Puerto Sancto Darkness

   Here it comes again: the turmoil, the chaos, the hubbub and howls—the nightdogs again—the pre-dawn yapping that starts in the hills south and sweeps across the town, just when you were sure the sonofabitches had, at last, exhausted the shadows and were going to settle down and let you get some rest.
   Old Chief whimpers. The Tranny Man burrows under his pillow cursing the night, the dogs, the town, his crazy wife who had suggested in the first place coming to this thorny wilderness, goddamn her! Why here, he demands of the darkness, instead of Yosemite or Marineland or even the Shakespeare festival in Ashland? Why this goddamn anarchy of thorn and shadows?
   A fair question. I had been forced to deal with it there once myself. You see, one day, not long after Betsy had announced we were finally broke, we all finally knew that my father was going to die (of course I am reminded of him by the Tranny Man—not by the person himself but by certain things particular to this type of American: the erect exit, the wink, the John Wayne way he spoke to machinery and mechanics… many things). The doctors had been telling us for ages that he only had so much time, but Daddy had continued to stretch that allotted time for so long that Buddy and I secretly believed that our stubborn Texas father was never going to succumb to any enemy except old age. His arms and legs shriveled and his head wobbled on his “goddamn noodle of a neck,” but we continued to expect some last-minute rescue to come bugling over the horizon.
   Daddy thought so too. “All this research, I figure they’ll whip it pretty soon. They better. Look at these muscles jump around—” He’d draw up a pantleg and grin wryly at the flesh jerking and twitching.
   “—like nervous rats on a leaky scow.”
   Yeah, pretty soon, we agreed. Then one September day we were out at the goat pasture sighting in our rifles and talking about where we were going to take our hunting trip this fall, when Daddy lowered his ‘ought-six and looked at us.
   “Boys, this damned gunbarrel is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits: Let’s take some other kind of trip…”
   –and we all knew it was going to be our last. My brother and I talked it over that night. I knew where I wanted to go. Buddy wasn’t too sure about the idea, but he conceded I was the big brother. We presented the plan to Daddy the next day over his backyard barbecue.
   “I don’t object to a journey south, but why this Purty Sancto? Why way the hell-and-gone down there?”
   “Dev claims there’s something special about it,” Buddy said. “He wants to show off where he hid out for six months,” Daddy said. “Aint that the something special?”
   “Partly,” I admitted. Everybody knew I’d been trying to get the three of us down there for years. “But there’s something besides that about the place—something primal, prehistoric…”
   “Just what a man in his predicament needs,” my mother put in. “Something prehistoric.”
   “Maybe we oughta fly up to that spot on the Yukon again,” Daddy mused. “Fish for sockeye.”
   “No, damm it!” I said. “All my life you’ve been hauling me to your spots. Now it’s my turn.”
   “A drive across Mexico would shake him to pieces!” my mother cried. “Why, he wasn’t even able to handle the drive to the Rose Parade up in Portland without getting wore to a frazzle.”
   “Oh, I can handle the drive,” he told her. “That aint the question.”
   “Handle my foot! A hundred miles on those Mexican roads in your sorry condition—”
   “I said I can stand it,” he told her, flipping her a burger. He turned to eye me through the smoke. “All’s I want to know is, one: why this Puerto Sancto place? and, two: what else you got up your sleeve?”
   I didn’t answer. We all knew what was up my sleeve.
   “Oh no you don’t!” My mother swung her glare at me. “If you think you’re going to get him off somewheres and talk him into taking some of that stuff again—”
   “Woman, I been legal age for some time now. I will thank you to leave me do my own deciding as to where I go and what stuff I take.”
   Years before, at the beginning of the sixties, Buddy and I had been trying to grow psilocybin mushrooms in a cottage-cheese vat at the little creamery Daddy staked Buddy to after he got out of Oregon State. Bud made up some research stationery and was getting spore cultures sent to him straight from the Department of Agriculture, along with all the latest information for producing the mycelium hydroponically. Bud and I plumbed an air hose into the vat, mixed the required nutrients, added the cultures and monitored the development through a microscope. Our ultimate fantasy was to produce a psilocybin slurry and ferment it into a wine. We believed we could market the drink under the name Milk of the Gods. All we ever made was huge yeast-contaminated messes.
   But in one of those culture kits Buddy ordered they very helpfully included a tiny amount of the extract of the active ingredient itself—I guess so we could have something to compare our yield to, were we ever to get one. Daddy brought this particular package out to the farm from the post office. He was skeptical.
   “That little dab of nothing?” In the bottom of a bottle smaller than a pencil was maybe a sixteenth inch of white dust. “All that talk I heard about those experiments and that’s all you took?”
   I dumped the powder in a bottle of Party-Pac club soda. There wasn’t so much as a fizz. “This is probably about the size dose they gave us.” I began pouring it in a set of wineglasses. “Maybe a little bigger.”
   “Well, hell’s bells, then,” Daddy said. “I’ll have a glass. I better check this business out.”
   There were five of us: Buddy, me, Mickey Write, Betsy’s brother Gil—all with some previous experience—and my Lone Star Daddy, who could never even finish the rare bottle of beer he opened on fishing trips. When we’d all emptied our glasses there was still a couple inches left in the Party-Pac bottle. Daddy refilled his glass.
   “I want enough to give me at least some notion… I’m tired of hearing about it.”
   We went into the living room to wait. The women had gone to the shopping center. It was about sundown. I remember we were watching that last Fullmer-Basilio fight on TV. When the shopping run got back from town my mother came popping in and asked, “Who’s winning?”
   Daddy popped right back, “Who’s fighting?” and grinned at her like a goon.
   In another hour that grin was gone. He was pacing the floor in freaked distress, shaking his hands as he paced, like they were wet.
   “Damn stuff got down in all my nerve ends!” Could that have had something to do with getting that disease? We all always wondered, didn’t we?
   By the merciful end of a terrible hell of a night, Daddy was vowing, “If you two try to manufacture this stuff… I’ll crawl all the way to Washington on my bloody hands and knees to get it outlawed!”
   Not a fair test, he later admitted, but he was damned if he was going to experiment further. “Never,” he vowed. “Not till I’m on my deathbed in a blind alley with my back to the wall.”
   Which was pretty much the case that September.
   The three of us flew to Phoenix and rented a Winnebago and headed into Mexico, usually Buddy at the wheel while Daddy and I argued about our selection of tapes—Ray Charles was alright, but that Bob Dappa and Frank Zylan smelt like just more burning braincells.
   The farther south we went the hotter it got. Tempers went up with the temperature. A dozen times we were disinherited. A dozen times he ordered us to drop him at the first airport so he could fly out of this ratworld back to civilized comfort, yet he always cooled down by night when we pulled over. He even got to like the Mexican beer.
   “But keep your dope to yourselves,” he warned. “My muscles may be turning to mush but my head’s still hard as a rock.”
   By Puerto Sancto Daddy had thrown out all the cassettes and Buddy had picked up some farmacia leapers. We were all feeling pretty good. I wanted to take the wheel to pilot her in on the last leg of our journey, then, the first bounce onto a paved street in hundreds of miles I run over a corner of one of those square Mexican manhole covers and it tilts up catty-corner and pokes a hole in our oilpan. We could’ve babied it to a hotel but Daddy says no, leave it with him; he’ll see to it while we hike into town and get us a couple rooms.
   “Give me one of those pep pills before you go,” he growled, “so I’ll have the juice to deal with these bastards.”
   He took a Ritalin. We eased it on to the biggest garage we could find and left him with it. Buddy and I went on foot across the river and into town where we rented a fourth-story seafront double, then walked down to the beach action and got burned forty bucks trying to buy a kilo of the best dope I ever smoked. From a hippie girl with nothing but a tan and a promise.
   We waited three hours before we gave up. On the defeated walk back through the outskirts we passed a bottled gas supply house. I spoke enough Spanish and Buddy had enough creamery credentials that we talked them out of an E tank of nitrous. By the time we’d had a hit or two in the stickerbushes and got on back to the garage, the oilpan was off and welded and back on and Daddy knew the first names and ages and family history of every man in the shop, none of whom spoke any more English than he did Spanish. He had even put together the deal for the jumping beans.
   “Good people,” he said, collapsing into the back of the Winnebago. “Not lazy at all. Just easy. What’s that in the blue tank?”
   “Nitrous oxide,” Bud told him.
   “Well I hope it can wait till I get a night in a hotel bed. I’m one shot sonofagun.”
   We all slept most of the next day. By the time we were showered and shaved and enjoying room-service breakfast on our breezy terrace, the sun was dipping down into the bay like one of those glazed Mexican cookies. Daddy stretched and yawned. “Okay… what you got?”
   I brought out my arsenal. “Grass, hash, and DMT. All of which are smoked and none of which last too long.”
   “Not another fifteen rounds with Carmen Basilio, eh? Well, I aint cared about smoking ever since a White Owl made me puke on my grandpa. What was in that tank, Bud?”
   “Laughing gas,” Buddy said.
   To a man with thirty-five years’ experience in refrigeration, that little tank at least looked familiar. “Is the valve threaded left or right?”
   I held it for him, but he didn’t have the strength to turn it. I had to deal it—to my father first, then my brother, then myself. I dealt three times around this way and sat down. Then we flashed, this man and his two fullgrown sons, all together, the way you sometimes do. It wasn’t that strong but it was as sweet as dope ever gets… at the end of our trip on the edge of our continent, as the sun dipped and the breeze stopped, and a dog a mile down the beach barked a high clear note… three wayfaring hearts in Mexico able to touch for an instant in a way denied them by gringo protocol. For a beat. Then Daddy stretched and yawned and allowed as how the skeeters would be starting now the breeze had dropped.
   “So I guess I’ll go inside and hit the hay. I’ve had enough. Too much dipsy-doo’ll make you goony.”
   He stood up and started for bed, his reputation for giving everything a fair shake still secure. It wasn’t exactly a blessing he left us with—he was letting us know it wasn’t for him, whatever it was we were into, or his hardheaded generation—but he was no longer going to crawl to Washington to put a stop to it.
   He went through the latticed door into the dark room. Then his head reappeared.
   “You jaspers better be sure of the gear you’re trying to hit, though,” he said, in a voice unlike any he’d ever used when speaking to Buddy or me, or to any of the family, but that I could imagine he might have used had he ever addressed, say, Edward Teller. “Because it’s gonna get steep. If you miss the shift it could be The End as we know it.”
   And that is what reminds me most of the Tranny Man show. Like Daddy, he knew it was gonna get steep. But he wouldn’t make the shift. Or couldn’t. He’d been dragging too much weight behind him for too long. He couldn’t cut it loose and just go wheeling free across a foreign beach. When you cut it off something equally heavy better be hooked up in its place, some kind of steadying drag, or it’ll make you goony.
   “Drive you to distraction is what!”
   This, the Tranny Man tells me at the post office. I stopped by to see if there was any jumping-bean news. There’s the Tranny Man, suntanned and perplexed, a slip of paper in each hand. He hands both notes to me when he sees me, like I’m his accountant.
   “So I’m glad she took off before we both had some kind of breakdown. It’s this crazy jungle pushed her over the edge if you ask me. Serves her right; she was the one insisted on coming. So there it is, Red.” He shrugs philosophically. “The old woman has run out but the new transmission has come in.”
   I see the first note is from the estacion de camiones, telling him that a crate has arrived from Arizona. The second is also from the bus station, scrawled on a Hotel de Sancto coaster:


   “By the time you get this I will be gone. Our ways have parted. Your loving wife.”


   Loving has been crossed out. I tell him I’m sorry. He says don’t worry, there’s nothing to it.
   “She’s pulled this kind of stuff before. It’ll work out. Come on down to the bus depot and help me with that tranny and I’ll buy you breakfast. Chief?”
   The old dog creeps from behind the hotel desk and follows us into the cobbled sun.
   “Pulled it lots of times before… just never in a foreign country before, is the problem.”

Last Shot of Tranny Man’s Wife

   He used to do reckless things—not thoughtless or careless: reckless—like to toss me an open bottle of beer when I was down in the utility room, hot with cleaning. What could it hurt? If I dropped it there was no big loss. But if I caught it? I had more than just a bottle of beer. Why did he stop being reckless and become careless? What was it caught his attention and stiffened him into a doll? What broke all that equipment?—is what the Tranny Man’s wife is thinking on her way to the American Consulate in Guadalajara to try to cash a check.

Last Shot of Tranny Man

   They wouldn’t let me on the plane with the ticking five-gallon can of jumping beans. I had to take the bus. At the Pemex station outside Tepic I saw the Tranny Man’s Polaro and his trailer. He was letting old Chief squat in the ditch behind the station. Yeah, he was heading back. To the good old U.S. of A.
   “You know what I think I’m gonna do, Red? I think I’m gonna cross at Tijuana this time, maybe have a little fun.”
   Winking more odd-eyed than ever. How was his car? Purring right along. Heard from his wife? Not a peep. How had he liked his stay in picturesque Puerto Sancto?
   “Oh, it was okay I guess, but—” He throws his arm across my shoulders, pulling me close to share his most secret opinion: “—if Disney’d designed it there’d of been monkeys.”

Abdul & Ebenezer

   Listen to that bark and beller out there.
   Something extraordinary to raise such a brouhaha, to get me walking this far this late into the pasture this damp with dew… They’ve quitted, quieted. But it isn’t done they’re just listening, there’s something—mygod it’s Stewart fighting something right here! Yee! Gittum Stewart, gittum! Yee! Get outta here you phantom fucker you whatever you—I can’t tell if it’s a fox, a way-out-of-his-woods wolf or a rabid ‘possum.
   Bark bark bark! Bark and beller and pound my heart while every hair for acres around springs to rigid attention. Stewart? Pant pant pant. Good gittin’, Stew Ball. Who was that strange varmit? Your foot okay? Probably a fox, huh, some teenage fox out daring the midnight. Probably the same one that will sometimes slip up outside my cabin window in the hollow squeaking shank of a strung-out night to suddenly squawl me up out of my swivel chair three feet in the air then disappear into the swamp with yips of ornery delight.
   Hush, Stewart. Hush. Let things settle down, it’s twelve bells and hell’s fire! What’s that in the moony mist just ahead, that big black clot? It must be Ebenezer, back in that same spot beside the dented irrigation pipe. So, the drama is still running, after all these days. Over a week since that labor in the stickers and longer than that by almost another week since the slaughter, and she’s still by the pipe. Well, it’s a good drama and deserves a long run. Not that it has a nice tight plot, or a parable I can yet coax a clear meaning from, but it’s a drama nevertheless.
   It has a valiant hero, and a faithful heroine. Despite the masculine moniker, Ebenezer is a cow. She got her misleading name one communal Christmas before we communers were cognizant of such things as gender in the lesser life forms.
   She is one of the original dogies, Ebenezer is, appropriated that first year I was out of jail and California—back in Oregon at old Mt. Nebo farm. Betsy had moved there with the kids while I did my time, and all the old gang had followed. That first giddy year the farm was loaded with lots of loaded people trying to take care of lots of land without much more than optimism and dope to go on. One enthusiastic afternoon we drove the bus to the Creswell livestock auction and bid into our possession eight baby “bummers.” In the cattle game a bummer is a two– or three– or four-day-old calf sold separately because the owner wants to milk the mom instead of raise the calf, and sold cheap because, we found out a few hours after we got our little string home to their straw-filled quarters, they seldom survive.
   The first went to the Great Round-up before the first night was over and the second before the second, their skinny shanks a mass of manure and their big eyes dull from dehydration. By the end of the third night the other six were down. They wouldn’t have made it through the week but for the introduction of my brother’s acidophilus yogurt into their bottles. True to Buddy’s claim, the yogurt fortified their defenseless stomachs with friendly antibodies and enzymes and we pulled the remaining six through.
   Hush, Stewart; it’s Ebenezer. I can’t see her in the dark but I can see our brand: a white heart with an X in it, floating ghostly in a black puddle. We use a freeze brand instead of a burn brand, so instead of the traditional bawling of calves and reek of seared hair and flesh, our stock marking is done with whispers and frozen gas. The heavy brass brand soaks at the end of a wooden stick in an insulated bucket bubbling with dry ice and methyl alcohol while we wrestle a calf to the sawdust. We shave a place on the flank, stick the frosted iron to the bald spot, then hope everything holds still for the count of sixty. If it’s done right, the hair grows back out white where the metal touched. Why the crossed heart? It used to be the Acid Test symbol, something to do with spiritual honesty, cross thy heart and hope to etc.
   It worked on Ebenezer the best; maybe the iron was colder, or the shave closer; perhaps it’s simply that she is an Angus and pure black for the white to show against. Her <heart> has tripled in size since it was frosted on years ago yet still shines sharp and clear. The insignia gives her a look of authority. Indeed, Ebenezer has led the herd with an influence that has continued to grow ever since she first realized that she was the smartest thing in the field, and the bravest, and that if anybody was going to lead a charge of periodic grievances through the fence to protest pasture conditions, it would have to be her. When there is a beef, so to speak, Ebenezer is the spokesman of this whole eighty acres of grazers—cows, calves, steers, bulls, sheep, horses, goats, donkeys, and vegetarian four-footers all.
   I refuse to say spokesperson.
   The crown of leadership has not been a light one. She’s paid for her years of barricade busting and midwinter protest marches. She’s been hung with irritating bells, tethered to drags, hobbled, collared with yokes made from Y’s of sturdy ash sticking a yard above her neck and a yard below to stop her from squeezing between the strands of barbed wire (stop her until she really got resolute, of course; any of our fencing during those first years was at best a tacit agreement with the half-ton tenants), and she has had bounced off her hide barrages of rocks, clods, bean poles, tools, tin cans and tent stakes and, on one rainy raging night, after hours of mediation over a border dispute, fiery Roman candle balls.
   She doesn’t do it so much anymore. She’s learned the price of protest and I’ve learned how to build stronger fences and feed better hay. Still, we both know we can look forward to future demonstrations. There’s a farm doggerel, goes: “Ya know ol’ Ebenezer… she will do what’ll please ‘er!”
   Hi, Ebenezer. Still here at the dent in the pipe, eh, chewing away cool and calm? I see you haven’t let no hotrod fox mess with your memories in the ruminating night…
   She’s had other old men. The first was Hamburger, a big Guernsey bull, low-browed and hard-looking and horny enough to one time try to mount an idling Harley, biker and all, because a heifer in heat had rubbed against the rear wheel. During the bidding the auctioneer admitted Hamburger was no good looker to speak of, but he claimed he knew the beast personally and could guarantee he was a hard lover with boundless ardor. We knew he had spoken the truth as soon as the bull came down the truck ramp into our clover. He hit the ground with his hard already on. From that time on, almost any hour of any day when you saw Hamburger hanging out, it looked like he could have broke new ground by just walking on his knees.
   But ardor that knows no bounds neither knows any boundaries. He wasn’t a movement leader like Ebenezer but he was just as hard on my fences. One morning he wasn’t in our pasture. I found the twisted gap in the wire, but Hamburger was nowhere to be seen. Butch, my neighbor Olaf’s son, finally brought us the news that his dad had Hamburger chained in his barn. When I went over to get him, Olaf says, “Come on in the house. I’ll have the woman make us a pot of fresh coffee. I want to talk to ya.”
   I trust Olaf. Like most of my farming neighbors he has to hold down a job to support his right to labor on his own land. He’s out working his fields the minute he’s home from the woods; he doesn’t even change out of his calk boots.
   We chatted the first cup away. After the second cup he says, “That bull’s become a breacher—dangerous. Guernsey bulls’ll do that, all to once one day decide to be hateful. And this’n has decided. From now on he’s gonna go through any fence any gate any damn thing that happens to stand between him and anything he fancies. Till eventually he’s gonna turn on a human being. Maybe not a grown man, but he wouldn’t hesitate to turn on a kid or a woman trying to head him. Ya can bet money on it. He’s got that look in his eye.”
   We went out to his barn and peered through the rails. There was no denying it: what had once been just hard and horny was now a look burning with the first coals of hate for the human oppressor.
   “I’ll butcher the bastard tomorrow,” I said.
   “Now don’t do that. Ya don’t want to be eatin’ hate. He’s still young enough so he oughten be too tough, but he’ll have all that breachin’ and screwin’ and sod-pawin’ in his blood. The meat’d be rank as a billygoat. What it is ya’ll have to do is put him in a fattening pen and top him off with grain for about forty days. Try to get his mind off all the hellin’ around after hot heifers.”
   We built the pen out of railroad ties and telephone poles, but I had my doubts about changing Hamburger’s mind. Not only was he still horny, with those heifers crooning at him every night from miles around—“Hamburger… Hammm-burger, honey”—those coals in his eyes were hotter with each passing penned-up day. When we saw that the weeks of solitary were making him no mellower, were in fact making him rush daily fiercer at the fence when we brought his grain out, and roar and rumble nightly louder and louder like a pent-up volcano of sperm, we finally resorted to putting a potion in his serving of morning mash, hoping to raise his consciousness, if not up to the Knowledge of the Glorious All-Pervading Mercy that Passeth Understanding, at least up out of his scrotum.
   Our potion produced more agitation, it seemed, than enlightenment. He stood staring into the empty bucket a few minutes, slobbering and twitching. Then he gave a mighty fart and charged. He leveled a railroad tie with his first rush (it must have been a good one; we had estimated his weight as that of six men and medicated him accordingly). When he crashed out we headed for high places, stumbling over each other in our realization of what we had wrought, but his hormones were apparently stronger than his hate; forgetting his scattering tormentors, he stampeded straight for the neglected herd. Far into the night we could hear the debauchery.
   Betsy phoned Sam’s Slaughtering. The little refrigerated aluminum truck was there at dawn. Sam’s son John got out and took the .22 rifle from the rack behind the seat. Sam no longer did the actual knockover. He was content to stay back at the butcher shop and argue with deer hunters while his son took care of the field work. John was only about eighteen at this time. Though not a licensed butcher, years of accompanying his father on these killing runs had taught John something about death and timing. He knew to arrive at dawn, to stroll out to the condemned animal before it was fully awake (a wave of his hand, a call—“Hey! Here!”—a sharp crack…) and to drop it with the first shot.
   The resulting quake of terror that runs from one end of the farm to the other after this shot must never enter the mind of the victim, or the meat. Ya don’t wanta to be eatin’ fear, neither. As far as John and I and the cows are concerned, this is what kosher was originally supposed to be about.


