Текст книги "The Marijuana Chronicles"
Автор книги: Jonathan Santlofer
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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 13 страниц)
T
HAD
Z
IOLKOWSKI
is the author of
Our Son the Arson
, a collection of poems, the memoir
On a Wave
, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award in 2003, and
Wichita
, a novel. In 2008, he was awarded a fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His essays and reviews have appeared in the
New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, Artforum, Travel
&
Leisure
, and
Index
. He directs the writing program at Pratt Institute.
jacked
by thad ziolkowski
The rental’s GPS declares with satisfaction that I have reached my destination but all I can make out, along both sides of the road, is scrub and evergreens. Which might be funny if I weren’t so sleep deprived and cranky. With the canceled connecting flight in Salt Lake City, it’s taken two days to get here instead of one.
Assuming I’m here. Finally, in the shadow of a spruce (or fir or larch or whatever) I spot the mailbox and cattle gate my brother described. I get out of the car, unhitch the rope keeping the gate closed, walk the gate open, get back in the car, and drive through onto the dirt road on the far side. Then I get out and close the gate, rehitching the rope, and get back in the rental. At which point a phrase from Marx comes to mind: The idiocy of rural life.
The dirt road has a strip of mossy grass running up the center and seems cut into forest primeval. Ever since he quit following the Dead around, Justin has lived in outposts like this. We’ve seen each other three times over the past fifteen years and if I hadn’t visited him—once in Alaska, twice in Kauai—we likely wouldn’t have seen each other at all. But he’s eleven years my junior and I’ve always felt a parental sort of obligation to meet him more than halfway, to shrug off the unanswered e-mails and unacknowledged gifts. Until recently he’s been too broke, working in restaurants, then as an apprentice cabinetmaker, to afford trips to New York. (I’ll pass over in silence the bluegrass festival he somehow managed to attend in Kentucky.) But the fact is, I’ve been only marginally less poor myself all these years, endlessly adjuncting and paying off student loans, and I’ve gradually gotten fed up with the asymmetry of things between us.
As the car crests a rise, the house appears swathed in fading milky sunlight, a modern two-story, familiar from photos, the wide rolling lawn and guest cottage. Half a dozen pickups and cars are parked in the upward-sloping driveway. A barn in the distance, a greenhouse. Dirt bikes and an ATV in the side yard. I know how recent and precarious this prosperity is, but seeing the spread in person releases a shot of envy mixed with something like shame that prickles my cheeks unpleasantly. The contrast with my monastic room in the group loft on Manhattan’s Avenue D is just too stark. I’m possessed by an impulse to back down the driveway and slip away before I’m noticed, somehow call the whole thing off from afar.
But Justin emerges grinning from the two-car garage. He’s cut short his long hair and shaved off his beard and looks, in T-shirt and jeans and work boots, younger than thirty-five but more plausibly proprietary. Getting out of the rental to greet him, I smile through my baser emotions and as we embrace they fall away—for the most part. Holding him, feeling the physical reality of his shoulders and back and head, is soothing and bracing in an elemental way I can’t seem to retain between visits. Which is the point of visits, especially now: our mother is dead, our brother, Justin’s father. We’re all that’s left of our immediate family.
“Man, sorry about the canceled flight,” he says. “What a drag!”
“Not at all—I got to hang in decadent Salt Lake City for the night.”
He laughs in the coughing way he has, meanwhile pulling back to search my face. “Hey, wanna check out the garden before it gets dark?”
“Not really.”
He stands squinting at me uncertainly.
“Jesus, I’m kidding!” I say. “Of course I want to see your precious garden!”
Justin delivers a half-speed martial arts kick to my rib cage and I’m reminded that if he winds up going to prison he’ll be able to defend himself. He leads the way to the acreage behind the house and a pair of Australian sheep dogs I also know from photos falls into step with us—handsome but on the small, mellow side for guard dogs, at least compared to the New York pit bulls I’m used to. Irrigation lines run along ground littered with white plastic buckets, torn bales of hay, shovels, pitchforks.
