Budding Prospects (11 page)

Then we began to get itchy. Neither Dowst nor Vogelsang had showed up and we had no further instructions. And yet Dowst had repeatedly impressed upon us the vital necessity of keeping on schedule. The plants had to attain their optimum growth by September 22, when the photoperiod began to decrease. Once the daily quotient of sunlight was superseded by a greater period of darkness, the plants automatically began to bud—it was built into their genes—and that was that. The later
you got your seedlings into the ground, the smaller your plants would be when the autumnal equinox rolled around—and the smaller the plants, the smaller the harvest. You didn’t have to be a botanist to appreciate how all this smallness would relate to net profit.

“So what do we do?” I asked. We were inside now, sipping at the evening’s first cocktail. We’d just driven the final nail into the greenhouse, the moon was up and the birds were crouched in the trees, grumbling like revolutionaries. “Just sit around?”

Gesh was in the kitchen, rattling pans and slamming drawers. “Mr. Yale is fucking up on us already,” he said, swinging round and slapping a blackened pot of ravioli on the table. “How could we ever be so stupid as to trust somebody with a name like Boyd Dowst?”

We’d put in a tough day in damp, forty-degree weather. The fire was warm, the smell of food distracted us, canned ravioli, boiled potatoes and pale yellow wax beans had appeared on our plates. There was coffee, orange juice and something that resembled a foot-square brownie. Outside, the hiss of wind and a spatter of rain. We ate in silence, our eyes gone soft with the first chemical rush of hunger gratified, facial muscles swelling and contracting, saliva flowing, throats clenching and stomachs revolving in mindless subjection to the alimentary imperative: chew, swallow, digest. I listened to the scrape of utensils on the tin plates, glanced at our beards, our tattered clothes, the ramshackle roof that sagged over us, and thought how apt Phil’s military metaphor had been—we
were
like irregulars, some cadre of the People’s Army holding the line in a remote outpost, guerrillas taking refuge in the mountains. Of course the metaphor had its limits—we were capitalist guerrillas, after all.

“We could use a day off,” Phil said after a while. “We can’t do anything without Dowst and Vogelsang. I mean, what do we know about plants anyway? Christ, I never even had a wandering Jew.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said.

“No? What are we supposed to do then—fence in the whole three hundred and ninety acres? I say we take tomorrow off and just lay up and rest—or maybe go into town, see what kind of nightlife Willits has to offer.”

Gesh was shaking his head. “Uh-uh, Felix is right. Look, I’m not up here for my health—I’m going to bust my ass, tear my hair out, do everything I fucking can to make sure I see that hundred and sixty-six thousand come November—and I say we pick out another growing area on our own.”

Next morning we took the come-along and went looking.

It was a good move psychologically. We were riding the crest of accomplishment, the dreariness and hardship of the first week behind us, one area already fenced and the greenhouse erected, and now, when we had every excuse to sit back and wait for instructions, we were seizing the initiative. Here we were, men of action, hard, tough, ready for anything, off to wrest a million and a half dollars from the earth. But where to begin? There was an awful lot of territory out there: trees uncountable, rocks, slopes, sheer deadly drops, gaping gulleys, hardpan flats that mocked pick or shovel, thickets of thorn and manzanita as close and sharp as teeth. “What we need,” I said, lacing my sneakers, “is something hidden, level and not too far from the house.” We were milling around the front yard, belching softly over breakfast. “Good luck,” Phil said.

The property sloped sharply toward the dirt road that linked us (however tenuously) with the outside world, and then dropped off beyond it to the south and east. To the north was Sapers’s house, inconveniently located at the extremity of his property, no more than two hundred yards across the ravine from ours. (We couldn’t believe it—the two places combined must have been close to a thousand acres, and yet the houses were within shouting distance. Wagon-train mentality, Phil called it, his voice saturated with disgust.) To the west, the mountain we were situated on rose another two hundred vertical feet before petering out in a smooth bald crown of rock. Since we wanted southern exposure—that much we knew at least—we started down a crude ancillary road that looped away from our driveway and wound round the southern slope like a waistband.

You didn’t have to be Natty Bumppo to see that the road had been in disuse for some time. Branches had begun to close over it, saplings sprouted in the hollows dug by ancient wheels, clumps of poison oak made forays into the shoulders. There was evidence of animal life, too, most notably mounds of excrement flecked
with seeds and bits of nutshell. I stopped at one point to tie my shoelace, and when I caught up with my co-workers they were bent over a glistening coil of feces that had been deposited smack in the center of the road. “Dog shit,” Gesh announced.

