At the hotel, after he had requested Blindman’s name, Hap had noticed his red hands. He kidded John about the intensity of Braille lessons. John slurped his cappuccino and asked if Hap had seen Sarah. But he could tell Hap was connecting the dots, putting together the parallelogram; Blindman, Squirrel Lady, Sarah, Squirrel Boy. Someone was selling dope. And John was making it clear someone was sampling the product in too-large quantities.
“Nope, I ain’t seen her,” Hap had told him. “But Billy Chuck said she was out at Whitward’s when he went to borrow one of them blooper videos.”
“Blooper videos?” John had said.
“Blunders and foul-ups,” Hap had explained. “There’s one goin’ around of celebrity porn bloopers; Chuck Berry peeing on a girl, Elvis with six cheerleaders and a monkey. That butt-ugly kid with the red hair used to be on a show about a family. Somebody filmed him with a transsexual.”
John didn’t know what Hap was talking about. What butt ugly redhead on a show about a family? Throw a cop into the mix with a buxom blonde, and that described half of prime-time television.
John was more concerned about Sarah’s connection to her ex-husband. Why were the divorced couple talking? Did it have to do with Daryl’s father and the Waterfall’s “outback”? What was a redneck doing growing dope on a commune? John had been so disoriented during the harvest, he wasn’t sure if Grandma’s crop had also been on Waterfall land. Maybe there was a hippie crime syndicate and he would have to pay tribute? Maybe Sarah was working her deals through Daryl? Or maybe she was just working things out? She seemed adamant about her contempt for her ex-husband, but John knew enough about women to know he didn’t know enough about women.
“The wife likes the ones where weddin’ cakes slide off tables and cats fall into toilets,” Hap had continued. “Some folks got other tastes.”
“Do you know what Sarah was doing there?” John had queried, trying to skip over the video conversation.
“Same old same old,” Hap had replied. “Daryl was fussin’ with his Camaro, tryin’ to get it ready for fair. They were arguin’ and Sarah stormed off. Billy Chuck said Daryl looked too pissed to ask to borrow a video, so he came here and I lent him one from my Chuck Norris collection.”
John had tried to put the information into working order. He wished Sarah had a telephone so he could call her. It was a long drive to the Waterfall to discover she wasn’t home. He didn’t know where she lived up there either. Not to mention, he might not be welcome. He had opened his mouth too much already: Daryl was due to pay him a visit. He’d postpone contact with Sarah until after he finalized the deal with Blindman.
“What you want with her?” Hap had asked. “Don’t say business or pleasure, Squirrel Boy. No man could be that dumb.”
John thought about the mistakes he could have avoided by taking other people’s advice and what he had learned doing things the hard way. The strangest aspect was not having Christina’s vote cast into the mix anymore, leveling optimism or solidifying his confidence, supplying an excuse and place to point his finger if things went wrong. Her answer to any impasse was to scream insults and withhold sex. His father, on the other hand, also part of John’s morality meter, made his decisions based on what he thought Ronald Reagan would do in a similar situation, being a fan of both his films and anti-Communist work. Before John left Miami, his father had taken to describing his choices as “executive decisions,” as if Reagan’s two terms in office had somehow further validated his judgment. John’s mother blustered at the fringe of the decision-making process like a poorly funded lobbyist. Both would be horrified to learn John was involved in a dope deal. His father would shake his head in embarrassment and disgust on the confirmation that Grandma had grown marijuana. The Gipper would not have approved.
“I want to talk to her about something,” John had said, as a woman with nothing in her glass but orange juice pulp beckoned Hap for more bubbly.
Hap moved to refill her glass. The hostess stepped into the bar and called for a table of five. Although John had been drinking coffee, everyone else in the bar was getting sloshed on red wine and mimosas. It was eleven-thirty. Light flooded through the front windows of the hotel, a beautiful day. John didn’t want to think about these tourists on the winding roads of highway 128, swerving in pursuit of the perfect pinot.
