by Jim Nisbet
Truly, nothing—no one—is as it or he seems, today.
About ten feet before they reached the barn door Eddie cleared his throat, brought up a wad of phlegm, and hawked it loudly into the dust.
Mattie was so distracted by this obviously boorish display on the part of an otherwise polite man that she ran right into Scott, who had stopped abruptly in front of her.
“Oh, by the way,” he said, reaching behind him with one hand and grabbing a handful of Mattie’s hip. They both jumped. “Oh, excuse me,” he said, turning with a smile, not too quickly withdrawing his hand.
“You’re supposed to get my phone number first, turisto.”
“I just,” Scott smiled sweetly, reaching under his shirt-tail, “wanted to point out that I’m packing iron, Jed.” A pistol appeared in his hand as he said this, a big one, clean and well-worn. Mattie could see where the bluing had worn off its short barrel. Blistered, off its short barrel.
“Eek,” she said, even though Scott displayed the weapon in the flat of his hand, with its butt away from him. “You can’t have my phone number,” thinking, guns now? And then, she realized, no wonder he wasn’t worried about Jake Macbee, back in the cafe.…
Scott smiled thinly at Jed. “No offense.”
“.357 Mag,” Jed said, looking at the gun. His eyes leveled with Scott’s. “That’s a cop’s gun.”
“If you’re a cop.” Scott’s smile got a little bigger.
Jed pursed his lips. “Glad you mentioned it.” He turned and pulled open the barn door. Strange odors and the hum of talk met them. “There’s a check stand,” he said, “right before the metal detector.”
Metal detector?
The barn door was one of a pair, high and wide enough for two men to pass through it sitting horses. Just inside stood a rectangular frame with wires coming off it and a green electric sign over the top of it that read, READY. A man dressed as a cowboy dozed in an aluminum lawn chair beside it. His hat was down over his eyes and a Winchester 94 lay across his lap.
“What,” Eddie remarked, “no Uzi?”
“Curly’s a one-slug kinda guy,” Jed said quietly. “No need to wake him. He was up all night.”
Him, too, Mattie thought, glancing nervously at Curly, how considerate to let him sleep. Now there were two guns.
“Just put the piece in this box, here. You’ll get it back when you leave for good.”
Jed slid a cardboard Dos Equis carton out from under the seat of the lawn chair. It was about half full of gun butts and barrels. Scott added his to the pile.
Lots of guns.
“One at a time, please,” Jed said, sliding the box back under Curly. “Wait for the light.” He watched as Scott passed through the metal detector, then Eddie, then Mattie. Mattie’s passage set the thing off. It squealed loudly.
She’d set them off a time or two before, in airports, and it was always embarrassing. But this time she turned and vented a little spleen.
“You wanna frisk me now,” she said to Jed over her shoulder, and then added, venomously, “for the first time?”
Scott and Eddie discreetly continued on as if they’d heard nothing.
Jedediah’s redheaded sunburn went redder and as he walked past her. “No, ma’am. I can see by the close fit of those clothes it’s that rodeo belt buckle set that thing off.”
“I’m surprised you noticed,” she said icily.
To no avail. Jed kept walking.
She followed him straight down the middle of the barn, and it was a strange sight to see.
The barn had a dirt floor covered in fresh straw. That accounted for one odor, slightly tinged by the varied smells of cow and horse manure, and occasionally the sharp reek of fermenting chicken droppings. But stronger, sweeter, much more pungent odors prevailed, ranging from the essence of fresh mint to the stench of burning rope. The place was a riot of odors, but it positively reeked of dope.
The stalls had been converted to booths, and on three sides of the barn were exhibits, consisting of a few boards over sawhorses, in some cases simple tables, draped with identical beige bedsheets right off the supermarket shelf. Each booth had a shirt cardboard with a number pinned to the cloth, counting from #1 to the left of the metal detector clockwise around the barn floor to #37 to the right of it. Six or eight men and women were dispersed singly or in pairs around the interior, some talking, some smoking, some doing both. Curtains of smoke hung in the light slanting down from the clerestory at the top of the barn.
