Kind Nepenthe

by Brockmeyer, Matthew V.

  And she was horny.

  So fucking horny. A literal heat ripping up through her and making her head spin.

  There were girls around her now. Helping her undress. Pulling silky garments up over her head. Gorgeous hippie girls with long, dark hair. And they were kissing her and giggling. So pretty and soft. And she was kissing them back and it felt good. It felt wonderful.

  She found herself shuddering at their touch, on the brink of orgasm.

  And a man was watching them, smiling. A little man with a beard. And she wanted to come, wanted to come so badly as the girl with the razor blade approached her and said, “Don’t be afraid: in love there is no wrong,” and she realized they all had it, that bloody X carved into their foreheads. And she leaned back quivering. And she wasn’t afraid, wasn’t afraid at all. She wanted it. Wanted to feel that sharp metal sink into her skin, wanted to be one with them, all of them, wanted the mark. Wanted it as surely and deeply as she wanted to come. And when the blade pierced her she gasped in pleasure, the blood warm and sticky as it ran down her face, salty and sweet in her mouth, and she was going to come. She was going to come, and suddenly she was awake.

  She shook her head, and almost instantly the dream began slipping away from her, disappearing faster than she could recall it. She was drunk and felt sick, but was so worked up and turned on. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt this charged up. Her body ached.

  She looked over at Calendula. She could just make him out in the dim glow. He was asleep on his back, naked, his mouth hanging open, the sheets in a knot at his feet.

  She felt moisture slipping down from between her legs. She told herself to just go back to sleep, but before she even knew what she was doing she was reaching out and taking him in her hand, stroking him till he stiffened, bowing her head down and pressing him against her lips, taking him in her mouth, feeling him harden against the back of her throat.

  Calendula moaned, awoke, and looked down at her. “Rebecca, what are you doing?”

  She gazed up at him, still feeling drunk, bashfully turning her head and shrugging before climbing on top, straddling him. He grasped her hips as she arched her back, fell forward on top of him and clamped her lips on his, filling his mouth with her tongue.

  She pulled her lips from his face, moaned, and threw her head back, her long dreadlocks cascading behind her as she rose and fell, grinding herself against him. She trembled, a torrent of warmth washing over her as she orgasmed. She was panting, shaking, her mouth hung open, fingers pressed into the slick flesh of Calendula’s chest, and that’s when she felt the eyes on her.

  She didn’t see or hear anything, just knew she was being watched. A scary, preternatural feeling. All the sweat cascading down her body suddenly turned to ice and the skin on the back of her neck pimpled as the tiny hairs there rose.

  Yes, something was in the doorway, staring at them. She was certain of it. Positive. She could feel it, sense it. She turned her head, looked over her shoulder, and saw it. There it was, a tiny figure silhouetted in the open doorway: the ghost.

  It was the ghost of the little boy, that’s who it was. It had to be him, and she gasped loudly and stifled a scream with her hand.

  Calendula shot up. “What? What is it?”

  And then the tiny figure spoke.

  “Mommy,” Megan said as a cascade of urine spilled down her leg. “I’m cold.”

  15

  DJ picked up a coin from the big bag of nickels he’d gotten from the bank, looked at it, put it aside, picked up another, looked at it, put it aside. It was four-thirty in the morning and he’d been kneeling on the ground, hunched over the chipped-up old coffee table, looking at nickels, for over six hours now.

  Rain crashed down outside and a gust of wind rocked the little trailer on its cinder block foundation. He had three hundred dollars in nickels. It was a big bag, a lot of work. He rubbed his face, picked up another nickel, looked at it.

  Katie was in the tiny kitchenette, a mere square of linoleum, scrubbing with some new type of mop that squirted cleanser out of its head. She had four mops, testing them all on the little piece of linoleum. Ever since she gotten pregnant all she ever did was clean. Clean and talk.

  “You know this swifter really gives a nice shine, and it smells so good, too. That other one just smells like bleach. So much it even makes my eyes water. But bleach is the cleanest and we need it clean for the baby. Right, hon?”

  “Yeah, whatever you say.”

  Katie put down the mop and spread herself out on the sofa. She picked up the iPad Diesel had given earlier that afternoon and began swiping her finger across it. DJ picked up a lighter and used it to crush a pile of meth shards that lay on a Kid Rock Mirror with a cheap wooden frame. He rolled the lighter back and forth over the crystals, trying to get a nice fine powder. Kid Rock, dressed like pimp in a purple velvet hat, smiled up from under the glistening pile.

  He had won that Kid Rock mirror at the county fair up in Ferndale last year. It had been his first real date with Katie. A magical night—the spinning lights, the taste of cotton candy on her lips. They held hands as they wandered the fairgrounds, the stars shimmering in the sky and the moon rising up fat and full. Later that evening, in the backseat of his old Mustang, she had given in and let him press himself between her legs. The next day he had tried to clean the upholstery, but to no avail. The blood was still there now, an irritating, faded-brown patch.

  “Can I have another bump?” Katie asked as he took a straw and snorted a small pile.

