Demon Box

  "What did I hear you telling Dev about Charity? That she got you gone instead of getting you breakfast? Good on her. And she's pregnant? She ought to get you neutered if you ask me."

  "Why, Betsy, Charity don't want nothing that permanent. But speakin of breakfast" - he edged around her toward the kitchen, the one huarachi flapping on the linoleum - "is you nice folks fetched in yet the aigs?"

  "The henhouse is that way." Betsy pointed. "Past the billygoat."

  "Mm, I see. Well then, in that case... where y'all keep the cornflakes?"

  While Betsy ground the coffee, M'kehla and I went out to contain the goat so we could gather the eggs. Percy was delighted with the action. His freckled face followed from bus window to window as we manhandled the animal back into the field he'd butted out of. While we were swinging the gate closed he caught M'kehla a sharp hind-hoof kick on the shin. I had to laugh as M'kehla danced and cursed, and Percy hooted and jeered from the bus. Even the peacocks and chickens joined in.

  Out in the henhouse M'kehla told me his story.

  "I don't know whether it was my Black Panther dealings or my white powder dealings. Charity just says get the hell gone and give her some respite. I say Gone it is, Baby! Naturally I called Heliotrope. Long distance. She's been the last year up in Canada with Percy's older brother, Vance, who's dodging the draft. And a bunch of Vance's buddies of like persuasion. Heliotrope persuaded me to sneak Percy off from his old man in Marin and bring him up... help her start a mission."

  We had the chickens fed and quieted and all the eggs that the rats and skunks had left us piled nicely in the feed bucket. We stood in the henhouse door, watching the morning sun pull hard for a Fourth of July noon, circa 1970.

  "A mission? In Canada?"

  "Yeah." He was looking across the chickenyard at his bus. The black door had cracked open and Percy was peeping out to see if the coast was clear. "A sort of modern underground railway."

  "You mean leave the States?"

  "Heliotrope was very persuasive," he answered. "And who can say how thick this Vietnam shit is gonna get?"

  "M'kehla, you're way past getting drafted."

  "But I'm not past knowing bum shit when I see it border to border. Hang around shit long enough you're gonna get some on you I also know that."

  "Listen. When I was on the run I came across a lot of American expatriots. You know what they all had in common, especially the men?"

  He didn't answer. He picked an egg out of the bucket and rolled it around his long magician's fingers.

  "They were all very damn hangdog apologetic, that's what they all had in common."

  "Apologetic about what?"

  "About running away from home with all this bum shit needing cleaned up is what! Besides, what about Percy? He isn't draft age either."

  "In a way he is. His square daddy keeps trying to force him to shape up. His teachers are always on his case - pledge allegiance, cut his hair, mind his tongue."

  He paused. Percy's red head had ducked out of the bus and he was sneaking across our yard.

  "There are some pegs that'll never fit a square hole. No matter how much force is used."

  "We can change the hole," I reminded him.

  "Can we?" M'kehla carefully put the egg back in the bucket and looked at me. "Can we really?"

  This time it was me didn't answer. The issue was too long between us for short answering. During the decade of our friendship we had shared a vision, a cause if you will. We were comrades in that elite though somewhat nebulous campaign dedicated to the overthrow of thought control. We dreamed of actually changing the human mind to make way for a loftier consciousness. Only from this unclouded vantage, we maintained, could humanity finally rise out of its repetitious history of turds and turmoil and realize that mighty goal of One World. One World Well Fed, Treated Fair, At Peace, Turned On, and In Tune with the Universal Harmony of the Spheres and the Eternal Everchanging Dharma of... of... Anyway, One Wonderful World.

  We never claimed to know precisely when the birth of this New Consciousness would take place, or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but as to the birthplace we had always taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of an American labor.

  Europe was too stiff to bring it off, Africa too primitive, China too poor. And the Russians thought they had already accomplished it. But Canada? Canada had never even been considered, except recently, by deserters of the dream. I didn't like seeing them leave, these dreamers like brilliant and broken Heliotrope and old comrade M'kehla. These freckle-faced Huck Finns.

