The Perfect Stone

The Perfect Stone chronicles the story of a psychopathic lawyer from New York named Mike Hunt who is bent on creating the perfect strain of marijuana.

It is set in the very heart of darkness of the Emerald Triangle in Mendocino Co. California atop an aquifer that pumps out over 200 million gallons of pure spring water a year. Hunt tries to sell the water to various Indian tribes and all reject his offer. The White Devil AKA Hunt is feared and despised by the community as he is regarded as a con artist, charlatan and counterfeit Christian by many.

A detective is sent by some So. Cal. investors to investigate the lawyer who ripped them off prior to his being hospitalized for sepsis. A shocking discovery is made on Split Rock ranch, one that shakes the marijuana industry to the core — The Perfect Stone!

The Perfect Stone

by

Thor Sawyer

December, 24th 2013

Trying to find them wasn’t easy. The rain didn’t help and none of the roads were marked. I was given such vague directions by my employers that I figured that random turns would more likely get me there. But I ended at the very top of Rooster Ridge at a gate that was open. It was dark by then and no dogs barked. There was an angel plaque that fell off of a post that had a security light on it and was on the ground, pockmarked by the elements. I got out and put it back on the screw it hung from and decided it was safe enough to venture in. I drove by some trailers, then rounded a steep corner, drove a bit more and could see a house,with some odd colored lights flashing inside. It was raining hard. I parked the car, shut the lights off and got out.

Using my night vision binocs , it looked as if it was a woman inside, framed by a window. My tension dropped away. I then navigated the darkness, barely seeing the edge of the road which kept me from falling into the Chaparral.

There was drumming. Nothing rhythmical at all though, more it was in the same cadence as the random flashing lights. It unnerved me a bit and my tension returned. Maybe the Sasquatch brothers were doing some tweek inspired performance with a mannequin. I pulled my .50 out and approached the kitchen window way from the side and looked in.

What I saw caused my heart to drop about 12 inches or so into my spleen. It looked like a  bobble headed hag. You know, the ceramic dolls handed out at baseball games. But this was no ball player. It was a full blown hag and she was alone, with bolts of lightning coming out of her eyes. Her withered hand was beating on a goat skin drum. The other one had a lit bundle of sage in it.

I tapped on the window with the barrel of my gun but she did not turn towards the sound. She stopped drumming though. There was this chanting in a language I didn’t understand but her lips weren’t moving. It was then that I slid the glass door open and went inside. On the floor was a cassette player and I unplugged it. There were lit candles all around her. Odd how the flames didn’t move at all.

“Is this the Sasquatch residence?”

“Oh, I think I nursed those boys at one point.” The bobble headed thing began to take on a more human form. “But I wasn’t the one who raped them. Sasquatch did. Chased them out of Mike Hunt’s property. They were stealing his weed.”

I backed out of the door with my gun trained on her, stepped into the darkness and made a call.

“Yeah, sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier, thought I was lost,. Yeah,don’t worry. I think I’m onto them.” I left a message for my employers back in L.A.

“Well, the dogs didn’t bark so you’re welcome to stay here. I’m the only one here now.” The woman was at the doorway now, silhouetted by the candles inside. “With the season being over.”

She motioned for me to come in. I put my gun in its holster and hopped up the stack of palettes she was using for a step. She was more human looking now, but her face was weathered deeply. One of the pupils looked like it was glaucoma-ed but perhaps that’s what eye lightning does to a person.

I sat on a lawn chair next to what appeared to be an expensive wood burning stove. She sat in one too.

“This mountain either kills you or heals you.” She said with a thick Texas drawl. “Was the gate open?”

“Yeah.”

“I figured I’d be safer with it open. The guy who murdered a trimmer with a hammer over a missing pound got out of San Quentin about a month ago. I was expecting him up here. He wants his book on pagan Christianity back. I left it by the angel in some Saran Wrap.  Did you see it?”

I pulled out my spiral bound notepad and started scrawling. I doubt she could have deduced I was a detective.

“I shredded his letter he sent from prison after I consulted with my lawyer.”

“Mike Hunt?”

She got up to heat some water. I declined her offer of tea.

“Yeah. How you know about him?”

“Oh, I heard he’s a legend in these parts.”  I thought I blew my cover by blurting this, but it was obvious she was suffering from some kind of dementia and was oblivious.

“Met the killer at the Lark motel in Willits. Was an astrologer and tried to get me to transfer my Delaware Trust assets to him during a Jupiter alignment. Wouldn’t do it. Would you?”

I stared at the plywood floor in this unfinished home. “How’d he get popped from prison so soon?” I was yearning for some tea now.

“Must have been the alignment.” She reasoned.

“I’m sorry….you are…..”

“Pamela.”

No mention of any Pamela by my bosses. Shit, I was really in the woods now.

“I’m sorry Pamela, but I think I took a wrong turn or something down by the water tanks. I really should be on my way.”

“Oh, you won’t find them here on this mountain. They’re over at Split Rock a skip and a holler away. Hear the gunfire from time to time. Those Sasquatch boys are whacked.”

I got up and went back outside. I took my gun out and she retreated from the doorway.

After getting into my truck, I discovered that it  wouldn’t start. Don’t know what drained the battery as I didn’t leave the lights on. I tried turning it over again and tried not to panic. I got out and looked at the stars.

“Just stay in the trailer!” She yelled. “But watch for the bears. Better bang on something on your way down.”   I could see her in the doorway.

Bears weren’t on my priority list during this mission and I didn’t care. Something jarred the fear from me. Maybe it was the ritual I just got tangled up in.  I managed to get to the trailer and piled inside. Dust and mold overwhelmed me and my sinuses swelled up. Somehow I managed to crash hard and didn’t dream much. I had puffed on some Harlequin I found in a jar and maybe that helped.

December 25th, 2013

In the morning, I was greeted by two dogs at the door. One a Doberman and the other a cross between a Malumute and a German Shepard. The latter kept swinging its large head in the direction of the house on the hill. I took the hint and followed them back up top.

The view was spectacular: miles upon miles of Yolla Bolly forest and mountain peaks beyond Rooster ridge. When I got up top, I could hear that Pamela was drumming again.

I tried starting my truck but it was still dead.

She came out and walked down the hill. Much more quickly than I thought possible. She looked distraught and wove her fingers together.

“Some of the trimmers we had up here this fall stole my St. Michael’s crystal. It’s worth seven hundred dollars.”

I flashed her my detective badge but nothing registered.

“Maybe Sasquatch stole it.” I tested her some more and she seemed to come out of her spiritually dissociated state somewhat.

“Oh, no. I would never let that thing in my house. He only answers to Mike. I think its his pet or something.”

“Ma’am, I need to move my car. It’s dead.”

Pamela held her hands out towards it and closed her eyes.  “Jump it with the work truck since it isn’t responding to me. Keys are in it.”

I walked with her down to base camp and into a garage that looked like some half finished man cave.

“Manfried built this for the Kubota but the carpenters made the door all wrong. They were all stoned on ear wax. My son shouldn’t hire such hard core dopers. They always mess up the measurements.”

She pulled some jumper cables out of a box and handed them to me. I hopped in the work truck and groaned up the mountain. There was just enough room to get it next to my Toyota. I heard bobcats fighting in the woods and the big dog started barking. The Doberman was eating a rat near the solar panel, tail hanging out of its mouth. I put the cables on the battery terminals and went to take in the vista when I heard my horn honking. I turned and saw smoke coming out from under the hood, ran over and pulled the cables off.

It absolutely was not because I had the polarities reversed. No. Couldn’t be that. Ever. Black on Black. Red on Red. No, it was a distorted memory when they didn’t match up and I pulled them off. Could never get something so basic wrong in all of my battery jumping days.

The smoke smelled like burnt rubber and continued to pour out from under the hood. Shit. Through the haze I saw her walking up the road.

“The vortex I told you about last night reverses polarities. Looks like Spirit mountain killed your car.”

My employers couldn’t stop laughing when I phoned them .  “We aren’t paying to get it fixed.”

I tried telling them that it couldn’t be towed and that the rain muddied the road up too much. I was trapped and this is where the story really begins, one month after Christmas eve at the very top of Rooster Ridge with the bobble headed hag and no escape.

January 24th, 2014

“We lost a hundred thousand dollars last year.” Pamela proclaimed, looking over the fog shrouded valley below. “Even more than that, probably.”

I sipped on some Kombucha tea and nodded my head. In the month I’d been there I heard about this loss nearly every day. That and her complaining about the cost of potato salad at the grocery store in town.

“Manfried wouldn’t haul the pot back to Merkl. Said it would be safe here. Obviously it wasn’t. All by itself.”

I looked at my notes and concluded that it was the Ganesh statue in the growing area below, which a felon allegedly took a pot shot at that created the fiscal sinkhole. The elephant headed god, imported from Nepal, got his revenge since the guy left in handcuffs, carried off by the Feds last year when Pamela got raided and their crop chopped down. Unlike the murderer, he is still in the slammer. Or it could even have been the Green Tara statue near the RV I was staying in, holding onto a broken solar powered lantern instead of a lotus with one of its heavenward palms. Most likely though, the curse on the place was from the red Mermaid totem with a rather dour look on her face, clutching a quartz crystal. It was parked right across from my door. Pamela told me that someone named Ricardo had carved it.

I dictated virtually everything she said, transcribing her babblings in my notebook. I figured that randomness was my asset and that eventually she would randomly spill the beans on the Sasquatch brothers and Mike Hunt. She showed me where the door to the house had been pried when they got jacked and where upstairs the disgruntled workers took their entire harvest off the drying racks. She made me carry the old door frame out one day after a carpenter she hired took it down and leaned it against the house. The rains hadn’t ceased and there was no way I could get my truck towed down to the valley. After much digging under the hood one day, I discovered that it was the fusible link that I fried. I was relieved it was only that, but felt I needed to stay. I was beginning to like the quiet on the mountaintop.

My employers wouldn’t help out. I was working this job on spec since they knew I was desperate. I could have lied and told them I found the brothers and the Big Foot too and that they had the lock code to open Mike Hunt’s gates and they could get what was theirs. But I didn’t. I knew there was something bigger going on-more than a deluded harridan whacking on a shaman drum and sitting on a substantial trust fund.

