Mule (3 page)

Mason came back on the phone. He said, "At sixty-five, I'd net eight. At eighty, it would be over ten."

"Thousand?"

"Oh yeah, James. Thousand."

I didn't hesitate. I said, "What if I could get it to you for five?"

 

Chopping wood was brutal labor. I was splitting the rounds I'd earned and gathered in our yard evening after evening. My body hardened; soon the widening pile was higher than my shoulders. Still, when Kate would come out onto the porch wrapped in her blanket, she'd shake her head and say, "We aren't going to make it." When the first frost came and we fired up the stove, I figured out right away what she meant. The stove was a glutton, ate wood like a beast, just a week of it chewed a hole in the pile big enough to lie in. Kate said, "When it gets really cold, we'll have to run it all the time. Because if we don't, we could freeze to death in our sleep." When she saw the look on my face, she smiled and added, "Well, we might not die, but we are going to have a little baby to keep warm."

Even in that hardest of our times, we hadn't been completely abandoned by the state. Kate had qualified for the WIC food program, and MediCal would cover the cost of the birth. Despite all the humiliating phone calls and hoops we had to jump through to get it, we were grateful for the help. Still, every part of government assistance just reminded us that our lives as we'd known them were gone.

Kate said to me in the dark one night, "Can you remember anymore who we used to be?"

She was warm in my arms, her belly swollen, the baby kicking insistently against my hand. I said, "I remember I thought I was such hot shit."

She said, "I remember how the money made me feel. The partying. The friends. I had no idea it could end as suddenly as it did."

I was quiet a moment. Then I said, "Are you worried about the baby, Kate?"

"I think about her all the time."

"Are you afraid it's going to hurt?"

"I only want her to be well."

"So she's a girl this time?"

"Tonight she feels like a girl."

"What do you want to name her?"

Kate thought about it. "I've always dreamed I'd make it to Europe one day. To Rome. And I've always liked the name Roman because it sounds so strong. We can add an
a
at the end and make it pretty: Romana."

"Did you ever have any idea how strong you were going to have to be?"

"Not until they fired me."

"And now?"

"Part of me will always be angry."

The baby stopped kicking in Kate's belly. Then it was just the two of us. I said, "You ever worry that we rushed into this?"

"Sometimes I do. But mostly I'm glad about everything that's happened. Sometimes I'm even grateful. They forced me to stop working; life slowed down. I've been able to really feel this baby grow. You're at home with us all the time and you've been able to feel the baby. As long as I focus on things like that, everything seems fine. We'll have a little more time before the unemployment runs out when we can just lie in bed and be with her."

"And then?"

"And then something will have to happen for us."

"What if something doesn't happen?"

"I don't know."

 

Kate went into labor the second Friday in October, two weeks overdue, and her water broke in bed. It had snowed during the night, and it took me an hour to shovel us out to the road as she waited on the porch in her coat and boots. "Why'd you let it get so deep, dummy?" she kept shouting at me between contractions.

The storm had closed the pass; we had to go south to Redding. The icy drive down the mountain took two and a half hours. Kate's labor quickened in the car. She began to scream every few minutes as if being killed right beside me, and it was all I could do to keep us on the road. At the hospital when they rushed us in, she was already dilated past eight and a half centimeters, too late for an epidural. The looks we got from the nurses let us know they saw us as crazy mountain people.

In the birthing room I found out things I didn't know: my wife has a primal strength in her, and the world as we've constructed it is a joke. Just before the end, dripping with sweat, Kate looked up at me from the bed with this stricken face and whispered, "I can't do it, I can't do it." I knew right then she was going to die. My wife and my baby were both going to die. I knew I'd never love anything again as much as I loved them. I knew my heart would be broken and I would have to die there, too.

Then someone said, "Dad, we've got a baby girl!" and someone else took my hand and put surgical scissors in it and someone else guided my hand and I watched the scissors cut a milky plastic tube with dark lines in it. And I understood that the tube was the umbilical cord, and then I understood I was holding my daughter in the palms of my hands. She was covered all over in stork bites and blood clots and vernix. All this relief poured out of me as she began a long, loud squall. I knew right then I'd do anything for her.

