The Big Finish (16 page)

These days the greenhouse no longer contained his mother’s colorful medley of flowering beauties, for they’d been replaced by a monochromatic single plant. Its downward hanging trumpet-shaped blooms were the pale yellow of a sad winter day. Hailing from the Solanaceae or nightshade family, the trumpet flower was as beautiful and tropical and eerie as anything Webb’s mother had ever grown, but it was far more than a simple ornamental. This was a plant that could gratify the senses in any number of ways and greatly profit a man willing to risk the dangers of its blooms, its pollen, its seeds, its very scent, a man willing to exploit its potency.

As he always did when working inside the greenhouse, Webb wore latex gloves and one of the army surplus gas masks he’d bought online. NATO filter and a hydration port. NBC was its nickname. Full protection against nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. Also good for smoke, paint spray, and grinding dust and the full range of airborne microorganisms. Probably a bit of overkill, but the outfit settled Webb’s nerves.

Webb’s workers had to make do with paper surgical masks, and as a result a few of them, now and then, had tragically succumbed to an overdose of the trumpet flower’s pollen. Losing a well-trained man was always a setback, but it was the unlucky cost of doing the kind of business he was engaged in.

The trumpet flower Webb was cultivating went by many names.

Some South Americans knew it as the Borrachera tree, or the tree of the drunken ones. Fall asleep beneath its branches and wake up plastered. Tree Datura and burundanga were other aliases. A plant used by Mexican shamans to add color and vividness to hallucinations and utilized by criminals in Medellín to stupefy gullible foreigners, then direct them to empty their own bank accounts.

Its blooms and seeds and even the invisible spores of its sugary scent contained the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, powerful toxins that in low doses could cause dizziness, sweating, dry mouth. But at higher amounts the same chemicals could produce delirium, unconsciousness, and a wide range of hallucinatory experiences. Push the dose a bit higher, you were cold-cocked dead.

Domestic pharmaceutical companies used compounds of scopolamine and atropine in treatments for Parkinson’s, or as a sedative or to prevent motion sickness, and surely some of Webb’s customers had these lawful medical applications in mind when they bought a few of his bright red tablets.

But like any entrepreneur, Webb could make no guarantees about the usage his product was put to once it was in the hands of the consumer. Laurie reported that some of her customers at Fort Bragg employed the drug for carnal adventures. Zombie rapes, as they were known. Far superior to the other date rape alternatives, which left the victim unconscious, the trumpet flower kept the prey upright in a dreamy, compliant state.

When he’d finished mixing the batch of potting soil and firmly fixed the fresh-cut stalk of the trumpet flower in its center, he washed his latex gloves in the sink, went outside in the fresh air, stripped off his protective gear, and drew out his phone again and texted Laurie.

Where R U?

A few seconds later she came back with:
Moving product, where else?

Get your ass home. 9-1-1

Webb went upstairs, showered, toweled off, and lay naked atop the double bed where his mother and father had slept, where they fornicated, where Webb and Laurie were conceived. It was Webb’s room now, but he hadn’t changed their lumpy mattress, their stained sheets, their sour pillows. All his. Where he came to gather himself.

Webb stared up at the ceiling that his mother had stared at while Webb’s old man had lain atop her and pounded his mass against her frail body. He traced the cracks in the ceiling plaster as his mother had. She’d seen things there, flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies. She told him about them, reported how those cracks distracted her while Webb’s father grunted and labored above her. Always missionary, his mother told him. Always the same groan and unholy curse at the end.

He had a giant penis, she told him. A horse cock. When she asked young Webb, at fifteen, to present his own penis one afternoon, he’d obeyed, the two of them alone in this bedroom. Let me see it. Don’t worry, there’ll be no touching or any of that. When she insisted, he unzipped and pulled it out.

Though his mother only looked, Webb’s penis hardened and he tried to stuff it back in his pants before it came to full life.

She said no, let me watch. Let me see it in its full glory. Those were her words. Full glory. So he did. Without touching it, without using his hands, just his mother’s eyes doing the work. It rose and it rose until it was fully erect.

