So Shall the Tree Grow, page 11
Chapter Twenty-One
It was evening. Sherry Lynn imagined she could hear the sound of the tractor out in a field, getting louder and louder and louder, then softer and softer and softer after it turned at the end of the row and went the other way. Like somebody was cutting wheat. It wasn’t real, though. She knew there was no wheat growing at Land’s End, or any other crop for that matter. Her son Drew raised thoroughbred horses.
Drew. That’s who the young man was who’d told her she had pulled up all the tomato plants. Her own son, Drew. She hadn’t, of course. Why would she uproot tomato plants? She loved tomatoes.
She could still hear the tractor, though. She knew it wasn’t real, but she could still hear it. Wasn’t that an odd thing. The auditory image had been burned into her brain during the years she was married to Tim Brand and lived on his farm on Crocker Pike, raising his three rowdy sons. They hadn’t had much during those years. Lived in an old frame house on his family farm, with Tim growing corn, tobacco and breeding black angus cattle. It had been a far cry from the life she’d lived in the beautiful mansion with the roaring lions out front — that had surveillance cameras in their mouths, but nobody knew that part. The other end of the spectrum. Riches to rags, they’d call it.
Even though she sat with the air conditioner blowing cold air right into her face, she still felt hot. Flushed hot. She’d got Drew to install it in her bedroom because the central air conditioning didn’t proper cool the top of the house. The way the heat rose in late August — one frying-pan day following another — she hadn’t been able to sleep at night, couldn’t seem to get cool enough.
Sherry Lynn couldn’t cool off now, either, but it wasn’t about August heat or central air conditioning. She was hot on the inside now.
She hadn’t turned on the light in the room, just sat there in the shadows with the cold wind in her flushed face, feeling the chill of her wet clothes stick to her skin as the sweat slowly evaporated.
Growing weed.
Righteous Weed.
Those two words touched so many hot buttons within Sherry Lynn that she felt like she was being electrocuted. Like she was being shocked all over, lying on a wire mattress some psychopath had attached wires to so he could use it to torture his victims.
The words had pulled out the stops, collapsed a dam she didn’t even know was there until it wasn’t anymore. All the pain and misery had come flooding down the hillside and covered her up, got up to her chin, was about to drown her.
Awful images. Nightmare images.
They were like still photographs, illuminated by those flashbulbs you used to buy for small cameras, the little square ones that produced a brief light so bright you couldn’t see afterwards.
Click-click.
Walking back into her mansion, empty, after she had been released from jail. Jail! She walked into the living room where there’d been a birthday party in progress until the FBI showed up. She’d been just about to introduce the clown to the crowd of children when she heard the doorbell ring.
And the doorbell had sounded sinister. It had! Even then, when she had no idea the horror that awaited her … even then the bell sounded menacing and she hadn’t wanted to answer it. But she had. And they’d hauled her away in a state police cruiser while Drew and the other little kids stood wide-eyed on the porch watching.
The house was quiet by the time she got back. All the mess was gone — no presents or gift-wrapping, no decorations, no cake or melting ice cream. Somebody had cleaned it all up. She didn’t know who. The only sound she could hear was the gentle clop of her footsteps and the sound of someone sobbing softly. It was her crying, but she didn’t know that at the time.
The night in jail, though she was only locked up for eight or nine hours, had permanently changed Sherry Lynn Hannacker. She would never be the same again. It broke something. She’d felt it snap. It was like the rubber band inside a doll, stretched tight to hold the pieces of the doll in place, had broken, so the arms and legs just dangled. That was Sherry Lynn. All her pieces parts just dangled.
She couldn’t look at anybody for months, didn’t make eye contact for what felt like a year, slinked around, avoided everybody — except, Jessie, of course. Oh yeah, Jessie’d been there alright. Telling Sherry Lynn to be strong, that Drew needed her, that everything would be alright, that they’d get through this and go on with their lives.
