Demon Box

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.”