Triplines (9781936364107) (9 page)

Ed says, “Thanks.” He puts these on and disappears into the night.

After Sal floated the idea, Lenny spends hours thinking about the pay. Five dollars a day. Thirty-five dollars a week. Eight weeks of work: 280 dollars. An astounding amount. The most he ever earned was fifty-five dollars after a winter of shoveling sidewalks. Lenny can buy more books, more weapons, and even his own TV and VCR to watch kung-fu videos.

After school he cuts through a neighbor's side yard and heads to Sal's ranch house two blocks away on a street shaded with tall, leafy oak trees. Paint peels off the shutters and an old station wagon rusts in the driveway with blue tarp covering the back of it. A basketball and a pile of old, warped, wooden shingles lie stacked near the front entrance.

Lenny rings the doorbell.

Sal's sister Terry appears. Short with a blunt banged haircut, she looks at Lenny, puzzled. When he asks to see her brother, she calls over her shoulder, and Sal tells her to let him in.

Their house smells of wet dog, and Lenny then notices the sound of barking from the back yard. Cluttered with furniture, the hallway and living room are dark and shadowed, little sunlight coming in through the windows. Framed photographs—collages, weddings and birthdays—cover the walls. Terry points Lenny to a door at the end of the hall.

Lenny knocks.

The door opens and Sal puts on his jacket while walking out. He carries a backpack, says, “Ready?”

Lenny says he is.

Sal leads him out the back, where the minibike leans against the side of the garage. His dog, a young Doberman, barks and pulls against a long chain. Sal ignores it. He looks down at Lenny's oversized hiking boots and says, “Those look like clown boots.”

“They were my brother's.”

“Be careful on the bike. Don't drag your feet. You might fall off.”

He starts the engine and climbs on, strapping his backpack to the handlebars, and waits for Lenny. As soon as Lenny settles down Sal races off, Lenny's boots stuttering on the ground.

Lenny wonders if he could buy a minibike with the money.

Sal brings them to the same spot as before, locking his bike up, and they hike down to the creek, jumping over a small mound of accumulated garbage pooling in an eddy, and down one of the paths. He says, “Always make sure no one is around. Don't be followed. No one knows about this, but you have to be careful. I'm going to show you the trail markers.” He stops. “I mean it when I say you can't tell anyone. Not one person.”

“I know.”

He studies Lenny, then they continue deeper in, the path narrowing. Sal explains that this will be his first crop, so he's still figuring things out.

“Where'd you learn this?”

“A friend of a friend gave me a copy of a photocopied
handbook. Some guys wrote it a while ago, and it tells you basically what you need to know.”

“Can I see it?”

“Maybe.” He points to a tree by the path. “See the notches at the bottom?”

At the base are “x” marks etched with a knife. Sal points past the bushes and ferns, and moves through them, leaving the path. Lenny follows. They continue walking for another ten minutes, pushing their way through denser, overgrown plants and shrubs. Sal explains that because kids sometimes come here to drink and party, he planted the marijuana deep in the middle, where no one ever goes. He stops and motions to an oak tree with its large lower branches spread out like two arms. “This means we're getting close. After this tree look for the Birch tree with a ‘v' with the bark all diseased.”

Lenny points ahead. “I see it.”

They climb through prickly bushes, and then Lenny sees past the Birch trees to a small open area, bushes surrounding it. They approach a narrow clearing about ten by twenty feet, with a dozen rows of young plants a foot and a half high. It's smaller than Lenny imagined, and Sal says, “It's my test crop. I'm still learning a lot. The light's not the best.”

Lenny looks up. Large leafy oaks shade much of the area.

Sal adds, “Something about the soil is acidic, so I should've used lime, but they're doing okay.”

“What do I do?”

Sal explains that he's worried about pests, that already he noticed something—maybe rabbits or rats—likes to chew on the young plants. He has already tried different kinds of repellents, but Lenny will need to check on the plants to
make sure they aren't being eaten.

