Budding Prospects

Chapter 1

The fire put things in perspective. It came like a judgment, singeing, cleansing, burning with a pure, fatal, almost mystic candescence, eating away at the old growth of our baited lives to make way for the new. Immediate, deadly, it put us back in touch with ourselves. If we’d sat around the stove on a rainy spring night and traded tales of cheating death, now we fought for our lives. We burned. Inhaled smoke, rubbed our eyes raw. We dropped into the inferno and emerged again. Singed. Cleansed. Alive.

It was a stifling, bone-dry night in early October, a month from harvest (with hope, fear and a nod to the demons, we’d chosen my birthday, circled in black on the apocalyptic calendar, for the day we would reap what we’d sown). Gesh was gone, damping his inner fires in the anodynic embrace of Tahoe Nelda, and Phil and I were sitting up late — well past midnight — drinking big glasses of vodka and tonic, smoking pot and playing pitch. The fuel in the ancient Coleman lantern was burning low. I shuffled the cards. All the world was as hushed as if it were about to plunge into eternity.

Phil took the bid, and I could tell he had a killer hand by the way he let his eye wander casually over the room (he was contemplating the appointments, struck with the smart conjunction of couch, armchair and splintered end table, cards the furthest thing from his mind). He threw the queen of spades (the son of a bitch, I knew he had the king and jack back there, too), just as the lamp began to flicker. “Damn,” he said, raking in my deuce and slapping down the king. The light was fading fast. I studied his king for a long palpitating moment, as though debating the loss of another point card, and then with a grin laid down the ace. Of spades. “I’ll get it,” Phil said, jumping up to refill the lantern. “Make me another drink, will you?”

I got up and shuffled to the cooler in darkness as Phil fumbled for the flashlight, snatched the lantern from the table and hurried out the door. Ice. I pawed around, dropped some cubes in a pair of fresh glasses and felt the house rock gently as Phil thumped across the porch. CAUTION: DO NOT REFILL WHEN HOT, warned the inscription on the base of the lantern. I poured from bottles. Glug-glug-glug. Outside were the stars, the trees, the endless blanched hills. I settled in the darkness, drink in hand, and listened to the slow weary moan of the storage shed door as it pulled back on its hinges.

In August, I never thought I’d see September on the farm, let alone October. Any shred of hope I may have nurtured after the earlier disappointments — the reemergence of Jerpbak, my confinement to the property, the ongoing decimation of the crop — was dashed by the leapfrogging catastrophes of that nightmarish two-day period at the end of the month. In the space of just over thirty hours I’d managed to rearouse the viper’s pit of the Bum Steer, alienate Petra, sully Jerpbak’s mother, feel the pinch of Jones, witness the eruption of physical conflict between my partners and experience the onset of cardiac arrest in the terrible moment in which Aorta had gasped and I looked up to see that leering face in the window. Was ever man so beset by demons? I was ready to hang it up, flay myself through the streets, run to the authorities and turn myself in: I saw that face in the window and knew we’d reached the end. But here it was October, and we were alive and well and unincarcerated, and looking forward to reaping not thorns but dollars.

We’d been spared. For the moment, at any rate. The great jaws had come near, gaping so that all we could see was the darkness within, and then they’d rushed on by to gobble up some other luckless creature while we bobbed helplessly in the wake. August had left us with two choices: run or stay. If we ran, we would take next to nothing with us, the plants having barely begun to bud. If we stayed, we faced loss, disorder, sorrow and ruination. We stayed. Through inertia more than anything else. We were stuck in gear, crushed by indecision and apathy, unable to throw down our shovels and hoses no matter what the cost. Like the mule that goes on pulling its cart after the muleskinner drops dead of sunstroke, we went on. Out of necessity. Out of boredom, fatigue, confusion. Out of habit.

It was in this state that we awaited Jones. We waited through that long Tuesday, Phil, Gesh and I (Dowst and Vogelsang had vanished, of course), waited grimly, heroically, waited like prisoners on death row. Jones wanted ten thousand. Between us we had sixteen dollars and forty-two cents. Noon came and went. No Jones. We were puzzled, anxious. Had he gone to the police after all? Had he forgotten the whole thing? Had he died and gone to hoods’ heaven? Night fell. We sat in darkness so we could see him approaching. We emptied half a gallon of vodka. Gesh smoked two packs of cigarettes. Jones didn’t show. By the third or fourth day the tension began to ease, and we forgot him for minutes at a time as we went about our chores and fought the tedium with the usual round of drinks, bombers, cheap paperbacks, tortured naps, horseshoes, Monopoly and cards.

A week after the appointed date, we were jolted from our postprandial torpor by the throaty roar of a foreign car negotiating the hill. I looked into my co-workers’ eyes and saw fear, despair and resignation. We shuffled outside and stood in a grim knot on the porch. We weren’t running. I chewed my lip and watched the trees for the first heartless red flash of Jones’s MG. Phil began to whistle tunelessly. As the sound of the engine grew closer, I began to whistle, too. Oh, Susannah, I whistled, don’t you cry for me, but then Vogelsang’s Saab rounded the corner and lurched into the field, and I felt as if I’d been resurrected from the dead.

Unfortunately, the appearance of Vogelsang’s Saab did not necessarily indicate the appearance of Vogelsang (though we didn’t realize it at the time, he’d already paid his final visit to the summer camp). Aorta was alone. We watched as she slid out of the car and made her sinuous way toward us, a flat white envelope clutched in her hand. “Hi,” she said, her face as expressionless as the late Mao Tse-tung’s. I saw that she’d dyed her hair anew: a two-inch azure stripe now ran from her brow to the nape of her neck, giving her the look of some bush creature, some weirdly striped antelope or prowling cat. “Vogelsang said to give this to you.”

“Where is he?” Gesh demanded. “What’s he doing about all this shit that’s coming down?”

“Jones never showed,” I said.

She glanced up at me, then focused on the crumpled Pennzoil can at my feet. “We know,” she murmured. “Read the letter.” And then, as if she were messenger to a colony of lepers, she turned to hurry off before we could contaminate her.

I tore open the envelope, which bore my name across the front in the blocky misaligned characters kidnappers clip from magazines in gangster movies. The letter inside was pasted up in the same way:

Felix:

I have contacted J., having found his address in the court record for his arrest. He will not bother us further. I was able to bargain him down to $5,000, which I paid him in cash. The money, of course, is a debit against out net earnings, and will have to be deducted from our respective shares.

The other problem, the problem of S., has I think been resolved, and far less painfully (see enclosure).

The Fates are smiling on us, yes?

Yours

V.

Phil and Gesh read over my shoulder.

“Five thousand bucks,” Phil said. “Ouch.”

“I’d kill him for five hundred,” Gesh muttered, and I wasn’t sure if he was referring to Jones or Vogelsang.

“What enclosure?” I said.

The car door slammed. Vroom, the engine turned over with a low sucking moan. Vroom-vroom. I glanced up, noting absently that Vogelsang had removed the license plates, than bent for the crumpled envelope. Inside, equally crumpled, was a newspaper clipping. LOCAL GIRL MISSING, I read. Savoy Skaggs, 17, a June graduate of Willits High School and a resident at 199 °Covelo Road … No, it couldn’t be, I thought, the moment poetry, sweet as revenge, victory, the beatific light that shines on the darkest hour. … no leads … investigating the possibility … Of course, of course. She’s run off to consort with Eugene, suave and irresistible offshoot of G. P. Turner, the gentleman pugilist. I pictured her hitchhiking to Wiesbaden, thumb out, skirt hiked, sick to death of being a conniving country bitch and bar slut, hastening to marry off her little mangoes before they rotted. Love conquers all.

My comrades were frowning over the letter. The Saab had begun to creep forward. “Hey, look at this!” I shouted, nearly whooping with the joy of it and waving the newsprint like a flag at a parade. But then I stopped cold: investigating the possibility of foul play. Foul play?

Suddenly I was running. “Stop!” I shouted. “Wait up!” Aorta was still in first gear, taking it easy over hummock and hump, but picking up speed. Something snatched at my foot. I went on, shouting, waving my arms. I caught her as she was swinging onto the road.

There was a whine of brake discs, the car humped forward and then back, dust rose. Aorta looked alarmed. “What? What’s the matter?”

I thrust my face in the window, dripping sweat. “Vogelsang.” I gasped, lungs heaving, air too thick to swallow. “He didn’t have anything to do with this? He didn’t …?”

Aorta’s face was white, ghoulish, the eyes sunk deep in her head. Zombies, I thought. Murderers. Kidnappers. “What do you mean?” she demanded.

Exhaust bit at my throat, dust settled on my forearm. I noticed the license plates on the seat beside her. “Savoy, Vogelsang wouldn’t have, have done anything, would he?”

She made a heroic attempt at working incredulity into her face, slash eyebrows lifting a degree, eyes fighting for the ironic glance. “Don’t be silly,” she said, her voice tinny as a party horn. She goosed the gas pedal. “Of course not,” she said, eyes forward, and then she popped the clutch and shot off down the road. I stood there, inhaling dust that tasted like ashes and wondering just how much all this would redound to my future happiness and well-being.

Then there was the face in the window.

It was a large face, pale and childish, tapering at the brow and expanding like a prize eggplant in the region of the jowl. Above, there was a bristle of close-cropped hair and a long-billed cap; below, a congeries of chins. When I recovered from my initial shock, I realized that the face belonged not to a sheriff’s deputy, spare extortionist or special investigator from the DEA, but to our own witless, puerile and very likely subhuman neighbor, Marlon Sapers. Who else?

“Oh, my God,” Aorta had said, and we’d frozen in our worst moment, the moment of our dissolution and grief. Vogelsang had Gesh in a lethal chokehold, I was wrestling the.22 from Phil, Dowst was shouting, Aorta gasping, garbage climbed the walls as if it were alive and chaos roared in our ears. Phil was the first to react. He swung the rifle around like a skeetshooter and took out the upper left panel of the window as neatly as if he were potting a clay pigeon. Pow! The face disappeared from the window, Vogelsang sprang up as if he’d been scalded, Gesh struggled unsteadily to his feet, Dowst hit the floor. Looking pleased with himself, looking as if he’d just solved the better portion of the world’s problems in a single flamboyant stroke, Phil lowered the gun. It was then that I made the association between those fleshy befuddled features and Sapers’s son and heir, and I called out his name in shocked reproof. “Marlon!” I cried. “You come back here!”

The next thing I remember, Vogelsang and I were crashing through the scrub behind the house, pursuing Marlon. What we intended to do with him once we caught him was a question that begged further consideration. We didn’t stop to consider.

To his distress, Marlon was not built for flight. Clumsy, lumbering, reeling from the shock of discovery and rattled by the deadly crack of the gun, he lurched blindly through the brush, heading first in one direction, then another. We caught up with him between the storage shed and the propane tank. Perceiving our closeness, he turned at bay, a frantic, crazed, trapped-beast sort of look in the eyes that loomed huge behind the thick lenses of his glasses. “Go away!” he screamed, his body shuddering under the force of conflicting impulses and aberrant emotions. “Leave me alone!” I pulled up short, half a dozen feet from him, but Vogelsang, caught up in the chase and the bloodlust of his clash with Gesh, dove for his legs like a tackier.

If he could have paused to think things out or had he been a fraction less keyed up, I’m sure Vogelsang would have acted differently. As it was, he saw almost immediately that he’d made a mistake. A grave mistake. Marlon let out a shattering, high-pitched, psychotic shriek — the shriek alone enough to commit him to Mattewan — and flung Vogelsang from him as if he were made of sawdust and paper. Then he turned to me. Vogelsang lay in the bushes, stunned, birds flew cursing into the trees, the sky darkened. Marlon was in a rage. He stamped his feet and shrieked again, pounding his fists up and down like pistons. I backed up a step. “Marlon,” I said, trying for a reasonable, soothing tone. “No one wants to hurt you.”

“You do,” he choked. “You don’t like me.” There were beads of sweat on his face, he was turning color — his usual chalky pallor giving way to the angry swollen red of a sore about to burst — and his eyes jerked around the perimeter of the glasses like fish trapped in a sinking pond. Here was the psychopath, the disturbed adolescent who’d nearly crushed his grandmother after she’d scolded him, the inhabitee of the padded cell at Napa State. “I know you,” he blubbered, his voice so constricted it sounded like the hiss of a deflating balloon. “You, you hollered at me!”

The great reddening hulk of him was awash in inflammatory chemicals, burning secretions from bad glands. His teeth chattered, his neck foundered on its chins like a ship going down. I backed up another few steps, poised to run, when suddenly he let out a terrible scourging shriek, bent low, tore up a bush the size of a bale of hay and heaved it at me. Branches scraped my chest, roots, dirt, I felt something wet at the corner of my mouth. When I looked up, Marlon was spinning round as if in a game of blindman’s buff, dust beating about his frantically churning legs, a high choking whinny of rage and terror stuttering through his clenched teeth. Suddenly he lurched off, erratic as a drunk, all thought of fleeing subsumed in the peremptory urge to nullify his immediate environment, to beat the visible world to dust. Before him stood the propane tank, big as a submarine. He never hesitated. Just lowered his shoulder and galloped into it, pounding it repeatedly until it fell from its cinder-block stand with a single deep booming reverberation.

I didn’t know what to do. We’d set him off, and he was unstoppable. Vogelsang didn’t look as if he had any ready solutions either. While Marlon was distracted by the propane tank, he’d dodged out of the way, holding his side. Now he stood at a discreet distance, looking dazed and helpless, as Marlon turned his attention to the storage shed. Huge, savage, amok, Marlon reared back and hit the side of the building with the force of an artillery shell, and I heard something give, the brittle snap of stud or beam. Then he began pummeling the weathered panels with his fists and forearms until he’d managed to punch a hole in the wall. Then again and again, tearing at the hole, his fists bleeding, face warped with hatred and anguish, the ancient flimsy structure rocking on its foundation. He was awesome, brutal, mindless, King Kong hammering dinosaurs into submission. “Marlon!” I shouted over the clamor. “How about a Coke?”

No response.

“A Mars bar?”

Nails screamed, boards wheezed. A plank tore loose and flew into the field.

It had begun to look as if he would reduce the entire lodge to splinters when there came a sharp imperious roar from the ravine at my back. “Marlon!” the voice boomed, deep as the rumble of ruptured earth, hard as a wall of granite. “You stop that now!” I turned my head. There, blasting up out of the thicket like Grendel’s mother was the biggest woman I had ever laid eyes upon — not your typical fat woman or bearded lady, but a monument to flesh, twice the size of the shot putter for the Soviet women’s team. Or for the men’s team, for that matter. Trudy Sapers. I didn’t need an introduciton.

Neither did Marlon. As enraged as he’d been an instant earlier, as frenzied and disturbed and out of control, he now shifted gears, suddenly caught up in a new paroxysm of blind, destructive, mother-mortifying fury. His jowls shuddered convulsively, he stamped and raged in full tantrum, put the great log of his sneakered foot through the wall. But his mother knew him too well. On she came, six-two at least, five hundred pounds or more, moving across the field with a purposive grace, with a mammoth, unimpeachable dignity, undaunted in an ankle-length dress the size of an open parachute. She took hold of him by the upper arm and firmly but gently, almost tenderly, threw him to the ground and sat on him.

There was nothing to say. In the face of such a fit and so monumental an act of melioration and tenderness, Marlon’s voyeurism seemed hardly worth mentioning. I stood there awestruck through a long aphasic moment as Marlon’s breathing gradually became easier and Sapers himself emerged from the bushes behind me. He could have been emerging on a battlefield. Vogelsang was still cradling his ribs and I was licking blood from the corner of my mouth, there were three jagged rents in the face of the storage shed, and the propane tank lay on its side in the bushes like a beached whale.

“Heh-heh,” Sapers said, and he spat nervously. “Heh-heh. My apologies about all this, boys. No harm done, I hope. Heh-heh.” He spat again, the stream of tobacco juice like some part of his anatomy, a coiled brown tongue lashing in and out as if to test the air before each breath. “Ohhhh, don’t you worry a bit, I’ll pay for the damages, a course.”

Vogelsang stood off in the brush, looking dazed. His eyes were shrunken with pain. I saw him wince and snatch at his side when he lifted his hand in a gesture meant to reassure Sapers.

Phil, Gesh, Dowst and Aorta were peering down from the shattered kitchen window, mouths agape, as stunned and bewildered as tourists witnessing bizarre rites in the heart of a savage and little-known region. I was feeling bewildered, too, as if my life had somehow become confused with a Fellini movie.

“So,” Sapers roared, startling me, “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to meet my wife?”

And thus the menace had withdrawn, retracting its claws as suddenly as it had shown them: Jones, Savoy, the face in the window. Days passed, weeks. We went about our business like blind men, like drudges, the sky didn’t fall, the earth didn’t tremble and the cells at the county jail remained as recondite as the tunnels beneath the Potala. We licked our wounds, drew a deep collective breath and went on weeding and watering, cooking meals, consuming vodka and hauling manure. I began to feel easier (relatively speaking, of course — think of the plummeting skydiver, his parachute tangled behind him, who sees that he will not after all be impaled on the nasty black pointed spires of the wrought-iron fence but hammered to pulp on the sidewalk instead), yet one problem still nagged at me: Petra. I wanted her, wanted her with an ache that tore at my dreams and soured my morning coffee,’ wanted her as a native of the searing plain wants the distant white-tipped mountains. And yet I was powerless to do anything about it. I couldn’t leave the property to phone her, not after what had happened, and I wouldn’t be free to see her until November. The thought was torture. Would she be there in November? Would she want to see me? I could confess to her then, of course, the plants harvested and sold and the operation wrapped up, but how would she react?

It took me a week to hit on the idea of writing her. Phil lifted the phone book from the local Circle K and I found her address — same as the store — and wrote her a fifteen-page epistle in longhand. The first three pages consisted of an elaborate (but witty and self-justifying) apology for my behavior at the heifer festival, and this was followed by an eight-page dissertation on my background, motives, beliefs and desires, and thoughts on subjects ranging from ceramic sculpture to Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems (from which I quoted liberally). The concluding pages marked a return to the exculpatory mode and hinted at the dark, dangerous, enigmatic and stimulating circumstances in which I now found myself, promised full disclosure in due time and concluded with a desperate plea for patience and understanding. I signed it “Love, Felix,” and gave Dowst’s Sausalito address.

Two weeks passed and there was no answer. I wrote again. Twenty-five pages’ worth, a letter so thick I had to have Phil mail it in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. If the first missive was poised between pathos and wit, this was a howl of anguish, written out of despair and loneliness and the sting of rejection. It was demanding, insinuating, the sort of thing that convinces the addressee to move to Toledo and neglect to leave a forwarding address. I dissected my dreams, compared myself to Manfred, young Werther and James Dean, writhed on the page like an insect pinned to a mounting board and generally made an ass of myself. I even confessed that I loved her (a mistake under any circumstances), and insisted that I would change my name and emigrate if she didn’t return my feelings. The day Phil mailed the second letter, Dowst showed up with a reply to the first.

“Dear Felix,” she’d written in a bold cursive on the back of a prestamped postal service card, “I have neither the time nor patience to play games or carry on a correspondence with an underground man. If you want to see me, see me. But please, no more tortured letters.” She signed it, “Best, Petra.”

She never wrote again.

Neither did I.

Yes, and then there was the fire.

The night was hushed, moonless and black, the night of desert and outback and the wild places of the world beyond the ken of linemen and meter readers. I sat in darkness, thinking nothing, thinking one more drink, another couple of hands, a cold shower, bed. Phil was in the shed refilling the lantern. He was drunk. I was drunk. We’d been playing pitch, talking in low voices against the oppression of the night and the place, killing our various hurts with alcohol, when the lantern fizzled out. DO NOT REFILL WHEN HOT. Though I couldn’t see it, the kitchen door stood open. I listened to the sounds I’d heard a hundred times, flesh, metal, wood: the groan of the hinges as the storage shed door swung open, the rattle of the gas can, Phil’s murmuring heartfelt curses as he blundered into this object or that and burned his fingers on the spigot at the base of the lantern.

But then — sudden, chilling, anomalous — a new sound intruded on the familiar sequence, a sound like the low sucking whoosh of a stubborn gas jet, and before I could react the night exploded with light, a single coruscating flash that illuminated the doorway as if it were noon. My first thought was that lightning had struck the shed, but instead of the rumble of thunder I heard Phil’s shout and the deadly incendiary clank of the gas can hitting the floor. This is it, I thought, flinging myself from the chair as Phil cried out again and a second can of fluid went up with a sickening rush of air. My feet pounded across the rotten planks of the porch, the shed glowing like a jack-o’-lantern before me, and I understood that this was the nightmare that had brooded over us all along, this was the trial — not police, not helicopters, dogs, poachers or informers, not rats, locusts or bears, but the quick licking flames of the refining fire.

When I reached the shed, I saw the spitting lamp, the overturned fuel cans, cold blue flames spilling across the floor in liquid fingers. And I saw Phil, in shock, his torso flaring like a struck match. He’d staggered back against the wall, frantically swiping at his crackling T-shirt and the corona of flame that clung to his head, the flesh of his right arm coated in burning fluid and hissing like a torch as he swept it through the air. More: I saw the flames at the walls, the burning newspapers, collapsed furniture, garbage, the big ten-gallon cans of gasoline lined up like executioners in the far corner.

Drowning in fire, Phil clutched at me. He was dancing — we were dancing — whirling and shouting, frenetic, Laurel and Hardy dropped in the giant’s frying pan. My nostrils dilated round the chemical stink of incinerated hair, my flesh touched his and I burned. For a single terrible runaway instant I was caught up in his panic, frozen, unable to act — WOULD-BE RESCUER DROWNS IN FOUR FEET OF WATER — until I got hold of myself and shoved him from me. His face heaved, he shouted out my name. But I was already on him again, slapping the crown of his head, tearing at his shirt until it dropped from him in luminous strips, and then driving him through the door and out into the merciful night. Tangled like wrestlers, we pitched over the edge of the porch and I pinned him to the ground, buried him beneath me, rubbing, massaging, beating at the flames until they gave in.

