Demon Box

We drank beer and enjoyed our old arguments and watched the crowd gather. Rampage and his kids, Buddy and his. The Mikkelsens, the Butkovitches. The women carried dishes to the kitchen; the kids went for the pond; the men came down to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After about an hour of tepid beer and politics Dobbs tossed away his half-empty bottle out the window.

“Alright e-nuff of this foam and foofarah,” he declared, right at M’kehla. “Break out the heavy stuff!”

As a man of the trade, M’kehla always had a formidable stash. He uncoiled from his zebra lounge and walked to the front of the bus. With a flourish he produced a little metal box from somewhere behind the driver’s seat. It was a fishing tackle case with trays that accordioned out when he opened it, making an impressive display: the trays in neat little stairsteps, all divided into partitions and each section filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled royal coachman he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.

“Afghany,” he said, rolling it along his fingertips like the egg in the henhouse.

He pinched off a generous chunk and heated it with a butane lighter. When it was properly softened he crumbled it into the bowl of his stone-bowled Indian peacepipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke Percy came baying up the stairwell like a hound. He had smelled it all the way to the pond.

“Hah!” he said, coming down the aisle rubbing his hands. “In the nick of time.”

He was wearing Quiston’s big cowboy hat to keep from further sunburning his nose and neck, and he had a bright yellow bandanna secured around his throat with a longhorn tie slide. He looked like a Munchkin cowpoke.

He plumped down in the pillows and leaned back with his fingers laced behind his neck, just one of the fellas. When the peace-pipe came back around to M’kehla he passed to Percy. The little boy puffed up a terrific cloud.

Davy wouldn’t join us, though. “Makes a man too peaceful,” he explained, opening another beer. “These are not peaceful times.”

“That’s why Perce and me are pullin stakes and rollin on.”

“Up to Canada did I hear?” Dobbs asked.

“Up it is,” M’kehla answered, reloading the pipe. “To start a sanctuary.”

“A sanctuary for shirkers,” Davy muttered.

“Well, Dave,” Dobbs said, lifting his shoulders in a diplomatic shrug, “patriots and zealots don’t generally need a sanctuary, you got to admit that.”

F. C. Dobbs had served in the early days of our inglorious “police action” as a marine pilot, flying the big Huey helicopters in and out of the rice-paddy hornet’s nests of the Cong. After four years he had been discharged with medals and citations and the rank of captain, and a footlocker full of Burmese green. He was the only vet among us and not the least upset by M’kehla’s planned defection, especially under the pacifying spell of M’kehla’s hash. Davy, on the other hand, was growing less and less happy with M’kehla and his plan. You could see it in the way he brooded over his beer. And when M’kehla’s Indian pipe came around to him again, he slapped it away with the back of a balled fist.

“I’ll stick to good old firewater from the Great White Father,” he grunted. “That flower power paraphernalia just makes a man sleepy.”

“I been driving since noon yesterday,” M’kehla said softly, retrieving his pipe. “Do I look sleepy?”

“Probably popping pills or sniffing snow all the way,” Davy grumbled. “I seen the type on the gym circuit.”

“Not a pill. Not a sniff. Well, just a puff of some new flower power stuff. One little hit. But I’ll bet there isn’t one of you big white fathers with the balls to try half what I am gonna do.”

“Me!” Percy chirped.

“Leave that shit alone,” Davy ordered, pushing the boy back and tilting the hat down over his eyes. “You half-baked buckeroo.”

I stepped up to get between Davy and M’kehla. “I might try a taste. What is it, like smoking speed?”

M’kehla turned without answering. He reached a clay samovar down from his staples cupboard and opened it. He pinched out a wad of dried green leaves.

“Not much,” he answered, smiling. “Just a little ordinary mint tea—”

He thumbed the wad down into the bowl of the pipe, then took a tiny bottle out of his tackle box, from a partition marked SNELLED HOOKS. Carefully, he unscrewed the lid.

“—and a little S.T.P.”

“Eek,” said Buddy.

Dobbs agreed. “Eek indeed.”

We had never tried the drug but we all had heard of it—a designated bummer, developed by the military for the stated purpose of confusing and discouraging enemy troops. The experiment had reportedly been dropped after a few of the hapless guinea pigs claimed that the chemical had promoted concentration instead of confusion. These lucky few said it seemed to not only sharpen their wits but double their energy and dissolve their illusions as well.

Nothing the army wanted to chance, even for our own soldiers.