They walked slowly, browsing. On each table were two or three aluminum pie tins, cigarette papers, matches, and ashtrays. In every pie tin was a different kind of marijuana. Behind each pie tin was a stack of computerized forms that displayed all kinds of information about the marijuana in its respective tin.
Specimen # 4
Seed stock Michuacán
Grown Humboldt County
Generation 4th
Gender Sinsemilla
Drying/Curing SloDri, No Cure
% THC:: Dry Weight 14-19%
Graded? Check
Packaging Colas; buds; clean shake.
Quantities 10 lbs & up, @ from $2700.
Discounts? Negotiable
Availability Thanksgiving
References Ref. 326-B
Comments: 22: Killer Euphoria, sweet taste.
17: Can’t work on it; bouquet & taste excellent.
9: Best taste. Great for sex.
31: Love thy neighbor. Turbo.
5: Compare with 17, 19, 28.
Will go fast.
This particular brand had a discreet SOLD OUT placard on top of the stack of stat sheets, with an index card labeled Alternates. Four alphanumeric codes similar to the “References” were listed on it, in differing hands and inks.
Mattie had hardly any idea at all what these statistics meant, but she gradually realized that she was standing on the premises of what amounted to a marijuana trade show of no mean scope.
Well, hell, she thought to herself, big deal, my boyfriend’s a pot dealer. And, she noted with a twinkle, so are all his friends. Well, well. At least he’s not running the Aryan Brotherhood, or bootlegging hydroponic cadaver parts, or something.
Of course, this is illegal. Isn’t it?
A little tension eased out of her, a fatigue replaced it. So all the secrecy, the cars, and the extra people stand explained.
So far as she could see, all that remained to be resolved was Jed’s attitude.
As she passed people who stood talking before various exhibits she heard terms like bouquet, sinse, hydrocannabinol, sexing, stick, flue cure, maristemming, cornfield, water table, whitefly damage, and Wow. A few nodded pleasantly. Others seemed to have a knack of having their backs turned whenever she looked their way. These people, they were not all men, she assumed were buyers. Some dressed like city people, businessmen in slacks and polo shirts even, and a couple who had to be together dressed matching fancy western, in expensive iguana hide riding boots and pricey Stetsons with concho hatbands. Another wore a very expensive Rolex wristwatch and a couple of gold chains beneath his $200 pineapple shirt, another quite a bit of silver and turquoise rings and bracelets. None of them seemed particularly to be espousing the products of any one booth but rather to be connoisseurs. One buyer held parts of plants up to the light to study them through a hand-held magnifying lens. Others rolled samples into cigarettes, which they then studiously smoked. Oddly, most of them would take one or two fastidious puffs, then extinguish the reefer. Obviously these people weren’t in here just to get stoned. She caught up with her little party.
“. . . some operation,” Scott was saying approvingly.
“It’s a fucking theme park,” Eddie agreed.
“We’ll move about twenty thousand pounds this year,” Jed said. “Maybe more, maybe less.”
Scott whistled softly. “Jesus, Jed. What’s an average pound?”
“Well, we get it up every year. We try to eliminate the shake sellers. Of course, we’
ll move shake for the better growers, but, on the whole, I guess the cheapest pound here goes for fifteen hundred dollars.”
Scott frowned. “That’s—”
“Thirty million a year,” Eddie said, crumbling a bud into the bowl of a small brass pipe.
Scott looked at him in awe. “Really?”
Eddie raised his eyebrows and gently tamped the bowl with his forefinger. “Minimum.”
Jed nodded. “For the growers, that might be so. We take a very small percentage of that.”
“Mm-hmm,” Eddie said, snapping the flame of a Bic lighter.
Scott looked around the room. “What do you do with all these samples, when it’s over?”
Jed shrugged. “Smoke them. Give them away.”
Eddie puffed happily.
Scott smiled, as if in wonder.
“It’s kind of a perk. Of course, some flavors are more popular than others.”
“How does it work?”
“Each year, a committee selects a site, arranges the transportation and communication. Another committee screens growers and crops.”
“That must be kind of hectic.”
