Budding Prospects (44 page)

After the smoke had been around three times, I found myself concentrating on the big trimmed cola that lay before me on the coffee table like one of those toy evergreen trees you get with model-railroad kits. It was worth, roughly, a hundred and fifty dollars. We’d grown it from nothing, from a seed you could barely see, from a speck of lint. Entranced by the marvel of it, I lifted the cola from the table as a diamond buyer might have lifted a gem from the tray, slowly turning it over in my hands. It was stiff as a bottle brush, the rich dark green of it touched here and there with the gold and white of the tiny stigmas. I exhaled and wiped my brow. Gesh was smiling serenely. The smoke was smooth, slightly sweet and minty, and as good as or better than what we’d been sampling in the field over the course of the past six weeks. I felt a rush of pride, discovering in that instant the exultation of the creator, the nurturer, the husbandman with the prize pumpkin: we’d done it.

“What do you think?” Gesh asked.

I didn’t need to consult Dowst for this one. I raised myself in the chair, astral specks and phantom amoebae floating unchecked through my field of vision. “It’s ready,” I said.

The final phase of the harvesting process—separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were—commenced immediately. We rose as one from our seats and threw open the windows, cut the thermostat, and unplugged the fans and space heater. Then we lifted down the skeletal plants, removed the flowering tops and arranged them on a folding aluminum banquet table I nastily set up in the middle of the front room, and fed the rest—leaves, branches and the horny fibrous stems that looked like the lower legs of storks or spoonbills—into the fireplace. (This gave rise to a steady spew of viscous black smoke that poured from the chimney for two days, casting an industrial pall over the neighborhood and twice prodding my landlord out of the garage with a garden hose.) After sampling another bud or two—purely for analytical purposes—we sent out for beer, turned up the music, sharpened our scissors and sat down to the tedious business of manicuring the tops.

Early next morning, Gesh called Rudy. I didn’t like Rudy—didn’t like the way he looked, didn’t like his locker-room humor and half-witted street talk, and especially didn’t like his connection with Jones. But Rudy, dealer in stimulants and sedatives, was going to do us a service. For five dollars an hour and all he could smoke, he was going to help us trim, weigh and bag our lovely top-grade sinsemilla, and then he was going to take our share on consignment at $1,400 a pound and peddle it to his clientele. We would take a beating to the tune of $200 a pound, but we figured it was well worth it to avoid the hassle of having to unload the stuff ourselves.

Rudy came sniffing up the stairs like a bloodhound. His eyes bulged as if under some abnormal internal pressure—as if there were something alive in there trying to get out—and the boneless dollop of flesh that passed for his nose was twitching in agitation. Under his right arm, cradled like an attenuated football, he carried an Ohaus triple-beam scale in a paper sack. “Hey man, how the fuck you doing?” he said, clapping Gesh’s shoulder with a hand shriveled like a bird’s claw. He greeted Phil with a “What’s happening?” and nodded at me in passing.

“Holy Christ,” he said, pushing his way into the living room, “what are you guys trying to do here with all this shit—get yourselves busted or what?” He hovered over the fire, warming his hands. Beside him, stacked up like cattle fodder, was the dross we’d yet to burn. “You know it smells like there’s a truck-load of pot on fire out there?”

I knew. My landlord, eager to inquire into certain disturbing phenomena (such as the irregular hours I was keeping, the prodigious belch of black smoke emanating from the chimney and the five-day period during which the oil burner never shut down), had cornered me half an hour earlier as I was coming up the front steps with a grease-stippled bag of fried wonton. He’d traded in the yarmulke for a faded Giants cap, from the nether margin of which a band of hair the color and texture of an Airedale’s projected at a peculiar angle. “I am not sleeping last night,” he said, delivering this information as if it were momentous, revolutionary, as if he were announcing the discovery of a new planet or the cure for cancer. I told him I was sorry to hear that. He peered at me questioningly out of his black
perplexed eyes, and I had the feeling he was sizing me up, trying to reconcile his memory of me with the wild-eyed apparition standing before him. It was as if he weren’t altogether sure I wasn’t an imposter.

“So,” he said suddenly, glancing up at the fuming blanket of smoke that flew up from the roof as from the depths of a refinery, “you are cold? With open window?” Just then I caught a whiff of it, a smell reminiscent of rock festivals in packed concert halls. “The fire, you mean?” He nodded. A few months ago I would have made an effort, I would have soothed him with a flurry of apologies, promises and plausible lies—but now I found that I just couldn’t muster the energy. Instead, I ducked my head, gave him a grief-stricken look and told him we were burning my mother’s mementoes in accordance with her last wishes. “You know,” I added, “photo albums, diaries, old seventy-eights of the Andrews Sisters and whatnot.” He cleared his throat respectfully and told me I had one month to get out.

