A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death

by Sarah Reith

  “So what happens?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t remember. He has to de-activate it in the next episode with a hairpin or something.”

  “I mean in the dream.”

  “I don’t know.” He frowned. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. It’s like it’s on a loop. There’s no good place to bury your own body, I guess.” He prodded the box of Diesel with a curtain rod. A thick snarling wave of odor thrashed into the air. “Wow, that stuff really smells like diesel.”

  Patron Saints & Beasts of Burden

  I’M SURE YOU’VE heard of mules. I don’t mean the dead ones you find in Southern novels. I mean the live ones you can visit—if you clear it with the right authorities—in any one of many women’s prisons. They are the bad boy’s lovelorn dupes, caught with a diaper bag full of cocaine. They are desperate village maidens who can barely write their own names, swallowing condoms full of heroin. They are hardly ever single childless women just a few credits away from completing a master’s degree in comparative literature. There is a sense of being insulated when you are doing something completely unsuitable, as if you’re safe because you’re not really doing it. As if at any moment you could retreat to your proper destiny.

  And besides, I was just going to the post office in Finley.

  The Finley post office is a run-down little outbuilding on the edge of a pear orchard in Lake County. If it were fulfilling its proper destiny, it would be providing shelter to a few old garden implements. The postmistress can warm the whole place with a space heater the size of a milk carton. According to Google maps, it is forty seven point three miles east of Serendipity Organics. Mendocino County is vast, but not unlimited.

  To the south, the famous wineries of Napa and Sonoma offer endless opportunities for high-end alcohol consumption. The vines of Bacchus reach for the horizon in orderly rows. The tasting rooms are eminently tasteful. But as you travel toward the setting sun, the hills begin to jumble together. There are vagrant waterways and broken fences. There is desperation east of Mendocino County. The meth labs are unrelieved by the presence of eloquent activists, speaking up on behalf of their most beloved controlled substance. No speed freak ever got up in front of the Board of Supervisors and delivered an impassioned speech about the medical or religious value of methamphetamine. Consequently, the District Attorney of Lake County is free to be an unreconstructed drug warrior, making no distinction between cannabis and speed. The sheriff is not required to satisfy a constituency that includes a large percentage of politically active felons. The chief of police does not hesitate to take action when he sees a cloud of fragrant smoke pouring out of a moving car.

  However, as Caitlin used to say, I am the flower of white womanhood. “People who look like me don’t get pulled over,” she declared, when she wasn’t plotting unlikely encounters with law enforcement. Simone de Beauvois asserts that successful prostitutes are fundamentally conservative, since their profession would be impossible without a profoundly unequal status quo. Still, Caitlin’s copy of the Bill of Rights was bookmarked with a bright pink sticky note at the fourth and fifth amendments.

  I’m not sure how many pounds it was. I do remember that we filled two coolers, both with Alizarin’s full name and phone number written on them in black capital letters. Alizarin planned a lot of outings in her role as a community arts educator, and found it useful to identify her equipment.

  When we finally took a break from our conspiracy to distribute a Schedule I controlled narcotic, we all gathered round to have a cup of herbal tea (caffeine was frowned upon at Serendipity Organics). The coolers were wedged against the door, so no one would forget them in the rush to meet the connection.

  The buds looked impressively professional, now that they were properly packaged. It was like taking a painting out of the studio, away from all the dirty rags and scabs of paint; like putting it in a frame and hanging it on a clean white wall. Hey, that’s a real painting, you say, when it’s removed from the signs of the effort it took. The same is true of pot: taken away from the litter of leaf and the clutter of agricultural endeavor, it starts to look like a luxury product. Something seductive, worth thousands of dollars and the risk of several years’ lost liberty.

  “I’ve been driving that car,” Alizarin began.

