Smoky Joe's Cafe

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Hah, that’s wonderful, that’s just what we need to know, thank you,’ Wendy says at last. I tell you what, I’m beginning to wonder what sort of girl I’ve married.

  The meeting goes on a while longer and arrangements are made for us to work with Shorty and Spags. You know, plough the land, get the crop planted.

  It is decided that Nam Tran is going to set up a small laboratory to extract the oil and it will be located underground, Viet Cong style.

  Shorty points to me, ‘Thommo, you’ve worked as a builder’s labourer and know a bit about construction, don’t ya?’

  ‘Sure, a bit,’ I reply.

  ‘Can you drive a back hoe, mix cement, lay a line o’ bricks and do a bit o’ plumbing?’

  ‘Yep, three o’ them things, I can’t do electrical.’ I think a moment. ‘Don’t expect too much, mate, it’ll be about the same standard as my cooking.’ Which brings a laugh.

  ‘Electrician, that’s your trade, ain’t it, Flow?’ Shorty asks.

  ‘Yeah, no problems,’ Flow answers.

  ‘That’ll do. Thommo, you’re elected to be Nam Tran’s offsider when he builds the lab, Flow will do the electrics when the time comes.’

  Shorty and Spags are absorbing the cost of ploughing, fertiliser and pesticide and the cost of feeding us for the duration. They agree to be paid back later from our profits. In the pesticide area we make a resolution to use nothing that’s harmful to humans, it’s the least we can do seeing how this whole scam has become necessary.

  Lawsy is the treasurer and accountant. The rest of us will give our time and Wendy is in charge of distribution and selling.

  So, when you look at it, the most reliable are in the box seat, with the shit-kickers like me doing the labouring. It ain’t all that different from the army.

  The boys who come up originally from Sydney and elsewhere backtrack home for a few days to get their gear and tell their wives and girlfriends they’ll be away for a month or so, no questions asked or explanations given to stickybeaks.

  Most of the vets in our platoon have a habit of ‘going bush’, disappearing from time to time, so their women aren’t that curious and, besides, they’ll probably enjoy the break from a Vietnam vet.

  Nam Tran, it seems, has been staying at Shorty’s place all along. I move in the next day and help him fix up the citrus shed as a bunk house and lay a slab of cement and put in an open-air shower block and a bit of a kitchen for when the boys arrive back. Flow fixes the new electrical requirements when he gets up with the rest.

  Ten days after the meeting at Smoky Joe’s we are all assembled at Shorty’s farm and ready for the kick-off.

  We soon enough find out we’ve grown soft and the first few nights in the shed are really crook. But after a couple of days’ work we’re that buggered, we can sleep on a fencing rail with a roll of barbed wire for a pillow. Anyway, we keep comforting ourselves, it’s a bloody sight better than kipping in a shell scrape under a hutchie during the monsoon season.

  Me and Nam Tran done the cooking as well as working on the laboratory. The blokes come to refer to any given working day as a ‘Grunt chow’ day or a ‘Nog chow’ day. Grunt chow being bad and Nog chow good. They soon realise that after frying a bit of meat on the barbie, chopping up a few pounds of spuds and boiling up a bucketful of veggies or pasta my culinary ability is exhausted.

  After a few days of my chow they go on strike and I’m put on breakfast duty frying eggs and bacon, my Smoky Joe’s job as well as making the sangos for lunch. At night Nam Tran cooks and I prepare the veggies and stuff. Nam Tran cooks Chinese style with only one big cleaver as his cutting instrument and he wants me to do the same. It’s got something to do with how you cut them or something. So I agree and I get to like using it and, after a while, I get pretty cocky. Chop, chop, chop in a blur, carrots, celery, onions diced and sliced before your very eyes. So one night the inevitable happens and the bloody thing damn near cuts my finger off.

  ‘Shit!’ I yell and Nam Tran comes running. ‘I’ve cut me bloody finger off,’ I scream.

