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“With Cropper?”

“With Cropper. Oh, God. Why did I tell you that? Sometimes I talk before I think. I basically just told
you
that you had a brother who died.”

Lytton sighed deeply. “From what little I know of this family, that’s starting to sound like a typical day in hell.”

And he grinned at me. That absolutely melted me. Looking back, I was already feeling feverish standing out there in the parking lot under the relentless mountain sun. At four thousand feet, P & E had that sort of thin air that allowed in all the healing as well as volatile spectrums of light. The impact of Lytton’s sheer beauty, the angst and tragedy of his character, was already working on my inflamed psyche.

I was in a cold sweat. I stammered like a schoolgirl. “Don’t worry. I have no fear that your DNA test will come back positive and Ford will accept you, and welcome you into the family. It’s so obvious you’re an exact clone of him, even with different mothers.”

“Do I really
want
to be welcomed into this family, though? You tell me.”

I had to think for a minute. While The Bare Bones were obviously involved in some shady, illegal affairs—Ford used to build bombs in our Cottonwood garage—I had always known them to be full of camaraderie, men who would go to bat for each other. Seeing as how I’d had such a shattered, broken family, this aspect had always appealed to me. “Yes. I think you do. Once these guys have your back, they’ll never let you down.”

Lytton snorted skeptically. “I’d have to join their dumbass club, I guess.”

“Oh, don’t worry. You’d have to prospect for them first, like my brother did. Ford wouldn’t just let you in because you’re his brother. You seem well-educated.”

“For a Pretendian, right?”

“What’s a—oh, a Pretendian.” It was an accurate stereotype—which I guess is how stereotypes come to be—that most Native Americans were under-educated. I could understand why Lytton had come to have such a giant chip on his shoulder. “Ford got his GED under his own steam when he was a teenager. He reads a lot. Is that what you did?”

Lytton regarded me now with a new attitude. He looked at me slyly with glittering eyes. “How’d you know I’m educated? I just acted like a lowbrow goon in there with your brother-in-law. I’ve got a doctorate in chemistry from MIT.”

You can imagine how fast my nerdy heart beat then! The initials MIT stood for Master of the world In Training, to my geeky mind. If I wasn’t already enough in love with Lytton Driving Hawk before, I certainly was now. His forlorn, downtrodden background perfectly tugged at my sappy heartstrings. The way he’d picked himself up and dusted himself off literally made my bosom swell with pride. He wasn’t a guy who would sit around feeling sorry for himself. He may have been raised in squalor but he’d elevated himself from that shit.

“I graduated Berkeley,” I bragged. Before he felt obligated to praise me, I quickly added, “And you probably don’t know, but our mother is dying of pancreatic cancer. That’s why I’m here talking to Madison. I was in Africa trying to finish out an irrigation contract, but I came back to take care of our mother. I think she’d really appreciate some of your Young Man Blue or whatever you’ve got on hand.”

A sort of shadow glazed his eyes then, as though the sun had gone behind a cloud. Maybe he was disappointed I was just talking business. Setting his jaw, he started up his engine, so he had to talk louder. “We only distribute to dispensaries in Phoenix and Tucson. Why don’t you go down to A Joint Effort and talk to that assmuncher?”

I had actually been planning on heading down there when I finished talking with Madison, but suddenly it seemed imperative that I get my hands on some of this Young Man Blue. I knew that flattery would get me everywhere. “I could tell by the way you talked that you know your stuff.”

Lytton cradled his brain bucket, one of those shallow matte black jobs that make the wearer look like a World War One infantryman. “My stuff’s organic, too. The Bare Bones’ stuff isn’t.”

That clinched it. Just say the word “organic” to any Peace Corps volunteer and we’re all in. “Okay. You’re up near Mormon Lake?”

The clouds had evaporated from Lytton’s eyes, and he held the helmet out to me. “I’m not exactly on Google maps. Get on.”

So I did.

I know—after four years of tramping over borders and being detained by scary men with Uzis accusing me of being a Russian, four years of being chased by Sudanese tribesmen until I hid under a table, four years of riding on
top
of broken-down trains or leaky boats—six years of nonstop adventure, and the most dangerous thing I ever did was climb onto Lytton Driving Hawk’s pussy pad and slap on his brain bucket.

