Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes

by Terry Southern

  “Hey, kid,” said the tall boy after glancing around the deserted block. Nick continued to stare at the comic-book, finally turning another page.

  “Maybe he don’t hear so good,” said the tall boy, speaking to the others.

  “Maybe he oughtta have his ears cleaned out a little,” said the second boy. They watched him silently, until Nick raised his eyes.

  “You talkin’ to me?” he asked.

  “He wants to know if I’m talking to him,” said the tall boy.

  “He’s nosey, ain’t he?” said the third boy, making his voice mockingly shrill and effeminate.

  “C’mere,” said the tall boy to Nick.

  Nick slowly got up and walked toward them, folding the comic-book and stuffing it in his pocket.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked before he got there.

  “What’s-the-matter,” echoed the third boy in his taunting falsetto. “He wants to know what’s-the-matter. Show’im what’s-the-matter, Gino.”

  “Yeath, get Gino to show’im what’s-the-matter,” said the second boy.

  Nick had stopped just out of arm’s length. The tall boy raised a finger and motioned him forward as for something confidential, while the other two boys moved out on both sides of Nick, blocking his escape in either direction.

  “What’s that you stuck in your pocket?” asked the tall boy.

  “What, this?” said Nick, taking out the comic-book and offering it to him. “Here, you can have it, I finished it awready.”

  “Oh, get that,” said the third boy, “he finished it awready.”

  Nick glanced down the street toward where Vince and Ritchie lived. It was deserted, except for a man walking idly along in the distance.

  “Expecting somebody?” asked the second boy.

  Nick started to put the comic-book back in his pocket, having held it extended for some time.

  “Gimme,” said the tall boy, and Nick handed it over.

  As the man approaching reached the spot where they were standing, the three boys fell silent, trying to assume casual attitudes while he passed. Nick, however, took advantage of the opportunity and tried to walk away. One of the boys grabbed his arm and the other two closed in, as the man, a few paces beyond, stopped, turned and slowly retraced his steps.

  The three boys glared at the stranger with open hostility. He was a man of medium height and slight, wiry build, dapperly dressed and deeply tanned. Hatless, with a thick close-crop of silver-gray hair, he resembled one of those veteran movie actors who must keep trim and tanned to continue playing youthful, athletic roles. There was an extreme hardness about his eyes and mouth, however, and an unlit cigarette hung from his lips, so that perhaps more than an actor he looked like the romantic version of a highly successful criminal.

  When he spoke to the boys, after a moment of silence, his voice was low and cold, with a slight, foreign accent.

  “Okay,” he said. “Beat it!”

  The tall boy, half turning his head away, raised a hand derisively, muttering something like “Na-a-ah!” as though he couldn’t be bothered even slapping the older man, whereupon an extraordinary thing happened: with an animal-quick movement, the man seized the tall boy’s hand at the extended fingers, and in an abrupt, judo like twist sent him writhing to his knees, at the same time slapping him across the face with such resounding force that he cringed like a wounded cat.

  “I din’ do nothin’!” he shrieked, “I din’ do nothin’!” while the other two boys, frozen wide-eyed for a moment, broke and ran.

  “That’s my book he’s got,” said Nick piously, pointing at the comic-book that lay at the tall boy’s feet.

  “Why don’t you give him back his book?” asked the man, twisting the arm so mercilessly the tall boy’s free hand trembled as he handed the book up to Nick.

  “Now, beat it,” said the man, giving the arm a last vicious twist and poising his raised foot to show his willingness to kick out the tall boy’s teeth if necessary. “Fast,” he said softly, and the tall boy scrambled to his feet and fled, visibly shaking with sobs.

  “Thanks,” said Nick, very impressed, as the man lit his cigarette and glanced easily around the lot.

  “You got nothing better to do?” said the man, referring with a nod to the comic-book in Nick’s hand.

  “Why, how’d you mean?” asked Nick, putting the book away, a little embarrassed.

  The man shrugged and continued casually to survey the lot.

