Mule (22 page)

I didn't know what to say. Then I said, "Yeah, I think he probably would."

"Do you think he knows where we live?"

"I don't know what he knows."

"Do you think he checked up on us the way we checked up on him?"

"I'm sure he did."

"Could we ask Darren for help?"

"Darren's in it for the money, Kate. I don't know that he would care."

"Then we'll leave without telling either of them. We'll disappear to London."

"How will we live over there?"

"We'll go on working until we've made enough. Then we'll take enough with us for a long, long time."

I nodded. "What about my mother?"

"Your mother?" Kate thought about it. Then she said like a realization, "What really goes on out there?"

The baby began to cry in her room; I went in and picked her up. How warm she was, how small her limbs. Even after she fell asleep on my shoulder, I held her to me in the dark. I was thinking all these things with her body against mine, about how she was in the world now not having asked for this, about how we were doing all of this to her, too. Then I thought of my father, how sad his death had made me feel, sad even now. He'd had hard times, too. What a piece of shit he would have thought I was. What if something happened to us out there? Prison, something worse? I'd have to watch my daughter grow up through visitation room glass. Maybe wind up in pieces at the bottom of a quiet pond.

Enough. Way too much for now. I put those thoughts away, set down my sleeping child. Back in our bedroom, my wife seemed to be asleep. I stood awhile and looked out the window at the moon. What was the true meaning of everything I'd done?

 

Over the next few days, Kate pitched her camp on the couch with Cristina, was laid low with mild contractions. I paid the nanny to stay away so I could spend time with my daughter. As I pushed Romana in the stroller beside the pond at Payne Park, I called Mason on a TracFone, asked to talk to Emma.

"What do you want to talk to Emma for?" Mason said.

"I want to thank her again for picking me up when that car broke down on me."

Emma came on the line. Was she ready to do the long haul? I asked her. She said quietly, so I knew Mason wouldn't hear, "How much are you going to pay me?"

"It depends. Can you do Albuquerque to Tallahassee?"

"How many days is that?"

"One day out, two days across, one day home. They will be real days, Emma, not like those three hours out of San Angelo. It will be dawn-to-dusk driving, twelve to fifteen hours."

"How much will I be carrying?"

"Sixteen or seventeen pounds."

She was silent. Then, "I don't want to know about all that. I'm going to tell myself I'm carrying clothes. Or nothing at all. I'm going to have to quit my job to do it. So it has to be worth my while."

"How about two pounds? You'll clear at least ten grand when you put it out."

"That sounds good."

"If you make everything go right, you can run that twice a month."

"Then you know I'll make everything go right."

I called Jerome, crossed my fingers. I knew he'd quit his day job. So he needed the money now, didn't he? "How much to get you behind the wheel for me, Jerome?"

He thought for a moment. "How much you got, James?"

We haggled. How far would he have to take it? Sacramento to Albuquerque, one long day. How much weight? Almost twenty pounds. Ten thousand dollars, he said. I said, Three thousand. At last we settled on a pound of weed. Then he said, "If I get caught, I'm giving you up."

"Fine. But you have to let me know where your family lives."

"What do you need to know that for?"

"So I'll know you won't steal from me."

Jerome hesitated. Then he told me, "I'll text it to you."

When I hung up with him, I looked at my daughter. Was this how it really was? Being a child in a stroller one day, growing up the next and offering your family as collateral so you could make some money? Yes, this was how it was, at least for some people. The address came in on my cell even before we left the park.

 

At the 8th Street house that evening, I asked Nick if he'd set up the Orlando thing yet. He'd been working on it, he said as he played Skate on the TV, but there had been a snag.

"What kind of snag?"

"They don't want to do the switch in a motel room anymore," he said, his eyes on the game. "They have some kind of address they want us to come to in motherfucking Pine Hills."

"What's the matter with Pine Hills?"

"Everybody up there calls it Crime Hills."

I parted the drapes to look out at the street. Nobody was out there. I said, "Who's doing the talking?"

"Everything's going through Micah."

"Tell Micah it's a motel or they can forget it."

"If we tell them to forget it, how will I get my money?"

