Demon Box

“Sweetheart, think of it as medical,” I says. “Reverend Poll’s sermons are as effective as any of my sleeping prescriptions,” I says trying to kid him away from it.

So I felt it then. He kept at me, though. He’s like his grandpa was that way, when he gets a notion he thinks is for somebody else’s good. I carried the phone over to turn down Secret Storm, making excuses one after another why I can’t go till at length he sighs and says he guesses he’ll have to tell me the secret.

“The real reason, Grandma, is we’re all having a birthday party—a surprise birthday party if you weren’t such a stubborn old nannygoat.”

I says, “Honey, I sure do thank you but when you get past eighty a birthday party is about as welcome a surprise as a new wart.” He says that I hadn’t been out to visit them in close to a year, blame my hide, and he wants me to see how they’ve fixed the place back up. Like for a grade, I thought: another trait of his grandpa’s. I told him I was sorry but I did not have the faintest inclination to aggravate my back jouncing out to that dadgummed old salt mine (though it isn’t really my back, the doctor says, but a gallbladder business aggravated by sitting, especially in a moving car). “It was forty years out there put me in this pitiful condition.”

“Baloney,” he says. “Besides, the kids have all baked this fantastic birthday cake and decorated it for Great-Grandma’s birthday; their dear little hearts will be broken.” I tell him to bring them and their dear little hearts both on into my apartment and we’d drink Annie Green Springs and watch the people down in the parking lot. Ugh, he says again. He can’t stand the Towers. He maintains our lovely low-cost twenty-story ultra-modern apartment building is nothing more than a highrise plastic air-conditioned tombstone where they stick the corpses waiting for graves. Which it is, I can’t deny, but plastic or no I make just enough on my Social Security and Natural Gas royalties to pay my way if I take advantage of Poor People’s Housing. My own way.

“So I appreciate the invitation, sugar, but I guess I hadn’t better disappoint the Reverend W. W. Poll. Not when he’s just a short elevator ride as opposed to a long ordeal in an automobile. So you all bring that cake on over here. It’ll do us old geezers good to see some kids.” He tells me the cake’s too big to move. I says “toobig?” and he says that they was having not only my party, see, but a whole day-long to-do with music and a service their ownselves and quite a few people expected. A sort of Worship Fair, he called it. “Al-so,” he says, in that way he used to twist me around his finger, “the Sounding Brass are going to be here.”

Grandkids always have your number worse than any of your own kids, and the first is the worst by a mile. “Don’t you flimflam me, Bub! Not thee Sounding Brass.” He says cross his heart; he picked them all up at the bus depot not three hours ago, swallowtails, buckteeth, and all, and they have promised to sing a special request for my birthday, even though they don’t usually dedicate songs and haven’t done it in years.

“And I will wager,” he says, “you can’t guess which one.” His words some way more extravagant than’s even usual for him. I don’t answer. I heard it then. “They are going to sing that version of ‘Were You There’ that you used to like so much.” I say “You remember that? Why, it’s been twenty years since I had that record if it’s been a day.” “More like thirty,” he says. He said al-so as far as the ride went they had a special bus with a full-size bed in it coming for me at four on the dot. “So don’t give me any more of that bad back baloney. This is your day to party!”

I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his granny. Not Betsy, nor Buddy. Somebody else.

“In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack.”