Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (12 page)

Together they carefully spread the checkered tablecloth the way Jackie always did, and then laid out the food. Buddy had brought along a portable phonograph, which he opened up now while Murray uncorked the wine.

“What’ll it be,” Buddy asked with a laugh, after looking at the records for several minutes, “Bird or Bartók?”

“Bartók, man,” said Murray, and added dreamily, “where do you go after Bird?”

“Crazy,” said Buddy, and he put on
The Miraculous Mandarin.

Murray lay propped on his elbow, and Buddy sat opposite, cross-legged, as they ate and drank in silence, hungry but with deliberation, sampling each dish, occasionally grunting an appreciative comment.

“Dig that bridge, man,” said Buddy once, turning to the phonograph and moving the needle back a couple of grooves, “like that’s what you might call an ‘augmented
oh-so-slightly.’
” He laughed. “Cat’s too much,” he said, as he leaned forward to touch a piece of chicken to the mayonnaise.

Murray nodded. “Swings,” he said.

They lay on the grass, smoking and drinking the cognac, closing their eyes or shading them against the slanting sun. They were closer together now, since once Buddy had gotten up to stretch and then, in giving Murray a cigarette, had sat down beside him to get a light.

After a while Buddy seemed to half doze off, and then he sleepily turned over on his stomach. As he did, his knee touched Murray’s leg, and Murray moved lightly as if to break the contact—but then, as if wondering why he had reacted like that, let his leg ease back to where it had been, and almost at once dropped into a light sleep, his glass of cognac still in his hand, resting on his chest.

When Murray awoke, perhaps only seconds later, the pressure of Buddy’s leg on his own was quite strong. Without looking at Buddy, he slowly sat up, raising his legs as he did, sitting now with knees under his folded arms. He looked at the glass of cognac still in his hand, and finished it off.

“That sort of thing,” said Buddy quietly, “doesn’t interest you either.” It was not put as a question, but as a statement which required confirmation.

Murray turned, an expression of bland annoyance on his face, while Buddy lay there looking at him pretty much the same as always.

“No, man,” said Murray, then almost apologetically: “I mean, like I don’t put it down—but it’s just not a scene I make. You know?”

Buddy dropped his eyes to a blade of grass he was toying with; he smiled. “Well, anyway,” he said with a little laugh, “no offense.”

Murray laughed, too. “None taken, man,” he said seriously.

Murray had risen at his more or less usual hour, and the clock at Cluny was just striking eleven when he emerged from the hotel stairway, into the street and the summer morning. He blinked his eyes at the momentary brightness and paused to lean against the side of the building, gazing out into the pleasantly active boulevard.

When the clock finished striking he pushed himself out from the wall and started towards the Royale, where he often met Buddy and Jackie for breakfast. About halfway along Boulevard Saint-Germain he turned in at a small café to get some cigarettes. Three or four people were coming out the door as Murray reached it, and he had to wait momentarily to let them pass. As he did he was surprised to notice, at a table near the side, Buddy and Jackie, eating breakfast. Buddy was wearing dark glasses, and Murray instinctively reached for his own as he came through the door, but discovered he had left them in his room. He raised his hand in a laconic greeting to them and paused at the bar to get the cigarettes. Buddy nodded, but Jackie had already gotten up from the table and was walking toward the girls’ room. Murray sauntered over, smiling, and sat down.

“What are you doing here, man?” he asked. “I didn’t know you ever came here.”

Buddy shrugged. “Thought we’d give it a try,” he said seriously examining a dab of butter on the end of his knife. Then he looked up at Murray and added with a laugh, “You know—new places, new faces.”

Murray laughed too, and picked at a piece of an unfinished croissant. “That’s pretty good,” he said. “What’s that other one? You know, the one about—oh yeah, ‘Old friends are the best friends.’ Ever hear that one?”

“I have heard that one,” said Buddy nodding, “yes, I have heard that one.” His smile was no longer a real one. “Listen, Murray,” he said, wiping his hands and sitting back, putting his head to one side, “let me ask you something. Just what is it you want?”

Murray frowned down at where his own hands slowly dissected the piece of croissant as though he were shredding a paper napkin. “What are you talking about, man?”

