1
I was all in. All on green. I flew to Portland, and he picked me up. He was kind and sweet and helped with my bags. I was blindfolded for the long drive out to the boonies. It was best I didn’t know where the fields were, he said. Standard practice. He stopped to get us coffees and lit my cigarettes along the way. There’s nothing like coffee and a cigarette, except for maybe a beer and a cigarette. I reclined in my seat.
When we got close Esha said I could take off the blindfold, and I watched tall evergreens slide by our sides. We turned off the gravel road, up to a small cottage that backed onto a reedy lake. We gathered my things and carried them up creaky steps. The place was shades of wood—cupboards, countertops, floors. There was a bank of smudged windows looking out over the stale water. Insects buzzed like electricity through power lines, and ducks and ducklings paddled near the shore.
“I’ll start you up tomorrow,” Esha said, cranking open a window. “You’ll be filling bags. We’ll load up the quad and trailer with topsoil and take it to the first field.”
“You haul in the soil?” I said.
“Yeah, the ground is too hard and full of roots to punch holes with the auger. Plus, the PH is all wrong. Too acidic for the plants. You’d get nothing but bunk.”
“Alright.” I nodded. “Bags?”
“Yeah, you grow in them, like soft plastic, about this big.” He hugged the air in front of him to show their round size. “They sit on top of the ground, so you gotta stay on top of watering. But only some of the fields will have those. The others, we’ll have to dig holes and fill them with soil and lime.” Esha opened the fridge. “Beer?” He threw me a can. “After we get all that done we’ll start transplanting the babies.” He saw my blank face. “Babies are cloned from a mother plant and sprouted in these little pucks.” He set down his beer and made a big O with his thumbs and fingers. “We have them under lights right now—they’re getting big. There’s eight fields that will have about five hundred plants each. We all share the work, like the crews rotate the fields for watering and feeding.”
“Okay, cool,” I took a hard swig from my can. “I’m on your crew, then?” I gave a little smile.
“Of course.” He walked over and put his arms around me. “Let’s not talk shop right now, babe.” He kissed me and squeezed my ass. “Listen, I’m sorry for what happened. Let’s just hang out, get you settled in, and then I’ll show you the ropes, yeah?”
I looked up his giant frame and put my hands on his chest. “Okay.”
2
We got up early and got to work. We loaded the quad’s trailer with forty-pound bags of soil and stacked them high. Esha strapped it all down, and I climbed on behind him. The thick tires crawled through the brush, over small trees, their branches whipping at our faces. The trailer bounced and rattled behind us. It was a half-hour trek before we came to a wide clearing. Roots and stumps littered the uneven ground.
“Let’s start on the far side, there,” Esha said over the engine, “and then we’ll work back this way.” We parked along the edge of the field, and he cut open the first bag of soil. He filled a grow bag about three-quarters full and threw in fistfuls of fertilizer. He mixed it with gloved hands before walking it over to the corner of the field. He mixed the next and spaced them about four feet apart. “Some plants can get pretty fat, if we’re lucky, so try to give about this much room. We need a path to walk between them.”
“Okay.”
I started filling, mixing, and placing the bags. The sun was hot. My feet slid forward and back in my boots, and my pants slid low on my hips. I folded them down at the top and stripped down to my sports bra. Horseflies took turns biting at the sweat on my forehead.
The day was long, and the sky sprayed down on us with a machine-gun sun. I put my head down and focused on the finish line. Our deal was 7 percent of the final pull. Five hundred plants per field would produce about 250 pounds at about $1,500 each. The math was $3 million gross, minus initial capital, which worked out to $2,690,000. My cut at 7 percent would be $188,300 for four to five months of work. Give or take.
That night, Esha left me at the cottage alone. He had some business in town, he said. I smoked and drank, and did bumps of Ketamine to pass he time. He didn’t get back until after midnight, and he woke me up when he crawled into bed. I got up, groggy, walking barefoot with dirt stuck to the bottom of my feet. I lowered myself down to the cold seat, elbows on knees, and sat there peeing for ages. I finally finished, guzzled too much water, and felt my way back toward Esha. Moonlight bounced from the lake to the bed, and a palm-sized shadow rested on the wall above him.
“Esha?” His breathing was steady. The shadow moved quickly to the left. “Esha, wake up.” Nothing. I stood there staring, frozen. “Esha!”
“Yeah,” he mumbled.
“What the fuck is that?”
“What is what?” he mumbled again into the pillow.
“That! Above you.”
“I don’t know—turn the light on.”
“No, you do it.”
“What the fuck, babe?” He threw off the covers, flipped on the switch, and I hid around the doorframe, peeking. It was huge. The leggy bastard scurried across the wall and down behind my side of the bed. “It’s just a spider,” he sniped.
“Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of a freak, mutant spider is that! Kill it!” I shook through my hair, scratched my neck, and all the way down my body. “I don’t want that roid-raged monster near me! It’s on my side of the fucking bed!”
“Relax! It’s just a fishing spider. Get used to it, they’re everywhere. Go to sleep.”
“No fucking way!”
“Go to sleep!” he barked and I went to sleep on the couch. But I couldn’t. They were all over me, swarming the floor, crawling up walls, and dropping from the ceiling. They sprinted across my face with long fuzzy legs that tickled my lips. I tossed and turned and scratched all night. I must’ve slept eventually. They crept through my dreams and whispered in my ears, and their bundles of eyes shone in the dark.
3
It was six a.m., and it was effort. My head pounded as I dragged my body out of bed. I stepped into my dirt-packed clothes and washed my face. I stood in the mirror, horrified by my swollen Romulan forehead. Fucking horseflies. I pulled one of Esha’s ballcaps over it, downed a cold beer, grabbed a one-hit bumper, and helped Esha hook the auger to the back of the bike.
