Of course, no matter how fast the wheel was spinning he hadn’t lost all control or forgotten his tactics and so when he got close he put on the brakes and went low to the ground till he was mud all over, till he was indistinguishable from the mud, and crept up on his elbows and knees to take up a recon position and glass the plantation to be sure there were no aliens or hostiles snooping around or helping themselves to his crop. What he saw took the heart out of him. Half the pots, at least half, had been tipped over by the violence of the storm and another half of those had washed down a series of gullies that hadn’t been there the last time he’d looked. That upset him, of course it did, and maybe it made him careless too, because he jumped to his feet and just burst right out into the clearing and started righting the pots and checking on the seedpods he’d painstakingly slit in six places with a razor blade so he could milk the sap out of them, backbreaking work. Boring work. Work he’d come to hate. Which was why he’d been two days away from it, distracting himself with little yellow pills and getting laid. Stupidly.
A lot of the stems had been bent out of shape or even snapped in two when the pots tipped over and the ones that had washed downhill were just a total loss, but what he could do was salvage as many seedpods as possible, dry them out and grind them up to make a sort of tea, tea that would get you high, or at least that was what he’d heard. But then he couldn’t sell that and if he couldn’t sell it then it just defeated the whole purpose of trying to raise some cash out of all this work and worry so he would have the wherewithal to do it again next year and the year after that because those little toast-brown balls of opium were his beaver hides, the modern-day equivalent of the plews that would make him independent and never have to say Yessir, Cap’n, to no man.
Truth be told, he was in a kind of frenzy, trying to put things right when he should have realized he’d just have to cut his losses, but every plant meant something to him because he’d grown them from the little black gnat-sized seeds he’d mixed with a handful of sand so they’d scatter nicely across the surface of the five-gallon plastic pots he and Cody had lifted from the back of a nursery one socked-in night when the only way you could see anything was with night-vision goggles. Some of the seeds never germinated. Others got chewed down to the stub by a mysterious nighttime presence he never was able to track down, whether it was bugs or rabbits or even deer. Or aliens. Could have been aliens. He wouldn’t put it past them. But then why would they attack the half-grown plants instead of waiting for the flowers and the seedpods and the milky white drip of opium that made it all worthwhile?
What you had to do was score the pods late in the day so the sap wouldn’t coagulate like blood but instead just drip in a nice wet flow all night long so you could collect it in the morning and set it aside to dry from milky white to golden brown for a couple of days and just store it up in your screw-top jar for personal use or sale on the street or maybe under the counter at the Big 5, and no, he had no interest in making heroin from it because that required boiling out the impurities and using chemicals and no mountain man wanted to go near chemicals. That wasn’t natural. That wasn’t organic. Dry it and smoke it, that was as far as he wanted to go, but he didn’t even want to go there, not anymore, because really all he needed was 151 and pot and maybe, when the wheel was spinning out of control, a medicinal hit of acid to bring it back into line.
But here he was, in his frenzy, everything mud and half the plants ruined, the beautiful tall stiff green stems he’d watched climbing higher day by day till they flowered and the petals dropped off and the seed pods started nodding under their own weight now just bent and broken and pretty much useless, the rain slacking off to a mist that climbed up the back of his neck like a slug and the beef stew sitting on his stomach like its own kind of death. Talk about miserable. He just wanted to raise his face to the sky and scream till his lungs gave out. And he might have, except that soldiers didn’t complain or blame anybody for anything except themselves, and it was a good thing too because it was right then that he spotted movement at the far end of the plantation, in the treeline there, and just about jumped out of his skin. But he didn’t do that either. He kept his cool and retreated, silent and swift, sluicing uphill through the mud till he slipped over the edge of the bunker and snatched up his binoculars, and he was bummed, of course he was, but there was something inside of him that kept swelling and swelling until it began to feel like joy. This was it. Finally. Definitively. The moment he’d been waiting for since the seeds arrived on his doorstep in a neat tan box with raised silver lettering you could run your fingers over again and again just for the sheer transference of it: Russo & Ayers, Horticulturists. And wasn’t that a beautiful thing? The box? The seeds? The moment?