We entered the grow room and immediately Roger's face lit up, after two weeks the seeds had finally germinated.
" Thank Christ Funnie! I was starting to worry!" Roger strolled over to adjust the lights on the seeds and inspect them.
" How long does it usually take?" I asked fishing in my pocket for my cigarettes.
" A few days, these seeds weren't cheap either, so I've been shitting enough bricks to build a church." I rarely saw him happier than when he was growing weed. It seemed to bring out a fatherly, nurturing aspect of his personality that didn't seem to exist outside of a grow room. Curiously, his poison of choice was cocaine and not weed, which he only occasionally smoked. I, on the other had, was the opposite. As much as I loved pony I tried to limit my usage of it as much as possible, I was all about the skunk most of the time. I strolled over to the grow bed to inspect the seeds for myself. They had cracked open and produced what looked like little white tails. They almost looked like gigantic motionless sperm. Roger was smiling ear to ear, like he was looking at a batch of newborn babies. I however, was relatively unimpressed.
" Jeez, they don't look much different Roger." I remarked.
" Are you crazy Funnie? They've sprouted!" He smiled and gestured towards the seeds, as if I was going to suddenly see them in a different way. I lit my smoke and looked at them again and shrugged my shoulders. On seeing my reaction, Roger's face dropped and he began to scowl. " What were you fucking expecting!? Full grown fucking weed plants in two weeks?"
" Well, no. But.." I hesitated.
" But what? You know how hard it was to get all of this together?" He questioned angrily pointing his finger in my face.
" Well yeah I do! We did it together! Did you forget?" I said defensively.
" Bah! You don't know shit about growing weed Funnie, yeah you helped out here and there, but if you were in charge we'd still have fucking seeds!"
" They don't look that much different than seeds at the moment to me Roger." I said smiling cockily.
" You take that back." He said deathly serious. I genuinely thought he might clock me one over his lousy sperm seeds. We looked each other dead in the eyes, until eventually I relented.
" Fine, I take it back. Sorry I didn't realise you were so sensitive about your funky seeds Roger!" He twisted up his face at my half apology, he seemed to consider still hitting me before he said.
" Well, you should be sorry, there's a lot of money to be made." He turned away from me to look at the plants again, toying with one the lights. He seemed solemn, like the comments about the seeds had genuinely hurt his feelings. Even though he would never under any circumstances admit that. Eventually he said without looking at me.
" Come here and I'll show you what do if I'm not around next week." I strolled over to look at the seeds and he began explain. " Ok, so at the moment the most important thing is the light. If everything goes right they should grow everyday. So you should move the light close to the seeds and move it further away slightly if they grow too close."
" Why?"
" Because, we don't want these fuckers growing too big."
" So, let me get this straight, you're trying to make the weed smaller?" I asked jokingly.
" Have you seen the size of this room Funnie? Weed grows to extraordinary heights unless you do it properly. This is a fucking shoebox!"
" Oh, I get you." I said feeling a little green.
" We'll have to fill those barrels over there with water." Roger announced crossing the room to some gigantic blue plastic containers.
" Are we going to change the water?"
" Yeah but not today, we gotta age the water for three to four days."
" Why?" I asked again. I was kind of pissed off at Roger for berating me earlier, since Skeeter killed himself I had developed a bit of a nasty streak. When Roger pissed me off I liked to question him until we arrived at the limit of his logic.
" Because we need to." Said Roger not really understanding what I was confused about.
" Oh yeah, sure we need to. But why do we need to?" I asked, acting as if I genuinely cared to hear an explanation and not just fuck with his head. Roger was losing his patience fast.
" What do you mean WHY!? That's the next step, that's part of it!" Roger answered becoming visibly frustrated. Roger was somewhat of an enigma. He sucked at school and I suspect that he had some form of learning disability with words and numbers. However, he was incredibly practical and seemed to learn from doing or trial and error. He was widely knowledgeable on subjects that he was interested in, but piss poor at anything he wasn't. He never seemed to make mistakes with money and if someone owed him money or shortchanged him he knew all about it. He confided to me once that when he was younger his teacher suggested that he be tested for dyslexia and learning difficulties. His mother however, objected to this, saying:
" My baby ain't gonna be in no retard class."
And so it was that Roger scraped his way through the education system, being held back once or twice and picking up what knowledge he could. I had come to the conclusion that if he had had some kind of help when he was younger, he would have been at least as good as me or even Chalky Studebaker at most things. The truth was that Roger was great at growing weed, but only because his uncle in Florida had taught him by doing. Roger really didn't have a clue WHY everything worked. He just followed the steps to a T. He didn't know fuck all about, hydrogen, nitrogen, nutrition, THC levels or half of HOW what he was doing resulted in good weed. He just knew what to do and what not to do.
