Tough Guys Don't Dance (7 page)

I remember I sliced each stem with a ceremonial patience, trying to feel the instant when the life of the plant passed through the knife into my arm and the plant was cut down to the half-life of its future. Now, its spiritual existence would depend on its ability to commune with whichever human—evil, wicked, contemplative, comic, sensual, inspired or plain disruptive—was ready to smoke it. I tried, in effect, to meditate while I performed the act of harvest, but (it may have been the rabid panic of the bugs or the bodeful imminence of the hurricane) I rushed the job. Despite myself, I began to slash at the roots and gathered the plants too quickly. In compensation,
I tried to cure them with care, converting a large closet in our cellar, never used before, into an impromptu drying room, and in the dark air (I had set up bowls of baking soda to keep the product dry) the Mary Jane was provided a real chance to rest over the next few weeks. After I stripped its leaves and buds, however, and packed them in small glass coffee jars with red rubber pressure-washers (I detested Saran-Wrap or plastic bags for stuff as fine as this) and actually began to smoke it, I found that something of the hour of its violent harvest was in each poke. Patty and I had fights to strike new notes of ugliness—we would pass from bouts of detestation to blood rage in the throat.

Moreover, that crop of marijuana (which I took to calling Hurricane Head) began to bring exaggerated effects down on Patty's head. It has to be understood that Patty Lareine believed she had psychic powers, which, speak of Occam's Razor, gives all the explanation one may need for why she chose Provincetown over Palm Beach inasmuch as the spiral of our shore and the curve of our sea contained, she claimed, a resonance to which she was sensitive. Once, in her cups, she said to me, “I've always been a swinger. When I was just a cheerleader in high school, I knew I was going to swing. I thought it would be a damn shame if I didn't get to fuck half the football team.”

“Which half?” I asked.

“The Offense.”

That was rote between us. It soothed the waters. She could give her large laugh, and I might offer two slightly widened lips.

“Why is your smile so evil?” she would ask.

“Maybe you should have fucked the other half.”

She loved that. “Oh, Timmy Mac, you are nice at times.” She took a deep puff of Hurricane. Never did the ravages of her hunger (for what, I cannot name—I wish I could) show so vividly as when she drew in smoke. Then her lips curled, her teeth showed, the smoke
seethed
—like a strong tide going through a narrow gate. “Yeah,” she said, “I commenced as a swinger, but as soon as I got divorced the first time, I decided to be a witch. I been one ever since. What are you going to do about it?”

“Pray,” I said.

That broke her up. “I'm going to blow my bugle,” she told me. “There's a real moon tonight.”

“You'll wake up Hell-Town.”

“That's the idea. Don't let those motherfuckers sleep. They get too powerful. Somebody's got to keep them down.”

“You sound like a good witch.”

“Well, honey, I am a white witch. Blondes are.”

“You're no blonde. Your pussy hair says you're brunette.”

“That's carnal taint. My pussy hair was bright gold until I went out and scorched it with the football team.”

If she had always been like that, we could have
kept drinking forever. But another toke put her on the promontory of Hurricane Head. Hell-Town began to stir.

Let me not pretend I was immune to her occult claims. I had never been able to make a philosophical peace with the notion of spirits, nor come to any conclusion. That you might die but still remain alive in some vale of our atmosphere seemed no more absurd to me than the notion that every part of your person ceased to exist after death. Indeed, given the spectrum of human response on any matter, I was ready to assume that some who died remained near, and others went far away, or were altogether extinct.

