In this story a couple teenagers search out psilocybin mushrooms in a north Florida cow pasture. Danger hovers over this story. If you’ve never heard stories about novice mushroom hunters getting sick, just Google that. Then there’s the threat of suicide hanging over Felix’s father, and the guilt that that instills in Felix.
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“Do they even have cows in Florida?” asked Felix, looking out the passenger window as if he might see one in the pitch darkness. “I don’t remember cows in Florida, and I’ve made a few trips over the years.”
They weren’t actually in Florida yet; they were still well north of the state line, having just passed through Hazlehurst, where they had stopped at a Waffle House. The food hadn’t been very good, but then it hadn’t been bad either. That was the thing about Waffle House: It was consistently cheap and mediocre. Except when you went at the end of an evening of drinking—then it had the potential to be great. The food was hotter, the waitresses prettier. You might even wonder who had come up with the brilliant idea to scatter the hash browns and then cover them with a slice of American cheese. That was how Felix always got them. And then you might wonder out loud whether or not scattering, in the food-skillet context, was a Southernism. Like “fixing” to do something. As in, “I’m fixing to scatter some hash browns,” a phrase you might actually hear while dining at Waffle House. Then some smartass like Drew might remind you that you’d already extolled the virtues of Waffle House’s unique and certainly patented hash-browning process a week ago or something and tell you to shut up, in a friendly kind of way.
But tonight the grits were lumpy, the eggs were cold, and an ornery guy with a mustache and a mullet took their order. And Drew was locked up at a penal farm in Bumfuck, Wyoming. Still, the meal had been cheap, even with a generous tip. Charles usually left an extra couple of dollars as they got up to leave. He imagined every waitress a single mom with a lousy ex-husband who might watch the kid every now and again while she worked, but rarely, if ever, wrote a check for child support. Charles had watched a lot of Alice reruns growing up.
“The book says that—”
“Charles, who wrote it, some burned-out hippie who doesn’t know a cow from a, well,… something really different from a cow?”
“I can’t remember. It’s on the floor somewhere. You might be stepping on it…”
Strangers often mistook Charles’s sincerity for sarcasm, but Felix knew better. Still, he chose to ignore him and continue with his rant: “Anyway, what’s the difference between north Florida and south Georgia? Can’t we just find some south Georgia cow shit?”
“Did you find the book?”
“I was kinda kidding. Do you really want me to find out who wrote it?”
“Nah, that’s okay,” said Charles sheepishly.
“A cow and a chipmunk,” Felix continued after a while. Considering the comparison, he curled his face up like he’d just taken a swig of sour milk. “It’s just not the punch I was going for,” he boxed the air in front of him for emphasis. “Don’t you hate it when it takes too long to come up with the snappy thing to say, and then by the time you think of something it sounds worse than if you’d just dropped it completely?”
Felix knew he’d already lost his audience. He had come to expect people to zone him out when he started in on one of his manic digressions. He even got sick of listening to himself sometimes. But it was like a virus that had to run its course.
“And whoever it is you’re talking to—like, in this case that would be you,” he dropped both palms out in Charles’s direction as if he had just conjured his friend out of thin air and was eliciting applause from an imaginary audience. “Whoever it is by that point has no idea what you’re even talking about. Which is fine in this case because I can assume that you stopped paying attention a while ago,” he concluded, trying, out of habit, to salvage some shred of dignity by illustrating a degree of self-awareness. Having reached an end, however unsatisfying, he relaxed his muscles, sank into the seat, and lit a cigarette, relishing the silence.
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“Okay, that was definitely a cow,” said Felix, rolling his window down and inhaling a lungful of wind. “It even smells like Florida. Come on, what’s the difference?”
“The pasture I have directions to is near Jacksonville,” Charles argued feebly.
“And you got them from, what, the back of a comic book? It’s probably a setup. Those fields are probably monitored. Plus, look, it’s, what is it?” Felix tilted his watch toward the dash lights. “Christ, it’s almost three. When did your mom want you home?”
