Prime Slime
Chapter 15: Southern Discomfort

On the way back to New Jersey, Cal Radi didn’t utter a word. George, on the other hand, could not stop talking:

“I knew it! There’s germs out there that could cripple agriculture as we know it! Sooner or later, it’s gonna hit us hard.

“It’s the ‘great correction’ for the harm we’ve done to nature!

“There’s no doubt anymore! Organic plants are superior!

“Time to convert to sustainable agriculture, before it’s too late!

“We can now make a legal case! We’ll need good lawyers.”

George might as well be talking to himself, because Cal was contemplating another great correction.

Back at Terra, George dropped Cal off in front of the barracks, and continued on to his office in the main building. He did not notice his farmhand’s silence, since Cal never did say much. George was too busy thinking about all the implications to notice.

As George vanished from sight, Cal reached into his pocket and removed the vial of Prime Slime. Blood burned through his veins as he gazed at the murky contents. While fondling his new possession, his best friend Sonny Noche called over to him. Sonny was sitting under a big oak tree, donning an ragged Yankee cap, and keeping out of the sun. His dark, leathery skin betrayed a lifetime working the fields with Cal. They’d been together since childhood, begging and filching on the Nuevo Laredo streets. Later, they found work in migrant camps in the States. After 20 years of dirty work, they found refuge in the Terra nursery.

Cal called back to Sonny as he approached: “Que Paso, Chico? How joo been?” Sonny worked solo all day. “I got something big.”

“Joo score?”

“No, man, this is much bigger than weed.”

“How could that be? Hey, I don’t do that other stuff!”

“It’s not drugs, Vato! I got something joo won’t believe. Go pack a bag, amigo. We’re going home.”

“Juss like that?” Sonny asked.

“Yeah, juss like that. Hurry now! I’ll tell you later in the car.”

Before long, Sonny pulled up in a 1957 pink, lo-rider, Pontiac convertible. It’s massive frame and fins pointed to a simpler time, and the noisy, smoky exhaust confirmed its age.

Cal jumped into the passenger seat without opening the door. Two tired old friends were ready for the road once more, perhaps for the last time.

“We’re gonna fuck those assholes, after treating us like dogs.”

“What assholes?” The revving engine censored the profanity.

“Those megafarm fucks! Joo know, them plantation owners who gave us shit for our labor, and ran us into the ground.”

“Yeah, that was some bad shit. We lived like dogs.”

“Dogs got it made compared to us. But now there’s paybacks.”

“Joo got weapons? Hey man, I ain’t never killed nobody.”

“No, no, my friend, this is the perfect revenge. It’s gonna take them down to their knees, all them fat cat mother fuckers!”

“What chu got, the atomic bomb?”

“Even better.” Cal exposed the tube of Prime Slime in his hand. “This shit will destroy crops, all kinds of crops, and quick too. But it won’t hardly mess with the organic stuff, so that’s good. Meanwhile we put those assholes out of business.”

“What da fuck joo got, man?”

“It’s a germ that eats plants, but just shitty plants. Joo know, like we used to grow, with all them chemicals and shit. This bug wiped out a whole room full of plants in just a few hours. I seen it with my own eyes, man! So I stole some from the lab.”

“Joo shoulda stole more. What we gonna do wid dat lil ting?”

“Believe me, my friend, this shit goes a long way. There’s billions of bugs in this tube. We’ll make gallons of it.”

“And do what?”

“Spray the factory farms all the way back to Laredo.”

Sonny’s eyes lit up like hot tamales. His hatred was as deep as Cal’s. “Sounds good to me. I been dyin’ to see the family.”

Revenge was the immovable force, as Cal and Sonny planned their course of action. Sonny’s head twitched repeatedly from the pent up energy, as Cal’s face twisted with anger. They were treated like shit, fed shit, paid like shit, and lived in shit. Now it was time for the shit to hit the fan.

But first they had to make more slime, so they drove down to the garage that stored compost tools. Cal took out two large backpack pump dispensers used to spray compost tea and filled them to near capacity with water. He added some sea salt, a quart of molasses, and half the contents of the Prime Slime vial into each tank. He recalled Prime Slime in action:

“Unbelievable! The plants melted right in front of us.” Cal’s eyes opened like Svengali’s, and Sonny was caught in the trance.

