Behind The Curve-The Farm | Book 2 | The Farm

by Craven III, Boyd

  “That’s fine,” Angelica said with a smile.

  Maybe he really is trying to turn over a new leaf, Angelica thought to herself.

  The Sheriff’s near miss did not overshadow the party. When the pig was done, everyone dug in with gusto. Lyle and Goldie were trying to explain the different cuts on the pig, but like carnivores in the true sense of the word, everyone dug in, using a knife to cut off large chunks. They had sauce for dipping, bear claws for shredding some, biscuits to use to make sandwiches with the sliced or shredded meat, cornbread, deviled eggs and about ten more side dishes. Everyone was absolutely full by the time the Owens started making their goodbyes.

  That was also the time frame the state police called it quits after a very long day. After Lyle’s crew left, Curt and Dante asked the police crew and their pups if they would like to eat. They almost said no, but one of the K9’s named Rufus was pulling hard on his head towards a chunk of meat Anna was holding at the dog’s eye level.

  “Can he at least have a treat?” she asked sweetly.

  “My wife will kill me, but sure,” he said. “Is there… uh... “

  “We have forty or fifty pounds of meat left,” Luis told him.

  He was sitting backwards on the picnic table, his boots crossed as he contemplated how stuffed he was, and whether he had overdone it.

  “I mean, if it’s no problem?” the other officer asked.

  “Go get the third guy, and we’ll fix you three and your pups some plates. For drinks we have some beers, bottled water and… um... Grandma’s vodka mix in lemonade.”

  “I might have me a little lemonade,” the one officer whose dog got the treat said. “If it’s no trouble.”

  “None at all,” Anna said, turning on the charm.

  “I’m going to spank her for that later on,” Steven muttered darkly.

  He was overheard by both Luis and Leah, who started laughing and pointing at her.

  “What did I do?” Anna asked the two of them seriously.

  “Ask me three beers ago,” Andrea said with a grin.

  “That doesn’t even make any sense,” Anna told her.

  “And neither do I!”

  They were laughing again, and the police looked at them funny, then shrugged and sat down. Other than asking about Grandma’s lemonade recipe that was actually moonshine, they relaxed themselves. The pups were all fed chunks of meat and anything else that was safe for them that they wanted. They had been working a long time too. Angelica brought over Roscoe’s big water dish and filled it from a spigot and put it down for the K9s. They went back and forth with the food to the water for a while until Roscoe decided to come sniff their plates. He made a chuffing sound and sat down in front of one of the food bowls, wrapping his big front legs around it and started eating.

  Ranger looked like he thought that was hilarious, because he barked at both Roscoe and the other dogs, almost like he was inciting them to do something. Anything. Finally, the dog whose bowl had been stolen came over to the big hound and made a whining motion while he was sniffing. Roscoe got up and they both did the doggy sniff check. When the K9 went back to eating, Roscoe used a foot to pull the dish out and let out a low growl.

  “Roscoe…” Andrea started.

  The K9 laid down on all fours, then rolled onto her back. Roscoe sniffed her neck then walked to the other bowl and sat down.

  “What are they doing?” Dante asked, though to nobody in particular.

  “Roscoe is establishing dominance,” Rob said. “He’s the biggest and meanest fur face here, but he’s not being a dick about it.”

  “You’re right,” Officer Kensky told him. “Dog handler in the military?”

  “Something like that,” he said, not entirely telling the truth.

  “But he’s not really being aggressive about it,” Anna said.

  “He’s probably got a quarter more of those other dog’s body weight, and I’m sure they knew that. Now if they were going to all gang up on him, he would be in a world of hurt. Instead, they are letting him be the boss. For now.”

  “Dogs are so weird,” Leah said, grinning.

  “That’s because their chest thumping and fight for dominance is a lot like what our menfolk do,” Angelica said, making Anna almost spray food. She started choking and coughing so Steven pounded on her back, muttering, “It wasn’t that funny.”

  Which made her cough and choke and laugh more. All in all, it wasn’t a bad evening.

