Excerpt from the novel:
The Year of the Mad Jag
By Jonathan Slator
Based on a true story
The first four chapters can be read, free of charge, for a short period, before it is released on Amazon, here: http://jonathanslator.com/the-year-of-the-mad-jag/.
Reviews appreciated.
The Year of the Mad Jag is a rollicking yarn about illegal marijuana growing in the counterculture of the 1970s—and it’s also an acutely observed account of a bemused, confused love triangle: three English people loosed into the hippie freedom of the desert Southwest, yawing between adventure and recklessness, love and irresolvable torment. In this extraordinary novel, Slator combines a poet’s gift for describing the natural world with a memoirist’s unsparing honesty in portraying the obsessions of lust and love.
— Allegra Huston, co-founder of the Imaginative Storm writing method and author of Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found
Here is the “Shantaram” of the American West. A gang of amateur crooks makes a chaotic foray into the dangerous world of cannabis growing and smuggling in the early eighties. At once lyrical and prosaic “The Year of the Mad Jag” is a nostalgic hymn to the aphrodisiacs of drugs, sex and criminality.”
—Alex Dryden, author of Death in Siberia.
1. Close Encounter
The last, moist tendrils from the forty thousand-foot tower of cumulonimbus settled on the top bills of the nests of notes set in the light of the juniper fire. A billion-kilowatt light show backlit the massive cloud as it toppled south, teasing the barren uplands with sparse showers. I cut a disk from the beef tenderloin on the grill, scooped the blackened onions from the skillet and while I ate pondered the fate of my companions, the ten thousand-dollar wads warming themselves beside the blaze.
At long fucking last we had some payback. Here was the first tangible evidence that this madcap wilderness cultivation blag might actually bear fruit; here finally was reward for the shoulder scarring carries of gear in the late winter; the staggering agony of schlepping the hundred-pound Briggs and Stratton pump through the desert mountain terrain; the nauseating paranoias that had dogged many waking and sleeping hours of the last eight months. Here at last was solid proof that we were about to make some serious coin. I settled back against the basalt, drew sparingly on a slender spliff of as fine a sinsemilla as was to be found, in those times, Arizona nineteen eighty, and allowed my mind to wander over the pleasures of spending the loot.
How much more could we realistically expect to get from the crop? After the usual culling of male plants and the attrition of deer, drought, molybdenum deficiency etc., we had brought to maturity seventy indica females and about seven hundred sativas. The indica had produced seventeen pounds of bud, which we had just sold for a tad over twenty-seven thousand dollars. Seventy divided by seventeen equals four and change, call it a quarter pound a plant. Down in the canyon the remaining sativa plants, by the same reckoning, would produce…. I wrestled with the math. Seven hundred by four equals- one hundred and seventy-five. One hundred and seventy-five pounds of killer grass at roughly eighteen hundred a pound. Good god! We were looking at making three hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, put fifteen aside for expenses leaves a hundred and fifty grand apiece, for Wiz and me each. Not bad!
Also, despite my misgivings about Dick the dealer’s character and dodgy reputation, he could probably move all our crop, given time. Of course, at that time, we had only an inkling of his troubles with his old lady and never expected his untimely kicking of the bucket. A few weeks after the indica deal that Dick was cooking up his free base when he and Kathy fell into one of those awful domestic arguments that escalate swiftly to vitriol. The pitch rose another notch and Kathy, fearing for her safety, ran out to their pick up. As she jumped in Dick ran from the house with his Magnum and lay on the bonnet pumping lead through the windscreen while Kathy screamed and hunched over the wheel and drove four blocks before she slammed to a halt and fell sobbing across the bench seat.
Dick’s body, mutilated, mangled and dismembered as a result of its peristaltic passage through a narrow sphincter framed by the undercarriage of a solidly forged American steel automobile and an asphalt road, was discovered by a resident taking his dog for an early morning crap. Wiz and I were out seven grand and change and we’d lost the best dealing contact we had.
But right now, I had some real cash and still eluded the law. Enough cash maybe, in that wonderfully unjust system of world justice and one particularly prevalent in the great and corrupt U.S. of A., enough dough to buy myself out of trouble should we get nabbed before the gig was done. I grabbed up three of the bundles of notes and skipped around the fire attempting a juggle but succeeded only, in my stoned and deliriously happy state, in dropping one into the embers. I collapsed in a fit of giggles, frantically brushing the sparks from my hard-earned lucre.
Next morning, I cocooned in my North Face down bag till the sun rose, brewed tea, packed leisurely, and strolled to the rim. The air was cerulean in the wake of the storm. In the Apache plumes on the canyon slope a covey of mountain chickadees whistled. Gliding effortlessly along the rim cliffs, a pair of ravens banked away with a startled cackle when they saw me, their plumage iridescent in the early light.
I down climbed the caprock cliff and made the gruelling descent of the fourteen hundred feet of basalt rocks that offered the only viable path into Mad Jag Canyon. I drank long from the creek. Then I began the familiar schlep downstream, as always hopping the boulders rather than walking the pleasanter sandy streamside areas so as to avoid leaving any footprints and thus being able to check for those of intruders. Occasionally I missed my step and turned back to sweep a track from the sand with a branch.
