Mule (2 page)

I put on a brave face about it, still couldn't believe all of this was happening. Kate's scrawny father had been an itinerant timber faller, her tough mother had driven a forklift in the McCloud sawmill before it had closed. When I met them for the first time, I could see they were worn-out drunks. They were supposed to help us move in, but they sat on the porch and drank can after can of Coors. Kate didn't have much to say to them as we carried in our things, so I didn't either. I could tell right away we hadn't come here because of them.

The air was crisp and clean; everywhere were lakes and streams, everywhere high forested ridges. The water that flowed down from there fed the great agriculture fields of California. Kate took me driving through the timber up old logging roads to look at the snow-covered height of Mount Shasta. "People dream of the mountain," Kate told me one evening as we sat on a blanket in a field of lupine, six thousand feet up. "The Indians did. Some of the Gold Rush miners did, too. Then in the sixties it started calling the hippies, a white mountain every night in their dreams. They rode the rails, came in beat-up cars, raised their families in camps in the woods. Now it calls the odds and ends. People show up with just the clothes on their backs. Somehow they make their way here and never leave again."

"So why did you leave, Kate?"

She thought about it. She said, "I guess I wanted other things out of life then, James. A mountain just didn't seem like enough to me at the time."

A few weeks after we moved in, Kate's mother came by one evening with a pot of pork and beans, sat for a while and rubbed Kate's belly, and then asked Kate for money. I was lying on the bed in the backroom to give them some time together; of course I was also listening in on what they had to say. What her mother said was "If you have any spare change, you know we could use it. You must have saved something out there in the world. Isn't that why you went there? God knows this cabin isn't spendy."

First Kate said, "Don't you know that's why we're living in it?" Then she said, "Is it going to be the same old shit after all this time?"

Later, when Kate came to bed, she took my hand to feel the baby. There it was like always, kick kick kick.

"A boy or a girl this time?" she asked.

"A boy this time," I said.

"You still want to name him Evan?"

"My old man would have liked that."

We were quiet in the evening's cool, the cabin quiet around us. At last I said to Kate, "Did she really ask you for money?"

"It was only a matter of time."

"Don't they think about us and the baby at all?"

"They know the baby will survive on my milk."

 

There wasn't any work up there to look for, so I didn't. Discussions about what we were going to do next we put off for now. We were getting by on the little we had, growing closer together. Sometimes it felt like nothing was wrong.

That long summer in the mountains, I'd never seen anything so lovely as my pregnant Kate. Inch by inch her belly grew, and with it our baby inside her. She spent more time in the mornings brushing her hair because the hormones had made it thicker. She headed out early for walks, coming home with her bandana full of wild blackberries she'd gathered from the bushes by the tracks. "Do you think you could live here forever, James?" she asked me one afternoon.

I'd caught two rainbow trout from the river, was gutting them in the sink. I'd spent a little extra money on a couple cheap poles; all I ever did anymore was fish. "Live here forever? Maybe if there was any work. The air's clean. It's safe. It's the most beautiful place I've ever been."

"But in a place like this, it would be just you and me. No big distractions and not a ton of friends. Just you and me and the kid. Would that be enough for you?"

The trout were fat and fleshy, and had appeared on my line like miracles. That I'd reeled them in for our dinner had made me glad all day. Outside the window, the Steller's Jays were blue dashes in the boughs of our cedars. I said to her, "What did all of that mean anyway? If we could pay for it, I'd live anywhere in the world with just you."

Mason called at the end of August: he and Emma were fighting. Of course they would work it out, but could he come and see us for a while? Kate called up someone she knew from high school, a guy named Darren, who she knew could hook her up with some weed. I worried about the cost, but she said she wasn't going to ask him for much, probably wouldn't even have to pay for it. It was the least she could do for Mason, she told me, after everything he did for us before we left Austin.

When I came back the three and a half hours from the Sacramento airport with Mason in the car, still reeling in my head from the busy city, Kate had a neat blunt rolled for him and they got stoned on the porch right away. All the two of them did, as they smoked under our tall trees, was laugh like a pair of old hyenas. When I asked them what they were laughing about, Mason grinned at me and said, "Poor James doesn't even know. It's because this kush is so fucking good."

