Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (8 page)

Momentarily discarding this sheet, he went back to the first page, and where he had written, “Let it stand as living testimony to the fiber of our times,” crossed it through, and rewrote, “Let it stand, a living mirror to the fiber of our times,” and immediately below, in the margin, “reflection of, etc.”

“Who’s to say how you’ll react?” Professor Thomas took it up again now. “According to all accounts, there’s no foretelling the effect of drugs. You’d better be careful, Ralph. Damned careful.”

“Ralph,” said George Drew in an almost blatant interruption, “as, well, as an amateur
semanticist,
I’m very much interested in vocabularies and their physical correlations; that is, if and when they do exist. I mean, of course, in terms of the particular group mentality involved—”

“Careful,” repeated Professor Thomas half aloud. “You’ll have to be very careful.” He was quite serious.

“Oh yes, Tom,” said Dr. Warner, wearily, but added at once, as on an afterthought, and with a smile for them both, “yes, I’m hip that I will.”

Coming up the subway stairs, Dr. Warner touched at his throat with an already damp handkerchief. It was a warm evening. Dressed for the occasion, he was wearing a gray flannel suit and a soft dark shirt, buttoned at the collar. His shoes were suede and had heavy crepe soles. Clean shaven and hatless, his fine head erect, glinting silver beneath changing lights, he could have been an owner of horses, or a California surgeon. Or, he could have been a very proper junky, for his movements were listless, as without direction, and his face was in absolute blank repose, betraying nothing, except indifference and, possibly, a dull and distant contempt for effort. But his mind was still not under control. Why had he said he wouldn’t mainline it? Of course, he
would have to mainline it.
What had he been thinking of? These weren’t children.

At the top of the stairs he paused and brought the handkerchief to his face again. On the street it seemed even warmer. But he knew this would pass. Once he was moving, once he was functioning, it would be all right. He even managed to think:
then it’ll be cool.
And he could have smiled at this, but his face wouldn’t betray him. He had mastered his face. He had mastered everything but his thoughts, and his thoughts were of the order of those of famous actors in the seconds leading up to the big scene:
blood in the chamber . . . matches and spoon .
.
. you cut it, I’ll cut it, won’t cook up, will cook up, behind the knuckle, blood in the chamber, silence, .
. .
silence. Be cool.

Leaning against an iron post by the subway entrance, Dr. Warner began to order his thoughts. He lit a cigarette, but the cigarette at once recalled the smoke-filled booth in New Orleans; and what he was about to do suddenly took on another irresistible importance. Marijuana was one thing, heroin was another. Heroin was
stronger.
He distrusted the word, but could think of no better one. Heroin
is
stronger, he thought.
There’s something irretrievable . . . there’s no emetic for a substance put straight into the blood stream. There’s no turning back. And they say if you fight it.
. . .

At that moment, a cab passed very close to the curb, slowing for the changing light, and the Doctor’s eye caught his own distinguished image framed squarely for an instant in the window glass. He dropped the cigarette and slowly ground his foot over it. And he knew he would be able to do whatever was required.

He crossed the street toward an alleyway opposite. At the head of the alleyway was a short-order place, its door and raised glass-front open to the summer night, where, because of a small neon
MALTED
sign, light lay upon light in soft transparent cubes, forming a great milk-green swath over the sidewalk and curb, violated by a flashing liquor brand across the way which moved in stabs of red as harsh as traffic noise. But from a juke-box inside came the sound of a singing tenor sax . . . leaping out raid-like through neon against the passing traffic, to flurry just above their heads, brandishing something there in sound so quick and serious before springing back again, it could only astonish them.

Standing around on the sidewalk, or leaning against the front of the short-order place, were three or four young men in different attitudes of listening to the music, or of just standing there. There was nothing in their manner or dress to relate them, and each seemed somehow alone, but all their faces bore the same stamp of extreme ennui and polite detachment that was due to something more than just civilization.

Walking very slowly, Dr. Warner paused when he reached the corner of the alleyway and the short-order place, and after standing for a few minutes listening, he leaned against the wall himself.