I was just bursting with pride, a sense of danger and—I realized later—a rising temperature, in more ways than one. I had meant to say I’d follow him in my rental car, but the moment he said “get on,” it was all over for me. Every last cell in my 140 IQ was sucked right out of my brain and into my pussy.

Lytton’s bike smoothly cleaved through rise after rise of ponderosa pine. I had had my own little rice rocket when I lived in Benin, but a motorcycle was way too impractical for the thorn-riddled sand of northern Kenya. We drove Land Rovers with four spare tires. As we hummed along with my tits plastered to his broad, muscular back, I inhaled his warm, musky scent. In retrospect, it was probably one of his many strains of pot that imbued his hair.

I had smoked
bhangi
many a time in Africa. I could only drink one big Tusker beer before feeling bloated and full, and there wasn’t anything much else to get you high other than the occasional bottle of third world palm wine or
wazungu
—white man—whisky, which was hugely expensive. Randy and I used to knock off work every day at six, drink our warm Tusker, and enjoy a bowl of
bhangi
. The penalties for being caught with
bhangi
were Turkish prison bad, although it was weak as hell stuff. I had never seen a whole plantation of pot plants. I was actually hugely interested in Lytton’s irrigation scheme. Things like that excited me, thrilled me to the core.

But not as much as squirming my tits against that back like a slab of marble.

I pretended I was trying to get comfortable as I squiggled my labia against the pussy pad. I was wearing one of the loose hippie skirts I’d become accustomed to in Africa, paired with a racer-back tank that had a built-in bra. I loved the manufacturer’s idea of “built-in bra.” It was more like just a second layer of fabric hemmed in by elastic, and my nipples always wound up poking out like hobnails on boots. A few times Lytton reached around and slapped my hip, presumably to stop me from squirming.

It was forbidden and exciting to be shooting down Lake Mary Road like a luge sledder down a chute. A turn took us off the main drag and up the mountain about two miles. At an iron gate, Lytton paused for the first time since leaving Mescal Mountain to punch some numbers into the touchpad. Once the gate swung open, we were on our way again.

I couldn’t tell much about the extent of his land due to acre after acre of pines. We reached a house that was surprisingly low-profile, just a two-story frame job that couldn’t have even been two thousand square feet. I was prouder than ever of Lytton for not being a show-offy boor. He rode a Harley because he truly enjoyed it, not to impress anyone with his cooler-than-thou lifestyle.

Of course, just as I was removing my lid and thinking how unpretentious Lytton was, some slut wandered out onto the front porch. I don’t normally call other women sluts, but this one was
so
glaring and blatant, she probably
enjoyed
being called a slut. Her tiny lace camisole seemed designed specifically to highlight her, well, headlights. Her miniskirt was more like a handkerchief, and her eyeliner was smudged like a shopkeeper’s ledger.

She draped herself over a banister and smiled lazily at Lytton. I could detect no expression on
his
face, and he lifted a hand to me, I suppose to bring me closer to him. I came tentatively—I hadn’t expected other sluts to be lying around, although of course it made sense for a single, well-to-do pot farmer living in isolation on a mountain.

Lytton said, “The house is just a house, so let me show you the greenhouse, the clone room.”

We walked down a narrow path between the trees. I said, “You said Doug Zelov told you about Cropper being your father. I remember Ford and Cropper talking about The Cutlasses. Ford’s not going to appreciate it much if you do business with The Cutlasses. They’re kind of mortal enemies, from what I gathered.”

“I’ve never dealt with The Cutlasses on purpose, if that’s what you mean. They keep trying to force me to make deals with them, to help them.”

“If I recall correctly, The Bare Bones blew up some warehouse of theirs not far from here, maybe ten years ago.”

“I remember that. I was just going away to MIT, but my stepfather complained the roof down about hooligans near his property trying to kill each other.”

“Well, it’s no big secret that Ford built the bomb that blasted the thing sky-high. I remember my brother Speed was prospecting for them, but he blew his mission to be their lookout, and some Cutlasses stumbled in and nearly wrecked the entire job. Speed wound up joining the army because he thought he was such a loser as a biker.”

