Demon Box

  A fair question. I had been forced to deal with it there once myself. You see, one day, not long after Betsy had announced we were finally broke, we all finally knew that my father was going to die (of course I am reminded of him by the Tranny Man - not by the person himself but by certain things particular to this type of American: the erect exit, the wink, the John Wayne way he spoke to machinery and mechanics... many things). The doctors had been telling us for ages that he only had so much time, but Daddy had continued to stretch that allotted time for so long that Buddy and I secretly believed that our stubborn Texas father was never going to succumb to any enemy except old age. His arms and legs shriveled and his head wobbled on his "goddamn noodle of a neck," but we continued to expect some last-minute rescue to come bugling over the horizon.

  Daddy thought so too. "All this research, I figure they'll whip it pretty soon. They better. Look at these muscles jump around -" He'd draw up a pantleg and grin wryly at the flesh jerking and twitching.

  "- like nervous rats on a leaky scow."

  Yeah, pretty soon, we agreed. Then one September day we were out at the goat pasture sighting in our rifles and talking about where we were going to take our hunting trip this fall, when Daddy lowered his 'ought-six and looked at us.

  "Boys, this damned gunbarrel is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits: Let's take some other kind of trip..."

  - and we all knew it was going to be our last. My brother and I talked it over that night. I knew where I wanted to go. Buddy wasn't too sure about the idea, but he conceded I was the big brother. We presented the plan to Daddy the next day over his backyard barbecue.

  "I don't object to a journey south, but why this Purty Sancto? Why way the hell-and-gone down there?"

  "Dev claims there's something special about it," Buddy said. "He wants to show off where he hid out for six months," Daddy said. "Aint that the something special?"

  "Partly," I admitted. Everybody knew I'd been trying to get the three of us down there for years. "But there's something besides that about the place - something primal, prehistoric..."

  "Just what a man in his predicament needs," my mother put in. "Something prehistoric."

  "Maybe we oughta fly up to that spot on the Yukon again," Daddy mused. "Fish for sockeye."

  "No, damm it!" I said. "All my life you've been hauling me to your spots. Now it's my turn."

  "A drive across Mexico would shake him to pieces!" my mother cried. "Why, he wasn't even able to handle the drive to the Rose Parade up in Portland without getting wore to a frazzle."

  "Oh, I can handle the drive," he told her. "That aint the question."

  "Handle my foot! A hundred miles on those Mexican roads in your sorry condition -"

  "I said I can stand it," he told her, flipping her a burger. He turned to eye me through the smoke. "All's I want to know is, one: why this Puerto Sancto place? and, two: what else you got up your sleeve?"

  I didn't answer. We all knew what was up my sleeve.

  "Oh no you don't!" My mother swung her glare at me. "If you think you're going to get him off somewheres and talk him into taking some of that stuff again -"

  "Woman, I been legal age for some time now. I will thank you to leave me do my own deciding as to where I go and what stuff I take."

  Years before, at the beginning of the sixties, Buddy and I had been trying to grow psilocybin mushrooms in a cottage-cheese vat at the little creamery Daddy staked Buddy to after he got out of Oregon State. Bud made up some research stationery and was getting spore cultures sent to him straight from the Department of Agriculture, along with all the latest information for producing the mycelium hydroponically. Bud and I plumbed an air hose into the vat, mixed the required nutrients, added the cultures and monitored the development through a microscope. Our ultimate fantasy was to produce a psilocybin slurry and ferment it into a wine. We believed we could market the drink under the name Milk of the Gods. All we ever made was huge yeast-contaminated messes.

  But in one of those culture kits Buddy ordered they very helpfully included a tiny amount of the extract of the active ingredient itself - I guess so we could have something to compare our yield to, were we ever to get one. Daddy brought this particular package out to the farm from the post office. He was skeptical.

  "That little dab of nothing?" In the bottom of a bottle smaller than a pencil was maybe a sixteenth inch of white dust. "All that talk I heard about those experiments and that's all you took?"

  I dumped the powder in a bottle of Party-Pac club soda. There wasn't so much as a fizz. "This is probably about the size dose they gave us." I began pouring it in a set of wineglasses. "Maybe a little bigger."

