Demon Box

Just like praying for something, Lord, I don’t like to take a pill for sleeping unless it’s absolutely necessary. Often’s the night I laid awake till dawn listening to the elevators go up and down the Towers rather than take one of these blessed pills. They always make me sleep too long and leave me feeling dopey as a dog for days. Don’t even let you dream, usually. But now I found myself dreaming like a fire broke out! It was those thoughts and pictures I’d been given suck with. I hadn’t shed them after all. I’d just covered them over like sparks in a mattress. Now they were blazing to life in icy flames, revealing a whole different version of life, and death, and Heaven. Mainly it was this shadow thing—sometimes it was an alligator, sometimes it was a panther or a wolf—rushing through my world and snapping off pieces, all the weak namby-pamby limbs, like snapping off Devlin’s hands playing the guitar, or Frank Dobbs’s leg while he was striding around, or my tongue from saying little oil-on-the-water fibs. Miss Lawn it lopped off absolutely. And Emerson T, and most of my past. Then it moved ahead, a dark pruning shadow snipping through the years ahead until only the bare cold bones of a future was left, naked, with no more fibs, nor birthday cakes, nor presents and doodads. For ever and evermore. Standing there. And out of this naked thing the heat begins to drain, till the ground was as cold as the soles of its feet and the wind the same temperature as its breathing. It still was because it was a true thing, but it was no more than the rock or the wind. And all it could do was to stand there gawking into eternity, waiting, in case God might want to use it again. Like an old mule or the ghost of a mule, its meaning spent, its seed never planted and wouldn’t have grown anyway because it is a mule, a trick of God.

It saddened me to my very marrow. It seemed I could hear it braying its terrible bleak lonesomeness forever. I wept for it and I wished I could say something, but how can you offer comfort to one of the bleak tricks of God? It brayed louder. Not so bleak, now, nor far-off sounding, and I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Out the window I saw Otis under the moon, howling and running in circles, way past wishing he’d blown the dust out of his brandy glass. Devlin and the others were trying to get him, but he still had his wooden sword and was slashing at them.

“Keep your place. It wasn’t me not this wienie he had no call! Devlin? Dobbsy? Help me, old chums; he’s put the glacier on your old—he had no justifications I’m already pruned!”

First begging for help then whacking at them when they came close, screaming like they’d turned into monsters.

“He’s trimming me, boys, dontcha see? Me who never so much as—he had no right you black bastard all I was was just foolish!”

And get so wound up he’d scream and run right into the fence around the chicken yard. He’d bounce off the fence and hew the men back away from him then he’d howl and run into the wire again. The chickens were squawking, the men hollering, and Otis, Lord Jesus, was going plumb mad. This isn’t just foolishness, I told myself; this is simon pure unvarnished madness! He needs help. Somebody to phone somebody. Yet all I could do was watch like it was more of my same cold dream rushing about in the moonlight and chicken feathers, until Otis got his sword snaffled in the wire and the men swarmed on him.

They carried him thrashing and weeping to the house, right past my cabin window. As soon as they were gone from sight I was up out of that bed. Without a further thought on the matter I put on my housecoat and slippers and struck out toward the ash grove. I wasn’t scared, exactly. More like unbalanced. The ground seemed to be heaving. The trees was full of faces, and every witch-doctor and conjure-man story I ever heard was tumbling up out of my Ozark childhood to keep me company, but I still wasn’t scared. If I let myself get the slightest bit scared, I suspicioned, I’d be raving worse than Otis under the curse of Keller-Brown.

But he wasn’t sticking pins in dolls or such like that. He was sitting calm in his therapeutic recline-o-lounger reading one of his big books by the light of the Coleman lamp, a big pair of earphones on his head. Through the bus windows I could hear there was a tape or record or some such playing, of a bunch of men’s voices chanting in a foreign tongue. His mouth was moving to the words of the chant as he read. I slapped on the side of the bus stairwell.

“Hello… can I come in a minute?”

“Mrs. Whitter?” He comes to the door. “Sure, man. Come in. Come on in. I’m honored. Honest.”