   After Hamburger we went through several steer misses—chance bulls, spared by our ineptness with the elastrator or weak rubber bands; but these fellows were at best bush-league bulls who kept trying to get into their own mothers, so they lasted no length of time. After a couple seasons of no bull, and fast approaching a time of no beef, I made a deal with my dad and brother and Mickey Write to get new blood on the property. Mickey had a couple of ponies foundering on my far pasture, and my father knew a milk producer with an extra young bull to swap. Mickey hauled the ponies to the producer in his girlfriend’s horse trailer and returned a few hours later with our trade. We all stood in the bee-loud field and witnessed the cautious coming-out of a black Aberdeen yearling, as demure and dimensionless in the trailer as midnight itself. This was to be Abdul, the Bull Bull.
   Barely a boy bull that afternoon, he backed off the ramp as cowed-looking as a new kid on a strange playground. A cute new kid, too. Almost dainty. He was long-lashed and curly-locked and hornless, it appeared to us, in more ways than one. He took one apprehensive look around at our array of cows watching him in a row, tails twitching and eyes a-glitter from two years of bull-lessness, and struck out south for mellower climes like San Francisco, through our fence, our neighbor’s fence, and our neighbor’s neighbor’s neighbor’s fence before we could head him off.
   When we finally got him back he took another look at our cows and headed this time for Victoria. It took two days of chasing him with rocks and ropes and coaxing him with alfalfa and oats to get him back and secured and calmed or at least resigned that this was, ready or not, his new home. He stayed, but all the rest of that summer and fall he kept as much field as possible between himself and that herd of hussies stalking his vital bodily essence.
   “What kind of Ferdinand have you rung in here on me?” I asked my father.
   “A new experimental breed,” Dad assured me. “I think they call ‘em Faggerdeen Anguses, known for docility.”
   When hard winter set in, young Abdul finally took to associating openly with the herd, but for warmth and meals only, it appeared. After the daily hay was gone he would stand aside and chew in saintly solitude. With his shy face and his glossy black locks he looked more a pubescent altar boy considering a life of monastic celibacy than the grandsire of steaks.
   There comes into the story now a minor cow character, one of Hamburger’s heifers named Floozie. A cross-eyed Jersey-Guernsey cross—runty, unassuming, and as unpretty as her father—yet this wallflower was to be the first to clear Abdul of the charge of Flagrant Ferdinandeering. Betsy had told me some of the cows looked pregnant but I was a doubter. I was even more skeptical when she said that it was homely Floozie who was due to drop her calf first.
   “Any time now,” Betsy said. “She’s secreting, her hips are distended, and listen to her complain out there.”
   “It’s only been barely nine months since we bought him,” I reminded her. “And the only thing he jumped that first two months was fences. She’s just bellering because the weather’s been so shitty. Everything is complaining.”
   That had been the coldest winter in Oregon’s short recorded history—20 degrees below zero in Eugene!—and the bitterest in even the old mossbacks’ long recollection. Nor did the freeze let up after a few days, like our usual cold snap. The whole state froze for one solid week. Water went rigid in the plumbing if a faucet was left off for a few minutes; submersible pumps burned out sixty feet down; radiators exploded; trees split; the gasoline even froze in the fuel lines of moving cars. After a week it thawed briefly to let all the cracked water mains squirt gaily for a day; then it froze again. Another new record! And snowed. And blew like a bastard, and kept freezing and snowing and blowing for week after week right through February and March and even into April. By Easter it had warmed up a little. Fairer days were predicted. The snow had stopped but those April showers were a long way from violets. Sleet is worse than snow with none of the redeeming charm. With nasty slush all day long and black ice all night, every citizen was depressed, the beasts as bad as the folks. Beasts don’t have any calendar, any Stonehenge Solstice, any ceremonial boughs of holly to remind them of the light. Cows have a big reservoir of patience, but it isn’t bottomless. And when it’s finally emptied, when month after miserable month has passed and there is no theology to shore up the weatherbeaten spirit, they can begin to despair. My cows began to stand ass to the wind and stare bleakly into a worsening future, neither mooing nor moving for hours on end. Even alfalfa failed to perk them up.
   Then one dim morning Betsy came in to tell me Floozie was in labor down in the swamp and looked like she needed help. By the time I was bundled up and had followed Betsy back down, the calf had been born: a tiny black ditto of daddy Abdul without a doubt, curly-browed and angel-eyed and standing against the sleet as healthy and as strong—to coin a phrase—as a bull. Floozie didn’t look so good, though. She was panting and straining through sporadic contractions, but she couldn’t seem to rally strength enough to pass the afterbirth. We decided to move them up to the field next to the house to keep an eye on them. I carried the calf while Betsy shooed Floozie along behind. We all had to duck our heads into the stinging icy rain. I was cursing and Betsy was grumbling and Floozie was lowing forlornly about the woes of this harsh existence, but the little calf wasn’t making a sound in my arms; his head was too high and his eyes too wide with the wonder of it all to think of a complaint.
   The sleet got colder. Betsy and I went inside and watched out the window. The calf lay down in the shelter of the pumphouse and waited for whatever new wonder life had in store. Floozie continued to low. The afterbirth dangled from her rump like a cluster of grape Popsicles. Some of it finally broke away and dropped to the icy mud. The remainder started drawing back inside. Betsy said we ought to go out there and dig the rest of it forth. I observed that cows had been surviving calving for thousands of years now without my help. Dig my arm into that mysterious yin dark? I was not—to coin another—into it.
   That afternoon Floozie was down. She still hadn’t passed the afterbirth, and fever was steaming from her heaving sides. She was making a sighing wheeze every few breaths that sounded like a rusty wind-up replica of a cow running down. The little calf was still standing silent, nuzzling his mother with soft, imploring bumps of his nose, but his mother wasn’t answering. Betsy said peritonitis was setting in and we’d need some antibiotics to save her. I drove into Springfield, where I was able to buy a kit for just this veterinarian problem. It was a pint bottle of oxytetracycline antibiotic hooked by a long rubber tube to a stock hypo with a point big as a twenty-penny nail. Waiting for a freight at the Mt. Nebo crossing I had time to read the pamphlet of directions for the inoculation. It showed a drawing of a cow with an arrow indicating the vein in the neck I was to hit. It said nothing about where to tie her off, however.
   The rest of the drive home I spent considering various ties. A garden hose, I thought, would be best, with a slip knot… but before I was even turned into our drive I saw that I wasn’t going to get the chance, not that day. I could see the sides heaved no more. The little calf was still standing beside the steaming mound, but was no longer silent. He was bawling as though his heart would break.
   The rest of that sleetsmeared day I spent shivering and shoveling and thinking how if I had just gone ahead and stuck my hand up that cow this morning I wouldn’t be digging this huge goddamned hole this afternoon. While I dug and the calf bawled, the cows—one by one—came to the fence to stare in on the scene, not at the dead sister, who was already little more to them than the mud being shoveled back over her, but at the newborn marvel. As the cows stared you could see them straining back through the long dark tunnel of the winter’s memory, recalling something. That little calf’s cry was tugging on the udders of their memory, drawing down the milky remembrance of brighter times, of longer days and clover again, of sunshine, warmth, birth, of living again.
   Before that dingy day had muddied to full dark my cows were calving everywhere, not weakened by forlorn despair but strengthened by jubilant certainty. Ebenezer calved so fast she thought there must be more to come. We were able to slip Floozie’s little maverick alongside; in her jubilation Ebenezer never doubted for a moment that she had dropped twins. By the next morning I couldn’t tell the orphan from its stepbrother or from any of the other curly-browed calves that continued to pop out all that day in a steady black line.
   During all this maternity business, the father hadn’t come in from the field. After the last cow had calved I walked out, and I could see him in a far corner near my neighbor’s fence. I reached him just as the sun pried through a jam of clouds. He listened shyly while I tendered him apologies and congratulations, then turned his back on me to enjoy the bundle of alfalfa I had brought. I noticed further bellering and saw two of my neighbor’s Holsteins with fresh black babies and, in my neighbor’s neighbor’s field of high-rent red Devons, saw more of Abdul’s issue hopping about in the sun like a hatch of crickets.
   “Abdul, by God you are one bull bull!”
   He didn’t deny it, chomping away with altar-boy innocence; he didn’t brag about it, either. It wasn’t his style.

   The seasons wheeled on. Our herd soon doubled and then some. We banded the baby bulls, ate the fatted steers, and spared the heifers toward the time when even I get it together enough to realize my dairy farm vision. As the herd got bigger, it got blacker. Better than two thirds were now three-quarters black, with fading smatterings of Guernsey, Jersey, and Oregon Mongol. Abdul got broader and less dainty, yet never lost his altar-boy demeanor; he never butted or assaulted a heifer with that typical show of cruel strength that gives origin to the name “bully.”
   No one ever saw him score; taking advantage of his natural camouflage, he chose darkness for his wooing ground. If his midnight nuptials sometimes took him through a fence or two, he usually returned before dawn; when he didn’t, there was never any attitude but gentle obedience toward any of us who went to fetch him back. The only anger I ever saw crimp his brow was aimed at no human but at the bull who serviced Tory’s herd across the road, an old blowhard Hereford. It was easy to see why. After every broad-daylight hump of some sleepy heifer, this rednecked old whiteface had to parade up and down his fence and bawl his boasting across the road at our young Angus. Abdul never answered; whenever Old Blowhole across the road started, Abdul always headed for the swamp.
   At length, Betsy began to worry about the number of our herd and about the size of some of Abdul’s daughters. They were getting “that age,” as it were (and as the nasty neighbor bull was quick to make clear whenever one of Abdul’s virgin daughters grazed past) and old enough to be capable of inbreeding. I personally didn’t think Abdul would stoop to incest, but who wants to take a chance on idiot veal?
   “What can we do?” I asked Betsy. We were walking along the fence, checking our charges over. Across the road Tory’s bull was following, huffing up some new diatribe.
   “Pen Abdul up, or auction him off, or sell him, or—”
   She stopped, drowned out by the whiteface. When his harangue bellowed back down I asked, “Or what?”
   “Or eat him.”
   “Eat Abdul? I don’t want to eat Abdul. That’d be like eating Stewart.”
   “Pen him up, then. That’s the way you’re supposed to keep breeding bulls…”
   “I don’t want to pen him up, either. I wouldn’t give Tory’s bull the satisfaction.”
   “That leaves sell or trade. I’ll put an ad in the paper.”
   We found no one wanted to trade anything but deer rifles or motorcycles. And the cash orders came not from kindly cattle breeders but from local beaneries seeking bargain burger.
   After a month passed without any results from our ads, and after a night helping Hock, our neighbor to the east, separate Abdul from the half-dozen Charolais Hock’d just bought, I decided to try the pen.
   The tie had been replanted, the rails replaced, but not since Hamburger had the little square been occupied. Abdul entered without a squawk. To my surprise, he had to squeeze in the gate that Hamburger used to pass through easily.
   “Abdul ol’ buddy, you’re big enough to know some of the harsh facts of life,” I told him as I fastened the gate. “It ain’t all free love and frolic.” Abdul stood without comment, munching the bucket of green apples I had used to lure him. Watching from across the road, Tory’s bull had a lot to say about his rival’s incarceration. He was terrible. All afternoon he kept up his needling of Abdul with bawled innuendos and sexual slurs. By the time I went to bed, the Hereford had worked up to downright racial insults. I promised myself to have a few words with old man Tory about his beast someday soon.
   Old man Tory beat me to it. He was there at sunup, cracking at the windowpane of my front door with a flinty old knuckle.
   “Yer bull? Yer gor-gor-gordam black bull?” He was shirtless and shuddering violently, from both the morning chill and the heat of some as-yet-unbottled anger. “Yer sell him er yer still got him tell me that!”
   Tory is a toothless old veteran of some eighty embattled years of farming, with the face of a starved mink, and not much bigger. It is said that he once accosted a pair of California duck hunters trespassing after a flock of mallards they’d seen go down in the slough that gullies through Tory’s property, and had proceeded to chew them out with such snapping ferocity that one of the hunters suffered a coronary. Now, as I watched him shuddering and sputtering on my doorstep, toothless and scrawny in his bib overalls and no shirt, I feared that this might be his blood pressure’s time to blow. Soothingly I told him, why yes, as a matter of fact, I still had Abdul. “If you’d like to size him up he’s out in my bullpen—”
   “The gordam hell if he is! He’s been over in my field since afore light, tearin’ up fences an’ gates an’ all sortsa hell. Now he’s into it with my bull—t’ the death!”
   I told him I’d get after the delinquent right away, soon’s I got my clothes on and my kids up to help. I apologized for the trouble and old man Tory cooled off a little.
   “I’d’ve broke ‘em apart myself,” he growled, as he started hobbling back down the steps, “but I ain’t had my breakfast yet.”
   I hollered everybody up and we headed over to our field car, a ‘64 Merc convertible. We didn’t have to drive down to Tory’s gate; the hole in his fence looked like a road grader had opened it. I maneuvered through the fractured wood and wire, then headed us bouncing toward the cloud of dust in the distance. I drove alongside the freshly rutted trail left by the battle’s progress. The distance traveled into Tory’s land showed who was winning. Bull fashion, the Hereford had planted himself between the black attacker and his whiteface herd, but Abdul had forced him steadily backwards, more than half a mile. When we reached the scene of the conflict the Hereford was nearly to the edge of Tory’s gully. His tongue was dripping blood from the corner of his mouth and his eyes were rolling wildly to and fro, from Abdul, standing mountainlike a few feet in front, to the lip of the chasm a few feet behind.
   They both turned their heads to regard the car honking and reving its engine at them. I got out. “Abdul!” I hollered. “Knock it off! And go home!” He gave me such a look of apology I thought for a moment he might obey, like a dog. But the whiteface tried to take advantage of the distraction with a charge for Abdul’s turned neck: butt! Abdul staggered. He pawed for his balance, stepping backwards, then dropped his head in time to meet the next attack: ka-dud! The two big skulls crunched together with astonishing force. Thousands of pounds of conflicting inertia rippled down their backs to their butts and right on through the earth. You could feel it underfoot: ka-dud! Then again: duddd! and Abdul regained the turf my shouting had cost him.
   What a spectacle! They would collide, and drive, heave, grind until they were exhausted, then stand panting. Sometimes they placed their big foreheads together without a charge, almost affectionately, increasing the force until the huge necks would accordion with the effort; sometimes they would sling their heads from side to side and bring them together with a sharp crack before starting their push. But whatever the tactic, inch by inch Abdul was forcing his weary opponent to what looked like certain defeat; even if the Hereford didn’t lose his footing over the edge and expose his underside to Abdul’s murderous trampling, he would still be fighting downhill. Downhill from that much weight would put him at a conclusive disadvantage.
   I didn’t want to be paying Tory purebred prices for a dead blowhard, so I jumped back behind the wheel of the Merc and gunned it into the fracas. The bumper caught Abdul in the fore shoulder while he was brow to brow and pushing. He didn’t budge. I backed off farther and came at them again; again there was no give. But the impact had jammed the radiator back into the fan; the ensuing racket distracted Abdul long enough to let the Hereford escape the precipice. For a second it looked like he was going to turn tail on valor and run for discretion, but his ladies across the chasm raised such an outcry the Hereford had to swing back about. There was nothing to do but fight to the finish or spend the rest of his days hearing them nag.
   He spread his feet groggily for his last stand. I tried to maneuver the car into position for another side shot, but it was beginning to steam. Abdul hiked a couple of disdainful clods into the air and lowered his head for the kill when a sharp crack! crack! startled all of us. Up out of the gully came old man Tory. A clean white shirt was buttoned over his overalls and his dentures were in; his lips and stubble were flecked with toast crumbs and berry jam. In his hand he carried a little green leather buggy whip, the kind you buy as rodeo souvenirs.
   “Good gord ain’t yer broke these sonsabidges up yet?” I told him I’d been waiting for them to wear themselves out, they’d be less dangerous.
   “Dangerous? Dangerous? Why good gordamighty damn stand outter the way. I ain’t a-skeered of the sonsabidges!”
   And waded into them, whip crackling and dentures snapping. His Hereford received two snaps on the snoot and, to my amazement, took off bleating like a lamb. Abdul spun to give pursuit but there was that little wizard right in his path, green wand cracking like firecrackers. Abdul hesitated. He looked after the panicked whiteface galloping for the barn, then back at the stick conjuring green sparks, and decided if Old Blowhole was that scared of it it must be pretty strong medicine. He turned around and started toward home in a shambling walk, his black brow lowered.
   “Yer see that?” Tory pointed the whip after his fleeing bull. “When the sonabidge was a calf my great gran-kids useta tie him to a wagon an’ whup him inter pullin’ them—with this shittin’ little whup. Never forget it, did ‘e?”
   We gave the old farmer a lift back to his farmhouse. I told him I’d fix his fence; he said it was done past that; now that my bull had topped his it wouldn’t rest till it had topped the whole herd. “Prolly won’t even rest then, yer know? There’s only one thing to do. And if yer don’t I b’gord will.”
   So that night we called Sam’s, and the next morning John came turning in the drive before I’d even had coffee. Riding the running board, I directed him out to where the herd was bedded in the green clover around the main irrigation pipe. Ebenezer commenced bellering a warning, as she has come to do whenever she sees the approach of the silvery little death wagon, but she was too late. John was already out, walking around toward the target I had pointed out. Because of the size, he was carrying a .30-.30 instead of his usual .22. Abdul was just blinking awake when the shot exploded in his brow. He fell over the pipe without a sound.
   As the herd bucked and bawled John hooked his winch cable to Abdul’s hind feet and dragged the carcass away about fifty yards. I used to insist that he drag them clear from the field out of sight, so the herd wouldn’t have to watch the gory peeling and gutting of their fallen relative, but John’d shown me it wasn’t necessary. They don’t follow the carcass; they stay to circle the spot where the actual death occurred, keening around the taking-off place though the hoisted husk is in full view mere yards away. As time passes, this circle spreads larger. If one were to hang overhead in a balloon and take hourly photos of this outline of mourning, I believe it would describe the diffusing energy field of the dead animal.
   Abdul was the biggest animal we’d ever killed, and this mourning lasted the longest. Off and on between grazing, the herd returned to the dented pipe and stood in a lowing circle that was a tight ten feet in diameter the first day, and the next day fifteen feet, and the next day twenty. For a full week they grieved. It was fitting: he’d been their old man and a great one, and it was only right that the funeral last until a great circle had been observed, only natural—with the proper period of respect fading naturally toward forgetting while Nature shuffles her deck for the next deal around.
   But at this point up pops a joker.
   The bathroom floor rots through. Buddy and cousin Davy drive out in the creamery van with a load of plywood and we work the night away nailing it down. When they leave in the morning Buddy is attracted by a bellering in the field. It is Ebenezer. Another duty of her office is to let us know when one of the young cows has started labor. Buddy sees the supine heifer and throws his truck into reverse and comes hollering and honking back. “Looks like there’s a calf about to be borned,” he yells at me. Betsy hops in with him while I open the gate. We head out to where Ebenezer is trumpeting her announcement.
   “That’s right where Abdul got it last week,” I told Buddy. “They’ve been bedding down there every night.”
   “Listen to Ebenezer,” Betsy said. “O, me, I hope she doesn’t think—!”
   It was too late. Ebenezer had already made the mistaken association: early morning, an approaching truck, a killing still strong in her memory… and what had begun as a call for assistance became a shriek of warning. She planted herself between us and her laboring sister and bellowed, “It’s the killer wagon! Head for the woods, honey; I’ll try to hold the fiends back.”
   We were the rest of the morning trying to find the cow in the swamp. We finally located her hiding place by her ragged breathing. She was on her side under a thicket of blackberries. From the size of the calf’s front hooves sticking out, we could see it was a whopper, far too big for so young a heifer. Maybe she could have squeezed it out on her own out in the field when she was still fresh, but Ebenezer’s misguided alarm had sent her running and spent her strength. Now she was going to need help.
   I tried to get a loop over her head, but she was as skittish as I was unskilled. The rest of the afternoon Betsy and the kids and I chased her from one stickerpatch to the next. There was never really any room for me to get a good toss of my loop. At length, I traded my lasso for my old wrestling headgear and climbed into the low branches of a scrub oak. When Betsy and the kids drove her beneath me I leaped on her and wrestled her down bodily. I held her until Quiston got a loop around a hind leg and Betsy got another around her neck. We got a third tie around her other hind leg and lashed her to three trees. Quis sat on her head to keep her from rearing up. I wrapped the calf’s protruding hooves with clothesline and started pulling. Betsy massaged her stomach, and little Caleb talked to her and stroked her neck. When a contraction would start I would brace a foot against each side of her spread flank and tug. When the clothesline broke, I doubled it– and when it broke again, I double doubled it and kept pulling.
   The sun went down. Sherree brought the flashlight down from the house and some wet rags to towel some of the stuff from our faces while we labored. Blood and mud and sweat and shit. Finally, with a mighty tugging and grunting and rending of orifices, out it came: a pretty little bull, all black with one stripe of white in the corner of its mouth, as though he’d been drinking milk already and had drooled. It wasn’t breathing. Betsy blew air into its lungs until they started pumping on their own.
   We let the cow up but kept the tie around her neck so she wouldn’t flee in exhausted craziness before she accepted the calf. Sherree brought her a bucket of water, and while the animal drank we stood back out of sight and shined the flashlight beam on the calf. Calmed by the drink, the cow stepped forward to sniff the wobbly child. I switched off the light.
   The moon had come out and was dappling down through the oak leaves. She had begun licking the calf. I wanted to take the rope from around her neck so she wouldn’t tangle in the brush, but she wouldn’t let me near the loop knot to loosen it. I opened my buck knife and slipped up as close as I could and began sawing very gently at the rope a few feet from her back-straining head, humming as I worked. She looked back and forth from me to her calf in the moonlight. You could see the trust returning.
   But apparently both jokers had been left in this deck. As the last strands parted, a car came rattling down the road and screeched to a halt by our mailbox, then backed up and swung in the drive and shut off the ignition. As the engine quit it gave a loud backfire and off the cow stampeded, right over the hapless calf.
   Betsy and the kids went after the cow while I went after the car. It was unloading a rowdy crew and a barking dog. The crew was a bunch of Dairy Manufacturing majors from Oregon State who’d had a few brews after class and decided to drive down from Corvallis, check out how the famous commune was doing—and the dog was a goddamned German shepherd barking about how many chickens he could kill given the opportunity. I dispatched them quickly back northward, clattering and backfiring and cursing back at me—“Grouchy old baldheaded prick!”—then I returned to the swamp.
   The cow was back with her calf, licking it and lowing. Betsy whispered it looked like she was going to stay. We crept away to the house and washed up. Betsy visited the mother and child once more before we went to bed.
   “She’s still with it. He hasn’t got back up yet, though.”
   “He’s probably exhausted. Lord knows I am. Let’s get under the covers before something else happens.”
   In the morning the calf was where we had left him, dead. Lifting his body away from the grieving cow, I could feel some of his little ribs were broken. Who knows? From the rigors of the birth or the backfire that stampeded his mother over him? From Ebenezer’s confused warning? Tory’s bull’s taunting? The position of the stars and the planets, the dice throw of destiny?
   I buried him near what was left of his great-aunt Floozie. He made a small new hump next to the big old hump, blooming blue and yellow from the crocus bulbs we had planted there last fall. I haven’t decided what we’ll plant over his nutrients. Cowslips sounds about right.
   Let’s go Stewart; this dew has all my toes froze. Nighty-night, Ebenezer. Lie back down and tell the rest of the gals to cool it. It was just a fox, tell them, just a varmint in the dark