We come to a kind of signboard affixed with what turns out to be ten or so medical marijuana certificates, each in its own plastic envelope: Patient, Caregiver, Registry Number, State Seal. They look like play money. The plants themselves are just beyond, enormous, bushy things wrapped in green plastic skirts, the bud-heavy stalks held aloft by lengths of twine tied to stakes. Beyond the pot, the forest primeval again, where night has already fallen.
It’s obvious at a glance that there’s more here than these notional ten patients could smoke in a lifetime, which I knew was the deal, but the surplus is so flagrant that my surprise must show.
“It’s the backbone of the local economy, so the sheriff’s not gonna touch it,” Justin says. “And the feds are busting people with forty thousand plants, not forty.”
I nod as if reassured, but to my big-brother ears this sounds pat, like someone else’s words.
“Mold and thieves is what you worry about,” Justin says now, as if to add realist heft. I follow along as he makes a quick tour of the patch, pointing out the stumps of ten plants harvested a week ago.
“What about those thieves?” I ask. There’s no perimeter fence that I can see. In addition to being suddenly colder, it’s also gotten spooky out here, evergreens in thrusting, spiky silhouette against the midnight-blue sky, psychedelic foliage whispering in a rising breeze. Relatively small or not, this patch must be worth over a million. Past my mind’s eye flickers an image of Mexican cartel soldiers slipping balaclavas over their heads.
“Yeah, well, motherfuckers love to jack right about now, when you’ve done all the backbreaking work and it’s ready to harvest.” He lifts his chin at a pup tent I hadn’t noticed. “That’s why I post somebody out here every night.”
“Armed?”
“Just with a cell phone. I don’t allow guns on the property.”
“That’s a relief.” Or is it? How does he impose his no-guns rule on gunslingers?
The highest buds are so tall that he has to stand on tiptoe to reach their drooping, bristling tips. If I were a pothead, I’d be salivating, but I have if anything an aversion to the cannabis high, which tends to maroon me in my own head. Tenderly thumbing back leaves, Justin peers at a bud through a kind of jeweler’s loop.
“The sugary hairs are made up of what they call tricomes—a bit like shrooms. Here.” He has me take a peek but all I can see in the dim light is something like blurred rice vermicelli.
“You want all your trikes to be cloudy; none clear,” he explains, as if partly to himself, peering through the loop again. “With the right ratio, amber mixed in with cloudy. Leaving them up for a single day can make a subtle but big difference.”
He steps back and surveys the plot. “These are coming down tomorrow.” His tone is so momentous I nearly let out a laugh. But I’ve never rolled the dice on anything of this magnitude. If the quality of the pot and therefore his reputation ride on this decision, I guess he has every right to be solemn.
And with that we turn back toward the house, all of whose windows are now cozily lit. Trotting ahead, the dogs seem as relieved as I am to be leaving the ominous outdoors behind.
The living room is cluttered with sleeping bags and knapsacks. The scent of high-grade weed hangs like incense in the air but vaporizers are the new bong and the air isn’t smoky. The crew of trimmers, ranging from teenaged to grizzled, sits at a long wood table in the center of which is a pile of dried pot. Placing a hand on my shoulder, Justin says, “Hey everybody, this is my brother Darius, all the way from New York!”
“The Big Apple!” a guy calls out as if it’s a password, though it’s something only tourists ever say—some crass, Tammany Hall–era image of plenitude and opportunity, “action.”
There’s the usual slightly puzzled smiles as they look from me to Justin and back. We have different fathers and bear little obvious resemblance to each other. They call out greetings and wave, then Justin points to each one and tells me his or her name—Jai, Toph, etc.—which I’m too tired to bother trying to keep straight.
Justin’s new girlfriend is tending a cauldron of ratatouille in the kitchen. I know her name is Serena and she makes jewelry but I’ve yet to see a photo of her. It turns out that she looks enough like our mother at thirty that I stand frowning as she delightedly sets aside a wooden spoon and comes forward to give me a long, tight hug.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she whispers in my ear. “Justin really needs you right now.”