I would just have to wait until the roads dried up even more.

February 6th,

Pamela and Manfried, her prodigal son, eat vulture hearts like they were Maraschino cherries. Such is the way of Texans, I have quickly found out. Gun them down with a .12 gauge while sitting on the hood of their Mercedes, then slice open the scavenger’s chests with a swipe of a bladed fingernail-painted peppermint pink. Eat a little Texas dirt to wash the blood down when they get back to their padded spread in Merkl after selling the hundreds of  p’s. The p’s they have forced me to process. I’ve been trimming the buds for well over a week now in 9-10 hour shifts along with a couple of skanky looking girls on some kind of narcotics. Manfried brought them up the mountain and split the next day.  I’m made to ‘burp’ the pot that’s ready for market. I have to go up stairs and open each turkey bag and then squirt the buds with a mister bottle before closing them again. Twice a day.

They also conned me into making hash with the leftover trim shake, using a washing machine, dry ice and standing in the cold and mud for hours at a time. Manufacturing is a felony but they don’t care. Manfried comes late at night and always goes early the next morning. The Feds could confiscate the property if he was there during a raid. They aren’t going to go after his mom who gets her name in the New York Times, calling them ‘Jack booted thugs.’

They also made me help them with making the very ear wax that Pamela complained got the workers too stoned to work. There were dozens of butane cans near the garbage cans after this and I felt like a renegade alchemist making it.  I stashed quite a bit of it on the side and intend to sell it in Oakland when I’m done with this assignment.  I’m glad I’ve done this because I wrongly assumed that they were going to pay me. I got to know very well their song and dance, sleight of hand  maneuvers.

Her’s: “We’ve been living off of credit caaards.” Exaggerating her panhandle drawl for effect as she sashayed near the fertilizer shed one day. The post menopausal Premarin she takes, according to Manfried,  has exerted a toll on her hormonal demeanor over the years-nipples jutting unnaturally hard out of her High Maintenance T-shirt, the telling words spelled out in glittering sequin nonetheless.

His:  “Gonna bite a bullet.” workhorse of a threat in light of his Jehova’s Witness, Mexican ex-wife taking him to court over some custody mess. The wedding was not of the shotgun variety from what I could tell. A kind of equity ransom deal but the hostages and hostage takers will never be released, bound together forever like fingers in a Mexican wedding ring.

He actually caused me to wax poetic and write the following:

The Burial of Manfried

Solemn columns, one made of Fir, the other from Mesquite and a fiddled dirge with sacrificial overtones. Coffin dawn levitates just above the ground and each facet of the Texas ghost charade I’m shuffled into is accented by some post mortem cartography stumping even the best of the code breakers. Can’t squelch the despair, wind shorn into some forlornness that only serves to cut a bit deeper with betrayal evident in my hosts face across the grave, like some worm antennae in Pamela’s soul, pointing the way to the sacrifice needed for the completion of the grieving process. The mandatory herald, a family crest, flaunts the tin can bloodline like some racing trophy. The flapping walls of the greenhouse protect the grow for now though. The camouflage absorbs the heat and there’s respite indeed in this.
Now, the family fills the grief horizon to the cusp, hard pan mannerisms silhouette subdued into an indicting caricature, donned hats, lowered heads and all. Only the Diamondback Rattlesnake understands and the Brown Recluse spider that buried an egg in one of Manfried’s knees and which a Maztalan doctor extracted after merciless digging through cartilage and muscle, proudly showing him the yellow ‘Bolsa’ or purse afterwards. Emblem scar pays arachnid homage now in the knee the undertaker deliberately left uncovered for the wake. Wonder if Manfried would have forgiven me for the broken gate. The one I broke yesterday, trying to ride it. Won’t matter any until it can close again, if ever that happens.

These people are soul suckers and their twisted visages cannot hide this. They sucked the soul out of the illegal alien, Ricardo, who braved a border crossing to work up here in Mendocino, only to be lost in the desert for two weeks thanks to the misguided mule who abandoned him and many others. Neither Pam or her son visited him in the hospital when he was recovering from the ordeal. The next year, he tried crossing again only to end up in a Federal prison in So. Cal. At least my hosts are nice enough to send money to his wife and children in Mexico every month although I’m sure it is just an obligatory pittance.

March 13th, 2014

The rains have subsided enough to get my truck down to town, but when I went up to Pamela’s to get her to tow me, she was standing outside in a blue bath robe, radiant in the otherwise subdued light. She was trying to open the locked sliding door with some credit card of Manfried’s she found. I climbed a ladder in back to see if the bathroom window was open but no-it too was locked. I then rounded the building and saw her trying to insert a rusted keyhole saw into the lock of the new door. She had found it in the AWOL carpenter’s tool kit in the barn. I went back to the sliding door, pushed and lifted at the same time and it opened. Glad she didn’t try calling the locksmith-since her phone was inside and the  ‘ranch phone’ given to me wasn’t charged yet.

When it was, I called Manfried back in Merkl. Thought it would be brownie points in regards to getting paid for my labor. But that wasn’t the case at all. I told him it was dementia but failed to specify that it was of the New Age variety more so than Premarin induced.

March 30th, 2014

The cannabis seedlings I managed to sprout on my own looked healthy. Every day I’d hold hands with Pamela in the greenhouse while she prayed to Jesus, Kwan Yin, Shiva, Buddha and other assorted deities she’d pull randomly out of her spiritual grab bag. I even played my guitar for them.  My truck was up and running again but I couldn’t leave until someone could take my place. And still no money from Manfried. I found out from a neighbor that he uses all the pot money to fund his son’s Go-Kart racing, a hobby requiring something like a half a mil a year to sustain. “Team Cannabis” I envisioned a pot leaf decal on the side of the ride as it sped ahead of the pack and the fat kid garnering first THC place.

Damn, I was so despondent. All the free Train Wreck that I smoked didn’t make things much better.  I requested some more money from my guys and they sent me some, surprisingly. I managed to get their attention when I said a mysterious man appeared on Pam’s property one day, driving a black Expedition. He introduced himself as Cody Dogmann. I was so desperate to get off the mountain that I climbed in his truck after he toured the property and spent some time with Pamela alone in her house. We then followed Pam down the hill to go eat some Pizza at the Indian Casino in Covelo.

“I’m a Christian.” He said rather proudly and launched off into bragging about back crossing marijuana strains. He had me sufficiently lulled by the time we arrived at the casino with his talk about Red Malawi/OG Mic crosses. He might as well have been speaking in Hebrew to me.

“I like you.” He said. “I’m a good judge of character.”

But I doubted it, seeing he was one of Pam’s friends. I got paranoid and thought it might be the trimmer murderer at first posing as a lawyer.

“Most people in this business are hollowed out.”  He informed me.

Cody handed me his business card.

“Oh don’t worry Jake. I go by many aliases.”

He must have noticed my puzzled expression. I looked at the card again as we sat in the booth eating. It was hard to read in the dim light. Greenwood Law Firm it read.

Somehow I had found the very Mike Hunt I was looking for. Much too easily. It appeared that I hadn’t gotten lost at all and I needed the Pamela Greene detour and delay. Small pot growing world after all.  She must have talked me up good. It must have been all the free work I had done for her and Manfried. And I didn’t have to deal with the Sasquatch Brothers either. Yet.

When we said goodbye in the parking lot, Cody leaned over and whispered in my ear. “If you get tired of working for Pam, give me a call. I could use some help.”

“For sure.” I said. “Mike.”

“By the way. I’m finished with the bible and now am taking on the Tanakh!” He yelled this so Pam would hear. She nodded in approval.

It was the very next day, for sure, that I did. Packed up my gear and wax and a few p’s of Bubble Berry and  rolled off the hill without saying goodbye except to the dogs. Pam would have to fend for herself all alone on the hill. Bang on her shaman drum and call upon the Pleiadians she claimed were trolling the valley in their spaceships for help with this year’s harvest.

Sad though how I had bonded with the seedlings. But I didn’t want to stick around for the transplant and bear the brunt of Ganesh’s wrath seeing Pam and Manfried were going to be well over the legal  limit and no doubt were going to raided and/or stolen from again.

July 20th, 2014

Walking through the garbage and broken down trucks, the rat shit and dust, I made it to the concrete foundation out behind the caretaker’s house and spun around. The trunks of Douglas Firs about fifty to a hundred yards away were scorched black. Some meth addict, Mike told me, was too stoned to turn off the valve on the 300 gallon Propane tank. The guy is a DEA informant now, he insisted. Whatever the truth was, the tweeker opened up some kind of vortex with the explosion and invited all sorts of mischief in.

When I walked further on through a parched meadow, I tried to quiet down. After breathing a bit and staring at the ground, the rituals began to play out before me in a hologram panorama which served to encompass the killing field. The dances and songs made the cliffs open up and share their secrets. But what they were, I couldn’t tell.

Pomo myth has it that Iron Peak south east of here is the birthplace of the universe and that serpents from the north horned in because they wanted the springs, for whoever controlled it, ruled everything. They are the ones sustaining all the strife here. Done with distance and calculation — employing human vectors to keep the evil going and the good spirits away, the ones that departed to the ocean from the Mountain Baby Rock the women once circled in hopes of gaining fertility and a better future. Their dances got the peak to hum like a tuning fork and kept the serpents away for awhile. But they answered back by rounding up the ranchers to carry out the Manifest Destiny, bloodlust sacrifice needed to keep them alive. It was mostly the women and children they rapined and left unburied up here. Same kind of sacrifice as today-no different, considering all the missing children posters plastering the lobbies of Wal Marts and Rest Area kiosks throughout Nor Cal. One needs only to try and head count all the fodder hitchhiking up and down the coast with their spirits snuffed and souls barely hanging on, hippy heavens long vanished from their kaliedoscopes, smashed into nothing by the White Monkey.

Those unable to grasp how high the stakes are, get possessed real quick. I’ve seen it myself here on the ranch in the four or so months I’ve been here. Mike holding on to a fire poker, ready to beat some speed freak trimmer who he slaved for weeks on end and who dared to stand up to him. This was after his warm and fuzzy, “It’s about the people” pep talk he gave us prior to his ski trip to Heavenly.

