IV: Down the Tombs of Taurus

   “A drought is upon her waters; and they shall be dried up: for it is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their images!”

Jer. 50:38

 
   Still October 19, Saturday afternoon, only a few tense seconds having elapsed.
   “Good morning, my friend,” says Marag, sifting his hand from the sleeve of his blue gellabia; “It is a good morning?”
   I tell him it isn’t a bad morning for two in the afternoon and shake his hand. We look each other over for the first time in the daylight. He’s older than I thought, graying, but his eyes are as youthfully bright and black as his teeth are white. He’s smiling at me to see what I’ll do. There’s protocol at stake here on this sunny sidewalk: an acknowledgement that this is my main hash man could be a faux pas costing me a good connection; on the other hand discretion might be taken as a snub, etc.
   Muldoon ends my dilemma by introducing him to me as Marvin instead of Marag. I tell him my name is Devlin. Muldoon says Marvin has this map, and quick little hands produce a roll of paper. Something is dimly penciled secondhand over a kid’s math assignment still showing through. We lean to look and it rolls back up like a windowshade.
   “Marvin says it’s a map, to a Secret Hall of Holy History—”
   “Secret Tunnel,” Marag corrects, “of Angel History. Not far. I have car and driver will take you there very reliable. Hut! Nephew! My friends from America. Hut hut hut!”
   He waves at a guy slouched against the fender of his cab at the curb, a surly sort about twenty years old, wearing polyester-knit slacks and a polo shirt, sleeves rolled up to emphasize the arms-folded biceps. He looks us over, the set of his jaw and the beetle of his brow letting us know here, by Allah, is a customer cool yet dangerous. He answers Marag’s hail with a curt nod, the very image of rawboned threat were the effect not flawed by the driver’s actual squat-legged big-butted round-shouldered shape.
   “Not so much education,” Marag confides, “but a fine driver.”
   “Say, Marvin, just where’d you get that map?” I can’t remember mentioning anything to him the other night about the Hall of Records.
   “I hear talk the American doctors one with baldness are searching for the Secret Tunnels. I draw this last night this map.”
   “You drew it?”
   “And have my son write in the words. Very reliable secret map. My family is live at Nazlet el-Samman many hundreds of years, pass down all is know.”
   Muldoon says all he is know is Marvin wants ten pounds for it. Ten pounds! Jacky and I say at once.
   “Only five for me,” Marag hastens to add. “Other five for car and my nephew driver.” He notes our hesitation and shrugs good-naturedly. “As you wish, my friends. I don’t blame you being cautious. We take only five now—for car, gasoline—and my five for map when you are return satisfied. Is good? Only five now?”
   Five seems to be the going front figure. Marag keeps grinning at me.
   “Let’s go for it,” I decide. I take a five-pound note out of my wallet. The hand comes out and the note vanishes into the folds of the blue gellabia; not as quick as the nephew’s eye, though; he comes fuming over and he and Marag have a splendid argument in screaming Egyptian.
   As squat as the nephew is, he still is some inches taller than his bantyweight uncle, and you can tell he’s pushed a little iron down at the YMMA. Still, it’s an obvious no-contest. That bright-eyed little mink of a man would swarm all over Cool Yet Dangerous, leaving nothing but a pear core.
   “My nephew is a fool with money,” he confides, showing us all toward the battered Fiat. “But a most reliable driver you can be insured.”
   As he bustles around the car closing us in, I realize he isn’t coming along.
   “Also most furthersome. His name is T’udd.”
   “Thud?” we all ask in mutual dawning apprehension. “Thud?”—as a thick brown thumb punches the starter into a victorious roar. Pumping the foot feed, Thud turns and gives us a thick-lipped leer of triumph. The map is crumpled in his hand.
   “I haven’t seen a grin like that,” Jacky concedes, “since Sal Mineo won the Oscar for Young Mussolini.”
   Thud adjusts the mirror so he can see his reflection, brushes back an oily lock, then “peels out” is, I believe, the term: lays rubber in a squealing fishtailing brodie away from the Mena House turnaround off down Pyramid Boulevard, the pedal to whatever metal there is in a Fiat floorboard. Too late we realize we are in the sainted presence of Brainless Purity; as Las Vegas has distilled Western Materialism down to its purest abstract, so Thud is the assimilated essence of motormad Egypt. Blinking his headlights and blaring his terrible warhonk, he charges the afternoon traffic ahead, fearless as the Bedouin! wild as the Dervish! He reaches the creeping tail end of the traffic pack at full fifty. Never touching the brake he goes rocking shockless over the shoulder to the right of a poky VW, cuts back sharply between two motorcycles, and guns into the left lane to pass a tour bus, the passengers gawking horrified as we cut back just in time, then to the other lane around one of those big six-wheeled UAR machines the two soldiers on top with a cannon-passing left or right, again and again, just making it each time by the skin of our grill, finally getting in front of the pack to what looks like a promising clear stretch a chance to really unwind—except for one minor nuisance, a little accident jam ahead, about thirty cars, coming up fast—
   “Thud!”
   There is the sickening metal-to-metal cry of brakes screaming for new shoes; then the shudder of the emergency against more scored metal; finally the last-minute cramping skid. My door is inches from the rear of a flatbed full of caged turkeys.
   “Jacky for the love of God, tell him no more! I’ve got a wife and kids! Tell him, Muldoon!”
   It’s no use; both interpreters are in tongue-tied shock. Thud can’t hear anyway, has his horn full down and his head out the window, demanding to know the meaning of all this mangled machinery impeding us. He eases ahead so we can see. It’s two flimsy Fiat taxies just like ours, amalgamated head on, like two foil gum wrappers wadded together. No cops; no ambulances; no crowd of rubberneckers; just the first of those skinny street jackals sniffing the drippings, and what apparently is the surviving cab driver groggily standing on the center stripe with a green print handkerchief pressed to his bloody ear with one hand, waving the oncoming traffic around with the Other. Thud keeps shouting until he provokes a response. He pulls his head back in and passes the information on to us, so matter-of-factly that Jacky is brought from his trance to translate.
   “He says that’s a relative, mother’s side. The dead cabby is also a relative. Was a good relative but not a very good driver—not amin, not reliable.”
   “Tell him about my unreliable heart!”
   Too late—Thud has spotted what looks to him like a remote possibility, is peeling around the rival driver—the green paisley handkerchief hanging unheld to the injured ear as the man shakes both fists after us in outrage—Thud paying no heed—all under control—situating the rumpled map on the dash so he can study it as he simultaneously scans the road checks his face in the rearview honks his horn drives down the wrong side of the center line straight at a big fucking yellow Dodge panel oncoming with furniture all inside packed clear to the windshield a brass bedstead lashed to the grill in front springs on top while Thud—[Here, the page of the journal is smeared]
 
   October 20. Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost, just after dawn and before breakfast… out in back of my cabana in chaise lounge without the chaise.
   Jacky went to the desk last night and raised a dausha about them not putting his call through to Jann Wenner and us not getting separate rooms yet. He was so effective they moved us right out of our nice room into two poolside cabanas, tiny cement cells intended for bathing-suit changers, not residents: a hard cot, no windows, no hot water, costing as much apiece as our other room. But Jacky was going nuts with me prowling weird in the wee wired hours from all that Turkish coffee and Pakistani hash…
   I’ve wheeled the lounge chair from the pool to where I can sit looking at the Great Pyramid over the hotel ledge. The morning sky is spectacular, piled with thunderheads. The air is so still I can hear the pyramid ravens jiving around the summit, a dozen black specks jostling for the king perch on the long wooden pole that is planted atop the pyramid to indicate where the peak would be if the capstone was in place. They are having a great time, swooping and skawking. Must be better than Turkish coffee. Kirlian photographs of small pyramid models show force fields streaming straight up out of the peaks, like volcanoes erupting pure energy. There are all sorts of tales of mysterious machinations manifesting on top of the Great Pyramid: compasses going crazy, wine botas shooting sparks, radium paint crumbling off the wristwatch dials to rattle around inside the crystals like green sand. I should check it out before going home…
   Yesterday was the first time away from the pyramid since coming out from Cairo a week ago. I had resolved that I would concentrate my time only on the Giza area and resist the tourist’s mistake of trying to “see it all.”
   But yesterday we were driven to see one of those alls, for all of my resolve, and damn near to our doom as well. Thud turned out to be about as reliable and furthersome as Marag’s map, and a much dirtier burn.
   As soon as we were a good skid away from the Mena House he forsook the ability to comprehend any English whatsoever, and when he finally realized that Jacky and Muldoon weren’t shouting Arabic phrases for his hairbreadth triumph through that amazing pile-up he went into such a cloudy sulk that even they couldn’t reach him. Every request for slower speeds was answered with a “Mish fahim abadan.”
   “It means?”
   “It means I don’t understand,’ “ Jacky screamed. “But what it really means is we have insulted the sonofabitch! He’s kidnapping us is what it amounts to.”
   Thud wrenched the car full right, off the crowded Pyramid Boulevard onto a narrow blacktop running between a high shady row of Australian gum on the right side and a wide irrigation canal full of half-sunken cows and car carcasses on our left. Free at last of the sticky traffic, Thud could cruise full out with nothing in the way but insignificant items—chickens, children, donkeys, and the like.
   “Thud”—I tried to make contact over a more universal frequency—“you trite pile of outdated camel shit, you’re driving too fast!”
   “Also too far,” Muldoon added, scratching his head. “I think he’s taking us out to Sakkara, to the Step Pyramid.”
   “That damned Marag set me up.”
   “You mean Marvin?” In the front seat Jacky has captured the wad of paper from the dash. “Maybe not. See, this map isn’t actually to Zoser but to some area a ways past it, to a place called the Tunnels of Serapeum. See? He might have thought it meant seraphim, as in angels.”
   We gave up trying to get through to Thud. Jacky said all our shouting was just making it worse, and Muldoon added that it was probably a good idea for us to see Sakkara anyway. For perspective. “The Step Pyramid is the old-age champion grandaddy in all camps, except Cayce’s. It’s worth seeing, got a lot of soul.”
   “Have you seen this Tunnel of Angel thing?”
   “Serapeum? I went through it with a class. It’s got a lot of—of I guess you might say balls.”
   After about twenty miles along that canal road we took another right, west up out of the narrow Nile Valley onto another limestone plateau. When you crest the rise you can see the Giza group shining across miles of sand, like channel markers in the sun. Then, the other direction and much nearer, the step structure of King Zoser.
   “Very badly gnawed by the tooth of time,” said Muldoon. “One of the guys at the university has an act called Tennessee Egypt. He sings a song about this tomb called ‘The Old Rugged Pyramid.’ “
   Thud was so placated by his magnificent drive that his comprehension returned and Muldoon talked him into detouring for a look. We followed Muldoon through the reconstructed temple gates toward the dilapidated old structure. “Built for King Zoser, they say, by an architectural genius named Imhotep. About fifty years before the Great Pyramid, the Egyptologists say.”
   It was hard to think of this primitive pile as being only fifty years older than the masterwork of Giza, but it was even harder to think of it as being 5,000 years younger than Cayce’s construction date.
   Muldoon took us to a tipped stone box at the rear of the pyramid where you climb up and look through a two-inch peephole. A stone effigy is sitting at the rear of the module, tipped back in the same incline as the box, like an astronaut ready to fire himself into space.
   Muldoon told us how they think the pyramid was built by a continual adding of new wings to the basic block tomb, finally stacking them up in diminishing steps. “Some of Khufu’s contractors saw it later, the theory goes, and said, ‘Hey! if you just filled in those steps you’d have a great pyramid; let’s build one for the Chief.’ “
   He escorted us down into beautiful chambers of alabaster, tattooed ceiling-to-floor with comic strips of daily Egyptian life 5,000 years ago. There were farmers plowing, planting, harvesting; a thief was traced from crime to capture to trial; fishermen cast nets from boats over underwater reliefs depicting finny denizens in meticulous zoological detail, some familiar, some long since disappeared.
   Thud followed behind, getting more and more impatient with all this interest in things immobile. Finally he would follow no farther; he stood with his arms folded, calling out threats.
   “His dander is up again,” Jacky translated. “He says if we don’t get back to his taxi he’s going to go on without us.”
   Even fixed again behind the wheel Thud’s dander didn’t go back down. All the rest of the desert drive to the Serapeum location he bitched at us for taking so long, and just to look at a lot of dirty graves! We tried to humor him, offering gum, asking him to join us down the Serapeum tombs. Phhht! Crawl down in a big hole like a lizard? Not on all our lives!
   We left him revving his motor and walked out into the sand. We had no problem following the trail of torn tickets to the underground temple’s entrance, a wide, sloping slot cut through the limestone down to a high square door. It looked like a steep driveway down to a sub-level garage for desert trucks.
   At the bottom the armed Arab took our piastres and handed us three half tickets from the pile of already torn halves. We entered the high door and turned left down a spacious passage, roughly hewn through the earth. Another guard asked us for another payment and took the scraps from us and halved them again. He solemnly returned our halved halves to us and placed his on his dusty pile (which was only half the size of the other guy’s halves, being only quarters) and waved us on. It grew dimmer. There was another turn, left or right (I’m lost now), and another high door and we were in the main tunnel.
   It’s a simple, solitary passageway cut through solid stone, rough-walled, high-ceilinged, level-floored, big enough to handle a complete subway system; two trains could come and go side by side and still have ample room along the walls for gum machines and muggers. But it’s completely empty. It runs on vacantly ahead of you, until out of sight in the dim distance.
   It is lit indirectly, the light coming, you realize, from large rooms chiseled alternately into each side of the tunnel about every twenty paces. These rooms are rugged, regular cubicles and similar in size, about forty feet on a side, a little higher than the roof of the tunnel and sunk a man’s height deeper than the tunnel floor so when you stand at each crypt, leaning on a safety rail, you are looking down on the top of the room’s sole furnishing.
   It is the same in every room: one enormous granite coffer with corresponding lid pushed slightly aside allowing a peek into the empty insides. Except for different chiseled inscriptions the coffers are all identical, each carved from a single solid block of dark red granite, each stark and somber and huge. You could have put Thud’s taxi inside and closed the lid.
   As far down this eerie subway as you care to walk, it is the same, room after room; one to the left; then, a few dozen paces on, the next to your right, each with its arched entrance, each with its grim granite vault identical almost to the angle of the ten-ton lid pushed askew to allow the contents to be long ago pilfered.
   “They were for dead bulls,” Muldoon told us. “Sacrificial bulls. One a year, every year for thousands of years, evidently.”
   We walked down steel steps into one of the sepulchers and stood next to the giant coffer. I could reach to the top of the lid. Muldoon searched over the inscribed granite sides until he found a picture of the tomb’s sacrifice.
   “The bull had to look like this; had to have exactly this pattern on his rump, plus had to have two white hairs in his tail and a birthmark under his tongue shaped like a scarab. Here, sight down these sides.”
   The granite sides of the huge hollowed block were as flat as still water.
   “Yet the archaeologists won’t give them anything better than copper! That’s all the tools there is evidence of from this period. Our modern high-speed diamond drill takes a week to poke a little hole through, but the archaeologists won’t give these poor carvers anything but copper.”
   The whole effect was macabre, disconcerting; such modern precision, for something so stone-aged. Jack stamped around the giant enigma in dismay. “What the hell was their trip? I mean forget about the goddamned tools; even if they were equipped with Goldfinger’s laser and Solomon’s worm, it’s still a hard way to carve your roast.”
   “Nobody knows why they did it. Maybe it was initially intended as some kind of symbolic burial of the Age of Taurus, and they got so deep into it they kept going. But nobody knows.”
   Jacky Cherry couldn’t get over it. “There’s something downright perverse about it, you know? Something—”
   “Bullheaded,” Muldoon filled in. “Which reminds me: we better see if our driver is still reliably waiting.”
   We found Thud in such a thunderous peeve he wasn’t going to look at us, let alone drive us home. He stared in the direction of Cairo and claimed we had robbed him of a whole afternoon’s livelihood, tips and everything. He diatribed he was going to sit there and listen to the radio until some tourists arrived on one of those camel caravans from Giza. After their voyage aboard one of those smelly ships of the desert, plenty tourists would be ready to jump camel for a berth on his luxury liner, hopefully pay him enough extra to make up for what our dawdling had cost.
   It was a bare-faced bluff. There might not be another caravan until tomorrow and he knew it, but he was going to milk every possible piastre out of the predicament. Worse yet, I realized, when the bastard finally consents he has it in his four-cylinder mind to scare the shit out of us!
   It was getting downright depressing all around. While Thud argued with Jack and Muldoon I remembered my Polaroid; I would while away this bullshit time practicing my photography.
   I got the bag and bucket of negative developer out of the rear seat and carried it to a little stone bench at the edge of the parking lot. When I took the camera from the bag I heard Thud’s diatribe stumble slightly. And every time I snapped a button or turned a dial his concentration was further distracted. As an experiment I swung the lens toward him and he hushed entirely so he could suck in his gut. I swung on past to take a shot of the Step Pyramid. He tried to resume his tirade, but he was faltering fast. Then he saw it produced pictures immediately! He was a lost man.
   He left Jack and Muldoon in mid-squabble and came bargaining humbly to me: all our insults, all our dawdling and delays would be forgotten and forgiven, but for only one picture of himself produced immediately.
   I squeezed off another prizewinning shot of the sand and sky, pretending not to fahim. When he saw that precious film being wasted on wasteland he began to beg shamelessly. “Snap,” he wheedled. “Snap me; snap T’udd!” I told him I had only one more snap in this packet and wanted to save it to get a shot of those farmers I had seen back down in the valley, so picturesque working that deep dark Nile soil. “But I’ll tell you what, Thud. You drive us nice and slow back to the Mena House and I’ll get another pack.”
   We were away at once. When I tried to photograph the farmers he jumped out and ran around the front of the taxi to try to find a place in the frame. I cropped out all but his bicep, but even that meager sliver was enough to make his breath come thick and his hands grasp uncontrollably.
   It was the worst attack of covetousness I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing. It was degrading and embarrassing, and a little frightening. Thud knew he was losing all cool but he couldn’t help himself. He climbed under the wheel like a whipped spaniel. He readjusted the mirror, this time so he could watch me. He watched me like Dog Watches Man With Meatball. He didn’t even turn on his transistor.
   All the strained ride home he kept helplessly clearing his throat into the silence. When he turned up Pyramid Boulevard he forced himself to drive so slowly that it was almost as unpleasant as his speeding. By the time we reached the hotel all of us were trembling, and Thud’s hands were shaking so he could hardly turn off the key. His stomach was growling. His brown face had actually gone ashen with the agony of that stretch of unnatural driving forced on him by his terrible yen.
   “Snapping now?” he begged pitifully.
   “Going to get film,” I told him. “At the cabana.” I didn’t dare take the camera along. He would have driven right across the pool after me.
   “Hurry back and snap him soon,” Jack Cherry called. “Before he snaps himself.”
   When Thud saw me returning he almost broke into tears. I loaded the camera and noticed my hands were shaking under the scrutiny. Jacky positioned him with sideshadow, the pyramid at his back: “For dramatic effect.”
   He stood on the curb. It took him nearly a minute to pull himself together and pump up to the right pose before nodding he was ready.
   “Now! Snap me!”
   He snatched the Polaroid print away before I could coat it. Its impact on him was incredible. As he studied his developing image on the little square of paper, we could actually see his face begin to change and shift. He set his jaw, then his shoulders. He worked his features until they presented once again the countenance of a very cool cat, watch out. His breathing slowed. His color returned. When he had it all together, as they say, be damned if the fucker didn’t demand an extra five pounds!
   Another huge hassle. Thud laughed scornfully at our deal with Uncle Marag. Who is Marag? Where is he, this Marag, with the so-called car’s five pounds promised, eh? Why isn’t this Marag here to complete the transaction? Okay, okay, Jack sighs and hands over the five. No no, that was just the usual fare! (Thud glanced again at his photograph for reassurance; yep, he was still there.) Another five was what he was talking about, for all the time we made him wait. I was getting tired of it. I said okay, here’s the extra five. But I get the picture back.
   He gasped.
   Hadn’t that been the deal? I gave you picture; you gave us nice ride and no extra? He blinked, looking around. He wasn’t alone. Some of the other cabbies and hustlers had ambled over to see what was happening. They were all grinning. It was very clear what was happening. Thud was cornered.
   To save face he had to give face up.
   He snatched the bill from me and slapped the photo down on the street (face up) and roared off in his taxi, shoulders back, stomach sucked in, head held high. Almost made you proud of him.
   Later that night, however, the power of the picture must have run down. He came knocking on my cabana door with one of those little metal outfits you throw away when your pack of Polaroids is empty. A little flimsy black box. He’d found it under the seat where I’d kicked it, my bag already full to the brim with the print peelings and all that other Polaroid waste.
   He grinned triumphantly, holding the little box high in the air.
   He would trade, he carefully explained, this obviously valuable photographic attachment for the picture, which could be of no possible value to me. He stood, grinning and waiting. How could I explain to him that I had never coated his picture and that the prints from these special positive-negative Polaroid films fade blank in minutes without that coating goop? Besides, that other deal had gone down. So I told him no dice; he could keep the valuable photographic attachment, I’d keep the picture, albeit nonexistent.
   “No dice?” he cried. “No dice is no trade?”
   “No trade is what no dice is. No picture. No deal.”
   He was dumbfounded. He stared at me with a new respect; here was someone as bullheaded as he was. He cursed and threatened me for a while, in Arabic and English and three or four other fractional languages, brandishing a black metal box that was as empty as his threats.
   When he finally stalked off, bewildered and pissed, I made a mental note to henceforth check both ways very carefully before crossing any busy Egyptian thoroughfares.
   Back from supper I finish washing my negatives in the little gallon bucket of chemicals you have to carry with this kind of Polaroid film. A hassle and a nuisance.
   I bought this complicated process because of all the photogs over the years who have sought to snare my likeness—affronting my view, plaguing my poise, making me stumble where I had walked sure before, always promising, “I know it’s a bit of a bother but I’ll send you prints!—only to disappear into their darkrooms never to be seen again.
   I thought this process would be more equitable; the subjects could have their print, I’d have the negative. But piss on it. It’s just too much hassle.

