Authors: T.C. Boyle
This was it, I thought, this was my chance. I could empty the magazine and fling myself into the highest branches of the tree before he knew what hit him. I scrutinized the welter of leaves with the intensity of a hit man, probing for a target. There, that was the cracked black sole of his foot, wasn’t it? Yes! And there, buried in the vegetation, the immense mottled hulk of him, like a heap of moldy carpet someone had scraped from the
floor of a flooded basement. I steadied the pistol with my left hand, as Vogelsang had demonstrated, and took aim.
A big bloated second ticked by, the bear snoring, my finger clutching the trigger as if it were my pass to the realms of glory. I remembered the scoutmaster, the bull’s-eye target perforated with .22 holes, Vogelsang and the shotgun. But this was not the shotgun, this was the pistol, and its use required skill and concentration. What if I missed? Or merely wounded him? And if I killed him, then what? Would I bury him? Skin him and eat him? Leave him for the maggots? I lowered the gun. You’d have to be heartless, a degenerate blood-crazed butcher, to shoot a sleeping bear. There he lay in all his splendor, denizen of slope and glade, hibernator, bee-keeper, omnivore, symbol of the wild and born free: who was I to take his life? Perhaps I could simply fire in the air and scare him off. But that left open the possibility that instead I’d scare him into springing up and removing my face. I thought of slinking away, going for Gesh and Phil and the shotgun, sharing the danger and the terrible responsibility both. But no. There was no time for that. The bear was raiding our crops, destroying everything we’d worked and planned for, threatening the very success of the project itself. I raised the gun.
Kill!
a voice shrieked in my ear.
Kill!
At that moment, my options were suddenly reduced to zero. For the bear, perhaps sensing on some deep instinctual level that he was half a step from eternity, awoke, and poked his huge grizzled snout from the bushes. He was lying on his side, raising his head wearily, like a commuter roused by the first buzz of the alarm clock. For an instant we regarded each other in bewilderment. His great chocolate eyes were striated with red veins, marijuana leaves hung from his drooping jaw, and his odor—the feculent, rancid, working stench of him—enveloped me. I was stunned. Terrified. Entranced.
The bear broke the spell. He rolled to his feet like an old sow shaking up from the dust, a sapling snapped under the weight of him and I fired.
BOOM!
The report of the gun was loud as a howitzer blast.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
I fired again and again, backing away simultaneously, all my circuits open wide.
I missed.
When the smoke cleared, the bear was standing there precisely as he had been an instant earlier, but now his eyes were seized with intimations of mortality. He gave me one quick dumbfounded look, as if to say “You’re really serious about all this, aren’t you?,” and then he was gone.
He took the back fence with him, and cleared a path through the scrub that would have accommodated Clyde Beatty’s elephants. For a long while I could hear him crashing through the brush, and I listened till the sound was absorbed in the hum of the insects and the bored, quotidian
chock-chock-chock
of the hidden bird.
Even before I could think to set down the sack of German beer, cold cuts and cannolis tucked under my arm, I’d hit every light-switch in the place, flicked on the air conditioner, tuned the TV to some cretinous game show and dropped the stylus on
Carmina Burana
at killing volume. This was living. I felt like Stanley emerged from the jungle, Zeus hurling thunderbolts; I felt liberated, triumphant, omnipotent. Machines hummed and clicked at my command, breezes blew and trumpets rang out. I was home.
Gesh followed me up the stairs like a page, his arms laden with wine, kaiser rolls, grapes, olives, anchovies, taco chips, Dijon mustard and artichoke hearts. It was two p.m., Friday, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and we were a hundred and fifty miles from the heat, dust and disrepair of the summer camp. I was overjoyed. Save for a trip to Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply in Santa Rosa, this was the first time I’d left Willits in four months. Four months: I could hardly believe it. The world had gone on, governments rising and falling, economic indicators in a tailspin, people scheming, dying, erecting shopping centers and committing acts of heroism and depravity, and all the while I’d been sitting on my ass in the hinterlands, contracting poison oak and facing down rednecks and bears. But now, now at long last, sacrifice would have its reward: Gesh and I were on a three-day furlough, horny and wild and crotchsore as drovers descending on Abilene.