“Well, it can be. The sampling and selection and transport all necessarily have to take place toward the end of the season, just after harvest, when the growers have some kind of product to show for themselves. And that’s when security is worst. It’s only when it’s in the barn or safely out of your life, in the hands of your middleman, that you know you have something to sell. A lot can happen between the seed and the high.”
“Man,” said Eddie, exhaling a thick, fragrant smoke, “you got a witness.”
“You never handle the stuff,” said Scott.
“No way. There’s enough smoke in this barn to keep me in jail for awhile, but there’s no dope for sale, here. Nobody walks in or out of here with anything more than a sheet of paper with a few figures on it and a good buzz. This is just a showroom.”
“Hey, come off it, Jed,” Scott said. “This ain’t exactly an innocent scene, here.”
Jed smiled and shrugged. “Bernie says, pay up front, then just leave it to him.”
“Bernie from Seattle?” Eddie asked.
“Bernie from Seattle.”
“Bernie, the attorney.”
“Bernie, the attorney.”
Eddie nodded. “Good lawyer.”
“I wouldn’t know. Never needed him.”
“Oh,” said Scott, “just last year he sprung…”
Jed held up his hands. “I don’t want to know.”
Scott nodded slowly. “Right.”
“So,” said Jed, “how’s your budget?”
“Ah,” said Scott derisively, “we’re only authorized to about thirty grand.”
“What’s the market?”
“Two guys putting up, half each; they sit on it for almost the entire year, then sell it dear in the dry season. Mostly through lots of little guys.”
“Kind of a Mom and Pop operation,” Jed said.
“Actually,” Eddie cheerfully volunteered, “it’s a dyke consortium.”
Jed looked at Eddie. “Frisco.”
Eddie smiled around the stem of the pipe. “What a town, what a town…”
Jed stared at Eddie a moment. Then he addressed Scott. “Pricey?”
“Not too,” Scott said. “Middle-to-upper-middle class customers. Type that split an ounce of Maui Wowie four ways for Christmas.”
“Four couples, ten days, condo, Squaw Valley, kind of Christmas,” Eddie added, apparently for clarification. He scratched his head vigorously, lost interest, swiped at the air in front of him as if trying to catch a fly, and dropped the pipe, still smoking.
“Shit,” he said stupidly.
“Damn, watch it, man,” Scott said irascibly, quickly stooping to retrieve the pipe.
Jed smiled, unperturbed. “Pretty good?”
Eddie bugged his eyes, closed them, bugged them again. “Do you have a fetal chamber here?” he asked huskily. “I’d like to go back to the womb, get a few things straight with Mom.…”
Jed looked annoyed.
“Guy’s susceptible,” Scott explained, watching Jed stamp the smoldering coal left in the straw by the pipe. “Best field man I know. A walking litmus test.”
“How much is this shit?” Eddie asked.
“Read the printout,” Jed said. “Behind you.”
Eddie picked it up, raised his glasses onto his forehead, and squinted at it. “A mere three grand a pound, minimum five pound lots,” he muttered. “After ten, goes down to twenty-seven fifty.” He replaced the sheet on the table. “If we went for ten we’d get the discount and save almost enough for an eleventh.”
Scott was thoughtful. “Hmmm…”
“Which reminds me,” Jed said. “I have to briefly tend to the records. Who loaned you the Verlaine?”
Mattie, who had been listening closely to this conversation without understanding all of it, sensed the importance of this question. She was reading a printout at the next table, with her back turned to the three men.
“Ahm,” Scott said, “I’m not sure of the protocol.”
“They didn’t tell you anything?”
“We have our own little system, a double blind. Eddie knows some and I know some, but neither of us knows everything the other knows. Get it?”
“What do you think this is,” Jed said disgustedly, “a fucking James Bond novel?”
“Hey, Jed. Take it easy. You run your business and we’ll run ours.”
“Tell him.” Eddie wrinkled his forehead to make his glasses fall back down onto his nose as he replaced the stat sheet on the pile on the table. The glasses didn’t come down, however, and he continued to wrinkle his face without results, except for comic ones. “He’s not gonna like it anyway.”
Scott got serious. “How’s that?”
“Look around,” Eddie said, wrinkling his face. “He’s not here.”
