Smuggler's Blues Read online

  “Hey, jefe!” Father Flaherty shouts and comes running from the log cabin. “We have radio contact!”

  “Karamazov!” I call to the dog, and we lope down the field to the cabin. The last thing I want is for him to get hit by an airplane.

  “This is Yogi Bear to Groundhog. Do you read me, Groundhog?”

  “This is Groundhog. We read you loud and clear, Yogi,” Father Flaherty speaks into the transmitter. He looks up at me and grins.

  Over the crackle of static, Yogi says, “Can you see your shadow?”

  Father Flaherty gives me a puzzled look. “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Even before I can answer, I hear the distant drone of four powerful Pratt & Whitney engines becoming louder by the second. Now we are all skittish with the excitement that comes from imminent danger. We run out to the strip. I tell the drivers to start their engines. After a moment, before we can see the plane, the roar of the engines is impossibly loud. The trees seem to shake and the hills vibrate with noise. The air is dense with sound—a sound foreign to these parts—as the monstrous machine descends rapidly into this peaceful valley. In my mind I see farmers and woodsmen all over Franklin County waking up and wondering if it’s time to head to the air raid shelters. The Russians are coming.… But there is no time to think, no time to imagine what the locals might be thinking, for there is the plane coming in loud, coming in huge and hot, landing like a giant, fat-winged locust chewing up the scenery. I suddenly realize how foolish, how insane it is to have attempted to bring a 50,000-pound behemoth with a 10,000-pound payload to earth on this patchy sod-and-gravel field.

  Yogi Bear is an expert STOL—Short Take Off and Landing—pilot. But he’s either asleep at the yoke or the strip comes up too fast for him because he overshoots the end of the runway, drops hard, touches down too far into the field. I’m afraid he’s going to crash into the trees at the far end of the strip. The rear wheels hit ground, the nose levers forward and the front gear digs into the sod like the blade of a plow. Grass and mud sprout in ribbons, clogging the gear, causing the plane to buck then dive and belly flop with a screeching metallic wail heard over the scream of reversing engines.

  Yogi kills the engines as propeller blades hit the ground and fling grass and dirt in the air like shit hitting the fan. The plane is skidding now, burrowing its nose along the ground like a dog sniffing for scent. The rear gear folds under, the plane is wheel-less, landing more like a seaplane. I catch a quick glimpse of Yogi in the cockpit as the plane slides by. He appears remarkably composed, working the controls, trying to slow the plane before it hits the trees. We watch dumbfounded, helpless, fascinated. One wing tip strikes ground, the plane twists on its axis, does an about-face, slides, slides closer to the end of the runway and the riverbank. Now I’m afraid it’s going to slip into the river. Or burst into flames. The shriek of the metal on gravel is like the cry of a wounded beast. The other wing tip smacks into a tree and topples it like the fell swoop of an axe.

  Then—silence. The six is lying at the tree line, its tail teetering on the river’s edge, looking like nothing so much as a giant bird of prey shot from the sky. I hear the rapid patter of footfalls and look over to see the two rookie helpers running off into the woods.

  “Whoa! Where the fuck’re you goin’?” JD shouts. “Let’s get this bird unloaded!”

  The cockpit door pops open. Yogi Bear, dressed for the occasion in a khaki jumpsuit and safari vest, hops out, followed by his terrified Colombian copilot. “I hurt my knee,” Yogi says, limping over to me. “Get me out of here. I’ve got an appointment in Atlanta.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” I ask, indicating the crashed plane.

  Yogi shrugs, cracks a smile, and says, “Turn it into a disco.”

  2

  THE GOOD SAMARITAN

  THE NEAREST COP shop is half an hour away from our tranquil valley. In less than twenty minutes, we have five tons of reefer in the trucks and on the road. The plane is clean, no residue of controlled substances, no seeds or shake, no paperwork to connect it to anyone except the phony Bermuda corporation to which it is registered. No evidence of a crime per se. Just a big, abandoned machine, a relic of the War on Plants, it will recline at the end of the strip for some time, though never open as a disco. Yogi and his Colombian copilot get soused in the bar at the airport in Portland before boarding a flight to Boston, then on to Atlanta.