I continued with compiling my notes for my clients in So. Cal, back in the ratty camper Mike stuck me in and did a lot of praying for the place, but one of the scaled critters reared its subterranean head and bit the lawyer real bad.

When I came to check on him after he threw his back out carrying one of the generators and got the flu, it was the first time I had entered his bedroom since I’d been here. Mildewed cobwebs heavy with dust, skin flakes, spider eggs and dead bugs draped down from the ceiling like airborne scabs. They covered an indian bonnet made of eagle feathers near the doorway and it looked like some contagious, silk spun disease had taken it over.

I held his hand. “Mike, you’ve got to start loving yourself.” I said, unable to conceal my shock.

“I’m trying.” He weakly bleated and looked away.

The next morning I heard a voice telling me to drive up to the house in the Samurai and didn’t even question it. When I got there, a neighbor of his was in the kitchen. We ventured upstairs together and he was still slurring his words. The water I had brought him the night before was untouched. She pulled his dirty quilt off of him revealing the open sores and purple yellow bruises all up and down his legs. He confessed to her that he was taking Lexapro. Most likely doubled up on it and it caused him to fall. Odd how Mike introduced me to the RN a few days before. Like he already knew what was going to bite him.

I wondered if it ever surprised him that his infallible firewall of deeds, reciprocal trusts and exclusive easements, arson clauses, aquatic rights and the like, could not bounce the sepsis his very own bedroom spawned. It was the only thing that succeeded getting into his blood and poisoning him. None of the neighbors could do it, those whose land he threatened to take from them or the cops who he managed to dodge, then pummel with his deadly legalese — or the IRS that tried putting a tax lien on the place or the DEA agent that put a gun to his head and forced him to open the safe and surrender his client files after the third raid on his property. He dodged them all. But the snake bit deep that time and the whole thing ruined his family. His third marriage went bust even with a potentially lucrative lawsuit pending against the feds. It broke him too, broke his spirit and something else took over. The White Devil. He often called himself that and quite proudly. It sounded better than “Puppet master” anyway. Had more resonance to it.

But the divide between his courtroom brilliance and the pathetic squalor he lay in dying, could not be bridged. The infection crept even deeper through the breach, into his heart valves and then into the kidneys.

But it was leading up to nothing. Only a vaporous panoply of more 24/7 delusions, all served up ballistic: Retirement home up where the mountain lions live, the youth hostel near a huge, man made pond, a school bus Rasta-painted green, yellow and red, full of college cheerleaders wearing ‘Mendocino Love’ sweaters with Mike at the helm, driving down the main drag in Willets and Ukiah, the girls cheering on the spring water project that would save all of the county. He even offered to rebuild the house that blew up and let me live in it. I would have taken him up on his offer but it would have been hard to find someone desperate enough to draft up blueprints for his mirage. Especially on spec. Oh well, I was used to that.

The living waters lay beneath my feet but the land was parched and damned, choked with Poison Oak and Blackberry thorns and Rattlesnakes and scorpions and more garbage. It was only through praying that I could connect with the springs. They pumped out over 200 million gallons of the purest water, per year. It was only by calling upon Great Spirit that helped me feel the echoes, the very resonance of the aquifer itself , beckoning for some lost harmony retreated, still hidden in the rocks or the ocean where the spring water ended up.

Whatever malice aforethought Mike had planned, that harmony would be realized, once again. No matter what. And the spirits would come back again, back up from the ocean and back to the Mountain Baby Rock the women danced around and prayed for their children.

The further I climbed, it became clearer that I’d been up here before, surveying the spread. It must have been during the money crises early last spring when Hunt announced that he would lose the ranch to some creditors. This was back when I thought he was real and doubted my client’s assessment that he had been ripping them off. I climbed to this same place where I now am standing and read 2 Samuel Chapter 22 out loud, at the base of the crag wall 200 ft. high. I did it for him-back when I believed him. When I believed he was a Christian after he told me so at Pamela’s.

Thou has enlarged my steps under me so that my feet did not slip.

Mike promised water to several tribes in Mendocino but none accepted the offer. After all, it was their land. Somehow the indians got their names folded into the purparty clause he divided the ranch up with and claims that they would inherit it when he died. He never mentioned those names to me. Nor have I seen the likes of any of them up here. The other tribes must have known that he only wanted to use them as a billboard. I offered to proof the proposal he drafted for some board members and it was sadly transparent that he was only after more land, more clout and more power. It was all a barmecide feast, his so called philanthropy, and no one wanted to dine with him so he pulled in whoever he could to bolster his spring water fueled delusions. His ‘civic generosity’ would turn him into the veritable savior of Mendocino county if he ever got his way.

Darryl’s water truck, rusted out, has only taken one load of the liquid manna so far. All along Spyrock Road, his New Springs flyers were torn down, I heard through the pot vine. Sammy Miami, a drunk and artist and small time grower whose house you can see from Split Rock, was most likely behind the sabotage, seeing Mike pushed him over a 30 ft. embankment over some property line dispute years ago. He claims Sammy’s an informant too. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the hostility towards Mike Hunt was consensual all throughout the mountain. No wonder he always made me ride with him when we went to town. I was still bewildered that he trusted me considering he confessed to me that he was pulling water without a permit.

I’m guessing that’s how he ended up here. Rounded up by the serpents, just like the ranchers were in the 1800’s. They must have come back above ground, in ’69, when the peace and love thing was fading and the hippies couldn’t drive them far enough away. They slithered under Hunt’s paisleyed VW van, when he was driving here from New York en route to a stellar legal career fresh out of law school, only to draw him, quite magnetically, into the very cradle of the world up on Iron Peak.

And now, I can feel the serpents slithering under where I stand here on the mountain, waiting for his return. Not from the glory of one of his courtroom devastations, but the grey crib of the hospital he’s been in for over a month. The incubator, where he now is being prepared for deployment, is being closely guarded. There will be more tremors shaking my camper at night and keeping me and the boulders and the cougars up top awake.

In light of this, I’m betting on some kind of epiphany Mike surely must have had when they put him into an induced coma, to clean the poison out of his kidneys. I’m banking that he met the Lord and that his unconditional love and infinite compassion softened his lawyer heart. But a dream I had the other night told me otherwise. In it he came bursting into the main house, angry. I saw it from above, like the roof had been torn off, saw the savagery in his countenance and nothing else. I can’t remember if he was carrying the fire poker or not. It was the face that said everything.

Perhaps he met Fortune in the beyond, at the end of the tunnel. I’m hoping that’s the case because when he was still upstairs two days prior to taking him to ER, he had said to me in a quavering voice:

“I hear Fortune. Do you know where she is?”

I couldn’t tell. Had to have one of the construction guys come to the house. Once he found her, he loosened up the deck boards so I could step in and pull her out. One look into her warted, mucus encrusted eyes and I knew she was gone. I took her inside, out of the heat and lay her down in the dining room. Pouring water on her mouth and head, I said a little prayer and opened the door so the wind could cool her down. She yelped a bit more when I left, after giving her last rites.

It wasn’t until an hour or so later that one of the guys came and got me. I grabbed my guitar at his beckoning and we tried to get to where they were burying her near the breeding garden — but they were already packing the grave down with a backhoe. I sat on a log and strummed a makeshift funeral dirge for the pooch. The Puerto Rican autistic with the pock marked face just stared at the grave blankly — he was too stoned on ear wax to care or couldn’t.

 

The Salvadorian came over and gave me a big hug and showed me his gang tattoos. There’d be no going home for him. On his back was engraved a likeness of his grandfather. Still alive as there was no death date inked in his skin. He grasped the mournful import of the music I played, more than the Americans, and put his arm around me. He really meant it. I could feel it.

I just didn’t have it in me to tell Mike about Fortune when I was at the hospital. His ex was there and took over the show that day. After pacing around for some time, she asked me for my email address and then zipped me a photo of her self wearing a surgeon’s glove. A nurse came in and gave Mike a shot and he winced. They had trouble finding a vein considering how dehydrated he was. He moaned a bit.

“Pain? Try giving birth to a baby. It feels like someone taking a pair of pliers and pulling on your intestines. I did like the labor though. Kinda fun.” Darlene said and traipsed around the bed to show me the video she took with her iPhone of the robot doctor giving the prognosis on Mike’s condition. The thing was wearing a sheriff’s badge — it could have been hospital humor, although PRIZM most likely was wired into its remote hard drive and feeding into some shadow data base local and otherwise. A real doctor walked in and started chatting with the patient. Darlene paced back and forth, waiting her turn. She leaned over the railing. “The sanitary conditions where he lives in are…”

“Enough.” Hunt snapped and the two savagely lock-horned into some time worn, S and M pas de deux until she gave him a kiss and backed away.

After the doc left, she walked with me down the corridor and out into the parking lot to her Lexus. She had come all the way up from Belvedere in Marin, quite an inconvenience considering the traffic.

“Well, we’d do lunch but its a long drive.” She smirked and I stood in the heat and sun as she drove away.

When I had told Darlene about Fortune inside, she said that it had happened before with another dog, in exactly the same way, dying near the front door after getting pulled out from under the deck. Odd how I had put Fortune there as well. Something in me knew where to put her.

Sacrificial dogs are a requirement for any lawyer to keep themselves alive, I suppose. At least Hunt wasn’t eating them. As far as I knew.

So now, up on this rock, I pray that every experience Mike Hunt has is a near death one, that the light at the end of the tunnel will be so bright that it melts through all his defense attorney armor and he experiences the unconditional love of the Lord. I pray this fervently because of something he told me, out on the front deck, when I first got here. He was freeing up Fortune’s tail with an electric clipper, cutting the matted fur away from her hind end, covered in months of dried up shit.

He said he was with another lawyer, dining at some penthouse restaurant in Los Angeles. It had a glass ceiling, enabling them to look up into the night sky from where they sat. His colleague raised his eyes towards the stars and then looked at him and said, “You know Mike, this is the closest to heaven you and I will ever get.”

Mike must have broken through the glass ceiling and gotten a bit closer to heaven because he called me an ‘angel’. I had come back to the hospital with his glasses, a bible and a cell phone he requested the day after. Tubes coming out of every orifice and flat out, he held my hand this time and called me an angel.

Then called me a liar the day after that, making me wonder about my angelic status. Odd how truth makes one into a liar.

