Mule (4 page)

But I understood the drug interdiction police would not be looking for me; they were out there profiling blacks and Hispanics, especially non-English-speaking Hispanics. Just being white would be my best protection. The fact that I'd be driving my own car would help if I was pulled over. That I was articulate, with no criminal history and a perfect diving record, would help even more.

Still, there were the drug dogs. If I got pulled over and refused a search, the cops would try to get a K-9 unit to the location as quickly as possible, run the dog around the car. If the dog barked or scratched or indicated drugs in any way, it would give the police the reasonable suspicion they needed to search. It was clear from my reading there was no way to beat a dog. Dogs could smell drugs buried in coffee grounds, in grease, in gas tanks, anything. Even if the dog didn't indicate drugs, the handler could jerk the leash in a secret way to make the dog do it. The dogs were so infallible, their searches always stood up in court. If they ran a dog on you, you were done.

I plotted the route to Austin, Googled each stretch of highway for interdiction activity. The
NORML
website had a detailed interdiction map, and I saw I would have to avoid all of the I-10 along the Mexican border, where the Border Patrol operated checkpoints and the Fourth Amendment didn't seem to apply. I saw, too, that the I-40 through Flagstaff was a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, as was the Texas-Oklahoma border.

I read stories about people who'd been busted. I learned never to drive at night, to check that all my lights were working every time I stopped for gas, to stay with the flow of traffic. If a cop started to tail me, I would have to be cool. If I got pulled over, I'd have to control any nervous tics. And the punishments? If caught with a pound in Arizona, I'd face a year and a half behind bars and a $150,000 fine. In New Mexico, eighteen months; in Texas, two years. I'd have a felony on my record and mountainous legal expenses. Forever after, I'd have trouble getting any kind of legitimate work. At the same time, there wasn't any kind of legitimate work to get right now, was there?

The one thing I shouldn't have watched was the videos on YouTube of the police making highway busts. The cops popped the trunk, saw the bales of weed, pulled their guns, tackled the drivers to the pavement. Then they posed with the captured dope like hunters with their deer. But I wouldn't get caught, I'd tell myself on the drive back to the cabin; I'd be just another car on the highway like thousands and thousands of others. It would work best if I forgot I had the weed with me. Even the police websites admitted they barely caught anyone. My one pound would be hidden in the fifty-billion-dollar annual U.S. pot trade. And if I did get caught, I'd explain to the judge that we'd lost our jobs, I couldn't find work, we had a new baby, I'd done it for the money. Not a single thing I'd tell him wouldn't be the truth.

 

Darren Rudd drove up in a silver Malibu the day before Christmas while Kate was at her folks' with the baby. He was grinning when he met me on the porch; under his arm was a Christmas present. He handed it to me, and it was lighter than I'd imagined it would be, the length of two footballs wrapped end to end. I gave him the MetLife check. He put it in his pocket without looking at it. Then my heart began racing.

"You want to weigh it?" he asked me.

"I have to trust you," I told him.

"What you have to do is drive fast and swerve a lot."

Drive fast and swerve a lot? After everything I'd read?

As he turned to leave, Darren said, "Take it easy, James. It's just a thing we say around here when we're wishing each other luck."

Kate and I had lopped the top off a fir tree below the Castle Crags the week before, our first real outing with the baby. We'd set it in a stand in the corner of the cabin. It was the prettiest tree of my life. Under it were our few Christmas presents: a bronzed pinecone ornament I'd bought for Kate as a memento of our time in the mountains, things from our parents for the baby. In an envelope was an airplane ticket, our decision made at last, Kate and the baby's one-way trip to Florida, our savings spent again. The girls were leaving on New Year's Day; I'd be following behind in the car. Now I'd have a pound of weed with me. I hid Darren's present among the boxes.

I cracked my knuckles, cracked my neck, went outside and smoked. Long icicles hung from the eaves over the porch, and suddenly I was more worried. I didn't really know Darren, did I? What if he'd ripped me off? I couldn't help myself: I hurried inside, peeled the tape, opened the present. It was a thick, vacuum-packed plastic bag stuffed with weed. The ends of the bag were mechanically sealed, the buds inside as dense as cattails, hairy with threads, covered with crystals like they'd been dusted with sugar. I quickly wrapped it up. It was obviously incredible weed.