  After that, the freighter off-load, if not exactly anticlimactic, is more like a precise military—or naval—operation. The weather is our only obstacle. Fishing boats rendezvous with the mother ship off the coast in high winds and rough seas. Loaded tractor trailers head down the interstate toward Boston, New York, and points west in sleet and freezing rain. The second day into the off-load, I’m driving around overseeing the inventory, weighing, marking, and transshipping hundreds of bales of compressed Colombian pot. I have a half ton stashed waiting to go to my friends in Canada. It looks like a good 15 to 20 percent of the load is no good, soaked in diesel fuel and bilge water. The Colombians will demand to see it, but that is not my problem—except where to store it. My immediate problem is getting the rest of the load on the road, headed out of the state, and then getting paid.

  A late-season Nor’easter leaves a few inches of fresh snow on the ground in the high country. I hook up with a coke dealer I call Fearless Fred Barnswallow. Breaking one of my cardinal rules—never trust a coke fiend—and against my better judgment, I have enlisted Barnswallow to help line up stash houses for some of the load. It isn’t only that cokeheads are unreliable; people who deal and use a lot of coke attract weird, often negative energy. It’s the devil’s candy, true, but I have a soft spot for Fearless Fred. I feel partly responsible for the latest coke binge he’s been on since he met Maria, my Colombian former girlfriend over Halloween in Aspen, Colorado. I suspect she has been supplying him with kilos of blow. I hope that making a few honest bucks in a crooked sort of way will enable Fred to pay off his coke bill with the Colombians, leave the nose powder alone, and get back to doing what made him rich in the first place—helping me move weed into Canada.

  Fred has a plane, a single-engine Beechcraft, and a hangar he leases at a municipal airport that has a 4,000-foot paved runway. He lives in a hilltop log cabin mansion he shares with two or three gofers, his pilot and communications expert, a couple of strippers, and Bear, his German shepherd. The Barnswallow’s roost is party central. I try to spend as little time as possible at Fred’s because I’m certain he must have picked up local Heat. He’s got an attic full of pot plants under grow lights. Lately he’s become obsessed with weapons. He’s got an Uzi, a Mini-14, two or three handguns. Yet any kind of violence is totally alien to his character. He’s a gentle soul with a generous nature. He’s supporting half the little town he lives in—including, he tells me, a corrupt cop.

  This morning, his place smells like a morgue: a cold chemical smell I’m certain comes from smoking cocaine base. Fred denies it up and down, but his looks betray him. His skin is pasty and sallow; his eyes are sunk deep in his head and have dark circles around them like a raccoon’s. His long black hair is lank and oily. He reminds me of Keith Richards without the talent. I drag him down to a local diner and get him to eat some breakfast. The way he wolfs down the food tells me it’s the first real meal he’s had in days. It’s impossible for me to dislike this guy—but at the same time I don’t trust him. Not that he’s dishonest; he would never cheat me or anyone else. But he’s weak. He’s a casualty of the drug war. I want to clean him up, lock him in a room for two weeks in some kind of forced rehab. But right now I need him and his people to hold some of the tons of weed I’ve got floating around the state.

  “You should meet this guy,” Fred tells me.

  “What guy?”

  “My friend, Arnold… the cop.”

  “I don’t want to meet any cops,” I tell him. “I don’t want to meet anyone.”

  “He’s cool,” Freddy says. “I boug
ht a gun from him last week.”

  “Great. Whatever you do, don’t tell him about any of this.”

  “Where’s all this weed coming from, anyway?”

  “Colombia,” I say. Fred’s on a need-to-know basis.

  After looking at a couple of places and making arrangements with the people who live there, we are in my four-wheel-drive truck with a camper cap on the bed, heading up the steep hill back to Fred’s home when we see a sedan that has slid off the road and is stuck in a ditch. I pull over, Fred and I get out and look over the situation. I offer to pull the guy out with my truck. We attach a towrope, get him back on the road; he thanks us, we shake hands and—the man gazes at me curiously with his clear blue eyes. There is a glimmer of recognition that unnerves me. He’s clean cut, with short, light-brown hair, and he’s wearing a tan windbreaker. He looks like a college football coach. Do I know this guy? Does he know me?

