After the gravel came the dirt road. The kids who trimmed camped in the pines. On his right he saw last night’s campfire. It still smoked. A thin gray line like something drawn with a pencil rose up into the branches near the sun. The kids’ pup tents were scattered here and there, and one of their pit bulls lapped up water from a tin pan on the ground.
Rome saw Brian standing on the side of the road. He pulled the car over and rolled the passenger-side window down.
“Mornin’,” Rome said.
“Mornin’.”
Brian had to hunch over to get his head in the cab. Rome hardly noticed the tattoos anymore. SELF MADE, my ass, he thought. ROME’S GUY was more like it.
“How’s it goin’ with them?” He nodded at the campsite.
“Pretty good,” Brian said. “Should be done with the first grow house end of the week.”
“Good, good.”
“Little problem last night, though.”
“What’s that?”
“The new kid. Botherin’ one of the girls. Well, not girl.”
“Right,” Rome said. “Which one?”
“Okie.”
Rome liked Okie.
“Real problem?” he asked.
“That’s what she — that’s what Okie said.”
“Okay, okay,” Rome said. “I’ll stop in.”
Brian didn’t emote. Not really. He stared. He stood there. New Hampshire or California — Rome knew it didn’t matter. The country was the country.
“What?”
“The fence. We got a serious issue up there,” Brian said. “Near the southeast corner.”
“Show me,” Rome said. “Get in.”
They drove up toward the hidden fields. On the left side of the rise, staked tight across the ground, was half an acre of black plastic sheeting. Kathy had mentioned flash floods, and Rome knew about those. After six months of drought, a monsoon off the coast. The loss of that plot had cost him $60,000. He didn’t need Kathy to tell him about anything, let alone the end of the world. The apocalypse wasn’t sexy anymore, someone should have told her. It was boring. It was here, and it was going to cost a lot of money. Lots and lots. More than the world could ever know.
One of the things Rome paid Brian for was to check the perimeter fence a few times a week, but during the harvest this proved more difficult than usual. In the grow room for most of the day, Brian inspected for quality and made sure the kids weren’t pinching more than they should. The gutter punks, like Okie, took only small amounts — a fat bud here, another there — but the hippies were greedy. You had to watch them all day and for part of the night. It was annoying, but necessary. Pounds were known to disappear between their fingers.
Rome parked the truck outside the south gate, and he and Brian walked east beside the scrub brush and vines that grew across the fence; it was chain link, and rusted in places. They stopped at the corner where the path took a sudden left. Brian squatted and pushed aside a pile of branches and Rome saw the bolt cutters. They were brand-new, two feet long, with red rubber grips.
“And over here,” Brian said. He slid over on his haunches like an ape to where the fence met the ground and pulled apart the cut links. “Half a foot, maybe. You think it’s—”
“I don’t think,” Rome said. “I know. They hit Bill. They hit Julie. We’re up from Julie. We’re next.” He went down on his knees and examined the cut. “Those assholes worked for me for three years.”
“Could be the other thing.”
“It’s not the other thing,” Rome said. “The other thing is they come here with machine guns, offer me money, and I say, ‘Muchas gracias, señors. No problemo.’ Then I retire. This isn’t that. It’s them.”
“I saw the one yesterday,” Brian said. “The young one.”
“I thought we were straight?” Rome asked. “I bought the land. I paid a fair price.”
“They’ve been here a long time,” Brian said. “They’re an old family.”
OLD FAMILY, Rome thought. That would have made a better face tat. OLD FAMILY or WHISKEY BOTTLE or PILL HEAD. TRUST FUND would have been hysterical, but Brian didn’t do irony.
“I know that, Brian,” Rome said. “I know they’re an old family.”
“They used to be all right.”
“Not anymore,” Rome said. “Now they’re trash. They’re gonna rob me here.”
Rome stood up, then Brian. On the other side of the high fence were five hundred plants. Afghani indica. It was early in the season — they were still in the stretch — but Rome could smell them: their oils, their resilience, their profit. He could do three fifty.
He could make that happen for her, if he wanted to.
“Whaddya think?” Brian asked.
“Put everything back exactly where you found it,” Rome said. “I’m gonna get the Bobcat up. I’m gonna dig a hole.”
He went at it all day and the better part of the evening. The vibrating interior of the Bobcat cleared his mind, and it was that, the work, the repetitive nature of it — even more than the money — that he was addicted to. He dug the hole eight feet wide and eight feet deep. He put beams in the corners to keep the walls from collapsing. He made twenty or thirty trips in the Bobcat so as to hide the dirt a quarter mile away. All of this he did in a kind of trance. When he was finished, after he covered the hole with tree limbs and branches and looked up to see the last of the shadows on the mountain, he began to think in a more regular fashion, his past forming, becoming, like the dark. It was an experience Rome found he didn’t care for. Instead of dealing with it, he went down to see about Okie.
It had taken Rome years to think of Okie as only Okie, and never as “she” or “her.” Kathy had always said “they” was fine, “they” was preferred, and Rome used it, sure, but the plural threw him off, not least of which because Okie was one person. He knew it was unfair, but the word “they” brought to mind multiple personalities. Also, after a lifetime of gendered pronoun usage, it was hard to break the habit. Rome was sympathetic to the cause, but the language flummoxed him. Still, he tried. He made the effort. He hadn’t left New Hampshire for nothing. The last thing he wanted to do was to become the kind of asshole he’d hoped to get away from.
The Coleman lanterns were on at the camp. The kids hung them from the lowest tree branches and left them on inside their tents. Red and yellow, green and blue: bubbles of color were scattered around. The kids moved from the fire to the woods, from the woods to the fire. They cooked their pinto beans, and the half-rotten meat they’d scavenged from town.
Rome saw Okie. They were sitting on the ground outside their tent. They were cleaning their knife. He went over.
“Mind?” He nodded at the ground beside them.
“It’s your land,” they said.
Rome sat. He watched them as they cleaned their knife with a green rag. It was a Bowie, with a brass-knuckle handle. The blade caught the firelight. Okie’s neck and arms were covered in a dense mosaic of black ink. Their hair was cut short, and their septum was pierced with a silver ring. They were self-conscious about their lips — the full, pink beauty of them — and they tried to keep them chapped by biting them all the time. In eight years, Rome had never seen Okie in anything other than fatigues and a black T-shirt. Rome could smell their body odor, their not-unpleasant sweat. They kept their breasts bound tight against their chest. They said it was their last season, but they’d said that every season. Who didn’t need forty grand? It didn’t matter who you were. A lot of the kids had run away from lives of privilege even, away from the inbred dysfunction of too much old money. Okie was one of those, Rome thought, but he couldn’t remember for sure. They’d mentioned a father once, a sailboat accident. He knew they hopped trains.