  Nam Tran grabs my hand and smothers it in a dish towel then he applies a tourniquet. ‘Thommo, okay. Tran fix, short time, no worries.’ He’s perfectly calm like nothing much has happened and he makes me hold my arm above me head and pisses off only to arrive back a few minutes later with one o’ them old-fashioned doctors’ bags wharfies and labourers used to use. He opens it up and takes out gear and cleans and dresses the finger and then to my amazement starts to sew it together. It hurts like hell but he grins and I grin and wince a bit, but there’s no doubt about it, he knows his onions. He stitches me up neat as you like and then bandages me like an expert. I’ve known MOs couldn’t have done half as good a job.

  Later I say to him, ‘Hey, Nam Tran, where’d you learn to, yer know,’ I hold up me bandaged finger, ‘learn to do this stuff?’

  He’s frying rice and he looks up, ‘North Vietnam Army.’

  ‘Yeah? You saying all Nogs can do this?’

  He laughs. ‘No, special one, barefoot doctor.’

  ‘Barefoot doctor?’

  ‘Not many doctor in North Vietnam so we make some soldier barefoot doctor,’ he explains further.

  ‘What’s that mean exactly, they go around without boots on?’

  He shakes his head, ‘Not doctor for studying in school to know everything medicine, only for wound. Battle wounds, this one barefoot doctor,’ he adds by way of an explanation.

  I nod, ‘Oh yeah, I see. Well, you could’ve fooled me, mate. You did a bloody good job. I’ve seen a few sutures in me time, you’re a flamin’ expert.’

  He points to the cleaver. ‘Not same as you,’ he says laughing. I can see he likes what I’ve said about the job he’s done on me.

  Anyway, over the next couple of weeks he tends to the finger real well and then takes out the stitches just as expert as he put them in. Tell you what, if all them barefoot doctors are as good as him I’d trust them any day over your average Oz army MO. Reckon the little bloke could whip your appendix out, no problems.

  As we work together to build the underground laboratory I soon grow to admire the little Nog. The laboratory is situated beneath a huge old winemaking and packing shed fifty yards back of Shorty’s house. Shorty’s built a new shed closer to his grapevines and citrus orchards.

  Nam Tran goes like a steam engine from dawn to dusk, but he don’t get in the way or try to impress. I soon learn there’s not much he don’t know about underground construction. What’s more, he’s always got a smile on his gob as he shows me what to do so there’s no way I can take offence.

  Me and Nam Tran become real good mates. He can stand under me armpit with room to spare but he’s true blue and a man has to run to keep up with him. By the end of the day I’m whacked and he’s into making the dinner, still smiling.

  The entrance to the laboratory is concealed inside one of these old wine barrels. There’s also a big old vat with a chimney going through the roof and Nam Tran turns this into the main ventilation shaft, lining it with pink fibre-glass bats to kill the noise. Ventilation is not only necessary for breathing but it turns out to be critical for the making of hash honey, which uses a lot of butane gas.

  From the outside nothing looks changed, just an old wine distillery and packing shed with this broken-down, dusty equipment in it. There’s still electricity in the shed and it’s a simple matter for Flow to wire the lab for lights and to put in an exhaust fan and the other gear Nam Tran needs. You could walk into the shed and be standing right on top of the laboratory and even with the exhaust fan blowing you wouldn’t hear a thing. No wonder the Nogs were so hard to beat.

  I must say, it’s amazing what we’ve built underground to Nam Tran’s instructions. There’s a complete facility for making large quantities of hash oil. Him and me have also put a ceiling in the old wine shed using very old floorboards. Nam Tran’s even built a bit of a buckle into it so it looks like it’s been there for yonks and is about to fall down.
Inside the roof are the drying facilities for the harvested weed and he’s also got a ventilation system that makes sure the crop is cured slow and perfect at around 21°C.

  Once the crop is harvested, the idea is to dry it and reduce it to the raw material required to turn it into hash honey as quick as possible for storage underground. Except for the lab, there is to be nothing on the surface to hide. Shorty takes one more precaution, only a couple of us will know the exact location of the laboratory.