  “You ever see that guy before?” I ask Barnswallow when we pull up at his house.

  “Uh uh,” Fred says. “You comin’ in? Some girls’re comin’ by later.”

  “I can’t, man. Too much to do… Listen, Freddy. Put the pipe away. Clean your shit up. Take care of yourself.”

  “Yeah. I will.”

  “You can make a lot of money. How much do you owe the Colombians?”

  He gives a start. “Huh?” Like I’m not supposed to know.

  “Maria’s people. What’s your tab?”

  “I don’t know… fifty… sixty grand.”

  “You can put that together in a week. But not if you’re sitting in your room sucking on the devil’s dick.”

  Fred nods, brushes his hair back from his eyes. “Thanks, man. I hear ya.”

  He gets out. I watch him shamble toward his home. He’s got terrible posture. He wears black canvas high-top sneakers even in the dead of a Maine winter. Bear, his big black-and-tan shepherd, comes up, wagging his tail, happy to see his master. It’s comforting how our dogs love us no matter how fucked-up we may be.

  Over the next couple of days I sleep no more than a few hours a night in different hotels and motels as I finish dispersing the load. The spoiled bales are stashed in an old barn, waiting for the Colombians to come inspect them. Some friends from San Francisco trade me their brand-new white Oldsmobile Toronado in exchange for my four-wheel-drive pickup. They remove the cap, buy a camper, attach it to the truck, fill it with bales of pot, and head back to the West Coast.

  With the load almost entirely gone, I’m ready to chill for a few days. It’s been an exhausting two weeks but I’ve made a lot of money—if I can collect it, never a sure thing in this line of work. As I get closer to the farm, I become increasingly paranoid. Something doesn’t feel right. It’s nothing I can identify, but when you’ve been in the business a while, you learn to pay attention to your gut. I worry someone might have spotted the Toronado with California plates somewhere it shouldn’t have been, and that I might draw Heat to my home. There is already enough fallout around the farm and the lodge from the busted-

  up DC-6 lying at the end of the airstrip. People know who owns the lodge and airstrip even if there is no way to tie it to me. I’m seeing agents lurking in the shadows. So I decide to spend the night at a motel in Farmington, the nearest town of any size to the farm.

  Oh, anonymous me. I get the best rest when no one knows where I am. And no place is too shabby for me to hang my hat. I like a Red Roof Inn or a Super 8 when I’m in the middle of a trip. The lower budget the motel, the better. Park the car around back away from the main road. Check in under an alias and blend in with the rest of the traveling salesmen. The room smells of disinfectant, damp, cheap carpet, and plastic wall covering. The windows don’t open. I make no calls from the room. I’ve got a sack full of quarters for the pay phone, a paperback book about Meyer Lansky, some personal stash, and an overnight bag. Nothing to connect me to any of the frantic importation and distribution of enough weed to satisfy North America’s enormous demand for a few days except a few scraps of paper with my coded phone numbers and financial records.

  I delude myself that this is how I prefer to live—solo. There is no one checking up on me, no one to answer to except myself. My wife, Anaïs, left me a year ago. We’re still on pretty good terms, but she grew tired of the smuggler’s life. She lives in Toronto and still works with our group laundering money. I don’t need to call anyone and explain where I am or what I’m doing. I’m an outlaw. I live by a set of values and morals that are unique to my chosen calling. Together with my far-flung network of smugglers and dealers, we provide a quality product for a reasonable price. Nobody dies from smoking the shit. We don’t steal or extort money from neighborhood shopkeepers. No, and we don’t kill or maim people who don’t pay their bill. We simply stop doing business with them. We don’t smuggle or deal heroin or cocaine. Or do we?

  Now I know why I’m feeling threatened. Fearless Fred. Maria and the Colombians. The Lebanese. Jimmy Chagra and the organized crime people I work with in Boston and New York. These people have no such scruples. I’m a hypocrite if I pretend I am not complicit in whatever they do. That is the nature of the underground. This fear comes bubbling up from the knowledge that I am violating my own principles. I feel vulnerable. So I drown my shame in a bottle of red wine and pass out watching TV.

