Still, he and his partners—“good people, a tight bunch”—lived with unrelenting stress that began to wear on them. One night, they got stoned together and everybody realized that the other was feeling the same thing: I gotta get out of this. Plus, the marketplace had become more competitive, resulting in aggressive encroachment from some new growers nearby who were “less oriented toward a mutually supportive local economy.” Actually, they were the sort of guys “with a different kind of ponytail,” wanting to consolidate a larger market share and connected enough “in other circles” to boost Erik’s group’s collective blood pressure. Erik slept with a shotgun and finally used it one night, firing over the heads of some intruders to scare them off. In retaliation, the other growers beat up one of Erik’s group, and retaliation seemed unwise: These guys seemed more willing and able to escalate than Erik’s people were.
So they did their best to vanish. They took their last crop and seed stock and set up again in southern Oregon. After a year or two, they started divesting and diversifying. They figured that their horticultural skills would help them explore other promising products without so much anxiety attached to them.
“So, second year in Oregon, we had about five hundred pounds of prime bud and leaf to deliver and I was the designated driver. We were moving it to some new connections in Portland and Eugene, avoid the long drive to the Bay Area. Bad plan—we didn’t know them well enough. Long and short of it, I got caught. I elected to take the rap on my own, keep my friends out of it, and got twelve years. Got out in seven for good behavior.”
What to say to that?
What Brassard said was “Mother of God. I smoked hooch a few times over there, couldn’t see as it had much goin for it. Hard to believe there’s such a market for it. You did too, didn’t you, Earn? Smoke?”
“A bit. Never got the taste for it,” Earnest said. “Lot of guys did, though.”
By “over there,” Brassard meant Vietnam.
Brassard, turning back toward Erik, staying on topic and now hardening up a bit: “So what brings you to our neck of the woods? Anything besides seein your sister?”
Chapter 38
That day, for the first time ever, we ran late with afternoon chores. Erik kept us utterly caught up in his narrative.
Watching him tell his tale, I saw just how much he had grown. Prison, or maybe just life, had knocked off the sharper edges and rounded some of the harder angles. He expressed his certainties in ways that allowed more room for others’ opinions; his monologues were interspersed with pauses that invited others’ responses. And where he used to dramatize and emphasize, he now tended to speak with wry understatement. That said, there was a toughness to him—not the showy machismo of his younger years, that piratical dash and panache, but a slower, pragmatic kind that I supposed must be earned in, say, a state penitentiary.
He didn’t tell them everything—he saved some details for me alone, shared over dinner here at the camp tonight—but covered a lot of territory.
As Erik told us, he’d been betrayed by his buyers, and the police never learned the origin of his stock—he refused to incriminate his partners, who were also his dearest friends. They’d always agreed that if anybody got caught and didn’t talk, they’d reciprocate and preserve his or her share in the business, to collect later. Their experiences in California and his arrest discouraged them from continuing in the marijuana industry, but they continued as a corporation, more formally now. Erik got twelve years. Fortunately, the state had a progressive prison rehabilitation program, including access to college classes, and he had used it to develop skills he figured he’d need when he got out: business administration, marketing. He was determined to run his own shop—he wasn’t the employee type, he knew that much about himself.
So he got out, went to see his old partners. They were doing very well. They reimbursed him for his efforts on behalf of the corporation—“they stuck to their principles.” They offered, and he opted for, the van and its contents instead of cash.
At lunch, Brassard cut to the chase: “I guess here’s where I need to know what’s in that van that’s sittin in my driveway.”
Everybody’s eyes went to Erik as he absorbed the question. He stood up. He said he’d be right back. We heard him go out and, faintly, the opening drag of the van’s side door and a moment later the drag and slam. Cat kept her eyes on me.
“I’m sure you can understand my outlook, Ann,” Brassard said. This was the boss speaking.
Frankly, I was grateful for his taking charge. I hadn’t relished the idea that I would be the lone bearer of some bad secret, or the solitary carrier of difficult news from—or to—my brother.
Erik came back inside with a Styrofoam container about the size of a pizza box but six inches thick. He smiled like a chef about to serve his pièce de résistance as he brought it up to Brassard and set it on the table. He used a table knife to slit the tape and then lifted the top half of the box.
Brassard moved his glasses down his nose to look. “Roots?”
“They call them crowns, but basically they’re roots, yes,” Erik said.
In this case, it was the root mass of the hops plant, the flavor basis of beer. As Erik explained it, these were called “crowns” because, while they were the center of the underground part of the plant, they actually had two purposes. The roots headed out and down to suck up
