Prince of Pot

by Tanya Lloyd Kyi

  I feel like pounding on the desk. He knows where they are and he won’t tell me.

  But before I can consider my next move, he uncrosses his legs and scoots his chair forward. He leans his elbows on the desk.

  “I’ve known your grandfather for a long time.”

  Long enough to know that Walt likes his privacy. Fucking prick.

  “Longer than you might think. We went to Colombia together with the Peace Corps.”

  I blink at him. I had no idea Walt was with the Peace Corps. I’m not even completely clear on what the Peace Corps does.

  “I crossed the border to Canada after I got my draft card in ’70, same as Walt. He crossed the border a year after me. Joined the community I’d started north of Nelson. We tried to put our Colombia skills to use. When that dream broke up, though, we went different ways.”

  He tilts back in his chair, staring at the wall above my head. Maybe’s he’s back in his bell-bottoms, smoking up and playing Bob Dylan on a beat-up guitar.

  “Has your grandpa told you much about it?” Mr. Higgens asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Up to forty thousand of us crossed the border. They don’t know how many, exactly, because they didn’t ask whether we’d just been drafted or if we were already soldiers. They didn’t want to know.”

  When he lets his eyes settle on mine, I nod. I’m still trying to imagine him and Walt as friends.

  “I suppose what I’m saying is that I’d do a lot for your grandfather.”

  “You’d be helping him by pointing me in the right direction.”

  He shakes his head. “Wouldn’t even be legal.”

  Which seems a strange argument for a pot-smoking, commune-founding draft dodger to be making.

  “I can do something different for you, though,” he says.

  Then he punches a button on his phone and asks his secretary for a file. “Your dad has funds you can access.”

  Once his secretary has passed him a bundle of multicolored folders, he flips through. He begins laying papers in front of me. There’s a bank statement, which I recognize. There’s also an investment summary, which makes my eyes go wide, and a property assessment on the orchard.

  “The investments are meant for you and your sister,” he says. “They’ve been fairly lucrative over the years, and your family has added to them regularly. Rather a profitable business.”

  I manage to nod. The balance on those investments is big. Ridiculously big. Enough to pay for art school, or put a down payment on a house.

  “Why didn’t Judith…”

  “She moved into town last year, I believe,” the lawyer says. “Your dad visited then, and had me arrange for her to use the orchard property. He also covered her tuition. Your dad put these holdings jointly in your name and his. Still, I believe he would have released more to her eventually.”

  He holds my gaze again. “In his place, as a father, I would want to make sure my child was on track before I dumped a load of money in his lap.”

  He’s talking about me now, not Judith.

  “Do you have plans for your future, Isaac? School, perhaps?”

  I struggle to make my brain form syllables. “Art school, maybe. I thought I’d work for a year first. For tuition.”

  Though that’s hardly necessary now.

  For the first time, Mr. Higgens smiles. He has a surprisingly kind smile, one that crinkles the corners of his eyes.

  “You have Walter’s genes.”

  He stares at the corner again for a while, like he’s back in free-love land.

  “We had a good friend in our first community, a man named George Ibitson. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

  Even as I’m shaking my head, a flash of memory surfaces. Walt’s mouth working, struggling to form words after he looked at the book of my paintings. “George…Ib…” And when I think about it, the name does sound familiar. Landscapes, I think. Deserts and canyons.

  “He moved back to San Francisco years ago,” Mr. Higgens says. “Quite well known now, as an artist and as a teacher.”

  He checks his watch. “I have another appointment, I’m afraid.” He looks sincerely sorry, and he comes around the desk to shake my hand. “You think about it and let me know what you’d like to do. Do you need access to some cash in the meantime?”

  When I nod, he asks his secretary to make arrangements.

  Then somehow I’m on the sidewalk outside, blinking in bright July sunshine.

  I start walking. Then I start laughing. By the time I get to the bank, I’m laughing hard enough that people are giving me a wide berth on the sidewalk. I sink down onto a bench and try to regain control.

  “Fucking prick.” I shake my head, still catching my breath.

  An old woman glares at me as she passes.

  I don’t even know who I’m swearing at. My dad, for hiding all this from me. Walt, for making it impossible for me to find them. Myself, for being generally stupid.

  I knew what those plants were worth. Why did I never wonder where the money went? Why didn’t I listen more patiently to Walt when he tried to tell me about his pot-smoking painter friend?

  George Ibitson. Fucking prick.

  None of this takes the sting out of things. It isn’t as if I can plaster hundred-dollar bills over all my bullet holes. But at least it gives me focus.

  I think of the painting I made of the fire-ravaged woods with the magenta fireweed bursting from the foreground. That’s really what happens after forest fires. I’ve seen places on the mountain where lightning has ignited the trees and a patch of forest has burned black, crumpled into a charred bowl of ashes. It lasts only a season. By the following spring, there are greens growing from the dead logs and fireweed blooming in the gaps.

  I want to tell Judith about the money. I want to tell Mom that everything’s going to be okay. I want to tell Dad that I don’t love art more than I love him, and tell Walt that I love art more than I love almost anything.

  But I don’t know where they are, if they’ve made it to the new cabin, if there was even a cabin waiting for them.

  They’re doing it all without me.

  Which leaves me to do it all without them.

  •

  A couple of weeks later, Lucas slams the hood of the bus and leans against it. He’s spent plenty of days in the orchard lately, getting my new home in running condition.

  “Listen, we gotta talk about something,” he says.

  I’m a little surprised. He’s been tinkering while I’ve been painting the bus, and we’ve been talking the whole time. I’ve already spilled my guts about the bears, and about my family’s move to places unknown.

