"Observe," he said, and raised the pipe to his lips.
With the lighter boring a long blue flame into the stone bowl, M'kehla drew one deep breath and held it, eyes almost closed. Within seconds we all saw his eyes snap wide, then narrow, glittering afresh with that dark, sharp humor. He breathed out an inviting sigh and lifted the pipe toward my cousin. Davy dropped his eyes and shook his head.
"Not this father," he muttered.
"I guess I might try one blade tip," I ventured, feeling like somebody should defend the family honor. "For the sake of science."
We all watched as M'kehla repacked the pipe. He swayed as he worked, singing in a sweet, incomprehensible whisper. His hands danced and mimed. When he picked up the tiny vial a dusty sunbeam streamed through the window and illuminated the green glass. The hair on my arms stood up. I cleared my throat and looked at my brother.
"You want to join me, try some of this superstuff?"
"I never even tried it in my car. I'll get the dry ice ready for the brand. Come on, Percy. Learn something."
Buddy stood up and started for the door, pushing Percy ahead of him. I looked at Dobbs. He stood up too. "I guess I gots to finish the sound, boss."
Rampage was supposed to be picking up the keg at Lucky's and Bucko had to take a leak. One by one they ambled to the front and out the door, leaving only M'kehla and me.
And the pipe. I finished my beer and set the bottle back under my stool. "Well, as you say... let us so embark."
M'kehla hands me the pipe and fires it up with his little blue flame. Green smoke wriggles out of the stone hole. The mint mild in my throat... cool, mentholated, throat raw smoke Kools throat raw smoke Koo -
Everything stops. The green wriggle, the dust motes in the sunbeam. Only M'kehla is moving. He glides into my vision, his eyes merry. He asks how it goes. I tell him it goes. He tells me ride loose sing with it never let it spook you. Riding loose here. Good, and don't move until you feel compelled. Not moving, boss. Good, and what is the terrain this time? The terrain, boss? Yeh, Home, the terrain - What does it look like this time? It looks, this time it looks, it looks to me like you're right it looks like the future!
M'kehla smiled and nodded. I shot to my feet.
"Let's go get them cows!" I yelled.
"Yaa-hoo!" M'kehla whooped.
We stepped out into the Fourth of July noon just as Dobbs cued up James Brown and the Famous Flames blaring "Out of the Blue" over the airwaves, and the breezes blew, and the leaves danced, and the white pigeons bloomed above us like electric lilies.
I was a new man, for a new season.
In the pasture we moved with the smooth certainty of a well-trained army, M'kehla commanding the right flank, me the left, Betsy at the rear calling out calm instructions, and the fleet-footed kids filling in the gaps. The herd would try to escape to the right and M'kehla's force would advance. They would try to plunge left and I would press my platoon forward. We corraled the whole herd without one renegade breaking through our lines.
The branding was even more efficient. The kids would cut out a little maverick and haze him into a corner of the corral and M'kehla and I would rush in and throw him on his side and hold him. While Buddy stirred the big metal brand in a tub of dry ice and methyl alcohol, Betsy would shave the animal's side with the sheep shears. Then everyone would hold everything while Buddy stuck the icy iron against the shaved spot for the required sixty seconds. If the spot was shaved close enough, and the brand was cold enough, and the animal held still long enough, the hair would grow back out in the shape of the brand - snow white. Nothing moved, yelled, or bellered during this holy minute. Just Buddy's counting and the calf s heavy breathing. Even the mother in the adjoining corral would hold her worried lowing.
Then Buddy would say "- sixty!" and we'd turn loose with a cheer. The branded dogie would scramble to his feet and scamper away through the escape chute, and the army would be advancing on the next wild recruit.
If I had been impressed earlier by M'kehla's strength and agility, I was now astounded at my own. We were catching and throwing animals with ease, some topping two hundred pounds, one after the other. From just the tiniest pinch of powder! It dawned on me why it had been nicknamed after the superslick race-car additive; I was not only newly powdered but freshly lubricated as well, functioning without friction, without deliberation. No debates over right or wrong good or bad to impede the flow and delay decisions. In fact, no decisions. It was like skiing too steep or surfing too far out on the curl of a breaker too big: full go.
