Demon Box

“A miss! What’s amiss? Has the acclaim pried open our hero’s as it were vanity? Elementals will invade through one’s weakest point. Or has he gone all dropsy from a few celestial eyes staring?”—bending and scooping the hammer from its puddle to spin it high again and pluck it out of a pinwheeling spray. “Nay, not this lad, not world-famous Wet… Handle… Hooly! No pictures, please; it’s an act of devotion…”

I’d seen the act plenty times before, so I watched the doctor. The old man was studying the phenomenon through the hedge with the detached expression of an intern observing aberrant behavior through a one-way mirror. As Houlihan went on, though, and on and on, the detachment changed to a look of grudging wonder.

“It’s the demon himself,” he whispered. “He’s been stoned out of his box!”

He stood back from the hedge, lifting his brows at me.

“So it is not quite all Chronicle crap, eh, Dr. Deboree? Eviction by chemical command? Very impressive. But what about the risk of side effects?” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked earnestly into my eyes. “Mightn’t such powerful doses turn one into the very tenant one is trying to turn out? But, ach, don’t make such a face! I’m joking, my friend. Teasing. These experiments you and your bus family are conducting deserve attention, sincerely they do—”

It was over my shoulder that his attention was directed, though. The court recorder was coming, carrying a small green suitcase and a large pink pillow.

“—but at another time.”

He gave me a final squeeze good night and promised that we would resume our consideration of this puzzle the very next opportunity. In the tubs again this evening? I nodded, flattered and excited by the prospect. He asked that I think about his invitation in the meantime—sleep a few quiet hours on it, yah? Then he hustled off to join the girl.

I pushed my way through the hedge and headed across the lot, hoping I could get Houlihan geared down enough to let me sleep a few quiet minutes. Fat chance. As soon as saw me coming he whinnied like an old firehorse.

“Chief! You’re bestirred, saints be praised. All ‘bo-warrrd!”

He was through the rear window and up into his seat with the motor roaring before I could make it to the door. I tried to tell him about my appointment with the doctor but Houlihan kept rapping and the bus kept revving until it beckoned its whole scattered family. Too many had been left behind before. They came like a grumpy litter coming to a sow, grunting and complaining they weren’t ready to leave this comfortable wallow, wait for breakfast.

“We’re coming right back,” Houlihan assured one and all. “Positively! Just a junket to purchase some brake fluid—I checked; we’re low—the merest spin back to that—it was a Flying Red Horse if I recollect rightly—hang on re-verse pshtoww! now I ain’t a liar but I stretch the line…”

Drove us instead up a high-centered dirt road that llamas would have shunned and broke the universal miles from the highway but coincidentally near the hut of a meth-making buddy from Houlihan’s beatnik days. This leathery old lizard gave the crew a lot of advice and homemade wine and introduced us to his chemical baths. It was a day before Buddy returned from his hike to borrow tools. It was nearly a week before we got the U-joint into Monterey and welded and replaced so we could baby the bus back down to civilized pavement.

It was a whole decade before I kept my appointment with Dr. Klaus Woofner, in the spring of 1974, in Disney World.

A lot of things had changed in my scene by then. Banished by court order from San Mateo County, I was back in Oregon on the old Nebo farm with my family—the one that shared my last name, not my bus family. They were scattered and regrouped with their own scenes. Behema was communing with the Dead down in Marin. Buddy had taken over my Dad’s creamery in Eugene. Dobbs and Blanche had finagled a spread just down the road from our place, where they were raising kids on credit. The bus was rusting in the sheep pasture, a casualty of the Woodstock campaign. A wrong turn down a Mexican railroad had left nothing of Houlihan but myth and ashes. My father was a mere shade of that tower of my youth, sucked small by something medical science can name only, and barely that.

Otherwise, things seemed to be looking up. My dope sentence and my probation time had been served and my record expunged. My right to vote had been reinstated. And Hollywood had decided to make a movie of my nuthouse novel, which they wanted to shoot in the state hospital where the story is set. They were even interested in me doing the screenplay.