Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear
by Grandma Whittier

   Don’t tell me you’re the only youngsters never heard tell of the time the bear came to Topple’s Bottom? He was a huge high-country bear and not only huge but horrible huge. And hairy, and hateful, and hungry! Why, he almost ate up the entire Bottom before Tricker finally cut him down to size, just you listen and see if he didn’t…
   It was a fine fall morning, early and cold and sweet as cider. Down in the Bottom the only one up and about was old Papa Sun, and him just barely. Hanging in the low limbs of the crabapple trees was still some of those strings of daybreak fog called “haint hair” by them that believes in such. The night shifts and the day shifts were shifting very slow. The crickets hadn’t put away their fiddles. The spiders hadn’t shook the dew out of their webs yet. The birds hadn’t quite woke up and the bats hadn’t quite gone to sleep. Nothing was a-move except one finger of sun slipping soft up the knobby trunk of the hazel. It was one of the prettiest times of day at one of the prettiest times of year, and all the Bottom folk were content to let it come about quiet and slow and savory.
   Tricker the Squirrel was awake but he wasn’t about. He was lazying in the highest hole in his cottonwood highrise with just his nose poking from his pillow of a tail, dreaming about flying. Every now and again he would twinkle one bright eye out through his dream and his puffy pillowhair to check the hazel tree way down below to see if any of the nuts was ready for reaping. He had to admit they were all pretty near prime. All day yesterday he had watched those nuts turning softly browner and browner and, come sundown, had judged them just one day short of perfect.
   “And that means if I don’t get them today, tomorrow they are very apt to be just one day past perfect.”
   So he was promising himself “Just as quick as that sunbeam touches the first hazelnut I get right on the job.” Then, after a couple of winks, “Just as quick as that sunbeam touches the second hazelnut I’ll zip right down with my tote sack and go to gathering.”—and so forth, merely dozing and dallying, and savoring the still, sweet air. The hazelnuts get browner. The sunbeam inches silently on—the fifteenth! the twentieth!—but the morning was simply so pretty and the air hanging so dreamy and still he hated to break the peace.
   Well then, the finger just about touches the twenty-seventh hazelnut, when a holy dadblamed goshalmighty roar came kabooming through the Bottom like a freight druv by the Devil himself, or at least his next hottest hollerer.
   Oh, what a roar! Oh oh oh! Not just loud, and long, but high and low and chilling and fiery all to once. The haint hair and the spider webs all froze stiff—it was that chilling!—whilst the springs boiled dry and the crabapples burned black from the hellheat of it. Even way up in Tricker’s tall, tall tree the cottonwood leaves turned brown and looked ready to fall still weeks before their time. Moreover, that roar had startled Tricker out of his snooze so sudden that he stuck startled halfway between ceiling and floor. And hung there, petrified, spraddle-eagled spellbound stiff in midair, with eyes big as biscuits and every hair stabbing straight out from him like quills on a puffed-up porcupine.
   “What in the name of sixty cyclones was that?” he asks himself in a quakering voice. “A dream gone nightmare?”
   He pinches his nose to check. The spellbind busts and Tricker drops hard to the floor: bump!
   “Hmm,” he puzzles, rubbing his nose and his knees, “it is like a dream with a little nightmare noise thrown in—like a plain old floating and flying dream dream… except when you get real bumps it must be a real floor.”
   And right then it cut loose again—“ROAWRRR!” shaking the cottonwood from root to crown till a critter could hardly stand. Tricker crawls cautious across the floor on his sore knees, and very cautious sticks his sore nose out, and very very cautious cranes over to look down into the clearing below.
   “Again I say ROARR!”
   The sound made Tricker’s ears ring and his blood curdle, and the sight he saw made him wonder if he wasn’t still dreaming, bumps or no.
   “I’m BIG DOUBLE from the high ridges and I’m DOUBLE BIG and DOUBLE BAD and DOUBLE DOUBLE HONGRY a-ROARRR!”
   It was a bear, a grizzerly bear, so big and hairy and horrible it looked like the two biggest baddest bears in the Ozarks had teamed up to make one.
   “Again I say HONGRY! And I don’t mean lunchtime snacktime littletime hongry, I mean grumpy grouchy bedtime bigtime hongry. I live big and I sleep big. When I hit the hay tonight I got six months before breakfast so I need a supper the size of my sleep. I need a big bellyfull of fuel and layby of fat to fire my fulltime furnace and stoke my sixmonths snore a-ROOAAHRRRR!”
   When the bear opened his mouth his teeth looked like stalactites in a cavern. When he swung his head around his eyes looked like a doublebarrel shotgun going off at you.
   “I ate the high hills bare as a bone and the foothills raw as a rock, and now I’m going to eat the WHOLE! BOTTOM! and everybody in it ALL UP!”
   And with that gives another awful roar and raises his paws high above his head, stretching till his toenails strain out like so many shiny sharp hayhooks, then rams down! sinking them claws clean outta sight into the ground. And with a evil snarl tears the very earth wide open like it was so much wrapping paper on his birthday present.
   In the sundered earth there was Charlie Charles the Woodchuck, his bedroom split half in two, his bedstead busted beneath him and his bedspread pulled up to his quivering chin.
   “Hey you,” Charlie demands, in the bravest voice the little fella can muster, “this is my hole! What are you doing breaking into my home and hole?”
   “I’m BIG DOUBLE from the HIGH WILD HOLLERS,” the bear snarls, “and I’m loading the old larder up for one of my DOUBLE LONG WINTER NAPS.”
   “Well just you go larding up someplace else, you high hills hollerer,” Charlie snarls back. “This aint your neck of the woods…”
   “Son, when I’m hongry it’s ALLLL Big Double’s neck of the woods!” says the bear. “And I AM HONNNGRY. I ate the HIGH HILLS RAW and the FOOTHILLS BARE and now I’m going to EAT! YOU! UP!”
   “I’ll run,” says the woodchuck, glaring his most glittering glare.
   “I can run too–oo,” says the bear, glaring back with a grin that turns poor Charlie’s glitter to gloom. Charlie meets the bear’s blistering stare a couple ticks more, then out from under the covers he springs and out acrost the bottom he tears, ears laid low tail hoisted high and little feet hitting the ground sixty-six steps a second… fast!
   But the big old bear with his big old feet merely takes one! two! three! double-big steps, and takes Charlie over, and snags him up, and swallers him down, hair hide and all.
   High up in his hole Tricker blinks his eyes in amazement. “Yep,” he has to allow, “that booger truly can run.”
   The bear then walks down the hill to the big granite boulder by the creek where Longrellers the Rabbit lived. He listens a moment, his ear to the stone, then lifts one of those size fifty feet as high as his double-big legs can hoist it, lifted like a huge hairy piledriver, and with one stomp turns poor Longrellers’s granite fortress into a sandpile all over the rabbit’s breakfast table.
   “You Ozark clodhopper!” Longrellers squeals, trying to dig the sand out of one of his long ears with a wild parsnip. “This is my breakfast, not yours. You got a nerve, come stomping down here into our Bottom, busting up our property and privacy, when this aint even your stomping grounds!”
   “I hate to tell you, cousin, but I’m BIG DOUBLE and ALLLL the ground I stomp is mine. I ate the high hills BARE and the foothills CLEAN. I ate the woodchuck that run and now I’m going to EAT! YOU! UP!”
   “I’ll run,” says the rabbit.
   “I can run too–oo,” says the bear.
   “I’ll jump,” says the rabbit.
   “I can jump too–oo,” says the bear, grinning and glaring and wiggling his whiskers wickedly at the rabbit. Longrellers wiggles his whiskers back a couple of ticks, then out across the territory rips the rabbit, a cloud of sand boiling up from his heels like dust from a motorscooter scooting up a steep dirt road. But right after him comes the bear, like a loaded logtruck coming down a steeper one. Longrellers is almost to the hedge at the edge of the Topple pasture when he gathers his long ears and elbows under him and jumps for the brambles, springing up into the air quick as a covey of quail flushing … fast, and far!
   But the big old bear with the big old legs springs after him like a flock of rocketships roaring, and takes the rabbit over at the peak of his jump, and snags him up, and swallers him down, ears elbows and everything.
   “Good as his word the big bum can certainly jump,” admits Tricker, watching bug-eyed from his high bedroom window.
   Next, the bear goes down to where Whittier Crick is dribbling drowsy by. He grabs the crick by its bank and, with one wicked snap, snaps it like a bedspread. This snaps Sally Snipsister the Martin clear out of her mudburrow boudoir and her toenail polish, summersetting her into the air, then lands her hard in the emptied creekbed along with stunned mudpuppies and minnows.
   “You backwoods bully!” Sally hisses. “You ridgerunning rowdy! What are you doing down out of your ridges ripping up our rivers? This aint your play puddle!”
   “Why, ma’am, I’m Big Double and ANY puddle I please to play in is mine. I ate the ridges raw and the backwoods bald. I ate the woodchuck and I ate the rabbit. And now I’m going to EAT! YOU! UP!”
   “I’ll run,” says the martin.
   “I can run, too–oo,” says the bear.
   “I’ll jump,” says the martin.
   “I can jump too–oo,” says the bear.
   “I’ll climb,” says the martin.
   “I can climb, too–oo,” says the bear, and champs his big yellow choppers into a challenging chomp. Sally clicks back at him with her sharp little molars for a tick or two, then off! she shoots like the bullet out of a pistol. But right after her booms the bear like a meteor out of a cannon. Sally springs out of the creekbed like a silver salmon jumping. The bear jumps after her like a flying shark. She catches the trunk of the cottonwood and climbs like an electric yo-yo whizzing up a wire. But the bear climbs after her like a jet-propelled elevator up a greasy groove, and takes her over, and snags her up, and swallers her down, teeth toenails and teetotal.
   And then, it so happens, while the big bear is hugging the tree and licking his lips, he sees! that he is eye-to-eye with a little hole, that is none other than the door, of the bedroom, of Tricker the Squirrel.
   “Yessiree bob,” Tricker has to concede. “You also can sure as shooting climb.”
   “WHO are YOU?” roars the bear.
   “I’m Tricker the Squirrel, and I saw it all. And there’s just no two ways about it: I’m impressed—you may have been a little shortchanged in the thinking department but when it comes to running, jumping and climbing you got double portions.”
   “And EAT!” roars the bear into the hole, “I’m BIG DOUBLE and I ate—”
   “I know, I know,” says Tricker, his fingers in his ears. “The ridges raw and the hills whole. I heard it all, too.”
   “NOW I’m going to EAT—”
   “Gonna eat me up. I know,” groans Tricker. “But first I’m gonna run, right?”
   “And I’m gonna run too–oo,” says the bear.
   “Then I’m gonna jump,” says Tricker.
   “And I’m gonna jump, too–oo,” says the bear.
   “Then I’m gonna drink some buttermilk,” says Tricker.
   “And I’m gonna drink buttermilk, too–oo,” says the bear.
   “Then I’m gonna climb,” says Tricker.
   “And I’m gonna climb, too–oo,” says the bear.
   “And then,” says Tricker, smiling and winking and plucking at one of his longest whiskers dainty as a riverboat gambler with a sleeve full of secrets, “I’m going to fly!”
   This bamboozles the bear, and for a second he furrows his big brow. But everybody—even shortchanged grizzerly bears named Big Double—knows red squirrels can’t fly—not even red squirrels named Tricker.
   “Wellthen,” says the bear, grinning and winking and plucking at one of his own longest whitest whiskers with a big clumsy claw, “when you fly, I’ll fly too-oo.”
   “We’ll see–ee about that,” says Tricker and, without a word or wink more, reaches over to jerk the bear’s whisker clean out. UhROAWRRR! roars the bear and makes a nab, but Tricker is out the hole and streaking down the treetrunk like a bolt of greased lightning with the bear thundering behind him, meaner and madder than ever. Tricker streaks across the Bottom toward the Topple farm with the bear storming right on his tail. When he reaches the milkhouse where Farmer Topple cools his dairy products he jumps right through the window. The bear jumps right through after him. Tricker hops up on the edge of a gallon crock and begins to guzzle up the cool, thick buttermilk like he hadn’t had a sip of liquid for a month.
   The bear knocks him aside and picks up the whole crock and sucks it down like he was a seven-year drought.
   Tricker then hops up to the rim of the five-gallon crock and starts to lap up the buttermilk.
   But the bear knocks him aside again, and hefts the crock and guzzles it down.
   Tricker doesn’t even bother hopping to the brim of the last crock, a ten-galloner. He just stands back dodging the drops while the bear heaves the vessel high, tips it up and gradually guzzles it empty.
   The bear finally plunks down the last crock, wipes his chops and roars, “I’m BIG DOUBLE and I ate the HIGH HILLS—”
   “I know, I know,” says Tricker, wincing. “Let’s skip the roaring and get right on to the last part. After I run, and jump, and drink buttermilk, then I climb.”
   “I climb too–erp,” says the bear, belching.
   “And I fly,” says Tricker.
   “And I fly too–up,” says the bear, hiccupping.
   So back out of the milkhouse jumps Tricker and off he goes, dusting back toward his cottonwood like a baby dust devil, with the bear huffing right at his heels like a fullblown tornado. And up the tree he scorches like a house a-fire, with the bear right on his tail like a volcano. Higher and higher climbs Tricker, with the bear’s hot breath huffing hotter and hotter, and closer and closer, and higher and higher till there’s barely any tree left … then out into the fine fall air Tricker springs, like a little red leaf light on the wind.
   And—before the bear thinks better of it—out he springs hisself, like a ten-ton milk tanker over the edge of a straight-down cliff.
   “I forgot to mention,” Tricker sings out as he grabs the leafy top of that first suntouched hazelnut tree and hangs there, swinging and swaying: “I can also trick.”
   “ARGHH!” his pursuer answers, plummeting past, “AAARRG—” all the way till he splatters on the hillside like a ripe melon.
   When the dust and debris clear back, Sally Snapsister wriggles up from the wrecked remains and says, “I’m out!”
   Then Longrellers the Rabbit jumps up and says, “I’m out!”
   Then Charlie Charles the Woodchuck pops up and says, “I’m out!”
   “I,” says Tricker, swinging high in the sunny branches where the hazelnuts are just about perfect, “was never in to get out.”
   And everybody laughed and the hazelnuts got more and more perfect and the buttermilk just rolled…
   down…
   the hill.

Good Friday
by Grandma Whittier

   Dearest Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on this poor confused tormented and just plain scared-silly old soul down on her bony knees in the dark for the first time in heaven knows how long begging bless me and forgive me but honest to betsy Lord i always figured that for one thing you had enough sparrows to keep your eye on and that for another you had done answered this old bird her lifetime’s share the time after papa and uncle dicker topple and brother took us kids to the tum-of-the-century worlds fair in little rock and i saw the wild man from borneo running around in a cage all ragged black and half naked with hair sticking out a foot making this crazy low and lonesome sound way down in his chest as he chased after a white chicken and finally caught it right where the crowd had pushed me up against the bars so i couldn ‘t help but see every yellow fang as he bit that chicken neck slick in two then hunkered down there staring directly into my popeyes chewing slobbering and would you believe grinning till i could not help myself but to go and throw up all over him which peeved him so he gave a howl of awful rage and run his hand through the bars at me screeching such a rumpus that the sideshow man had to go in the cage with a buggy whip and a stool and drive him back whining in a comer of the filthy old cage but not before i got my bonnet tore off and had been put in such a state that papa had to leave the other kids with uncle dicker and take me home sick with the shakes so abiding terrible that from that night on through the entire summer i could not be left alone in my room without a burning lamp and even then still had practically every nights rest ruint by thesehorrible nightmares how this black man not a negro but a wild primitive black man that had been trapped and took from his home and family in the jungles of borneo and was therefore already crazed with savage lonesomeness and hate and humiliation was bound and determined to bust out of that puny little sideshow pen and come after me because of the way i had vomited at the loathesome sight of him and late one autumn afternoon sure as shooting i had just walked little emerson t home from playing in our yard because it was getting towards dusk and on my way from the whittier place coming back towards topples bottom i saw the cane shaking and something coming through the canebrake and heard a kind of choked-off baying moan so chilling i froze cold in my tracks as it came closer and closer till O Lord there he was that big old ball of black hair and that mouth and that chicken flopping in his hand lumbering out of the cane right at me then you can bet i run run screaming bloody murder right acrost the road ruts through the gorse stickers and in that dim light blundered over the edge of a gully and lit headfirst in a pile of junk farm machinery and scrap iron that brother had put there to keep the soil from gullying away so fast and laid there on my back in kind of a coma so as i was still awake and could see and hear perfectly well but could not move so much as a muscle nor mouth to holler for help while tearing through the gorse and dust and blackberries right on down at me here came this wild black head and Loving Jesus as though i wasnt already scared enough to melt now i saw that he was not only going to get me but i wouldn’t even be mercifully passed out so i prayed Lord i prayed in my mind like i never prayed before nor till this instant that if i could just die just happily die and not be mortified alive that on my solemnest oath i would never ask another blessed thing so help me Great Almighty God but then i saw it wasnt the wild man from borneo after all it was only the mute halfwit colored boy that lived with the whittiers cropping hands and as was the occasional custom of the coloreds at that time he had stole a legern pullet from the whittiers coop and the sound i had heard was a mix-up of his cleft pallet moaning the chicken squawking and whittiers old redbone hound bawling after him in a choked-off fashion because mr whittier kept the dog chained to a six-poundcannonball from his navy days that the dog was towing behind him through the brush and i thought oh me i prayed to die and now i am going to lie here paralyzed and bleed to death or something and not be mortified after all but then that mute boy seen me hurt at the bottom of the gully and tossed the chicken to the hound and climbed down and picked me up and carried me out of the gully and back through the stickers onto the road just in time for brother happening past to take one look at me all bloody being toted by a goo-gawking black idiot and knock him down with a cane stalk and beat him nearly to death before his daughter my niece sara run to get papa who brought me into pine bluff in the back of uncle dickers wagon with my head a bloody mess yet still wide-open-eyed in mamas lap and the boy roped behind the wagon gaping and gagging at me in the lanternlight waiting for me to tell them but i couldn’t speak no more than he could while all the way papa and brother and the other men who joined our little procession kept talking about hangings too good for the inbred maniac he oughta be burnt or worse till they carried me on into doctor ogilvies downstairs parlor and undressed me and cleaned me and doctored my wound as best they could with the doctor shaking his head at papa and mama and my sisters crying and all the time me seeing the lanterns passing back and forth on the porch and hearing brother and the men talking about what they aimed to do to that boy should i not pull through like it looked like i wasnt and then my eyes finally closed and i let out a long last breath and sure enough i died.


   It was the queerest thing. I sailed right up out of my body while Doctor Ogilvie was saying, I’m sorry, Topple, she’s gone—sailed right over the town through the night right on up to Heaven where the streets were lit with pure gold and the angels were playing harps and the moth I presume did not corrupt. Heaven. But when I started to go through the gates that were all inlaid pearl precisely like they are supposed to be this huge tall angel with an enormous book says to me, Wait a minute, little girl; what’s your name? I says Becky Topple and he says Becky Topple? Rebecca Topple? I thought so, Becky; you have been marked by the Blood of the Lamb of God Almighty and you aren’t due up here for another good seventy-seven years! The Son of Man Hisself has you down for not less than one entire century of earthly service! You’re to be a saint, Rebecca, did you know that? So you got to go on back, honey. I’m sorry…
   And sent me sailing back through the clouds and the stars to Arkansas and Pine Bluff and Dr. Ogilvie’s house all fluttering at the parlor windows with torches and lamps like big angry millers and right down through the roof. I swear it was absolutely the queerest sensation, seeing my body in that room with all my folks and family crying and little Emerson T struggling with his papa to get to me, crying Becky aint dead aint dead cant be dead as I just drifted back into my body like so much smoke being sucked back down a chimney and took a breath opened my eyes and sat up and told them that the mute boy had not harmed me. No. Quite the contrary. That I’d been fooling around that gully and fell into the scrap iron and he had come along and seen me and saved me, thank the Lord (I had my fingers crossed, and said another Thank the Lord to myself) and


   I have never bothered you about another single thing since that, Jesus, as I solemnly promised. What was there for me to ask, actually? I have never doubted that angel with the book. Not from that instant to this have I ever faced mortal danger, nor never thought I would have to, either—leastways till nineteen eighty-something rolled around. And I always figured that by then I would be more than tickled to be getting shut of this wore-out carcass and battered old mug anyhow. So I swear to You with God and that tall angel as my witness that I am not shivering scared here on my knees like some dried-up old time miser pinchin life like her last measly pennies. Because I’m not. What I am asking for is I guess a sign of some kind, Lord; not more time. Running out of time simply is not what I’m scared of. What I am afraid of I can’t put a name to yet, having just this day encountered it like finding a new-hatched freak of nature, but it is not of dying. Moreover I am not even sure whether my fear is of a real McCoy danger or not. Maybe the simple weight of years has finally made its crack in my reason like it has in poor Miss Lawn and in loony Mr. Firestone with his Communists behind every bush and in so many other tenants at the Towers lots of whom I know are way younger than me—made its cruel crack in my mind so that all these sudden fears these shades and behind-every-bush boogers and all this dirty business that seems to have leaked in are nothin more than just another wild black mistake from Borneo this old white hen is making… is what I’m wanting to know, Lord Jesus, is the sign I’m praying for


