Demon Box

I told her I was attending another service, and instead of those soggy donuts was having a fantastic cake. But I didn’t have the heart to Lord it over her about the Sounding Brass, though. Them eyes were already going from red to green like traffic lights. In the entire year and a half she’s lived in the apartment next door I believe the only visits she’s had from the outside is Jehovah’s Witnesses. I says, I am, Miss Lawn: dee-lirious, and that I was going to have myself a good long hot soak in Sardo before I popped with delirium. So, if she would excuse-a pliz—and went strutting into the bathroom without another word.

I like Miss Lawn well enough. We went to the same church for years and got along just fine, except her seeming a little snooty. I reckoned that came from her being a Lawn of the Lawn’s Sand & Gravel Lawns, a rich old Oregon family and very high society around Eugene. It wasn’t till Urban Renewal forced her to follow me to the Towers that I realized what a lonesome soul she actually was. And jealous… she can’t hardly stand how people make over me. She says the way people make over me you’d think I was the only one in the building. I always say, Ah, now, I don’t know about that, but I am glad people like me. Well, she says, they ought to like me; I never done anything to make people dislike me! I say, All I do is try and be nice and she says, Yeah, but you’re too nice with them, gushy, whether they’re good folks or bad; if I had to get friends by being too gushy like that I don’t want ‘em. Actually, I’m pretty snippy with people, but I say, Yeah, well, if you’re gonna make friends you’re gonna make ‘em by loving thy neighbor, not all the time acting like you’re passing judgment on him. Besides, I never ran into anybody I didn’t think but was good folks, you get deep enough down. And she says, Well, when you been around as much as me you sure will find different; something will happen someday and you’ll find out that there are some people who are rotten all the way down! “Then,” she says, “we’ll see how that mushy love-thy-neighbor way of yours holds up.”

Forlorn old frog; what other world could she expect with that kind of outlook? Like Papa used to say: It’s all in how you hold your mouth. Oh well, I don’t know. A little later I called out to her that there was a bottle of cold wine in my Frigidaire.

I filled my tub just as steaming hot as I could stand and got in. The Sounding Brass! The last and of course only other time I’d been fortunate enough to hear them was after Lena left home to marry Daniel. I got so blue that Emerson drove me back to Arkansas for a family reunion and on the way back through Colorado took me to the Sunrise Service at the Garden of the Gods where the Brass family absolutely stole the show. Afterwards Emery became the Deacon Emerson Thoreau Whittier and traveled to a lot of religious shindigs. I usually begged off accompanying him; somebody needs to keep track of the farm, I’d say. After the house burned and we moved into town I came up with other excuses. Like Emerson’s driving being so uncertain that it gave me the hiccups. Which it did. But it wasn’t just that, nor just cars. It’s anything scurrying around, helter and yon; get here, get there; trains, buses, airplanes, what-all. Right this minute my lawyers tell me I am taking a loss of sixty-five dollars a month on my gas check simply by putting off journeying to Little Rock to sign some papers in person. But I don’t know. Consider the lilies, I say, they toil not, speaking of which I hear my Frigidaire door slam as Miss Lawn got over her snit in the other room, then the lid of my cut-crystal candy dish, then my television came back on. The poor old frog. When I finally finished my rinse and come out in my robe it was still on, blaring. Miss Lawn was gone, though, as was most of the candy I’d planned to take to the kids at the farm and all the Annie Green Springs.

I recognized my ride the instant it turned the corner into the parking lot. Even eighteen stories down and before I got out the field glasses there was no mistaking it, a big bus, all glistening chrome and gleaming white and five big purple affairs painted on the side of it in the formation of a flying cross. When I got them into focus I seen they were birds, beautiful purple birds. It turned and parked in the Buses Only and opened its front door. I saw get out first what I could tell immediately was my grandson by his big shiny forehead: another trait from his grandpa’s side.