Florida Heatwave (22 page)

Once he hit Brewton’s four-lane expansion, Florida wasn’t far. State lines, like county divides but magnified by twenty, weren’t anything tangible you could grab at, except maybe the bright green state sign greeting you after the road humped over the cluster of train lines at the Florida/Alabama border. Zane and his buddy Duane had walked those tracks more than a few times, immersed in strong hallucinogenic mind meanders together, heading whichever way east or west called them stronger, tapping young shoes against dusty railroad ties, wandering through entire evenings until they groggily adjusted their dilated pupils’ blurred vision as the sun would crank up on another day of youthful indiscretion.

Those were some great times for Zane and Duane, sharing a sheltered recklessness only kids from successful bloodlines could live. Zane had been sent by his folks to a military school his sophomore year of high school, right after he’d started acting out and getting in trouble. Zane’s dad figured it’d whip him back into shape, onto the right track, to fulfill the promise of the last name he was born with. That one year at military school, Duane was the first person he met, another wealthy kid sent off for some shaping up or shipping out, and of course that linked them as best young friends, bonded by a similar mission to survive the rigid structure, sneaking through the militant routines that were supposed to straighten them out, maintaining their hell-bent, recreational drug-fueled attitude, just below the radar of all the crewcutted instructors and straight-laced older students with pseudo-authoritarian powers. Duane spent three years there, two solo flights through the Florida Air Academy sandwiching his one year spent in solidarity with Zane. Everyone else at the school, if not using their last names, called Zane “Zee,” since he and Duane tended to be within ten paces of each other, and rhyming names for best friends at a military school overflowing with budding alpha male teenagers probably was too homosexual. But “Zee” and Duane were tight like a middle and a trigger finger, twisted together to make the sign for good luck.

Afterwards, while Zane had stumbled and staggered his way out of his parents’ favor, Duane, perhaps from the extra tours of duty through military school, had mastered the art of parental deception, even well into adulthood, to the extent his folks still supported him, even giving him a potentially functional farm, complete with live-in quarters for farm workers back behind the main house that Duane kept empty of any other people. His farmhouse compound was about thirty miles over the railroad track hump, and after a couple of miles across the blacker, fresher Floridian four-lane surface of Escambia County south, Zane’s stomach started churning noisily from adrenaline, Pepsi bottle corn syrup, and amphetamine chemicals.

Zane yanked his truck into a service station, one of those old school joints that had yet to replace the garage bays with the neon shine of sandwich bars and coffee machines and a sprawling buffet of road snacks. The station’s bays were locked behind windowed doors, cars still lifted, waiting for Monday morning mechanics to come back tomorrow morning. But the dilapidated little snack center, nothing more than a single soft drink cooler and one metal rack stacked with single-serving potato chip bags and snack cakes, was open, a chubby redneck girl watching a tiny black-and-white TV behind a wall made of cigarette displays.

“You got a bathroom?” Zane asked her.

She looked up. “Yeah, around the side. The key’s by the door there.”

Zane knew this already, but it helped to act out the scene as if it was your virgin trip into their always-locked, well-stocked bathroom. The actual garage owner, only there during weekdays proper, had been weird about Zane using the bathroom one time coming through this way, since Zane hadn’t bought gas or anything. The key itself was zip-tied to a foot-long slab of wood, to discourage loss. The bathroom was kept clean, more likely meant to be an employee perk than a public option. Mint green tiles gave it an institutional feel, with a small, ceramic sink sticking out the wall in front of a fading mirror. Zane sat on the low-slung stool, the chemical orchestra still churning inside. The bathroom’s lone wire-reinforced windowpane had a pea-sized fleck missing, spider webbing outwards, ordered yet neglected. Not a mark of graffiti was to be seen, and the metal door automatically locked behind him, with only the one key, so Zane tried to relax.

Duane and his long-time girlfriend were spending the week down at an island beach house his family owned just past Pensacola. He’d told Zane about this last week during one of their frequent three-minute-long phone calls. Duane’s girlfriend didn’t think much of Zane, knowing him only as some sketchy dude who lived up in Alabama as opposed to a private school kid who came from a good family like Duane. But Zane and Duane had stayed close, as best as teenage friends geographically split by only an hour’s drive could remain a decade later. They’d still get together regularly to run off for weekend indulgences of drugs, drinking, and general indiscretions a couple of times a year, an hour or two in any direction, just to stay young. This, in all likelihood, compounded Duane’s girlfriend’s disdain of Zane.