We looked at each other, the moment crystallizing round the pained gaping incomprehension of his face, the feel of the blistered flesh of his arm, the dust cool as balm. Phil’s mouth was working, fishlike, trying to close on a bubble of shock, his pompadour was gone and the wicked hungry glare of the fire glistened in his eyes. There was no time for assessments, repairs or solicitude: the jaws were making another pass. “Quick!” I hissed. “The hose, the hose!” And then I was back in the shed, flinging things at the flames — a box of newspapers, a pillow, a pair of gutted mattresses — anything to give us a second’s purchase. Flames sprang up, I slapped them down. The overturned lamp spat like a torch, I kicked it across the room. I felt nothing — neither the heat on my face nor the burns on my hands and arms — nothing but the imperative of the moment: we had to quench the fire, kill it before it killed us and took the house, the woods and the mountain with it.

Even then, even in those first few frenzied seconds, I knew that our lives were at stake, that the fire, once loosed on the parched fields, would burn to Ukiah. We’d gone five months without water. Alder, manzanita, pine, hollow grass and withered scrub — it was all kindling, stacked and waiting. This was no grassfire we had here, no mere acre-scorcher or garage fire, this was the germ of the conflagration, the blaze that leaps into the air and rushes through the trees like apocalypse, the fire that outruns you, chokes you, incinerates you. I fought it. No thought of quitting, running, ducking out: this was the end of the line.

I stood just inside the doorway, flailing at the flames with an old overcoat. Across the room — through a gauntlet of heaped refuse and sudden startling splashes of fire — stood the jerrycans of gasoline. Four of them. The fire flowed toward them like the tide rising on a beach and I saw that they would be enveloped in a matter of minutes, and thought of teenaged Phil in the dump truck, too stupid to realize he was about to die. I was stupid, too. Beating back the flames with the smoldering overcoat, breathing fire, my eyes tearing with the smoke and ears slapped and stung by the roar, I pictured that moment of crushing combustion: my flesh — fat and lean — sizzling like bacon, roiling clouds of fire, the house going up as if napalmed. They’d never even find my bones.

At this juncture, Phil appeared in the doorway. He was shirtless, his sneakers were steaming and his head looked like a scorched onion. In one hand he held an intermittently spurting garden hose, in the other a dripping mop. Though his eyes gave away his terror — the sockets could barely contain them, the wild ducking eyes of horses trapped in a burning barn — he trained the hose on the heart of the blaze and began swabbing the heaps of burning refuse like a frenetic scrubwoman. Encouraged, I edged forward and lifted the nearest mattress, itself aflame now, and slammed it down again, momentarily damping the fire so that I could tear through the room to the cans of gasoline.

I tore. Through Stygian gloom and Tartarean fire, through a smoldering clutter that would have given a fire marshall nightmares, kicking aside paint cans and leaping mounds of fuming rags and discarded clothes. When I reached the far side of the room I couldn’t see Phil or the open doorway. The jerrycans were hot to the touch. I crouched over them, bending low to snatch a quick breath beneath the loops of smoke raveling down from the ceiling, thinking What next? Was I really going to sprint through that inferno with a pair of ten-gallon cans of gasoline tucked under my arm? Twice, no less? I saw smoke, flames like teeth. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Insidious, the image of a Buddhist monk, his charred frame the center in a whirling jacket of fire, came to me. So this is heroism, I thought, feeling like the buck private who flings himself on the hand grenade to save his buddies in the foxhole, the platoon, the general and his chiefs of staff, and by extension the whole of the United States and the American way of life. I.e., foolish.

Protean, the flames licked at the walls, roared beneath the elevated floorboards, tendrils and creepers of some spontaneous, irreversible growth. I was coughing, my lungs turned inside out like a pair of rubber gloves. The jerrycans weren’t getting any cooler. As from a great distance I heard Phil shouting my name, but I’d begun to feel dizzy, sleepy somehow. Smoke inhalation, I thought numbly, and inhaled more smoke, pinching my eyes shut against the acid haze. In another moment I’d be too groggy to stand, let alone heft eighty-pound cans of gasoline.

It was then — the pyre awaiting me, my throat constricting, inertia pinning me to the spot — that I became aware of an almost imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, a flow of cooler air, the soft incongruous touch of a breeze on the back of my neck. I jerked round to discover the rents Marlon had torn in the back wall — jagged, night-black, rents the size of jerrycans. The fire talked to me, harsh and sibilant, but I didn’t listen. One, two, three, four, the cans were gone, tumbled in the grass, and I was ducking across the room like a deserter in no-man’s-land. Phil gave me a wild desperate look as I flung myself past him and out into the open, where I fell to my knees and coughed till I thought I was about to give birth.

Twenty minutes later we were still at it. Stripped to the waist like stokers, soot-blackened and viscid with sweat, we plied shovels, hauled buckets of dirt, stamped out a grassfire on one side of the shed while flinging burning rubbish out of the door on the other. It was impossible, maddening, a losing proposition: one minute we’d think we finally had things under control, and the next flames would be spitting in our faces. We might have escaped the holocaust — the single scorching gasoline-fed blast that would have decided the issue once and for all — but the steady incremental force of the fire was beginning to take its toll. Phil was hurting, his chest and shoulders scoriated with whiplash burns, his right forearm slick with pus. He looked tired, scared, worn, looked as if he were about to throw down his shovel and bolt for the car. I didn’t feel much better. Though we’d worked like automatons, oblivious to heat, thirst, pain, worked without remit and in perfect accord, grunting instructions to each other, rushing from one threat to the next in feverish concentration — though we plumbed the depths of our physical and spiritual resources, reached down deep inside ourselves for that something extra and got it — we were barely running even. And we weren’t getting any stronger.

If we’d had water pressure it might have been different. But the hose, drawing on the spring-fed tank that supplied the house, could deliver no more than a trickle. (The water table was low, the tank small — a class of thirsty kindergartners could have come in off the playground and drained the entire thing without blinking. In better times — that is, when our lives weren’t imminently threatened by an advancing inferno — this was merely an annoyance; now it was critical.) Within minutes Phil’s mop had gone up like a pitch-pine torch, and we began to recognize the futility of attempting to fight a three-alarm blaze with teacups of water. We turned to the mattresses as a stopgap. Flung at the core of the conflagration, they would smother the flames for a minute or two while we frantically scattered burning debris and parried fiery thrusts with our shovels. Of course, this procedure had its drawbacks. Unlike more conventional fire-fighting agents— water, sand, CO₂ foam — bed ticking and cotton batting are themselves flammable, and periodically the mattresses had to be dragged out into the grass and beaten. Soon the grass was ablaze, and we were fighting fires on two fronts.

At some point we’d decided to abandon the mattresses in favor of dirt, and I found myself standing in a knee-deep trench just off the edge of the porch, shoveling like some crazed and fever-racked desperado atop a chest of doubloons. My hands were raw, the fire in the shed spoke with a steady implacable hiss, the mattresses leaked flames into the grass before me. I shoveled. Two scoops on the porch, one in the red-flaming grass. Phil stood above me on the porch, a cutout, flat against the glare, pitching the dirt through the open doorway. This was the shovel brigade. Dig, heave, dig: there was no other rhythm in the world.

I was in the act of lifting my six- or seven-hundredth shovel-load when I was arrested by a new sound from the shed — a fruity, nut-cracking sound, fibers yielding, tree limbs snapping in a gale — and turned to see that a section of the floor had caved in, spewing sparks and glowing cinders into the scrub behind the house. Unleashed, flames shot up through the gap, beating like wings, swelling and shape-shifting till they reached the ceiling. Phil staggered back from the doorway and dropped his shovel just as a can of something volatile — paint thinner? — went up with a percussive wallop. I stopped, too. For the first time since Phil had cried out and I’d started up out of the darkened kitchen, I hesitated. It was overwhelming, hopeless. The shed was engulfed in flame from beneath, the brushfire at my feet was spreading faster than I could cover it, and now the scrub out back was going up, too. I stood there transfixed, my hand clenched round the haft of the useless shovel, the familiar chalky taste of surrender creeping up my throat.

That was when Gesh appeared.

At the stroke of that moment — the paint thinner flaring in triumph, the hole in the floor feeding oxygen to the flames like an outsized bellows, Phil stunned and tired and hurt, my will wavering and the quitter’s taint rising in me like an infection — that was when Gesh emerged from the darkness like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. He came out of the night in white chinos and sandals, his hair slicked down, beard trimmed and aloha shirt pressed, trailing a scent of aftershave. He was running. Head down, shoulders hunched forward, the big man held in reserve for the crucial confrontation, for single combat, the goal-line stand. No time for questions, strategies, appraisals: he slammed through the grassfire, took the porch in a bound, snatched up Phil’s shovel and plunged into the burning shed.

The effect was almost immediate: flames that had leapt to the ceiling were suddenly hobbled, the brilliant dilating light diminished as if Gesh’s bulk alone could displace the flames, as if he were a true believer cast into the burning fiery furnace, a Joe Magarac able to cool molten steel with a touch of his hand. I heard the scrape of his shovel, the snarl of the flames, and then I watched as a steady swirling arc of fire disengaged itself from the conflagration and struck the surface of the porch in an ignifluous rush: a smoldering rug materialized, the charred headboard of a forgotten bed, smoke-spewing cans, scraps of lumber, blazing boxes of rags and newspapers. Shovel flailing, shirt aflap, Gesh stood rooted in the heart of the inferno, a shadow closing over the jagged sheet of flame, choking it, defusing it, stealing its fire. Revitalized, Phil danced round each heap of combustion as it shot through the doorway, poking and stamping like a bushman with an effigy. I came alive too. Suddenly the shovel was light in my hands, a toy, a stick, and I was dumping dirt on the brushfire like a backhoe in high gear.

This was teamwork. With Gesh hacking away in the shed like a hook and ladder company on the eve of a three-week vacation and Phil dredging up some final deep-buried reserve of grit and energy, I was inspired, a shoveling genius. Though the flames snaked through the grass and rose up to hiss in my face, though bushes exploded in a rush of streaming sparks and the ground went hot beneath my feet, I drove myself like a long-distance runner coming into the home stretch, my will undeniable, inexorable, victory in sight. The shovel rose and fell with a mechanical insistence until the last pocket of fire closed on a fist of darkness. Then I turned back to the shed.

Inside, the heat was dizzying, the smoke a noose round the throat. The atmosphere seemed denser now, blacker, and I remember wondering vaguely if this was a good sign or bad. As I inched my way in I thought I could make out Gesh’s form through the haze, but the fumes stabbed at my eyes and tore at my lungs until I found myself backing out the door like a crab. How could he stand it? He’d been in there five minutes, ten minutes, he’d been in there long enough to suffocate and collapse. I suddenly pictured him gasping for breath, going lightheaded, losing his bearings and tumbling into the flames like a man of straw, and then I was back in the shed, shouting his name as Phil had shouted mine over the simmering jerrycans. “Gesh!” I called, the vacuum of my throat torn by the smoke that rushed to fill it. At first I saw nothing, heard only the steady flap of the flames. I called out again. Then, out of a confusion of vacillating shapes, Gesh suddenly appeared, naked to the waist, wielding his shovel like a trident. I plunged forward. Took hold of his arm. Shouted in his face with all the frantic urgency of the rescuer lowered into the fuming pit. “This way!” I shouted. “Hurry!”

The aloha shirt trailed from him in spangled tatters, his face was rigid with fury, his eyes like open sores. “Get out!” he roared, snatching his arm away and turning to fling a bucket of earth at the fiery column rising through the gap in the staved-in floor. I glanced round. He’d managed to clear the floor, prop up the ceiling with a fallen beam and hammer out a section of the wall I’d last seen burning like a Yule log. I tried to pitch in, but quarters were close and he inadvertently slammed into me as he bent, cursing, for a second bucket of earth. Amazed, I watched as he hurtled round the room like a man trapped in a runaway locomotive, damping the main blaze in a chiaroscuro of furious movement, scattering debris, levitating buckets of dirt. The heat was cooking my skin, the smoke curing my lungs. I got out.

If Gesh was getting a grip on the fire in the shed, the blaze out back was the most concentrated threat now. Not only was it feeding the conflagration under the shed, but it was leapfrogging toward the drought-withered trees of the ravine and creeping along the base of the house as well. I turned to it like an outflanked cavalry officer, galloping round the corner of the shed with my spade held out before me like a lance; unfortunately I bowled into Phil, who was hunched feebly over his own digging implement and coughing into his fist like a tubercular orphan. "You all right?” I screamed, staggering past him, everything a shout, the whole world a roar. And then I was bellowing instructions at him and we were shoveling yet again, steel biting earth, earth flying. Together we were able to clear a corridor to the base of the shed, and we began pitching dirt at the flames blossoming beneath the floorboards as Gesh fought them from above. Smoke ran for the sky, the shovel tore at my blistered hands. Flames coughed, sputtered, flared up again with an insidious cackle. We moved dirt, truckloads of it, and eventually we began to prevail; the fire under the shed cringed, shrank, backed off to devour itself in frustration. There was a single astonishing moment when the light suddenly died and I looked up at the shed in stupefaction: it was no longer burning. Gutted, charred, smoking, a sagging depthless web of lines lit only by the sickly glow of the fire at my back, the shed was no longer burning.

The rest was anticlimax. There was Gesh hurtling along the edge of the ravine with a splitting axe, clearing brush, taking down thorn and manzanita as if he were picking flowers, forcing the fire away from the trees and back toward the ground it had already blackened. There was Phil protecting the back wall of the house as if it were Buckingham Palace or the Louvre, Gesh and I cutting swaths through the single fire, dividing it once, twice, and then dividing it again, the heat attenuating, the light fading. We watched, shovels flicking like tongues, as the isolated fires burned themselves out, watched as the coals glowed hot on the charred ground and then faded into the enveloping night. Half an hour after Gesh had emerged from nowhere to snatch up Phil’s shovel and fight his way into the shed, the threat was over.

The night had suddenly grown dark again. In the garish glow of the embers, Phil’s face looked like some Polish Christ’s, gaunt and long-nosed, suffused with suffering. Gesh’s hair stood straight out from his head, his face was blackened, the yellow strips of the aloha shirt trailed from him as if he were peeling. I was trying to catch my breath, experience relief, savor the first few moments of life without frenzy, when Gesh turned to me, the lines of his face underscored with soot and locked in the grid of rage he wore into battle. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he growled. “Can’t you see Phil’s got to be taken to the hospital?”

I glanced at Phil. His right arm had crusted over and the welts on his chest and shoulders were raw; a slashing wet wound cut back into his hairline. He was a mess. “Can you …?” I began, turning to Gesh. I meant to ask if he was sure he could handle things in the event the fire started up again, but I was jittery still and unable to find the words. As I faltered, the brush began to flare in a pocket out by the propane tank.

“I can drive myself,” Phil said, so softly I could barely hear him. He looked like the survivor of a DC-10 crash, his clothes reduced to rags, body scorched, hair gone.

“Bullshit,” Gesh said. “You take him, Felix.”

I felt sapped, felt as if I’d just come off a two-week shift in the coal mine — felt as if I’d been trapped in a coal mine, for that matter, buried under tons of hot rock, breathing noxious fumes and drinking beakers of acid. My shoulders and arms ached, I was bleeding in half a dozen places, my hands stung as if I’d dipped them in a deep fryer and then rubbed them with alcohol. I felt like shit, but I also felt transcendent, exhilarated, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. I’d stayed with it, fought the odds like a square-jawed hero, and won. “Sure,” I said.

Gesh had already begun to move off toward the presumptuous little blaze licking at the propane tank, but he paused to look me in the eye. “Go,” he said, and it sounded like a benediction.

Chapter 2

Trees cowered along the road, signposts and mileage markers backed off like startled animals, the pavement itself seemed to plunge away from the clutch of the headlights as if dropping into oblivion. It was four a.m. by the dashboard clock, and I was coming into Willits at eighty, Jerpbak and his jackbooted legions be damned: I was the one on urgent business this time. Full of grace, the lark ascending, survivor, victor, hardass, I took the curves like a teenager with identity problems and sucked the straightaways into the future with a blast of exhaust. A road sign — it sprang up like a puppet in a Punch and Judy show and then vanished instantaneously — announced the city limits. SPEED LIMIT 35. I slowed to sixty. Through the town center, past the nightglow of the Willits Diner, the neon lure of motels and quick-stop restaurants, stoplights falling away like leaves in a windstorm, noli me tangere.

Phil slouched in the death seat, eyes lidded. His neck had sunk into his chest and his head pitched and rolled with the road’s abrasions, his face impossibly heavy, a thing of stone. He hadn’t uttered a word since we’d left the farm. Was he asleep? In shock? Withdrawn in the web of his pain like a crippled animal, like a dog licking its mangled paw in the dark void beneath the house? I glanced over at him. He’d propped himself against the window, raw back arching away from contact with the seat, his near shoulder stippled with blisters, pitted, cratered, rough as toadskin. “You okay?” I whispered, watching the road. He began to cough into his fist. I stepped on the gas. “Another minute, Phil,” I murmured, lurching round the only other vehicle on the road — a creeping heedless bread truck — with a desperate jerk of the wheel. Phil didn’t even lift his head.

The hospital was like a medieval leprosarium, poorly lighted, neglected, falling into ruin. Cheap additions fanned out from the main building like the wings of a crippled bird, the sloping drive was afflicted with potholes, slabs of pale green stucco peeled from the walls like sloughed skin. I thundered past the lions couchant and Ionic columns of the main entrance (long since boarded up) and did a sloppy power slide into the AMBULANCE ONLY/NO PARKING/TOW AWAY zone in front of the emergency entrance. Phil clawed his way out of the car as if emerging from a tomb and tottered toward the doorway on stiff legs, his fists clenched at his sides. I swung open the door for him and we found ourselves in a scuffed hallway cluttered with plastic plants, cheap furniture and collapsible wheelchairs.

“Yes?” The night nurse sat stiffly at a pine desk outside the emergency room, alert as a three-headed dog. She was blond, forty, a victim of dry skin and a lifetime of suppressing emotion. Beyond her I saw a dull wash of light, a clutter of chairs, the janitor, feet up, white socks, masticating a bologna sandwich and devouring a Louis L’Amour Western.

“We’ve had an accident,” I said.

“Name?”

“Mine or his?”

Bent over a printed form, her pen poised to record information, the nurse’s cap cleaving her head like a scythe, she expelled a long withering depthless sigh of exasperation. “The name of the individual to be admitted,” she said without looking up.

Phil croaked out his name.

“Sex? Age? Height? Weight? Medical insurance? Allergies?” The questions came like body blows in a prizefight, cumulative, unending, wearying. Phil stood there in the sepia light, burned raw, the collar of his incinerated T-shirt still clinging to his neck, charred underwear poking through the holes in his pants. We were both in blackface.

“Look,” I said, cutting her off in mid-phrase — was she really asking about his bank account? — “the man is in pain, can’t you see that?”

“Savings?”

Phil looked as if he were about to go down for the count. “Crocker,” he gasped.

“Major credit card? Next of kin? Religion?”

“Listen,” I said. She ignored me.

“Sign here.” As she pushed the form toward Phil, she focused her colorless eyes on him for the first time, and I saw with a jolt that there was nothing there. Neither curiosity nor concern, sympathy or interest. She might have been home in bed, dancing in a casino, married to the Aga Khan. But she was here. In Willits. At four-ten in the morning. She’d witnessed resuscitation and expiration, stroke, hemorrhage and loss of hope, seen the human form twisted and degraded, hacked, torn, bathed in blood, pus, mucus, urine, she’d seen blue babies and blanched corpses. We were nothing. Scabs, vermin, dirt. The contact lenses clung to her eyes like blinders.

Phil signed.

As Phil stooped painfully to drag pen across paper, the doctor appeared as if on cue. He came flashing through the emergency-room door in a pristine scrub shirt, young, perfect, his head a mass of imbricate hair, mustache impeccable, teeth aligned, skin clear. “Well,” he crooned, jocular as an anchorman delivering the news of three hundred thousand fatalities in a Hunan earthquake, “so we’ve had a little mishap?” He was winking, nodding, grinning, as if we were sixth graders caught in some minor peccancy — playing with matches or peeping into the girls’ locker room. “Sensitive, is it? Yes, yes,” he purred, taking Phil by the elbow and steering him toward the back room in a flurry of one-liners and sympathetic tongue-clucks. As they passed through the doorway I heard the doctor’s voice rise in screaming falsetto as he broke into a mock Negro dialect: “And then she says, ’Lordy, lordy, this dude done got burned!’ “ There was a single wild bray of laughter, and then the door swung to with a click.

I took a seat in the waiting room. The janitor had finished his sandwich and was tenderly examining the ball of his right foot, from which he’d removed the sock. A bucket of filthy water stood beside him. the mop handle protruding from it like a reed in a swamp. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I was feeling weary, numb, the stirrings of a nameless dread pounding in my organs like jungle drums, a subtle chemical abstersion flushing my veins of the adrenaline that had kept me going over the past two hours. Freud, coming down off his cocaine, knew the feeling. So did Sherlock Holmes and the speed freaks on Haight Street. I’d felt exultant, energized, potent, rushing with stamina and inspiration, and now all I felt was empty. It was over, the crisis past. I’d consumed enough vodka before the fire erupted to be drunk now, but I didn’t feel drunk at all. I felt tired. Frightened. Depressed. I opened my eyes once and saw that the janitor hadn’t moved — he was fixed in the cloudy frame of my vision, feet forever white, rubbing, rubbing.

When I woke, the janitor was sloshing dirty water across the floor and the beaming physician was standing over me. “Your friend,” he said, “Phil?”

I nodded, rubbing my eyes. “Yeah?”

“He’s been burned pretty severely — right shoulder, right forearm, chest, back, hands — and he’s lost a lot of fluid.” He was rocking back and forth on his heels, grinning like a talk-show host.

“Is he going to be all right?”

