$200 and a Cadillac

XII



Eli drove fast and worked himself up about what he would say to Ron. But he didn’t speak. Neither he nor Eddie said anything as they drove past the Super 8 and out of town to the west, toward the refinery. Ron told them they should never be seen together around town. That made things difficult, of course, because there weren’t too many places they could meet where they wouldn’t be seen. Usually that meant meeting at one or the other’s house very late at night, but Eli had decided that in this case they just couldn’t wait. They’d have to be up very early in the morning to get started, so they couldn’t waste the night waiting up to talk to Ron.

As he drove, Eli thought it all through, going over the recent past and marveling at the natural progression of events. Six months earlier, Eli and Eddie were still working out at Monarch and everything was fine. Then they got hit in the layoffs and everything went to hell. At first, they lived off the money Eli’s aunt had left him in a trust. Fifteen grand. It felt like a fortune. For the first couple months they sat in the trailer, drank beer and smoked weed all day and tried to get a band going. They’d always intended to start one and they talked a lot about this maybe being the break they needed. Practice up, get a drummer and a bass player, head to LA and start playing some shows. Nothing big, just covers. They figured it was best to know the classics—easy crowd pleasers—so they spent their time learning as many AC/DC tunes as they could. They figured they could play a few nights a week in bars and make enough to get by. Maybe they’d get a little apartment down in Venice, hang out on the beach and live the good life.

But by the fourth month, they’d settled deep into a routine full of nothing and the money started getting low. They were collecting unemployment, but it wasn’t much and it would be hard to live on when that was all they had—and even that wouldn’t last forever. They started talking less and less about finding a good drummer and more and more about where their next meal was coming from. There wasn’t any work to be had anywhere and neither of them had anything worth selling. And even if they did, there weren’t too many people in town with any money to buy anything.

Finally, they started hanging out at Eddie’s sister’s place trying to get meals out of her. It was a small house she’d bought in town after she managed to sell their parents’ old place to a guy who’d moved to Nickelback to work at Monarch—a guy who turned out to be Ron Grimaldi, but they didn’t know that then. Eddie’s sister had moved back to take care of their sick mother and run the family business. Then the mother died, and the sister stayed to sell the place. Being the only real estate agent in town, she’d been able to keep one of the last pieces of decent business for herself and trade down to a small house, keeping the extra cash. It was a smart move. Janie was a smart woman. And because of that, it didn’t take her too long to get sick of the two of them and she and Eddie started fighting with each other all the time. After a while, they quit going over there and started sitting around Eli’s trailer all the time feeling more and more desperate.

Then they met Ron and everything changed.

They’d seen him around, of course, Nickelback was too small for anyone to go completely unnoticed. And this was especially true since it was Ron who had bought Eddie’s parents’ place when his sister sold it. But to them, he was just another lucky bastard who’d managed to both get and hold onto a job.

They’d stopped by Justin Baker’s house to pick up an ounce and ended up hanging around to watch a fight on pay-per-view. Justin always had weed, and a lot of people ended up stopping by on any given night. No one was sure where he got it, and no one much cared, as long as it was for sale and the bastard didn’t pinch the bags too much.

It was a small house and by the time the fight came on it was packed. There were people crammed in the living room—on the couch, on all the chairs that had been brought in from the dining room table, even leaning against the walls. Then there was a whole other crew standing around in the kitchen, drinking beer and shooting the shit, grazing through the bags of chips and plastic containers of salsa and ranch dressing sitting out on the counter. Most of the people knew each other. They’d all gone to high school together and watched the next dozen years slip away into the desert, with no hope of getting them back. Some of the guys told the same stories they’d been telling at similar parties for the past decade and everyone laughed like they’d never heard them before. Then it was, hey, remember the time? And then everyone was talking about the old days.