  "Well, hell's bells, then," Daddy said. "I'll have a glass. I better check this business out."

  There were five of us: Buddy, me, Mickey Write, Betsy's brother Gil - all with some previous experience - and my Lone Star Daddy, who could never even finish the rare bottle of beer he opened on fishing trips. When we'd all emptied our glasses there was still a couple inches left in the Party-Pac bottle. Daddy refilled his glass.

  "I want enough to give me at least some notion... I'm tired of hearing about it."

  We went into the living room to wait. The women had gone to the shopping center. It was about sundown. I remember we were watching that last Fullmer-Basilio fight on TV. When the shopping run got back from town my mother came popping in and asked, "Who's winning?"

  Daddy popped right back, "Who's fighting?" and grinned at her like a goon.

  In another hour that grin was gone. He was pacing the floor in freaked distress, shaking his hands as he paced, like they were wet.

  "Damn stuff got down in all my nerve ends!" Could that have had something to do with getting that disease? We all always wondered, didn't we?

  By the merciful end of a terrible hell of a night, Daddy was vowing, "If you two try to manufacture this stuff... I'll crawl all the way to Washington on my bloody hands and knees to get it outlawed!"

  Not a fair test, he later admitted, but he was damned if he was going to experiment further. "Never," he vowed. "Not till I'm on my deathbed in a blind alley with my back to the wall."

  Which was pretty much the case that September.

  The three of us flew to Phoenix and rented a Winnebago and headed into Mexico, usually Buddy at the wheel while Daddy and I argued about our selection of tapes - Ray Charles was alright, but that Bob Dappa and Frank Zylan smelt like just more burning braincells.

  The farther south we went the hotter it got. Tempers went up with the temperature. A dozen times we were disinherited. A dozen times he ordered us to drop him at the first airport so he could fly out of this ratworld back to civilized comfort, yet he always cooled down by night when we pulled over. He even got to like the Mexican beer.

  "But keep your dope to yourselves," he warned. "My muscles may be turning to mush but my head's still hard as a rock."

  By Puerto Sancto Daddy had thrown out all the cassettes and Buddy had picked up some farmacia leapers. We were all feeling pretty good. I wanted to take the wheel to pilot her in on the last leg of our journey, then, the first bounce onto a paved street in hundreds of miles I run over a corner of one of those square Mexican manhole covers and it tilts up catty-corner and pokes a hole in our oilpan. We could've babied it to a hotel but Daddy says no, leave it with him; he'll see to it while we hike into town and get us a couple rooms.

  "Give me one of those pep pills before you go," he growled, "so I'll have the juice to deal with these bastards."

  He took a Ritalin. We eased it on to the biggest garage we could find and left him with it. Buddy and I went on foot across the river and into town where we rented a fourth-story seafront double, then walked down to the beach action and got burned forty bucks trying to buy a kilo of the best dope I ever smoked. From a hippie girl with nothing but a tan and a promise.

  We waited three hours before we gave up. On the defeated walk back through the outskirts we passed a bottled gas supply house
. I spoke enough Spanish and Buddy had enough creamery credentials that we talked them out of an E tank of nitrous. By the time we'd had a hit or two in the stickerbushes and got on back to the garage, the oilpan was off and welded and back on and Daddy knew the first names and ages and family history of every man in the shop, none of whom spoke any more English than he did Spanish. He had even put together the deal for the jumping beans.

  "Good people," he said, collapsing into the back of the Winnebago. "Not lazy at all. Just easy. What's that in the blue tank?"

  "Nitrous oxide," Bud told him.

  "Well I hope it can wait till I get a night in a hotel bed. I'm one shot sonofagun."

  We all slept most of the next day. By the time we were showered and shaved and enjoying room-service breakfast on our breezy terrace, the sun was dipping down into the bay like one of those glazed Mexican cookies. Daddy stretched and yawned. "Okay... what you got?"

  I brought out my arsenal. "Grass, hash, and DMT. All of which are smoked and none of which last too long."

  "Not another fifteen rounds with Carmen Basilio, eh? Well, I aint cared about smoking ever since a White Owl made me puke on my grandpa. What was in that tank, Bud?"

  "Laughing gas," Buddy said.

