“People are tired of this sort of thing,” a source close to the strike force said, “and they resent the outsiders that come into their community for illegal and often highly lucrative purposes. We’re confident that the reward system will make it easier for local residents to help us identify and apprehend the criminals in their midst.”
Operations could begin as early as next month, the source disclosed.
Dowst was grinning sheepishly, a slight flush to his cheeks, as if he’d just told an off-color joke at a lawn party. “Not such great news, huh?”
For some reason, the story didn’t affect me as it would have a few months earlier. I was alarmed, certainly, all the vital functions thrown into high gear as I read on, but I wasn’t panicked. In fact, relatively speaking, I was calm. Perhaps my run-in with Jerpbak and the little scene I’d gone through with Savoy—everybody knows what you guys are doing up there—had made me fatalistic. Perhaps I expected a bust. Perhaps I wanted it.
Gesh was not quite so calm. He snatched the paper from Dowst’s hands, balled it up and attempted to punt it into the trees. Then he turned on him, his face splayed with anger. “What next?” he shouted, as if Dowst were to blame. “Christ!” he roared, and spun round to face the empty hills.
Phil was pale. He tried to laugh it off, improvising a halfhearted joke about infra-red pot and reading glasses for the eye in the sky, until his words trailed off in a little self-conscious bleat of laughter.
Then, in what had almost become a reflex gesture for him, Gesh wheeled around to jab a thick admonitory finger in Dowst’s face. “Between the rats and the bears and you and Vogelsang and now the fucking federal government, there’s going to be precious little of this pot to split up, you know that?”
Dowst knew it. And so did we.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The following day, after he’d made a tour of the plantation and monitored the growth of each leaf, stem and twig, Dowst announced that he’d begun sexing the plants and that within a month all the males should have emerged. “Around the end of September, after the photoperiod begins to decline; that’s when we’ll get them all.”
Phil and I were playing checkers; Gesh was dozing on the couch, a newspaper spread over his face. It was mid-afternoon, and the heat was like a wasting disease. “Huh?” I said.
“You know,” Dowst was rattling through the cans of soup in the cupboard under the sink, “for sinsemilla pot. We’ve got to weed out the male plants.”
That was something we’d known all along, in the way we knew that chickens laid eggs whether there was a rooster or not, or that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system — it was part of our general store of knowledge. But we hadn’t really stopped to think about it, to consider its ramifications or work it into our formulae for translating plants into dollars. Any fool knew that in order to get sinsemilla pot you had to identify and eliminate the male plants so that the energy of the unfertilized females would go toward production of the huge, resinous, THC-packed colas that made seedless pot the most potent, desirable and highly priced smoke on the market. Any fool. But to this point we’d conveniently managed to overlook it.
I watched Phil’s face as the realization of what Dowst was saying seeped into his nervous system and gave vent to various autonomous twitches of mortification and regret. “You mean … we’ve got to … to … throw out some of the plants?”
Dowst had found a can of Bon Ton lobster bisque and was applying the opener to it. “Usually about fifty percent. It could be higher or lower. Depending.”
Phil looked like a man being strapped into the electric chair while his wife French-kisses the D.A. in the hallway. “On what?”
The lobster bisque was the color of diarrhea. Dowst sloshed it into his spotless Swiss aluminum camp pot and stirred it with a spoon he’d carefully disinfected over the front burner. “Luck,” he said finally, and he pronounced the word as if it had meaning, pronounced it like the well-washed Yankee optimist he was, a man who could trace his roots back to the redoubtable Dowsts on the Mayflower. Besides, he had his van, a condo in Sausalito and a monthly stipend from his trust fund. He didn’t need luck.
I thought of Mendel’s pea plants, x and y chromosomes, thought of all those hale and hearty many-branching glorious male plants that would be hacked down and burned — fifty percent of the crop in a single swoop and the second such swoop in a month’s time. Numbers invaded my head like an alien force, a little problem in elementary arithmetic: Take 840 pot plants and divide by 2. Divide again, allowing for one-half pound of marketable pot per plant, to solve for the total number of pounds obtained. Multiply this figure by $1600, the going rate per pound. Now divide by 3 to arrive at the dollar value of each share — the financiers, the expert’s and the yeomen’s — and finally divide by 3 again to find the miserable pittance that you yourself will receive after nine months of backbreaking labor, police terror and exile from civilization.
Dowst was whistling. Phil gnawed at the edge of a black plastic checker, expressionless, his eyes vacant. My half million had been reduced to $37,000. Barring seizure, blight, insect depredation and unforeseeable natural disasters, that is. It was a shock. If Jerpbak, ravenous rodents and the “Sinsemilla Strike Force” had driven a stake through my heart, Dowst had just climbed atop the coffin to nail down the lid.
I awoke the following morning to the tortured rasping of the pickup’s starter and the hacking cough of combustion that eventually succeeded it. Bleary, disoriented — what time was it, anyway? Five-thirty? Six? — I rolled out of bed and trundled up the hallway and into the front room, where I stood in my underwear and peered groggily out the window. The pickup sat motionless in the high weeds, a coil of shadowy exhaust winding from the tailpipe as I watched with a vague, unformed curiosity, emerging from dreams as from a lake. Then a dull tooth of light glinted from the pickup’s windshield as the vehicle heaved forward and rocked across the tarnished field, tailgate clanking, stiff grass giving way, birds bitching in the trees: there was the valediction of the brake lights, and it was gone. I stood there a moment longer, perplexed, scratching at my privates, until a voice spoke at me from the gloom of the far corner. “Gesh and Phil,” the voice said.
Dowst, I saw now, was sitting at the kitchen table over a bowl of granola, shaking vitamin tablets into his palm from a forest of plastic vials. A soft, aqueous light suffused the room, pressing like a swollen balloon against the familiar objects of the place, softening corners, spreading shadows.
“What time is it?” I said.
“Five.”
Five. I let that register, still scratching, then allowed my awakening mind to seize on the next question. “Where are they going?”
Dowst sighed. His eyes, pale in the best of light, were rinsed of color in the incipient gray of the morning. “Tahoe,” he said.
“Tahoe?”
“For three days. R and R, they said. Both of them said they couldn’t sleep.”