   I stopped when I heard something way off. Oh. Just that old log train tooting at the Nebo junction. Bringing the week’s logging down from Blister Creek. Unless they had changed their schedule sometime since those sleepless nights years ago it meant it was getting near midnight. Good Friday’s about to turn into what I guess a body might call Bad Saturday. It sure didn’t feel like Eastertime. Too warm. This was the first time Easter would be late enough in April to have Good Friday fall on my birthday since it must of been the first spring after marrying Emery. That first Oregon spring. It was hot and peculiar then, too. Maybe it’d cool some yet, bring down the usual shower on the egg hunt. Still, driving out from Eugene this afternoon I noticed a lot of farmers already irrigating. And the night air dry as a bone. Blessed strange.
   I clenched my lips and reminded myself in a calm voice, This isn’t strange at all, Old Fool. This is me-and-Emery’s old cabin, our old Nebo place. But another voice keeps hollering back, Then why’s everything seem so hellish strange? Well, it must be because this is the first night away from Old Folks Towers in about a century. No, that don’t account for it. I spent last Christmas and New Year’s at Lena’s and things was no stranger than usual. Besides, I felt it before I left the apartment. The moment my grandson phoned this morning I told him I didn’t want to go. I says, “Why, boy, tonight the Reverend Dr. W. W. Poll is having an Inspiration Service down in the lobby that I couldn’t miss!” Having accompanied me a time or two, and knowing that the doctor’s services are about as inspirational as a mud fence, he just groans, ugh.
   “Sweetheart, think of it as medical,” I says. “Reverend Poll’s sermons are as effective as any of my sleeping prescriptions,” I says trying to kid him away from it.
   So I felt it then. He kept at me, though. He’s like his grandpa was that way, when he gets a notion he thinks is for somebody else’s good. I carried the phone over to turn down Secret Storm, making excuses one after another why I can’t go till at length he sighs and says he guesses he’ll have to tell me the secret.
   “The real reason, Grandma, is we’re all having a birthday party—a surprise birthday party if you weren’t such a stubborn old nannygoat.”
   I says, “Honey, I sure do thank you but when you get past eighty a birthday party is about as welcome a surprise as a new wart.” He says that I hadn’t been out to visit them in close to a year, blame my hide, and he wants me to see how they’ve fixed the place back up. Like for a grade, I thought: another trait of his grandpa’s. I told him I was sorry but I did not have the faintest inclination to aggravate my back jouncing out to that dadgummed old salt mine (though it isn’t really my back, the doctor says, but a gallbladder business aggravated by sitting, especially in a moving car). “It was forty years out there put me in this pitiful condition.”
   “Baloney,” he says. “Besides, the kids have all baked this fantastic birthday cake and decorated it for Great-Grandma’s birthday; their dear little hearts will be broken.” I tell him to bring them and their dear little hearts both on into my apartment and we’d drink Annie Green Springs and watch the people down in the parking lot. Ugh, he says again. He can’t stand the Towers. He maintains our lovely low-cost twenty-story ultra-modern apartment building is nothing more than a highrise plastic air-conditioned tombstone where they stick the corpses waiting for graves. Which it is, I can’t deny, but plastic or no I make just enough on my Social Security and Natural Gas royalties to pay my way if I take advantage of Poor People’s Housing. My own way.
   “So I appreciate the invitation, sugar, but I guess I hadn’t better disappoint the Reverend W. W. Poll. Not when he’s just a short elevator ride as opposed to a long ordeal in an automobile. So you all bring that cake on over here. It’ll do us old geezers good to see some kids.” He tells me the cake’s too big to move. I says “toobig?” and he says that they was having not only my party, see, but a whole day-long to-do with music and a service their ownselves and quite a few people expected. A sort of Worship Fair, he called it. “Al-so,” he says, in that way he used to twist me around his finger, “the Sounding Brass are going to be here.”
   Grandkids always have your number worse than any of your own kids, and the first is the worst by a mile. “Don’t you flimflam me, Bub! Not thee Sounding Brass.” He says cross his heart; he picked them all up at the bus depot not three hours ago, swallowtails, buckteeth, and all, and they have promised to sing a special request for my birthday, even though they don’t usually dedicate songs and haven’t done it in years.
   “And I will wager,” he says, “you can’t guess which one.” His words some way more extravagant than’s even usual for him. I don’t answer. I heard it then. “They are going to sing that version of ‘Were You There’ that you used to like so much.” I say “You remember that? Why, it’s been twenty years since I had that record if it’s been a day.” “More like thirty,” he says. He said al-so as far as the ride went they had a special bus with a full-size bed in it coming for me at four on the dot. “So don’t give me any more of that bad back baloney. This is your day to party!”
   I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his granny. Not Betsy, nor Buddy. Somebody else.
   “In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack.”
   After we hung up I was in a kind of dither to think who. I started to turn my program back up, but it was the ad for denture stickum where the middle-aged ninny is eating peanuts. So I just switched the wretched thing clean off and stood there by the window, looking down at Eugene’s growing traffic situation. Zoom zoom zoom, a silly bunch of bugs. The Towers is the highest building in all Eugene unless you count that little one-story windowless and doorless cement shack situated on top of Skinner’s Butte. Some kind of municipal transmitter shack is I guess what it is. It was up there just like it stands today the very first time Emerson T and me rode to the top of the butte. We drove if I’m not mistaken a spanking brand-new 1935 Terraplane sedan of a maroon hue that Emerson had bought with our alfalfa sales that spring. Eugene wasn’t much more than a main street, just some notion stores and a courthouse and Quackenbush’s Hardware. Now it sprawls off willy-nilly in all directions as far as a person can see, like some big old Monopoly game that got out of hand. That little shack is the only thing I can think of still unchanged, and I still don’t know what’s in it.
   I picked up Emerson T’s field glasses from my sill and took them out of their leather case. They’re army glasses but Emery wasn’t in the army; when they wouldn’t let him be a chaplain he became a conscientious objector. He won the glasses at Bingo. I like to use them to watch the passenger trains arrive Monday nights, but there isn’t much to watch of a Friday noon. Just that new clover-leaf, smoking around in circles and, O, whyever had I let him make me say yes? I could still hear my pulse rushing around his words in my ears. I turned the glasses rear-way-round and looked for a while that way, to try to make my heart slow its pit-a-pat (nope, it hadn’t been Betsy or Buddy, nor none of his usual bunch that I could think of offhand), when, without so much as a by-your-leave or a kiss-my-foot, there, right at my elbow, sucking one of my taffy-babies and blinking those blood-rare eyes of hers up at me was that dadblessed Miss Lawn!
   “Why Mrs. Whittier—”
   Made me jump like a frog. Her eyes, mainly. Vin rose bloodshot. She puts away as much as a quart before lunch somedays; she told me so herself. “—don’t you realize you are looking through the wrong end again?” She shuffles from foot to foot in those gum-rubber slippers she wears then, in a breath that would take the bristles off a hog, she coos “I heard your television go off, then when it didn’t come back on I was worried something might be the matter…?”
   She wears those things for just that purpose, too: slipping. I know for a fact that as soon as she hears my toilet flush or one of my pill bottles rattle she slips into her bathroom to see if my medicine cabinet is left open. Our bathrooms are back-to-back and the razor-blade disposal slot in her medicine cabinet lines right up with the razor-blade disposal slot on my medicine cabinet, and if she don’t watch out one of these days I’m going to take a fingernail file and put one of those poor bloodshot eyeballs out of its misery. Not actually. We’re old acquaintances, actually. Associates. Old maids and widows of a feather. I tell her if she must know I turned it off to talk over the telephone.
   “I thought I heard it ring,” she says. “I wondered if it might be Good Book Bob dialing you for dollars again.”
   Once KHVN phoned and asked me who it was said “My stroke is heavier than my groaning.” I remembered it was Job because the Book of Job was the only book of the Bible Uncle Dicker ever read aloud to me (he claimed it was to help me reconcile my disfigurement but I personally think it was because of him constantly suffering from his rupture), and when I answered right and won forty dollars and a brass madonna of unbreakable Lucite, Miss Lawn never got over it. If I was in the tub or laid down napping and the phone rang more’n once she’d scoot all the way around from her place in time to answer the third ring, just in case it might be another contest. That’s how she thinks of me and of what she refers to as my “four-leaf-clover life.” Sometimes she comes in and waits for it to ring. She swears up and down that I must be hard of hearing because she always knocks before she comes in; all I say is it must be with a gum-rubber knuckle.
   “Well, it was not Good Book Bob,” I assure her, “it was my grandson.”
   “The famous one?”
   I just nodded and snapped the field glasses away in their case. “He’s coming in a special bus this afternoon to take his grandmother to a big surprise party everybody’s giving her.” I admit I was rubbing it in a bit but I swear she can aggravate a person. “I’ll probably be away to the festivities all evening,” I says.
   “And miss Reverend Poll’s special service? and the donuts and the Twylight Towers Trio? Mrs. Whittier, you must be delirious!”
   I told her I was attending another service, and instead of those soggy donuts was having a fantastic cake. But I didn’t have the heart to Lord it over her about the Sounding Brass, though. Them eyes were already going from red to green like traffic lights. In the entire year and a half she’s lived in the apartment next door I believe the only visits she’s had from the outside is Jehovah’s Witnesses. I says, I am, Miss Lawn: dee-lirious, and that I was going to have myself a good long hot soak in Sardo before I popped with delirium. So, if she would excuse-a pliz—and went strutting into the bathroom without another word.
   I like Miss Lawn well enough. We went to the same church for years and got along just fine, except her seeming a little snooty. I reckoned that came from her being a Lawn of the Lawn’s Sand & Gravel Lawns, a rich old Oregon family and very high society around Eugene. It wasn’t till Urban Renewal forced her to follow me to the Towers that I realized what a lonesome soul she actually was. And jealous… she can’t hardly stand how people make over me. She says the way people make over me you’d think I was the only one in the building. I always say, Ah, now, I don’t know about that, but I am glad people like me. Well, she says, they ought to like me; I never done anything to make people dislike me! I say, All I do is try and be nice and she says, Yeah, but you’re too nice with them, gushy, whether they’re good folks or bad; if I had to get friends by being too gushy like that I don’t want ‘em. Actually, I’m pretty snippy with people, but I say, Yeah, well, if you’re gonna make friends you’re gonna make ‘em by loving thy neighbor, not all the time acting like you’re passing judgment on him. Besides, I never ran into anybody I didn’t think but was good folks, you get deep enough down. And she says, Well, when you been around as much as me you sure will find different; something will happen someday and you’ll find out that there are some people who are rotten all the way down! “Then,” she says, “we’ll see how that mushy love-thy-neighbor way of yours holds up.”
   Forlorn old frog; what other world could she expect with that kind of outlook? Like Papa used to say: It’s all in how you hold your mouth. Oh well, I don’t know. A little later I called out to her that there was a bottle of cold wine in my Frigidaire.
   I filled my tub just as steaming hot as I could stand and got in. The Sounding Brass! The last and of course only other time I’d been fortunate enough to hear them was after Lena left home to marry Daniel. I got so blue that Emerson drove me back to Arkansas for a family reunion and on the way back through Colorado took me to the Sunrise Service at the Garden of the Gods where the Brass family absolutely stole the show. Afterwards Emery became the Deacon Emerson Thoreau Whittier and traveled to a lot of religious shindigs. I usually begged off accompanying him; somebody needs to keep track of the farm, I’d say. After the house burned and we moved into town I came up with other excuses. Like Emerson’s driving being so uncertain that it gave me the hiccups. Which it did. But it wasn’t just that, nor just cars. It’s anything scurrying around, helter and yon; get here, get there; trains, buses, airplanes, what-all. Right this minute my lawyers tell me I am taking a loss of sixty-five dollars a month on my gas check simply by putting off journeying to Little Rock to sign some papers in person. But I don’t know. Consider the lilies, I say, they toil not, speaking of which I hear my Frigidaire door slam as Miss Lawn got over her snit in the other room, then the lid of my cut-crystal candy dish, then my television came back on. The poor old frog. When I finally finished my rinse and come out in my robe it was still on, blaring. Miss Lawn was gone, though, as was most of the candy I’d planned to take to the kids at the farm and all the Annie Green Springs.

   I recognized my ride the instant it turned the corner into the parking lot. Even eighteen stories down and before I got out the field glasses there was no mistaking it, a big bus, all glistening chrome and gleaming white and five big purple affairs painted on the side of it in the formation of a flying cross. When I got them into focus I seen they were birds, beautiful purple birds. It turned and parked in the Buses Only and opened its front door. I saw get out first what I could tell immediately was my grandson by his big shiny forehead: another trait from his grandpa’s side.
   Then, behind him, bobble-butting out the bus door, come that big-mouthed doughball of a character from Los Angeles by the name of Otis Kone. Otis is a kind of full-grown sissy and has always rubbed me the wrongest of any of my grandson’s gang. For instance the way he stood there, looking at the Towers like he might buy it. He had on a little black beanie and around his rump he had strapped a belt with a scabbard. He pulled out a big long sword and flashed it around his head for the benefit of all. About the only good I can say about Otis is that he always goes back to Southern California as soon as our rains start in the fall, and stays there till they stop. Which is to say he stays away most of the year, praise the Lord. Watching him parade around Devlin with that sword I says to myself, Uh-huh, that’s who was giving me the willies from the other end of the phone!
   Then, out come this other fellow. A big fellow, draped in white from crown to toe like an Arab. Was he something! I strained through the glasses to see if I knew him but his face was all a-swirl. In fact, it seemed that he was wrapped in a kind of slow swirl. He come out of that bus and sailed about like he was moving fast and slow at the same time, pausing in midair to reach back for somebody else then swirling around again, opening like a flower as he lit down. I saw he had a little child who was also dressed in white but only in short pants and shirt with nothing over his head. It was quite apparent then that both of them were of the black race. He set the little child on his shoulder and followed Otis with his sword and my grandson with his forehead into the building, out from beneath my sight. But you could imagine it: Miss Prosper the nurse and receptionist craning over the top of her Organic Gardening, the rest of the lobby loafers looking up from their games and so on. I bet you didn’t hear so much as a checker move.
   I just had time to get the last clippie out of my hair before there came two quick knocks at my door, then one, then two more.
   “Let me in queeck, Varooshka; they are on to us! Ve must atomize the feelm!”
   It was of course that nitwit Otis. I shudder to think what would have happened had he pulled that at Mr. Firestone’s door by mistake. I opened as far as the chain would let me and seen it was just a wooden stage sword painted silver. He was wearing some patched-up baggy pants and the fly not even zipped. “Sorry,” I says, “I gave all my rags to the mission,” and made like to slam it before I said, O I am sorry. They laughed at that.
   “Happy Birthday,” Devlin says, hugging me. “You remember Otis Kone?”
   I took Otis’s hand. “Sure.” I give it a good squeeze, too. “Sure I remember Otis Kone. Otis comes up from California every summer to try and get my goat.” To which Otis says, “It’s not your goat I’m after, Granny,” wiggling his eyebrows, then made to reach for me. I spronged his fat little fingers with a clippie, harder’n I meant. He howled and duckfooted around the hall like Groucho. I told him to get his pointed head in out of the hall before somebody called the Humane Society. He slunk past so low I had to laugh in spite of myself. He is a clown. I was about to apologize for ragging him when the third fellow glided into sight.
   “Grandma, this is my longtime friend M’kehla,” Devlin says, “and his son Toby.”
   “Mrs…?” he asks. I tell him it’s Whittier and he bows and says, “It’s Montgomery Keller-Brown, Mrs. Whittier. The name M’kehla was… what would you say, Dev? a phase?” Then he smiles back at me and holds out his hand. “Everyone has told me about Great-Grandma. I’m very honored.”
   He was even grander than through the field glasses: tall, straight-backed, and features like the grain in a polished wood, a rare hardwood, from some far-off land (though I could tell by his voice he was as country southern as I was). Most of all, though, with a set to his deep dark gaze like I never saw on another earthly being. I found myself fiddling at my collar buttons and mumbling howdy like a little girl.
   “And this man-child,” he says, “is called October.” I let go the hand, feeling relieved, and looked to the little feller. About five years old and cute as a bug, squinting bright up at me from behind his daddy’s robe. I lean down at him. “Was that when you was born, honey? October?” He don’t move a hair. I’m used to how little kids first take how I look, but his daddy says, “Answer Mrs. Whittier, October.” I say, “It’s all right. October don’t know if this ugly old woman is a good witch who’s going to give him one of her taffy-babies or a bad witch gonna eat him up,” and stuck my false teeth out at him. That usually gets them. He eases out of the shrouds of his daddy’s robe. He didn’t smile but he opened his eyes wide enough so I suddenly seen what it was made them so strangely bright.
   “Toby is the name I like best,” he says.
   “Okay, Toby, let’s get some candy before that Otis consumes it all.”
   We all come in and I got refreshments. The men chattered about my apartment and low-income housing before they got around to what they had come about, the Worship Fair. I let little Toby look through the field glasses while my grandson showed me a little program of what was going to be happening. I said it looked like it was going to be a real nice affair. Otis dug down into one of his big pockets and come up with a handbill of his own that said ARE YOU PREPARED? with a picture of him in a priest’s outfit. He was looking up at the sky through the tube out of a roll of toilet tissue, his mouth saying in big black letters “THE CHICKENWIRE PARACHUTE IS COMING,” I knew it was just more of Otis’s nonsense but I folded it up, put it in my overnight bag, and told him I was always prepared. And that I notice he is, too, and reach down like to zip up his baggy old pants. He turns his back to do it himself, ears red as peppers. Somebody’s got to teach these city kids, I tell Mr. Keller-Brown, and he laughs. My grandson hefts at my bag and says, “Unh, who do you usually get to carry your purse?” I told him, “Don’t razz a woman about her essentials,” and if he didn’t think he was stout enough to handle it I bet little Toby could. The little boy put the glasses right down and came and started to lug at the purse. I says, “Aint we the good little helper, though?”
   Mr. Keller-Brown smiles and says, “We work on being the good helper, don’t we, Tobe?” and the little fellow nodded back.
   “Yes, Daddy.”
   I couldn’t help but gush a little bit. “What a change from most of the little kids you see being let go hog wild these days, what a gratifying change.”
   The main elevator was still being used to clear out the collection of metal they found when they opened poor Mr. Fry’s apartment, so we had some wait for the other one. I said I hoped we didn’t miss the Brass family. Devlin says we got plenty of time. He said did I know that Mr. Keller-Brown was part of a gospel singing group himself? I says, Oh? What are you called? Because I might have heard them on KHVN. Mr. Keller-Brown says they were called the Birds of Prayer but he doubted I’d heard them, not on AM.
   The elevator arrived with Mrs. Kennicut from 19 and the two Birwell sisters. I told them good afternoon as I was escorted on by a big black Arab. You could have knocked their eyes off with a broomstick. Otis gave them each one of his handbills, too. Nobody says a thing. We went down a few floors, where a maintenance man pushed on carrying a big pry bar much to Mrs. Kennicut’s very apparent relief. He don’t say anything either, but he hefts his pinch bar to his shoulder like a club. So nothing will do but Otis take out his sword and hold it on his shoulder, too.
   We slid on down, packed tight and tense. I thought Boy, is this gonna cause a stink around me for months to come—when, from below, I felt this little hand slip up into mine and heard a little voice say, “It’s crowdy, Grandma. Pick me up.” And I lifted him up, and held him on my hip the rest of the ride down, and carried him right on out through that lobby, black curls, brown skin, blue eyes, and all.
   I seen some rigs around Eugene—remodeled trailers and elegant hippie buses and whatnot—but I never saw anything on wheels the beat of this outfit of Mr. Keller-Brown’s. Class-y, I told Mr. Keller-Brown, and was it ever. From the five purple birds on the side right down to a little chrome cross hood ornament. Then, inside: I swear it was like the living room of a traveling palace: tapestries, a tile floor, even a little stone fireplace! All I could do was gape.
   “I just helped minimally,” he explained. “My wife is the one that put it together.”
   I told him he must have quite some wife. Otis puts in that Montgomery Keller-Brown did indeed have quite some wife, plus his wife had quite some father, who had quite some bank account… which might have helped minimally as well. I watched to see how Mr. Keller-Brown was going to take this. It must be touchy enough for a Negro man to be married to a white girl, then if she’s rich to boot… But he just laughed and led me toward the rear of the rig.
   “Devlin told me about your back. I’ve got a chair here I think might suit you, a therapeutic recline-o-lounger.” He pushed back a big leather chair. “Or there’s the bed”—then ran his hand over a deep purple wool bedspread on a king-size bed fixed right into the back of the bus.
   “Fiddlesticks,” I says. “I hope it never gets to where I’m not capable of sitting in a chair like a human. I’ll sit here awhile, then maybe I’ll lay on that bed awhile, as my fancy takes me!” He took my arm and helped me into the chair, my face burning like a beet. I pulled my dress down over my legs and asked them what they were waiting on, anyhow. I could feel twenty stories of wrinkled old noses pressed to their windows as we drove out of the lot.
   Me and my grandson gossiped a bit about what was happening with the family, especially Buddy, who seemed to be getting in two messes with his dairy business as quick as he got out of one. Up front, Otis had found a pint bottle of hooch from one of his big baggy pockets and was trying to share it with Mr. Keller-Brown at the wheel. Devlin saw the bottle and said maybe he’d better go up and make sure that addlehead doesn’t direct us to Alaska or something. I told him, Phooey! I didn’t care if they drunk the whole bottle and all three fell out the door; Toby and me could handle things! Devlin swayed away up to the front, and pretty soon the three men were talking a mile a minute.
   The boy had his own little desk where he had been piddling with some Crayolas. When Devlin left he put the Crayolas back in the desk and eased out of the seat and sidled back to where I was. He took a National Geographic out of the bookcase and made like to read it on the floor beside my chair. I smiled and waited. Pretty quick sure enough his big blue eyes came up over the top of the book and I said peek-a-boo. Without another word he put the book down and crawled right up into my lap.
   “Did Jesus do that to your face?” he asks.
   “Why, don’t tell me you’re the only boy who never heard what Tricker the Squirrel done for the Toad?” I says and went into the tale about how Mr. Toad used to be very very beautiful in the olden times, with a face that shined like a green jewel. But his bright face kept showing the bugs where he was laid in wait for them. “He would have starved if it wasn’t for Tricker camouflaging him with warts, don’cher see?”
   He nodded, solemn but satisfied, and asks me to tell him another one. I started in about Tricker and the Bear and he went off to sleep with one hand holding mine and the other hanging onto my cameo pendant. Which was just as well because the therapeutic recline-o-lounger was about to kill me. I unclasped the gold chain and slipped out from under him and necklace both.
   I backed over to the bed and sunk down into that purple wool very near out of sight. It was one of those waterbeds and it got me like quicksand, only my feet waggling up over the edge. Very unladylike. But wiggle and waggle as I might I could not get back up. Every time I got to an elbow the bus would turn and I would be washed down again. I reminded myself of a fat old ewe we used to have who would lose her balance grazing on a slope and roll over and have to lay there bleating with her feet in the air till somebody turned her right side up. I gave up floundering and let the water slosh to and fro under me while I looked over the selection in Mr. Keller-Brown’s bookcase. Books on every crazy thing you ever heard of, religions and pyramids and mesmerism and the like, lots with foreign titles. Looking at the books made me someway uneasy. Actually, I was feeling fine. I could’ve peddled a thousand of these waterbeds on TV: “Feel twenty years younger! Like a new woman!” I had to giggle; all the driver would have to do was look in that mirror and see the New Woman’s runny old nylons sticking spraddled into the air like the hindquarters of a stranded sheep.
   And I swear, exactly while I was thinking about it, it seemed I felt sure enough a heavy dark look brush me, like an actual touch, Lord, like an actual physical presence.

