Savior (16 page)

How was the water? asked Lianne.

Cold
. Let's go back to the fire.

He pulled on his pants and shirt
and took his underwear and socks and washed them out in the water. Don was talking about the way they harvested the mushrooms in the woods after the rains in the fall. The farm owned some protected land. They had some waterfalls and some other areas. Apparently he knew the woods pretty well. There was also cannabis in there, a big patch of it, almost ready for harvest. Ricky stuffed the wet clothes in the pack and pushed his feet into his sneakers.

Oh, you went in, said Don.

Yeah, I did.

Anyway, if you come by the big house tomorrow I'll get you on my work crew. We go into the woods to work on the different forest crops. That's top-secret stuff. But my word is good with the crew chiefs and I trust you.

That's cool, said Lianne.

Yeah, me too, right? said Ricky.

Yeah, you too.

Ricky started up the path back to the bonfire.

You coming, Lianne?

Lianne started towards him. Don pulled on his cargo pants and walked beside them shirtless. When they got to the bonfire, Ricky sat on the ground while Lianne and Don kept talking. Then he saw Grill and Fuzz Tone standing with Ned just outside the range of the dancers and the light of the fire. They were watching the dancers,
but Grill and Fuzz Tone looked around as if they were bored or anxious to get moving. Lianne tapped on his shoulder again.

You want to dance? she asked, smiling.

Ricky stood up to dance. He felt in a way like he was losing sight of who he was, like a private space in his head was shrinking to the point where he felt it perhaps did not exist any more. Dancing, spinning to the drumming and whirling along with the other dancers, Ricky felt his mind relax. It stopped being an issue. He wasn't at war. There was no war, just dancing, contentment, not minding where he was. He opened his eyes and watched Lianne feeling the same way herself. Even Don smiled at him. Then Ricky was piling more wood on the fire. A bunch of guys were gathering chain-sawed chunks of downed trees that must have fallen in a storm and were throwing them on the fire, so that it was growing and casting its light and heat in an ever-larger radius. At some point in the night it was like a dam had burst. Either that or he was very tired and was just getting off on some contact high. He panicked, and walked around and around in a circle holding the tablet to his ear, trying to hear his mother's voice guiding him through the minefields of his mind, thinking of his father the last time he'd seen him on the mountaintop in the Guatemalan highlands. If he ever forgot either of them, he'd be genuinely lost.

I'm about to pass out, Ricky, said Lianne

Yeah, me too.

Have some of this. Lianne held out a bottle of something.

What is it?

Just some tea. Arden got it for me. She said there's a place for us to crash on the bus.

Yeah, okay.

Do you want to go?

Sure.

You still have the pack.

Of course.

They
were given a place on the floor of the bus on two camping pads that Arden had rolled out next to her bed. They brushed their teeth using their fingers and some toothpaste and a basin of water out back and a flashlight Arden leant them. Vargas was already asleep. Scissorhands was not asleep, and Ricky noticed Arden seemed to be kissing him goodnight with more attention than if she was just his sister. Turned out that Arden was actually his mother, and Lianne had already found that out from Don. Arden slipped out and left them alone on the bus with Vargas and Scissorhands. They whispered late into the night. Lianne had also learned that Grill and Fuzz Tone were putting together a deal with Vargas for the sale of some meth, but they had to keep it a secret from Ned because Ned was opposed to all kinds of drugs that would apparently mess with the spirit of cooperation and balance they'd worked out as an intentional community. That must have been the intentional part of the community: they aimed to only get high in some ways that had been pre-approved.

It was amazing how fast news spread in this place, thought Ricky, like there was some telepathic energy of some kind, and Lianne and he had hooked right into it. He thought of the panic attack that had hit him, and how the tablet seemed to be the key to his moods. He needed to keep it by his side at all times. It was like a compass pointing
to the secret pathways of the heart, the kind that you needed to bushwhack for yourself because everyone was different.

In the morning, Vargas was stomping around, and he woke Ricky up. Lianne was still asleep and curled up with the blanket pulled around her head. Ricky’s head felt like it weighed a ton. He had a difficult time staying upright and flopped back down on the floor of the bus and waited for the noises of Vargas and Arden to subside. They seemed to be having an argument. Then, as the sun streamed through the windows and a pot of hot water began to simmer on the wood stove, Ricky stood up and dressed. Lianne
got up and she too dressed. They were the only ones on the bus. Did Scissorhands attend school? Ricky sat down on the cushion that served as a bed, and Lianne sat next to him.

You kind of like that guy?

Who?

You know, Grayshit guy.

Don? He's nice.

Wants to help us get on a good work crew.

Exactly.

She took his face in her two hands and turned it towards hers.

Earth to Ricky. Come in, Ricky.

What are you talking about?

You and me getting some breakfast. I'm starving.

Up at the house, the women from the other bus were coming out and getting into their cars and shouting back and forth good-naturedly. They had fresh clothes on and their hair wet from washing
; they looked like women anywhere in the country, setting off for a day of work in offices and places of responsible citizenship, not like they'd been up most of the night dancing stoned around a huge blaze of a bonfire. People in the house were drinking coffee, and Julia, the teenage girl from the next bus, offered Lianne and Ricky coffee, pouring it from a glass pot into their ceramic mugs. There was also a plastic bear of honey, but Ricky was fine without it. Ned was holding court, grumpily discussing plans for the day. There were several crews forming to go out to various spots around the farm. Don raised his hands and offered an overview of the work that was going on in the woods. He seemed like an eager beaverish sort of guy, thought Ricky. Vargas had already assembled his gang, two or three older guys who were building or repairing a barn that would house a couple of cows they were planning to bring in soon from somewhere in Kentucky.