  “Know where I could find the Panthers?” he asked after a pause.

  Nick regarded him suspiciously.

  “Why, what’d you want them for?”

  “I thought I might put a little work their way,” said the man.

  “Yeah. What kinda work?”

  “Easy work.”

  “I guess they’d wantta know what kinda work,” said Nick.

  The man smiled, as though Nick were too young to be trusted in these matters. “Well,” he said, “I guess I’d wantta talk to them about that, wouldn’t I?” He reached into his shirt pocket and lifted out the corner of a heavy fold of currency. “But it’d be easy work,” he said.

  “Well, you can keep talkin’, mister,” said Nick, “ ’cause you’re talkin’ to one of ’em right now, and the other two’ll be here in a minute.”

  The man brightened slightly. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that’s great. Glad to know you.”

  He took Nick’s hand in a firmly clasped handshake, at the same time raising his left in a signal toward one of the cars parked on the opposite side of the street a few doors away, and two other, more obvious plainclothes detectives got out and walked over to them.

  “This is one of them,” said the man. “Put him in the car and keep him quiet. The other two will be along. I’ll give you a sign.”

  “Awright, eat’cher cereal now,” Vince’s mother was saying. “I wantta get started with my wash.”

  Vince was not listening, but having turned over the last page of the paper, he threw it aside so savagely that the movement startled and annoyed his mother, and she unleashed a torrent of sardonic bitterness against him.

  “What’s the matter with you? Somethin’ in the paper you din’ like? What’s the matter, din’ get your pitcher in the paper? What’s the matter, din’ get your name in the paper? What’s the ma—”

  “No!” shouted Vince, jumping to his feet. “No! No!”

  His shouts set both babies crying, and his mother, enraged, began to hit at him wildly. At the same moment, he heard Ritchie calling his name from below and he made for the door.

  “Where you think you’re goin’?” his mother demanded, fiercely holding his arm. “You heard what your father told you! Ed! Ed!”

  Vince shoved her aside and got out the door, but there was a look of apprehension on his face, as though he already knew that something was very seriously wrong.

  On the stairs, leaning out over the stairwell, he could see Ritchie’s face two flights below. Even at the distance it seemed livid and panicky.

  They met on a dark landing halfway down the stairs.

  “Vince,” said Ritchie, breathlessly, “He’s—he’s dead!”

  Vince was confused, not wanting to believe it. “What—how—how’d you know that?”

  “At the store,” said Ritchie, beginning to cry as he sensed Vince’s helplessness. “They’re all talkin’ about it—they got a wreath up awready—they said he . . . suffocated!”

  The voice of Vince’s mother came down the stairwell, strident and loud.

  “Vince! Vince!”

  The two boys moved back against the dark wall, looking small and huddled now.

  “What’re we goin’ to do, Vince?” asked Ritchie.

  “C’mon,” said Vince at last, hopelessly, “we . . . we gotta get over to the lot and see Nick.”

  At the lot the detective stood alone, smoking, looking down the street, waiting. It seemed very quiet.

  Suddenly, rushing out from behind a heap of refuse, the
little boy with the giant pistol was upon him.

  “Kow! Kow! Kow!” he cried.

  The detective was slightly taken aback, then he smiled wanly as the little boy seized his trouser leg and clung to it, holding the gun aloft in his outstretched hand.

  “Kow. Kow.”

  They were standing like that, in that strange embrace, the detective looking down with a certain sadness in his eyes as he stroked the boy’s head, and the tiny boy clinging to his leg, his face half hidden against it, voice muffled, wearily repeating, “Kow, kow, kow,” when the little girl with the cloth doll appeared down the sidewalk near the lot. Slowly approaching, carrying her cloth doll on one arm, she raised her eyes and saw them, gave them a serious look, and turned away in a wide arc to pass, cradling the doll in both arms now, shielding it from their sight.