“We’re taking birthday lunch to my grandmother. She turned eighty-six on Tuesday.”
“If we turned around now we might make it back in time, but Jacksonville’s at least another hour and a half away.”
“Did you really see cows?” Charles asked, taking his foot off the gas and easing his right wheels onto the soft shoulder. “It smells like it just rained—the book says that’s good.”
Felix was spending the night at Charles’s house, and Charles, in turn, was staying with Felix. They had pulled this one before and knew that the scheme only worked if they could count on two things. The first was that Charles’s folks not call Felix’s house to check up on him. This didn’t used to be a problem because they had always trusted their son implicitly. But even the Waxmans became a little wary after Drew was shipped off. More than two squeaky-clean months had passed since then, though, and suspicions seemed to have waned. The second thing they counted on for the plan to work was, of course, that Felix’s father not call Charles’s house, either. This one was easier. Mr. Lowell didn’t really have an opinion one way or another on the issue of trusting his son. If Felix said he was staying somewhere else, that was the end of it. But it wasn’t a matter of trust. It had more to do with the fact that he had never completely recovered his will to live since Felix’s mom died. When faced with a question of parental procedure, it was as if he consulted an encyclopedia of fifties sitcoms—asked himself, “What would Ward do?”—and acted accordingly. If the Beav said he was staying at Whitey’s, then the parental switch was set on cruise control for the evening and he went about whatever it was he did when Felix wasn’t around. Felix imagined this entailed a lot of time seated alone at the kitchen table, brooding. And there was, in fact, a historical precedent.
One night some years ago, Felix had gone to a movie with Drew’s family. They dropped him back home afterward, and when he came through the back door, he found his father snoring face down at the head of the breakfast table, a near-empty bottle of bourbon a few inches from his right ear. He had never seen his father drunk, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. He turned and ran out into the driveway, but the station wagon’s tail lights were already retreating up the street. He slunk back inside and eased the door shut behind him.
With a wary eye on his father’s bowed head, he crept across the kitchen, but stopped just short of freedom, the knob of the hall door already twisted in his hand. Leaning in the corner, half-hidden by the TV stand, was his grandfather’s shotgun. He had seen the thing only once, a couple of years earlier. In a rare moment of parental engagement, his father had retrieved the gun from the back of his closet, ceremoniously pulled it from its padded leather sheath, and held it for Felix to see, explaining its history and using the opportunity to impress upon his son the grave and potential hazards of firearms.
The shotgun’s encore appearance that night, in conjunction with the bourbon and the snoring, startled the eleven-year-old Felix, so that he let go of the twisted knob, which clanged just loud enough to disturb his father’s drunken slumber. He jerked his head up a few inches off the table, concurrently sucking in a rush of air. His head then floated the rest of the way up and his eyes strained to focus on Felix.
“When’d you get home?” he said, blinking with confusion.
“Just now,” Felix muttered, surprised he could find any words at all.
Mr. Lowell rubbed his eyes with his palms: “I thought you were staying with the Pittses.” He looked up just in time to catch Felix looking toward the TV. He didn’t hear anything, but nonetheless turned toward the set. “Oh Christ,” he said, half to himself, seeing the gun. He squeezed his eyes shut and scratched the top of his head to stall.
Felix fought the urge to flee, and a long ten seconds later, his father reopened his eyes and spoke: “I thought I heard a burglar a little while ago.” He turned toward the window as if the imaginary prowler might still be afoot. Ignoring the bottle under his nose, he continued: “Turns out it was just the Feltons’ dog. I wish they would keep that thing in their yard.” He glanced at Felix to see if he was buying the story. “Scared me half to death.”
Felix regarded his father. “I’m gonna go up to bed then, if everything’s okay.”
“I couldn’t even find the shells, so good thing it wasn’t a burglar,” his father added.
“Yeah, good thing—well, I’m going to bed,” said Felix, hurrying through the doorway.
He forced a casual gait through the living room, then broke into a sprint up the stairs and down the hall to the relative safety of his bedroom.
