Red-Dirt Marijuana: And Other Tastes Read Free

straight against the side of the shed, gave the appearance of substance wholly without bone, like a softly-filled sack that has slowly, imperceptibly sprawled and found its final perfect contour, while his head lay back against the shed, watching the boy out of half-closed eyes. He laughed.
    “Boy, I done tole you,” he said quietly, “it feel good. ”
    “Well, that ain’t nothin’, dang it,” said Harold, almost angrily, “ I awready feel good!”
    “Uh-huh,” said C.K. with dreamy finality.
    “Well, I do , god-dang it,” said Harold, glaring at him hatefully.
    “That’s right,” said C.K., nodding, closing his eyes, and they were both silent for a few minutes, until C.K. looked at the boy again and spoke, as though there had been no pause at all: “But you don’t feel as good now as you do at Christmastime though, do you? Like when right after you daddy give you that new Winchester? An’ then you don’t feel as bad as that time he was whippin’ you for shootin’ that doe with it neither, do you? Yeah. Well now that’s how much difference they is , you see, between that cigarette you got in you hand an’ the one I jest put out! Now that’s what I tellin’ you.”
    “Shoot,” said Harold, flicking his half-smoked Camel and then mashing it out on the ground, “you’re crazy.”
    C.K. laughed. “Sho’ I is,” he said.
    They fell silent again, C.K. appearing almost asleep, humming to himself, and Harold sitting opposite, frowning down to where his own finger traced lines without pattern in the dirt-floor of the shed.
    “Where we gonna keep this stuff at, C.K.?” he demanded finally, his words harsh and reasonable, “we can’t jest leave it sittin’ out like this.”
    C.K. seemed not to have heard, or perhaps simply to consider it without opening his eyes; then he did open them, and when he leaned forward and spoke, it was with a fresh and remarkable cheerfulness and clarity:
    “Well, now the first thing we got to do is to clean this gage. We got to git them seeds outta there an’ all them little branches. But the ver’ first thing we do . . .” and he reached into the pile, “is to take some of this here flower , these here ver’ small leaves, an’ put them off to the side. That way you got you two kinds of gage, you see—you got you a light gage an’ a heavy gage.”
    C.K. started breaking off the stems and taking them out, Harold joining in after a while; and then they began crushing the dry leaves with their hands.
    “How we ever gonna git all them dang seeds outta there?” asked Harold.
    “Now I show you a trick about that,” said C.K., smiling and leisurely getting to his feet. “Where’s that pilly-cover at?”
    He spread the pillowcase flat on the ground and, lifting the newspaper, dumped the crushed leaves on top of it. Then he folded the cloth over them and kneaded the bundle with his fingers, pulverizing it. After a minute of this, he opened it up again, flat, so that the pile was sitting on the pillowcase now as it had been before on the newspaper.
    “You hold on hard to that end,” he told Harold, and he took the other himself and slowly raised it, tilting it, and agitating it. The round seeds started rolling out of the pile, down the taut cloth and onto the ground. C.K. put a corner of the pillowcase between his teeth and held the other corner out with one hand; then, with his other hand, he tapped gently on the bottom of the pile, and the seeds poured out by the hundreds, without disturbing the rest.
    “Where’d you learn that at, C.K.?” asked Harold.
    “Shoot, you got to know you business you workin’ with this plant,” said C.K., “. . . waste our time pickin’ out them ole seeds.”
    He stood for a moment looking around the shed. “Now we got to have us somethin’ to keep this gage in—we got to have us a box , somethin’ like that, you see.”
    “Why can’t we jest keep it in that?” asked Harold, referring to the pillowcase.
    C.K. frowned.