Free Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes by Terry Southern

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 South Summer Idyll
    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,