Budding Prospects (29 page)

One of the ceramic pinheads reached out and punched me in the solar plexus but I held on, praying, gasping for breath, feeling the great hot tongs of fate fishing around for me as if I were a lobster in a pot.

“It’s called Shirelle’s.”

The parking lot at Shirelle’s—that barren wasteland, that tundra—was as packed with vehicles as a used-car lot. There were pickups, RVs, Mustangs, Bobcats and Impalas, choppers, dirt-bikes and Mopeds, Trans Ams and Sevilles, woodies, dune buggies, vans—and the monolithic cherry-red cab of a Peterbilt truck, a machine among toys, rising like an island from the sea of steel and chrome. Beyond the cars I could make out cowboy hats and tiny sun-flamed faces and the metronomic dip and rise of the head of a grazing horse. I recognized the scene. Bingo under the trees, the church picnic, county fair. Children ran squalling through a blue-black haze of barbecue smoke, dogs yelped, Frisbees hung in the air. Over it all came the inevitable twanging thump of amplified country music—
Duckett, duckett, duck-etttt/Duck, duck, duck-etttt
—and the hoots and yahoos of inebriated giants in big-brimmed straw hats. I swung into the lot with a crunch of gravel and found a parking spot between two glistening, high-riding pickups. “Well,” I said, turning to Petra, “this is it, huh?”

She was leaning forward in her seat, legs long and naked and brown, scanning the lot with the intensity of a child at the fair. “There’s Sarah’s car,” she said, “and that’s Teddy’s motorcycle.” She shot a look past me. “And good, good. Alice is here, too.” Her hand was on my arm, light as a breath of air, heavy as a shackle. “I think you’re really going to like them.”

Odd, I thought, emerging from the car, that I’d barely noticed
all this on my way into town an hour and a half ago. (I’d been aware of an unusual level of activity—cars swinging in and out of the lot, music blaring—but had been afraid to look too closely for fear I’d find myself staring into Savoy’s face, or Shirelle’s or Sapers’s or George Pete Turner’s.) Odder still that we’d taken my car—the interdicted Toyota—but I’d felt, for reasons that have to do with the masculine ego and the need to assert it, that I should be in command. Despite the fact that Petra had offered to drive and that the very sight of the Toyota was a provocation to every law enforcement officer within a thirty-mile radius.

I slammed my door. Petra slammed hers. I stood there a moment in the hellish sun, the smell of burning meat in my nostrils, and felt as naked and exposed as a sinner at the gates of Dis. Twice before I’d trod this very ground, and twice before I’d found myself in deep trouble. The place was a sink of enmity, a nest of yahooism, as fraught with danger as the Willits police station. (Quick clips of the leering faces of Sapers, Marlon, Shirelle, Savoy and Jerpbak passed in review through the contracting lens of my consciousness.) Good God. I’d gone back on my word, left the farm wide open to discovery and paraded my car about the streets, and now here I was, strolling blithely into the lion’s den as if I had nothing to fear. What am I doing? I thought, suddenly seized with panic. Couldn’t I control my urges, get a grip on myself, act like an adult? Of course I could, yes, of course. It wasn’t too late. I’d tell Petra that I didn’t feel well, that I hated fairs, country music, sunshine, that my parents had been missionaries roasted by cannibals and that the smell of the barbecue pit turned my stomach. But then she took my hand to lead me forward, and something rose up in me that had neither regard for danger nor respect for fear, and I felt nothing but bliss.

Admission, FOR ALL THE MEAT, BEER AND SALLID YOU CAN HOLD, was six dollars, and we stood in front of a card table manned by a rapier-nosed, watery-eyed old fellow in a plaid shirt while Petra dug through her purse and I examined the contents of my pockets. I had about fourteen or fifteen dollars to last me the rest of my life, but for the same reason I’d insisted on driving, I attempted to pay for both of us. I came up with two fives and two singles that were so worn they looked like leaf mulch, and
laid them on the table, but Petra wouldn’t hear of it. “No way,” she said, scooping up the bills and forcing them into my front pocket. “I invited you, remember?”

