Fiction:
Skunk: Chapter One
By Grant Buday
They crossed the yard in single file, three silhouettes bent low in the night, the only sound the muted clank of tools in a nylon sports bag. One after the other, they descended the cement stairwell as if disappearing into the earth itself. A twist of a crowbar and the door drifted open. They listened, hearing only their own heartbeats and the rasp of their breath through the itchy wool of their balaclavas. They entered and shut the door.
Thief 1 peeled the balaclava off his head, exposing a shaved skull and a handlebar moustache of Hungarian rakishness. His tight black turtleneck highlighted a savagely muscular torso. He listened again and the others waited for his signal. None of them had been there before, but they all recognized the smell that told them they were in the right place. They grinned the grins of men excited by their work. They knew the pride that came with job satisfaction. Like a cavalry officer signalling a charge, Thief 1 gestured them forward, leading them to a second door where, with a second twist of the crowbar and a splintering of wood, the door popped open. It was as if they’d freed a stellar god, a creature of brilliance, radiant and pure, from its stone prison. They raised their arms to shield their eyes from the light—not the light of an avenging angel, but high-pressure sodium lights with melon-sized bulbs sizzling above a crop of marijuana as pungent as new piss. Ten tables with twelve plants each, worth $60,000. Thief 1 exhaled a satisfied sigh and gazed upon his colleagues. Had he not promised riches? Had he not been true to his word? He reached into the blue bag emblazoned with hockey sticks and handed out the Raybans and pruning scissors. They went to work. Soon their faces were shellacked with sweat in the heat of the 1,000-watt lamps. There was no talk, only the snick of the scissors and the rustle of leaves as they cut the thumb-thick stalks. Moving in tandem down each table they harvested the crop, shoving the plants deep into green plastic garbage bags.
Thief 1 had gazed upon the poppy fields of Cappadocia, had seen the 60-foot swells of the North Atlantic, and spent long years studying the painted brick wall of a prison cell. He had read War and Peace, learned to work a drill press, and earned the respect of the institution psychiatrist.
Ten minutes and they were done. They looked upon their work and were pleased. They left a single lone plant untouched in the middle of the room. “Don’t want to discourage him,” said Thief 1 in a deep voice that was not without sincerity, for he appreciated the moral dimension in the equation of labour and reward. And with that they laughed and then fled into the night.
* * *
To celebrate his 50th birthday, Willie gave Carmen $150 so that she could take him to the Grouse Nest on top of Grouse Mountain, a restaurant accessible only by cable car, unless you preferred an hour’s vertical hike and the risk of a coronary with your wine. They both ordered New York steaks, and throughout the meal Carmen repeatedly laid down her knife and fork to better devote herself to the panoramic view of Vancouver. Willie was glad she was enjoying it, and when she made appreciative noises he made them too, even though he thought the city looked as if it had been poured from a trash bin, spilling off the land and into the sea. Vancouver looked like so much rubble, and it lay beneath a pall of fumes that suggested a smouldering bog. At the moment, however, he was savouring a last glass of gum-stinging house red, and growing animated about getting away from the city and scouting the Okanagan for an orchard. Willie’s orchard fantasy involved a valley sweetened by a river and row after row of apple trees laden with fruit. Reaching across the bleached white tablecloth, he took Carmen’s hand.
“Close your eyes.”
She liked that. Her smile widened and her dimples deepened. She had large grey eyes, lovely teeth, a moonlight complexion, and hair of the finest auburn.
Willie’s voice became sensuous and coaxing. “It’s spring. The orchard is in flower. Smell.” He inhaled. “Hundreds of trees, millions of blossoms. Now it’s summer. The evening sunlight angling in. It’s hot. The trees are thick with fruit. Braeburns, Spartans, Jona Golds …” Carmen’s breathing grew heavy as if the very names were getting her excited. Willie knew she was indulging him. For her, apples meant the Safeway produce aisle.
“I love it,” she lied.
“I’m glad,” said Willie.
But that was only part of the fantasy. Along with the orchard would be the house Willie would build: hardwood floors, beamed ceilings, a river-rock fireplace, alcoves, a sunroom, a wraparound porch, a cedar-shake roof.
“We can do it,” said Carmen.
After dinner they strolled arm in arm along the restaurant’s alpine paths lined with crocuses. The lingering daylight was like land reclaimed from the sea. This morning the newspaper had gloatingly run a photo of local plum blossoms alongside a shot of Torontonians digging their cars out of snow. Carmen clung to Willie’s arm and laid her head on his shoulder. Heat rushed to his groin as if a bulb had gone on in his new khakis.
