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high field but there wasn’t ever time. He ought to park his car over on the Middle Road and cut through the woods on the back side of Preston Hatch’s property—either that or find some other way—but who cared. He hadn’t ever been caught and Creed hadn’t ever been caught running that old whiskey still out there either. History was on his side. History and habit and probably custom too.
    Up the hill he went and down a little tractor path that was more like a game trail than anything ever made by a man, and then on through a break in the barbed wire that passed for a gate. It sagged and it dripped rust. You could close it up if you had work gloves or if you didn’t mind bleeding to death or if your hands were made out of elephant hide like his uncles’, but he never bothered. He passed through it and walked another thirty yards in the low sun over fallow land. After a while he came to a little patch of woods. His uncle Creed’s old still was hidden in the middle of it and his own marijuana plants were set all about the perimeter where they could get sun. The marijuana competed with fiddleheads and poison ivy and Queen Anne’s lace and a million other kinds of underbrush that he didn’t know by name. It was a mixed blessing. Competition and concealment both. There was a time when he’d cunningly set the individual plants among the cornrows, hiding them in plain sight and thinking to put his uncles to work without their even knowing it, but the old men had surprised him and gotten up there with the harvester when he wasn’t looking. A season’s worth of grass, straight into the silo. He’d hoped the cows had enjoyed it. Since then he’d come to put his trust in nature. He made do without irrigation, contrary to the conventional wisdom, relying instead on a creek from up in the hills that fed this whole area and kept it all more or less green and yielded up this little copse of trees and brush. The creek ran over a couple of little waterfalls where he’d spent plenty of happy hours as a boy, and it still managed to bring him delight—if only indirectly—now that he’d put away childish things.
    It turned out the plants weren’t near ready yet, and he didn’t know whether to take that as an affront or a reprieve. He was prepared to begin trimming them and carrying them down to dry in the hayloft, and he was sure as hell eager to start turning his crop into cash, but on the other hand it was pushing nine o’clock and the air was still godawful hot and he was just plain beat from the overtime. How come the dope business was turning out to be so much like farming, anyhow?

    Vernon was on the porch, collapsed into a great big overstuffed chair. Damp clouds of cotton wadding leaked out of it along every seam as if something inside it had blown up. Vernon sat plucking little bits of the wadding with one hand, rolling them into little pellets between his thumb and forefinger and flicking them into the yard and then starting again. He’d been squinting into the failing sun and waiting for Tom to come down from the high field, down through the pasture and along the fence and into the barnyard where he might either turn toward the house or just get into his car and go. Finally he showed up. He came around the corner of the barn and turned into the yard and the old man spoke to him, his voice coming out with a deep and penetrating kind of squawk, like the voice of a crow slowed down. “Watch your step among them whirligigs,” he said.
    “I see them.”
    “You’re always in a hurry.”
    “I’m a busy man.”
    “I guess.”
    A light breeze had come up. It pulled the lace curtain out through the window and Vernon brushed it away from his face with one hand. The whirligigs in the yard veered as if they shared one mind among them, rotating to face away from the wind and begin their slow turning. Winged pigs and cows and horses. Chickens and geese and ducks. They creaked in the failing light and the sound of them