Demon Box

“Ah, cocksuck,” Houlihan grunted, looking down at the wedged tire in disappointment. It was the first time Deboree had ever heard him use the word. On the contrary, Houlihan was often heard correcting others for cursing; he claimed it was spiritual sloth to allow oneself to stoop to obscenity. But this didn’t sound like sloth to Deboree. It sounded more like desperation.

“Cock suck,” he said again and started to walk away. But Dolf wasn’t finished rubbing it in.

“You don’t have to… keep going in… circles.” Dolf was coming into the garage, walking around the grill, smiling his merciless little Zen smile. “You just have to be… strong enough… to straighten the problem out.”

And while everybody’s eyes popped, the little chubby hands reached down and hooked on each side of the bumper, and the back bulged in the ragged turtleneck and, as smoothly and inexorably as some kind of powerful hydraulic device intended for this very work, pulled the heavy metal away from the tire and back into proper place. Gawking, jawhanging, Houlihan couldn’t even curse. He left, muttering something about needing to crash, maybe at an ex-wife’s digs in Santa Clara, someplace alone, his crew abandoned on the lawn.

In the years of association that followed, as they became close comrades in adventure and escapade and revolution (yes, damn it, revolution! as surely as Fidel and Che had been comrades, against the same tyranny of inertia, in the guerrilla war that was being fought, as Burroughs put it, in “the space between our cells”), Deboree often saw Houlihan at a loss for words, or, more specifically, at an emptiness of words after days of speeding and driving and talking nonstop had left the dancing Irish voice raw and blistered and the enormous assets of cocky self-made intellect momentarily overdrawn, but never again so completely stymied. At least not so blatantly stymied. For Houlihan had a trick of filling the lapses with meaningless numbers—“Hey, you dig just then that lovely little loop-the-loop cutie doin’ the ol’ four five seventy-seven jive back thar on the corner Grant and Green, or was it eighty-seven?”—until his stream of consciousness commenced to trickle again and he got back on the track. Nonsense numbers to fill the gaps. An obvious trick, but none of his audience ever saw it as something to cover a failure. It was just noise to keep the rhythm going, just rebop until he found the groove again. And he always seemed to. “Keep rollin’ and you’ll always eventually cross your line again.” And that faith that saw him through his lapses had become a faith for everybody that knew him, a mighty bridge, to see them across their own chasms. Now the bridge was washed out. Now, at long last, it did seem that he had lost it for good, in terminal nonsense and purposeless, meaningless numbers of nothing. Forever.

Worse! That it had all been a trick, that he had never known purpose, that for all the sound and fury, those grand flights, those tootings, had all, always, at bottom, been only rebop, only the rattle of insects in the dry places of Eliot, signifying nothing.

Forever and ever amen.

So. Strung out and distracted and drunk in the dark, Deboree starts awake in his nest of moss in the wheelbarrow in the blackberry bush. Through the darkness he hears again the twang made when fence wire is strained, its barbs plunking through the staples as the barrier is breached by a head of stock forcing its way through, where no breach is intended, or by a foot climbing over. The twang is followed by a curse and a chorus of giggles and the crashing of sticks. He leans forward in his nest far enough to see a battery-powered lantern wheeling through the shadows of the cottonwoods that line the border of his swamp and his neighbor Hock’s pasture. Followed by more crashings and cursing, the light comes toward him, erratically, until it breaks into the clearing around the stump and is hung from a branch. It is the two hitchhikers loaded with packages and sacks, followed by Sandy Pawku. Sandy is carrying an enormous stuffed teddy bear. So loudly is she cursing and staggering about with the bear that the blond puts down his load and turns back to hush her.

“Cool it, huh? You want that old fart and his dogs down here?”

“I don’t want that old fart and his dogs at all,” Sandy answers. “You two farts will do, to share… for Sandy and her bear.”