Grower's Market

by Michael Baughman

  “We got us an excellent crop this year,” Shrimp said. “Super first-class prime cannabis. But there’s rumors some outsiders might show up to rip us off. I guess we got a few rippers around already. Saw some today in fact. Dealt with ’em. Some dude named Crazy Carlos might show up later somebody said. It’s all rumors though. Always is. Nobody knows what the fuck’s really going on.”

  “We heard this dude Crazy Carlos used to be a porn star,” Shadow added. “Shrimp here and me figure we’ll cut out and open up our restaurant pretty soon. It’ll be a first-class place too. All we got to do is figure what kind of food to serve. What kind of cuisine. We been watching that Food Channel every Thursday. That channel’s tough to find, out in the sticks, so we got to drive big miles to see the son of a bitch, but we hardly ever miss it.”

  “He’s right,” Shrimp said. “There’s too many crazy motherfuckers out here all over the mountains, more all the time. We got our loot all saved, more than enough loot, and pretty soon we’ll do it. Maybe we’ll figure it all out after we take our winter vacations. Maybe this’ll be our last season out here.”

  “First-class cuisine!” Shadow said. “The total opposite of army chow!” He patted Uncle Sam’s shoulder. “You wait, dude! You’ll be a fucking guest of honor! We’ll get you in there soon as we open the doors!”

  Uncle Sam didn’t blink.

  Shrimp changed the subject. “Used to be all we did in fall was hunt,” he said. “Remember how we used to sit in camp maybe blowing some weed along with the Jim Beam around the campfire? Remember that humongous buck you got that year when you slept late and everybody else was hunting in the old homestead draw and that dumb fuck walked right past the tent right after you crawled out of your fart sack? How come so many deer are so fucking dumb?”

  Uncle Sam’s eyes didn’t blink. Shadow patted his shoulder again and then slid his free hand underneath Uncle Sam’s head and slowly lifted his head up. It felt heavy. With the head close to vertical he positioned the low edge of his pint glass between Uncle Sam’s slightly parted lips. “Here’s some beer,” he said. “I mean some amber ale. You ready, buddy? Swallow it down now. Here it comes, dude.”

  When Shadow carefully tilted the glass the beer dribbled down Uncle Sam’s chin onto his neck and the collar of his T-shirt. Dark stains appeared on the red material.

  “I think maybe he’s asleep,” Shrimp said.

  Shadow slowly lowered the heavy head back down onto the red pillow.

  “We should kill him,” Shrimp said. “He’d be way better off, right?”

  “What if he hears you say that?”

  “I feel so fucking sorry for Rainbow.”

  “She doesn’t want us to kill him.”

  “When was the last time you asked her?”

  “A while back. A few months I guess.”

  “Just because she says she doesn’t want us to doesn’t really mean she doesn’t want us to. You think?”

  “No,” Shadow said. “She just can’t say it is all.”

  “Well then we should. We could do it right now. We could do it with the pillow. Rainbow ever tell you how she wants to be a nurse someday?”

  “Yeah, she told me. She got the idea from that old lady who died, that nurse named Heather.”

  “Well she could do it if we helped Uncle Sam here die.”

  “She might really not want us to kill him though.”

  “Talk to her again.”

  “I will. But she won’t be able to say it. How can we know for sure?”

  Shadow used the sleeve of his sweatshirt to blot the beer from Uncle Sam’s chin and neck. Then they sat for a while sipping the amber ale and looking down at him.

  “Talk to her again for sure,” Shrimp said. “Ask her at least.”

  “I will.”

