She watched them in there, Coyote mumbling to Calendula as they hung the marijuana on lines to dry, and she had a fearful sense that she had crossed an invisible boundary, had wandered off the map, and was now in a strange territory she didn’t know how to navigate.
2
Calendula couldn’t believe what a scammer Coyote was. When he’d told him they’d put in a thousand bucks of their own on diesel, the last of their money, he’d looked back dully, eyelids hanging at half mast, and asked, “You got the receipts?”
“Well, no.”
Coyote had already paid them the thousand bucks a week he’d promised, and the money lay on the table between them: a stack of newly-minted hundred-dollar bills. He motioned towards it, curled his upper lip in a sneer. “You’re getting paid, ain’t that good enough?”
Calendula could feel Rebecca getting ready to blow, he quickly reached out and put his hand on Coyote’s. “Hey, come on, brother. Fair’s fair.”
Coyote grinned as if the little people amused him: a court jester who had asked the king for a raise, wasn’t it cute? “I tease, I tease. Of course I’ll reimburse you for your expenses.” He chuckled and counted out another thousand, this one not crisp hundreds but a pile of twenties, fives and tens, dirty and worn. “But seriously, next time save the receipts.”
—
Calendula fingered the bulge of cash in his pants, caressing it and licking his lips before he pulled it out and stuck it in a sock, pushing it deep in the back corner of the drawer. It wasn’t much, eleven grand. But it was something. He could do this— they could do this. He could get his land, put his permaculture design certification to use and live his alternative life style: creating energy patterns, stacking functions, being organic and sustainable.
He thought of his father’s reaction when he had gotten his permaculture design certificate. He’d saved up the sixteen-hundred bucks to take the course, gone up to Occidental and for three weeks been drilled on alternative energy, organic gardening, water conservation, and how they all played together, how to stack their functions and learn to see pathways of energy in nature, to harvest the wastes of entropy.
“You are certified in what, exactly?” his father had asked. They were on the large back deck of his father’s sprawling suburban home, the smell of fresh cut grass in the air. His stepmother had hired caterers, and an elaborate brunch was spread out on the glass-covered wrought-iron deck tables: croissants, crepes, elegant bowls brimming with sliced fruits, bottles of champagne, carafes of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Expensive vodka and tomato juice.
“Permaculture design. Developing forms of a permanent agriculture that are self-regulating and sustainable.”
“Well, Mark—”
“Calendula. Please, Dad, call me Calendula.”
“Calendula. I’m sorry, what is a ‘Calendula’, exactly?”
“It’s a medicinal herb. A flower. It has the power to heal.”
“Yes. Well…okay.” His father stared at him, cocking his head as he dropped a strawberry in his mouth. “As I was saying… Calendula…you know, this permaculture thing you’re talking about, it sounds more like a hobby. You need to think about a career.”
“It’s not a hobby. It’s my life. Do you even know the concept of Gaia? That the earth is a living, breathing organism? Understand how precious our soil is?.”
“I’m talking about your future and you’re talking about playing in the mud.”
His dad was a corporate lawyer who commuted to Chicago every day in his BMW and lived in a suit and tie.
“Maybe I don’t want a future of defending corporate greed and getting rich off the destruction of the planet.”
“Son, I don’t think you understand what I do. Lawyers help people, we don’t hurt people.”
“You help the rich.”
“I can’t talk to him. I can’t,” his father said, rising from the ornate wrought-iron chair and marching away, the ice clinking in his empty glass of Bloody Mary. Then his step-mother, a woman he barely knew but who was always sweet to him (he assumed because of her inimical relationship with his notoriously difficult sister, Bethany, whom he noticed strutting his way right now) followed after his father and said, obviously for Calendula’s benefit: “Don’t get so upset. Everyone is different and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
Bethany strode up, eyes like ice as she looked him up and down, taking in his patchwork pants, the hole in his Phish T-shirt.