  Ten

  Kerry had gotten an odd phone call from her usual health inspector. They were up to date on paperwork, but they had been requested to have it available at the following Thursday market. That was odd, because she kept it framed on her wall to make the bi-annual visits go faster. At a glance, they could see the dates of permits, inspections etc. The other thing that had her concerned, was her local inspector was not going to be the one coming in. That was all they knew.

  Kerry opened Thursday like she normally did, checking to see if any of the vendors had not made it in. Sometimes things happened, but she would rather know if customers asked where so-and-so was. Sometimes they were not coming in, but left special packages in care of another vendor for the customer. Things like that. This day, she saw everybody there, smiles on everybody's faces.

  She decided not to open the doors fifteen minutes early like she’d done the last time, and realized there was quite a crowd of people waiting to get in. She remembered seeing the headlines on her phone before she had left that morning. Food shortages in the stores, meat not being easily sourced. Empty shelves. Toilet paper of all things suddenly gone. The farmers who served the local community directly did not seem to have any shortages of goods, but she’d also heard rumors of regulators coming into the communities, making suggestions that were more than merely requests.

  Kerry was not a conspiracy theory led person, but she’d been around a lot longer in life than her 50 years showed. She was what her nephew Rob would call an old soul. So, when she got the call that somebody new was coming in, she was already thinking along the lines of those suggestions that she had only heard of as only rumors on the internet. She didn’t want to change a thing here, her vendors loved her work on their behalf, and when the time came up to rehire her every other year or vote for a new market manager, she’d never had to worry about finding new work.

  She was one of the few people in the market and countryside that did not farm or ranch. That made her an oddity in a way, but it also gave her the necessary outsider’s view that made her a fair market manager. Her degree had been in business forever ago in a foreign nation called NYC, not that she would ever admit that aloud to anybody in her community. So, she saw the writing on the wall. She made her own projections, much like the Weavers did, and she did not like the answers she was coming up with.

  Soon, non farming communities were going to be in a world of hurt. She had seen on a micro scale what was going on, and if the folks from the cities started coming into the rural communities to go shopping at markets like this, the food wouldn’t last. The butcher that sold his cuts exclusively at the market was having a hard enough time getting enough meat animals to keep his regular customers happy.

  That is why she’d tried to drop a hint to her nephew’s group. So far, they had not taken them up on it, which she found curious. Leah had told her they had some custom butchering done, but it must have been from somebody else.

  “You need to stay here, Dante,” Leah told him. “One thing we’ve proven is that we need at least one of us around all the time until Andrea is out of her casts.”

  “I know, that’s why I think it should be me going,” Dante told her. “In case things get rough.”

  “Wow, I heard that oink all the way over here,” Anna said with a smirk, coming out of the kitchen in the big house.

  “I know, right? He better recognize he might be the big swinging dick in the cardiac unit, but us girls can and have been kicking ass, and we don’t need to be sheltered.”

&nbs
p; “Listen, there’s a difference between you and me physically. I know you can kick major ass,” the girls exchanged low fives while he wasn’t looking, “but I’m taller and uglier. They would take me more—”

  “If you say ‘seriously’, I’m letting the girls beat you to death,” Rob said, grinning.

  “I give up,” Dante told them, digging into his pancakes.

  “Would you mind if I went with you?” Luis asked.

  Dante’s face was blank, then he started grinning and nodding in agreement. Luis had come out on Saturday for the pig roast and had not left yet. He had found a million little things that needed doing at the farm and had been chipping away at the list. The group all liked him well enough to have totally read him into what they were trying to do there. They had been sort of soft feeling him out, much in the same way he had been trying to show them that he would be a useful asset. He had his own supplies, and brought a mixed bag of experience with him that went beyond what Steven and Rob had learned during their careers.