  After his second helping of eggs Percy began to yawn and Betsy packed him away to share Quiston's bunk. M'kehla looked wider awake than ever. He finished his coffee and announced he was ready for action. I explained the day's plan. We had a new string of calves that needed branding and an old string of friends coming out to help. We would herd, corral, brand, barbecue, swim, and drink beer and end up at the fireworks display in Eugene at dusk.

  "What we have to do now is prepare. We need to spread sawdust, buy beer, reinforce the corral to be sure it'll keep the calves in -"

  "And the goat out," Betsy added.

  M'kehla was already heading for the door. "Then let us so embark."

  We got the tractor started and the auger hooked up and holes for new posts drilled. I set the posts while M'kehla tamped them fast with stones and gathered more stones from the ditches. I had to hustle to keep up. I was glad when the first visitor showed up to give me an excuse for a break.

  It was my cousin Davy, the ex-boxer. His nose was red and his eyes even redder. I asked Davy what he was doing out this early. He said it was as a matter of fact this late; he had come because in the course of a long night's ramble he had acquired an item that he thought might interest me: "For your Independence Day doo-dah."

  He brought it from the back seat of his banged-up Falcon station wagon, a beautiful American flag trimmed with gold braid. It was a good twenty feet long. Davy claimed to have won it in a contest during the night. He didn't remember what kind of contest, but he recalled that the victory was decisive and glorious. I told him it was a great item; too bad I didn't have a pole. Davy turned slowly around until he spotted a small redwood that the frost had killed the winter after I planted it.

  "How about yon pole?" he drawled, then pointed at the last unposted hole where M'kehla and I were working, "in hither hole." So the three of us felled and bucked the dead limbs off the redwood. Davy made a try at barking it with the draw knife but gave up after ten minutes. M'kehla and I deepened the augered hole by hand until it would support the height of our spar, and drug it over. We attached the hooks and pulleys and tilted the pole into the hole just as Frank Collin Dobbs and crew were arriving in his cutaway bus. In our hurry to get the flag aloft for their arrival we just tossed in dirt, promising to tamp it later. Dobbs got out just as I pulled the brilliant banner aloft. He and Davy snapped to a rigid salute. They launched into the Marine Hymn so far off key I was moved to join them.

  M'kehla had chosen not to honor the ceremonies. He turned his back on the foolishness and was finishing our fencing task, reaching around the flagpole and hammering in the last section of wire.

  This is when Killer made that piledriving sneak attack that started this story about verve and nerve, and the loss of it, and old friends, and strange beasts.

  How came I with this awful goat? Much the same way the farm came by a lot of its animal population: the animals were donated by animal fanciers who had run out of space or patience. Our original peacocks had been abandoned by Krishnas whose ashram had been repossessed; the horses were from rock stars' girlfriends, adrift without permanent pastures. Donkeys without gold mines, sheep without shearers, parrots without perches - they had all found their various ways to the seeming stability of our farm.

  Stewart, for instance, had simply come trotting in one day, a halfgrown pup eager to enlist. Varmint-Boy was living in ou
r swamp in an old U.S. Army tent so he decided he would act as the induction officer. He whistled the pup into his tent and shot him up with a boot-camp dose of methadrine. For hours the new recruit drilled chasing birds and fetching sticks, until the shadow grew long and the drill instructor bored. The exhausted pup lay down to sleep but of course could only stare and ponder. Pondering is hard for a dog and not necessarily healthy, but Stewart survived (though he never lost that strung-out stare) to become the top dog. The Varmint was finally drummed off the place for this and other such crimes against innocence.

  Killer came from much more conventional sectors. He was the mascot for our high school team, the Nebo Hill Billies. Our symbol is the charging goat. For ten seasons Killer was tied to the bench of the football team, where visiting teams tried to run over him. He was paraded across basketball courts where opposing symbols reared and teased at him. Terry-cloth bears and papier-mache eagles. Enough to sour any animal.