Oh, he was beaming now, this doctor. There was no cancer in his body, he’d never bled, bruised or burned, his heart was like a piston. This was the question he’d been waiting for, this the reason he’d poked at preserved cadavers in a chilly basement in Guadalajara and interned at Cleveland General — for this moment and the infinitude of others like it. He was in no danger. He jogged ten miles a day, forswore tobacco, alcohol, caffeine, cholesterol, food additives and TV. But Phil? “We’ll have to keep him overnight. At least.”

The doctor wasn’t moving. He was winking again now, nodding and tossing his eyebrows like a stray Marx brother. “What about you?” he said, looking down at my hands.

“Me?” It hadn’t occurred to me that I might need treatment, too. I lifted my hands and examined them as if I’d never seen them before.

“You’ve got a second-degree burn there.” He smiled. “Blistering, extravasated fluid, risk of infection.” He looked pleased with himself.

Ten minutes later I was bent over the nurse’s desk, a pain killer dissolving in the pit of my stomach, my hands imprisoned in gauze. The sixty questions had passed the nurse’s lips, the responses had been duly recorded and the form shoved at me for confirmation. I was fumbling with the pen, struggling awkwardly with my gauze mittens and attempting a clonic, looping two-handed signature, when the outside door flew back with the sort of histrionic boom that announces Mephistopheles in Gounod’s Faust. Windows rattled up and down the corridor, a dull metallic echo resounded from deep in the hospital’s bowels. I looked up. Bullet head, frozen spine, boots like truncheons: Officer Jerpbak stepped through the doorway.

He was not alone. Cradled in his right arm, dead weight, was a Halloween ghoul, a bloodslick puppet, an extra from a sleazy flick about knife-wielding maniacs. Heels dragged, blood flowed. Signal 30, I thought, disintegrating sports cars, overturned logging trucks, head wounds, multiple contusions. I backed off as Jerpbak, one arm thrown out for balance, staggered down the hallway under his burden. I’d never seen so much blood. It maculated the floor, darkened the front of Jerpbak’s uniform, blotted the features of the limp, spike-haired kid locked under his arm. Jerpbak’s face was drained, the hard line of his mouth unsteady: he looked up at me and saw nothing.

The nurse’s pen was poised, her head bent to yet another form. “Name?” she said, barely glancing up. Jerpbak stood before the desk, dazed, bewildered, his mouth working in agitation — there was a wild, urgent look in his eye, the look of the harried shopper bursting into the kitchen with four splitting sacks of groceries and no place to set them down. He’d lurched to a confused halt, bracing his legs to support the kid’s weight, right arm girdling the kid’s chest, left cradling his head: bloody Mary, bloody Jesus. The kid was unconscious. His leather jacket shone wet with blood, blood like oil, black and slickly glistening; his face looked as if it had been slathered with finger paint, as if a twenty-five-cent bamboo back scratcher had been dipped in a pot of gouty red enamel and raked over his eyelids, nose, cheekbones, mouth. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen. I saw the lids roll back like defective shades, I saw the dull lifeless sheen of his eyes.

“Goddammit!” Jerpbak leaned forward to slam the desk with the flat of his hand. “Are you alive or what?” He was addressing the nurse. Roaring at her. Barking out the question, his voice a primal yelp that cut through the nurse’s apathy like the physical threat it was: she’d seen it all, yes, and now she was seeing this. She sprang from her chair as if she’d been stung, took the room in five amazing strides and plunged through the emergency-room door like a diver. At the Game time, Jerpbak lost his grip on the inert kid and staggered forward with him, inadvertently slamming the kid’s body across the desk like a slab of boneless meat — if he hadn’t caught himself at the last second he would have fallen atop him. I heard the sound of an electric motor starting up somewhere down the corridor, the lights dimmed, then came back up. Jerpbak leaned over the prostrate kid like a beast over his bloody prey, breathing hard. Then he pushed himself up from the table as if he were doing a calisthenic, caught my eyes — his were punctured with shock — and reeled into the waiting room shouting incoherently.

I saw the white flash of the janitor’s hair as he looked up from his mop, and then the young doctor pushed through the swinging doors and into the waiting room, his face rushing with hilarity as he rehearsed his stock of cops-and-robbers jokes. He looked first at Jerpbak, the grin turning quizzical, and then beyond him to where the kid’s limp form was flung across the desk.

His face went cold. Forget the charm-school manners, the easy quips, pain with a smile: this was no joke. He was on the kid in an instant, a man with a thousand hands — checking for heartbeat, clearing nose and mouth, stanching the flow of blood — all the while shouting instructions over his shoulder. I watched as nurses, orderlies, aides — a hidden white-clad army — slammed through the door with a jangling gurney, descending on the kid like a snowstorm.

Jerpbak, his uniform dark with the kid’s blood, stood at the doctor’s back, tugging abstractedly at his own stiff shirtcuffs. “He fell,” Jerpbak said, as if it mattered, “fell and hit his head.” The doctor gave him a quick sharp glance and then he was gone, the gurney squealing across the wet floor, voices parrying, the flurrying hands concentrated now on the kid’s face and head.

The whole episode, beginning to end, had taken no more than sixty seconds. Jerpbak stood with his back to me, watching as the gurney was swallowed up in the embrace of the swinging doors. The night nurse had vanished; the janitor shook his head slowly and went back to swabbing the floor, erasing the gurney’s tracks with a sleepy dreamlike motion. The form I’d signed lay on the desk still, a single smear of blood cutting it in two. I lowered my head, put one foot in front of the other and walked down the hallway and out into the night.

Amber light, red. Jerpbak’s patrol car stood at the curb, engine running, rack lights flashing. At first glance the car seemed empty, and I was shuffling toward the Toyota, thinking only to get out of there before Jerpbak turned his mind to other matters, when I was arrested by the pale glimmer of a face floating in the obscurity of the back-seat window. I saw the glint of an earring, the turned-up collar of a sad leather jacket like the one the kid had been wearing, a pair of pinned mournful eyes. I came closer. Behind the stark wire mesh of that back-seat prison I knew only too well, a second kid sat, the desolation of his face punctuated by the sickle-shaped bruise under his right eye. I stared at him. His tongue flicked out to lick a split lip, the radio crackled, the engine stuttered and then caught again. He was a tough guy, this kid, sixteen years old. He looked as if he’d been crying.

When I stuck my head in the open driver’s window, I saw that the kid was handcuffed to the mesh. He said nothing. I said nothing. I reached in, twisted the ignition key and killed the engine. Then, the keys rattling in my hand like swords, like the fierce, sharp, stabbing edge of righteousness, I cocked my arm and pitched the wheeling clatter of them into the flat black envelope of the night.

The Toyota drove itself. Down the ruptured drive and out onto the dark highway, the nasal blast of the exhaust setting shaded windows atremble, each shove of the gearshift rending the car’s guts anew: I didn’t want to go back to the farm. Not yet. I didn’t want to look into Gesh’s drained and soot-blackened face, didn’t want to contemplate the razed shed, charred stubble, the big greedy bite the passing jaws had taken out of our lives. It was just past five. My conscious mind had shut down, but something deeper, some root calibrator of need, led me into the macadam parking lot outside the Circle K and on up to the dimly glowing phone booth that stood before it like a shrine: I suddenly knew what I was going to do.

I fished through my wallet for the number, relayed the information to the operator in a voice so low she had to ask me to repeat myself, and listened to the suspenseful rhythms of longdistance connection—tap-a-tap-clicketa-click-click-click—as I cupped the receiver in my bandaged hands. It would be eight o’clock in New York.

When at long last the line engaged — with a final, definitive and climactic click — my voice leapt into the void on the other end: “Hello?” I demanded. “Hello?”

I got a recording: the number had been changed. I traced a pattern in the grime of the window as the operator dialed the new number and together we waited for the mice to stop running up and down the line. There was a distant ringing. Three thousand miles away Dwight lifted the receiver.

“Hello, Dwight?” I blurted, barely able to contain myself through the operator’s preliminaries, “it’s me, Felix.” The words came in spate, I couldn’t get them out quickly enough: I was afraid he’d left for work already, was he okay, we’d had an accident. Yes, Phil. In the hospital. Burns. I was all right, yes, just a bit shaken up.

He mumbled something about a weird coincidence. I asked him to read me something, anything, pick a day. How about this date in ’65, I said. I’m upset, I said. Help me. Read me something. Be late for work.

There was something wrong. His voice was strange, and for an instant I thought I’d somehow got the wrong number. “Dwight?” I said.

“It’s a weird coincidence.” He was repeating himself. “I mean that you guys …”

I couldn’t hear him. He was speaking so softly I couldn’t make out what he was saying. “Dwight,” I shouted, “I can’t hear you. What’s the matter?”

“The fire,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But we’re all right. We made it. I’m picking up Phil tomorrow.”

“No,” he said.

“Read me something.”

“I can’t. I’m talking about my fire, in the apartment. My old apartment.”

It was then that I began to understand, then that I slipped out of myself for a moment, then that I shut up and listened. Dwight’s building had gone up while he was at work. Two weeks ago. He’d lost everything, every record he’d ever kept, every note, every figure, every last fragment of the past. It was as if he’d never lived. “I can’t believe it,” I said.

“Believe it.” His voice was choked. bewildered. “I’ve been trying to remember,” he said. “For two weeks I haven’t been in to work — all I’m doing is trying to reconstruct it all, trying to get something down on paper anyway.”

I looked out at the night through the streaked grid of the booth’s window—Al & Jolene, Suck This, Go Wolverines—and saw the nodding head of the all-night clerk in the frantically lit quick-stop store. Open all night. Got everything you want. Milk, razor blades, whiskey, Kaopectate. It was a clean, well-lighted place.

“Remember Mrs. Gold? Third grade? It was me, Bobbie Bartro and Linda Lurlee in the far row up against the map of the Fertile Crescent, remember? And you sat where — two rows over, right? Behind Wayne Moore. But what I can’t remember is where Phil sat … or the name of the girl with the braids and buck teeth — Nancy something — that moved away in the fifth grade.”

His voice was a plaint, a drone, remembrance of things past and funeral oration wrapped in one: I didn’t want to hear it. “Dwight,” I said. “Dwight.”

“I’m getting senile. Really, I mean it. Like that game in Little League when we were twelve — we were the Condors, remember? We were playing the Crows, or was it the Orioles? Anyway, Murray Praeger got knocked unconscious in a rundown with somebody, remember? I can get that much. But it’s incredible. I’m really losing my grip: I can’t remember whether we won or lost—”

“Dwight,” I said. And then I hung up.

I felt as if someone had taken a vegetable peeler to my nerves. Hands wrapped in gauze, face smudged, clothes in a bum’s disarray, I stood there in the phone booth like a postulant, staring at the inert receiver as if I expected it to come alive, as if I somehow expected Dwight to call back and tell me he’d only been joking. After a while a pickup truck wheeled into the lot and two men in long-billed caps and coveralls emerged and ambled into the store, where the somnolent clerk served them coffee in paper cups. It wasn’t getting any earlier.

I fell into the Toyota like a dead man, animated the engine, flicked on the lights. Exhaust rose through the floorboards, the truncated tailpipe rattled furiously against the rear bumper. Three pale faces stared out at me from the blazing sanctuary of the quick-stop store as I backed around, slammed the car into gear and shot out onto the highway with a squalling blast. Suddenly I felt crazy, fey, psychopathic. Come and get me, Jerpbak, I thought, popping the clutch and fishtailing up the road. I got it up to seventy by the time I reached the town limits, then swung around and roared through the sleepy hamlet again. I was baiting the Fates, measuring the gape of the jaws. Nothing happened.

I found after a while that I’d somehow turned off the main drag, negotiated a tricky series of cross streets and emerged on the broad, tree-lined corridor of Oak Street. Now I was creeping, the exhaust a muted rumble. My hands were on the wheel, my foot on the accelerator, but the car rolled forward under its own volition, no arguing with destiny. Houses drifted past, white shutters, picket fences, shade trees, then a block of storefronts. I glanced at myself in the rearview mirror. Red-veined and sorrowful, the eyes fell back into my skull like open sores. I swiped at a black smear on my nose, tried to pat my hair in place. The headlights were tentacles pulling me along.

The shop was dark. I found the stairway out back. White railing, ghostly. Potted plants, leaves black and smooth to the touch, lovesick cat off in the bushes, smell of rosemary or basil. I stumbled on the first step, floundering in the darkness like a dog-paddler gone off the deep end; something crashed to the ground with a sick thump. I kept going. I didn’t think, didn’t want to think.

A moment later I stood on the second-floor landing, breathing hard and peering off into the abyss below. More plants. I turned to the door, knuckles poised, not thinking, not thinking, and made sudden cranial contact with what must have been a bowling ball suspended at eye level. It hit me once, hard, just above the bridge of the nose, then swung off into space to come back and crack me again, this time on the crown of my bowed head. All at once I felt desperate. I’d meant to knock deferentially — it was past five in the morning, after all — or at least wittily, but I found myself hammering at the door like the Gestapo. Boom, boom, boom.

From inside I could hear confused movement: shuffling feet, probing hands. A light went on, a voice called out. Boom, boom, boom, I hammered. Then the porch light, mustard yellow. A hanging planter materialized, reeling past my left ear; a ceramic dwarf looked up at me quizzically. “Okay, okay,” came the voice from within, “enough already.” I stopped pounding. There was the sound of lock and key, a bolt sliding back.

I spread my bandaged hands, lifted my shoulders in a deprecatory shrug: I was ready to capitulate.

Chapter 3

Petra stood in the doorway, her face soft with sleep, a dragon-splashed kimono pinched round her throat. There was a look of utter stupefaction in her eyes, a look of bewilderment and incomprehension, as if she’d been wakened from a sound sleep and asked to name the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics or the capitals of all the countries of the South China Sea, beginning with Borneo. A square-headed cat brushed up against her bare ankles and then froze, blinking up at me mistrustfully.

I’d twisted my face into a strained grin and fixed it there until I must have looked like a funeral-home director in a novelty shop. Since I couldn’t think of anything to say, I grinned wider.

“Felix?” she said. It was a question.

I nodded.

This exchange was succeeded by an ever-lengthening moment of silence, during which I struggled to think of some witty opener, the mot that would break the ice and precipitate a mutual flood of verbal good will, while Petra’s look went from puzzlement to a glare of irate recognition. She was studying my sorry hair, soiled face, scorched clothes and mummy-wrapped hands, recalling no doubt that the last time she’d laid eyes on me my behavior had been eccentric to the point of offense, and that our only communication since had been my mad, interminable, demanding, love-struck letters, the tone of which made Notes from Underground seem the tranquil recollections of a lucid mind. Behind her I could see buffed linoleum, a ceramic pig devouring ceramic corn, more plants. “I’m sorry,” I began, staring down at my feet and losing my train of thought: a ragged hole the size of a silver dollar had eaten through the canvas of my right sneaker, dissolving the sweatsock beneath and exposing the serried rank of my upper toe joints. Stiff, naked, red, the toes looked as if they should be cracked and dipped in drawn butter.

The cat nuzzled Petra’s ankles. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the oscillating planter had begun to lose momentum, winding down like a hypnotist’s watch. In the space of time I’d been standing on her doorstep groping for words, a legion of tired old men had breathed their last, interest had accrued, vows been exchanged, and the worldwide army of hollow-eyed widows had brewed enough tea to fill all the petroleum storage tanks in Houston. Finally Petra stepped back and held the door open. “My God,” she said, “what was it — a car crash?”

I told her everything.

We sat at the kitchen table amid a welter of corn plants, rubber plants, dracaena, coleus and African violets, sipping Postum and watching the night sky fall away to tatters in the east, while I told her about the model hole, about the bear, about the half million that had gone through more permutations than the federal arts budget. I told her about Gesh, Phil, Vogelsang, Sapers, Marlon, about the rain, the heat, the rattlesnakes, airplanes, poison oak. I told her about the fire.

The sky was pale, the trees beyond the windows brightening as if a filter had been lifted, when I closed out my apologia with the harrowing tale of the hospital and Jerpbak’s latest victims. “I threw his keys in the woods,” I said, my voice lifting with the memory of it.

Petra got up from the table and put the kettle on again. “More Postum?”

Postum. It tasted like boiled cinders. “Sure,” I said.

I’d been talking for over an hour. I’d begun hesitantly, guiltily, alluding obliquely to my conduct at the heifer festival and then staring down at the spectacle of my clasped hands. “I’ve been keeping something from you,” I said. If she’d looked angry, tired, sympathetic and apprehensive by degrees as she’d opened the door, let me in and offered me a seat, now she gave me a look of concentrated attention: the enigma was about to be unraveled. Yes, I’d insulted her friends, deserted her on our first and only date, plagued her with rambling letters and appeared on her doorstep at five in the morning — but there were extenuating circumstances. I was a nice guy — trustworthy, loyal, sane and sympathetic — really, I was. “We’re not up here for our health,” I said.

Her laugh surprised me. She reached out to pat my bandaged hand. “I can see that,” she said.

I acknowledged her point with a tight, rueful smile, then lowered my head again. “We’re growing pot.”

Petra had looked at me curiously, as if in that moment I’d emerged from darkness to light, as if I’d molted, sloughed off a strange skin and metamorphosed into the familiar. “So that’s it,” she said, smiling a wide, beautiful, close-lipped smile. “I should have guessed. And I thought you were schizophrenic or something. Or married.” She was watching me over the rim of her cup, her eyes flaring with amusement. “Remember Teddy? And Sarah?” I nodded. I wanted to get it over with, give her all the sorry details, I wanted to justify myself, I wanted absolution. “They’ve got a patch too. So does Alice.” She gestured at the dark windowpane. “I’ve even got five plants myself, buried out there in a clump of pampas grass. Everybody grows around here — it’s no big thing.”

This was my moment of confession, yes, my moment of humiliation, my scourging — but she’d gone too far. Did she think I was some piker, some weekend dirtbagger, some Teddy? “I’m talking two thousand plants.”

She shrugged. “Alice knows a guy up in Humboldt with twice that. He’s got his own twin-engine plane. He even contributed to the sheriff’s reelection fund last year.”

What could I say? We were losers, schmucks, first-class bone-heads. We weren’t paying off politicians or reconnoitering the skies — we were too busy dodging our own shadows and setting fire to storage sheds. Chastened, I dropped any pretense of coming on like the macho dope king and gave her the story straight. I described rampant paranoia, xenophobia, self-enforced isolation. I told her of sleepless nights, panic at the first sputter of an internal-combustion engine, suspicion that ate like acid at the fabric of quotidian existence. I told her how Vogelsang appeared and disappeared like a wood sprite, how Phil slept with his sneakers on, how Dowst would insist that we change the hundred-dollar bills he gave us for supplies before we bought groceries, on the theory that only dope farmers would flash a hundred-dollar bill in the checkout line. She was laughing. So was I. It was a comedy, this tale I was telling her, slapstick. We were ridiculous, we were cranks, sots, quixotic dreamers — Ponce de LeéoAn, Percival Lowell and Donald Duck all rolled in one. When I’d told her everything — the whole sad laughable tale — she’d said “Poor Felix,” and patted my hand again. Then she’d asked if I wanted more Postum.

Now, as I watched her at the stove, the first splash of sun ripening the window and firing the kimono with color, I felt at peace for the first time in months. Annealed by the fire, shriven by confession, I rolled the cup in my clumsy hands and felt like Saint Anthony emerging from the tomb. I’d revealed my festering secret and nothing had happened. Petra hadn’t run howling from the room or telephoned the police, the DEA hadn’t burst in and demanded my surrender, the stars were still in their firmament and the seas lapped the shores. No big thing, she’d said. She was right. For the moment at least I’d been able to put things in perspective, separate myself from the grip of events, see the absurdity of what we’d come to. If the best stories — or the funniest, at any rate — derive from suffering recollected in tranquility then this was hilarious. In telling it, I’d defused it, neutralized the misery through retrospection, made light of the woe. My trip to Belize? Oh, yes, I lost eight layers of skin to sunburn while snorkeling off the barrier reef, turned yellow from jaundice, got mugged outside the courthouse and couldn’t get a grip on my bowels for a month. Ha-ha-ha.

Petra’s kimono was slit to mid-thigh. Her skin was dark, even, smooth as the slap of a masseuse’s palm. I felt deeply appreciative of that revelation of skin, that sweet tapering triangle of flesh, and was fully lost in its contemplation when she turned to me and asked if I was hungry. I wasn’t. She was standing there in the nimbus of light, looking at me as if I were the UNICEF poster child. “You know what,” she said finally, two cups of fresh noxious Postum steaming in her hand, “you’re a real mess.” I liked the tone of this observation, liked, her concern. After all, I hadn’t come to her doorstep looking for indifference, abuse or rejection, but for sympathy. Sympathy, and perhaps even a little tenderness. I lifted my eyebrows and shrugged.

Her voice dropped. “You may as well spend the night,” she said. “Or the morning, I mean.”

If I’d been feeling the effects of my cathartic night, feeling leaden and listless, suddenly I was alert as a bloodhound at dinnertime. My first impulse was to decline the invitation ("You don’t have to do that; oh, no, no, I couldn’t"), but I suppressed it. “I’d like that,” I said. I looked her in the eye as she set the ceramic mug down before me — the mug was implausibly ringed by what seemed to be the raised figures of dancing nymphs and satyrs — and added, “That would be great. Really. You wouldn’t believe how depressing the farm is. Especially now.”

I was playing for sympathy, trying to gauge her mood. Was she asking me to spend the night in the way a Sister of Mercy might ask an invalid in out of the cold, or was she asking me to share her bed, clutch her, embrace her, make love to her like a genius? Out of uncertainty, out of nervousness, I began to rattle on about conditions at the summer camp — the stink of burned garbage and raw excrement, the dance of the rats and spiders, the humorless air, slashing sun, filthy mattresses and reluctant water taps — when she cut me off. “You’ll want a shower,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” I agreed, nodding vigorously, “a shower.”