  For nearly six decades, Luis had lived and worked in the construction industry, as had Steven, albeit for a shorter time. But with more experience comes more diverse knowledge, and his love for tinkering with electronics and mechanical devices was growing. Luis was not a computer guy per se, but he had an idea for a sun tracker; not for moving their panels, but for redirecting the sunlight at the panels with a mirror setup. It was all theoretical at this point, but it would make a difference in the power output the group could get come wintertime.

  “I… you don’t mind?” Leah asked, really not hating the idea of having somebody go with her.

  “It interests me. My Abuela would take me as a boy. I’m curious if it’s the same as it was when I was little.”

  “I don’t mind,” Leah said.

  “Have fun,” Steven told him. “It’s washing eggs, putting them in cartons, taking money and repeating that all over again and again and again and again and….”

  “I get it,” Luis told him holding a hand up, “but I would like to see what dried spices they may have, or see if anybody has any of the seed stock we were talking about.”

  “Uhhhhhh,” Steven moaned. “I forgot. We need to get that greenhouse built!”

  “That’s another thing; I was going to ask there if anybody had any extra rolls of film or plastic before we make our frame.”

  “Sounds good,” Dante said, with half a mouth full. “Let us know if you find any good deals.”

  “Si, I will,” Luis said with a smile.

  He wanted to go to the market for more reasons than he had stated. One of the biggest ones he left unsaid; he wanted to get an idea of what the public outside of the cities were like, mood-wise. He could almost feel and hear the tension in the Memphis area when he was there. The riots were still a weekly thing, instead of nightly. Out here they had their own problems, but so far, the masses who had attacked had kept bunched up at the gate, and they didn’t have the big numbers the city had.

  “Hey, just make sure you’re carrying,” Anna told him. “Nobody around here should be headed out without some form of protection.”

  “Miss Anna,” Luis said, “I’m too old to be thinking about having babies.” Luis said this so dryly that his tone almost dared somebody to call the joke out for what it was.

  “You better watch your mouth,” Grandma Goldie snapped. “You know you ain’t too old for me to spank!”

  “Now this sounds like my idea of fun,” Luis said, standing up. “Abuela, please, can I have another?” He was almost bending over.

  Everybody watched as Goldie got flustered and spluttered, and then they lost it when Harry busted up laughing. That triggered everybody else into gales of it. Goldie’s face was red, and she was still sputtering, so Luis stepped close to her, took her hand, and gave it a kiss.

  “I’m only trying to fit in,” he told her, “please don’t be offended.”

  “You really would like me to spank you, wouldn’t you?” she asked over their laughter.

  “I would count it as one of the more exciting moments in the last fifteen years or so, if you did.”

  “Oh, get out of here,” Goldie said, pushing him back. “You flatterer.”

  He took his seat again, with Rob laughing and whispering that nobody had ever called his mom on that bluff before. They all looked up when they heard footsteps from the top of the stairs. Angelica was wrapped in her housecoat that brushed the floor as she moved. Her hair was going everywhere except on one side where she had slept hard on it.

  “Somebody turned off my alarm,” she said, her voice scratchy and barely audible.

  “You’re supposed to stay in bed today, Momma. Doctors said so,” Harry reminded her.

  “I… can I have some coffee Doc?”

  Andrea answered for them. “We’ll run you up a cup. How do you like it?”

  “How I like my men. Tanned, sweet and ready to kick some ass,” she said, then coughed.

  “Go ahead and get back to bed,” Rob called to her. “Rest. We got the market figured out for today and we need you up and healthy soon, so get some rest.”

  “Dammit, I don’t want to be grounded to bed,” Angelica said, almost stomping her foot.

  Rob got up and pushed his chair in. He took the steps three at a time with his long legs. For a second Angelica looked like she wanted to run, but she also looked too tired to move very far or fast. Rob picked her up off her feet so gently she hardly felt it. He cradled her to his chest, and she was nearly asleep by the time he laid her back down in their bed. By the time he had pulled the covers over her, she was asleep.