  The Mood Out of Axotle

  THERE’S AN INTERESTING ROAD leading south out of Axotle, Mexico, that you might like to try sometime. It isn’t on the Good Gulf Map, and it isn’t on those issued by the Mexican Government. It is on one map—I wonder if you’ve seen it?—a map of very soft colors, scroll-edged, like some great exotic banknote; and the imprint of the publisher is in small black script along the lower left, “Ryder H. Raven and Son—San Jose, California.” I came across it about a year ago.

  The way it happened, I was with these two friends of mine in Mexico City—I say friends of mine though actually we’d met only a few days before, but anyway we were together this particular night, in their car—and the idea was to pick a town, such as the one we were in, and then to sort of drive away from it, in the opposite direction, so to speak. I knew what they had in mind, more or less, but it did seem that in being this strong on just-wanting-to-get-away-from, we might simply end up in the sea or desert. Then, too, at one point there was a kind of indecision as to the actual direction to take, like left or right—so I suggested that we look at a map. I knew there was a map in the car, because I had been with them earlier in the day when one of them, Emmanuel, bought a secondhand guidebook, of the kind that has folding maps in it.

  “That is good, man,” said the other one, who was driving, Pablo.

  That was the way they talked, “That is good, man”; “This is bad, man.” They were from Havana, and they spoke a fine, foppish sort of Spanish, but their English wasn’t the greatest. Still, they insisted on speaking it, despite the fact that my own Spanish was good—in fact, the Mexican dialect part of it was so good that they preferred me to speak, whenever it was necessary, to the Mexicans—and it pleased their vanity to argue that, if I spoke, it was less obvious we were tourists.

  Emmanuel got the guidebook from the glove compartment now and handed it to me in the backseat. We were at a corner southwest of the town, out beyond the stockyards and the slaughterhouse—at a crossroads. There was nothing happening here, only the yellow light from an arc lamp above, the yellow light that came dying down through the dead gauze of red dust which slowly rose and wound, or so it seemed, and bled around the car. That was the setting.

  I had some trouble finding the right map and finally in seeing it, distracted, too, by the blast of California mambo from the radio; and it was then, while I was trying to hold the book up in a way to get more light, that something fell out of it.

  “Let me see your lighter a minute, Pablo.”

  “What? What is?” He turned the radio down, just a bit. Sometimes he got quite excited if he heard his name.

  What had fallen from the book was a map of Mexico, a map which had evidently been put there by the book’s previous owner. One may say this because it was obvious the map was not a part of the guidebook; it was not of the same school of map making as were the maps in the guidebook. It was like something from another era, not handmade but somehow in that spirit: highly individual. It was large, but not as large as the ones given out by the gasoline stations—nor was it square; when opened, it was about eighteen by twenty-four inches, and was scaled 1:25.

  The paper was extraordinarily thin—Bible paper, but much stronger, like rice paper or bamboo—and it was hazed with the slightest coloration of age which seemed to give a faint iridescence to those soft colors. They were Marie Laurencin colors, and it was like that as well, a map for a child, or a very nice woman.

  “Where we are at this time?” asked Emmanuel, in a shout above the radio. Emmanuel was a year or two older than Pablo, and about one degree less self-centered.

  I had looked at the map a few minutes without attempting the analogy, just tracing electric-blue rivers to cerulean seas, as they say, but I did know where we were, of course; and, almost at the same time, I saw where it might be interesting to go.

  “Make a right,” I said.

  “A right, man,” said Emmanuel. “Make a right.” They had a habit of repeating and relaying things to each other for no apparent reason.

  Pablo gave a sigh, as of pain, as though he had known all along that’s how it would be, and he lurched the car around the corner, sliding it like a top over the soft red dust, and up went the radio.

  I continued to look at the map. We were going due west, and the map showed that about twenty miles ahead, on this same road, was a little town called Axotle. The road ran through the town east-west and then joined a highway, and this seemed to be all there was to it. But holding the lighter quite close, I had seen another road, a narrow, winding road, as thin as the blood vein of an eye, leading south out of the town. It seemed to go for about twenty-five miles, and on it there were two other towns, Corpus Christi and San Luiz, and there the road stopped. A blood-vein, dead-end road, with a town at the end of it; that was the place to go all right.

