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

mattress. And, as out from the ceiling center, where the untrained vision lay, the room grew, like an image on a screen, slowly down around her to a vague, somehow familiar definition, she knew that he was awake too, and she touched his shoulder.
    “What’s that noise, Sid?”
    “It’s somethin’ in the patch,” he said without moving.
    A dry electric rustling filled the room. They lay motionless for another moment as the rustling stopped, then started up again, and Sid got stiffly out of bed and went to the window.
    “What is it?” asked Sarah. Sitting up now she could see Sid looking steadily out the window, but from the side, with his back almost flat against the wall. Then he was all crouched down, so that his eyes seemed at the level of the sill, peering out across the patch.
    Sarah left the bed and knelt beside him. At the window the sounds were not the same as before. There was a scratching, a dry tinsel sound. Leaf against leaf, and leaf against vine. And these were of the night, but in the heart of the patch where the dark form lay moving, just there, were the different sounds, the heavy, wet-mouth breaking of melons and the sound of breathing. And while the rustling of the leaf and vine stopped, the breathing went on—yet somehow heard by Sarah as indistinct, so that she shook her head and turned it first this way and then that, out against the night, and at last even to peer into Sid’s face.
    “Where, Sid?” she asked. “What is it?” Because she saw that his eyes stared straight unblinking into the dark.
    “It’s a critter I reckon,” said Sid. He stood up slowly and took his clothes off the chair. “I reckon it’s a hog.”
    Sarah stayed hunched at the sill, looking out the window and back at Sid as he put on his clothes.
    “It’s bigger than a hog,” she said.
    “I know it,” said Sid.
    In the room she saw his back as he left the door, and at once, out the window, how he appeared at the corner of the house, a shadow in the darkness, creeping along the fence of the patch. Opposite the window he stopped, crouched peering out over the patch. And where the heavier shadow lay, there was nothing now except the still night and the breathing.
    Then Sarah saw Sid rise, holding a large white rock. And she put out her hand, for in this light she saw him as though a film of oil lay stretched across the window. But in a sudden bound he was over the fence, throwing the stone and rushing ahead, as to Sarah at the window the two sounds were joined in a loud tearing sound of the breaking leaf and vine. And as quickly, the single shape was split, formed and reformed, and was lost twisting down through the darkness.
    She stayed at the window while the sounds broke away, dying across the patch, down toward the sea. Then she went to bed.
    Sometime after sunrise she awoke again, and was still alone in the room. When she was up and dressed, she made the bed and began to sweep the floor; but once, near the window, she stopped and stood there, staring out over the land. Across the piece of yard to the fence, over the patch and beyond the field, lay the dim sea, rising back high against the morning, and nothing stirred but the brilliant shooting patterns of the sun moving out across the land.
    Sarah fixed the breakfast and Sid had not returned. Then she went out into the patch and chopped weeds until she was sick. She was lying on the bed when Sid came in at almost noon. His clothes were wet and torn; there were short deep cuts on his face. “What is it, Sid?”
    For a moment he stood motionless in the doorway.
    “It was a hog,” he said then, “a sea hog.”
    Sarah waited.
    “I druv it back into the water,” said Sid. And he took off his clothes and lay down.
    In the late afternoon he awoke and got up hurriedly. Out in the patch he worked in a frenzy for two hours. Then he sat down on the back steps.
    In the kitchen, mending the torn clothes, Sarah saw his head turned away from the setting sun, and always