Demon Box

More tinkering. Random exclamations through the heatwaves: “Duty calls!” “A-men!” “I’m gonna rip off that bitch you don’t keep her dressed!”… voices from a time-impacted playground, the kids never heard the bell ending recess, now they have all become man-sized and whiskered and hung over. “Truck it! The word for the day is ‘Truck it!’ “ Because the trailer idea fell through—too much hassle to hook a tow-rig to the black shuttle’s rear bumper. Now the plan is to use Joe Blow’s credit card to rent a refrigerated truck and truck the extra bikes home. Why a refrigerated truck? All I can think is it’s to keep the cruel summer heat off the wounded machines, but that doesn’t make any sense…

The prospect called Reject peeks in to ask, “You seen Old Bert?” I tell him not in a while and he goes farting off. Yesterday’s chili.

“I’m so damn proud! To be here! To-day!”—followed by that sharp, insinuating snigger, more a planing, now, than a hammering. I picture pine chips falling in white curls around black boots.

Somebody knocks on our big farm bell. I yell out my window “That bell’s an alarm bell! For fires! Nothing to be played with.”

“With us,” Harry hollers back from the other direction, “anything’s to be played with.”

A loud chongk! It’s a hunting knife being thrown against the pumphouse.

I hear Dobbs’s voice from down at the cabin porch. He’s reading from Grandma Whittier’s big Bible, very loud, about all the trouble Paul had with the Corinthians twenty centuries ago. If I was him I’d tone down and consider the trouble Rampage had only yesterday.

One of the Harleys pops to life, roisterous and husky, a machine in rut. The black car revs, honks twice, leaves. Another bike is stomped awake.

“Hey, everybody! let’s hear it for seriousness.”

Everybody: “Hawr hawr hawr…!”

Visiting Jenneke, that Danish delight, up from her rest, standing in the cookhouse doorway half-naked but with such a toothache that nobody dares come on to her, yet… glares at it all shaking her head—never seen barbarism like this in Copenhagen.

The tall guy with the cast comes lurching back, buckling his belt. Dobbs hollers up from the cabin, “Hey tell us the tale of your accident?”

Without halting his lurch the guy says, “Screech. Crash. Hurt. Hospital.”

Jenneke decides to put on a short kimono and take some of her stale pastry down to feed the ducks.

“I’m so damn proud… to be here…”

More bikes are racketing now, the majority of them, grunting, coughing, roaring—“Let’s go go go-o-o!” Then they all shut down. It’s Awful Harry that’s holding them up. His brakes after all. Completely fucked.

The black car is back with the trailer. What refrigerated truck? Nobody told them about no fuckin refrigerated truck.

Dobbs comes strolling up, drops in on me, shaking his head at all the starting and stopping out my window. “They’re like a rock band getting ready to play: tuning up and jerking off and rattling around trying to find the right key for so long that sometimes it comes close to music.”

“Never close enough,” I say, but I have to concede to myself: the bastards are trying to find the key, true enough. Maybe even the right one. Rusty gates might be unlocked by all this rattling and damn we’d hate to miss that ... The black car splits again, sans trailer.

“You tell me tough shit? When I aint got no fuckin brakes and my front end’s fucked up and I’m strung out and you tell me tough shit? Well fuck you!”

“Hey it was tough shit for me when I went down in that fuckin blizzard in Reno last Easter with my bad arm, but I didn’t get no truck ride home. So fuck you, too!”

Silence follows the flare-up, then the tinkering, then the sound of the knife against the pumphouse again.

The afternoon stretches out. There’s a breeze moving the God’s Eyes at last. The guy that I think is the acting president is sitting under the tree holding his head with both hands.

A meadowlark calls, bright and incongruous. More yells from the greasy concrete: “Hey you know what?”

“Hey you know what I don’t give a shit is what.”

“Hey you know what?

“Yeah, I know what… I want one of those downers is what.”

“Who got some downers? Who?”

“Who shits through feathers?”

“Hey you know what? I’m so damn proud…”

“I slid down the snow to the other lane and fuckin near got hit by a diesel, too!”

“… to be here…”

“Who’s got a yellow? I need a mellow yellow.”

“… to–day!”

The girl for the interview shows up, her East Coast attire provoking whistles and howls. “Take off them ray-ud pants!”

The knife hits the pumphouse. You can tell it doesn’t stick that often.

“Hey, where’s Varmint-boy? Let’s bug the Varmint some more.”

“Yeah, where is that weird little Varmint dude?”

“Bug the Varmint! Bug the Varmint!”

“The Varmint’s already bugged out,” Dobbs yells from the cabin. “Headed for the hills this morning while you guys weren’t watching, bow and arrow and all.”

“Ahhh,” everybody says.

The knife hits the pumphouse.

“Hey, Lucifer! Run up to the store and get us something while we’re waiting.”