Mule

by Tony D'Souza

  "Look at you now," he said to me, "a mountain man and all. In a motherfucking flannel jacket just like a goddamn lumberjack."

  I crossed my arms where I stood in the yard and beamed at him.

  "How much do you pay for an eighth of this?" Mason asked Kate. Kate batted her eyes at him and said, "Man, don't you know I grew up out here? I get this shit for free."

  He said, "You have any idea the money I could make with a pound of this in Austin?"

  It was great to have Mason at the cabin, a friend from the life we'd lived before, seeing us grown into this different place. I'd become proud of the mountains and how beautiful they were, wanted to impress him with our life in them. Mason mostly slept all day, which Kate said was because of the altitude, and when he'd rub his eyes open at last, it was all I could do not to drag him from the couch and down to the river. By the time he'd come to Dunsmuir, I knew a dozen foaming riffles that consistently produced big trout.

  Fishing the bend at Sweetbriar one afternoon, Mason said to me, above the roar of the water, "I've got this idea. I've got this money saved. I'm going to go to Korea to see my uncle and buy as many knockoff cell phones as I can. I'm going to bring them back and sell them out of the back of the store. I'll double my money easy."

  It was another one of Mason's schemes. He always had a bunch: to buy a camera and start a real estate video business, to buy a mixing board and turn his living room into a recording studio, to buy a home silk-screening machine and sell T-shirts on eBay. They excited him for a time, but they frustrated Emma, who would always point out the catches. "Plenty of people already have real estate video businesses," she'd say and roll her eyes. "How are we going to compete with them?" Or "Who'll want to record their crappy albums in our dirty living room or buy T-shirts you haven't even designed yet, Mason?" Knockoff cell phones from Korea seemed to me like something in that same vein. Instead of saying so, I asked him, "How much do you have saved?"

  "Four thousand dollars."

  A year ago, that wouldn't have seemed like that much money to me. Now it did. I built a driftwood fire on the bank, and we lay beside it in the grass and charred the fish we'd caught on a spit I'd rigged up with sticks. In the almost four months I'd been up there, I'd figured out how to do such things. As we gazed at the empty sky, I said, "You really think this cell phone thing will work out?"

  Mason took a long drag from his cigarette, thought about it. "You know what, James? Sometimes life feels like an endless pile of shit."

  Kate and I got married the last day Mason was with us, down the mountain in Redding at the Shasta County Clerk's Office. Kate wore a white maternity dress she'd grabbed off the rack, was really showing. I wore a jacket and tie. She changed in the bathroom before the service, our rings were from the mall. When we said our vows, the secretaries stood up at their desks around us to watch. Kate started crying; I wiped my face and I was crying, too. Then the marriage official introduced us to Mason as Mr. and Mrs. Lasseter, and we all laughed at the sound of that. We had Chinese food at a buffet restaurant afterward, and people in the surrounding booths congratulated us and wished us well for the baby. It wasn't the kind of wedding we'd ever imagined having. At the same time, it was private, sweet, and what we could afford, and our lives were what they were now, no matter how we wanted them to be.

  Mason took a few buds of weed home with him on the plane when he left, wrapped in cellophane and hidden in his underwear. Then he called us from Austin to tell us that he and Emma were stoned already.

  "It was so good to be with you guys. You guys will have the happiest baby. When you come through Austin, bring us some of that Siskiyou kush. We'd make a killing, I promise you that. I mean, I know you really can't, but you know what I mean. Thanks for having me as the best man at your wedding. Thanks for the fishing and everything."

  One night in bed, Kate said to me, "Why did I give my life to those people? Why did I let them treat me the way they did?" It was quiet, cool in the cabin, and there was nothing I could say. Kate said, "Why didn't I think I was worth more than that? Why did I let myself get so hurt by it?"

  We got a crib from the secondhand place down the mountain and Kate turned the corner of our room into a nest. And if we were going to make it through the winter, she told me, it was time to hurry up and start putting in firewood. We'd need at least eight cords, a pile as big as the house.