  To a man with thirty-five years' experience in refrigeration, that little tank at least looked familiar. "Is the valve threaded left or right?"

  I held it for him, but he didn't have the strength to turn it. I had to deal it - to my father first, then my brother, then myself. I dealt three times around this way and sat down. Then we flashed, this man and his two fullgrown sons, all together, the way you sometimes do. It wasn't that strong but it was as sweet as dope ever gets... at the end of our trip on the edge of our continent, as the sun dipped and the breeze stopped, and a dog a mile down the beach barked a high clear note... three wayfaring hearts in Mexico able to touch for an instant in a way denied them by gringo protocol. For a beat. Then Daddy stretched and yawned and allowed as how the skeeters would be starting now the breeze had dropped.

  "So I guess I'll go inside and hit the hay. I've had enough. Too much dipsy-doo'll make you goony."

  He stood up and started for bed, his reputation for giving everything a fair shake still secure. It wasn't exactly a blessing he left us with - he was letting us know it wasn't for him, whatever it was we were into, or his hardheaded generation - but he was no longer going to crawl to Washington to put a stop to it.

  He went through the latticed door into the dark room. Then his head reappeared.

  "You jaspers better be sure of the gear you're trying to hit, though," he said, in a voice unlike any he'd ever used when speaking to Buddy or me, or to any of the family, but that I could imagine he might have used had he ever addressed, say, Edward Teller. "Because it's gonna get steep. If you miss the shift it could be The End as we know it."

  And that is what reminds me most of the Tranny Man show. Like Daddy, he knew it was gonna get steep. But he wouldn't make the shift. Or couldn't. He'd been dragging too much weight behind him for too long. He couldn't cut it loose and just go wheeling free across a foreign beach. When you cut it off something equally heavy better be hooked up in its place, some kind of steadying drag, or it'll make you goony.

  "Drive you to distraction is what!"

  This, the Tranny Man tells me at the post office. I stopped by to see if there was any jumping-bean news. There's the Tranny Man, suntanned and perplexed, a slip of paper in each hand. He hands both notes to me when he sees me, like I'm his accountant.

  "So I'm glad she took off before we both had some kind of breakdown. It's this crazy jungle pushed her over the edge if you ask me. Serves her right; she was the one insisted on coming. So there it is, Red." He shrugs philosophically. "The old woman has run out but the new transmission has come in."

  I see the first note is from the estacion de camiones, telling him that a crate has arrived from Arizona. The second is also from the bus station, scrawled on a Hotel de Sancto coaster:

  "By the time you get this I will be gone. Our ways have parted. Your loving wife."

  Loving has been crossed out. I tell him I'm sorry. He says don't worry, there's nothing to it.

  "She's pulled this kind of stuff before. It'll work out. Come on down to the bus depot and help me with that tranny and I'll buy you breakfast. Chief?"

  The old dog creeps from behind the hotel desk and follows us into the cobbled sun.

  "Pulled it lots of times before... just never in a foreign country before, is the problem."

  LAST SHOT OF TRANNY MAN'S WIFE

  He used to do reckless things -- not thoughtless or careless: reckless -- like to toss me an open bottle of beer when I was down in the utility room, hot with cleaning. What could it hurt? If I dropped it there was no big loss. But if I caught it? I had more than just a bottle of beer. Why did he stop being reckless and become careless? What was it caught his attention and stiffened him into a doll? What broke all that equipment? -- is what the Tranny Man's wife is thinking on her way to the American Consulate in Guadalajara to try to cash a check.

  LAST SHOT OF TRANNY MAN

  They wouldn't let me on the plane with the ticking five-gallon can of jumping beans. I had to take the bus. At the Pemex station outside Tepic I saw the Tranny Man's Polaro and his trailer. He was letting old Chief squat in the ditch behind the station. Yeah, he was heading back. To the good old U.S. of A.

  "You know what I think I'm gonna do, Red? I think I'm gonna cross at Tijuana this time, maybe have a little fun."

  Winking more odd-eyed than ever. How was his car? Purring right along. Heard from his wife? Not a peep. How had he liked his stay in picturesque Puerto Sancto?

  "Oh, it was okay I guess, but --" He throws his arm across my shoulders, pulling me close to share his most secret opinion: "- if Disney'd designed it there'd of been monkeys."