Realizing his tossing and turning stomach wasn’t going to rest, Zane swallowed it in, settled it as much as a few deep breaths of the tiny bathroom’s lemon vinegar air could, splashed water on his face, and got back on the road, picking up another Pepsi from the drink cooler when returning the precious slab-anchored key to the redneck chick inside. He’d be at Duane’s in no time.

The driveway to Duane’s was long and paved, but about halfway up, there was an iron gate forever propped open by two hefty chunks of white quartz that you could see the front circular drive of the main house from. A newer pickup truck with a long trailer behind it sat there, and Zane saw two guys buzzing around the yard, one standing on a large mower and the other chopping at the edges with a weed-eater. As unseen as possible, Zane did a smooth U-turn onto the flat grass back out the iron gate, down to the main road, away from the house. Over the years, he and Duane had wandered most of this property, so he knew it fairly well, and took his truck up a logging trail just past Duane’s driveway that accessed the southern edge of Duane’s family’s property. Zane pulled off the rutted, red clay truck path at a clearing littered with beer cans. He slid out of the truck, and started pushing through the pines towards the fence line a few hundred feet through the sticky, prickled undergrowth. Deeper into the thickets, he started getting snagged on blackberry bushes, their promising white blooms long turned to dark berries that were either gone from the deer or withered on the vine and left behind as shriveled black balls. Every now and then, a stiff branch of blackberry thorns would fishhook Zane’s forearm, and the skin would yank out as spiky thorn and soft flesh struggled to separate. Finally, at the edge, the fence line was thickened with blackberries, and Zane slowly poked his way into the middle, crouching down, putting an eye to the two guys in the yard.

The one on the mower was a stocky pit bull of a man with a shaved head and fu manchu mustache, zipping back and forth in tight circles on grass already flat as a carpet. The other guy was a tall, skinny white kid in last year’s hip hop fashions, with a flat-brimmed baseball hat just barely cocked sideways on his head. Zane’s left forearm was pockmarked with blackberry bush contusions from pushing through the woods, and it had a dull ache from the natural poisons. He wasn’t sure how long he’d have to watch those guys recut the perfect lawn, and he wished he’d brought his Pepsi with him.

The fu manchu guy finally drove his mower back up onto the trailer, and then went up the porch steps to bang on the door a few times while the skinny kid wrapped up, trimming around the front yard boxwoods and two wispy willow trees on either side of the pebble walkway. The door never opened, and fu manchu guy peeked in the small window to the side quickly before heading back to his truck, as the skinny kid strapped the weed-eater to the trailer. Two minutes later, they were gone, leaving the iron gate wide open like always.

Zane straddled over the split rail fence, and walked across the yard. He felt out of place, cellular memory strongly attached to the circular drive and landscaped path up to the front door. Zane hiked across half-an-acre’s worth of manicured ryegrass, cut up the front porch without either foot touching the walkway’s off-white pebbles. He banged on the door with far more authority than fu manchu did, and surveyed the yard while there was no response. No hundred-year-old hardwood floors creaking from footsteps inside; no sight of Duane’s girlfriend’s car out front; nothing. Zane knew that no one was home, but still, this was a place he’d visited often, and felt he should go through the standard motions.

He gave the side window a cursory peek, and then walked around the house, back to where the outbuildings were. The first one, an old carriage house, was just Duane’s storage zone at this point, though there was a functional bedroom in the back that Zane would lay in if he bothered sleeping during a planned weekend visit.

Beyond the carriage house were two more unkempt buildings, one just a shed, and both wired with electricity that broke off from the main house at its power box, with one meter for the whole compound, which Duane said helped the electric company not notice how much power he used back inside the last building, where he cultivated expensive marijuana plants from expensive mail order marijuana seeds, to supplement his limited access to his parent’s wealth. If the shriveled state of the blackberry bushes were any indicator, Zane figured there’d be a healthy stash of dried buds on the workbenches across all four walls of the old building’s “kitchen.”

