Smoky Joe's Cafe (14 page)

Soon enough the blokes are clasping their elbows and leaning on their knees, looking down at the space between their legs and giving out more than the occasional sigh.

Shorty goes on about climate, planting just before the spring rains, soil conditions, irrigation, plant quality, the use of nitrates, lime and spraying insecticides. Humans are not the only ones to like dope neither. It seems bugs go ape over marijuana and bug control is a big problem as every manner of insect likes to take a chomp of it. I've never ever thought about a snail being stoned but there you go, there's a lot of wicked stuff going on in mother nature we just don't know about.

Then Bongface mentions that there's different sorts of cannabis for the use of.

Wendy jumps on this. ‘Different how?'

‘Well, there's the heads that you roll into a joint and smoke, then there's hash and hash oil,' Bongface says.

‘What's the difference?' she immediately wants to know.

‘Some's better than others,' he says.

‘Better how?' she asks.

‘Yeah, well, good hash gets you stoned quicker and hash oil is supposed to be even faster and better.'

‘Supposed? What's that mean?'

‘Well, yeah, I ain't used hash oil.'

Nam Tran chips in, ‘Hash oil very good, better, hash honey.'

‘Hash honey? That's a lovely name,' Wendy says. ‘It's the best, is it?'

‘Very good, very expensive, to make this one very hard.'

‘Can you make hash honey, Nam Tran?'

He nods, ‘I can make.'

‘And the price? On the market?'

Nam Tran shrugs. ‘Hash honey, you not find Australia. China, Hong Kong, New York maybe, only rich man, also movie star have this.'

‘And you can make it?' Wendy's eyes are shining.

Nam Tran turns his palms upwards, ‘Of course.'

‘What does hash honey do that the other dope doesn't?'

Nam Tran giggles and covers his mouth with his hand, ‘I not say to a lady,' he says.

‘Ah, it's an aphrodisiac, is it?'

‘Excuse me?' the little man says, looking confused.

‘Gives extra good sex,' Lawsy offers.

Nam Tran giggles again, ‘Special one, many, many for women, for man, long, long time.'

We all laugh. I say to Wendy, ‘Can't wait to try this hash honey, honey.'

‘Thommo!' she exclaims. She's smiling, but I know that particular smile, it's strictly for public consumption. ‘You'll keep,' she says and this brings another laugh. Wendy's winning the battle of the sexes and I can see the boys are getting to like her. They'd like her a lot better if only she'd stop asking so many goddamn questions and we could all go downstairs to the bar.

But she ain't finished yet. Nam Tran's English is pretty good but he has some trouble with getting her answers about this hash honey gear. Though after a while what comes out is that you use the stuff for just about anything. Mix it with butter and spread it on your toast, mix it into a drink, cover a pin with it and stick it down the front of a cigarette, spread it on a cigarette paper and use it with weed, bong it, hot knife it, you name it, this hash honey is the original convenience dope. What's more, whatever you do with it, it gives you a better, quicker and longer high. There's only one thing against it, it takes four times as much weed to make hash honey, which means it's gunna be very expensive on the street.

‘Hah, that's wonderful, that's just what we need to know, thank you,' Wendy says at last. I tell you what, I'm beginning to wonder what sort of girl I've married.

The meeting goes on a while longer and arrangements are made for us to work with Shorty and Spags. You know, plough the land, get the crop planted.

It is decided that Nam Tran is going to set up a small laboratory to extract the oil and it will be located underground, Viet Cong style.

Shorty points to me, ‘Thommo, you've worked as a builder's labourer and know a bit about construction, don't ya?'

‘Sure, a bit,' I reply.

‘Can you drive a back hoe, mix cement, lay a line o' bricks and do a bit o' plumbing?'

‘Yep, three o' them things, I can't do electrical.' I think a moment. ‘Don't expect too much, mate, it'll be about the same standard as my cooking.' Which brings a laugh.

‘Electrician, that's your trade, ain't it, Flow?' Shorty asks.

‘Yeah, no problems,' Flow answers.

‘That'll do. Thommo, you're elected to be Nam Tran's offsider when he builds the lab, Flow will do the electrics when the time comes.'