  UNCLE SAM

  “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”

  The eleven words of doggerel began sounding through Uncle Sam’s mind the first time Rainbow waited on him at Burger King all those years ago. He had never given a thought to what people called “love at first sight” and then it happened to him. In her silly Burger King uniform she was lovely with wide brown eyes and long black hair and a lithe and sexy figure and a smile that showed she was happy despite her work. All of that was clear at first sight. But Uncle Sam thought he saw even more there and he was right. They married a little less than six months after she served him his first Whopper. From grade school through high school and then at work Uncle Sam had been confident and talented and smart. He had been a success on the basketball court and in the classroom and then as a part-time logger. With Rainbow he found his happiness and four months after their wedding his troop plane landed overseas and exactly one month later on a hot summer morning he was riding in a Hummer along a narrow dusty road through a barren valley between two steep brown mountains and there came a blinding white flash and roaring heat and instantaneous oblivion.

  “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don’t upset us.”

  In what remained of his mind he heard it yet today.

  BASEBALL CAPS

  CASE

  When Case thought of his wife he understood that even though she had died in that awful way the pity he felt wasn’t nearly so much for her as for himself. Heather had been a nurse in his war and had cared for him after he suffered his wounds. They fell in love and kidded about how they were just like Catherine Barkley and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. Like Hemingway’s couple they hated the war and after Case was as healed as he would ever be and then Heather’s discharge seven months later they married and soon moved to the woods where Case cruised timber for the Forest Service. He used whiskey and marijuana in moderation to deal with his pain and from spring through fall he and Heather fly-fished and cross-country skied and hunted grouse and mountain quail and hiked. Heather worked as a nurse for an old country doctor who practiced in a small town forty miles away. She had stitched wounds and set broken bones and delivered babies and finally retired after the old doctor died and no young doctor could be found to replace him. After her retirement she helped the bartender Rainbow care for her comatose husband at the Bird of Prey. Besides her nursing she enjoyed doing everything Case did except for the marijuana. She had nothing against marijuana but feared that using it might somehow diminish its value to her husband. In the wintertime they both read books and listened to music and talked about what they had read and heard. They had no children and wanted none. They had agreed on that the first time they talked about marriage before they ever made love.

  When Case woke up in the cold and dark he had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. All he knew for certain was that he was alive. He felt nauseous and hungry at the same time and he tasted sour bile in his mouth, and even though his hands and feet were numb with the cold he could feel the wet earth caked underneath his fingernails.

  He coughed and vomited and then remembered. The afternoon flashed into his mind with images clearer than truth. He had hiked across the wet green valley and was starting up the long hill when he heard men screaming in the woods behind him. At least three different voices were screaming words but they were too far away for any of it to be understood.

  After a minute’s pause there was loud screaming closer to him.

  Case picked up his pace and soon he was panting for breath. The screaming came closer all the time and now he could discern some words:

  “Motherfucking thieves!”

  “Cocksuckers!”

  When he looked back he saw nothing but trees. Now the hill was so steep that he had to pull himself up the slope by grasping sword ferns hand over hand. He stopped long enough to slide the straps of his backpack off his shoulders and down over his arms, and he heard the pack thud to the ground and then he kept climbing.

  When a fern dislodged by the roots he fell heavily backward and cursed. He lay still for a moment and then rolled over and pushed himself up and resumed climbing. On a pa
tch of damp pine needles his right foot slipped out from underneath him and he sprawled face-first onto the forest floor. He tasted warm blood in his mouth and his heart thudded heavily.

  When he pushed himself to his feet he saw a huge fallen sugar pine blocking his path. Using limbs as handholds he tried climbing over the tree but the limbs weren’t spaced to allow him to make it all the way over the top. On his fourth and final try he gashed the palm of his right hand on a splintered limb.

  He spat a mouthful of blood and rubbed blood from his hand onto his pants and made his way around the pine instead of over it. His cotton shirt was stuck to his back with sweat. On the other side of the pine there was steeper terrain and he labored upward slower all the time as he fought through ferns and thick brush and wove back and forth among the big trees.

  “Assholes!”

  “Motherfuckers!”

  The words echoed back from distant hills and as the echoes faded Case reached a place where the trunks of the trees had been scarred by fire and the brush grew sparsely. Not far ahead he saw a clearing and just beyond it an immense gray boulder that marked the summit.