“That’s what the rapist told the deaf girl,” Hap had replied, catching John off guard. “Don’t start dealin’ that shit, Squirrel Boy. Or start smokin’ it either. They call it dope for a reason. No shame in being a traditionalist, stay with the bottle. Your Grandma didn’t leave you her place for you to become a pothead, otherwise she would have left rolling papers instead of them squirrels.”
“I don’t smoke marijuana,” John had said, unoffended by Hap’s paternal tone.
“I don’t care if you’re shovin’ it up your ass in the shape of the First lady,” Hap had informed him. “I’ve lived here long enough to see the signs and know the long-term effects. They ain’t what you’d expect.”
Hap had told John that aside from losing your volition, the worst side effect of smoking dope was that it turned you into a neat freak; the image of a messy room belonged to teenagers, it didn’t apply to adults. He knew people who couldn’t roll a joint without vacuuming first. They all owned white carpeting too. Marijuana made you paranoid, he had confirmed, but mostly of spills. You became anal retentive and interested in a supreme order, except the supreme order didn’t extend much beyond your sock drawer.
“Makes your feet smell like moldy bread too,” Hap had added. “Not a lot of people know that because serious pot smokers get a kitten to cover up the stench.”
John had assured Hap he would never become a habitual pot smoker if for no other reason than he didn’t want the responsibility of a pet.
“Never say never,” Hap had said. “You fall in with the wrong folks, it don’t matter if you’re allergic to cats or Carlos Santana, things take care of themselves.”
“It’s a subculture I don’t have much connection with,” John had said, uncertain whether he was fooling himself or lying outright. There he was, jacked on caffeine while contemplating the stultifying effects of his third day sober, and in his next breath, asking for the name of a drug dealer. He had recently been stoned out of his gourd while taking part in two dope harvests in one night, falling for one of the gardeners and related to the other. And if Balostrasi didn’t resurface, John was ominously the last person to see him alive. Or the second to last. So despite a gag reflex to the trimmings and trappings of the stereotypical pot smoker, some might consider John to have more than a minor connection with the subculture.
“Don’t take up poker, Squirrel Boy,” Hap had said, before assisting another customer. “You ain’t got the face for it.”
Later, as John rethought Hap’s caution, he heard a car in his driveway, followed by footsteps on his porch. Blindman filled the doorway, holding his squirrel cane in one hand and a shopping bag in the other. In place of his white clothing, he wore a Hawaiian shirt with a yellow parrot on the right shoulder and a pair of blue-and-green-striped pants. He sported the same black sunglasses. It was a tourist’s outfit, one looking for a gay bar in Tahiti.
“You ready to do business?” Blindman said, addressing the door frame two feet to John’s left.
John looked past Blindman to the car in his driveway, a late model Chrysler with a figure slouched behind the wheel, a woman either fiddling with the radio or intentionally leaning out of his sightline. John thought it must be Blindman’s wife.
“I was ready two hours ago,” John replied, returning his attention to Blindman’s outfit. “What were you doing? Looking for something special to wear?”
“Why do you say that?” Blindman asked, glancing over his shoulder in the general direction of his car. “I’m wearing white, ain’t I?”
John saw the slouching woman shift in her seat. She looked at John and then the totem squirrels. She kissed something in her hand and begi
n to pray. Blindman’s grip tightened on his cane. John could see the invisible world sending him signals, the Morse code inside sarcasm, the warning in a delayed response, the broken message of a stutter. Blindman was seething. He appeared ready to tap a course back to his car. The figure in the front seat reached over to the passenger side and locked the door.
“Of course you’re wearing white,” John said, and Blindman seemed to relax. “I’ve never seen you in anything else but an umpire’s mask.”
“Sorry about the other day,” Blindman said. “Things haven’t been the best on the home front. I’m getting ready for a run with some Robitussin. Either that or I’m calling Immigration and getting a new wife.”