We set off slowly through the trees. I wore my hat backward and pushed my forehead against Esha to avoid whipping branches. It took an hour to get to the hydrofield. Its skyscraping towers stretched on for miles.
“The rest of the workers arrived today, so they’re doing the other fields with bags,” Esha said. “The ground is soft enough here, so I’m gonna cut holes. You fill them with soil and mix in the lime.” He primed and cranked the pull-string on the auger’s motor. It fired up, piercing the air with a throaty gurgle, and the giant corkscrew crept into the earth. Blisters on my heels popped and rubbed as I pulled heavy bags of soil to the ground. The crew showed up with the same sort of rig—Moose and Zeke spooned on the bike, and Spunk bounced behind them in the trailer. I did a bump of coke, swallowed the drip, and I was good as new. Spunk and I worked side by side, passing the bumper between holes. He kept me laughing and it drowned in the wake of that deafening drill.
That one-hit wonder carried me through the day, but I was good and ready when Esha finally called it quits. We crawled back through the trees for a thousand hours. The brush blocked out the sinking sun, and monster mosquitoes fed on us. He cut the engine in front of our cottage, and it clamored on in my head. My blisters stung, my left nostril was clogged, and my bones hurt from bouncing off the back of the bike. Esha’s body took up most of the seat, and he barely moved forward when I asked him to.
“Wow, I’m sooo tired,” I said, sliding off the back. “Can’t wait to just chill.”
Esha swung off his leg, pounded up the steps, and slammed the door behind him.
My heart slammed too. I didn’t know what his problem was. I propped myself sideways on the quad’s pleather seat and lit a cigarette. I lit another to erase more time, finished it too, and took a deep breath. I walked to the cabin with gravel popping under my boots. It was quiet inside. Esha appeared from the hall. He was dressed with wet hair, and Irish Spring trailed behind him. He fiddled with the clasp of his watch.
“I’ll be back later,” he said.
“Where you going?”
“What do you care?” He huffed.
I squinted my eyes and lowered a brow. “Huh?”
“Why don’t you ask Spunk to come hang out,” he said. “I’m sure you’d both like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You two seem to be getting pretty cozy.” The clasp finally clicked, and he pushed past me for his keys.
“You’re leaving me here? What am I supposed to do? I don’t have a car.”
He pushed past me again and was out the door, in the car, and out the driveway. I stood in the doorframe staring, long after he’d disappeared behind the trees.
4
“Where the fuck have you been?” Esha wore big gloves, army pants, and a scowl across his face.
“Just out exploring, I guess.”
“Go get ready—we gotta load up the babies for tomorrow.”
I did, and he led me to a half-sized door at the far side of the cabin that led down to a rocky crawlspace. He fumbled the padlock with a tiny key and pulled the flimsy door wide open. It was blindingly bright. I crouched in to look and blinked away the glare. There was row after row of makeshift tables—long sheets of plywood balanced on the floor’s uneven rock and crates. A sea of green leaves held hands under hot bulbs, and the babies stared right back at me. They were like little hostages, tucked out of sight. Like me.
“I need you to go in there and start handing them out to me. We have to get loaded and ready for the morning,” Esha said.
I crawled inside and grabbed two at a time, then passed them back to Esha’s outstretched hands. The space was low and tight. I had to crawl forward on the plywood then scoot myself back, dragging a plant in each hand.
“Watch those lights, they’re expensive. You don’t want to bump into one of those—they’ll blow up,” he said. I flattened myself out even more. It was slow and tedious, but I was making a dent. On elbows and knees, I scooted back and forth deeper and deeper, handing the pots back to Esha. I’d cleared a wide middle path. The lights were bright and hot as hell, and sweat poured into my eyes. I reached for a plant that was off to one side and dragged it toward me. A scurrying black hand with eight fuzzy fingers darted into the clearing. It stopped to look at me.
“Fuck!” I lurched upward, my guts in my throat, and cracked my head on a hot globe. The thin glass shattered all around me. “Aghhh!” I screamed and shot back, scurrying on elbows and knees back to Esha.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, you crazy bitch?” he yelled.
“Steroid spider! Steroid spider!” I was dizzy with fear.
“What did I tell you? Now there’s glass in the plants, you idiot! It’s a fucking spider, get over it!”
“That’s not just a spider.” I was shaking.
“Get back in there!”
I went back in, slowly, heart pounding.
“C’mon, we don’t have all night.”
I cleared out the rest with Esha bitching behind me.
5
Esha crawled on top of me in the morning then left to take the quad somewhere. I chain-smoked my way through the afternoon, bored to tears. I puttered around the cabin, walked around the marshy shore, and cut through paths in the trees. Maybe I belonged here, alone, under strangled light with the dead earth beneath my feet. I kept walking. There was an old truck up the way, off to one side. It was a Ford, must have been from the ’60s. It had little round lights, rounded edges and its body was chewed out with rust. I pulled hard on the passenger door. It screeched and flung open. Dead leaves littered the seats, and trees had grown up through the floor. It was getting swallowed from the inside out.
I saw a book wedged in the bench seat. I pulled it loose and turned it over in my hand. It was yellow with age, and the pages were worn. The cover held on for dear life. Love Is a Dog from Hell, it read. Poems 1974-1977, Charles Bukowski. I flipped through the profanity-filled pages. There were titles like “Fuck,” and “I have shit stains in my underwear too,” and “Sex,” and “Bedpans,” and “The Good Loser.” This guy was a trip. I stopped on a crumpled page:
I took it with me, over fallen branches that were covered with moss and funny-looking mushrooms. They listened to my thoughts, and the trees turned their heads to watch as I passed. The poem repeated in my mind until it lost its meaning and swarmed around with the hungry mosquitoes.
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