Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Dude,” Brett says, “I don’t like this.”

“You think someone lives here?”

“Dude— obviously someone lives here.”

“They’re reading The Wheel of Time .”

“Probably to their peyote plants.”

“That’s so epic. Just read them, like, all thirteen books, drop a bunch of peyote buttons, and then, like, hold on to your hat .”

She walks through a kind of living room. There is a worktable with hand loppers and garden shears and a copy of the collected essays of Thomas Jefferson. Unopened boxes of Hefty garbage bags are stacked beside a six-foot-tall wooden Quan Yin, ornately carved. The ceiling is crisscrossed with white cotton clotheslines. She goes into a bedroom with a large four-poster bed and a dresser with a mason jar of bud, a stack of Robert Jordan novels, and a copy of Overcome Your Childhood Trauma .

She returns to the back door and slams it behind her to startle them, and it works. She hears Brett whisper, “Shit! Shit! ” and she can hear Jacob laughing. They scramble out of the house. She looks into the forest with the gun in her hand.

The road does not continue beyond the cabin and the nervous boys take off south, going cross-country down into the river valley. She listens to the silence of the clearing for a long time. Then she follows them. They walk along a high hedge of thimbleberry in a clearing of velvet grass and sweet vernal grass. Turtle goes quietly among the stumps of old trees. She stops at a large concrete circle in the grass, and beside it, the form of a pump, covered in a tarp.

She can hear the boys, but she isn’t listening to them. She thinks, stop and look. She goes in a half crouch, moving swiftly through the high grass, thinking, oh god, for christsakes, you two, stop and look. She sees them ahead, beside a stream at the border of the forest, the stream half overgrown with bracken.

She opens her mouth to call to them, but then she sees a man on the far side of the stream, wearing camo pants and a Grateful Dead shirt, a woven-hemp necklace with silver wire twining a large amethyst, a lever-action twenty-gauge shotgun slung on his back. He’s a small man, with a big rotund belly and a bright red face turned to leather with years of sunburn. The tip of his nose is waxy and bulbed, with little red veins standing out of it. He’s got a lemon-echinacea juice bottle in one hand. Turtle swings the Sig Sauer up and at him, placing the front sight over his temple, thinking, only if I need to, only if I need to.

“Hello, boys,” he calls out. “How you do’en today?”

Brett straightens and looks around to locate the man. Jacob spots him and calls back, “We’re good, a little lost, how about you?”

Turtle goes through the weeds, thumbing back the hammer. She thinks, easy does it, easy and slow, you bitch, and don’t fuck this up, just do this, every part of this, exactly fucking right, every moment of this; do exactly and only what is necessary, but you do it well and you do it right, you slut.

“Where you boys from?” the man asks.

“Well, I’m from Ten Mile and he’s from Comptche,” Jacob says. He walks up to the man, holds out his hand. “I’m Jacob. This is Brett.” They shake, and Jacob says, “A pleasure to meet you, friend.”

Turtle kneels behind a stump, places the sights on the man’s temple.

“All right, all right,” the man says nodding. He takes out a can of Grizzly chew, thumps it once with the ball of his thumb, pinches up a huge dip, and folds it into his lip.

“You chew?” he says.

“No,” Brett says.

“Only on special occasions,” Jacob says.

“Ah,” the man says, “well, don’t start. Myself, I’m trying to quit. They put fiberglass in this stuff. Can you believe that? So, boys, you take it from me, if you’re going to take it up, and it has its perks, I’ll give you that, you pay the extra dollar and go organic. All right?”

“Right,” Jacob says, “that’s solid advice.”

“Organic, that’s the way,” the man says, “not these chemicals. I believe in organic myself. Better yet, just stick with the marijuana. If it weren’t for nylon, that’s all we’d ever be smoking.”

“Speaking of that,” Jacob says, unshouldering his backpack and setting it down. “Is there any chance we can buy some from you?”

“Well,” says the man, turning the can of chew over in his hands. He frowns.

“It’s no worries,” Jacob says, “we were just looking for something to add to our adventure.”

“I can appreciate that,” the man says, nodding. “Sometimes you’re just looking for a little something to take the edge off all the walking, and it helps bring out the details, doesn’t it? You notice things you otherwise just plain wouldn’t.”

“That,” Jacob says, “is exactly what I mean. I can tell, sir, that you are both a poet and a scholar.”

“Well, I’d hate to leave a friend in need,” the stranger admits.

“My man,” Jacob says.

“I can help you out,” he says, after a hesitation.

What the hell? Turtle thinks. She stands in the grass, gun leveled at the man. Jacob passes the man a twenty-dollar bill, and the man opens a canvas pouch on his belt and takes out a tea canister. He pulls the cap and dispenses several buds into his hand, passes them to Jacob. Then he takes out a pipe made from a deer’s leg bone, with a wooden mouthpiece whittled to the bone flute, a bowl augured out of the jointed end. He begins breaking apart another bud in his fingers and packing it into the end, going on: “This stuff. This stuff, now. Not like tobacco, which is as addictive as anything—as addictive as heroin, and will kill you. Why I ever started smoking tobacco is beyond me. Trying to quit. Hence the chew, you understand. Only problem with the marijuana is that when you grow it out here, the fertilizer isn’t good for the salmon, even the organic fertilizer, and that gets to me. Looking at ways around it. Also, another thing is that we have rodents and things come out of the forest to chew on the stalks of the plants and you have to poison them or put up with them. I put up with them, and that’s why you should buy local. Those Mexican growers, those guys don’t care, this isn’t their home, right? They just lay down rat poison and it’s awful, just awful, kills the ringtails, the raccoons, the weasels, all those critters. That’s why you gotta buy your weed from guys like me. Locals. Supports the economy and it’s better for the environment. Where you headed, by the way?”

“We’re just trying to find a place to camp,” Jacob says.

The man nods, working his fat lip of tobacco. “You’re all right, boys, you’re all right, well, I’ll get you pointed in the right direction.” He squints off west.

“Why fiberglass?” Brett asks suddenly.

“Huh?” the man says. “What’s that?”

“You said they put fiberglass in the tobacco, but why would they do that?”

“Oh, well,” the man says, “the fiberglass now, it cuts your lips so that the tobacco gets absorbed faster, makes it more addictive. It’s the same thing with all of this packaged food they’re selling, don’t ever trust a corporation, boys, and especially don’t trust a corporation to make the food you eat. This is why I don’t have a car, you understand. Can’t conscionably have a car. Not when I’ve been down to South America myself, lived among jungle tribes in the Amazon and seen the damage the petroleum industry is doing down there. We should all eat a lot more local food, smoke a lot more pot, and drive a lot less, as far as I’m concerned. And love one another. I believe that. Community, boys, that’s the way.” He lights the bone pipe and takes a long draw. He puffs, and then hands the pipe to Jacob. They stand nodding and passing the pipe around.