Boonville

by Anderson, Robert Mailer

  “I’ve been CAMPed!” she screamed. “Bush and his bullshit war on drugs. How many marijuana-related deaths are there every year? How many from alcohol? That hypocrite supports dictators responsible for importing tons of drugs into this country, but for some reason, he makes it a point to get my plants. If my other patch is gone, I’ll get that bastard.”

  John didn’t know what Sarah was talking about. He was too busy having a Homo erectus moment, holding his hands above his head and stretching. But if using a flashlight was dangerous, it seemed to him, screaming at the top of your lungs about killing the president would also be a no-no.

  After her tirade, Sarah scanned the area with her flashlight. John thought it was unlikely that someone would be out here, whether they were paid by the government or not. He was amazed that anybody other than Sarah could find this place. Given a map, compass, broad daylight, and a bag of popcorn, John couldn’t locate this spot again to save his life. But he also could never remember where he parked his car when he went to the mall.

  “We haven’t done anything yet, have we?” he asked.

  “They’ve got infrared video cameras,” Sarah answered. “Last month they busted a school-board member watering his plants in the nude.”

  “That sounds like an entirely different kind of crime.”

  “At least one of those pricks hurt himself,” Sarah said, illuminating a piece of bloodstained fabric and a section of ground saturated with a coagulum of red.

  John noticed something else caught in the chicken wire. He asked Sarah to redirect the light. Hanging from one of the wire octagons was a hoop earring imprinted with skulls. Still clipped to its clasp, a piece of an ear.

  “Let’s get out of here,” John said.

  “I have to check my other patch,” Sarah told him.

  “And I have to keep breathing,” John said. “I don’t like this.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sarah said, but John had no choice but to worry, it was genetic.

  Sarah kept the flashlight on as they foraged through the brush to her second secret garden. John wondered if he should tell her about his encounter with Balostrasi. He couldn’t help feeling his next step would have him tripping over the dope-poacher’s dead body. There had been a lot of blood back there. It hadn’t all come from one severed ear. John wondered if CAMP’s standard procedure was “shoot to kill.” It seemed excessive. Newsworthy. But he hadn’t read a newspaper in a week. His television was in the closet. Wouldn’t the boys at Cal’s Palace have mentioned it? Surely the newspaperman would have said something if someone had been recently murdered in the area. It must be a case of vigilante vs. vigilante. But who would be out here crossing Balostrasi’s path?

  “Whose property are we on?” John inquired.

  “It’s part of the commune, sort of,” Sarah said. “The government can take away your real estate if you’re caught growing on your own land, so smaller plots are under our own names while the bulk of ‘the outback’ is under the name of a cofounder who doesn’t grow. He takes a cut from the harvest. Technically it belongs to him, but just on paper.”

  “What’s his name?” John asked, unsure if he would get an answer, not because he would use the information nefariously, but maybe there were other reasons he shouldn’t know. Sacred commune vows of silence. Rituals. Sarah could be sparing him the burden of a certain kind of knowledge. Or maybe there were even limits to her honesty.

  Sarah turned and lit John’s face with the flashlight, looking for signs of recognition as she spoke the name, “Whitward,” then stepped through the low-hanging branches to another clearing and plot of budding photosynthesis. Twenty plants, eight to fifteen feet tall. Money growing on trees.

  “As in Daryl Whitward?” John said, stunned simultaneously by the name Sarah had spoken and the stalks of marijuana.

  “As in Wesley Whitward, his father,” Sarah clarified, unsheathing her knife. “But I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

  Seeing the blade, John didn’t argue. This wasn’t the time or place to insult someone’s taste in men. He held open garbage bags while Sarah stuffed them full, hacking away with her knife like she had spent a lifetime in the cane fields of South Florida. John had never seen this type of plant before, a bumper crop from the pages of High Times. After tying off the fifth bag, he wondered about the street value. They were dealing with a lot of dime bags here. Not that he was any judge. His only attempt to purchase marijuana had scored him three joints of oregano.

