he opened his hand it held nothing but air. He tried again and felt a soft tickling in his palm.
“You get more plants, come again,” Leonard said from the steps.
“I was hoping you’d show us some of that fancy shooting of yours,” Shank said.
“Not this evening,” Leonard said.
Travis loosened his fingers. The lightning bug seemed not so much to fly as float out of his hand. In a few moments it was one tiny flicker among many, like a star returned to its constellation.
“Good night,” Leonard said, turning to go back inside the trailer.
“Empathy means you can feel what other people are feeling,” Travis said.
Leonard’s hand was on the door handle but he paused and looked at Travis. He nodded and went inside.
“Boy, you’re in high cotton now,” Shank said as they drove toward Marshall. “Sixty damn dollars. That’ll pay your truck insurance for two months.”
“I figured to give you ten,” Travis said, “for hooking me up with Leonard.”
“No, I got a good buzz. That’s payment enough.”
Travis drifted onto the shoulder and for a moment one tire was on asphalt and the other on dirt and grass. He swerved back onto the road.
“You better let me drive,” Shank said. “I was hoping to stay out of the emergency room tonight.”
“I’m all right,” Travis said, but he slowed down, thinking about what the old man would do if he wrecked or got stopped for drunk driving. Better off if I got killed outright, he figured.
“Are you going to get some more plants?” Shank asked.
“I expect I will.”
“Well, if you do, be careful. Whoever planted it’s not likely to appreciate you thinning their crop out for them.”
TRAVIS WENT BACK THE NEXT SATURDAY, TWO FLAT-WOVEN cabbage sacks stuffed into his belt. After he’d been fired from the Pay-Lo, he’d about given up on paying the insurance on his truck, but now things had changed. He had what was pretty damn near a money tree and all he had to do was get its leaves to Leonard Shuler. An honest-to-god money tree if there was ever such a thing, he kept thinking to himself when he got a little scared.
He climbed the waterfall, the trip up easier without a rod and reel. Once he passed the NO TRESPASSING sign, he moved slower, quieter. From the far bank’s underbrush a warbler sang a refrain of three slow notes and three quick ones, the song echoing into the scattering of tamarack trees rising there. Travis’s mother had once told him the bird was saying pleased pleased pleased to meetcha.
Soon cinnamon ferns brushed like huge green feathers against his legs, thick enough to hide a copperhead or satin-back. But he kept his eyes raised, watching upstream for the glimpse of a shirt, a movement on a bank. I bet Carlton Toomey didn’t even plant it, Travis told himself, probably somebody who figured the Toomeys were too sorry to notice pot growing on their land.
When he came to where the plants were, he got on all fours and crawled up the bank, raising his head like a soldier in a trench. A Confederate flag brightened his tee-shirt, and he wished he’d had the good sense to wear something less visible. Might as well have a damn bull’s-eye on his chest. He scanned the tree line across the field and saw no one. Travis told himself even if someone hid in the tulip poplars they could never get to him before he was long gone down the creek.
Travis cut the stalks just below the last leaves. Six plants filled up the sacks. He thought about cutting more, taking what he had to the truck and coming back to get the rest, but figured that was too risky. On his return Travis didn’t see anyone on the river trail. If he had and they’d asked what was in the sacks, he’d have said galax.
When Travis pulled up to the trailer, Leonard was watering the tomatoes. He unlatched the tailgate and waited for Leonard to finish. Less than a mile away, the granite north face of Price Mountain jutted up beyond the pasture. Afternoon heat haze made the mountain appear to expand and contract as if breathing. God’s like these hills, Preacher Caldwell had said one Sunday, high enough up to see everything that goes on. It ain’t like stealing a cash crop like tobacco where a man’s shed some real sweat, Travis reminded himself, for marijuana was little more bother than a few seeds dropped in the ground. Taking the pot plants was just the same as picking up windfall apples—less so because those that grew it had broken the law themselves. That was the way to think about it, Travis decided.
“How come you grow your own tomatoes but not your own pot?” Travis asked when Leonard laid down his hose and came over.
“Because I’m a low-risk kind of guy. It’s getting too chancy unless you have a place way back in some hollow.”
One of the Plotts nudged Leonard’s leg and Leonard scratched the dog’s head. The dog closed its watery brown eyes, seemed about to fall asleep. Not very fierce for a bear dog, Travis thought.
“Where’s Shank?” Leonard said. “I thought you two were partners.”
“I don’t need a partner,” Travis said. He lifted the first sack from the truck bed, pulled out each stalk carefully so as not to tear off any leaves and buds. He placed the plants on the ground between them. It was a good feeling, knowing everything on his end was done. A lot like when he and the old man unloaded tobacco at the auction barn. Even his daddy would be in a good mood as they laid their crop on the worn market-house floor.
As Travis emptied the second sack he imagined the old man’s reaction if he knew what Travis was doing. Probably have a fit, Travis figured, though some part of his daddy, the part that had been near an outlaw when he was Travis’s age, would surely admire the pluck of what his boy had done, even if he never said so. Travis nodded at his harvest.
“That’s one hundred and twenty dollars’ worth at the least,” he said.
Leonard stepped closer and studied the plants a few moments. He pulled the billfold from his pocket and handed Travis five twenty-dollar bills. Leonard hesitated, then added four fives.
Travis stuffed the bills into his pocket but did not get back in the truck.
“What?” Leonard finally said.
“I figured you to ask me in for a beer.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t much want to play host this afternoon.”
“You don’t think I’m good enough to set foot in that roachy old trailer of yours.”
Leonard settled his eyes on Travis.
“You get your hackles up pretty quick, don’t you?”
Travis did his best to match Leonard’s steady gaze.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Travis said.
Leonard shifted his gaze lower and to the right as though someone sat in a chair beside Travis. Someone who took Travis’s words no more seriously than Leonard did.
“After the world has its way with you a few years, it’ll knock some of the strut out of you,”