 

When we'd gaze at our baby asleep in her crib, Kate would whisper, "How could I have had no idea I would love someone so much?" For my part, I was constantly checking Romana's breathing. Kate's parents brought us TV dinners. My mother flew in, made her camp up the road at the Acorn Motel. She'd been upset that we'd married without her having met Kate or even being invited; the baby's birth made her forgive all that. "It would be a lot warmer for you guys in Florida," she kept saying and shaking her head as she shivered by the fire and knitted a blanket for her granddaughter.

My mother took me aside before she left, told me, "What's happening to the country is frightening, but people don't just starve and die. Your beard doesn't have to fall out, and you don't have to go on hiding up here. Maybe life won't turn out the way you thought. So what? That baby doesn't care about any of that."

Mason called from Austin to congratulate us. "In a year you'll say, How did she get so big? Then one day she'll stand up in her crib and go, Hey, old man, wake your ass up! Get me my goddamn bottle."

I went out on the porch, asked him, "Are we doing this, Mason?"

He said, "Yeah, we're doing this."

"How are we doing this?"

"We're going to figure that out."

But the next time he called, he didn't want to do it anymore. He said, "What if you get pulled over out there, James? I couldn't live with that."

He was right, I had too much to lose now. So I let the whole thing drop like the dumb idea it had always been.

Two days later, I got a text from him: "lets do it."

I called him, asked, "Can you send me the money in advance?" I could see him shaking his head as he said back, "You know Emma would never let me."

My family was middle class, and when I was in high school, my father had died of a heart attack. There'd been a modest life insurance policy. I'd spent most of my share on my bachelor's degree, hadn't let myself look at the remainder in the ten years since. Kate knew about it; we called it the baby's college money. Even after we'd lost our jobs, we'd promised each other to treat that money like we didn't even have it, to do everything we could never to touch her future.

Now I called MetLife. The woman on the phone told me my current balance was $22,031. If I wanted to write checks on it, she'd have blank checks sent; if I wanted to leave it alone, it would keep on growing at four percent interest. "Something really must be happening out there," the woman told me. "Lots and lots of people are tapping into their accounts right now."

 

One morning, I woke up to find Kate wrapped in her blanket and staring out the window at the latest round of snow.

Without looking back at me, she said, "Florida."

Taking a pound of weed to Mason wasn't a real thing to me yet, was still just an idea. Then Darren Rudd came over to congratulate us on the baby. He brought us oranges from a ranch he had down in Santa Cruz, was driving a new cherry-red F-150 Ford pickup I hadn't seen before. He'd had a haircut and his nose was tanned. When I asked if he'd been to the beach, he shrugged and said, "Yeah, in Phuket."

Darren liked the baby, held her. She was three weeks old and spit up on the shoulder of his calfskin jacket. When he told Kate she was looking slim again, she smiled at him and said, "You've always been such a liar." Then she took the baby to nurse, and Darren and I stepped out onto the porch to give her privacy. He had some kind of grain alcohol from Bangkok with a scorpion in the bottom of the bottle, and we took a couple sips from it standing up in the cold, dark night.

"What were you doing in Thailand, Darren?"

"R and R. Having some fun with the ladies."

"Work been treating you good?"

He nodded. "Things are changing. If they legalize, we'll have a few more things to figure out. But figuring things out is the nature of the business. There are always problems cropping up that need to be solved." He patted the place beneath his jacket where I knew he wore his gun. "In fact, I just had to figure something out over in Humboldt. Those inbreds over there can be such thieving idiots sometimes. Now I'll be heading back to Chiang Rai for a while, up in northern Thailand. I've got land there, too. I'm putting in a working organic farm, sustainable agriculture, doing my part to solve the world's problems. I'd do it here, but it's too expensive. You can't beat the cost of that cheap Thai labor.