V: Within the Stone Heart

   For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

Jesus


   When you got nothin’ to say, my Great-uncle Dicker advised me once in a kind of Arkie ode to optimism, go ahead and say it.
   “Because it’s like having nothin’ to serve for supper but say a pot of water and some salt; could be after you get the water boiling and salted, some colored cook on a potato wagon might aimlessly run over one o’ yer prize hens… ob–ligate herself to you.”
   Advice I have followed, as a potboiler of aimless words, to many a last-minute successful stew.
   “How-and-ever,” Uncle Dicker must have amended, “don’t invite a bunch over to take supper on the basis of this could-be. Help is just too blessed unree-lie–abul!” An amendment I must have forgotten, because here I am trying to write in Egypt, with a table full of invited readers, bellies growling, salty pots steaming, but no sign of any last-minute Jemima or her potatoes.
   To tell the truth, when Marag and his map didn’t come through, I pretty much gave up watching the road past the henhouse. I wish I could duck out of the kitchen entirely. Let Jann Wenner make a change in his menu: “Scratch the chicken stew special, Jacky, and open some windows; the whole diner is steamed up.”
   The vaunted Secret Sanctorum? I was closer to opening it in Dayton, Ohio, than moping here in Giza watching my linen maid suck a persimmon—I can’t even open a conversation. “Hot today,” is all the talk I can come up with, though I know her name to be Kafoozalum and the juices of the fruit are dripping. Her eyes are on me like the top two buttons of her Mena House uniform, talk about open.
   I know she speaks English. I’ve had many an opportunity to watch her prattle around the cabanas, cart full of fresh white linen and uniform full of ripe brown hide, but never had occasion to make conversation more than Hello or Thanks, even when she gave me her most treasured smile, 14-carat incisors, conversation pieces both of them… until this noon.
   I’d been hurrying back to the hotel with an exciting find. Buttoned in my khaki shirt pocket was the best thing I’d found since the ‘66 Pontiac convertible: a fantastic old Roman coin, I think, or Greek, with a noble profile still clearly raised from its time-battered bronze.
   In my enthusiasm to show Jacky Cherry that I could find something of ancient value, I had headed back as the crow flies. Instead of circling the grounds to the front gates I had managed a running vault over the rear wall of the compound. I lit, feet first, right between the spread brown knees of Kafoozalum on a little square tablecloth.
   I thought she was having lunch. Staggering to keep from stepping in her beans or on her knees, I managed quite a dance before I could catch my balance and hop off. I saw then that instead of food the cloth had been spread with what looked like some kind of Egyptian tarot. She gathered the cards prudently out of my way, glaring up at me in an expression both enticing and curious.
   I apologized and explained about my coin, and that I meant nothing disrespectful, jumping on her.
   “I mean on your cards. Can I see them?”
   “You bet!” The grin flashed and the two golden incisors winked out at me. “Sure!”
   When I was comfortable on a sack of cement, she smoothed the linen back out and began spreading the cards in rows for me to see. They weren’t tarot after all. They were her personal collection of those saccharoidal “posecards” that you see sold at all the knick-knack stands. Only these are for the natives, not the tourists. They display Egyptian fashion models, male and female, in stiffly tailored romantic poses. Mostly of marriage and courtship. Instead of a major arcanum like The Lovers, for instance, you have Handsome Young Couple at the Girl’s Door Saying Goodnight with Soulful Looks or Fiancee Alone, Beaming Wet-Eyed at Her Mailbox by the Flowery Gate with a Letter from Him—all always in Cairo’s latest hair and haberdashery, all always beautiful, loving, beaming. In short, sickening. But I was impressed by the way she presented her presentation.
   She reverently dealt the last one, her favorite (Beautiful Young Couple Still in Wedding Finery Alone for the First Time at Last or So They Think for We See in the Windowpanes Behind Them the Wedding Party Watching, as He Lifts Her Veil, Tenderly, and as She Touches His Mustache, Provocatively), then lifted her lashes to me with a look asking, in any language, What are you waiting for, fool? I responded by inviting her to drop into my cabana when she got her next break, I’d show her my Polaroid negatives—
   Now she’s accepted, traipsed into my cell with an armload of fresh folded damask and let the door blow closed behind her. Preliminary rites have been observed; we’ve exchanged pictures and she’s taken the persimmon from the dish. Nothing remains but for me to incant some key words, unlock the doors of our delight. And all I can say is Hot today.
   “What is you write?” Dripping on my notebooks, here.
   “Nothing. Notes. To remember what happened…”
   All for lack of simple courage, for fear of international faux I sit gnawing my tongue until she mercifully takes us off the hook.
   “Ya Salam!”
   Photos traded, fruit gone, there is nothing left for a maid to do but check the time on her wrist how it flies! She thanks me in a rush and scoops up her unrumpled linen, peeks a quick check both ways out my door, and is off to her cart, sucking on the seed.
   When she has traded all the clean laundry on her cart for soiled she comes wheeling back past my open door and inquires in at live, “Is yet hot to you, the day?” I tell her yes, yet hot. She encourages me to brace up; the winds change any day now.
   “All will pass.” She smiles. “Even the diarrheas.”
   And wheels on, leaving me tongue-tied like a hick fool indeed. What a low blow from a linen maid! Nevertheless, better toss the little filly a nice tip when you check out. How nice? Real nice. This is why the help in foreign realms always like us Americans best: we can always be expected to tip more, because we are always so inadequate of what is expected.

   October 23, Wednesday. The mosquitoes and scarabs have pinned Jacky Cherry up against his cabana wall. Also Yasir Arafat is taking a side trip from the Moslem convention in Cairo to visit the historic pyramids. He was allegedly seen lunching in a private portico off the main dining room. A sinister-looking coterie of bodyguards and lieutenants is spotted darkly around to make sure the Holy Land tour members don’t start anything. This doesn’t make Jacky any more comfortable. He catches the 900 bus into Cairo to see if he can’t get lodging with fewer pests.
   I walk up the hill, stopping at the shop nearest the pyramid to buy a miniature hookah I’ve had my eye on. The shop is an orderly little side cranny of a building labeled Poor Children’s Hospital. I ask the proprietor how he happens to have a place so close to the pyramid. He says because the profits help the hospital cure the Poor Children. I ask him what it is exactly that these Poor Children are sent out here, to the base of the Great Pyramid, to be cured of. After struggling to find a name for the disease he finally points back toward the city.
   “Of the pray-sure—eh?—of the city Cairo, they come to be cure. You understanding?”
   I take the hookah, nodding, and go out to seek my own cure. I had thought to find a private place somewhere on the pyramid’s outskirts, but there is a big crowd of tourists. I climb up to the third course and sit on the casing stones and watch the hustlers descend on each new shipment of live ones. They are merciless. One poor woman actually breaks into tears.
   “Seven years I saved for this, damn you! Leave me alone!”
   The dapper camel-panderer, backing away for fear of perpetrating a coronary, gets tangled in his animal’s rope and falls into a heap of fresh camel manure. He stares at the stain on his fresh white gellabia with such dejection I think he might cry himself.
   I wonder if they have a similar hospital in Cairo to take care of pyramid pressure casualties…