Eli leaned against the side of the refrigerator and listened to it all. It was depressing. They were all too young to have old times, to have a distant past they stood around reminiscing. Life should just be getting good for most of them, but instead they were there in Justin’s kitchen, drinking Miller Light from the bottle, and having the same goddamned conversation they’d all had fifty or a hundred other times in various living rooms, garages, and backyards around town. But it just went on happening. They’d all drink until they couldn’t walk. Then they’d drive home and pass out. And they’d spend the next week numbing themselves with the little sack of buds they’d bought from Justin, until even that was gone too, then they’d be right back doing the same thing the next Saturday.

Eli could remember his old man hanging around in town, talking it up with the boys at the supply store, or standing around leaning on the bed of a pickup truck, drinking from the old steel beer cans. Maybe that’s all people had ever done in Nickelback and this was just his generation’s version of it. Perhaps. But it seemed to make a huge difference that his old man and all of his friends were running their own outfits, selling tanker trucks full of oil to Monarch all week, while Eli and everyone he knew were just sitting around doing nothing all the time, trying not to think about what they would do next.

Eli let out a deep breath and made like he was going to the bathroom, but instead, he ducked out the side door onto the back porch. When he came out on the little deck, he was surprised to see an older guy already sitting in one of the lawn chairs that faced out into the desert, smoking a joint—the red tip of it glowing in the darkness. Eli had noticed him before. The guy was ten or fifteen years older than most of the other people there, but Eli hadn’t paid much attention to him. There were all kinds of people stopping by Justin’s all the time.

The only light came from the small kitchen, and it illuminated the man’s face as he turned his head back over his shoulder and glanced at Eli. “Hey,” was all he said before turning back to face the desert. Eli returned the greeting and lingered for a moment in the darkness, wondering if he should take a seat. He didn’t want to bother the guy, but he was annoyed that someone had beat him out to the porch.

Finally, the other guy said, “Take a seat. There’s too damned many people in there for me.”

Eli sat in the other lawn chair and said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. Can’t hear yourself think in there. It’s always like that around here.” Then he stuck out his hand and added. “Hey, I’m Eli.”

“Ron.” They shook. Brief quiet. The desert a giant black void out in front of them and they stared into it. The sweet smell of pot smoke drifted through the air around them. Muffled voices and laughter came through the wall behind them. Finally, Eli felt like he should keep the conversation going, and added:

“Last couple years it seems like you can’t come by here without a bunch of other people being around. And it seems like he never runs out of weed. Where the hell does he get it all?”

Ron waited for a second, and then asked, “Didn’t his old man have some oil wells out in the desert?”

“Sure, but he went under about the same time my old man did. There ain’t no money in that anymore.”

Ron laughed. “Nah, I don’t suppose there is. But there’s land, and probably some buildings, and this here’s the perfect climate for good weed to grow naturally. All you’d have to have is a little water, and hell, you could haul that in a couple times a week if you didn’t have a well. I’ll bet that’s all there is to it. He’s got himself fifty or a hundred plants out on his old man’s land, and that’s just big enough to keep him fed and just small enough to keep the heat from paying too much attention.”

Ron took another hit, looking over at Eli as he inhaled. Then he passed the joint to Eli and spoke as he held the smoke in his lungs. “Shit, he sells it all locally anyway. Who’s gonna rat him out? Everyone in town wants him to stay in business.” Ron laughed as he exhaled. The white cloud of smoke caught the light from the window for a moment, before dissipating into the darkness.

Eli took a drag and thought about what Ron had said. It almost made too much sense. At first, Eli thought there was no way it could really be that easy. He glanced at Ron and Ron gave him the grin again—glassy-eyed, jaw-clenched. But Eli was thinking about his old man’s place out in the desert. It had a good size building. It had a ton of old equipment. Hell, it even had a well that probably still had water. And pretty soon he wasn’t just thinking it, he was saying it. Ron turned his chair toward him and leaned in to listen, almost like he’d been waiting to have that conversation for a long time. Then he started asking questions and Eli started answering them, and before long, they were rolling another, getting another round of beers from the fridge inside, and Eli was giving Ron the whole history of Nickelback and the oil business there, and what had happened to his old man.

