LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

kneels behind a stump, places the sights on the man’s temple.

      “All right, all right,” the man says nodding. He takes out a can of Grizzly chew, thumps it once with the ball of his thumb, pinches up a huge dip, and folds it into his lip.

      “You chew?” he says.

      “No,” Brett says.

      “Only on special occasions,” Jacob says.

      “Ah,” the man says, “well, don’t start. Myself, I’m trying to quit. They put fiberglass in this stuff. Can you believe that? So, boys, you take it from me, if you’re going to take it up, and it has its perks, I’ll give you that, you pay the extra dollar and go organic. All right?”

      “Right,” Jacob says, “that’s solid advice.”

      “Organic, that’s the way,” the man says, “not these chemicals. I believe in organic myself. Better yet, just stick with the marijuana. If it weren’t for nylon, that’s all we’d ever be smoking.”

      “Speaking of that,” Jacob says, unshouldering his backpack and setting it down. “Is there any chance we can buy some from you?”

      “Well,” says the man, turning the can of chew over in his hands. He frowns.

      “It’s no worries,” Jacob says, “we were just looking for something to add to our adventure.”

      “I can appreciate that,” the man says, nodding. “Sometimes you’re just looking for a little something to take the edge off all the walking, and it helps bring out the details, doesn’t it? You notice things you otherwise just plain wouldn’t.”

      “That,” Jacob says, “is exactly what I mean. I can tell, sir, that you are both a poet and a scholar.”

      “Well, I’d hate to leave a friend in need,” the stranger admits.

      “My man,” Jacob says.

      “I can help you out,” he says, after a hesitation.

      What the hell? Turtle thinks. She stands in the grass, gun leveled at the man. Jacob passes the man a twenty-dollar bill, and the man opens a canvas pouch on his belt and takes out a tea canister. He pulls the cap and dispenses several buds into his hand, passes them to Jacob. Then he takes out a pipe made from a deer’s leg bone, with a wooden mouthpiece whittled to the bone flute, a bowl augured out of the jointed end. He begins breaking apart another bud in his fingers and packing it into the end, going on: “This stuff. This stuff, now. Not like tobacco, which is as addictive as anything—as addictive as heroin, and will kill you. Why I ever started smoking tobacco is beyond me. Trying to quit. Hence the chew, you understand. Only problem with the marijuana is that when you grow it out here, the fertilizer isn’t good for the salmon, even the organic fertilizer, and that gets to me. Looking at ways around it. Also, another thing is that we have rodents and things come out of the forest to chew on the stalks of the plants and you have to poison them or put up with them. I put up with them, and that’s why you should buy local. Those Mexican growers, those guys don’t care, this isn’t their home, right? They just lay down rat poison and it’s awful, just awful, kills the ringtails, the raccoons, the weasels, all those critters. That’s why you gotta buy your weed from guys like me. Locals. Supports the economy and it’s better for the environment. Where you headed, by the way?”

      “We’re just trying to find a place to camp,” Jacob says.

      The man nods, working his fat lip of tobacco. “You’re all right, boys, you’re all right, well, I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.” He squints off west.

      “Why fiberglass?” Brett asks suddenly.

      “Huh?” the man says. “What’s that?”

      “You said they put fiberglass in the tobacco, but why would they do that?”

      “Oh, well,” the man says, “the fiberglass now, it cuts your lips so that the tobacco gets absorbed faster, makes it more addictive. It’s the same thing with all of this packaged food they’re selling, don’t ever trust a corporation, boys, and especially don’t trust a corporation to make the food you eat. This is why I don’t have a car, you understand. Can’t conscionably have a car. Not when I’ve been down to South America myself, lived among jungle tribes in the Amazon and seen the damage the petroleum industry is doing down there. We should all eat a lot more local food, smoke a lot more pot, and drive a lot less, as far as I’m concerned. And love one another. I believe that. Community, boys, that’s the way.” He lights the bone pipe and takes a long draw. He puffs, and then hands the pipe to Jacob. They stand nodding and passing the pipe around.

      “Well,” Brett says, “I admire that, but I have to ride the bus to school. No other way to get there.”

      “Me too,” Jacob says, “though sometimes I drive. But you’ve given me something to think about.”

      Turtle doesn’t know what to do. She watches, relaxing her finger on the trigger, but she doesn’t lower the gun. After a silence broken only by the stranger’s sumptuous chewing and by the boys firing the lighter, Brett says, “Do you know where we go next? We’re a little turned around.”

      Jacob says, “Our path to glory has been swift and clear, but our destination eludes us.”

      The stranger nods down the gulch. “That way, keeping to the stream,” he says, and then turns and nods back the way they came, “or that way back.”

      “The stream will take us to a road?”

      The man nods, either agreeing or seconding the question, it isn’t clear to Turtle. He says, “There’s roads down there.”

      “All right,” Jacob says, “thanks for the advice, man.”

      “Yeah, dude, we appreciate it,” Brett says.

      “Well, off you go,” the man says.

      Brett and Jacob begin down the slope, following the stream. The man taps out the pipe, puts it away, turns and forges back through the bracken. Turtle tracks him with the Sig until he is gone. Then she looks south, into the gulch. The plan is a bad one. I should go back, she tells herself. Then she thinks, what will Martin do? It will go badly for me, but the hell. I am a girl things go badly for. A light rain begins to fall, and Turtle holds out her hands and looks up at the sky, huge, misshapen towers of clouds, and then the rain begins in earnest, wetting her hair, wetting her shirt, and she thinks, well, we’re in for it now.

       Six

      TURTLE STANDS ON A FALLEN LOG IN THE POURING RAIN. Fifteen, twenty feet below her the flickering yellow beam of Brett’s flashlight plays across the seamed and shaggy bark of redwoods, sword ferns, thimbleberry, the scaly, fluted trunks of western hemlocks, across the stream swollen high above its banks. She picks her way down to them. Water runnels, tea-colored with tannins, wind down between the knotty fern rhizomes, cutting dollhouse waterfalls, the soil spangled with something golden but not gold, tiny wafery minerals that circle the tiny catch pools, reflecting what light there is. The flooding washes millipedes out from beneath the logs, some trick of the current sorting dozens of them onto muddy washes so they lay stacked together, nearly all curled up, blue and yellow and glossy black.

      She thinks, these useless boys, useless. She needs to leave, she needs to go, but they are lost and won’t make their way down this hillside without her. Still, finding her way back home is easier said than done. Walking cross-country under a bright moon and a clear predawn sky is something entirely different than finding your way through this cloud-throttled black. It would be hard going.

      Beside her, Brett says, “I don’t know, dude.”

      Jacob says, “Yeah. I don’t know either, man.”

      Turtle boosts herself up onto the log and backpedals quietly

Скачать книгу