  I shaved off my beard patches, went to the bar in town, gave them my name. Guys started coming to pick me up at the cabin in the mornings, and I'd spend the day with them wildcatting pine off the Forest Service concessions. I knew what we were doing was stealing, but it was the way people lived. We'd labor until nightfall, covered in dust from the saws, then haul the wood back to town with the trucks' headlights off so the rangers wouldn't see us. The few times I made the mistake of trying to talk to those guys about the baby coming and being out of work, they laughed—their whole lives had been like this.

  Then I started cutting wood for Kate's high school friend Darren Rudd, a thin and rangy blond man with a hard and quiet edge to him, younger than I was, focused and serious. Unlike everyone else up there, Darren barely drank, didn't chew tobacco. The land we were working was on the back side of McCloud, and it wasn't Forest Service land but his own. He wore a sidearm on his hip, I didn't ask why. When I asked him how much land he had, he said, "Which piece?"

  Something in me knew to be wary of Darren. Still, I liked him. He knew the world, alluded to adventures he'd had in India and Thailand. He told me that he wished he'd gone to college as I had, that in another time and place he would have liked to have been a writer, too. When I got up the nerve to ask him where his money came from, he cut the motor on his chainsaw, shrugged, and said, "Oh, you know. Here and there. SoCal, Vegas, Denver, Phoenix. Sometimes it comes from as far away as Florida."

  I wiped my brow, felt the grit on it. I said, "My mother lives out in Florida."

  Without looking at me, Darren said, "A smart guy can put up big numbers in Florida if he's interested."

  In bed that night, I asked Kate about Darren's money. She told me, "The Rudds have always been pot growers. They've been doing it for generations. When we were kids, his parents would get raided and the boys would all get taken away. Then suddenly they'd all be back, half the time without any shoes. When we were young, it made them surly. They were the meanest kids in school. Darren has real money now, a hell of a lot of it. I guess all that meanness finally did some good for him."

  When I'd talk to Mason in Austin, from the ridge where our cell phone worked, he'd always say to me, "Man, what I could do with a pound of that Siskiyou weed." When I'd talk to my mother in Florida, she'd say, "You know, I'd love to have you guys here."

  One day working with Darren, I finally asked him, "How much would a guy have to pay for a pound of Siskiyou weed?"

  "If the guy was a friend, he'd probably have to pay two and a half," Darren said.

  "Thousand?" I said.

  "Yeah, thousand."

  "And how much could a guy get in Florida for it?"

  "A guy could drop it in Florida for five or six."

  "Thousand?"

  "Yeah, thousand."

  The idea of something became planted in me. I didn't know exactly what the idea was or what I would do about it, just that something could be had here in the mountains for a price you couldn't get it for anywhere else, and that I could buy it for that price and take it somewhere else and sell it for more than I'd paid. When I thought about it, I saw money, money we needed. I put thoughts of risk and danger away. I was already living in so much fear: that my child would go without, that I'd drag my family through poverty. More than anything else, I felt like I'd failed Kate in how our lives were supposed to be.

  I called Mason two nights later. "You know that present Kate had waiting for you and it made you laugh and laugh?"

  "Yeah, I know what you're talking about, James," Mason said cautiously.

  "How about instead of going to Korea with that
money, you stayed in Austin and I brought some of it to you?"

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'll tell you what. If it's the same stuff Kate had, that's what everybody here wants and can't get. If you brought it to me, I could get rid of it with just a few phone calls. It'd disappear around here like poof."

  "How much could you get for it?"

  "Sixty-five an eighth. Maybe more if we came up with a good name."

  "How much would that be on a big one?"

  "A big one?" Mason said.

  "Yeah, a big one. You know, like how you buy meat at the deli."

  "Meat at the deli? What the fuck are you talking about?"

  "By the pound, Mason. Jesus Christ."

  "Let me get my calculator."