   The next I know we were pulling into the old Nebo place. Devlin was squeezing my foot. “Thought for a minute you’d passed on,” he teased.
   He took my arm to help me out of bed. I told him I’d thought so for a while, too, till I saw that familiar old barn go by the bus window. “Then I knew I wasn’t in no Great Beyond.”
   The bus stopped and I sit down and put on my shoes. Mr. Keller-Brown came back and asked me how my nap was.
   “I never had such a relaxing ride,” I tell him. “Devlin, you put one of these waterbeds in your convertible and I just might go gallivantin’.” Mr. Keller-Brown says, Well, they were going to drive to Los Angeles to sing Sunday morn and he would sure be proud to have me come along. I told him if things kept going my way like they had been I just might consider it. Little Toby says, “Oh, do, Grandma; do come with us.” I promised all right I would consider it just as Mr. Keller-Brown scooped him up from the recline-o-lounger, swinging him high. I see he’s still got a-holt of my pendant.
   “What’s this?” Mr. Keller-Brown asks. He has to pry it from the little tyke’s fingers. “We better give this back to Mrs. Whittier, Tobe.” He hands me the necklace but I go over and open the little, desk top and drop it in amongst the Crayolas.
   “It’s Toby’s,” I told them, “not mine.” I said an angel came down and gave it to Toby in his dreams. Toby nods sober as an owl and says Yeah, Daddy, an angel, and adds—because of the cameo face on it was why, I guess—“A white angel.”
   Then Otis hollers, “Let’s boogie for Jesus!” and we all go out.
   We’d parked kind of on the road because the parking area (what used to be Emerson T’s best permanent pasture) was full to overflowing—cars, buses, campers, and every sort of thing. The Worship Fair was going like a three-ring circus. There was people as thick as hair on a dog sitting around, strolling around, arguing, singing. A long-haired skinny young fellow without shoes or shirt was clamping a flyer under every windshield wiper, and a ways behind him another longhair was sticking christ’s the one to the bumpers and sneaking off the flyers when the first kid wasn’t looking. The first one caught the second and there then ensued a very hot denominational debate. Otis went over with his sword to straighten it all out and pass out some flyers of his own.
   Across the orchard I could see they’d built a stage on the foundation where the house used to stand. At the microphone a girl was playing a zither and singing scripture in a nervous shaky voice. Devlin asked me if I knew the verse she was singing and playing. I says I thought the singing vas verse than the playing, but it vas a toss-up.
   Back behind the stage we found Betsy and the kids. The kids wanted to give me my presents right off but Betsy told them to wait for the cake. The men went off to take care of getting the next act onstage and I went off with Betsy and the kids to look how their garden already was coming up. Caleb led Toby on ahead through the gate, hollering, “I’ll show you something, Toby, that I bet you don’t have in your garden.” And Betsy told me that it was a mama Siamese, had her nest in the rhubarb.
   “She just has one kitten. She had six hidden out in the hay barn but Devlin backed the tractor over five of them. She brought the last one into the garden. He’s old enough to wean but that mama cat just won’t let him out of the rhubarb.”
   We strolled along, looking how high the peas were and how the perennials had stood the big freeze. When we got to the rhubarb there was little Toby amongst the leaves hugging the kitten and grinning for all he was worth.
   “That’s the first time I seen the little scoot smile,” I told Betsy.
   “Toby can’t have our kitten, can he, Mom?” Caleb asks. Betsy says if it’s all right with his folks it was most decidedly all right with her. I said with all the traffic maybe we’d better leave the kitty in the garden until he asks his mama. The smile went away but he didn’t turn loose. He stood there giving us a heart-tugging look. Betsy said he could carry it if he was careful. “We’ll ask M’kehla,” she says.
   All the rest of the afternoon Toby hung on to that cat for dear life, Caleb worrying at him from one side and the anxious mama cat from the other.
   Sherree took me in to show me her new curtains and we all had some mint tea. We could hear things out at the stage getting worked up. We moseyed back just as an all-boy chorus from Utah was finishing up. People had commenced to push in towards the stage so’s it was pretty thick, but the kids had saved me a nice shady spot with a blanket and some of those tie-dyed pillows.
   I didn’t see Devlin or Mr. Keller-Brown, but that Otis, he was impossible to miss. He was reeling around in front of the stage making a real spectacle of himself, getting all tripped up in his sword, which was worked round between his legs, hollering Hallelujah and Amen and Remember Pearl Harbor. And somebody had spray-painted across the rump of his baggy pants: “The Other Cheek.” I told Betsy he hadn’t better turn that other cheek to me if he knew what was good for him.
   The announcer was one of the local ministers. After the all-boys from Utah he asked if we couldn’t have a little quiet and a little respect—he said this right at Otis, too—“a little respect for one of the all-time great gospel groups of all time: The Sounding Brass!” I says good, just in time, and sits me down on one of them pillows.
   It started just like in Colorado Springs; a gong was rung backstage, soft and slow at first, then faster and faster and louder and louder. It’s very effective. Even Otis set down. The gonging rose and rose until you thought the very sky was gonna open and, when you thought you couldn’t stand it a moment more, made one last hard loud bang and they came running on stage and went right into “Ring Them Bells,” the world-famous Sounding Brass.
   At first I thought we all had been tricked! The Sounding Brass? These five old butterballs? Why, the Sounding Brass is tall and lean with natural red hair that shines like five halos, not these sorry old jokes. Because I mean to tell you the men didn’t have a hundred scraggly old white hairs divided between the four of them! Plus the woman was wearing a wig looked like it had been made out of wire and rusted. And I’m darned if she didn’t have on a minidress! I could see the veins from fifty feet away.
   I finally just shook my head; it was them, all right. All their movements and gestures were exactly those I remembered. But it looked like they’d been set to moving and then forgot the grease. And their voices, they were just horrible. I don’t mean old—I know a lot of older groups who sing fine, creaks, whistles, and all—I mean thin, hollow, like whatever had been there had been scraped away and left five empty shells. I recall reading how they’d had a lot of income tax problems; maybe that done it. But they were surely pathetic. They finished a couple of songs and people give them a little hand of pure charity. Then Jacob Brass stepped to the microphone.
   “Thank you and buh-less you all,” he says. “Now, the next number… well, we hear from reliable sources that it is the favorite of a very fine lady out there having her birthday on this beautiful spring day. Eighty-six years young. So puh-raise the Lord this Good Friday song is especially ded–icated to our Good Friday Birthday Girl, Mrs. Rebecca Whittier!”
   I wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it. And let me tell you: if they sounded bad on their faster numbers they now sounded downright pitiful. To make matters worse that dad-blamed Otis got going again. They’d sing, “Were you there… when they nailed Him to the cross?” and Otis would answer back, “Not me, youse mugs! I was in Tarzana drinking Orange Juliuses I can prove it!” loud enough the people got to laughing. Which of course only encouraged him.
   “Pierced Him in the side? Ech. I wasn’t there then, either. I don’t even go t’ roller derby.”
   The Brass family was so peeved by the laughter that to the secret relief of all they stalked offstage as soon as they finished two choruses, absolutely furious.
   Betsy says she’s sorry my favorite number got messed up and I says me too, but little Toby says, very seriously, that it’ll be alright, because here comes his folks. Then did the crowd hoop and holler! The Birds of Prayer was the other end of the stick from the Brass family. They pranced out all in purple, Mr. Keller-Brown and another big black fellow with a beard, and three pretty little colored girls. The fellow with the beard played organ and sung bass, and Mr. Keller-Brown played those big native drums and kind of come in now and then, talking to them. The three colored girls sung and played guitars and shook tambourines. After the Brass family they were like a breath of fresh air. My grandson comes through the crowd toward us, bouncing up and down to the rhythm.
   “How’d you like your dedication?” he asks, taking a pillow alongside me so’s he can reach the deviled eggs. I tell him it was fine but not a candle to them kids singing up there now. He grins, his lips all mustard. “So you like the Birds better’n the Brass?” A bushel, I say, that they were as good as anything I ever heard on KHVN. But I thought somebody said Mr. Keller-Brown’s wife was one of the group? He says, “She is. That’s her on the left.” And before I thought I says, “But what about our little—” I stopped before I said “blue-eyed,” but I’d said enough. My grandson shrugged and Betsy put a finger to her lips, rolling her eyes over at the little boy sitting there petting his kitty.
   I could have bit my stupid tongue off.
   Then the next thing that happened was after sundown. After the main of the crowd drove away or drifted off, a bunch of us walked down to the ash grove for my cake. Mr. Keller-Brown had pulled his bus down there and the kids had set up a table in front of where the cake was waiting. They sung “Happy Birthday, Great-Grandma” while Quiston scampered around with a box of matches trying to keep all those candles lit.
   “Here!” says I. “You kids help Grandma blow ‘em out before we start the woods a-blaze.”
   There was Devlin’s three, Quiston, Sherree, and Caleb, and Behema’s Kumquat May, and Buddy’s Denny and Denise, and the usual passel of Dobbs kids all circled close to be first at the cake. Quite a cluster. I seen little Toby way in the back outside this ring of glowing faces. He was still holding that cat.
   “Let Toby in there, Quiston. This many candles gonna need all the breath we can muster. Okay, everybody? One… two…”—with all of them drawing a lungful except little Toby there, his chin resting between the ears of that Siamese kitty, both of them looking right at me, expressions absolutely the same—“blow!”
   When I could see again, his daddy was standing right where he’d stood, lighting a Coleman lantern. He’d changed out of his purple jumpsuit into his most spectacular outfit so far.
   “Goodness me! Aren’t you something! You’re almost as pretty as this cake.”
   Actually, the cake looked like one of them lumpy tie-dye pillows whereas his robe was an absolutely beautiful affair, purple velvet and gold trim and wriggling front and back with some of the finest needlepointing I ever saw—dragons, and eagles, and bulls you could practically hear snorting. He thanked me kindly and did a slow swirl with the lantern held up hissing above him.

   “You must’ve locked your little woman home with needle and thread for about six months,” I says. I’d had a glass of sherry with Betsy before and was feeling feisty.
   “Nope,” he says, starting to ladle out paper cups of punch for the kids. “It only took three months. And I made it.”
   “Well, my, my,” I says, aiming to tease him was all, “I never seen anything so delicate done by a man.”
   The kids all laugh again but he took it some way wrong and the laugh died off too quick. Instead of responding to my rib he went right back to handing out that punch. To try to smooth over my foolishness I says, “Go on. I bet your wife did too make it.” By way of apology. But before he could accept my effort Otis stumbles up and butts across the front of us to take a Dixie cup.
   “Oh, I’ll vouch for M’kehla’s wife, Grandma, she doesn’t make anything.” Otis pours the cup about half full of brandy before he adds, “Anymore.”
   The quiet got even quieter. I thought he was going to look two holes in the top of Otis’s head. But Otis keeps sniffing his nose down in his booze like he don’t notice a thing.
   “My first Christian communion and from a Dixie cup,” he moans. “How rural. At my Bar Mitzvah we drank from at least clear plastic.”
   After his success aping the Brass family, Otis had got worse and worse, singing and reciting and cutting up. Yet everybody had took it in good humor. Devlin told me once that Otis was like he was because he’d been given too much oxygen at birth, so nobody generally took offense at what he said. But you could tell Mr. Keller-Brown was aggravated, too much oxygen or whatever. He reached over and snagged the paper cup out of Otis’s hand and threw it hissing into the fire.
   “Is this your first communion, Mr. Kone? We’ll just have to get something more fitting for your first communion.”
   I noticed back by the fire his wife’s sister stood up from where she’d been talking with my two grandsons and Frank Dobbs.
   Mr. Keller-Brown turns from Otis and hands me the punch ladle. “If you’ll take over, Mrs. Whittier, I’ll see if we can’t find Mr. Kone a more appropriate vessel.”
   The sister comes hurrying over and says, “I’ll get it, Montgomery—” but he says No, he’d do it, and she stops on a dime. Otis reaches for another cup mumbling something about not to trouble and he says No, it’s no trouble and Otis’s hand stops just the same way. He still hasn’t looked up to Mr. Keller-Brown’s eyes.
   The kids are beginning to get upset, so I say, “Why, if Mr. Kone gets a glass to drink out of, Mr. Keller-Brown, oughten I get a glass to drink out of?”
   Little Sherree, who is a Libra and a smart little peacemaker in her own right, joins in and says, “Yeah, it’s Great-Grandma’s birthday.” And the other kids and Toby, too, says yeah yeah, Grandma gets a glass too! Those eyes lift off Otis and move to me.
   “Certainly,” he says, laughing off his temper. “Forgive me, Mrs. Whittier.” He winked to me and jerked his thumb back at Otis by way of explanation. I winked and nodded back to indicate I knew precisely what he meant, that many’s the time I wanted to wring that jellyroll’s neck myself.
   He went into the bus and the kids went back at the cake and ice cream. I never could stand having people fight around me. I’ve always been handy at oiling troubled waters. Like when I was living with Lena: Devlin and Buddy would get in terrible squabbles over whose turn it was to mow the lawn. While they were fussing I’d go get the lawn mower and mow away till they came sheepfaced out to take over. (More handy than straightforward, to be honest.) So I thought the storm was past when Mr. Keller-Brown come back out with three dusty brandy glasses and shared some of Otis’s brandy. I blew at the dust and filled mine with the kids’ punch and all of us clinked glasses and toasted my birthday. Otis said that he would sympathize with me, being eighty-sixed quite a number of times himself. Everybody laughed and he was down from the hook. Five minutes later he was running off at the mouth as bad as ever.
   I opened my little pretties and doodads the kids had made me and gave them all a big hug. Buddy rolled some logs up to the fire. We sat about and sung a few songs while the kids roasted marshmallows. Frank Dobbs stamped around playing the mouth harp while the big black fellow with the beard patted at Mr. Keller-Brown’s drums. Devlin strummed the guitar (though he never could play worth sour apples) and the fire burnt down and the moon come up through the new ash leaves. Betsy and Buddy’s wife took their kids up to the house. Mr. Keller-Brown took Toby into the bus, him still hugging the kitty. He brought out a jar of little pellets that he sprinkled into the embers. Real myrrh, he said, from Lebanon. It smelled fresh and sharp, like cedar pitch on a warm fall wind, not sickening sweet like other incense. Then he brought out some pillows and the men settled down to discussing the workings of the universe and I knew it was time for me to go to bed.
   “Where’s that giant purse of mine?” I whispered to my grandson.
   He says, “It’s in the cabin. Betsy has made the bed for you. I’ll walk you up that way.” I told him never mind; that the moon was bright and I could walk my way around this territory with a blindfold on anyway, and told them all good night.
   The crickets were singing in the ash trees, happy that summer was here. I passed Emerson’s old plow; somebody had set out to weld it into a mailbox stand and had apparently give up and just left it to rust in the weeds, half plow and half mailbox. It made me sad and I noticed the crickets had hushed. I was taking my time, almost to the fence, when he was suddenly in front of me—a sharp black pyramid in the moonlight, hissing down at me.
   “Backdoor! Don’t you never come backdoorin’ on me or my little boy again, understand? Never! Y’ understand?”
   Of course I was petrified. But, truth to tell, looking back, not utterly surprised. For one thing I knew immediately who it was behind that black pyramid and that hissing gutter drawl. For another, I knew what he was talking about.
   “The motherfuckin necklace I let pass ‘cause I say ‘She old. She just old. She don’t know.’ But then to pull the same shit about the motherfuckin cat… that’s backdoor!”
   Two big hands from somebody behind grabbed both sides of my head, forcing me to look up at him. Fingers came all the way around over my mouth. I couldn’t holler or turn aside or even blink.
   “White angel white mother angel, my ass! I show you white angel!”
   And then O sweet Savior it was like he pulled back the dark blouse of his face. Two breasts came swirling out toward me dropping out and down until the black nipples touched my very eyeballs… giving suck… milking into me such thoughts and pictures that my mind knew at once not to think or look. Let them slide, I said in my mind, sli-i-ide… and I made a picture of rain falling on a duck. This duck splattering around must have come as a shock to him because he blinked. I felt the invisible hands drop from my head and I knew there hadn’t been nobody behind me.
   “So don’ let me catch you—”
   The duck run out a great long neck and quacked. He fumbled and blinked again.
   “I mean y’ better don’ try no secret influence on my son again, is all I wanted to tell you. Y’ understand? A dude, a father’s got to look out for his own. You understand?”
   And was gone back in the bush before I could catch my breath to answer. I hotfooted right on up to the cabin then I hope to tell you! And without slowing one iota pulled the shades took two yellow pills got in bed and yanked the covers up over my head. I didn’t dare think. I recited in my mind all the scripture I knew, and the words to “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “O Say Can You See.” I was into bread recipes before they took effect.
   Just like praying for something, Lord, I don’t like to take a pill for sleeping unless it’s absolutely necessary. Often’s the night I laid awake till dawn listening to the elevators go up and down the Towers rather than take one of these blessed pills. They always make me sleep too long and leave me feeling dopey as a dog for days. Don’t even let you dream, usually. But now I found myself dreaming like a fire broke out! It was those thoughts and pictures I’d been given suck with. I hadn’t shed them after all. I’d just covered them over like sparks in a mattress. Now they were blazing to life in icy flames, revealing a whole different version of life, and death, and Heaven. Mainly it was this shadow thing—sometimes it was an alligator, sometimes it was a panther or a wolf—rushing through my world and snapping off pieces, all the weak namby-pamby limbs, like snapping off Devlin’s hands playing the guitar, or Frank Dobbs’s leg while he was striding around, or my tongue from saying little oil-on-the-water fibs. Miss Lawn it lopped off absolutely. And Emerson T, and most of my past. Then it moved ahead, a dark pruning shadow snipping through the years ahead until only the bare cold bones of a future was left, naked, with no more fibs, nor birthday cakes, nor presents and doodads. For ever and evermore. Standing there. And out of this naked thing the heat begins to drain, till the ground was as cold as the soles of its feet and the wind the same temperature as its breathing. It still was because it was a true thing, but it was no more than the rock or the wind. And all it could do was to stand there gawking into eternity, waiting, in case God might want to use it again. Like an old mule or the ghost of a mule, its meaning spent, its seed never planted and wouldn’t have grown anyway because it is a mule, a trick of God.
   It saddened me to my very marrow. It seemed I could hear it braying its terrible bleak lonesomeness forever. I wept for it and I wished I could say something, but how can you offer comfort to one of the bleak tricks of God? It brayed louder. Not so bleak, now, nor far-off sounding, and I opened my eyes and sat up in bed. Out the window I saw Otis under the moon, howling and running in circles, way past wishing he’d blown the dust out of his brandy glass. Devlin and the others were trying to get him, but he still had his wooden sword and was slashing at them.
   “Keep your place. It wasn’t me not this wienie he had no call! Devlin? Dobbsy? Help me, old chums; he’s put the glacier on your old—he had no justifications I’m already pruned!”
   First begging for help then whacking at them when they came close, screaming like they’d turned into monsters.
   “He’s trimming me, boys, dontcha see? Me who never so much as—he had no right you black bastard all I was was just foolish!”
   And get so wound up he’d scream and run right into the fence around the chicken yard. He’d bounce off the fence and hew the men back away from him then he’d howl and run into the wire again. The chickens were squawking, the men hollering, and Otis, Lord Jesus, was going plumb mad. This isn’t just foolishness, I told myself; this is simon pure unvarnished madness! He needs help. Somebody to phone somebody. Yet all I could do was watch like it was more of my same cold dream rushing about in the moonlight and chicken feathers, until Otis got his sword snaffled in the wire and the men swarmed on him.
   They carried him thrashing and weeping to the house, right past my cabin window. As soon as they were gone from sight I was up out of that bed. Without a further thought on the matter I put on my housecoat and slippers and struck out toward the ash grove. I wasn’t scared, exactly. More like unbalanced. The ground seemed to be heaving. The trees was full of faces, and every witch-doctor and conjure-man story I ever heard was tumbling up out of my Ozark childhood to keep me company, but I still wasn’t scared. If I let myself get the slightest bit scared, I suspicioned, I’d be raving worse than Otis under the curse of Keller-Brown.
   But he wasn’t sticking pins in dolls or such like that. He was sitting calm in his therapeutic recline-o-lounger reading one of his big books by the light of the Coleman lamp, a big pair of earphones on his head. Through the bus windows I could hear there was a tape or record or some such playing, of a bunch of men’s voices chanting in a foreign tongue. His mouth was moving to the words of the chant as he read. I slapped on the side of the bus stairwell.
   “Hello… can I come in a minute?”
   “Mrs. Whitter?” He comes to the door. “Sure, man. Come in. Come on in. I’m honored. Honest.”
   He gives me his hand and seems genuinely happy to see me. I told him I had been thinking and if there’d been a misunderstanding I wanted to be the first—But he cuts right in, apologizing himself, how he’d acted abominable and inexcusable and hang on a second. Please. Then held up a big palm while he swirled around to flip a switch on his phonograph. The speakers went off but the tape still turned on the machine. I could still hear a tiny chorus chanting out from the earphones on the recline-o-lounger: Rah. Rah. Rah ree run. Like that…
   “I’m glad you come,” he says. “I been feeling terrible for the way I acted. There was no excuse for it and I apologize for getting so heavy on you. Please, come on in.”
   I told him it was understandable, and that was why I was there. I started to tell him that I had never said anything about the little boy having the kitten without his mom’s consent when I glanced back to the waterbed. She wasn’t there but the little boy was, lying propped up on a pillow like a ventriloquist doll, his eyes staring at a glass bead strung from the ceiling. He had on his own pair of earphones, and the bead twisted and untwisted.
   “Well, I get to apologize first,” I told Mr. Keller-Brown. That that was why I’d come. I told him that he’d been completely correct, and that I had no right telling his child those kind of whoppers and deserved a scolding. The chant went something like Rah. Rah. Tut nee cum. Mr. Keller-Brown says okay, we’ve traded apologies. We chums again? I said I guess so. Rah. Rah. Tut nee eye sis rah cum RAH and that bead turning slow as syrup on its thread. He says he hopes I’ll still consider riding down to LA with them; they’d be honored. I say it’s too bad it ain’t to Arkansas; I need to go to Arkansas—for legal business. He says they go to St. Louis after Oklahoma City and that’s near Arkansas. I says we’ll see how I feel tomorrow; it’s been a big day. He says good night and helps me back down the steps. I thank him.
   At the bus window waving, his face gives me no clue whether he believed it or not. Everything suddenly turned ten times brighter as I felt him withdraw that terrible pruning shadow and return it to its sheath. Now forget it, I told myself, all, and made a picture of the rain stopping and the duck flying off.
   I walked through the bright moonlight at the edge of the ash grove. The look of things was headed back to normal. There were crickets in the trees, nothing else. The ground ran level and the night was calm. I had just about convinced myself that it was all over, that it was all just a widder woman’s nightmare, nothing more, nothing worse, when I heard the mama Siamese meowing.
   The kitten was stuffed under some ash roots and covered with big rocks. I could barely move them. You were right, I told the mama; you should’ve kept him in the rhubarb. She followed crying as I carried it up to the cabin. I kept talking to her as I walked, and fingering the poor stiffening little kitty to see if it was cut or broke or what. And when I found it at the furry throat I was reminded of the time I was picking pears in the dusk as a kid of a girl in Penrose, Colorado, and reached up to get what I thought was sure a funny fuzzy-feeling pear, when it suddenly uncurled and squeaked and flew away and I fell off the ladder with bat bites all over my hand… was what I thought as my fingers recognized the cameo and chain knotted around its neck. O Lord, I cried, what have I got into now? And tossed it under the cabin porch without even trying to break that chain. Then I come inside and took another pill out of my bag and got right down on my knees for a sign. And a dumb old rooster just crowed. Okay. Okay then. If not a sign Lord Jesus to make me certain then how about the strength to act like i am for it looks to me like i am left with no choice but to go ahead along a fortress or harbor Amen Lord amen—


(to be continued)

Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Albert Hall

   In the waning days of 1968, for some reason never very specific and now nearly obscured by time, the prime movers from the Dead Center made arrangements with the Beatles at Apple to send over to London a sampling of psychedeloids.
   A kind of cultural lend-lease, heads across the water and all that.
   There were thirteen of us in all—hippies, hoopies, and harpies; Hell’s Angels and their hogs; a few serious managers with lots of plots and proposals… one prankster without plan one.
   I was happy to be getting out of the U.S. That book about me and my Kool Aid cronies had just come out and I felt the hot beam of the spotlight on me. It burned like a big ultraviolet eye. The voltage generated by all this attention scared me a little and titillated me a lot, and I needed a breather from it before I became an addict, or a casualty. Stand in this spotlight, feel this eye pass over you. You never forget it. You are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated and alone, above any of your old bush-league frets of stage fright, nagging scruples, etc. Self-consciousness and irresolution melt in this beam’s blast. Grace and power surge in to take their place. Banging speed is the only thing even close. Drowsing protoplasm snaps instantly to Bruce Lee perfection—enter the dragon. But there’s the scaly rub, right? Because if you go around to the other end of that eye and look through at the star shining there so elevated, you see that this adoring telescope has a crosshair built in it, and notches in the barrel filed for luminaries: Kennedy… King… Joplin… Hemingway…Anyway, we headed to London, flying high (as Country Joe put it) all the way. As the DC-8 began to hum down through the thick English fog, everybody realized that after our transatlantic antics a customs check was almost certainly coming up, and what couldn’t be flushed had better be swallowed.
   Up to the bustling British customs table we floated, a big-eyed baker’s dozen from America, in leather and furs and cowboy hats and similar fashionable finery. The weary officer sighed sorely at the sight, then politely searched us for three hours, even the cylinders of the two Harley-Davidsons. It was well into the afternoon by the time our fleet of taxis headed for London, escorted through the wrong-side-of-the-road traffic by Angels Old Bert and Smooth Sam Smathers on their two huge choppers. It was clammy gray twilight by the time we all arrived at Apple.
   There was a small flock of the faithful at the door, waiting with that radiant patience of reverent pilgrims. Frisco Fran, a long blond mama of thirty-five, with a feeling for Old Bert and Old Bert’s new Harley, and a $6,000 mink coat over her T-shirt and greasy jeans, looked at the little gaggle of fans on the Savile Row steps, then up at the crisp white office building, and observed, “I feel like I’m going to see the Pope, or something.”
   In the outer lobby a chubby receptionist welcomed us with a cheeky wink for the men and an embossed invitation for each of us. She looked like Lulu in To Sir, With Love. After a confirming call from higher up, she let us into lobby #2, where all the rock & roll managers greeted each other—Yanks, Limeys, even a visiting Frog—embracing and slapping five and jiving each other rock-&-roll-wise. This got us through lobby 2’s door into the crimson-carpeted keep of lobby #3, where George Harrison finally came down to shake everybody’s hand and escort us into the very core of the Apple organization—endless offices, wandering halls with gold records on all the walls, a huge recording studio in the basement that looked like Disney had designed it for Captain Nemo and hired Hugh Hefner to decorate it—finally to a doorless doorway upstairs opening on a large room that we could use as our digs, we were told, during our stay. All eyes popped at the accommodations. The room was full of food: roasted pigs suckling apples, smoked turkeys, cheeses, breads, cases of champagne and ale stacked to the ceiling… for the big Apple Christmas party coming up, we were told. Old Bert immediately dropped his ratty bedroll to the floor and booted it beneath a table full of glazed goose and stuffing.
   “Looks like home to me,” he proclaimed.
   Ringo dropped in for ‘arf a mo’ to welcome us, and once we thought we caught a glimpse of Paul down the hall, though some said it wasn’t Paul, that Paul was in New York getting engaged. But he was bright-eyed, lovable, and barefoot so it might have been Paul. Also, he was small.
   “They’re all so… so…”—Spider, a tall ex-UCLA-track star gone hip and hairy and thirty, searched for the precise word—“diminutive.”
   “They’re all the size I thought Ringo was,” Smooth Sam added.
   “I know,” said the mama in mink, eyes shining with tender solicitude. “It makes me want to hold an umbrella over them, or something.”
   We didn’t see John until later, at the famous Apple Christmas Debacle. What happened that night has been run down in a bunch of books, both pro-Yank and anti, so no one else needs to go into that. I only want to give you the setting for Lennon’s entrance, for drama’s sake…
   As the day drifted toward the festive eve ahead, we drifted out of our little food-filled office to stroll the Christmasy London streets and drink stout in the pubs—work up an appetite for the feast to come. When we ambled back to 3 Savile Row and past the pack of cheeky fans that cluttered the steps with their little autograph books (they all looked like Lulu) and through lobbies #1 and #2 to the hallowed lobby #3, we found that another coterie of Yanks had established a beachhead right in the middle of the lush crimson carpet. What kind of pull they had used to bore this deep into Apple I couldn’t imagine, because they were even scruffier than we were. There were half a dozen big bearded dudes with ragged grins, a bunch of naked noisy kids, and one woman—a skinny redhead on the sinewy side of thirty sporting a faded blue dress of hillbilly homespun with matching hicky twang.
   “We’re the Firedog Family,” she informed us. “We come here to see the Beatles all the way from Fort Smith, Arkansas. I had this dream me and John was running side by side through the electric-blue waters of the Caribbean and he looked at me and says ‘Come Together.’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ was play in’. We was naked. We was on acid. We ran right out of the water right up into the sky. And my given name is Lucy Diamond. Let’s chant again, children.”
   The pack of kids stopped fussing and settled themselves obeli diently in a circle and began chanting.
   “John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo. John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo…”
   The woman snaked across the carpet to the rhythm, all knees and elbows and freckles. “We know they is in the building. One of the kids was running in the hall and seen them carrying a big red sack. This chant will bring us together.”
   Her eyes fluttered shut a moment at the divine prospect, then she stopped dancing and gave us a look faded as her blue dress.
   “Y’ know, don’t you, that the Beatles is the most blessed people on earth? They are. For instance, how many times have you been coming down with the blues and heard a Beatles tune come on the radio and thought to yourself, ‘God bless the Beatles.’ Huh? That’s exactly what I said when I saw Yellow Submarine after my last abortion. ‘God bless the Beatles.’ And how many folks all over the world have done the same thing more or less, blest the Beatles? So, you see—they’re all saints. Blessed saints. I mean who on this miserable earth, in this day and age, who can you name that has been blest more times than the Beatles?”
   We couldn’t think of a soul. We were hungry and tired and not very interested in playing Name the Saints. When the door was finally opened to us and we left lobby #3 the kids were still chanting “John and Yo-ko Ring-go too-ooo” and the woman was swaying and the bearded dudes were nodding to the beat. We walked up the hall to our assigned room without a word, stomachs grumbling, only to find the food had been completely removed. Nothing left but the smell. It seemed like a hint. Grumpily, Old Bert gathered his bedroll from beneath the empty table.
   “Blessing them’s all right, but I don’t guess you have to get right up in their faces to do it.”
   “Yeah,” Frisco Fran agreed. “Let’s cut.”
   Back down in the main sanctum the night’s crowd was gathering—toffs in worsted flannel and sandalwood cologne, birds in bright beads and bouffants by Vidal Sassoon, executive types in tie-dyed Nehru shirts and Day-Glo tennies—and the champagne was flowing. Old Bert decided a little snack might be nice before leaving. His nose told him the grub couldn’t be far away. He sniffed up to a parted door where a natty lad in a plaid weskit was positioned as guard.
   “Whatsye, myte?” Bert had picked up a nice cockney accent in the afternoon pubs. “That I grabs me a drumstick for the road?”
   “Cawn’t, I don’t think,” the boy answered, nervous and vague. “Supposed to save it for after. The invited, rather. You understand—for later.”
   “We are invited, old sport.” Bert produced the card we’d been issued. “And maybe we ain’t staying till later. Furthermore”—he jerked a thick-knuckled thumb over his shoulder, indicating a place in the past—“I ain’t ate since the airport.”
   The boy looked at the thumb with all that carbon and grease still under the thumbnail from reassembling the bikes, and at the leather wristband with its battered studs, and at the big, vein-laced forearm with those terrible tattoos of knives and nooses, and it appeared to me that he was about to see his way clear to advancing Old Bert an early taste of turkey. But just then one of the tie-dyed higher-ups sidled by in long muttonchops and a snide smile. He was eating a macaroon.
   “Don’t give it to them, Clayburn,” this colorful creature advised through a long bony nose as he chewed his cookie. “I don’t care how much chanting they do.” Then, very foolishly, he added, “They’re nothing but leeches and mumpers anyway.”
   “What was that, myte?” Bert asked with a wide grin, turning slowly from the turkey to what promised to be juicier fare. “What did you sye?”
   “I said, ‘Leeches and mumpers.’ “
   Pow! The executive went somersaulting backward all the way to the wall, where he slowly slid down in a pile against the baseboard and lay there, like a rumpled rainbow. The room suddenly polarized, all the Englishmen springing to one side of the carpet to surround their clobbered countryman in an instant display of British pith, all the Yanks to the other.
   “Anybody else,” Bert asked the group glaring at us from across the room, “thinks we’re leeches or mumpers?”—in a challenge so specific that everybody knew it would have to be answered or none of the home team would ever be able to look the statue of Admiral Nelson in his steely eye again. I took off my watch and put it in my pocket. The music stopped. The two factions tightened and gathered, readying for the rumble.
   It was into this smoldering scene, right between these two forces about to clash, that John Lennon came, in a red Santa Claus suit and a silly white beard.
   “Awright, then,” he said, not loud but very clear, and reasonable, and unsmiling, that thin, bespectacled face pale yet intensely bright, polished by more time spent beneath the blast of that high-voltage beam than any face I have ever seen, the thin hands coming out of the white fur cuffs to hold back the two sides of the room, like Moses holding back the waters—“That’s enough.”
   And it was. The rumble didn’t erupt. He stopped it, just like that. Old Bert was so impressed that he apologized at once to everyone, even bent down to help the young executive brush the bloody coconut crumbs out of his muttonchops. Everybody laughed. A cork popped. The music resumed. Yoko emerged from behind John, as though cloned from his yuletide image, in matching beard and red Santa suit with a big red sack over her shoulder. She began passing out gifts. Blond Mama Fran decided to take off her mink and stick around awhile after all. Spider began to eye the nervous Lulus. The caterers swept in with trays of sliced meats and pickled crabapples. The party went on.
   Oo blah dee.
   After New Year’s Day, I returned to London with my family. We took a flat in Hampstead and I tubed daily to Apple to work on a spoken-word record that was to be called Paperback Records. It never happened. Fell apart. Administrative shake-ups. I didn’t mind. It was a fun time, hanging around the action in the Apple orchard in those days when the bounty was still unblighted.
   I saw John Lennon every once in a while after that first night—on the roof watching the sky, in the halls, playing the piano in the studio, at Albert Hall for his over-hyped “Alchemical Wedding” when he crawled into a big bag with Yoko for forty uncomfortable minutes of public humping while the packed and petulant house hooted and whistled and called out things like “ ‘Ow’s the revolootion goin’ then, John?”—but never again saw anything as bright and clear and courageous as when he stepped between the two sides at the Christmas party.
   He was something.
   When he said “Peace,” even the warring angels listened.
   But this isn’t a nickel valentine to a dead superstar. What this story is really about is not so much John Lennon as about all the stuff his passing stirred up around our farm, effluvia both bygone and yet to be, tangible and chimeral… mainly about these three visitations I had that week of his death, like the three ghosts from A Christmas Carol.
   The first came the day before the killing, Sunday evening, while we were waiting for my mom and Grandma Whittier to come out for supper. This specter was the easiest to comprehend and deal with. In fact, he was almost classic in his immediate comprehensibility; versions of this spook have probably been around since the first campfire. He poked his bearded kisser in out of the night, all shaggily a-grin. He had a bottle of screw-top Tokay in his right hand, a battered black boot in his left, and a glint in his gummy eyes that could have been bottled and displayed in the Bureau of Standards: the Definitive Panhandler Come-on Glint.
   “Greetings the house!” he called through a curtain of phlegm. “This is Bible Bill, ol’ Bible Bill, come in the name of the Main Redeemer, praise Him. Anybody home?”
   I didn’t have to give it a second thought. “No,” I said.
   “Dev? Brother Deboree? Greetings, brother, greetings!” He held forth the Good Book and the bad wine. “Compliments of Bible Bill, these—”
   “No,” I repeated, pushing right on past the offerings. I put one hand on his chest and held the door open with the other, pushing. Behind him, I could make out an entourage of shivering teenagers, unhappy in the December wind. Bill wasn’t pleased with the prospect of getting shoved back out in it, either.
   “Dev, don’t be like this, dammit all! I promised these kids—”
   “No.” I pushed.
   “Give it up, dude,” one of the teenagers said to him. “Can’t you see you’re bugging the man?”
   “But kinfolks—”
   “But my butt,” another kid joined in. “Let’s go.”
   With me pushing and them pulling we moved him back to the Toyota they’d come in, him hollering, “But cousins! Brothers! Comrades!” and me hollering back, “But no! No! No!”
   The second visitation was a little more complex. For one thing, he was likable. He showed up the next morning while I was out in the field with Dobbs, fixing the fence where the cows had broken through during the night. Whenever it’s real cold Ebenezer likes to lead her herd in an assault on the barnyard, hoping to break into the hay sheds (for cussedness and comfort more than food), and it was real cold. The ruts and tracks raised by their midnight raid were still hard as iron. Dobbs and I were long-johned and overalled and leather-gloved and still too cold to be able to effectively hammer in staples. After a half-hour’s work we would have to head to the house for a gin and tonic to warm us up. After the third try, we haywired a hasty patch and came in for good.
   I saw him standing by our stove, bent to the open door, moving his hooked hands in and out of the heat the way a man does when they’re numbed so stone hard he’s afraid to thaw them back to feeling. I left him alone. I peeled out of my overalls and boots and mixed Dobbs and me a drink. The guy never moved. When Betsy came downstairs she told me she had let him in because he was obviously about to freeze to death and didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about the prospect.
   “He says he’s got something for you.”
   “I’ll bet he does,” I said and went over to talk to him. His hand was as hard as it looked, a calloused claw, beginning to turn red with the heat. In fact he was turning red all over, beginning to glow and grin.
   He was about thirty-five or forty, like Bible Bill, with a lot of hard mileage in his eyes and scraggly hair on his face. But this hair was the color of berries on a holly bough, the eyes sharp and green as the leaves, merry. He said he was called—no lie!—John the Groupie, and that we had met once fifteen years ago at the Trips Festival, where I had given him something.
   “I got good and turned on,” he confided with a big limber-shouldered shrug, “and I guess I never been able to get turned off.”
   I asked him what in the dickens was he doing this far north at Christmastime with nothing on but ventilated sneaks and kneeless jeans and a Sunset Strip pink pearl-button shirt? He grinned and shrugged his carefree shrug again and told me he’d caught a ride with a hippie kid outta LA over the Grapevine, and the kid said he was headed all the way to Eugene, Oregon, so John the Groupie says, well, what the hell… never been to Oregon. Ain’t that where Old Man Deboree hangs his hat? Maybe I’ll go check him out. Met him once, you know, over a tab or two, ho ho.
   “Besides,” he added, trying to get that big red claw down a hip pocket, “I got something here I knew you’d want.”
   This made me back off two steps, I didn’t care how carefree his shrug or merry his eye. If there was one thing I had learned in Egypt, it was Don’t take nothing free, especially from ingratiating types who come on “My friend please be accept this wonderful geeft, my nation to yours, no charge”—pressing into your palm a ratty little scarab carved out of a goat pellet or something, a little hook by which the hustler can attach himself to you. And the less you want the goddamned thing he forces on you the more attached he becomes.
   “I got right here,” John the Groupie announced proudly, holding out a wad of white paper, “Chet Helms’s phone number.”
   I told him I had no need for Chet Helms’s phone number, that I had never needed Chet Helms’s phone number, even during Chet Helms’s San Fran Family Dog promoter days, hadn’t even seen Chet Helms in ten years!
   John stepped close, becoming intimate.
   “But I mean this isn’t Chet Helms’s answering service, man,” he made me to realize, delicately holding forth the little chit like it might have been a spindle of the purest Peruvian. “This is Chet Helms’s home phone number.”
   “No,” I said, holding both hands high and away from the offered morsel, which I wanted about as much as I wanted a goat turd or a hit off Bible Bill’s bottle. “No.”
   John the Groupie shrugged and put it down on the coffee table.
   “In case you get eyes for it later,” he said.
   “No.” I picked it up and put it back in his hand and folded the freckled fingers over it. “No, no, no. And I’ll tell you now what I have to offer: I’ll give you something to eat and I’ll let you sleep in my cabin, out of sight. Tomorrow I’ll give you a coat and a hat and put you back on I-5, on the southbound side, with your thumb out.” I fixed him with my sternest scowl. “My God, what a thing to do—just showing up at a man’s place, no invitation, no sleeping bag, not even any damned socks. It’s not courteous! I know it’s inhospitable to turn a wayfarer out like this, but goddammit, it’s discourteous to be tripping around unprepared this way.”
   He had to agree, smiling. “Like I said, I never been able to get turned off the trip. I guess I do get turned out a lot, though, ho ho hee.”
   “I don’t want to hear about it,” I kept on. “All I want you to know is I’m offering warmth and sustenance and a way back to Venice Beach if I don’t have to listen to you run any numbers on me, savvy?”
   He put the paper back in his pocket. “I savvy like a motherfucker, man. Just point me to this outasight abode.”
   Like I say—likable. Just your basic stringy, carrot-topped, still-down-and-it-still-looks-up-to-me acidhead flower child gone to seed. Probably no dope he hasn’t tried and, what’s more, none he wouldn’t try again. Still grooving, still tripping, he didn’t give a shit if he was barefoot in a blizzard. I left him rolled up in two cowhides, thumbing through the latest Wonder Warthog while the pine flame roared and rattled in the rusty little cabin woodstove like a caged Parsi firedemon.
   When he wandered back up to the house it was dark. We had finished supper and were on the other side of the room watching Monday Night Football. I didn’t turn but I could see Betsy in the mirror setting him a place. Quiston and Caleb had been duck hunting the day before, and we’d had two mallards and a widgeon for supper, stuffed with rice and filberts. A whole mallard and two half-eaten carcasses were left. John ate the mallard and picked all three carcasses so clean that red ants wouldn’t have bothered over the leavings. Plus a whole loaf of bread, a pot of rice big enough for a family of Cambodian refugees, and most of a pound of butter. He ate slowly and with bemused determination, not like a glutton eats but like a coyote who never knows how long it might be before the next feast so he better get down all he can hold down. I kept my eyes on the game, not wanting to embarrass him by letting on I was watching.
   It was the Dolphins against the Patriots, the fourth quarter. It was an important game to both teams, as they fought for a playoff berth, and a tense series of downs. Suddenly Howard Cosell interrupted his colorful commentary and said a funny thing, apropos of nothing discernible on the screen. He said, “Yet, however egregious a loss might seem to either side at this point in time, we must never lose sight of the fact… that this is only a football game.” A very un-Howard-Cosell-like thing to say, I thought, and turned up the sound. After a few moments of silence Howard announced over the play-action fake unfolding on the field that John Lennon had been shot and killed outside his apartment in New York.
   I turned to see if John the Groupie had heard the news. He had. He was twisted toward me in his seat, his mouth open, the last duck carcass stopped midway between tooth and table. We looked into each other’s eyes across the room, and our roles fell away. No more the scowling landowner and the ingratiating tramp, simply old allies, united in sudden hurt by the news of a mutual hero’s death.
   We could have held each other and wept.
   The weather broke that night. It rained awhile, then cleared. The sun sneaked through the overcast after breakfast, looking a little embarrassed for the short hours it had been getting away with during this solstice time. Betsy bundled John up and gave him a knit cap, and I drove him to the freeway. I let him off near the Creswell ramp. We shook hands and I wished him luck. He said not to worry, he’d get a ride easy. Today. I saw somebody stop for him before I had gotten back across the overpass. On the way home I heard a report on Switchboard, our local community-access program, that there was no need to call in to try to scam rides today, that everybody was picking everybody up, today.
   When I got home the phone was ringing. It was a Unitarian Minister from San Francisco who was trying to put together some kind of Lennon memorial in Golden Gate Park, needed some help. I thought he was calling to ask me to come speak or something—deliver a eulogy. I started saying that, sorry, much as I’d like to I just couldn’t make it, I had fence to fix and kids’ Christmas programs to attend and so forth… but he said, oh no, he wasn’t wanting that kind of help.
   “What is it you need, then?” I asked.
   “I need some organizational help,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before. I need to find out about permits and the like. So I was wondering if you might know how I could get in touch with Chet Helms? The guy who did all those big be-ins? You happen to have Chet Helms’s phone number anywhere?”

  Many such memorable scenes from the last decade and a half of our onreeling epic have been underscored by Beatles music: “With a Little Help from My Friends” was playing when Frank Dobbs and Houlihan and Buddy helped hold my acified atoms together one awful night. During my six-month sojourn in the outer reaches of the California penal system, I used a Beatles record as my mantra, a litany to lead me safely through the Bardo of Being Busted. The record was “All You Need Is Love.” I listened to it so many times that I came to count the number of times the word “love” is used in the mix. It was 128 times, as I recall.
   Now, as I run my eyes over these three ragged runes of Christmastime in the Eighties, looking at them for whatever message or augury they might offer, I cannot help but view them to the accompaniment of Guru Lennon’s musical teachings.
   The lesson learned from Bible Bill and his ilk is simple. I already had it pat: Don’t encourage a bum. Attention is like coke to these bottomless wraiths—the more they get the more they want.
   The epiphany taught by the visitation of John the Groupie is simple enough on the surface: Don’t forget the Magical Summer of Love in the Chilly Season of Reagan. I think even John the Limey would have agreed with this interpretation.
   What complicates the lesson is that in its wake washes up the third apparition.
   This final visitor is still a mystery to me. I knew how to deal with Bible Bill. I know now how I should have dealt with John the Groupie. But I still don’t know what to do about my third phantasm, the Ghost, I fear, of Christmases to Come: Patrick the Punk.
   He was on the road alongside my pasture, shuffling along in army fatigues and jacket and carrying a khaki duffel over his shoulder. I was headed to town to pick up some wiring and exchange a video tape. When I saw him I knew there was no place he could be headed but mine. I stopped the Merc and rolled down the window.
   “Mr. Deboree?” he said.
   “Get in,” I said.
   He tossed the duffel in the back and climbed in beside me, heaving an unhappy sigh.
   “Fuckin Christ, it’s cold. I didn’t think I’d make it. My name is Patrick.”
   “Hi, Pat. How far have you come?”
   “All the way from New York State on a fuckin Trailways bus. Took every nickel I had. But fuck, you know? I mean I had to split. That East Coast-shit, all they want to do is fuck you over or suck you dry. I’m dry, Mr. Deboree. I’m broke and I’m hungry and I haven’t been able to sleep in three days from this fuckin poison oak.”
   He was only a few years past voting age, with a soft unblinking stare and a gray mold of first whiskers on his chin. The whole right half of his face was covered with white lotion.
   “How’d you get poison oak?”
   “Running through the woods from this murderous old bitch in Utah or Idaho or someplace.” He dug a Camel out of a new pack and stuck it in his swollen mouth. “She thought I was trying to rip off her fuckin’ pickup.”
   “Were you?”
   He didn’t even shrug. “Hey, I was terminally drug with that fuckin’ bus. Who can sleep with all that starting and stopping? Bums and winos, maybe, but not me.”
   I still hadn’t resumed driving. I realized I didn’t know what to do with him. I didn’t like having him in the car with me—he stank of medicine and nicotine and sour unvented adrenaline, of rage—and I didn’t want to let him stroll onto my place.
   “I came to see you, Mr. Deboree,” he said without looking at me. He seemed in a kind of shock. The Camel just hung there.
   “What the hell for? You don’t know me.”
   “I’ve heard you help people. I’m fucked and sucked dry by those vampires, Mr. Deboree. You’ve got to help me.”
   I started to drive, away from the farm.
   “I never read Sometimes a Cuckoo Nest, but I seen the flick. I did read what you said in the Whole Earth Catalogue about believing in Christian mercy. Myself, I’m an antagnostic, but I believe everybody has a right to believe in mercy. And I need some, Mr. Deboree, you can fuckin believe that! I’m no wino bum. I’m intelligent. I’ve got talent. I had my own little C & W group and was doing real good for a while, but then, them fuckin vampires—I mean, man, you know what they—?”
   “Never mind. I don’t want to hear. It’ll just depress me. If you’ll promise to spare me your tale of woe I’ll buy you lunch in town.”
   “Lunch isn’t what I had in mind, Mr. Deboree.”
   “What exactly did you have in mind?”
   “I’m an artist, not a mooch. An experienced singer/songwriter. I need a job with a good little country-and-western group.”
   O, dear God, I thought, as if I knew a country-and-western group, or as if any group would want to take on this whey-faced zombie. But I kept quiet and let him ramble on in general about the shitty state of everything, about all the fuckin psychedelic sellouts and nut-cutting feminist harpies and brain-crippling shrinks and mother-raping bulls who run this black fuckin world.
   It was a week or so after the Lennon killing, a day yet before the winter solstice, so I tried to listen to him without comment. I knew he came as a kind of barometer, a revelation of the nation’s darkening spiritual climate. Still, I also knew that, as black as it might be, the Victory of the Young Light could always be expected after the darkest time, that things would get better again, and I told him so. He didn’t look at me, but I saw the side of his mouth move to make a smile, or a sneer. The expression was unpleasant, like an oyster lifting a corner of a slimy lip from a cold cigarette, but it was the first that had crossed his puffy puss and I thought maybe it was a hopeful sign. I was wrong.
   “Get better? With seventy percent of the nation voting for a second-rate senile actor who thinks everybody on welfare should be castrated? Hell, I been on welfare! Food stamps too. It’s the only way a legitimate artist can survive without selling out to the fuckin vampires. Fuck Jesus, if you knew the rotten shit I been through, with that bastard bus driver and that trigger-happy bitch in Idaho and now this fuckin poison oak—”
   “Listen to me, punk,” I said, gently. For I figured that anybody who doesn’t have anything better to do than travel 4,000 miles to try to get a fat old bald retired writer who he hasn’t even read to get him a job as a singer in a country-and-western band that doesn’t even exist is in dark straits indeed; so I decided to give him the benefit of some of my stock wisdom. “Don’t you know you got to change your mind? That the way you’re thinking, tomorrow is gonna be worse than today? And next week worse than this and next year worse than last? And your next life—if you get another one—worse than this one… until you’re going to simply, finally, go out?”
   He leaned back and looked out the window at the passing Oregon puddles. “Mister, I don’t give a fuck,” he said.
   So I gave him three bucks and let him off at a Dairy Queen, told him to get something to eat while I did my shopping. For the first time his eyes met mine. They were pewter gray, curiously large, with lots of white showing all the way around the pupil. To certain oriental herbalists, the white of the eye showing beneath the pupil means you are what they call sanpaku, “a body out of balance and bound for doom.” I concluded that Patrick’s curious eyes must indicate a kind of ultra-sanpaku, something beyond just being doomed.
   “You’re coming back to get me, aren’t you?”
   Something both doomed and dangerous.
   “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I’ll have to think about it.”
   And handed him his duffel. As I pushed it out the door at him, I felt something hard and ominous outlined through the canvas. It gave me pause.
   “Uh, you think you’ll need more than three bucks?” I felt compelled to ask. He had turned and was already walking away.
   It had felt about the size and shape of an army .45. But, Christ, I couldn’t tell. I didn’t get much wiring purchased, either. I couldn’t decide whether to leave him at the Dairy Queen, or call the cops, or what. I kissed off the electrical shop and went on to the video rental to trade in “Beatles at Shea Stadium” for a new tape, then I circled back by the Dairy Queen. He was already out on the curb, sitting on his duffel, a white paper bag cradled under his chin as though to match the chalky swatch on his cheek.
   “Get in,” I said.
   On the way back to the farm he started coming on again about the hard-hearted Easterners, how nobody back there would help him whereas he had always helped others.
   “Name one,” I challenged.
   “What?”
   “One of these others you’ve helped.”
   After some thought he said, “There was this little chick in New Jersey, for example. Real sharp but out of touch, you know? I got her out of the fuckin hypocritical public junior high and turned her on to a true way of living.”
   Made me mad again. I turned around and drove the little bastard back to the freeway. That evening when I came back from dropping my daughter off at her basketball practice, there he was, hunching along Nebo Road with his duffel over his shoulder, heading toward the farm.
   “Get in,” I said.
   “I wasn’t going to your place. I’m just looking for a ditch to sleep in.”
   “Get in. I’d rather have you where I can keep an eye on you.”
   So he ate supper and went to the cabin. He wouldn’t let me build a fire. Heat bothered his rash, and light was starting to hurt his eyes. So I turned out the light and left him lying there. While we were watching our video tape I couldn’t help but imagine him, stretched out down there in the black and cheerless chill, eyes still wide open, not scratching, not even brooding, really, just lying there.
   The movie we were watching was Alien.
   The next day Dobbs and I loaded up the pickup for a dump run to Creswell and I went down to stir Patrick up.
   “You better bring your bag,” I told him. Again he gave me that you-too-huh-you-fuckin-vampire look, then lifted his duffel from the floor and sullenly swung it up to his shoulder. The harsh right-angle object was no longer outlined through the khaki.
   He was so peeved at being hauled away he barely spoke. He got out while we were at the dump unloading and wouldn’t get back in.
   “Don’t you want a ride to the freeway?” I asked.
   “I’ll walk,” he’ said.
   “Suit yourself,” I said and backed the rig around. He stood in the mud and gravel and Pampers and wine bottles and old magazines, the duffel at his side, and watched us pull away, his round gray eyes unblinking.
   As I jounced out of the dump I felt those cross hairs on the back of my neck.
   The next day he phoned. He was calling from the Goshen Truck Stop, just down our road. He said his poison oak was worse and he was considerably disappointed in me, but he was giving me another chance. I hung up on him.
   And last night my daughter said she saw him through the window of the school bus, sitting on his duffel bag in the weeds at the corner of Jasper Road and Valley. She said he was eating a carrot and that his whole face was now painted white.
   I don’t know what to do about him. I know he’s out there, and on the rise.
   Dobbs and I went carousing this afternoon with ol’ Hunter S. Thompson, who’s up to do one of his Gonzo gigs at the behest of the U of O School of Journalism. We stopped at the Vet’s Club to help him get his wheels turning in preparation for his upcoming lecture—his “wiseman riff” he called it—and we talked of John Lennon, and Patrick the Punk, and this new legion of dangerous disappointeds. Thompson mused that he didn’t understand why it was people like Lennon they seemed to set their sights for, instead of people like him.
   “I mean, I’ve pissed off quite a few citizens in my time,” the good doctor let us know.
   “But you’ve never disappointed them,” I told him. “You never promised World Peace or Universal Love, did you?”
   He admitted he had not. We all admitted it had been quite a while since any of us had heard anybody talk such Pollyanna pie-in-the-sky promises.
   “Today’s wiseman,” Hunter claimed, “has too much brains to talk himself out on that kind of dead-end limb.”
   “Or not enough balls,” Dobbs allowed.
   We ordered another round and mulled awhile on such things, not talking, but I suspected we were all thinking—privately, as we sipped our drinks—that maybe it was time to talk a little of that old sky pie once more, for all the danger of dead ends or cross hairs.
   Else how are we going to be able to look that little bespectacled Liverpudlian in the eye again, when the Revolutionary Roll is Up Yonder called?