Shorty and Spags are absorbing the cost of ploughing, fertiliser and pesticide and the cost of feeding us for the duration. They agree to be paid back later from our
profits. In the pesticide area we make a resolution to use nothing that's harmful to humans, it's the least we can do seeing how this whole scam has become necessary.

Lawsy is the treasurer and accountant. The rest of us will give our time and Wendy is in charge of distribution and selling.

So, when you look at it, the most reliable are in the box seat, with the shit-kickers like me doing the labouring. It ain't all that different from the army.

The boys who come up originally from Sydney and elsewhere backtrack home for a few days to get their gear and tell their wives and girlfriends they'll be away for a month or so, no questions asked or explanations given to stickybeaks.

Most of the vets in our platoon have a habit of ‘going bush', disappearing from time to time, so their women aren't that curious and, besides, they'll probably enjoy the break from a Vietnam vet.

Nam Tran, it seems, has been staying at Shorty's place all along. I move in the next day and help him fix up the citrus shed as a bunk house and lay a slab of cement and put in an open-air shower block and a bit of a kitchen for when the boys arrive back. Flow fixes the new electrical requirements when he gets up with the rest.

Ten days after the meeting at Smoky Joe's we are all assembled at Shorty's farm and ready for the kick-off.

We soon enough find out we've grown soft and the first few nights in the shed are really crook. But after a couple of days' work we're that buggered, we can sleep on a fencing rail with a roll of barbed wire for a pillow. Anyway, we keep comforting ourselves, it's a bloody sight better than kipping in a shell scrape under a hutchie during the monsoon season.

Me and Nam Tran done the cooking as well as working on the laboratory. The blokes come to refer to any given working day as a ‘Grunt chow' day or a ‘Nog chow' day. Grunt chow being bad and Nog chow good. They soon realise that after frying a bit of meat on the barbie, chopping up a few pounds of spuds and boiling up a bucketful of veggies or pasta my culinary ability is exhausted.

After a few days of my chow they go on strike and I'm put on breakfast duty frying eggs and bacon, my Smoky Joe's job as well as making the sangos for lunch. At night Nam Tran cooks and I prepare the veggies and stuff. Nam Tran cooks Chinese style with only one big cleaver as his cutting instrument and he wants me to do the same. It's got something to do with how you cut them or something. So I agree and I get to like using it
and, after a while, I get pretty cocky. Chop, chop, chop in a blur, carrots, celery, onions diced and sliced before your very eyes. So one night the inevitable happens and the bloody thing damn near cuts my finger off.

‘Shit!' I yell and Nam Tran comes running. ‘I've cut me bloody finger off,' I scream.

Nam Tran grabs my hand and smothers it in a dish towel then he applies a tourniquet. ‘Thommo, okay. Tran fix, short time, no worries.' He's perfectly calm like nothing much has happened and he makes me hold my arm above me head and pisses off only to arrive back a few minutes later with one o' them old-fashioned doctors' bags wharfies and labourers used to use. He opens it up and takes out gear and cleans and dresses the finger and then to my amazement starts to sew it together. It hurts like hell but he grins and I grin and wince a bit, but there's no doubt about it, he knows his onions. He stitches me up neat as you like and then bandages me like an expert. I've known MOs couldn't have done half as good a job.

Later I say to him, ‘Hey, Nam Tran, where'd you learn to, yer know,' I hold up me bandaged finger, ‘learn to do this stuff?'

He's frying rice and he looks up, ‘North Vietnam Army.'

‘Yeah? You saying all Nogs can do this?'

He laughs. ‘No, special one, barefoot doctor.'

‘Barefoot doctor?'

‘Not many doctor in North Vietnam so we make some soldier barefoot doctor,' he explains further.

‘What's that mean exactly, they go around without boots on?'

He shakes his head, ‘Not doctor for studying in school to know everything medicine, only for wound. Battle wounds, this one barefoot doctor,' he adds by way of an explanation.

I nod, ‘Oh yeah, I see. Well, you could've fooled me, mate. You did a bloody good job. I've seen a few sutures in me time, you're a flamin' expert.'