For all his loudmouthing, though, Rudy didn’t seem especially concerned. Smoke was smoke, and who was to say we weren’t burning sandalwood or green mesquite—or creosote telephone poles, for that matter? He knew it as well as we did. Unless you walked up the block thinking pot, you’d never notice a thing. Of course, the whole fiasco had been ill-advised from the start. Bringing a hundred pounds of pot into the heart of the city in a U-Haul truck was beyond mere fatuity—it was irrational, irresponsible, the act of desperate men. But whereas we’d spent nearly nine months in a state of perpetual xenophobic panic in an area that contained fewer people in ten square miles than lived on this very block, we now tended to view things more dispassionately. Perhaps we felt safe in the very absurdity of what we were doing (weren’t all the narcs out sniffing around in the woods, after all?). Or perhaps we just didn’t give a shit. At any rate, I took Rudy’s comment for what it was—a means of staking out the territory, setting the record straight: we were bunglers and fools, dangerous even to ourselves, callow freshmen in the school of pharmaceutical usage and abusage, and he was professor emeritus.

The first thing Rudy did was roll himself two joints. He tucked one in his shirt pocket for future reference and settled into the
easy chair with the other. I watched him fuss over it like a cigar buyer in Havana—licking it, sniffing it, drawing deep and exhaling with a sigh—as he smoked the thing down to a stub. He sat there ensconced in the chair like a guru. After a while he said, “Good shit,” and pulled himself from the grip of the chair to set up his scales. First he weighed out a pound of the trimmed tops; then, for comparison, a pound of the raw stuff. I was sitting at the aluminum table with Phil and Gesh, doggedly snipping away with my scissors, my mind on other things: viz., Petra, my lack of employment or capital and my coming eviction. The TV was on, as it had been continuously since we’d stepped through the door (some soap opera rife with hard-drinking, tormented middle-aged men in Lacoste shirts and a host of apparently sex-crazed teenage women), and the radio pulsed softly to the thump of a synthesized disco beat.

Rudy nosed through the entire crop—colas big and small—poking around like a rodent, a big swollen two-legged rat come down from the mountain to take another bite out of our profits. I asked him when he was going to sit down and start earning the five bucks an hour we were paying him to trim pot. He didn’t answer, but a moment later he turned round and said, “You know, I’d say you guys got about thirty pounds or so here—plus maybe a couple pounds of shake.”

Thirty pounds. Gesh looked at Phil. Phil looked at me. No one said a word, but the calculators clicked on in our heads. Our share would be ten pounds, split three ways. At $1,400 a pound—that is, minus Rudy’s commission—we would come out with something like $4,600 apiece, or about $162,000 short of our original estimate. And oh yes, each of us would have to kick in $555 of that to cover the $5,000 Vogelsang had laid out for Jones, the extortionist. It was a shock. We’d known the figure would be low, but this was less by half than our most dismal estimate. After a moment or so, long enough for Rudy’s words to sink in and for the figures to materialize deep in our brains and work their way forward, Phil’s voice rose in a kind of plaint from the end of the table. “You sure?”

Later—it was nearly dark, the hills beyond the window cluttered with palely lit faécLades, houses like playing cards or dominoes—I was out in the kitchen opening a can of cream of tomato
soup when Rudy sauntered in, looking for matches. He was stoned, big dilated pupils eclipsing the insipid yellow irises, his lower lip gone soft with fuddlement. “What’s happening?” he said. I ignored him, concentrating on the way the soup sucked back from the can; I reached for the Worcestershire, black pepper. Rudy circled the room, vaguely patting at his pockets, poking into drawers. Finally he stopped in front of the stove. “Got a match?” he said.

I was irritated. Pissed off. The place was a mess, I was a failure and Rudy was a jerk. I dug a pack of matches from my pocket and flung them at him without turning my head.

The soup was the color of spoiled salmon, carrots gone tough in the ground. I stirred it without interest or appetite, watching the spoon as it broke the murky surface, vanished and reappeared. There was the rasp and flare of a match, the stink of sulfur, and then the supple, sweet odor of marijuana. “Hey, man,” Rudy said at my elbow—I was stirring the soup, stirring—“no reason to feel bad about it. You guys at least got something out of it.”

