Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (16 page)

“Very good,” he said, “the best.”

I leaned forward for a look and a sniff. It didn’t appear to be the greatest; in fact, it didn’t appear to be Mexican—and it looked like it was about fifteen years old.

“What is it, a spice of some kind?”

“Very good,” he said.

“How much?”

“How much will you give?”

I took a pinch and tasted it.

He nodded toward the car. “Perhaps your friends. . . . I’ll make you a good price. You tell me your price, I’ll make you a good price. Okay?”

I stared at the box for a minute, then made an eccentric grimace. “You don’t mean . . . you don’t mean marijuana . . . the loco weed? What, to smoke?” I shook my head vigorously, backing away. “No, thanks!” I said, while his face went even more sour than one might have expected.

“Come back when you grow up!” he snarled, shutting the box; and for the first time, as he turned into the shadow of the shack, he seemed slightly drunk.

The bridge itself was noteworthy. A bit longer than the car, but not a foot wider, it consisted of oil drums held together with barbed wire and covered with wooden planks, only the outer two of which seemed at all stationary. The device was secured at each bank by a rope attached to stakes driven into the ground.

We held back a few seconds before embarking, taking it all in. Then, as we crossed over, the whole thing sank about two feet, completely out of sight, swaying absurdly, as the black water rose up in swirls just above the running boards.

Nobody commented on the bridge; though once we were across, onto the road, and I was resting on the seat again, Emmanuel said:

“What happened back with the greaser, man?”

“Five dollars a head.”

“That swine.”

“That rotten greaser swine,” said Pablo.

“You said it,” I said, closing my eyes. I had not gotten to bed the night before; I was thinking, too, of a certain time-honored arrangement in Mexico whereby a cigar box full of marijuana is sold to a foreigner and then retrieved by the merchant at customs. I once heard that the amount of annual foreign revenue so gained in the consequent fines is second only to that from the tax on the shade-and-barrier seats at the bullfight. And I soon began to wonder, here on the soft-focus margin of sleep, how many, many times that particular box I just looked at had been sold. Ten? Twenty? How many miles? How many missions? Fifty missions to Laredo, and they would decorate the box and retire it. And smoke it. But, of course, it was no good. Why would they use anything good for a scheme like that? No, it would be like those bundles of newspaper money left for kidnapers; I suppose they send to New Jersey for it. Anyway, I decided not to mention the incident to my friends; it would only excite them unduly.

I must have been asleep when we reached Corpus Christi, because when I came up again to have a look, the car was already stopped. We were in the middle of the square, and Emmanuel was saying: “Man, dig this . . .
scene.
Dig this . . .
scene
,” while Pablo was just sitting there, leaning forward over the wheel, his arms hanging to each side of it.

The town, if it may so be called, is simply this square of one-story frame buildings, fronted all around by a raised, wooden, sidewalk arcade. Besides the car we were in, there were two or three others parked in the square along with several small wagons that had mules or donkeys hitched to them.

“Now, this is your true Old West, Pablo,” I began. “Notice the attempt at a rather formal—” But what
I
had failed to notice was that the shadowed arcades, all around the square, were lined with people. They were leaning against the storefronts, and lying on the wooden sidewalk, or sitting on the raised edge of it—not just grown people, but children as well; children, a number of whom were to be seen crawling about, in the manner of the very young indeed. This struck me as odd because it was now about two o’clock in the morning. But what was really more odd was the pure, unbroken torpor which seemed to overhang the crowd. For a large group of people—perhaps 200—their inactivity was marvelous to look upon, like an oil painting. It seemed that all of them were leaning, sitting, or lying down; and it was not apparent that they were even talking to each other. And here and there was someone with a guitar, his head down, as though playing for only himself to hear.

As I was speculating about the possible reasons for this, my attention was suddenly caught by something that was happening to a wall nearby, the side of one of the buildings—it seemed to be soundlessly crumbling, and I thought now I must be out of my skull entirely. But it was not crumbling, it was simply oozing and changing color all over,
green,
and shades of green, changing from one instant to the next, from bottle-dark to shimmering-Nile; and this, in a strange and undulating way. Had we been in Rockefeller Plaza or the Gilbert Hall of Science . . . but here there was no accounting for it. And while I was assuring myself that first-rate hallucinations are only doubted in retrospect . . . Emmanuel saw it too. I knew he had seen it because he quickly leaned forward and began changing the radio stations. Then he turned around with an odd look on his face. “Man, what is that? On that wall.”

