The Miseducation of Cameron Post (36 page)

“It’s more than that. It’s necessary,” Jane said. “Everybody should read it every year.” Then she let herself slip back into Jane from wherever she had just been. She stuck her hands on her hips and said, “And here are the two of you, thinking that it just showed up, somehow, in little plastic Baggies, all shredded and ready for your rolling papers.”

Adam began to sing, “There was a farmer grew some pot and Artist was her name-o.”

Jane and I both laughed.

“And Homo was her name-o,” I said. “It just sounds better.”

“Not to Lydia,” Jane said.

“What’s her deal?” I asked.

“She’s impersonating the mother from
Carrie
as a career choice,” Adam said.

“Hardly,” I said. “She’s not nearly dramatic enough, and I’ve never once heard her say ‘dirty pillows,’ either.”

“That’s only because you don’t flash your dirty pillows like you should,” he said. I laughed. We were standing at the edge of the pot patch, right where the forest floor of trampled leaves and undergrowth met the dark, churned-up soil that Jane had obviously worked and worked. I think neither of us was quite sure if we were officially welcome to enter the patch or not.

Jane had knelt next to a massive bush of a plant and was doing something to the stalk, but I couldn’t quite see what. “Lydia’s a complicated woman,” she said from behind that plant. “I think she’s actually sort of brilliant.”

Adam made a face. “But completely deluded.”

“Sure she’s deluded, but you can be both,” Jane said. “I’ll tell you what: She’s not one to be trifled with.”

“God, I love you, Jane,” Adam said. “Who uses the word
trifled
but you?”

“I bet Lydia would,” I said.

“Of course she would,” Jane said. “It’s a good word; it’s very specific in its meaning and it sounds nice on the tongue.”

“I can think of something else that sounds nice on the tongue,” Adam said, doing a goofy double elbow jab at me, and then adding, “bu-dum-chhh.”

“So we can just take this as our confirmation that you’re every bit the man half today,” Jane said, and Adam laughed, but I wasn’t really sure what she meant by that.

“Lydia’s hard work must finally be paying off,” he said in this Paul Bunyan kind of man voice.

“Where did Lydia even come from?” I asked.

Adam switched to a really bad English accent and said, “From a magical land called England. It’s far, far across the sea—a place where nannies travel by flying umbrella and chocolate factories employ tiny, green-haired men.”

“Right,” I said. “But why’s she here at Promise?”

“She’s the bankroll,” he said. “She’s majority stakeholder in Saving Our Fucked-up Souls Enterprises.”

“Plus she’s Rick’s aunt,” Jane said, standing and walking toward us, a couple of acorn-size buds in her hand.

“No way,” I said, exactly at the same time Adam said, “No shit?”

“She is,” Jane said. “Rick talked about it once during my one-on-one, or it came up somehow, I don’t remember; it’s one of those things that’s not specifically a secret but they’re specifically secretive about it.”

“God,” Adam said, “Aunt Lydia the ice queen. I bet she gives things like wool socks as Christmas gifts.”

“Wool socks are completely useful,” Jane said. “I’d be happy with a big box of wool socks beneath the tree.”

Adam laughed. “That’s possibly the dykiest thing you’ve ever said.”

“Which is saying something,” we both said in unison.

Jane shook her head. “Practicality has nothing to do with sexuality.”

“That would be nice on a T-shirt,” I said. “What with the rhyming and all.”

“Yeah, you mention that to Lydia when we get back,” Adam said. “I’m sure she’ll have a batch printed in no time.”

“Where’d she get her money?” I asked.

“I haven’t the foggiest,” Adam said. “But my personal theory is that she was a big porn star back in England and came here to escape her past and use her hard-earned devil money to do God’s work.”

I nodded. “Sounds reasonable.”

“I’m ever so slightly enamored of her,” Jane said, digging for something else in her backpack, eventually producing a small stack of lunch-size paper bags.

“Of course you are,” Adam said, overdoing his laugh. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

Jane stopped rummaging, looked at him. “She went to school at Cambridge, you know? Hello: the University of Cambridge. Have you heard of it?”

“Yeah I have,” he said. “That’s in Cambridge, Florida, right?”

I laughed at both of them.