Good ole Jessie. Yes sir-ee, right there whenever Sherry Lynn needed her. And in truth, Sherry Lynn might not have made it if she hadn’t had Jessie to lean on. That’s what made it so horrible, so awful, so unthinkable when she finally found out years later. Years! Jessie, the BFF she’d bonded with on that long drive home from Texas after the guard unit shipped out … Jessie had been sleeping with Sherry Lynn’s husband the whole time, sneaking around behind her back.
Jessie claimed it’d just been one time. Right, one time. Who believed a tale like that? Sherry’d gotten pregnant with Drew after only one time, but that was different. Jessie and Riley … she was certain they’d been sleeping together for years. And poor Sherry Lynn never suspected a thing. Poor stupid Sherry Lynn believed Jessie was her friend and all the while Jessie’s little girl … was Riley’s daughter.
Ruth. Jessie’s daughter Ruth. Somehow that witch had tricked poor Willa into some awful scheme to grow marijuana again. To grow Righteous Weed.
Drew had told Sherry Lynn before Christmas that Jessie was dead, that she’d been killed in that tornado that hit western Kentucky. Now, Sherry Lynn knew that’d been a lie. Jessie wasn’t dead. Jessie was very much alive, was using her witch daughter to manipulate Willa. Sherry Lynn didn’t know exactly how the whole thing was supposed to play out, but she’d find out. She’d uncover the whole plot, and then she’d show them what it felt like to be betrayed.
Sherry Lynn would put a stop to their grand plans if it was the last thing she ever did.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Damien Coulter looked down at the report on his desk, his eyes flicking over the words Righteous Weed highlighted in bright yellow, and thought about how he’d stolen Joe Ferguson’s pencil box the day he smoked his first joint and the pencil box had had a yellow highlighter in it and that’s what got Damien caught.
Sister Marie Celeste had gotten her nose way too out of joint about the theft — like Damien’d done it because he gave a rip about the stupid pencils and yellow highlighter. He’d lifted it accidentally, thought it was Joe’s lunchbox and not some dumb pencil box, and Damien was suffering from his first and arguably his most severe case of the munchies he’d ever had in his life.
Damien’d got caught because he’d used the highlighter. A pencil is a pencil, he could pass the rest of the contents of the box off as his own, but not the highlighter. He’d used it, the prissy old nun had seen it, demanded to search his locker and bada boom, bada bing, found the roach he’d saved from that first memorable joint in the box among the pencils. Damien Coulter had been summarily thrown out of St. Gregory’s school for boys. He was only twelve years old, had no idea what he was doing when the older boys shared their weed with him, thought he was smoking a cigarette — just one you rolled yourself like his uncle Phil did.
He’d inhaled and …
Yeah, he supposed he’d romanticized the experience, like every other stoner — that “first high” — can you hear the bands playing? But he really didn’t think he was. Some people had to smoke two or three joints before they ever “felt anything.” He did not number among those unfortunate souls. He took one toke off the fat “cigarette” sixteen-year-old Beto O’Malley handed to him, and he felt a sensation he’d been totally unprepared for.
He zoned.
He floated.
He felt at peace with the world, a partner of the universe … and, oh, by the way, so hungry he swallowed the contents of his own lunch sack in two bites, and then spotted what he thought was Joe Ferguson’s lunch box left unattended.
It was Damien’s first scrape with the authorities, so his parents dutifully hauled him across Atlanta to some other Catholic school. He hadn’t been there a week before he found the pusher. He bought. He smoked. And he was disappointed.
At the time, he didn’t know there were strains of weed, that they had names and certain characteristics and you could shop around until you found something you liked. He shopped, but never found the Nirvana of that first experience.
Had that lone joint been “Righteous Weed?” Maybe. The timeframe was right. It was the undisputed standard of excellence for nationally grown weed at that time, would have been billed “the best weed there is,” and that’s what he’d been told he was smoking.
