Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  Howard laughed. “I reckon it is,” he said softly.

  Once across the field, away from the airport, they turned up the railroad track. And now they walked very slow, straight into the sun, burning, mirrored a high blinding silver in the rails that lay for five miles unbending, flat against the shapeless waste, ascending, stretching ablaze to the sun itself—so that seen from afar, as quite small, they could have appeared, as children, to walk unending between these two columns of dancing light.

  With the rifle they took some long shots at the dead-glass discs on a signal tower far up the track, but nothing happened. When they were closer though, one of the signals suddenly swung up wildly alight. A burning color. Lawrence was about to take a shot at it when they heard the train behind them.

  They slid down an embankment, through the bull-nettle and bluebonnets, to walk a path along the bottom. When the freight train reached them however, they turned to watch it go by, and at one of the boxcars, Big Lawrence, holding the rifle against his hip, pumped three or four rounds into the side of it. Under the noise of the train, the muted shots had no connection with the bursting way the dark wood on the boxcar door tore off angling, and splintered out all pine white.

  As they walked on, Howard said, “Don’t reckon they was any hoboes in it do you?” Then he and Lawrence laughed.

  They struck the creek hollow and followed it in file, Lawrence ahead, stepping around tall slakey rocks that pitched up abruptly from the hot shale. Heat came out of this dry stone, sharp as acid, wavering up in black lines. Then at a bend before them was the water hole, small now and stagnant, and they turned off to climb the bank in order to reach it from the side. Howard was in front now, as they came over the rise, he saw the rabbit first. Standing between two oak stumps ten feet away, standing up like a kangaroo, ears winced back, looking away, toward the railroad track. Then Lawrence saw it too, and tried to motion Howard off with one hand, bringing his rifle up quick with the other.

  The sound came as one, but within one spurting circle of explosion, the two explosions were distinct.

  On their side, the half face of the rabbit twitched twice back and down even before it hit him, then he jumped straight up in a double flip five times the height he had stood and landed across one of the old burned out stumps like a roll of wet paper.

  “Goddam!” said Lawrence, frowning. He walked slowly toward the stumps, then looked at Howard before he picked up the rabbit. “Goddam it!” he said.

  One side of the rabbit, from the stomach down, looked as though it had been pushed through a meat grinder.

  “You must be crazy,” Lawrence said, “why didn’t you let me get him, goddam it, I could of gotten him in the head.” He dropped the rabbit across the stump again, and stood looking at it.

  Howard picked up the rabbit, studied it. “Sure tore hell out of it, didn’t it?” he said.

  Lawrence spat and turned away. Howard watched him for a minute walking down toward the water hole, then he put the rabbit back on the stump and followed.

  They leaned the guns against the dead grassed ground that rose at their backs, and sat down. Howard got out the cigarettes and offered them, so that Lawrence took one first, and then Howard. And Howard struck the match.

  “Got the car tonight?” he asked, holding out the light.

  Big Lawrence didn’t answer at once for drawing on the cigarette. “Sure,” he said then, admitting, “but I’ve got a date.” In this sun, the flame of the match was colorless, only chemical, without heat.

  “Where you goin’?” Howard asked, “to the show?”

  “I dunno,” said Lawrence, watching the smoke, “maybe I will.”

  The water hole was small, less then ten feet across, overhung only by a dwarfed sand-willow on the other bank, so that all around the dead burning ground was flushed with sun, while one half of the hole itself cast back the scene in distortion.

  Over and on the water though, in and through the shadow that fell half across them, played wasps and water-spiders, dragonflies, snake-doctors, and a thousand gray gnats. A hornet, deep-ribbed, whirring golden bright as a spinning dollar, hung in a hummingbird twist just on the water surface in the deepest shadow of the tree, and Lawrence threw a rock at it.

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. The hornet, rising frantically up through the willow branches, twisted once, and came down out of the tree in a wild whining loop, and lit exactly on the back of Howard’s shirt collar, and then very deliberately, as Lawrence saw, crawled inside.

  “Hold still,” said Lawrence, taking a handful of the shirt at the back and the hornet with it, holding it.