  Sarah explained that she had a buyer in San Francisco that bought her product in one lump. She was no dealer selling stems and shake. The commune had their connections, she had her own. Even with her other patch CAMPed, she would make forty grand. If they could get it back up the hill.

  Sarah looked over the grounds for fallen buds. John pushed the final plant into plastic, his hands covered with a sticky resin. He was officially a bagman. If the cops came, the excuse of a “nature walk” wouldn’t be accepted, not at two a.m. on the side of Mt. Everest with enough product to tour with the Steve Miller Band. With his luck there would be cameras capturing their every move. Suspect number one, female, Caucasian. And suspect number two, blundering onto the screen. “That’s him, your honor, the last one to see my Balostrasi alive!”

  John wanted to run, but there wasn’t anywhere for him to even crawl. Without Sarah, he would be lost anyway. She wasn’t going to leave without her crop. Nine bags full. So they started on their journey up the mountain, sacks slung over their shoulders like twin Santas delivering presents to the Furry Freak Brothers. After a few punishing feet, John was ready to cut the contraband loose. He was struggling to follow Sarah’s lead, the payload snagging and threatening to tear every third step. He had to create his own path by creating openings in the brush with a well-placed knee, dragging the bundles through the woods after him as he sliced his way through the forest using his shoulder as a dull blade. The only thing keeping him on course was the sound of Sarah humming the theme to “The Brady Bunch.” He stopped for a breather, wiping sweat from his brow, trying to get a better grip on the bags.

  The woods went silent. Not the kind of silence oceans afforded with their eternal crashing, numbing smaller sounds with the roar and anticipated repetition, nor was it the white noise of traffic or an electric fan. This was a complete absence of sound. The Earth almost ceased to be spinning. John was afraid to move, figuring every animal, redneck, and FBI agent within fifty miles would be able to track him. Inanimate objects seemed to suck a collective breath in an effort to bust him. He curled into a fetal position, remembering a theory that humans started to sleep because it was the simplest way to keep quiet during the night when they were most vulnerable.

  He noticed a twig sticking in his arm and pulled it from his skin. It was too dark to see if he was bleeding. He hadn’t been speared too deep. John tossed the stick aside to the sound of buckshot on a drum set.

  “They’re shooting at us!” John yelled.

  He began to burrow, hands hurling themselves at the dirt. Sarah shouted something about staying calm, but John was clawing his way beneath the topsoil, half-burying himself in front of the bags of dope. When silence reclaimed the forest, he raised his head. That’s when he saw the eyes, two bloodshot orbs as large as owls, glistening wet, with a row of Cheshire teeth beneath them. He tried to form a shape around the eyes, but they disappeared. He stared harder but they were gone. Or watching from another vantage.

  “What the fuck?” Sarah screamed. “Are you having some kind of flashback?”

  “I heard something,” John said.

  “You heard a twig snap!” Sarah said, her voice amplifying and warbling in John’s ears, then softening and solidifying into a normal tone.

  “It sounded bigger,” John offered, his own voice playing the same trick, realizing he was under the influence of something. “I panicked.”

  “No shit,” Sarah said, approaching him cautiously, taking his hands in hers.

  Marijuana resi
n clung thick to John’s palms, along with a generous sampling of the forest floor. She studied a couple of cuts slashed across his lifeline.

  “This stuff’s getting into your bloodstream,” she said. “Maybe through your pores, maybe through these cuts. You didn’t swallow any, did you?”

  “No,” John said.

  “Take deep breaths,” Sarah said, setting loose his hands and trudging back to her bags. “Nut up, Squirrel Boy.”

  John concentrated on his breathing, telling himself there was nothing in the forest except nature; no government agents, no armed criminals, no malicious eyes. Apparently, paranoia didn’t impress the chicks, especially when it was linked with hallucinations. He lumbered after Sarah.

