Post-Apocalypse Dead Letter Office (2 page)

Well, regardless of who sent him, we set him straight. Nice enough kid, I suppose. You should have seen him ride into town. He tried to be subtle as possible about it, rode in at dusk to what he thought was a safehouse... but Key-Righst you’d have laughed too if you’d seen the bale he was packing on his rack. He was seriously so weighted down on the back end that I was half-afraid his front tire would hit a rock and pop him into a perma-wheelie.

Of course, we captured him right away. He brandished this little butterfly knife like he’d gut every one of us. He seemed serious about it, too, but the opium-dosed joint he smoked with his safehouse “buddy” proved too much for him to bear. I guess I would have felt bad if he’d died... but not as bad as if I’d let some syndicate take over our pharmacultural affairs. Regardless, he came out of his stupor about six hours later, just after daybreak. And then we started with the torture. The application of goose feathers under his armpits and nose, sight of some of the leatherier girls on loan from the pool hall prancing about buck naked, and simple promise of another laced joint simply in return for a bit of information... dude had told us all we needed to know before two hours had passed. Of course, we weren’t satisfied, so we gave him what he wanted, then asked him to stick around.

Lloyd’s now one of our best fieldworkers. Hell of a nice guy, too. The stuff we took off his bike has been added to St. Francis’s drug stock, as it should be. The Nebraskans might have gotten the same result as we had, but there’s less violent ways of working, you know.

We’ve also been staving off this drought best we can. The farm itself is just a couple miles off the riverbanks, but we still play hell getting water out here if it doesn’t rain. The cannabis will do fine without irrigation, but the poppies need water, and so we had to implement a modified, bike-based bucket brigade. It’s kept the few hands we can keep and even sometimes me and Lisa riding four or so hours a day every day for the last three months. It’s worked out well, though. Good looking field of poppies.

Anyway, with regards to your previous letter, I think I know now what your basic cultivation problem is. You remember, how you mentioned that all the plants you been growing have all produced such shitty bud and gone all rangy-looking on you? Yeah, I figured it out. So, your farm is a mile or so south of town, right? Right down in the Kansas River floodplain? Well, I knew it before, but if you’d mentioned it to any friendlies in town they would have instantly and unmistakably pegged you as being a city boy. (You Lawrence kids never ever went down near the river, did you? Too many fucking junkie bums and cruisers down near the levee, huh? Made mommy too nervous to take you there, I bet.) That whole floodplain area along the Kansas – especially just off the banks – is just lousy with ditchweed and/or straight hemp. There’s no use trying to tame that shit, either... within our lifetimes, anyway. That shit’s always going to be just shit. Not good shit, not the shit, just shit. Trust me, an upstart farm in Cairo – not connected to any syndicate that I was aware of, and I am aware of most everything that happens in my market, as previously mentioned – just down the river, went through the same thing. They were sitting just off the river, and got terrible yields two years in a row. Got so bad that this year they switched to hemp and diversified to some other crops. I was personally glad to hear they didn’t go out of business completely, but had to change their focus. Competition is good, as long as it doesn’t threaten me. You know?

On the upside, you have a couple options. First is to bag up all the bud on your good starts before you move them out of your greenhouse (You have been keeping them in a separate space, haven’t you?) and keep trying to cultivate as usual. That’s a hell of a lot of work for what will likely be very little return at all, and given that the upshot of a whole nother failed crop might be losing the entire orchard, it’s a huge risk to be running.

Now, the second option, and the one I’d recommend has a couple steps. First, you get in touch with a couple other local farmers, preferably ones to the north of town. Not pot growers, of course, but folks who raise staples... OK, staples other than cannabis. Pitch this idea to them: you’ll be willing to trade, acre for acre, the land that belongs to them for the land that belong(ed) to your stepdad. You may not know it, but they definitely will that all that land right next to the river is some of the best, most fertile ground in the country, maybe the world. Now, you don’t need that land to grow your particular cash crop. It’ll do better the warmer, more light and humid it is, but it’ll grow just dandy in almost any kind of soil and as long as you can get it some water periodically. You know the old joke: that’s why they call it cannabis sativa... wait, what? The upsides to this one are obvious: you get a spot off the river and out of ditchweed pollen range for your plants to grow in, you’re less exposed to those few elements of the (almost entirely self-appointed) law who are not sympathetic to folks growing their own medicine, and last but not least is that your fellow farmers have way better land on which to raise grain, beans, squash and all other manner of edible vegetation. The only real downside is that you’ll have to give up your fruit trees, as the old ones won’t transplant at all and the young ones won’t very well. But you could get cuttings and grow clones. Just read up on how to do it – you still have a library there, right? – because it’s not that hard. Hell, the colonials used to do shit like that all the time, and in such a worse climate than we have. It’ll be a piece of cake for you to do. You owe me half a barrel of cider, too, you chintzy fucker. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.

Oh, and you’ll have to move. But whatever, you’ll still be in greater Wamego, raising and smoking world-class bud. Hahhah.

I guess you could try just heading down to the Kansas and chop down all the ditchweed you can locate, but you may as well try emptying the river a thimbleful at a time for all the good it’ll do you.

So, yeah, just go ahead and use those plants you’ve got right now for fabric. I say again: they are no good. Just in case you haven’t been following my advice and haven’t kept the starts inside or someplace other than your main cultivation area, I’ve taken the precaution of sending a couple new cuttings with this letter. (Yeah, usually the couriers will bitch about hauling off anything that weighs more than a tenth of an ounce or some such shit, but you tuck a little Greenbudis greenbudis in their pocket and they’re just docile as lambs.) They’re both from a great cultivar, one that came over from the Netherlands a year or two before the all the shit went down. Can’t remember the name off the top of my head. It was some offshoot of Lebanese Blonde, but the new cultivar’s name wasn’t even remotely catchy. Some damned arbitrarically – maybe even capriciously, having known several cultivators from my time in Rotterdam – alphanumerically encoded nomenclature. Typical Dutch nonsense.

