are always available. You know that.”
Millie nodded again and cleared their plates.
Although Dobbins was their given name, everyone in Pine Haven knew them as the Doobie Brothers. Two jokes rolled into one.
The “brothers” part started in junior high when Laurie decided just being gay wasn’t sufficient. She wanted to be flagrantly, outrageously super-butch, a style she first observed one summer at Topsail Beach where the bull dykes from Camp Lejeune paraded the sands in muscle shirts, hairy legs, and bad attitudes, and those ladies made a deep impression on the budding lesbian. For years afterward her mannish style was one of many ways she tormented her parents and martyred herself.
Although thank the sweet lord, that phase finally petered out and nowadays Laurie was all girly-girl again, smooth and feminine and lipsticked. Nevertheless that handle, “brothers,” stuck for good.
“Doobie” was easy. As kids Laurie and Webb consumed way more than their share of weed. But the label stuck for good shortly after their senior year. As a graduation gift Webb’s dad presented little Webb with a ten-acre parcel on the west end of the nine-hundred-acre Dobbins hog farm.
Webb Junior promptly plowed up a primo acre of his pineland and planted a hybrid ganja that was a cross between Afghan and Hindu Kush, known as Hog’s Breath, a name Webb considered so appropriate, it conferred virtual legality on his enterprise. The dense buds of Hog’s Breath were a beautiful dark green with bright orange hairs. The taste was cheddary and produced a tingly mind and body high. Damn good shit.
During that bountiful period, while Laurie handled distribution, catering mostly to military personnel at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, Webb Junior tended the plants, harvesting, cleaning, and bagging, and in his spare time he experimented with the horticultural aspects, playing around with sativa and indica hybrids to come up with better yields, greater bag appeal, and some seriously higher THC counts.
The Doobies were way ahead of their time. Now, a dozen years later, a new wave of cannabis barons were living large in high-rise office buildings in San Francisco and Denver. They underwrote state-of-the-art hydroponic farming operations and distribution networks that supplied hundreds of dispensaries with so many varieties of weed they had to keep adding pages to their Web sites to extoll all the medicinal and recreational virtues.
But being ahead of your time in the drug game wasn’t a healthy business strategy. Two years out of high school, the Doobie Brothers were keeping their profile low, their profits high, when one spring afternoon Webb’s daddy, suffering from early stage dementia or some damn shit, came riding out to Webb Junior’s operation unannounced with two DEA agents following in their Crown Vic. The senile fucker had turned in his son for reasons Webb Senior was forever at a loss to explain. Pure malice is what Webb always believed.
Webb was awarded an eighteen-month postgraduate scholarship at Wayne Correctional Center over in Goldsboro, a medium-security operation where he was treated to Narcotics Anonymous meetings three nights a week and a shitload of inspirational bullshit. And he met some mighty fine gentlemen in the facility, a few folks who were now his loyal customers.
Webb took the fall for Laurie, and to show her gratitude, his sister managed in the year and a half he was locked up to piss away their entire stash of dope and cash so that when Webb returned to civilian life, he had become, like his father and grandfather before him, nothing more than a simple hog farmer. Until a year ago.
When he and Laurie were getting up to leave the Happy Biscuit, Webb got another ring on his cell. He listened while they were walking out the door and said, “Be right there.”
“What is it?”
“Burkhart needs me,” he said. “He caught another spy.”
“Well, well,” she said. “Maybe we won’t need Cruz
Millie nodded again and cleared their plates.
Although Dobbins was their given name, everyone in Pine Haven knew them as the Doobie Brothers. Two jokes rolled into one.
The “brothers” part started in junior high when Laurie decided just being gay wasn’t sufficient. She wanted to be flagrantly, outrageously super-butch, a style she first observed one summer at Topsail Beach where the bull dykes from Camp Lejeune paraded the sands in muscle shirts, hairy legs, and bad attitudes, and those ladies made a deep impression on the budding lesbian. For years afterward her mannish style was one of many ways she tormented her parents and martyred herself.
Although thank the sweet lord, that phase finally petered out and nowadays Laurie was all girly-girl again, smooth and feminine and lipsticked. Nevertheless that handle, “brothers,” stuck for good.
“Doobie” was easy. As kids Laurie and Webb consumed way more than their share of weed. But the label stuck for good shortly after their senior year. As a graduation gift Webb’s dad presented little Webb with a ten-acre parcel on the west end of the nine-hundred-acre Dobbins hog farm.
Webb Junior promptly plowed up a primo acre of his pineland and planted a hybrid ganja that was a cross between Afghan and Hindu Kush, known as Hog’s Breath, a name Webb considered so appropriate, it conferred virtual legality on his enterprise. The dense buds of Hog’s Breath were a beautiful dark green with bright orange hairs. The taste was cheddary and produced a tingly mind and body high. Damn good shit.
During that bountiful period, while Laurie handled distribution, catering mostly to military personnel at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, Webb Junior tended the plants, harvesting, cleaning, and bagging, and in his spare time he experimented with the horticultural aspects, playing around with sativa and indica hybrids to come up with better yields, greater bag appeal, and some seriously higher THC counts.
The Doobies were way ahead of their time. Now, a dozen years later, a new wave of cannabis barons were living large in high-rise office buildings in San Francisco and Denver. They underwrote state-of-the-art hydroponic farming operations and distribution networks that supplied hundreds of dispensaries with so many varieties of weed they had to keep adding pages to their Web sites to extoll all the medicinal and recreational virtues.
But being ahead of your time in the drug game wasn’t a healthy business strategy. Two years out of high school, the Doobie Brothers were keeping their profile low, their profits high, when one spring afternoon Webb’s daddy, suffering from early stage dementia or some damn shit, came riding out to Webb Junior’s operation unannounced with two DEA agents following in their Crown Vic. The senile fucker had turned in his son for reasons Webb Senior was forever at a loss to explain. Pure malice is what Webb always believed.
Webb was awarded an eighteen-month postgraduate scholarship at Wayne Correctional Center over in Goldsboro, a medium-security operation where he was treated to Narcotics Anonymous meetings three nights a week and a shitload of inspirational bullshit. And he met some mighty fine gentlemen in the facility, a few folks who were now his loyal customers.
Webb took the fall for Laurie, and to show her gratitude, his sister managed in the year and a half he was locked up to piss away their entire stash of dope and cash so that when Webb returned to civilian life, he had become, like his father and grandfather before him, nothing more than a simple hog farmer. Until a year ago.
When he and Laurie were getting up to leave the Happy Biscuit, Webb got another ring on his cell. He listened while they were walking out the door and said, “Be right there.”
“What is it?”
“Burkhart needs me,” he said. “He caught another spy.”
“Well, well,” she said. “Maybe we won’t need Cruz
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