Sal says, “They're almost old enough to have a hard stem, but I'm still fighting the bugs off.” He reaches into his back pack and pulls out plastic spray bottle. He hands it to Lenny. “Spray the plants. It's a special castor oil mix that rats don't like. I'll spread the blood.”

“The what?”

He pulls out a plastic bag filled with rusty red powder. “Dried blood powder. It keeps the deer away.”

“Where'd you get that?”

“Gardening store,” he replies, and spreads the powder a few feet away from the plants, circling the area. Lenny sprays the plants with the oil, examining the small long leaves. Sal says, “I'm thinking of stringing up a trip wire to see if anyone or anything comes by at night. You'll need to check that.”

“You check on this how much?”

“Every few days, definitely on the weekends. The next stage is figuring out the male and female plants and separating them.”

“There are male and female plants?”

“I know. Weird, huh? You separate them because the females make better and more smokeable weed. If they get pollinated, then the females start making seeds, and less of the stuff that gets you high.”

“It sounds complicated.”

“It gets worse. It's really hard to tell the males and females apart until it's almost too late. It's giving me nightmares. This is a fucking full-time job.”

Lenny laughs.

Sal smiles and asks, “What do you think? Can you do
it?”

“Five dollars a day?”

He hesitates. “The thing is, I can't pay you until I harvest it, dry it and sell it.”

“How long will that be?”

“Summer. Late summer.”

“Like August? That four months.” Lenny calculates one hundred fifty dollars a month for four months. “Six hundred dollars?”

Sal shakes his head. “No, you wouldn't go every day after they get older. I'm just worried about right now. How about a total of three hundred dollars at the end? Cash. As soon as I start selling.”

“You're going to make that much?”

“If it goes okay, yeah. These plants get big, and then I can probably get maybe six pounds, dried.”

“How much do you sell it for?”

“By the ounce or gram?”

“How much for an ounce?”

“Two hundred dollars, give or take.”

“How many ounces in a pound?”

“You don't know that? What the hell do you go to school for? Sixteen.”

There are too many numbers to keep track of. Lenny tries to figure out sixteen ounces times six pounds.

Sal laughs. He says, “It depends on how I sell it. If I sell it by the gram, it's ten dollars per gram, a dime bag. That takes a while though. Some people want it by the ounce or more. If everything goes well, I can make three grand per pound.”

Slowly it dawns on Lenny that three thousand dollars per pound with six pounds means Sal is talking about eighteen
thousand dollars. Sal sees the shock on Lenny's face and adds, “That's only if everything goes well. Already I lost a couple plants to the rabbits, and I don't know how many will be the better-producing female plants yet. I'm hoping at least half of that will work out. So, you don't have to worry about you getting your three hundred dollars. Next time I'm going much bigger. All right? Deal?”

Lenny replies quickly, “Deal.”

They finish protecting his crop from pests, and Sal shows Lenny the nearest water source, a small stream a few yards away. Plastic milk containers are tied to a branch, and he fills them in the stream. He says, “The soil is pretty moist right now, but in the summer we'll need to do a lot of watering. I'll bring more of these soon.”

He instructs Lenny to water the base of the plants, and after they finish, he stands back and inspects the crop. He says that if all goes well the plants could grow over eight feet tall. The hardest part will be keeping everything hidden. Sal says, “You're going to feel the need to show off, to tell other kids what you're doing. Don't.”

“I won't.”

“Make sure you're never followed. If you see other kids around near the swamp, don't come here. Don't give anyone any idea that there might be something here.”

“I won't.”

“You understand how much is at stake, right? Not just money, but getting arrested.”

Although Lenny knows marijuana is illegal, he doesn't make the connection to what Sal is doing until he says this. Lenny asks him if he can be arrested for growing, not selling.

“Yeah. I'm a minor, so I'm not sure what that means, but we can get in a lot of trouble. Our parents, too.”

Lenny hears the “we” and this sinks in.

