!Woodsmen --- by Anna @ 2024 --- Chapter 7: Harvest --- It's funny putting Mike's story together now that he's gone. I thought I was done inventing the lives of men when dad died. I sit on this ratty couch in this drafty, smoky shithole. The fire in the stove smokes up this shack because Mike and I ran out of silver tape for the stovepipe or didn't bother. When I look at the stovepipe I think about what I did wrong. Through the little sooty glass window, when I look at the fire, I see how much I don't know, probably never will know, about Mike. My sister told me before I left for Memphis I wasn't curious enough about Mike. I was satisfied to feel his restlessness and unsettledness blow over me. I was content to live by whim and impulse. To listen at him when I felt like it. Not to pry or take interest in inconsistencies and mysteries. Telling how I came to have no one involves telling the story of Mike, his friends, and people we knew in common, the parts I know and parts I can guess or make up. It's insufficient. The fire flickers at me with the undeniable unknowableness of what happened in the last year. Mike stalked around the marijuana garden in the national forest as it erupted stinkily in bud. Deer rifle in hand, walkie clipped to shirtfront, wire to his earbud, ball cap shading his eyes he watched the sky for helicopters or whatever was coming. Since the cornbread mafia was busted up, growing was a different kind of dangerous---taskforces in the sky, cartels in truckstops and trailer parks. The cornbread mafia grew theirs intercropped with late- planted corn and Mike's employers of course hid theirs in the forest. On the walk up to the grow he worked on, Mike stepped over tripwires that ran to rat-traps rigged to fire shotgun shells at intruders. The war on drugs wasn't funny to Mike and his little Noriega, Jim. On TV I saw a drug taskforce bonfire. I thought Lord, possums and woodpeckers must get high as hell off that smoke. Mom told me a Richmond Register article said some federal assessment determined the---I don't know--- Sinaloa Cartel or something owned London, Laurel County's seat, and probably Lexington, too. They got every unsolved crime and mystery pinned on them, as the new boogerman in town. What a relief to learn everybody you're kin to is too sanctified to do awful shit anymore. It was surely the Mexicans who shot some local pot- growing rednecks from a van that drove up beside them on the highway. Must have been them who straight up lynched some bikers the Sheriff found hung from trees behind the tall fence between the Outlaws' clubhouse and Skagg's creek. I figured whoever owned the factory, local dealerships were probably independently owned and operated, whether in Memphis or Kentucky, but I'm just a waitress at a diner. My sister said Mexicans got bad in the trailer park behind Okonite too, bad as youth pastors and social workers with their comings and goings. There was a fenced kennel full of rottweilers with the wheeze they get when their vocal cords are cut. An expensive new Jeep like a space shuttle parked next to what everybody else in the trailer park drove. Of course NAFTA was expected by the guys at the factory to send their jobs south with a giant sucking sound. Maybe the Mexicans couldn't wait til next year. Whatever was happening, it brought the kind of attention Floyd and his kind feared. If Mike brooded on Shirley's psalm as he walked the perimeter of the marijuana garden, I don't think his mind was on the prayer for great harvest. I think he'd settle for the prayer for protection. The irrigation tubing was undamaged, the pesticides had killed every bug in the vicinity, the mantraps were set, ready to grievously injure trespassers, but on the brightest day, under the clearest sky, death loomed. That Terry guy was probably dead. Whoever was next might also not die at the hands of government or the Mexicans, regardless of how long their fingers stretched. As the crop broadcast the sticky funk of a million or so dollars, it did so in the midst of ten thousand noses raised to sniff each and every breeze. Mike wasn't the only guy thinking about getting something that could shoot common military ammunition. Bills making their way through the legislature promised to impose waiting periods and background checks on all firearms purchases. The government was on the verge of banning big magazines, pistol grips, folding stocks, automatic fire rates, and Chinese manufacturers. Anybody selling any of that could move all the inventory they could lay hold of that summer, with tremendous markup. Jim promised all the guys new weapons out of the profit of this harvest. Chinese Kalashnikov knockoffs for everybody, ten thousand rounds of ammo, a .50 caliber rifle, and maybe an RPG-7 grenade launcher to keep the helicopters away. Guns and ammo to train with, and more to bury in barrels in weapons caches to fall back to when whatever was coming arrived. As Mike brooded and walked the perimeter, he carried his old .30-.30. If Mexicans or UN troops showed up, it would be about as useful as a handful of firecrackers, but it was what he had. What I know is walking that perimeter Mike was as high on the danger he was playing in as he used to get on crack. Mike and his guys were the protagonist of a violent story, a Red Dawn for the end of history. Him and the boys stood ready ready to protect their ill-got property, ready to break the teeth of the ungodly and foreign for the pleasure of it, secure and heroic in their frontier settler fantasy. While some of them patrolled the rest cut big sticky buds into bags to be taped up and transported to the places where the buds would be trimmed and repackaged for transport and sale. Up on the ridge the guys cut soaked in sweat or soaked in rain under the shade cloth hung to shield their operation from cameras in the sky. Jim wanted Mike to recruit trimmers. Start conversations in the break room when only white guys are in there. Listen for honest misfortune. Grateful guys don't cause trouble. Avoid the prideful. An ostentatious new pickup with tinted windows and a Mexican flag decal had started parking in the Okonite parking lot second shift. Mike sat down to his sandwich, looked up, said, Y'all seen that truck? I don't