“There aren’t any dogs up here,” Phil said. “I bet it’s raccoon shit.”

“What about coyotes?”

“Whatever it is, it looks pretty big,” I said.

Gesh was racking his brain, mentally thumbing through the pages of some old battered
Fieldbook and Guide to the Mammals of the Pacific Northwest.
“Bear shit?”

We glanced around us as if an entire zoo were crouched in the bushes, eyes blazing, ears cocked, great pink tongues lapping at paws and hind ends. Then Phil straightened up, shrugged, and looked off down the road: the wonders of nature had an intense but short-lived appeal. We moved on.

Surprisingly, the road began to level out farther on down the mountain, until finally we came upon a strip that showed evidence of recent use. The faint impress of tire tracks was visible beneath a grid of weed, and here and there a bush had been lopped or a tree limb severed. Moments later we came across a garbage-strewn path that intersected the road at a forty-five-degree angle and then plunged into a thicket as dense as something you’d expect to find in the Great Dismal Swamp. “What do you make of this?” I said, hesitating.

Gesh grunted. The path was well worn, the bushes clipped back. “Jones,” he said.

Jones. Enlightenment came like a blow to the back of the head. My pulse rate accelerated. Undifferentiated fears assailed me like bats exploding from a cave.

Phil looked perplexed, as if we’d been talking in code. “Who?”

“That dipshit farmer, remember? Somebody was up here last year, he said, somebody that was up to no good. Somebody named Jones.”

“Or Smith,” I added, but Gesh was already lumbering through the undergrowth, striding along like a Bunyan, and I hurried to keep up. I don’t know what I expected to find—half-eaten human carcasses dangling from the trees, a cache of automatic weapons or an angel-dust factory—but I should have guessed. “Wait up,”

Phil called. Weeds slapped at my face, a branch snagged the sleeve of my shirt. I focused on Gesh’s back, birds hissed in the trees, something darted off through the bushes, and suddenly we were standing at the edge of a sunlit clearing between walls of oak and laurel. I took it all in at a glance: the gray splintered tree stumps, the chicken-wire fencing, the sunken rims of the holes. Strips of corrugated aluminum had been driven into the ground at the base of the fence, as if at the border of some suburban zucchini patch, and hundreds of twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups littered the area, crushed underfoot, caught up in the roots of bushes, while deflated plastic bags advertised a Polk Street party supply house. There was garden hose, too, great sun-bleached coils of it, and crumpled half-empty sacks of fertilizer from which jagged clumps of weed had begun to sprout.

Gesh stood in the midst of this desolation, hands on hips. Phil and I were spouting expletives and taking the name of God in vain. We were like children exposed to the ugly underbelly of Fantasyland, the dirt and grease and grinding gears beneath the pristine forest floor. “Pot!” I shouted, surprised at my own emotion. “The son of a bitch was growing pot up here and Vogelsang never said a word about it.”

It was true, it was incontrovertible. If the Leakeys had problems interpreting the archaeological record at Olduvai, this was a snap—it couldn’t have been clearer had Jones left a diary with photographs. He’d used the Styrofoam cups to sprout his seedlings, and he’d dug the holes—as we would—to create a controlled environment for his maturing plants. But what went wrong? Or had it gone wrong? Maybe Jones was in Rio at that very moment, parading around in a Nixon mask and doing cocaine till his septum dissolved. I had a fleeting vision of palm trees, the girl from Ipanema, the mask, the cocaine and a water glass of dark Jamaican rum, but it was almost immediately supplanted by a vivid recollection of the Eldorado County Jail and the look of unreasoning hatred on Officer Jerpbak’s face.

“Hey, what’s this?” Phil said, fishing a flat wooden object from the weeds. I saw rust, a spring and a coil of steel wire. It looked like a rat trap.

“Looks like a rat trap,” Gesh said. I studied the ground. There must have been fifty of them in plain sight. I remembered the
rats or squirrels I’d seen the first day—big brown things the size of footballs. There was a connection here, a nasty connection. But I wasn’t ready to make it.

