Budding Prospects (38 page)

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?”