Anyway, I chalk it all up to a polarity reversal in my estimation, one I could not sufficiently appreciate at the time. Although some insight was afforded when I told the nurse neighbor about how I was praying for the truth to be revealed (not telling her that somehow I found all the credit card receipts my clients were looking for). She audibly gasped and gave me a big hug. She had seen it all before twenty years prior when she cleaned the ranch for Hunt: the spring water/snake oil salesman flaunting his dance, when the place was showcase and there were still horses and the family still came here.

July 26th

In a vision this morning, I saw the Pomo dance ceremonially near the Mountain Baby Rock when their water truck arrives. They circle the truck and beat on Tom Toms but Mike steps out of the barn, wearing the cob webbed indian bonnet. That wasn’t a part of the vision but it is now and I cannot erase it. The dancing stops. The flute music as well. Mike cannot move as he is glued to the ground. Maybe that’s good because he cannot give the tribal leader the mildewed bow and arrow he’d been saving for the occasion, tucked behind an equally blighted Bose stereo speaker in his living room for many years, and which now is strapped to his back as a gesture of good will.

The myth is real. The serpents are real and that they have never left this place.

He’s due back to the ranch, in a couple more months I heard-already walking the hospital corridors in Santa Rosa, building up what’s left of his atrophied muscles. He must have thrashed the sepsis himself in some white blood cell courtroom, convincing the antibiotic jury to verdict decimate what was left of it and now he was on to bigger game. All 500 acres of his property funneled into the original growth forest down below, flanked by guerrilla grows — so it wasn’t too safe going down there until after harvest to see what he was talking about. He told me you could even get to the 101 if you found the right trail. The vision enhances and Mike, wearing the bonnet, steps over the dead bodies of the tribal leaders, to the prime bit of real estate bordering the ranch, one any celeb would salivate over and instantly buy. He’d bank on his charade giving him adequate cover to get what he wanted. He was rapacious as a Turkey Buzzard and that was enough for it to work.

August 1

The other night I found myself scrying the side of Split Rock with some of Mike’s binoculars. Nothing explained the three caves, like concave lenses-other than aberrant erosion, that were bored in its side. It was more like the Bear Doctors climbed up there and carved them out. To the right of that only when the light is right, emerges an alphabet, glyphs etched into some buff colored extrusion, that trickles down when the mountain cries.

I took the wood flute out of its leather case and played, reading the glyphs like notes and improvising, trying to open to the song that’s been here all along and it worked. The constriction in my head ceased and the magnet charged plumes apex-ed even further up. I want to climb up to the cave and have the mountain re-birth me. Some celebration this dead place needs. But the trash at its base still has not been cleaned. Darryl wants $1200 a load. Can’t do that until its all gone.

I scan the cliffs some more. Now the inscriptions confide more deeply in my heart, answering to a different bloodline indeed. I play the flute again and watch my dead self roll down the edge and smash into a dried up Manzanera tree. Something off my shoulders for sure and the flute sounds clearer now.  The notes followed the rifted quartz veins that spiral under the caves and into the amphitheater within.

Aug. 5th

When I arrived after escaping the Greene’s pot gulag, Mike showed me the Hindu Kush and Barry White starts, A shiver ran through me and I got dizzy.

They were infested with spider mites. They hadn’t been sprayed. The blight continued until early June and destroyed the indoor crop. There were still starts left and after they were sprayed they were transported down to one of the greenhouses. But the mites defied Forbid, a potent pesticide. Eventually hundreds of plants had to be cut down. It was me who did it. Odd how the Scrub Jays were making a racket in a nearby tree. They just wouldn’t stop. Felt dizzy again and locked things up and started hiking back to the top. Nausea overcame me and I felt like collapsing. There was a large puddle and Yellow Jackets were windsurfing across the surface. I got lost in their wakes, thought they were parting curtains or the locks were being opened. All of my stomach got pulled out of me and I walked, intestines trailing. I got them gathered up all right and by the time I reached the school bus, I was doubled over.

Then I saw her. In a haze of dark red and green. There the hag was and she pointed a finger at me.

“How dare you pray God’s love on those plants.” She said but had trouble keeping form. “They’re mine.”

I felt fear, but it wasn’t coming from me, not like when I was climbing near the cougar dens. Her ugliness intensified, but I kept praying. Now I knew why the roots were all knotted up and covered with brown slime. And the Spider Mites, she sent them. Just like she sent the crippling disease that whacked Mike. I kept praying and humming and Split Rock hummed too. An invisible chorus resounded and the nipple and boulder peak rang out. Everything melted off of me, the fear most of all. I turned a circle and the sky near Iron Peak flashed some orange off the needles and the evilest woman in the bible was gone.

Maybe she was a representative of the Texas Jezebel back on Rooster Ridge.

Using the gift of spiritual discernment given to me by the Lord, it was evident that through the weed Mike and the Greene’s were selling, she was replicating herself. A curse goes back many generations, all the way back to the garden. I could see its own origin. As the rocks sang for the first time, it all went lucid and the truth played out before me. There they were, the Rabbis in a vast cannabis field. Naked shikshas ran through the resinous plants singing the Song of Songs in unearthly harmonies. The Burning Bush. Moses Chapter 3:3. The menorah was in the cannabis branches, so beautiful, like a rare and virgin jade. And I could see the light of the Ark of the Covenant in the plant sap. The women return from the fields and the Rabbis scrape the resin off their lithe bodies with the same kind of blades the moels used for circumcision.

The high of this sacred weed enabled the Rabbis to fully bear the light of God. Without a veil. The healing properties were so wide ranged, curing everything from migraine headaches to spirit possession. Only those fully prepared were allowed to ingest this wondrous herb.

What I saw next saddened me so very much. From Ba’al Ashteroth, some horsemen swooned down and destroyed all of the Burning Bush. They had veils over their eyes. Gathering up the crop, they bundled it all up and threw it on the horses. One turned around and eyed the Rabbis.

“A curse down to the end of time on you, your people and your plants.”

The peaks were really humming now, tri-octave concordance, like the sky was a giant crystal bowl and even more played out.

The Rabbis, fearing for their families, took the seeds, stored in solid gold casket lined with Chalcedony and fled. Soon, they migrated out of the Holy Land and went to India, to the land of Kush where Abraham is  a Brahman and vice versa.  Soon the fields were lush and radiating love, once again.

So is the story of Hindu Kush. The very plant I chopped down. Never even got to try it.

The vision helped me in so many ways. It helped me understand the time I found Mike in one of the warehouses, on the floor, nearly unconscious. The giant blackboard with each strain’s family tree on it scrawled out in day-glo green chalk.

“Try some.” He held the smoking blunt up to me. “The Perfect Stone.”

I hesitated. He retracted his smoking offer and took another puff.

“Only I could genetically translate it.”

Maybe it wasn’t some THC induced, mumbo-jumbo after all. The curse was real and I saw it over the whole ranch. But who were these invaders? Wasn’t that too far south for Attila the Hun and his hordes? No, the horses had ornate bridles, perhaps some neighboring tribes. I’ll try to call up more detail, but for now, I can only pray no matter where the curse came from, I must take action. Maybe this is why I was put here.

I better learn back crossing fast for the entire lineage is at risk here. None of those who cause so many problems here knew how they were being used by the puppet master. And then it all broke through, like Satori, the bottom of a Smart Pot bursting out and a flood of light pouring through it and I could now understand why the serpents were here. I saw Mike with angel wings holding onto a scale in one hand and a scepter in the other.

I helped him up and sat him down by some trays of rock wool. Wanted to dust off his wings but they were gone. He placed a small plastic bag in my hand.

“And I give them to you now.”

I felt some genuine warmth coursing through my limbs and it felt like some lineage was bridged with the gift. The land of Kush. Heard there were Hebrew letters carved into stone of great age there, up in the hills where Jesus was said to have resided after the crucifixion. In an instant I could see the impurities in my heart, like little strands of tar and the light bound it all and cleared it away. I see the torus rings of Hebrew letters morphing into Greek and Aramaic and a cannabis seedling appears in this woven poetry.

Mike smiles like he’s sharing some insider grow info known only to him and God. Suddenly, the root lights burrowed even deeper and I placed my hand on the pot. There was such love coming forth, through the plant, that I had to turn away. Could feel the unforgiveness still in my heart, towards Mike, towards the Greenes, my clients, myself. I placed my hands on the base of the stalk and each of its seven branches sparked aflame. God’s mercy indeed on a fallen angel who somehow managed to pass the bar. Even when it was raised as high as it was.

I ran back up top and could see the neighboring grows, all alight because the roots touched them. And I could see everything with this love and the miasma of fear evaporated from the valley. Something of the original peace of this place came here. I prayed for the restoration of it for sure.

Soon, the Perfect Stones were into flowering and one could see the crystalline structure of the THC. Through a magnifying glass, you could see a fractal ecstasy, full spectrum exuberance spelled out in the 30%. We needed to go back and thwart the invaders and smoking some of it helped. I tackled one carrying the ark box, right off his horse, could have been heading back to the thirteenth tribe with the stash for all I knew.

Damn good herb, but it wore off too quick.

The next day I dumped the pot and wax I stole in the woods. No way did I want the Jezebel curse following me.

August 13th

This morning I got the impulse to climb up to the peak and braved it through the horse trail, past fresh bear scat and some older mountain lion scat as well. Rounding to the right, I found the path up top and quickly made my way to where there was a better view. Some fighting hummingbirds dive bombed me and a pair of ravens orbited for awhile before banking off toward the nipple, a rock out cropping that looked like petrified lava flow.

A Turkey Buzzard came in even closer and circled. The concrete foundation was so small from up there — and all the sorrow the land had seen, just so trifling. Wish I could have shared that with the rocks below that I had sat on. Just so much pain in them. Had to do some breathing and took my pack off and sat on it. Could see the blood running down the runnels and into the sands. More vivid here than anything down below. The mountain hadn’t forgot. Just sat there breathing peace as best I could and had to move on. The place needed peace and this rock was quivering and crying. It’s anger ran deep.