Hey, call it MK420. Guess the numeric part doesn’t really mean much to folks nowadays. Huh. Well, leave it on anyways, as a reminder of the bad old days long past, and the bad new days that aren’t quite so bad as the bad old days... and to be capricious.

Wink at Tammy and then apologize for me. And say hello to the kids, or not.

Viva la revolucion verde or whatever!

Ron G.

To: Charles Yao, Kansas City, MO

From: The Seattle Crew, Seattle, WA

June 8, 20+7

Hey, Chuck! it’s Deanne, Nick and Nicole from Ballard!

We got your previous letter, dated March 10th, just two weeks ago. Those cogboys sure seem to take their time. There can only be, what, like two or three mountain ranges in between here and KC, right? Buncha lazybodies. Ha.

It was so wonderful to hear that you’ve finally found some work. None of us had any idea you’d done woodworking before. It’s probably nowhere near doing IT work for Schwab but we’re sure you’re a real asset to them and hope that you’re happy there. What we mean is... we’re sure you get what we mean.

Also great to hear that you’re now engaged to Jean. She’s a very lucky lady, indeed. Deanne says you’re a very lucky son of a bitch. We REALLY did not imagine that we’d learn that you’re expecting, too. Congratulations are in order (see enclosed bottle – homemade, of course. Jean probably shouldn’t have any for another six months... then again, it may take that long to get to you.)! Things are really on the upswing for you both.

We were all very sorry to learn about Snapdragon. Thirteen years is pretty damn good for a tabby these days, though, and we know she led a full life – for at least the five years we were around her, anyway. Still remember you bringing her home from the shelter, just a little tricolor fuzzball. When she chose one of Nick’s Bean boots as her living room – and the other as her litter box – we knew you’d picked a winner. Such a sweetie. We’re sure she’s in a better place now. (Nick just made a disgusting joke that I will not repeat here, or ever for that matter. Yeesh.)

To get you up to speed on our doings here. Deanne is still with the mayor’s office, trying to find new ways to make life in town less shitty. I (Nicole) have been doing most of the housework, the gardening, mending, cooking and other day-to-day stuff. Never pegged me for a housewife, did you? Nick has been staying with us, happily, and working four fulltime jobs – as a gardener and freelance fisherman by day, a minstrel at dusk and our love slave by night. (“Haw haw,” says Nick.) The powers that be are trying to get the locks working again by retrofitting it to work manually, and recently got a kick in the ass about it, as there’s rumored to be a pod of orca just outside the bay. Most folks think the orca are OK, but would rather not have them near their boats or eating fish in the bay. Nick’s been assured that if/when the locks come back online, he’ll be brought back on full time. With it being manually operated, he’ll get some exercise to boot (HA!).

He seems kind of ambivalent about going back to work after so many years, and for good reason. He has turned into quite the fisherman. No really. Keeps us pretty full up w/fish – more than we can eat, most days. Living near the locks and (recently converted) botanical garden has quite a few advantages. Not only are we able to get down to the garden early to work and earn our share of the produce, but if we get there around first light, we can usually snare or shoot a coney. Fish is great, but it’s nice to have a bit of red(ish) meat every now and then. Plus, I have figured out how to tan hides (Nick’s really laughing, now) and have made us some seriously comfy slippers, vests and even a blanket. Deanne still wears whitefolk (read: cotton) clothing and Red Wings to her workplace at the mayor’s, but Nick and I have almost completely switched over to all animal-based dress. Wool and leather, baby!

It was pretty fortunate that I’d been doing this, as Nick actually had a brush with death a month or so ago. Which is part of the reason we’re writing you.

Deanne had left first thing to ride over to the mayor’s. Nick and I slept in a bit that morning, shared a pot of coffee, a bowl of leftover potato and leek soup and a nice slice of salmon jerky and then rode down to the garden. I got to working and Nick strode off to fish. It couldn’t have been an hour or two later when I heard yelling coming from the pier. (Everything’s so wonderfully quiet these days, we can actually hear conversations coming from houseboats across the bay.) Well, after a minute finishing weeding the squash patch, I headed down to towards the noise. Of all the things I expected to see, Nick doing the sidestroke towards the shoreline towing what appeared to be a bag of laundry with him wasn’t one of them. The tide was rolling out, and Nick was struggling to make it back with whatever he had stupidly gone in the water for. Finally, it seemed, he got to the shallows and started dragging the thing along with all his might. That’s when I realized the thing was a pale wisp of a man.

Nick hauled the guy up to the shoreline and then collapsed on top of him. I finally got up to them, and Nick rolled off and looked up to me. He coughed out a bit of water and said something like “Maybe more,” and pointed west. I looked up and gasped. Through the mist I could see a barge drifting south through the sound.

One of my fellow community gardeners, Todd – nice guy – helped me wrap up Nick and the man overboard as best we could, then we hauled them back to the house. I stoked up the fire to a probably too-hot level, but it was all I could really think to do. Nick was cold to the touch, but the other guy simply felt like he was already dead. We tore the clothes off them both and threw them on the bed. Todd stripped down and jumped into the bed as I tossed blanket after blanket on top of all three of them. (The rabbit fur blanket went on first, as I thought it’d hold the heat in best.) I undressed quick as I could and then we both linked arms together and huddled around Nick and the sailor.