“You
don’t
want to play music,” Buddy began as though he were taking an inventory, “and you
don’t
want . . . I mean just what have we
got
that interests you?”

Murray looked at him briefly, and then looked away in exasperation. He noticed that Jackie was talking to the patron who was standing near the door. “Well, what do
you
think, man?” he demanded, turning back to Buddy. “I dig the
scene,
that’s all. I dig the
scene
and the
sounds.
”

Buddy stood up, putting some money on the table. He looked down at Murray, who sat there glowering, and shook his head. “You’re too hip, baby. That’s right. You’re a
hippy.
” He laughed. “In fact, you’re what we might call a kind of professional
nigger lover.’’
He touched Murray’s shoulder as he moved to leave. “And I’m not putting you down for it, understand, but, uh, like the man said, ‘It’s just not a scene I make.’ ” His dark face set for an instant beneath the smoky glasses and he spoke, urgent and imploring, in a flash of white teeth, almost a hiss, “I mean
not when I can help it,
Murray,
not when I can help it.
” And he left. And the waiter arrived, picking up the money.
“Monsieur désire?”

Still scowling, staring straight ahead, Murray half raised his hand as to dismiss the waiter, but then let it drop to the table.
“Café,”
he muttered.

“Noir, monsieur?”
asked the waiter in a suggestively rising inflection.

Murray looked up abruptly at the man, but the waiter was oblivious, counting the money in his hand.

Murray sighed.
“Oui,”
he said softly,
“noir.”

I
T WAS ONE OF
those huge, jagged emptinesses left wherever a building is improperly torn down in the tenement section of a city. Actually, it was New York; but seen out of context—say, in a cropped photograph—one might have said it was some place in Europe, destroyed by war: a part of London, or Hamburg, after a raid—except that there was nothing recent, or mysterious, about this rubble; it had settled, in impossibly uneven, hard-packed mounds, all molding and covered with soot. The children in the neighborhood called it “the lot.”

Every conceivably usable thing had been wrenched out of the debris and dragged into the houses long ago, so the lot no longer held the remote chance of yielding treasure, except perhaps to the very, very young. Even the rotten pieces of lumber were gone, the two-by-fours that had stilted out so oddly, making strange inhuman shapes, or all too human shadows, to strike fear into young and old alike, passing the lot on summer nights, whenever gray clouds hazed the brightness of the moon. Now there were not even rusty nails to dare or dread at twilight, when the smallest played capture-the-flag, leaping the stagnant pools of oily water.

Out of expediency, the adults, too, when dealing with the children, called it “the lot.”
Go get your brother, over at the lot, a
woman might be heard to say, or
Don’t lie to me, I know you was at the lot, Mrs. Harley seen you there when she went to the store.
Among themselves, however, they pretended to be less familiar with it, most often referring to it as “where the building used to be” or, even more pretentiously, as “the excavation site”: they also called it a “shame” and a “menace.” Then, at night, hidden from each other by the darkness, they used it as a garbage dump.

It was strange, seeing children playing in the lot. It had the spaciousness of a small park, but there was a certain bleak wildness about the broken terrain, and the lighting was always bad: unreal, like that on a print of underdeveloped film.

In the fall afternoon now, the sunlight filtered down across the lot as though it were being strained through black gauze, making the rust-brick building that formed the west wall of the lot loom up all shadowed and dark, the color of bad blood. Near the ground, scrawled across this wall in already graying white, was the single word, “Panthers,” and out about twenty feet, along the rise of a refuse mound, sat the three boys, their backs to the wall.

The one who sat on the crest of the mound was named Vince. Vince had the proverbial clean-cut intelligent young face of the type often pictured on the backs of cereal boxes gleefully exclaiming, “Gosh, Mom,” etc. He looked rather more wistful now though than anything else; pensive, yet vague, as one engrossed in an abstraction, a daydream. He held a large, heavy stick in his hand which he swung in deliberate, measured blows against the upturned side of a rust-eaten bucket half-buried in the debris. It made an insistently harsh sound and sometimes a rasping tear.