   October 24, Thursday late. Just wobbled down from a bizarre bar scene where I finally made contact with my resident pyramid colleagues, the cosmic ray scientists. All of them (except for the Egyptian students) proved to be very learned and equally drunk. The new Mena Lounge is a terrible bar, pretentious and expensive. I stalked in wearing my British walking shorts and pith helmet (a dusty day at the digs) and splurged on one of their overpriced gin-and-tonics-for tradition’s sake—just as a real Englishman complete with muttonchops and ascot came reeling over from one of the tables behind the plastic arabesque. “Be-ah, please,” he enunciated. “And some pea–nuts.” In a voice so high-handed it’s no mystery why the British were kicked out of all their colonies.
   The dour Egyptian behind the bar bit his tongue and obeyed. I told the Englishman he hadn’t better use that tone on a bartender in Oregon.
   “Unlikely one would bloody ever be in Oregon,” he said, finally focusing on me. “But see our outfit. Monty’s Dynasty, what? That Rommel campaign? By God’s wound one has to agree with the professor—this great grimy crude pot of a place does serve up specimens from every period.”
   He’d been pointed out to me previously as one of the ray experts here with the new spark chamber specially constructed for another try at probing the pyramid. I told him I’d also come to this great pot of possibilities in search of hidden chambers.
   “This is what I thought one was supposed to wear.”
   “Great pot of nonsense, you want my inebriated expert’s opinion. On the other hand, if you demand sober-er-er experts, come…”
   He picked up his beer and peanuts, then hooked my arm to tow me back to his table, introducing me as the renowned fellow pyra-midiot, Sir Hidden Chambers-Pott. “On with our pith helmet, Sir Hidden; give these loutish clods an eyeful of the real archaeological élan!”
   They were five in all: the Real Englishman, a burly black-bearded American about my age, a suave old German wearing tinted glasses and a white linen suit, and two apprentice experts from the University of Cairo. The loutish clods barely noticed me, for all my élan. They went right back to their interrupted conversation concerning the deeply significant sociopolitical, teleological, and religious ramifications of the upcoming heavyweight title fight in Zaire.
   “I don’t care if Ali takes up Tibetan Yoga and learns to levitate,” the American proclaimed. “Foreman is still going to waste him. Kayo-pow! Guar-an-teed.”
   He had a virile delivery and build, burly arms and neck squeezed into a T-shirt. A stencil across the chest declared him a member of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Computer Spacewar Team, their motto: Never Say Hyper!
   “Sure, Ali was great, a goddamned saint of a fighter. But what made him great wasn’t his faith. It was number one his speed—which has slowed considerably—and number two his needle. If anything esoteric gave him special powers it was his goddamn needle, right?”
   “Just so,” said the Real Englishman. “His bloody needling blacky’s mouth—”
   “But he tries to pull his needle on this man—‘Yo’ gonna fall in nine, you honky-lovin shine!’—it simply is not going to work. Not on Big George. This ain’t no Uncle Liston! This ain’t no paranoid cub scout Floyd Patterson! This is a bona fide bright-eyed one-track-minded Jeezus freak and could give less a shit about what the black crowd thinks of him.”
   He was speaking toward the two students, but I had the impression that it was really for the benefit of the older man.
   “So if Ali can’t psyche him then what’s it come back to? Physical ability. Speed, size, and strength. And Foreman is faster bigger younger. I don’t care what country he’s fighting in.”
   “Just so,” agreed the Englishman. “Modern tactics over heathen superstition. Guaranteed kayo.”
   This stirred the German professor to rebuttal. “So?” He chuckled softly and shook his head at the Englishman. “Just so like your modern British tactics kayoed the heathen Nasser?”
   “Not fair!” the Englishman flared back, stung. “But for that bloody Eisenhower we would have—”
   “I must again remind you young gentlemen: this battle will be taking place in the middle of the African continent at three in the morning under the full Scorpio moon.”
   The American told the old man he’d been reading too much Joseph Conrad. “Maybe a few years ago Ali could’ve put the whammy on Foreman, but this is 1974. Things’ve changed, as old Ali’s gonna find out. Just because the guy he’s fighting is black ain’t no guarantee anymore the African whammy’s gonna work on him.”
   “Neither is being Christian a guarantee of the certain kayo,” the professor reminded them, smiling. “As we in Germany found out.”
   “Been a mystery to me ever since, now you bring it up,” the Real Englishman said, pouting over his peanuts. “Damned unlike him, meddling in over here.”
   “Unlike Ali? Not really, not if you followed Ali’s career. Ali’s style—”
   “Not Ali, you Yankee dimwit,” the Englishman snapped. “Eisenhower!”
   This provoked such a fit of mirth that the American tipped over his drink, laughing. Then, scooting back to avoid the spill, he fell out of his chair. The students helped him back up and set him in his chair, still laughing. This time he drew the German’s sting; the moment the tinted glasses fixed him the giggle hushed. The German took off his coat and folded it in his lap deliberately. A tense quiet fell over our table—over the entire room, in fact. The drinkers at the other table sipped in thoughtful silence while the Moslems moved their lips, thanking Allah for forbidding them the evil of alcohol.
   True, all three scientists were soused to their Ph.D.s, but that didn’t explain the tension. After a minute I asked how the cosmic ray probe was coming. “Very satisfactory,” the American told me. “On Chephren and Mykerinos, damned satisfactory!” He took a drink of my gin-and-tonic and hulked again over the table, attempting to rally from the old German’s strange sting. He admitted they’d found nothing earthshaking in these two, but for the Great Pyramid they had great expectations.
   “Going to scan from the outside, this time, goddammit! Set the receiver up inside the Queen’s Chamber. The holiday crowds should have dwindled enough to install it by tomorrow afternoon, the next day for certain!”
   The Real Englishman disagreed. “Device worth upwards a million pounds sterling? Want some camel driver micturating in it? These people are wild! Unpredictable!”
   I asked them what they hoped to find, their best hope? The American said what he wanted was a chamber of filthy hieroglyphs. The German said he also hoped to find a chamber, but one containing that dream of every Egyptologist: an unrobbed coffin. The students said the same. The Englishman, regaining some of his puff, said that what he hoped to find was an end to all this bloody tommyrot and twaddle, once and for all.
   “Likely all we’ll grub out of that sanctified hill of beans will be a couple of carved geegaws worth about three and six on the geegaw market. But at least that’ll be an end to it.”
   “So why risk it?” I had to ask. “A device worth a million pounds sterling? What justifies such an investment?”
   “Careful.” The German laid his kindly smile on me like the tip of a whip. “This is not the kind of question to ask in the field.”
   “True enough,” the American agreed. “That’s the kind of question that’ll be asked a-plenty back at the home office. For what it’s costing to send me over here Stanford could build a pyramid.”
   “Exactly! What’s the home office’s best hope? Why do—” I didn’t finish. The German’s linen jacket had slid from his lap, disclosing the explanation for the table’s mysterious vibes: he was holding not only the American’s beefy paw in one of his long-nailed hands, he was also holding the hand of the Egyptian student seated next to him in the other. All eyes averted diplomatically from the little hand show, to drinks, peanuts, etc. The Englishman chose to turn his attention to me and my question.
   “You mean what’s it worth, don’t you, duck? What’s in the pot? Right-o, then; let’s put our pyramid stakes on the table.” He swept a space clear of shells.
   “First, let me list some of the Known Negotiable Assets: It’s a multidimensional bureau of standards, omnilingual and universal, constructed to both incorporate and communicate such absolutes as the bloody inch (a convenient ten million of which equals our polar axis) plus our bloody damned circumference, our weight, the bloody length not only of our solar year and our sidereal year but also our catch-up or leap year . .. not to mention the bloody distance of our swing around our sun, or the error in our spin that produces the wobble at our polar point that gives us the 26,920-year Procession of the bloody Equinoxes. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius, you see.
   “Digging deeper in our stone safe we find deposited such blue-chip securities as the rudiments of plane geometry, solid geometry, the beginnings of trigonometry, and—probably more valuable than all these mundane directions and distances and weights put together—the three mightiest mathematical tricks of them all: first being of course pi, that constant though apparently inconclusive key to the circle. Second, phi, the Golden Rectangle transmission box of our aesthetics enabling us to shift harmoniously and endlessly without stripping gears so long as 2 is to 3 as 3 is to 5 as 5 is to 8 as 8 is to 13. Get it? And, third, the Pythagorean theorem, which is really just an astute amalgam of the first two shortcuts and about as attributable to Pythagoras as soul is to Eric Clapton.”
   “Bravo,” the German applauded, but the Englishman’s blood was up and he was not to be distracted.
   “In Accounts Probable, the dividends look equally inviting. Based on the admission that so far we have been able to comprehend and appreciate the pyramid’s info in terms of and thus only up to our own, then how much must be contained in this bloody five-sided box that we cannot yet see? Wouldn’t a folk who knew enough about the sun to utilize its rays and reflections—even its periodic sunspots and their effects—be likely to have a suggestion or so for us about solar power? Hut! Call the Minister of Energy! And mightn’t an astronomy so accurate as to aim a stone tunnel in pure parallel with our axis at a starless space in space, or point a radius from the center of the earth through the summit of this stone pointer at the star in Pleiades—that is indicated by drawings gleaned from centuries as the center star about which the other six of the constellation are orbiting and perhaps our sun as well!—have some helpful hints for NASA? Call them, I say—hut hut—the Home Office, the UN, the Pentagon. What’s a few billion in research to the Pentagon if they can get their hands on a ray so precise as to cut granite to watchwork accuracy yet so powerful as to sink a whole bloody continent from the face of the waters to the mud and mire of mythology?”
   “It’s as viable as research on the fusion bomb,” the American encouraged.
   “But let us speak frankly, mates. The aforementioned is all just collateral, just bloody pignoration compiled to get us bonded by the bureaucrats. The real treasure, as all Pyramidiots passionately know in their secretmost chamber of hearts, whether they mention it in their prospectus or not, lies in Accounts Receivable.”
   The vision of this priceless prize brought him unsteadily to his feet. He stood weaving a moment, his chin trembling, then spread his arms as though he addressed all creation.
   “Something is owed us. The debt is clearly implied by the scar of its erasure. We’ve been shortchanged and the books have been brazenly juggled. It’s obvious to even the densest bleeding auditor: they are trying to cover up our fall! A whole long column has been rubbed out and written over and the embezzlement assiduously concealed by fraudulent bookkeepers from Herodotus to Arnold Toynbee! But for all their artfulness the debt still shows, a bloody eighteen-and-a-half-minute buzzing gap marking the removal of something important—no, of something imperative!—to this court’s search for our dues. How much has been pilfered from us, mates? How much of our minds, our souls? How is it that the same species responsible for that great temple out there is now administering this bloody bushwah tourist trap featuring flat beer and unpredictable hoodlums strolling the grounds outside my window wearing dark glasses and revolvers?”
   He had found his focus again. His voice rang through the lobby like Olivier in a Shakespearean tirade.
   “I demand an explanation! As a human being I am owed an accurate accounting, by the heavens, owed an honest audit!”
   It was a cry for the benefit of all the shortchanged everywhere, spoken out of a caldron of social outrage and cosmic inspiration and flat beer. He did not let his eyes drop back to us. He turned on his heel and strode from the lobby in his stateliest stagger. There was actual clapping.
   When the reviews of the Englishman’s speech subsided I hoped to find out more about their ray results, but the mention of the Mena House’s new gun-toting tenants had led instead to the topic of Arafat. Not a man much loved, I gathered; even the Moslem students had bad things to say about the Palestinian guerrilla leader. The German was scathing.
   “Storm trooper at heart, a filthy terrorist with a limousine.” He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “I was at the Munich games when they murdered those fine young Israeli athletes. Wrestlers, as I remember. Filthy! I will confess to you all: If given the opportunity I would sprinkle ground glass in his Turkish coffee when they wheel the cart past in the hall.”
   The American said he would use LSD instead. “It’d be a gasser watching Yasir on a bummer. Clean up his Karma, too, heh heh. If we just knew where to get a hit…”
   I excused myself and bought a beer and carried it back here to my cabana. I suppose I could have given them my Murine bottle; I’m sure not using it. But I’m against dosing. We just don’t have the right to launder other people’s Karmas, no matter how filthy. Besides, those desert gunsels? Who knows what they might do with the jams kicked out. Watching them prowl around with their revolver butts showing, I too find myself thankful their prophet forbade them booze: they’re wild enough sober. As the Englishman said, unpredictable.

   October 27, Sunday. It’s all looking less and less resultful to Jacky. This morning we found a fence had been put up around the Sphinx.
   “Little like closing the barn door,” Jacky observed, “after the Turks have already shot off the Sphinx’s nose.”
   Ignoring the mixed metaphor, the big cat-thing kept on glowering, over our heads past the squalor of Nazlet el-Samman, toward the Nile.
   This afternoon things look a bit better to Jack. He’s struck up an acquaintance with Kefoozalum, even had room service bring them two rum Cokes.
   “She’s not a Moslem, she’s a Copt. The Copts are a sect of Egyptian Christians, tolerated because of their tiny size and their seniority. In fact they claim to be the first Christians, the people who cared for Joseph, Mary, and the Kid while they were in Egypt escaping Herod. Some even say they are the last remnants of the Essenes, thus actually preceding Christ as Christians by dint of second sight and signs and visions supposedly indigenous to their faith.”
   “That could explain her stare,” I mused; the traditional Moslem woman is never supposed to look into any man’s eyes but her father’s, brother’s, or husband’s. “So frank and forward.”
   “Could be,” Jacky said. “She buses into Cairo every Sunday morning to attend church, the very church, she told me, that housed the holy family twenty centuries ago. A place most miraculous. Just a few years ago, she said, a workman saw a woman on the roof. He went inside and got the Coptic minister, who came out and ordered her down. Then he noticed a light emitting from her: ‘Holy Mary Mother of God,’ he exclaims, ‘it’s the Virgin!’ Or something to that effect.
   “Anyway, the whole congregation came out and saw her, and next Sunday saw her again. The next Sunday the churchyard was packed—Moslems, Christians, agnostics—everybody saw her! It went on for two months. Thousands witnessed her weekly appearance.”
   Jacky smiled and raised his brows.
   “The crowds finally got so big the Egyptian government put a wall around the place and charged twenty-five piastres at the turnstile. The apparition immediately stopped appearing.”
   “Far out,” I say. “I wouldn’t have stood for it either. Not when they’re getting fifty piastres a head to look at those empty bull coffins.”

   October 28, Monday. Jacky finally lands a room in Cairo. I go in with him and check at the KLM office. I can get a plane out this coming Thursday morning, or Monday night November 4. I tell the coiffed Dutchess to book me on the Thursday morn flight.
   Now that he’s been accepted back into metropolitan civilization, Jacky wants to stay another week. “Why not take a room with me in Cairo? Wait and catch the November fourth flight? See some belly boogie? That way you could spend Halloween night at the tombs.”
   I tell him I’d rather spend the eve with the kids in Oregon, passing out popcorn balls to mummies in rubber masks. He shrugs. “Whatever. But do you think Thursday gives you enough time to find—to finish your pieces?”
   I appreciated his mid-sentence alteration. I would have been forced to concede it was highly unlikely that I will be able to “find it” by Thursday, or by Monday for that matter. The closer I’ve looked the less I’ve seen. The pyramid disappears within itself as you approach it. The longer you look the more your theories become dwarfed by the blunt actuality of the puzzle.
   I walk the ruins around the Giza plateau largely unaccosted now. I have learned a trick of bending down to pick up a rock as soon as I detect an approaching hustle. I then examine it through the little sighting lens on my engineer’s compass, and the hustlers back off respectfully. “Shh. Observe. The Yankee doctor has found a clue. Observe the manner he thoughtfully scratch his great bald puzzle piece.”
   Little do they know. I’m just drifting. Peter O’Toole crossing the desert on his camel, watching his shadow ripple hypnotically over the sand. Omar Sharif rides up from behind and swats him with his camel crop. What?
   You were drifting.
   Oh, no! I was thinking.
   I was—
   You were drifting.
   After a solitary supper I shuffle back to my cabana. I can’t rest or write. Rest from what? Write what? I have less an idea of what I’m looking for than when I left Oregon a month ago. My poke’s about played out and the cards have been cold or crooked, like that Marag and his five-pound fake map.
   And my ace in the hole? The Murine bottle that I had promised myself to use should all else fail? Out of the question. As Muldoon Greggor expressed it, “I wouldn’t want to try to divine its secret with acid. Soon as your armor was blasted away, these watchmen and hustlers would crawl all over you. They wouldn’t leave anything but a dry husk.”
   I do have one of those five hash fingers left. That’s safer. Perhaps, if I could get a place on the back side in one of those tombs, under the stars in sight of the Sphinx… bound to afford more inspiration than this cinderblock cell. So I gather my paraphernalia and strike out into the night.
   It’s late. The road is empty of cabs. The sentries nod me past. The searchlights and speakers of the evening’s Sound and Light are shut away in their tombs and bolt-locked, but there’s plenty of illumination: the moon heralded new by that Ramadan cannon two weeks ago is now nearing full; the Great Pyramid shines mournfully under it for lack of anything better to do.
   On the moony slope I find the seat where we were brought by Muldoon that first night. There’s more wind than I thought. I roll a page from my notebook and light it with my last match. I didn’t twist it tight enough and it flares up but I’m determined to get one hit, sucking so frantically at the hookah mouth tube that I’m unaware I have company.
   “Good evening, Mr. D’bree.”
   I see his little face glittering so close that I think at first it’s the flame itself. Hash sparks fly everywhere.
   “You have trouble with hubble-bubble this good evening?” I tell him not anymore, no. With the last flicker we both can see the bowl is empty. I toss the ash into darkness. He tells me he is most sorry, but to come, follow him, for a more nicer smoke than hubble-bubble. Does he mean a joint? This hash and hookah business is very ritzy but a joint would be nice…
   Marag takes me to one of the tombs down the slope where the limestone plateau just begins to drop away toward the village. There is a faint rectangle of light hissing from the tomb’s door; Marag stops me with a feathery hand on my arm before we get too close.
   “This is my friend,” he whispers. “A young desert boy but already guard this corner. Very good position! Still, he is not at ease, it is not his home. You got hashish?”
   “You’re not gonna mix it with tobacco? I don’t smoke, and cigarettes hit me harsh.”
   “No. No harsh cigarette. Good stuff, from Finland. You’ll see.” He reaches the door of the tomb just as a faceless form is coming out with a carbine to check on the noise. The light hisses brighter and they stand talking in it. Our desert boy wears a mask of shadows. I can see the rifle is an ancient American Springfield .30-.06 left over from the battle of Bordeaux, and I can see the way his hands fondle it, but his face I can’t see.
   Marag brings him over. He tells him my name but not me his; nor do we shake hands. He doesn’t speak. The turban he has cowling his face is patched and frayed with age, though I judge him some years short of twenty. But not a boy; probably never a boy.
   I get some kind of pass from this phantom because he lowers the .30-.06 and trades it for a carpet. He unrolls the carpet on the sand and nods us to sit. From his gellabia pocket he takes a tin box and opens it. Marag reaches again for my hashish and I relinquish it reluctantly.
   The phantom carefully heats and crumbles the hash into the box. Nobody says anything. He’s very meticulous and takes a very long time to roll three big sticks. We could have been smoking the first one while he practiced but nobody says anything. He finally lights and passes it to me.
   “It is tobacco all right!”
   “But not cigarette,” Marag hastens to add. “It’s pipe tobacco. And Finnish!”
   The guy’s wife steps from the door of the tomb into the moonlight, carrying a copper tray and three glasses. She is traditionally barefooted and pregnant and the fact embarrasses her. When she leans to place the tray on the sand you can feel the blush. Marag makes some crack in Arabic about her girth and she skitters back into the tomb.
   The tea is wickedly strong and sweet but the Finnish tobacco, I’m forced to admit by the time we’re done with the first round, isn’t all that bad. The wife appears with a kettle as the husband is lighting the second joint—spliff, rather—refills our glasses, and disappears again, all in a moment. This round of tea is milder and they are running low on sugar, but right on cue with the third joint she appears to replenish us. Hardly more than hot water. She remains outside, indicating that the goodies are gone; if more is wanted it will require her trotting barefooted to the village. She stands as though weightless for all her swollen condition, the globe of her belly buoying her up. The husband finishes the weak drink and returns the glass to the tray before he shakes his head no; we’ve had enough.
   She leans to take up the tray. This time the young husband reaches to her foot and affectionately squeezes her bare instep. Marag gasps at this most un-Moslemlike display.
   “It is as they say.” He clucks. “These kids smoke dope and our old ways of behave are forget.”
   I guess it must be Marag’s version of irony, but it’s hard to say. That last one did it. The gas light from the tomb hisses back down and the moon moons. We sit for a long time, looking at the stars and listening to the dogs keep each other abreast of the neighborhood night. When it’s time to leave, we all three stand at once. The young guard puts the tin box in his pocket and rolls up his carpet. The shadow head on the shadow body nods goodbye and disappears after its mate.
   Never a word. Never a chin or cheekbone let stray out in the prying moonlight. But that faceless presence has furnished a circle in the dirt with the grandeur of Araby.