  We’d agreed it would be unwise to transport the investment in my pickup truck, which sported bright red temporary registration tags and had developed a medley of inexplicable sounds. Instead, I would use Alizarin’s royal-blue Prius. It was a solid, leftward-leaning, middle-class vehicle. With license plates bearing the name of a Mendocino dealership, it did hint at the fact that it had been paid for in full with undeclared cash. You will find imperfect reasoning at the heart of every conspiracy. The conspiracy to distribute is no exception.

  For example: why didn’t Alizarin drive her own damned pot into enemy territory?

  The answer is simple and eminently sensible: the Hebrew calendar is lunar. That year, the month of Nisan fell in winter, which is the most logical time to dispose of a pot harvest. Regardless of the season, eight days of Nisan are given over to Pesach, a celebration of the end of captivity in Egypt. It would be a bitter herb indeed if Alizarin Goldfarb were sitting in jail, in the company of lovelorn dupes, instead of breaking unleavened bread with her people in the Promised Land. Alizarin was on her way to Israel again, just as the markets were opening up and she was ready to sell.

  To be honest, we all thought of prison as one of those things that’s always happening to other people, like getting old or being dead. It was tasteless and melodramatic to invoke the possibility. And besides, Mercury was only just now coming out of retrograde.

  If it promotes my case at all, I’d like to make the following statement: while it is tempting to use a government agency as a black-market courier service, I was not premeditating the felony of sending controlled substances through the U.S. Post Office. No: I had an assignation there with Melanie.

  Let’s just say that Melanie worked in quality control and acquisitions at The Club. It doesn’t matter which one; just that pot clubs were beginning to be the gold standard that year. The field was bursting with outlaws, longing for the respectability of country clubs and tasting rooms, where they would all smoke good cigars and build their business empires. Medical marijuana dispensaries had a superficial air of legitimate yet daring entrepreneurship, like the dot-commers of the previous decade. They were edgy and criminal-minded, though they would rather avoid the inconvenience of actual criminality. They were smart, and they were cool, and if you were a serious grower with quality buds, they offered a smooth transition from outlawry to industry pioneership. Placing your product in a well-positioned club was a huge indicator of success. Also, the clubs would buy large quantities, which cut down on the number of people like Melanie any grower had to deal with.

  Melanie was how I came to discover my affinity with Effie the dog, because Effie always seemed torn between the options of biting her in the face and hiding under the house until she was gone. Melanie was a non-stop talker, constantly reciting self-evident explanations, unoriginal theories, and professions of loyalty to various causes. She gave the disquieting impression of someone with bad nerves and a good memory who is fully capable of making an accurate confession. She had a bouncy, cheerful ponytail, which made her look unnecessarily wholesome, and the exposed parts of her suntanned back and shoulders were covered with Sanskrit tattoos. Worst of all, she refused to conduct any business whatsoever while Mercury was in retrograde. When she considered the consequences of committing an ordinary workaday felony during this dangerous time, her voice reached a pitch of such frantic urgency it was difficult to refrain from biting her in the face.

  However, as soon as Mercury was in a more permissive mood, Alizarin would be attending to religious responsibilities in the homeland of her people. That meant someone else would have to call upon the grace of Mercury, god of commerce, eloquence, travelers, and thieves.

  “I’ve been drivi
ng that car,” Alizarin began again. “So I know for a fact that it’s fine. It really is. I was all ready to drive it into Finley myself, three days ago, but fucking Melanie . . .” The smell of burning plastic from freshly vacuum-sealed bags attested to the fact that no one had been ready for anything three days ago. But the implication was that we could have been, if Melanie had given us any reason to stay up after midnight stuffing bags while the planets were inauspiciously aligned.