  “You’re pregnant and you’ve been at it all night. You sure that’s a good idea?”

  “I know. I know. I’m going to stop after tonight. It’s just so cozy in here. You know? With the rain outside and all?” She gave him her sweet little girl smile and he cut her out a small pile with a razor blade.

  She took one of the brightly-colored children’s straws they’d been using and snorted her small bump, then sat back with a satisfied look on her face and began to talk rapidly.

  “That sure was sweet of Diesel. He’s just the best. I can’t believe he wants me to call him Pops. That’s so sweet. Who else calls him Pops?”

  “Nobody.” DJ picked up a nickel and looked at it, then put it aside and picked up another. “Nobody fucking calls him Pops. He’s just high.”

  “Don’t be mean, DJ. He’s so sweet.”

  “He ain’t fucking sweet, trust me. And he’s a fucking idiot for letting people walk all over him. I set up that whole fucking grow room. That chef house and all that land should be ours, that fucker Coyote owes us, and Spider before him. I’m gonna get that fucking land, watch me.”

  Katie draped her hand over his head, caressing his scalp. “Oh, DJ.”

  DJ was pissed. He felt he had missed out on his birthright.

  When he had been living with his mother up in Eureka he’d seen his old friends down here quickly get pot rich. Suddenly they had new pickup trucks with custom bumpers and headache racks, land, houses. Pot was going for four to five thousand dollars a pound and you couldn’t grow enough. He was determined to get down here and get in on the scene. He scraped up enough to buy these forty acres from his uncle and put a trailer on it. It was happening. But suddenly everyone was doing it, and with the Medical 215 law it was even quasi-legal, and now the price of pot had dropped to a thousand bucks a pound, sometimes even less. After you paid to get it trimmed, what did that leave you? With fertilizer and soil prices going through the roof?

  And it was hard to unload. The market was flooded. In order to get anywhere near a decent price the stuff had to be this year’s trendy shit: Headband, O.G., Sour Diesel. He couldn’t keep up with it, didn’t know where to get the designer clones. He was still gr
owing the Purple Urkle and nobody wanted that shit anymore. His last batch of outdoor had turned yellow before he was able to sell it. He ended up making the whole crop into hash. Now he was getting by selling meth and pills. Doing what he had to and trying to get up a nut.

  His old man had some nerve telling him to lay off the meth. That fucking old tweaker? Fuck him. He’d never been there for him, never gave him shit as a kid, was always in fucking jail. Now he wants to get all buddy-buddy? All high and mighty with his cranked-out biker-momma girlfriend, always telling him to go to school, be a diesel mechanic like him, like that ever helped him, like he’d ever used it for anything. Who had time for that bullshit? He needed to get his nut up now.

  He picked up a nickel, put it in the pile, picked up another nickel, looked at it: BINGO.

  “Got one,” he shouted to Katie.

  “Yeah.” She lit a cigarette. “Good job, hon.”

  He smiled. That’s right, he would get his nut. He would get what was coming to him. One way or another, he would get his.

  TWO

  “We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,

  Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”

  —E. A. Poe. Ulalume

  “Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,

  Four and twenty black birds baked in a pie.”

  —English nursery rhyme

  1

  Rebecca started down the long hallway to her little office, unable to look away from the glint of the padlock on the door to the storage room. Rain poured down outside and the black clouds had grown opaque, the darkness nearly complete and all encompassing: a wet, rain-drenched heaviness that hung in the rooms of the cookhouse, clinging to the shadows, giving the weird orange light of the overhead incandescent bulbs that lit the hallway a garish nightmare-horror-movie pall. At the end of the hall, her reflection stared back at her from the dusty old mirror.

  Coyote was back and he and Calendula were in the grow room, harvesting the pot. Coyote had been ordering Calendula around, grunting out commands and motioning with a Coors light. She hated the obsequious manner Calendula adopted around him: slavishly following behind like a dog, waiting for his orders and jumping at them. And Coyote was such an asshole; the first thing he’d said after he pulled up in his gleaming black Lincoln Navigator was, “Where’s all the fucking firewood? We need the fire going to dry the pot.”

  Calendula just stared at him, mouth going up and down but no words coming out. Rebecca stepped forward. “We burned it. It’s freezing in there.”

  “Even with all those grow lights?”

  “In Megan’s room, yes. So cold you can see your breath.”

  He just stomped inside. “Well, let’s check out the grow room.” Calendula followed behind him, head down, ever obedient, while Megan quietly watched with her big baleful eyes, her bunny stuffy clutched to her chest.

  Rebecca followed them, anxious to see what Coyote thought of the pot, ready to defend Calendula if Coyote dared say anything negative. The nerve of him. To leave all this responsibility on them and then just storm back in with his customary bad attitude. They went through the bedroom and past the big steel door and into the bright light and humidity of the grow room. The unnaturally large space assaulted her senses: the loud hum of the lights, the whir of the fans, the stink of the flowering marijuana: skunky, pungent and musky. Dank.