The Demon Box:
An Essay

   “Your trouble is—” my tall daddy used to warn, whenever the current of my curiosity threatened to carry me too far out, over my head, into such mysterious seas as swirl around THE SECRETS OF SUNKEN MU or REAL SPELLS FROM VOODOO ISLES or similar shroudy realms that could be reached with maps ordered from the back of science fiction and fantasy pulps:
   “—is you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable.”
   Years later another warning beacon of similar stature expressed the opposite view. Here’s Dr. Klaus Woofner:
   “Your trouble, my dear Devlin, is you are loath to let go your Sunday school daydreams. Yah? This toy balloon, this bubble of spiritual gas where angels dance on a pin? Why will you not let it go? It’s empty. Any angels to be found will not be found dancing on the head of the famous pin, no. It is only in the dreams of the pinhead that they dance, these angels.”
   The old doctor waited until his audience finished snickering.
   “More and more slowly, too,” he continued. “Even there. They become tired, these dancing fancies, and if not given nourishment they become famished. As must everything. For the famine must fall eventually on us all, yah? On the angel and the fool, the fantastic and the true. Do any of you understand what I’m talking about? Izzy Newton’s Nameless Famine?”
   Dr. Woofner was still asking this straight at me, black brows raised, giving me the full treatment (like a cop’s flashlight, somebody once described the analyst’s infamous gaze). I ventured that I thought I understood what he was talking about, although I didn’t know what to call it. After a moment he nodded and proceeded to give it a name:
   “It is called, this famine, entropy. Eh? No ringing bells? Ach, you Americans. Very well, some front-brain effort if you please. Entropy is a term from conceptual physics. It is the judgment passed on us by a cruel law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To put it technically, it is ‘the nonavailability of energy in a closed thermodyamic system.’ Eh? Can you encompass this, my little Yankee pinheads? The nonavailability of energy?”
   Nobody ventured an answer this time. He smiled around the circle.
   “To put it mechanically, it means that your automobile cannot produce its own petroleum. If not fueled from without it runs down and stops. Goes cold. Very like us, yah? Without an external energy supply our bodies, our brains, even our dreams… must eventually run down, stop, and go cold.”
   “Hard-nail stuff,” big Behema observed. “Bleak.”
   The doctor squinted against the smoke of his habitual cigarette. A non-filter Camel hung from his shaggy Vandyke, always, even as he was on this night—up to his jowls in a tub of hot water with a nude court recorder on his lap. He lifted a puckered hand above the surface as though to wave the smoke away.
   “Hard nails? Perhaps. But perhaps this is what is needed to prick the pinhead’s dream, to awaken him, bring him to his senses—here!”
   Instead of waving, the hand slapped the black water—crack. The circle of bobbing faces jumped like frogs.
   “We are only here, in this moment, this leaky tub. The hot water stops coming in? Our tub cools down and drains to the bottom. Bleak stuff, yah… but is there any way to experience what is left in our barrel without we confront that impending bottom? I think not.”
   About a dozen of my friends and family were gathered in the barrel to receive this existential challenge. We’d been driving down the coast to take a break from the heat the San Mateo Sheriff’s Department was putting on our La Honda commune, bound for Frank Dobbs’s ex-father-in-law’s avocado ranch in Santa Barbara. When we passed Monterey I had been reminded that coming up just down the road was the Big Sur Institute of Higher Light, and that Dr. Klaus Woofner was serving another hitch as resident guru. I was the only one on board who had attended one of his seminars, and as we drove I regaled my fellow travelers with recollections of the scene—especially of the mineral baths simmering with open minds and unclad flesh. By the time we reached the turnoff to the Institute, I had talked everybody into swinging in to test the waters.
   Everybody except for the driver; somewhat sulky about the senseless stop anyway, Houlihan had elected to stay behind with the bus.
   “Chief, I demur. I needs to rest my eyes more than cleanse my soul—the wicked curves ahead, y’unnerstand, not to mention the cliffs. You all go ahead: take some snapshots, make your, as it were, obeisance. I’ll keep a watch on the valuables and in the event little Caleb wakes up. Whup? There he is now.”
   At the mention of his name the child’s head had popped up to peer through his crib bars. Betsy started back.
   “Nay, Lady Beth, you needn’t miss this holy pilgrimage. Squire Houlihan’ll keep the castle safe and serene. See? The young prince dozes back down already. Whatcha think, Chief? Thirty minutes for howdies and a quick dip, forty-five at the most? Then ride on through the fading fires of sunset.”
   He was wishful thinking on all counts. The little boy was not dozing down; he was standing straight up in his crib, big-eyed to see the crew trooping out the bus door to some mysterious Mecca, and it was fading sunset by the time we had finished our hellos at the lodge and headed for the tubs. It was long past midnight before we finally outlasted the regular bathers and could congregate in the main barrel where the king of modern psychiatry was holding court.
   This was the way Woofner liked it best—everybody naked in his big bath. He was notorious for it. Students returned from his seminars as though from an old-fashioned lye-soap laundry, bleached clean inside and out. His method of group ablution came to be known as “Woofner’s Brainwash.” The doctor preferred to call it Gestalt Realization. By any name, it reigned as the hottest therapy in the Bay Area for more than ten years, provoking dissertations and articles and books by the score. There are no written records of those legendary late-night launderings, but a number of the daytime seminars were taped and transcribed. One of the most well known sessions was recorded during the weekend of my first visit. It’s a good sample:

   Dr. Woofner: Good afternoon. Are you all comfortable? Very good. Enjoy this comfort for a while. It may not last.
   (The group sprawls on the sun-dappled lawn. Above is the acetylene sky. Down the cliffs behind them is the foamy maw of the Pacific. In front, seated at a shaded table with an empty chair opposite him, is a man in his late sixties. He has a bald pate, peeling from sunburn, and an unkempt billygoat beard. A cigarette droops from his mouth and a pair of tinted glasses sits slantwise on his nose.
   (He removes the glasses. His eyes move from face to face until the group starts to squirm: then he begins to speak. The voice is aristocratically accented, but an unmistakable edge of contempt rings under the words, like the clink of blades from beneath an elegant cloak.)
   Dr. W: So. Before I inquire if there is a volunteer who is willing to interface with me, I want to clarify my position. First, I want you to forget all you have heard about “Super Shrink” and “Charismatic Manipulator” and “Lovable Old Lecher,” etc. I am a catalyst; that is all. I am not your doctor. I am not your savior. Or your judge or your rabbi or your probation officer. In short, I am not responsible for you. If I am responsible for anyone it is for myself—perhaps not even that. Since I was a child people told me, Klaus, you are a genius. It was only a few years ago that I could accept what they said. This lasted maybe a month. Then I realized that I did not much care for the responsibility required to be a genius. I would rather be the Lovable Old Lecher.
   (The group giggles. He waits until they stop.)
   So. I am not Papa Genius but I can play Papa Genius. Or Papa God, or Mama God, or even the Wailing Wall God. I can take on the role for therapy’s sake.
   My therapy is quite simple: I try to make you aware of yourself in the here-and-now, and I try to frustrate you in any attempt to wriggle away.
   I use four implements to perform this therapy. The first is my learning and experience… my years. Second is this empty chair across the table, the Hot Seat. This is where you are invited to sit if you want to work with me. The third is my cigarette—probably irritating to some but I am a shaman and this is my smoke.
   Finally, number four is someone who is willing to work with me, here and now, on a few dreams. Eh? Who wants to really work with the old Herr Doktor and not just try to make a fool of him?
   Bill: Okay, I guess I’m game. (Gets up from the lawn and takes the chair; introduces himself in a droll voice.) My name is William S. Lawton, Captain William S. Lawton, to be precise, of the Bolinas Volunteer Fire Department. (Long pause, ten or fifteen seconds. ) Okay… just plain Bill.
   W: How do you do, Bill. No, do not change your position. What do you notice about Bill’s posture?
   All: Nervous… pretty guarded.
   W: Yes, Bill’s wearing quite an elaborate ceremonial shield. Unfold the arms, Bill; open up. Yah, better. Now how do you feel?
   B: Butterflies.
   W: So we go from the stage armor to stagefright. We become the anxious little schoolboy in the wings, about to go on. The gap that exists between that “there” in the wings and here is frequently filled with pent-up energy experienced as anxiety. Okay, Bill, relax. You have a dream that we can work with? Good. Is it a recent dream, or is it recurring?
   B: Recurring. About twice a month I dream of this ugly snake, crawling up me. Hey, I know it’s pretty trite and Freudian but—
   W: Never mind that. Imagine that I am Bill and you are the snake. How do you crawl up me?
   B: Up your leg. But I don’t like being that snake.
   W: It’s your dream, you spawned it.
   B: All right. I am the snake. I’m crawling. A foot is in my way. I’ll crawl over it–
   W: A foot?
   B: Something, it doesn’t matter. Maybe a stone. Unimportant.
   W: Unimportant?
   B: Unfeeling, then. It doesn’t matter if you crawl over unfeeling things.
   W: Say this to the group.
   B: I don’t feel this way toward the group.
   W: But you feel that way toward a foot.
   B: I don’t feel that way. The snake feels that way.
   W: Eh? You’re not the snake?
   B: I am not a snake.
   W: Say to us all what you’re not. I’m not a snake, I’m not—?
   B: I’m not…ugly. I’m not venomous, I’m not cold-blooded.
   W: Now say this about Bill.
   B: Bill’s not venomous, not cold-blooded—
   W: Change roles, talk back to the snake.
   B: Then why do you crawl on me, you snake?
   W: Change back, keep it going.
   B: Because you don’t matter. You’re not important.
   –I am important!
   –Oh, yeah? Who says?
   –Everybody says. I’m important to the community. (Laughs, resumes the affected voice.) Captain Bill the firefighter. Hot stuff.
   W: (taking over snake’s voice): Oh, yeah? Then why is your foot so cold? (laughter)
   B: Because it’s so far from my head, (more laughter) But I see what you’re getting at, Doctor; my foot is important, of course. It’s all me—
   W: Have the snake say it.
   B: Huh? A foot is important.
   W: Now change roles and give Mr. Snake some recognition. Is he not important?
   B: I suppose you are important, Mr. Snake, somewhere on Nature’s Great Ladder. You control pests, mice and insects and… lesser creatures.
   W: Have the snake return this compliment to Captain Bill.
   B: You’re important too, Captain Bill. I recognize that.
   W: How do you recognize Captain Bill’s importance?
   B: I … well, because you told me to.
   W: Is that all? Doesn’t Captain Bill also control lesser creatures from up on the big ladder?
   B: Somebody has to tell them what to do down there.
   W: Down there?
   B: At the pumps, crawling around in the confusion… the hoses and smoke and stuff.
   W: I see. And how do these lesser creatures recognize you through all this smoke and confusion, Captain Bill, to do what you tell them?
   B: By my—by the helmet. The whole outfit. They issue the captain a special uniform with hi-viz striping on the jacket and boots. Sharp! And on the helmet there’s this insignia of a shield, you see—
   W: There it is, people! Do you see? That same armor he marched onstage with—shield, helmet, boots—the complete fascist wardrobe! Mr. Snake, Captain Bill needs to shed his skin, don’t you think? Tell him how one sheds a skin.
   B: Well, I… you… grow. The skin gets tighter and tighter, until it gets so tight it splits along the back. Then you crawl out. It hurts. It hurts but it must be done if one is to—wait! I get it! If one is to grow! I see what you mean, Doctor. Grow out of my armor even if it hurts? Okay, I can stand a little pain if I have to.
   W: Who can stand a little pain?
   B: Bill can! I’m strong enough, I believe, to endure being humbled a little. I’ve always maintained that if one has a truly strong “Self” that one can—
   W: Ah-ah-ah! Never gossip about someone who isn’t present, especially when it is yourself. Also, when you write the word “self” you would do better to spell it with a lower-case s. The capital S went out with such myths as perpetual motion. And lastly, Bill, one thing more. What, if you would please tell us, is so important over there—
   (lifting a finger to point out the vague place in the air where Bill has fixed his thoughtful gaze)
   –that keeps you from looking here?
   (bringing the finger back to touch himself beneath an eye, razor-blade blue, tugging the cheek until the orb seems to lean down from his face like some incorruptible old magistrate leaning from his sacrosanct bench)
   B: Sorry.
   W: Are you back? Good. Can you not feel the difference? The tingling? Yah? What you are feeling is the Thou of Martin Buber, the Tao of Chung Tzu. When you sneak away like that you are divided, like Kierkegaard’s “Double Minded Man” or the Beatles’ “Nowhere Man.” You are noplace, nothing, of absolutely no importance, whatever uniform you wear, and don’t attempt to give me a lot of community-spirited elephant shit otherwise. Now, out of the chair. Your time is up.

   Woofner’s tone was considered by many colleagues to be too sarcastic, too cutting. After class, in the tub with his advanced pupils, he went way past cutting. In these hunts for submerged blubber, he wielded scorn like a harpoon, sarcasm like a filleting knife.
   “So?” The old man had slid deeper beneath the girl and the water, clear to his mocking lower lip. “Der Kinder seem to be fascinated by this law of bottled dynamics?” His sharp look cut from face to face, but I felt the point was aimed at me. “Then you will probably be equally fascinated by the little imp that inhabits that vessel—Maxwell’s Demon. Excuse me, dear—?”
   He dumped the court recorder up from his lap. When she surfaced, gasping and coughing, he gave her a fatherly pat.
   “—hand me my trousers if you would be so kind?”
   She obeyed without a word, just as she had hours earlier when he’d bid her stay with him instead of leaving with the Omaha Public Defender who had brought her. The doctor toweled a hand dry on a pant’s leg, then reached into the pocket. He removed a ballpoint pen and his checkbook. Grunting, he scooted along the slippery staves until he was near the brightest candle.
   “About one hundred years ago there lived a British physicist named James Clerk Maxwell. Entropy fascinated him also. As a physicist he had great affection for the wonders of our physical universe, and it seemed to him too cruel that all the moving things of our world, all the marvelous, spinning, humming, ticking, breathing things, should be doomed to run down and die. Was there no remedy to this unfair fate? The problem gnawed at him and, in British bulldog fashion, he gnawed back. At length he felt he had devised a solution, a loophole around one of the bleakest laws on the books. What he did was… he devised this.”
   Carefully cradling the checkbook near the flame so all could see, he began to draw on the back of a check, a simple rectangular box. “Professor Maxwell postulated, ‘Imagine we have a box, sealed, full of the usual assortment of molecules careening about in the dark… and inside this box a dividing partition, and in this partition a door’ “
   At the bottom of the partition he outlined a door with tiny hinges and doorknob.
   “ ‘And standing beside this door… a demon!’ “ He sketched a crude stick figure with a tiny stick arm reaching for the doorknob.
   “ ‘Now further imagine,’ said our Professor, ‘that this demon is trained to open and close this door for those flying molecules. When he sees a hot molecule approaching he lets it pass through to this side’ “—he drew a large block H on the right half of the box—“ ‘and when he sees a cold, slow-moving molecule our obedient demon closes the door, containing it on this, the cold side of the box.’ “
   Mesmerized, we watched the puckered hand draw the C.
   “ ‘Should not it then follow,’ Professor Maxwell reasoned, ‘that as the left side of the box got colder the right side would begin to get hot? Hot enough to boil steam and turn a turbine? A very small turbine, to be certain, but theoretically capable of generating energy none the less, free, and from within a closed system? Thus actually circumventing the second law of thermodynamics would it not?’ “
   Dobbs had to admit that it seemed to him like it ought to work; he said he had encountered such demons as looked like they had the muscle to manage it.
   “Ah, precisely—the muscle. So. Within a few decades another fascinated physicist published another essay, which argued that even granted that such a system could be made, and that the demon-slave could be compelled to perform the system’s task without salary, the little imp still would not be without expense! He would need muscles to move the door, and sustenance to give those muscles strength. In short, he would need food.
   “Another few decades pass. Another pessimist theorizes that the demon would also have to have light, to be able to see the molecules. Further energy outlay to be subtracted from the profit. The twentieth century brings theorists that are more pessimistic still. They insist that Maxwell’s little dybbuk will not only require food and light but some amount of education as well, to enable him to evaluate which molecules are fast-moving and hot enough, which are too slow and cool. Mr. Demon must enroll in special courses, they maintain. This means tuition, transportation to class, textbooks, perhaps eyeglasses. More expense. It adds up…
   “The upshot? After a century of theoretical analysis, the world of physics reached a very distressing conclusion: that Maxwell’s little mechanism will not only consume more energy than it produces and cost more than it can ever make, it will continue to do so in increase! Does this remind you of anything, children?”
   “It reminds me,” my brother Buddy said, “of the atomic power plants they’re building up in Washington.”
   “Just so, yah, only worse. Now. Imagine again, please, that this box”—he bent again over the picture with his ballpoint, changing the H into a G—“represents the cognitive process of Modern civilization. Eh? And that this side, let’s say, represents ‘Good.’ This other side, ‘bad.’ “
   He changed the C to an ornate B, then waggled the picture at us through the steam.
   “Our divided mind! in all its doomed glory! And ensconced right in the middle is this medieval slavey, under orders to sort through the whirling blizzard of experience and separate the grain from the chaff. He must deliberate over everything, and to what end? Purportedly to further us in some way, eh? Get us an edge in wheat futures, a master’s degree, another rung up the ladder of elephant shit. Glorious rewards supposedly await us if our slave piles up enough ‘good.’ But he must accomplish this before he bankrupts us, is the catch. Und all this deliberating, it makes him hungry. He needs more energy. Such an appetite.”
   His hand had drifted down to float on the surface, the checkbook still pinched aloft between thumb and finger.
   “Our accounts begin to sink into the red. We have to float loans from the future. At the wheel we sense something dreadfully wrong. We are losing way! We must maintain way or we lose the rudder! We hammer on the bulkhead of the engine room: ‘Stoker! More hot molecules, damn your ass! We’re losing way!’ But the hammering only seems to make him more ravenous. At last it becomes clear: we must fire this fireman.”
   We watched the hand. It was gradually sinking, checkbook and all, into the dark waters.
   “But these stokers have built up quite the maritime union over the past century, and they have an ironclad contract, binding their presence on board to our whole crew of conscious faculties. If Stokey goes, everybody goes, from the navigator right down to the sphincter’s mate. We may be drifting for the rocks but there is nothing we can do but stand at the wheel, helpless, and wait for the boat to go… down.”
   He held the vowel, bowing his voice like a fine cello. “O, my sailors, what I say is sad but true—our brave new boat is sinking. Every day finds more of us drowning in depression, or drifting aimlessly in a sea of antidepressants, or grasping at such straws as psychodrama and regression catharsis. Fah! The problem does not lie in poo-poo fantasies from our past. It is this mistake we have programmed into the machinery of our present that has scuttled us!”
   The book was gone. Not a ripple remained. Finally the court recorder broke the spell with her flat, cornbelt voice.
   “Then what do you advise we do, doctor? You’ve figured somethin’, I can tell by the way you’re leadin’ us on.”
   That voice was the only thing flat she’d brought from Nebraska. Woofner leered at her for a moment, his face streaming moisture like some kind of seagoing Pan’s; then he sighed and raised the checkbook high to let the water trickle out of it.
   “I’m sorry, dear. The doctor has not figured anything. Maybe someday. Until then, his considered advice is to live with your demon as peacefully as possible, to make fewer demands and be satisfied with less results… and above all, mine students, to strive constantly to be here!”
   The wet checkbook slapped the water. We jumped like startled frogs again. Woofner wheezed a laugh and surged standing, puffy and pale as Moby Dick himself.
   “Class dismissed. Miss Omaha? A student in such obviously fit condition shouldn’t object to helping a poor old pedagogue up to his bed, yah?”
   “How about if I walk along?” I had to ask. “It’s time I checked on the bus.”
   “By all means, Devlin.” He grinned. “The fit and the fascinated. You may carry the wine.”
   After getting dressed, I accompanied the girl and the old man on the walk up to the cottages. We walked in single file up the narrow path, the girl in the middle. I was still in a steam from the hot-tub talk and wanting to keep after it, but the doctor didn’t seem so inclined. He inquired instead about my legal status. He’d followed the bust in the papers—was I really involved in all those chemical experiments, or was that merely more San Francisco Chronicle crap? Mostly crap, I told him. I was flattered that he asked.
   Woofner was quartered in the dean’s cabin, the best of the Institute’s accommodations and highest up the hill. While the court recorder detoured to get her suitcase, the doctor and I continued on up, strolling and sipping in silence. The air was still and sweet. It had rained sometime since midnight, then cleared, and pale stars floated in puddles here and there. The dawn was just over the mountains to the east, like a golden bugle sounding a distant reveille. The color echoed off the bald head bobbing in front of me. I cleared my throat.
   “You were right, Doctor,” I began, “about me being fascinated.”
   “I can see that,” he said without turning. “But why so much? Do you plan to use the old doctor’s secrets to become a rival in the nut-curing business?”
   “Not if I can help it.” I laughed. “The little while I worked at the state hospital was plenty.”
   “You wrote your novel on the job, I heard?” The words puffing back over his shoulder smelled like stale ashtrays.
   “That’s where I got all those crazy characters. I was a night aide on a disturbed ward. I turned in all my white suits the moment I had a rough draft done, but I never lost the fascination.”
   “Your book must have reaped certain rewards,” he said. “Perhaps you feel some sort of debt toward those crazy people and call it fascination?”
   I allowed that it could be a possibility. “But I don’t think it’s the people I’m fascinated by so much as the puzzle. Like what is crazy? What’s making all these people go there? I mean, what an interesting notion this metaphor of yours is, if I’ve got it right—that modern civilization’s angst is mechanical first and mental second?”
   “Not angst,” he corrected. “Fear. Of emptiness. Since the Industrial Revolution, civilization is increasingly afraid of running empty.”
   He was breathing hard but I knew he wasn’t going to stop for a rest; I only had another couple dozen yards left before we reached his cabin.
   “And that this fear,” I pressed on, “has driven us to dream up a kind of broker and install him in our brain so he can increase our accounts by—”
   “Minds,” he puffed. “Into the way we think.”
   “—minds… by monitoring our incomes and making smart investments? He can’t be any smarter than we are, though; we created him—and that he is the main snake-in-the-grass making people crazy, not all that psychology stuff?”
   “That psychology stuff is… like the stuff the Chronicle writes… mostly crap.”
   I followed in silence, waiting for him to continue. The wheezing breaths turned into a laugh.
   “But, yah, that is my metaphor. You got it right. He is the snake in our grass.”
   “And no way to get him out?”
   He shook his head.
   “What about the way he got in? What would happen if you hypnotized somebody and told them that their dream broker was no more? That he got wind the bank auditors were coming and committed suicide?”
   “Bank failure would happen.” He chuckled. “Then panic, then collapse. Today’s somebody has too much invested in that dream.”
   We were almost to his cabin. I didn’t know what else to ask.
   “We are experimenting,” he went on, “with some hybrid techniques, using some of Hubbard’s Scientology auditors—‘Clears,’ these inquisitors call themselves—in tandem with John Lilly’s Sensory Deprivation. The deprivation tank melts away the subject’s sense of outline. His box. The auditor locates the demon and deprograms him—clears him out, is the theory.”
   “Are you clearing any out?”
   He shrugged. “With these Scientology schwules who can tell? What about you? We have a tank open all next week. Just how fascinated are you?”
   The invitation caught me completely by surprise. Scientologists and deprivation tanks? On the other hand, a respite from the bus hassles and the cop hassles both was appealing. But before I could respond the doctor suddenly held up a hand and stopped. He tilted his hairy ear to listen.
   “Do you hear a gang of men? Having an argument?” I listened. When his breathing quieted I heard it. From somewhere beyond the hedge that bordered the cottages arose a garbled hubbub. It did sound like a gang of men arguing, a platoon of soldiers ribbing each other. Or a ball team. I knew what it was, of course, even before I followed the doctor to an opening in the hedge; it was Houlihan, and only one of him.
   Against the quiet purple of the Big Sur dawn, the bus was so gaudy it appeared to be in motion. It seemed to be still lurching along even though its motor was off and Houlihan wasn’t in his driver’s seat. He was outside in the parking lot among the twinkling puddles. He had located some more speed, it looked like, and his six-pound single jack. Then he had picked out a nice flat space behind the bus where he could waltz around, toss some hammer, and, all for himself alone and the few fading stars, talk some high-octane shit.
   “Unbelievable but you all witnessed the move—one thirtieth of a sec maybe faster! How’s that you skeptical blinkies? for world champion sinews and synapsis. But what? Again? Is this champ never satisfied? It looks like he’s going for the backward double-clutch up and over record! Three, four—count the revolutions—five, six… which end first? In which hand?… eight, nine—either hand, Houlihan, no deliberation—eleven twelve thirteenka-fwamp yehh-h-h…”
   Flipping the cumbersome tool over his shoulder, behind his back, between his legs—catching it deftly at the last instant by the tip of the dew-wet handle. Or not catching it, then dancing around it in mock frustration—cursing his ineptness, the slippery handle, the very stars for their distraction.
   “A miss! What’s amiss? Has the acclaim pried open our hero’s as it were vanity? Elementals will invade through one’s weakest point. Or has he gone all dropsy from a few celestial eyes staring?”—bending and scooping the hammer from its puddle to spin it high again and pluck it out of a pinwheeling spray. “Nay, not this lad, not world-famous Wet… Handle… Hooly! No pictures, please; it’s an act of devotion…”
   I’d seen the act plenty times before, so I watched the doctor. The old man was studying the phenomenon through the hedge with the detached expression of an intern observing aberrant behavior through a one-way mirror. As Houlihan went on, though, and on and on, the detachment changed to a look of grudging wonder.
   “It’s the demon himself,” he whispered. “He’s been stoned out of his box!”
   He stood back from the hedge, lifting his brows at me.
   “So it is not quite all Chronicle crap, eh, Dr. Deboree? Eviction by chemical command? Very impressive. But what about the risk of side effects?” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked earnestly into my eyes. “Mightn’t such powerful doses turn one into the very tenant one is trying to turn out? But, ach, don’t make such a face! I’m joking, my friend. Teasing. These experiments you and your bus family are conducting deserve attention, sincerely they do—”
   It was over my shoulder that his attention was directed, though. The court recorder was coming, carrying a small green suitcase and a large pink pillow.
   “—but at another time.”
   He gave me a final squeeze good night and promised that we would resume our consideration of this puzzle the very next opportunity. In the tubs again this evening? I nodded, flattered and excited by the prospect. He asked that I think about his invitation in the meantime—sleep a few quiet hours on it, yah? Then he hustled off to join the girl.
   I pushed my way through the hedge and headed across the lot, hoping I could get Houlihan geared down enough to let me sleep a few quiet minutes. Fat chance. As soon as saw me coming he whinnied like an old firehorse.
   “Chief! You’re bestirred, saints be praised. All ‘bo-warrrd!”
   He was through the rear window and up into his seat with the motor roaring before I could make it to the door. I tried to tell him about my appointment with the doctor but Houlihan kept rapping and the bus kept revving until it beckoned its whole scattered family. Too many had been left behind before. They came like a grumpy litter coming to a sow, grunting and complaining they weren’t ready to leave this comfortable wallow, wait for breakfast.
   “We’re coming right back,” Houlihan assured one and all. “Positively! Just a junket to purchase some brake fluid—I checked; we’re low—the merest spin back to that—it was a Flying Red Horse if I recollect rightly—hang on re-verse pshtoww! now I ain’t a liar but I stretch the line…”
   Drove us instead up a high-centered dirt road that llamas would have shunned and broke the universal miles from the highway but coincidentally near the hut of a meth-making buddy from Houlihan’s beatnik days. This leathery old lizard gave the crew a lot of advice and homemade wine and introduced us to his chemical baths. It was a day before Buddy returned from his hike to borrow tools. It was nearly a week before we got the U-joint into Monterey and welded and replaced so we could baby the bus back down to civilized pavement.
   It was a whole decade before I kept my appointment with Dr. Klaus Woofner, in the spring of 1974, in Disney World.