Yes, she said. It’s his. You’re his son.

No, I’m your son, yours.

You have his cock. I can do nothing for you. You’re his.

And thereafter, she never again confided her private longings or memories to him, but became cool and formal, causing Webb such a deep and abiding hurt that even now all these years later the memory of it could bring him to tears if he let it.

A half hour later, Laurie drove up in her white Jaguar, came slinking up the front stairs, and sat beside Webb on a rocker. There was a halo of weed clinging to her clothes and skin and her gray eyes were fogged.

Webb said, “How stoned are you?”

“Scale of one to ten, maybe six,” she said, voice hoarse. “Haven’t got the giggles, but I been fantasizing about a case of MoonPies.”

“You need to sober up quick, this guy Thorn is on his way.”

When Webb finished recounting Cruz’s phone call, Laurie said, “This woman is incompetent or nuts or both.”

“I’ve been calling around, everybody we can trust. You do the same.”

“You hear what I said? This Cruz woman is a loser. I thought she had a surefire plan.”

“Make your calls,” Webb said. “Put the storm flag out.”

Webb looked off at the greenhouse.

Staring at him, the last shreds of dope haze in Laurie’s eyes clearing.

“You been wallowing in your childhood again,” she said. “I can see it in your goddamn face, Webb, how your eyes go soft and your mouth droops with that sorrowful, woe-is-me thing. You’re making yourself weak and sick at heart thinking of Momma.”

“What I think about is none of your concern.”

“It damn well is my concern. I’m out there pushing pills eight hours a day, risking life and limb. Now’s not the time for weakness. This extravaganza with Flynn Moss and Thorn and this Cruz woman, this whole deal is because you had to go into hock to Pastureland, build another barn and another one, till we were giving them every fucking penny we made and still slipping so far behind on our payments we didn’t have a choice but to start our jim-dandy little sideline.

“Now we’re using that smokehouse to cure blooms instead of ham, the slaughterhouse to stamp out pills by the hundred, and we’ve got Momma’s greenhouse chock-full of enough Schedule III drugs to keep the Carolinas stoned on their ass for the next year. And why exactly are we in the fix we’re in right now? I’ll tell you. Because you had to outdo our daddy and run the biggest, baddest hog farm the world has ever seen. A man that’s been in the grave for years.”

“I’m twice the man he was, three times.”

“Yes, you are, Webb, and three times as dumb. Now suck it up, get all that Mommy’s boy look out of your face, and this time, let’s get this done right.”

SIXTEEN

THORN DROVE WITH TINA’S PHONE
in his lap so he could monitor the signal strength, but for the next half hour the icon flickered between one bar and none at all. There were no mountains or valleys to obstruct cell signals, so he assumed this part of the world had not yet attracted sufficient interest from the marble halls of commerce to warrant connecting it with the rest of civilization.

He followed Reb’s directions, made the proper turns, and watched as the land grew ever more flat and treeless. A patchwork of fields ran alongside the highway, but they seemed to have been left unplowed, unplanted, and untended for years and whatever crops once gave them color and value had long ago been harvested, consumed, and forgotten.

A few houses appeared, cramped brick rectangles, some double-wides with battered pickups out front. Some satellite dishes. Thorn could only imagine what was taking place inside those isolated dwellings, with folks like Reb and his family, televisions playing endlessly to ease the boredom, stoke the fantasies, and withstand the solitude of this barren countryside.

There were houses boarded up with plywood and two-by-fours, yards cluttered with abandoned farm implements, plows and tractors, old army jeeps. In every direction the land was fenceless as if the owners had long ago come to accept that there was nothing worth keeping out or keeping in.

He found the turn for Perkins Hollow Road. A mile or two later he rounded a sharp corner and discovered a river flowing alongside the highway. For a few miles the road and river meandered in unison, then Thorn saw a place along the shoulder wide enough to pull off.

He got out and stood for a moment, taking it in, then crossed a weedy patch to the river’s edge. He took the postcard from his shirt pocket and held it up beside the water. The photograph had been taken midsummer with the river gleaming and flowers blooming along the banks and a profusion of leaves on the oaks and hickories. Now the trees were bare and the river itself was a dull gray as if the sediment on its bottom had been churned by recent rains.