  Pablo drove like a madman, except that he was quite a good driver actually. He was supposed to be upset, though, about not having found the kind of car he wanted to drive in Mexico. His story—or rather, his-story-through-Emmanuel, since Pablo himself didn’t do much talking—was that he had a Mercedes at home and had been looking for a certain kind of car to drive in Mexico, a Pegaso, perhaps, but had finally bought this car we were in now, a ’55 Oldsmobile, which had three carburetors and was supposed to do 145 on a straightaway, though, of course, there weren’t too many of those.

  “Man, this old wagon,” he kept saying, “I dunt dig it.”

  But he drove it like the veritable wind, making funny little comments to himself and frowning, while Emmanuel sat beside him, wagging his closed-eyes head, shaking his shoulders and drumming his fingers along with the radio, or else was all hunched over in twisting up sticks of tea and lighting them. Sometimes he would sing along with the radio, too; not overdoing it, just a couple of shouts or a grunt.

  We pulled in then at a Gulf station for gas. We were about halfway to Axotle now, and I was looking at the map again, outside the car, standing under the light of the station, when it suddenly occurred to me to check with the more recent map of the guidebook to see if perhaps the town had been built up in the last few years; it would put me in an embarrassing position with my new friends if we drove to the end of the line, only to smash headlong into a hot-dog stand. So I got out the guidebook and found a map of the corresponding region—quite detailed it was—and that was when the initial crevice of mystery appeared, because on this map there was no road leading south out of Axotle; there was only the east-west road which joined the highway. No road south and neither of the towns. I got a map then from the service station. It was a regular road map about two feet square, and was supposed to show every town with a population of 250 or more . . . and the crevice became the proverbial fissure.

  “This is bad, man,” said Emmanuel, when I told him. Pablo didn’t say anything, just stood there, scowling at the side of the car. Emmanuel and Pablo were both wearing dark prescription glasses, as they always did, even at night.

  “No, man,” I said, “this is good. They’re ghost towns . . . you dig? That will be interesting for you.”

  Emmanuel shrugged. Pablo was still frowning at the car.

  “Ghost towns
,” I said, getting into the backseat again. “Sure, that’s very good.”

  Then, as we got under way, Emmanuel turned to sit half-facing me, his back against the door, and he began to warm toward the idea, or was perhaps beginning to understand it.

  “Yeah, man, that is very good.” He nodded seriously. “Ghost town. Crazy.”

  “It is very good, man,” he told Pablo, while the radio wailed and the car whined and floated over the long black road.

  “What is this, man,” Pablo demanded then in his abrupt irate way, half-turning around to me, “this goat town?”

  “Goat town! Goat town!” shouted Emmanuel, laughing. “That’s too much, man!”

  “Man, I dunt dig it!” said Pablo, but he was already lost again, guiding his big rocket to the moon. And I lay back on the seat and dozed off for a while.

  When I woke up, it was as though I had been on the edge of waking for a long time; the car was pitching about oddly, and I had half-fallen from the seat. The radio was still blasting, but behind it now was the rasping drone of Pablo’s cursing. And I lay there, listening to that sound; it was like a dispassionate chant, a steady and unlinked inventory of all the profane images in Spanish. I assumed we had gotten off the road, except we seemed to be going unduly fast for that. Then I saw that Emmanuel had his hands up to his mouth and was shaking with laughter, and I realized that this had been going on for some time, with him saying softly over and over, “Man, dig this . . . road! Dig this . . . road!”

  So I raised up to have a look, and it was pretty incredible all right. It was more of a creek bed than a road, but occasionally there would be an open place to the side . . . a gaping, torn-off place that suggested we were on something like a Greek mountain pass. And then I saw as well, dishearteningly so, why we were going fast; it was because every now and then one of the side pockets stretched right up to the middle of the road, so that the back wheels would pull to that side, spinning a bit, as we passed over it. And, as we passed over it, you could see down . . . for quite a long way.