Texas Summer by Terry Southern Page B

glove in his lap, and every so often he would flip the baseball up and twirl it over his fingers like an electric top.
    As Harold came in and sat down, on the arm of a stuffed misshapen mohair chair, Lawrence looked up, laughing. Most of the time Lawrence’s laugh was coarse and, in a curious way, bitter.
    “Well, goddam if it ain’t old Harold!” he said, affecting an even more pronounced Texas drawl than he actually had, perhaps because of a western movie they had seen together a few nights before.
    Somewhere, next door, a radio was playing loudly — Saturday-morning cowboy music from station WRR in downtown Big D Dallas.
    Crazy Ralph looked from Harold to Lawrence, and back. “You gonna do it again today?” he asked, grinning with a kind of demented slyness.
    Lawrence glared at him. “You jest shut your dang hole ’bout that, Ralph.”
    “ Are you, Harold?” he repeated, still wild-eyed and grinning. “Y’all gonna do it?”
    On the floor, next to the wall, the baseball spun twisting across Tommy Sellers’s knuckles like a trained rat.
    “I told you to shut your A-fuckin’ hole,” said Lawrence grimly, slamming the bolt home and slapping it hard. Then he looked at Harold. “Let’s head out.”
    Harold started to get up, but before he could, Lawrence turned around on the bed and leaned heavily against Ralph’s legs, sighting the rifle out over the backyard. There, across the yard, sitting about three feet out from the back fence, all crouched with feet drawn under, was a cat — a black cat, rounded, large, and unblinking in the high morning sun. Big Lawrence squeezed one out on the empty chamber. “Ka-pow!” he said, and brought the gun down, laughing. “Goddam! Right in the eye!” He raised up, and taking some shells from his shirt pocket, loaded the rifle; then he quickly threw out the shells, working the action in a jerky, eccentric manner, causing the shells to fly all over the bed. One of them went above the comic book in Ralph’s hand and hit the bridge of his nose. The other boys laughed, but Crazy Ralph muttered something, rubbing his nose, and flipped the shell back over into the rest of them next to Lawrence’s leg, as he might have done playing marbles — and Big Lawrence flinched.
    “You crazy bastard!” said Lawrence, and then he reached over, picked up the shell and threw it as hard as he could against the wall behind Ralph Wilton’s head, making him duck. They left the shell where it fell on the floor behind the bed. Ralph didn’t speak, just kept turning the pages of the comic book, while Lawrence sat there staring hard at the book in front of Ralph’s eyes.
    Then Lawrence reloaded the gun and drew another bead out the window. The black cat was still sitting there, head on toward the muzzle, when Lawrence moved the safety with his thumb. Next door someone turned the radio up a little more, but here in the small room, the explosion was loud. The comic book jumped in Crazy Ralph’s hand like it had been jerked by a wire. “God dam it!” he said, but he didn’t look around, just shifted a little, as if settling to the book again.
    Harold rested his elbow on the windowsill and looked out across the yard. The cat hardly seemed to have moved — only to have been pushed back hard toward the fence, head down, feet drawn under, eyes staring straight at the house as though hypnotized.
    And in the screen now, next to a hole made in opening the screen from the outside, was another, perfectly round, flanged out instead of in, worn suddenly, by the passing of the bullet, all bright silver at the edge.

    Big Lawrence and Harold walked a dirt road along one side of the old abandoned Hampton Airport. It was an unbelievably hot, dry day.
    “What’s a box of shells like that cost?” Lawrence asked, and when Harold told him, Lawrence said: “Sure, but for how many shells?”
    At crossroads, the corner of a field, a place where on some Sundays certain people who made model airplanes came