T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

If we saw Dowst once or twice a week, we rarely saw Vogelsang. As the plants blossomed into hard evidence, he made himself increasingly scarce, more than ever the silent partner. “Look, I’ve got too much to lose,” he told us one night after he’d been summoned to repair the kick start on the surviving Kawasaki. “I just can’t take the risk of being seen up here or identified in any way with this operation. I’ve got business interests, property in three states, a number of other deals in the works …” and he waved his hand to show the futility of trying even to intimate the scope of his interests. We watched that exasperated hand in silence, thinking our own thoughts about how much he had to lose, and by extension, how little we had. To lose.

For my part, the euphoria of being allowed to stay on was quickly exhausted, and I’d come to feel as oppressed as my coworkers by the drudgery and the unvarying routine. During the long slow hours of the interminable sweltering afternoons, propped up in a chair with a tall vodka and tonic and some moronic sci-fi paperback Phil had picked up at a used-book store in Ukiah ("The classics , Phil,” I’d tell him, “get me something fat by Dostoevski or Dickens or somebody"), I began to feel I was aestivating, my clock wound down, brain numbed. It was then, more than ever, that I would find myself thinking of Petra.

One evening, while we stood round the horseshoe pit, winning, losing and exchanging chits, Dowst’s van slid through the trees along the road and swung into the field, jouncing toward us across the brittle yellow expanse of the yard like a USO wagon come to some remote outpost. We were shirtless, bearded, dirty, our jeans sun-bleached and boots cracked with age and abuse. Behind us the sun flared in the sky, fat and red as a tangerine, and a host of turkey vultures, naked heads, glossy wings, converged on the carcass of some luckless creature struck down behind the shed. Puddles of crushed glass glinted at our feet, the sagging out-buildings eased toward the ground like derelicts bedding down for the night, and the cabin, pale as driftwood, radiated heat in scalloped waves until you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t on fire. For an instant I saw the scene from Dowst’s eyes — from the eyes of an outsider, an emissary from the world of hot tubs and Cuisinarts — and realized that we must have looked like mad prospectors, like desert rats, like the sad sun-crazed remnants of Pizarro’s band on the last leg of the road to Eldorado.

Dowst backed out of the van, crablike, his arms laden, and disappeared into the house. A moment later he emerged, newspaper in hand, and crossed the yard to join us. He was wearing white shorts and an alligator-emblazoned shirt, tennis shoes and pink-tinted shades. “Hi,” he said, gangling and affable, as relaxed as a man who’s just played two sets of tennis before brunch, and then held out the newspaper as if it were a new steel racket or a Frisbee. “I thought you guys might want to see this.”

See what? VOGELSANG ELECTED MAYOR; POT SOARS ON COMMODITIES MARKET; JERPBAK TRANSFERRED TO JERUSALEM. We saw the front page of the Chronicle , blocks of print, a murky photograph. Puzzled, we crowded round him, scanning the headlines, passing quickly over the stories of corruption in government, poverty in the Third World and carnage in the Seychelles, until the following story leapt out from the page to seize us like the iron grip of a strangler:

WAR DECLARED ON POT GROWERS

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department of Justice have formulated plans for a federally funded assault on growers of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana along the Northern California coast, the Chronicle learned today. A federal law-enforcement grant of $400,000 has been rushed through to enable the newly formed “Sinsemilla Strike Force” to begin operations before the fall harvest season. The strike force will coordinate federal agents and local police departments in “sniffing out illicit growing operations,” as one source put it, in Mendocino, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties. Aerial surveillance, including the use of infra-red photography, will, it is hoped, pinpoint the locations of so many of the large-scale farms, while a program of special cash rewards for turning in growers is expected to help in exposing others.

“People are tired of this sort of thing,” a source close to the strike force said, “and they resent the outsiders that come into their community for illegal and often highly lucrative purposes. We’re confident that the reward system will make it easier for local residents to help us identify and apprehend the criminals in their midst.”

Operations could begin as early as next month, the source disclosed.

Dowst was grinning sheepishly, a slight flush to his cheeks, as if he’d just told an off-color joke at a lawn party. “Not such great news, huh?”

For some reason, the story didn’t affect me as it would have a few months earlier. I was alarmed, certainly, all the vital functions thrown into high gear as I read on, but I wasn’t panicked. In fact, relatively speaking, I was calm. Perhaps my run-in with Jerpbak and the little scene I’d gone through with Savoy— everybody knows what you guys are doing up there —had made me fatalistic. Perhaps I expected a bust. Perhaps I wanted it.

Gesh was not quite so calm. He snatched the paper from Dowst’s hands, balled it up and attempted to punt it into the trees. Then he turned on him, his face splayed with anger. “What next?” he shouted, as if Dowst were to blame. “Christ!” he roared, and spun round to face the empty hills.

Phil was pale. He tried to laugh it off, improvising a halfhearted joke about infra-red pot and reading glasses for the eye in the sky, until his words trailed off in a little self-conscious bleat of laughter.

Then, in what had almost become a reflex gesture for him, Gesh wheeled around to jab a thick admonitory finger in Dowst’s face. “Between the rats and the bears and you and Vogelsang and now the fucking federal government, there’s going to be precious little of this pot to split up, you know that?”

Dowst knew it. And so did we.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The following day, after he’d made a tour of the plantation and monitored the growth of each leaf, stem and twig, Dowst announced that he’d begun sexing the plants and that within a month all the males should have emerged. “Around the end of September, after the photoperiod begins to decline; that’s when we’ll get them all.”

Phil and I were playing checkers; Gesh was dozing on the couch, a newspaper spread over his face. It was mid-afternoon, and the heat was like a wasting disease. “Huh?” I said.

“You know,” Dowst was rattling through the cans of soup in the cupboard under the sink, “for sinsemilla pot. We’ve got to weed out the male plants.”

That was something we’d known all along, in the way we knew that chickens laid eggs whether there was a rooster or not, or that Pluto was the ninth planet in the solar system — it was part of our general store of knowledge. But we hadn’t really stopped to think about it, to consider its ramifications or work it into our formulae for translating plants into dollars. Any fool knew that in order to get sinsemilla pot you had to identify and eliminate the male plants so that the energy of the unfertilized females would go toward production of the huge, resinous, THC-packed colas that made seedless pot the most potent, desirable and highly priced smoke on the market. Any fool. But to this point we’d conveniently managed to overlook it.

I watched Phil’s face as the realization of what Dowst was saying seeped into his nervous system and gave vent to various autonomous twitches of mortification and regret. “You mean … we’ve got to … to … throw out some of the plants ?”