“Hello, Mark.” Her mouth curved into its customary half-smile perma-smirk. “Wait, no, it’s, it’s…Don’t tell me…Ca-len-du-la. Am I right?” She spoke in that nasal tone all her upper-crust, socialite friends used when speaking with someone below them: waiters, caddies, caterers.
“Hello, Bethany. Yes, I’m going by Calendula. It’s my forest name.”
“Your…wait, what?”
“My forest name.”
She was dressed in a pink, Prada suit-dress with a matching headband. She clacked her long, perfectly manicured fingernails (painted the same soft shade of pink as her outfit) against her champagne flute.
“What’s up with the hair?” She took a sip of her mimosa, eyebrows furrowing into a deep-set V, which gave her the look of a predatory bird. “Those aren’t…dreadlocks?”
He ground his teeth and nodded, meeting her gaze dead on.
“I suppose this means you’re over the ‘Yo, dog, what’s up’ stage?”
He just stared at her.
“And I hear you work in a super market now?”
“It’s a co-op.”
“Like a health food store?”
“It’s a cooperative market, which means as an employee I’m a co-owner and on the board, having voting privileges. It’s an experiment in socialist capitalism.”
“Gotcha.” She tossed her hair back with a quick shake of her head. “You know, Rodger and I are eating all organic now. I don’t want poison on my food.” Rodger was her fiancé who had recently passed the bar on his third attempt. “It’s terribly expensive, though. Honestly, I don’t know how you can afford it.” She laughed in that awful, fake way that always grated against his bones.
She didn’t get it, didn’t get it at all. None of them did. It wasn’t about keeping the poison from yourself, it wasn’t about you. It was about keeping the poison out of the rivers, out of the mice who got eaten by the owls and hawks and eagles. It was about realizing that humanity was a parasite using up all the resources of this tiny finite planet.
They made him feel alone, like a freak—worse, like an abysmal loser—even his overly sweet stepmother, who obviously wanted him in her corner of the ring. She came up behind him and put her arm around his shoulder, declaring, “Well, I for one, am proud of Mark, er, Calendula. The world needs more free spirits who do what they believe in.”
Later, she slipped him a few hundred dollar bills, told him she didn’t want him to go hungry. He took the money. But taking it made him feel even worse.
He just wanted to run, get as far away as possible. Which is what he always did. Running west to until the ocean met the land in San Diego and there was nowhere further west to go.
And now he was here, in these dark, wet, back hills: as far away from them as possible, in every conceivable way.
—
The headaches and buzzing in Calendula’s ears had grown worse since he’d started cleaning out the grow room and getting it ready for another run. He thought maybe it was the bleach fumes, or the pesticide, the same damn pesticide that’d caused that awful fight with Rebecca.
The pot was harvested and hanging, industrial dehumidifiers whirring and sucking the moisture from the air in
the back rooms, and the grow room was almost ready for the clones, the baby plants, Coyote had gone to get.
It had taken days to clean out the little plastic baskets, stripping out the roots and separating the marble sized balls of rust-colored lava rock. Cleaning them in a bleach solution that burned his hands, singed his cuticles, and stripped the color from his fingers. Bent over the big laundry sink in the back corner of the grow room, hour after hour: rinsing and draining, rinsing and draining. Then the buckets, scrubbing, mopping, till he was soaked through with water, his nasal passages burning with bleach fumes and his eyes stinging and raw.
When Coyote had pulled the metal canisters of industrial pesticide fogger out of the plain, brown paper bag, he’d grinned. “This stuff is illegal in California. I had to have my buddy in Oregon drive it down to me. It’ll kill every bug in here. Every motherfucking one of them.”
“But won’t that kill the, ah, beneficial insects, too?”
Coyote gave him a look like he was the dumbest motherfucker he had ever met. “Come on, three in each row. Let’s try to get out of here before the room’s full of gas.”