Phil, who had experienced some measure of relief in Tahoe the previous weekend, had reluctantly agreed to stay behind and tend the plants. “I can handle it,” he said, and then, playing on our fears, “so long as Sapers stays where he belongs and the bear doesn’t come poking around again.” We scarcely heard him. After sixteen weeks of abstinence—sixteen weeks during which we leered at sheep, slavered over farm girls in the two-hundred-pound class and built elaborate fantasies around the whores of Rio—we were strung just as tightly as the horniest zit-faced adolescent. Bears, cops, commandos, insolvency, failure, ignominy and incarceration: none of it mattered. Our eyes were glazed with romance, we were already lifting cocktails in lush gleaming bars full of secretaries, cosmeticians, poetesses and lutanists, the field of our perception narrowed to a single sharp focus. For the present, we had one concern and one concern only: women.
Gesh made the sandwiches while I showered and shaved. Then, while he was anointing himself, I made a few phone calls, hoping to connect with one of the girls I’d dated sporadically over the past year or so. I was disappointed. Amy and Marcia, I learned, had married, and I offered them my feeble congratulations. Giselle was in France, Corinne had joined the army, and Annie was dead. When Annie’s phone didn’t answer, I called her sister, who erupted in sobs at the mention of her name. It was a shock. Annie, declaimer of poetry, danseuse, cat-lover, Annie of the quick smile and athletic legs, had been laid low, cut down by a Coup de Ville as she crossed Market Street on her Moped. All I’d wanted was the fleeting comfort of pressing my flesh to hers—all I’d wanted was love—and instead I’d been given a whiff of the grave.
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,/O Priestess in the vaults of Death …
“Bummer,” Gesh said, flailing his hair with a plastic brush.
I didn’t mean to be insensitive, but I couldn’t have agreed more: it was an inauspicious beginning, and the shock of it dampened my mood as automatically as would the news of an earthquake in Cincinnati or the outbreak of the Third World War. Gesh sat in the corner, a beer between his legs, subdued, watching me. What could I say? It was too bad, a shame and a pity and all that. Still, we were off the farm, and that alone was
enough to ignite us again. Before long we were dribbling beer down our chins and bellowing along with Orff. We ate the sandwiches, drank the beer, graduated from Orff to the Stranglers, the Rude Boys and finally the Armageddon Sisters, and then flung ourselves out the door.
Our first stop was the Mexican laundry, where we deposited eight swollen sacks of towels, T-shirts and undershorts in varying stages of fermentation and stained with paint, grease, sweat, tomato paste, Rose’s Lime Juice and the essence of bear. Next we drove up to Ashbury Heights to visit one of Gesh’s acquaintances, a recreational pharmacologist who occupied the dingy servants’ quarters of a twenty-room Edwardian mansion he shared with a lawyer and his wife, a lesbian couple, three Iranian students and an out-of-work carpenter. We passed through an iron gate, ascended marble steps. Gesh knocked.
There was a cacophony of canine yelps and snarls, a scrambling of paw and toenail against the inner door and then the irascible tones of a distant voice: “Coming. Coming.” A moment later, a short angry character with a buzzhead haircut simultaneously swung back the door and kicked savagely at a pair of trembling Gordon setters. “Yeah?” he said, pinning us with a malevolent look.
“Rudy in?” Gesh said.
Without a word, Buzzhead simply turned and walked off into the shadows, leaving the door wide open and the skittish dogs shivering at the doorframe. I followed Gesh, pulling the door shut behind me, the wet noses of the dogs poking at my hands as we passed through a crepuscular entrance hall jagged with furniture—highboys, lowboys, armoires, sideboards. The entrance hall gave onto a drawing room heaped with boxes of clothes and books and smelling of cat litter. “This way,” Gesh said, and we followed a paneled corridor past another disused room, descended a flight of stairs and pushed through a curtain into a small apartment.
There was an odor of onions, tobacco, rubbing alcohol. In the corner, stretched out on a bare mattress and spotlighted in the glow of a tensor lamp, a man with plaited hair held a paperback book to his face. Aside from the mattress, which lay on the floor, and a number of milk crates ranged against the wall
and stuffed with books, shoes, clothing and newspapers, the only furniture in the room was a safe the size of a refrigerator. “Hey,” the man said as we entered the room, and then he sprang up from the bed like a predator, snarling, “Get out, get out, you fucking beasts!”