I was standing suddenly, watching her closely, fumbling toward the first move, a touch, a kiss, never certain, suspended in the moment like an insect caught in a web. She stood three feet from me. Morning light, ceramic pig, a stove that shone like the flank of a Viking rocket. She sipped her Postum, watching me in turn, her lips pursed to blow the steam from her cup. Now, I thought, hesitating.

“The shower’s through here,” she said, setting down her mug and drifting through the kitchen in a liquid rush of dragons and lotus flowers. The living room was on the left, her bedroom on the right. She stood at the door of the penumbral bedroom — bed, dresser, patchwork quilt — ushering me forward. Dimly visible in the far corner, a clutch of ceramic figures gazed at me with stricken, sorrowful eyes that seemed to speak of lost chances and the bankruptcy of hope. I followed her through the room, past the broad variegated plain of the big double bed and the eyes of the gloomy figures. Then the bathroom door swung open, a splash of underwater light caught in the thick, beaded, sun-struck windows. “Here’s a towel,” she said, shoving terrycloth at my bandaged hands, and then I was in the bathroom, door closing, click, and she was gone.

My pants were a trial. Fingers like blocks of cement, fumbling with the catch, the zipper. Scorched, frayed, reeking of smoke and dried sweat, the pants finally dropped to the floor. Then the rest: sneakers fit for the wastebasket, T-shirt a rag, socks and Jockey shorts smelling as if they’d been used to mop up the locker room after the big game. The tiles felt cool under my feet, the windows glowed. I was nude, in Petra’s bathroom. Though the shower awaited, I couldn’t resist poking through her medicine cabinet — take two in the morning, two in the evening and feed the rest to the ducks — and peeking into her dirty-clothes hamper. I studied her undergarments, her makeup, her artifacts and totems. I used her toothbrush. Counted her birth-control pills, took a swig of Listerine and swirled it round my mouth, found a plastic vial of what looked to be Valium, shook out two and swallowed them. Then I slid back the opaque door of the shower stall, stepped inside and took the first hissing rush of water like a bride in the ritual bath.

One minute passed. Two. Water swirling round my feet, my head bowed to the spray, hands held high to keep the bandages dry. When the stall door slid back, I turned like a supplicant before the oracle. Petra was smiling. The kimono dropped from her and that naked interesting leg engulfed her, pulled her forward. The water beat at me, at us, purifying, cleansing, doing the work of absolution. “I thought you might need help,” she murmured, holding me. “What with your hands and all.”

Phil was waiting for us amid the plastic ferns in the hallway-cum-lobby of the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital. At first I didn’t recognize him. He had his back to us, and he was slumped in a burnt-orange imitation-leather easy chair, thumbing through a twelve-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. An old man, so wasted his flesh looked painted on, dozed in a wheelchair beside him, while a thick, stolid, broad-faced woman who might have been Nina Khrushchev’s cousin from San Jose sat directly across from him, stolidly peeling a banana. I stepped through the main door, Petra at my side, and took in the scuffed linoleum, battered gurneys, the pine desk, which now bore a placard reading “Receptionist,” the little group ranged round the cheap furniture and plastic plants. Nina’s cousin gave us a brief bovine glance and then turned back to her banana. I saw the nodding old man, I saw the back of Phil’s head (which was not Phil’s head at all, but the shorn and gauze-wrapped cranium of some stranger, some poor unfortunate from whose afflictions one instinctively and charitably averts one’s eyes). “Maybe he’s still in his room or something,” I said, steering Petra toward the receptionist’s desk.

Gone was the sour night-nurse. In her stead, a motherly type beamed up at us, dispensing smiles like individually wrapped candies. “May I help you?”

Beyond her, the emergency room stood empty, no trace of the kid’s bloody passage. “Phil Cherniske,” I said, with an odd sense of déeAjéaG vu that took me back to the Eldorado County jail. I’d phoned the hospital from Petra’s apartment half an hour earlier, and Phil had told me he was all right — a little sore, that was all — and that he’d meet me in the lobby at two. It was ten after. “He’s due to be discharged?”

She gave me a peculiar look, a web of creases suddenly emerging to snatch the smile from her lips. “But he’s right over there,” she said, indicating the trio among the ferns.

Petra and I turned our heads in unison, the old man in the wheelchair woke with a start and shouted something incoherent, Nina’s cousin tucked the nether end of the banana in the pocket of her cheek and Phil looked up from his magazine. “Phil,” I blurted, my voice echoing down the corridor, “over here.”

He stood. Pale as a fish, dressed in his soot-blackened jeans, greasy workboots and a pale green hospital gown that fell away in back to reveal bandages upon bandages, he looked like an invalid, a refugee, one of the homeless. They’d shaved the crown of his head, and he wore a listing slab of sticking-plaster and gauze on the left side as if it were a jaunty white beret. I crossed the hallway and gave him the Beau Geste hug, gingerly patting his bandaged shoulders with my bandaged hands. “Christ,” I said, stepping back, “you look terrible.”

Phil’s stubborn eyes had come into alignment, and he was surveying me head to foot with a tight sardonic smile. I was wearing the punctuated sneakers, my beat pants and a Boy Scout shirt of Petra’s that was so small it looked like a bib. And my bandages, of course. “You don’t exactly look like the Barclay man yourself, you know.”

“You are all right, though, aren’t you?” I said. His right arm was taped and bound, his chest, back, shoulders; where a tongue of flesh protruded from beneath the gauze, it was rough and raw, as if someone had taken a cheese grater to it.

Phil shrugged. “I’ve got to change the bandages once a day and rub this shit that looks like green toothpaste …” He broke off in mid-sentence. A look of bewilderment had come over his face, and he was gazing beyond me at Petra as if she were a cross between La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Dragon Lady.

I turned and slipped my arm round her waist. “Phil,” I said, “this is Petra. Petra, Phil.”

Phil shook her hand numbly.

“Who the hell are you?” bawled the old man in the wheelchair, glaring at the wide-faced chewing woman. She’d been sitting there, motionless, staring off into space and absently turning the banana peel over in her hands as if she were molding clay. “You,” the old man raged. “Fat face. What the shit, piss and fuck do you think you’re doing in my bathroom?”

The woman looked alarmed, terrified, as if she’d been denounced in a purge and was facing a howling mob. She rose to her feet, gathering up a handbag the size of a pig’s head and looking wildly around her, as we moved off down the hallway, away from the commotion. Phil was giving me an are-you-crazy-or-what look, the look of a conspirator betrayed, a look of disbelief and mortal offense. I ignored him.

We passed through the double doors and out into the sunshine. I was holding Petra’s hand, couldn’t seem to stop touching her in fact. I’d never in my life felt better. “I told her everything, Phil,” I said.

He stopped short. Petra attempted an awkward grin; I put on my sober, prisoner-in-the-dock expression. We stood there in the driveway for a long moment, the three of us, facing one another like footballers in a huddle. I watched as Phil absorbed the news, watched as his lips and eyes tried out one expression after another, sorting through responses like ties on a rack — he looked like a stand-up comic trying to play Lear, Cordelia and the Fool simultaneously. Finally he just dropped his shoulders and gave us a bald-headed, green-gowned, wild-eyed, gap-toothed smile. “At least you didn’t tell the Eyewitness News Team … or did you?”

The caféeA Petra chose for breakfast/lunch was, of course, the very one in which I’d had my first paranoid episode, the one in which I’d conjured the specter of Jerpbak and gone into ataxic shock while Phil blithely related the adventures of Bors Borka, inter-galactic hero. That was back in April. I hadn’t been near the place since. Now, as I swung the Toyota into the parking lot and nosed up to the cinder-block foundation between the inevitable pickups and dusty Ford sedans, I felt the slightest tremor run through my digestive tract. Phil was rattling on about hospital food, oblivious as usual. “They gave me lime Jell-O for breakfast, with a little shit-smear of that fake whipped cream — you know, that stuff they make out of leftover fiberglass? For lunch it was grape Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it. I mean that was it. No bread, no milk, no meat, eggs, nothing. Jell-O.” He scratched the bristle of his head. “Maybe it’s some kind of new miracle food or something.”

“Haven’t you heard?” Petra said. “It prevents cancer.”

We were laughing as we ascended the front steps, grinning like fools as we stepped through the door. The place was crowded. Puffs of starched hair, cowboy hats, cigarette smoke, a rumbling clatter of cheap silverware and busy voices and the faint, countrified pulse of the jukebox. Petra was leading us past a row of congested booths to a table by the far window, when a hand reached out to grab my wrist.

I stopped. Looked down. Lloyd Sapers was grinning up at me, a plate of runny eggs and grits at his elbow. Beside him, the massive spill of goggle-eyed Marlon, an avalanche of flesh in a T-shirt the size of a bedspread. Sitting across from him, and eyeing me wrathfully, was George Pete Turner. “Howdedo, howdedo,” Sapers was saying, the chin bobbing up and down on his neck like a rubber ball attached to a paddle. “Looks like you boys mighta had a little accident, huh?”

Phil and Petra had stopped, too, and were looking back at me questioningly. How many times had I been through this, I wondered, watching the mock-innocent expression hang on Sapers’s face like a kite in the wind, how many times had I played the whipping boy to this crew of in-bred, shit-shoveling, tobacco-chewing rednecks? Things had changed. I’d been through the fire and my life was something new. I jerked my hand away. “What’s it to you?” I said.

“Just asking, that’s all,” Sapers roared as if addressing the entire restaurant. A sly smirk creased the stubble of his cheeks and he licked his lips. “Just being neighborly.”

“You want to be neighborly,” I said, leaning forward and resting my bandaged fists on the edge of the table, “why don’t you come up with some cash to cover your son’s rampage a month and a half ago? Like you promised.”

He was glib, Sapers, chameleonlike, but I had him. His face folded like a lawn chair and he began to fidget in his seat. Marlon, who’d been lustily attacking a double Super Chili Beef Burger in a sea of French fries, reddened and stared down at his plate.

“Come on, Felix,” Phil said. He was standing behind me, the hospital gown tucked into his jeans, impatience hardening his face: he didn’t like Sapers any more than I did.

Sapers was on the defensive now, mumbling something about an operation for Trudy and a stud bull with the bloody scours. I cut him off. “You owe me,” I said.

Through all this, George Pete Turner had been glowering up at me with his wicked slanted vigilante’s eyes, no doubt privately implicating me in the disappearance of his daughter-in-law-to-be and a thousand other crimes, not the least of which was my insistence on continuing to draw breath and occupy space. Now I turned to him, straightened up and folded my arms across my chest. I felt like Shane unleashed, like Kid Lightning, hands wrapped, warming up for the main event. “And you, friend,” I said, “don’t I owe you something?”

The question seemed to take him by surprise. He glanced at Phil and then Petra, as if for clarification.

I was a firefighter, a hero, a lover. I looked him in the eye, two feet away, and prodded him: “Like a good shot to the side of the head, maybe?”

“Hey-hey,” Sapers said, roaring again. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

George Pete was rangy, tough, hard as a knot. He was wearing a plaid shirt, a hand-tooled belt and a string tie. His eyes were the color of water vapor. He didn’t say a word.

“Come on, stand up,” I said. “I’ll take you on right here and now, bandages and all.” I don’t know what had come over me, but I was suddenly hot with outrage, self-righteous as a preacher, vengeful as a man wronged. I was ready to fight to the death, bite the heads off chickens, anything.

A nerve twitched under George Pete’s right eye. Plates rattled and voices hummed around us. Marlon swished the ice in his glass, Sapers was silent. George Pete suddenly became interested in the design of his napkin. “Fine,” I said, and an era had ended. I turned my back on them contemptuously, the matador walking away from a spiritless bull, and led Petra and Phil to a table in the corner.

Something had changed. Some subtle alteration had taken place in the balance of things — I’d cut a new notch in the chain of being, and I could feel all the myriad creatures of the earth, from slippery amoebae and humping earthworms to the hordes of China, shoving over to make room like passengers on a crowded bus. As if in confirmation of this new state of things, the ancient waitress responded instantly to my merest gesture, though the place was packed. She poured us hot coffee, freshly brewed. The food came so quickly I suspected the cook of clairvoyance. It was hot, properly seasoned, tasty. The rolls were airy, the butter firm and pale. Phil and Petra discovered the common ground of sculpture and became fast friends almost instantly. When I looked up, Sapers and his party had vanished.

“No,” Phil was saying, “I haven’t done anything in years.”

“But you wouldn’t catch him dead without his blowtorch,” I said.

Petra smiled. She was wearing white — a peasant blouse, embroidered gentians twining the sleeves. I watched her lift the sandwich to her mouth, pat her lips with the napkin, and then watched her smile widen like the wake of a sailboat cutting across a flashing depthless sea. When the two highway patrolmen lumbered through the door, keys clanking, gunbelts creaking, and heaved into the booth behind us, I barely glanced up.

Chapter 4

Unseasonable, freakish, the rains began in earnest the last week of October. I woke one morning to the sound of rain on the sheet Styrofoam of the roof — it was like the rattling of a snare drum — and to the slow steady drip of the runoff making its way through the seams and spattering the kitchen floor. At first I was elated. Like one of Noah’s unwitting contemporaries on the first blessed day of rain, I thought only of the crops standing tall in the fields, of the even, invigorating, pluvial wash laving leaves, buds, stems, percolating down to the thirsting roots. Lulled by the sweet percussion, I turned over and fell back into my dreams: there would be no need to start up the pump, I thought, not today.

Three days later it was still raining.

Now I woke to the hiss of it as to a pronouncement of doom, thinking of the generations of plowmen gone down, from the Mesopotamians to Virgil’s agricolae to the pioneers of the Midwest and their mechanized descendants — tilling, seeding, fertilizing and watering, waiting, praying, sacrificing to the gods — only to wake one morning to the rattle of hail or the cutting rasp of the locusts’ wings. My bed was damp, my clothes damper still. A single day’s rain was cause for celebration, a boon — just the thing to coax the buds into a final pre-harvest frenzy — but this was a disaster. Sodden, the heavy colas would pull the branches down till they snapped, the plants would die premature deaths, the buds would develop mold and wind up tasting like coffin scrapings. Where was the season of mellow fruitfulness, plumping kernels and deluded bees?

I was making breakfast — fried-egg sandwiches with green salsa and melted jack cheese — when Gesh rumbled down the stairs from the attic like a tree dweller dropping to earth. He was wearing a hooded black sweatshirt and a pair of grease-stiffened corduroys, and he was cursing. The curses were elaborate, heartfelt, rhythmic and persuasive, and they were directed at the weather, at Vogelsang, at the Powers That Be and life in a disappointing and ultimately tragic universe. For five minutes or more he stood at the yellowed front window, hooded like a monk at prayer, cursing into the windowpane. The glass clouded over: it was cold. Once again. And of course we hadn’t laid in even a stick of wood, thinking only of the maturing sun, the crop — attenuated though it was — coming to golden fruition, money in the bank, release, the life of the city. Why stockpile wood against a winter we’d never see?

When Gesh finally joined me at the table, he announced (yet again, litany of disaffection) that he was fed up with the whole thing. I watched as he slathered ketchup on his eggs and thumped the bottom of the salsa bottle. “I mean it,” he said, as if I’d questioned him. “Just get in the truck, drive to Tahoe and forget the whole fucking mess.”

I sympathized with him. Who wouldn’t? I had the same feelings myself. But I was determined to see those plants harvested if I had to do it in a boat. Alone. With both hands manacled behind my back and Jerpbak circling overhead in a helicopter. It was no longer a question of money (the crop had been so decimated we’d be lucky to wind up with a fraction of even our most despairing estimate), reason (if I’d been reasonable I would have been sitting in front of the stove in Petra’s kitchen) or pride — no, it went deeper than that. Call it stubbornness, call it stupidity. I was beyond caring. Grim as the shipwrecked fanatic who survives six weeks on the open sea only to be offered rescue within sight of shore, I was determined to stick it out to the end. “Maybe we ought to go out there and check on the plants,” I said. “Or give Dowst a call.”

“Fuck Dowst,” Gesh said. Predictably.

A muted subaqueous glow drained the room of light until it began to feel like a dungeon. Behind me there was the steady syncopation of the water dripping from the ceiling into pots, pans and buckets. The kitchen smelled like a mushroom cellar.

I was thinking that phoning Dowst wouldn’t be such a bad idea — especially as it would give me an excuse to drop in on Petra as long as I was in town — when Phil emerged from the shadowy depths of his room as if from the Black Hole of Calcutta. His eyes were watery and flecked with red, his bandages dirty. A joint glowed in his hand and a haze of marijuana smoke seemed to seep from his ears and cling like a phantom to the shorn crown of his head (he’d been sedating himself diligently since the fire — to ease the smart of his burns, he insisted — but changing the bandages far less faithfully). “Morning,” he said, shuffling across the room to the stove, where he fired up all four burners and held his hands out flat as if he were roasting weiners. We watched him pour himself a cup of coffee, cradle it in his hands, blow on it and take a tentative sip, watched with open-mouthed concentration, as if we’d never before seen so subtle and astonishing a feat. “What about it,” he said finally, swinging around to face us. “The weather stinks, Vogelsang’s a liar and I’m the mummy’s ghost. Let’s get stoned.”

Stoned, straight, drunk, sober: it didn’t make a shred of difference. “Why not?” I said.

We mopped up our eggs and then huddled over the stove, glumly sharing a joint, gearing ourselves up for yet another critical decision. (We were smoking our own product now, heady stuff — shake leaves from fourteen-foot female plants with colas the size of nightsticks. The leaves were so saturated with resin they stuck to your fingers like flypaper.) We drank coffee, smoked a bit more, stood around staring off into space. Then, as if at a given signal, we shrugged into our rain gear and trundled out into the downpour to make the rounds and assess the damage.

Outside, water had begun to collect beneath the gutted storage shed and in a wide scimitar-shaped depression in the front yard. The Jeep, which hadn’t run in a month, sloped forward in a reddish pool that already threatened to engulf the front bumper. There was no wind, no slant to the rain, no indication that the storm was moving on. Clouds clung to the earth as if strangling it, the main drive had reverted to its primitive state — i.e., it was a riverbed — and a network of parched gullies that were nothing more than scars in the dust suddenly churned with angry, braided streams. It was March all over again.

We trudged down the road to the Jonestown growing area — the only one that ultimately produced anything — and fought our way through the dripping undergrowth to the rat-trap-strewn enclosure we’d thrown up in the vain hope of protecting our crop from the quick-toothed vandals of the wood. Our plants — what was left of them — had been doing well, flowering for better than a month now, putting out buds on top of buds. This was the climactic growth we’d been waiting for, fey, penultimate, triggered by the autumnal equinox and the declining days that succeeded it. Dowst had been busy throughout September, identifying and eliminating the male plants, foiling nature. I’d watched as he cut down one healthy plant after another — each the culmination of months of coolie labor, of digging, hauling, fertilizing, watering — and tossed them aside to decompose. It hurt. But it was necessary. Frustrated, aching, desperate for completion, the females spread themselves ever more luxuriously, the flowers swelling, growing sweeter, more resinous and potent; budding more and still more, our harvest battened on the vine.

Now we stood confused amid the apparent ruins of it. Raindrops tapped at our backs like insinuating fingers, water puddled the ground, streamed from our hats and shoulders. The trees drooped like old men with back problems, the fierce jungle smell of ripe pot stunned the air, raw and chlorophyllific; the carcass of a rat lay twisted and dumb-staring in a trap at my feet. None of us had been out of the house since the rains had begun, and we weren’t quite prepared for the transformation they’d wrought. Whereas three days earlier we’d been tending plants twelve and fourteen feet tall with branches arching toward the sun like candelabra, now we were confronted with broken limbs, splayed growth, the declining curve. Fully half the plants had ruptured under the water-heavy burden of the flower bracts, and all were bent like sunflowers after a frost. In the lower corner of the plot I found a six-inch cola — prime buds — immersed in a soup of reddish mud. It was as if someone had gone through the field with a saber, swiping randomly at stem, branch, leaf and bud. My thoughts were gradual. Still stoned, I looked round me in a slow pan — everything seemed to be moving, divided into beads of color, as if I were looking through a microscope. Somehow my heartbeat seemed to have lodged in my brain.

“What now?” Phil was standing at my side, Mr. Potatohead, carrot nose and cherry tomato eyes. The rain thrashed the trees like a monsoon in Burma.

“I don’t know,” I said.

So much water was streaming from my hat I had to turn my head and look sideways to see him. We might as well have been hooked to the conveyor track in a car wash. “This could go on forever,” he said.

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Anything positive, that is.

“So what do we do?” he said. “Wait and hope it clears up, try to harvest now, or what?”

It was a resonant question, pithy, full of meat and consequence, the question I’d been asking myself for the past several minutes. “We call the expert,” I said.

Half an hour later, after schussing down the driveway in the Toyota, fighting erratic windshield wipers and skirting Shirelle’s Bum Steer, Phil, Gesh and I crowded into a phone booth at a Shell station just outside Willits and phoned Dowst. I did the talking.

“Hello, Boyd?”

A pause. I could picture him hunching over his typewriter in a glen plaid shirt, sipping hot chicken-noodle soup and typing out his notes on the wild onion or the water wattle. “Christ, I thought you guys would never call,” he said. “What’s going on up there?”

“It’s raining.”

Another pause, as if we were speaking different languages and he had to wait for the translator to finish before he could respond. “Well, yes, of course. What I mean is did you get the stuff in yet?”

“You mean the plants?”

We hadn’t seen Dowst in a month, since he’d finished culling the crop. Just before he left, he’d strolled up to the horseshoe pit and announced in sacerdotal tones that all the remaining plants were females and that we had nothing to worry about, and then he’d taken me aside. He was wearing a sober don’t-jump-on-me-it’s-out-of-my-hands expression, partly defensive, partly apologetic — he could have been a surgeon breaking the news that he’d made a slight miscalculation and removed my liver rather than my gall bladder. “Felix,” he said, “you know we’re going to harvest a lot less than we expected. A lot less.” Yankee farmer, Yankee farmer, I thought, looking into those eyes rinsed of color through the generations of toil in the bleak rocky fields of New England. Lizards scurried in the dust, the clank of horseshoes beat at the moment like a blacksmith’s hammer. “I know,” I said. Then he shook my hand in a way that disturbed me, a way that seemed both empathetic and final. It was a scene from Kamikaze Hell or Zero Hour Over Bataan: he was bailing out. “I got that job, you know — did I tell you? At Berkeley. I start in the spring.”