"Look at you now," he said to me, "a mountain man and all. In a motherfucking flannel jacket just like a goddamn lumberjack."

I crossed my arms where I stood in the yard and beamed at him.

"How much do you pay for an eighth of this?" Mason asked Kate. Kate batted her eyes at him and said, "Man, don't you know I grew up out here? I get this shit for free."

He said, "You have any idea the money I could make with a pound of this in Austin?"

 

It was great to have Mason at the cabin, a friend from the life we'd lived before, seeing us grown into this different place. I'd become proud of the mountains and how beautiful they were, wanted to impress him with our life in them. Mason mostly slept all day, which Kate said was because of the altitude, and when he'd rub his eyes open at last, it was all I could do not to drag him from the couch and down to the river. By the time he'd come to Dunsmuir, I knew a dozen foaming riffles that consistently produced big trout.

Fishing the bend at Sweetbriar one afternoon, Mason said to me, above the roar of the water, "I've got this idea. I've got this money saved. I'm going to go to Korea to see my uncle and buy as many knockoff cell phones as I can. I'm going to bring them back and sell them out of the back of the store. I'll double my money easy."

It was another one of Mason's schemes. He always had a bunch: to buy a camera and start a real estate video business, to buy a mixing board and turn his living room into a recording studio, to buy a home silk-screening machine and sell T-shirts on eBay. They excited him for a time, but they frustrated Emma, who would always point out the catches. "Plenty of people already have real estate video businesses," she'd say and roll her eyes. "How are we going to compete with them?" Or "Who'll want to record their crappy albums in our dirty living room or buy T-shirts you haven't even designed yet, Mason?" Knockoff cell phones from Korea seemed to me like something in that same vein. Instead of saying so, I asked him, "How much do you have saved?"

"Four thousand dollars."

A year ago, that wouldn't have seemed like that much money to me. Now it did. I built a driftwood fire on the bank, and we lay beside it in the grass and charred the fish we'd caught on a spit I'd rigged up with sticks. In the almost four months I'd been up there, I'd figured out how to do such things. As we gazed at the empty sky, I said, "You really think this cell phone thing will work out?"

Mason took a long drag from his cigarette, thought about it. "You know what, James? Sometimes life feels like an endless pile of shit."

 

Kate and I got married the last day Mason was with us, down the mountain in Redding at the Shasta County Clerk's Office. Kate wore a white maternity dress she'd grabbed off the rack, was really showing. I wore a jacket and tie. She changed in the bathroom before the service, our rings were from the mall. When we said our vows, the secretaries stood up at their desks around us to watch. Kate started crying; I wiped my face and I was crying, too. Then the marriage official introduced us to Mason as Mr. and Mrs. Lasseter, and we all laughed at the sound of that. We had Chinese food at a buffet restaurant afterward, and people in the surrounding booths congratulated us and wished us well for the baby. It wasn't the kind of wedding we'd ever imagined having. At the same time, it was private, sweet, and what we could afford, and our lives were what they were now, no matter how we wanted them to be.

Mason took a few buds of weed home with him on the plane when he left, wrapped in cellophane and hidden in his underwear. Then he called us from Austin to tell us that he and Emma were stoned already.

"It was so good to be with you guys. You guys will have the happiest baby. When you come through Austin, bring us some of that Siskiyou kush. We'd make a killing, I promise you that. I mean, I know you really can't, but you know what I mean. Thanks for having me as the best man at your wedding. Thanks for the fishing and everything."

 

One night in bed, Kate said to me, "Why did I give my life to those people? Why did I let them treat me the way they did?" It was quiet, cool in the cabin, and there was nothing I could say. Kate said, "Why didn't I think I was worth more than that? Why did I let myself get so hurt by it?"

We got a crib from the secondhand place down the mountain and Kate turned the corner of our room into a nest. And if we were going to make it through the winter, she told me, it was time to hurry up and start putting in firewood. We'd need at least eight cords, a pile as big as the house.