The familiar trail slipped by and after about half an hour I found myself at the junction of the main stream and the dry side canyon that gave a long tough hike to the more remote east rim. I dropped my pack and climbed up this east side route to a lookout. I sat there for perhaps twenty minutes, tuning in to the canyon sounds, scouring the rim for a glint of metal, listening intently for the sound of a motor, or worse yet the distant murmur of voices. All seemed well.
I found myself lured yet again into the simple mystery of this place. If there was a threat to our success in this escapade, I had always felt it came on the outside, on the highway or in town. Here in the bottom of this gorgeous canyon, where the company came in the form of a phainopepla singing from the mesquite, or the grasshoppers scratching a complaint of the heat I could not convince myself, or perhaps bear to think, that anything violent or arresting could occur.
It was this canyon and this country that had changed my life not the lust for money, nor the awkward camaraderie with Wiz, nor the fleshy and psychoactive delights of Jerome and its bohemian crowd. No, it was the recuperative and contemplative qualities of a lush streamside habitat and the gorgeous terrain of these dry, high plateaus that had made the deepest mark on me and had, in some vague, regressive fashion, rekindled values that my mum and dad had instilled in me during my childhood on the farm.
As I strolled back to the creek, I spotted the paw print and froze. We had seen the cat tracks several times during the year and heard the bone-chilling scream in the night. Though Wiz and Stilt had claimed the presence of the jaguar and had named their strain of grass after it I always allowed for some hyperbole on their part and reckoned the cat in our canyon was more likely a big tom cougar.
The first time we had hiked in to search out a new garden, we had had a terrifying encounter. Camped in a clearing, warming a can of beans over a small fire, we had been petrified by the ungodly shriek of a very large animal. Wiz had leaped to his feet brandishing a burning branch. “C’mon then you son of a bitch! Let’s see your ass!” I was caught in a paroxysm of both terror and mirth.
“What’s so goddamned funny? That jaguar could eat us alive.” The humour was scotched. I had researched the threats of this desert country before I committed to the project: bad-tempered rattlesnakes, jaw-grinding Gila monsters, lance-like agave, scorpions, tarantulas, bears, mountain lions. Despite Wiz’s claims to the contrary and his and Stilt’s story of their brush with a big cat I had never truly imagined we would have to contend with a jaguar, the largest cat in the Americas, an immensely powerful beast capable of pulling down a healthy steer.
“Jesus Christ. I thought you guys were joking about the Mad Jag. I thought there were no jaguars left in the States. They’re all south of the line…. Aren’t they?’ I had added hopefully.
“No. They’ve sighted them recently in the Peloncillos and also in the Chiricahuas. This one may have wandered up here many years ago and been unable to get back south. Trapped by the expansion of Phoenix.”
I stooped to examine the huge paw-print. It was about the size of my hand when I bent my fingers a touch. The track was fresh, the edges of the front toe pads crisp. I was no Tonto, but I reckoned the creature had passed through that day, maybe within a few hours, and was certainly in some part of our canyon at that very moment.
What exactly I intended to do if confronted by this enormous predator I really didn’t have an ‘effin’ clue. The advice on the National Forestry notice boards for encounters with mountain lions offered some crap about making yourself as large as you could, waving your arms and shouting. That might cut the mustard with a cougar, the biggest of which might top a hundred and fifty pounds whereas the jaguar could reach three hundred, a heavyweight compared to his welterweight cousin.
I spotted three more paw-prints as I rock-hopped the familiar terrain. This was usually my favorite part of the journey. Deep in our own canyon, half a day’s hike from the nearest road, in the best shape of my life and with my knowledge of the lay of the land I figured I was quids ahead of any agency man if he tried to feel my collar.
We’d always considered our best chance was to “book,” to use my partner’s colloquialism. We had explored all the possible exits from the canyon and although the few we’d found required some brutal scrambling and scary free soloing through the caprock, we fancied our chances to shake off any would-be captors on such a climb.
As I neared the garden an extra degree of caution crept into my step. The stream was squeezed into a ravine here, leaving a couple of sandy beaches where we’d had to lob in some stepping-stones to avoid leaving prints. But the cat had no such concerns and had left a dozen crystal clear tracks on the beach. My high spirits since the deal the night before were elbowed away by the old fears on approaching the plants and the presence of this huge cat. I sat and pondered and listened.
The garden was just a couple of hundred yards downstream. If we’d been discovered, the agency men were probably crouching in cover close at hand. This was the spot where I always forced myself to wait. I slipped the shoulder straps from the pack and settled in.
Fifteen minutes is a long time to sit still when your nerves are on edge but I made myself do it. I checked my watch and was about to move on when a movement at the top of the outcrop had my head whipping up and my heart pounding. In that hideous interval between the sighting and the recognition I had to fight the urge to run headlong. Then I saw the great head of the jaguar swing towards me and a wave of relief and terror and delight swept through me.
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