And the women couldn't even tell we were high.
Davy stood near the keg, sipping beer and watching from under a defeated scowl. He made no move to help, and the only time I saw him smile was when Percy drawled a suggestion how we could avoid all this unnecessary toil.
"Say, you know? What Ah say we ought to do... is cross these calves with all these damn pigeons." He hitched at his belt like a Hollywood cattle baron. "And get you a herd of homing cows." Everybody laughed in spite of the count. Percy whooped and slapped his leg and elbowed Quiston. "What do you say to that, Quizzer? Homing cows?"
"Good idea!" Quiston agreed. "Homing cows!" Always an admirer of the older boy's style, Quiston hitched at his britches and drawled, "But what Ah say we ought to do... is we ought to go down to the pond and get that thing out, like Dad said he would."
"What thing?"
"That monster thing."
"Hey, damn straight, Quiz," Percy remembered. "Before it gets too shady. Haul him out an' brand him!"
"At the pumphouse, you say? That's a deep dive."
"I dove it."
"Yeah, Dad. Percy dove it."
I stood up and looked around me, tall as a tower. Everything seemed under control. Pastoral. Bucolic. The fresh cedar shavings like soft golden coins under the sun. The calves all cowed and calm. The huge flag not so much waved by the breeze as waving it, like a great gaudy hand stirring the air to keep the flies away.
Buddy plunged the frosted brand back into the fogging tub, watching me.
"How many more?" I asked.
"Just three," he told me. "Those two easy little Angus and that ornery spotted Mongol over there."
I took off one of my gloves and wiped my stinging head. I realized I was rushing like a sweaty river. Buddy was focusing hard on my face.
"We got more than enough hands to finish up here. Why don't you go on down and cool off. Capture their dragon. Get them out from underfoot."
Everybody was watching. I took off my other glove and handed them to Buddy along with my lariat.
"Alright, I will. We'll geld this Gorgon ere he spawns."
"Yaahoo, Uncle Dev!" yelled Percy.
And Quiston echoed, "Yaahoooo, Dad!"
I followed the boys past the shade maple where Dobbs was fussing in his sound scene. He had a cold beer in one hand and a live microphone in the other, happy as a duck in Disneyland.
"How-dee!" he greeted us through the mike. "Here's some of our gladiators now, rodeo fans. Maybe we can get a word. Say, podnah, how's it going out there in the arena? From up here it looks like you're drubbing those little dogies pretty decisively."
"We got 'em on ice!" Percy answered for me, pulling the microphone to his mouth. "We're letting the second string finish 'em off."
"Yeah, Dobbs," Quiston added proudly. "And now we're going after that thing at the bottom of the pond!"
"Hear that, fans? Straight from the barnyard to the black lagoon without a break. Let's give these plucky wranglers a big hand."
The women making potato salad across the lawn managed a cheer. Dobbs settled the needle on a fresh record.
"In their honor, friends and neighbors, here's Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers doing their immortal 'Cool Water.' Take it away Bob!"
He thumbed off the mike and leaned close. "You okay, Old Timer?"
I told him Sure, better than okay. Super. Just going along with these, get this, rinse the grit off before dinner it
smells great I better catch those kids.
The smell of the meat sizzling on the barbecue was, in fact, making my throat constrict. But I didn't feel like I needed sustenance. Every cell in my body seemed bursting with enough fuel to keep me cooking for a decade.
The pond trembled in the sun. The boys were already shucking clothes into the daisies. From up the slope behind us I heard a cheer rise as the wranglers caught the spotted Mongol, and Dobbs's boozy voice joined the Sons of the Pioneers on the chorus, declaring he's a devil not a man, and he spreads the burnin' sand with water -
"- cooool, cleeeer wah-ter."
I knew it would be cool all right, but none too clear. Even when it wasn't glinting at you, spirogyra and pondweed made it difficult to see more than a few feet beneath the surface. I sat down and started unlacing my boots.
"Okay, lads; where is this mooncalf a-murking?"
"I can show you exactly," Percy promised and scooted up the ladder to the top of the pumphouse. "I'll dive down and locate it. Then I'll blow a bunch of bubbles so you can bring it up."