When Kate came home, I took the baby from her, pointed under the tree at the present. She made a face, went and picked it up, carried it to the table.

"Where did you get this, James?" she said quietly when she opened it.

"Darren brought it up."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"I'm dropping it off at Mason's on my way to Florida."

Kate touched the bag with her finger as if trying to understand what it meant. Then she sat on the couch and stared at the fire dancing in the stove.

"How was it at your parents'?" I asked, just to say something.

"You know my parents were drunk."

"Did you get anything to eat over there?"

"I drank a little wine with them."

I sat down beside her. Romana was swaddled and sleeping in my arms. The cabin was quiet around us with the crackling of the fire. The tinsel-covered tree was a festive thing. Kate said, "What gave you the idea to do this?"

"Do you even have to ask?"

"What do we do if you get caught?"

I shook my head at her. "I've got it all mapped out. I'm not going to get caught."

Kate said, "Couldn't you have bothered to tell me first?"

"I knew you'd say no."

"I asked you never to lie to me."

"I had to do this, Kate."

We went to bed with our backs turned; neither one of us was sleeping. At midnight Romana cried and I got up and fed her. When I finished, Kate was standing behind me in the firelight.

"How much are you going to make?"

"Twenty-five hundred dollars."

"Where'd you get the money to pay for it?"

"I used the baby's money."

She nodded. The bag had been on the table all of that time, and now we approached it like sleepwalkers. Kate broke a hole in it and the stink immediately filled the room. She fished out a bud with her finger, held it up in the firelight for me to see. She said softly, "See how it's white where it's been cut? That means it's organic. Lots of growers use chemicals; they show up as dark rings in the stem. This bud's all natural. Darren's done a really good job with it."

She broke off a piece, crumbled it on a blunt wrapper, rolled and licked the wrapper shut. Then we went out onto the porch in our coats. There were stars in the sky, the moon on the snow. I knew that soon we'd be giving these things up. When Kate was halfway through her smoke, I asked her, "Is any it good?" She said, "It's a fantastic body high."

"I'm sorry I didn't ask you first."

"What do we have left if we don't have trust?"

We went inside and looked at Romana in her crib, our beautiful sleeping baby. Just before we turned to sleep, Kate said, "I knew I shouldn't have let you get involved with Darren."

Kate told me, "You have to call me from every stop, and you can't take any chances. You drive the speed limit and stick to your plan. You stop at night and get enough rest, and then you come home to your wife and daughter."

I promised her all of those things.

"You make Mason pay you what you guys agreed. Don't let him change the deal once you get there, you hear me?"

"Yes, Kate."

"You want to know something, James?"

"What?"

"I've never seen so much weed in my life."

 

I took the girls to the Redding airport the next day, New Year's 2008, said goodbye to them for the very first time. Kate held up the baby and I kissed them both through the security glass. Then their flight was called.

Up at the cabin, I dismantled the crib, put the pieces in the back of the car. There were bags of clothes to pack as well, the diaper pail. I thought about leaving the spare tire behind, hiding the weed in the wheel well. But that would be the first place the cops would look. I sealed the package with clear packing tape, left it wrapped as a present in the back window.

Why not? I thought as I smoked in the night. It's the gift-giving time of year. Who won't be traveling with gifts in their car? Who won't be on their way to visit people? By midnight I'd worked my way through a six-pack of stout; even then I couldn't calm my nerves. Why had we been so stupid as to open the package? I took it out of the car, smelled it; there wasn't any odor. Orion's belt was bright in the sky, the stars gleaming everywhere. I said out loud to them, "Am I going to get caught out there?" There was nothing but my breath in the air.

I went inside and sat by the fire and picked up my daughter's teddy bear. It was a small stuffed toy with an embroidered heart on the belly. When I pressed the heart, the electronic piece inside said, "I love you." Kate had handed it to me at the last moment at the airport; it was covered with the milky smell of my daughter. I smelled it now, pressed the heart, and the bear told me, "I love you."