I shaved off my beard patches, went to the bar in town, gave them my name. Guys started coming to pick me up at the cabin in the mornings, and I'd spend the day with them wildcatting pine off the Forest Service concessions. I knew what we were doing was stealing, but it was the way people lived. We'd labor until nightfall, covered in dust from the saws, then haul the wood back to town with the trucks' headlights off so the rangers wouldn't see us. The few times I made the mistake of trying to talk to those guys about the baby coming and being out of work, they laughed—their whole lives had been like this.

Then I started cutting wood for Kate's high school friend Darren Rudd, a thin and rangy blond man with a hard and quiet edge to him, younger than I was, focused and serious. Unlike everyone else up there, Darren barely drank, didn't chew tobacco. The land we were working was on the back side of McCloud, and it wasn't Forest Service land but his own. He wore a sidearm on his hip, I didn't ask why. When I asked him how much land he had, he said, "Which piece?"

Something in me knew to be wary of Darren. Still, I liked him. He knew the world, alluded to adventures he'd had in India and Thailand. He told me that he wished he'd gone to college as I had, that in another time and place he would have liked to have been a writer, too. When I got up the nerve to ask him where his money came from, he cut the motor on his chainsaw, shrugged, and said, "Oh, you know. Here and there. SoCal, Vegas, Denver, Phoenix. Sometimes it comes from as far away as Florida."

I wiped my brow, felt the grit on it. I said, "My mother lives out in Florida."

Without looking at me, Darren said, "A smart guy can put up big numbers in Florida if he's interested."

 

In bed that night, I asked Kate about Darren's money. She told me, "The Rudds have always been pot growers. They've been doing it for generations. When we were kids, his parents would get raided and the boys would all get taken away. Then suddenly they'd all be back, half the time without any shoes. When we were young, it made them surly. They were the meanest kids in school. Darren has real money now, a hell of a lot of it. I guess all that meanness finally did some good for him."

When I'd talk to Mason in Austin, from the ridge where our cell phone worked, he'd always say to me, "Man, what I could do with a pound of that Siskiyou weed." When I'd talk to my mother in Florida, she'd say, "You know, I'd love to have you guys here."

One day working with Darren, I finally asked him, "How much would a guy have to pay for a pound of Siskiyou weed?"

"If the guy was a friend, he'd probably have to pay two and a half," Darren said.

"Thousand?" I said.

"Yeah, thousand."

"And how much could a guy get in Florida for it?"

"A guy could drop it in Florida for five or six."

"Thousand?"

"Yeah, thousand."

The idea of something became planted in me. I didn't know exactly what the idea was or what I would do about it, just that something could be had here in the mountains for a price you couldn't get it for anywhere else, and that I could buy it for that price and take it somewhere else and sell it for more than I'd paid. When I thought about it, I saw money, money we needed. I put thoughts of risk and danger away. I was already living in so much fear: that my child would go without, that I'd drag my family through poverty. More than anything else, I felt like I'd failed Kate in how our lives were supposed to be.

I called Mason two nights later. "You know that present Kate had waiting for you and it made you laugh and laugh?"

"Yeah, I know what you're talking about, James," Mason said cautiously.

"How about instead of going to Korea with that money, you stayed in Austin and I brought some of it to you?"

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "I'll tell you what. If it's the same stuff Kate had, that's what everybody here wants and can't get. If you brought it to me, I could get rid of it with just a few phone calls. It'd disappear around here like
poof.
"

"How much could you get for it?"

"Sixty-five an eighth. Maybe more if we came up with a good name."

"How much would that be on a big one?"

"A big one?" Mason said.

"Yeah, a big one. You know, like how you buy meat at the deli."

"Meat at the deli? What the fuck are you talking about?"

"By the pound, Mason. Jesus Christ."

"Let me get my calculator."

I knew the basics of the weed trade from when I smoked it in college, but what I didn't know as I waited for Mason was soon I'd be able to reel off the numbers in my sleep. Eighths in a pound? 128 of course. Quarters? 64. Halfs? 32. Dimes in an eighth? 3.5. Nickels? 7 or 8, depending on how greedy you were and what you thought you could get away with. A single pound of Siskiyou kush could be rolled into a thousand thin spliffs. The potential existed for a guy with a primary source to more than quadruple his money.