Hell-Town, however, was a phenomenon. When you smoked Hurricane Head, it became a presence. Over a hundred and fifty years ago when whaling was still active in these waters, a whore town sprang up on the other arm of Provincetown harbor, where now there was nothing but a long-deserted spit of sand. In the years after whaling ended, Hell-Town's warehouses and brothel cribs had been put on rafts and floated across the bay. Half the old houses in Provincetown had those sheds attached to them. So while much of what was most crazy in our moods on Hurricane Head may have come to us compliments of Patty Lareine, part of the manifestation emanated, I think, from our house itself. Half of our holding of sills, studs, joists, walls, and roof had been ferried over from Hell-Town more than a century ago, and thereby made us a most material
part of that vanished place. Something of a perished Klondike of whores and smugglers, and whalers with wages hot in their pockets, lived in our walls. There had even been unspeakable cutthroats who, on moonless nights, would set a beach fire on the back shore to encourage a sailing vessel to believe it was rounding a light. Thereby the ship might come around for port too soon and run aground on a shoal. Whereupon these fiends would plunder the foundering vessel. Patty Lareine claimed she could hear the cries of the sailors who were slaughtered trying to fight off the marauders' long boats. What a Biblical scene Hell-Town must have offered of catamites and sodomites and whores passing the infections of the ages on to each pirate with blood in his beard. Provincetown, then, was just far enough away to be able to keep up the Yankee proprieties of widows' walks and white churches. What an intermingling of the spirits, therefore, when the whaling ended and the shacks in Hell-Town were floated over to us.

Some of that rut was added to our marriage during the first year we lived in our house. A bawdy force came down to us from one-night stands of whores and seamen more than one hundred years dead. I would, as I say, not enter into disputes about the real or unreal possibility that they lived in our walls—I only say our carnal life did not suffer. In truth, it thrived on the lusts of our unseen audience. It is nice when a marriage may feel like an orgy each night without having
to pay the toll—that is, having to look on the face of the neighbor who is screwing your wife.

If the wisest rule of economy, however, is that you can't cheat life, it may as well be true that the most vigorous law of the spirit is: Do not exploit death. Now that Patty Lareine was gone, I had to live most mornings with the unseen presence of much of the population of Hell-Town. For if my wife was not with me, her much-vaunted sensitivity still seemed to be on loan to my psyche. One reason I could not open my eyes in the morning was for the voices I heard. Let no one say that a century-old New England whore does not snicker on a cold November dawn. There were nights when the dog and I slept together like children huddling before a fire that is out. Once in a while I would smoke Hurricane Head by myself, but the results lacked clarity. Of course, such a remark can hardly be understood unless marijuana is your guide. I was convinced it was the only nostrum to take when sailing the seas of an obsession—you could come back with answers to questions twenty years old.

Now that I was living alone, however, the Hurricane Head stirred no thoughts. Desires arose, instead, that I did not care to name. Serpents were laboring up from the murk. So, for the last ten days, I had not gone near my own reefer.

Can this explain why I acted with such reluctance to so generous a piece of advice from my Chief of Police?

While I did, so soon as I returned home, get into my car and drive out to the highway and there took the direction to Truro, I was still not at all certain that I would actually move my cache of Hurricane Head. I hated to disturb it. On the other hand, I most certainly did not want to be busted.

What a nose Regency had for my habits! I could not even say why I had chosen to keep the stash so near my marijuana field, but I had. Twenty glass coffee jars filled with carefully harvested crop were packed into a steel footlocker varnished and oiled against rust. That had all been placed in a hole in the ground beneath a most distinctive tree two hundred yards down an overgrown trail from a one-lane humped sandy road in the forest.

Yes, among all the hollows of the Truro woods to choose, I had nonetheless concealed my stash close to the stubble of my garden-size plot. That had to be the worst place to keep one's private store. Any hunter blundering through on the same trail (as they did a few times a year) might recognize the character of the agriculture practiced there, and so devote a little effort to examining the environs. I kept only an inch of soil and some much tamped-down moss over the rock that closed the burrow where I stowed the footlocker.

Yet this particular site was important to me. I wanted the product kept near its home. In prison, where the food we ate had been shipped to us out of the entrails of the largest food corporations
in America, there was never a bite that did not come out of a plastic wrapping, cardboard package, or can. Taking into account the trip from the farm to the processing factory, and from there to us, I figure most of the food must have voyaged, on average, two thousand miles. So I saw a panacea to the world's ills: Let no one look to sup on food grown farther away from his home than the distance he can carry it on his back in a day's walk. An interesting idea. I soon ceased to look for ways to implement it. But it left me fierce about respecting the origins of my marijuana. Like wine that mellows in the shade of the vineyard where it grew, so would my Mary Jane be stored close to the earth out of which it sprouted.