  Coyote’s attitude immediately improved when he saw the weed. He even began lightly chuckling to himself. Calendula had been very attentive and the reefer looked amazing: thick, dense nuggets of tight flower clusters, coated in crystals, hairs shriveled to rust, gleaming under the bright industrial lights. Coyote smiled and knelt before a plant, squeezed it, pressing his face against it.

  “Did you flush them?” Looking up to Calendula.

  “Oh, yeah. First with floral flush and then with plain water for the last week.”

  A clown-like grin seeped across Coyote’s face, spreading from ear to ear, and Rebecca thought that the only things that made this man smile were pot and money. Coyote rose up and clapped his hands together, vigorously rubbing them against each other. “All right, looks like the Girl Scout Cookie and Green Crack are ready to harvest. We’ll give the O.G. and Sour Diesel another couple days.” Then his eyes hardened. “But you’re going to have to clear out those back rooms. We need them to dry the weed in. Megan can sleep in your room till we’re finished with the trimming. And we’re going to have to get more firewood.”

  —

  So now she had to pack up the spare room she’d been using as an office for her herbal business. She’d already emptied Megan’s room, her clothes and all the stuffed animals she liked to sleep with, covering the little bed with a tarp so it wouldn’t get filthy when they hung all their pot in there. She pushed open the door to her office and stepped in.

  It was sparse inside: a card table with her laptop on it (though without internet the thing was practically useless to her), a small printer she used to make labels, pamphlets and business cards. Jars filled with lotions, packets of immune sprinkle, and sachets of tea. She sat down in the wooden chair she had dragged here from the kitchen, sighed, and began packing up her stuff: stowing the laptop back into its case, putting all her products in a large cardboard box.

  She tucked the last bottle of lotion in and closed the lid, heaved it up and started out, thinking about last night, how Calendula had finally convinced her to stay for another run.

  —

  He’d begged her to stay, literally getting down on his hands and knees and pleading with her not to leave.

  She’d sat on the edge of the bed, that same bed Megan had seen them fucking on, feeling something within her begin to divide.

  “I just don’t know if I can stay here.”

  The wind outside moaned and the old house creaked. The only light in the room seeped in from the cracks of the door to the grow room. Shadows loomed everywhere. She took off her glasses and, in a quick and caustic gesture, squeezed her eyes, trying to ignore Calendula as he paced the small bedroom, a silhouette emerging from and sinking back into darkness.

  “It’s only two and half more months, and we’ll get half this time. Half! Think of all we can do with the money. Get our own land, have an organic homestead. No indoor grows, no generators, no diesel. We’ll get some solar panels and find a place near a town with a farmers’ market and a community center. Some place like Briceland or Harris. Somewhere with a good school for Megan.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know if I can stay. I—I don’t feel happy here, or safe.” Was he making her decide between him and this place? Would he do that to her?

  He stepped out of the darkness, knelt before her, reached out and tucked a long dread that was hanging in her face behind her ear.

  “I love you. Please, don’t leave me here alone.”

  And there it was: He was staying with or without her. And so she made her decision. In the end, it wasn’t the mother in her that responded to his pleas, though she felt that tug, it was her fear of being alone. She had given everything to be with him, invested so much in this relationship. And there was nothing to go back to: Everyone at the co-op either hated her or thought she was crazy. What were her options? Go back to her mother’s house in Bakersfield? Find some new town and try to start over again? She couldn’t bear the thought. She couldn’t do it again: be alone in that desultory existence. He was all she and Megan had, her only hope, so she finally relented.

  “Fine,” she’d said, shaking her head and gnawing on her lower lip, tapping her foot and refusing to look at him. “I’ll stay.”

  —

  She stepped out of the room, arms filled with boxes, laptop hanging fr
om her shoulder, just as Coyote came down the hallway, pulling a ring of keys from his pocket. Calendula followed behind, dragging a blue tarp piled with a mound of freshly cut weed. She stepped back into the room to let them pass, watching as Coyote grasped the padlock and slipped a key into it.

  “What’s in there?” she asked.

  He paused, the lock grasped in his fingers, his veiled eyes regarding her suspiciously. “Nothing. Why?”

  She thought of Megan standing in front of it, knocking, standing in a puddle of piss, saying how a little boy lived in there. “I… I was just wondering why you keep it locked.”

  “I keep it locked to keep it from getting all junked up. I need this space to dry herb.” He squinted at her. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  He pulled the lock from the hasp, pocketed it, and as he swung the door open—creaking on its rusty hinges—a frigid rush of cold air blew out. She turned to the doorway, craning forward to tentatively peer in. It was just a large, dark, bare room: the walls fake wood paneling, the three windows at the far end covered in black plastic sheeting. String lines for drying herb ran across it and three large, blue, industrial dehumidifiers sat parked in the back corner.

  She nodded and gulped, staring into the vacant room, noting the fetid, musty odor that emanated from it.

  Coyote gazed at her with a vaguely questioning look in his hooded eyes, as if asking, satisfied? Then he strolled in, giving his keys a quick twirl on his finger and jamming them in his pocket. Calendula shuffled along behind and gave Rebecca a hopeful smile as he dragged the pot-laden tarp into the dark room.