One of my phones started vibrating. The baby? But it was an Austin number, Mason calling from his job.

"You've got my fucking wife working for you?"

"I don't like it either."

"Why the fuck does it have to be her?"

"I asked you. You wouldn't do it."

Mason started freaking out on me over the phone. He wasn't down with this—what would he do if something happened to Emma out there? He couldn't raise their daughter alone. He could barely handle it with Emma there anyway.

"So tell her no," I told him.

"I already tried that."

"What did she say?"

"You know what she said."

"She said she wants the money?"

"Yeah."

"Then that's it, isn't it?"

"Not if you don't let her do it!"

"Well, I've done enough, and I need a break."

"Well, what if I told you no?"

I sighed, said, "Emma's good. Emma's cool. Nothing's going to happen to Emma. And if something does, you know we'll take care of her. That's what the legal fund is for."

"The legal fund is bullshit, James! We both know it won't do shit against the kind of trouble she'd be in." He added in a pleading tone, "Come on, man. What if it was Kate?"

Could we talk about this later, please? I said. Mason said no we could not. He was pissed I'd gone behind his back. And he was pissed right fucking now. How could I break it to him? I said, "Remember that cotton field?"

"You know what, James? This has turned into complete horseshit."

"You're telling someone who knows that."

Mason hung up on me. My heart was beating fast, he'd gotten me so worked up. Of course I didn't like the idea of putting Emma out there. At the same time, what other choice did I have? Now Nick started in on me about Orlando again.

"What do we do if they refuse the motel? Can't you just let me cruise up there and make the drop myself?"

"Even Micah says these guys are sketchy, Nick."

"I can handle it, Jim. I've got it all covered."

"What do you mean, you've got it all covered?"

"You've seen how tight I hustle. You know I'm not afraid."

"You really want the money that bad?"

"Hell-to-the-fucking-yeah. Of course I do."

Looking at Nick was like seeing myself. The money. The money. The lust for the money. "If you go up there alone, you're done working for me. Even if everything goes perfectly, you'll never hear from me again."

"You that worried about it?"

"It just has to be done right."

"So how are we going to do it?"

I'd been thinking about it, how to do this deal, or any deal with people you didn't know. "There'll be two ends. They leave the money in the motel room, Micah gets a key from them. I get the key from Micah, I go in, get the money. I leave the key in the door, drive away. You wait until you see I'm on the road, then you go in and make the drop. Then you get out of there, too. They can pick it up whenever they want. But we're only there a minute."

"Two cars?"

"Yeah, two cars. I'll grab a rental and go up with the weight. You go up with Micah."

Another of my phones vibrated. Austin again. This time it was Emma. "Did Mason talk to you? He didn't change your mind, did he?"

"Don't worry, Emma. Mason didn't change a thing."

Emma said, "I didn't know he was so chickenshit. Just because he's scared, I'm supposed to be? It's just drive fast and swerve a lot. Isn't that all it is?"

There were a million things I could have said to her, the same things people could have said to me. What I told her was "Drive fast and swerve a lot. That's it."

Could she run something else by me? she asked. Of course she could, I said.

Her cousin was a sophomore at UT, she told me, and there was a guy in his dorm who was looking for weight. A college kid? Yeah, a preppie undergrad. Was he moving weight around or was he just getting established? Her cousin said the guy was moving weight around already. How much weight was he looking for? He was looking for a pound; he'd pay five and a half if he liked it—what did I think about that? Five and a half sounded good to me. Right, she said, because that's what she'd been thinking, too. But the thing was, how should she get it to him? That depended on her, I said. She could walk it right in if she wanted to. Well, she wasn't ready to do that yet. Would I come out there and do it for her the first time?

"If you pay for my flight, I'd be happy to, Emma."

"How much is the cost on that?"

"Probably four hundred bucks."

"So I'd still be making a crapload of money?"

"Getting it all figured out, aren't you?"

When I hung up with her, Nick said, "Why did you just tell whoever that was to 'walk it right in' when you're giving me so much shit?"

"Different story. That's a college dealer in a dorm room."

"So what?"

"He'll have way too much to lose to fuck around."