   We are scrabbling down into the village, where Marag is going to make another score for me. I’m high like a motherfucker. The Sphinx looks like a big old mouser purring by the path, fat on camels and Fiats.
   “My young friend is far from his Bedouin home.” Marag feels he must explain, looking back up the dim trail at me. “I get him this position. He is family. I leave that village too, when I am very little, very young. His relative get me position.”
   He was turned around walking backwards down the steep rut now.
   “This young fellow, I think he will not stay long. He will go back to the desert for the birth. When he comes back I will get him another position. It is good, is it not? Having a person like family at the pyramid?”
   I can’t help wondering what he’s trying to promote me into. Maybe I should make it clear that a wealthy globetrotter I am not. It could be years before I can afford to return, decades. He should save his pitch for a better prospect.
   I can’t go with him to score, he explains. I will wait at his home. I follow him down sandstone paths that get wider and leveler until they become miniature streets crisscrossing between a maze of tiny block dwellings. The streets are too narrow for cars but there’s plenty of traffic-nocturnal strollers and striders, men and women, goats and kids. Cronies squatting against the wall grin and wink at Marag whisking past with a big live one in tow.
   In the square of light before one of the doorless doorways a knot of kids are playing with homemade clay marbles. A little boy jumps up from the game and scampers after us. He looks about seven, which means he’s probably close to eleven if you allow for the protein lag. Marag pretends not to notice him, then gruffly makes as if to swat him away. The kid ducks, laughing, and Marag takes him by the hand.
   “This is Mister Sami,” he explains, still gruff. “My oldest son. Sami, say hello to my friend Mister Deb-ree.”
   “Good evening, Mister Deb-ree,” the boy says. “Is nice evening?” His handshake is as light as his father’s.
   We cross a shared yard jammed between four mud huts and enter Marag’s home. From the ceiling a single dim bulb gradually coaxes the room from the night. It is only slightly bigger than the guard’s tomb. There are two big trunks; one carpet and one grass mat; one big bed and two bunks; no chairs or cupboards; no tables. For decoration there is a hanging tapestry with kids’ art pinned to it and a long bundle of sugarcane in the corner, bound with a gay red ribbon.
   Marag introduces me to his wife, a tiny woman with one of the milked-over eyes so frequently seen in the Egyptian poor. Also to Mister Ahmed, Missy Shera, Mister Foo-Foo, all younger than Sami.
   Marag takes a pillow from the bed and places it on the floor next to the wall and bids me sit. The kids squat in a semicircle and stare at me while Marag helps his wife pump a little white gas burner to hissing flame. I blow my harmonica for the kids and let them play with my compass. The wife begins to prepare tea for us in a little copper kettle.
   I ask Sami how he got a crescent scar on his forehead. Grinning, he points toward the pyramid and pantomimes a tumble with his hands.
   “It was a bad fall,” Marag says. “But maybe it convince him the spirits want him to be an educated, not a pyramid goat. He can read and count and draw pictures now, Mister Sami can.” He beams at the boy in unabashed wonder. “He can write.”
   From the foot of the top bunk he takes down a notebook to show me, the very one that donated a page for that map. He proudly points out the pictures and words.
   “Mr. Deb-ree is an artist and doctor, Sami. Maybe he draw for you a picture while I go on an errand.”
   After Marag leaves with my five-pound note, Sami and I exchange drawings. I do a Mickey Mouse and Sami does the pyramid. I tell him it looks too steep and he turns to the back page. Taped to the inside cover with electrician’s tape is a dollar bill. It’s taped Great Seal side up, and written beneath it, first in Arabic, then English, in the careful and patient hand of any good grade-school teacher in any language, is the translation of the two Latin slogans: new order of ages and allah has prospered our beginnings.
   “Did your daddy give you this the other night?”
   Yes, he nods, frowning at the page to remember what else his teacher has told him. “It is Roman lira pound?”
   “No,” I tell him; “it is Yankee dollar, American simoleon buck.” Marag is gone a long time. The wife puts Missy Shera and Mister Ahmed to bed. It must be past midnight but they’re still wide-eyed and excited, staring at me from their bunks.
   She takes up little Mister Foo-Foo and sits on the edge of the bed and drops one shoulder of her smock. In the dim light she looks withered way beyond her years. But all the kids are healthy, plumper than most of the pyramid pack I’ve seen. Maybe that’s why she’s withered.
   Foo-Foo roots in. Mom closes her one good eye and rocks gently to and fro on the edge of the bed, humming a monotonous nasal lullaby. Foo-Foo watches me unblinking as he sucks and rocks.
   A scrawny turkey chick wanders in the open door and Sami shoos it back outside. In a corner of the yard I see a very old woman milking a goat. She grins at Sami shooing the chick and calls something in Arabic.
   “Mother-my-father,” he explains. “Is right?”
   “Grandmother, we say. Sami’s grandmother.” After she finishes she rubs the goat’s bag with oil from a jar and brings the bucket of milk in. She doesn’t acknowledge me at all. She pours half the milk into the copper kettle on the cold gas burner and covers the rest with a cloth over the top of the bucket. She unties a long stalk of sugarcane from the bundle in the corner. She takes up her half bucket and shuffles out. The stalk brushes the bulb and the shadows rock back and forth. The humming never stops and all the little eyes are still wide in the dreamy light swinging, watching me, even the goat’s square pupils in the yard outside, glowing yellow at me as she chomps the cane…

   Back at the cabana. I fell asleep on Marag’s floor and had a hell of a dream, that the village had been struck by a sandstorm. I couldn’t see. In despair I tried to call but sand filled my throat. All I could make out was the rising din of thousands of impatient horns.
   When Marag returned and woke me I was sweating and panting. So was he, after his run. But this time he had only one little taped cartridge to show for his hours of effort. He handed it to me, apologizing. It lay in my hand in the dim light and both of us felt very sad.
   As he guided me from his house through the tiny thoroughfares to Sphinx Street, he continued to apologize and promise to make things good. I told him the deal was cool and not to worry over it! It was just a little burn.
   “The deal is not cool!” he insisted. “Is a bad burn. I bring the rest of the deal tonight, eight o’clock at Mena House—guaranteed!”
   He kept on and on about it in a distracted tirade. I finally got him off the subject by telling him what a nice family he had.
   “You are kind saying so. What about Sami, you like Sami? Is smart boy, my Mister Sami?”
   I told him yeah, I liked Sami, he was plenty smart.
   “Smart enough to catch up in one of your modern schools?”
   “Sure. He’s a bright kid. Personable and alert and bright, like his daddy. I bet he would be up with the other kids in a matter of weeks.”
   “I bet, too,” he said, pleased.
   I told him good night at the Sphinx. I was over the hill and nearing the hotel before I finally put it together. Marag hadn’t been promoting himself—it was Sami. Like any father he has his dream: the son is taken back to the Land of Opportunity by some gentleman, raised in a modern home, sent to a modern United States school. The kids get a chance to break into the twentieth century; the gentleman gets a permanent liaison with the past…”A friend always at the pyramid.” Not a bad scam. No wonder you were so upset about that hash; you had bigger deals wheeling. For all your light touch and soft sell, Marag, you’re a stone hustler…

   October 29. Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 300th day. Slept till Muldoon and Jacky wake me just in time to see the sun going down. They push me into the shower and send a pool boy to bring a pot of coffee. Jacky has reservations at the Auberge to see Zizi Mustafa, the most famous dancer of them all, and Muldoon has news of a hot archeological find in Ethiopia.
   “An abdomen that ought to be put in the Louvre!” Jacky promises.
   “A human skull that pushes us millions of years back further than Leakey’s find!” says Muldoon. “And no monkey business about it; this cranium is human! Darwin was full of crap!”
   “Maybe,” says Jacky, always a little reluctant to reorient his thinking or his anatomical focus. “On the other hand, maybe his evolutionary theory was right but his time scale was slightly off. That we still come from monkeys only it took us longer.”
   “That’s not the question, Jacky.” I’m out of the cold shower and hot into the discussion. “The question is did we or did we not fall!” As we are walking through the lobby I suddenly remember Marag’s resolve to meet me at eight with the rest of my purchase.
   “Eight in Egyptian means somewhere between nine and midnight,” Jacky translates. “That’s if he shows up at all.”
   I leave word at the desk to have Marag go on down to my cabana if he shows up before I return. I go back and unlock the door just in case and leave the hookah on the nightstand.
   After we eat the elaborate Auberge supper we find that the dancer doesn’t come on until nine. At ten they say midnight. Muldoon says he’s in the middle of exams and can’t wait any longer. I talk Jacky into coming back out to the Mena House with me; we can check out Marag and still make it back for the dancer. We get a cab, drop Muldoon at his place, and head back to Giza. By the time we get to the Mena House it is after eleven and no sign of Marag. The door to my cabana is ajar but nothing is waiting for me on the nightstand. We walk out to the street while Jacky regales me with some Arabic wisdom regarding gullibility. The doorman signals for a cab, then asks in a hazy afterthought, “By the way, sir, are you not Mister Deb-ree?”
   I tell him I am called so by some.
   “Ah, then, there was waiting for you a person. But he has left.”
   When? Ah, sir, minutes ago, sir; he waited a long time. Where? In utility room, sir, out of sight. Didn’t you tell this person to go on down to my cabana as I instructed? Oh, no, sir; that we cannot do! They would be bothering our guests, these persons… They! Who the hell do you think you are? Official doorman, sir. How long did this person wait for me? Oh, that we could not say; the person was sitting waiting when we came on duty at seven thirty.
   “But when he left,” he says, finally dragging his fist free of his gaudy pocket, “he gave for you me this package.”
   And he holds out my red handkerchief. Inside are the other four taped cardboard cartridges and my Uni pen.

   October 30, Wednesday. My last day in Egypt.
   I feel shitty about Marag. No luck at all trying to locate his house in the labyrinth of that village. Nor with the tomb where the young Bedouin couple were living. They left in the night, a new watchman tells me. Does he know Marag? Everyone knows Marag. Held the World Record Up-and-down Pyramid, Marag. Where does he live? Somewhere in village. When does he come on duty? Sometimes late night, sometimes early morning, sometimes not for days… Oh, a man of unpredictable moods, Marag, many of them dark.
   In Cairo I smoke a cartridge with Jacky and Muldoon and give one to each. I have to be clean on the plane back. I give Muldoon my four-volume PYRAMIDOLOGY by Rutherford. We mumble goodbyes and I hurry back out to Giza. Still no Marag on the dark aouda. My plane isn’t until 10 a.m. but I leave word at the desk to wake me at 6.