What could I say? We’d worked side by side, pitched horseshoes and played cards together, and yet I felt nothing, nothing but bitterness. My smile was fractured, inane, a grimace really. “Great,” I said.

“See you,” he said, turning to head for his van. A woodpecker drummed at dead wood off in the forest; overhead, in the reaches of space, lightwaves bent like coat hangers as they responded to the gravitational tug of distant suns. “You’ll be back soon?” I called, thinking of the harvest. Perhaps he didn’t hear me. I remember the way the sunlight glanced off the side panel of his van as he rolled across the lot.

Now it was raining. Gesh’s shoulders crowded the booth’s open doorway; water spilled from the upturned collar of his khaki overcoat. Phil pressed himself flat against the glass beside me. On the other end of the line, Dowst raised his voice. “Don’t you guys realize that a rain like this is going to sap the plants? You’ll get withered stigmas and the gland heads’ll wash away, which means you’re going to get one hell of a less potent harvest — you leave it out there much longer, you’re not going to get shit.”

I found Dowst’s usage disturbing: the genitive form of the personal pronoun had shifted from “ours” to “yours.” We were asking for help, advice, for the expert judgment he’d contracted to deliver, and we were getting a brush-off. Dowst wasn’t in trouble; we were. He’d cut us adrift, lost interest. He’d written the whole thing off as a failure and had no intention of showing his face again — except to pick up his share of the proceeds. Anger rose in me like some hurtling, uncontainable force — a spear thrust, a rocket blast. “What the hell do you mean?” I said, my voice choked tight. “You’re in on this, too. You’re the so-called expert here, aren’t you?”

At this juncture, Gesh snatched the phone from me and shouted into the receiver. “Get your ass up here, scumbag!” he roared, the phone like a throttled doll in his huge, white-knuckled fist.

I wrestled the receiver away from him. “Boyd?” I said, but Gesh, his face like hammered tin, tore it out of my hands and screamed “I’ll kill you!” into the inert black bulb.

“Boyd?” I repeated when I’d regained control of the receiver. “Are you there?”

His voice was distant, cold. “Get the plants in.”

I appreciated the injunction, but just how were we supposed to go about it? It had been apparent for some time that Dowst, Gesh, Phil and I would be on our own when it came to harvest. No one mentioned Mr. Big any more — clearly the deal was off. He only dealt with major operators, the guys who grew pot like Reynolds grew tobacco. We were nothing. Not only would we have to harvest and slow-dry the plants, we’d have to manicure the buds and peddle them ourselves. But Dowst’s expertise was essential to all this: without him we were helpless. “Wonderful,” I said, “super,” a heavy load of sarcasm flattening my tone, “but how?”

“That’s up to you. Rent a truck or something.”

“But what then? I mean where are we going to dry it and all?” The plan had called for giving the crop another two weeks or so to come to the very cornucopian apex of potent, fecund, resin-dripping fruition, after which we would hack the plants down and string them across the lower branches of oaks, ma-drones, etc., to desiccate in the dry seasonal winds. Meteorologically speaking, the plan was all washed up.

There was a pause. Phil tilted his rainhat back, exposing a swath of filthy gauze; the set of his mouth, a certain redness about the lower nostrils and a roving rabbity gaze betrayed his anxiety. Gesh stared straight into the receiver, as if his eyes could hear. “What’s wrong with your place?” Dowst said.

“My place?” The suggestion was outrageous, preposterous — he might as well have named the Oval Office or the lobby of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Hundreds of pounds of marijuana strung up like dirty wash in my apartment? In the middle of the city? How would we get it in — or out?

Dowst’s voice pricked at me like a hatpin. “Look, I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is that it’s supposed to rain for the rest of the week and you’d better get that shit in and dry it someplace.” The line crackled as if with the dislocations of the storm. “Harvest,” he said. “Now.” And then he hung up.

Phil and Gesh were looking at me as if I were a runner bringing news of foreign wars. “Well,” Gesh said, “what did he say?”

Rain spanked the glass walls of the phone booth; a dank wind rose up out of nowhere to assault my nostrils. Suddenly it didn’t matter. Inspiration came, joy, uplift. All at once I knew what we were going to do, and how. But even more important was the electricity of the understanding that came with it: we were free. The project was finished, harvest upon us. All we had to do was cut the plants, pack up and turn our backs on the place. Forever. No more Jerpbak, Sapers and the rest, no more lizards and rats, heat, dust, rain, cold, no more alarms in the night or bathing in a tub fit for crocodiles, no more Dowst, Jones, Vogelsang: it was over.

“Well?”

I was grinning. The rain fell steadily, dropping like the curtain on the final act of a wearying and protracted drama. “We harvest,” I said. “Now.”

Ever since the fire, I’d felt that the three of us had drawn apart in some subtle, indefinable way. We were still close — as close as any band of guerrillas under attack, as close as survivors, comrades, buddies, blood brothers — but the fire, as I’ve said, altered our perspective. As it became increasingly evident that the whole ill-fated project was a bust and that we’d sweated and agonized and given up nine months of our lives for nothing, we began perhaps to feel a bit shamefaced, embarrassed for ourselves, as though we were rubes taken in by a good but transparent pitch, as though we should have known better. The profits would be negligible, Mr. Big was an interdicted subject, the hazards mounted as the crops ripened, but it was understood among us that we would stick it out. We no longer bothered to perform calculations on the mental ledger sheet — solving for x was too unsettling. We were going to persevere, grimly, stolidly, Tess cutting sheaves at Flintcombe-Ash, Job staggering under the burden of calamity, and we didn’t want to know the score.

And so, once united behind the myth of success — the yachts, the restaurants, the equal shares of half a million dollars — we now by necessity drew into ourselves to avoid confronting its rotten wasted core. Gesh brooded. He took long plodding walks through the fields, his fierce Slavic gaze fixed on the ground, hair in a tangle, great bruising hands wadded behind him like tissue paper. Restless, he made a twenty-four-hour run to Tahoe for pharmaceutical meliorants; exhausted, he slept twelve hours a day. He seemed distracted, cankers of rage eating at him like some alien growth, disappointment, self-reproach and the ravages of heartburn sunk into his eyes. Increasingly taciturn, cryptic even, he became the evil genius of the place, a bristling presence to whom the least gesture of day-to-day life was a wellspring of bitterness. Throw a ringer to beat him at horseshoes, draw the winning card from the deck, and he looked as if you’d run a sword through him.

If Gesh was tangled up in himself, rootbound with frustration, Phil was the sensitive plant. For the first few days after his return from the hospital, he drifted from one room to another like a ghost, scratching idly at his crotch or the desolation of his crown, smiling little, saying less. He picked at his guitar for hours at a time (mournful single-string meanderings that sounded like lamentations for the dead), he stopped eating, chain-smoked pot; his bandages glowed in the dark. I came in from irrigating the plants or stood at the stove stirring a kettle of tuna, noodles, and cream of celery soup while Gesh glared at a tattered skin magazine and Phil gazed out the window as if he were witness to rare visions or rehearsing for the rapture. Acid emotions, short-circuited brainwaves: I felt pinched between them. “Phil, are you okay?” I asked after a day or two. No response. I repeated myself. “Me?” he said finally, as if he were one of hundreds present. “Oh, yeah, sure, no problem.”

Finally, just as I’d begun to suspect that the flames had somehow scoured the inside of his head as well as the outer tegument, Phil roused himself to action. It was early morning, four or five days after he’d got back from the hospital, the weather sere and hot, snakes stirring, rats nibbling, rain an impossible proposition. Gesh and I were on our way back from ministering to a thirsty if depleted crop, stepping gingerly, our ears attuned to the least rustle of leaf or twig (I held the shotgun out before me like an assegai, wary of snakes and poachers alike), when Gesh grabbed my arm and dropped his voice to a tense whisper: “What was that?”

“What?” I said, my chin the end-stop beneath the flaring exclamation point of my mouth, nose and brow. “That noise.”

We were cutting cross-country to save time, up to our knees in dense, reptile-nurturing brush, no more than fifty yards from the cabin. “I don’t hear anything,” I whispered, hearing it. It was a hiss: faint, sibilant, saurian, nasty. I released the shotgun’s safety catch. Cautiously, slowly, with more reluctance than curiosity, we made our way to the edge of the field that lay before the house.

What we saw was Phil. He was bent over something, his back to us, intent as a cannibal at breakfast. As I drew closer it became apparent that the hissing was not an expression of ophidian rage but rather the constant fulminating rush of burning gas: Phil was fooling around with his acetylene torch, playing with fire, shaping something. We came up behind him. Sparks flew. Rumpled, twisted, dull as dried blood, the dismal, rusted shapes of discarded machine parts lay in a jagged heap beside him like the debris of foreign wars. Phil was in the process of joining the spin basket of an abandoned washing machine to the amputated fender of a deceased Packard I’d tripped over at least sixty times since March. I asked him what he was doing.

Behind him loomed the charred skeleton of the shed; the blackened grass fanned out around him like a stain. I watched as he steadied the spin basket with one hand and carefully drew the torch along the base of it with the other. He finished the connection before he turned to look over his shoulder at us.

“It’s a bird feeder, right?” Gesh said.

Phil was wearing goggles. The dirty bandages clung to him like a second skin. He could have been a downed fighter ace, injured but game, hunched hopefully over the husk of his gutted jet. For a long moment he simply regarded us as if he’d never laid eyes on us before, the blue flame spitting from his fingertips as if in some magic act. After a while, he turned back to his work.

By nightfall a chin-high pyramid of conjoined junk rose from the ground where the greenhouse had once stood. I’d watched Phil from the shadowy interior of the cabin as morning became afternoon and the roving sun beat at his long nose and naked brow, watched as he dragged bedsprings across the stubble, caressed fenders scalloped like giant ashtrays, probed the slick bulging bellies of his objets trouvéeAs with the burning finger of his torch. He sifted through the ash and debris of the storage shed until he came up with the decapitated head of a pitchfork with its scorched and twisted tines, crabwalked across the back field like a man with bowel problems as he struggled with the gearbox of the weed-whipped Hudson that straddled the cleft of the ravine like a beached ship. He hammered, burned, melted, bent, wedged, clattered and thumped. There was noise, there was heat, creation blossomed amid the rubble, ineffable design confronted physics. When it was fully dark, Phil staggered into the kitchen to take nourishment.

“Is it done?” I asked. My tone was buoyant, warm, shot full of enthusiasm. Phil had been a zombie since the fire, not yet dead but not alive either, and to see him snap out of it was a relief. “Whatever it is,” I added. “What is it, anyway?”

Phil was bent over the gas burner, lighting a joint. I suppose the cannabinoids contributed in some mystical way to the purity of his vision — I was standing knee-deep in a bog and he was scaling creative Annapurnas. “No,” he said, exhaling fragrant smoke, “it’s not done yet.” Dried sweat chewed at his bandages with yellow teeth, his wild eye spun in its socket like a lacquered lemon in a slot machine. “It’s a, it’s—“ He broke off to take another hit. “It’s a tribute to us, I mean to the whole thing we’re doing up here.”

Gesh was slumped in the easy chair, his huge bare feet splayed out across the floor. “You mean like a memorial to the dead, right?”

“Come on, give us a break,” I said.

“What about the eye in the sky?” Gesh drew himself up and leaned forward. “You don’t think they’ll spot that pile of junk from anywhere in the range of five hundred to thirty thousand feet? You might as well put up a neon sign: ’Pot, a hundred and twenty dollars a lid.’”

Phil wasn’t listening. He was spooning papaya-coconut chutney on a slice of white bread and staring off at the flat black windows as if his gaze could drive back the night and illuminate the yard. The creative fit was on him.

It took him a week. After the second day he had to use a ladder. I went outside one morning to see how he was doing and found him perched ten feet off the ground, nesting in the crotch of his metallic aerie like some gangling unfeathered big-winged chick, the blue flame licking here and there, parts accruing. “How’s it going?” I shouted. Aloft, grinning, begoggled, he held up two fingers in the victory sign.

Gesh bitched. Lizards began to frequent the structure’s lower verges, twitching in the dazzling light, doing short-armed pushups and yelping from soft trembling throats. Birds shat on it, rats toured its tortuous walkways like prospective tenants looking over an apartment complex. The sum of its parts, Phil’s monument grew in unexpected directions, mad, random, sensible only to the inner vision that spawned it. Twice the artist made frantic trips to town to replenish his supply of brazing rods or refill one or the other of his tanks. Aside from those two brief hiatuses, he worked from dawn till dusk, skipping meals, ignoring his chores, his comrades, the plants blooming like medallions in the fields. Frayed, the bandages whipped round him in ectoplasmic flux, his pants and T-shirts were spattered and singed, skin began to peel in transparent sheets from his sunburned nose. On the sixth day he worked late into the night, the glow of the torch dimly visible beyond the darkened windows of the cabin. On the seventh day he rested. He rose about noon and summoned Gesh and me outside. Tottering on the porch, his eyes glowing feverishly, he gestured toward the mound of welded junk with a flourish and said “VoiléaG.”

Gesh gave me a sidelong glance. I tried to maintain my equanimity.

“What do you think?” Phil said.

Think? The thing was monstrous, anarchic, a mockery of proportion and grace of line. It looked like a heap of crushed and rusted French horns and tubas, it looked like a dismantled tank in the Sinai, it looked like the Watts Towers compressed by an Olympian fist. I walked round it, Phil at my side. Twenty feet high, wide around as my bedroom floor, it was monumental, toothy, jagged, unsteady, a maze of gears, bolts, hammered planes and swooping arcs. “Nice,” I said.

Gesh’s hands were sunk deep in his pockets. He was grinning, fighting down a laugh, his face animated for the first time in days.

Phil took my arm and backed off a pace or two, maneuvering for a better perspective. “I was thinking of calling it Agrarian Rhapsody“ he said, “but now I’m not so sure. What do you think of Burned?”

If my co-workers had motivational problems during those declining weeks at the summer camp, I had my bouts of self-doubt and despondency, too. I felt useless, I felt as if I’d been sold a bill of goods, deceived, I felt like Willie Loman at the end of the road. But just when my spirit had shrunk to a hard black knot, the fire delivered me up to Petra and I felt my priorities shift like tectonic plates after a seismic storm. I’d been standing on one side of the rift, and then as the gulf widened I’d leapt to the other. Gesh ate himself up, Phil sought solace in art, I was in love.

The others didn’t like it, not a bit. By introducing Petra to our inner circle, I’d compromised the project, weakened our position irretrievably. First I’d screwed up with Savoy, and now I’d willfully violated our vow of secrecy and my promise to remain on the property as long as Jerpbak roved the streets and the plants grew straight and tall. Phil looked the other way, Gesh muttered and swore, Vogelsang — had he known — would have mounted the pedestal of righteousness and denounced me for a turncoat and a fool, but nearly every afternoon during that three-week period between the fire and the rains, I cranked up the Toyota and drove into Willits. I couldn’t help myself. Didn’t want to. The summer camp was moribund; this was newborn.

I would saunter into her shop at four each afternoon — horny as a tomcat, aching, throbbing, my eyes and fingertips, my tongue, lips, and nostrils swollen with lust — and feign indifference as she chatted with a customer or watch transfixed as she sat at her wheel, shaping clay beneath the pyramid of her long tapering fingers. The shop closed at five. I would have been up since seven, tending the plants for the first hour or two, then killing time with walks, cards, trashy paperbacks, the ritual of meals, the one-o’clock siesta, all the while palpitating for the hour of my liberation like a dog awaiting the scrape of his master’s heel on the doorstep. If there were no customers, I’d walk straight in, soothed by the music of the bell, the shadows, the cool plants and glistening triumphant pots, the music of Boccherini, Pachelbel, Palestrina, find her in her smock before the glowing oven or bent over the wheel, and stick my tongue in her ear. Sometimes she was busy, and I would wait; other times we would wrestle on the floor, naked in the clay, and let the angels sing.

I liked it best when there were customers in the shop. Then I could browse, anonymous, a customer among customers, pondering this object or that, my fingers tracing the persuasive, gently swelling convexity of a vase or cupping a smooth glazed bowl as if it were an object of erotic devotion. This was the season of the late-blooming tourist, the golden ones, retirees in Winnebagos and Sceni-Cruisers, smiling their wan beneficent smiles, dropping Mastercard slips and traveler’s checks like manna. I heard madrigals and watched her lips, I hummed along with motets and saw the pregnant look she gave me over the stooped white heads of couples who’d been married fifty years. The anticipation was delicious. I watched her, ogled her, coveted her in the way a child covets the foil-wrapped gifts beneath the Christmas tree — the breasts pushing at her smock, the long impossible fall of her legs, the even white teeth, and the flawless tender expanse of her lips as she beamed at some sunny old character’s blandishments. Five o’clock would come and I’d help her close up the shop, draw the shades, count out the receipts with trembling fingers, touching her, and then I’d take her upstairs and ravish her. Or rather, during that first week when my hands were still bandaged, she ravished me. Upstairs, on her bed, under the greedy voyeuristic gaze of her dwarves and elves and pinheads, she undressed me, button by button. Then she took off her smock.

We would drink a bottle of wine, eat a lazy dinner — tofu salad or veggie delight from Sarah’s place or three-pound garbage burritos from the Mexican restaurant two doors down — go back to bed, smoke, drink, talk. We talked about our respective childhoods, childhood in general, about the relative virtues of growing up in Chicago and New York, about sculpture, movies, books, the tide of illiteracy rising steadily to undermine the country’s intellectual foundations. We talked politics, art, religion, talked blues and plainsong, considered the variety of life on the planet and the argument from design, wondered about life after death and dismissed reincarnation. I confessed that like most children of the Wonder-bread era I hadn’t believed in God past the age of awareness, but that lately I’d begun to feel the tug of the irrational. She told me she’d wanted to be an artist since her discovery of fingerpaints in kindergarten; I told her I’d always been fascinated with dirigibles. Lighter than air, I said, as if the phrase were magical.

“Felix, listen,” she said. Her hand was on my arm. She gave me a look, lips drawn tight, eyes extruded, that reminded me of Michelangelo’s PietéaG. “When he left me like that — my husband, I mean — it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I felt like I had a disease or something — I felt like I was a disease.”

“You know, I quit on my wife,” I said.

She just looked at me.

“It was a career thing. Or no, it was me, I was immature, hung up on role playing, you know?” I told her about Ronnie, how when we met she’d seemed so helpless, so utterly adrift — unable to eat in a restaurant by herself, incapable of locking a car door or paying the phone bill before they disconnected her — and how good it had made me feel to think that she needed me, that I was her champion, her foundation and support. I told her how all that had changed, how she’d grown up and abandoned the little-girl-in-search-of-a-daddy role like a dress that no longer fit her, how she’d suddenly taken an interest in local politics, Afghan hounds and assertiveness training, how she’d asked me for a quid pro quo — to support her through her M.B. A. program as she’d supported me through my abortive Ph.D. — and how I’d quit on her. When I finished, I glanced at Petra like a guilty child, like a thug, a criminal, a male supremacist and backward boor, and flashed her a tentative smile. She was holding an empty teacup. “You know something?” she said. I shrugged. “The way you smile — with your whole face, with your eyes — it’s like a certificate of trust.”

One night, I don’t remember how — who but an insomniac can retrace the web of association of even his own thoughts, let alone recall the progress of a free-ranging dialogue — we got on the subject of babies. It was not a subject to which I readily warmed. Raised as an only child in a neighborhood where it was thought impolite to have more than two children, I’d never had to deal with either sibling rivalry or sibling bonding, had never been supplanted at my mother’s breast by a little gene-shuffler, had never cooed into half-formed faces or wiped up infantile secretions. I knew more of dogs, cats or even goldfish than I knew of children, and my experience of the last-mentioned had been exclusively negative. Children — babies — were loathsome to me, all open orifices and dribbling body fluids, they were the noose around the throat, an end to youth, an eternal responsibility, anathema. But on this night, this otherwise triumphant, golden, redolent night, babies was the subject.

“I’m twenty-nine now,” Petra said, running a reflective finger around the edge of her wineglass.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’ll be thirty in two months.”

I nodded, wondering what this had to do with anything. I felt a twinge of panic. Was she making an oblique comment on our relationship? Was she too old for me? Was I too young for her? Had she been doomed by some genetic infirmity to collapse on the brink of her fourth decade?

“You know,” she said after a moment, “I could never be serious about anybody — a man, I mean — who didn’t want children.” We were in bed. Her legs were wrapped around me. At the mention of this highly charged term with its suggestion of sex, love, tenderness, and affliction, of generations gone down and generations to come, with its messy implications and terrible responsibilities, my poor organ rose briefly with the inflammatory thought of the act involved, and then immediately collapsed under the weight of the rest.

“The child is father of the man,” I said, apropos of nothing. “Speaking of Wordsworth, do you know what Whitman had to say about childhood?”

She was resolute, unswervable. “I’m no religious nut,” she said. “Or one of these virginal types out of a Victorian novel who can’t relate to good clean healthy athletic sex — it’s nothing like that.” She sat up, arranged herself against the headboard in the lotus position and then reached out to the night table to refill our wineglasses. I watched her breasts move.

“It’s just that when you look at it, no matter how much our generation has tried to postpone the issue of adulthood and all the responsibilities that go with it, you’ve got to grow up sometime and realize that having a family is just a part of life, maybe the biggest part.” She shoved her hair back, took a sip of wine and went on to talk about the life force, mayflies, the great chain of being and the nesting habits of birds. She was philosophical, and she was nude. Somehow, everything she said made perfect sense. “It’s nature,” she said. “I mean, all these nerve endings, the physical thing, you know …” She dropped her eyes. I took her breast in my hand like a sacred object. I knew. “It’s all there to ensure the survival of the species.”