I named the bear JoJo that night; I don't know why, I was drunk. I said to him, "Keep me safe, JoJo, and I'll bring you back to the baby. I know you know the baby loves you. I know you want to be with her again."

In the morning, I put the key under the mat on the porch, took a last look at the cabin. Despite everything, we'd been happy here. I stopped at Kate's folks' place for a final goodbye, then pulled onto the I-5. It felt like a cop was waiting behind every bend, and for the first fifty miles I drove in terror. But JoJo Bear sat in the passenger seat and kept me company, told me "I love you" every time I needed it. Down in the valley the traffic picked up, and I calmed down and got lost amid the cars.

 

Sacramento wasn't a long way from our cabin, about three and a half hours, but I'd started late because of everything I'd had to do. When I phoned Kate from a gas station just north of the city, she told me to call her friend Rita, ask if I could crash at her place for the night.

"We're at your mom's. We're missing you," Kate told me in her quiet voice. "Is everything going okay out there?"

"Don't worry, Kate. I'm being careful. Everything's going just fine."

Kate had worked at Macy's in Sacramento when she'd left the mountains after high school. She'd lived in an apartment downtown, near the nightlife; Rita had been her roommate. Now Rita lived on the south side of town, in a simple duplex in an urban neighborhood with her two young boys. She was attractive like Kate, still in retail. She gave me her couch while she put the boys to bed. When she came back downstairs, she asked if I wanted to smoke.

I tapped the bottle of Alleycat I'd brought in with me. "Haven't touched it since college. Never liked it. Now I know enough to stick to beer."

"Drinkers and smokers," she said and laughed. "Isn't that the way?"

Rita sat in an armchair, looking tired from work, rolling a joint on a little wooden cutting board on her lap and telling me about Kate in the old days. "So you married Kate Sisson? Isn't she so pretty? Man, all we ever did back then was spend our money. God, did we have some fun."

It was quiet, and I felt safe. The fear I'd had on the road was gone. I liked Rita, would have hit on her in my past life. Should I tell her about the weed? Should I not? What would she think of me if I did? At last I said, "Rita? Can you keep a big secret?"

She knitted her brow, looked at me suspiciously. Then she said softly, "Sure."

I hurried out to the parking lot, didn't want to leave the weed out there all night anyway—it was worth more than the car. I grabbed the package, brought it back to the house, unwrapped it on her kitchen table. The place was silent, the children asleep. Rita took one look at all that weed, covered her mouth with her hands, and said, "Man, are you totally insane?"

She immediately called her brother Henry, who came over with a friend, Jerome. Jerome had a digital scale. He zeroed a small Tupperware bowl on it, began fishing out big buds. Rita grabbed one, smelled it, passed it to Henry. They nodded their heads. I got nervous among those strangers, and said to Jerome, "How much are you taking out?"

"An ounce."

I mulled my lip. "How much does an ounce weigh?"

He shot me a confused look. He said, "Dude, do you even know what the fuck you're doing?"

They took turns running out to an ATM, bought three ounces, $1,200 cash. Not six hours into it, I'd already made half our money back. Rita wanted the biggest buds for herself, so did Henry and Jerome. When they passed around a bowl of it, Henry closed his eyes and said, "Chronic."

Henry was a third-grade teacher, Jerome a teller at a bank. Both of them looked like their jobs. Henry said to me, "If you stay over another day, you'll get all of this sold, most of it at four hundred an O.Z. Nobody wants to go through a dealer. It would be between you and our friends."

Could I stay? Hustle back up to Dunsmuir, grab another pound from Darren? But Kate and the baby were waiting for me in Florida. Jerome said, "Dude, this shit you got is the real kush. Wherever you take it, they're gonna be blown away. Call us anytime you're passing through. We'll always score a few ounces off you."

Later, lying awake on the couch, I thought about the evening, how excited they'd been. I'd had no idea about that part of it. Hadn't that made me feel good, like I hadn't in a while? Hadn't that been why I'd done it? The roll of money was thick in my pocket. I knew Mason would understand why I'd started selling it.

Just before Rita had gone up to bed, I'd said to her, "Am I taking this money from your kids?"