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

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