   A lot of things had changed in my scene by then. Banished by court order from San Mateo County, I was back in Oregon on the old Nebo farm with my family—the one that shared my last name, not my bus family. They were scattered and regrouped with their own scenes. Behema was communing with the Dead down in Marin. Buddy had taken over my Dad’s creamery in Eugene. Dobbs and Blanche had finagled a spread just down the road from our place, where they were raising kids on credit. The bus was rusting in the sheep pasture, a casualty of the Woodstock campaign. A wrong turn down a Mexican railroad had left nothing of Houlihan but myth and ashes. My father was a mere shade of that tower of my youth, sucked small by something medical science can name only, and barely that.
   Otherwise, things seemed to be looking up. My dope sentence and my probation time had been served and my record expunged. My right to vote had been reinstated. And Hollywood had decided to make a movie of my nuthouse novel, which they wanted to shoot in the state hospital where the story is set. They were even interested in me doing the screenplay.
   To firm up this fantasy I was limousined up to Portland by the producers to meet the head doctor, Superintendent Malachi Mortimer. Dr. Mortimer was a fatherly Jew of fifty with a gray pompadour and a jovial singsong voice. He sounded like a tour guide when he showed the hospital to me and the high-stepping herd of moguls up from Hollywood. Hype of moguls might be better.
   As I followed through the dilapidated wards, memories of those long-ago graveyard shifts were brought sharply back to me—by the sound of heavy keychains jangling, by the reek of Pine Sol over urine, especially by the faces. All those curious stares from doorways and corridors gave me a very curious feeling. It wasn’t exactly a memory but there was something familiar about it. It was the kind of tugging sensation you get when you feel that something is needed from you but have no notion what it is, and neither does the thing needing it. I guessed that maybe it was just information. Over and over I was drawn from our parade by looks so starved to know what was going on that I felt obliged to stop and try to shed some light. The faces did brighten. The likelihood that their sorry situation might be exploited as the set for a Hollywood movie didn’t seem to disturb them. If Superintendent Mortimer decided it was all right, then they had no objections.
   I was touched by their trust and I was impressed with Mortimer. All his charges seemed to like him. In turn he admired my book and liked the changes it had wrought in the industry. The producers liked that we liked each other, and before the day was over everything was agreed: Dr. Mortimer would permit use of his hospital if the movie company would foot the bill for a much-needed sprucing up, the patients would be paid extras, I would write the screenplay, the hype of moguls would pull in a heap of Oscars. Everyone would be fulfilled and happy.
   “This baby’s got big box written all over her!” was the way one enthusiastic second assistant something-or-other expressed it.
   But driving back to Eugene that evening I found it difficult to hold up my end of the enthusiasm. That tugging sensation continued to hook at me, reeling my mind back to that haunted countenance at the hospital like a fish to a phantom fisherman. I hadn’t confronted that face in years. Or wanted to. Nobody wants to. We learn to turn away whenever we detect the barbed cast of it—in the sticky eyes of a wino, or behind a hustler’s come-on, or out the side of a street dealer’s mouth. It’s the loser’s profile, the side of society’s face that the other side always tries to turn away from. Maybe that’s why the screenplay I eventually hacked out never appealed to the moguls—they know a loser when they have to look away from one.
   Weeks passed but I couldn’t shake that nebulous nagging. It put a terrible drag on my adaptation efforts. Turning a novel into a screenplay is mainly a job of cutting, condensing; yet I felt compelled to try to say not only more but something else. My first attempt was way long and long overdue. I declined the producers’ offer to rent me a place up near the hospital so I could browse around the wards and maybe recharge my muse. My muse was still overcharged from that first browse. I wasn’t ready to take another. For one thing, whatever it was that had got me so good was still waiting with baited looks; if it got me any better I feared it was liable to have me for good.
   For another, it seemed to be communicable, a virus that might be transmitted eye to eye. I was beginning to imagine I could detect traces of it in friends and family—in fretful glances, flickers of despair escaping from cracked lids, particularly in my father’s face. It was as though something picked up from the hospital had passed on to him, the way the fear inside a fallen rider can become the horse’s. It was hard to believe that a mean old mustang raised on the plains of west Texas would inexplicably develop a fear of emptiness. He had always been too tough. Hadn’t he already outlasted all the experts’ estimates by nearly five years, more from his own stiff-necked grit than from any help they had given? But suddenly all that grit seemed gone, and the sponge collar that he wore to keep his head up just wasn’t doing the trick any more.
   “What’d this Lou Gehrig accomplish that was so dadgum great?” was the sort of thing he had taken to asking. “No matter how many times you make it all the way around the bases, you’re still right back where you started—in the dirt. That’s no accomplishment.”
   He swept the sports page from his lap and across the lawn, exposing the withered remnant of his legs. I had dropped by and caught him out on the backyard lawn chair, reading the newspaper in his shorts.
   “I’m sick of home plate is what it is! I feel like a potted plant.”
   “Well, you ain’t no tumbleweed anymore,” my mother said. She was bringing another pot of coffee out to us. “He’s working up to buying that used motorhome down the street is what it really is—so I can drive him to the Pendleton Roundup.”
   “Maybe he wants to go to Mexico again,” I said. Buddy and I had rented a Winnebago some years before and taken him on a hectic ride over the border. I had wanted him to come on at least one of those unchartered trips that he used to warn me against. He came back claiming that the only thing he’d got out of it was jumping beans and running shits. I winked at my mother. “Maybe he wants to go into the jungle and look for diamonds, like Willy Loman.”
   “Uh-huh,” Daddy grunted. The sudden sweep of the papers had tilted his head; he was pushing it straight with his hand. “Maybe he don’t, too.”
   “Another cup of mud?” my mother asked to change the subject.
   I shook my head. “One cup of that stuff is plenty; I’ve got to work tonight.”
   “How you coming with it?” my dad wanted to know.
   “Slow,” I said. “It’s tough to get the machine up to speed.”
   “Especially when you ain’t run the thing in a dozen years.” He had his head steady enough to get me with his old, stiff-thumb-in-the-ribs look. “If you expect to have that movie out in time to benefit from my opinions, you better crank ‘er up to speed pretty damn quick!”
   It was the look that flashed a second later, after the stiffening went out, that got me. I finished my coffee and stood up. “That’s where I’m headed out to right now,” I said. “To crank ‘er up.”
   “Better not head too far out,” he growled, reaching for another section of the paper. “I’m liable not to wait for you to get back.”
   Mom met me at my car. “They have him on tap for another one of those spinals Saturday,” she said. “He hates the nasty things, and they scare the dickens out of me.”
   “Spinals aren’t dangerous, Mom: I’ve seen dozens of them.”
   “Ever think that might be why he wants you to be around, you knothead!”
   “Take it easy, Mom, I’ll be around,” I promised. “Thanks for the mud.”
   So when Dr. Mortimer called the following Thursday to invite me to join him at the annual convention of psychiatric superintendents, I told him I’d better stay home and keep at our project.
   “But it’s in Florida this year!” he explained through the phone. “At the Disney World Hotel! The movie people will pick up your tab.”
   Again I declined. I didn’t mention my father. “I’m a little stuck with the script,” I explained.
   “They said they thought a trip like this might help unstick you. This year’s entertainment is The Bellevue Revue. I saw them two years ago in Atlantic City. Positively hilarious. I bet you could pick up some fresh angles from those Looney Toons. Also, the keynote speaker? They’ve dug up the author of that beatnik bible, Now Be Thou. You’ve perhaps heard of him? Dr. Klaus Woofner?”

   I said yes I had, and that I’d be interested to hear what he was talking about these days—“But not right now.”
   “They’ve got you a ticket waiting at the Portland airport: United to Orlando at three thirty.” Mortimer sounded as excited as a kid. “A free trip to Disney World, you lucky dog—think of it!” I told him I would; I had a good twenty-four hours to make up my mind. “I’ll phone you tomorrow morning and let you know what I decide.”
   “I’m sure it’ll be a load of laughs,” he urged. “Honestly try to make it.”
   I said I was sure, too, and that I honestly would, though I had no intention whatsoever of driving a hundred and fifty miles to Portland, then flying all the way to Florida, not even to hear old Woofner huff and puff.
   The next morning I didn’t feel quite as firm about it. The night had cranked me backwards and left me feeling uncertain. I had shitcanned most of my old draft and made a fresh start, and the new stuff was already looking old. A little break away from it looked more and more inviting. On the other hand, a drive to Portland in my wishy-washy condition would be a task. By the time it was getting late enough that I had to make the call to Mortimer, one way or the other, I was in the middle of a quandary. I decided that I had best consult the I Ching for an answer; the oracle has helped me clear up more than one wishy-washy quandary. I had just carried the book to the breakfast table when the dogs announced the arrival of a car. Betsy opened the door for a well-dressed young man with a monotone voice.
   “Good morning, Mrs. Deboree. I’m Dr. Joseph Gola. Dr. Mortimer sent me down from the hospital to pick up your husband.”
   “Pick up my husband?”
   “And drive him back to Portland. Dr. Mortimer was afraid there could be a problem getting gas.”
   That weekend was the peak of the Arab oil embargo. Governor McCall had motorists buying gas on odd or even days, according to the last digit on their license plates, and there were still reports of craziness at the pumps.
   “The patients call me Joe,” he introduced himself. “Joe Go.”
   Joe Go was a young Irish-Italian, wearing a hopeful expression and a St. Jude the Obscure pin for a tie clasp. He was very soft-spoken. After he accepted a chair and a cup of coffee, he shyly asked about the picture-covered book in front of me.
   “It’s just an I Ching,” I explained, “with its cover collaged with photographs. I was about to ask it whether to go or not to go. Then you showed up. I better pack my suit.”
   “Better pack the book too,” he said with a grin. “In case we need to ask about coming back.”
   Betsy was completely taken by his altar boy innocence. While I packed she kept bringing him coffee with blueberry muffins and big smiles. The kids on the other hand had nothing but frowns for Doctor Joe. After all, they had never been to Disney World—not to Disneyland in Anaheim, even. If innocent young company was what was needed in Florida, couldn’t I take one of them along? They each made their bid a few times, then moped off in protest, all except for little Caleb. The ten-year-old remained at the table in his long Grateful Dead nightshirt and his longing face. He yearned to go as much as his brother or sisters, but it wasn’t Caleb’s style to mope off and maybe miss something else. He was the only one that came outside to wish us farewell, too.
   “Remember to bring us something back from Disney World, Dad,” he called from the porch, his voice brave. “Something neat, aw-right?”
   “Aw-right,” I called back as I climbed into the car. I waved but he didn’t wave back—he couldn’t see me through the Lincoln’s tinted safety glass. The thing was big as a barge. I told Doctor Joe he’d better back it out instead of trying to turn around between our blueberries. “They’re hard enough to keep alive.”
   He started down our drive in reverse, twisting out his door to try to miss the deepest holes. I buckled my seatbelt and rolled with the bouncing. After a night of getting nowhere on my own, I found I liked the idea of being picked up and carried away. I was leaning back to try the cushy headrest when, from out of nowhere, something yanked me straight up and wide-eyed, something deeper than any of our chuckholes.
   It was that same tugging sensation again, to the tenth power—still as enigmatic and even more familiar, like a dream so meaningful that it jolts you awake, then you can’t remember what it was about. It only lasted a second or two before it faded, leaving me dumbfounded. What the hell was it? Simply the thought of going back up to that hospital and having to face that face again? Some kind of hangfire out of the past bounced loose?
   “What’s the best way back from here?”
   It took a moment to realize the young doctor was asking me the best way back to Portland. He’d come to the end of our driveway.
   “Well, I go that way if I’m in a hurry.” I pointed up the hill. “Or down through Nebo and Brownsville if I’ve got time for a peaceful cruise.”
   He backed around headed downhill. “We’ve got plenty of time,” he said, and reached over to open a leather case that was waiting on the seat between us. It looked like an old-fashioned sample case for patent medicines. Neatly arranged between the dividers was an extensive selection of those miniature bottles of brand liquors, dozens of them.
   “It looks like things have changed since I was connected with the mental health business,” I observed.
   “Some ways yes, some ways no,” he said, choosing a tiny Johnny Walker. “Less restrictions, more medications. Still no cures. Help yourself.”
   Conversation was sparse. The young man was more of a one-liner than a talker, and I would have been content to keep quiet and go over the mystery of that thing that had hit me back in the blueberries, or go to sleep. But with the help of the long drive and the medicine kit we gradually got to know each other. Doctor Joe had rebounded into psychology after flunking out of the field of his true interest: genetics. Both the Latin and the Gaelic sides of his family had histories of mental disease, not to mention a lot of crazy poets and painters and priests. Joe said he had inherited a lot of bad art, blind faith, and troubling questions. Also, he said he was going to the convention for the same reason I was—to see Dr. Klaus Woofner. He said he had been a fan since his undergrad days at Queens.
   “I’ve read every little thing written by him, plus that huge pile of shit about him. They called him everything from the Big Bad Wolf to Old Sanity Klaus.”
   He gave me a look of hopeful curiosity. We were on a stretch of empty two-lane through the gentle pasturelands above Salem, the cruise control set at a drowsy forty-five.
   “The old goat must have been some sort of hero, yeah? to get so much shit started?”
   Yeah, I nodded. Some sort of hero. I closed my eyes. Could the old goat get it finished was what I was curious about.
   The Lincoln’s horn woke me. We were in an insane jam of cars all trying to gas up before the weekend rush. The hospital was less than a mile away but we couldn’t get through the snarled intersection where the gas stations were. Cars were lined up bumper-to-bumper for blocks. Joe finally swung about and took a wide detour around the tangle. By the time we got to the gate at the hospital grounds, the dashboard clock showed we had less than a half hour before flight time. What’s more, the drive up to the main building was blocked by a police car slanted into the curb. We couldn’t get around it.
   “Grab your bags!” Joe switched off the Lincoln right where it sat. “Maybe Mortimer’s still on the ward.”
   He sprinted off like a track star. I picked up my shoulder bag and my suitcase and followed groggily after him, reluctant to leave the big car’s torpor. But that surprise at my morning Ching should have forewarned me; this was not going to be a peaceful cruise. When I rounded the squad car I encountered a tableau that stopped me in my tracks.
   The car was still idling, all four doors open. At the rear a stout state trooper and two overweight police matrons were trying to bring down an Unidentified Flying Object. The thing was far too fast for them, a blur of noise and movement, whirling in and out of the haze of exhaust, hissing and screeching and snarling. Honking, too, with some kind of horn-on-a-spear. It used this spear to slash and honk at the circle of uniforms, holding them at bay.
   Two burly hospital aides came loping to help out, a sheet stretched between them dragnet fashion. Reinforced thus, the herd charged. The UFO was silenced beneath half a ton of beef. Then there was a high, sharp hiss followed by a beller of pain and the thing whirled free again. It scurried right through the legs all the way around the herd into one rear door of the car and out the other, twittering curses in some language from a far speedier dimension. By the time the pursuers had circled the car, their quarry was arrowing down the drive for the open gate. The herd was already slackening their halfhearted chase—anybody could see that there was nothing earthly capable of catching up—when, to everybody’s astonishment, the arrow missed that huge two-lane opening by a good five feet and crashed full tilt into the Cyclone fence. It spronged back, spun erratically a moment on the gleaming green, then went down a second time under the welter of uniforms. There was a final piteous little squank from beneath the pile on the lawn, then nothing but heavy puffing and panting.
   “Come on!” Joe had returned and jerked me out of my gawk. “Don’t worry. You couldn’t hurt that little cyclone with fifty fences.”
   He led me through a lobby full of carpenters, past the elevator, and up a long, echoing ramp. The ramp leveled off to a metal door. Joe unlocked it and I found myself back on Dr. Mortimer’s ward. Everything was in upheaval for the Hollywood renovation, new stuff and old piled in the halls. Mortimer wasn’t in his office. Neither was his secretary. We hurried past the staring patients to the nurse’s station at the ward’s intersection. The duty nurse and the secretary were both there, sharing a box of Crackerjacks.
   “Omigod!” the nurse exclaimed as though caught. “Dr. Mortimer just left.”
   “Left for where!”
   “The lot… Possibly the airport.”
   “Joannie! You get on the phone to the main gate.”
   “Yes, Dr. Gola.” The secretary hurried back to the office.
   “Miss Beal, you try the CB in the lobby, in case he’s still at the motor pool. I’ll run down to the lot.”
   The nurse trotted off, Crackerjacks rattling in the pocket of her white cardigan. Joe sprinted back the way we’d come, leaving me alone in the fluorescent buzz.
   Well, not exactly. Robed specters were trolling back and forth past the windows and open half door of the nurse’s station, casting looks in at me. I turned my back on them and sat down on the counter, pretending to peruse a back issue of OMNI. As the minutes hummed past I could feel eyes picking at my neck. I traded OMNI for a copy of National Enquirer, rattling the big pages. The hum seemed to caramelize right over the noise of the paper like a clear glaze. Spells in the blueberries. U.F.O.s on the lawn. Now this. I am in no condition for this. Then the glaze was shattered by a screech at the Admissions Door.
   “—fascist snotsucking shitmother pigs! Don’cha know whosoever wields the Diamond Sword of ACHALA wields burning justice? Where’s my cane you ignorant assholes and don’t whisper to me Cool it! Like, you’re so hip? So with it? Don’cha know this messing with blood sacraments in the name of revolution must fucking cease?”
   The high twittering hiss had been slowed but it was still sharp; the words chopped through the impacted air like an ax through ice.
   “Down with dilettantes who mouth dopey slogans and muddy the flow of change! May the lot of you be slit butthole to bellybutton by the diamond edge of ACHALA Lord of Hot Wisdom, whose face is bloody fangs, who wears a garland of severed heads, who turns Rage to Accomplishment, who is clad in gunpowder and glaciers and lava, who saves honest tormented spirits from filth-eating fascist pig ghosts! In His name I curse you: NAMAH SAMANTHA VAJRANAM CHANGA!”
   It sounded like some militant soprano Gary Snyder tongue-lashing a strip miners’ meeting. I joined the others in the hall to see what it was that could sound so pissed-off and poetic all at once.
   “MAHROSHANA SHATA YA HUM TRAKA HAM MAM!”
   It was a girl, still years and inches short of legal age or full growth, bony and bone-colored, skin, hair, eyes, clothes, and all. There was a checkerboard pattern up her front from the crash with the Cyclone fence, but no cuts, no purple bruises. The only color in the whole composition was a green swatch down the side of her close-cropped head, probably from the scuffle on the lawn. She fingered the air before her a moment, like a cave lizard, then lunged.
   “Give me my fucking stick you faggot!”
   “No you don’t, Lissy.” The biggest-butted aide held it high out of her reach. “This could be a weapon in hostile hands.’”
   I saw that the spear had originally been the kind of lightweight staff used by the Vision Impaired. The white paint was all but gone from the battered aluminum, and it had been thonged from tip to handle with feathers and beads, like an Indian spear. Just in front of the handle was lashed the staffs main mojo—a rubber squeeze-toy head of Donald Duck, his angry open bill forward and his rubber sailor cap within thumb’s reach. This was how she had been able to swing the thing and quack it at the same time.
   “Give it give it give it!” she screeched.
   “I won’t won’t won’t!” the aide mocked, parading ahead like a fat-assed drum major with a baton. The girl took squinting aim at the plump target and kicked; she missed as wide as she had missed the gate. She would have fallen if the matron hadn’t been gripping her arms.
   “What about my glasses then? Am I going to deathray somebody with my fucking glasses? I’m fucking legally blind, you stupid shits! If I don’t get my glasses immediately every turd of you is gonna fry! My whole fucking family are lawyers.”
   This threat hit home harder than all the other curses together. The parade stopped cold to talk it over. The aide who had gone in search of higher authorities came panting back with the news that the ward seemed empty of doctor and nurse alike. After a whispered debate they decided to relinquish the specs. The state trooper removed them from a manila envelope and handed them to her. The matrons loosened their grip so she could put them on. The lenses were like shot glasses. As soon as they were settled on her nose she swung around snarling. Out of that whole hallful of gaping specters she focused on me.
   “What are you gawping at, Baldy? You never seen somebody on a bum trip before?”
   I wanted to tell her as a matter of fact I had—been on some myself—but the ward door clashed open again and in bustled Joe, the nurse, and Dr. Mortimer. The nurse was carrying a two-way radio. She saw the congestion in her halls and waded right in without breaking stride, swishing it clear with the antenna. She stopped in front of the girl.
   “Back so soon, Miss Urchardt? You must have missed us.”
   “I missed the elegant facilities, Miss Beal,” the girl declared. “Wall-to-wall walls. Bathtubs you could get drowned in.” A lot of the sharp sting had gone out of her tongue, though.
   “Then let’s not hesitate to enjoy one. Dr. Mortimer? Would you phone Miss Urchardt’s father while I admit her? The rest of you, go about your business.”
   At his office Dr. Mortimer passed the task right on to his secretary and hurried Joe and me toward the ramp door. We could hear the phone start ringing before he got it closed. He leaned back in.
   “That’s probably the senator now, Joannie,” he called. “If he wishes to speak to his daughter, tell him she’s in the Admissions Bath. If he wishes to speak to me, tell him he’ll have to call Orlando, care of the Disney World Hotel. Ask for Goofy.”
   Then locked the door behind us. He giggled all the echoing lope down the ramp. “Ask for Goofy, Senator; ask for Goofy.”