They set off the foggers and darted out of the room. Calendula grabbed some duct tape and tried to seal up the door after they shut it, but the noxious chemical smell, like melted plastic, leaked through the cracks of the doors, the reek permeating their bedroom.
Coyote left to go get clones, and when Rebecca came back in the bedroom and smelled the pesticide she went berserk.
“In our bedroom? Where we sleep? Calendula, how could you?” Her hands clenched into fists that she put to either side of her head.
Calendula just looked away, thinking, If she knew how dangerous this shit really was she’d absolutely lose it. Coyote’s words echoing in his head: This stuff is illegal in California.
She flung open a window, wind and rain blowing in, then turned back to him. “What is wrong with you, Calendula?”
“Hey, I didn’t do it. Talk to Coyote.”
“I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. Who are you?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Stop it. You were there. You could have stopped it.” She gave him an insanely angry look—eyes bulging from their sockets, teeth bared—and he actually thought she might attack him.
Megan came to the doorway. “What’s wrong, Mommy? Are you fighting?”
“No, Megan, we’re just talking. Now go in the kitchen and work on your puzzle. It’s not safe for you to be in here now.”
“Come on,” Calendula said. “It’s perfectly safe. The smell will go away in a minute.”
Rebecca’s eyes glinted like razor blades; her hands were trembling. She looked down at Megan, panting in her effort to remain calm. “Go on, honey. I’ll be there in a minute.”
After Megan had gone out the door and the sound of her shuffling feet disappeared down the hall, Rebecca spun toward Calendula and got in his face, virtually nose to nose. “Know what I think? Coyote owns you. You’re nothing but his little bitch. And you’re becoming everything I hate.”
Suddenly he wanted to hit her. The ringing in his ears went up a notch, his headache flared and pounded, and he almost took his fist and cracked her across the face. But as suddenly as the violent urge came upon him it disappeared, leaving him slightly startled.
He stared at her, silent.
He was so tired; he didn’t know how to defend himself. She turned and started pulling at her hair, where her thick dreadlocks met her temples. She kicked the bedframe so hard he could hear the wood crack.
She was right, of course. But what could he do? He was only taking orders, and Coyote did have a point, they couldn’t take a chance with bugs. If spider mites got a foothold in there they’d be impossible to stop, even with the nastiest of pesticides.
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’m trapped,” she said. “Fucking trapped.” And she started to cry.
He couldn’t take it, he was so tired, so spent, so spun. There was that terrible ringing in his ears and he wasn’t used to her crying. She had never cried before like this, had always been so tough. Even during that whole Starbucks fiasco back in San Diego she had never wept. She would get angry, curse, pout, grown sullen and silent, but never cry. He had always admired her strength. He turned and walked away from her, down the hallway, past Megan at the kitchen table wading through puzzle pieces, and out to the screened-in porch.
He lowered himself on to a battered old chair, the enclosure damp and musty, rotten holes in the floor, moss growing in the corners. He stared at the falling rain. He felt funny. As if a part of him wasn’t here at all. When he tilted his head just right, the grumble of the generator sounded like laughter. The kind you’d hear at a fair, by the fun house, coming out of some robot clown with a giant head and a menacing smile that ate up half its face.
3
Rebecca eased the big Ram pickup beside the diesel pump at the Last Chance Market and put it in park. Coyote was out doing whatever the hell it was he did, and Calendula was still working on the grow room, so she had taken Megan on a fuel run. She’d needed to get out. She sighed and looked over at her little girl gnawing on an apple. So small and frail in the big bench seat with the thick, blue seatbelt strapping her in.
After the fight with Calendula, Rebecca felt as overwrought as ever, like she hadn’t slept in days or was coming down off some hallucinatory-drug trip, her spirit a dishrag that’d been wrung out. Last night she’d taken her last bottle of wine, sat out on the dirty porch and drank it. The whole thing. Straight from the bottle, without a cup. And strangely enough, she didn’t dwell on being stuck on Coyote’s land or that her little girl was obsessed with ghosts; instead she just kept thinking about how badly she wanted a cigarette. She hadn’t had one in nearly six years, when she’d made the decision to keep her baby and live a healthy, righteous life. But God how she had wanted a smoke.