Again Blindman turned to where he thought his wife had parked, but was actually staring in the direction of the woods. John wondered if certain reflexes were instinctual and you performed them even if you didn’t have the senses to back them up, like trying to scratch the itch of an amputated leg. There was a threat in Blindman’s gesture, but what was he going to do? Pin the tail on the donkey?
“Come in, Blindman,” John said, taking a step back into the cabin.
Blindman tapped past the threshold to the couch in the living room, knocking over several squirrel sculptures on his way. John shut the door. Blindman made himself comfortable while John reset the statues. John sat down in a chair opposite his guest.
“Squirrel Boy, I believe you have ten trash bags of Edna’s product and it’s as good as Sarah says it is, and in return, I have thirty grand,” Blindman said, recapping the deal. “But if you’re trying to pull a fast one, recording this conversation or trying to shortchange or blackmail me in any way, I’ll have you killed faster than you can say, ‘Who was that fat Spic with the knife?’”
John hadn’t considered those options, except in regard to their being used against him. He wasn’t going to say anything. He figured Blindman wouldn’t either.
John’s father wouldn’t have approved of his son’s trusting nature. “Never put all your cards on the table,” he used to say. “Something is worth what you get for it.” When John had refused to play their stock market game anymore, his father took him to work to get him interested in sales. For such an unscrupulous guy, his father’s office sure was crappy. It was then that John realized there were other ways of knowing, the threadbare confidence in the cut of your suit, the frame surrounding your wife’s photo, the cadence of your voice. His father oozed the fumes of failure.
“I’m presuming you’d rather not have me make a phone call to Miami,” John said, hoping Blindman couldn’t smell bluff. “Anything strange happens, it’s your ass and the price of a plane ticket.”
Dueling tough guys. But whereas Blindman might have some south-of-the-border connection to do his dirty work, John would have to do it himself or call Bean Bean and try to set up an opportunity for him to bore Blindman to death, arrange what seemed to be an innocent luncheon and then unleash him over dessert with a speech on farm reports during the Truman era or the history of slippers.
“I’d expect nothing less,” Blindman said. “I’m easily found.”
With that gentleman’s agreement, Blindman owned a permanent part of John’s guilty conscience.
Leafing through the seventh envelope, each containing fifty bills with the face of Andrew Jackson looking blankly to his left, John realized he had never had this much cash in his hand before. The previous high had been 6,200 dollars, which he had carried on his person for two hours after he and Christina had withdrawn the amount from their savings to buy a used car. He had taken the wad from the bank’s envelope, doubled it over and secured it with a rubber band, and then slipped it into the pocket of his khakis to pretend it was walk-around money. He put a ten at the center and went to eat breakfast. He had a secret crush on a waitress, sexily full-figured and unflappable, who never gave John more than a refill on his coffee. For some reason he wanted to impress her. He knew she wouldn’t be impressed by a large sum of money, but maybe by the mystery surrounding where it had come from, a layer of intrigue suggesting John was a complex character. It was a careless move, even at John’s breakfast nook where the toughest customers ordered eggs Florentine. But he felt like Scarface flashing the roll, until the waitress casually said, “Buying a used car today?”
John was up to twenty thousand, stacking the envelopes on the coffee table, when he thought about where he was going to hide it. He couldn’t put the money in the bank, the IRS would think it was unclaimed inheritance. Coffee cans in the backyard seemed too retro. There weren’t that many inventive hiding places thieves didn’t know about, under the bed, in the Bible, a shoebox. If you had any idea about the person you were robbing, you knew where the money had been hidden. There was an energy that drew you to that hollowed brick above the mantel. The same reason the most common combination for a briefcase lock was 666. The feng shui of secrets.