  “That night we got pulled over. The night your sister came to get me,” Lucas says, staring over my shoulder at the apple trees. “I told the police.”

  Slowly, his words penetrate.

  “Told them what?”

  “That you had a grow. And I told them where you lived.”

  I want to make him shut up.

  “You don’t even know where I lived.”

  “At first all their questions were about the truck and why we stole it. But a few minutes later, the questions became all about you. And they got really specific. Was your place north or south of the campground? Who lived with you? How long had you been there?”

  He stops to scrub a hand through his hair. “Listen, I figured Sam had told them. She must have. They were looking for confirmation, so I gave it to them. In between begging them not to call my dad.”

  Looking at Lucas is like looking at someone years younger than me. He leaves for university soon. All he wants to do is please his folks, smooth out the rough edges in his life, do what everyone expects of him.

  Was I like that once? And was it only a few weeks ago? It feels like decades.

  “What
exactly did you say?”

  “That you lived above the campground somewhere, I didn’t know what direction. I told them about the druid, the bear and the pot. They said otherwise I’d be arrested, and they’d be calling my parents, so I basically told them everything I could think of, which wasn’t much…” He shakes his head. “I should have denied it. I could have told them nothing. Maybe they wouldn’t have come.”

  I shake my head. I don’t have the energy to get mad anymore, and I can’t stand the thought of losing Lucas after everything else.

  “It’s not your fault. If I’d been careful enough, you wouldn’t have known any of that stuff. And if Sam hadn’t taken us on her crazy joyride, you wouldn’t have found yourself at the station.”

  I can’t say her name without an edge of bitterness creeping in, even though Sam’s long gone. She had to cancel her drama-camp plans. Her dad sent her to stay with her grandma in Kamloops for the summer, and apparently Corporal Ko has applied for a transfer.

  Lucas leaves for university soon.

  “I guess you’ve worked off your debts anyway.” I rap my knuckles against the bus. The Art Bus, we’ve dubbed it.

  He grins. “I’ve got this baby running like a dream now.”

  “San Fran, here I come.”

  “You free to leave?”

  I nod. “The crown decided last week not to press charges.”

  Back in July, Mr. Higgens said I was too young and too stupid to be charged with cultivation, or even with feeding dangerous animals. He said there wasn’t enough proof, and it turns out he was right.

  Lucas gathers his tools, but he stops to glance at the bus one last time.

  “This is quite an accomplishment,” he says. He gives me a hug before he leaves, slapping both hands on my back.

  Then he’s gone.

  I step back to examine the work I touched up this morning.

  Quite an accomplishment.

  Hopefully it’s enough. I looked up Walt’s old friend, George Ibitson. He teaches private classes. All you have to do is submit a project for consideration.

  Or, in my case, a bus.

  On the left side I’ve painted the cabin — the same composition I used in last year’s canvas, the one Mr. Pires submitted to the magazine. Mr. Pires has been to the orchard a couple of times, actually, offering a few pointers.

  I circle to the far side of the bus, where I’ve painted the town of Creston, rising above patchwork fields. Everything’s there: brewery, orchard, school, Sam’s house, Canyon Street. Even the stolen pickup is hidden along a side road.

  But the work I’m most proud of waits at the front. The hood of the school bus.

  I stop when I get there and reach up my hand. I run my fingers over the fur, feeling the texture of the paint.

  It’s Hazel, running the way she did when she was half-grown, purely for the joy of it.

  She looks like she’s going to leap right off the metal.

  She would, too. Then she’d be right alongside me, anywhere I decided to drive.

  Thank you to the BC Arts Council for its financial support during the writing of this book.

  I owe a huge thanks to Shelley Tanaka and Groundwood Books for falling in love with Hazel. For reading multiple drafts, my endless gratitude to my agent Amy Tompkins and to fellow writers Rachelle Delaney, Kallie George, Christy Goerzen, Stacey Matson, Lori Sherritt-Fleming and Maryn Quarless. Shannon Ozirny, you have amazing psychic powers.

  Gordon and Shirley Lloyd and Sandy and Jason Racz read early drafts and continued to love me despite my incompetence. Min, Julia and Matthew managed to survive living with me through rewrites and revisions. You are all awesome.

  For help with Isaac’s homework, thank you to Michael Ward, professor and neighbor extraordinaire, who tells me that the answers are 4 and 2…unless I’ve misinterpreted the questions. Again.

  Finally, a big thank-you to those friends and family members who would prefer not to be named but happen to have expertise in the growing of marijuana, the keeping of bears and the design of squatters’ cabins in the woods.

  Tanya Lloyd Kyi is the author of more than twenty books for young readers, including Eyes and Spies and Anywhere but Here. She spent several childhood years in Crawford Bay near Isaac’s imaginary home, and while she didn’t live on a grow-op, there were plenty of habituated bears around. She has yet to forgive the one that wrecked her swing set.

  Tanya now lives in Vancouver with her husband and two children.

  Groundwood Books, established in 1978, is dedicated to the production of children’s books for all ages, including fiction, picture books and non-fiction. We publish in Canada, the United States and Latin America. Our books aim to be of the highest possible quality in both language and illustration. Our primary focus has been on works by Canadians, though we sometimes also buy outstanding books from other countries.

  Many of our books tell the stories of people whose voices are not always heard in this age of global publishing by media conglomerates. Books by the First Peoples of this hemisphere have always been a special interest, as have those of others who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible. Since 1998 we have been publishing works by people of Latin American origin living in the Americas both in English and in Spanish under our Libros Tigrillo imprint.

  We believe that by reflecting intensely individual experiences, our books are of universal interest. The fact that our authors are published around the world attests to this and to their quality. Even more important, our books are read and loved by children all over the globe.