He spent the rest of the night half awake, waiting for a gun blast that mercifully never came. When he walked into the kitchen the next morning, he found his father reading the paper and sipping a cup of coffee. The gun and the bottle and any other evidence of the previous evening were gone, and neither of them ever mentioned it again.
It wasn’t until ninth grade that Felix voluntarily spent another night away from home, and even then he was half prepared to find some grisly scene when he got home the next day. He still suffered pangs of guilt when he stayed away overnight. It seemed somehow irresponsible. And on nights like this one, the added factor of deception only compounded his guilt.
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“This is what we’re looking for,” Charles held a paperback open under the weak dome light, tilted so that Felix could see. Three quarters of the right page was taken up by a field shot of the coveted Psilocybe cubensis, one of a number of psychoactive mushrooms. Four or five fleshy stems emerged from fissures in a pile of cow dung, each crowned with a brownish cap. The tawdry light of a camera’s flash made it look like a crime scene. An unsmoked cigarette had been placed next to the specimens for scale.
“Christ, it looks like alien pornography. I guess the cigarette’s for after,” said Felix, pulling one from his breast pocket. “Do we sterilize these things before eat em?” he continued, the unlit cigarette clinched between his teeth. “It seems like a good way to get sick or catch worms or something.”
“We can make tea. That way the boiling water will kill some of the bacteria. But first we have to find some.”
“And what do we do if a cop happens by?”
“I was thinking we could just say we’re working on a biology project,” Charles replied in all sincerity, as if this explanation would certainly send a police officer on his merry way, leaving a couple of minors roaming around a stranger’s cow pasture in the middle of the night, two hundred miles from home.
“Yeah, that should do it,” said Felix with a nervous laugh. Shaking his head, he stepped out of the car to wait for Charles in the cool breeze of the sub-tropic winter.
Charles came around the car and squatted beside the rear tire to check for the silhouettes of cows against the horizon. Besides fence posts, there wasn’t anything taller than the grass.
Climbing through the fence, they made their way into the pasture. The tall shoots of grass painted lines of dew on the thighs of their jeans as they ventured farther and farther from the car. Once their eyes adjusted to the starlight, they were able to locate manure clusters by the indentions in the grass, without the aid of the flashlight, thus minimizing their chances of getting caught. They split up to cover more ground.
After a few minutes, Felix heard Charles call his name. He scanned the horizon, and on his second pass he saw a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. He trained his gaze on the general area, and after a few seconds there was another flash. It looked like a mortar shell exploding on the horizon. Or maybe some heat lightning. Apparently Charles was trying to create a beacon. He walked in the direction of the light until he heard Charles’s voice again and saw his arms waving against the sky: “Felix, over here.”
“Ah, Christ,” said Felix under his breath, some ten feet short of where Charles was waiting. “If that’s a bust we can always check the bottom of my shoe,” he announced. “I’ve had, like, three consecutive direct hits.”
Charles was kneeling on the edge of a small stand of trees in the middle of the field. As Felix approached, he clicked on the flashlight again and cupped it in his hands to narrow the beam. In front of him was a generous pile of cow dung, but nothing that looked like a mushroom.
“There’s not exactly a shortage of cow shit in this field, Charles. I thought you’d found mushrooms.”
“I did, look.” He opened the aperture of his palms a bit wider and aimed the beam at the gnarled roots of a tree a few feet away, where a cluster of mushrooms rose up.
“I thought they were supposed to grow in the cow shit,” said Felix.
“Look, there’s dung right there. And they totally look like the ones in the book.”
Charles slowly stretched his hand out toward the fragile fungi like he was afraid of being shocked. He plucked the biggest one and held it in the light between his thumb and forefinger.
“If you say so,” said Felix. “Pick em and let’s get out of here. We need to get back.”
Charles produced an oversized brown prescription bottle from the pocket of his jacket and gingerly placed the specimen inside. “We have lift off.”
“Okay, dork. Come on, get the rest of them so we can put out the light.”
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