“Well,” I said, “it must be
oil
. . . or something like that.”

“Oil? Man, that’s not oil. What’s happening? That wall is
alive.
”

“Listen, let me get out of the car for a minute,” I said, perhaps because of his tone. “I’m . . . curious, as a matter of fact, to see what it is myself.”

As I got out of the car, I felt that if I took my eyes off the wall for a second, when I looked back it would have become just an ordinary wall—so I kept looking at it, and walked toward it then, very deliberately until I was there, leaning forward from two feet away to peer at it; and while I must have known before, it was not until my face was six inches from the wall that the field finally did narrow to the truth, a single moving inch: a green roach. For, true enough, that’s how it was: alive—with a hundred thousand green-winged flying roaches, ever moving, back and forth, sideways and around, the wings in constant tremulous motion.

I looked around at the people then, sitting and leaning nearby. I started to say something—but I was distracted to see that they as well were covered with the roaches . . . not in quite the profusion of the wall, but only for the reason that from time to time they passed a hand in front of their faces, or shrugged. So I was not too surprised when I looked down at myself and saw that
I
, too, even as they and the immobile wall . . . and then I heard the sound, that which had been in the air all along—a heavy ceaseless whirring sound—and it was a sound which deepened intensely in the dark distance of the night above and around, and it seemed to say:
“You think there are quite a few of us down there—but if you only knew how many of us are out here!”

I thought I understood why the people weren’t talking: because the roaches would get in their mouths; or sleeping: because they would crawl up their noses. But I may have really felt that it was not so much because of this, but because of something else, past or impending.

I stuck my trousers into my socks, and my hands into my pockets, and started back to the car. I had heard about the green flying roaches, how they settle on a town like locusts, and now I felt a gleeful anticipation, like the first of a party to swim an icy stream—toward springing the phenomenon on Pablo and Emmanuel. I thought it might be good to pretend to have scarcely noticed: “What, those? Why, those are bugs, man. Didn’t you ever see a bug before?”

When I got back to the car, however, I saw they had already surmised. Indeed, half the car was covered: the windshield wipers were sweeping, and inside, Pablo and Emmanuel were thumping wildly against the side-glass in trying to jar the creatures off.

“You finicky spies!” I shouted, snatching the door open and pretending to scoop and fan great armfuls in on them. Emmanuel jerked the door closed, and locked it; then he rolled the window a crack, and raised his mouth to it: “Man, what’s happening?” he asked and quickly closed the glass.

I stood outside, gesticulating them out and pretending to shout some emergency information. Pablo had started the car, and was racing the engine, sitting all hunched over the wheel; I got a glimpse of his maniacal frown and it occurred to me that an experience like this might be enough to snap his brain.

After a second, Emmanuel rolled down the window just a bit again.

“Listen, man,” he said, “we are going to drive over nearer to the bar, so we can make it into the bar—you know?”

I looked around the square. So they had already found the bar. None of the buildings had signs on them, but I suppose it wasn’t too difficult to tell. I saw it then, too, on the side we had come in, and next to it, a café.

“Let’s go to the café first,” I said, “that would be much cooler.”

Emmanuel nodded, and as I turned away, I knew he would be relaying it to Pablo: “The café first, man, that’s much cooler.”

We reached the door of the café at the same time, and went right in.

It was an oblong room, with a hard dirt floor and raw-wood walls; there were about ten tables, set two by two the length of the place—bare boards they were, nailed to four sticks, and accompanied by benches. We sat at the first one, near the door.

