My first thought was to close the door, trap him so he couldn’t escape. But then what? Strangle him with his tie? Get him in a headlock and wait for reinforcements? Jones. The wonder of it, the perfidy, the wicked baffling collusion of chance and circumstance: he’d known all along. I slammed the door with a savagery that shook the house.
“No need to get upset, brother,” Jones said, dragging on his cigarette. “I just came to talk business, that’s all.”
I measured the room in six long strides and stood over him, hands clenched at my sides. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. My voice was strained, distant, as harsh and punchy as a drum-roll echoing across an open field.
Jones didn’t flinch. He just looked up at me, cool as an assassin, arms folded and jaw set. I don’t give a shit, his eyes said. About you, the social contract, hard work, sweat, toil, aspiration. … I want, they said.
I wanted, too. I wanted tranquillity, soothing pleasures in every part, an end to fear, madness and the frantic driven wide-eyed rush of the pursued, I wanted my friends to make money and the summer camp to succeed. And though I hadn’t struck anyone in anger since I was thirteen and a kid named Sammy Wolfson told me to get my dirty ass out of his mother’s begonias, I wanted to strike Jones. Right then. Swiftly, savagely, with power and immediacy and all the hammering force of righteousness. I wanted to blast him, flatten him, cripple him, concentrate all my rage and bile in one annihilating, bone-crushing blow and lay him to waste. I’d had it. I looked at Jones and knew I could kill.
If he could read my thoughts, Jones gave no indication of it. He crossed his legs as casually as if he were lunching at the finks’ club, and then flicked the ash from his cigarette. On the floor. “All’s I want is ten thou.”
“Get out!” I roared. I was trembling.
Jones uncoiled himself and cautiously rose from the couch. We were standing two feet apart. “You want to fight?” he said. “I’ll fight you, motherfucker.”
This was it, the project gone to pot, the wolf at the door, violence and criminality. “Get out,” I repeated, senselessly, and my voice dropped with resignation: there were no more words.
“Hit me, man,” Jones said, backing off a pace. “Go on. But I’ll walk straight into the Willits police station and collect a thousand bucks for turning you guys in. You like that?”
I didn’t like anything. I didn’t care. I cocked my fist.
Just then, salvator mundi, there was the sound of a car in the field outside, and Dowst’s van eased into view beyond the window. We watched silently as the van jerked to a halt in a maelstrom of dust and Dowst emerged in shorts and sandals, looking as if he were on his way to a croquet party. Jones exhaled a cloud of smoke and eased himself down on the arm of the couch. “The other partner, huh?” he sneered. “Let’s let him in on this, too.”
Dowst came through the door with a sack of Santa Rosa plums, two bags of ice and a big-toothed companionable grin. When he spotted Jones slouching there against the arm of the couch like a delinquent outside the principal’s office, he stopped dead a moment, as if afraid he’d entered the wrong house, then continued on in and set his burden down on the kitchen counter. His face had flared briefly — with surprise, passion, outrage — and then fallen in on itself like a white dwarf. Now he stood there at the counter, his mouth puckered in a lower-case o, struggling for some reason to replicate the call of a familiar woodland bird.
“Jones,” I said.
“Jones?”
“The famous dope farmer,” I said. Jones grinned. “He’s here to blackmail us.”
“All’s I want is ten thou,” Jones said, replaying a tape.
I watched comprehension filter into Dowst’s face, and then I watched him get angry (it began with his ears, which flushed the color of spiracha chilis, as if they’d been tweaked, and then seeped into his face, settling in a tight intransigent line across his lips). “We’re busy here,” he said. “We’ve got no time for leeches. As Dowst waxed, I waned. I found that my own anger had dissipated, choked on itself like the mythical beast that swallows its own tail. All I felt now was despair.
Jones ground out his cigarette on the arm of the couch and then adjusted the knot of his tie. “You’re busy,” he mocked. “Well, so am I. So’s the sheriff. He’s busy looking for assholes like you.”
“We know about you,” Dowst said. He was puffed up with self-righteousness now, the Yalie remonstrating over a trick question on a botany quiz. “You were busted last summer.”
Jones shrugged. “Then they’ll know my information is reliable, right?” He pushed himself up from the chair arm and moved past me toward the door. “Look,” he said, pausing at the doorway and glancing from me to Dowst, “I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Ten thousand bucks. Cash. You don’t give it to me, I’ll have a talk with the sheriff.”
The color had gone out of Dowst’s face as the gravity of the situation hit home: we were powerless. We could bait, bluster and threaten all day, we could coddle and cajole, appeal to Jones’s better nature and then pin him down and work over his ribs and groin till he couldn’t stand, but he had us. Short of murder, there was nothing we could do to stop him. Dowst looked sorrowful, penitent, deeply hurt and appalled; he looked as if he’d been punched in the wallet. “But we haven’t got that kind of money,” he said. “It’s all wrapped up in the plants.”
“Monday. Noon.”
“You know that,” I said. He was giving us two days. “You of all people …”
Jones turned to me with a look of malice that made me want to wring my hands, tear out my hair and out-howl the damned in the lake of fire. “Ask Vogelsang,” he said, and the name sounded natural on his lips, the thought sensible and apposite, until I realized that this was Jones speaking, a stranger, someone who couldn’t possibly have known who was behind us … unless—picture mountains toppling into the sea, great slabs of granite shearing off and hammering the pitching waters, and you’ll have an idea of how this insight was to hit me—unless Vogelsang had been lying to us all along, unless Jones had been his man. Dowst must have had the same thought. Slap. Crash. Thud. His mouth gaped and his hands fluttered at his sides as if he’d gone into neuromuscular collapse.
The door was open. Jones was framed in the glare from the dead yellow field and the dead yellow hills beyond. His expression was gloating, triumphant — he could have been a grand master maneuvering his bitterest rival into checkmate. I watched in a daze as he lifted his index finger in hip valediction. “Ciao,” he said, and the door pulled shut.
I was sunk uneasily in the easy chair, simultaneously studying Vogelsang’s back, tapping my foot to a manic nine/eight beat and devouring corn chips with a compulsion that verged on frenzy. Something was about to happen, something final and irrevocable, but I didn’t know what. Vogelsang’s back (the dapple of brown and green in the jumpsuit, the undershirt of muscle rippling and contracting as he gestured with his hands and upper body, the hard black excrescence of the.44 at his side) was the center in a storm of uncertainty, a cipher, something to hold on to. I studied it as the setting sun smeared the windows with blood.