I felt one good full dread, therefore, at shifting the stash, and it was close to the fear with which I had awakened this morning. Truth, I needed to leave everything as it was. Nonetheless, I took the turn off the highway to the country road that (by way of a crossroad or two) would lead eventually to my sandy lane in the middle of the forest. Driving slowly, I began to realize how much I had been calling upon gifts of balance through this day. How else account for one's aplomb—everything considered!—during the dialogue with Alvin Luther? After all, where
had
the tattoo come from?

At that moment I was obliged to pull the car over. Where
had
the tattoo come from? This thought might as well have come upon me for the
first time. With no warning, I was near to being as ill as the dog.

I can tell you that by the time I was able to move forward again, it was with the absurd caution a poor driver brings to his wheel after a missed collision. I crawled.

That way I passed through the back roads of Truro on this chill afternoon—would the sun never appear again?—and I studied the lichen on tree trunks as if their yellow spores had much to tell me, and stared at blue mailboxes on the road as though they were security itself, even halted by a green-bronze sign at a crossroads to read the raised metal letters commemorating a local boy who died in an old war. I passed many a hedge in front of many a gray-shingled salt-box whose white crushed-shell walks were still offering their whiff of the sea. In the woods, the wind was strong on this afternoon, and whenever I stopped the car, a murmur came to me like a high surf washing over treetops. Then I was out of the woods again and drove up and down abrupt little hills and passed by moors and quaking bogs and kettle bowls. I came to a well I recognized by the side of the road, and stopped and peered into its bottom where a green moss I knew would gleam back at me. Soon I was in the woods again, and the paved road was gone. Now I had to drive in low gear down the sandy lane, scratching first one side of the Porsche, then the other, on thickets and briars, but the hump in the middle was so high that I did not dare to ride the ruts.

Then I was not certain I would get through. Rivulets crossed the road, and in several places I had to ford shallow pools where the trees grew together overhead and formed a tunnel of leaves. On sunless afternoons I had always liked to drive through the mournful, modest lay of these Truro hills and woods. Provincetown, even in winter, could seem active as a mining town in comparison with such sparse offerings. Up on any of these modest summits, if there was a high wind like today, one could watch the seawater in the distance thrash through a millrace of light and whitecaps, while the color of the ponds in the hollows remained a dark and dirty bronze. All the palette of the woods seemed to accommodate itself between. I liked the dull green of the dune grass and the pale gold of the weeds, and in that late autumn panorama when the beef's blood and burnt orange are out of the leaves, the colors came down to gray and green and brown, but with what a play between! My eye used to find a dance of hues still left here between the field grays and the dove gray, the lilac gray and the smoke gray, the bracken brown and the acorn brown, fox brown and dun, mouse gray and meadowlark gray, and the bottle green of the moss, and sphagnum moss and fir green, holly green and seawater green at the horizon. My eye used to dart from lichen on a tree to heather in a field, in and out of the pond weeds and red maples (no longer red but wet-bark brown) and the scent of pitch pine and twist of scrub oak were in the still of the
forest with the wind in the leaves overhead coming again in the high sound of the surf: “All that has lived clamors to live again” was the sound of the surf.

So I parked my car where I could look from the pond to the sea and tried to calm myself with these soft and wistful colors, but my heart was pounding now. I drove on until I came to my trail off this sand road, and there I stopped and got out of the car and tried to recover that immaculate sense of being alone which these woods had given me before. But I could not. People had been here in the last few days.

As soon as I stepped onto my trail, half hidden by shrubs from the road, this sense became more keen. I did not halt to look for traces, but doubtless some could be found. There are subtleties to a stale presence that only the woods can reflect, and as I walked the hundred steps from the road to my stashing box, I was sweating again in the way I had before on that hot September afternoon when the advance of the hurricane hung over us all.