  I knew the basics of the weed trade from when I smoked it in college, but what I didn't know as I waited for Mason was soon I'd be able to reel off the numbers in my sleep. Eighths in a pound? 128 of course. Quarters? 64. Halfs? 32. Dimes in an eighth? 3.5. Nickels? 7 or 8, depending on how greedy you were and what you thought you could get away with. A single pound of Siskiyou kush could be rolled into a thousand thin spliffs. The potential existed for a guy with a primary source to more than quadruple his money.

  Mason came back on the phone. He said, "At sixty-five, I'd net eight. At eighty, it would be over ten."

  "Thousand?"

  "Oh yeah, James. Thousand."

  I didn't hesitate. I said, "What if I could get it to you for five?"

  Chopping wood was brutal labor. I was splitting the rounds I'd earned and gathered in our yard evening after evening. My body hardened; soon the widening pile was higher than my shoulders. Still, when Kate would come out onto the porch wrapped in her blanket, she'd shake her head and say, "We aren't going to make it." When the first frost came and we fired up the stove, I figured out right away what she meant. The stove was a glutton, ate wood like a beast, just a week of it chewed a hole in the pile big enough to lie in. Kate said, "When it gets really cold, we'll have to run it all the time. Because if we don't, we could freeze to death in our sleep." When she saw the look on my face, she smiled and added, "Well, we might not die, but we are going to have a little baby to keep warm."

  Even in that hardest of our times, we hadn't been completely abandoned by the state. Kate had qualified for the WIC food program, and MediCal would cover the cost of the birth. Despite all the humiliating phone calls and hoops we had to jump through to get it, we were grateful for the help. Still, every part of government assistance just reminded us that our lives as we'd known them were gone.

  Kate said to me in the dark one night, "Can you remember anymore who we used to be?"

  She was warm in my arms, her belly swollen, the baby kicking insistently against my hand. I said, "I remember I thought I was such hot shit."

  She said, "I remember how the money made me feel. The partying. The friends. I had no idea it could end as suddenly as it did."

  I was quiet a moment. Then I said, "Are you worried about the baby, Kate?"

  "I think about her all the time."

  "Are you afraid it's going to hurt?"

  "I only want her to be well."

  "So she's a girl this time?"

  "Tonight she feels like a girl."

  "What do you want to name her?"

  Kate thought about it. "I've always dreamed I'd make it to Europe one day. To Rome. And I've always liked the name Roman because it sounds so strong. We can add an a at the end and make it pretty: Romana."

  "Did you ever have any idea how strong you were going to have to be?"

  "Not until they fired me."

  "And now?"

  "Part of me will always be angry."

  The baby stopped kicking in Kate's belly. Then it was just the two of us. I said, "You ever worry that we rushed into this?"

  "Sometimes I do. But mostly I'm glad about everything that's happened. Sometimes I'm even grateful. They forced me to stop working; life slowed down. I've been able to really feel this baby grow. You're at home with us all the time and you've been able to feel the baby. As long as I focus on things like that, everything seems fine. We'll have a little more time before the unemployment runs out when we can just lie in bed and be with her."

  "And then?"

  "And then something will have to happen for us."

  "What if something doesn't happen?"

  "I don't know."

  Kate went into labor the second Friday in October, two weeks overdue, and her water broke in bed. It had snowed during the night, and it took me an hour to shovel us out to the road as she waited on the porch in her coat and boots. "Why'd you let it get so deep, dummy?" she kept shouting at me between contractions.

  The storm had closed the pass; we had to go south to Redding. The icy drive down the mountain took two and a half hours. Kate's labor quickened in the car. She began to scream every few minutes as if being killed right beside me, and it was all I could do to keep us on the road. At the hospital when they rushed us in, she was already dilated past eight and a half centimeters, too late for an epidural. The looks we got from the nurses let us know they saw us as crazy mountain people.

