Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (10 page)

“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!”

H
AVING 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 it 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.

Violet and Boris were each with a stranded piece nearby, to begin moving this piece towards the larger one: Boris, using as leverage a stiff segment of cigarette-tobacco, rolled and pushed from behind, while Violet had taken one of her own blonde hairs, and herself ahead, dragged the load in a loop. This arrangement, however, perhaps because of the weight of the mercury, allowed the hair to go under the load, to strain, and slip away.

“It nearly broke then,” said Violet once, thinking obviously of the hair and the moment of strain before the tension broke, and how with that sudden snap of tension she could have fallen over, perhaps even into this near fissure, being near the edge herself and as high as she was.

“It’s probably cooler to roll it,” said Boris then, working close to the edge. And so saying, he drew his first load up sharp just before the silver mother, and around to one side, was pushing from behind, now with his fingernail, as they watched the great silent fusion: how these two surfaces touched, weighed heavily each against the other, arcs flattened, straining black in the silver, and then in an instant’s quaver, bent one over one, and collapsed whole with the great slush of soft cold metal.

By the time Priscilla and Aaron came down, the center place had been cleared of all except the one big piece, and Violet and Boris were working away to the left, bringing, as was necessary now, the outlying pieces of mercury over one, two, and sometimes three wide cracks in the floor.

So that these two, in their turn, began working the other side, Priscilla facile with a bit of broom-straw, Aaron less so, yet very sure, with a matchstick.

But once now Priscilla stopped as speaking to them all, and said:

“If you merge several small ones so they make a large one, then you can take them all in one trip.”

And she sat so erect in the silence while the others went on, heads down, even as unhearing, so engaged was each, that she had to say:

“Don’t you agree?”

And only then could someone speak, as from another room:

“What’s the hurry?”

“Well, no,” said Priscilla, even scowling, “but I mean there’s no sense in being irrational about it, is there?”

“Forget it,” said Aaron with four pieces lined up on the brink of an adjacent crack, driving them across like golfballs. Still the last one failed to clear, rising early in flight, taking the most gradual arc to strike the opposite wall and fall, so slowly, to the bottom of the chasm. And Aaron leaned on his stick there, sullenly, looking after it.

“See,”
said Priscilla, who had watched, almost wringing her hands, “if you had put them all together, it would have rolled right over!”

“I topped it,” said Aaron.

“Now we’ll never get it,” the girl went on, hopeless.

Violet, lying on her stomach, put her head down, laughing.

Yet Aaron heard only Priscilla, seeing her face very close for an instant.
“Why not?”
he said, his voice tense, but at once lighter, as if perhaps in what he had seen there then he had somehow been mistaken. “Of course we’ll get it,” he said, “. . . come on, I see it already.”

And for the moment they worked together, but then Priscilla had to say repeatedly: “You’ve got to pull it! You’ve got to pull it!”

“It’s actually cooler to roll it,” said Aaron, distant, as though to himself, “. . . that way you’re behind it.”

“In case anything goes wrong, that is,” said Violet without raising her head.

Priscilla stopped short. “What do you
mean?
” she fairly hissed; but when Violet didn’t answer at once, she turned back, haughty, speaking rapidly, as though really unconcerned: “There’s another advantage to merging the small ones,” she said, “they’ll roll right over the crack.”

Now that all the apparent pieces had been returned to the great mother piece, what they continued to do individually took on the nature of a treasure-hunt—with occasional discoveries, in the fissures or behind a nailhead, which excited the attention of the others. Yet once, as perhaps was sure to happen now, Priscilla sat singly, simply staring for a long while down.

“What is it?” asked Aaron when he saw, quietly this time, so as not to involve the others.

“Down there,” the girl said, pointing, while Aaron peered, not really seeing it, not as she did, there in the fissure, as crouched deep dark, glinting in a false-promise of silver blue, gray as death through the snarl of lint.