   With the help of a ticket agent, a later longer flight finally got us through the night to the sticky Florida sunshine. The rent-a-car cost us double, because of the fuel shortage, we were told, but the room for three at Disney’s monstrous pyramid cost us only about half the regular rate, and for the same reason. The gum-chewing peach behind the desk told us we were lucky, that triples was took months in advance, usually.
   I asked if a Dr. Klaus Woofner had checked in yet. She glanced at her book and told me not yet. I left my name and a message for him to call our room as soon as he arrived. “Or leave word if we’re out,” Mortimer added, herding us upstairs to stow our bags. “Time’s a-wasting, boys. I intend to see it all.”
   On the monorail to the park Dr. Mortimer divided the package of free ticket books that had been provided us by the movie producers, more thrilled by the minute. He really did intend to see everything, we found out. He ran Joe and me ragged for hours. I finally balked at Small World.
   “I want to phone the hotel, see if anybody’s heard anything about Woofner.”
   “And I want,” Joe added, “to buy one of those beadwork botas.” We had seen a bunch of foreign sailors drinking out of wineskins on the Mississippi Riverboat Ride, and Joe had been covetous ever since.
   “I suspect they’re not available here, Joe,” the doctor suspected. “I hate to get separated—”
   “Joe can ask around while I phone. We’ll check for you every half hour—at, say the Sky Ride ticket booth?”
   “I guess that will be all right,” the doctor singsonged, right in time with “It’s a small world af-ter all,” and hurried away toward the music.
   Joe asked around and I phoned. Nobody had heard anything about Woofner or wineskins, either one. On the Sky Ride we were able to enjoy Joe’s samples in the privacy of our plastic funicular. We alighted to find that there are ticket booths at each end of the ride. When the doctor wasn’t at one end there was nothing to do but climb back aboard and highride back to the other. We spent a good part of our afternoon this way, without another glimpse of Dr. Mortimer. Once, though, Joe thought he might have seen Dr. Woofner.
   “The guy with the nurse?” Joe pointed a tiny Tanqueray bottle at the funicular that had just passed us. “Could that be our hero? He appears old and bald enough.”
   I craned around to look. An old man and a blond nurse were seated on each side of a folded wheelchair. He wore dark glasses and a too-big Panama hat. For a second something about him did remind me of Woofner, some severe slant to the shoulders, some uncompromising hunch that made me wonder if I wanted to meet up with the ornery old gadfly as much as I thought I did, then a breeze flipped the hat off. The man was old and bald all right, nary a hair from his crown to his chinless neck, but he wasn’t much bigger than a child. I laughed.
   “Not unless he’s turned into a Mongoloid midget,” I said. “These dwarf drinks must be affecting your vision, Joe.”
   When we docked I phoned the hotel nevertheless. No doctor by that name had checked in. There was a message from one named Mortimer, though. He had returned, reserves exhausted—would see us before the evening’s program.
   The Sky Rides had depleted Joe’s reserves, too, so we spent the rest of the afternoon more or less on the ground. It was exactly like Disneyland in Anaheim except for one striking addition: the Happy Hippos. This was a temporary exhibit set up in Adventureland, near the Congo boat dock. A low fence had been erected outside a tent, and a pair of full-grown hippos lounged in a makeshift puddle in the enclosure.
   These brutes were nearly twice as big as those mechanical robotamuses on Disney’s Wild Jungle River Ride, awesome tons of meat and muscle, fresh from the real wild. Yet they dozed complacent as cows in their knee-deep puddle, beneath an absolute downpour of insults. Kids bounced ice cubes and balled-up Coke cups off their bristled noses. Teenagers hollered ridicule: “Hey Abdul how’s yer tool?” A Campfire Girl probed at the wilted ears with her rubber spear from Frontierland until an attendant made her stop. Every passerby had to stop and express contempt for this pair of groggy giants, it seemed. The chinless dwarf from the Sky Ride even got in his licks; he took a big sip of Pepto-Bismol, then motioned his nurse to wheel him up close so he could spew a pink spray at them.
   Inside the tent was the exhibit’s film, produced by UNESCO, Made Possible by a Grant from Szaabo Laboratories, rear-projected on three special screens donated by Du Pont. As the right and left screens flashed slides of drought-stricken Africa, the center screen would show parched hippos being winched from the curdled red-orange mire of their ancestral wallows. These wallows were drying up, the narration informed us, as a result of a lengthy dry spell plus the damming of rivers to provide electricity for the emerging Third World.
   After an animal was successfully winched up from his bog he would be knocked out with a hippo hypo, forklifted onto a reinforced boxcar, and released, hundreds of miles away, into a chain-link compound full of other displaced hippos awaiting relocation. The compound looked as desolate as the regions they’d just been evacuated from, swirling with flies and thick orange dust.
   “During the initial weeks of the project,” the voice of the narrator told us, “the hippos made repeated charges against the compound’s fences, often breaking through, more often injuring themselves. We were eventually able to quell these assaults by introducing into their drinking water a formula especially designed by our laboratories—making them, comparatively, much happier hippos.”
   “Compared with what?” I heard Joe’s one-liner from the dark. “Each other?”
   The shadows were long when we emerged from the film, the sun sinking between the spires of Cinderella’s Castle. I had pretty much lost interest in the convention, but Joe felt he should make an appearance. Besides, now his reserves were completely exhausted. So we took the old-fashioned choo-choo around to the gate, where we boarded its modern monorail counterpart.
   We had to wait while our engineer had a cigarette outside on the landing. A restless musing filled the car while we waited. Hidden machinery hummed. People slumped in the chrome-and-plastic seats. Out the open doors of the car, the Florida sky was airbrushed full of crimson clouds, just like Uncle Walt had ordered, and the indistinct sounds and voices of the park waved softly in and out on the evening breezes. Annette Funicello’s recorded greeting at the entrance gate could be heard clearest: “Hey there hi there ho there,” she chanted like a cheerleader. “We’re as happy as can be, to have you here today… hip hip hoo-ray!”
   None of the waiting passengers seemed inclined to be led into the cheer. In the seat in front of us a family rode, six of them. The husband sat alone, his back to us, his muscled arms spread over the red plastic seatback. Across from him, facing us, his family fussed and stewed. His wife had dark circles under her eyes and at her Rayon armpits. In her lap his toddler whimpered. On one side of her his first-grader whined and on the other side his sixth-grader sucked her thumb. Across the aisle his teenager slouched and bitched.
   “The kids at school will not believe we never went on Pirates of the Caribbean!”
   “Hush, honey,” the mother said wearily. “We were out of tickets. You know that.”
   “We could have bought more,” the teenager maintained. The other kids wailed agreement. “Yeah! we could have bought more!”
   “We were also out of money,” the mother said.
   “We didn’t even get to see the Enchanted Tiki Birds. The kids at school simply will not believe it!”
   “That we were out of money? Well, the kids at school had better believe it. And you better give it a rest if you know what’s good for you—all of you!”
   And all the while the father sat without comment, not moving, just the muscles in his forearms and his big workadaddy hands, gripping the back of the seat. I noticed he’d been able to get his wrists and knuckles clean for this occasion, but there was still carbon under the fingernails, the indelible tattoo left by the other fifty-one weeks of his year working a lathe in Detroit, or changing tires in Muncie, or scrabbling coal in Monongahela.
   “In a recent worldwide survey,” Annette’s voice continued in a more serious vein, “it was found that twice as many people desire to go to Disney World than to any other attraction on earth. That’s pretty impressive, don’t you all agree?”
   Nobody nodded agreement, not even the kids. Before we could hear more our driver returned to his controls; the doors hissed shut and the big tube hummed away toward the hotel. The hands continued their gripping and ungripping of the seatback, trying not to let it show how hard it was getting to be, this business of keeping a grip—Joe and I exchanged looks. The poor guy. Hadn’t he done everything you’re supposed to? Labored hard? made a home? raised a family? even saved enough for this most desired of all vacations? But it wasn’t working. Something was wrong somewhere, and hanging on was getting harder all the time.
   We never saw his face. They filed off forward of us at the hotel. As they left Joe shook his head:
   “Just the tip of an enormous iceberg,” he said, “heading toward a titanic industry.”
   I had no idea just how titanic until I saw the exhibits. While Joe rushed off to make his appearance at industry parties, I roamed the crowded exhibition hall, amazed at all the latest devices and potions designed to care for and control the upcoming hordes unable to care for or control themselves. Teenagers rented from the local high school were our guides through a vast maze of displays. They demonstrated long-snouted pitchers that could get nourishment down the most intractable throat. They showed us how new Velcro straps could strap down a big strapping lad as well as the bulky old buckle cuffs. They invited us to test the comfort of urine-proof mattresses, pointing out the slotless screwheads that held the bed-frame together: “to keep them nuts from eating the screws.”
   There were unrippable pajamas with padded mittens to prevent the hallucinator from plucking out an offending eye. There were impact-dispersing skullcaps for the clumsy, disposable looparound mouthpieces for the tongue gnashers, lockfast maxi-Pampers for the thrashing incontinent, and countless kinds of medication reminders that beeped and buzzed and chimed to remind the forgetful. The vast majority of the booths were manned by the many pharmaceutical laboratories supported by this industry. Most of these displays lacked the visual pizazz of the hardware shows. Pills and pamphlets just aren’t as interesting to look at as restraining chairs featuring built-in commodes with automated enemas. The Szaabo display was the exception, attracting far the largest audience of all the booths. Company designers had mocked up a large cocktail lounge complete with plastic plants and free peanuts and waitresses in miniskirts. Above the bar was a big-screen TV monitor that played actual tapes of the company’s products in action. Conventioneers could eat peanuts and drink and cheer like a Monday Night Football crowd as they watched big hyperactive hellraisers get wrestled down and turned meek as mice with a shot. I wondered if the display designers got the idea from the hippo show, or vice versa.
   The trouble was once you got into the popular Szaabo lounge, it was next to impossible to get back out through the crush of the boisterous crowd. Harder than that to snag one of the free drinks. I was buffeted back and forth through the smoky clamor until I found myself near an exit along the far wall. It was marked for Emergency Use Only. I felt my smarting eyes and burning throat qualified so I pushed the lockbar and peeked out. To my great relief I saw I had found not only a private balcony with fresh air and a view of the sunset, but a tray of unclaimed martinis.
   I squeezed through and heard the big door shut behind me over the noise. I grabbed the push bar but I was too late. “Let it lock,” I decided, releasing the bar. “I can get by on olives if I miss the banquet.”

   I noticed these olives were skewered on clever little S-shaped silver swizzles, supposed to look like the Szaabo logo. It was also etched on the martini glasses, in red and yellow, like the crest on Superman’s chest. About halfway through the tray I raised one of the glasses in a toast—to Szaabo Labs, original layers of those tiny blue eggs of enlightenment. Remember when we used to think that every egg would hatch cherubs in every head and that these fledglings would feather into the highest-flying Vision in mankind’s history? Remember our conspiracy, Szaabo? You make ‘em; we’ll take ‘em—as far as the Vision can see. Who’s left to carry the colors of our crusade now? Where’s the robin’s-egg-blue banner of the Vision of Man now? In the hands of one little girl, that’s where, some titless wonder who can see about as far as she can pee, and she’s been captured, probably by now quelled with one of your latest designer formulas and watching a rerun of Happy Days, comparatively happy herself.
   But, like Joe says, compared to what?
   By the time the drinks were drained and the olives eaten, the din on the other side of the door had gone down considerably. For a keepsake I dropped the last glass in my shoulder bag with my Ching and my leftover ticket books and tried the door. I was able to attract one of the waitresses by rattling the tray between the bar and the metal. She let me back in, apologizing all over herself for not hearing my signal earlier; it had been just too dern noisy. I gave her the tray and a ten spot and told her not to worry—I hadn’t been signaling earlier, anyhow.
   The Szaabo bar and the convention hall were both almost empty. Everybody was off getting dressed for the evening’s main event. I swung one more time by the main desk and saw my message to Woofner still folded in his box. The fresh peach behind the desk told me so many folks’d been asking she was curious herself what’d come of this missin’ doctor.
   Up in our room Dr. Mortimer was trying to find an answer to the same question. He was pacing to and fro in front of the telephone table in his rumpled tux and untied tie, talking into the receiver in a loud singsong German. I discerned he was a little drunk. When he saw me he put his hand over the receiver and shook his head forlornly.
   Joe was also dressed for dinner, more rumpled than his boss and lots drunker. He was tilted back on a wastepaper basket. “You’re burned bright as a beet,” he said squinting at me. He held out the miniature bottle of Beefeater he was drinking. “Use some of this on your head. White wine’s best but gin’ll do.”
   I shook my head, explaining I had come to expect olives with my gin. Joe finished the bottle and dropped it between his legs into the wastebasket. I heard it clink against other bottles. He looked at his boss pacing foolishly with the phone, then started singing, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf…”
   Mortimer got the point and finally hung up. “I know you’re both disappointed”—he sighed—“but it may be just as well. According to some of my colleagues our big bad wolf has long ago lost his fangs. And who wants to sit through a dull gumming? The program will be just fine, regardless. We’ve got last year’s minutes, and the Bellevue Revue, and Dr. Bailey Toocter from Jamaica has already volunteered to fill in as keynote with his—what did he call it, Joe?”
   “Therapeutic Thumb harp,” Joe answered. “Soothes the savage breast.”
   It was just as well with me, too. I had realized as much locked out on the balcony—that I’d been wishful dreaming. Only a pin-head fool would hope to find the wild and woolly Big Sur of bygone days in the Florida torpor. I stepped over Joe’s legs to the closet where my gray suit hung.

   The dinner was held in an elegantly appointed wedge-shaped hall, its point focusing on the raised dais. Dr. Mortimer was seated at this head table between the square-jawed Dudley DuRight who was to be the evening’s master of ceremonies and a wild-headed black man in a coral pink tuxedo. First served, they had already finished eating. Dudley was sober and serious about his evening’s role—he kept checking backstage, reading messages, going over his handful of notes—while the black man and Mortimer whispered and giggled like carefree schoolgirls. On the table in front of their plates was a hinged wooden box inlaid with mother-of-pearl butterflies. I assumed it was the thumb harp.
   Joe and I were about three tables back, still picking at our lobster Newberg but already into our third bottle of Johannesburg Riesling. I admitted to Joe that he was right; the cold wine was relieving to the outside of my burned head as well as the inside. I didn’t mention the main relief I was feeling—that I would not have to face my old mentor after all. I wasn’t disappointed and I found I was rather pleased with that fact. I saw it as a significant stride. If you feel that nothing is owed you, then you owe nothing. I leaned back with my chilled Riesling and newfound wisdom, prepared to enjoy a peace I had not enjoyed for months. Screw the nuts and to hell with the heroes. As far as I was concerned, the change to the thumb harp was just what the doctor ordered.
   But when Dudley got up and took the mike and launched into a grandiloquent introduction of the great man who was to speak to us, I wondered if anybody had told him about the change.
   “A legend!” he proclaimed. “A star of Sigmund Freud’s magnitude, of Wilhelm Reich’s radiance, of Carl Jung’s historic brilliance! A pillar of fire burning before most of us were born, yet still listed in the Who’s Who of Psychology Today! Still considered a giant in the contemporary field—a giant!”
   This didn’t seem to describe the dreadlocked Dr. Toocter, not even the thumb harpist himself, now frowning perplexed up at the MC. Indeed, all seated at the main table were turned toward the master of ceremonies in wonder. It was nothing like my amazement, though. When our speaker rolled in from the curtain wings, I saw it was the hairless dwarf from the Sky Ride after all.
   The tall blond nurse had changed from her nurse’s uniform into a beige evening gown, but her patient was wearing the same dark glasses and rumpled shirt and slacks, as though he’d never left the chair. She wheeled him to the podium through an uncertain flurry of clapping, then helped him stand. When she was sure he had a good grip on the podium she wheeled the chair back off, leaving him swaying and nodding in the spotlight.
   He was not merely hairless; he was partially faceless as well. The corner of his upper lip and much of the lower had been pared away, all the way down his chin, and the scar covered with flesh-colored makeup. This was why he had looked to me like some kind of long-lived Down’s syndrome this afternoon. And without his hat the Florida sun had burned his head even brighter than it had mine. He was a blazing Day-Glo purple everywhere except the painted scar. This hand-sized swatch looked like the only island of natural flesh on a globe of synthetic skin, instead of the other way around. The clapping had been over for a long minute before he finally cleared his throat and spoke.
   “Who’s who,” he murmured, shaking his head. “Das ist mir scheissegal. Who’s who.” Then the voice lifted a little. “That’s what you really want to consider, yah? Who was, who is, who will be who, when next season’s list is published?”
   The accent was thicker and the speech halting. It would never be the fine instrument of old, but there was still a ring to it.
   “How about we consider instead who is correct. Der Siggy Freud? All those interesting theories? like how anal retention becomes compulsive repetition and causes some sort of blockage what he called petrification? Und how this blockage could be dissolved with enough analysis, like enough castor oil? Please, mine colleagues, let us speak truthfully, doctor to doctor. We have all observed the application of these theories. Interesting though they may be, we all know that they are for all practical purposes useless in the psychiatric ward. Castor oil would be more effective, and Sigmund would have been more useful had he written romances for a living. The romantic ideal can be useful in the world of fiction; in world of medicine, never. Und we are all medical men, yah? We must be able to distinguish medicine from fiction. We must be able to know what is psychological results and what is psychological soap opera, never mind how the one is so discouraging while the other is so fascinating. You are all just as capable as I am of knowing who is really who and what was really what, so you all must have suspected what I am trying to tell you before now: that Sigmund Freud was a neurotic, romantic, coke-shooting quack!” When he said this he slapped the podium a sharp crack. The effect on the convention crowd would not have been greater if he’d said Albert Schweitzer was a Nazi, then fired a Luger at the ceiling. He swept his black-goggled gaze about the hall until the air subsided.
   “Old daydreamer Carl Jung mit his sugar-glazed mandala? Willy Reich teaching orgasm by the numbers? All quacks. Yah, they were all very good writers, very interesting. But if you are a woodcutter, let us say, and you purchase a woodsaw—what does it matter how interesting the sawmaker writes about it? If it does not saw good it is not a good saw. As a woodcutter, you should be the first to detect the cheat: it won’t cut straight! So take it back to that lying sawmaker, or paint a sunset on it, or throw it in the river—but don’t pass the crooked wood on to your customers!” He paused to reach down and pick up Dr. Toocter’s wadded napkin. He bowed his head to dab at the sweat that had begun to glisten on his neck and throat. He waited until his breathing calmed before he looked back up.
   “Also, you are bad woodcutters for more reason than you invest in bad saws. You are afraid to go into the forest. You would rather invent a tree to fit your theory, and cut down the invention. You cannot face the real forest. You cannot face the real roots of your world’s madness. You see the sore well enough but you cannot heal it. You can ease the pain, perhaps, but you can’t stop the infection. You cannot even find the thorn! Und so”—he lifted his shoulders in a deprecating shrug—“that is the reason why I have flown to speak to you here tonight, even here, in the very heart of the festering American dream: to point out to you that thorn. Miss Nichswander?”
   She was already rolling out the blackboard. When it was secured behind the dais she took a stick of chalk from her jeweled handbag and handed it to her boss. He waited until she was out of sight through the curtains before he turned back to us.
   “Okay, some concentration if you please.” The hand began pushing the chalk around the slate rectangle. “I will explain you this only once.”
   It was the same annotated sketch from ten years before, only honed far finer, with more bite to it. I smiled to think of those who had been worried about getting a dull gumming this evening. The old wolf was maimed and mangy, but still plenty sharp. His history of James Clerk Maxwell and the laws of thermodynamics was more extensive, his drawing more detailed. The demon had acquired a set of horns and a very insolent sneer. And the seams of the whole concept had come together so ingeniously that he could move the metaphor back and forth at will, from the machine to the modern mind, hot and cold to good and bad, smooth as a stage magician. “This problem of nonavailability was grasped by only a few during Maxwell’s day: William Thomson, Lord Kelvin; Emanuel Clausius. Clausius understood it best of all, perhaps; he wrote that, while the energy of the universe is constant, entropy is always on the increase. Only a handful of the smartest, back then. Today every illiterate clod with an automobile is beginning to get it; every time he sees the price of petrol go up, he sees his world go a little emptier, and a little more mad. So you educated doctors ought to be able to see it. Of all people, you must have seen the signs. Your ward rollbooks should trace the trend: as the power shortage increases, enrollment in your institutions follows along? What are your most recent statistics? One American in five will be treated for mental illness sometime during their lifetimes. What? Did I hear someone say it is now one in four? Ach, don’t you see? You are no longer the gentlemen curators of some quaint Bedlam, displaying such mooncalfs as once were accounted rare. You are the wall guards over increasing millions. In ten years it will be one out of three; in thirty years one out of everyone—millions and millions, and rundown walls in the bargain.”
   He paused again to catch his breath, swaying with the effort. I noticed Joe was swaying slightly in concert as he stared, like a bird watching a cobra.
   “Still, you are true to your duty. You walk your watch, chin high and diplomas shouldered for all to see, though you are secretly certain that if the rabble decides to rush the walls, that roll of paper will be as useless against them as Freud’s theories. You are up on that wall armed with only one weapon with any proven firepower. Can anyone tell the rest of the class what that weapon is? Eh? Any guesses? I shall give you a hint: Who is paying the bill for this august gathering?”
   No hands went up. The whole hall was spellbound. Finally the old man gave a disgusted snort and unrolled the napkin for all to see: embossed around the border, like a record of registered cattle brands, were all the logos of the convention’s sponsors.
   “Here’s who!” he declared. “The pharmaceutical companies. Their laboratories manufacture your weapon—drugs. They are the munitions dealers and you are their customers. This gathering is their marketplace. Each of those displays downstairs was designed to appeal to your need up on that wall, to convince you that their laboratory can provide you with the most modern ammunition—the very latest in the high-powered tranquilizers! painkillers! mood elevators! muscle relaxants! psychodelics!”
   This last category could have been aimed at the table where Joe and I sat, but with those black glasses it was impossible to be sure. “That is all you have in your arsenal,” he went on softly, “the only armament known to work on both the demon and the host: a few chemicals—though the host has become a horde, and the demon, he is legion. A few feeble spears and arrows, dipped in a temporary solution to which that horde will soon become immune. Miss Nichswander?”
   The blond was already coming through the drapes to retrieve the blackboard. She wheeled it away without a word. The drapery closed behind her, leaving Woofner sucking thoughtfully on his piece of chalk. It was the only sound in the room—not a shuffle or cough or clink else.
   “I apologize,” Woofner said at length. “I know that at this point in the program one is expected to follow up his diagnosis of the disease with a prognosis for a cure. I am sorry to have to disappoint you. I do not have a cure for your problems up on that wall, and I refuse to offer temporary solutions. I should have made it clear to begin with that I bring you no salvation. All I can do is bring you to your senses, here, in the present. Und if you find that the pressure of this here-and-now is too much for you to bear, ach, then—?” He wagged his head derisively. “Then it is quite an easy task to simply step over the wall and join the happy hippos.”
   If most of his audience was left in the dark by his closing metaphor, this time at least I was certain: it was a parting shot at none but me. He must have recognized me at my table during his talk and at the hippopotamus tank both, probably even on the Sky Ride. His shoulders sagged and he drew a long ragged breath; he was hunched so low that the sound whistled loudly through the mike. His whole body appeared to shake with the effort, like some kind of holy ruin about to collapse before a gale. Then he took off the pitch-dark glasses; the contrasting beam that burned forth was a shock. The temple roof might have been in ruin but the altar still held its fire, blue as the arc from an electric welder, and as painfully bright. Don’t look away if he turns it on you, I told myself. Try to meet it. Sure. Try matching eyes with skull-necklaced Kali. At the first searing touch I bent and focused on the congealing butter sauce around my lobster shell, for whatever unguent the oil might offer.
   “So? That is that, yah? Yah, I think so. I thank you all for your attention. Guten Abend und auf wiedersehen! Miss Nichswander?”
   When I looked back up she was wheeling him through the velveteen slot.