In college, John had friends that raided dorm rooms for pornography. Nine out of ten times they found it beneath the mattress. Then it was the embarrassing question of what that student had found arousing; Playboy, Hustler, Juggs. National Geographic photos of starving pygmies. The more off-beat it seemed, the more difficult it was to find; a tribute to the link between the sexual imagination and shame. In one room, they found a folder of historic pictures of Chairman Mao bathing in the Yangtze along with a specialty Aslan men’s magazine called Yellow Inches, a tube of Vaseline and a package of plastic forks carefully hidden in an empty typewriter case. Someone knew what he liked. It was either the design major or the foreign exchange student from Austria. John never went on the raids and didn’t purchase pornography he felt he had to conceal. Daryl’s sex blooper video was safe. John was strictly a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue man, hidden in plain sight, just creased and kept around for an extra couple of months.
“It’s all here,” John said, finished with his counting. “Do you want to test the product?”
“No way of me telling until I get it separated and dried,” Blindman said. “It’s about trust, Squirrel Boy. Get me a drink. We’ll close this thing.”
“What would you like?” John asked, returning the envelopes to the shopping bag, still uncertain where he was going to hide the money, but the problem of having too much cash wasn’t something to complain about.
“Edna had a bottle of Germain-Robin in the cabinet above the refrigerator,” Blindman said. “We used to have a belt to finish our business. It was her favorite.”
“What is it?” John asked, moving to the kitchen.
He didn’t like Blindman knowing more about the contents of his cabin or Grandma than he did. He hoped the bottle wasn’t there. Blindman would realize he couldn’t lay claim to memory in John’s home. He also hoped Germain-Robin wasn’t gin because unless gin was ice cold with a Greek festival’s worth of olives in its midst, he couldn’t stand the taste. Or the smell.
“It’s brandy from Ukiah,” Blindman answered. “Supposed to be the best in the States. They serve it at the White House.”
John found the bottle. Above the name Germain-Robin was printed the word, ‘reserve.’ He opened the cork and sniffed the caramel-colored liquid.
“I thought Grandma’s favorite was gin,” John said, now looking for glasses.
“That was every day,” Blindman answered, as John set the bottle and glasses on the table. “This was special occasions.”
John didn’t want to hear any more about Blindman and Grandma’s special occasions. He poured what remained of the brandy into the glasses and handed one to Blindman who stuck his nose into the drink, then began swirling the liquid.
“Needs to warm up,” Blindman proclaimed. “You don’t send your children off to school without putting clothes on them.”
Blindman leaned back into the couch holding his glass like it was a tin cup full of pencils. John didn’t know whether he should slug his back and tell Blindman to do the same or wait to savor his grandma’s favorite drink. Maybe it would take the bad tast
e from his mouth knowing she preferred something with a little more complexity and style than bargain gin.
“You going to do any gardening next year?” Blindman asked. “Read a couple issues of Sunset magazine and the Anarchist’s Cookbook, and you could set up a fine future for yourself.”
“I’m not planning on it,” John said, whose plan was not to plan anything for a while. “This was a one-time deal.”
“If you develop a taste for the easy green,” Blindman said, “you’ll develop a green thumb.”
“I don’t mind working,” John answered, and it was a good thing because he was no trust-fund baby. Forty grand of inheritance, twenty plants and a thousand squirrel sculptures was hardly a legacy to insure a secure future. But planting and tending a crop of marijuana seemed like more work, not to mention stress, than it was worth. He’d rather punch a clock.
“Think of it as a civil rights issue,” Blindman suggested. “Performing a community service in the face of tyranny.”
John tried to rationalize growing dope in this light but it wasn’t the same as running a clean needles program, supplying AIDS testing in poor neighborhoods, or donating time at the YMCA. None of which he had ever done, but was more inclined to participate in than farming cannabis for justice. He felt the freedom to cultivate marijuana was the sort of single issue that had already garnered too much focus, draining energy from pressing issues and larger problems. What was the end result anyway, smoking a joint? It was like worrying about suicide being outlawed, people were going to take the leap if they wanted to. There was no need spending your life building tall platforms for them to jump off.
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