I was sitting up now, too, sitting close, my hands on her. “You sound like Charles Darwin.”

“No, I mean you go through life in stages and at each stage everything changes. You’re a kid with a doll or bicycle and every day lasts six years, then you’re a teenager counting pubic hairs and waiting for the phone to ring.”

“You too, huh?”

She smiled, nodded, took a quick sip of Bardolino. I hunkered closer.

“Then you’re twenty, twenty-five, and you want to have a good time — why get tied down? Hedonism, right? The Me Generation?”

My hands were on her, and now hers were on me. There was something moving in me, and it wasn’t philosophy.

“I’m all for it,” she said. “But I want something else, too. I want to feel complete — you know what I mean?”

At this point I could only murmur. I was rising up on my haunches like a satyr, falling into her as into a warm bath.

And then all of a sudden she was gone. Pushing herself up from the bed, swinging her legs out, padding across the floor to the gnome that sat on her dresser. “I loved being a kid,” she said, running a thoughtful finger across the gnome’s fallen forehead. “Loved it. My mother was a big woman and she would take me shopping or walking along the lakeshore and I would feel like I was in the grip of some god and that nothing could go wrong, that everything would last forever, like in a painting — like in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte … you know it?”

I shook my head.

Then she was crossing the room to the bookcase, everything in motion, and bending like one of Degas’s nudes to pluck up a book of reproductions of the French Impressionists. She handed me the book, open to Seurat’s idyll. I saw a day of milky sunshine, kids, dogs, sunbonnets, a warmth and radiance that never ends, no quitting allowed. Or even contemplated. Petra was watching me. “Come here,” I said, setting the book aside. She came, and then we sank back into the bed and I gave myself over to impulse and the tug of the life force.

The following day I strolled into the shop at the usual hour and found her bargaining with an old road warrior over a four-hundred dollar stoneware table setting.

“Four hundred,” she said.

The old man was heavyset, pouchy and grizzled, in a new white T-shirt. His face was broad and sorrowful, collapsing on itself like a decaying jack-o’-lantern. “Three hundred,” he said.

“Four hundred.”

“Three-fifty.”

“Four hundred.”

“Three seventy-five.”

Light, airy, elegant, Debussy’s Children’s Corner Suite fluttered effortlessly through the speakers as I walked in, wondering at the coincidence: was she trying to tell me something? Petra flashed me a smile, I winked in surreptitious acknowledgment, then turned to examine a soup tureen as if I’d never before encountered so exquisite an object, as if I could barely restrain myself from having it wrapped immediately and whirling round to bid on the old man’s crockery.

“Three-eighty,” he said, “and that’s my final price.”

But Petra wasn’t there to answer. She’d swept across the room, locking her arm in mine and effectively blowing my cover as the disinterested and anonymous pottery-lover. “Felix,” she gasped, grinning till all her fine teeth showed, strangely animated, ebullient, ticking away like a kettle coming on to full boil, “have you heard? Have you seen the paper?”

I hadn’t seen the paper. I lived like an ignorant pig farmer in a sagging shack three miles from the nearest hardtop road. “Heard what?”

“Jerpbak. They got him.”

“Who?” I cried, believing, disbelieving, already lit with a rush of anticipatory joy, already panting. I wanted to hear the worst, the vilest details, I wanted to hear that he’d murdered his wife, vanished without a trace, been run down by a carload of ganja-crazed Rastafarians. “What are you talking about?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” she said, skipping back to the counter for the newspaper. Befuddled, the old Winnebago pilot stood at the cash register, a two-pound ceramic plate in one hand, a sheaf of traveler’s checks in the other.

The story was on page six, tucked away amid a clutter of birth announcements and photographs of bilious-looking Rotarians and adolescent calf-fatteners. It was simple, terse, to the point. Jerpbak had been suspended from active duty pending investigation of assault charges brought against him by the parents of two juveniles he’d taken into custody earlier in the month. Charles Fadel, Jr., 16, son of the prominent Bay Area attorney, had been admitted to the Frank R. Howard Memorial Hospital in Willits suffering from facial contusions, concussion, and fractured ribs; his companion, Michael Puff, 17, of Mill Valley, had sustained minor cuts and bruises that did not require emergency care. According to the official police report, Officer Jerpbak encountered the pair at 3:45 a.m. on the sixth of October as they were hitchhiking along Route 101 just south of Willits. They allegedly refused the reasonable request of a police officer in declining to identify themselves and subsequently resisted arrest, at which time the officer was constrained to subdue them. In filing charges, the parents of the juveniles contended that the arresting officer had violated the youths’ civil rights and had used unwarranted and excessive force in detaining them. (Oh, yes. I could picture the dark road, Jerpbak wound up like a jack-in-the-box; I closed my eyes and saw the bloody kid splayed out on the nurse’s desk.) CHP officials declined comment.

I read through the story with mounting exhilaration, then stopped to read it again, savoring the details. I clenched my fist, gritted my teeth: they were going to stick it to him, they were going to hang his ass. I felt as deeply justified, as elated and self-righteous as I had when I first heard the news of Nixon’s resignation. Jerpbak had got his comeuppance. There was justice in the world after all, justice ascendant.

Petra and I embraced. We danced round the shop, arm in arm, homesteaders watching the Comanches retreat under the guns of the cavalry. “We’ve got to celebrate,” I said.

Forgotten, the old man slouched behind his belly, watching us out of cloudy, lugubrious eyes. We were dancing in each other’s arms; he had a bad back, bad feet and an abraded memory. “All right,” he said, setting down the plate and scrawling his signature across the face of the topmost check, “I’ll give you four hundred.”

We went to the classiest restaurant in town, a place called Visions of Johanna that crouched like a tortoise behind the Blue Bird Motel. The cuisine was haute Mexican: cainitas, menudo, pollo en mole. We ate, we drank. The subject of niénTos, which had lain between us like the sword in Siegfried’s bed, never came up. Petra paid. Vindicated, victorious, flushed with passion, tequila and a sense of universal well-being, we went home to make triumphant love.

That was four days ago. When the sun was shining and the fields were blooming, when God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Now it was raining. Phil, Gesh and I slumped open-mouthed round the telephone outside the forlorn Shell station, trying to cope with the sudden, monumental, liberating effect of Dowst’s injunction. “Harvest now,” he’d said, and it was a cutting away of the bonds, a dropping of the shackles. We were grunts in the trenches and the general himself had sent us the word: we’re going home, boys!

My mind was in ferment. I hadn’t seen Petra since the night of the restaurant, and I didn’t know when I’d see her next. We would be caught up in a seething rush of activity for the next several days, weeks even. We were harvesting. Packing up. Evacuating. And once we’d evacuated we’d have to find a place to dry, manicure, weigh and package the stuff, to say nothing of unloading it. “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to make a phone call. Could you guys wait in the car?”

The back of Gesh’s trench coat was soaked through. He was breathing in an odd, fitful way, his mind in the wet fields, flashing like a scythe. “We’re going to need a truck,” he said. “Something enclosed.”

Phil was nodding in agreement.

“Okay,” I said, “great. Just let me make this phone call and we’ll discuss it.”

I watched as they dodged off through the downpour, hitting the puddles flatfooted and snatching at their collars. Then I dialed Petra’s number and counted the clicks as the rain drummed at the tinny roof of the phone booth.

She was in the shop. Her voice was a pulse of enthusiasm, quick, high-pitched, barely contained. She was firing a new piece — a figure — her work was going well in the sudden absence of tourists. No, it wasn’t a grotesque, not really. She was going in a new direction, she thought: this figure a swimmer on a block of jagged ceramic waves, limbs churning, head down, features not so much distorted as unformed, raw, in ovo — she couldn’t seem to visualize the face. Weird, wasn’t it?

“Strange,” I said.

How did I like the rain?

“We’re harvesting,” I said.

Her voice dropped. “So soon? I thought—?”

“I just talked to Dowst. This much rain is going to kill us, it’s going to weaken the crop and make the smoke a lot less potent. We have no choice.”

A gust of wind rattled the booth, raindrops tore at the glass like grapeshot. I couldn’t hear. “What?” I said.

“So you’re leaving, then.”

“Yes.”

“Going back to the city.”

“I’ll call,” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

We rented a twenty-four-foot U-Haul truck and bought two hundred double-reinforced three-ply extra-large plastic trash bags and three sickles. It was getting dark by the time we introduced the truck’s big churning wheels to the riverine bed of the driveway. Gesh was behind the wheel of the truck and I was in the deathseat; Phil preceded us in the Toyota. There were no surprises. The truck staggered like an afflicted beast groaning in every joint, Gesh fought the wheel like Hercules wrestling the Hydra, I braced myself against the dashboard with both hands and feet, branches slammed at the great humped enclosure that rose up behind the cab and the wheels bogged down in mud. Six times. We took down saplings and beetling limbs with bow saw and axe, we propped up the wheels with skull-sized stones and rotted logs, we shoved, sweated and bled. Expert at this sort of thing, we managed to clear the top of the hill in a mere two and a half hours. The rain slacked off just as we rolled up outside the cabin, the clouds parted and the pale rinsed stars shone through the gap like the sign of the covenant. “Hey,” Gesh said, slamming the big hollow door of the truck and cocking his head back, “you know what? It looks like it might just clear up after all.”

Phil and I gazed hopefully at the heavens. Just then the moon emerged, cut like a sickle, and the clouds fell away in strips. “Yeah,” I said after a while, “I think you might be right.”

He wasn’t.

In the morning it was raining again. Hard. The earth sizzled, the sky was a cerement, the rain heaved down brutally, retri-butively, with crashing fall and stabbing winds out of the northwest. Inside, it wasn’t much better. Brownish swill drooled from the ceiling, filling and overfilling the receptacles flung randomly across the kitchen floor, wind screamed through the planks, the sodden beams groaned beneath my feet like arthritic old tumblers at the base of a human pyramid. The house was sapped, enervated, falling to ruin. I couldn’t have cared less. If, as in some vaudeville routine, the entire place collapsed the moment we slammed the door, so much the better.

Shivering in the early-morning cold, I eased down on the living room floor to pull on my socks and shoes. I wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table or on the couch or easy chair for the simple reason that they no longer existed — at least in the form we’d known them. In a festive mood after winning the battle of the U-Haul, we’d dismantled the furniture, feeding the combustibles into the wood stove while toasting our imminent departure with the dregs of our liquor larder (two fingers of bourbon, three of Kahlua, a faint whiff of vodka and half a gallon of soured burgundy that tasted like industrial solvent). I laced my boots to the mocking chatter of the rain, and then, hosed and shod, I sloshed my way to the stove as Gesh rambled about overhead and the decelerating rhythm of Phil’s snores indicated that he was about to emerge from the grip of his dreams.

The kitchen was a palette of life, blooming with rank growth, with festering sludge and the primordial agents of decay. A rich blood-red fungus that apparently throve on periodic incineration clogged the stove’s jets, exotic saprophytes stippled the walls, the counters were maculated with splotches of blue-green mold from which black filaments arose like trees in a miniature forest. The smell was not encouraging. If the place had been barely habitable when we moved in, it looked now as if a troop of baboons had used it for primal therapy. I shrugged and struck a match, surveying the room for the penultimate time. Then I shoved aside the crusted kettle in which the remains of our last supper were slowly congealing, and put on the water for coffee.

We tackled the Khyber Pass first.

Up the precipitous slope, stumbling over mud-slick streams like Sherpa rejects, the rain driving at our faces. We wore improvised rain gear — plastic trash bags, hastily tailored to admit necks and arms — and we carried our sickles like weapons. Slash, hack, slash. Top-heavy, the plants gave way at the first swipe. We caught them in a dazzling rush of leaves, shook them out like big soggy beach umbrellas and unceremoniously stuffed them into trash bags. The bags skipped gracefully down the slope, and we followed them, staggering, careening, already as mucked over as alligator wrestlers. Then we proceeded to Julie Andrews’s Meadow and Jonestown, and finally to the marginal areas that lay on the far wet verges of the property.

We were finished by three in the afternoon, every leaf, bud and twig bundled up and stowed away in the rear of the U-Haul. Stacked up there like sandbags atop a levee, the bulging bags of pot looked like a king’s ransom, like paydirt and wealth abounding. We knew better. After drying, the bulk of the crop would be so much dross: it was only the buds that concerned us, and well we understood how few they were likely to be. Still, we felt elated. Despite the rain, and considering the sweat, toil and emotional trauma that had gone into raising it, the crop had been surprisingly simple to harvest. We were rapid reapers, the cat burglars of the open field, snatching the goods and filling our sacks. Cut, bag and load. That was it. We were done. The summer camp was history.

Gesh hustled his paper sack of dirty underwear and other worldly baggage out to the Toyota while Phil packed up his priceless mementoes, disintegrating sci-fi paperbacks, his guitar and torch. I bundled my clothes, stuffed them into the sleeping bag and collected the coffee pot and colander we’d liberated from my apartment in the city. The rest we left. The mile and a half of PVC pipe, the cattle troughs, the water pump, the motorbikes, the pickup and the nonfunctional Jeep. Not to mention the shotgun and the crooked.22, the ruptured sacks of garbage and Phil’s heroic junk sculpture. It all belonged to Vogelsang. Let him come and get it.

My partners launched the U-Haul down the hill, twice foundering on dangerous shoals and once coming within a tire’s breadth of pitching over the side of a precipice cut like the face of the Chrysler Building. We encountered our Charybdis in the guise of a swirling spectacular pothole that nearly wrenched off the left wheel, and then moments later our Scylla loomed up on the right in the form of a stray chunk of pillow basalt the size of a Volkswagen. The trees dug their talons into the flanks of the truck as if to hold it back, the front end shimmied like a school of anchovies in distress and the rear doors flew open twice, spilling bags of pot into the free-flowing roadway. Minor impediments all. We made the necessary repairs and adjustments and floated the big treasure-laden truck down the drive like a stately galleon. I saw my comrades out to the blacktop road, gave them the thumbs-up sign and started back up the hill for the Toyota.

It was getting dark by the time I reached the cabin. Hurrying, I emerged from the grip of the trees, strode across the field and past the waiting Toyota, up the steps of the porch and into the house for my final look around. The place was silent, penumbral, already haunted by our absence. Nothing had changed, but for the disappearance of the furniture, and yet the low, littered rooms had been transformed — whereas before they’d had the look of healthy seething squalor, now they stood derelict. After all that had gone on in these rooms, after all the confrontations, disappointments and anxieties, after all the bullshit sessions, card games and miserable meals — after all the living we’d done here — the place was dead. I felt like a historian pacing off the battlefield at Philippi. I felt like a grave robber.

I stood there in the center of the room for a long moment, watching the shadows swell and darken like living organisms, listening to the inexhaustible rain as it spanked the ground beneath the eaves. What was I waiting for? What was I doing? I shook my head like a drunk under the shower and then walked down the hallway to my room to see if I’d left anything. The door pushed open to the scrape of frantic feet and there was a blur of movement as the rat flew along the baseboard and vanished in the shadows; he’d been digging into the stained and stinking underbelly of my mattress as he might have dug into a corpse. Naked tail, a brush of whisker and the quick flashing eye: he’d been reinstated, restored to his rightful dominion. The mattress, the fetid soup cans and mouldering chicken bones, the 3-in-1 oil and the complete adventures of Bors Borka: these were his legacy.

Looping filaments of dirt festooned the walls, the floor sagged in the center as under the force of some invisible weight, a lustrous tan spider slid up and down the guys of its trembling web like a finger on the neck of a banjo. I hadn’t forgotten anything. The wastebasket was full, scraps of glossy magazines (idealized photos of food and women, in that order) slashed at the walls, newspapers, torn flannel shirts and worn jeans lay heaped on the floor. I’d left them consciously, purposely, as I might have left them in a burning building or a foundering ship: why bother, after all? The whole run-down, gutted, roof-rent slum was nothing more than an oversized refuse bin, was the essence of trash itself.

I turned to go — as I’d turned nearly nine months earlier, fresh from the city and stunned by the desolation of the place — and found myself confronting the calendar on the back panel of the door. I’d seen it a thousand times, ignored it, mocked it, forgotten it, but there it was. Still. The woman in the cloche hat with her face averted, the rubric of the year, the page splayed out and defaced by an unknown hand in forgotten times. A bad joke, nothing more.

We’d harvested prematurely, nearly two weeks ahead of the designated date. Today was the thirty-first — Halloween — and we were gone. Or going. Whatever the orphic calendar portended for the thirty-second anniversary of my birth — joy or calamity or provocation — no longer mattered. I reached out, slipped the calendar from the rusty nail that secured it, folded it once and tucked it into my back pocket.

The rain seemed heavier as I maneuvered the Toyota down the drive, past the block of pillow basalt and the downed tree limbs, and out of the clutch of the angry grasping branches. Water fanned out over the windshield faster than the spastic wipers could drive it back, the headlights made phantoms of the steaming tree trunks, my breath clouded the windows. I was picking my way carefully, maintaining momentum to keep from bogging down, my thoughts on Phil and Gesh and our rendezvous later that night, when all at once I found myself hallucinating.

There, against the soft stagy backdrop of the trees, was an apparition, the ghost of harvest past, the clown prince of the scythe, in motley and whiteface. Huge, swelling to gargantuan proportions under the approaching headlights, the figure slogged to the far berm and stood frozen beside the road. As I eased by, the flaring point of highest illumination giving way in a flash to invisibility, I understood that this was no hallucination. No, this was flesh, flesh with a vengeance: beneath the frippery I recognized the big bones and broad vacant gaze of Marlon Sapers. Marlon Sapers, mannish boy, got up as superabundant clown, replete with bulbous nose and pancake jowls, in a drenched ruffled shirtfront and baggy suit with dancing polka dots and writhing stripes, Marlon Sapers, come to mock me. I stopped. Rolled down the window to the teeth of the blow and peered back into the rubicund glow of the taillights. I could barely make him out. “Marlon?” I called. Water rushed past the wheels with the thousand moans of the drowning, rain drilled the roof. There was no answer. But then, reedy, childlike, as tinny as a bad recording, his voice came to me over the crash of the storm — he seemed to be complaining, or no, he was offering something. “Suck your feet?” he asked.

For a moment I lost him. The car coughed and spat, mist seeped out of the earth. Then he took a step forward and his face emerged from the night, pink, garish, huge, floating in the wash of darkness like an orb in the infinite. His expression startled me. He seemed to be grinning — Cheshire Cat, Robin Good-fellow — grinning as if in contemplation of some killing, suprahuman jest.

The pillowcase appeared from nowhere, legerdemain. It was bulging, wet as skin, its neck gaping wide between his big buttery fists. “Trick or treat?” he said.

Chapter 5

I got into San Francisco about half past ten to find the mud-spattered U-Haul parked directly in front of my apartment — and poorly parked at that. One wheel was up on the curb, the cab obscured a sign that threatened TOW AWAY come seven the next morning, and Gesh had managed to straddle two and a half prime, precious, hotly sought-after and fiercely contested parking spaces. To cap it off, he’d settled beneath a high-intensity streetlamp that lit the rear of the truck like a stage. Our plan had been to meet at Vogelsang’s — we would surprise him with the truckload of pot and coerce him into allowing us to string it up to dry in his cavernous rooms and endless hallways — but the plan had fallen flat. Typically. As I discovered on arriving at the Bolinas manse, Vogelsang had eluded us once again. The gates were locked, the house was dark, the lewd mannequins stood guard. I found a note from Phil and Gesh pinned to the main gate. It read, simply, Fair Oaks.

My co-conspirators were sunk into the furniture in the front room as I plodded up the stairs with my suitcase and Phil’s guitar. They were drinking beer, testing the limits of the stereo system with an album called White Noise Plays White Noise, and watching a sitcom about a quadraplegic detective who ferrets out evildoers through astral projection. I was wet, weary, hypnotized to the point of catatonia by the incessant frantic swipe of the Toyota’s windshield wipers. The suitcase plummeted from my grip, Phil’s guitar dropped into the rocking chair. I cut the volume on the stereo and offered an observation. “You made it,” I said.

Still bandaged, still depilated, his bad eye blazing with the awakening joy of the exile returned, Phil swung round to acknowledge the soundness of my observation. Gesh set his beer down. “Vogelsang wasn’t there, the son of a bitch,” he said.

Outside, in the close, shadowy depths of the U-Haul van, a hundred bags of sodden marijuana stood ready to mildew, rot, deliquesce into soup. “So I noticed,” I said.

Another thing I noticed was the shopping bag at Phil’s feet. The paper was crisp and unblemished and it bore the logo of the corner market. Inside, atop a six-pack of generic beer, were five spanking-white cellophane-wrapped coils of clothesline. Phil was watching me closely. In the background, White Noise’s keyboard virtuoso was attempting an auditory re-creation of the siege of Britain. Gesh was watching me too. The bombs fell, the machine guns rattled. “What now?” Phil said.

We brought the pot in, a bag at a time, just after three. The streets were quiet, the glare of the streetlamp softened by a milky drizzle. Up the stairs and down, the landlord wondering at the thump of our footsteps, the sacks of contraband like body bags, like pelf, like the insidious pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. We worked quickly, silently, our shoulders slumped with guilt, our eyes raking the streets for the first stab of the patrol car’s headlights. Phil stood in the back of the truck and tossed the bags forward, while Gesh and I hustled them up the stairs like ants scrambling under the burden of their misshapen egg cases. At one point a car stopped just down the street to discharge a passenger, engine rumbling, headlights slicing into the rear of the truck. We froze. A pair of voices echoed through the haze and bounded off the wet pavement, and a moment later a gangling teenager in a Gumby costume ambled up the street and into our midst. We gave him stares like swords. He looked down at his feet.