   The Bellevue Revue couldn’t understand why their crazyhouse hilarity received even less laughs than it deserved, which was damned little. My leftover lobster was funnier than they were; I was sorry when the waiter took it away. After the banquet broke up, however, the conventioneers set about dispelling the heavy pall the best way they could, by trying to make light of it. The remainder of the evening was spent drinking hard and listening to a lot of lampoons of the Woofner address. His heavy accent made him easy prey to parody. The joking got so uproarious in the wide-open hospitality suite the La Bouche Laboratories had reserved that kindhearted Dr. Mortimer fretted the old man might hear.
   “All this ridicule, this loud laughing—what if the poor fellow happened to come by? It could be injurious to someone in his condition.”
   “This isn’t laughing,” Joe said. “This is whistling in the graveyard.”
   It was long after midnight before the revelers wore it out and Mortimer got everybody quieted down enough to listen to Dr. Toocter play his harp. It was the perfect soporific. Within minutes people were yawning good nights and stumbling off toward their rooms.
   As much as I’d drunk I was sure I’d drop straight off when I hit the bed, but I didn’t. The air of our room seemed too close, the pitchy dark full of racket. The air conditioning throbbed brokenly and Mortimer snored along. I was so tired and dehydrated I could barely think, not even about Woofner. I’ll think about him tomorrow. I’ll look him up in the morning for a quick hello, then get on the first thing I can find flying west. Tonight all I want is a little sleep and a lot of liquid.
   On one of my trips to the bathroom to refill my water glass, I met Joe coming out carrying his. He frowned at me from the crack of light.
   “Christ, man, do you really feel it that bad?”
   “Not quite,” I said. “But I feel it coming.”

   Joe took me by the arm and pulled me into the bathroom and shut the door. He gave me a big pink tablet from his shaving kit.
   “Remedy number one,” he prescribed, “is to duck it. Before it hits.”
   I took the pill without asking any questions. After that I got up only once more, to get rid of some of that liquid. The room was still black but still at last. The broken throbbing had been fixed and Mortimer’s bed was quiet as a church. It seemed I had just lain back down when he shook me awake and told me it was Sunday.
   “Sunday?” I squinted at the light. My head hammered. “What happened to Saturday?”
   “You looked so wasted we decided to let you rest,” Joe explained. He was drawing open the drapes. In the cruel light my two roommates looked pretty wasted themselves. Mortimer said I must be hungry but there would be time for a bite of breakfast before our flight; we’d better hurry.
   I didn’t feel hungry or rested either. I just had a cup of airport coffee and bought a box of Aspergum to have in my shoulder bag—the hammering in my head promised to get louder. Boarding the airplane I confided to Joe that whatever I had ducked seemed to be swinging back for another shot. He sympathized but said that big pink pill had been his last. He gave me a peek in his sample case, though; he’d managed to buy a quart of black rum from one of the Cuban maids.
   “Remedy number two: if you can’t duck it, try to keep ahead of it.”
   It was a long sober return flight even with the rum. While Mortimer slept, Joe and I drank steadily, trying to keep ahead of the thing. The rum was gone before we got to Denver. Joe looked at the empty bottle mournfully.
   “Yuh done somethin’ t’ the booze, Hickey,” he muttered in a thirties dialect. “What yuh done t’ da booze?”
   The mutter was for my benefit, but Dr. Mortimer was roused from his doze by the window.
   “What’s that, Joe?”
   “Nothing, Doctor.” Joe slid the bottle out of sight. “Just a line that came to me from O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. It’s in the last act, after Hickey’s given them all ‘The Word,’ so to speak, and one of the barflies says something to the effect of ‘The booze ain’t got no kick t’ it no more, Hickey. What yuh done t’ da booze?’ “
   “I see,” Mortimer answered, and dug his head back into the little airplane pillow. He saw about as well as anybody did, I guessed.

   With the help of Aspergum and overpriced airline cocktails I was still in front of the thing when we landed in Portland, but it was closing fast. The banging in my skull heralded it like the rising toll of a storm bell. Mortimer phoned his wife from the airport to have her meet him at the big Standard station on the edge of the hospital grounds. He said he simply did not have the energy to check on the ward just now. Joe said he would do it. Dr. Mortimer gave Joe a grateful smile but allowed as how the nuts had been cracking right along without either of them for two days and nights now; another night probably wouldn’t hurt.
   “Besides, our guest has to be driven home,” he added. “Unless he’d like to lay over a night with us. Devlin? It would give you an opportunity to study the set sketches the producers sent up.”
   “Yeah, why don’t you?” Joe put it. “You can check out my collection of bad religious art from Ireland.”
   I shook my head. “I promised I’d be back. My dad was scheduled for a spinal this morning. I thought about phoning from Denver,” I said, “but you know how it is.”
   They both nodded that they did and no more was said about it.
   We dropped Dr. Mortimer off at the gas station. His wife was nowhere in sight, but we might not have seen her; there was still a jam of cars stretching around the corner of the block both ways. Joe began to fret as soon as the looming complex of the hospital came into sight. “I think I ought to swing in, anyway,” he said. “We can make a quick round while they’re gassing us up at the motor pool.”
   He braked to make the turn and the guard at the gate waved us on. He pulled to the NO STOPPING curb in front and motioned the aide sweeping the lobby to come out.
   “Mr. Gonzales? Would you mind driving this bomb around back and filling it up?”
   Gonzales didn’t mind a bit. Grinning at his good fortune, he gave Joe the broom and took the wheel. Joe shouldered it and marched around to my door.
   “Come on,” he implored, “you can stand it if I can.” He even added an enticement. “Maybe I can scrounge up another pink pill.”
   I could see he was needing the company; the hopeful glow had gone out of his eyes, leaving a gloomy smudge. I caught the strap of my shoulder bag and followed him toward the lobby, resolved to stand it.
   The lobby was empty and completely changed. The renovation was nearly finished and the workers had knocked off for the weekend. There was gleaming new tile on the floor and fresh white paint on the walls. The veteran squad of khaki couches had been discharged and a replacement of recruits waited in close-order file, still in their plastic shipping bags. All the Venetian blinds had been removed from the windows, and the wooden window frames replaced by chrome. It glistened in the harsh sunshine streaming through the big windows.
   The only thing about the lobby that was the same was the fluorescent lights. They still buzzed and fluttered even in the shadeless sunlight. They made me think of the ward above. And this suddenly made my resolve start to flutter like the chilly light in those long tubes. I backed out when the elevator door opened.
   “I’ll wait down here,” I had to tell Joe. “Maybe I’ll finish that Ching you interrupted the other morning.”
   “Right,” Joe said. “So you can find out whether to go or not to go to Florida.” He handed me the broom. “Find out for me too, why don’t you?”
   The elevator took him up and left me standing there, knowing that I had let him down. I leaned the broom against the wall and went to the drinking fountain and spit out my last piece of Aspergum. I tried to rinse out the taste but it wouldn’t go away. It tasted like pennies, or a lightning storm in the making. I walked to the receptionist’s deserted desk. Two of the buttons on her switchboard were blinking. As I watched, they both stopped. Calls were probably being relayed to another board during renovation.
   I managed to get an outside line and dial my parents’ house. I listened to it ringing at the other end. Maybe they were still at the hospital. Maybe something had happened. I should have tried to call earlier. I had lied about Denver. I hadn’t thought of calling from there at all.
   I tried awhile to ring Information for the number at the clinic, but I couldn’t decipher the complicated switchboard. I finally gave up and walked to the couches. I took a seat in the one at the front of the rank, right at the windows. New louvered sun shades waited along the baseboard. They would replace the old blinds. Now the sun boomed in dead level, like cannon fire.
   I got up and went around to the couch at the rear. It was still in the sun but I managed to pull it over into the bar of shade from one of the window frames. I sat down in the narrow shadow and closed my eyes.
   Joe was gone a long time. The sun angled along. I had to keep scooting on the plastic to stay behind that shadow. I slumped back and folded my arms, hoping I might appear calm and relaxed should a guard happen past. I just about had the flutter in my breath under control when a thumping crash right at my feet made me jump a mile. My shoulder bag on the couch had been spilled by my fidgeting—the thump was the I Ching hitting the floor; the crash was the martini glass I’d swiped from Szaabo.
   I tried to make fun of myself: Whadja think, one of the guys in white gotcha with his butterfly net? I was leaning to gather up the spilled stuff when I saw something that got me worse than any net ever could. It was on the front cover of the book, one of the pictures taken years before-of a little boy in pajamas looking over the rail of a crib at the back of a cluttered bus. God Almighty had that been all there was to it? Nothing but a spell of déjà vu! a commonplace phenomenon triggered by that glimpse of Caleb standing on the porch in his nightclothes? It seemed to be that simply: the image on the porch had resonated with the photograph of that other time I traipsed off to see this mysterious Wolf Doctor. Always one of my favorite of Hassler’s bus pictures. That’s why it’s front page center in my collage. A ringing moment from the past, and it happened to find a corresponding note in the present. This could account for all these shadows that have been haunting me. Reverberations. The nuthouse reverberations. Woofner repeated. Separate splashes in the same pond, the ripples intersecting. Resonating waves, that’s what it is, clear and simple—
   yet…
   there must be something more to it than surface waves to get you so good. It stirs too far down, rolls from too far away. To roll that far, wouldn’t the two moments have to share something deeper as well? some primal heading? some upwelling force from a mutual spring that drives the pair of times to join forces and become one many times more lasting than either original time alone, a double-sided moment that can roll powerfully across years and at the same time remain fixed, permanently laminated in a timeproof vault of the memory, where the little boy stands longing yet, in unfading Kodachrome, in flannel pajamas and Grateful Deadshirt both, on the porch at the farm and holding to the crib rail at the back of the bus, eyes shining forever brave down that dim and disorderly tube—
   and yet…
   it isn’t the longing. Or the bravery. It’s the trust. If Dad leaves a speed demon to babysit, the very act must signify it’s aw-right, right? If he says a visit to Disney World is a Big People’s business trip, then that’s that. Trust doesn’t fume off in a pout, like big brother Quiston, or wheedle like May or Sherree; but it does expect to have something brought back. It does expect to reel in something if it casts far and often and deep enough, like those faces on the ward. It does expect to slide in someday to more than a plate of dirt if it rounds bases enough. It expects these things because these things have been signified. That’s what gets you.
   Especially if you’re one of those that’s been doing the signifying.
   So the discovery that I was having déjà vus did not bring me any ease. It only clarified the fearful murk that had been nagging me into something far more haunting: guilt. And when I closed my eyes to shut out the little face looking up from the book on my lap, I found my head crammed full of other faces waiting their turn. What was my mother going to say? Why hadn’t I phoned? Why wouldn’t I lend poor Joe a little support a while ago after all of it he’s afforded me the last two days? Why can’t I face those faces upstairs? I know now that it isn’t my fear that chains me back. It’s the bleak and bottomless rock of failure, jutting remote from the black waters. Onto this hard rock I am chained. The water pounds like blame itself. The air is thick with broken promises coming home to roost, flapping and clacking their beaks and circling down to give me the same as Prometheus got… worse! Because I sailed up to those forbidden heights more times than he had—as many times as I could manage the means—but instead of a flagon of fire the only thing I brought back was an empty cocktail glass… and I broke that.
   I clenched my eyes, hoping I guess to squeeze out a few comforting drops of remorse, but I was as dry as the Ancient Mariner. I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t do anything about anything, was about what it came down to. All I could do was sit by myself on my godforsaken reef of failure, clenching my eyes and gnashing my teeth in morbid self-recrimination.
   This is what I was doing when I realized I was no longer by myself.
   “Squank!”
   She was leaned over the back of the couch, her twin telescopes within inches of my face. When I turned she reared away, wrinkling her nose.
   “Tell me, Slick: are you wearing that expression to match your breath, or are you this lowdown for real?”
   When I regained myself I told her that this was about as real as it got, and as lowdown.
   “Good,” she said. “I hate a phony funk. Mind if I join you? I’ll even share your troubles…”
   She came around without waiting for an answer, tapping her way to a place beside me.
   “So. How do you explain this hangdog face?”
   “I swallowed more than I can bite off,” was all I told her. I didn’t think this myopic little freak would understand more, even if I could explain it.
   “Just don’t spit up on me,” she warned. She leaned around to get a closer look at my face. “Y’know, dude, you look kind of familiar. What do they call you besides ugly?” She stuck out a skeletal hand. “I’m called the Vacu-Dame, because I’m out in deep space most of the time.”
   I took the hand. It was warm and thin, but not a bit skeletal. “You can call me the Véjà Dude.”
   She made a sound like a call-in beeper with a fresh battery. I guessed it was supposed to be a laugh. “Very good, Slick. That’s why you look so familiar, eh? Very clever. So what’s with all the pictures stuck on that book in your lap? Photos of your famous flashbacks?”
   “In a way. The pictures are from a bus trip I took once with my gang. The book’s an ancient Chinese work called The Book of Changes.”
   “Oh, yeah? Which translation? The Richard Wilhelm? Let me have a look at it, so to speak.”
   I handed her the book and she held it up to her face. I was beginning to suspect that this freak might understand more than I thought.
   “It’s the English edition. That’s what I used when I first started throwing the Ching. Then I thought I’d try using Wilhelm in his original German. I wanted to see if it helped the poetic parts. I found such a veritable shitload of difference between the two that I thought, ‘Shit, if it loses this much from German into English, how much must’ve been lost from ancient Chinese to German?’ So I decide to hell with it all. The last Ching I threw I threw at my degenerate Seeing Eye dog for turning over my wastepaper basket looking for Tampons. The sonofabitch thought I was playing games. He grabbed the book and ran outside with it, and by the time I tracked him down he’d consumed every page. He was a German shepherd. When he found something written in his ancestral tongue he just couldn’t put it down. What’s all this glass underfoot, incidentally? Did you drop something or did I just miss a Jewish marriage? I don’t care for dogs but I love a good wedding. It gives the adults an excuse to get soused and let all the dirty laundry hang out. Is that where you’re bringing such a booze breath back from, Ace? A big wedding?”
   “I’m bringing it back from Disney World, believe it or not.”
   “I believe it. On the Red Eye Rocket. Here, you better put your fancy book away before I see a dog.”
   When I tried to reach around her for my bag I bumped her staff. It tipped and fell before I could grab it.
   “Watch it!” she shrilled. “That’s my third eye you’re knocking in the broken glass!”
   She picked it up and turned around to stand it behind the couch, out of danger. Then she leaned close again and gave me a fierce frown. “You’re the one broke it too, ain’t you? No wonder you got such a guilty look on you, cursed with such a clumsy goddamn nature.”
   For all her frowning, I couldn’t help but grin at her. She didn’t seem as fierce as she looked, really. She might not have realized she was frowning all the time. She wasn’t as hopelessly homely as she first appeared, either, I decided. Or as titless.
   “Speaking of curses,” I said, “what was that one of yours the other day? It was formidable.”
   “Oh, that,” she said. The frown vanished instantly. She drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. “It isn’t mine,” she confessed. “It’s Gary Snyder’s, mostly, a poem of his called ‘Spel Against Demons.’ You want to know why I happened to memorize it? Because one time I spray-painted the entire thing. On a football field. Remember when Billy Graham held that big rally in Multnomah Stadium a couple of years back?”
   “You’re the one who did that?”
   “From goal line to goal line. It took nineteen rattle cans and most of the night. Some of the words were ten yards big.”
   “So, you’re the famous phantom field-writer? Far damn out. The paper said the writing was completely illegible.”
   “It was dark! I’ve got a shaky pen hand!”
   “You were plenty legible the other afternoon,” I prompted. I wanted to keep her talking. I saw her cheeks color at the compliment, and she started rocking back and forth, hugging her knees.
   “I was plenty ripped is what I was,” she said. “Besides, I recite better than I handwrite.”
   She rocked awhile in thought, frowning straight ahead. The sun was almost out of sight in the ridgeline across the river, and the light in the room had softened. The chrome trim was turning the color of butter. All of a sudden she clapped her hands.
   “Now I remember!” She aimed a finger at me. “Where I know your melancholy mug from: the dust jacket of your goddamn novel! So far-damn-out to you too!”
   She started to rock again. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see her put her thumb in her mouth.
   “I’m something of a writer myself,” she let me know, “when I’m not something else. Right now I’m an astral traveler on layover. Too far over, too, after two days of Miss Seal’s Bed and Breakfast.”
   I told her she didn’t look nearly as far laid over as the others I saw up there. This made her blush again.
   “I cheek the tranqs,” she confided. “I never swallow anything they give me. Watch—”
   She felt around between her ragged deck shoes until she found a big shard of glass. She tossed it to the back of her mouth and swallowed. She opened wide to show nothing but teeth and tongue, then a moment later spat the shard tinkling across the new tile. “Want to know the reason they hauled me in here? Because I dropped three big blotter Sunshines and went paradin’ around the rotunda at the capitol. Want to know why I got so ripped? I was celebrating the completion of my new novel. Want to know the name of it?”
   I told her that as a matter of fact I would like to know the name of her novel. I couldn’t help but feel that somebody was getting their leg pulled, but I didn’t care. I was fascinated.
   “I called it Teenage Girl Genius Takes Over the World! Not too shabby a title, huh?”
   I conceded that I’d heard worse, especially for first novels. “First your ass! This is my goddamn third. My first was called Tits & Zits and my second is Somewhere Ovary Rainbows. Shallow shit, those first two, I admit it. Juvenile pulp pap. But I think Girl Genius has got some balls to it. Hey, let me ask you something! My publisher wants to reprint the first two and bring all three out as a package. But I’m not so sure. What’s your thinking on that plan, as one novelist to another?”
   I didn’t know what to think. Was she on the level or lying or crazy or what? She sounded serious, but that could have been like the frown. I couldn’t get over that feeling of a pulling sensation on my leg. I avoided her question with one of my own.
   “Who’s your publisher?”
   “Binfords and Mort.”
   If she’d named off some well-known New York house like Knopf or Doubleday I’d have started shoveling pantomime manure. But Binfords & Mort? That’s a specialty house for high-class historic stuff, and hardly known outside of the Northwest. Would she pick such company to lie about? Then again, would they pick her?
   “I think you could do worse than follow the advice of Binfords and Mort,” I averred, trying to probe her eyes. I couldn’t get past the glass. I’d have to try another test.
   “Okay, Girl Genius, I’ve got one for you.”
   “It’ll have to be quick, Slick. I think my chariot has just arrived.”
   A black sedan had indeed just pulled up at the no standing curb. She must have heard it. An ambitious-looking young legal-type flunky got out and started for the lobby door.
   “Quick it is,” I said. “I’d like to know what’s your thinking—just off the top of your I.Q.—on the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”
   If I hoped to see her thrown by this, I was disappointed. She got very deliberately to her feet and stood in front of me. She bent her face down until it was almost touching mine. The thin lips were starting to stretch at the corners. The eager pad of driver’s footsteps stopped a few feet away but neither the girl nor I turned.
   “Melissa?” I heard him say. “Everything’s cleared, Sweetie. Your father wants us to go to the Leaning Tower and order a couple giants—a pepperoni for him. He’ll join us as soon as he gets rid of that damned delegation from Florence’s fishing industry—they’re still singing the blues about the salmon regulations. How does Canadian bacon sound for the other one? It’s smoke cured…?
   The lenses never wavered from me. But the lips continued to stretch, wider and wider, until it seemed her whole head might be split in half by her grin. The blush raged across her cheeks and neck, and her eyes flashed around their crystal cages like giddy green parakeets. She finally cupped her hand so we were shielded from the driver’s eyes.
   “Entropy,” she whispered behind her hand, like a resistance fighter passing a vital secret under the very nose of the enemy, “is only a problem in a closed system.” Then she straightened and spoke up. “What’s more, a singing fisherman from Florence sounds better to me than a singed pig from Canada. How about you, Slick?”
   “Much better,” I agreed.
   She nodded curtly. The scowl snapped back into place. Without another word she turned on her heel and stalked unaided past the waiting flunky, across the lobby, and straight out the door toward the sedan, majestically, or as majestically as possible for a knobby-jointed maybe-crazy half-green-haired nearly-completely-blind girl-thing from another dimension.
   “If you’re ever in Mt. Nebo,” I called after her, “I’m in the book!”
   She kept going. The flunky caught up to her but she disdained his help. She nearly stumbled when she stepped off the curb, but she caught the rear fender and felt her way to the door handle and got in. It was then I realized that, in her show of majesty, she’d left her cane.
   They were pulling away as I ran out. I waved the feathered staff, but of course she couldn’t see me. I thought of honking the thing after them but they were already to the gate, and the traffic was loud.
   Besides, I knew it was the very sort of something I was supposed to bring back. It was absolutely neat. Caleb would love it. He would take it to school, show it off, brandish it, twirl it, honk it. His classmates would admire it, covet it, want one of their own. On their next trip to the Magic Kingdom they would look for them at all the Main Street souvenir shops, ask after them in all the little information kiosks…
   Then, one bright blue airbrushed morn—a marvel of demand and supply!—there they’ll be.