They boarded the cable car for the return to the parking lot. When the car began its descent, Willie’s stomach rose as if he was in a plunging elevator. Carmen, on the other hand, could scarcely suppress shouting, Whee! The car was Swiss-built, but Willie knew from hard experience in the construction business that a machine was a machine was a machine, and they all broke down. He clutched the pole, which grew clammy beneath his palm. If the cable snapped there would be shrieks as they plunged and then the slam of impact, but that would only be the start, because then they’d roll and bounce and shatter in the parking lot, crushing cars that would explode into flames, by which point everyone inside would have been pounded to pâté. But they arrived safely and drove home.
Willie and Carmen lived in the far reaches of the East End, an area unburdened by charm. On this night of nights, his 50th birthday, his Big Five Oh, he bumped slowly down the alley in the van and pulled into the carport and switched off the ignition. They leaned toward each other and kissed beneath the attar of rose deodorizer dangling like mistletoe from the rear-view mirror. Carmen tasted of wine and Nicorets. He was proud of her for quitting cigarettes. She’d gone two weeks and was feeling confident. Her lips were soft and, if not exactly sweet, they were willing. They kissed and murmured and then crossed the lawn with their arms around each other. The back porch light glinted on the stucco wall. Willie liked stucco, bits of brown and green glass embedded in masonry, cost-effective and yet attractive, always there to reflect even the briefest flash of winter sun.
While Carmen showered, Willie popped downstairs to say good night to his plants. And was shocked. It was as if he’d been struck across the skull with a plank. He dropped to his knees and raised his hands as if in a state of spiritual agony, because his marijuana plants, his babies, his girls, the tender creatures he had nurtured from seedlings, had been stolen. All that remained under the burning blaze of the lights were their bleeding stumps. The pump and the reservoir continued blindly sending water through the spaghetti tubes that fed each pot of clay balls holding the roots that had been rendered useless by the brutal amputations.
And there was the single plant that had been spared. A solitary survivor of slaughter, a lone witness to events terrible to behold. Willie understood the message: We own you, and we’ll be back.
Carmen now came down the steps, all jiggly and pink and naked beneath her white terrycloth bathrobe with its gold trim, crooning a melodious “Willie …,” for it was understood that a back rub and sex were to complete this evening of evenings.
He turned and watched her take it all in, watched the transformation, her expression plunging from sensual anticipation to terror. As well as celebrating his birthday, they’d been celebrating the crop, and the fact that Willie promised to buy her an immaculate 1988 robin’s egg-blue BMW 321i convertible that was sitting in a lot across town. She had it all picked out to match her bohemian self-image: the serious artist, scarf pirate-style around her head, harem pants, a shirt knotted beneath her boobs, the car’s stereo pumping Carmina Burana as the sunshine followed her like a spotlight.
But the sun was not shining at the moment, and Carmen began to moan and tremble as if in the throes of palsy. She fell against the washing machine and her tiger’s-eye ring tapped a spastic code on the metal.
“Carmen—”
She reached out, beseeching, plaintive, tender, the robe falling from her shoulder revealing a Rembrandt breast. “What if we’d’ve been here?”
Willie saw the nightmare trampling Carmen’s mind. Terror, humiliation, blood, rape. He caught her hands and held them. He spoke in a tone of reasonableness and calm. “Take it easy. Calm down. They knew we were out.” He immediately saw his error. “Carmen … Carmen …”
“They were watching? We’re being watched!” Her eyes rolled like a cow comprehending all too late what those men in the black rubber aprons intended to do with their cleavers.
Willie tried to embrace her but she backed away, her fingers in her mouth, and fled upstairs.
* * *
Willie had raised his plants from cuttings. They were his children and their optimism had won his heart. He nurtured them through their phases and maladies, their blights and rusts and scabs, until the seedlings were no longer seedlings but hardy young plants taking their place in the world. One hundred and twenty of them that would stand over a metre high at maturity.
When he altered the light to simulate autumn and coax them into bud, the relationship evolved a new seriousness. Bud meant money. His beauties were becoming a cash crop. As he talked to them his voice took on a husky tone. When the branches bent under the weight of bud, Willie became fearful and excited, for his babies, his girls, were pregnant and glistening with sugary resin. Yet with this stage came guilt. His girls were destined for the fires of reefers and water pipes and oven-baked brownies. But wasn’t that marijuana’s raison d’être, to entrance the smoker, to enhance his life, to heighten and brighten and delight, to re-enchant food and music and the toker’s every sense? Of course. But it was his first crop, and like any first-time parent he’d had no way of comprehending the depth of the bond. He became maudlin and philosophical, talking to the plants in ways he rarely did to people, of life, of death, of what it all meant, and offering thanks for what they were giving him—not just money, but a sense of pride and accomplishment, and most of all the relationship, yes, the relationship, the chance to know them, the honour of loving them.