He put the postcard away and got back in the car. A couple of miles farther down the road he saw a girl of thirteen or fourteen skimming rocks across the smooth water. Beside her was an older boy casting a fishing line out into the river. He pulled off again.

The girl turned away from the water and watched Thorn approach. She was an African American child wearing yellow jeans and a gray hoodie. The boy stayed focused on his work. His plaid pajama bottoms were droopy and heavy boots unlaced and he had on a Marine Corps T-shirt, though he was several years too young for the service.

“Is this the Neuse River?” he asked the girl.

She stared at him for a moment as if he’d spoken a foreign tongue.

He repeated his question and after more consideration she nodded.

“My daddy’s just over yonder. Don’t you think of trying nothing.”

“I’m looking for my son.” A lie to calm the fear. “I thought I might find him fishing along here.”

“Is he addled too?” the girl said, gesturing with her shoulder at the boy. “Ain’t no fishes here you can eat. Though I seen lots of copperheads on the bank right along here.”

The boy reeled in his line and cast again. He turned his head slightly in their direction and Thorn saw the boy had the blank stare and mechanical movements of a child with some neural disorder.

At that moment the breeze must’ve shifted for it was only then Thorn caught the stench of rot and noticed farther downstream dozens of small silver fish, shad, he thought, floating belly-up just below the surface. Dozens more had washed onto the riverbank, their shiny bodies blemished by red sores and missing fragments like the half-moon bite marks weevils make in perfect green leaves.

At the girl’s feet, a small wave brought more dead fish onto the bank. A few were still flopping. More bloody sores.

“There’s a million of ’em dead, my daddy says. More than that maybe.”

“What killed them?”

She shook her head hard. She knew but wasn’t saying.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head again.

“You’ve been warned not to talk about it.”

She picked up another stone from the riverbank and slung it sidearm low across the river. It skipped three times then went in.

“Bet I can do four,” he said.

“Hell, four’s nothing. I do seven all the time.”

Thorn found a stone and sidearmed it with a sharp wrist flip.

It made four quick skips then arced up and skipped three times more.

“Seven,” he said.

“I seen six. I didn’t see no seven.”

“Well, I got to be going,” Thorn said. “Nice talking to you.”

He was turning away when she said, “It’s them hogs, their shit.”

“Their shit?”

“There’s lakes full of shit out on their fancy hog farms, stuff leaks in the creeks back up in there, and that shit run down here into the river and the fish come floating up with them bleeding places. Been like that since ever I can remember.”

“Pollution,” Thorn said. “From the hog farms.”

“Naw, it ain’t polluting, it’s hog shit.”

“Has anybody tried to do anything about it? People from out of town making a fuss?”

“Saw a man once, he came around, wrote something about the fish, then he left. Said he’d put it in the newspaper. Never saw him again after that once.”

“No one else?”

The girl looked out at the river and shrugged like she’d had her say, and by god, Thorn could just get on back into his car and leave her be.

He tried rephrasing the question, but she was done with him.

Thorn was turning to leave when a man his size, a black man in his thirties wearing overalls and a striped shirt, came walking along the bank.

“This gentleman bothering you, child?”

Thorn held his ground.

“Asking about the dead fish is all.”

“Did he touch you in any way?”

“No, sir. He didn’t touch me.”

“What you tell him?”

“’Bout the pig shit is all. He wanted to know about other people, strangers, if they was any of them around.”

“He did, did he?”

The man moved closer to Thorn, squinting into his eyes as if to see what kind of devil he might be dealing with.

“You a lawyer?” the man said.

Thorn shook his head.

“Newspaper writer, scientist, politician? You ain’t the governor by any chance?”

“Just the father of a boy protesting around here.”

“Oh, yeah? Protesting the hog farms?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure. He’s on the run from the law. I don’t have much contact with him, a postcard now and then.”

The man nodded, softening some, but still watchful.