Upstairs, I regarded the spill of slick plastic bags as I might have regarded the debris of a natural disaster or the baggage of desert nomads. The living room was inundated, the kitchen piled high, the spare room glimmering with the dull sheen of plastic. Already Gesh had begun to string the rope across the living room, securing the ends with a quick booming convergence of hammer and nail. Phil twisted open the wet bags, shook the plants over the carpet in a tumult of rasping leaves, shuddering buds and precipitant moisture, inverted them with a flick of his wrist and hooked them over the clothesline like so many wet overcoats. I cracked a window, wondering what I’d let myself in for now. Then I set the thermostat at 95 degrees and started up a pair of ratchetting fans I dug out of a box in the basement. We worked furiously, noisily. Clumsy with exhaustion, we stumbled into one another: the hammer thumped, the bags rippled, our footsteps played a frantic tarantella across the ceiling of the apartment below. As Gesh’s hammer rapped at the wall for perhaps the fiftieth time, my landlord, a middle-aged bachelor with a viscid Armenian accent, rapped at the outside door. This rapping, unidentified at first, put us in mind of agents of the law and gave us a final nasty shock, a coda to the demonic symphony of such shocks we’d endured over the course of the past nine months. But then the landlord’s voice rose faintly from the well of the stairs—“Fee-lix!”—and I knew we’d been delivered once again.

I met him at the base of the stairs, regarding him warily from my end of the security chain. He was wearing a skullcap and a pair of dirty striped pajamas that looked as if they’d been lifted from an internment camp, he was barefoot and his sleepy eyes were riddled with incomprehension. “What is happening here?” he said, his mouth working beneath the blue bristle of his beard. “This, this …” and he held his hands like claws to the side of his head, “this thrumping and bang-ing.”

I told him my mother had died and that my brothers and I were constructing the coffin ourselves, in deference to the traditions of the old country. Wired, beat, my apartment devastated and body sapped, I didn’t have much trouble looking appropriately distraught. “Old country?” he said. “What is that?”

“Boston,” I told him, sober as a motherless child.

He looked at me for a long moment, the whites of his eyes crosshatched with broken blood vessels, lids crusted and inflamed. Three-chord rock and roll and the boom-boom-boom of the hammer filtered down from above. Breath steamed from his big flared nostrils; he shuffled his bare feet on the wet pavement. He looked puzzled, disoriented, looked as if he were about to say something but couldn’t quite get it out. After a while he turned, muttering, and slammed into his apartment.

By dawn, my roomy Victorian had the look and feel of a curing shed in Raleigh, North Carolina, and smelled like the alley out back of a florist’s shop doused with agent orange. The atmosphere was stifling, barely breathable, the rank wet seething odor of the pot pungent as spilled perfume. It was 107 degrees in the living room. Desert winds roared from the vents, an electric space heater glowed in the corner opposite the crackling fireplace, the fans screamed for oil and we sweated like jungle explorers. As the windows were turning gray we strung up the last of the plants, nearly twenty-four hours after we’d plunged into the fields with our flashing sickles. We were worn out, frayed to the bone. We sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee from cardboard containers and staring off into space. I felt like Sisyphus taking a five-minute break, like Muhammad Ali at the end of the fourteenth round in Manila. Gesh’s head slumped forward, Phil lapped absently at a frosted doughnut. Outside, it was still raining.

I got up and made my way through the vegetation to the living room. Bending to my record collection, I thought back to the night I’d played The Rite of Spring and Vogelsang had thumped up the stairs with his mad proposal. The room smelled like a silo, sweat dripped from my nose. I straightened up and put on a record — Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. It could have been my theme song.

The crop dried in five days. During that interval Gesh lay roasting like a pecan on the couch, the perpetual beer clutched in his perspiring hand, while Phil and I escaped the deadly whirling sirocco breezes of the apartment by planting ourselves in the front row of the unheated ninety-nine-cent movie house around the corner, where we regaled ourselves with popcorn that tasted like Styrofoam and a succession of kung fu/slasher/biker/car-chase flicks with Spanish subtitles. Now that I had leisure for it, I also spent a disproportionate amount of time worrying. I worried about the steady wind wafting from my front window to perfume the entire block with the essence of torrefying pot, I worried about the dark looks my landlord gave me when I ran into him on the front stoop, I worried about the disposition of the U-Haul truck, which we’d somehow neglected to move and which had subsequently been towed away and impounded by municipal drones while we rested from the labors of our harvest. And then of course my personal finances were a mess: rent and utility bills on the apartment had pretty well eaten up my meager savings during the course of my exile, and we were a long way from realizing any profit on the marijuana that littered the apartment from floor to ceiling (we still had to trim, bag and peddle it). Nor could I forget my pending court appearance, though Jerpbak’s demotion could be expected to play in my favor.

I worried about Petra, too. I phoned her several times from the pay phone outside the Cinema Latina, my home phone having been disconnected in my absence, but was unable to reach her. Was she distracted by the roar of the kiln? Was she out digging clay in some remote streambed? Had she left town for good, found a new man, flown to Puerto Vallarta for two weeks in the sun? I didn’t know. Couldn’t guess. I just hung on to the receiver and listened to the flatulent busy signal as if to some arcane code.

Dried, that is deprived of the water weight that composed seventy percent of its bulk, the crop took on an increasingly withered and reduced look. Leaves shriveled, buds shrank. Plants that had been big as Christmas trees now seemed as light and insubstantial as paper kites. On the afternoon of the fifth day we gathered in the saunalike atmosphere of the front room to sample the product and determine its fitness for sale. Phil and I sat sweltering on the couch while Gesh broke a long squirrel’s-tail cola from a brittle branch and pared away the leaves that protruded like tongues from between the flowers. Then he plucked two of the neat fingertip-sized buds from the stem and crumbled them over a creased cigarette paper with a slow circular rub of his palms. No one said a word, the moment as drenched in ritual as a high mass at the Vatican. We watched as he rolled the joint with sacerdotal solemnity, sealed it with a sidelong lick and held it up before our eyes as if he were blessing the host. Sere leaves rustled overhead, the fans hummed and the heat swabbed at the back of my throat as Gesh struck the ceremonial match and held the joint out to me as to a communicant at the rail. I took it to my lips and inhaled.

After the smoke had been around three times, I found myself concentrating on the big trimmed cola that lay before me on the coffee table like one of those toy evergreen trees you get with model-railroad kits. It was worth, roughly, a hundred and fifty dollars. We’d grown it from nothing, from a seed you could barely see, from a speck of lint. Entranced by the marvel of it, I lifted the cola from the table as a diamond buyer might have lifted a gem from the tray, slowly turning it over in my hands. It was stiff as a bottle brush, the rich dark green of it touched here and there with the gold and white of the tiny stigmas. I exhaled and wiped my brow. Gesh was smiling serenely. The smoke was smooth, slightly sweet and minty, and as good as or better than what we’d been sampling in the field over the course of the past six weeks. I felt a rush of pride, discovering in that instant the exultation of the creator, the nurturer, the husbandman with the prize pumpkin: we’d done it.

“What do you think?” Gesh asked.

I didn’t need to consult Dowst for this one. I raised myself in the chair, astral specks and phantom amoebae floating unchecked through my field of vision. “It’s ready,” I said.

The final phase of the harvesting process — separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were — commenced immediately. We rose as one from our seats and threw open the windows, cut the thermostat, and unplugged the fans and space heater. Then we lifted down the skeletal plants, removed the flowering tops and arranged them on a folding aluminum banquet table I nastily set up in the middle of the front room, and fed the rest — leaves, branches and the horny fibrous stems that looked like the lower legs of storks or spoonbills — into the fireplace. (This gave rise to a steady spew of viscous black smoke that poured from the chimney for two days, casting an industrial pall over the neighborhood and twice prodding my landlord out of the garage with a garden hose.) After sampling another bud or two — purely for analytical purposes — we sent out for beer, turned up the music, sharpened our scissors and sat down to the tedious business of manicuring the tops.

Early next morning, Gesh called Rudy. I didn’t like Rudy — didn’t like the way he looked, didn’t like his locker-room humor and half-witted street talk, and especially didn’t like his connection with Jones. But Rudy, dealer in stimulants and sedatives, was going to do us a service. For five dollars an hour and all he could smoke, he was going to help us trim, weigh and bag our lovely top-grade sinsemilla, and then he was going to take our share on consignment at $1,400 a pound and peddle it to his clientele. We would take a beating to the tune of $200 a pound, but we figured it was well worth it to avoid the hassle of having to unload the stuff ourselves.

Rudy came sniffing up the stairs like a bloodhound. His eyes bulged as if under some abnormal internal pressure — as if there were something alive in there trying to get out — and the boneless dollop of flesh that passed for his nose was twitching in agitation. Under his right arm, cradled like an attenuated football, he carried an Ohaus triple-beam scale in a paper sack. “Hey man, how the fuck you doing?” he said, clapping Gesh’s shoulder with a hand shriveled like a bird’s claw. He greeted Phil with a “What’s happening?” and nodded at me in passing.

“Holy Christ,” he said, pushing his way into the living room, “what are you guys trying to do here with all this shit — get yourselves busted or what?” He hovered over the fire, warming his hands. Beside him, stacked up like cattle fodder, was the dross we’d yet to burn. “You know it smells like there’s a truck-load of pot on fire out there?”

I knew. My landlord, eager to inquire into certain disturbing phenomena (such as the irregular hours I was keeping, the prodigious belch of black smoke emanating from the chimney and the five-day period during which the oil burner never shut down), had cornered me half an hour earlier as I was coming up the front steps with a grease-stippled bag of fried wonton. He’d traded in the yarmulke for a faded Giants cap, from the nether margin of which a band of hair the color and texture of an Airedale’s projected at a peculiar angle. “I am not sleeping last night,” he said, delivering this information as if it were momentous, revolutionary, as if he were announcing the discovery of a new planet or the cure for cancer. I told him I was sorry to hear that. He peered at me questioningly out of his black perplexed eyes, and I had the feeling he was sizing me up, trying to reconcile his memory of me with the wild-eyed apparition standing before him. It was as if he weren’t altogether sure I wasn’t an imposter.

“So,” he said suddenly, glancing up at the fuming blanket of smoke that flew up from the roof as from the depths of a refinery, “you are cold? With open window?” Just then I caught a whiff of it, a smell reminiscent of rock festivals in packed concert halls. “The fire, you mean?” He nodded. A few months ago I would have made an effort, I would have soothed him with a flurry of apologies, promises and plausible lies — but now I found that I just couldn’t muster the energy. Instead, I ducked my head, gave him a grief-stricken look and told him we were burning my mother’s mementoes in accordance with her last wishes. “You know,” I added, “photo albums, diaries, old seventy-eights of the Andrews Sisters and whatnot.” He cleared his throat respectfully and told me I had one month to get out.

For all his loudmouthing, though, Rudy didn’t seem especially concerned. Smoke was smoke, and who was to say we weren’t burning sandalwood or green mesquite — or creosote telephone poles, for that matter? He knew it as well as we did. Unless you walked up the block thinking pot, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, the whole fiasco had been ill-advised from the start. Bringing a hundred pounds of pot into the heart of the city in a U-Haul truck was beyond mere fatuity — it was irrational, irresponsible, the act of desperate men. But whereas we’d spent nearly nine months in a state of perpetual xenophobic panic in an area that contained fewer people in ten square miles than lived on this very block, we now tended to view things more dispassionately. Perhaps we felt safe in the very absurdity of what we were doing (weren’t all the narcs out sniffing around in the woods, after all?). Or perhaps we just didn’t give a shit. At any rate, I took Rudy’s comment for what it was — a means of staking out the territory, setting the record straight: we were bunglers and fools, dangerous even to ourselves, callow freshmen in the school of pharmaceutical usage and abusage, and he was professor emeritus.

The first thing Rudy did was roll himself two joints. He tucked one in his shirt pocket for future reference and settled into the easy chair with the other. I watched him fuss over it like a cigar buyer in Havana — licking it, sniffing it, drawing deep and exhaling with a sigh — as he smoked the thing down to a stub. He sat there ensconced in the chair like a guru. After a while he said, “Good shit,” and pulled himself from the grip of the chair to set up his scales. First he weighed out a pound of the trimmed tops; then, for comparison, a pound of the raw stuff. I was sitting at the aluminum table with Phil and Gesh, doggedly snipping away with my scissors, my mind on other things: viz., Petra, my lack of employment or capital and my coming eviction. The TV was on, as it had been continuously since we’d stepped through the door (some soap opera rife with hard-drinking, tormented middle-aged men in Lacoste shirts and a host of apparently sex-crazed teenage women), and the radio pulsed softly to the thump of a synthesized disco beat.

Rudy nosed through the entire crop — colas big and small — poking around like a rodent, a big swollen two-legged rat come down from the mountain to take another bite out of our profits. I asked him when he was going to sit down and start earning the five bucks an hour we were paying him to trim pot. He didn’t answer, but a moment later he turned round and said, “You know, I’d say you guys got about thirty pounds or so here — plus maybe a couple pounds of shake.”

Thirty pounds. Gesh looked at Phil. Phil looked at me. No one said a word, but the calculators clicked on in our heads. Our share would be ten pounds, split three ways. At $1,400 a pound — that is, minus Rudy’s commission — we would come out with something like $4,600 apiece, or about $162,000 short of our original estimate. And oh yes, each of us would have to kick in $555 of that to cover the $5,000 Vogelsang had laid out for Jones, the extortionist. It was a shock. We’d known the figure would be low, but this was less by half than our most dismal estimate. After a moment or so, long enough for Rudy’s words to sink in and for the figures to materialize deep in our brains and work their way forward, Phil’s voice rose in a kind of plaint from the end of the table. “You sure?”

Later — it was nearly dark, the hills beyond the window cluttered with palely lit faécLades, houses like playing cards or dominoes — I was out in the kitchen opening a can of cream of tomato soup when Rudy sauntered in, looking for matches. He was stoned, big dilated pupils eclipsing the insipid yellow irises, his lower lip gone soft with fuddlement. “What’s happening?” he said. I ignored him, concentrating on the way the soup sucked back from the can; I reached for the Worcestershire, black pepper. Rudy circled the room, vaguely patting at his pockets, poking into drawers. Finally he stopped in front of the stove. “Got a match?” he said.

I was irritated. Pissed off. The place was a mess, I was a failure and Rudy was a jerk. I dug a pack of matches from my pocket and flung them at him without turning my head.

The soup was the color of spoiled salmon, carrots gone tough in the ground. I stirred it without interest or appetite, watching the spoon as it broke the murky surface, vanished and reappeared. There was the rasp and flare of a match, the stink of sulfur, and then the supple, sweet odor of marijuana. “Hey, man,” Rudy said at my elbow — I was stirring the soup, stirring—“no reason to feel bad about it. You guys at least got something out of it.”

“What?” I snarled, turning on him like an attack dog. “What did we get out of it? Four thousand bucks?” I was frothing. “Big shit.”

“Better than Jonesie.”

Jonesie. The diminutive, no less. Ah, if I’d felt bitter to this point, chewing over my hurts and losses behind the snip of the scissors and the rattle of the spoon in the pot, now I was enraged, ready to strike out at anything that came into range. “Jonesie,” I echoed, mimicking him. “The leech. The cocksucker. He did nothing, nothing at all, not a lick — and for your information he’s going to wind up with more than any of us three.”

Rudy’s eyes dodged mine. “I can’t do nothing about that, man — don’t take it out on me.” Then he went into a little routine about how he knew the dude and all, but that didn’t mean he was his mother or anything, did I see what he was getting at? I saw. But there was something in his eyes he couldn’t control, a shiftiness, as if he was holding something back. He proferred the joint. I refused it. Vehemently. “Besides, I didn’t mean this year,” he said, exposing his gamy brown teeth in a conciliatory smile. “I mean last year. Vogelsang really screwed the guy.”

“Vogelsang?”

Rudy looked put out, angry and resentful suddenly, as if I’d spat down the front of his shirt or torn the stitches out of a knitting wound. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. “Yeah,” he hissed, “your pal, the big wheeler-dealer, the dope king. Vogelsang.”

“Vogelsang?” I repeated, as, lost and directionless, I might have repeated the name of a distant subway stop in a foreign country. Something was up, toil and trouble, all my brooding suspicions congealing like the soup in the pot before me.

“It cost me money, man.” Rudy, of the downsloping chin and punished nose, of the pigeon chest and hepatic skin, was outraged, the thought of it more than he could bear. Take my mother, my sister, my old hound dog, but don’t you come near my blue vinyl checkbook.

I dropped the spoon in the pot, feeling weak, staring into his tumid glistening eyes as into matching crystal balls and groping toward illumination — or rather toward confirmation of what I’d known in my heart all along: Vogelsang had done us dirty.

Rudy shuffled his feet in agitation, bent to rub his knee; smoke tugged at both sides of his head like a hot towel wrapped round a toothache. “Son of a bitch talked me into putting up three grand. Two hundred pounds, he said, easy. We’d split even, me, him and Jones.”

Vogelsang, Vogelsang, the syllables pounded in my blood with evil rhythm. I felt betrayed, I felt hot and vengeful. I saw myself slipping into his shadowy museum, lifting one of the Cambodian pig stickers down from the wall, and creeping up the hallway; I saw the door to the bedroom, the waterbed, Vogelsang.

Loose-lipped, spilling his grievances like spew, Rudy went on. “So when Jonesie goes and gets popped, Vogelsang insists—insists, even though it’s no skin off his ass, I mean he’s not even up there or anything — that the plants have to go. Bud says no, don’t panic, it’s no big thing, and Vogelsang went up there and did it himself. At night. With his flashlight and his fucking gun. He cut the whole crop down and burned it, and you know what I got out of it? Shit. Zero. I’m the one that got burned.”

I felt reckless, stupid with fury, felt as I had when Jerpbak took hold of me in the Eldorado County Jail or when Jones stood sneering before me in the hot still cabin, the blackmailer’s filthy demand on his lips. And why hadn’t Rudy told us all this when his old friend Gesh and I visited him over that long and fruitless Fourth of July weekend? I knew, I knew now: to ask the question was to answer it. Because he was in collusion with Jones, that’s why. Because he wanted his money back. From anybody. From us.

I could smell the soup burning behind me. Rudy stood there, bones in a sack, lips pouted and shoulders sunk under the weight of the world’s injustice. Poor Rudy. He was drawing on the joint, about to say more, when I slapped it from his hand and shoved him against the wall. “Get out,” I said, my voice like an ice pick. “Get your sneaking ass out of my house.”

Shock and fear: Rudy was featureless, a smudged drawing, something to hate. I had him by the throat like a madman, his breath was sick in my face, his wrists clutched at mine as if we were playing king of the mountain or fighting for a football. “Hey,” he said, “hey,” terrified by the look on my face, writhing like something fished out of the mud, “leave me alone, man, I haven’t done nothing.” I held him there against a wall bristling with kitchen implements — graters and choppers, the cleaver, the butcher knife — held him like a goose or turkey to be throttled, twist of the neck, pluck him clean. “You’ve got two minutes,” I said.

Then I was out in the hallway, my jacket torn from the hook, rattle of car keys, Phil’s face, Gesh’s, the long aluminum table heaped with our sad, diminished and tainted gains, my feet on the steps, the outer door, the porch, the car. The engine caught with a roar and I lurched out into the street. I didn’t see traffic lights, flashing neon, the sweeping turrets of the Golden Gate Bridge. Through the glare of the oncoming headlights and the shadows lashing at the windshield, I saw one thing only: Vogelsang.

Chapter 6

The night was clear, the moon a gift in the sky, a sharp unforgiving stab of cold on the air. Though the main gate was locked — barricaded like the portals of Teste Noire’s castle — I could see lights in the distance, and faintly, as in a midsummer night’s dream, I could hear snatches of music. He was home. I contemplated the glowing spot of the buzzer, the dark grid of the squawk box. Should I ring and announce myself like a dinner guest — or bound over the wall like a renegade? I’d come to the end of the line. I wanted answers, apologies, amends, I wanted to see Vogelsang on his knees, stigmatized by his guilt and begging forgiveness in a spew of mea culpas, I wanted to see him humbled like a Harijan outside the temple — maybe I even wanted blood. I don’t know, I wasn’t rational. Or I was rational in the way of a Son of Sam or a George Metesky, stealth and calculation on the surface, violence burning beneath like a primordial itch. I turned away from the buzzer.

Gravel crunched as I maneuvered the Toyota alongside the gate, squeezing in parallel, inches to spare. I had no thought — no conscious thought, anyway — of closing off the gate as if I were laying siege to the place, but that was the effect. My idea had been to use the car as a ladder, but as I hoisted myself from the Toyota’s roof to the top of the gate, I saw that I’d also managed to set up a blockade — as long as the car was there, no one was going anyplace. Blood sang in my ears; I heard the soft thump of drums from the direction of the house. Slowly, cautiously, with the grace that comes of necessity, I lowered myself down the inner side of the gate — it must have been ten feet high — and dropped into the darkness below.

All was quiet, save for the fitful melody drifting across the night from the dimly lit house. There were no crickets, no locusts, no katydids, the seething generation of insects that had chattered and gibed at me through the summer’s crises dead now, trod under. I moved toward the light, stealthy as an assassin. Down the drive, past Vogelsang’s faintly gleaming Saab and the pale backdrop of the eucalyptus grove — but what was that? The familiar outline of the Jeep, and beside it the Datsun pickup. Vogelsang had been busy.

Through another gate, circling round, and up the redwood steps to the back deck. No pets to worry about, no scurrying Siamese or lurching old hounds, no surprises or alarms. Breathing hard, I inched my way along the rear wall, a cloud of water vapor clinging to my face like a mask. The shades were drawn on the first window — kitchen or bedroom, I couldn’t remember which — but dead ahead a long parallelogram of light cut across the deck where the ballroom would be. Carefully, carefully. I edged toward it, the music dying and starting up again, louder now, more distinct: tabalas and tambourines, some sort of weird goatherd’s serenade pierced at intervals by an intermittent reedy piping that suggested a hobbled old fakir sporting a turban and dying of emphysema. Chink-chink, doom; chink-chink, doom.