  I mean we all know there is a laboratory on the property but the rest think it’s underground somewhere among the brigalow scrub. The citrus packing shed where we sleep and cook is a good mile and a half away from the main house and Weed Valley, as the planting location is called, is half a mile still further out so they don’t observe Nam Tran and my movements during the day.

  ‘What they don’t know can’t hurt us,’ Shorty says to me one day.

  ‘Mate, I’m not happy keeping stuff back from the mob. You said it yerself, one in all in,’ I protest.

  ‘Thommo, like the army, we’re all fighting the same war, but some of us know more than others. It’s been a while since Vietnam. Things change, some of our blokes are under a lot of psychological pressure, and in the hands of a big hairy-arsed cop anything could happen. We might be okay when we’re together, trust each other with our lives. But alone and under stress people have been known to talk, even when they think they’re not. When we harvest the weed I want there to be no trace of it left. If only you, Nam Tran, and me know the exact location of the lab and the drying shed, I’m going to sleep a whole lot better at night.’

  ‘What about Flow?’

  He’d forgotten about Flow. ‘Yeah,’ he now says, knowing what I mean. ‘I’ll have a talk to him.’

  Afterwards, when I think about it, and I should’ve before, I’m that ashamed of myself. A man’s a fool to think any different to Shorty. He’s the fall guy in all this. If the crop or the lab gets discovered on his property, he’s the bloke who gets the five years in the clink and a fine that would damn near bankrupt him. He has every right to be a tad cautious even with the brothers.

  The plan is, that the moment the crop is harvested the plants are to be uprooted and burned, with not a stem remaining. Weed Valley will then be sown with winter oats, clean as a whistle for anyone to see. But the lab and the drying shed will still be on the property for months afterwards.

  It turns out Nam Tran has been setting up a seedling nursery for about three months. When we get there he has nearly a thousand healthy marijuana seedlings ready for planting out.

  I can’t help wondering what Shorty would have done if we’d turned down the idea. I mean, would you burn a fortune’s worth of healthy marijuana seedlings? He must have been pretty confident that we’d go along with the scam. Better not think about that one too much, hey?

  Sharing accommodation and working all day together isn’t all sunshine and happy smiles. As one of the platoon section commanders and the biggest bloke among us, I’m sort of elected the peacemaker in the group. This takes up a fair bit of my time as getting along with others don’t come natural to most of us any longer.

  Planting out seedlings is back-breaking work and if one of the boys is malingering the others get cranky as hell. They forget we all have our off days. Also, being told what to do don’t go down too well neither. Most nights it’s something that one of the boys has said to another and which has been took the wrong way and caused a bit of aggro that needs sorting.

  Privately we all dread the nights. That’s when we can get out of control. With no grog or dope to calm the nerves each of us is secretly scared of the nightmares that we know sooner or later must surely come.

  But we’re so physically clapped out that sleep becomes a necessity and, as a mob, we seem to be generally less spooked than usual. I know I am.

  Gazza, though, has two real crook nights during the month and both times we have to pour a bucket o’ cold water over him to bring him out of his half-awake berserk state o’ mind. It’s bloody scary seeing it happen with someone else and knowing you’ve done the same yourself. I now see what Wendy’s been through and I’m ashamed of meself. Most nights one or another of the boys wakes us up screaming out and thrashing around, trying to escape their sleeping bag.

  Knives and clubs, the very things that give us the confidence to go to sleep, have to be stashed so that there won’t be any serious accidents. It’s my job to go around last thing to kick at every sleeping bag, see that no one has a four b’ two he’s placed inside it in case they get spooked in their dreams and half wake up and go on the attack. It took six of us to hold Gazza down, even without a weapon.

  The point is, we’ve all been there before, so an incident during the night don’t get talked about or a fuss made. It’s almost like being back together in the jungle. You know somehow, even in your nightmare, that your buddies are there with you and they’re not going to desert you in a crisis. Maybe I just invented that, but I know I was better in the citrus shed than at home.

  We get through the ploughing and planting and setting up the irrigation pumps and piping and fencing the area. After a month or so of hard yakka we’re fitter than we’ve been in quite a while and a few of the bellies around are considerably flattened, mine included.