The place was not quite empty. There was a man, who was evidently the proprietor, sitting at a table at the end of the room, and a man who was evidently drunk, sitting at a table on the opposite side. The man who was drunk had his head down on the table, resting it there as in sleep; his head kept sliding off the table, causing him to shake and curse it, and then to replace it carefully, while the proprietor sat across the room, watching him. I construed the situation as this: that the proprietor was ready to close, and was waiting for the drunk to leave; this possibility seemed strengthened by the way he simply remained seated when we came in, staring at us until we ordered some coffee. When he had brought it, he went directly back to his table and sat down, there to resume watch on the drunk. There seemed to be a point of genuine interest for him in watching the drunk’s head slide off the table. I noticed that it did, in fact, drop lower each time.

There were fewer roaches here, though still enough so that you might want to keep your hand over the coffee, or, in drinking it, hold it as though you were lighting a cigarette in the wind. Pablo didn’t drink his coffee, however, and didn’t bother to protect it, so that after a minute there were four roaches in it, thrashing about, not unlike tiny birds at bath. Whenever one of the roaches was scooped out to the rim of the cup, it would crawl along for an instant, fluttering like a thing possessed, and then jump back in. Pablo was poking about in the cup with a matchstick, and both he and Emmanuel regarded the roaches with manifest concern. Pretty soon they were talking about them as though they could distinguish one from another. “Dig this one, man, he’s swinging!”

“Don’t hold him under, man, he can’t make it like that!”

For my own part, I was content to watch the drunk and the proprietor, and this was as well, for, very soon, there was a bit of action. The drunk straightened up and started looking around the room. When his eyes reached our party they stopped, and after a minute, he leaned toward us and vomited.

I turned to get the proprietor’s reaction to this, he who was sitting, somewhat more stiffly in his chair now, still staring at the drunk, and frowning. Then he gave a short humorless laugh, and said in measured tones:

“Let’s-see-you-do-that-again.”

This caused the drunk to stop looking at us, and to turn around to the proprietor as though he hadn’t seen him before; and after staring straight at him, he laid his head back down on the table.

The proprietor slapped the table and gave several short, barking laughs, then resumed his scrutinous vigil.

During this vignette, Pablo and Emmanuel had abandoned their cups, which, I saw now, were crowded with the drowned.

“Well, that seems to be that,” I said, “shall we go to the bar?”

“Man, let’s cut out of this place,” said Emmanuel.

Pablo, with deeply furrowed brow, was staring at where the man had been sick. Finally he shook his shoulders violently.

“Man, I dunt dig . . .
vomit!
”

“Are you kidding?” I said, “I happen to know that you
do
dig good greaser vomit.”

The remark amused Emmanuel. “Ha-ha-ha! Good greaser vomit! Pablo digs good greaser vomit! That’s too much, man!”

“Listen,” said Pablo, leaning forward in serious confidence, “let’s go to the bar now, I think there are groovy chicks there.”

Like the café, the bar was unpretentious; but, where the café had been sparse and fairly lighted, the bar was close and steeped in shadow—sinister enough, as dark places go, but there wasn’t much happening, at least not to meet the eye. A few men at the tables, a few beat hustlers at the bar.

My friends, being at the head of our party now, chose a table in the very heart of things, and we ordered tequila.

Emmanuel nodded toward the bar, straightening his tie.

“See, man,” he said, giving me a little nudge, “dig the chicks.”

“Sure,” I said, “you’re swinging.” Pablo kept involuntarily clearing his throat and making sporadic little adjustments to his person and attire, even touching his hair once or twice. But after a moment or two, this fidgeting turned into annoyance that the girls, though they had seen us come in, had not made a play; so very soon, he and Emmanuel got up and took their drinks to the bar.

The girls, there were four of them, appeared to be extremely beat—two, by way of example, not wearing shoes—and were each holding a glass, untouched it seemed, of dark brown drink.

It was interesting to see them and my friends at a distance, not hearing, only seeing the gestures of hands and mouth, the flash of teeth and the tilted glass—man at an ancient disadvantage.

Sipping my tequila, I began to pretend I had settled down around here—quite near the toll bridge, actually. And a few days after my arrival, there had been a nasty run-in with the fat roadblock greaser, who, it developed, was loathed and feared throughout the region, and was known as “Pigman.” I heard the hushed whispers of the gathering crowd: