by Jim Nisbet
Well, to smoke you need fire. That narrows it down to the last ten thousand years. There were tears in her eyes. She looked up into the motes of dust and smoke drifting among the sunbeams at the top of the barn, so the tears wouldn’t spill over her cheeks. Ten thousand years we’ve had fire. All you had to do was step outside this barn and you’d trip over an igneous rock that had been lying there for ten million years! She thought of a poem she’d studied in college by a guy called Gray.
The stones have come so far they cannot speak.
That was it, the whole poem. Errol Gray? She couldn’t remember the poet’s first name or the title either, but it was hard to forget his poem. It made her laugh. She’d come a mere twenty-four hours and was speechless—let alone, an entire geological age. At one with the rocks.
Why hasn’t the human race learned to be equally phlegmatic? Surely, nasty talk had destroyed more reputations that it had built? No? A dead heat?
But there was more to come.
“Goddamn,” Jedediah said. Hearing Harris’ name he took a step back from Scott. “This is bad medicine.” He looked like a politician who’s been told the baby he just kissed is an AIDS patient.
Scott and Eddie exchanged glances. Scott didn’t look so confident, anymore. His neat ponytail was drying in the heat and covered with dust, the collar of his shirt was soiled. A patch of moisture showed under each arm of his paisley shirt, and the back of it was wrinkled and damp, where his gun should have been, cooling his coccyx. Pretty sweaty, for such a dry climate. But Eddie looked directly at Jedediah and smiled, shaking his head. “What’s that crazy son of a bitch done now?” he said. “Something quaint and colorful?”
Jedediah’s lip curled in an ugly way. It was easy to see that Eddie’s breezy patter was getting under his skin. “You could say that. About sunrise he drove up that road as fast as his truck could stand the rocks. He fired a rifle out the cab window all the way from the front gate, spun around the yard a couple of times, sideswiped somebody’s Samurai and ran over a chicken. Then he locked up the brakes and before the truck had stopped moving he was on the ground raving about how he’d just spent the entire night fucking the best pussy he’d ever had, and was ready to take on any combination of dope dealing motherfuckers that wanted to fuck with him, and et cetera. Then he changed his mind and put the barrel of his own rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Snap.” Jed snapped his fingers. “It was empty.
“A fucking shame. Man, were we disappointed. He woke the whole place up. We’d been all night partying, and nobody had been passed out above a full hour. He just about started a war.”
Eddie tried to hold back, pretending he was relighting the pipe, but he laughed in Jed’s face, blowing a plume of smoke straight out in front of him. The laugh was a high-pitched cackle that, once started, he couldn’t seem to stop.
“Sounds like Eddie’s kind of guy,” Scott observed dryly.
Jedediah wasn’t amused. “Could be,” he said, staring stoically at Eddie, now bent double by a fit of coughing. “One guy in the barn, one of the oldest customers here, a man with a wife and family I’ve known for ten years, had a seizure of some kind. Two other dealers had to take him to the hospital.”
Eddie, who had just begun to get a grip on himself enough to stand up straight, again fell victim to the uncontrollable cackling. Several of the people around the barn stopped whatever they were doing to watch the spectacle.
“Whose shit is on that table over there?” one of them asked.
“You remember the number?” The second man raised his mirror sunglasses to consult a sheet of paper he pulled from his hip pocket.
“There’s a hospital around here?” Scott asked seriously.
“I think it was the reuter alles,” the second man said.
“No, there isn’t,” Jed said, “and he wouldn’t have gotten to it if there was one. We airlifted him to Spokane.”
“Airlifted him? In what?”
Jed gritted his teeth. “A crop duster,” he said quietly.
But Eddie heard him. His reddening face started to edge into blue. He clutched his stomach. “Oh stop,” he choked.
“They shaved his head and everything,” Jed added, glumly.
Eddie howled.
Scott’s cheek twitched. “You mean, like, a biplane? Canvas wings and baling wire and all that? What’s the matter, Mattie?”
Mattie had sagged against the table. Now she dropped the cola to the straw.
“Hey, shit!” Jed said. He scooped up the merchandise as gently as if it were alive.
“I don’t feel so swift,” Mattie said haltingly. “The smoke…”
She was extremely pale, all the blood had drained from her face. Scott caught her in his arms and gently sat her on a camp stool beside the table.
“There, there,” he said, massaging the back of her neck. “Drugs and money make us all nervous. Just put your head down, low, like that, get it below your heart, get some circulation going. That’s it. Can you take a couple of deep breaths? Maybe Jed has an amyl nitrite.”
By now Eddie had come up for some air himself. There were tear streaks down both his cheeks, which were rosy red. His mouth was still twisted into a big smile, and he held one side with both hands. “Oh,” he said, trying to look serious, “oh God, Dowd. You’re going to kill me.”
“Do tell,” Dowd said nastily.
Eddie was unperturbed. “So where in the hell is Tucker Harris? Did he feel bad enough to go to Spokane with your friend?” He choked down a laugh. “Or was it Seattle?”
Jedediah’s face darkened. “We canceled his permit,” he said evenly. “What he did was the single most uncool thing that’s ever happened at a Rendezvous.” He shifted his eyes toward Mattie. “At least, it had been, until you guys showed up.” He looked at Eddie. “Harris is out. Next year, no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, he won’t be able to find out where or even when the Rendezvous is taking place.”
Eddie’s amusement faded visibly.
“I mean, there was fifty or sixty of the biggest domestic pot distributors in North America here yesterday, right?” Jed shook his head. “I don’t know how well you know the dude, but I’ve known him since ’seventy, and I said then and I’m saying now, he’s the most self-destructive… Let me amend that. He’s the most self-defeating man I ever met in my life, bar none, and let me tell you, in ’seventy where we were you couldn’t have ordered up a bigger collection of losers from Sears-Roebuck.”
“Seventy. When you and Scott were in Vietnam.”
“Vietnam.”
Eddie looked from Jed to Scott to Jed again. “You knew Tucker Harris in Vietnam?”
“He was there.”
“With you guys?”
Jed shook his head. “Different outfit. We were just trying to survive. Harris was a lerp.”
“A lerp? What the fuck’s a lerp?”
Jed squinted at Eddie. “You weren’t there?”
“Hey, man,” Eddie said firmly, looking Jed right in the eye, “I was missing in action before there was any action. No way they were going to get me to that war. And they didn’t. It cost me a year in a joint. No offense,” he added acidly.
Jed hesitated. “None taken.”
“So a lerp is…?”
Jed sighed. “Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol. It was an exclusive occupation. Every outfit would have one around, if it could. Those guys were total loners. They’d spend a night, a week, ten days, two weeks way out front, behind enemy lines, feeling out the enemy strength. Gathering intelligence, it was called, but what it really did was turn any number of men’s brains into mush. These guys could only operate at night, obviously, even though they were in the jungle. They’d spend the days in holes or in trees, and if there was a snake in there to keep an eye on things while they slept, so much the better. It was real common for a guy like that to find himself in the middle of some kind of nocturnal slope maneuver, and have to spend an entire night and maybe the next day lying in
a hole full of water, covered with leeches, never moving, not even so much as breathing. That sounds rough to you and me and to most other people, but guys like Harris liked it. Guys like him would come back with exclusive information about enemy troop movement and a couple of fresh VC ears around their necks, just to prove they’d been there.”
Eddie made a face.
Mattie heard all of this, and it was too much for her. The dichotomy between what she’d experienced with Harris and what she now heard Jed telling Eddie about him wrenched her in ways she’d never thought possible, and her stomach sent a little bile up to her mouth, which she spit onto the straw between her boots.
“I could have sworn I’d tried that stuff just yesterday,” said the man, looking up from his list. He indicated Mattie with his chin. “Did it seem that strong to you?”
“No way, no way,” was the response, its voice suffused by wonder. “Maybe we should try it again.”
The man folded his list and agreed that maybe they should.
“Good,” Scott whispered. He looked up at Jed. “Maybe we should send for that crop duster,” he said hopefully.
Jed shook his head, serious. “Whatever it is,” he said, “she’ll have to work it out here, at least until tomorrow.”
“Come on, Jed,” Scott said in a low, urgent voice. “What if it’s—”
Jed cut him short. “Let’s take her up to the house,” he said, throwing a glance at the two dealers moving toward this scene with undisguised curiosity. “She can lie down up there while we work this out.”
Scott agreed and asked Mattie if she thought she could make it to the house. She nodded weakly, not taking her eyes off the small amount of yellow fluid glistening on the straw between her boots.
She felt she couldn’t let anyone see her face, her face would give it all away.…
“Hey, wait a minute,” Eddie protested. “This is the last day, no? We’ve got some decisions to make here.” With a gesture he indicated the wide selection of marijuana displayed around the barn.
Jedediah shook his head, tiredly. He’d been a squad leader in Vietnam and had had to make many difficult decisions there, many of them simultaneously, but the strain of running this Rendezvous was beginning to tell on him. “No,” he said firmly, making way for Mattie, but not moving to help Scott with her. “Not until I get this straightened out.”
“Hey, listen,” Eddie said with surprising forcefulness. “We drove nonstop for two days to get to this place, and if you—”
“I told you,” Jed said, turning on Eddie, “not until we get this straightened out. We’re a little short on verification, here.”
“Well how the hell are you going to do that? Harris is our sponsor.”
“Easy,” Jed said grimly. “I’m going to ask him.”
Mattie groaned aloud.
“It’s O.K.,” Scott tried to reassure her.
“No, it’s not,” she whined. All that brazen talk about hoping Jed would find out about Tucker Harris didn’t amount to a hill of beans, now. That was the last thing she wanted, whether she and Jed had anything going on or not.
Eddie looked surprised. “Ask him? He’s still here?”
“More or less.”
“Where?”
Jed leveled his eyes at Eddie and studied him for a long moment. “No harm,” he then said thoughtfully, “I reckon, in you knowing he’s still here. Here’s a big place.”
“You didn’t just throw him out on his ear?”
“Yeah, I did. But then I pinned him there.”
“Smart,” said Eddie. “Can’t let a guy like that run around loose after you’ve cut him off from making his living.”
Jed raised an eyebrow and sighed. “You can say that again. It’s a real pickle what to do with him. I don’t think keeping him on ice just till the Rendezvous is over is going to be enough. Threats won’t work on a guy like Harris. In fact, they tend to have an opposite effect. He sees a threat as a challenge.”
Eddie nodded. “Must be a handy guy to have around, in the right circumstances.”
Jed shook his head. “Not to my way of thinking. Spend as much time worrying about him as you do using him, and the rest of the time you spend staying out of his way. I wish I’d never heard of the man.”
By now Eddie and Jed were halfway between the barn and the house. Scott and Mattie had already gone inside.
“If it’s any consolation,” Eddie said, “we don’t endorse this Harris guy’s style. But still,” he added stubbornly, “he is our sponsor.”
Jed stopped walking. “Look—what’s your name?”
“Mertz. Eddie Mertz.”
“Mertz. Mertz, if it wasn’t for Scott there,” he nodded toward the house, “I wouldn’t give two shits about the two days you spent driving up here, even if it meant putting you where I guess I’m going to have to put Harris. Not your pleasant manner, nor even Mattie’s I might say unexpected appearance here, would sway me.”
Eddie waited. He could see that it had been a couple of days since Dowd had had time to shave.
“But since it is Scott Michaels you came with, and only because it’s him, I’m going to go a little further out of my way than I ordinarily would to make sure you are who you say you are.”
Eddie nodded. “I sympathize. But how are you going to do that?”
“I’m not sure. But what I am going to do is ride over to where Harris is and have a talk with him. It’s going to be a real subtle talk, too. He’s not even going to know what I’m there for, except maybe to kill him. And if in the course of this talk your name comes up, and if he somehow confirms that he is your sponsor, then, and only then, because you had the password, the book, and Scott Michaels with you, and Harris keyed you in, then, and only then are you going to get a crack at what you came here for. Got it?”
“Man,” said Eddie, shaking his head, “this seems a little onesided. That Harris is a wily son of a bitch.”
Eddie studied Jed. In the bright light his green eyes were quite visible through his squinted lids, in the shade of his hat. The weather on the dry side of Washington would always be a trial for Jed. His was the fair, delicate skin of certain redheaded rain-people, and the sun and wind chafed it. The ends of his waxed mustache fluttered slightly in the breeze. Faint hints of the music tinkling in the Winnebago came with the wind. A horse snorted and stamped his hoof in the corral.
Finally Jed said, “You think of another way?”
“Yeah,” said Eddie, ruffling his frizzy black hair and squinting myopically into the light. “I think there is an angle, here.”
Jed said nothing.
“Want to hear it?”
Jed looked away in silence. Eddie knew he couldn’t force the play. It all had to be up to Jed. He could see that Jed was a little overworked, and wondered if he was capable of compassing a new proposition, on top of all his other problems.
Eddie followed Jed’s gaze. They were looking west where, high and dim beneath the falling sun, they could see the silhouettes of the North Cascades, beyond the end of Lake Chelan, nearly a hundred miles away.
“Ever been up in the Wenatchee?” Jed asked after a moment.
“Fuck no,” Eddie said. “Ever been to the Tenderloin?”
“Jesus, yes,” Jed said, appalled, looking at Eddie.
“My kind of wilderness, what a wilderness,” Eddie smiled.
Jed shook his head and resettled his hat on it. He looked away, looked back. “What’s your angle?”
“It’s simple,” Eddie said. “You’d just as soon not kill Harris, right?”
Again Jed shook his head. “Man,” he sighed, “what I want is one thing, and what’s to be is another. There ain’t no way but that sooner or later somebody is going to kill him. It’s a study he’s made it this long.”
Eddie nodded impatiently. They might have been talking about a baseball team in a pennant race. “But, tell me the truth, it doesn’t have to happen here, and it just as well might be somebody else that does it, for s
ome other reason. Right? It’s only more heat.”
“That’s what it is. Heat.”
“Besides,” Eddie added, “you’re not the killing sort.”
Jed didn’t even flinch at the irony of this remark. After some experience in the matter, it was his opinion that if you were human, you were the killing sort. Eddie’s, too.
“Ah, right. Sorry. Here’s the deal. When you get to Harris, put it to him this way.” Eddie counted off points on his fingers. “He came here to buy dope and, in fact, we know he came here representing somebody else. Even if he has a piece of the action, he’s got other people in with him. People he doesn’t want to disappoint.”
“Right.”
“You, Jed, won’t allow Harris to come back down to the ranch and shop. That’s off limits and not negotiable, he’s eighty-sixed from here forever.”
“Good.”
“However, there’s a couple guys down to the ranch who heard of his predicament, and while they completely agree with you, Jed, and your decision, they don’t see why they can’t help old Tucker Harris out of a bind. Now, why would they want to do that?”
“Because they love him like a brother.”
“Really,” Eddie agreed. “But what if they owe him?”
Jed raised an eyebrow. “He sponsors them.”
Eddie nodded. “Right again. And for a small percentage…”
Jed smiled. “And for a small percentage…?”
“. . . On account of their loyalty to their sponsor, if he’ll agree to take whatever they buy for him, maybe he can suggest to you what grades et cetera he’s looking for, and how much he’s authorized to spend, less the percentage, they’ll make the buys for him.”