The first problem we encountered was a familiar one: noise. When all the pipe had been painted, laid and linked, and all the connections made to the reservoirs, we gathered at the base of the hill to fire up the pump and inaugurate the system. It was a ceremonial occasion, and we stood around clutching slippery cans of beer while Vogelsang bent to make minute adjustments to the gasoline feed, the filter, the carburetor. Mosquitoes whined, the stream slid over obstructions with a languid splash and trickle. I thought of railroad men come together for the driving of the final spike, or boutonniered politicians toasting the first explosive rush of water that flooded the Erie Canal.
The day was hot, one of the first true scorchers we’d had, the sun raging through the trees like a forest fire. We were swallowed up in the clot of vegetation that lined the streambed, and it seemed as if the leaves caught and held the air until it reared up and slapped us in the face. Gesh was running sweat, his eyes slits, cheekbones glistening as if they’d been oiled; Phil’s clothes were soaked through; I could taste the salt on my lips. Only Vogelsang seemed oblivious to the heat. Dressed in goggles, gloves, surgeon’s mask and jumpsuit, and with a.44 magnum strapped incongruously round his waist, he had spent the better part of the morning creeping through the scrub to inspect each joint and coupling along the pipeline. Now, as he hunched over the pump with wrench and screwdriver, I was surprised to discover that not a single damp spot darkened the khaki jumpsuit. I was marveling over this revelation—he doesn’t even sweat, I thought in amazement — when he stood, brushed the knees of his pants and jerked the starter cord.
Our cheers were drowned in the roar of the engine, which was at least six decibels louder than the one we’d abandoned outside the cabin. The beers popped soundlessly, blue-black coils of exhaust clutched at us before twisting off to darken the sky, the engine screamed its animate agony. Phil looked unhappy, Gesh gritted his teeth. If Vogelsang was disturbed, he gave no sign of it — he merely stood there, arms akimbo, staring down at the thing as if he were contemplating a painting in a gallery. Aorta never even turned her head. In shorts and halter top, she perched on a rock in midstream and serenely tapped her foot to a private rhythm, her ability to register auditory shock evidently impaired through her association with the Nostrils. Rat-a-rap-rap, screamed the engine, rap-rap-rap. Gesh bellowed something in my ear, but it was lost in the machine-gun rattle of the engine; I concentrated on swallowing without choking on my tongue. After five minutes or so, Vogelsang shut the thing down, then lifted his surgeon’s mask and turned to us. “You’ll have to dig a pit.”
We dug. Four feet down in yellowish clay. Sweat flowing, mosquitoes harassing, beer gone sour in our throats. Then we set the pump in the trench, threw a slab of plywood over it and buried the muffler in sand. “That should do it,” Vogelsang said.
As Gesh, Phil and I started up the hill, he turned the engine over again and I thought at first we were under attack, the fulminating blast of machinery so unexpected, so obscene and startling in the quiet of the woods. Phil shouted something to the effect that laboratory rats chewed off their own feet when subjected to loud and unremitting noise, but already the trees had begun to muffle the blare of the pump, taking the edge off it in the way a mute softens a trumpet. We would barely hear it from the house, I realized, but Gesh, who had long since identified Vogelsang as the enemy, wasn’t mollified. “Terrific,” he said, loping up the hill. “That’s about as subtle as the London blitz.”
The second problem was more complicated, human rather than mechanical. The problem was Lloyd Sapers. According to legal agreement, Sapers had access to the central road bisecting our property and plunging down into the valley to the southeast. This was his fire road — his escape route in the event that the primary road was blocked by fire, no mean consideration in an area that grew progressively drier until at the end of the season the hills were as volatile as balls of newsprint soaked in gasoline.
On the morning after we’d broken in the irrigation system, Vogelsang, Aorta and I were gathered around the breakfast table while Phil and Gesh watered the Khyber Pass and Dowst huddled in the greenhouse, trying to perform horticultural miracles with a handful of withered seeds and a bucket of Nutri-Grow. Since his arrival two nights earlier — he’d come, reluctantly, to oversee the completion of the irrigation system — Vogelsang had been jumpy as an air-raid warden. Nervous about everything from poison oak to pot poachers to detection and arrest by the DEA, FBI, IRS and the Willits Sheriff’s Department, he was practically clonic, every facial muscle twitching, fingers drumming the tabletop, legs beating like pistons. In a word, he was wired.
This was understandable. With a forest of eighteen-inch plants in the ground, we were all edgy — they had the goods on us now — but Phil, Gesh and I had come to grips with our fears. Or at least we tried to obliterate them through the abuse of drugs and alcohol and an unwavering commitment to the sustaining visions of Rio, Cajun seafood houses and fat bank accounts. We had no other choice: unlike Vogelsang, we had to live with the threat of exposure day in and day out. For well over a month, for that matter, I’d been living with the knowledge of what Savoy had said to me that night—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—a festering little secret, hidden close. Before the words had passed her lips I was on my feet, pretending I hadn’t heard her, making apologies. I glanced at my watch, slapped my forehead, shrugged into my jacket and staggered out the door like a hamstrung deer. When I got back to the cabin, the lights were out. Just as well, I thought, inching my way through the darkness to my room, spun round with alcohol, panic and the finality of my decision. I was in this thing to the end: Give me pot, or give me death, I thought, giggling to myself. No teenager with an uplift bra and unsized eyes was going to scare me off it, nor Jerpbak, voodoo calendars or shotguns, either. I could take it, liberated by the pledge I’d made myself, burst from under the pall of the sickness unto death and into the light of faith. But why worry Phil and Gesh?
Now, with Vogelsang twitching across the table and rattling on about Krugerrands, gypsum and Oriental rugs, I couldn’t resist sticking it to him just a bit, as he’d stuck it to me over the issue of the guns. “Oh, by the way,” I said, cutting him off in the middle of a panegyric to Bokharan weavers, “did I tell you a plane came over the other day?”
Vogelsang set down his spoon, shot a glance out the window and then fumbled in his pocket for the vial of breath neutralizer. “Really?” he said, a barely perceptible sob cracking his voice.
“Cessna, I think. One of those little jobs with the sculpted cockpit and the propeller out front?”
He nodded. His features were drawn together, a string bag tightening at the neck, and the veins in his temple began to pulse.