We paused before the greenhouse doors. I wanted to catch Lytton’s attention before we got all distracted by pot plants, humidity, and lighting. I held his plaid sleeve between thumb and forefinger, stopping him. “Are you sure you know what you’re demanding from Ford? He’s not going to suddenly acknowledge you as his brother without also patching you into the club. Do you know what that involves? I don’t think they’ll let you just walk the walk. They’re an outlaw club, Lytton.” I had to laugh then. “But I guess you were kind of an outlaw up here, before they legalized weed.”

His wide smile seemed genuine. “Thanks for being concerned about me. I admit I was pretty half-cocked at first, just reacting out of anger and panic. I’ve had more time to think now.” He nodded with confidence. “I know I want to be part of The Bare Bones.”

If they’ll have you
. The Bare Bones that I knew wouldn’t look favorably on some stranger popping up out of the blue, even
if
he turned out to be related to the President. They were going to make him
earn
those colors. Nobody just patched in thanks to nepotism. They had made my brother Speed wander in the desert without food for three days on peyote to earn his top rocker, a truly biblical task that had nearly killed him.

Inside, I breathed in the pungent aroma of the plants. They really were quite beautiful, just a sea of slightly moving chartreuse, as though you could
see
them growing. For about an hour Lytton showed me his system, talking about feminizing seeds, color spectrums, and selective light training. There was a lot more to it than I ever imagined. Lytton mentioned things like perpetual harvest, vegetative stages, and top shelf genetics. I admired his recycling method of drip irrigation.

We were over by his experimental bog garden. He had levelled out the bottom and lined it with sand, then installed pond liner.

“Is this Alfagrog?” I’d seen the porous ceramic material in koi ponds.

“It sure is.” Lytton seemed proud that I knew much of what he was talking about. We were speaking the same language, a speech that would have been gibberish to outsiders. “The bacteria are cleaning up the water as we speak.”

By this time, especially in the enclosed atmosphere of the greenhouse, waves of fever were washing over me. I estimated my temperature easily at a hundred and three by then. Of course I’d taken my antimalarial drugs while in country, but there were always mosquitos that were developing resistance to it. That’s why they were constantly coming up with new drugs, to stay one step ahead of the damned buggers.

Lytton must’ve seen the sheen of sweat on my forehead. He creased his brow and stepped closer to me, holding me by the upper arms. His proximity was a complete and total aphrodisiac, even in my feverish state. His sepia eyes glimmered fiercely like one of those hypnotic mesmerists in the back of old comic books. “Are you okay? You look weak.”

I would never admit to ill health. In the Peace Corps people who got sick off every tiny insect or piece of raw wildebeest liver don’t last long. Being Teflon tough was the name of the game in Africa. However, I didn’t try to squirm out of his clutches. “Oh, I’m fine. So I presume the dissolved oxygen level needs to be very high for your bacteria to survive.”

Lytton blinked with annoyance. “Yes, but…
June!
” He gave me a little shake. Just a little one, but it caused my head to loll about on my neck, and I could feel my eyeballs start to roll into my skull. “You’re
not
okay. What’s wrong? Some flu? When did you get back from Africa?”

I laughed drunkenly. I could hear it from outside of myself, as though someone else were laughing on the other side of the bog garden. “I’m
fine
, Lytton!” Throwing my arms around his neck, I stood on tiptoes and kissed him.

Malarial fever can act like a very strong drug. Once I was stranded in the coastal town of Malindi when fever gripped me. Randy told me later that I was babbling about space aliens invading my brain. Another time in Nairobi, with a hundred and six degree temperature frying my consciousness, I seriously did technically die and have a near death experience, my spirit floating somewhere out beyond Betelgeuse.

This time, maybe due to Lytton’s overpowering sexual influence, I reacted in an embarrassing, slutty way.

Maybe it was the peer pressure of that whore I’d seen on Lytton’s front porch. Suddenly I felt the need to prove that I was desirable. I felt so old and dowdy compared to that chick in my baggy skirt, my only asset my big, nicely rounded boobs. I smashed them against Lytton’s chest, knowing he’d be powerless to resist, and I sucked his luscious lower lip into my mouth.

It worked. Initially he seemed surprised, sort of frozen, but for only a split second. Lytton immediately melted right into it, crushing my upper arms, slashing the tip of his tongue against my lip. I was enveloped in his warm, natural scent, probably high from breathing in the plant life emissions.