He was referring to the dogs.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, and there was real vehemence in his tone. “Stinking hairy bastards.” Then he grabbed Gesh’s hand and his face erupted in a grin. “Gesh!” he boomed. “How the fuck are you?”
Gesh said he had no complaints, and then nodded at me. “Rudy,” he said, “Felix.” I opted for the soul shake, but Rudy came straight on and twisted my hand around as if it were a salami on a string. Then he turned abruptly, padded to the safe and began spinning the tumblers. “So,” he shouted over his shoulder, “you hear anything from Ziggy?”
Gesh responded to this—no, he hadn’t heard from Ziggy but someone had told him he was waiting tables in Lahaina—while I studied Rudy. Aside from one or two of the pus-eyed reprobates clutching bottles in doorways off Mission Street, Rudy was the oddest, unhealthiest, most unsavory-looking character I’d laid eyes on in years. He was barefoot, wearing a torn pair of Jockey shorts and a ribbed turtleneck sweater with a
NUKE
THE
WHALES
button appended to the shoulder; his bare legs were hairless, the skin more yellow than white. His hair was plaited in tight cornrows that alternated with furrows of pink scalp as if his head were the blueprint for a maze, he was chinless and skinny as a concentration camp survivor, his nose was shoved up into his face and his eyes were too big for their sockets, stretching the lids like beer bellies poking out from beneath shrunken T-shirts.
When the safe swung open, I saw pharmaceutical scales, bags of mannitol and cocaine, plastic tear-sheets of Mandrax stacked like corrugated cardboard, a big food-storage Baggie full of twenties wound tight as pencils and secured with rubber bands. Rudy extracted a miniature medicine vial from the safe, and then fished around in one of the milk baskets for a bag of pot and a package of cigarette papers. For the next half hour we sat cross-legged on the floor beneath posters of John Lennon, Margaret Thatcher
and the Pope, and deposited various substances in our oral and nasal cavities while we shammed the roles of host and guest. The conversation consisted of ejaculations like “Um, yeah, that’s good,” and a continuing exchange between Rudy and Gesh that invariably began with one or the other of them saying “What do you hear from X lately?” After a while they seemed to run out of mutual acquaintances and a paralyzing silence fell over the room. This was the signal for Gesh and me to rise and lay out half our weekend’s allowance—painstakingly hoarded against our eight-dollars-per-diem salary—for two grams of coke and fifteen Quaaludes. Then we wished Rudy well and went out to tear the town apart.
It was six o’clock. We drove to North Beach, parked, and ambled down the street in a blaze of neon. I was feeling good, the pavement clicking beneath my heels, windows struck with light, people on the street, music in the air. After the months of exile, after the countless deadening hours that weighed on us like some wasting disease, this was exhilarating, a rush, and even the clash of traffic and the stink of exhaust gladdened my heart. I’d been around the world with Magellan, eaten my own shoes and seen the worst, and now I was home again. When Gesh said, “Let’s have a cocktail,” I was already dancing in the street.
The first place we stepped into featured thundering rock and roll and naked women grunting in a mud pit. We had two stingers and one quack apiece, and perked ourselves up in the men’s room with a line of coke. I stood with my back to the bar, propped on my elbows, and watched the artificial mud cling to the nipples and moisten the crevices of the wrestling women. My teeth were on edge, and I found myself leaning into Gesh and shouting nonstop over the music as the coke worked on the verbal centers of my brain. This was good, I thought, this was what I wanted: excitement, cheap and loud. I felt expansive, generous, witty and invulnerable.
Twenty minutes later, as the effect of the coke waned and the methaqualone began to pour sand in my joints, I waxed philosophical. What was this need, I mused, for chemical oblivion? The world was full of drunks, junkies, kat-chewers and ether-sniffers. Kids stuck their heads in buckets of paint thinner, bears bloated on fermented berries, cats rolled in catnip. And here I
was, stoned and getting stoneder, on holiday from my new vocation—itself an indictment—and watching a pair of big-titted women slog around in a tub of artificial mud. Understanding hit me like a truck: I was a degenerate. I was no part-time scholar and contractor on the rebound from the recession, I was a dope fiend and a dope dealer, saboteur of lives and minds, a gutless profit-monger and mammon-worshipper. Jerpbak had been right to single me out and pin me to the wall: I was dangerous, subversive. Suddenly I felt depressed, filled to the neck with sadness like a carafe with bad wine.