Texas Summer by Terry Southern

dull look. “Well then, you know so much about it, why you ask me?”
    “’Cause I just heard it — I never said I knowed it for sure.” He waited. “How long is he in there for?”
    “Oh, he in there for a long time,” said C.K. He chuckled. “They may of throwed away the key on ole Big Nail.”
    “Well, how come he’s there in the first place?” Harold demanded.
    C.K. sighed. “Well, he there mainly ’cause of bad luck, that’s how come he there.”
    The boy scoffed. “‘Bad luck’ — you call killin’ somebody ‘bad luck’?”
    “No, the bad luck was when the sheriff come along — jest after it happen. Ain’t nobody call the sheriff, he jest come along...by bad luck.” He looked at Harold to see if he understood, then added: “It weren’t no white folks’ business, you see, them fightin’ like that. The sheriff got no business comin’ in there. He jest passin’ by in his car, then he see somethin’ goin’ on, an’ come in — but he got no business there.”
    “Shoot,” said Harold, “he’s the dang sheriff, ain’t he? I reckon he can make it his business to go wherever he wants to.”
    C.K. shook his head firmly. “Nope. Not in there he cain’t — not in the Paradise Bar.”
    Harold had heard this sort of crazy talk before, about how the Paradise Bar was somehow outside the law, or should be.
    “You’re lucky they don’t shut that place down,” he said.
    C.K. laughed. “Well, they try to shut down the Paradise Bar might cause a lotta trouble. Maybe more than they be ready to handle. Anyhow, why would they want to do that?”
    “Why?” Harold seemed surprised. “Because of all the fightin’ an’ killin’ that goes on in there, that’s why.”
    C.K. gave him a sad, quizzical look. “You been in the Paradise Bar, Hal — you ain’t never seen no fightin’ or killin’ in there, has you?”
    “No,” Harold had to admit, though he was quick to add with firm conviction, “but I’ve heard plenty.”
    C.K. nodded. “Uh-huh. Well now they is a big difference, you see, between what a man hear an’ what be true. The sooner you learn that, the smarter you be.”
    They walked on, not speaking, until they reached the last stretch of fence between them and the house. C.K. put his foot on the bottom strand of barbed wire, while lifting the one above it with his hand. “There you is, my man,” he said lightly, standing to the side.
    Harold stepped through, then held it from the other side for C.K. “What’ll we do with that stuff when it’s dried out, C.K.?”
    C.K. shrugged, kicked at a rock, then thrust his hands into his pockets.
    “Shoot,” he said, sounding a little like Harold, “ah reckon we find some kinda use for it.” And he smiled, quite openly, at the challenging prospect.

VI
    H AROLD SAT OUT on the back steps, in the full blazing heat of the Texas summer, knees up, and propping in between them his old single-load twenty-gauge shotgun. While he steadied and squeezed the butt in one hand, the other, with careful unbroken slowness, wrapped a long piece of friction tape around and around the stock — for beginning at the toe of the butt and stretching up about five inches was a thin dry crack in the old wood.
    His mother came out, down off the back porch, carrying a blue-gray chipped enameled basin heaped with twists of wet half-wrung clothes.
    “You be careful with that old gun,” she said, with a slight frown. “Your daddy know you got it out?”
    “He told me to get it out,” Harold said, his nasal twang making him sound querulous. “Heck, I wanted to use his twelve-gauge double.”
    “Stop saying ‘heck’ and ‘dang’ so much,” she replied softly, almost absently, it being perhaps the ten-thousandth time she’d said it. “Twelve years old is too young to use a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
    “Aw I shoot it all the time, you know that.”
    “Not unless you’re with a grown-up, you don’t.”
    “Well, that ain’t exactly my fault, is