  Early the next morning, I am up smoking my morning joint and compiling my list of things to do. I go for coffee and to use the pay phones at a restaurant up the road from the motel. I am well known in the area, especially to local law enforcement. The sheriff sometimes hangs out at my farm, drinking, playing poker, singing I shot the sheriff, but I didn’t shoot no deputy after we polish off a bottle of Patrón Silver. One night he left his hat there and I kept it as a souvenir. I spend a lot of cash money in the county, employ locals who can’t get other work, and rely on innate Yankee hostility for outsiders and big government.

  When I walk into the restaurant, I spot a couple of county deputies having coffee. I’m about to go over and say hello when I pick up on their vibe. Something is definitely wrong. Now all my antennae are keen. I sense weirdness going back to the day I helped the blue-eyed stranger stuck by the side of the road near Barnswallow’s pad. But that’s the thing with paranoia—you never know how much of it is well founded, particularly when you smoke a lot of weed. I learned to pay attention to these flights of fear, follow them to their logical—or illogical—conclusion, hunt down the dread, and ferret it out like a wild animal running loose in the attic of my brain.

  The deputies want nothing to do with me. They quickly turn away, glance down at their coffee, and pretend they have no idea who I am when I look over and nod. I take the cue and keep walking past their booth. At the door to the restroom, when I turn back to look, they are huddled in tense conversation.

  I stare at my face in the men’s room mirror. “Stratton,” I say to my reflection, “you are about to get popped.” Quickly, I go through my pockets, tear the slips of paper I have with phone numbers and records of the load into pieces, dump the bag of personal stash, and flush it all down the toilet.

  There is still a dusting of snow on the ground as I walk out of the restaurant, keep walking past the Toronado with the California plates, walk along the road and past the motel where I crashed the night before. I walk a mile up the highway to a shopping mall and into a drugstore where I know there are pay phones and a few video games in the back. Paranoia, paranoia, great destroyer, I say to myself when no army of agents leaps out of the shadows to pounce on me. Let me play a few games of Gorf, one of my favorite video games, call the farm in an hour or so, and have JD come over and pick me up. We’ll come back for the Toronado later. I’ll have him drive me to the airport, get out of town. Go to Spanish Wells in the Bahamas and hide out until things cool down.

  I am into my third or fourth game of Gorf, racking up one of my all-time high scores, with a few local kids standing around watching, when I look up and see them: DEA agents, maybe half a dozen of them, d
ressed like thugs, with their guns drawn. They swarm into the drugstore and make straight for where I stand. I take my hands from the video game controls and raise them above my head.

  “Richard Stratton! You’re under arrest!” says one of the agents.

  “Wow! Cool,” says a kid behind me.

  And then I recognize the DEA agent. It’s him, the blue-eyed waylaid traveler who was stuck in the ditch at the side of the road on fearless Fred Barnswallow’s hill. And now the fucker is pointing a gun at me.

  The federal agents hustle me outside and drive me to the local jail at the Farmington police station where I am locked up in a tiny, dark, filthy cell. I make my one phone call to my personal attorney, Channing Godfried. Since I bought out the horse farm we’ve become friends over the years. He now owns a farm near my place and lately he’s been acting as my counsel, dealing with an ongoing IRS investigation. When I reach him at his home in Cambridge, he tells me he will call a criminal defense lawyer he knows in Portland, Maine, and see what he can find out.

  What impresses me about being arrested is that it is exactly that—you are arrested, stopped in your tracks, locked up in a small space. You are no longer in control of where you go or what you do except within the confines of the cell and your body and mind. Life becomes at once remarkably simple, focused and internal. There is nothing I can do about whatever might be going on out there in the larger world. It is all happening right here in my head and in this dark, cramped space. I must hunker down, go within, and compose my mental and emotional attitude. Find my inner peace and dwell there. Keep telling myself I can handle this. They missed the load.

  The cell is so small I can barely sit down. The cops tell me they have been instructed to keep me isolated, and this cell, not much bigger than a phone booth, is all they have available. There is a clogged drain in the middle of the floor with what looks like puke and piss puddled around it. I dance from foot to foot for eight hours consoled by the thought, They missed the load.