"When you locate it why don't you bring it up?"
"Because it's too big for a kid, Uncle Dev. It's way too big for anybody but a man."
He pulled his goggles over his eyes and grinned at me like some kind of mischievous kelpie. He sucked in a deep breath and jumped out into the air, hollering "Yaaahoo" all the way to the water. His splash shattered the glint and for a moment we saw him froglegging down. Then the surface closed over him. Quiston came and stood beside me. I finished pulling off my boots and Levi's and tossed them inside the pumphouse. I shaded my eyes against the bounce of the sun and stared hard at the water. There wasn't so much as a freckled flicker.
After nearly a minute Percy came spewing up through the surface. He paddled to the shore where I could give him a hand out.
"Didn't find him," he panted, his hands on his knees. Finally he looked up. "But I will!"
He clambered back up the ladder and dived right back in. No yell. Again the water snatched him from our sight. Quiston reached up to slip his hand into mine.
"Percy said it had teeth like a shark and a hide like a rhinoceros," Quiston recalled. "But he's probably just fooling."
"Percy's never had a reputation for reliability."
We squinted at the water for his signal. Nothing but the chromium undulation. Quiston squeezed my hand. At length Percy spurted to the surface again.
"Must be deeper... than I thought," he puffed, crawling ashore.
"It's a deep pond, Percy."
"I knew you were fooling," Quiston claimed, relieved.
Percy flushed red and thrust a fist under Quiston's nose.
"Listen you, you see this? Mess with the Perce, go home in a hearse!"
"Take it easy, Perce. Forget it. Why don't you kids go down to the shallow end hunt some tadpoles?"
"Yeah, that's it!" Quiston had never been greatly fond of this dark water by the pumphouse anyway, even without monsters. "Tadpoles in the cattails!"
"I'm not after tadpoles." Percy said and fumed back up the ladder. He snatched off his goggles and flung them away as though they had been the trouble. He drew a great breath and dived.
The water pitched, oscillated, slowed, and stilled. I began to worry. I climbed up the ladder, hoping to decrease the angle. Impervious as rolled steel. Quiston called up at me: "Dad...?" I watched the water. Percy didn't come up. I was just about to dive in after him when I saw his face part the surface.
He lay back treading water for a long while before he paddled for shore.
"Never mind, Percy," Quiston called. "I believe you. We believe you, don't we, Dad?"
"Sure. It could have been anything - a sunken branch, that deck chair Caleb threw in last fall...
Percy refused Quiston's offered hand and pulled himself up the muddy bank to the grass. "It wasn't any branch. Wasn't any chair. Maybe it wasn't any monster but it wasn't any goddamn furniture either so fuck you!"
He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered. Quiston looked up at me on the pumphouse roof.
"Okay, okay, I'll take a look," I said and both boys cheered.
I removed my watch. I tossed it to Quiston and stepped to the high edge of the pumphouse roof. I hooked my toes over the tar-papered plywood and started breathing. I could feel my blood gorging with oxygen. Old skindiver trick the kid didn't know. Also he'd been jumping too far out, hitting too flat. I would go straighter down... breathe three more, crouch low, spring as high as possible, and jackknife.
But in the middle of the leap I changed my dive.
Now I'm no diver. My only period near a diving board was the year we spent in Boyes Hot Springs while my father was stationed at Mare Island. Buddy and I were about Quiston and Percy's ages. A retired bosun friend of my dad's devoted many after-school afternoons teaching us to go off the high board. Buddy learned to do a respectable one-and-a-half. The best I could accomplish was a backward cutaway swan, where you spring up, throw your feet forward and lie backward in the air, coming past the board close with your belly. It looks more dangerous than it is. All you have to do is get far out enough.
And when I took off from the pumphouse I knew I was getting plenty far out. I was so pumped by the distance and height my wonder muscles had achieved that I couldn't help but think the future is now, and I went into my cutaway.
