A Whiff of Something Terrible

It was nearly one in the afternoon when Tom Percival arrived home in a flurry of snow. He stomped an icy crust off his boots and stepped into the kitchen.

A pile of mail awaited him on the kitchen table. He sorted through it, noting the many envelopes from the power company and the bank to which he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. A few bad harvests had been all it took. Tom could not stand the thought of looking his palsied son in the eye and telling him he had failed to secure any new deals to keep the farm afloat. Without the farm, they would be penniless. Chad’s disability payments wouldn’t count for much, and Tom would have to adapt to other jobs at sixty-two years of age.

He finished sorting two separate piles on the table and noticed a brown paper box addressed to Chad Percival. He ignored it for now. He strolled to the window looking out on the frozen pond and took a moment to steel himself.

“Chad, I’m home.”

His words came out as mist. He checked the thermostat. It had been set twenty degrees lower than usual.

“Chad?”

Nobody answered. Tom climbed the staircase. The upper floor was gray from the blizzard outside. Chad’s door stood ajar. His room looked the same as the last time he’d been in it. The bed was unmade, the floor bare, and Chad’s anticonvulsant medications lay scattered across his desk.

He’s in the barn. Has to be.

Tom would sometimes catch Chad in the old barn, loitering among the stray straws as if he was thinking about how to remodel the building.

He returned downstairs and went out the back door. The blizzard hit him in full force again. Tom swept up his hood and trudged towards the ghostly shape in the distance.

The barn had been in the Percival family for two decades. The snow hid its age, yet he could see the red paint flaking off in some spots and the overhang warping under a thick layer of snow. He had fantasized about replacing it with a steel barn painted the same fire-engine red, long before the debt encroached on his mind. In his happier thoughts, after clearing the debt, he’d reach out to his younger son Logan again and get him to come back and work on the farm. Logan deserves to inherit, and Tom wouldn’t let a misunderstanding get in the way of that.

He undid the latch on the main door and yanked it open. A wall of bright warmth washed over him like a tsunami, along with an earthly, pungent odor. He knew that smell even before his eyes adjusted and the first plant came into focus, basking in a pool of intense light from the rafters.

Marijuana.

Tom stepped into the warm embrace of the barn, his mouth open. The plants came up to his chin. They stood in military ranks of ten each, lit by miniature suns that flooded the interior in yellowish light. The plants seemed to glow a poisonous green.

Behind him, the wind howled and slammed the barn door open so it rapped rhythmically on the wall. Somewhere in the fifth row, Chad struggled to his feet, his bad arm spasming.

“Close the door behind you. The plants don’t like being cold.”

Tom bristled. *Now he’s ordering me around on my own property. The nerve.*

He rounded a soil bed and strode to Chad, getting into his face.

“Why are you *doing* this?”

“Saving the farm.”

“This is illegal!”

“Not for much longer.”

“Don’t be flippant with me, son. You know better. You could go to prison and *I* could lose this farm because this is in my barn! What were you thinking?”

Chad didn’t bat an eye. “How did your deals go?”

“How dare you. I want you out of here by the end of the month. I will not have a criminal living under my roof!”

“As opposed to being a fraudster?”

This stopped Tom cold. “Excuse me?”

“I have evidence of the fraudulent information in the application you sent to the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Trying to get an insurance payment you don’t deserve? You could get thirty years in federal prison for this, you know.”

Tom took a moment to collect himself. “Whatever I do, I do for this family.”

“Including crime. Got it.”

“You have no idea what’s in store for you if we lose the farm.”

“I probably do. That’s why I started this operation.”

Tom scoffed. He resisted the urge to wrinkle his nose. He wasn’t sure what was getting to him more, the smell or Chad’s sudden defiance.

He’s bluffing. He has to be. But he didn’t dare call it.

“I will give you a week to remove all of this from here. I’m sure you can manage…” Tom glanced pointedly at his son’s crooked arm. “You are putting us in an even worse position.”

Tom didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and stalked away. He pretended not to hear Chad shouting.

“Think on it. And close the door behind you!”

Tom pulled his coat tighter against the blizzard.

Let him close it himself.

***

They spent the rest of the day without speaking. After these back-to-back revelations of an illicit weed farm and his own fraud, Tom did not want to antagonize Chad any further. Tom retreated to his computer, researching his legal situation in quiet desperation. It did nothing but confirm his fears.

He was in deep shit, more so than his son would ever be.