  When they reached Sarah’s truck, John wanted to plant a flag. The hike up had taken longer than the trip down. He hadn’t fallen as much, but the strain of holding the bags had sapped him worse than the toppling. Soreness seemed to be the special of the day in Boonville, every day. Tonight’s menu also offered assorted greens and a dirt glacé. He swung the sacks into the back of the pickup. Feeling light-headed, he almost collapsed. Stars were fading in a sky that had turned three shades brighter in the last half-hour. John pressed his head to the dew-covered truck. They hadn’t encountered any wild animals or narco squads, and despite losing one patch, uncovering a possible homicide, and learning that Sarah still had ties to her ex-husband, the mission was a success. It would just take a few months to remove the dirt from beneath his fingernails.

  “One last stop and we’re done.” Sarah said, tossing her bags alongside John’s.

  “What?” John said, his body beginning to stiffen. “A little reggae, some rolling papers, we’ve got ourselves a party.”

  “I’ve got to dry, separate, and clean this shit before anybody takes toke one,” Sarah told him. “Maybe in two weeks, but I don’t torch the profit. And you’re cut off.”

  “That’s fine,” John said, rubbing his hand across his face but hardly feeling it. “I feel weird.”

  “Don’t worry,” Sarah said, seating herself in the truck. “It’s a short ride and a potentially big profit. You’ll thank me later.”

  “Can I curse you now?” John asked.

  He climbed into the cab, tempted to let his head fall onto her shoulder. But the road was too rocky for a snooze and he became transfixed by the squid mating in the headlights, eight legs times two, tentacled and intertwined with a slick of ink floating between them, drifting into shapes of hearts and diamonds. For a minute, he thought he was having an out-of-body experience, then realized he was staring into the side-view mirror.

  Sarah was telling him about a science fiction story she was writing about an alien zoo where humans were kept in a cage that resembled a 7-Eleven. At feeding time, microwavable burritos were dropped into the cage with hot dogs and nacho fixings. The humans lined up and paid for things without knowing why; one guy played cashier, an old woman was a compulsive shelver. But the aliens had gotten things wrong, there were refrigerators full of books, crates of soccer balls, religious artifacts stacked next to cereal boxes and jars of peanut butter. It was similar to apes given a tire to play with instead of indigenous vines. The humans began to understand that they were trapped somewhere other than Earth. The first line was, “The Slurpee machine had been broken for as long as anyone could remember.”

  It freaked John out. The whole thing. It had to mean something, that the eyes he had seen existed. Sarah was trying to tell him Boonville was an alien zoo. It would explain the inbreeding. But what about half-shirts and Juice Newton? What could explain them? Viruses? Mind control? Was he thinking these thoughts or just thinking he was thinking them? What about the expression “second nature.” What was “First nature,” or “third nature?” How many natures were there? And why was everything being numbered, “the fourth estate,” “fifth column,” “seventh heaven?”

  John noticed they were outside, walking through another forest, not as dense this time. When did they get out of the car? Dawn was breaking. He could see in front of him, but he had no idea where he was. It was a pattern for him in Boonville, disorientation like a morning cup of coffee. He followed Sarah out of habit. She had her pack and knife and continued to move forward with a purpose. It was enough to warrant John’s submission. He smelled something familiar, diluted by the open air. Someone’s perfume. Something crunched beneath his foot. He looked down to see he had stepped on a Christmas tree ornament. Why would a tree be decorated in the woods? Especially this time of year? Then he noticed he was standing in another marijuana patch, but in this one the plants were drooping with red bulbs to resemble wild tomatoes. It seemed someone had staked, fertilized, watered, decorated, and then left the weeds to their own demise. The stalks had been hindered by other foliage, but there were still an abundance of buds.

  “Whose garden is this?” John asked, disregarding the broken ornament.

  John saw something else in the dirt, a mud-caked bottle. He kicked it with his foot. There were several in a row, quart-sized, made of sturdy frosted glass, all covered with dirt. He assumed they had been used for watering purposes.

