Land of the Lost and Found

Abstract

Land of the Lost and Found Jack Driscoll (bio) I'd estimate a couple-three years after the real estate venture went belly up was when we moved in. A tire iron instead of a front door key and the padlock so flimsy it popped on the first try, as if anxious to share in the trouble Sheila guaranteed was ours for the taking. I'd pledged better. Respectable full-time employment, health benefits, a 401(k). That life. Commonsense and better managed. Given that we'd been camping out in the van, and my wife of six years curling farther and farther away from me each night under the queen-size comforter, knees tight to her chest, our love life on hold. And Sheila not saying, "Goodnight." Not saying, "Sweet dreams," or "Tomorrow's another day," but rather, "Any freaking port in a storm, right, Fletch?" And her tone making clear that what we needed was a practical backup plan for a change, a shingled roof over our heads, and an actual doorway to step through together if there was any chance whatsoever of returning again to our happier selves. Annulment I'd heard of, but a reverse marriage? I swear to God that's how she phrased it after our eviction for back rent unpaid. And the pot plants—a thriving quarter-acre plot of them—suddenly pulverized worthless in the recent, deep-drench downpours. Rain and wind and hail straight out of the Bible, sideways chuting sheets of it unlike anything we'd ever endured out here on the far northern tip of nowhere. Had there been a creek or stream nearby, the house trailer would have lifted from its moorings like an ark and floated away. Amateur growers. First-timers in the medical marijuana trade, but Sheila with a green thumb and with our future pulsing dimmer with each passing day, I argued, "What's to lose? I mean, okay, so we're unlicensed, I get that part." I deemed it a minor technicality and a far cry from peddling meth or pilfered pharmaceuticals along the downtrodden, single stoplight towns that bordered us. [End Page 137] "Spare me," she said. "Never fails, does it? The crackpot theories, the bullshit rationale," though next thing I knew we'd started the plants from seeds in a makeshift atrium. They could have been anything—zinnias or sunflowers or even zucchini—and one late May morning on our hands and knees we patted the soil in the furrows around each spindly stem. One after the other, hour after hour and taking a break at the end of each row we'd ballpark our potential gross, not in joints or Ziploc ounces but in monster kilo multiples. We referred to it as our Field of Dreams, and agreed when the plants reached three feet and budding up we'd coast into our new lifestyle absent any stress or anxiety, and, first and foremost, we'd shit-can our grind-it-out, spirit-killing day jobs. Sheila from Bojack's Bar and Grill with its borderline starvation wages if you included the tips and subtracted the foot miles. And me, not a trained orderly but a janitor, scrubbing and then swabbing a mop back and forth across the shiny black and white checkerboard hallways of Mission Ridge, a rest home that specialized in advanced Alzheimer's care for widows and widowers. And where pet friendly meant being awakened most nights by the distant, forlorn choruses of coyotes. On any given shift, a sure bet that I'd be mistaken half a dozen times for someone's son or grandson or even their own fathers, at thirty-one, stopping by for a visit. We'd discussed having children—Sheila and me—and we followed the conversation forward: the names and nicknames we'd give them. Smart, ambitious kids who'd answer the call to scrap vocational for college prep and full-ride academic scholarships. Living proof that against the odds we'd raised them right. Our own flesh and blood living professional lives in exotic locales like Cincinnati or Chicago. Or maybe even Corpus Christi, Texas, where rumor had it you could make...