Budding Prospects by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle [Boyle, T. Coraghessan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101573860
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 1990-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

I was advised of my rights, photographed, fingerprinted, relieved of my personal property and consigned to the local jail, where I was escorted to a communal cell occupied by two happy-hour drunks, an acne-ravaged shoplifter, a vagrant Indian, and a middle-aged man who had assaulted his seventy-five-year-old mother in a dispute over a can of sugar-free Dr Pepper. I was charged with interfering with the duties of a peace officer and assault and battery. Bail was set at $2,000.

The cell was big, fitted out with Murphy cots, tile floor (easy to hose down, like a cage at the zoo), and two crappers. The Indian—I thought at first he might have been one of the pool players from Shirelle’s—was leaning against the bars, dragging on a cigarette, as I stumbled into the cell. A toothpick jutted from his mouth, and his eyes were like cups of blood. The others sat or lay on their cots in silence, gripped by the peculiar lassitude that sets in when the cell door clanks shut and you find yourself locked away and powerless. After a moment the Indian nodded at me and said, “What they get you for?”

I was feeling stupid, ashamed, guilty. I’d acted impulsively, foolishly, replaying my first encounter with Jerpbak to the letter, déeAjéaG vu. I wanted to hang myself, throttle Jerpbak, make love to Petra, Chinowa, poor dead Annie, I wanted to sit around the table at the summer camp and drink gin rickeys with Phil and Gesh and even Dowst; I did not want to hunker down behind the broomhandle-thick bars of the Willits jail and open up my heart to a vagrant Indian. “Murder,” I said.

The Indian’s lower lip protruded until it entirely obscured the upper, and he nodded his head slowly and solemnly. No one else said a word to me until Phil came to bail me out six hours later.

Six hours. For six hours I lay on my cot and listened to the tortured ratchetting snores of the drunks and the mea culpas of the mother-beater ("Mama,” he moaned at regular intervals, “Mama, forgive me"); for six hours I reflected on my crime and its consequences for the summer camp, and tried to focus the image of Petra, already dissolving in my memory like a teaspoon of sugar in a water tank. There were the distant echoes of footsteps, blown noses, cleared throats. A single yellow bulb burned in the hallway. “What they get you for?” the Indian asked the shoplifter.

In the car on the way in, and while we sat shackled wrist to wrist in the anteroom of the Willits Police Department, Petra had given me an insight into Jerpbak that made my blood boil. Not that I wasn’t already coddling with fear, excitement and rage, my nervous system like a leaky gas jet over which someone was fumbling with a pack of matches, but this was a real provocation, this was heinous: Jerpbak had sexually harassed her. I was outraged and disgusted. He was no ascetic, no true believer—he was venal, an extortionist, an amatorial strong-arm man.

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