For the next ten minutes or so we poked around Jones’s growing area (Smith, Jones: was anybody really named Smith or Jones?), uncovering rat traps, checking the chicken wire fences, gazing up at the sky in an effort to gauge the area’s vulnerability to aerial detection. Then we continued along the road and discovered that it gradually wound back on itself and joined our driveway just below Sapers’s house. On the way back I said I didn’t like the fact that someone had tried to farm the place before us. Phil didn’t like it either. “I wish I knew whether Jones was lying on a beach in the Bahamas or out on bail,” he said. Gesh spat in the dirt. He was climbing the hill with his long loping strides, breathing hard. “At least we know where to put the fence up,” he said.

Three nights later, after we’d refenced and cleared Jones’s plot (we dubbed it “Jonestown” by way of honoring our unknown predecessor and out of a perverse sense of humor that laughs in the face of its own defeat), we heard the sound of a well-tuned engine straining up the hill. All three of us were outside in the gathering dusk as Dowst’s sky-blue van lurched into the front yard and skidded to a halt. The first thing Dowst said was “Sorry I’m late,” as if he were overdue at a cocktail party. We said nothing. “I had to finish up this article on the walking-stick cholla for
The Cactus and Succulent Journal
, and I just got buried in my notes.” He shrugged. “Well, listen: I hope you can appreciate my position—I had to deliver on time and there were no two ways about it. I’m sorry.”

He looked like a page out of an L. L. Bean catalogue: fisherman’s sweater, duck hunter’s vest, skeet shooter’s cap. We regarded him with unremitting hatred. He’d been writing articles and we’d been stringing wire.

“So,” he said, clapping his hands and rubbing the palms together as if they were wet, “I see you’ve got the greenhouse up.”

Our heads turned like beads on a string. The greenhouse sat in the corner of the yard like the centerpiece in an exhibition of avant-garde sculpture, its camouflage colors disguising it about
as effectively as the brick-oven red of my Toyota. “Yeah,” Gesh said finally, turning to Dowst, “no thanks to you.”

That night we sat around the stove, smoking the pot Dowst had brought Us, examining the Skippy jars full of seeds that would make us our fortune, and listening to Dowst’s assurances that everything was all right and that the few days we’d lost really wouldn’t matter in the long run. The resentment we’d felt when he first stepped from the van had begun to wane, and Phil broke the ice socially by offering him some of the corn chowder he’d been boiling for the past three days. Dowst feigned a grateful smile and said he’d already eaten. I told him he could sleep on the couch, but he said he’d just as soon sleep in the van—which he’d equipped, incidentally, like a pimpmobile, with cherrywood paneling and shag carpet. “Okay,” I said, “have it your way.”

In the morning we found ourselves in the front yard, lined up like refugees and licking egg yolk from the corners of our mouths, while Dowst plied his shovel in an exemplary and instructive way. The air was dank. A crow jeered from the rooftop. We listened to the hiss and scrape of the shovel, the sudden sharp clamor of metal and stone. We watched Dowst’s flailing elbows, his sure foot, we counted the seams in his designer jeans. And then, when he stood back, wiping the sweat from his brow with a red bandanna, we edged forward, silent, curious, awed and disgruntled, to contemplate the model hole.

I was against it. Gesh was for it. Phil wavered. But when we came within sight of Shirelle’s Bum Steer, the bed of the pickup loaded to the gunwales with groceries, twelve-ounce Styrofoam cups, half-gallon bottles of vodka, seam-split sacks of worm castings and steer manure, three rolls of chicken wire and a battery-powered Japanese tape player Gesh had picked up at a yard sale, Phil braked, downshifted and spun the wheel, and we rumbled into the parking lot like Okies on parade, lurching to a halt beneath the sorry bumper-blasted oak that presided over the place in long-suffering martyrdom.

There were three other cars in the lot: two mud-caked Chevy pickups and a Plymouth Duster with bad springs. A dog that looked like a cross between a malamute and a hyena regarded us steadily from the bed of the nearer pickup. “Just one,” Phil said, holding up a finger and draining a can of Coors in a single motion.

“Or two,” Gesh grinned.

“Okay,” I said, gulping down my beer. “But remember what Dowst said.”

“Fuck Dowst.”

“No, really—we can’t be too careful.”

“Loose lips sink ships,” Phil said, swinging out the driver’s door.

“Right on,” Gesh shouted, drumming at my shoulder blades as I heaved open the door and flung myself from the cab.