* * *
Marshall Ferguson and his friends kept getting together to play Diplomacy. They all had a better idea of what they were doing now than they had when Lucas’ father first brought the box out of the closet. Today, Austria-Hungary and Russia were ganging up on Turkey—if the Ottomans got loose, they had a way of metastasizing through the Mediterranean. Germany and France were trying to do the same number on England, which could be even more dangerous. But Marshall, who was playing perfidious Albion, talked Italy into stabbing France in the kidneys.
So he was doing all right for himself. Tim had Turkey this game. He found a way to save the sultan’s bacon that wasn’t in the rules. Just when things looked blackest, he pulled out a fat baggie of what looked like killer dope. Experiments immediately followed. It not only looked like killer dope, it was killer dope.
It was such killer dope, in fact, that everybody stopped caring about who wound up top dog in Europe. Marshall stopped caring about almost everything. Almost, but not quite. “Dude,” he said languidly, “where’d you score such righteous shit?”
Tim giggled. Giggling was a hazard with what they’d just smoked, but Marshall wanted to know. It wasn’t urgent—nothing was urgent, or would be for a while—but he did want to. When he asked again, Tim giggled some more.
“C’mon, man,” Marshall said. “Dope like this is hard to come by these days.” The supervolcano had done the same number on weed as it had on so many other cash crops. Climates that had been just right were suddenly too cold, and production in areas that went from too hot to just right hadn’t ramped up yet. So good dope was indeed hard to come by.
But that turned out not to be why Tim was giggling—or not the only reason, anyhow. He also wasn’t giggling just because he was stoned out of his tree, although he was. “You sure you want to know? You really, truly sure? Really-o, truly-o sure?”
“Talk, already.” Marshall would have got mad if it didn’t seem like too much trouble. “I don’t want the trailer. I want the fuckin’ movie.”
He set everybody laughing, Tim included. “Okay, okay,” Tim said. “Just remember, you asked for it. You wanna know where I got the shit? I got it from Darren Shitcabbage, man. How funny is that?”
Most of the erstwhile would-be masters of early twentieth-century Europe thought it was the funniest thing they’d heard in their entire lives, or at least since they got baked. Lucas damn near wet his pants, he thought it was so hysterical. “The chief’s kid, dealing dope?” he said. “Oh, wow! That is too much, I mean way too much.” He nudged Marshall. “How come you don’t do that?”
Marshall smoked dope. Marshall bought dope. It wasn’t as if he didn’t support his local dealers. But he’d never had the slightest urge to move into the supply end of the business. You started getting into heavy shit when you did that, and dealing with some highly unpleasant people. From what he knew about Chief Pitcavage’s son, Darren had himself a head start on that.
His old man wished he would have drawn his line closer to truth, justice, and the Drugs Are Wicked American Way. Marshall didn’t draw it there, no matter what his father wished. But he did draw a line. Darren Pitcavage didn’t seem to.
Marshall fired himself another fatty. If he got wasted enough, maybe he wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow. If he didn’t remember it, he wouldn’t have to figure out what to do about it, or whether to do anything at all about it.
He did remember. He’d known he would, no matter how much he smoked. You lost things for a while with weed—sometimes, anyway. But they mostly came back. He’d never been into drugs that bit chunks out of your life and swallowed them for good.
If he’d liked Darren Pitcavage better . . . If his father had liked Chief Pitcavage better . . . He still needed a couple more days to work up his nerve to go, “Dad?”
“What?” His father sounded distracted, and was—he was changing Deborah’s diaper.
“Um—you know I went to Lucas’ place over the weekend to play Diplomacy, right?”
“Yeah. How’d it go?” Dad had learned the game. He and Marshall sometimes played a cutthroat two-man version with a much newer copy of the game than the one Lucas’ dad had resurrected. Each of them controlled three countries, with weak sister Italy vacant. No real diplomacy in that variant, but it was great for testing board maneuvers.
“We, mm, kind of got sidetracked after a while. Tim—” Marshall had to stop while Dad snorted and snickered. Dad never had been able to take Tim seriously, not even for a minute. Licking his lips, Marshall made himself go on, “Tim brought out some weed, some fine weed, and—”