For the first time in more than twenty years. Yet everything was happening so helpfully slow that I had plenty of time to remember all the moves and get them correct. I lay back with a languid grace, arms spreading into the swan, chest and belly bowed to the astonished sky. It was wonderful. I could see the pigeons circling above me, cooing their admiration. I could hear the Sons of the Pioneers lope into their next ballad: "An old cowpoke went riding out..." I could feel the breeze against my neck and armpit, the sun on my thighs, smell the sizzle of the barbecue - all with a leisurely indulgence, just hanging there. Then, somewhere beneath all these earthly sensations, or beyond them, remote and at the same time disturbingly intimate, I heard the first of those other sounds that were to continue in increase all the rest of that awful afternoon and evening. It wasn't the familiar howling of decapitated brujos that you hear on peyote comedowns, nor the choiring arguments of angels and devils that LSD can provoke. Those noises are merely unearthly. These sounds were un-anythingly - the chilly hiss of decaying energy, the bleak creaking of one empty space scraping against another, the way balloons creak. Don't let it spook you, he said, ride loose and sing, so I sung to myself O listen to this entropy hiss...
And I came loose from the sky.
I tilted on backward and down, shooting past the pumphouse roof and through the seamless water. My body had become flawless, almost fictional in its perfection, like Tarzan in the old Sunday funnies with every muscle and sinew inked clean, or Doc Savage after forty years of ferocious physical training. The water sang past me, turning cold and dark. I was not alarmed. I wasn't surprised that I didn't have to swim to perpetuate my deepening plunge - the dive had been that frictionless - and I wasn't startled when my outstretched hands finally struck the jagged mystery at the pond bottom. It seemed perfectly natural that I had arrowed to the thing, like a compass needle to the pole -
"Hello, Awfulness. Sorry I can't leave you lurking here in peace, but some lesser being could get bit."
- as I grasped it by its lower jaw and turned for the surface.
I knew what it was. It was the fifty-gallon oil drum M'kehla and I had lost some half-dozen psychedelic summers before. We had been using it to cook ammonium nitrate fertilizer, piping the gas out the threaded bung through a hose down under the water so we could catch the bubbles in plastic bags. Trying to manufacture nitrous oxide. It had been an enormous hassle but had worked well enough that the whole operation - me, M'kehla, hose, barrel, and Coleman stove - had all tumbled into the water, flashing and splashing.
We saved the stove but the lid came off and the barrel went down before we could catch it. It must ha
ve landed at a slant, mouth down, because a pocket of air still remained in the corner so that it rocked there on the blind bottom, supporting itself at an angle, as if on its haunches. What I grabbed was the rusted-out rim below that corner with the air pocket.
I kicked hard, stroking one-handed for the dim green far above. I felt the thing give up its hold in the mire as brute inertia was overcome by my powerful strokes. I felt its dumb outrage at being dragged from its lair, its monstering future thwarted by a stout Tarzan heart and a Savage right hand. I felt it tug suddenly heavier as it tilted and belched out its throatful of air in protest. A lot heavier. But my inspired muscles despaired not. Stroke after stroke; I pulled the accursed thing toward the light. Upward and upward. And upward.
Until that stout heart was pounding the walls in panic, and that Savage right hand no longer held the thing; the thing held the hand.
That discharge of its buoyant bubble had jerked the rusty teeth deep into my palm. To turn it loose without first setting it down would mean letting those teeth rake their way out. All I could do was stroke and kick and hold my own, and listen to that alarm pound louder and louder.
Everything was suddenly on the edge of its seat. The ears could hear the panic thumping through the water. The eyes could see the blessed surface only a few feet away - only a few more feet! - but the burning limbs consulted the heart, the heart checked with the head, and the head computed the distance as already impossible and getting more impossible by the instant!
When the lungs got all this news, the sirens really went off. The nerves passed the signal on to the glands. The glands wrung their reserves into the bloodstream, rushing the last of the adrenaline to the rescue, giving the right hand the desperate courage it needed to uncurl and release its grip on the damned thing. I felt it rip all the way to the fingertips and away, swirling the cold water in derision as it escaped back to its lair.
I squirted gasping into the air, pop-eyed and choking and smearing the silver surface with my lacerated palm. I splashed to the bank. Quiston looked as terrified as I felt. He took my arm to help me out.
"Oh, Dad, we thought we saw your breath! It was all yellow and stinky. Percy ran to get help. I thought something got you..."