Demon Box

He gives me his hand and seems genuinely happy to see me. I told him I had been thinking and if there’d been a misunderstanding I wanted to be the first—But he cuts right in, apologizing himself, how he’d acted abominable and inexcusable and hang on a second. Please. Then held up a big palm while he swirled around to flip a switch on his phonograph. The speakers went off but the tape still turned on the machine. I could still hear a tiny chorus chanting out from the earphones on the recline-o-lounger: Rah. Rah. Rah ree run. Like that…

“I’m glad you come,” he says. “I been feeling terrible for the way I acted. There was no excuse for it and I apologize for getting so heavy on you. Please, come on in.”

I told him it was understandable, and that was why I was there. I started to tell him that I had never said anything about the little boy having the kitten without his mom’s consent when I glanced back to the waterbed. She wasn’t there but the little boy was, lying propped up on a pillow like a ventriloquist doll, his eyes staring at a glass bead strung from the ceiling. He had on his own pair of earphones, and the bead twisted and untwisted.

“Well, I get to apologize first,” I told Mr. Keller-Brown. That that was why I’d come. I told him that he’d been completely correct, and that I had no right telling his child those kind of whoppers and deserved a scolding. The chant went something like Rah. Rah. Tut nee cum. Mr. Keller-Brown says okay, we’ve traded apologies. We chums again? I said I guess so. Rah. Rah. Tut nee eye sis rah cum RAH and that bead turning slow as syrup on its thread. He says he hopes I’ll still consider riding down to LA with them; they’d be honored. I say it’s too bad it ain’t to Arkansas; I need to go to Arkansas—for legal business. He says they go to St. Louis after Oklahoma City and that’s near Arkansas. I says we’ll see how I feel tomorrow; it’s been a big day. He says good night and helps me back down the steps. I thank him.

At the bus window waving, his face gives me no clue whether he believed it or not. Everything suddenly turned ten times brighter as I felt him withdraw that terrible pruning shadow and return it to its sheath. Now forget it, I told myself, all, and made a picture of the rain stopping and the duck flying off.

I walked through the bright moonlight at the edge of the ash grove. The look of things was headed back to normal. There were crickets in the trees, nothing else. The ground ran level and the night was calm. I had just about convinced myself that it was all over, that it was all just a widder woman’s nightmare, nothing more, nothing worse, when I heard the mama Siamese meowing.

The kitten was stuffed under some ash roots and covered with big rocks. I could barely move them. You were right, I told the mama; you should’ve kept him in the rhubarb. She followed crying as I carried it up to the cabin. I kept talking to her as I walked, and fingering the poor stiffening little kitty to see if it was cut or broke or what. And when I found it at the furry throat I was reminded of the time I was picking pears in the dusk as a kid of a girl in Penrose, Colorado, and reached up to get what I thought was sure a funny fuzzy-feeling pear, when it suddenly uncurled and squeaked and flew away and I fell off the ladder with bat bites all over my hand… was what I thought as my fingers recognized the cameo and chain knotted around its neck. O Lord, I cried, what have I got into now? And tossed it under the cabin porch without even trying to break that chain. Then I come inside and took another pill out of my bag and got right down on my knees for a sign. And a dumb old rooster just crowed. Okay. Okay then. If not a sign Lord Jesus to make me certain then how about the strength to act like i am for it looks to me like i am left with no choice but to go ahead along a fortress or harbor Amen Lord amen—

(to be continued)

Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Albert Hall

In the waning days of 1968, for some reason never very specific and now nearly obscured by time, the prime movers from the Dead Center made arrangements with the Beatles at Apple to send over to London a sampling of psychedeloids.

A kind of cultural lend-lease, heads across the water and all that.

There were thirteen of us in all—hippies, hoopies, and harpies; Hell’s Angels and their hogs; a few serious managers with lots of plots and proposals… one prankster without plan one.