It was the first thing either of us had said since we’d left the police station. We’d been lost in our own thoughts, measuring out the sentence of doom, trying to accommodate ourselves to disappointment and failure. “So how’s Vogelsang taking it?” I said.
I studied Phil’s profile in the glow of the dashboard. It was unrevealing. He was all nose, chin and Adam’s apple, like a caricature. I thought at first he might be suppressing a grin, but I couldn’t be sure — he might have been frowning, too. Just then the tires squealed, we lurched around a corner and slowed as we hit the pitted surface of the road up to the summer camp. Phil shrugged. “He’s up there now, waiting for you. Everybody’s in a panic.”
“Look,” I began, and the weight of what I was about to say nearly choked me, “maybe I ought to quit the project. I mean, get out of everybody’s way. You guys don’t really need me now that the heavy stuff’s over with.”
The car shivered on its worn springs, bushes scraped at the side panels with the rasp of knives on a whetstone. “You don’t have to do that,” Phil said, his voice soft. He glanced at me, then turned back to the road. “We’ll work something out.”
It was two a.m. We rumbled into the field in front of the house and jerked to a halt beside Vogelsang’s Saab. It was a moonless night, stars high and cold like pinpricks in the fabric of the universe. There was the usual chorus of nocturnal insects, the uncertain hump of Dowst’s van and the shadowy displacement of space that indicated the pickup and Jeep. I glanced up and saw that all the windows of the cabin were aglow.
I’d been gone a little over sixty hours. Gesh and I had clambered into the car on Friday like escapees from the chain gang, like troupers boarding the bus for home after a tour of Piscagoula, Little Rock and Des Moines. Now it was Monday morning, and I was back. For months I’d been desperate to leave the place, ticking off the days like a prisoner in solitary, looking up from shovel or come-along and seeing cement, brick and asphalt, lying in my sweaty sheets and dreaming of cold beers, hot showers, checkered tablecloths and discerning waiters; but now, as Phil and I mounted the steps of the porch, I felt I’d come home. It was odd. In a moment we would push through the door to dirt, heat, chaos, to the feeble glow of Coleman lanterns and the scuff of lizards on the wall — and it would be all right. Suddenly I was crushed with regret. I was going to have to face them all — Vogelsang, Dowst, Aorta, Gesh, Phil, my co-workers and comrades — and tell them I was going to quit. Walk out with nothing. Sacrifice myself for the good of all. I didn’t know what I’d do if they took me up on it.
The door swung open and four faces turned to look up at me as if I were a specimen in the zoo. There was a stink of rancid garbage, insects batted at the Coleman lanterns, shadows clung to the corners. My business partners were seated at the kitchen table, ranged round the Monopoly board, beleaguered by coffee cups, an empty rum bottle, brightly colored cards, the spurious lucre of the game’s treasury. They looked anxious. And tired. I couldn’t help noticing that Vogelsang held the deeds to half a dozen properties, had accumulated a mountain of cash and erected hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. Gesh picked up a Go Directly to Jail, Do Not Pass Go card as we stepped in the door.
“Felix,” somebody said, and then they were all on their feet, nosing around me like hounds worrying the carcass of a rabbit. All except Vogelsang, that is. He sat there stoically, his features inscrutable, thumbing through his play money like Joe Stalin examining photographs of disloyal party chiefs. Though it was the middle of the night, and he had no intention of stepping out the door or coming into contact with any form of vegetative life, let alone poison oak, he was nonetheless wearing his NASA jumpsuit. I tried not to look at him.
For the first few minutes everyone was solicitous. Gesh poured me a shot of vodka, the only thing we had in the house, Dowst brewed some lukewarm tea, Aorta regarded me with interest, and Vogelsang asked some indirect questions pertaining to the nature of my confinement and how much the law knew about me. I alternately sipped warm vodka and cold tea, my stomach curdling with the bitter culture of guilt and dereliction, while Gesh tried to make sense of things.
Like the others, he was puzzled. What had I done? What was it all about? One minute he’d been snoring against the window frame, and the next he was staring into the whipcrack face of a highway patrolman. The patrolman said nothing, merely pointed to where I sat in the back seat of the cruiser, returned to his car and thundered up the highway. Gesh stared after us, incredulous, then drove to a phone booth and called Vogelsang. Vogelsang asked what had happened, and Gesh was only able to say that I’d been handcuffed to some woman and hauled off by the police. Gesh looked at me for confirmation, elucidation, enlightenment. I looked down at the floor.
Gesh’s voice faltered, then picked up again. Luckily, Vogelsang kept some cash on hand for just such an emergency, and promised to get on the horn to his lawyer and then drive up to Willits with the bail money. Fine. Terrific. Gesh had hung up, feeling relieved, but then found himself at a loss. He didn’t dare go near the police station, for fear he’d be implicated in whatever it was I’d done, and he couldn’t very well sit by the phone booth for the rest of the night. All at once it occurred to him that he should hustle up to the summer camp and alert Phil, in the event that legions of troopers were even then surrounding the place. They weren’t, and he’d had no recourse but to sit tight and soothe his frazzled nerves with alcohol. This he’d apparently succeeded in doing, as he was half drunk at the moment, the words clinging to his lips as if they’d been written out on strips of paper and pasted to the roof of his mouth. When he finished, everyone turned to me. I’d never known a more miserable moment.
“It was really stupid,” I said finally, and the room fell silent. The sound of the moths beating against the lamp screen transferred itself to my head, a frenzied thumping patter of drums. Beyond the windows, something — some creature of the night — let out a short sharp yip of pain or bloodlust. Hesitantly, like a man on the couch trying to reconstruct a dream, I told them what had happened, sparing no detail, and concluded by reasserting that the whole thing had been a foolish mistake, which I heartily regretted. No one said a word. “I feel like I’ve let everybody down,” I said after a moment. “I mean, Jerpbak’s got a vendetta against me now. I don’t see how I can go on.”
Dowst was watching me like a shark moving in on a gutted mackerel. Vogelsang was so alert I thought he was about to snap to attention and salute. Phil and Gesh averted their eyes.
“What I’m saying is, for the sake of the project I think it would be better if I quit.”
“No,” Gesh said. “You can’t do that.”
Phil screwed up his lazy eye and gave me a look of loyalty and camaraderie, a look that said teak tables and marble-topped oyster bars be damned. “I don’t see why you can’t stay on,” he said. “It’s not as though you got busted for a drug offense or anything, and Vogelsang already said his lawyer can postpone the trial till after the harvest. …”
“How much would you want?” Dowst said. “I mean, how would we split?” And then, in a rush: “Because you’d be breaking your contract.”