“Oh, man.”
“Just saw his face all bloody in the gravel.”
“Damn.”
Diesel laughed. “Anyway, what can I do you for?”
Andy rubbed at the stubble on his chin, jaw going back and forth as he drummed the fingers on the table. He eyed the big bag of meth that sat there between them, his red-rimmed eyes focused on the shards of crystal; beads of perspiration broke out on his sickly, fish-belly-white face. He licked his chapped lips and placed the grocery bag on the kitchen table, glancing from Diesel to the bag of meth, all darting eyes and nervous hands.
Boy’s acting funny as hell, Diesel thought. “What you got in the bag, Andy?”
Andy reached in and Diesel saw the unmistakable flash of metal that was a handgun. Fuck, was this asshole going to rob him? He was friends with his fucking father. His mind flashed to the .22 sitting on the bottom of his safe. What the fuck was he thinking doing business unprotected?
But then Andy was offering him the gun, handgrip first. “I was wondering if you had any interest in this thing.” Pushing it at him. “Take a look, take a look.”
Diesel let out a sigh. Stupid asshole, lucky he didn’t get his head blown off. He took the pistol from him.
“It’s a .38 special, in real nice shape,” Andy said, the beads of sweat on his forehead condensing and running down his face. His ashen lips stretched into a smile to reveal craggy, brown and yellow teeth.
“I see that,” Diesel said, admiring the clean sheen of the steel, the dark grain pattern on the wooden grip. “Snub nose.” Releasing the cylinder, he held it up and looked through the empty chambers: unloaded. He gave the cylinder a spin and with the flick of his wrist shut it. “Nice weapon you got there. Got no hammer, that’s so you can yank it out your pocket easier.”
He put it below the table and drew it on Andy to show his point, chuckling. “Bang. Bang, bang.”
Andy laughed along with him, eyes darting left and right, same strange grin.
“How hot is it?”
“Ain’t hot at all, Diesel. It’s registered to a dead guy.”
“Dead how?”
“Natural causes. Natural causes. Guy was old and died. I got it from his daughter, up in Eureka. She’s a friend of mine.”
“That right?”
“Yeah, man. That’s right.”
Diesel cast a sidelong glance at Andy, who was staring at the pistol and chewing on his lower lip. Diesel watched his yellow teeth pulling off large, white flakes of skin and the thought quickly passed through his mind that Andy wasn’t looking too good lately. And damn if Amber wasn’t right about his feet being dirty. Not just his feet but his pants legs, too: the camouflaged-pants legs all covered in mud. He turned his attention back to the pistol.
“This could come in handy. How much you looking to get for it?”
“Well, it’s in new condition and totally untraceable. I was thinking, like, three hundred?”
“Yeah, right. How about seventy-five bucks.”
“Ah, come on, Diesel. Fuck, man. Give me a hundred for it at least. And I didn’t come here empty handed. I got the cash for a couple ounces, too.”
“Yeah, all right. Got anything else?”
“I got some OxyContin.”
“Just what the doctor ordered.”
11
Black clouds rolled in, darkening the land, and as Rebecca bounced the Outback up the dirt road to check her e-mail and look at Facebook, rain began to patter down against the windshield. She flipped on the stereo: the same live Phish CD Calendula had been playing since they left San Diego. She sighed and turned the stereo off. She couldn’t listen to that album again, and had left her iPod back at the cookhouse.
The road rose up and around to a clearing on the summit and her cell began to ding, signaling that she had reception. She pulled over at a spot where the road grew wider, fumbled through her purse for her phone, and, finding it, thumb-swiped the screen.
Nothing from Coyote. Damnit. Why was he not texting her back? She was getting really worried. She still felt irked by how, when she’d tried earlier to talk to Calendula about it, he’d just blown her off. Like he always did.
“Listen,” she’d said, “we’re almost completely out of cash and the generator only has diesel for another couple days. What are we going to do if Coyote doesn’t show up soon?”