VI

   October 31, Halloween morn. Up before the sun. I recheck my packing (three girls from Oregon are right now serving a life sentence for dope in Turkey, where my plane lands after Cairo); nothing but the last ball of hash. And the Murine bottle. The hash I can swallow at the airport, but what about this stuff? Just flush it down the toilet? That’s like carrying the key all the long battle to the castle and up the wall to the maiden locked behind the massive tower door, then chickening out for fear she’ll be a bitch and tossing it in the moat.
   I’ve got to try. Never get another chance. There’s not enough time left to swallow it—it would be flight time before I took off—but if I bang it…
   So I’m headed again up the hill for one last desperate attempt, the Murine bottle in my shoulder bag, the insulin outfit in my pocket. By the time I reach the aouda I’m shaking all over with trepidation. I lean against the casing stones to reinforce my resolve but I keep shivering. It’s chilly and gray. A whirlwind comes winding across the empty aouda, gathering a fanatical congregation of scraps. The wind spins, like the spirit of a new messiah, inspiring corn husks, cigarette packs, the shells of yesterday’s pumpkin seeds… lifting newspapers, gum papers, toilet papers high and higher. What a following! Then the spirit evaporates and the wind unwinds. The Zealots drift back to the limestone.
   “Good morning, Mr. Deb-ree… is a nice morning?”
   “Good morning, Marag.” I had planned to apologize for the fuck-up at the hotel; now I realize again there is nothing to say. “It’s not a bad morning. A little chilly.”
   “A new season comes. The winds will now blow from the desert, more cooler and full of sand.”
   “No more tourists for a season?”
   He shrugs. “As long as great Khufu stands there will be tourists.” His bright little eyes are already chipping away at my chill. “Maybe my friend Mister Deb-ree want a guide take him to the top? Guide most reliable? You know how much?”
   “Five pounds,” I say, reaching for my wallet. “Let’s go.”
   Marag tucks his gellabia in the top of his shorts and leads the way like a lizard. It’s like climbing up 200 big kitchen ranges, one after another. I have to call a stop to him three times. His tiny eyes needle merrily at me gasping for breath.
   “Mister Deb-ree, are you not healthy? Do you not get good nourishment in your country?”
   “Just admiring the view, Marag; go on.”
   We finally reach the top and flush the ravens off. They circle darkly, calling us all kinds of names before they sail off through the brightening morn toward the rich fields below. What a valley. What a river to carve it so!
   “Come, friend.” Marag beckons me to the wooden pole in the center of the square of limestone blocks. “Marag show you little pyramid trick.”
   He has me reach as high as I can up the pole with a chip of rock and scratch a mark. I notice a number of similar scratches at various heights. “Now have a seat and breathe awhile this air. Is magic, this air on top pyramid. You will see.”
   I sit at the base of the pole, glad for a breather. “How does it affect you, this magic pyramid air?”
   “It affect you to shrink,” he says, grinning. “Breathe deep. You’ll see.”
   Now that he calls it to mind I remember noticing that most of the pyramid sealers are indeed men of unusually slight stature. I breathe deep, watching the sun trying to push through the clouded horizon. After a minute he tells me to stand with my stone and scratch again. It’s hard to tell, with all the marks of previous experiments, but it looks to me like I’m scratching exactly next to my first mark. I’m about to tell him his pyramid air is just more of his bull when I find myself flashing.
   It’s an old trick. I used to use it myself as a way to get an audience off. I tell them to take fifteen deep breaths, hold the last lungful and stand, then everybody om together as the flash comes on. Hyperventilation. Every junior-high weirdo knows it. But the business with the scratch and the magic air was so slick I didn’t make the connection, even when I felt the familiar faint coming on.
   I grab the pole for support, impressed. Marag has positioned himself in front of me, hands on his hips, grinning skyward. He’s done this before. He flaps a moment, then the breeze stills. I follow his gaze up into the milky sky and see what he has been waiting for: the thumb of God. I see it come down out of the haze and settle on top of Marag’s head, bowing him like a deck of cards until his face snaps, revealing another behind it, and another, and another, face after face snapping and fanning upward in an accelerating riffle—some familiar, from the village, the aouda, some famous (I remember distinctly two widely known musicians who I will not name in case it might bring them hamper), but mostly faces I’ve never seen. Women and men, black, brown, red, and whatever, most of them looking at least past the half-century mark in earthly years. The expressions completely individual and various—bemused, patient, mischievous, stern—but there is a singular quality uniting them all: each face is kind, entirely, profoundly, unshakingly benevolent. The fan spreads up and up, like the deck at the climax of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, clear to the clouds. From a distance these two vast triangles would resemble an hourglass, the bottom filled with grains of limestone, the top with face cards.
   At the last there are a number of blanks, positions available for those willing and qualified. When the last blank is snapped away there is a hole left in the shape of Marag’s slight body. Through this hole I can see the Sphinx, and beyond his paws those lanes of huts housing these faithful sentries who have for thousands of years guarded the treasury of all our climbs and all our falls. It is not buried. It is hidden on the very surface, in the cramped comings and goings, the sharing of goat’s milk and sugercane, in the everlasting hustle by the grace of which this ancient society has managed to survive. For thousands of years this people has defended this irreplaceable treasury and its temple with little more than their hustle and bustle and their bladders.
   As long as there’s piss in the King’s Coffin there isn’t going to be a pair of McDonald’s arches on the aouda.
   “What you think, Mister Deb-ree?” Marag snaps back into the space before me. “Is a good trick?”
   “Is a good trick, Marag. Is a great trick.”

   Back on the aouda I give him gifts for his family. Handkerchiefs, shoulder-bag stuff. My harmonica for Sami, and I will talk to my wife about the boy coming to Oregon for a year of school. To Marag I give my canteen, my compass, and a page from my notebook inscribed This man Marag is a servant who can be relied upon. Signed with my name and gooped over with my Polaroid fixative to preserve it. We shake hands a last time and I hurry down to check out.
   My cabana door is open. Sitting on my bed is Dr. Ragar.
   “Brother! I have brought for you the map of the Hidden Hall, known only to Masons of many degrees.”
   I begin to laugh. I’m delighted to see him. I wonder, was he one of the faces? I can’t remember.
   “Sorry, Doctor, I’ve already seen the Secret Hall. What else have you got?”
   He misunderstands my exuberance. He thinks I am ridiculing him. His eyes take on a wronged look, whimpering from beneath his dark brow like two whipped dogs.
   “I Dr. Ragar do have,” he says in a hurt voice, “a formula for a blend of healing oils. Used by the Essenes, it is said for the feet of your Jesus. The usual price of this formula is five pounds, but, my brother, for you—”
   “Five pounds is perfect! I’ll take it.”
   He helps me carry my bags and shares the taxi as far as Cairo. He is reluctant to leave me. He knows something more than money is up for grabs, but not what. He keeps running that rancid glim over me sidelong. When he gets out we shake hands and I press the Murine bottle into his palm.
   “In return for all you’ve done for me, Brother Ragar, please to accept this rare American elixir. One drop in each eye will clear away the cobwebs; two in each will open the third; three if you wish to see God as he appeared in San Francisco in 1965. I would not divulge this powerful stuff but for the fact that my father, you recall, was a Mason. I think he would want it so. Please, be so kind…”
   He studies me, wondering if I’m drunk at nine in the morning, then takes the bottle. “Thank you,” he says uncertainly, blinking thickly at the gift.
   “One stone at a time,” I tell him.

   Epilogue. Nine forty-four by the cabbie’s watch. He’s finding holes no Fiat ever fit through before but I’ll never make it. They said to allow at least one hour for getting through Cairo customs. Look at that mob of tourists! Like rats panicked at a sinking porthole. Nine fifty. Nobody’s going to make it.
   But the plane is delayed because an old pilgrim had a heart attack and they had to unload him. The guy I strap in next to tells me about it.
   “Right there trying to put his camera bag in the overhead and the Lord took ‘im. Happens all the time on these Holy Land hops.”
   The guy is a preacher from Pennsylvania and a tour host himself: very, very tired.
   “Wasn’t part of my group thank the Lord. But I’m due. Y’see there’s so many of them that are Senior Citizens, old folks that have saved enough to take a gander at the Holy Land even if it’s the last thing they do.”
   The engines are finally running and we taxi to the end of our runway. The spirit on board lightens. Nervous chatter is heard. Just before we take off somebody yells, Hey, who won the fight last night?
   What fight? somebody calls back.
   Between the Heathen and the Infidel.
   Everybody laughs, even the Turks and Nurds, but nobody knows who won. The stewardess says she’ll ask the captain and report back. We blast off. When we level out the Pennsylvania preacher says, “It wasn’t Foreman. I don’t care what she reports back.” I thought he was sound asleep. I say what? and he repeats the statement without opening his eyes: “I said Foreman didn’t win, no matter what the outcome.” When he doesn’t elaborate I turn back to my window.
   We’re banking right over Cairo. There’s the bridge crossing the Nile to the Omar Khayyam. There’s the Statue of Isis Awakening, lifting her veil to watch us leave. There’s Pyramid Boulevard… The Mena House… Giza village… but I don’t see… could I have overlooked it in this haze? There! No wonder; even from up here you don’t see it because you’re looking for something smaller. But you don’t overlook it. You can’t. You underlook it.
   “And you wanna know why?” the preacher has rolled his head to ask. “Because he’s got a discrepancy is why! How can he be the good Christian he claims to be and still be hitting people for money?”
   He fixes me with eyes worn red and raw from two weeks’ keeping track of his rattled flock.
   “That’s what does it, the thing really gets these Holy Landers. It’s not the age, not the heart. It’s the discrepancy!”
   His eyes close. His mouth falls open. I turn back to the window. The airplane’s shadow flits across the golden ripples of the Sahara. We level out. The speaker pops on and the pilot addresses us in sophisticated Amsterdam English.
   “This is your captain, Simon Vinkenoog. It appears we have to take a little detour in our routing to Istanbul, west of the Nile delta, because of… political reasons. We do not estimate much time loss. Lean back relax. The weather in Istanbul is clear and cool. The report from Zaire last night—before a crowd of ten thousand Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round, regaining the World Heavyweight Championship. Have a pleasant flight home.”

Killer

   I wander thru each charter’d street
   Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
   And mark in every face I meet
   Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

William Blake


   Killer, the one-eyed one-horned billygoat—rearing fully erect on his hind legs, tall as a man, tucking his cloven hooves beneath his flying Uncle Sam beard, bowing his neck, slanting his one horn, and bulging his ghastly square-lensed eye at M’kehla’s back—came piledriving down.
   “M’kehla, watch out!”
   M’kehla didn’t even turn to check. Using the fence post like a pommel horse he vaulted instantly sideways. Amazing nimble for a man his size, I marveled, not to mention been up driving all night.
   The goat’s horn grazed his thigh, then struck the post so hard that the newly stretched wire sang all the way to the post anchored at the corner of the chicken house. The hens squawked and the pigeons flushed up from the roof, hooting angrily. They didn’t like the goat any better than M’kehla did.
   “Choose me off, will you, you smelly motherfucker!” M’kehla pistoned a furious kick against the blind side of Killer’s shaking head—“I’ll kick your mother skull in!”—then two more to the jaw before the dazed animal could back away from the post.
   “Hey, c’mon, man. This isn’t anything”—I had to think a moment to come up with an alternative word—“personal. Honest, he does it with everybody.”
   This was only partly honest. True, Killer had tagged just about everybody on the farm at one time or another—me, Betsy, the kids when they tried crossing his field instead of going around—but the goat had seemed to choose M’kehla off special, from the moment the man had arrived.
   It had been early that morning, before anybody was up. I half heard the machine pull in but I figured it was probably my brother in his creamery van, out to get an early start on the day’s roundup. I rolled back over, determined to get as much sleep as possible for the festivities ahead. A few seconds later I was jarred bolt upright by a bellow of outrage and pain, then another, then a machine-gun blast of curses so dark they sounded like they were being fired all the way from a ghetto of hell.
   Betsy and I were instantly on our feet.
   “Who in the world?”
   “Not Buddy,” I said, dancing into my pants. “That’s for sure.”
   Still unzipped I reached the front door. Through the open window I saw a shiny black bus parked in the gravel of our drive, still smoking. I heard another shout and another string of curses, then I saw a big brown man in a skimpy white loincloth come hopping out of the exhaust fumes at the rear end of the bus. He had a Mexican huarachi on one foot and was trying to put the mate on as he hopped. After a wild-eyed look behind him he paused at the bus door and started banging with the sandal.
   “Open the door, God damn your bastard ass—open this door!”
   “It’s M’kehla,” I called back toward our bedroom. “M’kehla, and here comes Killer after him.”
   The goat rounded the rear of the bus and skidded to a spread-legged stop in the gravel, looking this way and that. His lone eye was so inflamed with hate that he was having trouble seeing. His ribs pumped and his lips foamed. He looked more like an animation than a live animal; you could almost hear him muttering in his cartoon chin whiskers as he swung his gaze back and forth in search of his quarry.
   M’kehla kept banging and cursing at somebody inside the bus. I glimpsed a face at a side window but the door did not open. Suddenly, the banging was cut short by a bleat of triumph. Killer had found his mark. The horn lowered and the hooves scratched for ramming speed. M’kehla threw the sandal hard at the onrushing animal, then sprinted away around the front fender, cursing. You could hear him all the way down the back stretch, heaping curses on the bearded demon at his heels, on the bastard ass behind the bus door, on the very stones underfoot. When he appeared again at the rear of the bus I swung open our door.
   “In here!”
   He covered the twenty yards across our drive in a tenderfooted stumble, Killer gaining with every leap. I slammed the door behind him just as the goat clattered onto the porch and piled against the doorframe. The whole house shook. M’kehla rolled his eyes in relief.
   “Lubba mussy, Cap’n,” he finally gasped in a high Stepin Fetchit voice, “where you git a watchdog so mean? Selma Alibama?”
   “Little Rock. Orville been developing this strain to guard melon fields.”
   “Orville Faubus?” he wheezed, rolling his eyes again, bobbing in a foolish stoop. “Orville allus did have a knaick!”
   I grinned at him and waited. Betsy called from the bedroom—Everything alright?—and he instantly dropped the fieldhand facade and straightened up to his full six-foot-plus.
   “Hello, Home,” he said in his natural voice, holding out his hand. “Good to see you.”
   “You too, man. Been a while.” I put my palm to his, hooking thumbs. “How’ve you been?”
   “Still keepin ahead,” he said, holding the grip while we studied each other’s faces.
   Since we last saw each other I had wasted ten foolish months playing the fugitive in Mexico, then another six behind bars. He had lost one younger brother in Laos and another in a 7-Eleven shootout with the Oakland police, and an ailing mother as a resultof the first two losses. Enough to mark any man. Yet his features were still as unmarred as a polished idol’s, his eyes as unwavering.
   “… still movin still groovin and still keepin at least one step ahead.”
   There had always been a hint of powers recondite behind that diamond-eyed gaze, I remembered. Then, as if he had read my thoughts, the expression changed. The eyes dialed back to gentle, the lips loosened into a grin and, before I could duck free, he hauled me close and kissed me full on the mouth. He was slick all over from his scrimmage with the goat.
   “Not to mention still sweatin and stinkin.” I wriggled free. “No wonder Charity wouldn’t let you back on the bus.”
   “Isn’t Charity, Dev; she kicked me out last month. I can’t imagine why…”
   He gave me a glance of wicked innocence and went on.
   “All’s I said was ‘Get up and get me some breakfast, bitch, I don’t care if you are pregnant.’ For that she tells me ‘No, you get up, get up and get out and get gone. Just like that. So I been going.”
   He nodded toward the bus.
   “That’s Heliotrope’s pup, Percy,” he said. “My complete crew this trip—cabin boy, navigator, and shotgun.” Then he leaned down to holler out the open window: “And he better quit dickin with me, he ever expect to see his mama again!”
   The face at the bus window paid no attention; there were closer things to worry about. Killer had returned to the bus door and was working the hinges with his single horn. The whole bus was rocking. M’kehla straightened up from the window and chuckled fondly.
   “Stuck out there, that billygoat between him and his breakfast cereal heh heh heh.”
   Heliotrope was a paraplegic pharmacologist from Berkeley, beautiful and brilliant, and a bathtub chemist of underground renown. M’kehla always liked to pal around with Heliotrope when he was on the outs with his wife or when he was out of chemicals. Percy was her ten-year-old, known to some around San Francisco as the Psychedelic Brat. He had boarded with us occasionally, staying a week, a month, until one of his parents came to round him back up. He was redheaded, intelligent, and practically illiterate, and he had a way of referring to himself in the third person that could be simultaneously amusing and infuriating.
   “Percy Without Mercy he calls himself nowdays; likes to keep the pedal to the metal.”
   “Hello, Montgomery.” Betsy came out of the bedroom, belting on her robe. “I’m glad to see you.”
   Not sounding all that glad. She’d seen the two of us go weirding off together too many times to be too glad. But she allowed him a quick hug.
   “What did I hear you telling Dev about Charity? That she got you gone instead of getting you breakfast? Good on her. And she’s pregnant? She ought to get you neutered if you ask me.”
   “Why, Betsy, Charity don’t want nothing that permanent. But speakin of breakfast”—he edged around her toward the kitchen, the one huarachi flapping on the linoleum—“is you nice folks fetched in yet the aigs?”
   “The henhouse is that way.” Betsy pointed. “Past the billygoat.”
   “Mm, I see. Well then, in that case… where y’all keep the cornflakes?”
   While Betsy ground the coffee, M’kehla and I went out to contain the goat so we could gather the eggs. Percy was delighted with the action. His freckled face followed from bus window to window as we manhandled the animal back into the field he’d butted out of. While we were swinging the gate closed he caught M’kehla a sharp hind-hoof kick on the shin. I had to laugh as M’kehla danced and cursed, and Percy hooted and jeered from the bus. Even the peacocks and chickens joined in.
   Out in the henhouse M’kehla told me his story.
   “I don’t know whether it was my Black Panther dealings or my white powder dealings. Charity just says get the hell gone and give her some respite. I say Gone it is, Baby! Naturally I called Heliotrope. Long distance. She’s been the last year up in Canada with Percy’s older brother, Vance, who’s dodging the draft. And a bunch of Vance’s buddies of like persuasion. Heliotrope persuaded me to sneak Percy off from his old man in Marin and bring him up … help her start a mission.”
   We had the chickens fed and quieted and all the eggs that the rats and skunks had left us piled nicely in the feed bucket. We stood in the henhouse door, watching the morning sun pull hard for a Fourth of July noon, circa 1970.
   “A mission? In Canada?”
   “Yeah.” He was looking across the chickenyard at his bus. The black door had cracked open and Percy was peeping out to see if the coast was clear. “A sort of modern underground railway.”
   “You mean leave the States?”
   “Heliotrope was very persuasive,” he answered. “And who can say how thick this Vietnam shit is gonna get?”
   “M’kehla, you’re way past getting drafted.”
   “But I’m not past knowing bum shit when I see it border to border. Hang around shit long enough you’re gonna get some on you I also know that.”
   “Listen. When I was on the run I came across a lot of American expatriots. You know what they all had in common, especially the men?”
   He didn’t answer. He picked an egg out of the bucket and rolled it around his long magician’s fingers.
   “They were all very damn hangdog apologetic, that’s what they all had in common.”
   “Apologetic about what?”
   “About running away from home with all this bum shit needing cleaned up is what! Besides, what about Percy? He isn’t draft age either.”
   “In a way he is. His square daddy keeps trying to force him to shape up. His teachers are always on his case—pledge allegiance, cut his hair, mind his tongue.”
   He paused. Percy’s red head had ducked out of the bus and he was sneaking across our yard.
   “There are some pegs that’ll never fit a square hole. No matter how much force is used.”
   “We can change the hole,” I reminded him.
   “Can we?” M’kehla carefully put the egg back in the bucket and looked at me. “Can we really?”
   This time it was me didn’t answer. The issue was too long between us for short answering. During the decade of our friendship we had shared a vision, a cause if you will. We were comrades in that elite though somewhat nebulous campaign dedicated to the overthrow of thought control. We dreamed of actually changing the human mind to make way for a loftier consciousness. Only from this unclouded vantage, we maintained, could humanity finally rise out of its repetitious history of turds and turmoil and realize that mighty goal of One World. One World Well Fed, Treated Fair, At Peace, Turned On, and In Tune with the Universal Harmony of the Spheres and the Eternal Everchanging Dharma of… of… Anyway, One Wonderful World.
   We never claimed to know precisely when the birth of this New Consciousness would take place, or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but as to the birthplace we had always taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of an American labor.
   Europe was too stiff to bring it off, Africa too primitive, China too poor. And the Russians thought they had already accomplished it. But Canada? Canada had never even been considered, except recently, by deserters of the dream. I didn’t like seeing them leave, these dreamers like brilliant and broken Heliotrope and old comrade M’kehla. These freckle-faced Huck Finns.