The old man looked confused. He stared up at us out of pale, swollen eyes, then produced a handkerchief and blew his nose carefully, tenderly, as if he were aware that each blow might be his last. “Two?” he said, his voice distant and cracked, and then held out a trembling pink hand to take the twenty Petra offered him. As he fumbled for change in the cigar box at his elbow and then carefully tore two pale orange stubs from a wheel of all-purpose tickets, I couldn’t help thinking, with shame and mortification and an odd sensation of arousal, of the makeshift desk at the suck palace and the ten sordid despairing minutes I’d given up there. I took the ticket guiltily—ADMIT ONE—and followed Petra, my guide and support, into the roped-off area that enclosed the sickly tree, the gaping dark entrance to the bar and the smoking pit.

For the first few minutes I kept my head down, tense and wary, concentrating on bits of broken glass in the dirt, on the sharp, minatory toes of cowboy boots, on bare ankles, painted toenails and snub-nosed sneakers. Petra led me to the beer booth, where I studied the footprints in the beer-muddied earth and the way the froth dissolved at the bartender’s feet. “What’ll it be, honey?” the bartender asked, twanging the verb until it fell somewhere between
bee
and
bay.

“Two beers,” I said, addressing his belt buckle.

Petra laughed. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “My voice is changing.”

I stole a glance at the guffawing bartender, expecting Lloyd Sapers or George Pete Turner, and was relieved to find myself staring into the grinning, wild-eyed, gold-toothed, sun-blasted face of a drunken stranger in a Stetson hat. “Good beer, boy,” he said, handing me two plastic cups filled to the rim. “Drink up. We got a bottomless keg here.”

I nodded, wrenched my face into a simulated grin and gave the crowd a quick scan (the backs and profiles of strangers, naked shoulders, sunburned beer bellies, bola ties and blue jeans), and then ducked my head again, expecting the blade to fall at any
moment. Then Petra said, “There’s Sarah,” and nudged me in the direction of a maze of tables heaped with food.

Sarah was tall, broad-shouldered and bosomy, dressed in Dan-skin top and jeans, her hair teased straight out from her head until it looked like one of those furry hats worn by the guards at Buckingham Palace. She sat at a long table behind a sign advertising her health-food store—THE SEEDS OF LIFE—and served falafel, tahini, tofu salad and carrot juice as alternatives to the ceremonial slabs of bloody beef that made National Heifer Week the event that it was. She wasn’t doing much business. I took her hand as Petra introduced us, then watched as she scribbled “Out to Lunch” over the store logo and laid a sheet of plastic wrap over the tofu salad. “Everybody’s over here,” she said, and we followed her past the smoking barbecue pit (out of the corner of my eye I saw billowing smoke, vague menacing figures, the glow of hot coals) to a blanket spread out in the shade of the building.

The three occupants of the blanket—Teddy (a little guy in racing leathers whom I took to be Sarah’s beau), Alice (a health-food nut, thin as a refugee), and a big, box-headed character with a wire-thin Little Richard mustache—smiled benevolently at us as we eased down amidst a clutter of paper plates and plastic cups, denuded ribs, puddled grease and pinto beans. I sat between Petra and Sarah, and sucked the foam from my beer. Flies hovered, the big P.A. speakers crackled, smoke spun off into the sky.

Petra introduced me—everyone seemed to be familiar with our connection, and this pleased me—and then Little Richard said that he’d just got back from three weeks in Hawaii, tuning pianos. This led to two distinct but rapidly converging threads of conversation: the Islands and the trade of piano tuning. Sarah said she was tone deaf. Teddy said that he once swam with humpback whales off Maui. Alice looked up from a plate of shredded carrots and said that she preferred Debussy’s Etudes to anything Chopin ever did—especially when she was in Hawaii. Did the tropical air make tuning more difficult? Petra wondered. Richard tied up the loose ends neatly with an anecdote about sun bathing in Kaanapali with his
tuning forks, and then turned to me and said, “So what do you do, fella?”

These were dangerous conversational waters, and I could see the shoals and reefs prickling about me. Earlier, in the car, Petra had asked the same question and I’d begged off by saying, “You know—a little of this and a little of that.” “Sounds like a pretty evasive answer,” she’d retorted, and I’d dropped the corners of my mouth and said, “You’re right. Actually I run guns to Libya.” Now I opted for the straightforward approach. I looked Richard in the eye and told him I inspected airplane fuselages for stress fractures.