The Day after Superman Died

   Strung out and shaking he was, pacing distractedly about the clutter of his office upstairs in the barn, poking among the books and bottles and cobwebs and dirt-dauber nests, trying to remember what he had done with his colored glasses.
   His special glasses. He needed them. Since before noon he had been putting off the walk to the ditch out in the field because the air was clogged with an evil eye-smiting smoke. Since the first smudge of dawn, long before his eyes had started smarting and his sinuses had begun to throb, and even before the hassle he’d just had with those hitchhikers down in the yard, he had been telling himself that this dreary day was going to be one real bastard without some rose-colored armor. Those glasses, he had been telling himself, would surely ease the day’s sting.
   As he paced past his window, he heard the heartbroken bleating of the mother sheep start up again, baffled and insistent, twisted by the hot distance. He pushed the curtain back from the sunlight and looked out over his yard into the field, shading his eyes. He couldn’t see the lamb because of the thistle and Queen Anne’s lace, but the three ravens still marked the spot. They eddied above the ditch, arguing over the first morsels. Farther away, in the ash grove, he could see the ewe bleating against her rope and, farther still, past the fence, the backs of the two hitchhikers. Little was visible beyond that. Mt. Nebo was only a dim line drawn into the hanging smoke. The merest suggestion. It made him think of Japanese wash painting, a solitary mountain form stroked hazily into a gray paper with a slightly grayer ink.
   The Oregon farm was uncommonly quiet for this hour. The usual midafternoon sounds seemed held in one of those tense stillnesses that ordinarily prompt the peacock to scream. One New Year’s Eve the big bird had called steadily during the half minute of burning fuse before Buddy’s cannon went off, and last week it had screamed within seconds of the first lightning that cracked the iron sky into a tumultuous thunderstorm.
   A storm would be a relief now, Deboree thought. Even the peacock’s horrible squawk would be welcome. But nothing. Only the little clock radio on his desk. He’d left it on for the news, but it was Barbra Streisand singing “On a Clear Day, etc.” Terrific, he thought. Then, above the music and the distant grieving of the sheep, he heard another sound: a high, tortured whine. Certainly no relief, whatever it was. At length he was able to make out the source. Squinting down the road toward the highway, he saw a little pink car coming, fast and erratic, one of those new compacts with a name he couldn’t remember. Some animal—a Cobra, or a Mink, or a Wildcat—with transmission trouble, whatever the beast was. It squealed around the corner past the Olson farm and the Burch place and came boring on through the smoky afternoon with a whine so piercing and a heading so whimsical and wild that the hitchhikers were forced from the shoulder of the road into the snake-grass. The blond gave it the finger and the blackbeard hurled some curse at its passing. It screamed on past the barn, out of sight and, finally, hearing. Deboree left the window and began again his distracted search.
   “I’m certain they’re up here someplace,” he said, certain of no such thing.
   Deboree’s eyes fell on his dog-eared rolling box, and he took it from the shelf. He gazed in at the seeds and stems: maybe enough could be cleaned for one now, but unlikely enough for one now and one later both. Better save it for later. Need it more later. And just as well, he thought, looking at the box in his hands. The little brown seeds were rattling all over the place. He was still trembling too violently with the surge of adrenaline to have managed the chore of rolling. As he returned the box to its niche in the shelf, he recalled an old phrase of his father’s:
   “Shakin’ like a dog shittin’ peach pits.”
   He had been up two days, grassing and speeding and ransacking his mental library (or was it three?) for an answer to his agent’s call about the fresh material he had promised his editor and to his wife’s query about the fresh cash needed by the loan office at the bank. Mainly, since Thursday’s mail, for an answer to Larry McMurtry’s letter.
   Larry was an old literary friend from Texas. They had met at a graduate writing seminar at Stanford and had immediately disagreed about most of the important issues of the day—beatniks, politics, ethics, and, especially, psychedelics—in fact, about everything except for their mutual fondness and respect for writing and each other. It was a friendship that flourished during many midnight debates over bourbon and booklore, with neither the right nor the left side of the issues ever gaining much ground. Over the years since Stanford, they had tried to keep up the argument by correspondence—Larry defending the traditional and Deboree championing the radical—but without the shared bourbon the letters had naturally lessened. The letter from Larry on Thursday was the first in a year. Nevertheless it went straight back at the issue, claiming conservative advances, listing the victories of the righteous right, and pointing out the retreats and mistakes made by certain left-wing luminaries, especially Charles Manson, whom Deboree had known slightly. The letter ended by asking, in the closing paragraph, “So. What has the Good Old Revolution been doing lately?”
   Deboree’s research had yielded up no satisfactory answer. After hours of trial and chemistry before the typewriter, he had pecked out one meager page of print, but the victories he had listed on his side were largely mundane achievements: “Dobbs and Blanche had another kid… Rampage and I finally got cut loose from our three-year probation…” Certainly no great score for the left wing of the ledger. But that was all he could think of: one puny page to show for forty hours of prowling around in the lonely library of what he used to call “The Movement.” Forty hours of thinking, drinking, and peeing in a milk bottle, with no break except that ten-minute trip downstairs to deal with those pilgriming prickheads. And now, back upstairs and still badly shaken, even that feeble page was missing; the typed yellow sheet of paper was as misplaced as his colored glasses.
   “Pox on both houses,” he moaned aloud, rubbing his irritated eyes with his wrists. “On Oregon field burners poisoning the air for weed-free profit and on California flower children gone to seed and thorn!”
   He rubbed until the sockets filled with sparks; then he lowered his fists and held both arms tight against his sides in an attempt calm himself, standing straight and breathing steady. His chest was still choked with adrenaline. Those California goddamned clowns, both smelling of patchouli oil, and cheap sweet wine, and an angry festering vindictiveness. Of threat, really. They reeked of threat. The older of the two, the blackbeard, had stopped the barking of M’kehla’s pair of Great Danes with only a word. “Shut!” he had hissed, the sound slicing out from the side of his mouth. The dogs had immediately turned tail back to their bus.
   Deboree hadn’t wanted to interface with the pair from the moment he saw them come sauntering in, all long hair and dust and multipatched Levi’s, but Betsy was away with the kids up Fall Creek and it was either go down and meet them in the yard or let them saunter right on into the house. They had called him brother when he came down to greet them—an endearment that always made him watch out for his wallet—and the younger one had lit a stick of incense to wave around while they told their tale. They were brothers of the sun. They were on their way back to the Haight, coming from the big doings in Woodstock, and had decided they’d meet the famous Devlin Deboree before going on south.
   “Rest a little, rap a little, maybe riff a little. Y’know what I’m saying, bro?”
   As Deboree listened, nodding, Stewart had trotted up carrying the broken bean pole.
   “Don’t go for Stewart’s stick, by the way.” He addressed the younger of the pair, a blond-bearded boy with a gleaming milk-fed smile and new motorcycle boots. “Stewart’s like an old drunk with his stick. The more you throw it, the more lushed out he gets.”
   The dog dropped the stick between the new boots and looked eagerly into the boy’s face.
   “For years I tried to break him of the habit. But he just can’t help it when he sees certain strangers. I finally realized it was easier training the stick throwers than the stick chasers. So just ignore it, okay? Tell him no dice. Pretty soon he goes away.”
   “Whatever,” the boy had answered, smiling. “You heard the man, Stewart: no dice.”
   The boy had kicked the stick away, but the dog had snagged it from the air and planted himself again before the boots. The boy did try to ignore it. He continued his description of the great scene at Woodstock, telling dreamily what a groove it had been, how high, how happy, how everybody there had been looking for Devlin Deboree.
   “You shoulda made it, man. A stone primo groove…”
   The dog grew impatient and picked up his stick and carried it to the other man, who was squatting in the grass on one lean haunch.
   “Just tell him no dice,” Deboree said to the side of the man’s head. “Beat it, Stewart. Don’t pester the tourists.”
   The other man smiled down at the dog without speaking. His beard was long and black and extremely thick, with the salt of age beginning to sprinkle around the mouth and ears. As his profile smiled, Deboree watched two long incisors grow from the black bramble of his mouth. The teeth were as yellow and broken as the boy’s were perfect. This dude, Deboree remembered, had kept his face averted while they were shaking hands. He wondered if this was because he was self-conscious about his breath like a lot of people with bad teeth.
   “Well, anyway, what’s happening, man? What’s doing? All this?” Blondboy was beaming about at his surroundings. “Boss place you got here, this garden and trees and shit. I can see you are into the land. That’s good, that’s good. We’re getting it together to get a little place outside of Petaluma soon as Bob here’s old lady dies. Be good for the soul. Lot of work, though, right? Watering and feeding and taking care of all this shit?”
   “It keeps you occupied,” Deboree had allowed.
   “Just the same,” the boy rambled on, “you shoulda made it back there to Woodstock. Primo, that’s the only word. Acres and acres of bare titty and good weed and outa sight vibes, you get me?”
   “So I’ve heard,” Deboree answered, nodding pleasantly at the boy. But he couldn’t take his mind off the other hitchhiker. Blackbeard shifted his weight to the other haunch, the movement deliberate and restrained, careful not to disturb the dust that covered him. His face was deeply tanned and his hair tied back so the leathery cords in his neck could be seen working as he followed the dog’s imploring little tosses of the stick. He was without clothes from the waist up but not unadorned. He wore a string of eucalyptus berries around his neck and tooled leather wristbands on each long arm. A jail tattoo—made, Deboree recognized, by two sewing needles lashed parallel at the end of a matchstick and dipped in india ink—covered his left hand: it was a blue-black spider with legs extending down all five fingers to their ragged nails. At his hip he carried a bone-handled skinning knife in a beaded sheath, and across his knotted belly a long scar ran diagonally down out of sight into his Levi’s. Grinning, the man watched Stewart prance up and down with the three-foot length of broken bean stake dripping in his mouth.
   “Back off, Stewart,” Deboree commanded. “Leave this guy alone!”
   “Stewart don’t bother me,” the man said, his voice soft from the side of his mouth. “Everything gotta have its own trip.”
   Encouraged by the soft voice, Stewart sank to his rump before the man. This pair of motorcycle boots were old and scuffed. Unlike his partner’s, these boots had tromped many a bike to life. Even now, dusty and still, they itched to kick. That itch hung in the air like the peacock’s unsounded cry.
   Blondboy had become aware of the tenseness of the situation at last. He smiled and broke his incense and threw the smoking half into the quince bush. “Anyhow, you shoulda dug it,” he said. “Half a million freaks in the mud and the music.” He was beaming impishly from one participant to the other, from Deboree, to his partner, to the prancing dog, as he picked at his wide grin with the dyed end of the incense stick. “Half a million beautiful people…”
   They had all sensed it coming. Deboree had tried once more to avert it. “Don’t pay him any mind, man. Just an old stick junkie—” but it had been a halfhearted try, and Stewart was already dropping the stick. It had barely touched the dusty boot before the squatting man scooped it up and in the same motion sidearmed it into the grape arbor. Stewart bounded after it.
   “Come on, man,” Deboree had pleaded. “Don’t throw it for him. He goes through wire and thorns and gets all cut up.”
   “Whatever you say,” Blackbeard had replied, his face averted as he watched Stewart trotting back with the retrieved stake held high. “Whatever’s right.” Then had thrown it again as soon as Stewart dropped it, catching and slinging it all in one motion so fast and smooth that Deboree wondered if he hadn’t been a professional athlete at a younger time, baseball or maybe boxing.
   This time the stick landed in the pigpen. Stewart flew between the top two strands of barbed wire and had the stick before it stopped cartwheeling. It was too long for him to jump back through the wire with. He circled the pigs lying in the shade of their shelter and jumped the wooden gate at the far end of the pen.
   “But, I mean, everything has got to have its trip, don’t you agree?”
   Deboree had not responded. He was already feeling the adrenaline burn in his throat. Besides, there was no more to say. Blackbeard stood up. Blondboy stepped close to his companion and whispered something at the hairy ear. All Devlin could make out was “Be cool, Bob. Remember what happened in Boise, Bob…”
   “Everything gotta live,” Blackbeard had answered. “And everything gotta give.”
   Stewart skidded to a halt in the gravel. Blackbeard grabbed one end of the stick before the dog could release it, wrenching it viciously from the animal’s teeth. This time Deboree, moving with all the speed the adrenaline could wring from his weary limbs, had stepped in front of the hitchhiker and grabbed the other end of the stick before it could be thrown.
   “I said don’t throw it.”
   This time there was no averting the grin; the man looked straight at him. And Deboree had guessed right about the breath; it hissed out of the jagged mouth like a rotten wind.
   “I heard what you said, fagbutt.”
   Then they had looked at each other, over the stick grasped at each end between them. Deboree forced himself to match the other man’s grinning glare with his own steady smile, but he knew it was only a temporary steadiness. He wasn’t in shape for encounters of this caliber. There was a seething accusation burning from the man’s eyes, unspecified, undirected, but so furious that Deboree felt his will withering before it. Through the bean stake he felt that fury assail his very cells. It was like holding a high-voltage terminal.
   “Everything gotta try,” the man had said through his ragged grin, shuffling to get a better grip on his end of the stake with both leathery hands. “And everything gotta—” He didn’t finish. Deboree had brought his free fist down, sudden and hard, and had chopped the stake in twain. Then, before the man could react, Deboree had turned abruptly away from him and swatted Stewart on the rump. The dog had yelped in surprise and run beneath the barn.
   It had been a dramatic and successful maneuver. Both hitchhikers were impressed. Before they could recover, Deboree had pointed across the yard with the jagged end of his piece and told them, “There’s the trail to the Haight-Ashbury, guys. Vibe central.”
   “Come on, Bob,” Blondboy had said, sneering at Deboree. “Let’s hit it. Forget him. He’s gangrened. Like Leary and Lennon. All those high-rolling creeps. Gangrened. A power tripper.”
   Blackbeard had looked at his end. It had broken off some inches shorter than Deboree’s. He finally muttered, “Whatever’s shakin’,” and turned on his heel.
   As he sauntered back the way he had come into the yard, he drew his knife. The blond boy hurried to take up his saunter beside his partner, already murmuring and giggling up to him. Blackbeard stripped a long curving sliver of wood from his end of the stick with the blade of his knife as he walked. Another sliver followed, fluttering, like a feather.
   Devlin had stood, hands on his hips, watching the chips fall from the broken stick. He had glared after them with raw eyes until they were well off the property. That was when he had hurried back up to his office to resume the search for his sunglasses.
   He heard the whine again, returning, growing louder. He opened his eyes and walked back to the window and parted the tie-dye curtains. The pink car had turned around and was coming back. Entranced, he watched it pass the driveway again, but this time it squealed to a stop, backed up, and turned in. It came keening and bouncing down the dirt road toward the barn. Finally he blinked, jerked the curtain closed, and sat heavily in his swivel chair.
   The car whirred to a stop in the gravel and mercifully cut its engine. He didn’t move. Somebody got out, and a voice from the past shouted up at his office: “Dev?” He’d let the curtain close too late. “Devlinnnn?” it shouted. “Hey, you, Devlin Deboreeeee?” A sound half hysterical and half humorous, like the sound that chick who lost her marbles in Mexico used to make, that Sandy Pawku.
   “Dev? I’ve got news. About Houlihan. Bad news. He’s dead. Houlihan’s dead.”
   He tipped back in his chair and closed his eyes. He didn’t question the announcement. The loss seemed natural, in keeping with the season and the situation, comfortable even, and then he thought, That’s it! That’s what the revolution has been doing lately, to be honest. Losing!
   “Dev, are you up there? It’s me, Sandy…” He pushed himself standing and walked to the window and drew back the curtain. He wiped his eyes and stuck his head into the blighted afternoon. Hazy as it was, the sunlight nevertheless seemed to be sharper than usual, harsher. The chrome of the little car gleamed viciously. Like the knife blade.
   “Houlihan,” he said, blinking. The dust raised by the car was reaching the barn on its own small breeze. He felt it bring an actual chill. “Houlihan dead?” he said to the pink face lifted to him.
   “Of exposure,” the voice rasped.
   “When? Recently?”
   “Yesterday. I just heard. I was in the airport in Oakland this morning when I ran into this little hippie chicky who knew me from Mountain View. She came up to the bar and advised me that the great Houlihan is now the late great. Yesterday, I guess. Chicky Little had just got off the plane from Puerto Sancto, where Houlihan had been staying with her and a bunch of her buddies. At a villa right down the road from where we lived. Apparently the poor maniac was drinking and taking downers and walking around at night alone, miles from nowhere. He passed out on a railroad track between Sancto and Manzanillo, where he got fatally chilled from the desert dew. Well, you know, Dev, how cold it can get down there after sunset.”
   It was Sandy Pawku all right, but what a change! Her once long brown hair had been cropped and chromed, plated with the rusty glint of the car’s grill. She had put heavy eye makeup and rouge and lipstick on her face and, over the rest of her had put on, he guessed, at least a hundred pounds.
   “Dead, our hero of the sixties is, Dewy, baby. Dead, dead, dead. Of downers and drunk and the foggy, foggy dew. O, Hooly, Hooly, Hooly, you maniac. You goon. What did Kerouac call him in that book? The glorious goon?”
   “No. The Holy Goof.”
   “I was flying to my aunt’s cottage in Seattle for a little R and R, rest and writing, you dig? But that news in Oakland—I thought, Wonder if Dev and the Animal Friends have heard? Probably not. So when the plane stopped in Eugene, I remember about this commune I hear you all got and I decided, Sandy, Old Man Deboree would want to know. So Sandy, she cashes in the rest of her ticket and rents a car and here she is, thanks to Mr. Mastercharge, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Avis. Say, is one supposed to drive these damn tricks in Dl, D2, or L? Isn’t L for driving in the light and D for driving in the dark?”
   “You drove that thing all the way here from the airport in low gear?”
   “Might have.” She laughed, slapping the flimsy hood with a hand full of jeweled fingers. “Right in amongst those log trucks and eighteen-wheelers, me and my pinkster, roaring with the loudest of them.”
   “I’ll bet.”
   “When it started to smoke, I compromised with Dl. Goddamn it, I mean them damn manufacturers—but listen to me rationalizing. I probably wrecked it, didn’t I? To tell the truth? Be honest, Sandy. Christ knows you could use a little honesty…” She rubbed the back of her neck and looked away from him, back the way she had come. “Eee God, what is happening? Houlihan kacked. Pigpen killed by a chicken-shit liver; Terry the Tramp snuffed by spades. Ol’ Sandy herself nearly down for the count a dozen times.” She began walking to and fro in the gravel. “Man, I have been going in circles, in bummer nowhere circles, you know what I mean? Weird shit. I mean, hey listen: I just wasted a dog on the road back there!”
   He knew he must have responded, said, “Oh?” or “Is that right?” or something, because she had kept talking.
   “Old bitch it was, with a yardful of pups. Whammed her good.” Sandy came around the front of the car and opened the right door. She tipped the pink seat forward and began hauling matching luggage out of the back and arranging it on the gravel, all the while relating vividly how she had come around a bend and run over a dog sleeping in the road. Right in the road. A farmwife had come out of her house at the commotion and had dragged the broken animal out of the culvert where it had crawled howling. The farmwife had felt its spine then sentenced it to be put out of its misery. At her repeated commands, her teenage son had finally fetched the shotgun from the house.
   “The kid was carrying on such a weeping and wailing, he missed twice. The third time, he let go with both barrels and blew bitch bits all over the lawn. The only thing they wanted from me was six bits apiece for the bullets. I asked if they took credit cards.” She laughed. “When I left, goddamn me if the pups weren’t playing with the pieces.”
   She laughed again. He remembered hearing the shots. He knew the family and the dog, a deaf spaniel, but he didn’t say anything.
   Shading his eyes, he watched this swollen new version of the skinny Sandy of his past bustle around the luggage below him, laughing. Even her breath seemed to have gained weight, husking out of her throat with an effort. Swollen. Her neck where she had rubbed it, her wrists, her back, all swollen. But her weight actually rode lightly, defiantly, like a chip on her shoulder. In her colored shoes and stretch pants and a silk Hawaiian shirt pulled over her paunch, she looks like a Laguna Beach roller derby queen, he thought, just arriving at the rink. She looks primed, he thought. Like the hitchhiker; an argument rigged to go off at the slightest touch. The thought of another confrontation left him weak and nauseous.