“We’ll be fine. The pot’s just about done. If we run out of diesel we’ll just harvest. We’ve got plenty of supplies. We’ll make it.”
“We don’t have that many supplies. What if we run out of propane, how will we cook? Have hot water?”
“We’ll cook on the woodstove. Heat our own bathwater. It’s called living off the land.”
“Calendula, I’m serious.”
“So am I. I mean, what are we going to do? Why stress on something you have no power over? When he gets here, he gets here.”
“And what if he never shows up?”
“He’ll show up. I promise you. Now, relax.” And with that he’d kissed her on the head and disappeared back into the grow room.
She checked her email. Ads for organic clothes, vegetable seeds, herbal products, and a message from her mother back in Bakersfield.
Becky,
How are you? I wish I could call you. I do not like you out in the middle of nowhere with no phone. It sounds dangerous. Are you sure you’re safe? What are you doing for money? Shouldn’t you be working? How is Megan? Are you going to be able to put her in some kind of school up there? Please call me.
Love,
Mom
Rebecca took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. No one called her Becky but her mother. It was six-thirty. Her mother would be home from work by now. She should call her, but she decided to just reply to the email instead. She couldn’t deal with all the questions and condemning silences. She hit reply with her thumb and went to tapping on the little screen.
Mom,
We are fine. And no, it is not dangerous. I am working, I’m finally getting my herbal products business together. We are very happy and glad to be out of the rat race. Don’t worry, I love you and will call soon.
Becky
She hit the Facebook app. Pictures of her friends in San Diego, on the beach, in bars, smiling, seemingly without a care in the world. She stared at the blinking cursor—Update your status. What’s on your mind?—and then began to type rapidly with both thumbs.
Living off the land. So blessed, thank you Mother Earth. Megan and I went mushroom hunting this morning and got a whole basket of oysters and chanterelles which I cooked up for lunch with steamed kale and chard from our garden. Tonight it’s wildcrafted redwood sorrel and plantain pesto. Blessed be.
She sat back and felt like a big fucking liar. Did she say how worried and paranoid she was? How fucking lonely? Already her friends were liking her comment and posting comments of their own.
Yummy.
Send me some. Lol
So lucky, wish I was there
She felt so transparent and fake. Utterly full of shit. She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. She was so unhappy. And no, Megan was not “just fine” either. The more she thought about that weird thing that Megan had done the other night the more it troubled her.
It had been the dead of night, around three. The house was freezing, even in their bedroom, and she had gone to put more wood on the fire. As she was opening the lid on the top loader she heard a rapping sound. It scared the hell out of her, startling her so badly that she almost dropped a log on her foot.
At first she thought it was C
oyote. Maybe he was back and had lost his key or something. She was just about to go wake up Calendula when she heard it again and realized it was coming from inside the house, down the hall, by the three back rooms, where Megan’s bedroom was.
She crept over to the hall, which they kept lit at night for Megan, and there at the end, knocking on the padlocked door of the room Coyote used for storage, was Megan, her bunny stuffy lying limp under one arm, her image doubled by an old ornate mirror hanging on the wall
“Megan? Honey, what’re you doing?”
“Knocking back,” she said, the overhead light casting dark shadows below her eyes. “There’s a little boy in there and he wants me to play with him.” And then she wet herself.
As she’d cleaned Megan up—mopping her legs with a wet towel—and put her into clean jammies, she told herself that these things were normal. They happened. Kids had relapses, peed the bed, peed themselves.
Megan had had imaginary friends before, too, little girls she drank herb tea with. But never a boy.
She talked it over with Calendula the next morning and they decided to stop forcing her to go to the nasty old outhouse at night and just let her pee in the little shower. It seemed to have worked, so far. There hadn’t been another incident the past few nights.
Megan’s words came back to her and a chill ran down her spine. Knocking back.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.” She surprised herself by saying the words aloud.