Sal sees that this is having an effect, and says, “You get it, right? That's why no one else can know about this.”

“I get it.”

After he drops Lenny off he tells him that they'll go again tomorrow afternoon to the site. Lenny then walks to the Merrick Library to do some research. He tells the reference librarian that he's writing research report on illegal drugs and needs to find recent information. She directs him to the
Reader's Guide to Periodicals
, a thick green book in the reference section with listings of magazine articles. She shows him the list of magazines and newspapers they carry in the stacks and in storage, and how to request the magazines. She asks, “You're writing a report on drugs? What grade are you in?”

He tells her that he's in the advanced section, and it's extra credit.

Settling into a corner, Lenny discovers that the
Reader's Guide
gives him access to all kinds of information, and not just about drugs. He gets distracted when he sees an article about descrambling pay channels on cable TV. He doesn't have cable—he doesn't even have a TV—but he promptly jots down the issue of
Radio Electronics
magazine on the request slip, and gives it to the front desk. The librarian rings a bell, and a teenager appears. He brings the slip downstairs and within minutes reappears with the magazine, leaving it in tray. When Lenny leafs through the issue he finds schematic
diagrams, plans, and instructions for how to build a cable TV descrambler from parts he can buy at any Radio Shack. He looks around, amazed.

Over the next three hours he learns about everything from how to tap phones to how to build an indoor green house. One article has a listing of “controversial” publishers and catalog companies, which he photocopies. He intends to send away for all the catalogs he can.

When he returns home, he's exhausted, and is surprised to find his parents in the living room, sharing a bottle of wine. His mother says, “The tests came back. The tumor is benign. I still need the operation, but I don't have cancer.”

Lenny realizes that he had been trying not to worry about this, and when he hears this news he feels weak with relief. Maybe he's tired from all his research, but he suddenly needs to sit down. He reaches back for the ottoman and lowers himself slowly. His mother sees this, and she comes over to him, takes his head in her hands, and kisses him on his forehead.

The days are marked by school holidays, weekends, and a countdown to Umee's operation. Lenny tries to impress his mother with his library research skills, and presents her with a few photocopied articles about thyroid surgery, including the statistics of how common thyroid nodules are, and how simple the procedure is. But his mother skims through the pages without really reading them, thanking him but saying that she doesn't want to know too much.

Lenny can't understand this, but lets it go. She may not like too much information, but he craves it, and armed with his research tools he sends away for mail order catalogs from a spectrum of small renegade publishers that specialize in everything from imported tae kwon do books to drug cultivation. And he continues his research at the library, where he begins running into the limitations of a small suburban public library—they don't carry any esoteric magazines—but he learns about magazine stores in Manhattan that carry many of the current issues. Manhattan is only a forty-minute train ride away.

The details of his grandmother's arrival are being worked out, and he can see this creating more friction between his parents. The tone of their arguments are subdued, though, as if his father understands the purpose of his mother-in-law's visit, and how she will be helping to care for the children and the house. The gist of the arguments are about the length of the stay, and Lenny hears them compromise on a
two-week visit.

Meanwhile, the school year is ending, and although he doesn't share the excitement of leaving grade school and entering junior high, he does enjoy the prospect of the summer vacation. Over the next couple of weeks he finds school a major inconvenience, because tending to Sal's crops is much more time consuming that he had thought. The weather is warming and the soil is drying, so Lenny has to water the plants every day. Plus the battle against the pests continues, with some kind of flea beetle attracted to the young marijuana plants. Sal shows him the photocopied manual on growing cannabis, the images so blurred that they look like black smudges, and the section on pests recommends either a garlic spray or a limestone and wood ash mixture.

Lenny's mother has a jar filled with garlic cloves, so he spends an hour preparing the spray, shelling and mincing the garlic, and then blending it into a liquid. His fingertips reek of garlic, and his sister hears the blender wanders into the kitchen, wondering aloud what he's cooking.