Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes (6 page)

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 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 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, swelling, swelling, swelling, to a scream.
“Stop!”

Lilt. And the surf around them feathered out all white-edged rose, their motion faded to an end as gradual and even as the close of slow music.

For a long while Sarah stood in the surf seeing only where the water broke silver and red around the upright spear. Then she drew out the spear and facing the sea, she felt the tremor beneath her feet as the weight was dragged away along the sand, under the water. And she was alone.

Back at the house she worked in the patch until night, then she went to bed.

Before dawn she awoke, while the moon was still high and there was no sound except the stirring of the night wind in the patch. But beyond the patch and past the field, from down at the sea, she could hear something like the surf on rock cliffs, and above this, the listening that came up through the night.

She got out of bed and dressed, walked through the kitchen and out the door. Near the back steps, struck straight in the ground was the hoe handle that had been fashioned into a spear. Sarah would know as she passed, from the way its shadow fell under the moon, just how early or late the morning was.

She crossed the patch and was into the field before she could remember and touch the pocket of her thin dress. There were two coins there: a nickel and a quarter. She stiffened a little and stood still, holding the coins in her hand. A small cloud passed under the moon, and for an instant on the left the dirt road to Fly was only a twisting shadow. Then the cloud was gone, the road to Fly was clear. She realized that the man who sold the tickets would give her the change himself, and she started to walk.

She walked very slowly, her mind flowing a train of smoothly veiled thought as straight and dark as the narrow road before her.

The moon had waned and the sun risen by the time Sarah reached the square at Fly. Because she had never been to the Tuesday matinee, she did not know when it began, and so had come early as an assurance. Standing before the plain-front cinema, she saw at once that the glassed box was empty, and in place of the man was a sign reading:

SHOW—1:00

OPEN—12:30

For a long while she stood looking at the display stills that were attached to a kind of wooden bulletin board. Once, after glancing at the glassed box and around the desolate bleak-light square, she slowly raised her hand and touched one of the photographs. She drew her hard-pressing finger across the middle of it, then she went out to the curb and sat down.

She sat there until noon, then joined the line of children as it began to form.

When she reached the box, she gave the man the quarter and the nickel.

“Two?” he asked.

“One,” said Sarah.

“Fifteen cents,” said the man, returning her nickel and a dime.

She picked up the coins and turned aside. But when her eye fell again on the display stills, her brow assumed a crinkle of knowing and she turned back to the man in the glassed box, her face a serious frown.

“Goin’ to be a
reel-less?
” she asked.

“I
’LL HAVE TO BE
a
hipster
,” Doctor Warner said leaning toward them from out of billowing dark leather while behind this great chair, where study lamplight softened to haze on a thousand grains of dullest panel, there danced in points of twos the refracted amber of glassed cubed-ice in the hands of his two friends opposite—danced, it seemed, on an opaque screen which could measure the wildness of thought and the tedium of conversation.

“A very
hip
hipster,” he continued genially, and withdrew himself slightly, for emphasis, “if not, indeed, something
more.
”