A bit annoyed at her presumption, I pull back and smile insipidly into her soulful gaze until, with what seems like a sigh of slight disappointment, she releases me to Justin, who shows me to a bedroom down the hall, where his two kids by a former girlfriend must stay on their visits, given the bunk bed and stuffed animals and Nerf guns.
He asks whether I want to crash for a bit and I answer by flopping backward onto the lower bunk. I’m expecting to plummet into sleep but once my eyes are shut I start counting money: Justin’s paying me twenty-five dollars an hour to trim. I have no idea how much I can do, but I’m hoping to clear a grand, which will put a small dent in my credit card and student loan debt. But with the canceled flight, my earning time has been reduced from five days to four.
I find a bathroom down the hall, take an overdue piss, splash cold water on my face, and go back to the trimming station, where Justin, giving guard-duty instructions to a young, rather stoned-looking guy, points out a pot of coffee and a free chair next to Dolly, a middle-aged woman wearing a tricorn pirate’s hat. The scene is more festive now, with beers being cracked open and the carbs of vaporizors loaded with one or another strain of Justin’s weed.
Billy, a young guy Justin met in Kauai and seems to have made his factotum, waxes on to no one in particular about how grateful he is to have been brought into the business, being able to help all the “patients” who need their “medicine”; it sure beats working in restaurants, though of course everything can get boring if you do it enough times, even giving massages to the cheerleading squad. At which point Justin sends him out to guard the garden for the night and I’m spared any more of the kid’s soft-porn philosophizing.
I watch Dolly’s chubby hands, the left holding a bud of kush and rotating it while the right snips rapidly away at the stems using short-sheered scissors with orange finger-grips. “You basically give ’em a haircut.” She holds the trimmed bud up for my inspection. “He’s in the army now!”
“So he’s going back to Afghanistan,” I say.
“Ha-ha!” she laughs after a beat. “Your brother’s funny!” she calls to Justin.
“So you’re a professor?” Josh or maybe Jai asks me from across the table.
“Sort of,” I say, starting in on a bud with my own pair of scissors. “I’m an adjunct professor.”
“What’s that?”
“A part-time fool,” I say with no more than the usual bitterness, but in this mild, agrarian company it sounds jarringly harsh. They stare at me blinkingly. Well, let them run around the city between two or three colleges for a decade, too worn down to publish and with no hope now of getting a tenure-track job. The only reason I’m “free” to be here is that one of my classes was canceled at the last second.
“Better than a full-time fool!” says a Deadhead Methuselah in a knit rasta cap. He barks out a laugh as if he’s startled himself with his own wit, then repeats the remark a few times lest anyone fail to savor it.
For a while I work well enough on coffee and cinnamon toast, and when that no longer stokes my brain fires I begin sniffing around for something stronger. Every month on payday I treat myself to a mingy half-gram from my dealer Richard or one of the local coke bodegas if Richard doesn’t pick up and I have a nose for who’s holding. As it turns out, no one is, but the verging-on-gaunt girl in the corner has a prescription bottle full of Adderall. She waves away my offer to pay for half a dozen and I’m soon buzzing along more or less oblivious to the tedium.
As people begin dragging themselves off to sleep, Justin pulls up a chair and trims alongside me. How he stays up I’m not sure—sheer drive to see the harvest through, from what I can tell. Dropping the finished buds into a Rubbermaid tub labeled Willie’s Wonder, we chat about this and that until he broaches the inevitable subject of our mother, who died of a staph infection in Hawaii three years ago, just when Justin was getting his pot plantation underway.
“I just wish she could’ve been here for a harvest,” he says quietly, though the other trimmers are listening to music on earbuds and can’t hear us.
“She’d be so proud of you, man,” I say.
Justin lets his head fall forward and his shoulders heave.
“She would have cooked for everyone round the clock,” I say, rubbing his back with resin-sticky hands, “and trimmed until she got carpal tunnel.”
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he nods. “I know.”
“And she probably would’ve wanted to be one of the runners too.”
“She would have, wouldn’t she?” he says, brightening.
“Which would’ve been brilliant, because who’d suspect a seventy-year-old lady?”
“Or a professor,” he adds with a wink.
“Yeah, right.”
