It came back to him now, though so much had happened in the interval he’d completely forgotten about it, and even if he hadn’t he still couldn’t fathom what Carey was talking about. It was seven-fifteen in the morning. He’d had too much to drink the night before. The overhead light cut into his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “So?”
“This is just what we were talking about. This. Right here. Right now.” Carey was having trouble containing himself, but he dropped his voice as the Mexicans wheeled past and turned into the next aisle over.
Sten saw that their carts were loaded with staples, four-pound bags of Calrose rice, dried pinto beans, cellophane-wrapped boxes of instant noodles and what looked to be half the ground meat in the store, but still he just stared at Carey, the moment unwinding in slow reveal. Take Back Our Forests had been Carey’s idea—his and Gordon Welch’s, who managed the local B. of A. branch—and it wasn’t a vigilante group, not at all, a designation they’d bent over backwards to deplore. No, it was a citizens’ group—an association of concerned citizens, property owners, businessmen, locals all—that had risen up spontaneously in response to what was going on in the forest. The drug cartels—La Familia, the Zetas, Sinaloa—had come north, had come here, to grow marijuana on state and federal land, bypassing the need to smuggle product across the border, and in their wake they’d brought violence to the Noyo Valley, to Big River and the Mendocino National Forest. And worse: they poisoned everything, putting out baits for rabbit, skunk, deer and bear, even poisoning the streams. The calculus was simple: a dead rabbit wouldn’t be girding the base of the plants to get at the moisture there and a dead deer wasn’t going to browse the nascent buds—or a dead bear either or a marmot or a squirrel or anything else that ate, moved and breathed—and the best way to ensure that was just to poison the drinking supply. Hikers had been shot at. Fishermen. Hunters. People were afraid to go into the woods.
“I was out for my morning run,” Carey said, and then he broke off to crane his neck and peer down the aisle. “Mules,” he said. “These are the mules. You see what they’re buying?”
Sten shrugged. “Maybe it’s a church group. Maybe they’re going on a picnic.”
“Bullshit.”
They stood there a moment, blinking in the light. Sten wanted a cup of coffee, an English muffin, maybe a soft-boiled egg—and a nap, definitely a nap. He watched a heavyset woman who looked vaguely familiar—another early-morning shopper—stump by with a handbasket bristling with celery, seven or eight bunches of it, and wondered what that was all about—cream of celery soup? Carey put a hand on his wrist. “Listen, we’ve got to follow them, you know that, don’t you? To find out where the camp is—”
“Why not just call the sheriff?”
“Don’t be na?ve. There’s no law against buying groceries. And even if they’re illegal, which you damn well know they are, the cops are prohibited from checking their status—they can’t even ask because it might abridge their precious rights, to which everybody is entitled the minute they set foot in this country, whether they’re drug dealers or not. The cops are useless, you ought to know that.” He was going to say more, all ready to go off on a rant, but he suddenly stopped himself, motioning with his eyes, and here came two of them with their cart that was heaped now with peppers of every description—jalape?os, serranos, green, red, yellow, orange—and a pyramid of tortillas in the family-sized packages, twenty, thirty or more. When they’d turned down the next aisle, heading for the checkout stand, Carey let go of his wrist and lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. “You got to help me out here.”
Sten was noncommittal, but he was aroused: more dark little men, more criminals. And here, right here in the U.S. He was no racist—he’d seen the demographic shift in the school population over the years, the Swedes, Norwegians, Italians and Poles who’d worked the lumber mills when they were a going concern giving way ever so gradually to the Hispanics who cleaned their houses, repaired their cars, stocked the shelves in the supermarket and made up the beds for the tourists, and it had meant nothing to him, immigrants in a nation built on them—but when they destroyed the land, drove people out of their own parks and forests, it was another thing altogether. He’d seen their abandoned camps deep in the woods, the mounds of trash, the carcasses of the animals, oil and pesticides leaching into the ground, the abandoned propane tanks and crude listing shacks. It was a matter of ecology as much as anything else. Save the forests. Save the trout. The salmon. The deer.
“We’re going to have to use your car. Because I told you, I jogged here”—Carey picked at the front of his T-shirt in testament—“and mine’s all the way back at home.”
“Follow them? Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“We stay back, way back. Just till we see what road they turn off on.”
“Then we call the sheriff?”
“Yeah, then we call the sheriff.”
14.