Free Texas Summer by Terry Southern Page A

squeezed it between two others until, through all this heavy red of rabbit, sticking, covering his whole hand now, he could almost see, but never quite, where in one spot on his smallest finger, up through all the thick dark blood of the rabbit, he was bleeding too.
    He went down to the water hole to wash his hands, but he finished skinning the rabbit first.
    When he got back, Harold was bent over, ready to light the fire.
    Then it was Lawrence who squinted at the sun, still monstrous but lower now in the western sky. “Well, are we goin’ to the goddam picture show or not?” he demanded.
    “I don’t care,” said Harold, looking up at him. “Do you want to?”
    “Well, we better git back if we’re goin’.”
    Harold pulled the old newspaper from where he had put it to start the fire. Then he wrapped it around the rabbit again, and he stuffed the whole thing inside his shirt. Finally he folded the skin square and put it in his back pocket, like a handkerchief.
    Lawrence had the rabbit’s head. He tried to get the eyes to stay open, and one did stay open, but only the white showed when he sat it on the stump. He took a rock from the windbreak Harold had built for the fire and put this on the stump, too, behind the head, and they started across the field. When they were a little way out, they took shots at the head, and finally Lawrence used the last of the shotgun shells he had coming to go up close and blast the head, and finally a part of the stump itself.
    “Bombs away!” he said the last time he pulled the trigger, up close.
    Before they reached the street where Lawrence lived, they could hear Tommy Sellers cursing and Crazy Ralph Wilton, farther, yelling: “All the way! All the way!” and as they turned in, Tommy Sellers was there, coming toward them, walking up the middle of the street, swinging his glove by one finger.
    Harold pulled the wad of newspaper out of his shirt and held it up to show, and Tommy Sellers stopped and kicked around at a pile of dead grass in the gutter, while in the distance Crazy Ralph was yelling: “All the way! All the way!” Then Tommy Sellers found the ball with his foot, and, bending over, in a low twisting windup from the gutter, without once looking where, he threw it — and the ball lifted like a shot to hang sailing for an instant in a wide climbing arc toward the sun.
    Big Lawrence brought his rifle off his shoulder. “Ka- pow! Ka- pow! ” and the barrel point wavered, sighting up the lazy wake of the ball. “Dead-sonafabitch-bird,” he said.
    Tommy Sellers was standing closer now, hands on his hips, not seeing half a block away, where Crazy Ralph, with his eyes wild, his fingers nervously tapping the glove palm, was trying to pick the bouncing throw off the headlight of a parked car.
    “Goddam that thing stinks!” said Lawrence, making a face when Harold opened the newspaper. The paper had become like a half-dried cloth, stiff, or sticking in places and coming to pieces. Almost at once a fly was crawling over the chewed-up part of the rabbit.
    “You know what it’s like?” said Lawrence. “Rotten old afterbirth!” and he spat, seeming to retch slightly.
    “What was it?” asked Tommy Sellers, looking closely at the rabbit, then up, not caring, dancing away to make an over-the-shoulder circus catch of the throw from Crazy Ralph.
    As they walked on, Harold wrapped the newspaper around the rabbit again and put it in his shirt.
    “It’s already startin’ to rot!” said Big Lawrence.
    “Aw you’re crazy,” Harold said.
    “ Crazy, ” repeated Lawrence through clenched teeth. “You’re the one who’s crazy. What’ll you do...eat it?” He laughed, angrily, spitting again.
    They were walking in the street now in front of Lawrence’s house. Tommy Sellers and Ralph Wilton were at the curb, throwing their gloves up through the branches of a stunted cedar tree where the ball was caught.
    There were some people standing around the steps at Lawrence’s