  The crop is planted and the spring rains come on time and we’re feeling pretty damned pleased with ourselves with all the little dope plants standing up straight in long rows, like they’re on parade.

  Shorty draws up a roster system where each of us will come back for a period of two weeks during the growing season, two blokes at a time. Our job is to guard and tend the crop until harvest time. We throw a bit of a party where we all get pissed for the first time in a month before the rest of us go back home.

  The easy part is over. Detection is now the big worry, though the crop is in a secluded little valley which you can only approach through a dense stand of brigalow and then a six-foot-high fence. Shorty assures us it’s hard to see from the air, though anyone flying low over it ain’t gunna mistake what’s growing down there for next season’s rice crop.

  We’ve got one thing good going for us, marijuana isn’t really being grown on a commercial scale in Australia yet. Or if it is, there’s never been a major bust. Mostly it’s hippie communes growing small batches in the bush for their own use and as a bit of a cash or trade crop on the side. The fuzz won’t be out looking at the daily doings of your basic farmer, nor will they ever suspect it is to be grown in a big way in the middle of the rice-rich Riverina.

  Almost all the weed and hash sold in Australia is still imported from Asia. The cops and various State drug squads are mostly into making busts on the street, in airports and at the docks.

  We’ve got six months before we harvest and then sell our product and so every Wednesday arvo the two warriors on roster and the six locals, Shorty, Spags, Lawsy, Nam Tran, Wendy and me, have a meeting at Smoky Joe’s to discuss the operation. In this way everyone is eventually updated and briefed.

  It is over this period that Wendy comes into her own. She’s the forward scout and it’s her responsibility, with Lawsy, to organise the selling and legal-protection arm of the operation. I dunno how she fits it in, I don’t get back to help in the cafe for the first two months and she has to run it alone except for the weekends when I get home.

  Unfortunately little Anna is back at the Children’s Hospital for another bout of chemotherapy and so weekends Wendy flies down to Sydney and back to see her. She gets other stuff done while she’s there, but when I ask her about this she laughs, then says, ‘Secret women’s business, Thommo.’ She’s working her butt off and I’ve never seen her better, she seems to be thriving on the challenge she’s been given.

  One evening I’m standing with Shorty at the edge of Weed Valley, the plants are now about three feet high. ‘It’s like looking at a vault full of money,’ I say, then I point to a weed plant near me, ‘Every one of them little buggers are worth a fort
une.’

  ‘Only 50 per cent of them,’ Shorty says.

  ‘How come?’ I ask.

  ‘Half of those plants are male, and when they come into bud we’re going to have to weed them out.’

  ‘Shit, hey? You can’t tell the sex when they’re seedlings?’

  I shouldn’t have asked. Shorty goes into this technical explanation which I won’t repeat. But it seems there are male and female marijuana plants and the males must be gotten rid of before pollination.

  The crop comes along a treat and, apart from the insects which are always having a go at it and keeping the weeds down, it’s not hard to look after. This is how you can tell they’re male, the buds have these little balls that hang off a bit of a stem and they don’t have these little white hairs coming out of them like the female buds.

  The female buds are called sinsemilla. I don’t suppose you need to know this, but with the male pollen missing, the females use all their energy to grow thick with unfertilised flowers. In a few more weeks these unfertilised flowers are the real McCoy, they produce the resin called THC, the stuff that dreams are made of.

  It’s a shit of a job getting the male plants out, you have to be real careful not to shake the plant in case some early female buds open and you cause fertilisation.

  Harvesting comes at last and the boys begin arriving. Shorty and Spags pick them up in Griffith at night and bring them in. For several days Nam Tran has been going around smelling the crop and one morning I go with him.

  ‘You smell, Thommo,’ he says and points to a flower. I take a sniff and it smells sort of musky sweet. Then he shows me the resin that has formed on each of the tiny buds that have turned from white to amber. ‘Tomorrow okay,’ he says, grinning at me, then he waves his arm to indicate the whole of Weed Valley. ‘Special this one, very, very good for oil.’