Damien had been searching for that weed, for that experience, ever since, as had a whole lot of other weed smokers. In that pursuit, he had gone from consumer to provider before he was out of middle school — hawking weed in exchange for contributions to his own personal supply. His family moved out of the city in the vain hope that a rural, less metropolitan setting would change the trajectory of their only son’s life back onto the straight and narrow. He quickly became “the man” in high school, when he and his buddies traveled to Atlanta to purchase weed to take back out into the hinterlands and to sell to the locals. Their supplier in Atlanta, a man he knew only as Bosco, took a liking to Damien and took the boy with him to New York City, where Bosco sold his own Georgia-grown weed and purchased different strains for distribution.
Bosco’s supplier in New York was a black man who’d lost his leg in some famous battle in Vietnam. The man’s name was Ace, and from him Damien learned firsthand about the Cornbread Mafia … and idolized them. They were folk heroes. He wanted to be them. After he grew his first crop, using seeds he’d gotten out of the bottom of a baggie of weed to plant five scrawny marijuana plants between the rows of a neighbor’s corn crop, he branched out into bigger fields. Damien Coulter was on his way.
He grew weed and sold it, and although smoking it never did get him to that place he’d first encountered, he managed to put together a weed operation that provided marijuana to dealers all over Georgia before his twenty-fifth birthday. Then all over the southeastern United States. A couple of near-misses — running through a weed field with a DEA chopper hanging in the sky overhead — convinced him to clean up his act. When Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs slammed American growers into federal prisons on mandatory twenty-year sentences, Damien moved his operation offshore, found a way to launder his money, invested in legitimate businesses. He got a college education, met the right people, formed the right alliances, went up the ladder to success. Seven years ago, he’d founded a cannabis company called CoulterCulture Cannbis, Inc., grew acres of licensed weed in five states, harvested it with machinery, and mass produced edibles for sale all over the county.
He’d long since given up his quest for the Holy Grail of marijuana, weed that would reproduce the experience he’d had with the joint that’d sent him scavenging for other kids’ lunch boxes when he was twelve years old. Then he kept tripping over references to Righteous Weed and he wondered. Was it possible …?
Looking up from the report, he eyed Russell Brockawitz, who’d crawled out of a hole somewhere in the wilds of Oklahoma to chase down leads.
“So Baby Bear’s Bed is a dummy corporation?”
“Kinda like one of those Russian stacking dolls. It’s one shell corporation inside a bigger shell corporation inside … We do know that whoever is running it has spent more than thirty thousand dollars on advertising.”
“That’s a lot of money to invest in a charade.”
“I don’t know how much you know about the original Righteous Weed, but it was grown by a cartel called the Cornbread Mafia and they went down hard. The whole circus tent fell down around their heads more than thirty years ago, busted maybe a hundred workers in fields all over the country, hauled them off—”
“I know all about the Cornbread Mafia. What’s your point?”
“Just that they all came from the same place, this little county called—”
“Callison County, Kentucky. I know. Tell me something I don’t know.”
“The fellow who took the biggest hit was Riley Hannacker, and he’s still alive, got out after twenty years in federal prison and still lives in Callison County, Kentucky.”
That was interesting.
“He’s growing weed there?”
“Not that anybody knows about.”
Damien had a thought.
“You don’t suppose he still has … seed …?”
“That he’s been sitting on for four decades? Not likely. But if he developed the original Righteous Weed strain, maybe he’s managed to come up with some kind of knock-off. They’d have to believe what they’ve got is close enough to pass or they wouldn’t dare hype it as the real thing.”
That made sense.
“If that’s the case, just some old guy and a couple of his cronies,” Brockawitz continued, “they’re operating on a shoestring.”
“And you’re thinking maybe they’d be willing to sell?”
“To somebody who could produce it on a scale that’d make ten times what they could make — why not?”
Right. Why not? Unless money wasn’t their only motivation.
“And if they’re disinclined to sell?”
