Magpie

Chapter 1

Lily remembered hearing her mother telling the story about the time she shared an evening with Marlon Brando. It would always end with the same lesson about seeking out your dreams and being intentional about your life, or as Brando had said, You only have so many faces in your pocket.

Excuse me, what did you say? Lily asked blankly as she stared at the bulletin board designated for intern opportunities for students, located in the Student Union.

Are you going to apply for that job at the cannabis laboratory? Corey repeated.

Wanted:

Student Lab Assistant

Lengthy hours and short rewards.

Please apply at the Union

Friday 10 P.M.

Drug test mandatory!

It sounds intriguing. Are you interested too? Lily asked.

My name is Corey Maples and I’ve been there and done that. And as chance would have it, I’m still there. I’m the Pot Doc’s assistant. Have you ever been on a debate team?

Yes, why? And I don’t believe in chance, she replied.

So there’s a reason for everything, like why I work in the only legal place to grow cannabis, incessantly yearning to taste the fruits of my labor, only to be forbidden, ‘Adam, no apple, bad human.’ I’m like a fat kid caught in a perpetual dream of a candy store where every sweet delicacy is just out of reach.

Prometheus, Lily said.

Yah, the fire guy. Boy, just once I’d like to torch the place and turn the whole lab and me into a purple haze.

Only to have birds spread their wings creating just enough turbulence to keep the smoke just out of breath’s reach, she said.

What kind of birds ate out his liver?

Must have been Magpies, they’ll eat anything. You have to be pretty damn desperate to eat liver, said Lily.

Well I hope to see you Friday night. It’s quite a show.

Show? Lily questioned.

Yah, the drug test gives instantaneous results. Most of the applicants are students who make a game out of seeing who registers the highest THC level. The frats started the unofficial ‘Pot Exam’ five years ago. Last year an independent won the coveted ‘Hotty Toddy Hempty Cup’ but he graduated, and now teaches kindergarten in Gautier. His little brother is a freshman and all the frats are recruiting him, thinking if he has half his brother’s talent, the ‘pot prize’ will come back home to fraternity row. I heard he’s living at the Hippy Hotel so I’m putting my money on the new kid, but I think he’ll stay independent or maybe go KA. He’s got this fantasy of riding along with Robert E. Lee and entering a ganja field, stopping to spend the day smoking with the General, said Corey.

You sound pretty sure of this kid. Do you know him? asked Lily.

Kin. He’s my cousin on my mom’s side. We share the same genetic inclinations; only he gets to indulge in what is a ‘mustn’t touch it’ for me.

Mustn’t-touch-it, reminds me of a joke, said Lily.

I hope I get to hear it, but got to run, meeting with the Pot Doc.

You have a strange job for a grown man.

Lily sat on a bench in front of the union wondering if she’d made the right decision. After so much time away from school, her life and its supposed course now seemed so foreign. It was like she was on a movie set where everyone knew his or her lines except her. Somewhere she thought she could hear the director say action, only no one had ever bothered to show her the script. Yet the setting had been established and here she was, enrolled as a student in Botany at the University of Mississippi. Wondering what the title of this movie would be called; Pot Field of Dreams, My Mom would be So Proud of Me, or maybe, Damn it Lily, Why are You So Stubborn?

Lily left the union and paused to stare at the magnificence of the Grove, the centerpiece of the University of Mississippi, and depending on whom you talked to the crown jewel of the whole South as well.

You must be new here, for your beauty I find so enticing that if I were to have met you earlier, you would already be with child, said the student now blocking her view of the Grove.

Lily chose to remain silent, firm in her belief that there is no such thing as chance, and feeling an overwhelming urge to kick this bad-mannered twerp in the groin.

Why don’t you come over here and sit next to us, twerp gestured to a group of the university’s finest, who spend most of their waking hours trying to see who could make their baseball caps look the most distressed.

The breeze from the roof chiller creates a cool mist from which I’m sure you would look simply radiant, twerp said with confidence.

I thank you for your kind offer, both to father my children and a cool place to sit. But no thank you on your offer to bed me, and I’m not very fond of chicken grease. The chiller for this building is around back, downwind. The cool mist you feel is the exhaust from the fryers of the chicken fingers, which, by the way, you still have on your upper lip. Lily replied.

Throwing her bag over her shoulder, she wondered if her insight would make any difference in the complexion of the slow basted frat boys. Walking away, she caught a glimpse of their leaving, and thought, there goes my baby’s daddy and my job at Clearasil.

As she walked towards the Oxford town square, she reminisced on the how’s and why’s that brought her to this point. Lily wanted to be a doctor since she was four, doing the whole doctor and nurse thing with Barbie and Ken. Bandages on her dogs and yes, the Bactine for the goldfish. That one still made her sad. She still goes to the pet store, buys a dozen of goldfish and sets them free every October fourth in remembrance of the one she permanently cured. She picked that day not because that’s when she did the dastardly deed but that is the day dedicated in the church calendar to St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals.