"Micah's a college kid."

"We're not really dealing with Micah on this, are we, Nick?"

 

A few days later, Kate and I went for a long walk in our bare feet on the white sand of Lido Beach. Though her due date was still two weeks away, she was miserable, wanted this kid out immediately. "Doesn't nature have to run its course?" I'd winked and asked her at the house before we'd left. She'd snapped back, "Nature can fuck itself, James. I've been pregnant for two years."

Of course the long walk didn't get the baby out. Then she asked if I would make the spicy penne pasta we had at the cabin the night she went into labor with Romana. I knew that wouldn't work either, but I picked up the stuff from Whole Foods, made it for her anyway. "Anything happening?" Cristina and I asked her all night after dinner as we sat in front of the TV. Kate just made pained faces on the couch; the only thing happening was heartburn. The next night, she tried jumping up and down. The pissed-off baby kicked her until dawn.

Then she wanted to drink castor oil. She'd read about it online, a hundred women on a discussion board said it had worked for them. What the heck was castor oil? we asked her. It was the extracted oil of some kind of bean, she explained. What the heck did they use it for? we asked. They used it to loosen people's stools, she said.

Cristina made a face. "How is that supposed to put you into labor, Kate?"

"It's supposed to make your bowels start cramping. Then the cramps spread to your uterus and then you have your baby."

"Sounds like an old wives' tale to me," I said.

Kate said, "Sounds like you've never been pregnant."

Could she at least wait a couple days before she tried it? I asked. I had to fly to California tomorrow. California? How long would I be away? she asked. Only overnight this time, I told her.

"What if the baby comes while you're gone?"

"Tell them to make it stay in."

"You really think I'm going to stop it if it starts?"

"Can't you just take it easy until I get back?"

 

I'd mailed out the cash to Billy in advance. Now I hopped a flight to Sacramento to grab the weight from him, drive it across town, hand deliver it to Jerome. Wouldn't it have been nice if Billy and Jerome could have met and taken care of it themselves? But I already knew how that conversation would go:

Jerome: "How much does James pay you for a pound?"

Billy: "He's paying us twenty-nine hundred dollars right now."

Jerome: "Well, I'll give you three and a half."

Billy: "Done."

I met Billy for burgers on Del Paso Road at the old In-N-Out after I landed. How was everything up Siskiyou way? I asked him. Everything was fine in the mountains, he said. Man, did I miss those beautiful mountains, I told him. It was a whole lot of beauty to miss, he said. Had he heard from Darren over in Thailand recently? Because I certainly hadn't heard from Darren in months. Yeah, Darren was doing fine, he'd been complaining about not being able to unload some big piece of land he had down in Santa Cruz, properties in SoCal—he was getting hit by the real estate market like everybody else. But business was rolling along, busy as usual. Darren was getting married to a Thai girl, a high school girl, something like that. Anyway, nobody knew their real birth dates over there, Darren had told him; the girl was definitely legal age, it just sounded complex.

Darren was getting hitched, huh? Yeah, Darren was getting married—so that definitely was a new thing for Darren, but probably Darren didn't plan on taking it too seriously. Because I knew what Darren was like, didn't I? Actually, I didn't know what Darren was like at all. Well, why did I think Darren was always over in Thailand? Wasn't he organic farming or something? Yeah, maybe he was doing a little bit of that, but mostly he was over there lying low, chasing around the ladies. Lying low? Oh yeah, keeping his head down. He'd had a scrape up in Humboldt this last time just before he'd left. Hadn't he mentioned something about that to me? Yeah, maybe I vaguely remembered something about that. Yeah, he'd caught a couple inbreds skimming one of his grows, it happened there all the time. But he'd taken care of it; those two definitely weren't going to be doing that to him again.

Anyway, Thailand, yeah, Darren liked going over there to chase tail. To chase tail, huh? Oh yeah, that's what they all did over there in Thailand. You'd think that would help him work out his aggressions. But no, not Darren, never Darren. What a hard motherfucker he could sometimes be. Anyway, yeah, Darren was getting married was the word on the street. Well, good for Darren then. Yeah, we'll see how it goes.