The Galaxy III dinged again. She looked down expecting another Facebook comment but it was a text from Coyote:
I M back. Sorry late. Harvest tomorrow. C U in the morning.
She felt a wave of relief wash over her. Things were fine and she felt foolish for getting so uptight. Coyote would be back in the morning. The pot looked great, and she wasn’t a fake: she had harvested mushrooms, had made a sustainable lunch. She should be proud.
The last of the daylight was gone. With a gust of wind that rocked the car, a heavy rain blew in, pounding against the roof of the Outback. She turned on the headlights. Beams of yellow cut through the inky night, revealing tiny streams of water already starting down the road in muddy tendrils. She put the Outback in drive and turned the car around, heading back toward the compound.
12
I can’t make any money, Coyote thought as the double panes of the McDonalds’ take-out window swung open. It’s just a stupid cat-and-mouse game of catch up.
He reached up and grasped the cold, dew-laden cardboard cup of his supersized cola, set it into the cup holder of his Lincoln Navigator, speared the lid with a straw, and reached back up to grab the big, warm bag, the comforting smell of meat, grease and sugar filling the SUV.
“Have a nice day, sir,” the cashier called out to him with a smile.
Coyote grunted and pulled away, one hand on the steering wheel, the other rummaging in the bag to retrieve his Big Mac and free it from its paper wrapper. He pulled into traffic, taking a big bite, special sauce dribbling off his chin and down his swirling blue-and-red tie-dye T-shirt. Next, he stuffed a fistful of fries into his mouth, then soaked it all with cold soda he sucked greedily up from the straw.
He chomped and gulped the mess down as he steered through the maze-like streets of San Rafael, then turned onto the spiraling onramp and headed north on the 101, away from the Bay area, cranking up the live Band of Gypsies CD he always listened to after a Big Deal, thinking to himself: Bullshit, fucking bullshit. It seemed no matter what he did he couldn’t seem to catch up, to get a sizeable chunk of cash. His savings was pathetic.
His Oregon buyer had been so smug at the deal, lowballing the crap out of him.
“It’s a changing economy, my friend, and you’re going to have to change with it. Now that Washington and Colorado have gone legal, the whole game is changing. Prices just aren’t what they used to be. You gotta take what you can get. Just wait till California legalizes. It’s bound to happen next year.”
“I got all the best strains,” Coyote said. “O.G., Girl Scout Cookie. Everybody wants this shit. And it’s dank. Fucking dank bud, man.”
“It’s not a question of quality or genetics, my man. You’ve always got the goods. If you didn’t, you’d have hit the skids long ago. Like a lot of other people. It’s a matter of supply and demand. Turn on the computer, you can get herb delivered to your door at very competitive prices, right over the internet. Why should I come all the way down here to see you?”
“Those stores in Washington and Colorado, all the medical dispensaries everywhere, they’re selling this grade of product for twenty bucks a gram, four hundred bucks an ounce. How’s that bringing the market price down? Those fuckers are getting rich, I’m barely making a buck.”
“It’s a buyer’s market. You think the C.E.O. of Phillip Morris is thinking about some poor tobacco farmer’s family at night?”
“I thought you were some kind of socialist or something.”
“Free-market anarchist, bud. I’ll give you twelve hundred per, best I can do.”
This whole thing was just starting to feel like a loser’s game. Hell, with all the expenses and the risk? How many cops had he passed on his way down here? Nine? Ten? And now he barely had enough money to make it for another round. Barely even a hundred grand. He wouldn’t be able to pay Diesel the fifty grand he owed him, and he knew that big, crazy fucker was expecting it. He should be able to give him at least ten or twenty, keep him off his back for a while. He’d need enough cash to pay the trimmers when he got back, and he needed enough for fuel and fertilizer for another run. And clones, just the clones were over twelve grand. Christ, could he ever catch up?