  ABDUL & EBENEZER

  Listen to that bark and beller out there.

  Something extraordinary to raise such a brouhaha, to get me walking this far this late into the pasture this damp with dew... They've quitted, quieted. But it isn't done they're just listening, there's something - mygod it's Stewart fighting something right here! Yee! Gittum Stewart, gittum! Yee! Get outta here you phantom fucker you whatever you -- I can't tell if it's a fox, a way-out-of-his-woods wolf or a rabid 'possum.

  Bark bark bark! Bark and beller and pound my heart while every hair for acres around springs to rigid attention. Stewart? Pant pant pant. Good gittin', Stew Ball. Who was that strange varmit? Your foot okay? Probably a fox, huh, some teenage fox out daring the midnight. Probably the same one that will sometimes slip up outside my cabin window in the hollow squeaking shank of a strung-out night to suddenly squawl me up out of my swivel chair three feet in the air then disappear into the swamp with yips of ornery delight.

  Hush, Stewart. Hush. Let things settle down, it's twelve bells and hell's fire! What's that in the moony mist just ahead, that big black clot? It must be Ebenezer, back in that same spot beside the dented irrigation pipe. So, the drama is still running, after all these days. Over a week since that labor in the stickers and longer than that by almost another week since the slaughter, and she's still by the pipe. Well, it's a good drama and deserves a long run. Not that it has a nice tight plot, or a parable I can yet coax a clear meaning from, but it's a drama nevertheless.

  It has a valiant hero, and a faithful heroine. Despite the masculine moniker, Ebenezer is a cow. She got her misleading name one communal Christmas before we communers were cognizant of such things as gender in the lesser life forms.

  She is one of the original dogies, Ebenezer is, appropriated that first year I was out of jail and California - back in Oregon at old Mt. Nebo farm. Betsy had moved there with the kids while I did my time, and all the old gang had followed. That first giddy year the farm was loaded with lots of loaded people trying to take care of lots of land without much more than optimism and dope to go on. One enthusiastic afternoon we drove the bus to t
he Creswell livestock auction and bid into our possession eight baby "bummers." In the cattle game a bummer is a two-or three-or four-day-old calf sold separately because the owner wants to milk the mom instead of raise the calf, and sold cheap because, we found out a few hours after we got our little string home to their straw-filled quarters, they seldom survive.

  The first went to the Great Round-up before the first night was over and the second before the second, their skinny shanks a mass of manure and their big eyes dull from dehydration. By the end of the third night the other six were down. They wouldn't have made it through the week but for the introduction of my brother's acidophilus yogurt into their bottles. True to Buddy's claim, the yogurt fortified their defenseless stomachs with friendly antibodies and enzymes and we pulled the remaining six through.

  Hush, Stewart; it's Ebenezer. I can't see her in the dark but I can see our brand: a white heart with an X in it, floating ghostly in a black puddle. We use a freeze brand instead of a burn brand, so instead of the traditional bawling of calves and reek of seared hair and flesh, our stock marking is done with whispers and frozen gas. The heavy brass brand soaks at the end of a wooden stick in an insulated bucket bubbling with dry ice and methyl alcohol while we wrestle a calf to the sawdust. We shave a place on the flank, stick the frosted iron to the bald spot, then hope everything holds still for the count of sixty. If it's done right, the hair grows back out white where the metal touched. Why the crossed heart? It used to be the Acid Test symbol, something to do with spiritual honesty, cross thy heart and hope to etc.

  It worked on Ebenezer the best; maybe the iron was colder, or the shave closer; perhaps it's simply that she is an Angus and pure black for the white to show against. Her has tripled in size since it was frosted on years ago yet still shines sharp and clear. The insignia gives her a look of authority. Indeed, Ebenezer has led the herd with an influence that has continued to grow ever since she first realized that she was the smartest thing in the field, and the bravest, and that if anybody was going to lead a charge of periodic grievances through the fence to protest pasture conditions, it would have to be her. When there is a beef, so to speak, Ebenezer is the spokesman of this whole eighty acres of grazers - cows, calves, steers, bulls, sheep, horses, goats, donkeys, and vegetarian four-footers all.