About mid-morning
Don and Aunt Peggy gathered with their crew—Lianne, Ricky, and Julia—to go into the woods. They drove to the edge of the fields in an old tractor, passing over the rows of corn and potato and cabbage, now just stubble, that needed to be turned over, across the old necks of cabbages sticking out of the rough earth, and past a long row of a metal building that housed pigs. Behind the trees to their right was the county road heading up towards Jackson and the highway to the larger worlds of Memphis and Nashville.

They stopped the tractor and began hiking. They walked for several miles through a barren area of grassland, mostly flat, slightly uphill. Aunt Peggy pointed out a rare five-petalled white flower that was still in bloom.
The woods began just beyond the grassland and were mostly stumpy oaks mixed in with yellow pine. The ground was covered in leaf litter, and the cloudless blue sky shone between the branches of the oak, setting off the yellowing leaves in sharp relief. They stopped where trees had been cut and stacked in logs and Don took out two cordless drills from the pocket of his oversized army coat. He, Julia and Lianne were going to be drilling holes in the logs for mushroom spore. Aunt Peggy and Ricky continued on through the trees. They could hear the sound of the cordless drills and then just the crunching of their steps through the dead leaves.

This was all cut over and farmed at some point. And then the people moved on, said Aunt Peggy. The soil was too thin for any kind of extractive farming. They were mostly tobacco farmers from back east who weren't used to living on the land. They wouldn't work in the iron mines around here because it was mostly slaves who did that work. After the Civil War the former slaves fled, the iron mines closed, and then there was nobody for a long time until Ned and his friends moved in.

Isn't that what you're doing?

What? Fleeing?

Yeah.

Hmm. I can see how it would seem that way, Ricky. We're trying not to. Ned always talks 'bout the two boats we
’re riding in, Mahayana and Hinayana. You've got to be riding in both. He says Hinayana is your little life. The trick we're trying to learn is keeping that balanced. It's hard. Much harder than it seems when you're young. What about you?

What?

How do you find your balance?

I don't know.

Ricky thought of how he'd had the feeling the previous night of needing the tablet by his side all the time, of how desperate he felt when he thought of searching for his father, and sometimes how he wished he could forget about the whole thing and just concentrate on working things out, having fun.

And then Mahayana is how you're effecting change in the broader picture. What kind of ripples are you sending out? That sort of thing. The little boat goes in the big boat. How do you fit it in?

Look, I don't have a clue. I said that already.

Well
, think about it. Use your time wisely, young man. Here we are. Look at this.

They'd reached a clearing in the woods. There was a stand of several hundred cannabis plants stretching about head
high. Aunt Peggy examined the thick buds with a magnifying glass.

Yes, this is it. Come have a look.

Ricky wandered over to where she was.

See the hairs? They're beginning to turn from clear to milky, even amber in color.

Ricky looked through the glass. It reminded him of science class in seventh grade when they'd visited the arboretum in Panama City. It was clearly of great importance to Peggy.

This is a female plant. She's trying to attract the male pollen. Right now is the time to harvest. We have a window of about a week, I would say.

What happens if you wait too long?

Then you get the THC starting to break down and too many byproducts in the resin.

Ricky wasn't a smoker. He'd tried a couple of times on the beach with Lianne, Kendra Jackson, and her cousin Connor. But it wasn't something he cared about, just something that had colored those afternoons last summer with a slurred memory of strangeness.

So the male plants fertilize the females, is that what happens?

There are no males. We don't want the energy going into seed production, so we cull the males as soon as we can, usually sometime in the late summer.

That seems cruel.

These ladies are full of goodness and earth wisdom, Ricky. Can you hear the story they are telling us? Let's stand in the middle here and listen.

She led the way to the middle of the stand and stopped. She put her arm around Ricky's shoulder and spun him so he was facing the same direction
she was.

It's all about ripeness, Ricky. What you want and what
the world wants can be aligned. You have to listen for it. Do you understand what I'm saying?

I have no idea.

Then she leaned over and kissed him on the lips, opening her mouth and probing with her tongue for his. Ricky closed his eyes and listened. All he could hear was the pounding in his ears of the blood rushing in his veins. They fell to the ground and she stripped her clothes off first and then helped him undress. Her breasts were surprisingly full. Their bodies tangled, came together and then separated like ocean tides. They lay together while their hearts slowed and their senses returned, looking up at the blue sky through the straight, bending stalks and the thick buds of the ripe cannabis.

That was your first, am I right?

I guess.

She laughed.
What have we done? Have I just corrupted you, young man?

Don't worry about it.

Well, then. Thank you so much for that.

She leaned down and kissed him again. This time he listened and heard more clearly the word she had said: ripeness. He should have been in school; he should have been saving his father from the
Santos Muertos
. Instead he was lying on the bottom of the woods in Tennessee with some woman he barely knew. Now that he had experienced what it was that took place between men and women, a secret out of which sprung a lot of the good and bad in life, all tied together in a spiraling sequence, a dance, interconnected, he thought his path might seem a little clearer. Instead the world seemed a muddle of botched possibilities. If this was God's idea, he surely had a twisted sense of what ripeness entailed. The woods, on the other hand, had a clarity and a peace about them that filled his lungs with the sharp tang of pine scent. They had never been home for long to anyone, and yet there was a sense of hominess as if they were also yearning for completion. Maybe that was the point, he thought, staring up at the blue hole of the sky.