I’ve been on overwhelm before but this one just tore deep and it wasn’t until I came back down from the top that I saw the lock down evil gripping Split Rock. Yet the Rufous hummingbirds buzzed my head some more, as if taunting me while Great Spirit bound the darkness and hurled it back into the crevasse. Dragonflies zagged over while the peaks hummed, rock tuning forks and there was no forgetting the harmony so pleasing to the earth’s ears. Had to turn on my phone and get the voice recorder. I tried whistling it into the microphone but its resonance went to the core of the earth and resounded through the ridges to the west and into the ocean. Nothing I could duplicate. Yet. Could see the indians coming up the same trail, all to shed their old selves and all the bad, so they too could hum along. Yet, the women were sad and made their wombs hum some harmony for the Mountain Baby Rock.

Went under the bridge on the horse trail and found the arrowheads I had plunked in it, when there was still flowing water. 15,000 b.c. my hands said and some Mastodon moment bridged the periodic gap. Made me feel better, enough to be patient with the two Red bats that were in the guest house. I just opened the door and radar guided them out. They echolocated an opening above my head and disappeared while I marveled at their golden red fur in the sunlight.

August 21st

I took what Hunt had given me and put it on my desk. The marbling was perfect — with a substrate pattern as if some odic force imprinted itself on the seeds. Didn’t think I needed to charge them in the orgone generator. There was some genuine power in them. Their entire veg cycle was flash condensed by their own light. Didn’t think the two gallon plastic pots would hold them, they bulged but it was just a temporary build up.

These plants grew by their own light and Mike would only see a reduction in his electric bill and an even more clandestine way to grow. He had no option since PG&E installed Smart Meters a few weeks ago. The quintessential buds crowned the candelabra perfectly, with an amber colored resin that glazed them like tortes, all topped with some seductive foxtailing. The buds glowed on the roots and nourished them. The plants took care of themselves, but only did so if whoever was growing had a pure heart. None of the usual grow guile. Those into the bottom line game of it would not do well with this strain. Getting it to grow itself  required years of spiritual discipline.

That night I dreamed on about growing this strain 100% organic for the terminally ill who rely on dispensaries for their weed. Perfect Stone would be the most in demand strain if word got out about its purity indeed. While my dreams shifted into profit margins, I caught myself and realized the plants would not grow if this would be the only thing in my mind.

August 26th

Closing my bible, I didn’t think much of it, but there it was. The cannabis geneaology, spelled out in living light, the very gemstone at the heart of Genesis.

From above I could see the fields where Abraham consummated Keturah and formed the Zimran strain, along with Jokshan and Medan and Midian varieties. Indica, sativa, I couldn’t see the details although my eyes zoomed into one of the buds the size of an Arizona Ice Tea can and pulsating with life. Sons of the concubines revealed the mystery to me. The breath of Brahma, the breath of Abraham — godhead by any other name. There was so much love in the buds that any darkness that encroached was warded instantly away. Now at garden level, I peered from the edge and watched the Sons consecrate the soil the plants grew in. There could be no darkness or the enzymes would shut down. Rooted in light-living gems would crown anyone blessed enough to smoke it when it finished out.

It wasn’t until a Jubilee year that the Isaac strain was grown into perfection. It was the only year the invaders did not succeed in stealing the crop. Mike gave me the directions, had it encrypted in the pedigree scribblings on the blackboard in the greenhouse. Blinking, my eyes zoomed in even closer, so I could see the formation of the Menorah. The trunk was cut about six inches above the soil and then topped. The buds turned to flames in succession,  the plants own resin providing the fuel needed.

Couldn’t straighten any of this out but it was the gardening guide I was looking for. My bible that is.

August 29th

There was the problem of the transference. How did Hunt get the seeds from the Holy Land? And past the invaders? And the three thousand year span? Were his recollections palpable enough to reach back into and get them. And what Hunt was babbling when he was on edibles:

“You know the biblical prophets were persecuted. Take Elijah for example. It’s a little known fact that the raven led him to the cannabis fields. He hid his love-some sacred scripture in the roots of a plant and it grew and anyone smoking this stuff would know how he defeated the Ba’al empire. It would open them to God’s love. They never found him. The raven did the right thing for the slayer of prophets could not get him. Thus my Elijah’s Cup strain.”

And here’s Hunt again after he smoked some ear wax the Puerto Rican kid made:

“I saw the Lord giving his blessings over the fields. All twelve of the apostles were with him circling and they did the round dance. The plants spiraled in ecstasy and nothing could harm them. I heard the prayers they sang.

Here’s what we’re going to do.  I wrote those prayers down and we will sing them over our own plants. Nothing will harm them. Then we sneak into our neighbors’s fields and pollinate their crops. They may accuse us of sabotage but the seeds are golden and they know it. We can hold them hostage — make them pay a price for the prayers required to activate the seeds. The seeds of the House of David. Soon we’ll be able to replicate the temple of Solomon with the profits and the Cannabis Cup judges will be on their knees. Perfect Stone!”

And here he is again:

“The Pharisees… I know them all. I can tell which ones reincarnated. All I need to do is to step into Jesus’s sandals and mincemeat them in my court of law.”

I remember that one clearly. It was after I had to help him to bed. He had a few Old Crows with some hunters he invited to the ranch that night. I tried to remind him that the kingdom of heaven is within but he had already passed out. Thus planting the seeds in my mind I went to bed, where they sprouted in my dreams:

I wander an infinite cannabis field, extending in all directions and past the horizon. But each plant I look at withers away and dies. An angel appears and plucks the freeze dried cadaver of Hunt off my back and beckons me to look at it. Each worm eating the flesh is translucent and contains a larval, cinematic condensation of the lawyer’s soul, as convoluted as some arcane Sumerian legal code. The angel pokes one with the tip of his sword and in the pool of amniotic gel I can see a key. I pick it up and proceed towards a temple in a clearing in the field and reach out to unlock the door but the door swings both ways. I see a beautiful woman crying inside. I look out the window and the fields have withered away. The angel taps my chest. Then I understand and go back out. There they are waiting.

September 3rd

My clients got a bit impatient when I inadvertently sent them the above journal entry. They wanted numbers and what was happening to their investment, the previous year’s pot that was and the nine greenhouses of grow Mike apparently sold them on this year. After their first trip up here from L.A. is when they hired me. I had to delay them as I had no money myself.

After a strained phone conversation where I told them I was speaking in code and that they should discern the truth of where their money really was being funneled-based on what I was seeing. Deep in the night, I found myself in front of the blackboard, reading the thing with my head lantern. It was only 4:00 AM and I have no recollection of arriving at this place. I turned the lantern off because there was some greater illumination going on. I snuck into the grow room and there it was. All the plants had turned into menorahs and there were seven flames for each plant like Hunt said there would be. Self illumination — growing their own selves with golden branches and a golden trunk. It was the perfection that Hunt was seeking. Yet I hesitated to harvest the light, yet it was time indeed to do so. No need to trellis these plants as they supported themselves with their own illumination.

I felt a hand pushing me outside and under the deck. I crawled on my hands and knees and discovered boxes twelve feet long and covered with a camo tarp. Ripping one of them open, I could not help but run my hand along what turned out to be a huge bolt of black velvet. How this find would help my clients get Mike disbarred, I didn’t know, but I told them about it. At first they thought I had flipped but when I told them about the hundreds upon hundreds of feet of gold cord, they wired me some cash to keep my facade going. They knew it was big, so they let me off the hook with my visions and all that.

All the while I wondered how the Sasquatch Brothers factored into this spread. Pamela nursed them. Was she speaking too in code?

September 21th

One day, I was looking for some Super Thrive and came across a cardboard box. I picked it up but the bottom came undone and its contents spilled out on the floor near the blackboard. It was filled with awards, trophies and other related memoribilia. Unable to control my hand, I plucked a photograph out. It was of Mike in what appeared to be Jr. High, holding onto a science award, for a project he conceived. He stood in front of the entry, an alembic looking like it was made out of blown glass — an elaborate flask of sorts.

I dropped the photo and backed away, feeling dizzy. It appeared that the alembic created an orginal vacuum in which life could propagate itself — this was implied — like some subjective prompting. But this is not what won him the contest. I could see the seeds — the Perfect Stone at the bottom — seven of them clustered together and sprouting, weaving their roots together into some nascent arabesque. I could see the concubines holding baskets of soil and the sprouts being put into them. Each concubine dutifully bringing the transplants into the garden. Then more appeared with flutes, celebrating in accordance to the calendar they were following.

And there was Mike, dressed like a Rabbi overseeing the project.

How this won over all the other entries has been left unexplained. I put everything back into the box and looked around. Still couldn’t find the Super Thrive, but came across something else that was curious. It looked like his ex-wife’s discarded cosmetics. Circa early 90’s and all arranged into a sefiroth. Perhaps Mike was abstracted when he made the arrangement or maybe he was uttering some Hebrew incantation over them in hopes that the queen he needed would appear, she that would bless the plants and call the spirits back in,  the one who headhunted the resinous shikshas from all the neighboring tribes.

I shook my head clean. It didn’t seem like this stuff was frothing up from my unconscious as some kind of needed recompense for my desertified mind, but a hard, Holy Land trail to follow for sure. One paved with black velvet and golden cords.

I shoved the box under the work bench with my foot and went back outside. That’s when I saw the hawk carry a snake away in its talons and realized that was the clue I was looking for. It was another serpentine illusion and Mike’s yarmulke turned into an SS hat complete with skull and bones.

September 25th

Odd dream last night — or rather right before I awakened. In it I found myself at the barn and all the doors were wide open. Looked cleaner than it was. A Pit Bull followed me in and jumped on a railroad tie. I went over and discovered that its jaw had been torn off completely so I did some healing work on it, perplexed at what caused the injury. Panicking I looked around and could see her again. I placed the dog on a table and said some prayers. Sensed that dogs were God’s messengers so I stared at the jaw that was in my hand. Shouldn’t have been in there. Tried writing about it and could not get it out of my head. The recipe for the edibles that he and the pockmarked autism kid cooked up. Called them Extreme-ibles as they were extra strong. They had used most of last year’s trim shake and the kid was boiling it down late into the night. It all seemed to take place in some other dimension as I had nothing to do with the project.

