Demon Box

“Entropy,” she whispered behind her hand, like a resistance fighter passing a vital secret under the very nose of the enemy, “is only a problem in a closed system.” Then she straightened and spoke up. “What’s more, a singing fisherman from Florence sounds better to me than a singed pig from Canada. How about you, Slick?”

“Much better,” I agreed.

She nodded curtly. The scowl snapped back into place. Without another word she turned on her heel and stalked unaided past the waiting flunky, across the lobby, and straight out the door toward the sedan, majestically, or as majestically as possible for a knobby-jointed maybe-crazy half-green-haired nearly-completely-blind girl-thing from another dimension.

“If you’re ever in Mt. Nebo,” I called after her, “I’m in the book!”

She kept going. The flunky caught up to her but she disdained his help. She nearly stumbled when she stepped off the curb, but she caught the rear fender and felt her way to the door handle and got in. It was then I realized that, in her show of majesty, she’d left her cane.

They were pulling away as I ran out. I waved the feathered staff, but of course she couldn’t see me. I thought of honking the thing after them but they were already to the gate, and the traffic was loud.

Besides, I knew it was the very sort of something I was supposed to bring back. It was absolutely neat. Caleb would love it. He would take it to school, show it off, brandish it, twirl it, honk it. His classmates would admire it, covet it, want one of their own. On their next trip to the Magic Kingdom they would look for them at all the Main Street souvenir shops, ask after them in all the little information kiosks…

Then, one bright blue airbrushed morn—a marvel of demand and supply!—there they’ll be.

Last Time the Angels Came up

“I’m so damn proud to be here today,” yells Mofo.

It was the first thing I heard when I got back from Florida three days ago and found them all here, and I’ve heard him holler it at every lapse and lull ever since, changing only the italics: “I’m so damn proud to be here today” or “I’m so damn proud to be here today…”

“Me too,” agrees the little one named Big Lou. “And I’ll be just as proud when I’m gone. If the heat leaves us go in peace I’ll be proud and pleased both.”

It’s currently against the law to ride motorcycles in the state without crash helmets. They’d been hassled by one state trooper after another, all the way from the California/Oregon border.

“They fuckin better,” says the three-hundred-plus-pounder called Little Lou. “I’m tired of taking shit off these uniformed faggots. Especially when theys only-est one of them to thirty of us. Might’s right, ain’t it?”

“Fuckin A,” answers Big Lou.

“I know for a fact that the Reverent Billy Graham says that right is might. So might is got to be right by miles, right? Thirty to one?”

“Seems right to me,” says Big Lou, stretched out on his belly down in the yard, six-foot-six and a sixth-of-a-ton of dusty meat and leather. “But the only-est thing I know for fact is that, since San Fran, I got miles and miles of piles.”

Then, a moment later, that measured laugh. It comes hammering up from the yard and the concrete apron in front of my shop where numerous Harleys are undergoing various repairs. I can’t tell if it’s a laugh about Big Lou’s rhyme, or about another comment about me up here typing, or what.

“Say I’ll tell ya what I’ve got,” says the heavy voice I’ve come to recognize belongs to that one called Awful Harry: “I got brakes by Christ I didn’t even know I had!”

Then goes roaring a doughnut and braking and raising an awful pillar of dust in my driveway to prove his point.

“See that? Brakes! This morning when I’m coming back out from the mechanic and sees this little chickie here hitchhiking, I locked ‘em up. I mean locked ‘em the fuck up! When I finally stops I looks behind me and all I sees a strip of rubber running a quarter mile back to her standing there with her little pink tummy hanging out. Aint that right, Chickie Bird?”

Chickie Bird doesn’t answer but Rumiocho squawks his “Right on!”

“Hear that?” Harry rasps. “He says ‘Right on.’ The fuckin bird’s hipper’n all you pukes. Hey, Parrot? I’d steal your ass if you didn’t belong to friends o’ the fam–bly har har har…”