—
Seeing his Oregon connect brought back memories of Helen and his little girls—Miriam and Melinda—up there on that hellhole of a commune outside Eugene. The Octagon. He was pretty sure they were there; they always went there, every time she left him. He thought about asking the connect if he’d seen Helen and the girls, but in the end he hadn’t even bothered.
The girls would be eight now, what a pain in the ass they must be. Twins. Double your pleasure, yeah right, double your headaches. When he thought of those red-headed girls he always seemed to remember them screaming. Screaming as babies, screaming as toddlers, screaming as children. Always screaming. Screaming in happiness. Screaming in sadness. Screaming in boredom. Screaming and running.
But that wasn’t entirely true. He remembered the goofy smiles they’d give him, that utter and complete trust in him that would fill their hazel eyes as they came running up to him.
Sometimes in the loneliness of the night, lying in the darkness, he’d think of how it had been in the early days with Helen and the girls, how they had been a team, a gang, and he’d get that sad, lost feeling and think to himself, maybe I should go find them. Make a go at being a family again. He’d open himself up to that hidden, lonely place that yearned to be needed, loved, and not alone. That sensitive, humane part of himself he tried to obliterate with drugs, sex, and money, that part of him he longed to isolate and sever from the slick, jaded player he saw himself as. Then the arrogant, cynical, savvy, part of himself would say: Forget it. It’s over, done. You’ve both fucked around on each other so much, said such hateful things, spit in each other’s faces, you can’t go back now. It’s over, deal with it.
He remembered the last time he had gone up to Oregon searching for them. That desperate, aching loneliness had grown so heavy in his soul, like a rock in his gut, slowly putting on weight like a kidney stone, growing, layer by layer, until, barely even conscious of what he was doing, he found himself driving north.
He found them at that run-down commune in the wet, rain-drenched Oregon woods. There was only about a dozen people living there at th
e time, mostly mothers with their children, a couple of recalcitrant, shy, bearded men he didn’t recognize who turned their gaze away and wandered off when he came strutting through the door.
They all lived in a huge, eight-sided log cabin with a leaky roof. A gaggle of feral children running around, mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. A large kitchen and dining area, big stone and brick fireplace for cooking and warmth, blooming up in the middle of the floor. Everyone looked dirty and tired, sulky and angry. The children were wary of him, though he knew all their parents, hell, had fucked half their moms. Little dirty rag-a-muffins who would dart up to him, tap him on the back or mumble something, then run away giggling. But his girls seemed healthy enough, and smart as whips, too, already reading and doing math though they weren’t yet five years old. The women prided themselves on their homeschooling skills and their cooking; but he’d always thought that if their teaching skills weren’t any better than their cooking skills, the children were doomed to be idiots.
It wasn’t hard to convince Helen to leave. She even seemed relieved, happy, especially when he told her he’d just bought a hundred acres with a big house on it—the cookhouse—in the southeastern corner of Humboldt County.
The other women hugged her as she said her goodbyes. Some even wept, but Coyote thought it all seemed subdued and lackluster, a halfhearted ritual they felt obliged to perform. He really couldn’t detect all that much love coming from them. He was driving a Toyota 4-runner at the time, and Helen and the kids piled in and they took off south, the girls complaining that they missed their friends before they even reached the highway.
They finally made it to the property, the cookhouse barren and cavernous, a bare mattress for Helen and him, the girls having to sleep in a bundle of blankets on the floor. It was winter and raining, the grow room wasn’t in yet, there was nothing for any of them to do, and after only a couple of days he knew he wouldn’t be able to take it, wouldn’t be able to endure them for much longer. He loved them and missed them when they were gone, thought about them all the time, but having them around him was unbearable. The girls’ cyclone of energy, the condemning glances from Helen, that dissatisfied tone she’d get with him: “We need more firewood. We need a real kitchen table. At the Octagon I had Sarah and Jasmine to help. We always had firewood. Here it’s like I’m alone. I can’t live like this.”
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