  M’kehla’s Great Danes discovered her in the yard and came barking. Sandy sliced at them with her pink plastic handbag. “Get away from me, you big fuckers. You smell that other mutt on my wheels? You want the same treatment? Damn, they are big, aren’t they? Get them back, can’t you?”
   “Their big is worse than their bite,” he told her and shouted at the dogs to go home to their bus. They paid no attention.
   “What the shit, Deboree?” She sliced and swung. “Can’t you get your animals to mind?”
   “They aren’t mine,” he explained over the din. “M’kehla left them here while he went gallivantin’ to Woodstock with everybody else.”
   “Goddamn you fuckers, back off!”Sandy roared. The dogs hesitated, and she roared louder. “Off! Off! Clear off!” They shrunk back. Sandy hooted gleefully and kicked gravel after them until they broke into a terrified dash. Sandy gave chase, hooting their retreat all the way to the bus, out of his view.
   The ravens were flying again. The sun was still slicing a way through the impacted smoke. The radio was playing “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys. Back in the yard below, at her luggage, Sandy was humming along, her hysteria calmed by her victory over the dogs. She found the bag she had been searching for, the smallest in a six-piece set that looked brand-new. She opened it and took out a bottle of pills. Deboree watched as she shook out at least a dozen. She threw the whole handful into her mouth and began digging again into the case for something to wash them down with.
   “Ol’ Thandy’th been platheth and theen thingth thinth Mexico,” she told him, trying to keep all the pills in her mouth and bring him up to date at the same time. Seen lots of water under the bridges, she let him know, sometimes too much. Bridges washed out. Washed out herself a time or two, she told him. Got pretty mucked up. Even locked up. But with the help of some ritzy doctors and her rich daddy, she’d finally got bailed out and got set up being half owner of a bar in San Juan Capistrano; then become a drunk, then a junkie, then a blues singer nonprofessional; found Jesus, and Love, and Another Husband—“Minithter of the Univerthal Church of Latterday Thonthabitcheth!”—then got p.g., got an abortion, got disowned by her family, and got divorced; then got depressed, as he could well understand, and put on a little weight, as he could see; then—Sunday, now—was looking for a place where a gal might lay back for a while.
   “A plathe to read and write and take a few barbth to mellow out,” she said through the pills.
   “A few!” he said, remembering her old barbiturate habit. “That’s no ‘few.’ “ The thought of having more than one carcass to dispose of alarmed him finally into protest. “Damn you, Sandy, if you up and O.D. on me now, so help me—”
   She held up her hand. “Vitamin theeth. Croth my heart.” Pawing through a boil of lingerie, she at last had found the silver flask she had been seeking. She unscrewed the lid and threw back her head. He watched her neck heave as the pills washed down. She wiped her mouth with her forearm and laughed up at him.
   “Don’t worry, Granny,” she said. “Just some innocent little vitamins. Even the dandy little Sandy of old never took that many downers at once. She might someday, though. Never can tell. Who the hell knows what anybody’s gonna do this year? It’s the year of the downer, you know, so who knows? Just let it roll by…” She returned the flask to the suitcase and snapped it shut. Rayon and Orion scalloped out all around like a piecrust to be trimmed. “Now. Where does Sandy take a wee-wee and wash out her Kotex?”
   He pointed, and she went humming off to the corner of the barn. The big dogs came to the door of their bus and growled after her. Deboree watched as she ducked under the clothesline and turned the corner. He heard the door slam behind her.
   He stayed at the window, feeling there was more to be revealed. Everything was so tense and restrained. The wash hung tense in the smoky air, like strips of jerky. The peacock, his fan molted to a dingy remnant of its springtime elegance, stepped out of the quince bush where he had been visiting his mate and flew to the top of one of the clothesline poles. Deboree thought the bird would make his cry when he reached the top, but he didn’t. He perched atop the pole and bobbed his head this way and that at the end of his long neck, as though gauging the tension. After watching the peacock for a while, he let the curtain close and moved from the window back to his desk; he too found he could be content to let it roll by without resolution.
   Over the radio The Doors were demanding that it be brought on through to the other side. Wasn’t Morrison dead? He couldn’t remember. All he could be sure of was that it was 1969 and the valley was filled to the foothills with smoke as 300,000 acres of stubble were burned so lawn-seed buyers in subdivisions in California wouldn’t have to weed a single interloper from their yards.
   Tremendous.
   The bathroom door slammed again. He heard the plastic heels crunch past below; one of M’kehla’s dogs followed, barking tentatively. The dog followed the steps around the other corner, barking in a subdued and civilized voice. The bitch Great Dane, he recognized. Pedigreed. She had barked last night, too. Out in the field. Betsy had got out of bed and shouted up the stairs at him to go check what was the matter out there. He hadn’t gone. Was that what offed the lamb? One of M’kehla’s Great Danes? He liked to think so. It made him pleasantly angry to think so. Just like a Marin County spade to own two blond Great Danes and go off and leave them marooned. Too many strays. Somebody should go down to that bus and boot some pedigreed ass. But he remained seated, seeking fortification behind his desk, and turned up the music against the noise. Once he heard a yelping as Sandy ran the bitch back to the bus. Sometimes a little breeze would open the curtain and he could see the peacock still sitting on the clothesline pole, silently bobbing his head. Eventually he heard the steps return, enter the barn below, and find the wooden stairs. They mounted briskly and crossed the floor of the loft. Sandy came through his door without knocking.
   “Some great place, Dev,” she said. “Funky but great. Sandy gave herself the tour. You got places for everything, don’t you? For pigs and chickens and everything. Places to wee-wee, places to eat, places to write letters.”
   Deboree saw the pitch coming but couldn’t stop her chatter. “Look, I blew the last of my airline ticket to Seattle renting that pink panther because I knew you’d want Sandy to bring you the sad news in person. No, that’s all right, save the thanksies. No need. She does need, though, a little place to write some letters. Seriously, Dev, I saw a cabin down by the pond with paper and envelopes and everything. How about Sandy uses that cabin a day or so? To write a letter to her dear mother and her dear probation officer and her dear ex et cetera. Also maybe catch up on her journal. Hey, I’m writing up our Mexico campaign for a rock’n’roll rag. Are you ready for that?”
   He tried to explain to her that the pond cabin was a meditation chapel, not some Camp David for old campaigners to compile their memoirs. Besides, he had planned to use it tonight. She laughed, told him not to worry.
   “I’ll find me a harbor for tonight. Then we’ll see.” He stayed at his desk. Chattering away, Sandy prowled his office until she found the shoe box and proceeded to clean and roll the last of his grass. He still didn’t want to smoke, not until he was finished with that dead lamb. When he shook his head at the offered joint, she shrugged and smoked it all, explaining in detail how she would refill his box to overflowing with the scams she had cooking in town this afternoon, meeting so-and-so at such and such to barter this and that. He couldn’t follow it. He felt flattened before her steamrolling energy. Even when she dropped the still-lit roach from the window to the dry grass below, he was only able to make the feeblest protest.
   “Careful of fire around barn?” She whooped, bending over him. “Why, Mistah Deboree, if you ain’t getting to be the fussy little farmer.” She clomped to the door and opened it. “So. Sandy’s making a run. Anything you need from town? A new typewriter? A better radio—how can you listen to good music on that Jap junk? A super Swiss Army? Ho ho. Just tell Sandy Claus. Anything?”
   She stood in the opened door, waiting. He swiveled in his chair, but he didn’t get up. He looked at her fat grin. He knew what she was waiting for. The question. He also knew better than to ask it. Better to let it slide than encourage any relationship by seeming curious. But he was curious, and she was waiting, grinning at him, and he finally had to ask it:
   “Did he, uh, say anything, Sandy?” His voice was thick in his throat.
   The black eyes glistened at him from the doorway. “You mean, don’cha, were there any, uh, last words? Any sentences commuted, any parting wisdoms? Why, as a matter of fact, in the hospital, it seems, before he went into a coma, he did rally a moment and now wait, let me see…”
   She was gloating. His asking had laid his desperation naked. She grinned. There he sat, Deboree, the Guru Gung Ho with his eyes raw, begging for some banner to carry on with, some comforter of last-minute truth quilted by Old Holy Goof Houlihan, a wrap against the chilly chaos to come.
   “Well, yep, our little hippie chick did mention that he said a few words before he died on that Mexican mattress,” she said. “And isn’t that irony for you? It’s that same ratty Puerto Sancto clinic where Behema had her kid and Mickey had his broken leg wherein our dear Hooly died, of pneumonia and exposure and downers. Come on! Don’cha think that is pretty stinking ironic?”
   “What were they?”
   The eyes glistened. The grin wriggled in its nest of fat. “He said—if Sandy’s memory serves—said, I think it was, ‘Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight.’ Quite a legacy, don’cha think? A number, a stinking number!” She hooted, slapping her hips. “Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight! Sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight! The complete cooked-down essence of the absolute burned-out speed freak: sixty-four thousand nine hundred and twenty-eight! Huh-woow woow wow!”
   She left without closing the door, laughing, clacking down the steps and across the gravel. The injured machine whined pitifully as she forced it back out the drive.
   So now observe him, after the lengthy preparation just documented (it had been actually three days and was going on four nights), finally confronting his task in the field: Old Man Deboree, desperate and dreary, with his eyes naked to the smoky sun, striding across the unbroken ground behind a red wheelbarrow. Face bent earthward, he watches the field pass beneath his shoes and nothing else, trusting the one-wheeled machine to lead him to his destination.
   Like Sandy’s neck, he fancies himself swollen with an unspecified anger, a great smoldering of unlaid blame that longed to bloom to a great blaze. Could he but fix it on a suitable culprit. Searching for some target large enough to take his fiery blame, he fixes again on California. That’s where it comes from, he decides. Like those two weirdo prickhikers, and Sandy Pawku, and the Oakland hippie chick who must have been one of that Oakland bunch of pillheads who lured Houlihan back down to Mexico last month… all from California! It all started in California, went haywire in California, and now spreads out from California like a crazy tumor under the hide of the whole continent. Woodstock. Big time. Craziness waxing fat. Craziness surviving and prospering and gaining momentum while the Fastestmanalive downs himself dead without any legacy left behind but a psycho’s cipher. Even those Great Danes—from California!
   The wheelbarrow reaches the ditch. He raises his head. He still cannot see the carcass. Turning down into the ditch, he pushes on toward the place where the three ravens whirl cursing in and out of the tall weeds.
   “Afternoon, gents. Sorry about the interruption.” The birds circle, railing at his approach. The wheel of the barrow is almost on top of the lamb before Deboree sees it. He is amazed at the elegance of the thing lying before him: a rich garment, not black at all, not nearly, more the reddish brown of devil’s food cake. A little chocolate lambie cake, served for some little prince’s birthday on a tray of purple vetch, garlanded with clover blossoms, decorated with elegant swirls and loops of red ant trails and twinkling all over with yellow jackets, like little candles. He blows them out with a wave of his hat. The three ravens swoop away to take up positions on the three nearest fence posts. Black wings outspread, they watch in imperious silence as Deboree flaps the ants away and bends to inspect the carcass.
   “What got him, gents? Any ideas?” Betsy was right; not a tooth mark to be found. Maybe the dogs were running him and he tripped in the ditch and broke his neck. “He looks too healthy to just up and die, don’t you birds think?”
   The ravens rock from foot to foot and advance no theories. They are so righteously disgruntled that Deboree has to smile at them. He considers leaving the carcass where it is on the ground, to be attended to by the ravens and bees and ants and the rest of Nature’s undertakers. Then he hears the mother bleating again from the ash grove where Betsy tethered her.
   “I guess not. No sense in agony for ecology’s sake. I’m gonna have to bury him, boys, to get him off his mom’s mind. You can sympathize…”
   Not in the slightest, the ravens make it clear as soon as they see their rightful spoils being lifted into the wheelbarrow. They rise from their separate posts, beating the air with their wings and calling. They flap into a circling formation above the wheelbarrow, calling together in perfect cadence as they follow all the way through the pasture to the swamp at the other end of the seventy acres. Sometimes the circle rises higher than the cottonwood tops so their continual rain of abuse sounds almost musical in the distance. Other times they circle close enough that Deboree could have swatted them with the spade.
   He picks a shady spot under an overhanging oak and sticks the spade into the dirt. It’s clay: mud in winter, baked concrete in summer. It would be easier digging up by the pond, but he likes it here. It’s hidden and cool. The arms of the old scrub oak are ceremoniously draped with long gray-green shrouds of Spanish moss. The pinched, dry oak leaves are motionless. Even the ravens have abandoned their raucous tirade and are watching in silence from a branch in the tallest of the cottonwoods.
   He hangs his hat on an oak stob and sets to digging, furiously now that he has chosen the site, hacking and stamping and chopping at the mat of clay and roots until his lungs wheeze and the dust runs off his face in gullies of sweat. He finally wipes his eyes with the hem of his shirt and stands back from the simple black basin. “Ought to be deeper if we want to keep the foxes from smelling it and digging it up.” He looks down into the hole, panting and shaking so violently that he has to support himself with the shovel. “But then, on the other hand,” he decides, “it’s deep enough for folk music, as they say,” and tips the corpse into the hole. To make it fit he has to bend the front legs back against the chest and force the hind legs together. It looks actually cute this way, he concedes, a kid’s woolly doll. Hardly used. Just have to sew on a couple of bright new buttons for eyes, be good as new.
   Then the trembling starts to get worse. This must be how they begin, he thinks. Freak-outs. Breakdowns. Crack-ups. Eventually shut-ins and finally cross-offs. But first the cover-up…
   He spoons the earth back into the hole over the little animal much slower than he had dug it out. He can feel that he has blistered both hands. He wishes he’d remembered to bring his gloves. He wishes Sandy hadn’t smoked his last joint. He wishes he had his glasses. Most of all, he wishes he’d thought to bring some liquid relief. His throat is on fire. There is water back up at the stock tub, a short walk away, but water isn’t enough. There are fires in more than the throat that need attention. And no hope in the house. Why hadn’t he driven to the liquor store in Creswell before he started this flight? Always good to have a parachute. Never know when some unexpected downdraft might pop up, throw the best flier into a tailspin. He closes his eyes and frowns, examining the possibilities. No downers, no tranquilizers, no prescription painkillers even. All went with the main troops on the Woodstock campaign. Not even any wine left at the house, and Betsy still off with the only working vehicle. In short, no parachutes nowhere.
   He begins to shudder uncontrollably, his teeth chattering. He’s afraid he is having a stroke or a seizure. They run in the family, fits. Uncle Nathan Whittier had a seizure slopping the hogs in Arkansas, fell into the sty, and the hogs ate him. No hogs here, just those ravens up there and these still oaks and, over there, in another little glade only a dozen yards deeper into the swamp, atop a stump in a beam of smoky sunlight, by the grace of God, a gallon of red wine? Burgundy? From the heavens a bottle of burgundy?
   He drops the spade and reels through the branches and banners of moss until he has the bottle in his hands. It is a wine bottle, cheap Gallo to be sure but still half full and cool in the shady bottom air. He unscrews the top and upends the bottle and drinks in long swallows until he loses his equilibrium and has to lower his head. He turns around and sits on the stump until he catches his balance, then tips his head back for the bottle again. He doesn’t stop swallowing until his lungs demand it. There is less than a fourth remaining after his unbroken guzzle, and he can feel the liquid already spreading through his body’s knotted thoroughfares, already bringing relief.
   It’s only then that he notices that it is not a light, dry 12-percent burgundy after all but a syrupy sweet 18-percent wino port with a bouquet just like he’d smelled out of Blackbeard’s mouth a couple of hours back. He looks around and sees two raggedy bedrolls, a World War I shoulder pack, and the remains of a small fire. There is a dog-eared pile of underground comics beside one bedroll and a paperback On the Road. In the other bedroll’s area lies a pile of shavings, idly whittled slivers, some as thin as the fallen cotton-wood leaves.
   “So this is why they were up the road from this direction, not down from the highway direction like every other pilgrim. Asshole bums…”
   But there is no heat in the curse. He tips up the bottle again, more thoughtfully now, and somewhat curious. Maybe they’re more than bums.
   “Team,” he says to the ravens, “I think we ought to put a stakeout on these assholes.”
   The birds don’t disagree. They seem to have already begun the vigil, hunching their heads deep into their black breasts and settling down on their limbs in the smoky air. Deboree picks up the paperback and the stack of comics and retreats to the wheelbarrow, his finger still hooked in the gallon’s glass handle. He selects a blackberry patch about twenty steps from the camp and bores into the brambles from behind, using the wheelbarrow as a plow and the spade like a machete until he has cleared a comfortable observation post in the center of the thorny vines. He tilts the wheelbarrow up and packs it with the Spanish moss from an overhanging oak limb until the rusty old bucket is as comfortable as any easy chair. He settles into his nest, arranging the leaves in front of his face so he can easily see out without having to touch the vines, and takes another long drink of the sweet wine.
   The shadows climb slowly up the tree trunks. The ravens desert, squawking off to their respective roosts after a disappointing day. The air turns a deeper red as the sun, dropping to the horizon, has even more smoke to penetrate. The wine goes down as the Checkered Demon and Mr. Natural and the Furry Freak Brothers flip past his eyes. At last there is only an inch left, and the paperback. He’s read it three times before. Years ago. Before heading off to California. Hoping to sign on in some way, to join that joyous voyage, like thousands of other volunteers inspired by the same book, and its vision, and, of course, its incomparable hero.
   Like all the other young candidates for beatitude, he had prowled North Beach’s famous hangouts—City Lights, The Place, The Coffee Gallery, The Bagel Shop—hoping to catch a glimpse of that lightning-mouthed character that Kerouac had called Dean Moriarty in On the Road and that John Clellon Holmes had named Hart Kennedy in Go, maybe eavesdrop on one of his high-octane hipalogues, perhaps even get a chance to be a big-eyed passenger on one of his wild rapping runs around the high spots of magic San Francisco. But he had never imagined much more, certainly not the jackpot of associations that followed, the trips, the adventures, the near disasters—and, worse danger, the near successes that almost put Houlihan on stage. Houlihan was Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, and Lord Buckley all together just for starters. He couldn’t have helped but been a hit. But a nightclub format would have pinched his free-flying mind, and no stage in the world could have really accommodated his art—his hurtling, careening, corner-squealing commentary on the cosmos—except the stage he built about himself the moment he slid all quick and sinewy under the steering wheel of a good car: the bigger, the boatier, the more American, the better. The glow of the dash was his footlights, the slash of oncoming sealed beams was his spots. And now, and now, and now the act is over. No more would that rolling theater ever come bouncing and steaming and blaring rhythm and blues and Houlihan hoopla up the drive all full of speed and plans and hammering hearts.
   For now, now, now, the son of a bitch is dead.

   And, with the last inch of wine lifted in a salute before finishing it, Deboree begins to weep. It is not a sweet grief, but bitter and bleak. He tries to stop it. He opens the familiar Kerouac paperback, looking for some passage that will wash out that bitter burn, but the tears won’t let him focus. It’s getting dark. He closes the book and his eyes both, and enters again the library of his memory, looking under H. Looking for Houlihan, Hero, High Priest of the Highway, Hammer-tosser, Head-twister, Hoper Springing Eternally. Or maybe not so. Now it is the disciple, looking and hoping, hoping to ward off the circling heralds of desolation with some kind of gallant scarecrow, stuffed with some strawhead records showing just who this wondrous Houlihan was, what his frenetic life had meant, stood for, died for. Hoping to stave off the mockery of his hero’s senseless death and to buttress himself against those bleak digits by checking out a collection of inspirational Houlihan aphorisms (Six four nine two eight: the complete works of another one of those Best Minds of Their Generation!), anecdotes, anything!
   But the section is empty. The H shelf has been stripped, the works all recalled, out of print, confiscated as invalid in the light of Latest Findings. Deboree laughs aloud at his library metaphor and finds his throat dried almost hard. He drinks the last of the wine as though he is fighting a brush fire. “Year of the downer,” he says, speaking up through the little arch of berry vines, watching the last rays of the rusty sun fade from the tops of the cottonwoods, staring until the last smolder has drifted away and the wine has carried him back into the forlorn stacks and shelves of his memory. This time he finds a slim volume—not under H at all but under L—about the time Houlihan the famous Fastestmanalive met the renowned Stanford Strongman, Lars Dolf, and lost to Dolf in man-to-man charismatic warfare. Under L, for losing…
   During the late fifties and early sixties, these two giants had towered over the budding Bay Area revolutionaries. Both men were titans of their own special and singular philosophies. Owing to his appearance as a hero in a number of nationally distributed novels, Houlihan’s rep was the greater, the more widespread. But in his own area, Lars Dolf was Houlihan’s equal. Everybody that had any touch with the hip life on the peninsula had heard of Lars. And because of his Bay Area proselytizing for a Buddhist seminary, many had met him personally and were all in awe of his soft-spoken power.
   One spring partying evening, Lars Dolf had dropped into the Deboree house, across the street from the Stanford golf course. Dolf claimed he had heard of Devlin, and he wanted to meet him, and he was open to invitations, especially concerning wine. Deboree saw immediately that they were due to argue—it was in the way the man placed his feet—and passed him the bottle.
   It was first over art. Lars was an unknown painter, and Deboree could match him that in the field of writing. Then over philosophy. Lars was a graying, wine-torn Zen beatnik champ, and young Devlin was a psychedelic challenger with a higher-than-wine insinuation. And, eventually, naturally, over the much more ancient and basic issue: physical prowess. This category happened to be Devlin’s strong point during that time. He was driving three times a week to the Olympic Club in San Francisco hoping to represent the United States in freestyle wrestling in the upcoming Rome Olympics. Lars was also the bearer of such laurels: the All-American Stanford linebacker dropout Kraut. Tales about him were many. The most memorable and oft repeated described him taking on a truckful of Mexican artichoke pickers at a Columbus Day picnic in Pescadero and fighting them to their own national standoff; when local deputies stopped the battle and an ambulance driver examined Lars, the broken points of three Tijuana switchblades were found sticking out of his great round shoulders.
   Deboree can’t remember who started the contests that day on the Lane. Probably he himself, with one of the trick feats he had learned from his father, probably going through the broom so supple that Lars Dolf didn’t even uncross his legs to try. Then, as he recalls it, the spotlight was wrested from Devlin by his brother Bud, who was down from Oregon for some culture. Buddy went through the broom both forward and backward, which Devlin never had been able to do. It was Buddy who started the Indian wrestling.
   Standing palm to palm and instep to instep, Buddy flipped through one after the other of the gang of awkward grad students, besting them each so easily that he became embarrassed with his one-sided victories and was about to turn the center ring back to Deboree (who hadn’t challenged him; the Indian-wrestling issue had long before and many times been decided between the brothers; Devlin was heavier and older and longer reached) when Lars Dolf spoke from his lotus position near the wine:
   “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.
   “It’s where you think from, do you begin to see? The eye that seeks the lotus… never sees the lotus. Only the search can it see. The eye that searches for nothing… finds… the garden in full bloom. Desire in the head… makes a hollow in the center… makes a man… ahm!”—as he threw Deboree into the particle-board wall, with its growing array of dents and craters—“unbalanced.”
   When Lars Dolf left after that evening, he took three of the undergraduates back to the city with him—two psychology majors and a frat boy who had not yet settled on a field—to enroll them in the Buddhist seminary on Jackson Street, never mind that spring term at Stanford was only two weeks short of over. Deboree himself was so impressed that he was half considering such a transfer until Lars informed him that the sutra classes began at four in the morning six days a week. He decided to stick it out at the writing seminar instead, which only met three times a week, and at three in the afternoon, and over coffee and cookies. But, like his brother and everyone else, he had been awestruck. And Lars Dolf had reigned as the undisputed phenomenon of the peninsula until the next fall, when a Willys jeep with a transmission blown from driving it too far too fierce too fast had brought Houlihan into his yard and his life.
   The famous Houlihan. With his bony Irish face dancing continually and simultaneously through a dozen expressions, his sky-blue eyes flirting up from under long lashes, and with his reputation and his unstoppable rap, Houlihan became a sensation around the Stanford bongo circuit before the tortured jeep had hardly stopped steaming. He was a curiosity easily equal to Lars Dolf in charisma and character and, without the heavy-handed oriental dogma, a lot more fun to be around.
   There were, in fact, no real similarities between the two men. But comparisons could not be avoided. As fast as Dolf was phlegmatic, as sinewy and animated as Dolf was thick and stolid, poor Houlihan was matched with the Buddhist Bull before he was even aware of an opponent’s existence. By mid-fall term, all the talk in the hip Palo Alto coffeehouses was about the latest Houlihan blitz—how he had climbed on stage during Allen Ginsberg’s reading in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, without a shirt or shoes, carrying a flashlight in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, to stalk invisible scurriers about the podium: “Maybe so, Ginsy, but I saw the best mice of my generation destroyed by good ‘ol American grit—there’s one take that you rodent you oop only winged ‘em there he goes anyhow—you were saying? Don’t let me interrupt”; how he had talked the San Mateo deputy sheriff into giving his stalled sedan a jump start instead of a speeding ticket after being pulled over on Bayshore, and, so persuasive and brain-boggling was Houlihan’s rap, got away with the cop’s cables in the bargain; how he had seduced the lady psychiatrist who had been sent by a distraught and wealthy Atherton mother to save a daughter deranged by five days’ living in the back of the family’s station wagon with this maniac, and the mother who had sent her when they all got back to Atherton, and the nurse the family had hired to protect the daughter from further derangement. Usually, eventually, these coffeehouse tales of Houlihan’s heroics were followed by conjecture about future feats and finally, inevitably, about the meeting of the two heroes.
   “Wonder if Houlihan’ll be able to mess with Lars Dolf’s mind like that? Should they ever lock horns, I mean…”
   Deboree saw the historic encounter. It took place in the driveway of a tall, dark-browed, spectral law student named Felix Rommel, who claimed to be the grandson of the famous German general. No one had given much credence to the claim until a huge crate arrived from Frankfurt containing—Felix had announced– his grandfather’s Mercedes. Lars Dolf had been phoned to find out if he would like to see this classic relic from his fatherland. He arrived on a bicycle. There was a champagne party on Felix’s wide San Mateo lawn while the car was ceremoniously uncrated and rolled backward into the garage under the lights, gray and gleaming. Lars looked it over carefully, smiling at the double-headed eagle still perched on the radiator cap and some of the Desert Fox’s maps and scrawled messages Felix showed him in the glove compartment. “It is a beaut,” he told everybody.
   The car had been carefully preserved, unscratched except for the right side of the front bumper, which had been bent in shipping and was crimped against the tire. Felix even started the engine with a jump from Deboree’s panel. Everybody drank champagne in the yard while the big engine idled in the garage. Felix asked Dolf if he would like to drive it when the bumper got straightened, that there might be a chauffeur’s job open as soon as the California bar exams allowed Felix to practice. Felix said he couldn’t legally drive it himself for another nine months because of a DUIL, and his wife wouldn’t drive it because she was Jewish, “So I need somebody.”
   Dolf was politely thanking the couple for the offer but was saying he would probably stick with his old Schwinn—“For my German vehicle”—when into the drive came a steaming, lurching ‘53 Chevy with a noisy rod about to blow under the hood and noisier driver already blowing wild behind the wheel. Houlihan was out the door and into the startled yard before the signal from the ignition had reached the poor motor, shirtless and sweating and jabbering, zooming around to open the other doors for his usual entourage of shell-shocked passengers, introducing each to everybody, digressing between introductions about the day’s events, the trip down from the city, the bad rod, the good tires, the lack of gas, and grass, and ass, and of course the need for speed—“Anybody? Anybody? With the well-known leapers? Bennies? Dexies? Uh? Preludins even? Oops? I say something wrong?”—admonishing himself for his manners and his hectic habits, complimenting Felix on his idling heirloom, kicking the tires, clicking his heels and saluting the two-headed hood ornament, starting all over again, introducing his bedraggled crew again only with the names all different… a typical Houlihan entrance that might have gone on uninterrupted until his departure minutes or hours later, if Felix hadn’t distracted him with a huge joint that he drew out of his vest pocket as though he’d been saving it for this very occasion. And while Houlihan was holding the first vein-popping lungful of smoke, Felix led him by the elbow to the little cement bench in the shadow of the acacia where Lars Dolf had retreated to sit in full lotus and watch. Without speaking, Dolf had slowly untwined his legs and stood to take Houlihan’s hand. Houlihan had resumed his chatter, the words spilling out as irrepressible as the smoke:
   “Dolf? Dolf? Didn’t I, yass I did hear tell of a fella supposed to have confiscated all the switchblades in Ensenada—or was it Juàrez?—went by that name Lars Dolf, also by the nick of ‘Snub,’ Snub Dolf the sportswriters called him, used to be a footballer, all-something, all-defensive something of the something, forsook future with the Forty-niners for meditation, which, the way I see it, correct me if I’m wrong, is mainly the exchange of one coach and his philosophy for another coach and another game plan—same game—single wing ‘stead of double—this meditation practice probably just as beneficial as tackling practice—rather beat off, myself personally, if it’s for spiritual purposes we are considering…”
   And on and on, in a fashion best left inimitable, until the round, grinning face and the ominously unblinking eyes began to affect Houlihan in a manner none of the fans had ever witnessed before. In the face of Dolf s deliberate silence, Houlihan began to stammer. His rap began to rattle and run down. Finally, with his brow creased over the same mystery that Buddy and Deboree had encountered Indian wrestling, Houlihan stuttered to a rare stop. Dolf continued to smile, holding on to Houlihan’s hand, watching him fidget in his unaccustomed silence and humiliation. Nobody broke the silence as the moment of victory and defeat was wordlessly accepted and formalized.
   When the victor felt that his power had been sufficiently acknowledged by this silence, Dolf let go the hand and said, softly, “That is the way… you see it, Mr. Houlihan.”
   Houlihan could not retort. He was buffaloed. The dozen-or-so spectators smiled inside and congratulated themselves on being present during the decisive settling of this historic duel. They had all known it all along. When it comes right down to it, the mouth is no match for the muscle. Houlihan turned away from the grinning puzzle, seeking some route of escape. His eyes fell again on the idling Mercedes.
   “Well on the other hand hey, what say, Felix, that we take ‘er for a little turn?” He was already opening the right side door to climb behind the steering wheel. “Just round the block…”
   “ ‘Fraid it would have to be one way around,” Felix said casually, hands in his pockets as he followed around the front of the car after Houlihan. He took him by a naked arm and drew him back out of the car. He pointed at the bent bumper with his long chin. “Until we get that straightened, the best you could do is keep going in circles.”
   “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.”
   Fascinated, Deboree watches from the brambles as Sandy waltzes in a slow circle, then leans the huge doll against the stump and sits in its lap. “Give us a hand,” she says, picking at the button of the collar taut across her throat, “an’ a drink.” Blackbeard draws a half gallon of wine from one of the grocery sacks. He uncorks it and drinks beneath the gently swinging light, his eyes on the fat woman and the doll. He lowers the bottle and takes a big summer sausage from the other sack and begins to chew the plastic wrapping away. Blondboy kneels beside Sandy, giggling, to help with the buttons of her blouse. Blackbeard watches, and Deboree. The 10:10 toots past at the Nebo junction. The shadows rock. The fumbling fingers have the garment off one shoulder when, abruptly, Sandy’s head falls back to the bear’s shoulder and she begins to snore. The giggle bubbles louder over the healthy teeth as Blondboy hefts the bra strap up and down.
   “What kinda credit card got you these, mama?”
   Sandy sags and snores louder. The boy tries to reach behind her sleeping back to find the clasp. Blackbeard is going through her shopping bag. He takes out a little transistor radio and turns it on. He leans against the oak tree, gnawing the sausage and tuning the radio as he watches his partner wrestle with the sleeping woman’s brassiere. At last, Deboree has to close his eyes to the spectacle, and the dark swirls over him. His head is ringing. He hears the radio dial travel on until it finds The Beach Boys’ hit. The harmony softens Sandy’s snores and grunts and covers the crunch of twigs. Deboree can barely hear any of it. It comes from a long way off, through a twining, leafy tunnel. The tunnel has almost twined shut when he hears Blackbeard speak.
   “What did she say he was doing out there on the railroad tracks? Counting?”
   “The ties,” Blondboy answers. “Counting the ties between Puerto Sancto and the next village. Thirty miles away. Counting the railroad ties. They got him doped up and dared him and he did it, didn’t he, hee hee?”
   “Houlihan,” says Blackboard’s voice, gentler. “The great Houlihan. Done in by downers and a dare.” Blackbeard sounded honestly grieved, and Deboree found himself suddenly liking him. “I can’t believe it…”
   “Don’t let it bother you, bro. He was fried, you know? Gangrened. But c’mere and check this. I bet this makes you take that wienie outta your mouth…”
   Deboree tries to lift his eyes open, but the tunnel is twining too fast. Let it close, he tells himself. Who’s afraid of the dark now? Houlihan wasn’t merely making noise; he was counting. We were all counting.
   The dark space about him is suddenly filled with faces, winking off and on. Deboree watches them twinkle, feeling warm and befriended, equally fond of all the countenances, those close, those far, those known, those never met, those dead, those never dead. Hello faces. Come back. Come on back all of you even LBJ with your Texas cheeks eroded by compromises come back. Khrushchev, fearless beyond peasant ignorance, healthy beside Eisenhower, come back both of you. James Dean all picked apart and Tab Hunter all put together. Michael Rennie in your silver suit the day the earth stood still for peace, come back all of you.
   Now go away and leave me. Now come back.
   Come back Vaughn Monroe, Ethel Waters, Krazy Kat, Lou Costello, Harpo Marx, Adlai Stevenson, Ernest Hemingway, Herbert Hoover, Harry Belafonte, Timothy Leary, Ron Boise, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lee Harvey Oswald, Chou En-lai, Ludwig Erhard, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Mandy Rice-Davies, General Curtis LeMay and Gordon Cooper, John O’Hara and Liz Taylor, Estes Kefauver and Governor Scranton, the Invisible Man and the Lonely Crowd, the True Believer and the Emerging Nations, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, Elsa Maxwell, Dinah Washington, Jean Cocteau, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Jimmy Hatlo, Aldous Huxley, Edith Piaf, Zasu Pitts, Seymour Glass, Big Daddy Nord, Grandma Whittier, Grandpa Deboree, Pretty Boy Floyd, Big Boy Williams, Boyo Behan, Mickey Rooney, Mickey Mantle, Mickey McGee, Mickey Mouse, come back, go away, come on back.
   That summer-sweet Frisco with flowers in your hair come back. Now go away.
   Cleaver, come back. Abbie, come back. And you that never left come back anew, Joan Baez, Bob Kaufmann, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Lish, Gordon Fraser, Gregory Corso, Ira Sandperl, Fritz Perls, swine pearls, even you black bus Charlie Manson asshole. And you better get back to Tennessee Jed come back, get back, now come back afresh.
   We are being summoned. We get a reprieve, not just rebop. He wasn’t just riffing; he was counting. Appear and testify.
   Young Cassius Clay.
   Young Mailer.
   Young Miller.
   Young Jack Kerouac before you fractured your football career at Columbia and popped your hernia in Esquire. Young Sandy without your credit card bare. Young Devlin. Young Dylan. Young Lennon. Young lovers wherever you are. Come back and remember and go away and come back.
   Attendance mandatory but not required.

The Search for the Secret Pyramid

I: Safari So Good

   September 26, 1974. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. At-One-Ment. To be observed, God makes it plain, this one-day fast from sundown to sundown once a year, forever and ever. An auspicious day to embark on a pilgrimage to the pyramids.

   September 28, Saturday. Paul Krassner’s in S.F. I ask Krassner if he observed the Yom Kippur fast. He says he would have but he was too busy eating.

   September 29, Sunday. Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Krassner’s packed and ready. He plans to visit the pyramid with me as part of his conspiracy research, something about using the angle of the Grand Gallery to prove conclusively that the bullet that killed Kennedy could not possibly have come from Jack Ruby’s gun.

   September 30, Monday. Jack Cherry from Rolling Stone drives Krassner and me to the airport where we are going to fly to Dayton, Ohio, to talk with the great underground pyramid expert, Enoch of Ohio, about the Great Underground Pyramid. Cherry is to fly to New York later to rendezvous with the safari. He speaks Egyptian.

   October 1, Tuesday. Succoth, the First Day of Tabernacles. Enoch of Ohio runs a tattoo parlor where he specializes in tattooing women and pierces nipples on the side. The walls of his shop are filled with color Polaroids of his satisfied customers. When we arrive he is buzzing a rendition of Adam and Eve Being Driven from The Garden into the flaccid flank of a forty-year-old housewife from Columbus, wiping aside the ooze of ink and blood every few seconds. Krassner stares as I question the artist.
   Enoch tells us, over the whir of the needle and the whine of the housewife, what he knows about the secret underground temple. Enoch of Ohio is a famous Astral Traveler and has visited the Valley of the Kings often in his less corporeal form. He is full of information and predictions. His eyes burn brighter as he talks, and his needle produces more flourishes and blood. The housewife continues to groan and grimace until we can barely hear his prophecies.
   “Okay, Sweetmeats, that’s enough for today. You look a little pale.”
   I follow him to the back of his shop where he washes his hands clean of the stain of his trade, still expounding on ancient and future Egypt. A gasp and a crash from the other room rushes us back. But the housewife is fine. Krassner has fainted.

   October 2, Wednesday. I throw Lu, The Wanderer, and am ready to move on. But Krassner has had enough of the arcane. “They’d probably search me and find out that I am circumcised,” he says and flies back to San Fran.
   I buy a creamo ‘66 Pontiac convertible from a furniture designer and head out to Wendell Berry’s in Port Royal, Kentucky, hoping to enlist him in the cause. I hear over the car radio that the earliest frost in fifty years has smitten the Kentucky tobacco crop. Fields on both sides of the road are full of limp leaves and dour farmers. Much as I dislike cigarettes I can’t help but be touched by these forlorn figures in overalls and baseball caps. There is a quality timeless and universal about a farmer standing in the aftermath of a killer frost. It could be a hieroglyph, a symbol scratched on a sheet of papyrus depicting that immortal phrase of fruitless frustration: “Stung!”

   October 3, Thursday. Birthday of St. Theresa. Another record-breaking cold night. After biscuits and eggs Wendell and I hitch up his two huge-haunched Belgian work mares and gee and haw out into the cold Kentucky morn to see if his sorghum survived. The leaves are dark and drooping but the stalks are still firm. We cut a few samples and head on up to the ridge for the opinion of two old brothers he is acquainted with.
   “The Tidwell twins’ll know,” Wendell allows. “They been farming this area since the year ‘ought-one.”
   The wagon rumbles along the winding, rocky ruts, through thorn thickets and groves of sugar maple and osage and dogwood. We find the brothers working a lofty meadow high above the neighboring spreads. No woe is frosted on the faces of this pair; their tobacco crop is hanging neatly in the barn since well before the cold snap, and they are already disking under the stalks. Erect, alert, and nearing eighty, the picture presented by these two identical Good Old Boys might describe another hieroglyph: Them as Didn’t Get Stung.
   They examine Wendell’s stalk of sorghum and assure him how it ain’t hurt in the joint, which is what roorins the crop.
   “Don’t let no cows into it, though,” they warn. “Freeze like that makes prussic acid sorghum. Mought make a animal sickly…”
   Listening to these two old American alchemists one can better understand why Wendell Berry, an M.A. from Stanford and a full professor with tenure two days a week at the U of Kentucky, busts his butt the rest of the time farming with the same antiquated methods the land of his forefathers; there is a wisdom in our past that cannot be approached but with the past’s appurtenances. Think of Schliemann finding ancient Troy by way of Homer.
   On the way back down from the ridge I tell Wendell of the team of scientists from Berkeley who tried probing the pyramids with a newfangled cosmic ray device in search of hidden chambers. “What they found was that there was something about the pyramids that thwarted our most advanced gadgetry. The only thing their ten tons of equipment accomplished was to electrocute a rat that tried to nest in the wiring.”
   “Killed a rat, did they?” says Wendell, tromping the brake to keep the wagon from overrunning the mares down the steep slope. “For Berkeley scientists, that’s a start.”

   October 4, Friday. Dateline Paris (Kentucky, that is).
   Looking for the Bible in the drawer of my ancient hotel room, I find a phone number penciled onto the unfinished wood of the drawer bottom, a dark number, etched deep and certain, after which is penciled even darker this rave review:


EPIK FUCK!

   The phone is on the nightstand right next to the drawer and I must admit I’m housed upstairs alone with the classic traveling-salesman horniness. I look at the number again, but farther back in the drawer there’s the Bible, after all. Besides, I have hired out to do an article, not an epic.
   The passage I am seeking is Isaiah, chapter 19, verses 19 and 20. It is a pivotal quote in the first volume of a four-volume set on pyramidology that I bought in S.F. for sixty bucks, but the author has written the passage in its original Hebrew, fully aware that your usual reader will have to refer to the Bible to find out what is said. The only thing else he lets you know about the passage is that it contains 30 words and 124 Hebrew letters, and that when the numerical value of these ancient words and letters is added up by a process known as gematria the sum total of the passage equals 5,449, which is the height of the Great Pyramid in pyramid inches.
   The pyramid inch is a unit so close to our own inch (25 pyramid inches = 25.0265 of our inches) that I will henceforth refer to these units simply as inches: 5,449 is also the weight of the pyramid in tons times 100. Comparisons continue ad infinitum. Compressed within the scope and accuracy of the Great Pyramid’s angles and proportions seem to be all the formulas and distances pertinent to our solar system. This is one of the reasons we don’t want to switch to the metric system. It’d be like cutting off our feet so we can get Birkenstock transplants.
   The book falls open to Psalm 91—“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty”—which is one of the Egyptian verses written, according to the Urantia Book, by that first great teacher of monotheism, King Akhnoten, who, according to Enoch, was schooled personally by Melchizedec himself, who, according to Cayce blah blah, you see what I mean? The path to this pyramid can lead you down endless alleys of rumination. On to Isaiah.
   Here it is, chapter 19, and underlined in the same dark pencil as was used to record the phone number on the drawer bottom:

   19 In that day shall there be an altar to the lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the lord.
   20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the lord of hosts in the land of Egypt; for they shall cry unto the lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them—

   Wait a minute. That way lies the musclebound madness one sees caged behind the isometric eyes of the Jesus freaks—not the way I wish to wander in this quest. I don’t need a course in spiritual dynamic tension. I return the gift of the Gideons to its drawer and shut it away along with the secret gematria of the Epik Fuck. All very interesting but I don’t need it. Being raised a hard-shell Baptist jock I consider myself still fairly fit faithwise. Besides, going to the Great Pyramid to find God strikes me as something of an insult to all the other temples I have visited over the years, an affront to the words of spiritual teachers like St. Houlihan and St. Lao-tzu and St. Dorothy who, perhaps best of all, sums it up: “If you can’t find God in your backyard in Kansas you probably can’t find him in the Great Pyramid in Egypt, either.”
   In fact (I may as well tell it now) this expedition is not aimed at the Great Pyramid of Giza at all, nor any of the other dozens of already-studied and profusely interpreted temples lining the west bank of the mighty Nile, but another marvel, as yet undisclosed and said to contain in its magnificent halls all the mysteries of the past—explained!
   Like just how did they cut those stones so hard and move them so far and fit them so tight? And what was the device that once crowned the summit of Cheops with such power that it echoes all the way down to the back of our Yankee dollar? Where did those builders come from? Where do we come from and, more important, as our nation’s worth leaks away and the gears of this cycle’s trip grind from Pisces to Aquarius in approach of the promised shifting of the poles, where are we bound?
   This expedition is going to try to find the edifice called by John the Apostle the New Jerusalem and by Enoch of Ohio the Secret Temple of Secrets and by Edgar Cayce, in countless readings that prophesy the discovery of this hidden wonder sometime between 1958 and 1998, the Hall of Records.
   Next stop: The A.R.E. Library, the Association for Research and Enlightenment, in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

   October 5, 6, 7, 8. Research at Cayce’s A.R.E. Library.
   As the great accusing aftermath that followed the French Revolution dragged on and the lines of heads scheduled to be lopped off grew too long to be serviced by Dr. Guillotine’s nifty machine, the overflow of minor-league aristocrats was relegated to a more cut-rate end. When their time came they were grasped by the arms and hustled indecorously from their cells to an open field where a burly nonunion executioner held aloft a simple sword.
   To alleviate the boredoms of these day-in day-out heads-offs, the head hostlers developed this simple sport: just before the sword came down they would hiss in the ear of the trembling wretch they were holding bent forward, “You are free, mon ami: run!” and release his arms. Then the spectators would bet on how many steps the headless body would run before toppling. Seven steps was not unusual; twelve was par for a particularly spirited specimen. The record was set by a woman—twenty-four strides and no sign of falter before the sightless body encountered a parked manure wagon.
   Some things keep going farther than others. “A spirited lass, that one…”
   This same ongoing spirit surrounds the big white A.R.E. building that houses the 49,135 pages of verbatim psychic readings given by the unassuming little man known as the Sleeping Prophet.
   What I learn after four days’ research is that hundreds have preceded me in this search for Cayce’s Secret Pyramid. The most noteworthy is a certain Muldoon Greggor. Scholar Greggor has written a book on the subject, called The Hidden Records, and is in fact at present in Cairo, according to his brother, continuing his research. Has he unearthed anything new?
   “He can be found at the university,” the brother advises me without looking up from his research. “Why don’t you wait until you get to Cairo and ask him? Myself, I’m into almonds.”

   October 9, Wednesday. New York City. I’m in this raging Babylon not half an hour and my car gets towed away. It takes me the rest of the day and 75 bucks to get it back. A little girl waiting with her daddy in the angry line at the redeeming pier tells me their car was stolen, too, and is probably crying after the abduction.
   “They drag them away by their hind foot, you know.”

   October 10, 11. More museums and libraries. I think I’ve got the information to piece the history together. I had planned to write my assimilation of all this material during these few days before Jacky Cherry arrives for our departure, but this city is too overpowering. Awful and awesome. It is here that the leak is most evident, a constant hiss of escaping economy. When you stand near the New Jersey Turnpike you can feel a great protein wind blowing from all over the nation into Long Island and right on out into the ocean to the ten-mile square of floating garbage.
   Jack is here and we fly to Cairo tomorrow. My next filing will be from the other side of the globe.

II: Ramadan: “They Teem by Night!”

   October 13. Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Our 747 comes wallowing down out of the clouds into the Amsterdam airport like a flying pig, bellying in to the trough.
   Three big trucks swarm out to service her, to see carefully to her comfort. In turn, this pampered porker spares no expense when it comes to the comfort of her clientele. We are lavished with it. Refreshments are served constantly by an ample staff of smiling nubilians. For entertainment you have stereo music, in-flight movies, and a free magazine. Passengers are invited to take this free piece of worthless printed crap home. Of course, there is the very latest in sanitation: everything that comes in human contact is incinerated afterwards.
   What a difference when we deplane in Ankara, Turkey, and board the dowdy old DC-8 that will carry us on to Cairo. The plane is smelly as a subway, jammed to the gunwales with every sort of heavy-lidded heathen.
   “No wonder the terminal search took so long,” Jacky whispers. “Everybody looks like a terrorist.”
   He says he recognizes the tongues of Turks, Serbs, Kurds, Arabs, Berbers, and, he thinks, some Nurds-all flying to the climax of their month-long religious observance, all sweating and singing and noisily spattering each other with their various dialects and languages that sound, as Jack the language gourmet puts it, “like popcorn popping.”
   We unload a bunch at Istanbul, more than half. Oddly enough, the plane gets even noisier, swarthier. The remaining passengers look Jack and me over with new respect. “You? You go to Cairo?” We tell them yes, we are going to Cairo. They roll their eyes.
   “Ya latif! Ya latif!”
   In the air again, I ask Jack what it means. “Ya latif is the Arab equivalent for Far Out. To the devout it means, ‘Nice Allah, making for me more surprises.’ “
   As we cross the Suez we break from the clouds into open night. Out the window thunderheads stand like bored sentries, the shoulders of their rumpled uniforms laced round with rusty stars. They are rolling little balls of heat lightning back and forth, just to keep awake. They wave us on through…

   Sunday midnight. Cairo. The turmoil at the airport is unbelievable, tumultuous, teeming—that’s the word: teeming—with pilgrims coming and going and relatives, waiting for pilgrims, coming and going. Porters wait on passengers; ragged runners wait on the porters. Customs officials bustle and soldiers in old earth-colored uniforms stroll and yawn. Hustlers of every age and ilk hit you up from every angle known to man. Jacky takes the action in suave stride.
   “My year in the Near East,” he tells me, “I saw all the gimmicks.”
   We work our way through, filling forms and getting stamped, moving our bags through a circle of hands—this guy hands the stuff to this next guy who wheels it to this next guy who unloads it by the desk of this next guy—all expecting tips—until we finally make it outside into the welcome desert wind.
   The hustler’s runner’s porter who has attached himself to us runs down a taxi and hustles us in. He tells us, Do not worry, is great driver, and sends us careening terrifically down an unlit four-lane boulevard teeming from curb to curb with bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, sidehackers, motorscooters, motorbikes, buses dribbling passengers from every hole and handhold, rigs, gigs, wheelchairs, biers, wheelbarrows, wagons, pushcarts, army troop trucks where smooth-chopped soldier boys giggle and goose each other with machine guns… rickshaws, buckboards, hacks both horse– and camel– and human-drawn, donkey-riders and -pullers and -drivers, oxcarts, fruitcarts, legless beggars in thighcarts, laundry ladies with balanced bundles, a brightblack farm lad in a patched nightshirt prodding a greatballed Holstein bull (into town at midnight to what? to butcher? to trade for beans?) plus a huge honking multitude of other taxis, all careening, all without head– or taillights ever showing except for the occasional blink-blink-honk-blink signal to let the dim mass rolling ahead know that, by the Eight Cylinders of Allah, this Great Driver is coming through!
   Miraculously, we make it through the clotted city center and across the Nile to the steps of our hotel, the Omar Khayyam. The Omar Khayyam is now somewhat faded in splendor from its heyday, when its statues still had all their noses and nipples, and the lords and colonels and territorial governors still raised their lime squashes in terse toasts to the Empire that the bloody sun would never set on!
   We are shown to our room and unpack. It’s after two in the morning but the incredible hubbub from across the river calls us back out into the night. As we walk through that obsolete colonial lobby, Jack fills me in on some of the other wonderful things the British did for the Egyptians.
   “They introduced the rulers of Egypt to the idea of buying things on credit. Egypt as a result immediately went into stupendous debt, so the British were honorably obliged to come in and clear up their finances for them. This task took seventy years.
   “The British plan was to convert Egypt to a single-export economy—cotton. To encourage this they started building dams on the Nile. It bothered the British that the country got so flippin’ flooded every year.
   “Without the yearly flood that had always brought new soil to replenish the land, the Egyptians were soon dependent on wonderful fertilizers. Also, now that they didn’t have to worry about those nasty floods, the British didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t get two crops a year instead of one. Perhaps even three! The rulers, none of whom were Egyptian-born or even spoke Arabic, thought it was all wonderful. Albanians, I believe, and they were throwing incredible sums of money around, building Victorian-style mosques, importing things, and paying European creditors absurd rates of interest…
   “What happened when there were three crops a year instead of one was that the farmers spent a lot more time standing around in the irrigation ditches. So there was a tremendous increase of bilharzia, a parasite that’s spread by a little water worm that starts at the foot, so to speak, of the ladder, and climbs to the eyes. It gave Egypt the highest rate of blindness in the world. Over seventy percent of the population had it at one point.
   “Peculiarly enough, for all the modernization they were introducing to the Egyptians, the British never quite got around to building any hospitals. The mortality rate from birth to age five was about fifty percent. They have a proverb here, ‘Endurance is the best thing.’ The British helped emphasize this.”
   We have reached the other side of the Nile, where Jacky’s history of recent Cairo is drowned out by the city’s stertorous present. Nowhere else have you heard or imagined anything like it! It has a flavor all its own. Mix in your mind the deep surging roar of a petroleum riptide with the strident squealing of a teenage basketball playoff; fold in air conditioners and sprinkle with vendors’ bells and police whistles; pour this into narrow streets greased liberally with people noisily eating sesame cakes fried in olive oil, bubbling huge hookahs, slurping Turkish coffees, playing backgammon as loud as the little markers can be slapped down without breaking them—thousands of people, coughing, spitting, muttering in the shadowy debris next to the buildings, singing, standing, sweeping along in dirty damask gellabias, arguing in the traffic—millions! and all jacked up loud on caffeine. Simmer this recipe at 80 degrees at two in the morning and you have a taste of the Cairo Cacophony.
   After blocks with no sign of a letup we turn around. We’re tired. Ten thousand miles. On the bridge back, Jack is accosted by a pockmarked man with a tambourine and a purple-assed baboon on a rope.
   “Money!” the man cries, holding the tambourine out and the baboon back with a cord ringed into the animal’s lower lip. “Money! For momkey pardon me sir, for mom-key!”
   Jacky shakes his head. “No. Ana mish awez. Don’t want to see monkey dance.”
   “Momkey not dance, pardon me sir. Not dance!” He has to shout against the traffic; the baboon responds to the shout by rearing hysterically and snarling out his long golden fangs. The man whacks the shrieking beast sharply across the ear with the edge of the tambourine. “Momkey get sick! Rabies! Money”—he whacks him again, jerking his leash—“to get momkey fixed.”
   The baboon acts like his torment is all our fault. He is backing toward us, stretching the pierced lip as he tries to reach us with a hind hand. His claws are painted crimson. His ass looks like a brain tumor on the wrong end.
   “Money for mom–key! Hurr-ee!”
   Walking away, 50 piastres poorer, Jack admits that Cairo has come up with some new gimmicks since he was here ten years ago.
   As we round the end of the bridge we surprise a young sentry pissing off the abutment of his command. Fumbling with embarrassment, he folds a big black overcoat over his uniform still hanging open-flied.
   “Wel-come,” he says, shouldering his carbine. “Wel-come to Cairo… Hokay?”