" Yeah ok, but why-"
" -Why is the sky blue!? Who fucking cares!? Let's just get this done!" Roger grabbed one the barrels brought it outside. I could have kept going but I decided against it. Push him too far and we might end up with a fist fight.
Filling up the barrels was a tedious task. Mr. Studebaker must have had the most low pressure hose in the whole of Bulffington. This was the place where he usually ambushed us to spout his political views, one would think that he changed the pressure on the hose on purpose, and I didn't entirely doubt it. Of course today was no exception. Mr. Studebaker appeared in the back yard carrying a wooden crate, a large bag full of empty beer cans and bottles and of course a rifle.
" How's the work boys?" He asked dropping the crate and the bag.
" It's getting there Mr. Studebaker." I replied politely. He began to line up the bottles and cans on the crate.
" Well, speaking of weed..." He began. Roger Cursed under his breath and tightened his fist slightly. He was well aware that Studebaker was a liability. He liked to hear himself talk and he talked a hell of a lot. Roger was constantly worried he would spill the beans about the grow room or just or just be overheard by someone while he giving one of crazy-ass spiels.
" ... It reminds me of something that my dad used to say to me, he said, boy the government is like garden, every so often you gotta get in there and weed that son of a bitch." He walked back a few paces and took the safety off his gun, and began to aim at the bottles and cans.
" I never really understood what it meant until I got older." He discharged and shattered one the bottles. " You catch my drift boys?" He turned back to look at us. I hoped to god that the pressure of the hose would magically increase and the barrels would fill quickly. However, it seemed that my prayers went unanswered.
" There sure are a lot of weeds in the government Mr. Studebaker." Roger said in a way that was like prostitute telling her trick that he was biggest she ever had, completely disingenuous but sickly sweet. We had agreed the best policy was to just agree to whatever bullshit Studebaker came out with while avoiding giving our own opinions or keeping the conversation going until he got bored or was satisfied that he had dispensed some wisdom and fucked off.
He fired again, this time sending one of the cans spinning and flying off. He lowered the rifle and nodded. As if congratulating himself.
" Doug..." He began again. I rolled my eyes internally.
" Yes, Mr. Studebaker?" I asked trying not to sound reluctant to do so.
"... Didn't you used to have a dog?" He asked squinting and aiming at his next victim.
" I still have a dog, Mr. Studebaker." He fired this time missing. He lowered the gun with a puzzled expression on his face.
" Really? I haven't seen you around Bluffington with it at all, I just thought it odd because I used to see you with it all the time." He took another shot this time hitting his mark.
" Yeah, well to be honest Mr. Studebaker, he hasn't been the same since we got him fixed."
" Porkchop got the chop?" He said with a wry smile escaping out the corner of his unkempt beard.
" Unfortunately yes." I smiled, but it was one of those smiles that had motherfucker written on it. I had always been opposed to getting Porkchop neutered. It was something that my parents had always intended to do but never quite got around to. They had brought up the fact that it was eventually going to happen several times in the past but I either protested or didn't take them seriously. They managed to sneak it in shortly after Skeeter's suicide, at a time where I gave even less of a fuck about anything than I do now. When you don't leave your room for about a week and when you finally do you walk around in shock like a zombie for a month and a half, you tend not to notice that your dog has been fixed. And when you do you don't actually care.
" Sorry, I don't mean to rub salt in the wound Doug." Mr. Studebaker said after the fact.
" No, it's fine Mr. Studebaker." I said with mental images of grabbing his rifle and making him eat it. Roger was messing around on his phone, obviously grateful that I was the focus of Studebaker's attention and not him.
" Yeah, when I was about your age something similar happened, well, quite worse actually. I had a husky, Boba, God I loved that dog. We were literally inseparable since I was four years old." He shattered another bottle. " One day the old man took her out back and shot her. Rabies. I think I was twenty eight before I forgave him for that. I just couldn't understand that when a dog is sick that the kindest thing to do is put it out of it's misery." He was almost eloquent. " Yeah, that's something that I understand very well nowadays." He shot the final can. " There's a lot of sick dogs in this country of ours boys." Any sympathy I had for him was immediately lost. " And they need to be put down." Not only had he managed to force the anecdote, which had clearly been rehearsed, he had also cast away any doubt that it was completely made up. If we had been able to fill the barrels with Studebaker's bullshit we would've got the job done in no time