“Oh,” he said, and then the conversation rushed on past me, expanding to touch on methods of tofu preparation, the heat, the shameless behavior of a number of people I didn’t know, and the political situation in Central America. I leaned back on the blanket, scanning the crowd for trouble, smiling amenably at Petra’s friends and whispering nonstop witticisms in her ear. And oh, yes: drinking beer. It seemed that every time I took a swallow or two someone would hand me a fresh cup. This had a two-fold effect—of relaxing my guard (so what if I ran across Sapers or one of the other yokels—they had nothing on me) and suppressing my appetite. When Petra got us a plate of potato salad and chili beans, I did a couple of finger exercises with my plastic fork and then drained another beer.

After a while the conversation went dead, the C&W band lurched into some rural funk, and Sarah and Teddy got up to dance. Little Richard was passed out at the edge of the blanket, the sun filtering through the leaves to illuminate each separate astonishing whisker of his mustache, and Alice excused herself to go tend Sarah’s health-food stand. I thought of asking Petra to dance, but since I hate dancing, I decided against it. Instead I told her that I hadn’t meant to be flippant or to hide anything when she’d asked me what I did for a living, and sketched in what I’d been doing for the past year or so—that is, refurbishing Victorians in a slow market and reading banal, subliterate freshman papers as a part-timer at Cabrillo Community College. I didn’t mention the summer camp.

She looked disappointed. Or skeptical. “So you live in San Francisco?”

I nodded. “But I’m up here for the summer with a couple of friends—just to get away, you know?” “I know. Fishing, right?”

We smiled at each other. “Yeah, well, we do actually go fishing sometimes. But mainly the idea is just to rough it, you know, get out of the city, listen to the crickets, hike in the mountains.”

“I know what you mean,” she said, her voice so soft I could barely hear her, and then she dropped her head to trace a pattern in the blanket. I felt then that she saw right through me, knew as well as Vogelsang what I was doing in Willits. Lies beget other lies, I thought—now’s the time to come clean, to start the relationship off right. But I didn’t come clean. I couldn’t. I was about to say more, to get myself in deeper, when she lifted her glass and said “Cheers.”

For the next hour or so, while the sun made a molten puddle of the parking lot and the band hammered away at their guitars as if the instruments had somehow offended them, we talked, getting to know each other, comparing notes. I learned about Petra’s childhood in Evanston, summers spent sailing on the Great Lakes, her talent for design and the first misshapen piece she’d ever fired (a noseless bust of Janis Joplin). Her father was an architect, her mother was dead. Auto accident. She had a sister named Helen. She liked green chartreuse, Husky dogs and old-time Chicago Blues. She was twenty-nine. When she was in the tenth grade, attending a private school, she’d met a guy two years her senior, an athlete, high achiever and verbal whiz. They dated. He was class president, she was secretary of the Art Club. He went to the University of Iowa, she went to the University of Iowa. They dated strenuously, lived together, got married. He went to law school, she worked (in a Kentucky-style-chicken franchise where they went through thirty gallons of lard a day). When he graduated and got a job with a firm in San Francisco, they moved to a skylit apartment on Dolores Street and she began doing ceramics in earnest. One night he told her he was bored. Bored? she said. I don’t want to talk about it, he said. Two days later he was gone. She called the law firm. He hadn’t been in for over a week. Later she heard that he was in Amsterdam, living on a barge, then someone saw him at a jazz club
in Oslo. With a Danish girl. After that, she stopped asking.

I made sympathetic noises. How could anyone—be he deaf, dumb, blind, castrated—walk out on her? I was thinking, and then realized that someone, somewhere, could be thinking the same thing about Ronnie. Square pegs, round holes.

We drank beer. Petra stretched her legs, applied tanning oil to thighs and forearms, offered me potato salad as if it were caviar. It was hot, it was dry, there was too much dust, too much noise and there were too many people, but I hardly noticed—I gave my full attention to Petra, mooning over her like some ridiculous lovelorn swain out of Shakespeare or Lyly, ready to jump up and swoon at the drop of a hat. We drank more beer. Teddy and Sarah fumbled back to the blanket, panting and running sweat, stolidly drained their warm beers and staggered back to the dance floor. Then Petra handed me her empty cup and rose to her feet. “I’ve got to go to the ladies’. Would you get me another beer?”

“Sure,” I said, reckless, foolish, drink-besotted, hurtling mindlessly toward some fateful collision. I sprang up from the blanket. We were standing inches apart. I put my arm around her shoulder and we kissed for the first time, dogs yapping and chords thumping at the periphery of my consciousness, my whole being consumed with pure urgent animal lust. “Be back in a minute,” she said, her voice soft as a touch, and I stood there, empty cup in hand, watching helplessly as she receded into the crowd.