Two weeks later they were in business.

At first, Eli assumed it was going to be weed—an operation like he imagined Justin Baker had—and that’s what he spent his time talking to Ron about. Ron seemed only half interested and kept making vague suggestions that there might be something else they could do, but offered no specifics. Eli told Eddie, who was worried about Ron wanting to start a meth lab. Meth would make them a lot more money, but it took more skill to make and was harder to unload in really large quantities. Plus, none of them were meth freaks and none of them wanted to become one. But Eddie’s fear was simply that—his own fear. Ron showed no more interest in a meth lab than a growing operation. So Eli assumed—if it was all the same to Ron—that they’d stick a hundred plants out in the hot sun and watch them grow into a huge pile of cash.

The more they talked about it, the more they planned it all out, the more Eli and Eddie started to revive their talk of getting a band going, heading to LA, playing shows. They would lose sleep at night thinking about what it would be like harvesting every three months. They figured a hundred plants would get them about twenty-five pounds to sell. At two grand a pound—wholesale—that was fifty big ones every three months. Two hundred thou a year. Easy street.

Then, one night, they finally made the forty-minute drive out to Eli’s property so Ron could have a look. When they crested the low hill and saw the cinderblock warehouse, cluster of old derricks, and all the abandoned equipment—including two old twenty-thousand-gallon tanker trucks—scattered around in the moonlight, Ron seemed to lose his focus and started asking all kinds of very specific questions about the oil business. What was this for? What does that do? How do you figure out where to drill? Eli had spent years trying to forget the answers to those questions and Ron’s inquiries only made him tired.

When they walked around the property, Ron was amazed at the piles of junk everywhere. No one ever hauled anything out. Eli’s grandfather used to say that the whole desert is a dump, why waste your time hauling trash? There were rusted out cars, piles of old metal cans two and three feet high, massive rat’s nests of coiled wire and fence materials: a rusty graveyard for old industrial junk. When Ron was standing in the doorway of the warehouse, he stared out to the east, into the night, off where Monarch would be. Eli told him it was twenty miles away and that, with the rolling desert in between, you couldn’t see it even on a clear day.

Then Ron stuck his hands in his pockets and seemed to focus on the oddly straight line of a short stretch of sagebrush. When he asked about it his face seemed to explode with brightness at the answer. Like a light clicked on inside him.

“Oh, that’s left over from the easement,” Eli said, not even thinking about it.

“What easement?”

“From when they ran the pipeline through. It comes right in through here and then runs out west another twenty miles or so before it turns south toward Rancho.” Eli stood looking up at the cinderblock structure. Even in the dim light, he could see the cracks in it. There were too many earthquakes in southern California for a building like that to last forever.

Ron asked, “Where does it run?” Eli looked at him because his voice sounded different.

“Right through here.” He pointed along the ground and into the building. “My granddad was pissed about the whole thing, thought he was getting railroaded. So he took the money from the easement and built the building right over the top of the pipeline.” Eli laughed. “Said they could stick this building up their ass if they ever needed to dig up the line.”

Ron was silent for a minute, just staring at the ground, and then he looked around at all the old equipment and grinned. Then he asked, “How deep is it?”

The workday at Monarch ended at four. Now that it was down to a single shift—and a skeleton crew at that—the place was a ghost town by four thirty. Eddie and Eli parked along the road and waited for the last of the cars to come out of the parking lot. Ron was one of the last to leave, and he saw the two of them as he pulled out onto the road. They followed him for a few miles until he slowed and pulled down the side road that led out to Eli’s property. The dust kicked up and Eli lagged behind until Ron stopped his truck once they were out of sight of the main road.

They could see the back of Ron’s head just sitting in the truck as they approached. Suddenly it occurred to each of them that he might just come out of the truck with his baseball bat, ready for action. Eli shut the car off and hesitated. Would the crazy son of a bitch really do something like that? Weren’t they too close to Monarch for him to pull that kind of thing? Someone must have seen them parked out front of the plant. Someone would put it together if their bodies were found out there, wouldn’t they?