   After his second helping of eggs Percy began to yawn and Betsy packed him away to share Quiston’s bunk. M’kehla looked wider awake than ever. He finished his coffee and announced he was ready for action. I explained the day’s plan. We had a new string of calves that needed branding and an old string of friends coming out to help. We would herd, corral, brand, barbecue, swim, and drink beer and end up at the fireworks display in Eugene at dusk.
   “What we have to do now is prepare. We need to spread sawdust, buy beer, reinforce the corral to be sure it’ll keep the calves in—”
   “And the goat out,” Betsy added.
   M’kehla was already heading for the door. “Then let us so embark.”
   We got the tractor started and the auger hooked up and holes for new posts drilled. I set the posts while M’kehla tamped them fast with stones and gathered more stones from the ditches. I had to hustle to keep up. I was glad when the first visitor showed up to give me an excuse for a break.
   It was my cousin Davy, the ex-boxer. His nose was red and his eyes even redder. I asked Davy what he was doing out this early. He said it was as a matter of fact this late; he had come because in the course of a long night’s ramble he had acquired an item that he thought might interest me:
   “For your Independence Day doo-dah.”
   He brought it from the back seat of his banged-up Falcon station wagon, a beautiful American flag trimmed with gold braid. It was a good twenty feet long. Davy claimed to have won it in a contest during the night. He didn’t remember what kind of contest, but he recalled that the victory was decisive and glorious. I told him it was a great item; too bad I didn’t have a pole. Davy turned slowly around until he spotted a small redwood that the frost had killed the winter after I planted it.
   “How about yon pole?” he drawled, then pointed at the last unposted hole where M’kehla and I were working, “in hither hole.” So the three of us felled and bucked the dead limbs off the redwood. Davy made a try at barking it with the draw knife but gave up after ten minutes. M’kehla and I deepened the augered hole by hand until it would support the height of our spar, and drug it over. We attached the hooks and pulleys and tilted the pole into the hole just as Frank Collin Dobbs and crew were arriving in his cutaway bus. In our hurry to get the flag aloft for their arrival we just tossed in dirt, promising to tamp it later. Dobbs got out just as I pulled the brilliant banner aloft. He and Davy snapped to a rigid salute. They launched into the Marine Hymn so far off key I was moved to join them.
   M’kehla had chosen not to honor the ceremonies. He turned his back on the foolishness and was finishing our fencing task, reaching around the flagpole and hammering in the last section of wire.
   This is when Killer made that piledriving sneak attack that started this story about verve and nerve, and the loss of it, and old friends, and strange beasts.
   How came I with this awful goat? Much the same way the farm came by a lot of its animal population: the animals were donated by animal fanciers who had run out of space or patience. Our original peacocks had been abandoned by Krishnas whose ashram had been repossessed; the horses were from rock stars’ girlfriends, adrift without permanent pastures. Donkeys without gold mines, sheep without shearers, parrots without perches—they had all found their various ways to the seeming stability of our farm.
   Stewart, for instance, had simply come trotting in one day, a halfgrown pup eager to enlist. Varmint-Boy was living in our swamp in an old U.S. Army tent so he decided he would act as the induction officer. He whistled the pup into his tent and shot him up with a boot-camp dose of methadrine. For hours the new recruit drilled chasing birds and fetching sticks, until the shadow grew long and the drill instructor bored. The exhausted pup lay down to sleep but of course could only stare and ponder. Pondering is hard for a dog and not necessarily healthy, but Stewart survived (though he never lost that strung-out stare) to become the top dog. The Varmint was finally drummed off the place for this and other such crimes against innocence.
   Killer came from much more conventional sectors. He was the mascot for our high school team, the Nebo Hill Billies. Our symbol is the charging goat. For ten seasons Killer was tied to the bench of the football team, where visiting teams tried to run over him. He was paraded across basketball courts where opposing symbols reared and teased at him. Terry-cloth bears and papier-mâché eagles. Enough to sour any animal.
   The meaner he turned the more they came at him. The eye was put out by a baseball spike in a close play at home. The horn he lost during a Creswell homecoming game. A Creswell scatback was down after a hard hit on the punt return and the ambulance had driven across to get him. Killer had tugged at his tether when the flashing contraption drove onto the field. The fallen hero was lifted into the machine and the siren was started. This was more than Killer could endure. To the applause of the stands he snapped his dog chain and charged head-on into the ambulance. Fans that witnessed this famous charge spoke afterward of it with wonder and affection. “Not only knocked the headlight and turn signal clean off he then got tangled underneath in the front suspension; it was another half hour before they could get it all unloosed and towed off the field.”
   The wonder lasted but the affection fled with the goat’s aromatic recovery. The vet said the roll beneath the ambulance had ruptured the little musk sacks on each side of the goat’s anus—he could no longer turn the sacks on and off. Only leave them on. The vet said the only solution was neutering, cutting of the testosterone that stimulated the musk. The Nebo Hill Boosters thought it over and concluded that rather than have a ball-less billy for a mascot they would build one out of papier-mâché, and Killer was out of a job.
   When they asked over the school announcements who had a place capable of adopting a poor retiring mascot, my oldest boy, Quiston, an Aries, had volunteered our farm.
   It took three of us to separate the man and the goat, Dobbs and I holding the animal, Davy wrestling with M’kehla. This was a mistake. It very nearly got M’kehla and my cousin into it. Something was said in the scuffle and Davy and M’kehla sprang apart, glaring; they were already into their karate and boxing stances before we could step between them.
   Dobbs mollified Davy with a cold Oly and I convinced M’kehla to come down to the pond with me to cool down and scrub off. After his first dip he was laughing about the flare-up, said it wouldn’t happen again. Maybe, however, he should drive his bus down here out of goat territory. He could park it in the shade of the ash trees on the swamp side of the pond.
   I stood in the open stairwell and directed him down. The sound of the engine brought Percy straight from his nap and running from the house.
   “Look at him hop.” M’kehla laughed. “He thought I was leaving without him.”
   He parked where he could get some of the overhanging shade and still see the water. He swiveled out of the driver’s seat and strolled to the rear of his living room on wheels.
   “Come on back. Let’s get high and analyze the world situation.” He sprawled across his zebra skin waterbed like an Ethiopian nabob.
   The day mellowed. A soft breeze started strumming the bus roof with the hanging Spanish moss. My kids and Percy were splashing in the pond with their tubes; their shouts and laughter drifted to us through the swaying daisies and Queen Anne’s lace. M’kehla and I sipped Dos Equis and argued. We had just started on the Third World and our fourth beer when someone came banging at the bus door.
   M’kehla opened it and my nine-year-old son Quiston leaned in, wet and wide-eyed.
   “Dad!” Quiston yelled up the stairwell. “Percy’s found a monster in the pond!”
   “What kind of monster, Quis?”

   “A big one… crouched on the bottom by the pumphouse!”
   “Tell him I’ll come out after while and get it,” I told Quiston.
   “All right,” he said and headed back toward the pond with the news, his white hair waving in the weeds. “Dad’s gonna get him, Percy! My Dad’s gonna get him!”
   I watched him go, feeling very fatherly. M’kehla came up and stood beside me.
   “It doesn’t worry you, Dad? All this faith?”
   I told him, Nope, not me, and I meant it. I was feeling good. I could see my friends and my relatives arriving up by the barn. I could hear the squawk of the sound system as Dobbs got it wired up to announce the branding, rodeo style. I could see the new honey-colored cedar posts in the corral and the pigeons strutting on the bright new wire. And Old Glory was fluttering over all. “I got faith in all this faith,” I told him.
   “Do you?” he asked. “Do you really?” And this time I answered right back: Yep, I really did.
   We drank beer and enjoyed our old arguments and watched the crowd gather. Rampage and his kids, Buddy and his. The Mikkelsens, the Butkovitches. The women carried dishes to the kitchen; the kids went for the pond; the men came down to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After about an hour of tepid beer and politics Dobbs tossed away his half-empty bottle out the window.
   “Alright e-nuff of this foam and foofarah,” he declared, right at M’kehla. “Break out the heavy stuff!”
   As a man of the trade, M’kehla always had a formidable stash. He uncoiled from his zebra lounge and walked to the front of the bus. With a flourish he produced a little metal box from somewhere behind the driver’s seat. It was a fishing tackle case with trays that accordioned out when he opened it, making an impressive display: the trays in neat little stairsteps, all divided into partitions and each section filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled royal coachman he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.
   “Afghany,” he said, rolling it along his fingertips like the egg in the henhouse.
   He pinched off a generous chunk and heated it with a butane lighter. When it was properly softened he crumbled it into the bowl of his stone-bowled Indian peacepipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke Percy came baying up the stairwell like a hound. He had smelled it all the way to the pond.
   “Hah!” he said, coming down the aisle rubbing his hands. “In the nick of time.”
   He was wearing Quiston’s big cowboy hat to keep from further sunburning his nose and neck, and he had a bright yellow bandanna secured around his throat with a longhorn tie slide. He looked like a Munchkin cowpoke.
   He plumped down in the pillows and leaned back with his fingers laced behind his neck, just one of the fellas. When the peace-pipe came back around to M’kehla he passed to Percy. The little boy puffed up a terrific cloud.
   Davy wouldn’t join us, though. “Makes a man too peaceful,” he explained, opening another beer. “These are not peaceful times.”
   “That’s why Perce and me are pullin stakes and rollin on.”
   “Up to Canada did I hear?” Dobbs asked.
   “Up it is,” M’kehla answered, reloading the pipe. “To start a sanctuary.”
   “A sanctuary for shirkers,” Davy muttered.
   “Well, Dave,” Dobbs said, lifting his shoulders in a diplomatic shrug, “patriots and zealots don’t generally need a sanctuary, you got to admit that.”
   F. C. Dobbs had served in the early days of our inglorious “police action” as a marine pilot, flying the big Huey helicopters in and out of the rice-paddy hornet’s nests of the Cong. After four years he had been discharged with medals and citations and the rank of captain, and a footlocker full of Burmese green. He was the only vet among us and not the least upset by M’kehla’s planned defection, especially under the pacifying spell of M’kehla’s hash. Davy, on the other hand, was growing less and less happy with M’kehla and his plan. You could see it in the way he brooded over his beer. And when M’kehla’s Indian pipe came around to him again, he slapped it away with the back of a balled fist.
   “I’ll stick to good old firewater from the Great White Father,” he grunted. “That flower power paraphernalia just makes a man sleepy.”
   “I been driving since noon yesterday,” M’kehla said softly, retrieving his pipe. “Do I look sleepy?”
   “Probably popping pills or sniffing snow all the way,” Davy grumbled. “I seen the type on the gym circuit.”
   “Not a pill. Not a sniff. Well, just a puff of some new flower power stuff. One little hit. But I’ll bet there isn’t one of you big white fathers with the balls to try half what I am gonna do.”
   “Me!” Percy chirped.
   “Leave that shit alone,” Davy ordered, pushing the boy back and tilting the hat down over his eyes. “You half-baked buckeroo.”
   I stepped up to get between Davy and M’kehla. “I might try a taste. What is it, like smoking speed?”
   M’kehla turned without answering. He reached a clay samovar down from his staples cupboard and opened it. He pinched out a wad of dried green leaves.
   “Not much,” he answered, smiling. “Just a little ordinary mint tea—”
   He thumbed the wad down into the bowl of the pipe, then took a tiny bottle out of his tackle box, from a partition marked SNELLED HOOKS. Carefully, he unscrewed the lid.
   “—and a little S.T.P.”
   “Eek,” said Buddy.
   Dobbs agreed. “Eek indeed.”
   We had never tried the drug but we all had heard of it—a designated bummer, developed by the military for the stated purpose of confusing and discouraging enemy troops. The experiment had reportedly been dropped after a few of the hapless guinea pigs claimed that the chemical had promoted concentration instead of confusion. These lucky few said it seemed to not only sharpen their wits but double their energy and dissolve their illusions as well.
   Nothing the army wanted to chance, even for our own soldiers.
   The sight of the little bottle had produced a twisted silence on the bus. The wind-stirred brushing on the metal roof stopped. Everybody watched as M’kehla drew from his hair a long ivory knife with a very thin curved blade. He dipped the point into the bottle and put a tiny heap of white powder on the bowlful of green mint, three times.
   “Observe,” he said, and raised the pipe to his lips.
   With the lighter boring a long blue flame into the stone bowl, M’kehla drew one deep breath and held it, eyes almost closed. Within seconds we all saw his eyes snap wide, then narrow, glittering afresh with that dark, sharp humor. He breathed out an inviting sigh and lifted the pipe toward my cousin. Davy dropped his eyes and shook his head.
   “Not this father,” he muttered.
   “I guess I might try one blade tip,” I ventured, feeling like somebody should defend the family honor. “For the sake of science.”
   We all watched as M’kehla repacked the pipe. He swayed as he worked, singing in a sweet, incomprehensible whisper. His hands danced and mimed. When he picked up the tiny vial a dusty sunbeam streamed through the window and illuminated the green glass. The hair on my arms stood up. I cleared my throat and looked at my brother.
   “You want to join me, try some of this superstuff?”
   “I never even tried it in my car. I’ll get the dry ice ready for the brand. Come on, Percy. Learn something.”
   Buddy stood up and started for the door, pushing Percy ahead of him. I looked at Dobbs. He stood up too. “I guess I gots to finish the sound, boss.”
   Rampage was supposed to be picking up the keg at Lucky’s and Bucko had to take a leak. One by one they ambled to the front and out the door, leaving only M’kehla and me.
   And the pipe. I finished my beer and set the bottle back under my stool. “Well, as you say… let us so embark.”
   M’kehla hands me the pipe and fires it up with his little blue flame. Green smoke wriggles out of the stone hole. The mint mild in my throat… cool, mentholated, throat raw smoke Kools throat raw smoke Koo—
   Everything stops. The green wriggle, the dust motes in the sunbeam. Only M’kehla is moving. He glides into my vision, his eyes merry. He asks how it goes. I tell him it goes. He tells me ride loose sing with it never let it spook you. Riding loose here. Good, and don’t move until you feel compelled. Not moving, boss. Good, and what is the terrain this time? The terrain, boss? Yeh, Home, the terrain—What does it look like this time? It looks, this time it looks, it looks to me like you’re right it looks like the future!
   M’kehla smiled and nodded. I shot to my feet.
   “Let’s go get them cows!” I yelled.
   “Yaa-hoo!” M’kehla whooped.
   We stepped out into the Fourth of July noon just as Dobbs cued up James Brown and the Famous Flames blaring “Out of the Blue” over the airwaves, and the breezes blew, and the leaves danced, and the white pigeons bloomed above us like electric lilies.
   I was a new man, for a new season.

