Margaret Sexton - A Kind of Freedom

That night at Tiger’s place, they pushed their first cut branches into rock wool cubes, sealed them with plastic, and lined them up in a row under the grow lights.

When they were done, they stood and surveyed the scene.

“All right, all right, I see about you,” Tiger said. “I wasn’t sure, dawg, I wasn’t sure. I thought they had scavenged you at that place, but you back just as ingenious as ever. Let’s celebrate then, nigga.”

They sat on the edge of the bare mattress. T.C. couldn’t afford to buy weed, but Tiger pulled a bag out of his pocket, unwrapped a swisher, licked it, and rolled.

T.C. coughed up the first hit.

“Damn, nigga, you sound like a Mack Truck; you gon’ be high as a mothafucka.”

“I haven’t lit up in a while.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’m trying to save, nigga. Who you think bought all these cuttings and lights and shit?”

Tiger put the tip of the blunt to his lips. “Well, that’s all gon’ be behind us in a minute, lil’ bro. How long you said it take to flower, two months?”

“Yeah, but this is to sell nigga, not to smoke.”

“I know, I know,” Tiger said, “but how I’ma market it if I don’t sample it first?” He passed the blunt back to T.C., a smile spreading across his face.

T.C. didn’t say anything, just rolled his eyes and passed it between them for a while. This was his favorite part of smoking, the first fifteen minutes. After that, anything could happen, depending on the strain. He might pass out; he might get a ride home and gorge on MawMaw’s homemade jelly cake; he might turn on a movie and try to drown out his certainty that any minute a horde of po-po would bust through Tiger’s front door and send T.C. back to the place he swore he’d never see again. Now, though, he felt an ease in his heart, spreading out and touching everything that even crossed his mind. His problems showed up in different outfits, repositioned as opportunities. Alicia, for instance. He’d been wanting to call her since he came home, but he was afraid of what she would say, that she might try to lock him out of the baby’s life, or her own. Now though, three hits deep, it seemed like if he could just get her on the line, he could explain himself from the most genuine angle. He didn’t know exactly what the words were going to be, but the fact was, he loved that girl, and this baby was his chance to live again.

He reached for his phone.

“Who you calling, mothafucka?”

T.C. shrugged. “I don’t know, I wasn’t sure, but I was thinking about calling Licia.”

“Aww, hell no, put that phone down.” Tiger stood up as if he were going to wrestle it from T.C.’s hands.

“This ain’t the time for that, bruh. You all loaded and shit.”

“I ain’t loaded.”

“You ain’t loaded, you been over there smiling that goofy-ass smile of yours for the last fifteen minutes, that’s how I know you high.”

“Anyway when that ever stopped me from doing something?” T.C. asked.

“Yeah, but you ain’t smoked in a while. You liable to go and say something you can’t unsay, you feel me?”

“Nah, bruh, I just want to tell her I love her, that I’m always going to be there for her.”

“Yeah, and that sound all well and good right now, but she gon’ be able to tell you high, bruh, and then how she gon’ feel? You been out all this time, and you got to get out your mind before you call her?”

T.C. didn’t say anything to that. It sounded too much like sense. After a while, he relit the blunt, inhaled but didn’t cough, passed it back to Tiger.

“You hear that?” Tiger asked after he tapped it out.

“Hear what?”

“Them sirens.”

T.C. didn’t have to listen to know they were there, not directly but circling like he’d seen lions surround antelopes from all sides on the National Geographic Channel. Either way, he wasn’t worried; surely it was for the crackhouse next door. It was the perfect place to grow in that sense; nobody would be bothering to look out for them. “Mothafucka, you trippin’. Don’t get all paranoid on me now,” he said.

“All right, you right, you right,” Tiger said. Then, “T.C., that don’t sound right, man.”

“What don’t sound right? Man, you killing my buzz.”

“Better it’s me than some nigga with a burner, mothafucka, or worse, po-po.” He walked up to the window, peered through. “Come over here,” he said.

T.C. walked over. There was nothing out there. The emptied houses were even eerier at night, like gaps in a mouth where teeth had been shattered.

“You see something?” Tiger asked.

T.C. looked out into the darkness, the empty fields of brown grass.

“Hell, no, I don’t see nothing, mothafucka. Everybody’s inside. I told you wasn’t nobody out there. Now sit down.”

T.C. turned on the TV, looking for a movie. Friday had just started, and Craig’s mama was telling him she didn’t feel comfortable loaning him money without a job.

“Here, watch this,” T.C. said. “Calm your ass the hell down.”

They watched until Big Worm pulled his ice cream truck up on screen, and Tiger said he was hungry.

“Don’t nobody deliver over here but Domino’s though. I could fuck up some Domino’s right now.”

T.C. didn’t have any money, and he told him that.

“I got you,” Tiger said.

“Stop fuckin’ around.”

“Nah, I’m serious; you always getting me.”

By the time the movie was over, the pizza had arrived, and they huddled over the box in the dark. T.C. found himself feeling grateful.

“Thanks, nigga,” he said.

“I already told you, don’t worry about the pizza.”

“Not for the pizza, bruh. For that stuff with Alicia. I would have said something stupid, something I couldn’t unsay. You’re right.”

Tiger shrugged. “I just think it’s rare what y’all have, that’s all. I ain’t never had nothing like it, but if I did, I wouldn’t fuck around with it. I would treat it with respect, you feel me?”

Over the next few weeks, T.C. spent at least a few hours at Tiger’s every day, feeding the plants, changing their water, testing the pH, applying the chemical adjuster. Meanwhile Tiger started his marketing campaign. T.C. told him the plants wouldn’t finish flowering for at least a month, but he’d come in every day bragging about how perfect the middleman he’d found was going to be: “He got as much ambition as a NBA wife, nigga.” Or how many people were begging him for T.C.’s Blueberry: “They know it’s gon’ be another month, but they still asking about it. That’s the key, to have niggas waiting, hungry on the verge of an attack if they can’t taste your bud so the first week that shit gon’ be sold out from the sheer momentum.”

One day, the door opened, and T.C. heard Alicia’s voice behind Tiger’s. “What the hell y’all got going on in here, Tiger? You can smell the gas from outside.”

She stopped in her tracks when she saw T.C. though.

“I didn’t expect you to be here,” she said. “Tiger said he had something to show me. I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

T.C. and Alicia both looked at their friend.

“What?” Tiger asked. “Y’all need to fix this mess, bruh. I’m tired of watching y’all both suffer.”

T.C. hadn’t realized he had been suffering. Of course Alicia was always on his mind, she was his life, but he hadn’t known how very much he missed her until she walked in, his seed pressing on her belly so hard he thought there was a real chance she might deliver the child right there.

“What the hell y’all got going on in here?” she repeated.

He ignored the question, told himself to calm down. She didn’t seem happy to see him, so he clipped his own joy out of habit; he wouldn’t have it going out into territory it couldn’t see its way out of.