Lily had spent three troubling years with her mother, watching her agonizingly waste away with stomach cancer. Three years turned her doctor dreams into nightmares. She became disenfranchised by a system which seemed to value everything but the patient, the person, her mother. With her mother now dead, she was left with an undergraduate in biology from Sewanee and a full scholarship to Vanderbilt Medical School that had been withdrawn two years ago. Now she found herself about to give blood in order to join a THC contest so she could work in the field of Medical Cannabis.

Medicinal uses for cannabis came to the forefront for her as she sought to find anything to help her mother’s constant pain and nausea. After days wracked in pain, her momma would wake at night in wide-eyed terror as sleep became another conduit into despair. A causality of pain aged Lily’s mother beyond recognition and took away her appetites, all of them. There were times she didn’t have the energy or even the desire to breathe and at the same time she was too weary to die. Lily watched. She prayed some at first, but the lack of any response from God soon left her equating prayer with just another vehicle for misery. Jesus only had to hang three hours before he died. The agony Lily witnessed in the demons of pain that visited her mother made her believe in hell. A hell doesn’t wait for you to die.

Lily gave thanks when her mother breathed her last breath. A moan so deep it sounded like demons rushing to escape. A guttural roar of triumph caused Lily to hold her hand over her own mouth in fear that some would come her way, or maybe it was in fear of letting go of the ones that lived inside of her as well.

After the funeral she went to visit her Uncle Sautris in the Florida Keys. Thanks to extended time with the water and sun, Lily slowly saltwater washed and sun cooked some of the worst memories away. It was on a particularly beautiful July night following an even better day of diving that her new destiny began.

Three years of anguished memories began to dissipate as the subtropical world of the Florida Keys filled her with wonder. And yet as the tides ebbed and flowed, a rogue wave of sorrow would still come upon her, tumbling her back to her mother’s pain, her own pain. Let it go, she would scream to herself. But once it came, like a tide, she would have to fully live the moment until it passed. The external force of desolation was sometimes a force stronger than her will to expel it.

Her plan of destiny was to make a difference, to find new interpretations for the old dreams. Her mother’s cancer made her death inevitable, but it need not have been in vain. And most importantly her mamma’s pain could have and should have been avoided. Lily could not comprehend a world that had the means of comfort but in the end made it illegal. So began a journey into the smoke. She exhaled the paralysis of agony and inhaled the world of cannabis.

Sautris Duncan, Lily’s father’s older brother, came to the Keys to be a fisherman back in the seventies. After a couple of tours in Vietnam, he came back a little less motivated to take his place in the American Dream. A wife, kids, and a two-car garage seemed more like prison than a life’s goal. So he came to the end of America to piss the dream off the southern-most point in the U.S. and see if he could try his luck at fishing, occasionally fishing for Square Groupers.

Square Groupers are what the locals called the bales of ganja that would be dropped from airplanes into the waters off the coast of the over 100 miles of the Florida Keys; one bale, forty pounds of pure Jamaican sativa. Sautris quit the lucrative venture when the planes started dropping Club 54 cocaine from Columbia. For Sautris the sins of the past were strapped to a goat and sent floating off into the Everglades. He was never too greedy and he never got caught.

Lily remembered. At eight years old, she and her uncle were on their way to the reef to spear some hogfish for dinner when her uncle spotted a rectangular black garbage bag floating in the water. He slowed his Boston Whaler and drifted up to the bale. Lily remembered the pungent odor as her uncle gaffed the object and hauled it on deck. She wondered why her uncle was bringing trash on his boat, especially when it smelled like soiled baby diapers. Innocently she remembered thinking how rude it was for folks to drop their trash in the water and how kind it was for her uncle to pick it up. She inquired as to why he did it. He mumbled something about her college fund and said that the water was too murky for a good dive and they went back to the house.

That night they went out to eat with an old friend of her uncle named Thomas. He was wearing a wife beater t-shirt that had some slogan about guns and rights. But the most vivid thing she remembers about him was his nipples. He had the largest nipples she had ever seen. They reminded her of olive loaf sandwich meat. That night she was treated to two slices of Key Lime Pie and in hindsight realized she had witnessed her first drug deal.

It’s funny that she hadn’t thought about that in a long time. Not since she found out she had a trust fund set up by her uncle that would more than pay for four years at Sewanee even if she didn’t have a full academic scholarship. When Lily was afforded opportunities to smoke at school, she usually passed as it hindered her ability to study, or at least her desire. Use of marijuana was an action contrary to her drive to excel. Now she smiled at the irony of what she was about to study and at what she was striving to excel.