I recall one night when Hunt gobbled some of them and came back to my camper. I started strumming some C and W chords and asked him to sing. He did an about face and huffed it back to the house. Couldn’t even face me. The conditions in the kitchen were just as squalid as his bedroom and I figured that’s where he got the sepsis, from the dirty trays the edibles were cooked in. Also, the kid never boiled the brew properly, used a slow cooker at low temp and most likely bred the very noxiousness that nearly killed Mike. No surprise that he didn’t bother to check up on him when he was staying downstairs, hiding in his bedroom and hearing Mike falling after double dosing on the Lexapro.

It was her again. I know it. The slayer of prophets.

I stitched the jaw back onto the Pit Bull and he grabbed a scroll and we exited the barn. I threw away the strange set of toothless keys. Unrolling the scroll, I could see the incantation filtering through the kid’s brain and translating into thought prions that embedded themselves in the edibles.

The Jezebel Curse. This time in dessert form.

October 27th

He pulled up in a 4WD, good timing I guess considering the lead grower abandoned ship or walked the plank-didn’t bother to say goodbye to me — so I wasn’t sure which. His replacement was from So Cal I surmised but before I could even get my name out, he insisted that I take a look at something in his trunk. He flipped it open to reveal a bewildering assortment of blasting caps, dynamite and other detonative wonderments.

He held up something clear and a bit yellow.

“I found this Trinitite at Los Alamos just right before this paraplegic thought I was Satan and shot me. How can the Calico Coyote be Satan?” He held his hand up to my face as if it contained the answer.

I had to back up a bit so the bullet wounds were in focus. The scars formed a triangle on the back of his hand.

“It’s concordant with Pythagorean geometry exactly. Makes my wounds glow in a way that make the stars answer to it.” Calico was gleaming but I still couldn’t get my name in edgewise.

“Once all this occurs, the cave will open and we can walk through the mineral gallery.” He pointed up at Split Rock.

I had trouble sleeping even after smoking some Harlequin as I was anxious about whatever was to be revealed. If it was the truth I needed to make sure I had an exit strategy.

The next day, we climbed to where he was pointing a laser light at from the back deck. Odd how there was no fear when we toed the line of a quartz rift out to the lens I had seen from the deck. It was a 200 ft. drop. So I tensed a bit.

Calico took a puff off of his Vape and offered me some as I clung on the rock. I took a hit and my head reeled from the pure nicotine rush. When I came down, he was already inside. He turned on his head lantern but the bulb was out. Some kind of mysterious backlighting highlighted the chamber instead. The walls were lined with the same stuff he was holding up to the light.

“This better pay well.” He said and we crawled to the end of the gallery.

“Finally, the real jury.” Calico said and turned his headlamp off. The walls lit up the place enough to reveal a circle of mummified Indians.

The only thing not covered by dust in this amphitheater was the crystal bowl in the center they were sitting around. Calico rubbed his fingers, causing it to ring the Solfeggio frequency.

“Ming dynasty gunpowder, my friend. I found it on eBay!” He poured some in cardboard tubes and began inserting fuses made of braided marmot hair. He took out a hunting knife and scraped one of the screens and the filings fell into the tubes. “Just need a bit of the Trinitite — too much will conjure Oppenheimer himself. We just want these guys alive.” He gestured towards the mummies.

After sealing the tubes with pure beeswax he took out of a silver case, he backed up and lit one. The flash was too much for me though. I kept my eyes closed until I heard him again.

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected.” He shouted in a baritone voice. “Peter Hardemann Burnett said that.” His voice returned to squeak mode and this seemed to awaken the cross legged figures more than the blast. “First governor of California.”

The Trinitite screens brightened some more and revealed the original lair of the serpents — their eggs and a queen incubating them with her tail wrapped around them.

“From the circumpolar Draconis constellation.” Calico said. “They hatched airborne, dropped from the sky,  just under the threshold of the earth’s gravitational field. It was the heat of re-entry that caused them to hatch. Hatch and fly. Those that couldn’t sprout wings, burrowed into the earth. Those that could, flew to China.”

The Calico Coyote walked around the Indians who began to come to life, taking off their own bandages. “Like I said, behold the jury. They already know the verdict before the trial has begun.”

The gallery expanded and the Indians got up and sat in the jury box. The Trinitite glowed even more brightly.

“All please rise.” Calico laughed as the judge entered the courtroom. He slammed his tomahawk down on the bench.

I couldn’t figure out how we then ended up underwater in the very springs themselves. We watched Hunt in full scuba gear come into the courtroom. His air tank had OZONE emblazoned upon it. But something failed and he was signaling for help. Ended up getting resuscitated by a war club respirator, since he was handcuffed. The jury laughed when he sat in the witness stand.

“And this purparty clause? Can you further substantiate this Mr. Hunt?” We were in the third hour of the proceedings. Something happened to the prior time.

“Some parallax distortion.” Calico whispered in my ear. It was weird not panicking while  breathing in water. It took some acclimating but the trial cohered, even with the two hour glitch.

Mike could not answer the question. He looked utterly defeated. But it was some heuristic subterfuge and he slowly raised his chin until he looked proud.

“And you… a white man claims our tribes as parceners?”

“I have the very seeds of your destiny.”

“You leave garbage at the very feet of a sacred peak and let tweekers cook meth there.”

“Once I get the creditors paid off…”

“More garbage. This is your offering?” An Indian lawyer grilled him.

“What really happened when that propane tank exploded?” One of them asked.

“You went on a ski trip after you said the pot was stolen. True or false? That the pot was stolen.”

“You must not build a retirement home where the mountain lions live.”

“But I will! I will have my way!”

Now the scene gels into something airborne. We parachute and watch Hunt below, his body wrapped in a serpent’s tail like one of Asclepius’s barber shops back in the day. The Indians emerge from their holocaust graves down near the border of Mike’s property.

“Trippy, huh?” Calico yelled as we plummeted, our chutes folding in, causing us to gain speed.

“Don’t worry about the crash, I’ve already sequenced us through it. Downloaded an app that does it. So no impact.”

We watch Hunt emerge from the aquifer, handcuffed still, and back to 15,000 BC. He picks up the very arrowheads I found and looks around. He sees something in a clearing and goes closer to inspect. It is a cannabis plant growing in a soil of ground up flint. It is so very radiant that it makes the rocks transparent. He starts to see the movies I saw when I first got here, of the ritual dancing and singing.

But this scene is quarantined and it’s back in the courtroom, underwater.

“We sentence you to life imprisonment.”

“Do you have anything to say?”

“I’ll give you the water at an even more discounted price than I first offered.”

A lizard dressed like a rodeo clown enters and put a lasso around Hunt’s neck and pulls him even further back in time.

He sees Split Rock pre-garbage and then back to the trash which he wambles in. Hunt is taken to the Mountain Baby Rock and sees his daughter in jail and Darlene doing lines in Belvedere. He staggers and wanders through an indoor grow to the back where moldy bank boxes with client files in it and opens one and goes over his own arrest with DEA agent. He sees him as a lizard. Hunt freaks but calms down when he looks at himself in a mirror.

“The combination is neither in or out.” Calico pulls on the lock and suddenly we are back in the gallery with the Indians. One stands up from the circle, eyes still closed. He hands Calico a peace pipe.

“All my years of dumpster diving have come in handy.” Calico produced a fulgurite and handed it to the chief who began walking around his compadres while Calico took the vape out of his mouth. Soon, they were all back to life but refusing to come out with us.

Even the dormancy that was afforded them could not assuage their grief when they walked to the edge of the cave and saw the garbage at the base of the peak. It was on fire. Mike was too cheap to haul it to town.

October 1st

Yet I had planted you a noble vine, a seed of highest quality. How then have you turned before me into a degenerate plant of an alien vine?

Jeremiah 2:21

I received my first real pay check since the first of the year when I filled my clients in on the details: The cold call list I found in the storage shed.

I also sent an Mp3 of the following to my clients:

“It’s no Tanakh. It is not in the Tanakh as he claims, this mystical plant. Nor how to grow it. He should be sued for fraud, kibbitzing into a religion he knows nothing about and trying to sell it back to us.”

“Well thanks for your time Rabbi, but I doubt that it is a forgery for I’m seeing the results. These plants grow by their own light.”

I was struck by Hunt’s draftsmanship in the execution of the Grow-A-Gogue plans. They were artful and delicate and betrayed his persona. It was like he was making one of his wounds more vulnerable, but in a way that it would be concealed to all but the initiated.

“The nerve of that man. He said he’d put the Star of David on his water trucks when they delivered what he calls “kosher spring water” to us during this God induced drought. Hunt means dog in German you know. So what do you expect from a dog like him?” The Rabbi waited for a rhetorical answer I was guessing, but I remained silent.

“You know what else that Aryan schlemiel said? That there were biblical prophets hidden in the protein chains in the plants that he had clones of and was going to sell to us so we could keep the integrity of our lineage going.”

The rabbi slammed the phone down.

I wish I could have described the way Hunt so ingeniously inked in the profit margin, like it was an essential component of the architecture laid out in his blueprints. X amount of pounds guaranteed in each Grow-a-Gogue and which could be sold as Kosher marijuana in the dispensaries throughout California. Tax free. $4K a pound minimum while other growers begged for $900 a pound everywhere else during the flood.

Moses Chapter 3:3, the Burning Bush now sounding more like blood libel than scripture in Hunt’s interpretation of it.

The rabbi would have benefited from something else I could have shared with him: The calendar of the Perfect Stone and how the summit of its bloom cycle commenced with Hanukkah. Truly a late season plant able to withstand the cold of November/December. And how the branches light up like the menorah over seven days. In exactly the same sequence as they are lit all throughout the world. And the bit about the silver caskets too.

I’m sure he would have invited me to San Francisco and reconsider. After all I did try and hoo ride him with a Grow-a-Gogue set up fee of my own, since I posed as an installer instead of a detective when I first talked to him.

After casting my dreams of a little side profit aside, I dutifully faxed the blueprint to my clients in L.A. And they told me they were on a northward plane shortly thereafter. I’m guessing they thought it would be grounds enough to get the White Devil disbarred,the insanity card.

But what I saw was real as they would soon see.

November 4th

I waited around for a day, but my guys were a no show. Probably partying with their pot broker at some other grow they were looking into, but it had me worried.

“Wouldn’t be a good idea to come here.” I left a token message late the night before, trying not to sound panicked. I couldn’t bring myself to tell them what had arrived at the ranch.