   October 14, Monday morning. Jack and I are out early to look up a Dr. Ragar that Enoch of Ohio sent me to see. We find him at last, set like a smoky stone in the wicker chair of his jewelry shop, a rheumy-eyed Egyptian businessman in a sincere serge suit and black tie. We try to explain our project but he doesn’t seem as interested in digging up an undiscovered temple as in putting down his assortment of already discovered stuff. He slams a door to a glass display case.
   “Junk! I, Dr. Ragar, not lie to you. Most of it, junk! For the tourist who knows nothing, respects nothing, is this junk. But for those I see respect Egypt, I show for them the Egypt I respect. So. From what part of America you come from, my friend?”
   I tell him I’m from Oregon. Near California.
   “Yes, I know Oregon. So. From what part Oregon?”
   I tell him I live in a town called Mt. Nebo.
   “Yes. Mt. Nebo I know. I visit your state this summer. With the Rotary. See, is flag?”
   It’s true; hanging on his wall among many others is a fringed flag from the 1974 Rotary International meeting in Portland, Oregon.
   “I know your whole state. I am a doctor, archaeologist! I travel all over your beautiful state. So. What part the town you are living? East Mt. Nebo or West Mt. Nebo?”
   “Kind of in the middle,” I tell him. Mt. Nebo is your usual wide spot in a two-lane blacktop off a main interstate. “And off a little to the north.”
   “Yes. North Mt. Nebo. I know very well that section your city, North Mt. Nebo. So. Let me show you something more…”
   He checks both ways, then draws his wallet from a secret inner-serge pocket. He opens it to a card embossed with an ancient and arcane symbol.
   “You see? Also I am Shriner, thirty-two degrees. You know Masons?”
   I tell him I already knew he was a Mason—that was how Enoch knew of him, through a fraternal newspaper—and add that my father is also a Mason of the same degree, now kind of inactive.
   “Brother!” He claps his palm tight to mine and looks deep into my soul. He’s got a gaze like visual bad breath. “Son of a brother is brother! Come. For you I not show this junk. Come down street next door to my home for some hot tea where it is more quiet. You like Egyptian tea, my brothers? Egyptian essences? Not drugstore perfumes, but the true essences, you know? Of the lotus flower? The jasmine? Come. Because your father, I do you a favor; I give you that scarab you favored.”
   He clasps my hand again, pressing the gift into my palm. I tell him that’s not necessary, but he shakes his head.
   “Not a word, Brother. Some day, you do something for me. As Masons say, ‘One stone at a time.’ “
   He holds my hand, boring closer with sincerity. I wonder if there is some kind of eye gargle for cases like this. I try to steer us back to archaeology.
   “Speaking of stones, doctor, you know the legend of the missing Giza top stone? Where the Temple of Records is supposed to be hidden?”
   He laughs darkly. “Who could better know?” he asks, pulling me after him along the sidewalk. “But first, come, both of you; for refreshment.”
   Jacky follows but he isn’t to be so easily distracted. “Then you’ve heard of this place, doctor? This hidden temple?”
   “Dr. Ragar?—Archaeologist, Shriner?—hear of the Hidden Temple of Records?” He laughs again. Like that flag from Portland, there is in his laugh a dark insinuation that keeps you guessing. “Everybody hear of the Hidden Temple. Hear this, hear that… but The Truth? Who knows The Truth?”
   He stops and holds his Masonic ring out for me to see, not Jacky. “We of the Brotherhood know The Truth, which we cannot by oath tell the uninitiated. But you, my brother son-of-a-brother, to you I can maybe show a little light not allowed others, eh?”
   I nod, and he nods back, tugging me on a few steps more to a narrow doorfront.
   “First here we are at my factory with excellent spice tea… white sugar—none for me, I must apologize; this holy fast—then we talk. Ibrahim!” he shouts, unlocking the heavy door. “Tea for my friends from America!”
   We enter a smaller, fancier version of the other shop. It is hung clear to the ceiling fan with old rugs and tapestry. This muffles the noise of downtown Cairo to a medium squawl. But good Christ, is it stuffy. Doctor turns on the fan but it can barely budge the swaddled air.
   “So. While we wait my cousin bring the tea you will smell the true essence of the Nile lotus which no woman can resist.”
   Jacky ends up buying $50 worth of perfume for the girls back at Rolling Stone. All I get from the wise doctor, besides my free scarab, is the use of his telephone to call the American University of Cairo. I leave a message for Mr. Muldoon Greggor to please contact me at the Hotel Omar Khayyam. After an afternoon in the essence factory I can tell that if you want some straight information here in Cairo, you’re going to have to see an American.
   Walking back to our hotel we pass a street display of the ‘73 war, the campaign when Egypt crossed the Suez and kicked Jew ass and got away with it. In the center of the display is a two-story cement foot about to crunch down on a Star of David. I want to shoot a picture of it, but everybody watching makes me nervous about this damn big negative-print Polaroid.
   An intense young vet of that war leads us personally through the exhibit, pointing out strategic battle zones and fortifications in the big sand model he has built. He is passionately patriotic. He points to a bazooka shell propped against the sand that depicts the Bar-Lev, the Israeli version of the Maginot line.
   “That missile? Made in America. These captured guns? Also American.”
   His eyes are hard when he says these things to me, but there is no animosity. Even when he speaks of the Jews (pointing out their faces in the photographs so I can tell the bedraggled Israeli captives from the dust-ridden Egyptian captors), his voice holds no blame. He talks of the Israeli soldiers the way a player from one team speaks of his rivals across the river, with respect. And such close rivals, I realize, looking at the way Fate and the United Nations have placed Cairo and Jerusalem within a jet’s moment from each other. No wonder the military show on every street.
   Returning over the bridge I see again our little soldier standing shabbily at guard beside his tent and his haphazard pile of sandbags. We salute and I march toward the hotel, feeling a new familiarity with the political situation.

   October 15, Tuesday. Still unable to begin my article. Lots of walking in town. There are some hard sights, putting my put-down of our pampered lifestyle to the test: childworn wives leading patched families past the fruit stands to the mildewed piles of cheaper foods in the rear; a dog peeled to the bone with terminal mange, gnawing on a Kotex; a cryptic black lump in the middle of the sidewalk, about the size of a seven-year-old, all balled up with a black blanket pulled tight over everything except the upturned palm stuck on the end of a withered stick; whole families living in gutted shells of Packards and Buicks and Cadillacs biodegrading against the curbs…
   “Jacky, what this town needs is some New York tow-away cops. Keep the riffraff on the run.”
   And always the smell of urine, and the unhealthy stools half-hidden everywhere. As Cairo has a distinctive and subtle recipe of sound all its own, so it has its odor.
   All in all, it’s awful to behold. I carry the special Polaroid I bought in New York with me everywhere, but as yet I’m too squeamish to point it at this hard privation. I remember an argument I had with Annie Liebovitz: “Listen, Annie. I don’t want any pictures of me shaving, shitting, or strung out!” Neither would I want any shots of my teeth rotted away, or my eyes gummed over with yellow growths, or my limbs twisted and tortured.

   Tuesday night or Wednesday morn. Today is the last day of the Ramadan fast. Christmas in Cairo. Like New York, the power of this city is overwhelming, a presence too frightful to face. Unlike New York, though, the power of Cairo is generated by more than the daily flow of liquid assets through economic turbines. Cairo’s main current streams from its past, out of a wealth that flows toward something yet-to-be—a power of impending power. This is a city of influence since before New York was a land mass, a place of ancient records since before the Old Testament was in rough draft. Somewhere between the brittle no-magic nationalism of the young patriot in the park and the shopworn mysticism of the Illuminoid in serge, this larval account is swelling.
   Even now the cannon fires—the signal for the last day of Ramadan. The caterwaul of traffic politely drops so the amplified chants can be heard from the minarets on this night of nights.
   It gets quiet. You can hear the responses of the faithful in the scattered Moslem night, the prayers rising from the mosques and sidewalks. This afternoon I saw a streetsweeper prostrate himself alongside the pile of dirt he was herding, answering the call from Mecca with cabs swerving all around him.
   Ye gods, listen! It spirals louder yet. Let me out of this moldering room! I’ll take my pen and camera and face this thing while it’s still damp with dawn.
   I hurry past third-rate Theseus and his plaster legions, through the lofty lobby where chandeliers hang from ceilings infested with gilt cupids, around the praying gateman outside up the sidewalk to the belly-high cement wall that runs along the steep bank of the Nile.
   I put my notebook on the wall. The prayer is still going on but the city’s business has stopped holding still for it. Engines sing; brakes cry; horns tootle; head– and taillights blink off and on. Long strings of colored lights go looping along the streets, past elaborate cafe neons and simple firepots cooking kebobs on the curb. In the minarets the chant leaders are vying with the city and each other in amplified earnest, as thousands upon thousands of lesser voices try their best to keep up.
   It’s windy, the historic wind that blows against the current so the Nile boatmen of eons can sail south upstream and then drift back downstream north. A dog in the back of a passing pickup barks. The soldier comes out of his tent and sees me at the wall writing in my notebook. He turns up the collar of his long overcoat and comes toward me with a flashlight. He carries it with his hand over the lighted end so it is like a little lamp glow between us. We smile and nod at each other. This close I notice the bayonet on his shouldered carbine is rusty and bent.
   The din across the river jumps even higher in response to the chanting dawn. We turn back toward the city just in time to see first the fluorescent tubes across the bridge, then the landing lamps on the opposite bank, then every light in Cairo blow out—zam! Allah be praised! We turn to each other again, eyebrows uplifted. He whistles a low note of applause to the occasion: “Ya latif!” I nod agreement.
   The amplifiers have been silenced by the power overload, but the chanting in the streets hasn’t stopped. In fact, it is rising to the challenge of the phenomenon. Wireless worship. A voice spun from fibers strong as the fabled Egyptian cotton—longest staples in the world!—spindling out of millions of throats, into threads, cords, twining east toward that dark meteorite that draws all strands of this faith together like the eye of a needle, or a black hole.
   The soldier watches me write, kindly leaking a little light onto my notebook. “Tisma, ya khawaga,” he says. “Een-glees?”
   I tell him no, not English. “American.”
   “Good.” He nods. “Merican.”
   My throat is dry from the wind and the moment. I take my canteen from my shoulder and drink. I offer it to the soldier. After a polite sip he whistles a comment on the quality of such a canteen.
   “Merican army, yes?”
   “Yeah. Army surplus.” Ex-marine friend Frank Dobbs had helped me pick it out, along with my desert boots and pith helmet. “United States Army surplus.”
   He hands back the canteen and salutes. I salute him back. He gestures toward my notebooks, questioning. I point to the sound from across the river, cup my ear. I lift my nose and smell the Nile wind, then scribble some words. Finally I make a circle with my hand, taking in the river, the sky, the holy night. He nods, excited, and lays his closed fist on his heart.
   “Egypt?” he asks.
   “Yes,” I affirm, duplicating his gesture with my fist. “Egypt.”
   And all the lights of Cairo come back on.
   We lift our eyebrows to each other again, as the amplifiers skirl back up, and the lights and the traffic join again in noisy battle. When the soldier and I unclench our fists there’s maybe even tears. I fancy that I see the face of Egypt’s rebirth, charged both with a new pride and the old magic, silhouetted innocent and wise against that skyline of historic minarets and modern highrises—the whole puzzle. I must get a picture! I’m trying to dig the Polaroid out of the bag when I notice the light in my face.
   “No.” He is wagging the light from side to side. “No photo.” I figure it must be some religious taboo, like certain natives guarding their souls, like me with Annie Liebovitz.
   “I can dig it. I’ll just snap a shot of that skyline dawn across the Nile.”
   “No photo!”
   “Hey, I wasn’t aiming anywhere near you.” I start to stomp away, down the wall. “I’ll shoot from somewhere else if you’re so—”
   “No photo!”
   Slowly I take my eye from the viewfinder. The flashlight has been put aside on the wall to leave both hands available for the carbine. Too late I realize that it is the bridge he is guarding, not his soul.
   I put the camera away, apologizing. He stands looking at me, suspicious and insulted. There is nothing more for us to say, even if we could understand each other. Finally, to regain a more customary relationship, he puts two fingers to his lips and asks, “Seegrat?”
   I tell him I don’t smoke. He thinks I’m lying, sore about the picture. There is nothing to say. I sigh. The puzzle of Cairo shuffles off to stand in token attention on the abutment, his collar up and his back turned stiffly toward me.
   The light is coming fast through the mist. The wind dies away for a moment and a sharp reek fogs up around me. Looking down I see I have stomped into a puddle of piss.

   October 16. The Ramadan holiday. Erstwhile Egyptologist Muldoon Greggor calls, tells us to come over to his place; he’ll go with us to the pyramid tonight after his classes.
   “Check out of that morgue right now!” he shouts through the phone static. “I’ve reserved rooms at the Mena House!”
   So it’s outta that rundown Rudyard Kipling pipedream through the surging holiday streets up seven floors to the address Greggor gives us. A shy girl lets us in a ghetto penthouse. Jacky and I spend the rest of the afternoon drinking the man’s cold Stella beers, watching the multitudes below parade past in their gayest Ramadan gladrags. The shadows have stretched out long before Muldoon Greggor comes rushing in with a load of books. We barely shake hands before he hustles us down to catch a cab.
   “Mena House, Pyramid Road! We want to get there before dark.”
   So it is at dusty sundown that I see it at last: first from the window of the cab; then closer, from the hotel turnaround; then through the date palms walking up the hill; then—Great God in Heaven Whatever Your Name or Names!—here it is before me: mankind’s mightiest wedge, sliced perfect from a starblue sky—the Great Pyramid of Giza.