“Who cares where she went to school?” Adam said. “All kinds of crazies go to good schools.”

“I think she’s mysterious,” Jane said, resuming her digging. “That’s all.”

“Come on,” Adam said, bending all the way over at the waist as if entirely exhausted by Jane’s reasoning. “The solar system is mysterious. The CIA is mysterious. The way they record music onto records and tapes is fucking mysterious as all get-out. Lydia’s a psycho.”

“Recording sound isn’t really that mysterious,” Jane said, walking back over toward us, so, so careful of her plants. “It’s a fairly straightforward process.”

“Of course it is,” Adam said. “And of course you know all about it.”

“I do,” Jane said, taking us each by the elbow and leading us into the patch. “But I won’t tell you now because now is not the time. We came here to harvest.”

For the next hour or so she showed us how to pluck the heavy green buds, carefully, and how she wanted them wrapped in pieces of the brown paper bags she’d taken from the kitchen. She scrutinized things like the textures and colors on those buds, the little fibers, which Jamie had told me were called simply “red hairs” but which Jane referred to more accurately as the pistils.

She spoke like a botanist about using them to determine peak THC-to-CBD potency and thereby recognizing maximal harvest time, but then she added, “It doesn’t matter a whole heap because we’re picking anything and everything that might even give us half a buzz while we’re all snowed in during a blizzard come February.”

“Hear, hear,” I said to that.

“Hear, hear,” Adam said.

“Hear, hear is right,” Jane said back. “It’s a boon for you all that my nature is to be a provider.”

“It’s the Christian thing to do,” I said.

“Indubitably,” Jane said. She stretched her neck and squinted at the sun, using the back of her forearm to wipe her brow, her face determined and proud, just like a sepia-tinged portrait of an Old West pioneer missionary woman come to convert the natives and settle the land, only this time the crop wasn’t corn or wheat, and this time it was Jane who was in for conversion.

Adam waved a hairy, nearly golf-ball-size cluster of buds in front of Jane’s face. “Are we allowed to sample the harvest, O wise Earth Mother?”

She grabbed the cluster from him. “Not what we’re picking,” she said. “We have to dry it first. But I came prepared, as usual, because my nature is to be a provider.”

“And an artist,” I said.

“Yeah, don’t forget artist,” Adam said.

“It’s true that I am many things,” Jane said, leaving the plot and heading just into the trees, leaning her back against the tall, thick trunk of a Douglas fir and sliding to the ground, where she rolled up her pants to the knee and unfastened her leg, which (she was right) by then I was used to seeing her do.

Adam and I settled in beside her while she packed the pipe. It was perfect there on the floor of the forest on an early-fall afternoon, getting high. It was almost possible for me to forget why the three of us were together, the sin we had in common, the reason for our friendship. Jane had a couple of those little green cans of apple juice with her, like from snack time in preschool, and she had a pack of beef jerky too, and we sat and ate our little pioneer-type meal and passed the pipe.

We were good with smoking and not talking. All of us did so much talking at Promise, even those of us who didn’t really say anything in all that talking. Every so often a breeze would kick up and a few handfuls of those yellow leaves would flutter to the earth, the light passing through them.

At some point Jane asked, in a lazy sort of way, “So have you started to forget yourself yet? Or is it still too early?”

I had settled onto my back to consider the almost overwhelming height of the firs and hemlocks as they poked like half-closed green umbrellas into the sky. And when Adam didn’t answer, I sat up partway, leaned back against my elbows, and said, “You’re asking me?”

“Yeah, you,” Jane said. “Adam did summer camp, so by now he’s all but invisible.”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

“Promise has a way of making you forget yourself,” she said. “Even if you’re resisting the rhetoric of Lydia. You still sort of disappear here.”

“Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t thought about putting it that way, but I knew what she was getting at. “I guess I’ve forgotten some of me.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Adam said. “I’m the ghost of my former gay self. Think the Dickensian Christmas Past version but with my face.”

“I thought you were never a ‘gay self,’” Jane said.

“You and word choice,” he said. “I wasn’t, technically. I’m still not. I was just using the most handy term available to make a point.”

I did my best Lydia. “You were
promoting the
gay image
through the
use of sarcastic comments and humor
,” I said. “I’m probably going to have to report you.”

