Demon Box

I squirted gasping into the air, pop-eyed and choking and smearing the silver surface with my lacerated palm. I splashed to the bank. Quiston looked as terrified as I felt. He took my arm to help me out.

“Oh, Dad, we thought we saw your breath! It was all yellow and stinky. Percy ran to get help. I thought something got you…”

His face was as white as his hair, and his eyes were wild, going from me to the pond and back to me. The tears didn’t begin in earnest until he saw my hand.

“Dad! You’re hurt!”

I watched him cry and he watched me bleed and we couldn’t do a thing for each other. The water shined, the Sons of the Pioneers chased Ghost Riders in the Sky overhead, and in the distance, beyond M’kehla and Dobbs and Buddy sprinting toward us from the corral, I saw the flag, dipping foolishly lower and lower, though the noon sun had not budged an inch.

As Betsy cleaned and wrapped the wound I forced myself back to a presentable calm. I had my place and my plans to see to, not to mention my reputation. I can put up a front as well as the next fool; I just didn’t know how long I could keep it up.

I tried to assuage Quiston’s fears by reassuring him that it was just a rusty old barrel, at the same time trying to amuse Buddy and Dobbs and the rest of the gang by adding, “and it’s a good thing it wasn’t a rusty young barrel.” Quiston said he had known all along it wasn’t any real monster. Percy said so had he. The guys laughed at my joke. But there was no real amusement in the loud laughter. They were all humoring me, I discerned; even my kid.

So I didn’t participate much in the remaining events of that day. I put on my darkest shades and wired on a grin and stayed out of the way. I was stricken by a fear so deep and all-pervading that finally I was not even afraid. I was resigned, and this resignation was at last the only solid thing left to hold on to. Harder than fear, than faith, harder than God was this rock of resignation. It gleamed before me like a great gem, and everything that happened the rest of that shattered holiday was lensed through its cut-diamond facets. Since it was our national birthday this lens was focused chiefly on our nation, obliging me to view its decay and diseases like a pathologist bent to his microscope.

Flaws previously shrouded now lay naked as knife wounds. I saw the marks of weakness, and woe everywhere I turned, within and without. I saw it in the spoiled, macho grins of the men and in the calculating green eyes of the women. I saw it in the half-grown greed at the barbecue, with kids fighting for the choicest pieces only to leave them half eaten in the sawdust. It was in the worn-out banter at the beer keg and the insincere singing of old favorites around the guitar.

I saw it in the irritable bumper-to-bumper push of traffic fighting its way to the fireworks display at the football stadium—each honk and lurch of modern machinery sounding as doomed as barbaric Rome—but I saw it most in an event that happened as we were driving back from the fireworks late that evening.

The display was a drag for everyone. Too many people, not enough parking space, plus the entrance to the stadium had been manned by a get-out-of-Vietnam garrison complete with pacifist posters and a belligerent bullhorn. A college football stadium on the Fourth of July in 1970 is not the smartest place to carry anti-American signs and shout Maoist slogans, and this noisy group had naturally attracted an adversary force of right-wing counterparts. These hecklers were as rednecked and thickheaded as the protesters were longhaired and featherbrained. An argument over the bullhorn turned into a tussle, the tussle into a fight, and the cops swooped down. Our group from the farm turned in our tracks and headed back to Dobbs’s bus to watch from there.

The women and kids sat out on the cut-open back porch of the bus so they could see the sky; the men stayed inside, sampling M’kehla’s tackle box and continuing the day’s discussion. M’kehla kept his eyes off me. All I could do was sit there with my hand throbbing, my brain like a blown fuse.

The cop cars kept coming and going during the show, stifling drunks and hauling off demonstrators. Davy said the whole business was a black eye for America. M’kehla maintained that this little fuss was the merest straw in the wind, a precursor of worse woes on the way for the U.S. of A. Dobbs disagreed with both of them, grandly claiming that this demonstration demonstrated just how free and open our society really was, that woven into the fabric of our collective consciousness was a corrective process proving that the American dream was still working. M’kehla laughed—Working? Working where?—and demanded evidence of one area, just one area, where this wonderful dream was working.

“Why right here before your very eyes, Bro,” Dobbs answered amiably. “In the area of Equality.”

“Are you shitting me?” M’kehla whooped. “E-quality?”