  The meaner he turned the more they came at him. The eye was put out by a baseball spike in a close play at home. The horn he lost during a Creswell homecoming game. A Creswell scatback was down after a hard hit on the punt return and the ambulance had driven across to get him. Killer had tugged at his tether when the flashing contraption drove onto the field. The fallen hero was lifted into the machine and the siren was started. This was more than Killer could endure. To the applause of the stands he snapped his dog chain and charged head-on into the ambulance. Fans that witnessed this famous charge spoke afterward of it with wonder and affection. "Not only knocked the headlight and turn signal clean off he then got tangled underneath in the front suspension; it was another half hour before they could get it all unloosed and towed off the field."

  The wonder lasted but the affection fled with the goat's aromatic recovery. The vet said the roll beneath the ambulance had ruptured the little musk sacks on each side of the goat's anus - he could no longer turn the sacks on and off. Only leave them on. The vet said the only solution was neutering, cutting of the testosterone that stimulated the musk. The Nebo Hill Boosters thought it over and concluded that rather than have a ball-less billy for a mascot they would build one out of papier-mache, and Killer was out of a job.

  When they asked over the school announcements who had a place capable of adopting a poor retiring mascot, my oldest boy, Quiston, an Aries, had volunteered our farm.

  It took three of us to separate the man and the goat, Dobbs and I holding the animal, Davy wrestling with M'kehla. This was a mistake. It very nearly got M'kehla and my cousin into it. Something was said in the scuffle and Davy and M'kehla sprang apart, glaring; they were already into their karate and boxing stances before we could step between them.

  Dobbs mollified Davy with a cold Oly and I convinced M'kehla to come down to the pond with me to cool down and scrub off. After his first dip he was laughing about the flare-up, said it wouldn't happen again. Maybe, however, he should drive his bus down here out of goat territory. He could park it in the shade of the ash trees on the swamp side of the pond.

  I stood in the open stairwell and directed him down. The sound of the engine brought Percy straight from his nap and running from the house.

  "Look at him hop." M'kehla laughed. "He thought I was leaving without him."

  He parked where he could get some of the overhanging shade and still see the water. He swiveled out of the driver's seat and strolled to the rear of his living room on wheels.

  "Come on back. Let's get high and analyze the world situation." He sprawled across his zebra skin waterbed like an Ethiopian nabob.

  The day mellowed. A soft breeze started strumming the bus roof with the hanging Spanish moss. My kids and Percy were splashing in the pond with their tubes; their shouts and laughter drifted to us through the swaying daisies and Queen Anne's lace. M'kehla and I sipped Dos Equis and argued. We had just started on the Third World and our fourth beer when someone came banging at the bus door.

  M'kehla opened it and my nine-year-old son Quiston leaned in, wet and wide-eyed.

  "Dad!" Quiston yelled up the stairwell. "Percy's found a monster in the pond!"

  "What kind of monster, Quis?"

  "A big one... crouched on the bottom by the pumphouse!"

  "Tell him I'll come out after while and get it," I told Quiston.

  "All right," he said and headed back toward the pond with the news, his white hair waving in the weeds. "Dad's gonna get him, Percy! My Dad's gonna get him!"

  I watched him go, feeling very fatherly. M'kehla came up and stood beside me.

  "It doesn't worry you, Dad? All this faith?"

  I told him, Nope, not me, and I meant it. I was feeling good. I could see my friends and my relatives arriving up by the barn. I could hear the squawk of the sound system as Dobbs got it wired up to announce the branding, rodeo style. I could see the new honey-colored cedar posts in the corral and the pigeons strutting on the bright new wire. And Old Glory was fluttering over all. "I got faith in all this faith," I told him.

  "Do you?" he asked. "Do you really?" And this time I answered right back: Yep, I really did.

  We drank beer and enjoyed our old arguments and watched the crowd gather. Rampage and his kids, Buddy and his. The Mikkelsens, the Butkovitches. The women carried dishes to the kitchen; the kids went for the pond; the men came down to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After about an hour of tepid beer and politics Dobbs tossed away his half-empty bottle out the window.

  "Alright e-nuff of this foam and foofarah," he declared, right at M'kehla. "Break out the heavy stuff!"

