“No, Felix”—his tone had changed, the amusement dried up —“you’re a loser. You and Cherniske and that other halfwit. And Dowst, too. I made out, don’t you worry.”
What was he talking about? He’d made nothing, he’d made a mistake. “Bullshit,” I said.
Suddenly he was on his feet, catty, clonic, the old Vogelsang. He paced to the end of the table and swung round. “I bought that property in February, like I told you. But not this February. February two years ago. You know what I paid?”
I knew nothing. I was a loser.
“Ninety-two.”
Chink-doom, went the goatherd, doom-doom.
“You know what I’m getting — what I got? Already?” The cords stood out in his neck like stitches in a sweater. “I signed over the title yesterday — the deal’s been cooking for months. Months.” He was twitching, jerking, dancing in place like an Indian whooping over the corpse of an enemy. “One-seventy. And do you know why? Because you improved the place for me.”
I sat down. Hard.
“That’s right. I had a deal with Sapers — and don’t give me that look, I played straight with you: he knew nothing about the pot. If I fenced the property line he’d let me tap into his electricity. I told him my writer friends would do it for the exercise.”
A cavern was opening up inside me, a pit, a chasm in which I could hear the faint reverberations of all the coppers, pennies, yen, groschen, forints and centavos of all the sad, grasping, multifarious generations as they plunged into the everlasting gloom.
“And I’ll tell you something else. I’ll do a little work on that Jeep and that pickup and I’ll unload them for more than what I paid for them. The PVC pipe is stacked in the garage right now. The generator and pump, too.” He’d moved closer now, his fingers dancing on the tabletop. The smaller skull was in his hand — alas, poor Yorick — and he was gesturing with it. “Don’t be naive, Felix,” he said in a voice that could have humbled the chairman of the board at ITT, “don’t be stupid. I don’t lose.”
My own voice was a croak, a dying crippled thrust of rebuke. “Jones. He was your man. You got together to cheat us.”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“Rudy.”
He held the skull up before his face and gazed into the empty eye sockets; I thought he was going to crush it, but he set it down gently beside its mate and fussed over the arrangement for a moment before responding. “Rudy made a bad investment,” he said. “Jones is a leech.” And then: “Jones figured it out, that’s all. He talked to Rudy, he saw you and Gesh when you were in town. I assume he made a little reconnaissance trip up to the property to check things out and then he decided to squeeze us.” Vogelsang’s eyes went hard with the thought of it. “I guess he figured I owed him something.”
I rose slowly from the chair, feeling the tug of gravity like a gouty old pensioner with an inner tube of fat round the middle, like an arthritic horse or elephant about to receive the coup de grace. The load was too heavy, the taint too deep. I was digging a garden, thinking turnips and corn and fat, dewy beefsteak tomatoes, turning over the earth and finding garbage, layer upon layer of it, reeking, alive with the seething white ferment of decay. “But we were friends, weren’t we?”
He shrugged. “I offered you a deal. You could have said no.”
“You didn’t have to lie to me, use me like something you wipe your ass with.”
“Oh, come on, Felix, drop the martyr act, will you? It’s wearing thin. Just because I offer you a deal doesn’t mean I have to lay out my whole financial history and give you the FDIC seal of approval, does it? You didn’t ask me for a prospectus when I told you to buy zirconium, did you? I’ve made you money. And don’t forget, you put up nothing on this project. None of you did. I’m the one who bought the land and put up the capital, I’m the one who gave you the chance to make it.”
“We were doomed from the start.” All the blood seemed to have left my head. I felt like a moth sucked dry in the spider’s web. “You said two thousand plants, one thousand pounds. But you knew damned well we’d have to start with four thousand plants to wind up with two. I mean, you and Dowst come breezing into my living room and make it sound like you’re laying half a million dollars in my lap or something, when all along—”
He was holding up his palm. “No, no. I wanted it to go — I really thought it would, I believed in it. Why else would I even bother to set it up? Boyd’s the one. I relied on him and he let me down.” Vogelsang was calmer now: the threat had passed. He’d let me know, low as I was, that he was that much higher — he’d taken a couple of shots below the belt maybe, but he’d gone the distance and he was still the champ. “That was my biggest mistake,” he said after a pause, “—trusting Dowst.”
I just looked at him, stupidly, obtusely, the slow learner in a class of whiz kids.
“He swore he could come up with the seeds. And that half a pound per plant was the low estimate anyway, figuring for unviable seeds and bad weather and all the rest, that even if we ran into problems we should get a pound or more out of most of them. Plus he looked the place over and assured me he could grow a forest up there, a jungle — no problem.”
This was funny. Vogelsang was showing his teeth in appreciation, the bobcats were madly whirling, and the goatherd abruptly gave up his dirge for the merry scritch-scratch-scritch of the stalled stylus. But there was something else, too. A titter. From the shadows. I jerked my head round and saw, in the far corner of the room, the bare pale outline of a human figure hunched down on the couch. When she stood and moved toward the turntable to change the record, I saw with a shock that this was Aorta, naked still, rising from the dark corner like a naiad rising from her pool, and that her hair was bleached white and cropped close as ever. Buttocks, breasts, nipples, thighs, the tattoo on her left flank (a scorpion?) — each was like a jab in the arm, a skipped heartbeat. But what made me drop my lower lip and gape like a defective was that broad hacked bristling blue stripe that cut a swath through her hair.
I blinked at Vogelsang, dumbfounded. He was still smiling — or rather lifting his lip back from his teeth in the weird strained way of a Bible salesman or a friend of the opera. Was I going crazy? I glanced again at Aorta as she stood fussing with the record on the far side of the room, and then, with dawning comprehension, swiveled my head a hundred and eighty degrees to stare at the hard, cold, unrevealing slab of the kitchen door.
The door swung open at that moment, as if on cue, and she stepped into the room and came toward us, grinning hesitantly, showing off those fine even little baby’s teeth and the pink ripple of gum. She balanced a tray in one hand and held an open beer in the other. The kimono had fallen open partially, and I could see the slant of one little tittie, and below, a glimpse of pale pubic fuzz. Makeup, haircut, height, weight, walk, she could almost have been Aorta’s twin — but I knew her now, knew her instantaneously, knew her with a rush of amaze, envy, hatred and lust that came like the first jolt of electroshock. “Savoy,” I whispered.
The tray held delicacies — smoked oysters, artichoke hearts, the black spittle of caviar — an antipasto. Or anticoito. I watched her eyes as she set the tray down among the bones, beside the half-empty bottle and the three glasses. She gave me a single sharp, brazen look, brazen and triumphal both, and then slipped her arm round Vogelsang’s waist. “Hi,” she said. She was smiling, though her lip trembled just perceptibly. “Long time no see.”