Then he did see, though surely never as she saw, and he moved to go down with her, yet stopped. “What’s the matter?” he asked gently, nudging her, meaning simply that she should lean over with him.

“Nothing,” she said, “
you
go,” and she laughed, a little nervous.

Aaron snorted. “Come on,” he said, “well both go.”

And so, heads together, they leaned over, to stare down into this crack in the floor, eyes like diamonds, to see what the girl had found.

It was dark there, and it was narrow—so narrow that Aaron could not use his match, but must take Priscilla’s straw and poke into the very heart of the thing.

“Not like that,”
she said, breathless, touching his wrist in something now beyond alarm.

Aaron shook her away, yet would work the straw more gingerly now, less deep, nearer the tangled edge—while Violet, risen to one elbow, watched as mesmerized, and Boris frowned once and shook his head. “You shouldn’t let it bug you,” he said, for it seemed that then, at the point of the straw, just where it disappeared into the gray, there was a sudden treacherous movement, as of the angry living thing inside, and Priscilla screamed at the top of her voice.

Violet and Boris frowned terribly, and for a moment Aaron sat agape, like a stricken mute—but then it was he who had to put Priscilla, sobbing now, onto the bed, and to move around and around trying to calm her and tell her not to worry, baby, that it wasn’t anything, baby, wasn’t anything at all.

“I know, I know,” said Priscilla.

“You shouldn’t let it bug you,” said Boris from the floor, where very high on a heavy straight ledge, he was at that moment bringing two minute pieces together, merging them.

“I know, I know,” said Priscilla, whimpering her gratitude—for she probably thought he was talking to her.

T
HE
S
ORBONNE, WHERE
Murray was enrolled for a doctorate, required little of his time; class attendance was not compulsory and there were no scheduled examinations. Having received faculty approval on the subject of his thesis—“The Influence of Mallarmé on the English Novel Since 1940”—Murray was now engaged in research in the libraries, developing his thesis, writing it, and preparing himself to defend it at some future date of his own convenience. Naturally he could attend any lectures at the University which he considered pertinent to his work, and he did attend them from time to time—usually those of illustrious guest speakers, like Cocteau, Camus, and Sartre, or Marcel Raymond, author of
From Baudelaire to Surrealism.
But for the most part, Murray devoted himself to less formal pursuits; he knew every Negro jazz musician in every club in Paris.

At night he made the rounds. If there was someone really great in town he would sit at the same bar all evening and listen to him; otherwise he made the rounds, one club after another, not drinking much, just listening to the music and talking to the musicians. Then, toward morning, he would go with them to eat—down the street to the Brasserie Civet or halfway across Paris to a place in Montmartre that served spareribs and barbecued chicken.

What was best though was to hang around the bar of his own hotel, the Noir et Blanc, in the late afternoon during a rehearsal or a closed session. At these times everyone was very relaxed, telling funny stories, drinking Pernod, and even turning on a bit of hashish or marijuana, passing it around quite openly, commenting on its quality. Murray derived a security from these scenes—the hushed camaraderie and the inside jokes. Later, in the evening, when the place was jumping, Murray kept himself slightly apart from the rest of the crowd—the tourists, the students, the professional beats, and the French
de bonne famille—
who all came to listen to the great new music. And always during the evening there would be at least one incident, like the famous tenor-man’s casually bumming a cigarette from him, which would prove Murray’s intimacy with the group to those who observed. Old acquaintances from Yale, who happened in, found Murray changed; they detected in his attitude toward them, their plans, and their expressed or implied values a sort of bemused tolerance—as though he were in possession of a secret knowledge. And then there would be the inevitable occasion when he was required to introduce them to one of the musicians, and that obvious moment when the musician would look to Murray for his judgment of the stranger as in the question: “Well, man, who
is
this cat? Is he
with
it?” None of this lessened Murray’s attractiveness, nor his mystery, no less to others, presumably, than to himself; but he was never too hard on his old friends—because he was swinging.