“Not the gay image,” Adam said, with more seriousness. “No gay image here. I’m winkte.”

I’d seen that on his iceberg and had wanted to ask him about it. “What is that?”

“Two-souls person,” he said, not looking at me, concentrating, instead, on the long pine needles he was braiding. “It’s a Lakota word—well, the shorter version of one.
Winyanktehca
. But it doesn’t mean gay. It’s something different.”

“It’s a big deal,” Jane said. “Adam’s too modest. He doesn’t want to tell you that he’s sacred and mysterious.”

“Don’t fucking do that,” Adam said, throwing some of the nonbraided needles from his pile at her. “I don’t want to be your sacred and mysterious Injun.”

“Well, you already are,” Jane said. “Put it in your peace pipe and smoke it.”

“That’s outrageously offensive,” he said, but then he smiled. “It’s the Sacred Calf Pipe, anyway.”

“So you were like named this or something?” I asked. “How do you say it again?”

“Wink-tee,” Adam said. “It was seen in a vision on the day of my birth.” He paused. “If you believe my mother, that is. If you believe my father, then my mother concocted this
nonsense
as an excuse for my faggy nature, and I need to just
man up
already.”

“Yeah, I’ll just go with your dad’s version,” I said. “Much simpler.”

“I told you we’d like her,” Jane said.

Adam hadn’t laughed, though. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “My dad’s version is easier to explain to every single person in the world who doesn’t know Lakota beliefs. I’m not gay. I’m not even a tranny. I’m like pre-gender, or almost like a third gender that’s male and female combined.”

“That sounds really complicated,” I said.

Adam snorted. “You think? Winktes are supposed to somehow bridge the divide between genders and be healers and spirit people. We’re not supposed to try to pick the sex our private parts most align with according to some Bible story about Adam and Eve.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I made a joke, my usual response. “Listen, so long as you remember that it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, you should be just fine.”

Nobody said anything. I thought I’d blown it. But then Jane started giggling in that way you do when you’re high.

And then Adam said, “But I don’t know any girls named Eve.”

Which made me giggle along with Jane.

And then he added, “Plus I already let Steve jerk me off in the lake last weekend.”

“Then clearly you’re the mother of all gay lost causes,” which wasn’t even that funny, really, but the three of us got on one of those hysterical-laughter trains that lasts for so long you can’t even remember why you started laughing in the first place.

Eventually Jane reattached her leg and went to finish something or other in the patch, and Adam wandered off to somewhere, and I just stayed put. I listened to the small, high-pitched sounds of the tree swallows and the nuthatches, and smelled the smoke and the wet ground, the good, musty scent of mushrooms and always-damp wood, and I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous—the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows—but also so, so removed. I’d felt like this since my arrival, like at Promise I was destined to live in suspended time, somewhere that the me I had been, or the me I thought I was, didn’t even exist. You’d think that dredging up your past during weekly one-on-ones would do just the opposite and make you feel connected to those experiences, to the background that made you
you
, but it didn’t. Jane had just called it
forgetting yourself
, and that was a good way of putting it too. All the “support sessions” were designed to make you realize that
your
past was not the
right
past, that if you’d had a different one, a better one, the
correct version
, you wouldn’t have even needed to come to Promise in the first place. I told myself that I didn’t believe any of that shit, but there it was, repeated to me day after day after day. And when you’re surrounded by a bunch of mostly strangers experiencing the same thing, unable to call home, tethered to routine on ranchland miles away from anybody who might have known you before, might have been able to recognize the
real you
if you told them you couldn’t remember who she was, it’s not really like being real at all. It’s plastic living. It’s living in a diorama. It’s living the life of one of those prehistoric insects encased in amber: suspended, frozen, dead but not, you don’t know for sure. Those things could have a pulse inside that hard world of honey and orange, the ticking of some life force, and I’m not talking about
Jurassic Park
and dinosaur blood and cloning a T. rex, but just the insect itself, trapped, waiting. But even if the amber could somehow be melted, and it could be freed, physically unharmed, how could it be expected to live in this new world without its past, without everything it knew from the world before, from its place in it, tripping it up again and again?