Demon Box

I thought it was a frog a bullfrogthat the darned old heron had crippled but couldn’t carry off, she says. Except when I got closer I saw it was hairy. It was swimming like anything out where Stewart was barking, round and round and around in the pondweeds. I told Stewart, No! Leave it alone! Hush! And as soon as he hushes, I swear, here it comes right up the bank at us! I scooped it in the bucket before I knew what it was…

It’s a big old bull gopher, mean-looking as the devil. His front teeth are terrible, like two rusty chisel blades. He’s up on his hind feet in the can, chittering and snapping at our faces over the brim. Hub takes the bucket and grins down into it, pretty terrible-toothed himself. Him and the animal chitter back and forth a minute, then he opens his lunchbox and dumps the gopher right in, right with his plaid thermos bottle and his apple and his celery and his Saran-wrapped sandwiches, and snaps it shut.

I’ll turn him loose up at the logging show, Hub says, turning his yellow grin toward Joon the Goon.

Be careful, Joon says, grinning herself, that you don’t get mixed up and turn loose your cheese sandwich and eat the gopher. Yeah, Sherree says, ree–ally—like she can—and goes out to wait for the bus. Caleb says Yeah, ree–ally. Mom says Here comes the bus Quiston get your assignment sheet Caleb where’s your shoes! Hub says he will be careful, thanks for breakfast, see y’all this evening…

I don’t know what I’ll say, first period oral assignment—Tell What You Did For Your Mother On Mother’s Day.

Tranny Man over the Border

In The Plaza

–hibiscus blooms fall with heavy plops, lie sprawled on the sunny cobblestones and cement benches like fat Mexican generals, scarlet-and-green parade uniforms, gawdy and limp, too hot and tired to rise back to the rank of their branches. Later, perhaps. Now, siesta…

“Not good!” yells the gray crewcut American from Portland with his fifty-year face running sweat and his new Dodge Polaro sitting behind a tow truck outside the Larga Distancia Oficina. “Not three thrown in less than five thousand miles!”

Yelling from Puerto Sancto, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona, where he’d bought his last transmission after buying his second in Oroville, California, where he’d paid without much complaint because it is possible to strip the gears with the hard business miles he’d put on it, but a tranny again in Tucson? And now, less than a week later? The third blown?

“Not good at all! So listen up; I’m gonna jerk the thing out and ship it back first train your direction. I expect the same promptness from you garage boys, right? I expect a new transmission down here in time for us to make the festival in Guadalajara one week from tomorrow! There’s no excuse for this kinda workmanship I can tell you that!”

What he didn’t tell the garage boys in Tucson was that he was pulling a twenty-four-foot mobile home.

“I been a Dodge man ten years. We don’t want a ten-year relationship to blow up from one fluke, right?”

He hung up and turned to me. Next in line, I had been his nearest audience.

“That’ll get some greasemonkeys’ asses smoking in Tucson, won’t it, Red?” He leaned close, as if we had known each other for years. “They aren’t a bad bunch. Fact is, I hope I can find me a mechanic down here with a fraction the know-how as those Arizona boys.”

Reaffirmation of Yankee superiority left him so flushed with feeling for his countrymen that he chose to overlook the stubbled look of me.

“What’s your name, Red? You remind me of my oldest boy a little, behind that brush.”

“Deboree,” I told him, taking his hand. “Devlin Deboree.”

“What brings you to primitive Puerto Sancto, Dev? Let me guess. You’re a nature photographer. I saw you out there after those fallen posies.”

“Way wrong,” I told him. “It isn’t even my camera. My father sent his along. He came to Sancto last year with my brother and me, and nobody took picture one.”

“So Dad sent you to bring back the missed memories. He musta been a lot more impressed than I been.”

“Wrong again. He sent me to bring back jumping beans.”

“Jumping beans?”

“Mexican jumping beans. When we were down here last year he met a mechanic who also grew jumping beans. He bought a hundred bucks’ worth of this year’s harvest.”

“Jumping beans?”

“Five gallons. Dad’s going to give one bean away with each quart of his new ice cream, to publicize the flavor. Not Jumping Bean—Pina Colada. We run a creamery.”

“ ‘Debris,’ huh?” He gave me a wink to let me know he was kidding. “Like in ‘rubbish’?”

I told him it was more like in Polish. He laughed.