In the Keys with Sautris, Lily would spend her mornings fishing off the Hawk Channel Bridge. Sautris still kept a fishing boat but he also loved the interaction with the other locals on the bridge. By all accounts he would always catch more than enough for supper.

When the tide was slack, Lily would dive under the bridge beneath the pilings and see if she could tickle out a few lobsters. She was fonder of fish than lobster but loved to see the look on her uncle’s face when she brought one up. He would tell all his buddies that she was the best damn diver in the Keys. If she got a couple, then Sautris would exchange them for grouper or mangrove snapper. After lunch, she would read as Sautris napped before a trip to the reef or perhaps a troll for her favorite, Mahi Mahi.

She loved being on the water at sunset. The stillness of the blue hour always seemed to bring out the best conversation.

I loved Eleanor your mother, whispered Sautris almost inaudibly. When Jimmy died, I tried to convince her that it was my Biblical duty to marry her.

What’d she say? Lily asked.

Well if I remember correctly, she said something about her being a lawyer and as a public defendant it would be hard for her to remain true to the law if she shacked up with someone who was so clearly outside the law, Sautris answered.

I can see why.

You know she came down here after your dad’s funeral to kind of, well, to escape.

Again, I can see why.

Lily was only two months in the womb when her father was killed in a car crash outside of Columbus, Mississippi where her parents lived. In fact her mother had just gone to the doctor that day and was planning on telling her dad that evening. The State Trooper knocked on the door bringing her mother the first anguish she had ever known. Lily wondered if that news was the first seed of cancer that spread from that day forth. She also wondered if it lived in her too.

After Lily was born, her mother worked diligently in her law practice, eventually moving from Columbus to New Orleans after she was appointed Judge in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. She held the post for eight years until she got too sick to go to work. As Lily looked back it seemed that part of her mother was never really happy, never really fulfilled. It was as if part of her died when Jimmy died. Damn.

What was she like when she was younger? Lily asked.

Eleanor was so full of life, always the wittiest and prettiest girl in the room. I remember when Jimmy and her first started dating. As you know I’m a little older than your dad.

Sixteen years, Lily reminded him.

Yah, well anyway, Jimmy brought Eleanor home for Thanksgiving dinner and I happened to be in town, kind of between jobs. Jimmy, your Uncle Charlie, and I went outside to play football after stuffing ourselves with turkey. I said something about sneaking into her room that night and Jimmy came at me and tackled me so hard I saw stars. He told me not even to joke about that. He told me that he had never met someone as perfect as your mother. He called her his ‘Angel’ and that is exactly what she was. There were times that I could swear I saw her wings, said Sautris

Well, that’s because you’re always seeing things, Lily joked.

You know, that’s something your mother would have said to me. But she never judged me, your mother. She made me feel that no matter what I did there was still some good deep inside.

By the way, Uncle Sautris, thank you for the college money.

What money? asked Sautris.

I charmed my way through an intern in the financial aid office, Lily said smugly.

Damn. You weren’t supposed to know. Doesn’t anonymous mean anything anymore? I’m gonna sue.

You hate lawyers, Lily reminded him.

All but your mother, my dear. All but your mother. And don’t pick on my visions.

The conversation went back to that dinner with Thomas and his big nipples. Sautris reluctantly admitted to the whole story almost exactly as Lily remembered. In fact, it seemed that she remembered it better than he did.

What gave it away? Sautris asked.

The second piece of Key Lime Pie, Lily answered.

That was Thomas’ idea, the bastard, Sautris said with a smile.

Whatever happened to him? Lily asked.

"He was fishing one day off of Seven Mile Bridge when he saw a boat crashed on the reef with about thirty Cuban refugees swimming for the shore. He pulled up to the boat and saw a woman lying in the bottom of the sinking boat, too weak to swim for land. Her name was Lola and Thomas nursed her back to health. They later married and are now living in Hollywood, Florida. We both invested well back then buying up land on Duck Key when it was cheap, primarily to keep people from putting trailers on the lots.

When the same folks who found Miami found the Florida Keys, they couldn’t wait to tell their friends about the quietness and solitude of the Keys. So when they came down with big dreams and even bigger checkbooks, folks like Thomas and me were only too eager to accommodate their habits of acquisition. Square groupers and square lots seemed to be producing the same returns, but the latter held less risk. There is something to be said about being in the right place at the right time. Fate? Luck? Chance? Who knows?"

Lily thought about fate, a lot about fate, but when she reached the Harvest Café her reminiscing stopped. Lily frequently took trips to the past. So much heartache and pain and yet she felt her mental journeys to the past held clues to her future. Right now she wanted to focus on the present, which was in a bowl of the delicious black bean soup. She had found this vegetarian restaurant in her search for fresh vegetables. She had never been a strict vegetarian but knew that the places that catered to those who were would typically have the most creative ways to bring out the inherent flavor in the simplest of God’s creations. Today it involved a topping off the soup with fresh cilantro and green onions.

