When I finally looked up, I saw that the Indians had gone — the light over the pool table had been extinguished and the rear of the bar faded into shadow. The two epicures at the bar were still there, though, and I saw that they’d been joined by a hefty young couple who brooded over a pair of highballs like inspectors from the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms. Shirelle was nowhere to be seen.
Suddenly George Pete’s crony lifted his head and roared, “Soak them beans, for Christsake!” as if he were announcing a cavalry charge. The other old fellow seemed pretty far gone — he just waved his hand vaguely.
I was feeling better than I had for weeks. I’d made my decision (of course I was staying; I’d go to jail forever — welcome it — lock myself in at Attica with savage perverts or swim out to Devil’s Island, before I’d let down my friends and buddies), and it was as if I’d been set free, the fetters loosened, no more vulture come to feed on my liver. How could I even have thought of quitting? There was nothing more vital than the kind of friendship I had with Dwight, with Phil, with Gesh, and it was worth any sacrifice to sustain it. The alcohol spoke to me, my abraded nerves sank into their sheaths like sleeping tortoises. I felt light, holy, ecstatic: I could have gotten up and kissed everybody in the place.
What I would do, I decided, was have one more cognac to celebrate the rite of passage I’d endured, and then head on up the hill to the summer camp, get a good night’s sleep and go out in the morning to cultivate my garden, as resigned and sensible as Candide on the shores of Marmora. As if on cue, Shirelle reappeared, emerging from the door behind the bar with a case of no-name scotch, gin, vodka and rum. I smirked at her like some dapper character out of a forties movie and knocked over my empty beer glass. “Shirelle,” I said, my tongue somehow glued to the roof of my mouth, “one more Remy, please. With a soda back.” And then, as if this simple request needed amplification: “I’m celebrating.”
Shirelle’s eyes were veined with red, as if she’d just finished a hundred laps in an over-chlorinated pool. The bottle floated in her hand like a helium balloon, and on the first pass she missed the glass entirely, splashing bar, coaster, her left hand and my right with expensive imported booze. Then she connected, filled the water glass halfway, wordlessly snatched up my money and lurched over to join the fat-faced pair at the other end of the bar.
“Half a quart of vinegar, a box of peppercorns and a whole shaker of salt — the whole damn thing — to a gallon of water,” George Pete’s crony said.
“What’s that for?” asked the broader of the two new arrivals, who seemed to be female. “Footsoak?”
“Oh, gawd.” George Pete’s crony rolled his bulging eyes. “Ever’body’s a iggoramus tonight — that’s my genuine Chesapeake Bay crab boil.”
The other old boy, the one in coveralls, was asleep, hands in his lap and forehead pressed to the bar as if he were a devotee of some obscure Far Eastern religion.
I felt warm. A voice mewled over the jukebox: Well, here I stand,/All alone with a broken heart,/I took three bennies/And now my semi-truck won’t start. Time escaped me. I had another cognac.
It was then, just after I’d ordered the second post-phone-call drink — or was it the third? — that I felt a pressure on my arm and turned to see that someone had taken possession of the stool next to mine. I was too far gone to be startled: it was Savoy. Her hand was on my arm, a tall frosted glass of Coke sizzled on the bar before her. She was wearing a low-cut blouse and one of those complicated uplift bras that separate the bosoms and present them like ripe mangoes. “Hi,” she said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Oh,” I said, shrugging, waving my hand and licking the tips of my fingers like a third-base coach in the throes of a seizure, “it’s no big thing. Been keeping busy, that’s all.” Eugene’s locket clung to her throat like a magnet. I wanted to lick it.
“Yeah?” she said, grinning wide. “You living around here now or what?”
Boom, went the jukebox. Boom, boom, boom.
“Wanna dance?” I said.
She shook her head no and took a sip of her Coke. Pink lipstick, white straw. “Your name’s Felix, right?”
I nodded. “And you’re Savoy.” I grinned like a deviate, like a billy goat.
She ignored me. Sucked thoughtfully at her straw a moment. “So you guys living up here now or what?” she said, repeating her question with a slight but significant variation.
“Blood raw!” roared George Pete’s crony.
His interlocutor, who’d partially revived and propped his head on a bent elbow, squinted one eye and hissed, “Your ass!”
“Not really,” I lied.
She laughed, a rich musical sound that inflamed every fiber of my reproductive tract. “No,” she said, leaning into me, “I really want to know. I like you guys, I do.”
“Well, if you put it that way,” I said, making a stab at wit and raising my eyebrows to acknowledge the sexual innuendo, “we live in Berkeley, but we’ve been coming up here a lot — oh, it must be three or four times now — to go fishing, you know, trout and all.”
“Come off it. You’re living up by Lloyd Sapers’s place, aren’t you?”
“Sapers? Never heard of him.”
She looked offended, her mouth puckered in a little moue. “What do you take me for — stupid or something?”
“Hah!” shouted George Pete’s toothless compatriot, apropos of some culinary conviction forcefully expressed. “Hah! Hah! Hah! Don’t make me laugh.”
Savoy was staring into my eyes, cold and intent. A moment ago I’d felt warm, lit up, ready to lick the world: now I felt cold, cold, cold. “Come off it,” she repeated, as if she’d forgotten her lines. “Come off it, will you? Everybody in town knows what you guys are doing up there.”
PART 3. Efflorescence
Chapter 1
In June, the weather altered abruptly. Whereas before we’d shivered through a perpetual riveting downpour that made every moment of hole-digging or fence-stringing a curse and a trial, now suddenly we blistered under an unmoving sadistic sun. It was as if we’d been magically transported — house, weeds, garbage and all — from the windward coast of Scotland to the desert outside Tucson. One night the wind rattled up out of the south with the choking roar of an invading army — trucks in low gear, feet tramping across the roof — and in the morning it was clear. And dry. So dry that Phil’s pompadour went permanently limp and our bathtowels stiffened to the consistency of redwood bark. You could feel the change in your nostrils, in your throat; you could hear it in the dry, tortured groans of the house, see it in the shimmering air and wilting weeds and in the slow-wheeling helices of vultures riding the thermal currents. Ninety-five degrees, ninety-six, one-oh-two. Lizards appeared from nowhere, as if they’d been conjured from the air, hummingbirds hung like mobiles over the bells of flowers, streams fell back and left their banks exposed like toothless gums. Mud caked, dried, fragmented to dust. The arid season was upon us.
We were ready for it. As ready as the reddest-necked cracker in the Imperial Valley, as ready as the Israelis on the Negev. Or so we thought. By May 31, when workers elsewhere were grilling hot dogs and singing “God Bless America,” we were putting the finishing touches to an elaborate irrigation system engineered by Vogelsang, approved by Dowst and realized (i.e., hauled, hammered, cut, glued, joined and bled over) by Phil, Gesh and me. The mainstay of this system was a used gasoline-powered water pump for which Vogelsang had paid $100 at a foreclosure sale. Theoretically, the pump would suck water from the year-round stream at the base of the mountain, force it through the camouflaged lengths of one-inch plastic pipe we’d laid and connected, and then push it all the way up the mountain’s five hundred fifty vertical feet and into the big horse-troughs situated above the Khyber Pass, our highest growing area. From there, the water would gravity-feed to smaller reservoirs consisting of clusters of fifty-five-gallon drums, and thence to the hand-held hoses from which we would provide each plant with the two to three gallons of water it needed daily.