The person next to him was a boy of about twenty-five. He was as thin as an El Greco saint, with eyes like two black pins. He did not seem to have noticed the Doctor’s arrival. After a few minutes, Dr. Warner spoke to the boy, not looking at him, staring straight ahead, his voice soft and without inflection.

“Hey, man,” he said, “what’s happenin’?”

The boy seemed to blink as he turned his head, giving the Doctor a slow, quizzical look, almost a smile.

“You tell me, daddy,” he said finally, his lips scarcely moving, “know what I mean, like you tell me.”

“Well, man,” said Dr. Warner, “like I just got on the scene, dig, and I was wondering if anything was
happenin’
tonight. I’d like to make it, you know what I mean?”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said the boy, as though from some incredible distance.

Dr. Warner gave him a tired, patient smile.

“Now don’t jump salty, daddy-o,” he said, “I mean like level with me ’cause I’m straight for loot, dig, and I got eyes, you know what I mean, like I got big eyes to get on and just fall out someplace where the cats are blowin’.”

The boy turned his face away and was staring straight ahead.

“Like what?” he said at last.

“Well, like
Bird;
you
know?
”

The boy turned again and regarded the Doctor, slowly and vaguely. Then, and as though with considerable effort, he indicated a direction down the alley.

“Man, do you see that light? At the end? Yeah, well there might be something happenin’ there.”

Dr. Warner nodded with grave knowing. “Crazy,” he said and then, with his slow wink of confidence as he departed, “Later, man.”

The boy blinked with disinterest and sank carefully back against the wall.

The alley was narrowly lit and lined with a pure blackness from which rose huge dark piles of garbage.

As Dr. Warner walked, spiritedly now, he reproduced, whistling, almost exactly what he had heard from the juke-box.

Then he began to frame a sentence in his mind’s eye: “As to progressional pattern, the atonal
riff
is invariably—” and he had just succeeded in freezing
riff
in italics when the word and the phrase exploded in a flash of blinding white, as an arm swung out from the darkness and laid a short segment of lead pipe across the back of the Doctor’s head. As he staggered between two mountains of refuse, he was hit again, and the white light was shot through with coils and bolts of purple and gray, then flooded out on a heavy wave of blood-blackness.

One man took off the Doctor’s watch and emptied his billfold, while the second went through his other pockets. They both wore gloves.

A
SUMMER
S
ATURDAY
in Dallas and the boy Howard sat out on the back steps, knees up, propping in between, an old singleload, twelve-gauge shotgun. While he steadied and squeezed the butt in one hand, the other, with studied unbroken slowness, wrapped a long piece of friction tape around and around the stock—for beginning at the toe of the butt and stretching up about five inches was a thin dry crack in the old wood.

His mother came out, down off the back porch carrying an enameled basin heaped with twists of wet, wrung clothes.

“You wantta be careful with that old gun,” she said, making a slight frown.

A squat woman and dark-haired, almost eastern in the intensity she tried to bear on situations, her face was perhaps too open, eyes too widely spaced, and the effect was never what she calculated. She would not suspect, however, that within the block only a few could take her seriously.

Her boy Howard did, of course, though if others were present he might be embarrassed, or a little irritated.

“Aw now you’re kiddin’,” he said, wanting mainly to reassure her about the gun.

She had just given him a dollar for the weekend, and before dark he would have spent over half of it. Sitting now on the back steps he could reckon exactly how it would go. And with her standing there talking, he was aware, too, that except for the show she had no idea at all how he would spend the money.

At the kitchen table his father treated it lightly.

“Where you
goin’
boy? Shootin’?”

“Aw just fool aroun’,” said Howard, looking away, eating slowly at a piece of bread, buttered and covered with sugar.

“Who, you and Lawrence? What’re y’all goin’
after?
”

“Ah I dunno,” said Howard, “just fool aroun’, I guess.”

“Where’re you and Lawrence
goin’,
Howie?” asked his mother, back at the sink again.

“Aw out aroun’ Hampton Airport, I guess,” he said.

“You wantta be careful out there at Hampton,” said his mother, “with the planes comin’ in and all.”

Howard tried to laugh, even to catch his father’s eye.

