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

since the war, every Saturday they walked the two miles into Fly for the new movie. The movie in Fly played once on Saturday night and once again on Tuesday afternoon. Sid and Sarah went to the Saturday night showing, and they always left the house well before sundown in order to get good seats. All the seats were the same price, fifteen cents. They saw comedies and mysteries, westerns, dramas and classic histories, one a week for seven years.
    In the darkened cinema their faces were like a single wooden mask. Sometimes Sarah had difficulty in grasping the mood of a film at all. Then she would try to take her cue from Sid, leaning out to turn and peer at his face. But it never told her anything, and as soon as he noticed he would push her away again back down into her own seat.
    Only, if Sid had seen the film before, Sarah might watch him from the side, how he covered his mouth from time to time, nodding his head at the screen. The way this happened though, it never failed to strike Sarah as being different from what was happening at the same instant on the screen. And Sarah’s brow would go all dark furrowed, and she might draw her stiff fingers back and forth over the palm of her hand.
    Later, in the moonlight, on the narrow dirt road as they walked back to their place, Sarah would stay a little behind Sid and stare at the back of his head. Or else she might shoot a furtive, intent look at him from the side.
    “Nice film weren’t it, Sid?”
    “It weren’t a bad film,” Sid would say, and after a moment, “I seen it before now. I seen it in Englelan.”
    Sid Peckham had picked up one or two expressions in England. One of them was “piping” for hot, or more often to augment hotness. Only he had distorted it to “piper,” so that now they sometimes referred to the coffee of a morning as being “piper hot.” Or if Sarah simply asked, “How does this soup taste to you, Sid?” Sid might say, “It’s a right good soup, it’s piper hot.” Curiously too, through his experience, perhaps from a chance overheard conversation between two barracksmates in the faraway past, Sid had come to use the word “realist” to describe certain films; but, instead of “realist,” it sounded as though he were saying “reel-less.” And it was as if he might have somehow wholly confused the root stem of the word.
    “How’d you like it, Sid?”
    “It were good—it were one of them reel-less.”
    Or, perhaps, in the case of a musical or a cartoon:
    “There weren’t much to it—it weren’t no reel-less film.”
    But somewhere behind this, the mask of each expressed life, deep under the dead wooden simplicity of their ever separate, unspoken awareness, little things were crawling alive, breeding and taking on great, secret shape.
    During the day their labor was equally divided, until at last one Friday when Sarah was in the sixth month of her first pregnancy, it fell upon Sid to do most of the work in the patch. For her part, Sarah wondered if now, with the coming expense of the child, they would continue to go into Fly on Saturday for the movie. She wondered, too, how it would be after the child. And once, in a dream, she thought she saw the three of them sitting side by side in the darkness of the cinema, only their faces alight, as though she were seeing them from somewhere inside the screen. But she knew they had never, above the quarterly payments on the land, had money to spare at the time the payments were made. Moreover, with Sid working the patch alone, it was difficult to see how they would meet the next payment at all.
    Saturday, and Sarah awoke from a dreamless sleep, in a summer darkness long before dawn. At waking, this darkness was pure, and except for the night wind, perfectly still. She sought, but no notion of time could form in her mind, and she knew as soon that beneath the swift softness of the wind the night was alive with sound.
    She kept very still, her head straight against the flat cotton