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

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.
    Big Lawrence and Howard walked a dirt road along one side of Hampton Airport. It was a hot, dry day.
    “What’s a box of shells like that cost?” Lawrence asked, and when Howard told, Lawrence said, “ Sure, but for how many shells?”
    At crossroads, the corner of a field, a place where on some Sundays certain people who made model airplanes came to try them, they found, all taped together, five or six shiny old dry-cell batteries as might be used for starting just such small engines.
    Howard pulled these batteries apart while they walked on, slower now beneath the terrible sun, and when Lawrence wanted to see if he could hit one in the air with the shotgun, they agreed to trade off, three rifle-cartridges for one shotgun shell.
    Howard pitched one of the batteries up, but Lawrence wasn’t ready. “Wait’ll I say ‘Pull,’ ” he told Howard.
    He stood to one side then, holding the shotgun down as he might have seen done on a TV program about skeet-shooting.
    “Okay, now Pull! ”
    Lawrence missed the first one, said that Howard was throwing too hard.
    Howard tossed another, gently, lobbing it into the sun, glinting end over gleaming end, a small meteor in slow motion, suddenly jumping with the explosion, this same silver thing, as caught up in a hot air jet, but with the explosion, coughing out its black insides.
    “Got the sonofabitch,” said Big Lawrence. “Dead bird goddam it!”
    Howard laughed. “I reckon it is,” he said softly.
    Once across the field, away from the airport, they turned up the railroad track. And now they walked very slow, straight into the sun, burning, mirrored a high blinding silver in the rails that lay for five miles unbending, flat against the shapeless waste, ascending, stretching ablaze to the sun itself—so that seen from afar, as quite small, they could have appeared, as children, to walk unending between these two columns of dancing light.
    With the rifle they took some long shots at the dead-glass discs on a signal tower far up the track, but nothing happened. When they were closer though, one of the signals suddenly swung up wildly alight. A burning color. Lawrence was about to take a shot at it when they heard the train behind them.
    They slid down an embankment, through the bull-nettle and bluebonnets, to walk a path along the bottom. When the freight train reached them however, they turned to watch it go by, and at one of the boxcars, Big Lawrence, holding the rifle against his hip, pumped three or four rounds into the side of it. Under the noise of the train, the muted shots had no connection with the bursting way the dark wood on the boxcar door tore off angling, and splintered out all pine white.
    As they walked on, Howard said, “Don’t reckon they was any hoboes in it do you?” Then he and Lawrence laughed.
    They struck the creek hollow and followed it in file, Lawrence ahead, stepping around tall slakey rocks that pitched up abruptly from the hot shale. Heat came out of this dry stone, sharp as acid, wavering up in black lines. Then at a bend before them was the water hole, small now and stagnant, and they turned off to climb the bank in order to reach it from the side. Howard was in front now, as they came over the rise, he saw the rabbit first. Standing between two oak stumps ten feet away, standing up like a kangaroo, ears winced back, looking away, toward the railroad track. Then Lawrence saw it too, and tried to motion Howard off with one hand, bringing his rifle up quick with the other.
    The sound came as one, but within one spurting circle of explosion, the two explosions were distinct.
    On their side, the half face of the rabbit twitched twice back and down even before it hit him, then he jumped straight up in a double flip five times the height he had