  “Yours,” Sarah told him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  But before Sarah could respond, light caught a label, and John identified the bottle, Gilbey’s. Then the fragrance, gin. And finally the gardener, Grandma.

  12

  “Hold on! Hold on!”

  Sarah couldn’t help hearing Janis as she urinated on her fingers during her third attempt to fill the metrically-marked plastic beaker that came with the home pregnancy test. She wiped her hands on a washcloth and transferred her pee into one of the test tubes set on the toilet tank in the fold-out cardboard stand. The color was definitely pink. Not a hazy reddish-brown or indeterminate Rothko blotch like the first two. This was irrefutable Science, independent from emotions, unerotic and cold as bathroom tile.

  “Hold on! Hold on!”

  Sarah remembered how Daryl twisted in ecstasy or whatever it was that filled his body when he came, malice, longing, temporal adequacy, last month when she saw him on the sly for only the third time this year. Not bad for her. They had fucked in his pathetic double-wide trailer – the Double-Dumb, she called it – parked behind the airport. The night had been unbearably lonely before and after they had done the deed, everything pointing her to his trailer, the bourbon she had been drinking, the music on the radio, the wide spaces between the stars. It was inescapable, the destiny of a small town.

  Sarah had needed someone to say the words that night, even if they didn’t know what they meant or how to express them in a way that she or any other woman in the Western Hemisphere could understand. “I’m gonna cum a huge load for you.” What kind of dead-fuck language was that? She wished Daryl could just follow the bouncing ball, kiss her with the kind of passion he had when they were newlyweds. At least he knew half how to touch her, that was better than some anonymous body on top of you, needing to turn off the lights and take one last swig from the bottle before they kicked off their boots. Or didn’t. But they had been condomlessly careless, and now Sarah stood in her bathroom like she had been shot and had forgotten to fall down.

  Pink.

  She slapped the test tubes off the toilet tank and they broke with a tinkle. Urine splashed the shower curtain. The wet facts dripped. An alternate universe unembraced. Nobody whispered sweet nothings into the ear of Science, Sarah was sure of it, amidst her make-shift laboratory of failed results. Daryl would want her to have it too. Just like the last time. There wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to tell him, she decided right then and there. This one would have to be taken care of solo.

  A hard-to-breathe feeling entered her throat, the first sign of a panic attack. She had been fighting them off for the last few months, nearly fainting when she stepped from a hot bath or stood up too fast. She even borrowed one of Mom’s books on the subject and knew to run through the H.A.L.T. list: hungry, angry, lonely, tired? Of co
urse, she answered each question yes. Does it ever stop? She tried to take deep breaths and think about some better place, Hawaii, the Kona Coast, an uncrowded beach at sunrise. A room with a ceiling fan, a well-made bed, and clean sheets. One in a major hotel, not a hospital.

  “Hold on,” she told herself, reaching for a towel. “Hold on.”

  She began cleaning up her mess. The test tubes had broken into large enough pieces she could handle with a swath of toilet paper. She crumpled the rack constructed from the box of the pregnancy test and threw it in the wastepaper basket. Her hands were shaking. She wondered why they never showed this on the package. How come they always depicted an antiseptic couple who looked as though they had never had sex, smiling like they had won a new car? Just once she wanted to see a woman in the advertisement, upset and alone. A 16-year-old girl in a high school bathroom, crying. That was the way it had been for her the first time.

  With a shudder, she cut her finger and flashed onto an intuitive moment: It would have been a girl. Sarah was struck motionless. She knew this as well as she had ever known anything: a little girl. With Daryl’s stupid mouth and her blue eyes.

  Sarah collapsed, hyperventilating in a heap of helpless tears. This was three. Too many futures to be stillborn. Sarah remembered the last time she had gotten pregnant, four years ago, and how Daryl had wanted to use that as an excuse to get back together, as if having a child would somehow solve their problems. She was so lost then, she had said she would think about it if he went with her to Planned Parenthood in Ukiah.