III: Inside the Throne

   Imagine the usual tourist approaching for his first hit: relieved to be finally off the plane and out of that airport, a bit anxious on the tour bus through that crazy Cairo traffic but still adequately protected by the reinforced steel of the modern machine, laughing and pointing with his fellow tour members at the incongruous panorama of the Giza outskirts—donkeys drawing broken-down Fiats, mud huts stuck like dirt-dauber nests to the sides of the most modern condominiums—“Pathetic, but you gotta admit, Cynthia: very picturesque”—fiddling with his camera, tilting back in his seat a little sleepy from the sun; when, suddenly, the air brakes grab and the door hisses open and he is ejected from his climatized shell into the merciless maw of the parking lot at the bottom of Pyramid Hill.
   A hungry swarm of his first real Egyptians comes clamoring after him: buggy drivers and camel hasselers and purveyors of the finest Arabian saddle steeds. And guides? Lord, the guides! of every conceit and canon:
   “Wel-come, mister, wel-come; you are fine, yes?”
   The handshake, the twinkle, the ravenous cumin-winded come-on:
   “You like Cairo, yes? You like Egypt? You like Egyptian people? You like to see authentic hidden mummy the late King Koo–Foo? I am a guide!”
   Or, even worse, the Not-Guides:
   “Oh, pardon sir if I cannot help but notice you are being bothered by these phony fellaheen. Understand please; I am not a guide, being official watchman, in employ the Department of Antiquities in Cairo. You come with me. I keep these nuisances away from your holiday. I am Not-Guide!”
   Our poor pilgrim fights his way through the swarm up the curving walk to the aouda (a big limestone lot in front of the northern base of the pyramid, swarming with more of the same), presses on to the monstrous stack of stone blocks which are perched all over with more damned guides and Not-Guides grinning like gargoyles… pays his piastres for the tickets that allow him and his nose-wrinkled wife to crawl up a cramped and airless torture chamber to a stone room about the size of the men’s room of the bus terminal back home—and smellier!—then hightails it back to the relief of the bus:
   “But tell me the truth, Cyn, wasn’t that thing unbelievable big like nothing you ever saw in your life? I can’t wait to see these shots projected on the screen at the lodge.”
   Unbelievable big doesn’t come close. It is inconceivably big, incomprehensibly big, brutal against the very heavens it’s so big. If you come after the rush hour and are allowed to stroll unsolicited to it, you witness a phenomenon as striking as its size. As you cross the limestone lot the huge triangle begins to elongate into your peripheries—to flatten. The base line stretches, the sloping sides lengthen, and those sharpening corners—the northwest corner in the corner of your right eye; the northeast corner in your left—begin to wrap around you!
   Consequently the vertex is getting shorter, the summit angle flatter; when you finally reach the bottom course of base stones and raise your eyes up its fifty-degree face even the two-dimensional triangle has disappeared! The plane of it diminishes away with such perfection that it is difficult to conceive of it as a plane. When it was still dressed smooth in its original casing stones the effect must have been beyond the senses’ ability to resist; it must have turned into a seamless white line—a phenomenon of the first dimension.
   Even in its present peeled condition, the illusion still disorients you. You tell your senses, “Look maybe I ain’t seen the other sides but I did see this one so it’s gotta be at least a plane.” But planes are something we know, like airfields and shopping center parking lots, hence horizontal. This makes it seem that you could walk right out on it if you just lean back enough to get on the perpendicular. Ooog. It makes you stumble and reel…
   To calm my stomach I leaned against one of the casing stones. It was smooth to my cheek; it made me feel cool, and a little melancholy.
   “It’s sad, isn’t it?” Muldoon said. “Seeing the old place so rundown and stripped.”
   Muldoon Greggor wasn’t the tweedy old Egyptologist we had expected. He was a little past twenty, wearing patched Levi’s and a T-shirt, and a look in his eyes that still smoldered from some psychedelic scorcher that had made him swear off forever.
   “It’s eroded more in the six centuries since the Arabs stripped it than it did in the forty centuries before—if you accept the view of the accepted Egyptologists—or in the hundred and seventy centuries—if you go for the Cayce readings.”
   “Sad,” I agreed. “How could they do it?”
   “They figured they needed it.” Jacky came to the defense of those long-gone Arabs. “For Allah.”
   “More than just sad,” I kept on. “It’s insulting… to whoever composed this postcard in stone, and took the trouble to send it to us.
   “The Arabs needed the stones to rebuild Cairo. Remember Nasser’s construction of the High Dam?”
   Jacky was talking about Nasser’s flooding of architectural treasures with the construction of a hydroelectric dam. For the sake of the power-poor millions I had seen in Cairo, I was forced to admit that I would have done the same.
   “Removing the casing stones is different,” Muldoon said. “It’s like a goal-tending foul committed before the rule was enacted. Now we don’t know; was the shot going to go through or not? Those whoevers that built this thing were trying to transmit information important to everybody, for all time. Like how to square the circle or find the Golden Rectangle. None of the other pyramids convey any of this. Their message is pretty ego-involved, saying essentially: ‘Attention, Future: Just a line to remind you that King Whatnuton was the Alltime Greatest Leader, Warrior, Thinker, and Effecter of Stupendous Accomplishments, a few of which are depicted on the surrounding walls. His wife wasn’t half bad either.’ There’s none of that around the Great Pyramid. No bragging hieroglyphs. A much more universal message is suggested.”
   “Maybe,” Jacky said, “it isn’t obliterated at all. Maybe in the intervening eons since they sent it we have simply forgotten how to read.”
   “Or maybe this was just a decoy,” I said, “for the Arabs. Maybe the message was never in there in the first place.”
   I can maybe with anybody.
   A patter of gravel drew our attention up the face. A small figure had come out of the entrance tunnel and was working his way down to importune us.
   “Come on,” Muldoon said. “There’s a place back behind the southern face where they don’t find you.”
   Jacky and I followed around the northeastern corner and along the western base to the rear. It was darker, the lights of Cairo being blocked now by the huge structure. Carefully Muldoon led us into the excavated ruins of a minor funerary temple located between the rear of the Great Pyramid and the eastern face of its companion giant, the Pyramid of Chephren.
   “See that black ball down there?”
   Muldoon pointed off down the hill in the direction of the Giza village. I could make out a spheroid shape a quarter mile away.
   “That’s the back of the Sphinx’s head.” He found a seat facing the ominous silhouette.
   Jacky located a spot where he could look longingly east toward the twinkle of Cairo After Hours. I picked a rock with a backrest aimed so I could see the whole dim trio of pyramids, called in tour booklets “The Giza Group.” Check the picture on a pack of Camels.
   Far to the west is little Mykerinos. Much nearer is Chephren. With a crown of casing stones still in place on its summit, Chephren is almost the size of its famous brother. It is in fact some few feet farther above sea level, having been built on a slightly higher plateau than the Great Pyramid. It looks every bit as massive. But —as Muldoon mentioned about the other ruins and edifices—Chephren just doesn’t have the chutzpah. The little crown of casing stones that eluded the Arabs actually gives it a quality slightly comic, like a cartoon peak sculpted by a Disneyland architect. Oh, it’s also unbelievably big, Chephren is; and you are amazed by the manipulation of all that masonry, and gratified that its top is still there and cased; but it does not hold you. Your eye keeps being drawn back to the topless headliner, the star.…
   “What’s that dark slot?” I ask Muldoon. “Is there a back door in the Great Pyramid?”
   “That’s what Colonel Howard-Vyse thought, about 1840. He was the guy that blasted open the chambers above the King’s Chamber, you know, and disclosed that damned cartouche of Khufu.”
   It’s this name “Khufu” found scratched in an upper attic that goes hardest against the Cayce readings.
   “The Colonel was big on blasting, and he had this Arab working for him named Dued who apparently lived on blasting powder and hashish. Years of working with these two combustibles had made Dued deaf but had given him some fine theories about excavation.
   Like Vyse, he had a theory that there was another entrance, and he believed that, with the proper combination of his favorite ingredients, he could find it.”
   The wind had dropped and it had grown very still. For a moment I thought I saw something coming around the southwestern corner toward us, but it vanished in that fathomless shadow.
   “One of those blasts in the upper chambers short-fused and the Colonel thought he had lost a prize powder monkey. But after a couple days Dued woke up, with a vision—that there was a back door, situated exactly opposite the front door. The simplicity of the vision interested the good Colonel.”
   I noticed all the dogs in the village below had stopped barking.
   “Not that there are any other southern entrances in any of the other shitload of pyramids, of course, but old Howard-Vyse thought that, just to be on the safe side, they’d go around back and check… knock a couple of kegs’ worth.”
   “Did he find anything?” Jacky wanted to know.
   “Just more rock. It is called ‘Vyse’s Resultless Hole.’ “
   “Wouldn’t ya know it,” Jacky said.
   “He fired Dued and moved his operations to Mykerinos, where he found a sarcophagus that he claimed held the pharaoh’s mummy, but as luck or fate would have it the boat sank on the way back to England and Howard-Vyse lost his trophy. All he had to show for five years of digging and blasting is that resultless hole there and those damned upper chambers. One of which was filled with a mysterious black dust.”
   “Yeah? What was it?”
   “When science progressed enough to analyze it, it was found to be the bodies of millions of dead bugs.”
   “Terrific.” Jacky stood up and straightened his necktie. “I’m inspired to walk back to the hotel and kill mosquitoes. Let me know if you turn up anything resultful.”
   After Jacky moped off, Muldoon painted in some of his past for me. Raised by parents both ecclesiastical and into the Edgar Cayce readings, Muldoon had grown up pretty blase concerning theories arcane. Enoch of Ohio was his first real turn-on.
   “He came to town and set up his tent. During the day he did horoscopes and tattoos, then at night he’d have these meetings. He’d go into a trance and answer questions, as ‘Rey-Torl.’ Rey-Torl used to be a cobbler in Mu, made Mu shoes, then his business went under so he moved on to Atlantis and became an unlicensed genetic surgeon. He eventually got run out of town and ended up in Egypt, helping Ra-ta build the pyramid.”
   “Sounds hot. Did Rey tell you any good dirt?”
   “Not really. The same thing that Cayce and all the other prophecy brokers say: that the Piscean Age is flopping toward the end of its two-thousand-year run and the Grand Finale is coming up soon, and that it’s going to happen in this last quarter of this century. Rey-Torl called it Apodosis. Enoch called it the Shit Storm.”
   “The last quarter?”
   “Give or take a couple of decades. But soon. That’s why the Cayce people place so much importance on locating that secret hall. It’s supposed to contain records of previous shit storms plus some helpful hints on how to survive them. However—”
   I had the feeling this wasn’t the sort of stuff Muldoon talked about with fellow Egyptology students at the university.
   “—everything has to be exactly right before you can find it: you, the time, the position of the earth, that damned Cat’s Paw.”
   Looking off toward the black lump of the Sphinx’s head he quoted by heart the most famous of the Cayce predictions:


   “‘This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line of the shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx, that was later set as the sentinel or guard, which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx’s paw (right paw) until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man’s experience. Between, then, the Sphinx and the river.


   It was the same prophecy that had drawn me to the pyramid by way of Virginia Beach. Everybody at the Cayce library was familiar with it. Whenever I mentioned that I was on my way to Egypt the usual response from blue-haired old ladies and long-haired ex-hippies alike was, “Gonna look for the Hall of Records, huh?”
   “And the Sphinx isn’t the only guard,” Muldoon went on. “The readings mentioned whole squadrons of ‘sentries’ or ‘keepers’ or ‘watchmen’ picketed around the hidden hall. All around here, actually. This whole plateau is a geodetic phenomenon protected by a corps of special spooks.”
   I shivered from the wind. Muldoon stood up. “I’ve got to head back to Cairo if I’m going to make my eight o’clock tomorrow.” He snapped his Levi’s jacket closed, still looking off at the Sphinx. “A woman from the A.R.E. did come over and try, you know? After a lot of rigamarole and red tape they actually let her drill a hole in the front of the right paw…”
   “Did she find anything?”
   “Nothing. How she chose that one spot out of the mile or so between the paw and the river she never disclosed, but it was solid rock as far down as she drilled. She was very disappointed.”
   “What about those ghostly guards, did they smite her?”
   “That was not disclosed either. She did, however, end up marrying the Czechoslovakian ambassador.”
   Hands in his pockets, Muldoon headed off into the shadows, saying he’d see me “bukra fi’l mish-mish.” It was a phrase you hear a lot in Cairo. “It’s the Arabic version of mañana,” I remembered Jacky had said, “only less definite. It means Tomorrow, when it’s the season of the apricot.’ “
   Left alone, I tried to recall what I knew about geodetic phenomena. I remembered my trip to Stonehenge, watching the winter solstice sun rise up the slot between those two rocks directly in front of me, knowing that exactly half a year later it would slide up between those other two rocks exactly to my right, and how the phenomenon forced you to strain your concept of where you are to include the tilt of our axis, the swing of our orbit around the sun, the singular position on our globe of this circle of prehistoric rocks—how it made you appreciate being in the only place on earth where those two solstice suns would rise thus.
   I know that the pyramid was built in such a place—one of the acupuncture points of the physical planet—but no matter how I tried I couldn’t get that planetary orientation that Stonehenge gives you.
   For one thing I was still disoriented by that feeling of dimensions dropping away—everything still seemed flat, even the back of the Sphinx’s head—and for another, I couldn’t quite convince myself that I was alone. There seemed to be someone still close, and coming closer! The two hundred Egyptian pound notes in my pocket were suddenly bleeping like a beacon and I was beginning to glance about for a weapon when, down the hill, the Sphinx’s whole head lit up and proclaimed in a voice like Orson Welles to the tenth power:
   “I… am… the… Sphinx. I am… very old.”
   It boomed this out over the accompanying strains of Verdi’s Aida, as Chephren lit up a glorious green, and little Mykerinos glowed blue, and the Great Pyramid blazed an appropriate gold. It was the Sound and Light show, put on for the benefit of an outdoor audience at the bottom of the hill. From the tombs and mastabas everywhere banks of concealed floodlights illuminated the pyramids in slowly shifting hues while the Sphinx ran it all down in grandly amplified English. I just happened to hit it English night. The other performances rotate through French, German, Russian, and Arabic.
   In this golden glow I suddenly saw the little figure I had sensed, hunkered on a limestone block about thirty yards away, watching me. Taking advantage of the light, I got up and headed immediately back around the Great Pyramid in long strides. I didn’t turn until I had reached the road. He was right behind me.
   “Good evening, my friend. A very nice evening, yes?” He hurried the last few steps to fall in beside me. He wore a blue gellabia and scuffed black oxfords without socks. “My name is Marag.”
   I came to know that it was spelled that way but it was pronounced with a soft “g” so it rhymed with collage, only with the accent on the first syllable: Mah-razhhh.
   “Excuse me but I hear you wish to buy some hashish? Five pounds, this much.”
   He made a little circle with his thumb and finger and smiled through it. His face was polished teak, alert and angled, with a neat black mustache over tiny white teeth. His eyes flashed from their webwork of amused wrinkles. An old amusement. I judged him to be at least forty, as easily seventy, and not quite as tall as my thirteen-year-old son. Hurrying along beside me he seemed to barely touch the ground. When at last I relinquished the five-pound note and shook his hand to seal our deal, his fingers sifted through my grip like so much sand.
   There’s a little outdoor restaurant at the edge of the aouda where I sipped Turkish coffee and watched the pyramid change colors until the lights went out and the Sphinx shut up, then I paid my tab and left. I had waited nearly an hour. He had said twenty minutes. But I knew the rules, they’re international: whether you’re in Tangiers or Tijuana, North Beach or Novato, you don’t get up off the bread till you see the score. Twenty minutes ... in the season of the apricots.
   But just as I came out of the restaurant I saw a little blue figure come whisking around up the shadowy trail from the village. Panting and sweating, he slipped five little packages into my hand, each about the size of a .45 cartridge and wrapped in paper tape. I started digging at one with my thumbnail.
   “I had to go more far than I think,” he apologized. “Eh? Is good? Five pieces, five pounds?”
   I realized he was telling me that the score had cost him exactly what I had put out, none left over for his efforts. His face sparkled up at me. Reaching again for my wallet, I also realized that he could have packaged five goat turds.
   He saw my hesitation. “As you wish.” He shrugged. I gave him two American bucks, worth about a pound and a half on the black market. After examining the two greenbacks he grinned to let me know he appreciated my logic if not my generosity.
   “Any night, this corner. Ask for Marag. Everybody know where to find Marag.” Reaching out, he sifted his hand again through mine, his eyes glittering. “And your name?”
   I told him, somewhat suspicious still: was he going to burn me, bust me, or both, as the dealers were known to do in Tijuana?
   “D’bree? D’bree?” Trying the accent at each end amused him. “Good night to you, Mr. D’bree.”
   Then was whisked back into the shadows.
   Back in the hotel room I found the little packets were bound so tight I had to use my Buck knife. I finally shelled out a tiny brown cartridge ball of the softest, smoothest, sweetest hash I had ever tasted, or maybe ever will, the way Lebanon’s going crazy.
   It is at this point my journal resumes:

   October 17, Thursday. First day at the Mena House. Great place. After a huge breakfast and lots of strong coffee we head up the hill. The holiday crowd has arrived and are mounting the great hill from all sides like a gaudy herd of homecoming ants. But not all the way to the top. They climb a few courses and sit among the stones and eat pickled fish and fruit, or mill around the aouda below, eyes eager for action. They are drawn to Jacky and me as though we were sweating honey.
   Impossible to take a photo and damn near as hard to write. They love to watch me with my notebook, watch my hand drag the pen across the page whereas their hands push the script, gouging the calligraphy from right to left as into a tablet of clay.
   Jacky and I climb to a niche about twenty-five courses high and watch the multitudes throng kaleidoscopic up the hill.
   “I was here after Ramadan ten years ago,” Jacky marvels, “and it was nothing like this. It’s the victory last year against the Israelis. They feel proud enough to come face this thing.”
   A cop in a white uniform comes clambering up the stones, belt in his hand. He lays into the kids who have been climbing up to observe us. They flee screeching with delight. He stops, breathing hard. Jacky asks him why such a fuss about the kids. He explains in Arabic, then heads off after another batch of climbing kids, leather belt twirling.
   “He says a kid fell yesterday and died. Today they got ten cops patrolling each face.”
   “I can’t see that it’s that dangerous. Some kid just horsing around, probably.”
   “No. He said there has been a kid killed on the pyramid on Ramadan feast every year for thirty years. That last year there were nine killed. He respectfully requests that we move down or go inside before we lure any others to their doom.”
   At the hole the tickets are 50 piastres apiece. This is the tunnel known as El-Mamoun’s. We move in as far as the granite plugs and wait while the stairs empty of sweat-soaked pilgrims streaming down wild-eyed. You must remember: these are all Egyptians, not tourists, and it is probably 90° outside compared to the famous constant 68° you know it to be inside. Nobody outside was sweating.
   You also know from your research that the ascending passage is 26° 17’, up a tunnel about four foot square. But you have no notion how steep this is, or how small, until halfway up another stream coming down has to push past you. No wonder the sweat and wild eyes. It’s too small a place for this many people! Not enough oxygen and nobody in charge and everybody knows it, just like those early rock shows—nobody in control.
   Pushing hysteria upward, you break at last into the lofty relief of the Grand Gallery. The crowd behind goes gasping on up. You know, though, that you only have to continue on horizontally through the spur tunnel to the Queen’s Chamber to find fresh air. None of the natives seem so researched.
   “Ahhh,” breathes Jacky. “Unbelievable. And none of the other pyramids have ventilation like this?”
   “Nope. That’s why this one is considered to be maybe something other than a tomb!”
   “Right. The dead don’t need ventilation.”
   “I think it was another Howard-Vyse breakthrough. He figured because there were vents at these points in the King’s Chamber above, maybe there was something similar here in the Queen’s Chamber. So he calculated where they ought to be, gave a good knock, and there they were, within inches of coming all the way through.”
   “Weird.”
   “Not the weirdest, though. Look here…” I run my hand over the wall, like I’m showing a classmate around the family attic. “This stuff on the walls and ceiling? It’s salt, and only in the Queen’s Chamber and passages—crystallized sea salt.”
   “How do the Egyptologists explain that?”
   “They don’t. There’s no way to explain it except that this whole chamber was once filled with seawater… by some ancient plumber for some unknown reason, or by a tidal wave.”
   “Let’s go.” Jacky has had enough. “Let’s get outta here back to the hotel for a sensible beer.”
   “One more stop,” I reassure him, ducking back into the passage out of the Queen’s Chamber.
   We reach the Grand Gallery and resume our climb, still as steep, but there is nothing oppressive in this vaulted room. More than ever I am assured that these were initiatory walkways; when lit by torches instead of these fluorescent tubes, the Grand Gallery would appear to lift eternally above one’s head.
   Before we enter the King’s Chamber I have Jacky stand and feel the protruding Boss Stone right where I know it to be in the pitch-dark little phonebooth-sized foyer. “In case the Bureau of Standards ever goes belly up, here is the true inch.”
   We duck on into the King’s Chamber. The crowd of pilgrims are laughing and boo-boo-booming like frogs in a barbershop quartet contest. We walk past them to the coffer.
   “It’s carved from a solid piece of red granite. In angles so accurate and dimensions so universal that if every other structure were swept from the earth it would still be possible for some smart-ass cave kid with a mathematical bent to arrive at damn near all we know about plane and solid geometry, just by studying this granite box.”
   We lean and look into its depths as the crowd goes boom boom BOOM boom ahee hee!—mixing laughter and rhythm and Arabic discord until the room rings like the midnight streets.
   “They’ve captured the essence of Cairo,” Jacky admits, “right down to the smell.”
   When our eyes become accustomed to the gloom of that empty stone sepulcher we both realize that the bottom is about an inch deep in piss. Boom boom BOOM ahee aheeee… To stave off delirium I take out my Hohner. Startled by German harmonics, the crowd becomes silent. Jacky plucks at my sleeve but I keep blowing. They all stand staring as I blow myself dizzy, filling the stone vault with good ol’ G chords, and C’s and F’s. I’ll show you ignorant pissants how a Yankee pilgrim can play and boom-boom both! I’m clear into the chorus before I realize what I’m singing:
   “Shall we gather by the rih-ver, the beautiful the beautiful the rih-hih-verrr…”
   Stare away! What beautiful river did you think it was, you Moslems, you Methodists, you Bible-belters—the Mississippi? The Congo? The Ohio?
   “Yes we’ll gather by the rih-ver—”
   The Amazon? The Volga? The Yangtze? With that ancient picture on the back of your dilapidated dollar and that newborn profit in your bullrushes, what the hell river did you think it was?
   “—that flo-o-ohs by the throw-own… of God.” Jacky hauls me out before I start preaching. By the time we’re back through the Grand Gallery my head has stopped spinning but my insides are churning like a creekful of backslid Baptists.
   “You look bad,” Jacky says.
   “I feel bad.”
   We just make it into the open. To the applause of the whole aouda I toss my great Mena House breakfast all over the face of the Great Pyramid.

   October 18. Sick unto death. The Curse of the Pharaohs pins me sweating to the bed. I read some awful holocaust theories, have horrible dreams of humanity backsliding forever.

   October 19. I try to climb back up to the thing and am again wiped out with a high fever. More reading and dreams. Extrapolating. Okay, let’s say it’s coming: the Shit Storm. Let’s say the scientists have definitely spotted it, like in When Worlds Collide. People everywhere are soiling their laundry, rushing around in circles, demanding somebody do something. Do what? Send an elite sperm bank into space, as Dr. Leary proposes in Terra II, thus giving the strain at least a shot in the dark?
   Accept it as the Will of Allah and let it wash over us?
   Try to outswim it?
   But wait. There isn’t any real evidence for the need of a lifeboat to preserve the species. The Shit Storm has happened many times and Homo sapiens has hung in there. What is really in jeopardy is not our asses, or our souls. It’s our civilization.
   Imagine, after some sudden absolute-near-annihilation (they’ve found mastodons frozen with fresh flowers in their mouths—that sudden)—that there are little clots of survivors clinging to remote existences. Imagine how they struggle to preserve certain basic tricks. How would we hang on to let’s say for example pasteurization? It’s hard to explain bacteriology to a caveful of second-generation survivors, even with the aid of some surviving libraries. Rituals would have to come first.
   “Remember, boil–um that milk! Boil–um that milk!”
   “Will do, Wise Old Grandsir. Boil milk!” They break into the milk song: “Boil–um that milk an’ kill–um that bug that nobody see but make–um you sick.”
   The libraries exist! Old rituals hold clues to their whereabouts. Old chants! Chambers! Charts—!
   At this point Jacky Cherry breaks into my fever in a fervor. “Muldoon’s here! He’s found somebody who says he knows where it is! He’s going to lead us out there tonight.”
   “Knows what?” I rally a bit from my stupor. “Who?”
   “A local visionary. He had a vision three Americans were looking for a secret hall so he drew a map to it!”
   “A map?”
   “To an underground hall! The guy must have something on the ball to know we were looking for one, sounds to me like.”
   Sounds to me like Jacky is getting a little desperate over the flak from the home office about the resultless state of our expedition, but I dress and totter out to the street. Muldoon is negotiating with a little man in a blue gellabia.
   It is Marag.