We lapse into silence, each missing her in our own way, or perhaps in exactly the same way, who knows? Then Justin heads off to his room with Serena in tow and I’m left in the company of a few fellow speed-eaters.
As dawn breaks outside, Serena reappears bearing a large wooden jewelry display box. She’s making everyone gifts to commemorate the harvest. She has a few of the sort of silver heavy-metal rings I’ve secretly liked but have never even tried on, and I pick out a molten-looking one.
“Your hands are shaking,” she says, slipping the ring on my finger. She goes into kitchen and comes back with a mug of what looks and smells like herbal tea but almost certainly has some cannabis infusion mixed into it. I’m too whacked to care. “This will steady you up.” And it does.
Then in comes Billy-from-Kauai. He looks shaken but I don’t know him well enough to be sure.
“Billy, what’s up?” Serena asks.
He has trouble catching a breath. “Where’s Justin?” he says finally.
“Justin’s in bed. What’s up?”
“We got jacked!”
“Jacked? Where were you?”
“I was asleep!”
“Oh, Billy!”
“Where’s Justin, man?”
Serena rushes into the back of the house, followed by Billy, and they reemerge seconds later led by Justin, who runs out the back door with a pistol in his hand.
“Justin!” I shout, but if he hears me he doesn’t show any sign of it and is rumbling down the stairs to the ground floor. After a stoned pause to gather my wits, I go after them but make a wrong turn and wind up on the driveway in front of the house, and when I run around to the back and the garden, Justin and the other two have had a quick look at the scene of the crime and driven off with a snarl I can hear from where I stand looking at the stumps of the thirty plants. I call him on my cell phone but he’s not picking up.
Dolly and the Deadhead Methuselah join me. “Oh my God!” wails Dolly, and her tricorn slips off her head.
Methuselah covers his eyes with both hands. “Holy shit!” But there’s an undercurrent of excitement in their reaction too, the schadenfreude of hired hands.
“Well, he told us they were coming down today …” Dolly says, shaking her head.
“He just didn’t say who was cutting ’em down,” Methuselah finishes for her. Crouching bandy-leggedly, he points to sweeping marks in the dirt. “Look, they drug ’em off this way!”
We follow the trails to the edge of the woods, which have an innocent state-park character in the morning light.
Methuselah says, “I told him: put up a fence or leave the dogs tied up out here. Or both!”
“Didn’t want to listen,” Dolly says. At which point the dogs saunter up. “Where the fuck were you?” The dogs wag their tails happily at the acknowledgment.
“Folks live in these woods,” Methuselah explains, squinting into piney shadows crosscut with dim bars of sunlight.
“Sort of half-hippie, half-Deliverance,” Dolly adds.
A bit like you two, I think.
When Justin, Billy, and Serena get home it’s late afternoon. Most of the trimmers have left. Justin dismisses the rest, including Dolly and Methuselah, who have been doing more smoking and jabbering than working anyway.
“Okay,” Justin tells us in the kitchen. “We need to go to Plan B now.”
“Which is what?” I ask. Serena and Billy look just as clueless. “And where’s the gun?”
Justin lifts the hem of his T-shirt: it’s tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
“Give it to me,” I say, and to my surprise he hands it over. I just want to get it away from him but I find I like the feel of it. Engraved on the barrel in stylized letters: Glock.
“Plan B,” Justin says, “is we sell the trimmed weed to folks we have in Denver and Detroit, pay off people we owe, and do a quick indoor grow to recoup the loss from the jacking. And I want Billy to make the run.”
Even Billy the fuck-up looks stunned.
“Billy deserves a chance to redeem himself,” Justin says.
Serena is staring pleadingly at me but there’s no need.
Two days later I’m driving into Denver with ten pounds in the trunk, triple-bagged, vacuum-sealed, wrapped in newspaper, and buried under sacks of organic fruit. After Denver, Detroit; and after Detroit, New York, the Big Apple.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This collection is comprised of works of fiction, with the exception of the nonfiction essays by Raymond Mungo and Rachel Shteir. In the fiction stories, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Akashic Books
Illustrations by Jonathan Santlofer, except where noted
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