And then they were kidnapped. He never even got a chance to say goodbye.
Over the following months Willie mourned. He would gaze longingly at the photographs he’d taken of his babies. But he also grew determined. He shored up his defences. He installed motion detectors and a steel-framed door and crossbar. He bolted iron grilles over all the windows. He parked blocks away whenever he visited hydroponics shops, and rarely did he go to the same shop twice. Never would it happen again.
Carmen shared neither his confidence nor his determination. She started smoking again. “Go back into construction.”
“With my back?”
“Don’t bend over. Don’t lift anything. Hire grunts. Delegate.”
Willie had had his own company, Top Floor Construction. He could drive around Vancouver and point to the houses—the homes—he’d built, having overseen 73 of them from the foundation on up. Over the years he’d become intimate with every step of the process. He could get in there and frame, roof, paint, tile, lay a floor, build kitchen cabinets, plumb and wire. He loved the scent of fir and cedar, and nothing could be more beautiful than autumn sunlight gleaming in an amber drop of sap beading from a fresh two-by-four. He’d been happy in his work. He could say, with pride, I’m a builder.
But when he hit the age of 40 his back had said something else: No more. It made its position known via chronic pains and pulls and spasms. He hobbled around the work site leaning on a cane. Every winter it got worse. By the time he was 45 his back was locked up like a rusted vise. Then his knees and his shoulders went, followed by numbness in his hands. In the middle of the night he’d get up and pee strange colours. Eventually his entire body throbbed like a toothache.
Help came from an unexpected source. His long-time friend and adversary Rollo Burgess—carpet layer, back-stabber, boaster, liar and cheat—suddenly made him an intriguing proposal. Despite the fact that Rollo’s brain was corroded by glue fumes, and despite the fact that he earned a mere $12.50 an hour laying carpet, he owned a sailboat, a Sea-do, a 1963 candy apple-red Austin Healey, a Suzuki Samurai, a time-share in Puerto Vallarta, as well as two houses, all financed by the half dozen five-pound crops of skunk he’d been growing each year for the past decade. Now Rollo was offering advice, expertise and seedlings, plus he was willing to rent Willie his other house, at a moderate surcharge of course, because the previous tenant had absconded.
Willie had been swift to see the advantages: money, a no-risk landlord, money, working from home, money, but he mulled it over a few days before presenting the idea to Carmen, because it was, after all, crime. “You realize what this involves,” Willie said to her over lattes in the Abruzzo.
Carmen had given him the shrewd eye, reminding him that she was the bohemian.
Willie was reassured. Still, he was coming at it from an entrepreneur’s point of view. There was capital investment, a steep learning curve, and a lot of work, not to mention the risk. “We’ll be criminals.”
She was titillated. She grinned and reached under the table and slid her hand along his thigh. “Tell me more.”
“It’ll be just the two of us. Our thing.”
Her grin widened. “Cosa nostra.”
Within weeks they were living in Rollo’s second house and wiring the basement for a grow-op. Carmen quit driving cab and threw herself into her new life. The prospect of a basement full of marijuana tickled her like an aphrodisiac. The stress, if there was any stress, was fun, it was good stress—eustress—as in euphoria, eugenics, eulogy. Carmen felt special. She had a secret life. It was all a jolly adventure, a rollicking and sexy enterprise. Her winter-pale complexion gained a healthy flush. Some days, eccentric, inspired, she slicked herself with sun cream and worked naked but for a straw hat and Raybans. And she and Willie made love. They made love as if neither of them had done it in years. They’d lie in bed after doing it in the middle of a midweek afternoon and discuss all the money they’d soon have.
“There’s going to be a lot of it,” Willie warned her.
“Oh dear. Do you think we’ll have to give a lot of it away?”
“Quite possibly.”
It was their golden era. Their mornings were leisurely and not a little smug. Eight-thirty would see them lounging in the kitchen over a second cup of coffee, listening to the radio. When the traffic report came on Willie turned up the volume and grinned. “I love this.” Volume delays on the Second Narrows. Stall on the freeway. Backed up all the way to the tunnel on 99 South. If Carmen happened to be out of the room, Willie would deliver the news to her like a singing telegram. “Some idiot just abandoned his car at Broadway and Granville. In the middle of the intersection!” And they’d laugh giddily at having escaped the rat race. No more nine-to-five for them. When the traffic report was over, he’d pour himself another coffee and amble downstairs in his shorts and slippers—his 15-second commute to work—and begin his day. It was perfect. No one seriously worried about pot, the cops didn’t arrest because the judges didn’t prosecute, and even if he did get nailed the worst he could expect was a fine. What could go wrong?
Copyright © Grant Buday, 2005