“So what’s the plan, man?” Sonny asked. He was primed for a little excitement and now bent on revenge. Cal was busy plotting the roads they’d take. They knew every major farm on both sides of the Mississippi, having picked cotton in Texas, oranges in Florida, apples in the northeast, and many other kinds of produce wherever cheap labor was needed.

“Let’s do it like the old days. We’ll hit the big farms from here to Missouri, then go south through Texas before the Feds figure us out. We spray a little slime here and there, on every major farm. This stuff should last all the way to Laredo.”

“That’s a big job. We got enough bugs in there?”

“Dis shit is serious, man! A little goes a long way.” Suddenly Sonny grew paranoid, and stuck his head outside to look around:

“Anyone know joo got it?”

“George will find out eventually, when he hears of the mess and sees us gone. He knows where we’re from, where we’ve been. He saved us from dat shit years ago, and gave us a good life-simple but good-where we got respect. We could send a little money back home. That’s what’s important.

“George will be very angry,” Sonny cried.

“But he’ll thank us in the end. We’ll be doing the world a big favor.” Cal was very much aware of the irony.

“The Pontiac’s warmed up. We better go.”

“We’ll need to ditch it along the way; keep them off our trail.”

“You mean with Jose´ in St. Louis?”

“Yeah, den ride the trucks, trains and back roads to San Antonio. My brother Jesu will drive us to the border.”

With a stubby No. 2 pencil and a tattered US map, they worked out their revenge, farm by farm. The sins of the masters would be punished, slime for slime. Cal circled the cities they’d pass along the way: Philly, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Tulsa, Ft. Worth, Austin, San Antonio and finally Laredo. He etched a star on the map to mark the large farms they’d pass, and dotted many of the smaller farms in between. Cal and Sonny weren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, but they knew the land and what grew on it.

Cal was aware of the great power in his grasp, and had the skill to unleash it. His life never amounted to much, but what he learned would serve him well. This moment justified all his pain and shame. He was here on Earth to avenge his ancestors. All the folks, who struggled and died dishonorably, would finally rest in peace.

Before departing, Cal left a note for George about a family emergency back home. Everything needed was packed away in the car, including a sack of organic food, a bag of clothes, and an extra pair of shoes. With every bump in the road, the compost tanks bounced around in the back seat, helping to mix and aerate the contents within. With the sun beating down on their convertible, incubation conditions were ideal for Prime Slime growth.

Sonny wanted to see the destruction first hand, so they stopped at the farm where they purchased the conventional plants for their experiment. “George would be especially pleased if we spray these fucks!” Cal shouted. Along the side of the road, they tested their deadly spray on a plot of GMO soybeans. But, after waiting half an hour, nothing happened.

“I don’t see jack,” Sonny cried.

“It might be the dryness,” Cal surmised. “Things might not pick up till the rains come.” Indeed, the severe drought had a stranglehold on all living things. Slime was composed mostly of water, and could not do its thing without it.

“God’s on our side,” Cal reckoned. “We’ll get a head start before this thing ignites.”

None of the megafarms along the way were spared, as the two men retraced familiar routes across the US. Before leaving New Jersey, numerous farms in the Garden State were targeted. They drove into the sunset, top down, spraying plants that edged the side of the road. Sonny swerved the Pontiac left and right, depending on which side the farms resided. One little squirt would do, they reckoned; maybe two or three squirts for the major farms, and for those they hated most.

As Cal anticipated, the dry conditions kept Prime Slime from emerging. In time, however, some farmers noticed patches of destruction along the edge of their fields. It was something not seen before, and not covered in the textbooks. A few farmers notified the USDA, but local inspectors were also at a loss. Since the damage was spotty and small scale, it was dismissed as a wrinkle in a season full of problems. A drought like this had not come along for a hundred years or more. Plus, as a roadside phenomenon, officials passed it off as petrochemical toxicity.

Had USDA officials not been distracted by international terrorism, they might have taken Prime Slime more seriously. But, frankly, a few patches of slime at the margins of vast farmland did not qualify as a call to action. There were more ominous biological, chemical and nuclear threats on their radar screen. This did not fit the description or pattern anticipated. Plus, once the rains came, this problem was expected to abate. But a few farmers begged to differ: watering the damaged area made the slime patches grow much larger.