He points to the cleaver. ‘Not same as you,' he says laughing. I can see he likes what I've said about the job he's done on me.

Anyway, over the next couple of weeks he tends to the finger real well and then takes out the stitches just as expert as he put them in. Tell you what, if all them barefoot doctors are as good as him I'd trust them any day over your average Oz army MO. Reckon the little bloke could whip your appendix out, no problems.

As we work together to build the underground laboratory I soon grow to admire the little Nog. The
laboratory is situated beneath a huge old winemaking and packing shed fifty yards back of Shorty's house. Shorty's built a new shed closer to his grapevines and citrus orchards.

Nam Tran goes like a steam engine from dawn to dusk, but he don't get in the way or try to impress. I soon learn there's not much he don't know about underground construction. What's more, he's always got a smile on his gob as he shows me what to do so there's no way I can take offence.

Me and Nam Tran become real good mates. He can stand under me armpit with room to spare but he's true blue and a man has to run to keep up with him. By the end of the day I'm whacked and he's into making the dinner, still smiling.

The entrance to the laboratory is concealed inside one of these old wine barrels. There's also a big old vat with a chimney going through the roof and Nam Tran turns this into the main ventilation shaft, lining it with pink fibre-glass bats to kill the noise. Ventilation is not only necessary for breathing but it turns out to be critical for the making of hash honey, which uses a lot of butane gas.

From the outside nothing looks changed, just an old wine distillery and packing shed with this broken-down,
dusty equipment in it. There's still electricity in the shed and it's a simple matter for Flow to wire the lab for lights and to put in an exhaust fan and the other gear Nam Tran needs. You could walk into the shed and be standing right on top of the laboratory and even with the exhaust fan blowing you wouldn't hear a thing. No wonder the Nogs were so hard to beat.

I must say, it's amazing what we've built underground to Nam Tran's instructions. There's a complete facility for making large quantities of hash oil. Him and me have also put a ceiling in the old wine shed using very old floorboards. Nam Tran's even built a bit of a buckle into it so it looks like it's been there for yonks and is about to fall down. Inside the roof are the drying facilities for the harvested weed and he's also got a ventilation system that makes sure the crop is cured slow and perfect at around 21°C.

Once the crop is harvested, the idea is to dry it and reduce it to the raw material required to turn it into hash honey as quick as possible for storage underground. Except for the lab, there is to be nothing on the surface to hide. Shorty takes one more precaution, only a couple of us will know the exact location of the laboratory.

I mean we all know there is a laboratory on the
property but the rest think it's underground somewhere among the brigalow scrub. The citrus packing shed where we sleep and cook is a good mile and a half away from the main house and Weed Valley, as the planting location is called, is half a mile still further out so they don't observe Nam Tran and my movements during the day.

‘What they don't know can't hurt us,' Shorty says to me one day.

‘Mate, I'm not happy keeping stuff back from the mob. You said it yerself, one in all in,' I protest.

‘Thommo, like the army, we're all fighting the same war, but some of us know more than others. It's been a while since Vietnam. Things change, some of our blokes are under a lot of psychological pressure, and in the hands of a big hairy-arsed cop anything could happen. We might be okay when we're together, trust each other with our lives. But alone and under stress people have been known to talk, even when they think they're not. When we harvest the weed I want there to be no trace of it left. If only you, Nam Tran, and me know the exact location of the lab and the drying shed, I'm going to sleep a whole lot better at night.'

‘What about Flow?'

He'd forgotten about Flow. ‘Yeah,' he now says, knowing what I mean. ‘I'll have a talk to him.'

Afterwards, when I think about it, and I should've before, I'm that ashamed of myself. A man's a fool to think any different to Shorty. He's the fall guy in all this. If the crop or the lab gets discovered on his property, he's the bloke who gets the five years in the clink and a fine that would damn near bankrupt him. He has every right to be a tad cautious even with the brothers.

The plan is, that the moment the crop is harvested the plants are to be uprooted and burned, with not a stem remaining. Weed Valley will then be sown with winter oats, clean as a whistle for anyone to see. But the lab and the drying shed will still be on the property for months afterwards.