  Howard had his throat arched out, the back of his neck all scrunched away from the shirt collar. “Did you get it?” he kept asking.

  “Hold still, goddam it,” said Lawrence, laughing, watching Howard’s face from the side, finally closing his hand on the shirt, making the hornet crackle as hard and dry as an old match box when he clenched his fist.

  And then Lawrence had it out, in his hand, and they were both bent over in looking. It was dead now, wadded and broken. And in the shade of his hand, the gold of the hornet had become as ugly-colored as the phosphorus dial at noon—it was the stinger, sticking out like a wire hair, taut in an electric quaver, that still lived.

  “Look at that goddam thing,” said Lawrence of the stinger, and made as if to touch it with his finger.

  “Be careful, you’ll get stung,” said Howard.

  “Look at it,” said Lawrence, intent.

  “They all do that,” Howard said.

  “Sure, but not like that.”

  Lawrence touched it with his finger, but nothing happened.

  “Maybe we can get it to sting something,” said Howard, and he tried to catch a doodle-bug, crawling on a bluebonnet that grew alone between them, but he missed it. So Lawrence bent the flower itself over, to get the stinger to penetrate the stem at the bottom. “It’ll kill it,” he said, “it’s acid.”

  Lawrence held the tail of the hornet tight between his thumb and finger, squeezing to get more of the stinger out, until it came out too far and stopped moving—and Lawrence, squeezing, slowly emptied the body of its white filling. Some of it went on his finger. Lawrence smelled it, then he let Howard smell it before he wiped his finger on the grass.

  They lit another cigarette. Big Lawrence threw the match in the water, and a minute after it had floated out, took up the 30-30, drew a bead, and clipped it just below the burnt head.

  “Why?” he asked Howard, handing him the rifle, “are you goin’ to the show tonight?”

  “I might,” Howard said.

  “Yeah, but have you got a date?”

  “I guess I could get one,” said Howard, working the bolt.

  “I’ve got one with Helen Ward,” said Lawrence.

  Howard sighted along the rifle.

  “You know her sister?” Lawrence asked.

  “Who, Louise?”

  “Sure, maybe we could get ’em drunk.”

  Howard held his breath, steadying the rifle. Then he took a shot. “Sure I know her,” he said.

  They shot water targets, mostly with the rifle, Howard using the shots Lawrence owed him. Once, however, after he dug an old condensed-milk can out of the bank and sat it on the water, Lawrence took up the shotgun and held the muzzle about a foot from the can.

  “H-Bomb,” he said, pulling the trigger.

  They sat there for an hour, talking a little and smoking, shooting at crawfish and dragonflies, or underwater rocks that shone through flat yellow, or more often, dull dead brown.

  Then they decided to go back to the house and drink some beer.

  Near the stumps, Howard crossed over and picked up the rabbit, Lawrence watching him.

  “What’re you goin’ to do with that damn thing?” Lawrence asked.

  “Aw I dunno,” said Howard, “might as well take it along.”

  Lawrence watched while Howard held it by the ears and kicked at a piece of newspap
er, twisted dry and dirty, yellow in the grass. He got the paper, shook it out straight, and he wrapped it around the rabbit.

  They started across the field, Lawrence not talking for a while. Then he stopped to light a cigarette.

  “I know what,” he said, cradling the 30-30 to one arm, “we can cook it.”

  Howard didn’t answer right off, but once, as they walked back toward the stumps, he looked at the sun.

  “I wonder what time it is anyhow,” he said.

  Using Howard’s knife, Big Lawrence, once it was decided, sat on one of the stumps to skin the rabbit while Howard went pushing around through the Johnson grass, folding aside with his feet, peering and picking, bundling back, to build the fire.

  At the stumps, Lawrence cursed the knife, tried the other blade, and sawed at the rabbit’s neck, twisting it in his hand.

  “Wouldn’t cut hot niggerpiss,” he said, but somehow he managed to get the head off, and to turn the skin back on itself at the neck, so that he pulled it down like a glove reversed on an unborn hand, it glistened so.

