Demon Box

“Ex-cuse me. May… I… try?”

He remembers the way Lars spoke, deliberately slow and simple. He always addressed a listener in odd, singsong phrases that might have seemed retarded but for the twinkle behind his tiny eyes. That and the fact that he had been an honor student in mathematics before he left the Leland Stanford Jr. Farm for North Beach.

Now, observe Buddy and Buddha standing there in the middle of a 1962 beer-and-bongos council ring. Observe Buddy, blushing and grinning, enjoying his prowess at the game not out of any sense of competitiveness but out of playfulness, playing only, as all their family had been raised to play, for fun; win, lose, or chicken out. And now see standing opposite Buddy this opponent of entirely different breed, hardly seeming part of the same species, in fact seeming more mechanical than animal, with legs like pistons, chest like a boiler, close-cropped head like a pink cannonball set with two twinkling bluesteel bearings, planting a bare foot beside Buddy’s and offering a chubby doll-pink hand:

“Shall… we… try?”

Buddy took the hand. They braced, waited the unspoken length of decorum, then Buddy heaved. The squat form didn’t budge. Buddy heaved the opposite direction. Still no movement. Buddy drew a quick breath for another heave but instead found himself sailing across the room, into the wall, leaving the impression of his shoulder and head in the particle board.

Lars Dolf had not seemed to move. He stood, grinning, as inert and immobile and, despite the expression on his round face, as humorless as a fireplug. Buddy stood up, shaking his head.

“Dang,” he marveled. “That was something.”

“Care to try… again?”

And again his brother was sent flying to the wall, and again and again, each time getting up and coming back to take the pink hand without any kind of anger or chagrin or hurt pride but with Buddy’s usual curiosity. Any marvel of the physical world interested Buddy, and this squat mystery tossing him to and fro absolutely fascinated him.

“Dang. Something else. Let me try that again…”

What the mystery was Deboree couldn’t see. Squat or not, Dolf still probably outweighed Buddy by close to a hundred pounds.

“He’s just got too much meat and muscle on you, Bud,” Deboree had said, his voice testy. He didn’t like the way his little brother was being tossed around.

“It isn’t the weight,” Buddy answered, panting a little as he got up to take his stance before Dolf again. “And it isn’t the muscle, exactly…”

“It’s where a man… thinks from,” Dolf explained, grinning back at Buddy. There didn’t seem to be any hostility coming from him, or any cruelty, but Deboree wished they would stop. “When a man thinks from… here”—incredibly sudden, the pink hand shot out, one bullet-blunt finger extended. It stopped less than a quarter inch from poking a hole between Buddy’s eyes—“instead of here”—his other hand came forward from the hip in a hard fist, right at Buddy’s belt buckle, this time stopping even nearer and opening, like a gentle flower, to spread over Buddy’s solar plexus—“he is of course… unbalanced. Like a Coca-Cola bottle… balanced mouth-to-mouth with another Coke bottle: too much weight above…and below… and no connection in the middle. See… what I mean? A man must have balance, like a haiku.”

It had been too pompous for Deboree to let pass. “What I see is less like poetry and more like ninety pounds Buddy is giving away.”

“Then you try him,” Buddy had challenged. “I’m curious to see how you do, hotshot, giving away only maybe a third of that.”

The moment he took Lars Dolfs hand he had understood Buddy’s curiosity. Though he knew the round little form still had the advantage by perhaps two dozen pounds, he could feel immediately that the difference was not one of weight. Nor was it speed; during his last three seasons on the Oregon team Deboree had been able to tell within the first few seconds of the opening round whether his opponent had the jump on him. And this man’s reactions were almost slothlike compared to those of a collegiate wrestler. The difference was in a kind of ungodly strength. He remembers thinking, as Dolf snatched him from the floor with a flick of his forearm and hurled him through the air into a crowd of awestruck undergraduates watching from the daybed, bongos mute in their laps, that this would be what it was like to Indian-wrestle a 250-pound ant.

Like his brother, Deboree had risen and returned to battle without any sense of shame or defeat. To take the hand, to be thrown again and again and return again and again, more out of amazement and curiosity than any sense of masculine combativeness.