"So I've got my dreams," Darren said, "and unlike you right now, I also have the means to pursue them."

I let the comment roll off me. After all, things really were like that. Then I said, "Remember when I asked you how much a guy would have to pay for a pound of Siskiyou weed?"

"I remember I told you if the guy was a friend, he could get it for two and a half."

"How would he have to pay for it?"

"In cash, like everyone else."

"No advances for a pal?"

He patted the place where he kept his gun. "There aren't any pals like that at my level of the business, James."

I worried my beard patches. I said, "Kate and I have been talking about going to Florida; there's a guy in Texas I've been thinking of taking some to if we do. He's got the money waiting for me there. So I'd have to write you a check."

Darren squinted hard at me as if trying to figure something out. He said, "A check'll work this one time. After that, it's cash. Are you sure you can trust your guy in Texas to pay you when you get there? Things can get messy in a hurry if you're not careful. This business isn't as easy as people think. Not just anyone in the world can be successful at it. But if you can, it can reward you like you wouldn't fucking believe. Think you can handle stress? Hold yourself together under pressure? If you have that in you, you can completely change your life." He grinned at me. "It seems like you're under a lot of pressure already."

I hadn't shaved in a few days; I knew he could see my beard patches. I dropped my hand away from my face.

"There's another thing about it, James. Once you start, it's hard to stop. You sure you want to mess around with this?"

 

The MetLife checks arrived in our PO box in town; Kate didn't see them. Then we spent a night at the Mount Shasta medical center, because she had mastitis in both breasts. The doctor put her on an antibiotic drip, and that was the end of the breastfeeding. When she asked the doctor what she did wrong, he said things like that just happened sometimes.

Romana was on formula now, so I had more time with her. When she'd cry in the night, I'd warm a bottle on the stove and feed her while Kate went on sleeping. That life could be as simple and satisfying as this, I'd never known. But there were other parts to life, too.

When we'd talk about it, Kate would say, "Who knows? Maybe we'll find work out there in Florida." I'd tell her back, "We're going to have to live with my mother, you know."

We didn't have Internet at the cabin; I started spending afternoons on the one working computer at the tiny Duns­muir library. I was Googling "drug trafficking" and "interstate drug trafficking." I was reading about the marijuana laws and the protocols for highway stops and searches. I soon learned all about the Fourth Amendment: that you should never leave anything in plain sight in the car that would give the police a "reasonable suspicion" to search it; that if you were pulled over, you should never consent to a search; that you had a legal right to refuse, and if you did refuse, the clock was ticking on them and they could not detain you for more than twenty minutes without a stated reason. On the drive home from the library, I'd sit in the car and talk myself through a stop.

"Sir, I pulled you over for speeding. Will you let me search your car?"

"I'm sorry I was speeding, officer. Please write me a ticket, but I do not consent to a search. If I am not under arrest, I would like to go on my way."

"Sir, if you're not breaking any laws, why won't you consent to a search?"

"Because I believe in my right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment. If you're not going to write me a ticket, may I please go?"

If the officer asked me to step out of the car, I should lock it and put my keys in my pocket. At no time should I answer any questions. The police would have to prove "reasonable suspicion" to a judge in order to justify a search. If they went ahead and searched without it, a good lawyer could get my charges dismissed.

On the website of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, I read about the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program in force on certain highways, and studied pdf's of police manuals on how to profile drug couriers. I learned that empty fast-food wrappers in the car were a sign of someone traveling across the country quickly, that a windshield splattered with bugs was a sign, that maps were a sign. That transporting pounds of drugs was called "muling," "moving," or "carrying weight." That the average smuggler was a thirty-two-year-old male, unemployed, often with license and registration conflicts, driving a vehicle that didn't belong to him. That when questioned, the courier usually told a confusing story about his route and reason for traveling. That any perfume or other odor in the car was a sign of a smuggler masking the scent of weed. That most smugglers were high and nervous.