As dawn breaks outside, Serena reappears bearing a large wooden jewelry display box. She’s making everyone gifts to commemorate the harvest. She has a few of the sort of silver heavy-metal rings I’ve secretly liked but have never even tried on, and I pick out a molten-looking one.
“Your hands are shaking,” she says, slipping the ring on my finger. She goes into kitchen and comes back with a mug of what looks and smells like herbal tea but almost certainly has some cannabis infusion mixed into it. I’m too whacked to care. “This will steady you up.” And it does.
Then in comes Billy-from-Kauai. He looks shaken but I don’t know him well enough to be sure.
“Billy, what’s up?” Serena asks.
He has trouble catching a breath. “Where’s Justin?” he says finally.
“Justin’s in bed. What’s up?”
“We got jacked!”
“Jacked? Where were you?”
“I was asleep!”
“Oh, Billy!”
“Where’s Justin, man?”
Serena rushes into the back of the house, followed by Billy, and they reemerge seconds later led by Justin, who runs out the back door with a pistol in his hand.
“Justin!” I shout, but if he hears me he doesn’t show any sign of it and is rumbling down the stairs to the ground floor. After a stoned pause to gather my wits, I go after them but make a wrong turn and wind up on the driveway in front of the house, and when I run around to the back and the garden, Justin and the other two have had a quick look at the scene of the crime and driven off with a snarl I can hear from where I stand looking at the stumps of the thirty plants. I call him on my cell phone but he’s not picking up.
Dolly and the Deadhead Methuselah join me. “Oh my God!” wails Dolly, and her tricorn slips off her head.
Methuselah covers his eyes with both hands. “Holy shit!” But there’s an undercurrent of excitement in their reaction too, the schadenfreude of hired hands.
“Well, he told us they were coming down today …” Dolly says, shaking her head.
“He just didn’t say who was cutting ’em down,” Methuselah finishes for her. Crouching bandy-leggedly, he points to sweeping marks in the dirt. “Look, they drug ’em off this way!”
We follow the trails to the edge of the woods, which have an innocent state-park character in the morning light.
Methuselah says, “I told him: put up a fence or leave the dogs tied up out here. Or both!”
“Didn’t want to listen,” Dolly says. At which point the dogs saunter up. “Where the fuck were you?” The dogs wag their tails happily at the acknowledgment.
“Folks live in these woods,” Methuselah explains, squinting into piney shadows crosscut with dim bars of sunlight.
“Sort of half-hippie, half-Deliverance,” Dolly adds.
A bit like you two, I think.
When Justin, Billy, and Serena get home it’s late afternoon. Most of the trimmers have left. Justin dismisses the rest, including Dolly and Methuselah, who have been doing more smoking and jabbering than working anyway.
“Okay,” Justin tells us in the kitchen. “We need to go to Plan B now.”
“Which is what?” I ask. Serena and Billy look just as clueless. “And where’s the gun?”
Justin lifts the hem of his T-shirt: it’s tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
“Give it to me,” I say, and to my surprise he hands it over. I just want to get it away from him but I find I like the feel of it. Engraved on the barrel in stylized letters: Glock.
“Plan B,” Justin says, “is we sell the trimmed weed to folks we have in Denver and Detroit, pay off people we owe, and do a quick indoor grow to recoup the loss from the jacking. And I want Billy to make the run.”
Even Billy the fuck-up looks stunned.
“Billy deserves a chance to redeem himself,” Justin says.
Serena is staring pleadingly at me but there’s no need.
Two days later I’m driving into Denver with ten pounds in the trunk, triple-bagged, vacuum-sealed, wrapped in newspaper, and buried under sacks of organic fruit. After Denver, Detroit; and after Detroit, New York, the Big Apple.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This collection is comprised of works of fiction, with the exception of the nonfiction essays by Raymond Mungo and Rachel Shteir. In the fiction stories, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Akashic Books
Illustrations by Jonathan Santlofer, except where noted
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