  “And Steve says it’s fine,” Alizarin continued. “Steve would not lie to me. He says as long as you’re not taking it over the Sierras—actually,” she amended, mid-quote, “it would probably be fine over the Sierras. It’s stop-and-go traffic you have to worry about. It’s not the clutch, thank God. He’s pretty sure it’s one of the slave cylinders, but if it’s the master cylinder I think I have to replace all of them, don’t I?” She appealed to Morpheus, who regarded her as if it were a serious breach of gender-neutral decorum to assume he knew anything about cars. “Anyway,” she went on with unsurprised resignation, “there’s only one stoplight, just as you come into Finley, and if you pop it out of gear and rev it just a little bit—with the brake on, which of course you knew already—I think it’ll be fine. Steve thinks it’ll be fine,” she added, to strengthen her argument. “I specifically asked him if was safe to take it to Finley, and he said, oh, yeah, just don’t try to take it through San Francisco at rush hour or anything.” She looked at me expressionlessly. It’s the way people look at you when they’ve just offered you a terrible deal and are curious to see if you will take it.

  In the Shadow of the Mountain

  WESLEY, WHO MOVED through clouds of scented smoke with beaded dreadlocks clicking softly, spent his last hour of freedom sputtering up Dolores Street in a badly maintained VW van. He was conspicuously desperate to make it out of San Francisco with a suitcase full of cash and a binder full of blotter paper. He was nabbed by a beat cop who wasn’t even looking for him. Many years later, I turned my headlights on at the precipice of dusk on a lonely country road in Lake County and got pulled over for a broken taillight.

  It was almost a relief when the officer began the long, slow walk from his car to mine. Finally, I could stop worrying about what I would do. I haven’t been pulled over since I was seventeen years old, I reflected, wondering if this bore any resemblance to what that sheep was thinking as the dogs removed her entrails.

  “Licenseregistrationproofofinsuranceplease,” he intoned.

  I began to notice things. I saw that the officer’s eyes were crafty, like the eyes of a girl named Heather I went to high school with. Heather would say things like, “Hey. Do you believe in vibes?” as her friends convulsed with laughter. She had an air of barely repressed violence, which heightened the sense that she was always trying to extract a compromising confession.

  I handed the officer my documents. I remembered that I had said, “Why are you asking me that?” when Heather and her cronies cornered me. They were so disappointed, I almost felt sorry for them, the way I feel sorry for wolves in nature documentaries when their prey eludes them.

  The patrolman strode back toward his cruiser. I began to think, for no reason at all, that I might be able to handle this. I waited, listening to my thoughts interrupt one another, until the officer returned with my documents.

  “Ms. Ah, Ms. Reen . . . hard? Reen-heart,” he tried again, before moving on. “There seem to be some irregularities here.” He gave me several moments to absorb the news. “There’s no proof of insurance in this . . . envelope.” He regarded the packet of documents I had given him with a sad little smile, as if I had tried to bribe him, but the amount was so insignificant, he was willing to overlook it. “Would you like to take a few moments to check around for it?”

  I could feel cold air on two inches of skin at my waist as I leaned across the passenger seat to peer into the glovebox. It occurred to me that I was halfway lying down at the feet of an armed man I’d never seen before. I could feel him glancing at my sudden skin, then glancing quickly away. I knew the flesh was taut from my regimen of hauling heavy buckets of amendments up and down the mountain. I knew it was sprinkled with cinnamon freckles, and so did Officer Mauer, whose name I read on a ribbon above his right breast pocket. The corners of that pocket were indifferently pressed, which gave me a pleasurable feeling of disapproval. I wondered if you got in trouble, in the CHP, for having a badly pressed uniform. I imagined him being scolded like a scruffy little kid, before strapping on his weapon to protect civilians from people like me.

  “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions,” he decided softly, after my rummaging produced no results. “Please step out of the vehicle.”

  The frost on the grass crunched beneath my feet, because the shadow of the mountain kept it cold, all day long.

  “If you could take a seat in the back of the patrol car, please,” he continued, ushering me in with a gesture of purest gallantry. “I’m going to shut the door. Just so you don’t get chilled.”

  I settled into the bench seat behind the silent French braid of a female officer in the passenger seat. I noted with some surprise that it was very comfortable, if one were gracious enough to overlook the metal grille between the front and back seats; the heavy smell of well-oiled weaponry; and the fact that the doors could not be opened from the inside. But the cushions had just the right amount of bounce. The heater purred with odorless efficiency, unlike the one in Alizarin’s car, which produced intermittent blasts of armpit-scented heat. I wasn’t much more miserable than I’ve been on most of the dates I’ve had in my life.