think it's right with so many of our guys furloughed. He looked for a reaction. Don Hansen said, Fuckin A. I mean, they didn't furlough your sorry ass. Some guys Mike didn't know chuckled. He took a bite. No, you're right, Don. I don't know how come I got this job and still have it. I mean, I only speak English, man. Probably grandfathered in or something. One of the guys Mike didn't know said, The way they keep their women pregnant, they're trying to grandfather in some of their own. Don Hansen had already thrown out his trash. He left for his station. They'd keep our women pregnant too if we didn't do something about it, Mike said. You got a daughter? Be careful, man, they think girls're ready to breed at fifteen. The guy's name was Derek. He started trimming that weekend. He was pretty good at it. The longer the distance over which trade is carried out, the more money has to be invested and the more time it will spend en route. Maybe that was less true for the multinational corporations offshoring their factories, whose avoidable costs were all in taxes and wages, but it was true as ever for drugs. The more time en route, the more chances to get snatched or seized. The markets were up north. Jim, far as Mike could tell, kept everything up to shipping local. Trimmers worked in a number of locations, including the trailer park behind Okonite where the wheezy rottweilers were kenneled. Weed trimmed there got picked up somewhere else for shipping. Mike rode along with Dennis when another guy's daughter was sick. They hauled weed from three trim houses to the Wilderness Management Area, where they sold it to some guys who looked like Mexican sheetrock finishers for fifty thousand dollars. They didn't want to sit on the stinky, Dennis said on the ride back. Whoever you sell to, the money's just as green. You sell to whoever isn't hanging from trees. My sister's fiancee Jake's dad was one of the people they handed their money off to, who laundered it through safe bets at the horse races. After all their product was at trim houses or sold on down the line, Feds found their field and raided it before Mike's friends could pull out or till in the stalks standing from that crop and fertilize for the next. The feds arrested two guys, but nobody important. It isn't just those guys, though, it's whoever and whatever they know. The feds probably sprayed defoliant. Everybody knew the roundups were coming, except the trimmers. Don't tell them shit. Probably because of his dealings with Jake's dad, Mike thought about my parents, showed up one afternoon, asked my mom politely about me, and asked if he could replace his busted CV axle in dad's garage. His tools were stolen, he said. He offered to pay to use dad's. That was how Mike managed to clean his house in anticipation of the bust. He hid fifteen pounds of packaged weed, two grenades, a pistol, one of Jim's Chinese Kalashnikov rifles, a couple cans of ammo, and some newsletters and videotapes in the walls of dad's garage and the door panels of his truck that hadn't ever run. Dad, I'm sure, sat in his chair while black-and- white Westerns played. Honest-faced white men dealt straight with each other. There was no Persian Gulf, no Vietnam. Dad slept in his chair, took his pain pills there, ate from the TV tray mom placed beside him. Mom worked, managed his appointments, picked up his pills, cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, and slept alone. Mike left money in a drugstore thank-you card in the mailbox. The money was what mom told my sister about. Carley was the one told me Mike had been at the house. Mike had bought a fourwheeler. When he started in April he was paid in weed. He showed loyalty through to harvest, so his pay changed to cash. Cash is easier to spend. It doesn't matter if you can get four thousand a pound if you can't sell it. Mike didn't know many people. The people he knew he didn't know well. Most of the weed he'd been paid in languished in his freezer til he screw-gunned the particle-board walls of dad's neglected garage up over it. Mike had hoped, after more of the harvest was trimmed and sold, to trade for an S-10 pickup and a trailer to haul his fourwheeler to the trails. Jim wanted Mike to get a computer and a modem instead. The bust came before Mike had too many suspicious assets. You could trace a pretty straight line from his wages to his spending. House clean, stuff Jim asked him to hid, Mike knew the next part of the plan. Wait it out, probably til spring. Go to ground. Muster if events indicate it's time for resistance: street gangs n the Multi Jurisdictional Task Force confiscate firearms, FEMA activates camps or processing centers. Keep noses clean, don't talk to each other. Mike got his address book out of the drawer. Before the movement there hadn't been many numbers in it. He copied those out: girls, my mom and sister, Floyd and Shirley. He'd meet the guys from Michigan and Tennessee again if it was meant for him to know them. He had Dennis's pager number memorized like he was supposed to. He burned the book in the yard and flushed the ashes. The numbers gave Mike an idea. His weekends were going to be empty now. That'd be depressing and suspicious. With a couple fingers whiskey in his Domino's cup, he listened to the phones of a couple girls ring. One called Tracy picked up. She said she was glad to hear from him; she'd go dancing with him at the Blue Moon Saturday night. Mike laid down in bed with the TV in the living room tuned to static. He thought again about what he'd say if somebody else's phone book or finger pointed at him and he got raided. He'd step outside and close the door. Agree to talk to them over coffee. Let 'em in if they had a warrant but insist on one. Say I served to protect our freedoms, you understand. Over coffee he'd say, Yeah I know Jim through work but not well. Admit if asked he helped Jim or Dennis do some landscaping, and planned to hunt with them but never got around to it. He'd ask if something had happened, if he should be concerned. The whiskey and the night caught up with him. The trouble felt almost good. Maybe the trouble he and the guys feared and prepared for was here, no longer threatening, actual. Time to ride the wave, Mike drowsily thought.