  On his hands and knees he crawled up to the base of the boulder and then scrambled around it and then all the way to the top where he lay facedown on smooth cool stone. His left thigh had cramped and he heard his rasping breath and tasted more blood in his mouth and swallowed it down.

  A red-tail hawk soaring over the valley screeched.

  A moment later a raven cawed from down below.

  When Case heard the two birds he opened his eyes in time to see three men at least a quarter mile away. Even with his eyes deteriorated from age he could make out their black baseball caps and camouflage T-shirts and brown shorts and black boots. They ran hard across the valley floor with one of the men a few yards ahead of the other two. Then five more men came out of the trees not far behind the three. The five wore blue jeans and sweatshirts and the five soon caught the three. First the three were punched and then they were thrown to the ground and kicked, and Case could hear the hard kicks landing against flesh and bone and he heard the victims moan and beg. Their voices carried clearly up the long valley.

  “We’re sorry!” one of them said. “Please, man, we’re fuckin’ sorry!”

  “Fuck you!” came the answer.

  “Please stop! We’re sorry fuckin’ sorry please stop!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Soon the three men lay there sprawled out and motionless. Two lay on their backs and the other lay facedown, and Case heard boots thudding into the limp bodies.

  The T-shirts the three downed men wore were stained darkly with blood and their faces were bloody too and their baseball caps lay nearby on the green grass.

  Case heard one of the five men standing around the bodies say, “I think there’s another motherfucker up ahead there somewhere. I think I saw another one way out ahead of us. Let’s go.”

  Case watched the men enter the trees below him and heard them talking. He couldn’t understand the words but he heard them moving up the hill and breaking through patches of brush and drawing closer.

  Then they were close enough so he could understand.

  “You sure there’s another motherfucker?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe and maybe not.”

  “Can’t you count? How fuckin’ many did you see?”

  “I’m not sure, asshole.”

  “In other words you can’t count.”

  “Fuck you, Shrimp! Maybe there’s one more. I thought I saw one. A cotton top. Some old dude.”

  The hawk screeched.

  “Thought you saw some old dude. Fuck you, Shakespeare.”

  The raven cawed.

  “We got to make sure.”

  “I’m tired, man. I’m wiped out. I’m ready for some beer.”

  “We’re goin’ up to the top of this hill first.”

  “What about the ones down below?”

  “What about ’em? They learned their lesson.”

  “Fuckin’ A!”

  Case rolled onto his back and slid feet first off the boulder.

  When he stood a wave of dizziness hit him so hard that he had to stand still with his head down and his hands on his knees and his eyes squeezed shut. He counted to ten in his mind and the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was his right hand smeared with bright red blood.

  He started down the hill careful to make no noise and soon he was back into big trees and no longer heard the voices. He was light-headed and feeling sick but he feared they might come after him and veered off to his left into a thick dark stand of Douglas firs.

  Not far into the firs he came to another fallen log and made his way around it. Verdant green moss covered much of the log and he used some to rub dried blood from his hand.

  He knelt and fell onto his side and then lay with his back against the log on the downhill side. The log smelled wet and rotten. He lay there breathing deeply with his feet drawn up and his arms clutching his knees.

  It was growing darker and Case’s hands and feet felt cold and he felt himself shivering and pressed his back tight against the moldering wood. He tried not to think about what he had seen because now he felt safe.

  A long time ago in his war he had spent a night huddled behind a rotted log in a jungle and now he remembered that. In the jungle he had fought off aggressive rats through the warm night and warmth was what he needed now.

  He vomited.

  A nearby coyote howled and a few seconds later another answered back from somewhere far away.

  Case lost consciousness.

  Now he had awakened in the night and he knew he needed warmth. He needed a fire. He knew he was old and alone but decided he wanted to live.