Someone had driven him, unannounced, in a Candy Apple Suburban. Who it was remains a mystery as the windows were tinted and they didn’t get out. The vehicle was brand new and had ‘drug dealer’ written all over it. No license plates.

Hunt needed no help climbing the stairs up to the bedroom. The cane he brandished was apparently just for show.

While he was gone, one of the neighbors had volunteered to clean his room in hopes of getting some legal advice. She wore a respirator after heeding my warnings.

“Are you sure it wasn’t Legionnaires disease?” She said, while hosing the air conditioner filter out on the deck. The water coming out of it was black as oil.

Hunt pretended not to notice the transformation.

We gave him a tour of the nine greenhouses the next morning and then took him to the concrete foundation, where the propane blast had leveled everything.

The White Devil just stared. I knew it would be a risk but one I had to take if I was to survive. I made sure Calico was packed too and had instructed him to stand behind us.

The structure looked like it was for some royal internment. The gold trimmed door to the Grow-a-Gogue looked quite inviting in the evening light. It was still warm inside and the living menorahs within made it inviting. We all went inside. The air was pristine.

Mike turned towards me. But there was no anger in his face. Not even surprise.

“You listened. You heard me dictate the plan!”

Some impromptu angel assisted me. “In great detail. We set it up according to the exact specs spelled out in your blueprints and moved the starts from the grow room. Were led to where you had hidden the greenhouse material under the deck.”

Through some inexplicable, heliotrope phenomena, the plants leaned towards him. I had to hide my tears because I no longer saw a lawyer before me. Maybe Mike did meet the Lord when the docs were cleaning his guts out. I couldn’t believe how well he looked, after months in the hospital and rehab. It worried me a bit, how strong he was. I braced myself for some more dictation.

Instead, Mike knelt at one of the plants and inspected the kolas. “You have a way with plants bordering on the impossible.”

All I did was sprout and water the things. What else could shabbas goy do?

“How did you know?” He looked rapt and I wanted to believe that some metanoia had taken place and that the devil was gone out of him.

“Mike. I don’t mean to be the bearer of bad news, but you are in great danger. You should have told me you were coming back.”

“How? I’ve done nothing but good here and everyone on this mountain knows it.”

“When I tell the locals that I saved your life, they ask me why. Everyone on this mountain.”

“How do you think I’ve survived all these years? All the raids, losing my daughter, the DEA thug that messed up my shoulders after handcuffing me?”

I pulled out my detective badge and showed it to him.

“Thor Sawyer. Never heard of you.”

“The mountain reveals the truth sooner or later, Mike.”

“Who you working for? No informant could grow plants like this.”

“I’m your only hope of saving this ranch.” I pulled the only card I had left out of my jacket: the receipts from the credit card Mike had been banging. “They’re mafia. My guys. And, this greenhouse isn’t kosher seeing how you got it. Neither are these plants.  They’re going to kill you!”

“I said not to worry. Take me down to the barn.”

We all piled in the beat up Explorer and weaved our way to where Darryl’s water truck fills up. We followed Hunt inside after he unlocked a huge sliding barn door. The stalls within were jammed full of fertilizer bags, pots, hoses, augurs, giant fans and swamp coolers. All but one. It was a clean and in the center was a human like figure but about 10 ft. tall. No cob webs or bird droppings on it like there were on everything else.

Hunt went inside and uttered something arcane to the dormant mesomorph. Could have been archaic Yiddish for all I knew. The very crown of the Golem’s head lit up. And then the fingernails.

Calico puffed on his vape and put his hand on his gun, but I shook my head.

“I wanted to open up a pot bar called The Stoned Homunculus and have this Cupie doll be the nightly act. Bang some cocktail glissandos on a piano for Sun City crones. I could live off the tip jar proceeds.”

I couldn’t process it because I still wanted to see Hunt as an angel.

Why wasn’t the thing dried out? Had it been hibernating for the entire grow season? I was routinely scanning with my night binocs and never saw it roaming the ranch. I had been sleeping next to this thing in the guest house, when I moved there from the camper. The kolas it was made of were resinous, hard and full. Hunt pulled a bud from its navel and jammed it into a pipe and handed it to Calico.

This thing felt like it was sucking the marrow out of us.

“It’s an old yogic trick of mine, by the way. Has gotten me out of a lot of duty so to speak. Court, alimony, child support, preliminary hearings, taxes and even the creditors.” Mike said and tossed the receipts on the ground. “Even entire grow seasons. I’m a lawyer. I don’t get paid for what I do, so why should I work?”

He lit the pipe. He handed it to me but I passed it on to Calico. “I pull the diseases in from various star systems: Rigel, Orion. The sepsis was from Markarian 421.” He took another hit when Calico passed it back to him. “The cure too.” He said on the exhale. “Just need to know how to work those black holes.”

Then I knew. It was when I was holding his hand in the hospital. That’s when I got pulled into the dimension of his indelible pathology. Didn’t have the discernment to recognize it. I thought it was the Red Malawi/Mic I was smoking. I was stoned on it when I showed the Puerto Rican kid the previous year’s stash of pot in pickle barrels. I was stoned on it when the kid jacked it all, then looted the house after one of the trimmers came and got him from Hemet. He took the Mountain Lion skull, arrowheads, masks, the bow and arrow and the wooden flute too. And all of the equipment used to make the edibles I wrongly assumed did Mike in.

“Mike. Pontea stole last year’s weed when you were in the hospital. Stole a bunch of stuff out of the house and all the edibles out of the freezer.”

Hunt took his wallet out and pulled a credit card from it. The sefiroth on it was glow in the dark. The usual green. He waved it in front of the Golem’s eyes.

“Did you hear me?”

It hit before I got a reply. The unknown language that Pamela was chanting in. I heard it like it was there in the barn. Her disembodied voice. I heard the drumming too. Just needed the eye lightning to complete the picture. And her hideous bobble head.

“I did the So Cal shuffle on your guys and flim flammed them good. It’s the Mendocino way. You should have seen them when they came to the hospital. All standing around my bed. I got them crying. Distracted them enough on the sweetheart deal hand shake we did. Nothing in writing! And I got them to drive me up here! ”

Mike took another toke and pushed the pipe my way. “No bad seed in this breed of pot. The Esau strain. You really should try some.”

We walked back out and the Golem followed behind about ten yards. It shook its arms and legs when it got outside and looked around. A Bigfoot with a fondness for buggering meth wrecks.

Calico looked up at the gallery on the mountain. It seemed he was trying to do some blink version of morse code to alert the jury within. He held his hand with the bullet wounds up too, maybe to triangulate something into action.

“You abandon this grow now and you won’t get paid. By me or your guys. And good luck in court if we get raided. I’ll throw you both under the bus.”

The Golem opened its mouth. Mike handed it the pipe and it took a toke. I wondered if it was a fumigate version of cannibalism. It liked its own stone though, seeing how it smiled.

I looked over at Calico and he was shaking, sweating. He took a long puff off his vape and the lenses of his glasses fogged. All the black ops detonation drills in the military he bragged about. None had prepared him for this.

November 2nd

Let the extortioner catch all that he hath:
And let the strangers spoil his labor.

Psalm 109:11

I didn’t get much sleep. The hostage situation seemed insolvable. Spent the night trying to remember Pamela’s incantation gibberish but nothing came to me. I could see Hunt on the deck of the house, pacing back and forth while on the phone. I knew all the old horse trails and most of the growers were done for the year, their plants already cut down, dried and processed. I was willing to risk getting shot trying to get to the highway. Mike changed the lock codes on all the gates and my truck wasn’t big enough to bash them down.

Iron Peak to the south was radiant in the morning light and the clouds coming up from the valley seemed to avoid it. But there was no humming coming from Split Rock.

I went into the Grow-a-Gogue with my bible. I paged through it helplessly. The plants still had another month and a half until harvest. The 21st day of Kislev to be exact. I had planned to sneak in and snip the prize Shamash buds and haul them on my back up in bags I made from the leftover velvet and over the ridge behind the ranch house. I knew all the animal trails up there. Stash the bags in the mountain lion dens. Trim the buds myself up there. I could get even more than 4k. I could get 10k a pound, even more with the right pitch. Sell it to Madonna’s Kabbalah club and I’d be in forever as a grow celeb.

But there was Bud Foot as I called him. And it was a male because I saw him pissing one night while Hunt was taking spring water readings with Calico. And he could move. Saw him climbing a tree for fun, spanning ninety feet in a few seconds and ape swinging from the branches like it was nothing.

My heart had to be clean, all the way, to pull this harvest off. I spent the whole grow season forgiving others and forgiving myself, praying and most of all, blessing those that cursed me. I poured over Hunt’s Kabbalistic formulas and diagrams I had found and prayed some more.

I left something out about the Boy Wonder, Kris Pontea. The kid had Asperger’s syndrome I’m guessing and that’s why he did it. He would hide in his room all day and trim all night, just to avoid us. His face was cratered with pock marks and he had some serious welt scars on his shoulder blades. The kid told me how he would grind up his Ritalin and mix it with ear wax to enhance the buzz. He had to have heard Hunt fall that night as I’ve said before. And he did nothing.

After all the DEA flyovers on the 4th of July weekend is when he split. I watched him rip an old saddle off of a chair on the deck and toss it in the back of the pick up truck. His speed freak, trimmer friend Taylor just stared. His eyes were so hollow. That’s about all I can remember. Why couldn’t I piece what was going on? I just said goodbye to them and went back to the guest house like nothing was happening.

I got a text from Taylor about a week later asking me to call him. But I didn’t.

I prayed for days and eventually got the prompting early one morning. I sneaked past the main gate and walked all the way to the spiral petroglyph near the Spyrock school and sat by it.

“I’m so sorry.” I said to the boulder the glyphs were etched on. “I tried. I tried cleaning up all of Hunt’s garbage on that sacred land. Out of the woods where it had blown. Only to watch it blow back in again. I dug up corroded batteries out of the soil, leaking containers of diesel fuel, buckets of industrial grease, rusted Hamilton tanks still full of pesticides. I prayed at the spring head for a healing to take place. And, I saved the White Devil’s life. For that I’m the most sorry of all.”

Walking back as the sun rose, I could see two people about a quarter of a mile away. No resistance overcame me so I continued on. They waved at me. Figured they were grow workers, seeing how dirty and tattered their clothes were.