  He had to stop with the skin halfway down to cut off the front feet, and in doing this, hacking once straight on from the point of the blade, the blade suddenly folded back against his finger. He opened the knife slowly, saying nothing, but he sucked at the finger and squeezed it between two others until, through all this heavy red of rabbit, sticking, covering his whole hand now, he could almost see, but never quite, where in one spot on his smallest finger, he himself, up through the blood of the rabbit, was bleeding too.

  He went down to the pool to clean his hands, but he finished skinning the rabbit first.

  When he got back, Howard was down, ready to light the fire.

  “Are we goin’ to the show or not?” Lawrence said.

  “I don’t care,” said Howard, staring up at him. “Do you want to?”

  “Well, we better get back if we’re goin’.”

  Howard got the old newspaper from where he had put it to burn and wrapped it around the rabbit again, and he put this inside his shirt. He folded the skin square and put it in his pocket.

  Lawrence had the rabbit’s head. He tried to get the eyes to stay open, and one did stay open, but only the white showed when he sat it on the stump. He took a rock from the windbreak Howard had built for the fire and put this on the stump too, behind the head, and they started across the field. When they were a little way out, they took shots at the head, and finally Lawrence used the last of the shells he had coming to go up close and shoot the head, rock, and even part of the stump away with the old twelve-guage.

  Before they reached Rosemont Street they could hear Tommy Sellers cursing and Crazy Ralph Newgate farther, yelling, “All the way! All the way!” and as they turned in, Tommy Sellers was there, coming toward them, walking up the middle of the street, swinging his glove by one finger.

  Howard pulled the wad of newspaper out of his shirt and held it up to show, and Tommy Sellers stopped and kicked around at some dead grass piled in the gutter. “Okay, all the way!” Ralph Newgate was yelling halfway down the block, and Tommy Sellers found the ball with his foot. Then, bending over, in a low twisting windup from the gutter, never once looking where, he threw it—the ball that lifted like a frozen shot to hang sailing for an instant in a wide climbing arc.

  Big Lawrence brought the rifle off his shoulder. “Ka-pow!” he said, “Ka-pow!” and the barrel-point wavered, sighting up the lazy wake of the ball. “Dead sonofabitch bird,” he said.

  Tommy Sellers was standing closer now, hands on his hips, not seeing down there an eighth of a mile where Ralph Newgate, with his eyes high, nervously tapping the glove palm, was trying to pick the bouncing throw off the headlight of a parked car.

  “God it stinks,” said Lawrence, making a face when Howard opened the newspaper. The paper now was like a half dried cloth, stiff, or sticking in places and coming to pieces. Almost at once a fly was crawling over the chewed up part of the rabbit.

  “You know what it’s like?” said Lawrence—“goddam rotten afterbirth!” and he spat, seeming to retch a little.

  “What was it?” asked Tommy Sellers, looking close at the rabbit, then up, away, not caring, dancing out to take the wild looping throw from Crazy Ralph.

  They walked on. Howard wrapped the newspaper around the rabbit again and put it in his shirt.

  “It’s already beginning to rot,” said Big Lawrence.

  “Aw you’re crazy,” Howard said.

  “Crazy,” repeated Lawrence, “you’re the one who’s crazy. What’ll you do, eat it?” He laughed, angrily, spitting again.

  They were walking in the street in front of Lawrence’s house now. Tommy Sellers and Ralph Newgate were at the curb, throwing their gloves up through the branches of a cedar tree where the ball was caught.

  There were some people standing around the steps at Lawrence’s front porch. One was a youngish woman wearing an apron over her dress—and a little girl was holding on to the dress with both hands, pressing her face into the apron, swinging herself slowly back and forth, so that the woman stood as braced, her feet slightly apart. She stroked the child’s head with one hand, and in the other she was holding the dead cat.

  They watched Howard and Lawrence in the street in front of the house. Once the woman moved her head and spoke to the fat man standing on the porch who frowned without looking at her.

  Howard didn’t turn in with Lawrence. “See you at the show,” he said.

  As he walked on, the fall of their voices died past him.

  “How’d it happen, son?” he heard Lawrence’s dad ask.

  He turned off on a vacant lot that cut through toward his house. Halfway across, he pulled out the paper and opened it. He studied it, brought it up to his face and smelled it.