Coulter smiled. “We will make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Willa had been right. No big surprise there. Willa Hannacker didn’t miss much. She’d said from the git-go that there was way more illegal weed on the market in 2022 than there was legal weed. She had certainly nailed that one. Ruth had been on the road for almost three months now, hawking a product that didn’t yet exist — with a wink and a nod — to dispensaries all over eleven states. Ruth’d learned quick that there was “over-the-table” weed — sold through licensed dispensaries that had purchased it from growers who’d been licensed to grow it. It’d been approved, stamped and taxed. Then there was “under the table” weed that a reputable, licensed dispensary was not allowed to sell, illegal weed grown by who-knew-who, who-knew-where, no license, no taxes, no fees.
Why would a reputable establishment buy illegal weed? Well, duh. For the same reasons nightclubs and restaurant owners bought bootleg hootch. Great product, great price. The essence of American capitalism at work. Illegal weed in today’s marketplace was better weed — which stuck in the craws of the big operations … that were mostly run by small growers who’d branched out, and every small grower on the planet was hooked on the pursuit of the Holy Grail — the mystical, magical marijuana strain that was the best in the world. The research and development departments in Big Canna Land were peopled by — as Willa put it — a bunch of lost ducks in high weeds honking out one product after another when not a one of them had any real idea where the pond was. Those guys were “scientists,” botanists and agri-business professionals, who could actually genetically clone one plant from another one. But it was the little growers out there in the hinterlands, splicing one strain of weed to another, who were on the cutting edge — “the final frontier.” The farmers who’d grow a hundred plants and cut down ninety-nine of them — always looking for the best, the best, the best. Those guys were where the really good weed was coming from. Some things never changed.
The advertising Baby Bear’s Bed had purchased had created a buzz in the cannabis community that was as deafening as the cry of those cicadas that came out of the ground every seven years. Every dispensary Ruth talked to was “interested.” Their interest ranged along a scale from mildly curious to stoners with the munchies staring at a piece of chocolate cake.
Ruth smiled at the big man with the eyepatch. He was the right age, build and demeanor — he could have lost that eye to an IED in Afghanistan like that congressman from Texas. He also could have put it out with a sharp stick when he was in second grade.
The man stuck out his hand to shake Ruth’s. “Look forward to taking a look at your product … ma’am.” Ruth always introduced herself as “a representative of Baby Bear’s Bed,” and didn’t offer a name. She would have told him who she was if he’d asked, but he didn’t. None of them did. The quasi-anonymity of namelessness was part of the wink-and-nod game you played when you were hawking unlicensed weed — weed that came in the back door, marijuana everybody involved acknowledged was lightyears better than what came in the front.
As the man crossed back through the field of broad, waist-high marijuana plants that looked like little Christmas trees, toward his office building, Ruth set out toward her rental car in the parking lot, making notations on the bottom line of a tally sheet before she returned it to the folder in her backpack. Willa rolled her eyes at that, couldn’t understand why Ruth didn’t record all her information in an iPad. It wasn’t that Ruth was old-school like her father, who made no secret of the fact that he believed anybody who could operate any device more complicated than a flip-phone was a witch and should be burned at the stake. Ruth used pen and paper because she had first organized her businesses — Ruth’s Stuff and Has-Beens — by spreading papers all over the floor of her tiny apartment in Chicago, spreadsheets and product inventories and profit-and-loss statements. She didn’t know why it was, but she seemed able to keep a multitude of divergent facts and pieces of information “top of mind” if she could envision them on sheets of paper.
Top of mind. If there was a top of mind, there was also a bottom. And that’s the spot currently populated by most everything else in Ruth Hannacker’s life besides weed. A pang of guilt made its way through the exhausted synapses in her brain as she got into the car behind the wheel. She’d received — and ignored — half a dozen texts from her attorneys in the past couple of days and the lawyers were not trying to reach her in regard to the button-button-who’s-got-the-button shell game of corporations they’d created to obscure the identity of the owners of Baby Bear’s Bed. They were concerned about Ruth’s other businesses, the ones that’d meant the world to her just a couple of months ago, the ones she had spent fifteen years growing into thriving concerns.