“What’s up?” I asked.

They both smiled. No teeth. Identical twins from what I could deduce.

“Got a cigarette?” I asked.

One handed me three out of a pack of Golden Deer he had in a shirt pocket. “You’re going to need them.” He said and grinned.

“You know anything about a Bigfoot roaming around up here?”

Their faces melted. It was odd enough of a caricature to keep me going with the ploy. I pulled out a zip lock bag that I had tucked in my holster and dangled it in front of their faces.

“Some mother’s milk for you!”

They wasted no time grabbing the meth from me. I gave them my phone number. Made sure they keyed it in the right way on their phone. And I made them call me on the spot so I had theirs.

“Hit me up and we’ll work something out.”

I didn’t tell them about the ballerina costumes that the neighbor found when she cleaned Hunt’s bedroom. But I did emphasize just how much Ugly Dust was jam packed in the foot locker in Hunt’s bedroom closet. Pounds of it.

Walking on, I was certain that the Great Spirit arranged it, in a way beyond any expectations and assumptions my detective ego could ever conjure.

November 20th

Calico and I cut and hung all nine greenhouses of the late blooming weed, Death Star, in 14 hour shifts. Hunt brought in the usual renegade trimmers and slaved them. During breaks, I would visit the Grow-a Gogue behind the caretaker’s house several times a day. The plants were wondrous like no others, but I felt such deep pain. The pain of betrayal.

I knew my guys were mafia and were just using me as some kind of sleight of hand. One had an archipelago of casinos rivaling Harrah’s. The other was a fashion designer that made a killing off of Mexican dirt heroin on the side. Their boss was some investment banker who prayed to Allah every morning before his daily milking of the Dinar, some savvy, shrewd move he came up with during the first Gulf War and implemented years later. The Babylon Killing he called it. He killed it for sure, in a Billionaire’s Club kind of way.

I now wonder if they were really the ones that delivered Hunt to the ranch  like he claimed, after making some kind of covert deal. The fishiness of it all was constrictive. Not that I was paranoid.

I climbed every morning to the top of Split Rock to pray that the truth be revealed and could see Pamela’s summit resplendence across the valley. Wondered who she and Manfried were busy exploiting after I split. There was an odd rainbow film in the clouds above Rooster Ridge and it didn’t feel right.

November, 24th

Getting the Sasquatch brothers into the Ballerina costumes was the easy part seeing how emaciated they were. The grain alcohol and meth I gave them served as ample persuasion. They cackled and did a little dance together, eyes gleaming. The slippers were too small though, so they clunked around in their work boots. I did a selfie with them and sent it to my bosses. Figured it would throw them way off, wherever they were, enough to allow me to carry out with the plan.

I daubed some Musk oil behind the tweekers’s ears and put some pheromone spray I found on Hunt’s beside table on them too. Lots of it.

In the night, me and Calico took them up to the nipple across from Split Rock and had them stand there holding hands. They started doing pirouettes.  I figured that would broadcast the pheromone and the Musk oil enough and confuse the 500 lb. black bear we had seen roaming the property. We were after bigger game.

Climbing down a bit to take cover, I waited. It wasn’t long until the intended prey climbed up top. Bud Foot waved his arms like an angry gorilla and for the first time I heard something emerge from his throat. I prayed that the brothers remembered the incantation and they did before he could assault them. The meth must have made them lucid, for both chanted it in unison. The archaic Hebrew sounded poetic. It flowed beautifully like one of the psalms of David put to music.

Bud Foot went down to his knees and I climbed back up.

“Not a bad high you are.” I said to it. “And now it is time.”

I looked into the subdued Golem’s eyes and no longer felt it was trying to suck me dry of my spirit. Now it was pleading for release from Mike’s spell.

We could see the lights on in the ranch house and Hunt was silhouetted as per usual, pacing back and forth on the deck.

Bud Foot sprinted lithely down the jagged path and disappeared in the darkness. We all took turns watching through the night binocs. It was under a minute when he arrived on the deck. It grabbed Hunt and hefted him above his head with arms in full extension. Then he ran, jumped an entire flight of stairs and entered again into the dark.

It only took another minute for the golem to reach the summit of Split Rock. Bud Foot wasted no time and did a spin, hurling the lawyer over the edge. The plummet was rather disappointing, but we all heard The White Devil crash land hard. The Sasquatch brothers did some more pirouettes and held their hands out for some more meth. I already had a pipe loaded and fired it up for them, taking a pretend hit myself.

We heard Hunt groaning.  Amazing he survived a fall from that height. The Indian mummies emerged from the cave entrance, their stiffness dissolving instantly. They climbed out on the wall to watch. The huge serpent that emerged from the base gobbled up Hunt like an Anaconda. It slithered out into the open, glowing the same green as Hunt’s sefiroth card. We could see the emergent patterns on its back. Bud Foot jumped up and down in triumph above.

Then, out of the snake’s rectum emerged the lawyer turd we all had been waiting for. I wanted to display the thing in a museum. Maybe I could deliver to the DA in Ukiah.

I was impressed with the snake’s digestive abilities. Breaking down such a slimeball with its stomach acids so rapidly and excreting the waste product with remarkable efficiency. We could hear the Indians cheering and they climbed down the cliff face . Split Rock hummed and all the rocks became alive. Once again.

I lit the last of the Golden Deers and high fived my friends. I had brought my travel guitar that I used to play for the plants and performed a celebratory ditty for my friends:

Spyrock Road
(D minor tuning)

Way up yonder on Spyrock Road,
Those pot growers done lost their souls,
They calculate you coldly with empty eyes,
For all they care about is the bottom line,
Maximum yield in the shortest time.

Better not cross any property lines,
Because your sorry self you may find:
Beaten, bound and naked
On Highway 101.

The only way out of Spyrock,
Is the way you came in.
White Devil’s making deals,
You’ll never win.

Up on Spyrock Road
Don’t lose your soul
Up on Spyrock Road.

There’s so much fear in the mountain air,
And that’s why no one ever smiles up here.

Whatever happened to the,
Peace, Love and Harmony thing?
That the Hippies thought
Marijuana would bring?

Up on Spyrock Road
Growing more cold
Up on Spyrock Road.

The only way out of Spyrock
Is the way you came in,
Spiral Petroglyph in the
Morning Sun.

Time to go to the
Mountain Baby Rock
and call the spirits back in,
The ones hiding in the ocean.

Up on Spyrock Road.
Don’t lose your soul
Up on Spyrock Road.

Maybe the spirits hiding in the ocean would return to the mountain and stay for a long time now. Thanks to Bud Foot, the Ballerina Brothers and the cosmic intervention that had just taken place. I wouldn’t stick around to find out though.

I  just couldn’t.

December 24th, 2014

Zose Hannukah

I had just enough gas to make it to the base of Rooster Ridge. Then my battery light went on. Somehow I made it up without dying. The gate was still open. I guess the polarities were in my Christmas Eve favor, hallelujah. I got out and put the angel back on the post. The saran wrapped book was still there a year later and I picked it up and tossed it in the truck. The dogs wagged their tails and followed me as I rounded the corner by the solar panel and could see a light on in the house up top.

I parked exactly in the same place I did a year prior and walked up. There was Pamela, in the same chair and in the same place. She was tapping more rhythmically on the drum, using both hands to do so this time.

Sliding the door open, I stepped inside and wiped my muddy boots, then kicked them off. I sat in the chair opposite. The tea water was steaming on the counter. I pulled out some of the Shamash bud I snipped earlier in the day, crumbled it up and rolled a spliff and watched it light itself. I took my first ever puff of Perfect Stone and handed it to Pamela.

“One hundred percent organic.”

“I’m already there.” She sniffed and continued drumming.

Stepping outside, I was able to more appreciate the high. The galaxy was way lit that night and I could see the dogs even though there wasn’t any moon. I walked back to Pamela’s Bagua garden that she wanted me to finish before I split last spring. The wild pigs had decimated everything but the hot peppers, which still hung from their dried stalks. They even ate the roses I planted around the garden beds. The ones that her son Manfried spit on one day.

Sitting down in the intended center of this construct, I could hear a wind chime that Pamela had me put up near the water tanks. It had a glass hummingbird that hit against the metal tubes.

The aeolian chiming helped me realize that the ruin of it all didn’t matter anymore. It was if the anger, bitterness and unforgiveness of a lifetime had dissolved with one hit of Perfect Stone. I had the back of my pick up full of it. But there was no way I could sell it. It didn’t seem alien though, this conscience thing. More that I had no means to integrate it in a way where I could survive long term in the bloodless and cutthroat world of marijuana growing.

All my guys’s pot is stashed in pickle barrels in the woods back at Split Rock, about $800,000 worth. So no pay, no bonus, means I’m stranded here broke, once again, with the hag on the hill and no way out. At least they wouldn’t find me here.

“The White Devil is dead.” I had left a message a month ago, but never heard back from them.  I threw the phone down into the ravine and felt hung by the drumming above, unable to move.

The only way those cannabis menorahs lit up like Mike said they would was when I told him all the truth. About what Kris had done and that I saw it all. Yet I could not say why I didn’t try to stop him. Only now, perfectly stoned, do I know. It is because I could not see into the fucked up kid’s heart or Mike’s or anyone else for that matter. Not even mine. I could not see what drives people to do what they do. I could blame it on the evil of the place or the Pomo or Jezebel curse or even the snakes noodling about in the aquifer, waiting for the kill.

Rather, it was the primordial wound we all collectively fester, in one form or another, that blinded me. The wound that so deeply shrouds our origins.  A wound that maybe the Perfect Stone could someday heal.

If I only knew the real way out. I instinctively reached into my pocket and took out the seeds Mike Hunt had given me when he was flat out on the grow room floor. In the starlight, they took on an ethereal hue, and appeared as living constellations in my palm.

Even though it was cold and wet, I walked back up to Pamela’s garden, got on my knees and planted every one of them in the beds after clearing all the weeds out and tilling the hardened soil with my bare hands.  There would be no need for calendars, incantations and the like this time,  for they would grow entirely on their own.

Under the right conditions.

Thor Sawyer is a writer and cannabis activist. Please check out his blog @: www.cannibad.wordpress.com

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All photos by Thor Sawyer (C)2015