!Woodsmen
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by Anna @ 2024
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Chapter 7: Harvest
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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.