The second boy, Ritchie, was hunched a few feet away, knees drawn up beneath crossed arms on which he rested his chin, watching the damage of the stick on the bucket with dull comprehension.

Slightly below them both, on the incline of rubble, the third boy, Nick, lay sprawled on his side reading the comics of a tabloid daily and absently picking his nose. The three boys were each fifteen years old and looked quite a bit alike, except that the boy reading the paper, Nick, was wearing a baseball cap and, in spite of it, gave the impression of probably not being as good at baseball as Vince and Ritchie were.

Near the sidewalk, two very small boys were playing. The older one had a little plastic airplane that he careened on an outstretched hand above his head and jiggled in simulated attack on the smaller boy. The other, a tiny child who could not have been over four, had a gigantic toy pistol, a great silvery six-shooter, which he pretended to fire at the plane. He was so small, and the toy gun so grotesquely large, that it was often necessary for him to use both hands to support it against the maneuvers of the plane. The boy with the plane droned out unceasingly the effects of the plane and its machine gun.

“Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh! Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh! Umm-rahhahh! Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!”

“Kow! Kow! Kow!” the tiny boy would scream in reply, shaking himself and the great pistol.

Down this sidewalk, half a block in each direction, were the avenues where ten thousand buses, trucks and taxis were caught up in a writhing fantasy of noise and cross-purpose motion, the exposed segment of a tortured mechanical nerve, blindly, frantically threading the city. The sound seemed to funnel itself down the street from both ways and into this gap between the buildings, as into some huge amplifier, where, as a backdrop to the chorale of the two boys at war, the vicious timpano, and the quaking roar of the passing elevated, it made for a pure Bartókean nightmare of dissonance, while across the scene the dead light of afternoon seeped, in eerie, dismal shafts—winter light in a cathedral of dirty windows.

A blow from the stick rent the remaining length of the bucket, leaving now only the thick, turned rim which was already bent crescent shape. Vince strengthened his blows, his face visibly wracked with some nebulous, disturbing intensity, while Nick began to turn pages of the tabloid, wetting a thumb and forefinger for each.

“Hey, listenit this!”

He started reading aloud an account of how a woman had killed her husband with a meat hook. There was a suggestion of apology for the English language in the way Nick read. He faltered over certain words, not simply in ignorance as a seven-year-old might, but with a kind of embarrassment that such words should actually exist. Because of the noise, however, only a scattering of words were even audible.

“. . . scream . . . night . . . neighbor . . . the body . . . gruesome . . . punctured . . . the body . . . lacerations . . . police rushed . . . horrible . . . punctured . . . bloody . . . police said . . . crime . . . of passion . . .”

As his voice trailed off, bored with the account, or its ineffectualness on the others, a blow from the stick severed the last brittle strand of rim and the stick came to rest, as the boy sat, inert, staring at the completed work. After a moment he gave it another sharp blow, as for good measure, sighed, and dropped the stick, raising his face, still marked with some vague, ineffable anxiety. “Hey, lookit!”

Nick started up on one knee. “Lookit this!”

He struck the paper several times with the back of his hand. “The ‘Bandits’ busted up the hunnert-an’-fort’ last night and there’s a
pitcher
of it! They left their mark and there’s a
pitcher
of it!”

He hurried over as the two boys rose to meet him, crowding avidly, the nearest one, Ritchie, actually making a grab for the paper himself.

“Gimme that,” yelled Nick angrily, warding him off, even gesturing a threat to destroy the paper rather than yield it. “Let’s lookit for Chrissake!” said Ritchie.

It was a close-up photograph of a schoolhouse window with all the panes broken except one—across which was written: “Bandits.” It was obvious that the photograph had been heavily retouched to give the word glaring prominence. “Okay, what’s the other part say?” demanded Vince. “Jerk!” Still keeping them at bay, Nick began to read aloud, with an awkward self-importance, painfully enunciating each word.

“ ‘Public School one-hunnert-an’-four was entered late last night, according to authorities, by a teenage gang of vandals, known as The Bandits.’ ”

“Those
jerks!
” muttered Vince, stuffing his hands in his pockets and kicking at the torn bucket.