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

south to the sea. After supper they went straight to bed.
    Sarah didn’t wake until light. He was gone. She got up and dressed. Instead of fixing breakfast, she took the hoe from the back steps and went to work in the patch. By midmorning she could no longer feel her arms and shoulders. She tried to straighten up and something moved through her back like a burning knife.
    She sat on the steps with her face in her arms. Much later, she got up, and under the hot sun walked down through the patch and the field toward the sea. Above the throbbing heat of noon she could hear ahead the constant play of the surf, and something more when she began to climb the dunes. But when she reached the top of the dune and looked down onto the vast mirrored sea below, she saw that he stood alone, in apparent dead fatigue, and Sarah could only follow the dull sweep of his eyes on the retreating darkness in the water.
    She lay on the dune for a while after Sid left the beach, plodding past her, back up across the field toward the patch and the house.
    When Sarah reached the house, Sid was asleep. He slept into the afternoon, then went out into the patch with his hoe. She saw as he passed how his mouth was fixed straight, like the breaking length of a black string. After an hour, he was sitting on the back steps.
    From her chair at the kitchen table Sarah watched Sid with his pocketknife whittle off the handle of the hoe. He spent the rest of the afternoon there on the steps, sharpening the end of the hoe handle with his knife, so that finally what was left of the hoe was a sharp-pointed hardwood spear about three feet long. Then he went to bed.
    And Sarah followed. She lay in bed, her eyes opened, turning ever again from where the ceiling spread above them like a veil, to Sid’s face and back, and back again. Night. Night and the image of night.
    She did not awake until late.
    The land on the Gulf between Corpus Christi and Fly is a flat burning waste, with only the most gradual rise of dune above the surf.
    At the still blaze of noon, there is a wildness here in the heat and light, and atop the dunes the air is overhung with a sound like water beating against some distant cliff, but this is the sound of the sun, which strikes and rises from the dead sand in black lined waves.
    As Sarah climbed, crawling, she stopped, feeling the rise of sound and light, turned herself, her eyes, straight into the panic sun, and she slowly stood, her eyes strained to blackness. She was there, on the crest of the highest dune and she dropped to her knees at the sight of the endless sea stretched shorewise in an explosion of light. And below, deep in the burning surf, Sid Peckham fought for his life.
    Sarah lay on the dune, half dazed by the flat crystal brilliance of the scene, as the two bodies heaved and pitched together in some heavy soundless purpose. Now one, now the other in ascendancy, they fell and rose, threshing, their rage a slowly desperate waltz.
    Here from high atop the dune, she heard the muted scream and saw the lunge in the surf below, how the two fell grappling beneath the water, then rose wavering, fixed in heavy changing arcs of strength, leaning now toward the sea, now toward the land, but always flat under the burning sun. They gave no quarter except to fatigue when one beating arc would waver and fall, in favor of sea or shore.
    And then to Sarah the battle seemed locked like a poised weight, and she sprang up from the dune and rushed down to the sea. The hardwood spear stood jutting aslant from the sand below the surf, and as the girl threw herself between them she wrenched the spear from the sand, and turning its point from shore to sea and back, and back again, all her knowing was struck dim by the terrible flux of weight, balance and change, her eyes blind to the tearing sun. Great cloudhead image on the silver screen . . . approach and retreat . . . approach and retreat, the growing approach, approach, approach, uncontained growing,