  In the birthing room I found out things I didn't know: my wife has a primal strength in her, and the world as we've constructed it is a joke. Just before the end, dripping with sweat, Kate looked up at me from the bed with this stricken face and whispered, "I can't do it, I can't do it." I knew right then she was going to die. My wife and my baby were both going to die. I knew I'd never love anything again as much as I loved them. I knew my heart would be broken and I would have to die there, too.

  Then someone said, "Dad, we've got a baby girl!" and someone else took my hand and put surgical scissors in it and someone else guided my hand and I watched the scissors cut a milky plastic tube with dark lines in it. And I understood that the tube was the umbilical cord, and then I understood I was holding my daughter in the palms of my hands. She was covered all over in stork bites and blood clots and vernix. All this relief poured out of me as she began a long, loud squall. I knew right then I'd do anything for her.

  When we'd gaze at our baby asleep in her crib, Kate would whisper, "How could I have had no idea I would love someone so much?" For my part, I was constantly checking Romana's breathing. Kate's parents brought us TV dinners. My mother flew in, made her camp up the road at the Acorn Motel. She'd been upset that we'd married without her having met Kate or even being invited; the baby's birth made her forgive all that. "It would be a lot warmer for you guys in Florida," she kept saying and shaking her head as she shivered by the fire and knitted a blanket for her granddaughter.

  My mother took me aside before she left, told me, "What's happening to the country is frightening, but people don't just starve and die. Your beard doesn't have to fall out, and you don't have to go on hiding up here. Maybe life won't turn out the way you thought. So what? That baby doesn't care about any of that."

  Mason called from Austin to congratulate us. "In a year you'll say, How did she get so big? Then one day she'll stand up in her crib and go, Hey, old man, wake your ass up! Get me my goddamn bottle."

  I went out on the porch, asked him, "Are we doing this, Mason?"

  He said, "Yeah, we're doing this."

  "How are we doing this?"

  "We're going to figure that out."

  But the next time he called, he didn't want to do it anymore. He said, "What if you get pulled over out there, James? I couldn't live with that."

  He was right, I had too much to lose now. So I let the whole thing drop like the dumb idea it had always been.

  Two days later, I got a text from him: "lets do it."

  I called him, asked, "Can you send me the money in advance?" I could see him shaking his head as he said back, "You know Emma would never let me."

  My family was middle class, and when I was in high school, my father had died of a heart attack. There'd been a modest life insurance policy. I'd spent most of my share on my bachelor's degree,
hadn't let myself look at the remainder in the ten years since. Kate knew about it; we called it the baby's college money. Even after we'd lost our jobs, we'd promised each other to treat that money like we didn't even have it, to do everything we could never to touch her future.

  Now I called MetLife. The woman on the phone told me my current balance was $22,031. If I wanted to write checks on it, she'd have blank checks sent; if I wanted to leave it alone, it would keep on growing at four percent interest. "Something really must be happening out there," the woman told me. "Lots and lots of people are tapping into their accounts right now."

  One morning, I woke up to find Kate wrapped in her blanket and staring out the window at the latest round of snow.

  Without looking back at me, she said, "Florida."

  Taking a pound of weed to Mason wasn't a real thing to me yet, was still just an idea. Then Darren Rudd came over to congratulate us on the baby. He brought us oranges from a ranch he had down in Santa Cruz, was driving a new cherry-red F-150 Ford pickup I hadn't seen before. He'd had a haircut and his nose was tanned. When I asked if he'd been to the beach, he shrugged and said, "Yeah, in Phuket."

  Darren liked the baby, held her. She was three weeks old and spit up on the shoulder of his calfskin jacket. When he told Kate she was looking slim again, she smiled at him and said, "You've always been such a liar." Then she took the baby to nurse, and Darren and I stepped out onto the porch to give her privacy. He had some kind of grain alcohol from Bangkok with a scorpion in the bottom of the bottle, and we took a couple sips from it standing up in the cold, dark night.

  "What were you doing in Thailand, Darren?"

  "R and R. Having some fun with the ladies."

  "Work been treating you good?"