There was no porch, just flat slabs of scrap soapstone pressed into the grass from years of foot traffic. The front door was weathered wood speckled green by old paint, with a pineapple-shaped glass doorknob sticking obtrusively out, purpled from long-term solar exposure. Zane gave it a solid twist but it did nothing, as expected. He muled back and gave the door the bottom texture of his work boot as hard as possible, about a foot below the glass knob. The wood rattled, but everything held stiff. Zane repeated the blow, this time with his legs off the ground and his full weight pushed forward through his right foot. The boot struck a second time, and the door’s aged oak gave a satisfying crack along the right edge. One final blow and the panel went crooked enough for Zane to heave against the door and gain access. He brushed the hints of a red clay boot print off the door as he entered, lightly, to avoid splinters.

The place reeked of high-caliber weed, and the four kitchen wooden counters wrapping the room had all the signs of a slow, assembly line crop harvest. The first two were camouflaged with dried plants resting across the countertops. The third wall’s work bench had white-haired buds sorted into piles on top of a strip of wax paper stretched all the way to the fourth wall, where a cluster of relatively full pint jars and a digital scale sat. Zane knew from experience that the pint jars were going to end up as Duane’s personal stash, hiding behind his couch in the main house’s high-ceilinged living room. At the end of the last counter were a pair of stacks of heavy plastic orange Tupperware containers, four per stack. Zane popped open the corner of the top one in the front row, unleashing that unmistakable, intoxicating, Pandoran stink. Holding the Tupperware on his fingertips, he figured there to be about a half-pound inside. His thumbs resealed the lid along the edges, and Zane grabbed six of the eight orange containers, leaving the bottom one from each stack, and headed back out the bashed-in front door, past the carriage house, around the main house, and back across the half acre towards the fence line.

The ride home went faster, Zane never having felt comfortable riding around with a few pounds of high-powered weed in his truck, all of it tucked into the tool bin behind the passenger seat. Before he crossed the railroad tracks back into Alabama, he swung into the Piggly Wiggly to grab a twelve-pack, plus a pound of the cheapest coffee. The older guy at the counter held the twelve-pack by the handle and asked Zane if he needed an “Alabama cooler.”

“What’s that?”

The guy smiled a flat grin missing a few pieces, and said, “I can’t believe you never heard of an Alabama cooler.” Opening up a brown grocery bag, the older guy packed the box of beer into it sideways, folded down the top of the bag, and handed it back to Zane. “There you go, son … an Alabama cooler.”

Back at the truck, Zane tucked the twelve-pack into the pickup’s bed, sliced open the bag of coffee with a razor knife from the tool bin, and poured the whole bag inside around the Tupperware containers. Then he shut the lid on the overwhelming coffee smell. The large green sign proclaiming ALABAMA at the hump in Highway 29 was peppered with buckshot.

Back home, having all the weed laid out in front of him, lids off all the tops, Zane realized how much marijuana it actually was. This was high quality reefer, Duane asking nearly three thousand dollars a pound for it. Zane figured even if he sold it dirt cheap to move quickly, he could squeeze a grand out of each container. The only question was whether to weigh it out and bag it up into ounces to maximize the profit factor, or just sell it off as one bargain-priced lump amount. Individually, it had double the money potential, but he’d have to deal with people he either knew a little too well or not well enough, coming and going and interacting and clogging up his evenings with paranoia-laced transactions, sugar-coated with small-talk, dragging the night down with drawling propriety, it being seen as rude to simply show up and outright ask for what you actually wanted around these parts. Plus, Zane would have to ride a wide circle through the upper Escambia County to move this much high-priced weed. Most of the local stoners were bargain shopper varieties, more acclimated to amphetamines, and mostly looking for Mexican dirt weed to help wind down at the end of the night as opposed to the High Times centerfold-quality, nicknamed breeds Duane grew. But Zane knew a guy up towards Auburn that would probably be willing to buy the whole parcel, and sell all of it up there. A good-sized college town tends to have the discriminating tastes and discretionary incomes needed to make the most out of a three-pound score of marijuana like this.