“They ain’t any
planes
there now,” he said, sheepish at having to be impatient with her, “they closed it down, didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t want you goin’ up in that trainer-plane neither,” his mother went on as unhearing, almost closed-eyed, packing faded dripless lumps of cloth into the basin.

“Aw now you’re kiddin’,” said Howard, “it don’t cost but three dollars for fifteen minutes. Not likely I
will,
is it?”

At the table though, his father spoke about the gun, the danger, abstractly, as if he himself had never fired it. And yet, when he saw the box of shells on the table, he opened it and shook two or three out, holding them loosely, so as to appear casual, familiar, he who had not held a gun in thirty years.

“Look like good’uns,” he said finally, “what’d they
cost?
”

Howard reached Big Lawrence’s house by way of the alley. Stepping through an open place in the fence two houses before, and cutting across these back yards, he could hear Lawrence on at the house and he saw his shadow dark there behind a window screen.

“Ka-pow! Ka-pow! Ka-pow!” was what Lawrence said.

It was a small room.

Big Lawrence sat out on the edge of the bed, and all down around his feet the scattered white patches lay, fallen each as the poisoned cactus-bloom, every other center oil-dark, he cleaning his rifle, a 30-30 Savage.

Across one end of the bed, flat on his stomach looking at an old comic book, was Crazy Ralph Newgate, while Tommy Sellers sat on the floor, back flat to the wall. Tommy Sellers had a baseball and glove in his lap, and every so often he would flip the baseball up and it would twirl over his fingers like an electric top.

As Howard came in and sat down on the arm of a heavy-stuffed, misshapen chair, Lawrence looked up, laughing. Most of the time Lawrence’s laugh was coarse and, in a way, sort of bitter.

“Well, goddam if it ain’t old Howard!” he said, perhaps remembering a western movie they had seen the night before.

Somewhere, next door, a radio was playing loud, Saturday morning cowboy music from Station WRR in downtown Dallas.

Big Lawrence slammed bolt home, slapping it.

“You ready?” he asked Howard, and Howard nodded—but before he could get up, Lawrence had turned around on the bed and leaned hard across Ralph Newgate’s legs, sighting the rifle out over the back yard. There across the yard, out about three feet from the back fence, so crouched half-sitting that the feet were drawn way under, was a cat—a black cat, rounded small and unblinking in the high morning sun.

Big Lawrence squeezed one out on the empty chamber.

“Ka-pow!” he said and brought the gun down, laughing.

On the floor, next to the wall, the baseball spun twisting across Tommy Sellers’ knuckles like a trained rat.

“Goddam! Right in the eye!” said Lawrence. He raised up, and with some shells from his shirt pocket loaded the rifle; then he quickly threw out the shells, working the action in a jerky eccentric manner. One of the shells, as they flew all over the bed, went across the comic book Ralph Newgate was holding and hit the bridge of his nose. The other three boys laughed, but Crazy Ralph muttered something, rubbing his nose, and flipped the shell back over into the rest next to Lawrence’s leg, as he might have playing marbles—and Big Lawrence flinched.

“You crazy bastard!” said Lawrence, “what if it’d hit the cap!” and he picked up the shell and threw it as hard as he could against the wall behind Ralph Newgate’s head, making him duck. They left the shell where it fell on the floor behind the bed. Ralph didn’t speak, but just kept turning the pages of the comic book, while Lawrence sat there looking at the book in front of Ralph’s eyes for about a minute.

Then Lawrence reloaded the gun and drew another bead out the window. The black cat was still sitting there, head on toward the muzzle when Lawrence moved the safety with his thumb—and next door someone turned the radio up a little more.

In the small room, the explosion was loud.

The comic book jumped in Crazy Ralph’s hand like it was jerked by a wire. “Goddam it!” he said, but he didn’t look around, just shifted a little, as if settling to the book again.

The cat seemed to have hardly moved, only to have been pushed back toward the fence some, still sitting there, head down, feet drawn under, as though staring at the screen.

But in the screen now, next to a hole made in opening the screen from the outside, was another, perfectly round, flanged out instead of in, worn suddenly, by the passing of the bullet, all bright silver at the edge.