“Nothing’s easy,” Parker said.
“Amen,” Hanzen said. He waded out of the water, pulling the boat after him until the prow scraped on dry land, then pulled on the side of the boat until it came around far enough that the deck behind the cabin was reachable from the bank. “Climb aboard,” he said.
Parker stepped over the gunwale. The interior was recently painted, gray, and very neat. Two solid wood doors were closed over the cabin, with a padlock.
“Take this stuff, will you?” Hanzen said, holding out the roll of his clothes, and Parker took them and put them on the deck next to the cabin door, while Hanzen pushed the boat off again from shore until it floated, then climbed over the side. “Give me a minute,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
Hanzen unrolled his pants, found a ring of keys, and unlocked the padlock on the cabin. He pulled the doors open, and Parker got a look at a narrow lumpy bunk under a dark brown blanket, some wooden boxes and cardboard cartons used as shelves and storage, and Playboy bunnies on the inside of the cabin doors. Then Hanzen stooped inside, found a towel, dried his legs, tossed the towel in on the bunk, shut but didn’t lock the doors, and dressed himself. Only then did he go to the wheel beside the cabin doors, put the key in the ignition, and start the motor.
By then they’d drifted a ways south and out into the stream. There was no place to sit, so Parker stood on the other side of the cabin doors from Hanzen and the wheel, put one forearm on the cabin top, and looked at the bank. As they floated farther from shore, he could see other landings north and south, a few old structures, some small boats at anchorage. There was no apparent commerce, and he didn’t see anything that looked like vacation settlements or estates.
Hanzen said, “It’s north you care about, right?”
“Yes.”
Hanzen turned the wheel, and goosed the motor, and their slow drift backward became a steadily increasing push forward. Wake hissed along the sides. “We’ll go up this bank, down the other,” Hanzen said. He had to speak a little louder now.
They rode in silence for about five minutes. There were no boats around at all, though Parker knew there was still some barge traffic sometimes along here, and in summer there would be the pleasure boaters, both sail and motor. But off-season the river wasn’t used much.
They were keeping close to the east bank, and it stayed pretty much the same until they passed another river town, smaller than Hudson, and looking poorer, its clapboard houses climbing above one another back up the hill from the water. Hanzen steered farther away from shore at that point, out closer to the middle of the river, which was very wide here, the other bank visible but not clear, just a blur of green and the colors of structures.
North of that town, Hanzen steered closer to the bank again and said, “You don’t mind, I got some stuff of my own to look at along here.”
“Go ahead.”
“First we see if my alarm’s okay,” Hanzen said, and steered abruptly leftward, toward the middle of the river, so that Parker had to press his forearm down on the cabin top to keep his balance. Hanzen drove out a ways, then swung around in a wide half-circle, looking toward the shore, and smiled in satisfaction. “There it is,” he said. “You see the big branch bent down?”
Parker shook his head. “Just so you do,” he said.
Hanzen grinned at him. “That’s right, I guess. We know what we have to know, and we see what we have to see.”
Parker said, “What is this branch?”
“I’ve got some stuff in there,” Hanzen said. “Nobody’s gonna bother it except law. If the law finds it, they’re gonna touch it, probably pull it outa there. The minute they do, the minute they touch it at all or come at it the wrong way, that big tree branch I got tied so it bends down, it’ll release and go right back up. I come here, I don’t see my branch bent down, I just drive on by. Happened to me once, three years ago. Not here, another place.”
What Hanzen was doing here, Parker knew, was showing his credentials, his qualifications, should it be that Parker might have further use for him and want to know what sort of man he was. Because all they had between them so far was that Parker would give him three hundred dollars for a tour of the river north of Hudson up toward Albany, and more money if he was needed for anything else later. The subject of this trip was not for Hanzen to worry about, and the trip was not for him to talk about with anybody else. But of course he had to know something was being planned here, and wonder if maybe they could use a trustworthy river man later on.
Maybe. Time would tell.
As they neared shore, Hanzen slowed the boat to an easy glide, so the prow was no longer lifted and they left barely a ripple of wake. Ahead of them was a stretch of undeveloped bank, tangled with undergrowth. Large tree branches reached out over the water. It would be almost impossible to get to the bank anywhere along here, and probably just as tough to get to the water from the other side. Whatever Hanzen was hiding, he’d picked a good spot for it.
“There they are. My babies.” Hanzen grinned with fatherly pride. “See?”
There were about a dozen of them, widely spaced along the shoreline, under the overhanging branches, and it took Parker a minute to figure out what they were. Fifty-pound sacks of peat moss. Facing upward, they hung just barely above the water, suspended from strong-test fishing line fastened to all four corners of each bag and to strong tree limbs above. In each bag, two long slits had been cut along the upper side, and marijuana planted in the peat moss through the slits. The young leaves were bright acrylic green, hardy and healthy. The bags and their crop received filtered sunlight through the trees, but would be invisible from just about anywhere, including low-flying aircraft. You’d have to steer in here from the river to see them, and even then you pretty well had to already know they existed or you probably wouldn’t notice.
“We’re a long way from the ocean,” Hanzen said, steering slowly along beside his babies, looking them over, “but we still get the tidal effect. Twice a day, they get a good long drink of water.”
“Nice setup,” Parker agreed.
“My only problem is, if somebody steals a boat,” Hanzen said. “Then you got deputies in their launch, poking in places like this, looking for the goddam boat, and finding all this. Happened once, could happen again. In the fall, maybe, a fisherman might anchor in here, do some fly-casting out into the current, but by then I’m harvested and out of here.”
“You got much of this?”
“Sixty bags, up and down the river. Little farther on, there’s one more batch I want to check, that’s all in this direction.” Hanzen smiled out at the empty river. “You can really be alone out here, if you want,” he said. “If you know what you’re doing out here, the world’s your oyster.”
“I suppose so.”
Hanzen studied Parker. “You don’t like rivers,” he decided. “Water, whatever. But you’re doing something, and right now you need the river, so I guess what you’re looking for’s a place to go out from the bank, or come ashore, or both. I’d be happier if you didn’t use my place down there.”
“I need to be farther north,” Parker told him.
“Closer to Albany,” Hanzen suggested, “but not all the way to Albany.”
“Right.”
“And you’d like to mark it, and not tell me which spot you picked.” Hanzen grinned. “That’s okay, I understand. Only it won’t work.”