  Eleven

  Kerry was almost ready to fall over when the inspector left. She had been right in her suspicion of the 'suggestions'. They were not requesting either, just like she’d thought. Behind the scenes it was more directions and threatening consequences. The USDA and the FDA’s enforcement branches were cutting the market days down, promising to buy fifty percent of the produce, meat and goods at government set prices, which were far below what they were going for currently. It wasn’t like the farmers and ranchers out here were price gouging. Most of them hadn’t raised prices in forever, but now she was going to have to close down on Thursdays earlier, and try to get folks to sell to the government before they mandated it to them directly.

  “How have things fallen apart so fast?” she muttered to herself, seeing Leah and a strange gentleman at the Langtry’s farm stall.

  “Hey there,” she said, “how are you doing?”

  “Doing good, just bringing some eggs in,” Leah told her. “Kerry, this is Luis, he works with Steven.”

  “Luis, nice to meet you,” Kerry said, and meant it. Luis was a little bit older than her. He was definitely of Hispanic descent she thought, but he looked like a Texas cowboy to her. His skin was weathered, but the laugh lines around his mouth, and crow’s feet around his eyes only added to the character she was suddenly drawn to. With his long lanky looks, cowboy hat, right down to the boots, he looked the part of a cow puncher.

  “It's very nice to meet you, Miss Kerry. How are things looking today?”

  “So far so good,” Kerry told them, “but it looks like there's going to be some hard and fast changes coming to the market here. I just got out of a meeting and I'd love to discuss it with you, Leah.”

  “Anything you want to tell me, I'm all ears,” Leah told her.

  “Have you guys been hearing about the food shortages?” Kerry asked.

  “Yes,” Leah told her. “Why hon, what's going on?”

  “Apparently our government is now starting to take control of the food system. I just got a visit today from FDA and USDA inspectors I have never met before. They are going to… The markets are going to have to shut down early one day a week for the pandemic, but they don't want to close down food distribution throughout the state. They've asked me to pass along to all of the vendors that they would like to start purchasing food from us directly, for redistribution.”


  “Are they at least offering us good prices?” She laughed. “Remember the $350 toilet seats, the $600 hammers?”

  “No, they've apparently got a price list they are working on. Their set prices are often half of what the farmers are able to sell it for here at the market. They wanted me to walk around and talk with everyone today, let them know about the changes, and sign as many up as I could to start selling directly to them. The whole word ‘redistribution’ kind of peeves me off. I know it's what we do here at the Farmers Market, but this isn't exactly the same as their idea of redistribution.”

  “So what days is the market going to start closing early on? Not Saturdays, is it? That's everyone's best day of the week!”

  “Thursdays,” Kerry told her. “I'm thinking it's probably because they want to get more food out of the market, but don't want to be viewed as being heavy-handed. Yet.”

  Luis had been quiet until this moment, and he took the opportunity to look at the market manager. She had long curly blond hair tucked up tight, under a cowboy hat that was not too dissimilar to his. He was a little bit older than her, but she looked familiar somehow. Then it clicked; this was the Kerry that was related to Rob Little, or Little Rob as the group called him. They had told him all about her when they traded stories the other day at the cookout, but Luis thought he was suffering from CRS. Cannot remember shit. Kerry was just drawing all of his attention, and his brain was hardly working when he was trying to dig up the memory.

  They talked off and on for a good 10 minutes. Luis sat in the background, taking over the washing of the eggs. He liked listening to Kerry and Leah talk back and forth. What the inspectors, or government enforcers, as Luis thought of them, were proposing was pretty chilling. Luis sent the group at the farm the basics in a text message to Steven and asked him to let the group know. Of course, everyone wanted to blow up Leah's phone at that moment, but she just kept hitting ignore and talking.

  Leah had gone back and forth on whether or not she wanted to continue with the market. Talking with Kerry had made her really wonder whether the group selling their eggs at the market was even worth it. They had enough money set aside now, not to mention the small fortune that Dante and she had made from cashing in their stock. The rest of the group knew they were well off financially, but they had no idea how well-off they actually were now. Money was now literally no object to Leah, and $150 lost a couple days a week was not going to change her standard of living one bit.