Scott looked around. “You sure?”
Eddie shrugged. “He might be in the fetal chamber.”
“There is no such goddamn chamber,” Jed said irritably.
Eddie shrugged. “So we’re not at Club Med.”
“Who loaned you the Verlaine?”
“Great,” said Scott. “So much for the double blind.”
“Ah look, gentlemen,” Jed said testily. “There’s an issue here. Without its resolution we proceed no further.”
“The other half of our endorsement has apparently failed to arrive,” Scott said. “He isn’t here to back us.”
“So let me figure it out. Tell what you know.”
“Well,” Eddie said, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, least of all about Jed’s threatening tone, “we have the Verlaine.”
“And it’s the right Verlaine,” Scott chimed in. “The ISBN number ends in 298-4.”
“Really?” Eddie said, looking surprised. “That counts for something?”
Scott started to shake his head, smothered a smile, and nodded. “Check it out.”
Eddie dug the book out of his pocket and had a look. “Well I’ll be dipped.” He handed it to Jed. Jed looked at the cover, then opened it and studied the back of the title page. “O.K.,” he said. He closed the book and handed it back to Eddie. “So far so good.”
“And my favorite poem,” Eddie continued, placing a hand on his breast, “is, and has always been, Clair de Lune.” None of them was paying attention to Mattie, who, dreading the entire topic of Verlaine, now gave a visible start at the name of this poem. Eddie pointed at Scott. “It’s his favorite, too.”
Mine too, thought Mattie, feeling a little faint.
“That’s just peachy, Mr. Eddie,” Jed said.
Eddie smiled. “I thought we were in apple country.”
I should be home right now, thought Mattie, canning them for Jesus.
“And…?” Jed said expectantly to Scott. “We’ve got rules. The fact that I know you means exactly nothing. Verlaine’s good, the poem’s good
, the ISBN number’s good. Who’s the sponsor?”
“Well,” Scott said tentatively, “what about the girl…?”
Mattie felt as if all eyes shifted momentarily to her, though they didn’t.
Jed’s tone dismissed this casual connection without so much as considering it. “Forget her,” he said sternly. “Who’s the sponsor?”
Scott shrugged and rolled his eyes at Eddie.
Eddie continue to smile. “Tucker Harris,” he said.
Chapter Eleven
MATTIE HAD BEEN CAUGHT OUT BEFORE, BUT NOT LIKE THIS. She might have been snorting freon naked on Mt. Baker in January, and not felt so exposed. It was bad enough that Jedediah was up to his ears in dope, and that her discovery of it would undoubtedly lead to the end of their relationship; it already had. There could be no future for them. This was several years before the popularization of the concept of the “need-to-know basis” as regards secrets and secrecy, and Mattie’s thinking at the time was that if it was true Jedediah hadn’t trusted her before, then it would be equally true that she would never trust him again. So, in one day, she’d lost her job, her Siamese fish, and her boyfriend. There remained only for something bad to happen to her pickup truck, and the circle of woe would be complete. But now things had taken a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse. Jedediah had given her one fairly solid excuse to drop him like a hot rock; but if Tucker Harris were around, and given to bragging of his exploits (which in her experience of men she had no reason to believe he wouldn’t do), then by the lights of male logic Jedediah would have a good reason to shoot her and then drop her like a hot rock, into some deep ravine. Mattie was mortified at this unforeseen prospect, whence loomed the detestable moral specter of a fleeting good time ruining her life forever, even before the hangover had lifted. It seemed impossible, inconceivable, that all four of these men knew each other, and that they might meet within the four walls of this room momentarily, long before she’d recovered enough from the shock of the possibility to prepare any kind of defense, if such a defense were even imaginable. While pretending to closely inspect a marijuana cola as big as her arm she was thinking, goddamn these wayward chromosomes and this goddamn tiny deserted world we live in, where everybody, apparently, knows everybody. The buds in the cola had a purplish brown tinge to them, flecked with gold, and smelled powerfully. She wondered whose idea it had been to smoke this stuff in the first place. Or, for that matter, to make rope out it. Which came first: the rope or the smoke? Pragmatism, or disembodied flight?