Nell Zink - Mislaid

Flea took up gardening, hoping to add vegetables to their diet. She didn’t get very far. On her knees in the sand, she planted radishes she thought would sprout in three days and be ready to eat in two weeks. A typical country girl, raised between the TV and the car. Agriculture to her was clouds of pesticide raining down on corn. She knew traditional uses for many wild plants — as toys. Which seeds would fly farthest, how best to step on puffballs, how to make a daisy chain.

Meg’s first visit, she refused to bring Karen, not yet having the lay of the land. She left her in the care of Dee and Cha Cha. It was a smart choice. For whatever reason, the first floor of the house was filled with hay to a depth of six inches. Flea wanted her to stay through the full moon to raise the Wiccan cone of power (she was getting an education of sorts through courses in Virginia Beach), and the Seal wanted her to try his cocaine, which she did. “What is this shit?” she said, looking up with burning eyes. “This is crank.”

“It’s the finest coke on the East Coast,” the Seal insisted.

“Listen to me,” she said. “I know you’re experienced and all, but I used to run behind international faggotry, and I know cocaine when I taste it. This doesn’t even feel like cocaine. Yecch!” She clenched her teeth and shuddered.

“It’s the stuff we been selling,” Lomax said. “Are you telling me they been shitting me?”

“I’m not a chemist,” she said. “But seriously, if you were picking somebody to trust, at random, would you pick a drug dealer?”

“We’re all drug dealers here,” the Seal said.

“Are you wearing a really weird-looking shirt?” Meg asked him.

“It’s my sweatshirt I always wear.”

“Oh shit. I think it’s PCP. Honest to God. Fucking angel dust, man. I can’t believe it. You guys are the worst drug dealers in the whole godforsaken world!” She stood up and sat quickly back down. “Fuck!” she added.

“And we had them all paying cocaine prices,” Lomax said. “Aw, man. We were dicking people over right and left. Is that the kind of person I want to be?”

“Those assholes played us like a violin,” the Seal said. “You can bet if we’d lost one gram, they would have charged us for cocaine. And it was hard work! I mean, it was fun running up the bay in my boat, but it was all night, like swing shifts. For a white trash drug I’m embarrassed to have anything to do with. Shit!”

“I’m worse than you are,” Lomax said. “I went into retail on that shit. But nobody said a word! Doesn’t anybody know what cocaine is anymore? Not me, apparently.”

“People don’t fuck with drug dealers,” the Seal said. “But we should have made friends with a chemist.”

“So what’s in that acid Flea says you take all the time?” Meg asked. “Agent Orange?”

“Something jittery for sure. It gets us running around like rabbits.”

“That’s it,” Meg said. “I’m going back to drinking wine.”

“I wasn’t going to retire yet, but I’m losing all my ideals right here, right now,” the Seal said. “I mean it. I’m going to give up narcotics and go to work as a mercenary in Sri Lanka.”

“Sure you are,” Lomax said. “And what about my squirrels? Who’s going to defend my squirrels when you’re out there blowing away Tamil tigers?”

“The squirrels need you, man,” Meg said. “You got to stay. Give me a hit of that wine.” She glugged it and passed the bottle back to Lomax.

“Why don’t we deal booze?” Lomax said. “Like in Prohibition.”

“Are you nuts?” the Seal said. “Going up against a state monopoly! You want the ATF coming down on us? If you’re going to do a crime, you got to do something illegal, so you’re not competing directly with the government. That would be like if I started my own army instead of hiring on in Sri Lanka. Or smuggling cigarettes. That’s not little piss-ant drug dealer shit. For that, you need the Mafia.”

There was a brief silence, broken by the sound of Flea struggling with a thick brownie batter in the kitchen.

“You know what’s fun?” Meg said, leaning forward suddenly. “Tennis. You have any idea what a high that is, when you stroke the ball hard right into a corner? It’s total power and control.”

They turned to face her. “Tennis,” the Seal said. “I mean, popping gooks is a high, too, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.”

“Tennis never gets boring,” Meg said. “It puts you in a trance. That’s what we should do! Play tennis!”

Lomax blushed, warming to her vision and spontaneously admitting its profound truth. He said, “You know, a tennis court would fit perfect on the old bowling green, and it wouldn’t bug the squirrels none. I like sports. I went duckpin bowling once. Sports would be a nice change from falling down. Flea!”

She padded through the swinging doors, anklets jingling, licking the spatula. “Break out the champagne!” Lomax called out. “We got a new action plan. We’re giving up drugs for tennis!”

“Why would you do that?”

“Don’t ask me. I am higher than a mountain.”

Shortly after that, there was a huge cocaine bust with hundreds of arrests all over the papers, but it didn’t seem to affect anybody they knew. It struck Lomax how funny it would be if he had been transporting angel dust from some lab in Floyd County the whole time, “laundering” it, so to speak, in the Atlantic. Then he realized that he’d never seen it in inner tubes on the shore. Just being unpacked from a flimsy bass boat in Poquoson. And he realized there was a lot he didn’t know. He shook his head and returned to his belated reading of Eastern Chipmunks: Secrets of Their Solitary Lives .

Contractors experienced in the building of tennis courts were rare on the Eastern Shore in those days. But the Seal had built entire landing strips. Meg declared the bowling green off-limits, so he repurposed a parking lot that had been the kitchen garden. From then on, Meg regularly brought along Karen and Temple. (Cha Cha boarded with the Moodys, as dogs were not allowed in the squirrel sanctuary.)

The tennis-playing Temple acquired a retro look that became his uniform: a white cable-knit tennis sweater with a red-and-blue V-neck. When Karen stood next to him, leaning against the sweater with her arms around his torso, she didn’t look white at all. Compared to that sweater, nothing was white. Dee was a master of laundry chemistry. On sunny days, the sweater would hurt your eyes.

Meg began the day’s tennis lesson. The two children took their positions at opposite corners of the court. Temple’s windup was dramatic. What happened next made them all groan. The ball didn’t rise very high, and in a midswing attempt to avoid bonking his racket into his left knee, Temple threw his weight to the right, disregarding his right foot, which turned over. He sat down on the court, holding his ankle in disbelief.

“Smooth move, Arthur Ashe,” Meg said.

“I think I sprained my ankle,” Temple said.

“You need an ice pack,” Meg said. She headed for the house.

“Flea learned a shamanistic technique that would heal that ankle immediately,” Lomax remarked from his Adirondack chair. “She’s used it on me many times.”

“I want to see her do it,” Karen said.

“You know what? I feel all right,” Temple said. “I might try to hop on over to the house.”

“No, stay here so Flea can do shamanistic healing!” Karen said.

“Then at least be my pillow,” Temple said. Karen complied, sitting down cross-legged on the concrete. He arranged his head on her lap and said, “That’s better.” Meg returned with Flea and a dish towel full of ice cubes.

Temple was a little afraid of Flea. It was not difficult for him to let Meg palpate his ankle through his shoe. But when Flea took her place, squatting barefoot before him in her long skirt, and told him to relax so she could summon his totem animal, his thoughts were distilled to one rhythmic litany: No, not now, do not get an erection. She untied his shoelace. “No, please no,” he begged her and himself. He wiggled his foot in self-defense, trying not to kick her. “Please no, Flea. Please.”