  Officer Mauer took his seat with calm authority and pulled his door shut with the same. “Cold out there,” he remarked, rubbing his hands together in a way that was either gleeful or sympathetic. It was hard to tell in the dwindling light.

  The French braid spun around, but only partway, like a mean little dog whose movements are restricted by a very short leash. I could see her in three-quarters profile now, but I couldn’t make out her name tag. “We have a problem, Isobel,” she snarled. I could see particles of saliva backlit by the pastel sunset as she hit the b’s in “Isobel” and “problem” with unnecessary force. “You don’t have proof of insurance.”

  I found that I enjoyed the way she emphasized the first syllable of the word “insurance.” It made her sound plebian, which was as obscurely satisfying as if she had suffered some small but significant misfortune.

  “Well, Alizarin is very good about these things,” I murmured.

  I tried to convey the sense that I could not imagine how this creature had found her way into my drawing room, but had resolved to be civil until she was gone. I realized, in that moment, that I possessed an advantage I had never consciously exploited. It seemed somehow unsporting, though, as I sat there in the perfectly regulated temperature of the patrol car, it occurred to me, too, that I had never cared at all about sports.

  My advantage had everything to do with how Mauer and the French braid wore heavy boots and used imperfect grammar; how obedient they were, like lesser wolves in a great pack run by someone they called “Sir.”

  But I was a high-born outlaw. I knew exactly how to mark my rank by handing off a menu to a waiter without looking at his face; to take my tickets from an usher and forget immediately that he ever existed. This particular weapon is a constant, demoralizing reminder to those who would establish themselves as your enemies. It’s how you show the world that you are one of those who eats the tips of the asparagus and drinks from the headwaters and gets to hold the ornamental stick. Those who detain you illegally in the back seat of a patrol car on a lonely country road are a minor inconvenience.

  “You need proof, Isobel,” the French braid insisted, like I’d failed to back up some flimsy assertion about a great philosopher. “Do you know what proof is?”

  In my mind, I cast her as a pitiable waif who had just offered to recite a few scatological limericks at my black-tie dinner party. Your dignity is unimpeachable,
I told my outraged self. I waited as blandly as I could for whatever inappropriate thing it was she had to say to me.

  Mauer looked up from the ticket he’d been working on. It seemed to be taking him a very long time to document a broken taillight and a missing insurance card.

  “How do you pronounce your last name?” he asked, turning a face full of genial interest in my direction.

  I wondered if he was the kind of guy who scours the Internet for tips on how to pick up women. I pictured him studying the articles in a men’s magazine, chewing the end of a ballpoint pen as he put together a script. I pictured him next practicing his keenly interested facial expressions in a shaving mirror. It made me feel like I was invading his privacy, which produced a voyeuristic certainty that I knew more about him than he knew about me. I knew him, I decided. I knew exactly who he was.

  “Rine-hard,” I said, trying to sound like I was charmed that he’d been thoughtful enough to ask. It seemed like it would be poor counsel indeed to tell him the Germanic roots of the name Reinhardt, so I kept the manly virtue and the foxes to myself.

  He smiled, with a steady-eyed stare that would have made me sure he was a serial killer if we’d been chatting in a bar. “That is such a cool name.” He gave the rapport a few moments to expand, then asked, “How long have you known Alizarin Goldfarb?”

  I couldn’t help but notice that he accented all the wrong syllables in “Alizarin,” in spite of the fact that he had just heard me say it.

  “Twenty-eight years,” I said, and saw him check my license to make sure I hadn’t just told him I’d known her longer than I’d been alive. I decided to be flattered. The French braid was simmering resentfully, like she was sick to death of being interrupted all the time.

  “So you grew up with Ms. Goldfarb,” Mauer concluded, like he was in the habit of collecting sociological data on everyone he stopped for a minor infraction.