As a gardener herself she always enjoyed the new flavors that would emerge in the combination of two or more things. She thought about how Native Americans would grow their beans next to their corn so that the stalk would support the vine. In her garden, she always grew basil next to her tomatoes so that each time the basil leaves kissed the ripening fruit it would leave a little essence to remind the taster that they belonged together.

Eating her soup and freshly made baguette, she mused over her line of thinking, wondering if she was the stalk or the vine, the fruit or the spice. She had come to the conclusion that her life had been pretty bland, devoid of anyone to rub up against. She tried to imagine herself with the fraternity guy who hit on her earlier. The thought amused her like ice cream and broccoli or chocolate and chicken grease. Some things should never be put together. And some things, while seemingly out of place, could after a while become the norm. She thought of blackened fish. Flash burning of spices on a piece of redfish in New Orleans led to a culinary craze. Who’d have known? Paul Prudhomme did. Lily needed to find her own Paul Prudhomme to bring out her own inherent flavors and gifts.

In less than forty-eight hours she’d be taking a drug test to work in a medical marijuana laboratory. Fate is an interesting companion. On hindsight, fate seems to be in control. Yet look for it in the future and it’s as elusive as Peter Pan’s shadow. She did feel a little like Wendy ready to follow a dream and yet not really sure what it was. Where was the damn script?

Chapter 2

Patrick never relished flying, but his annual budget trip to DC was unavoidable. With spending cuts across all governmental agencies, this trip had been a disaster. He was informed that funding for the lab would be terminated in May. The rising war debt was collecting its collateral damage.

The cannabis lab had been his life for ten years. It had been his vehicle of grace. All things must come to an end, but he wasn’t quite ready for the end of this one, especially with Corey’s expectation that Lily would be a great addition to the team. Only time will tell, but time might be his nemesis. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time, how had Jimmy Buffett said it? Something about being a pirate two hundred years too late.

Patrick had so many people depending on him that the very challenge of having to shut down the lab could have paralyzed him, but instead he was energized. The idea of how the next months would play out made his head spin. He would arrive in Memphis in less than two hours.

He read the letter again; trying to read between the lines, save the part, We see no reason to continue to fund research in the area of medical cannabis. Your funding will be terminated at the end of the school term. All ongoing research and supplies at the Lab at the University of Mississippi are property of the U.S. Government. All employees must be terminated and contracts dissolved. The premises must be vacated by 9 am on June 1. Signed Jackson Ashe – Attorney General – United States of America. What was there to read between? Was this really the end of the road? Had time finally beat out hope? What a long strange trip it had been.

Pot Doc, The Herbsman of Yaknapatawpa, Potrick, Master of Mary Jane, he’d heard them all. Now what? So many years of research, so many years of promise. It was as if his life that had been measured by months and years was now being considered by a few pages of a calendar on a wall and a clock counting down to 9 a.m., June 1st. And yet aren’t all ends a means to a new beginning? After all these years was he ready to leave? Could he begin again? His life seemed to have purpose lately. He seemed so focused, especially after such a rocky start.

Patrick wondered how his ex, Anne Ashe was doing these days. According to Jackson, she was well, but Jackson never offered much. Every word to Patrick was a gloat, every look a smirk. After all these years Jackson Ashe still hated him. He knew when it started, but where would it end? It seemed that Jackson’s signature on the letter looked a little bigger than he remembered, the ink a little darker, the Secretary of State seal embossed a little harder. The pen had been plunged deep as a kill shot. Would it prove to be?

Stealing the homecoming queen from the All State Quarterback hadn’t killed him, even though his marriage to Anne had never been a thing of beauty. It had served to enrage Jackson so much that his constant delving into their privacy through his ‘connections’ had led to their break-up. Jackson even used his ‘connections’ to annul their three months together. Annul, as if it never had happened. Three months of his life expunged, erased. Maybe he ought to try it again, disappear, and become annulled.

Patrick still cared for Anne, though on hindsight probably never really loved her. He wondered if she was happy getting everything she ever wanted. Part of the freedom granted to Patrick to work in the field of medicinal cannabis over the last few years was gained by his promise never to contact her again. Although Jackson did not have direct influence over the Lab, he did bring to bear all that his office and title would allow. Freedom is always elusive, always enjoyed but is never free. Patrick could see the signs of it eroding. Jackson was a master of working the media. Cannabis was receiving bad press. It always had, but the latest attacks that began under the new Republican regime were relentless. Vilifying drugs, connecting them with terrorists and the worst aspects of society were common press releases. Racial profiling had been replaced by pot profiling. Widespread Panic or Sublime stickers on cars were seen as probable cause. Music that was bought in stores or downloaded was used to create