“…I froze. Sitting in the shade beside a gumtree only a dozen metres from where I was, there was a bloke wearing a camo jumper, with an Uzi in his lap. I backed up real slow and walked back to the house..”
Hitching north from Bairnsdale, I was picked up by a friendly bloke in a faded old Hiace. Gary gave me a cold can of coke out of his esky, and we talked a while about travel and women, (as you do).
“Don’t take this the wrong way” he said, “but I only got out of jail a few days ago”.
He looked a little anxious sharing this with me and I could see he wasn’t proud of what he’d just told me.
(Above: the POV from Gary’s passenger seat. Bairnsdale, Australia, 2007.)
“About 6 years ago,” Gary said, “I was having my afternoon tea beside the tractor and these two blokes drove up the driveway in a really flash four-by. I could tell they were city fellas ’cause they were dressed to the nines. My first thought was they were from the bank. The farm had been losing money for years and I was deep in debt. There were letters coming weekly at that time, telling me how much I owed and how deep the shit was getting round me. Well they introduced themselves and told me they wanted to rent some land, and if they could have a few minutes they reckoned they’d make me a good offer.”
Gary lit a cigarette.
“We went in the house and I gave the city boys a cup of tea and they sipped their tea and calmly told me they wanted to rent 10 acres of my land to grow marijuana. I wasn’t exactly shocked. This was near Griffith, and blokes have been growing weed there for yonks, but when they told me the dollars they were talking, that did make me sit up and pay attention. “You’ll get $14000 now. We’ll do everything, and you wont even know we’re there most of the time”, this fella says.
“We’ve studied your property and we’ll put our crop in the middle of the wooded section in the western valley. When we harvest it’ll all go out by night, nice and quiet, and you’ll get 140,000. Cash.” The bloke reached in his bag, and put a stack of money on my kitchen table.
“Thats the 14 grand” he says. “We’ll leave it with you, and if you decide to do business with us, it’s yours to keep.”
Gary flicked ash out the window of the van and looked across at me appealingly.
“He had me right then. I told him I’d think about it, but I knew I was sold. It was enough dough to get me out of trouble with the bank, and a bit to spare as well. Those fellas were pro’s, it was easy to see, and it was obvious they weren’t short of a buck. The 14 grand they left as a deposit went on credit card debts within 24 hours, and I made the call and did the deal.”
“So a week later a couple of shiny utes go up the drive and over the hill to the western valley. I left ’em alone, and got on with my business. I didn’t want to know any more about what they were doing than I had to. They were good as their word too, I hardly saw ’em. Every once in a while I’d see a ute coming and going, but other than that they might not have been there.
I only went over to the valley once to take a gander. It was about a month into the deal and I was starting to get used to the idea, and I was just plain curious. I took a long walk, telling myself I was checking fences, and I just happened to wind up in the western valley woodland. I saw from a distance they’d done it real smart. They had khaki camo nets stretched over the rows, and a whole system of hoses and sprinklers. I walked round the ridge of the hill on the northern side, admiring the smart way they’d set it up. When I was about 50 metres from the edge of the crop I froze. Sitting in the shade beside a gumtree only a dozen metres from where I was, there was a bloke wearing a camo jumper, with an Uzi in his lap. I backed up real slow and walked back to the house real quick. That was the last time I went over to the valley in my western paddock.”
Gary lit another cigarette and offered me the pack. I took one and lit it with his lighter.
“Two weeks after that half a dozen utes showed up one night. They harvested the crop, and they drove it out under tarps, and that night I was raided.”
Gary spat out the window of the van.
“Ten or fifteen federal coppers showed up about 1 am and kicked my front door in. They arrested me and turned the house upside down. They searched the property for days, but all they found was a lot of hose pipe and hessian. The well dressed fellas who’d done the deal with me and given me the deposit were nowhere near the place since the first day of course, and I never said a word about them to the coppers. Mate, those feds offered me all kinds of shit – immunity from prosecution, armed protection, broken arms, and holidays in fuckin’ Fiji, but I kept my mouth shut. In the end they threw the book at me and I got an 8 year stretch for conspiracy to produce narcotics or some shit.”
Gary took a deep breath and frowned sternly at the darkening road ahead.
“That was 5 years ago. I sucked up to the parole arseholes, and I’m out. All the time I been away I haven’t heard nothing from my business associates but the way I see it they owe me a hundred and forty grand, plus interest at market rate. I did a bit of asking around when I was inside, and when I got out I knew exactly how to track ’em down. The farm got sold from under me while I was away. The banks taken everything, and that money’s my chance to get back on my feet. Yesterday I finally got one of those city gents on the phone. He was real polite, and thanked me for keeping their names out of the court case. We set up a meeting for tomorrow afternoon in the city.”
There was a lengthy silence. Gary flicked his cigarette butt out the window of the truck.
“Jesus” I said. “what do you think’s going to happen?”
“Well, I reckon theyre gonna pay me”, Gary said. “They’re businessmen. I kept my end of the deal and I kept them out of jail.”
Gary looked over at me in the gathering gloom of the cabin and smiled hopefully.
“Be more trouble than it’s worth to kill me, I reckon”.
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