  “That rake’ll reach!” Crazy Ralph was yelling way behind him, “that rake’ll reach!”

  Put-down

  HAVING PASSED THE LAST table of the Fore as slowly as it is possible to walk, they stopped and half turned, standing uncertainly now—to appear surely as four Americans, wholly, typically, lost in the rich summer afternoon of Paris—but, in fact, so used to it, it no longer mattered.

  “Want to turn on?” Boris asked, absent and polite.

  Aaron tried to consider it, preoccupied, scrutinized the tables for a face.

  Priscilla was a little breathless. “What is it?” she whispered, “. . . tea?” asking Violet first, and then Boris, who just stood there, barely smiling, only finally moving his head in the direction of the street where he lived.

  “What is it?” Priscilla wanted to know.

  “What difference does it make?” said Aaron, suddenly coming back to them, scowling as though he had already decided, and perhaps against her even then, “. . . it’s something, isn’t it?” He was nervous, in the slow, ponderous way of heavyweight-intellectuals.

  “It’s hashish,” said Violet.

  “Hashish!” Priscilla was delighted. She almost clapped her hands. “Baudelaire used to have it in his confiture!” she cried.

  “Sure,” said Boris, “you see?”

  “There you are then,” said Violet, all smiles from the very beginning.

  Boris’ room could have been large, but it was very dark. For there was a heavy curtain over the window, and in the center of the room, an electric light-bulb, suspended from the ceiling, was all wrapped in newspaper.

  They sat on the bed. Near the bed, leaning against the wall, was a dark thin Spanish guitar, and Priscilla took this up, carefully.

  “How lovely,” she said.

  Aaron snorted, as if he were that impatient with her now.

  But Boris was there, hunched over the nightstand, rolling a cigarette. “Sure,” he said.

  Violet nearly laughed.

  “Listen . . .” Aaron began, but then he dropped it.

  “Train’s at the station,” said Boris, coming up with the cigarette at last, arab-shaped, like a white paper funnel, lighting it with care, turning i
t slowly in the flame, lighting all the cone-flat end of it.

  When Boris had inhaled twice deeply, he handed the cigarette across to Priscilla. No one spoke now, Priscilla taking one big drag and passing it on, to Violet and Aaron, and finally back to where it had begun, to Boris. And where it had begun, too, as a simple paper funnel, looking hollow, having such a wide flat whiteness for an end, it was now all thickly mashed, misshapen, and half the size in whiteness—though what had been consumed remained in length, a sharp fiery ash, so hard it could not be flicked away. And it passed again to Priscilla, to Violet, and to Aaron, to each around once more, three times in all, until there was nothing left of it but a small piece of burning paper and some wet worthless tobacco.

  Then Boris took the guitar from Priscilla’s lap, and after just holding it for a while, he leaned his head very close, as if for only his own ear to listen while the hand picked softly at one silver string. So softly now, the sounds were separately soft, and far-spaced, as moving horizontally on a screen, or again, as in diffusion, from behind the screen in a straight-on stream, to strike the screen and feather out as might drops of pure purple reaching up through a surface of snow.

  Priscilla listened, lay back on Aaron’s arm, her eyes closed as, sometime after, it was Boris humming softly, hunched again at the nightstand, where, as if quietly toying, he made another cigarette.

  Still Violet simply sat leaning out, for a long time looking just at that wallpaper nearest the bed; and Boris could have seen this, perfect host, for he gave her a nosedrop-bottle then, which held a small piece of mercury. And she poured this out into her hand, as a lump of wet mirror, small as the smallest silver coin, though with Violet being so close, it might not have been like that now, and even in letting it move across one palm and onto the other, and back, she must let it fall to the floor. So that while Boris slowly stood to adjust the newspaper light, Violet knelt down very close, as if she might have already made out what loomed there near in the half-light—which it did when the light came, like a soft silver moon, as big as a mountain against a black plateau, and all around, at different and precise distances, were its pieces, shattered, perched glittering and isolate on the same expanse, or down, glinting up half-hidden deep at the bottom of parallel fissures where the surface dropped sharply away, or yet again, over and beyond: one, two, three dark fields away.