   In the pasture we moved with the smooth certainty of a well-trained army, M’kehla commanding the right flank, me the left, Betsy at the rear calling out calm instructions, and the fleet-footed kids filling in the gaps. The herd would try to escape to the right and M’kehla’s force would advance. They would try to plunge left and I would press my platoon forward. We corraled the whole herd without one renegade breaking through our lines.
   The branding was even more efficient. The kids would cut out a little maverick and haze him into a corner of the corral and M’kehla and I would rush in and throw him on his side and hold him. While Buddy stirred the big metal brand in a tub of dry ice and methyl alcohol, Betsy would shave the animal’s side with the sheep shears. Then everyone would hold everything while Buddy stuck the icy iron against the shaved spot for the required sixty seconds. If the spot was shaved close enough, and the brand was cold enough, and the animal held still long enough, the hair would grow back out in the shape of the brand—snow white. Nothing moved, yelled, or bellered during this holy minute. Just Buddy’s counting and the calf s heavy breathing. Even the mother in the adjoining corral would hold her worried lowing.
   Then Buddy would say “—sixty!” and we’d turn loose with a cheer. The branded dogie would scramble to his feet and scamper away through the escape chute, and the army would be advancing on the next wild recruit.
   If I had been impressed earlier by M’kehla’s strength and agility, I was now astounded at my own. We were catching and throwing animals with ease, some topping two hundred pounds, one after the other. From just the tiniest pinch of powder! It dawned on me why it had been nicknamed after the superslick race-car additive; I was not only newly powdered but freshly lubricated as well, functioning without friction, without deliberation. No debates over right or wrong good or bad to impede the flow and delay decisions. In fact, no decisions. It was like skiing too steep or surfing too far out on the curl of a breaker too big: full go.
   And the women couldn’t even tell we were high.
   Davy stood near the keg, sipping beer and watching from under a defeated scowl. He made no move to help, and the only time I saw him smile was when Percy drawled a suggestion how we could avoid all this unnecessary toil.
   “Say, you know? What Ah say we ought to do… is cross these calves with all these damn pigeons.” He hitched at his belt like a Hollywood cattle baron. “And get you a herd of homing cows.” Everybody laughed in spite of the count. Percy whooped and slapped his leg and elbowed Quiston. “What do you say to that, Quizzer? Homing cows?”
   “Good idea!” Quiston agreed. “Homing cows!” Always an admirer of the older boy’s style, Quiston hitched at his britches and drawled, “But what Ah say we ought to do… is we ought to go down to the pond and get that thing out, like Dad said he would.”
   “What thing?”
   “That monster thing.”
   “Hey, damn straight, Quiz,” Percy remembered. “Before it gets too shady. Haul him out an’ brand him!”
   “At the pumphouse, you say? That’s a deep dive.”
   “I dove it.”
   “Yeah, Dad. Percy dove it.”
   I stood up and looked around me, tall as a tower. Everything seemed under control. Pastoral. Bucolic. The fresh cedar shavings like soft golden coins under the sun. The calves all cowed and calm. The huge flag not so much waved by the breeze as waving it, like a great gaudy hand stirring the air to keep the flies away.
   Buddy plunged the frosted brand back into the fogging tub, watching me.
   “How many more?” I asked.
   “Just three,” he told me. “Those two easy little Angus and that ornery spotted Mongol over there.”
   I took off one of my gloves and wiped my stinging head. I realized I was rushing like a sweaty river. Buddy was focusing hard on my face.
   “We got more than enough hands to finish up here. Why don’t you go on down and cool off. Capture their dragon. Get them out from underfoot.”
   Everybody was watching. I took off my other glove and handed them to Buddy along with my lariat.
   “Alright, I will. We’ll geld this Gorgon ere he spawns.”
   “Yaahoo, Uncle Dev!” yelled Percy.
   And Quiston echoed, “Yaahoooo, Dad!”
   I followed the boys past the shade maple where Dobbs was fussing in his sound scene. He had a cold beer in one hand and a live microphone in the other, happy as a duck in Disneyland.
   “How-dee!” he greeted us through the mike. “Here’s some of our gladiators now, rodeo fans. Maybe we can get a word. Say, podnah, how’s it going out there in the arena? From up here it looks like you’re drubbing those little dogies pretty decisively.”
   “We got ‘em on ice!” Percy answered for me, pulling the microphone to his mouth. “We’re letting the second string finish ‘em off.”
   “Yeah, Dobbs,” Quiston added proudly. “And now we’re going after that thing at the bottom of the pond!”
   “Hear that, fans? Straight from the barnyard to the black lagoon without a break. Let’s give these plucky wranglers a big hand.”
   The women making potato salad across the lawn managed a cheer. Dobbs settled the needle on a fresh record.
   “In their honor, friends and neighbors, here’s Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers doing their immortal ‘Cool Water.’ Take it away Bob!”
   He thumbed off the mike and leaned close. “You okay, Old Timer?”
   I told him Sure, better than okay. Super. Just going along with these, get this, rinse the grit off before dinner it smells great I better catch those kids.
   The smell of the meat sizzling on the barbecue was, in fact, making my throat constrict. But I didn’t feel like I needed sustenance. Every cell in my body seemed bursting with enough fuel to keep me cooking for a decade.
   The pond trembled in the sun. The boys were already shucking clothes into the daisies. From up the slope behind us I heard a cheer rise as the wranglers caught the spotted Mongol, and Dobbs’s boozy voice joined the Sons of the Pioneers on the chorus, declaring he’s a devil not a man, and he spreads the burnin’ sand with water—
   “—cooool, cleeeer wah-ter.”
   I knew it would be cool all right, but none too clear. Even when it wasn’t glinting at you, spirogyra and pondweed made it difficult to see more than a few feet beneath the surface. I sat down and started unlacing my boots.
   “Okay, lads; where is this mooncalf a-murking?”
   “I can show you exactly,” Percy promised and scooted up the ladder to the top of the pumphouse. “I’ll dive down and locate it. Then I’ll blow a bunch of bubbles so you can bring it up.”
   “When you locate it why don’t you bring it up?”
   “Because it’s too big for a kid, Uncle Dev. It’s way too big for anybody but a man.”
   He pulled his goggles over his eyes and grinned at me like some kind of mischievous kelpie. He sucked in a deep breath and jumped out into the air, hollering “Yaaahoo” all the way to the water. His splash shattered the glint and for a moment we saw him froglegging down. Then the surface closed over him. Quiston came and stood beside me. I finished pulling off my boots and Levi’s and tossed them inside the pumphouse. I shaded my eyes against the bounce of the sun and stared hard at the water. There wasn’t so much as a freckled flicker.
   After nearly a minute Percy came spewing up through the surface. He paddled to the shore where I could give him a hand out.
   “Didn’t find him,” he panted, his hands on his knees. Finally he looked up. “But I will!”
   He clambered back up the ladder and dived right back in. No yell. Again the water snatched him from our sight. Quiston reached up to slip his hand into mine.
   “Percy said it had teeth like a shark and a hide like a rhinoceros,” Quiston recalled. “But he’s probably just fooling.”
   “Percy’s never had a reputation for reliability.”
   We squinted at the water for his signal. Nothing but the chromium undulation. Quiston squeezed my hand. At length Percy spurted to the surface again.
   “Must be deeper… than I thought,” he puffed, crawling ashore.
   “It’s a deep pond, Percy.”
   “I knew you were fooling,” Quiston claimed, relieved.
   Percy flushed red and thrust a fist under Quiston’s nose.
   “Listen you, you see this? Mess with the Perce, go home in a hearse!”
   “Take it easy, Perce. Forget it. Why don’t you kids go down to the shallow end hunt some tadpoles?”
   “Yeah, that’s it!” Quiston had never been greatly fond of this dark water by the pumphouse anyway, even without monsters. “Tadpoles in the cattails!”
   “I’m not after tadpoles.” Percy said and fumed back up the ladder. He snatched off his goggles and flung them away as though they had been the trouble. He drew a great breath and dived.
   The water pitched, oscillated, slowed, and stilled. I began to worry. I climbed up the ladder, hoping to decrease the angle. Impervious as rolled steel. Quiston called up at me: “Dad… ?” I watched the water. Percy didn’t come up. I was just about to dive in after him when I saw his face part the surface.
   He lay back treading water for a long while before he paddled for shore.
   “Never mind, Percy,” Quiston called. “I believe you. We believe you, don’t we, Dad?”
   “Sure. It could have been anything—a sunken branch, that deck chair Caleb threw in last fall..
   Percy refused Quiston’s offered hand and pulled himself up the muddy bank to the grass. “It wasn’t any branch. Wasn’t any chair. Maybe it wasn’t any monster but it wasn’t any goddamn furniture either so fuck you!”
   He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered. Quiston looked up at me on the pumphouse roof.
   “Okay, okay, I’ll take a look,” I said and both boys cheered.
   I removed my watch. I tossed it to Quiston and stepped to the high edge of the pumphouse roof. I hooked my toes over the tar-papered plywood and started breathing. I could feel my blood gorging with oxygen. Old skindiver trick the kid didn’t know. Also he’d been jumping too far out, hitting too flat. I would go straighter down … breathe three more, crouch low, spring as high as possible, and jackknife.
   But in the middle of the leap I changed my dive.
   Now I’m no diver. My only period near a diving board was the year we spent in Boyes Hot Springs while my father was stationed at Mare Island. Buddy and I were about Quiston and Percy’s ages. A retired bosun friend of my dad’s devoted many after-school afternoons teaching us to go off the high board. Buddy learned to do a respectable one-and-a-half. The best I could accomplish was a backward cutaway swan, where you spring up, throw your feet forward and lie backward in the air, coming past the board close with your belly. It looks more dangerous than it is. All you have to do is get far out enough.
   And when I took off from the pumphouse I knew I was getting plenty far out. I was so pumped by the distance and height my wonder muscles had achieved that I couldn’t help but think the future is now, and I went into my cutaway.
   For the first time in more than twenty years. Yet everything was happening so helpfully slow that I had plenty of time to remember all the moves and get them correct. I lay back with a languid grace, arms spreading into the swan, chest and belly bowed to the astonished sky. It was wonderful. I could see the pigeons circling above me, cooing their admiration. I could hear the Sons of the Pioneers lope into their next ballad: “An old cowpoke went riding out ...” I could feel the breeze against my neck and armpit, the sun on my thighs, smell the sizzle of the barbecue—all with a leisurely indulgence, just hanging there. Then, somewhere beneath all these earthly sensations, or beyond them, remote and at the same time disturbingly intimate, I heard the first of those other sounds that were to continue in increase all the rest of that awful afternoon and evening. It wasn’t the familiar howling of decapitated brujos that you hear on peyote comedowns, nor the choiring arguments of angels and devils that LSD can provoke. Those noises are merely unearthly. These sounds were un-anythingly—the chilly hiss of decaying energy, the bleak creaking of one empty space scraping against another, the way balloons creak. Don’t let it spook you, he said, ride loose and sing, so I sung to myself O listen to this entropy hiss…
   And I came loose from the sky.
   I tilted on backward and down, shooting past the pumphouse roof and through the seamless water. My body had become flawless, almost fictional in its perfection, like Tarzan in the old Sunday funnies with every muscle and sinew inked clean, or Doc Savage after forty years of ferocious physical training. The water sang past me, turning cold and dark. I was not alarmed. I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t have to swim to perpetuate my deepening plunge—the dive had been that frictionless—and I wasn’t startled when my outstretched hands finally struck the jagged mystery at the pond bottom. It seemed perfectly natural that I had arrowed to the thing, like a compass needle to the pole—
   “Hello, Awfulness. Sorry I can’t leave you lurking here in peace, but some lesser being could get bit.”
   –as I grasped it by its lower jaw and turned for the surface.
   I knew what it was. It was the fifty-gallon oil drum M’kehla and I had lost some half-dozen psychedelic summers before. We had been using it to cook ammonium nitrate fertilizer, piping the gas out the threaded bung through a hose down under the water so we could catch the bubbles in plastic bags. Trying to manufacture nitrous oxide. It had been an enormous hassle but had worked well enough that the whole operation—me, M’kehla, hose, barrel, and Coleman stove—had all tumbled into the water, flashing and splashing

   We saved the stove but the lid came off and the barrel went down before we could catch it. It must have landed at a slant, mouth down, because a pocket of air still remained in the corner so that it rocked there on the blind bottom, supporting itself at an angle, as if on its haunches. What I grabbed was the rusted-out rim below that corner with the air pocket.
   I kicked hard, stroking one-handed for the dim green far above. I felt the thing give up its hold in the mire as brute inertia was overcome by my powerful strokes. I felt its dumb outrage at being dragged from its lair, its monstering future thwarted by a stout Tarzan heart and a Savage right hand. I felt it tug suddenly heavier as it tilted and belched out its throatful of air in protest. A lot heavier. But my inspired muscles despaired not. Stroke after stroke; I pulled the accursed thing toward the light. Upward and upward. And upward.
   Until that stout heart was pounding the walls in panic, and that Savage right hand no longer held the thing; the thing held the hand.
   That discharge of its buoyant bubble had jerked the rusty teeth deep into my palm. To turn it loose without first setting it down would mean letting those teeth rake their way out. All I could do was stroke and kick and hold my own, and listen to that alarm pound louder and louder.
   Everything was suddenly on the edge of its seat. The ears could hear the panic thumping through the water. The eyes could see the blessed surface only a few feet away—only a few more feet!—but the burning limbs consulted the heart, the heart checked with the head, and the head computed the distance as already impossible and getting more impossible by the instant!
   When the lungs got all this news, the sirens really went off. The nerves passed the signal on to the glands. The glands wrung their reserves into the bloodstream, rushing the last of the adrenaline to the rescue, giving the right hand the desperate courage it needed to uncurl and release its grip on the damned thing. I felt it rip all the way to the fingertips and away, swirling the cold water in derision as it escaped back to its lair.
   I squirted gasping into the air, pop-eyed and choking and smearing the silver surface with my lacerated palm. I splashed to the bank. Quiston looked as terrified as I felt. He took my arm to help me out.
   “Oh, Dad, we thought we saw your breath! It was all yellow and stinky. Percy ran to get help. I thought something got you…”
   His face was as white as his hair, and his eyes were wild, going from me to the pond and back to me. The tears didn’t begin in earnest until he saw my hand.
   “Dad! You’re hurt!”
   I watched him cry and he watched me bleed and we couldn’t do a thing for each other. The water shined, the Sons of the Pioneers chased Ghost Riders in the Sky overhead, and in the distance, beyond M’kehla and Dobbs and Buddy sprinting toward us from the corral, I saw the flag, dipping foolishly lower and lower, though the noon sun had not budged an inch.

