Выбрать главу

It was when he was dishing up the beef stew (blowing on it, actually; it was still too hot to eat) that an ugly thought occurred to him. It was the kind of thought a groundhog might have had studying his own burrow from outside in the hard light of day, a gnawing, paranoid kind of feeling that poisoned the smell of the beef stew and killed his mood dead. He shifted uneasily. His crotch was wet and it was going to start itching with the crotch fungus that made it feel as if your balls were on fire if he didn’t change into something dry pretty soon — and what was he going to do, go to the drugstore every day? But here came that thought roaring into his head and he cursed himself again. Fucker. Idiot. Moron. Shit for brains. Here he’d been sitting around in hospital waiting rooms and fucking Sara in the dark and jawing away with a random old lady like some — it hurt to have to say it — like some mental case, and not a thought to the plantation, which he hadn’t laid eyes on for two full days now.

He had to get a grip. There’d been a storm, rain falling in sheets and beating like a whole ship full of aliens on that old lady’s split-shake roof, and what if it had damaged the plants? What if it had broken the stems supporting the pods that were only viable now, right now, because the growing cycle was something like ninety days and he’d been late receiving his seeds in the mail and then getting them in the dirt of his two hundred twenty-seven gopher-proof pots? Worse, what if the whole thing had washed away, the pots and plants and the brown balls of opium in the screw-top jar hidden in the secret recess behind the back wall of the bunker? What then?

The stew was hot, too hot to eat, but he ate it anyway, the wheel cranking round now as if it had no stop on it, as if it was going to break loose and tear right out of his head like a freak accident on the roller coaster. He didn’t bother to scrape the can, just threw it down in the mud. The spoon too. And then he had his pack on, the rifle shouldered and the knife strapped to his thigh, and he was heading downhill, double time becoming triple time and then quadruple time till he was running full-out, running like Colter.

29

SO MAYBE HE SLIPPED and fell a couple of times, the mud slick underfoot, the tread of his boots clogged with it till he might as well have had no tread at all, everything rushing downward and the rain starting in again. His pants were filthy, basted with mud and long filarial streaks of some green shit he didn’t know what it was, and he’d managed to tear the sleeve of his shirt slamming into a tree to keep from pitching headlong into a ravine like some clumsy-ass motherfucker, but it was nothing more than what you would expect out here this time of year when the rain started in and just kept on coming, the kind of thing the average person didn’t even know about or even suspect because the average person was sitting in front of a TV in a dry house with a remote in one hand and a bag of wasabi peas in the other. Plus he was on a mission here and whether he broke a leg or both legs or not really didn’t enter into it — if he couldn’t keep on his feet and hurtle every obstacle then he didn’t deserve to have a plantation or live free or even think of calling himself a mountain man. So what he did was let his instincts take over and just go for it.

The plantation was a good four-mile trek from Camp 2 and it would normally take something like an hour to get there but he made it in record time, or at least that was what it felt like since he didn’t have a watch or a cellphone because no mountain man ever carried a watch and cellphones hadn’t been invented back then and plus in a state of nature you just knew the time the way the animals did, by the sun, by the shadows, by another sense altogether that wasn’t a sixth sense — that was reserved for danger — but a seventh sense, that was what it was. He liked the idea of it, seventh sense, and he began wondering if there were more senses yet, like an eighth sense or a ninth, and what they would be. The eighth sense — that would allow you to get inside the hostiles’ heads and know what they were thinking before they did, right when they got up in the morning and were taking their first steaming piss up against a tree, and the ninth, the ninth would not only allow you to know what they were thinking but change it like tuning a radio so you could make them skin themselves alive instead of you or Potts or any white men at all.

Of course, no matter how fast the wheel was spinning he hadn’t lost all control or forgotten his tactics and so when he got close he put on the brakes and went low to the ground till he was mud all over, till he was indistinguishable from the mud, and crept up on his elbows and knees to take up a recon position and glass the plantation to be sure there were no aliens or hostiles snooping around or helping themselves to his crop. What he saw took the heart out of him. Half the pots, at least half, had been tipped over by the violence of the storm and another half of those had washed down a series of gullies that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked. That upset him, of course it did, and maybe it made him careless too, because he jumped to his feet and just burst right out into the clearing and started righting the pots and checking on the seedpods he’d painstakingly slit in six places with a razor blade so he could milk the sap out of them, backbreaking work. Boring work. Work he’d come to hate. Which was why he’d been two days away from it, distracting himself with little yellow pills and getting laid. Stupidly.

A lot of the stems had been bent out of shape or even snapped in two when the pots tipped over and the ones that had washed downhill were just a total loss, but what he could do was salvage as many seedpods as possible, dry them out and grind them up to make a sort of tea, tea that would get you high, or at least that was what he’d heard. But then he couldn’t sell that and if he couldn’t sell it then it just defeated the whole purpose of trying to raise some cash out of all this work and worry so he would have the wherewithal to do it again next year and the year after that because those little toast-brown balls of opium were his beaver hides, the modern-day equivalent of the plews that would make him independent and never have to say Yessir, Cap’n, to no man.

Truth be told, he was in a kind of frenzy, trying to put things right when he should have realized he’d just have to cut his losses, but every plant meant something to him because he’d grown them from the little black gnat-sized seeds he’d mixed with a handful of sand so they’d scatter nicely across the surface of the five-gallon plastic pots he and Cody had lifted from the back of a nursery one socked-in night when the only way you could see anything was with night-vision goggles. Some of the seeds never germinated. Others got chewed down to the stub by a mysterious nighttime presence he never was able to track down, whether it was bugs or rabbits or even deer. Or aliens. Could have been aliens. He wouldn’t put it past them. But then why would they attack the half-grown plants instead of waiting for the flowers and the seedpods and the milky white drip of opium that made it all worthwhile?