“What?” I snarled, turning on him like an attack dog. “What did we get out of it? Four thousand bucks?” I was frothing. “Big shit.”

“Better than Jonesie.”

Jonesie. The diminutive, no less. Ah, if I’d felt bitter to this point, chewing over my hurts and losses behind the snip of the scissors and the rattle of the spoon in the pot, now I was enraged, ready to strike out at anything that came into range. “Jonesie,” I echoed, mimicking him. “The leech. The cocksucker. He did nothing, nothing at all, not a lick—and for your information he’s going to wind up with more than any of us three.”

Rudy’s eyes dodged mine. “I can’t do nothing about that, man—don’t take it out on me.” Then he went into a little routine about how he knew the dude and all, but that didn’t mean he was his mother or anything, did I see what he was getting at? I saw. But there was something in his eyes he couldn’t control, a shiftiness, as if he was holding something back. He proferred the joint. I refused it. Vehemently. “Besides, I didn’t mean this year,” he said, exposing his gamy brown teeth in a conciliatory smile. “I mean
last
year. Vogelsang really screwed the guy.”

“Vogelsang?”

Rudy looked put out, angry and resentful suddenly, as if I’d spat down the front of his shirt or torn the stitches out of a knitting wound. For an instant I thought he was going to hit me. “Yeah,” he hissed, “your pal, the big wheeler-dealer, the dope king. Vogelsang.”

“Vogelsang?” I repeated, as, lost and directionless, I might have repeated the name of a distant subway stop in a foreign country. Something was up, toil and trouble, all my brooding suspicions congealing like the soup in the pot before me.

“It cost me
money
, man.” Rudy, of the downsloping chin and punished nose, of the pigeon chest and hepatic skin, was outraged, the thought of it more than he could bear. Take my mother, my sister, my old hound dog, but don’t you come near my blue vinyl checkbook.

I dropped the spoon in the pot, feeling weak, staring into his tumid glistening eyes as into matching crystal balls and groping toward illumination—or rather toward confirmation of what I’d known in my heart all along: Vogelsang had done us dirty.

Rudy shuffled his feet in agitation, bent to rub his knee; smoke tugged at both sides of his head like a hot towel wrapped round a toothache. “Son of a bitch talked me into putting up three grand. Two hundred pounds, he said, easy. We’d split even, me, him and Jones.”

Vogelsang, Vogelsang, the syllables pounded in my blood with evil rhythm. I felt betrayed, I felt hot and vengeful. I saw myself slipping into his shadowy museum, lifting one of the Cambodian pig stickers down from the wall, and creeping up the hallway; I saw the door to the bedroom, the waterbed, Vogelsang.

Loose-lipped, spilling his grievances like spew, Rudy went on. “So when Jonesie goes and gets popped, Vogelsang insists—
insists
, even though it’s no skin off his ass, I mean he’s not even up there or anything—that the plants have to go. Bud says no, don’t panic, it’s no big thing, and Vogelsang went up there and did it himself. At night. With his flashlight and his fucking gun. He cut the whole crop down and burned it, and you know what I got out of it? Shit. Zero. I’m the one that got burned.”

I felt reckless, stupid with fury, felt as I had when Jerpbak
took hold of me in the Eldorado County Jail or when Jones stood sneering before me in the hot still cabin, the blackmailer’s filthy demand on his lips. And why hadn’t Rudy told us all this when his old friend Gesh and I visited him over that long and fruitless Fourth of July weekend? I knew, I knew now: to ask the question was to answer it. Because he was in collusion with Jones, that’s why. Because he wanted his money back. From anybody. From us.

I could smell the soup burning behind me. Rudy stood there, bones in a sack, lips pouted and shoulders sunk under the weight of the world’s injustice. Poor Rudy. He was drawing on the joint, about to say more, when I slapped it from his hand and shoved him against the wall. “Get out,” I said, my voice like an ice pick. “Get your sneaking ass out of my house.”

Shock and fear: Rudy was featureless, a smudged drawing, something to hate. I had him by the throat like a madman, his breath was sick in my face, his wrists clutched at mine as if we were playing king of the mountain or fighting for a football. “Hey,” he said, “hey,” terrified by the look on my face, writhing like something fished out of the mud, “leave me alone, man, I haven’t done nothing.” I held him there against a wall bristling with kitchen implements—graters and choppers, the cleaver, the butcher knife—held him like a goose or turkey to be throttled, twist of the neck, pluck him clean. “You’ve got two minutes,” I said.