  He sat up with his back against the log and forced his right hand into his pants pocket. The pants were wet and too tight but he felt the Bird of Prey book of matches with his fingertips. It was difficult grasping the matches and pulling his hand back out of the tight pocket.

  Case held the matchbook in his mouth and crawled away from the log and searched with his hands for whatever might serve as kindling. There was barely light enough from a half moon and stars to see and at first all he could find were wet leaves and ferns and a few small death-cap mushrooms. He crawled along until he came across a carpet of dry pine needles near the trunk of a tree and then some dry twigs alongside a stand of buck brush.

  He piled the dry pine needles next to the buck brush and carefully crisscrossed the twigs on top and crawled back to where he had started and searched with his hands on the underside of the log for loose hunks of dry bark. He ripped off bark until he thought he had enough. It took five trips to carry the bark back to where he had piled the kindling. After the fourth trip he felt his right hand bleeding again. After the last trip to the buck brush he realized it would have taken only one trip to carry the kindling to the fuel.

  “Idiot,” he said to himself.

  His voice sounded loud in the quiet night and his hands were so numb that he had trouble ripping a match out of the book. After he had dropped three matches trying to strike them, there were only a very few left and the fourth match scratched across the striking surface making tiny blue sparks but didn’t light.

  Case blew on the matches hoping to dry them out with his breath. The third match to the last struck and flared into a feeble blue and orange flame. When he lowered the match to touch it to the leaves and twigs it slipped from his fingers and fell to the wet forest floor and went out. He stuck the fingers of his right hand into his mouth. He bit the fingers and barely felt pain but after a while he thought he could hold a match. The second to last match lit when he struck it. When he carefully lowered the small flame to the kindling the dry leaves and twigs caught.

  He arranged small hunks of bark carefully over the flame. It appeared the kindling flame would die and he leaned down and blew on it carefully and finally the bark caught.

  “Yes,” Case said and his voice sounded loud again and str
ange in the forest at night and he didn’t speak again.

  Soon he could feel warmth from the fire and he knelt close in front of the steady orange flames and held his opened hands directly over the burning bark.

  He fed progressively larger pieces of bark to the fire. He knew he would be all right now and as soon as he was warmed through he would start the hike back to his cabin. Even in the dark he knew the way.

  DAGWOOD AND MR. DITHERS

  SUNBEAM

  In San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district in the summer of 1967 everyone who knew her called her Sunbeam. She was seventeen years old and had hitchhiked west from Kansas City where her father presided over a prosperous bank. Her father played a lot of golf while her mother’s preferred pastimes were eating lunch at expensive restaurants and shopping for clothes at exclusive stores. Traveling alone on the road west Sunbeam seldom met with anything but decent treatment. During a ride through western Kansas and Colorado she and a husky middle-aged truck driver sang folk songs for the better part of five hundred miles. Her San Francisco friends began calling her Sunbeam because she never lost her cheerful disposition in any antiwar protest or college administration building occupation or civil rights march. When cops or squares acted violently or obscenely by screaming at her or throwing eggs at her or spitting on her she responded with a benevolent smile. Sometimes she asked her tormentors to take up a banner or sign and join the parade. “Please come on along with us,” she would say. “Join us! You can do it! You know you want to!” Not many wanted to and she was arrested fourteen times in two years and spent thirty-six nights in jail and never shed her smile or abandoned her positive outlook. When she was jailed during a protest march against racial discrimination in housing she thought up a slogan that helped fuel the protest after her release: Would you want your daughter to marry a realtor? In 1969 she migrated north with a band of friends to form a commune in a remote mountain valley on government land. On a weekend excursion she met a boy named Drum at a hot springs pool in the woods and they soon married and soon after that they decided to grow weed, and the Bird of Prey helped launder the money they earned. After Drum died, Sunbeam kept both businesses alive. Over a period of several years she developed a product that connoisseurs believed to be equal to the finest strains of outdoor-grown cannabis found anywhere.