  As a man of the trade, M'kehla always had a formidable stash. He uncoiled from his zebra lounge and walked to the front of the bus. With a flourish he produced a little metal box from somewhere behind the driver's seat. It was a fishing tackle case with trays that accordioned out when he opened it, making an impressive display: the trays in neat little stairsteps, all divided into partitions and each section filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled royal coachman he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.

  "Afghany," he said, rolling it along his fingertips like the egg in the henhouse.

  He pinched off a generous chunk and heated it with a butane lighter. When it was properly softened he crumbled it into the bowl of his stone-bowled Indian peacepipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke Percy came baying up the stairwell like a hound. He had smelled it all the way to the pond.

  "Hah!" he said, coming down the aisle rubbing his hands. "In the nick of time."

  He was wearing Quiston's big cowboy hat to keep from further sunburning his nose and neck, and he had a bright yellow bandanna secured around his throat with a longhorn tie slide. He looked like a Munchkin cowpoke.

  He plumped down in the pillows and leaned back with his fingers laced behind his neck, just one of the fellas. When the peacepipe came back around to M'kehla he passed to Percy. The little boy puffed up a terrific cloud.

  Davy wouldn't join us, though. "Makes a man too peaceful," he explained, opening another beer. "These are not peaceful times."

  "That's why Perce and me are pullin stakes and rollin on."

  "Up to Canada did I hear?" Dobbs asked.

  "Up it is," M'kehla answered, reloading the pipe. "To start a sanctuary."

  "A sanctuary for shirkers," Davy muttered.

  "Well, Dave," Dobbs said, lifting his shoulders in a diplomatic shrug, "patriots and zealots don't generally need a sanctuary, you got to admit that."

  F. C. Dobbs had served in the early days of our inglorious "police action" as a marine pilot, flying the big Huey helicopters in and out of the rice-paddy hornet's nests of the Cong. After four years he had been discharged with medals and citations and the rank of captain, and a footlocker full of Burmese green. He was the only vet among us and not the least upset by M'kehla's planned defection, especially under the pacifying spell of M'kehla's hash. Davy, on the other hand, was growing less and less happy with M'kehla and his plan. You coul
d see it in the way he brooded over his beer. And when M'kehla's Indian pipe came around to him again, he slapped it away with the back of a balled fist.

  "I'll stick to good old firewater from the Great White Father," he grunted. "That flower power paraphernalia just makes a man sleepy."

  "I been driving since noon yesterday," M'kehla said softly, retrieving his pipe. "Do I look sleepy?"

  "Probably popping pills or sniffing snow all the way," Davy grumbled. "I seen the type on the gym circuit."

  "Not a pill. Not a sniff. Well, just a puff of some new flower power stuff. One little hit. But I'll bet there isn't one of you big white fathers with the balls to try half what I am gonna do."

  "Me!" Percy chirped.

  "Leave that shit alone," Davy ordered, pushing the boy back and tilting the hat down over his eyes. "You half-baked buckeroo."

  I stepped up to get between Davy and M'kehla. "I might try a taste. What is it, like smoking speed?"

  M'kehla turned without answering. He reached a clay samovar down from his staples cupboard and opened it. He pinched out a wad of dried green leaves.

  "Not much," he answered, smiling. "Just a little ordinary mint tea -"

  He thumbed the wad down into the bowl of the pipe, then took a tiny bottle out of his tackle box, from a partition marked SNELLED HOOKS. Carefully, he unscrewed the lid.

  "- and a little S.T.P."

  "Eek," said Buddy.

  Dobbs agreed. "Eek indeed."

  We had never tried the drug but we all had heard of it - a designated bummer, developed by the military for the stated purpose of confusing and discouraging enemy troops. The experiment had reportedly been dropped after a few of the hapless guinea pigs claimed that the chemical had promoted concentration instead of confusion. These lucky few said it seemed to not only sharpen their wits but double their energy and dissolve their illusions as well.

  Nothing the army wanted to chance, even for our own soldiers.

  The sight of the little bottle had produced a twisted silence on the bus. The wind-stirred brushing on the metal roof stopped. Everybody watched as M'kehla drew from his hair a long ivory knife with a very thin curved blade. He dipped the point into the bottle and put a tiny heap of white powder on the bowlful of green mint, three times.