Still, the government could not juggle minor internal problems during an international crisis. Homeland Security was consumed with border control, and could not drop its focus. The FDA was intent on patrolling imports, and stopping vitamin companies from making drug claims. FBI and CIA agents were obsessed with stopping the flow of drugs, and monitoring Islamic terrorists. The National Guard was fighting two wars to protect our oil interests overseas. So Prime Slime lay simmering in the fields.

Meanwhile, Cal and Sonny went from state to state–from pumpkin patch to cornfield–with their fancy squirt guns. Along the way, they sang old Mexican classics, like “Bessame Mucho” and “La Cucaracha”. Their favorite was “Low Rider” made famous by the band War in the 1970’s. They often sang and sprayed in tempo.

As planned, the Pontiac was ditched in Missouri. They made their way south from there, going virtually unnoticed from truck to box car, though they looked more like scuba divers than farmhands with their backpack canisters. Like two mud flaps dangling off the back of a truck, they sprayed their payload on farm after farm. Nothing - not corn, soybean, rice, wheat, sunflower, potato or alfalfa - was spared. It was all going down.

As they retraced the old highways and byways, many painful memories resurfaced. Born to Mexican peasants, they were forced early in life to hard, mundane and dangerous work. Their lives were spent picking fruit, sleeping on dirt floors, and earning enough to survive. At the end of the harvest, they returned to the family shack in Nuevo Laredo. Mexico offered a bleak future for the poor, especially since the drug wars had destroyed the economy of these border towns.

Like millions of Latinos, they planted and harvested the US crop every year. They were part of the mass migration of illegal aliens entering and circulating the US under the radar. Like so many others, Cal and Sonny were often victims of discrimination. They were undocumented and ineligible for help. They rarely saw the person whom they were working for, were paid peanuts for every bushel they harvested, and had no idea if they’d be housed or cared for if taken ill.

Their lives were characterized by transience. To maintain an income, they followed the harvest from state to state. Migrant work never ended, from grapes to pecans, blueberries, peppers, watermelons, tomatoes, cherries, cotton, all in their seasons. Every year was the same trek, from strawberry picking in the spring to the apple harvest extending through October.

Planting and harvesting crops was extremely labor intensive. The lack of clean water or sanitary facilities while working in the fields made things worse, especially with no real opportunities to access these amenities. They labored and lived under oppressive and dehumanizing conditions, and usually not notified about the dangers involved. Many thousands of farm workers contracted acute pesticide poisoning every year. Many died from heat stroke and toxic drinking water. The conditions were especially harsh on Sonny, who suffered from asthma.

As the harvest moved from state to state, misery followed. The lowly motels where they bedded housed as many residents as a small town. Migrants crammed together to reduce costs. Several slept together on a single mattress or on the floor. Workers slept in trailers, garages, tool sheds, fields and parking lots, avoiding the puddles of raw sewage outside their confines. They washed themselves and their clothes in nearby streams. Anything perishable was eaten quickly, as food poisoning was rampant.

Cal and Sonny knew the land from the mighty Hudson to the Rio Grande. They usually pitched tents along the way, but slept anywhere, under a tree or bridge, not spoiled by linen or lace, fine cottons or down pillows. Sonny remembered the mosquitoes and flies showed no mercy, just like the master farmers for whom they worked. It was debatable what contributed more to their oppression, economics or the cruelty among the rich and powerful.

The backbreaking work in the fields taught them perseverance, but also taught them how to hate. They would never forget the long days, baking in the hot sun, covered in dirt, pesticides and sticky fuzz from the ripe fruit.

Their fortunes improved greatly at Terra. Despite no health insurance, they had decent, stable working conditions, adequate housing, a living wage, and good nutrition.

“It was difficult,” Cal recalled. “And we were the lucky ones.”

Mexicans cross the border to do jobs that Americans consider beneath them. The guest worker program is exploitative, but continues with shockingly little protest. The system made fat cats out of many enterprising Americans. Now Cal and Sonny planned to cut into some of that fat.

As they made their way into the heart of Texas, the first trickle of rain soothed their craggy skin. A powerful system was working its way northward from the Gulf. Cal made the sign of the cross and asked God for forgiveness. Revenge was on the horizon.

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