Demon Box

Wish you were here, Sissy, with all my heart. He drains his Seven-and-Seven and feels a kind of delicious depression sweep over him. A poignancy.

An accordion in one of the shacks begins practicing a familiar tune, a song popular back home a couple years back. What was it? Went la la la laa la la; we’d fight and neh-ver win… That was it! Those were the days, my friend; those were the days…

The poignancy becomes melancholy, then runs straight on through sentiment to nostalgia. It stops just short of maudlin. With another sigh he picks his pen up and resumes the letter:

“I think of you often on this trip, Old Pal. Do you remember the year Father drove us to Yellowstone Park and how great it was? How wonderful and bright everything looked? How proud we felt? We were the first kids coming out of the Depression whose Father could afford to take his family on such a trip. Well let me tell you, things are not bright anymore and not very likely to get so. Ferinstance, let me tell you about visiting Darold, in ‘Berserkly.’ That about says it. You simply cannot believe the condition that nice college town has allowed itself to get into since we were there in ‘62 for the Russian-American track meet—”

He stops again. He hears a strange clucking voice: “Qué? Qué?” In the yard across the way he sees a very old woman. She appears to be swaying her way along a clothesline with an odd, weightless motion. Her face is vacant of teeth or expression. She seems unreal, a trick of the heat, swaying along, clucking “Qué? Qué? Qué?” She sways along until she reaches a frayed white sheet. She gathers it from the line and starts feeling her way back to her shack. “Qué? Qué? Qué Qué?”

“Blind,” says the Tranny Man, and rises to check Wally’s cupboards. He’s bound to have something to pick up where the Seventy-seven left off, something stronger if possible: eighty-eight… ninety-nine! He bobs this way and that around the strange kitchen, awash with sweat, rendered rudderless by the jagged apparition of the blind crone. He is drifting fast now toward the reefs.

The First Crack

The Tranny Man’s wife arrives half an hour later with Wally Blum’s wife, Betty, in Wally’s nice little Mexican-built Volkswagen jeep loaded with gifts for the gals back home. She has barely begun telling Betty Blum how grateful she is for the ride not to mention the company when she is pulled about by her elbow and scolded so loudly for going off without taking the mail—so unfairly—that the world is suddenly billowing silent about her, all the street sounds ceasing, the hens not clucking, the kids not chattering on the rooftop, the mariachi not pumping his accordion… even the river half a mile down the hill, stopping its sparkle around the rocks. The kneeling girls are raised from their wash to listen: how will the gringa señora take it, this machismo browbeating?

“Understand?” the Tranny Man demands in closing. “Sabe?”

The evening leans forward from its many seats. Betty Blum begins to take blame and croon apologies in the familiar catty pussyfooting of one browbeaten señora coming to the defense of another. The unseen audience starts to sigh, disappointed. But before the Tranny Man can begin his grumpy forgiving, the Tranny Man’s wife hears herself speaking in a voice stiff with care at the delivery of each syllable, telling her husband to let go of her arm, to lower his shouting, and to never treat her as though she were drawing a wage from him—never again speak to her like she was one of his broken machines.

“If you do I swear I’ll kill you, and if I can get to him I’ll kill Donald, and if I can get to them before I’m stopped I’ll kill Terry and the grandchildren and then myself, I swear it before God!”

Both her husband and Betty stare dumbstruck at this outburst. Then the two of them exchange quick small nods: shoulda seen something like this coming … woman this age… all those rum-and-Cokes. The Tranny Man’s wife is no longer paying attention. She knows she has been effective. For a moment she feels as though the intensity of this effect will set her aflame, that her flesh will melt and run off her bones.