Demon Box

We all slept most of the next day. By the time we were showered and shaved and enjoying room-service breakfast on our breezy terrace, the sun was dipping down into the bay like one of those glazed Mexican cookies. Daddy stretched and yawned. “Okay… what you got?”

I brought out my arsenal. “Grass, hash, and DMT. All of which are smoked and none of which last too long.”

“Not another fifteen rounds with Carmen Basilio, eh? Well, I aint cared about smoking ever since a White Owl made me puke on my grandpa. What was in that tank, Bud?”

“Laughing gas,” Buddy said.

To a man with thirty-five years’ experience in refrigeration, that little tank at least looked familiar. “Is the valve threaded left or right?”

I held it for him, but he didn’t have the strength to turn it. I had to deal it—to my father first, then my brother, then myself. I dealt three times around this way and sat down. Then we flashed, this man and his two fullgrown sons, all together, the way you sometimes do. It wasn’t that strong but it was as sweet as dope ever gets… at the end of our trip on the edge of our continent, as the sun dipped and the breeze stopped, and a dog a mile down the beach barked a high clear note… three wayfaring hearts in Mexico able to touch for an instant in a way denied them by gringo protocol. For a beat. Then Daddy stretched and yawned and allowed as how the skeeters would be starting now the breeze had dropped.

“So I guess I’ll go inside and hit the hay. I’ve had enough. Too much dipsy-doo’ll make you goony.”

He stood up and started for bed, his reputation for giving everything a fair shake still secure. It wasn’t exactly a blessing he left us with—he was letting us know it wasn’t for him, whatever it was we were into, or his hardheaded generation—but he was no longer going to crawl to Washington to put a stop to it.

He went through the latticed door into the dark room. Then his head reappeared.

“You jaspers better be sure of the gear you’re trying to hit, though,” he said, in a voice unlike any he’d ever used when speaking to Buddy or me, or to any of the family, but that I could imagine he might have used had he ever addressed, say, Edward Teller. “Because it’s gonna get steep. If you miss the shift it could be The End as we know it.”

And that is what reminds me most of the Tranny Man show. Like Daddy, he knew it was gonna get steep. But he wouldn’t make the shift. Or couldn’t. He’d been dragging too much weight behind him for too long. He couldn’t cut it loose and just go wheeling free across a foreign beach. When you cut it off something equally heavy better be hooked up in its place, some kind of steadying drag, or it’ll make you goony.

“Drive you to distraction is what!”

This, the Tranny Man tells me at the post office. I stopped by to see if there was any jumping-bean news. There’s the Tranny Man, suntanned and perplexed, a slip of paper in each hand. He hands both notes to me when he sees me, like I’m his accountant.

“So I’m glad she took off before we both had some kind of breakdown. It’s this crazy jungle pushed her over the edge if you ask me. Serves her right; she was the one insisted on coming. So there it is, Red.” He shrugs philosophically. “The old woman has run out but the new transmission has come in.”

I see the first note is from the estacion de camiones, telling him that a crate has arrived from Arizona. The second is also from the bus station, scrawled on a Hotel de Sancto coaster:

“By the time you get this I will be gone. Our ways have parted. Your loving wife.”

Loving has been crossed out. I tell him I’m sorry. He says don’t worry, there’s nothing to it.

“She’s pulled this kind of stuff before. It’ll work out. Come on down to the bus depot and help me with that tranny and I’ll buy you breakfast. Chief?”

The old dog creeps from behind the hotel desk and follows us into the cobbled sun.

“Pulled it lots of times before… just never in a foreign country before, is the problem.”

Last Shot of Tranny Man’s Wife