I was forcing myself to move slowly, counting one, two, three seconds between steps, concentrating on images of bushwhackers, scalp-takers, naked sly Iroquois to whom the snap of a twig meant the difference between life and death, when all at once a cold stiff hand shot out to snatch at my arm. I jerked back reflexively, there was a sharp rasping as of a chair shoved back against a parquet floor, and next thing I knew I was frantically juggling one of Vogelsang’s mannequins. The mannequin had been propped against the wall, minding its own business, and I’d blundered into it. Now, eyeless, faceless, it came at me, toppling like a cut tree, like a corpse dislodged from its niche in the catacombs, and I was already shrinking from the crash, the alarmed footsteps, the burst of the floodlights and the click of the shell in the chamber of that black blazing shotgun, when I lurched forward at the last second to catch it with the plunging manic swoop of a tango instructor at the graduation ball.

For a full minute I hunched there, motionless, the mannequin clutched to my thundering chest. I listened for footsteps, waited for the shout of discovery. Nothing. The music went on as before, the piping intertwined now with a flat nasal moan that rose and fell like smoke over a campfire. I didn’t know exactly what I was doing on Vogelsang’s back porch in the dead of night — or what I was going to do — but somehow surprise seemed the key. For once I wanted to catch him off guard, take him by storm, blitzkrieg his sensibilities and blast his composure — for once I wanted the upper hand. And so I froze there, barely breathing, the slow seconds digging into my scalp like tomahawks, until I knew I was safe. Soundlessly, with relief and gratitude and oh such care — picture the novice paramedic lowering a nonagenarian with back problems onto the stretcher — I set the mannequin down. Then, still hunched low, I crept forward.

Vogelsang was sitting at the long table in the center of the room, his back to me. A pair of antique brass pole-lamps flanked him, lighting the table like a ticket booth, and he seemed to be deliberating over the arrangement of a welter of pale, rigid and faintly yellowed objects spread out before him — if I hadn’t known better I might have taken them for ivory backscratchers and chopsticks, for nose flutes and tortoiseshell combs dumped from the bag of a Hong Kong street peddler. Looking closer, I saw the cusp of a mandible, the swell of a partial ribcage, and at Vogelsang’s elbow, the thin-boned dumb-staring skull. Or no, a pair of skulls, face up, worn the color of weak tea and tessellated like parchment. I watched him pick up a polished toe- or finger-joint and compare it with another, then lift a heavy magnifying glass from the table and peer through it as if he were grading gems.

Barefoot, dressed in a short oriental robe with a sash round the waist, Vogelsang could have been a samurai taking his ease in the geisha house. His movements were slow and circumspect, the lamps cast an aureole about him, the fireplace flared as with a ritual blaze. There were the remains of a snack — fish flakes and ginseng, no doubt — and a bottle of wine and three glasses on the table beside him. To the far left, in the darkened stereo/TV nook, the fiery red light of the amplifier glowed, and the VU needles of the tapedeck dimly registered the percussive clank and moribund whine of the goatherd’s serenade. I saw the guns and knives climbing the walls, the dancing bobcats, glittering display cases and all the rest; there was no one else in the room.

I stood, a fragment of the night, a Ch’en Ta Erh hovering over the go-between’s bed, and tried the handle of the sliding glass door. The door was unlatched. One finger, the slightest pressure, and I’d cracked it an inch. The music sharpened suddenly, all edges, and I could feel the warmth of the room on my face. I hesitated, steeling myself, fishing for an opening line — what do you say to someone who’s violated a trust, used and manipulated you, who plays dirty yet never loses, someone lounging in his pajamas in his own living room and fiddling with a heap of discolored bones while the walls bristle with guns and knives and swords? Naaah, naa-aaah-naaah sang the goatherd, chink-chink, doom went the drums. It was then — just as I’d screwed up the nerve to throw back the door and spring into the room like an avenging demon — that Aorta swung through the kitchen door with a coffee mug in her hand. But it wasn’t the mug that caught my attention: no, not that. The first thing I noticed was that she was naked.

Thirteen years old, I’d peeped through the curtains at sad yeasty middle-aged Marge Conklin and watched her roll the sepia stockings from legs like suet, until I lost heart — something terrifying there, something claustrophobic and fatal — and sank into the bushes as if I’d been clubbed. I felt the same way now. Forbidden fruit, systems overload: I was electrified. Aorta crossed the room, her breasts gently swaying, the swath of hair caught like a juggler’s prop between her legs, and stopped to lean over Vogelsang and his sepulchral booty. She showed me her backside, tight, solid, slightly parted legs, ass wagging, as she brushed Vogelsang’s cheek with her lips and set the mug down on the table. I was riveted, turned on, hot as a moth doused with pheromones, but feeling guilty, too, ashamed: I’d come with high purpose, I’d come to vanquish deceit and wave the banner of decency, truth and honor, and here I was shuffling around outside the window with a hard-on like some pubescent Peeping Tom. I backed off and pressed myself to the wall.

When I looked again, Vogelsang was alone. Aorta had moved off into the shadows at the far end of the room: I strained to make her out. So long as she was in the room — and especially so long as she was prancing around in her skin as if she were about to rub herself down with coconut oil or powder her privates — I couldn’t burst in and confront Vogelsang. Could I? But why not, I thought, feeling a rush of evil, remembering my hurts. I’d come to take him by storm, right? How better terrorize him than to spring through the door with a bloody shout just as he mounts her amid the phalanges and vertebrae? Yes, I thought, grinning like a deviate, and I began to pray that she’d stop fiddling around in the dark and come back to distract him from his bones.

It was too fond a hope.

I was crestfallen — as voyeur and sadist both — when a moment later she emerged from the shadows in a short robe identical to Vogelsang’s and made for the kitchen again. But wait a minute. Was this Aorta? Stiletto nails and black lipstick, yes, the up-thrusting breasts and liquid legs, but there was something different about her — was it her hair? It seemed longer, darker, and the broad badger stripe was gone. Or was it something else — her chin, her nose, the way she moved? I couldn’t be sure. The kitchen door swung to, and she disappeared.

Now was my chance. I thought of Jones, Rudy, thought of nine months down the tubes and threw back the door with an apocalyptic rumble. Vogelsang glanced over his shoulder — casually, with the barest interest, as if he were dining at Vanessi’s and the cocktail waitress had dropped a glass at the bar — and then all at once his face went numb and I saw the spasm of alarm, the panic that froze in his eyes till they shone like the glass buttons of his badgers and bobcats. I was huge, I was terrible. A wave of malicious joy swept over me. “Felix,” he said, fumbling for my name as if he’d forgotten it.

I stepped into the room. Saying nothing.

Anyone else would have expressed shock, surprise, outrage, fear, anyone else would have demanded an explanation, reached for the shotgun or ducked under the table. But not Vogelsang. No: he was never surprised, never startled; like some serene alien being, some exemplar of cool, some god, he merely turned his back to me. I’d broken into his house in the middle of the night while his woman strutted around naked, I’d sprung from the shadows to strike terror in his heart and make him think, if even for an instant, that his reckoning had finally come, and he turned his back on me. I was stupefied, enraged, cheated even in this. Was he deliberately baiting me? I was about to bellow his name in stentorian wrath, scream it till the windows shook, when he turned slowly round with the bottle in his hand. He held it aloft, offering it. “Wine?” he asked.

I looked beyond him to the three glasses on the tray and in that moment felt the balance shift — if for a second the momentum had been with me, I’d lost it now. Three glasses. Why three? It was uncanny, unsettling: it was almost as if he’d been expecting me.

“It’s been a while,” he said, pushing the chair back and standing to face me.

My throat was constricted, as if I were standing before a packed courtroom and trying to swallow a lump of cold egg noodles while cross-examining a witness. “Why’d you lie to us?”

He was pouring wine into a long-stemmed glass. “Bordeaux,” he said, “Haut Brion, 1972. Ever so slightly tart.” He stepped toward me, then thought better of it, and set the glass back down on the table while he bent to refill his own. We were playing at host and guest — the ceremonial offering, the gracious smile and easy banter — and all the while billowing little bursts of rage were detonating in my head. Even at the best of times the wine was an affectation, like his stilted diction and his sangfroid. Something to have, to know about, to control. I’d never seen him drink more than half a glass in my life — why would he? Alcohol softens you, takes the edge away. The competitive edge.

“We’re celebrating tonight, did you know?” He gestured toward the table. “Cocopa. A woman and child. We found them together, in a single grave, just across the border in Sonora.”

This was archaeology night. Here we were, pals, a pair of old bone collectors sharing a bottle of good wine prior to the slide show. Well, I was having none of it. I stood there fuming, intransigent, waiting for an answer: I would not be put off. “You lied,” I said.

He rolled the glass between his palms, deciding something. I watched the light catch his hair and the way his shadow loomed toward me as he rocked back and forth on his heels. “All right,” he said finally, “I admit it. I lied to you.”

If there was a moment at which things could have gotten physical, it had passed, and he knew it. I could have flung myself at him like a kamikaze, I suppose, and I’d been close to it in that gut-tightening instant when he’d turned his back to me as if I were nothing — a child, a cripple, a pup — but we both knew he could have taken me easily. I had only to think of the night he’d brought Gesh down, of the primal look that had come into his eyes and the terrifying mechanical response of his body, to understand how futile it would be. I’d come to recover my dignity. Lying prone beneath Vogelsang as he applied the Montagnard death grip was no way to start.

I stood there in the doorway, itching like a gunfighter called out back of the saloon. There was a cold draft on my neck, the night smelled of wet leaves and eucalyptus buttons, I heard the ring of silverware from the kitchen, the sad stiff bones glowed under the lights, the dancing bobcats grinned at me. “You’re a worthless son of a bitch,” I said. “You’re a cheat and a liar.”

Vogelsang accepted this with his bemused little schoolmaster’s smile. Then, shaking his head as if I’d just misconstrued some basic theorem at the blackboard, he circled round me to the open door. “Mind if I shut this?” he said, sliding it closed. “Cold, you know?”

I’d backed off a step or two, and found myself wedged between a bust of Oscar Wilde and a potted palm; somewhere at the periphery of my consciousness the goatherd’s serenade slipped into a sort of slow, clangorous threnody. Vogelsang strode back across the room, barefoot, his calves creased with muscle, looking as if he’d just taken two out of three falls for the championship. I felt the bitterness in me like a hot wire. “But how could you?” I demanded. “I mean, what’s the point? You use somebody to make a few extra bucks for yourself like, like …” I was worked up, spilling over, bad brew. “What do you think you are, some fucking robber baron or something?”

Vogelsang settled into his chair, the inflammatory smirk still creasing his lips, and gestured for me to have a seat. He was in control now and he knew it. Unruffled, composed, calm as a pasha sated with figs and partridges whose sole worry was to relieve himself of a bit of gas before calling for his dancing girls, he fiddled with the sash of his robe, lifted the glass to examine his wine and then tipped it to his lips for a leisurely sip. I wanted to snatch a thick-knobbed femur from the table and drive it into his skull. I ignored the chair. I stood. Like a pillar.

“And what did you get out of it, anyway?” I said, digging in, trying to nettle him, my anger and frustration building in proportion to his calm. “Subtract for that bloodsucker Jones and your share’s going to be worth less than fifteen thousand bucks — you went and screwed us and you’re not even going to make your expenses back. You’re hurting, too. You lost. For once in your life, you lost.” My voice was stretched like wire, a whine, a taunt. I was a benchwarmer ragging the home-run hitter who’s just struck out, a playground brat with a mouthful of orthodonture jeering from the stands. I was getting personal.

And that was it, the key I’d been looking for, the way in. Vogelsang’s smirk suddenly fell in on itself. I could call him a cheat and a liar all night and it was Brer Rabbit in the briar patch — he throve on it; it fed his self-concept; he was the wheeler-dealer, the manipulator, the crafty, tough, amoral éUUbermensch who rises above the grasping herd to prevail — but to be accused of failure, called a dupe, a loser, was more than he could bear. I’d hit home. Bull’s-eye. “Face it,” I said, twisting the arrow, “you’re a loser.”

“No, Felix”—his tone had changed, the amusement dried up —“you’re a loser. You and Cherniske and that other halfwit. And Dowst, too. I made out, don’t you worry.”

What was he talking about? He’d made nothing, he’d made a mistake. “Bullshit,” I said.

Suddenly he was on his feet, catty, clonic, the old Vogelsang. He paced to the end of the table and swung round. “I bought that property in February, like I told you. But not this February. February two years ago. You know what I paid?”

I knew nothing. I was a loser.

“Ninety-two.”

Chink-doom, went the goatherd, doom-doom.

“You know what I’m getting — what I got? Already?” The cords stood out in his neck like stitches in a sweater. “I signed over the title yesterday — the deal’s been cooking for months. Months.” He was twitching, jerking, dancing in place like an Indian whooping over the corpse of an enemy. “One-seventy. And do you know why? Because you improved the place for me.”

I sat down. Hard.

“That’s right. I had a deal with Sapers — and don’t give me that look, I played straight with you: he knew nothing about the pot. If I fenced the property line he’d let me tap into his electricity. I told him my writer friends would do it for the exercise.”

A cavern was opening up inside me, a pit, a chasm in which I could hear the faint reverberations of all the coppers, pennies, yen, groschen, forints and centavos of all the sad, grasping, multifarious generations as they plunged into the everlasting gloom.

“And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll do a little work on that Jeep and that pickup and I’ll unload them for more than what I paid for them. The PVC pipe is stacked in the garage right now. The generator and pump, too.” He’d moved closer now, his fingers dancing on the tabletop. The smaller skull was in his hand — alas, poor Yorick — and he was gesturing with it. “Don’t be naive, Felix,” he said in a voice that could have humbled the chairman of the board at ITT, “don’t be stupid. I don’t lose.”

My own voice was a croak, a dying crippled thrust of rebuke. “Jones. He was your man. You got together to cheat us.”

“Where did you get that idea?”

“Rudy.”

He held the skull up before his face and gazed into the empty eye sockets; I thought he was going to crush it, but he set it down gently beside its mate and fussed over the arrangement for a moment before responding. “Rudy made a bad investment,” he said. “Jones is a leech.” And then: “Jones figured it out, that’s all. He talked to Rudy, he saw you and Gesh when you were in town. I assume he made a little reconnaissance trip up to the property to check things out and then he decided to squeeze us.” Vogelsang’s eyes went hard with the thought of it. “I guess he figured I owed him something.”

I rose slowly from the chair, feeling the tug of gravity like a gouty old pensioner with an inner tube of fat round the middle, like an arthritic horse or elephant about to receive the coup de grace. The load was too heavy, the taint too deep. I was digging a garden, thinking turnips and corn and fat, dewy beefsteak tomatoes, turning over the earth and finding garbage, layer upon layer of it, reeking, alive with the seething white ferment of decay. “But we were friends, weren’t we?”

He shrugged. “I offered you a deal. You could have said no.”

“You didn’t have to lie to me, use me like something you wipe your ass with.”

“Oh, come on, Felix, drop the martyr act, will you? It’s wearing thin. Just because I offer you a deal doesn’t mean I have to lay out my whole financial history and give you the FDIC seal of approval, does it? You didn’t ask me for a prospectus when I told you to buy zirconium, did you? I’ve made you money. And don’t forget, you put up nothing on this project. None of you did. I’m the one who bought the land and put up the capital, I’m the one who gave you the chance to make it.”

“We were doomed from the start.” All the blood seemed to have left my head. I felt like a moth sucked dry in the spider’s web. “You said two thousand plants, one thousand pounds. But you knew damned well we’d have to start with four thousand plants to wind up with two. I mean, you and Dowst come breezing into my living room and make it sound like you’re laying half a million dollars in my lap or something, when all along—”

He was holding up his palm. “No, no. I wanted it to go — I really thought it would, I believed in it. Why else would I even bother to set it up? Boyd’s the one. I relied on him and he let me down.” Vogelsang was calmer now: the threat had passed. He’d let me know, low as I was, that he was that much higher — he’d taken a couple of shots below the belt maybe, but he’d gone the distance and he was still the champ. “That was my biggest mistake,” he said after a pause, “—trusting Dowst.”

I just looked at him, stupidly, obtusely, the slow learner in a class of whiz kids.

“He swore he could come up with the seeds. And that half a pound per plant was the low estimate anyway, figuring for unviable seeds and bad weather and all the rest, that even if we ran into problems we should get a pound or more out of most of them. Plus he looked the place over and assured me he could grow a forest up there, a jungle — no problem.”

This was funny. Vogelsang was showing his teeth in appreciation, the bobcats were madly whirling, and the goatherd abruptly gave up his dirge for the merry scritch-scratch-scritch of the stalled stylus. But there was something else, too. A titter. From the shadows. I jerked my head round and saw, in the far corner of the room, the bare pale outline of a human figure hunched down on the couch. When she stood and moved toward the turntable to change the record, I saw with a shock that this was Aorta, naked still, rising from the dark corner like a naiad rising from her pool, and that her hair was bleached white and cropped close as ever. Buttocks, breasts, nipples, thighs, the tattoo on her left flank (a scorpion?) — each was like a jab in the arm, a skipped heartbeat. But what made me drop my lower lip and gape like a defective was that broad hacked bristling blue stripe that cut a swath through her hair.

I blinked at Vogelsang, dumbfounded. He was still smiling — or rather lifting his lip back from his teeth in the weird strained way of a Bible salesman or a friend of the opera. Was I going crazy? I glanced again at Aorta as she stood fussing with the record on the far side of the room, and then, with dawning comprehension, swiveled my head a hundred and eighty degrees to stare at the hard, cold, unrevealing slab of the kitchen door.

The door swung open at that moment, as if on cue, and she stepped into the room and came toward us, grinning hesitantly, showing off those fine even little baby’s teeth and the pink ripple of gum. She balanced a tray in one hand and held an open beer in the other. The kimono had fallen open partially, and I could see the slant of one little tittie, and below, a glimpse of pale pubic fuzz. Makeup, haircut, height, weight, walk, she could almost have been Aorta’s twin — but I knew her now, knew her instantaneously, knew her with a rush of amaze, envy, hatred and lust that came like the first jolt of electroshock. “Savoy,” I whispered.

The tray held delicacies — smoked oysters, artichoke hearts, the black spittle of caviar — an antipasto. Or anticoito. I watched her eyes as she set the tray down among the bones, beside the half-empty bottle and the three glasses. She gave me a single sharp, brazen look, brazen and triumphal both, and then slipped her arm round Vogelsang’s waist. “Hi,” she said. She was smiling, though her lip trembled just perceptibly. “Long time no see.”

If the state of shock is a deep sleep of the senses that protects us in our cores from the sharp edges of the world, then I was deeply thankful for it at that moment. I felt it come over me like a blanket, like a drug, felt my lips go numb, my eyes glaze. I wasn’t thinking of perfidy, rottenness, greed: I was thinking nothing.

“It’s not what you think, Felix,” Vogelsang said. He looked embarrassed, caught with his hand in the jar; he grinned till the long pale roots of his teeth showed. “I never laid eyes on her till you sent me down there to talk to her. I swear it.”

“My mother’s an asshole,” Savoy said, as if we’d been discussing mothers and assholes for the past fifteen minutes.

“I made a deal with her. An arrangement. She wanted out of little Appalachia and I told her she could come stay here with me and Aorta if she’d back off the project.”

I was aware of a movement to my left. Aorta had come up and was standing at my elbow, stark naked. We made a foursome, I realized, a grouping, huddled round the scattered bones and the tray of goodies like actors in a necrophilic epic plotting out the next coupling. Music was playing, something I didn’t recognize, percussive, nasty, like the hissing of adders. I glanced at Aorta. Her expression was noncommittal. I felt drunk. My face was on fire, my groin throbbing.

“Eugene’s an asshole, too,” Savoy said.

Vogelsang reached for his wineglass, breaking the tableau, Aorta scratched herself absently and reached for a cracker, Savoy threw back her head to take a swig of beer. Uneasy on my heels, my eyes riveted to Aorta’s crotch, navel, nipples, I stuffed my hands in my pockets and backed off a step. It was then that I caught the scent of it. Rank, hot, urgent, it was the odor of sex, the musky perfume Vogelsang and Aorta had been wearing the night we’d lifted our glasses to the success of the summer camp. I snuffed it like a tomcat, like a caveman, and it had a rotten edge to it. The bones lay on the table, Aorta was watching me, the music hissed in my ears, and I hated them all. I hated cabals, plots, schemes, hated the hungry clawing fornicating faces of the world, I hated myself.

I turned and made for the door, for the smell of eucalyptus, the night, the wind, medicine for my hurts. My hand was on the latch. “Felix,” Vogelsang said, and I paused to look back at him. “You can stay if you want.”

I didn’t want.

Across the redwood planks, legs pulling me along, legs and feet, past the fallen mannequin and down the steps the way I’d come. A wind had risen to shake the trees. I was around the corner of the house when I heard his voice coming at me — he must have been standing at the door. “The calendar,” he shouted, “it was only a joke.”

I don’t know how long I sat in the car. Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? The wind drove in off the ocean, steady as a hand, the moon lay across the hood of the car like a cheap bauble. I was thinking. Of chinless Rudy, of Jones, Vogelsang and Savoy, all the stingers and stingees of the world, all the beat deals, the scams and the hustles, and I realized how precious little it all mattered. Go for it, they said, get it while you can, early to bed and early to rise. Well, I’d gone for it and now I was out of work, out of money and out of luck, I had a trial coming up and no place to live, and I felt like an emotional invalid, like a balloon without the helium. I sat there, getting cold, and I thought of Phil and Gesh back in the apartment clipping away at the shreds of their yachts and restaurants with scissors that grew duller by the moment. Money, give me money. Then I thought of Petra. No, I saw Petra. Her hands, sunk in the raw clay, kneading it like bread, molding it, pulling the hard, lasting stuff from its shifting, shapeless core. Wet, yielding, fecund: I could smell the clay, I could feel it.

I slipped the key into the ignition and started the car with a roar that sounded like applause, like a hundred thousand hands clapping in the dark. Then I backed out from under the shadow of Vogelsang’s gate, wound my way up the driveway and past the ghostly stripped trunks of the eucalyptus trees, and turned north, for Willits, a long rainy winter ahead of me, time to think things over, break some new ground, and maybe even — if things went well — to plant a little seed.