Ron glanced at the two of them in his rearview mirror. What the hell were they doing? You never knew what kind of idiocy the two of them were engaged in. He didn’t really want to get out in the heat now that his air conditioning was finally cooling things off, but they were just sitting there and he wanted to get home and relax. Finally, Ron opened the door and went back to the car.

They just sat there watching him until he was all the way up to the side of the car. Then Eli rolled down the window, looked up at him and said, “Hey man, we gotta talk.”

“Really?” Ron glared down at them. “I thought we were out for a f*cking picnic.” The two of them just stared up at him like a couple of children. “Well?”

“Man, we gotta talk about the operation. About the money. There’s no way we can make a hundred grand that fast.” Eli felt like he should get out of the car, but he was safer behind the wheel, where he could drive away if he had to. Ron looked exasperated, like he looked the day they picked up the hitchhiker.

“Christ. Just do the math for crying out loud. You two lazy sons of bitches just need to get off your asses. Stop sitting on the couch, polishing your goddamned bong all day. That’s the problem.”

“No, man, you don’t understand. We’d have to make two trips a day to even have a chance at something like that. There’s just no way we can do that. What if one of the trucks breaks down? Besides, it’ll look funny. It might draw attention.”

“How many trucks a day go into that place? Huh? No one is ever going to notice you two showing up twice.”

“Look man, we just need to cool it a little.” Eli hesitated at the thought of mentioning the hitchhiker. Then he added. “Man, some guy found a leg out in the desert and the cops are onto it. We gotta be cool about things. We can’t go stirring shit up.”

“Oh Jesus Christ, you two lazy a*sholes need to focus for five minutes on getting some goddamned work done and maybe this whole thing will be over. Both so stoned all the time it’s amazing you two can remember to wipe your asses.” Ron stood with his hand on his hips, hunching over to peer into the car, ready to scold them no matter what they said.

Finally, Eddie got out on the other side and looked over the roof at the red faced Italian. “All we’re saying man, is we think you went too far with that kid. Now the cops have found him and they might figure shit out if we’re not careful. We need to ease into this thing before we get too carried away.”

“Let me tell you two little f*ckers something. If I don’t start seeing a return on my investment, you’re going to think I handled that hitchhiker with kid gloves. You ain’t seen nothing. Frankly, I don’t care where you get the money, but two weeks from today you’ll either hand me a hundred grand, or I’ll beat the both of you until one of you shits it. Are we clear?”

Eli ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “Man, who the hell are you? What is your f*cking problem?”

Ron had had enough. He was supposed to leave the other one alone, but Eli was fair game. He reached into the car, turned the key off, took hold of Eli by the hair and shirt and dragged him from the car through the open window flopping him out into the dirt. Before Eddie could even see what was happening, Ron was kicking Eli in the ribs and rolling him across the road, screaming at him the entire time. “Listen you little bitch. Never mind who I am.” With each word Ron would send another kick into Eli’s crumpled body and roll him over in the sand. “You little cocksuckers are really starting to piss me off.”

Ron stood over Eli and watched him writhe in the dust. Eli stared up at him out of one eye, but all he could see was a massive silhouette against the bright sky. Eddie watched the whole thing from where he stood, feeling safe somehow with the car between himself and Ron. But he knew there was no way he could escape if Ron’s rage suddenly focused on him. Ron hovered over Eli for a few seconds and then spat in the dirt beside him. “F*cking losers,” he mumbled, and then stomped back to his truck, climbed in, and drove away.

Eli was balancing on his hands and knees when Eddie got to him. He was spitting blood into the sand, having taken a kick to the face in the midst of Ron’s fury. Eddie wasn’t sure what to do, so he just stood there, watching Eli struggle up to his feet. When he was finally standing, Eli touched his mouth with the pad of his hand, pulled it away, and glanced down at the blood, already drying in the heat.

“I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch,” was all he could think of to say.