Now, walking across the gravel parking lot and towards the little store, holding Megan’s little hand in hers—sticky from the apple—that urge came over her again.
A few locals sat beside the door, sucking beers down from brown bottles and guffawing, the one with the frizzy hair and overalls exclaiming, “And when I saw that snakebite on him, I just whipped out my dick and pissed all over it. Didn’t tell him I was going to or nothing.”
“Does that really work on rattler bites?”
“Hell, I don’t know.”
They burst out in fit of laughter, and as Rebecca and Megan approached the door, an older guy with a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache and mutton chops, a cowboy hat perched atop his head, stepped up and opened the door for her. He was huge, a giant of a man, and he loomed over them, googly eyes bulging out from a simian face
“Thank you,” Megan said in the polite way Rebecca had taught her.
“Sure thing, missy.” He grinned a wet, toothless smile that chilled Rebecca, though she managed to smile back at him and give a polite nod of her head as she stepped in.
The wood-walled, dimly-lit little store had a musty smell of hardware, dirt and industrial soap, like a garage. She picked up a plastic basket and wandered down the dingy aisles. Such crappy food: cans of pork and beans, boxes of sugary breakfast cereal, sardines, crackers, two-liter bottles of soda. She still had a few packages of tofu at the house, a big strip of tempeh, and all the greens from the garden, but she was going to need something to stretch it out until they could make another run up north to the health-food store in Eureka.
She finally settled on a couple cans of diced tomatoes and black beans. They weren’t organic but they would have to do. There was a small produce section on the refrigerated shelves at the back of the store, but it looked like the same soft tomatoes and browning
broccoli as the last time she was here, slowly rotting beside plastic-wrapped steaks and ground beef, pink and glistening in the fluorescent light. There were some nice-looking apples and bananas, though, and she put those in her basket.
Turning to the next aisle and heading back up towards the cashier, she came to the wine section. A few cheap boxes on the bottom shelf beside a couple dusty, gallon-bottles of Carlos Rossi burgundy, and on the top shelf some good local stuff. She recognized the Briceland zinfandel right away. The two red stripes meant it was organic. It was expensive, nearly thirty bucks a bottle, and they were really trying to save money. Oh screw it, she thought, grabbing a bottle and putting it in her basket, and then, on an impulse, grabbing another as well. For a laugh, she even tossed in a couple bottles of really cheap champagne. You never know when you might want to celebrate.
“Can I have an ice cream cone, Mommy?” Megan pulled a brightly colored triangle from the freezer and waved it back and forth. Rebecca sighed.
“But, honey, it’s not organic.”
“Please. Just this once?”
She really shouldn’t. She knew the thing was full of high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavors and preservatives. Who knew what types of hormones and anti-biotics were in the milk? But Megan had been through so much lately, with the move and this weird place and everything else, and the wanting smile on her face was breaking Rebecca’s heart. “Okay, honey. But understand we can’t get them all the time. This is a special treat.”
“Yay,” Megan said, skipping around in a quick circle.
The bell on the door jangled and Rebecca noticed the toothless guy in the cowboy hat slinking in. When he saw her he nodded and she turned away, walking to the register.
Rebecca laid out her groceries on the wooden counter. An elderly woman with white hair and incredibly thin wrists began to ring up her items as the giant in the cowboy hat stepped up behind her with a six pack of beer clutched in his hand. She cast a glance over her shoulder at him and his face lit up and he started nodding at her again, the gray fur around his mouth parting in a grin that exposed his glistening-pink gums. Rebecca quickly turned back to the counter as the old woman opened a brown-paper shopping bag.
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