Free Texas Summer by Terry Southern Page B

front porch. One was a young woman wearing an apron over her dress — and a little girl was holding on to the dress with both hands, pressing her face into the apron, swinging herself slowly back and forth, so that the woman stood braced, her feet slightly apart. She stroked the child’s head with one hand, and in the other she was holding the dead cat.
    They watched Harold and Lawrence in the street in front of the house. Once, the woman moved her head and spoke to the big man standing on the porch, who frowned without looking at her.
    Harold didn’t turn in with Lawrence. “See you at the picture show,” he said.
    As he walked on, the fall of their voices died past him.
    “How’d it happen, Son?” he heard Lawrence’s dad ask.
    He turned off on a vacant lot that cut through toward the livery stable, where he would meet Les Newgate for his ride home. Halfway across, he pulled out the paper and opened it. He studied it, brought it up to his face, and smelled it. Then he put it back in the paper and inside his shirt. “Ain’t nothin’ better’n fried rabbit with biscuit an’ gravy,” his granddad always said.

VII
    O N AN EAST T EXAS prison farm, about two hundred miles away, a different kind of action was unfolding. Cap’n Jack, his cheek bulging with chaw, was shouting furiously: “Git ’im, Bull! Git that black son’bitch!”
    And Bull Watson, 250 pounds, pig-bristle haircut, emptied his ten-gauge riot gun at the escaping prisoner, kicking out craters of red dirt on both sides of the man who scrambled over the culvert and up the ragged embankment.
    A dozen other prisoners, all black or Mexican, cheered him on: “Go, Big Nail, go!”
    “ Vamos, amigo! ”
    “Big Nail gonna make it! Hot damn!”
    And as the prisoner disappeared into the scrub-brush at the top of the embankment, Bull tried to avoid the Cap’n’s glare of contempt.
    “Ah may of gotta piece of ’im, Cap,” said Bull.
    “You got shit, that’s what you got,” said Cap. He spat a glittering brown trail of Red Man into the dust, then turned to the toothless Mexican trusty standing alongside and pointed to the old pickup with the faded letters: TEXAS STATE PRISON SYSTEM.
    “Go git the dogs!” he bellowed, “an’ git Slim an’ Dusty! Tell Warden Big Nail’s makin’ a run fer it!”
    The trusty turned and headed for the truck, as the other yelled after him: “An’ bring my Winchester!”
    “If Warden don’t want ’em runnin’,” muttered Bull, “then how come ah can’t use my thirty-thirty on the job?”
    “’Cause he don’t want nobody gittin’ killed, that’s how come,” said Cap, then spat and added quietly, “an’ ’cause he’s a goddam nigger-lover...now, jest shut your hole an’ git on over yonder an’ check them leg-irons.”
    Bull hitched up his trousers and headed toward the prisoners, while Cap pulled out his .357 Magnum and slowly cocked it.
    “Awright,” he said in a low snarl, “if they’s anybody else wants to give ole Cap a little target practice” — he fired a deafening shot over their heads, causing them all to flinch — “he can jest start haulin’ ass.”
    Across the culvert and beyond the embankment, Big Nail moved through the mesquite brush like a wounded animal, half hobbled by one leg-iron he had failed to slip.
    “Big Nail be long gone from this place!” he said aloud. “Glory to the fuckin’ Jesus!”
    In the distance behind he could hear Cap’n ranting at the prisoners and he knew that the Mexican was not yet back with the dogs.
    “Long gone now. Hot damn! Praise to the fuckin’ Jesus!”
    He ran without letup until he reached a narrow branch of the Cotton Mouth River — dried now in the raging heat to scarcely more than a rocky creekbed. But the water was deep enough to cover his feet.
    “Well, shit-fire,” he said. “And so long, hound-dog!” And he stepped carefully into the precious fluid and headed downstream.
    With the afternoon sun filtering down from the