He thought about calling his attorney, but quashed that thought almost immediately. He would have to reveal his fraud. And the FCIC website did not allow his insurance application to be withdrawn.

Tom sat in his office, pondering how things had gotten so wrong.

***

Sometime after five, Chad made dinner. They ate in silence, not meeting each other’s eyes. After he polished off the last of his food, Tom glared at his son. The brown box was still on the table, lying next to Chad.

“What’s in the box? More weed seeds?” Tom asked.

Chad swallowed. “Let’s hold that for now. I still want to talk about my operation.”

Tom sighed.

“First off, I paid these bills already. They don’t really care where the money comes from.”

“Is this why you turned the heat down?”

“High intensity lights take a lot of energy. I had no choice.”

“How did you afford all this?”

“My disability payments. I started small, saved my way up until I could cover the initial capital costs. Including the energy bills.”

“How long did it take you?”

“The last five years. Since the first crop went bad.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“You haven’t talked about your deals. I take it they didn’t go through?”

For a moment, Tom didn’t answer. He tipped his chin down and shook his head.

“This is good for us,” Chad said, gesturing in the barn’s direction with his good arm.

“How? I’ve always produced food. Real food that real people need. Not this feel-good shit. And I don’t believe you did this by yourself. You had friends helping you, which means they were trespassing on my property!”

Chad grimaced. “I took a hit once, the last time you were away. It made my spasm pains disappear for a while.”

His grimace turned into a glare. “In fact… it calmed down my spasms *and* my seizures. How do you think I was able to do so much work by myself? Because my friends gave some to me! And when I was doing it, I kept remembering what you said to me long ago, when I was getting passed over for jobs., and you refused to get off my ass. ‘Not economically viable’. Remember that? And today, when you saw my ability to help save this farm, you wanted to throw me out. Huh? What’s up with you?”

Tom dodged the last question and countered with his own. “How did you find out?”

“I wanted to learn how to run a weed farm, so I thought going through your books would be educational. You didn’t hide your false numbers very well.”

“How do you imagine you’ll save the farm with this?”

“High quality weed costs two to four hundred dollars an ounce. I already have a distributor network in three states. A ten-light growing area such as our barn can get a profit well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, for a modest investment. And the market for it keeps getting bigger.”

Tom shook his head. “I won’t help other people destroy their minds and their lives.”

“At least weed’s honest work. You can help me with it. Or…”

“Or what?” Tom spat. “Go on, say it.”

Chad pursued his lips. Tom smirked.

“Yeah, you don’t dare admit you’re blackmailing me. Because that’s illegal too.”

“Good luck proving that.”

They glared at each other. Finally, Chad broke the silence.

“What do you have to lose? Other than your freedom?”

“Plenty. My self-respect. I won’t let myself be pushed around.”

“Please. You’ve been pushed around for as long as I remember. By the banks. By the agricultural machine builders. And you took it out on me. Now I’d like to renegotiate our relationship.”

Tom felt himself slump in his seat. Chad’s phone rang. He pulled it out and looked at it, a smile slowly spreading across his face.

“Oh, joy. The state just legalized marijuana.”

Chad slid his phone towards his father. Tom could only look at it listlessly.

“Fine, you win. I’ll just have to get over my hangups.”

It was Chad’s turn to smirk, even though there was genuine joy in his eyes. “Think of this as a new start. This could be the beginning of a beautiful partnership.”

With that, he opened the brown box and lifted out a sumptuous chocolate cake.

They ate a few slices in silence. It took a moment for Tom to notice that Chad’s arm wasn’t spasming as much.

***

Tom’s heart wasn’t in it.

It had taken only a few days before he silently called it quits. He not only hated the smell of weed, he resented his son for trapping him. And the debts crept ever closer, a tightening wall in his mind. He did not believe that weed would pay them off in time.

In the wan light of dawn, before his son’s alarm clock buzzed,Tom hauled a suitcase into the cab of his pickup truck. He took a gas can from Chad’s generator stockpile and siphoned it into his tank.

Tom got behind the wheel . As the engine turned over, he gave the farm a last look. The house was dark. Yellowish light emanated from cracks in the barn.

He circled the frozen pond on his way out. The winter landscape was calm, the sky a clear opalescent. The road was covered in snow, but hard-packed from the passage of other vehicles. The only intersection in town kept a steady green light at this hour, so he had an easy time sneaking out.

He kept driving.