   As Betsy cleaned and wrapped the wound I forced myself back to a presentable calm. I had my place and my plans to see to, not to mention my reputation. I can put up a front as well as the next fool; I just didn’t know how long I could keep it up.
   I tried to assuage Quiston’s fears by reassuring him that it was just a rusty old barrel, at the same time trying to amuse Buddy and Dobbs and the rest of the gang by adding, “and it’s a good thing it wasn’t a rusty young barrel.” Quiston said he had known all along it wasn’t any real monster. Percy said so had he. The guys laughed at my joke. But there was no real amusement in the loud laughter. They were all humoring me, I discerned; even my kid.
   So I didn’t participate much in the remaining events of that day. I put on my darkest shades and wired on a grin and stayed out of the way. I was stricken by a fear so deep and all-pervading that finally I was not even afraid. I was resigned, and this resignation was at last the only solid thing left to hold on to. Harder than fear, than faith, harder than God was this rock of resignation. It gleamed before me like a great gem, and everything that happened the rest of that shattered holiday was lensed through its cut-diamond facets. Since it was our national birthday this lens was focused chiefly on our nation, obliging me to view its decay and diseases like a pathologist bent to his microscope.
   Flaws previously shrouded now lay naked as knife wounds. I saw the marks of weakness, and woe everywhere I turned, within and without. I saw it in the spoiled, macho grins of the men and in the calculating green eyes of the women. I saw it in the half-grown greed at the barbecue, with kids fighting for the choicest pieces only to leave them half eaten in the sawdust. It was in the worn-out banter at the beer keg and the insincere singing of old favorites around the guitar.
   I saw it in the irritable bumper-to-bumper push of traffic fighting its way to the fireworks display at the football stadium—each honk and lurch of modern machinery sounding as doomed as barbaric Rome—but I saw it most in an event that happened as we were driving back from the fireworks late that evening.
   The display was a drag for everyone. Too many people, not enough parking space, plus the entrance to the stadium had been manned by a get-out-of-Vietnam garrison complete with pacifist posters and a belligerent bullhorn. A college football stadium on the Fourth of July in 1970 is not the smartest place to carry anti-American signs and shout Maoist slogans, and this noisy group had naturally attracted an adversary force of right-wing counterparts. These hecklers were as rednecked and thickheaded as the protesters were longhaired and featherbrained. An argument over the bullhorn turned into a tussle, the tussle into a fight, and the cops swooped down. Our group from the farm turned in our tracks and headed back to Dobbs’s bus to watch from there.
   The women and kids sat out on the cut-open back porch of the bus so they could see the sky; the men stayed inside, sampling M’kehla’s tackle box and continuing the day’s discussion. M’kehla kept his eyes off me. All I could do was sit there with my hand throbbing, my brain like a blown fuse.
   The cop cars kept coming and going during the show, stifling drunks and hauling off demonstrators. Davy said the whole business was a black eye for America. M’kehla maintained that this little fuss was the merest straw in the wind, a precursor of worse woes on the way for the U.S. of A. Dobbs disagreed with both of them, grandly claiming that this demonstration demonstrated just how free and open our society really was, that woven into the fabric of our collective consciousness was a corrective process proving that the American dream was still working. M’kehla laughed—Working? Working where?—and demanded evidence of one area, just one area, where this wonderful dream was working.
   “Why right here before your very eyes, Bro,” Dobbs answered amiably. “In the area of Equality.”
   “Are you shitting me?” M’kehla whooped. “E-quality?”
   “Just look.” Dobbs spread his long arms. “We’re all at the front of the bus, aren’t we?”
   Everybody laughed, even M’kehla. However pointless, it had scotched the dispute just in time. The band in the distance was finishing up “Yankee Doodle” and the sky was surging and heaving with the firework finale. Pleased with his diplomacy and timing, Dobbs swung back around in his driver seat and started the bus and headed for the exit to get a jump on the crowd. M’kehla leaned back in his seat, shaking his head, willing to shine it on for friendship’s sake.
   But on the way out of the lot, as if that dark diamond was set on having the last severe laugh, Dobbs sideswiped a guy’s new white Malibu. Nothing bad. Dobbs stepped out to examine the car and apologize to the driver, and we all followed. The damage was slight and the guy amiable, but his wife was somehow panicked by the sudden sight of all of these strange men piling out. She shrank from us as though we were a pack of Hell’s Baddest Bikers.
   Dobbs wasn’t carrying a license or any kind of liability so M’kehla offered his, along with a hundred-dollar bill. The guy looked at the tiny nick on his fender’s chrome strip, then at M’kehla’s big shoulders and bare chest, and said, Ah, forget it. No big deal. These things happen. Prudential will take care of it. Even shook hands with M’kehla instead of taking the money.
   The last glorious volley of rockets spidered across the sky above; a multitudinous sigh lifted from the stadium. We were all bidding each other good night and hurrying back to our vehicles when the woman suddenly said “Oh” and stiffened. Before anyone could reach her she fell to the pavement, convulsing.
   “Dear God no!” the husband cried, rushing to her. “She’s having a seizure!”
   She was bowed backwards almost double in the man’s arms, shuddering like a sapling bent beneath a gale. The man was shaking her hysterically.
   “She hasn’t done it in years. It’s all these explosions and these damn police lights! Help! Help!”
   The wife had thrashed her way out of his arms and her head was sideways on the asphalt, growling and gnashing as if to bite the earth itself. M’kehla knelt to help.
   “We got to stop her chewin’ her tongue, man,” he said. I recalled that Heliotrope was also an epileptic; he had tended to convulsions before. He scooped up the woman’s jerking head and forced the knuckle of his middle finger between her teeth. “Got to gag a little, then—”
   But he couldn’t get in deep enough. She gnashed hard on the knuckle. M’kehla jerked it back with an involuntary hiss:
   “Bitch!”
   The guy went immediately nuts, worse than his wife. With a bellow he shoved the woman from his lap and sprang instantly to his feet to confront M’kehla.
   “You watch your dirty mouth, nigger!”
   It rang across the parking lot, louder than any starshell or horn. Everybody around the bus was absolutely stunned. Hurrying strangers stopped and turned for fifty yards in every direction, transfixed beneath the reverberation. The woman on the pavement ceased her convulsions and moaned with relief, as though she had passed some demon from her.
   The demon had lodged in her husband. He raged on, prodding M’kehla in the breastbone with a stiffened hand.
   “The fuckin hell is with you anyway, asshole? Huh? Sticking your fuckin finger in my wife’s mouth! Who do you think you are?”
   M’kehla didn’t answer. He turned to the crowd of us with a What-else-can-I-tell-you? shrug. His eyes hooked to mine. I had to look away. I saw Quiston and Percy watching over the rear rail of the bus porch. Quiston was looking scared again, uncertain. Percy’s eyes were shining like M’kehla’s, with the same dark, igneous amusement.
   It was after midnight before we chugged up the farm driveway. The men were sullen, the kids were crying, the women were disgusted with the whole silly affair. It was nearly one before all the guests had gathered up their scenes and headed home. Betsy and the kids went to bed. M’kehla and I sat in his bus and listened to his Bessie Smith tapes until almost dawn. Percy snored on the zebra skin. The crickets and the spheres creaked and hissed like dry bearings.
   When the first light began to sift through the ash leaves, M’kehla stood up and stretched. We hadn’t talked for some time. There had been nothing to say. He turned off his amplifier and said he guessed it was time to once again embark.
   I mentioned that he hadn’t had a wink in forty-eight hours. Shouldn’t he sleep? I knew he could not. I was wondering if either of us would ever again enjoy that blessed respite knitting up the raveled sleeve of care.
   “ ‘Fraid not, Home. Me and Percy better get out before it closes up on us. Want to come?”
   Avoiding his eyes I told him I wasn’t ready to pull stakes quite yet, but keep in touch. I walked up the slope and opened the gate for him and he drove through. He got out and we embraced and he got back in. I stood in the road and watched his rig ease out our drive. Once I thought I saw Percy’s face appear in the rear window, and I waved.
   I didn’t see any waving back.
   The farm lay still in the aftermath, damp with dew. It looked debauched. Paper plates and cups were scattered everywhere. The barbecue pit had been tipped over and the charcoal had burned a big black spot on the lawn. Betsy’s pole beans were demolished; someone or something had stampeded through the strings in the heat of the celebration.
   The sorriest sight was the flag. The pole had leaned lower and lower until the gold braid of the hem was trailing in the wood chips and manure. Walking to it I noticed Cousin Davy passed out in the back of his station wagon. I tried to rouse him to help me go bring it down and fold it away, but he only rooted deeper into his sleeping bag. I gave up and climbed over the fence and shuffled through the wood chips to do it myself, and this is the last scene in my story:
   I was on my knees and my elbows at the base of the pole, cursing the knot at the bottom pulley—“God bless this goddamned knot!”—because my fingers were too thick to manage the thin cord, musing about M’kehla’s invitation, about Percy, when all at once the sky erupted in a dazzling display of brand-new stars.
   That curse had been a prayer, I realized. These stars herald heaven’s answer! The knot was blessed even as it was damned! Trumpets celebrated. Bells rang and harps twanged. I sank to the sawdust, certain that my number had been up yonder called.
   In this attitude of obeisance I felt the lightning of the Lord lash me again. Ow! I recanted my recanting. Crawl off to Canada? Never! Never never and service forevermore bright with foam only forgive me all right? I heard an answering roll of thunder and turned just in time to see Him launch His final chastising charge, His brow terrible, His famous beard flying like amber waves of grain, His eye blazing like cannonfire across the Potomac.
   Davy finally managed to drive him from me with a broken bean stake. He took me under the arm and helped me over to the watering trough. It was empty. We had forgotten to turn it back on. The cows were all gathered, thirsty. Davy found the valve and turned it on. I watched the crimson sparkle in the rush of water on the tub’s rusty bottom.
   The cows were edged near, impatient. Behind them the calves, cautious, each with one side freshly clipped. The peacocks hollered. The pigeons banked over in a curious flock and lit in the chips.
   My cousin sat down on the battered brim of the trough. He handed me his wet handkerchief and I held it to the oozing lump where I had been driven into the flagpole. Salt was stinging the scrapes on my cheek and chin. Davy turned away and watched the milling array of beasts and birds.
   “Homing cows,” he reflected aloud. “Not a half-bad idea for a half-baked buckeroo.”

OLEO Demon Briefs & Dopey Ditties

Caleb Dreams

   Wild wolves and panthers and bears roamed the Wisconsin woods in those days. Sometimes Laura was afraid. But Pa Ingalls preferred to live miles from his nearest neighbors. He built a snug little house on the prairie for Ma and his daughters Mary and Baby Carrie and Laura. And his son Caleb.
   Pa kept a fire going all winter to keep out the cold. He taught Laura and Cal how to get things done in the wild frontier.
   Laura Ingalls… Laura Ingalls Wilder.
   Pa hunted and trapped and farmed. Ma knew how to make her own cheese and sugar. At night the wind moaned lonesomely but Pa just stoked the fireplace and played his fiddle and sang to his children, Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie. And young Caleb. Young Cal was much wilder than any of his sisters. He was wilder than the wolves and the panthers. Caleb Ingalls Wilder was wilder than all get out.
   Yet, once you really get to know Caleb you will see that he is not really a firebug. You will understand how disappointed he is when, instead of being cast as Clean Air in the Mt. Nebo school play, he is chosen to be Litter. You’ll understand how ashamed he is when he finds he is too scared to ride the Ferris Wheel at the Lane County Fair and why he almost cries when almost no one votes for him as home room president.
   Cal begins to feel he is not much good at anything and he begins to daydream during Social Studies. But what good is Social Studies? Social Studies doesn’t get things done. Social Studies doesn’t keep out the cold.
   You are sure to understand that’s why he dropped the book of matches in the wastepaper basket.

Chilly Sherree


When the chill is on the ankles
And the ice is in the pipes,
Then it’s time to get out blankles
And put away the gripes.



So let’s bake a lot of goodies
And fill the house with scent,
Till the temperature comes up again
And all the chill has went.

Be Kind to Your Webfooted Friends—for a Mother May Be Ducking Somebody

   Upstairs June Sunday Summer Solstice as my sweet Swallow of the Wire sails up to watch me type and the mud wasp in the wall whirs busily.
   Had a fine day fishing. Colonel Weinstein showed up on the train last night with a surprise son from his first wife just Caleb’s age; this morning early the four of us drive up the Willamette, then up little Salmon Creek, where I was able to sniff my way back to one of Daddy’s favorite fishing holes—stop atop a rise, hike down through the brush and stickers to a spot where the Salmon banks off a sheer mossy cliff. Cool bluegreen pool the swirling potential of an expensive billiard table deepest felt. Any shot is possible.
   Caleb and Weinstein’s boy pull out a dozen cutthroats apiece while the Colonel and I share a bottle of cabernet and talk about Hemingway. I tell him about the Sex & Television fast I’ve vowed to maintain for six months.
   “By Winter Solstice I expect to have my top and bottom chakras both scoured clean.”
   “What about the middle?”
   “That’s too submerged for me. Look! Your Sam has hooked into another one. He’s doing real well for his first time.”
   “Your Caleb’s teaching him well. Speaking of submerged, you know what it takes to circumcise a whale?”
   “Nope.”
   “It takes four skin divers.”
   Almost thirty trout. We got back in time to ice them good so the Colonel and his son could take them back south on the train this afternoon. Returned from the train station to find Dorothy James, known as Micro Dotty for the painted VW bus she drives. She has driven up with some white snow and her red-haired overbudded fourteen-year-old ooh mercy daughter in gym shorts and man’s short-sleeved dress shirt, collar turned up. The girl leans against their VW bus while her mom comes up to my office, chewing gum.
   Dotty shares a couple doobies with me upstairs, and then I tell her Come on, I’ll show you around. On the way down to the pond the daughter joins us. She has changed out of the shirt into a blue tubetop. She oozes along on my other side as I tell her mother about the farm. From the corner of my eye I can see the girl squeezing out of her tubetop like freckled toothpaste.
   I introduce them both to Quiston down at the pond. He’s casting after the bass, still griped that he missed out on the trip to Salmon Creek. The sight of all that red hair and squeezed skin wipes that gripe out of his mind immediately. He asks if she’d like to try a cast, that there’s a Big One by the reeds if she’s into it. Instead of answering Redbud oozes away to console the half dozen horny mallard hens, making it clear with a toss of hair that she wasn’t into boys her own age or fish of any size.
   “She’s rather advanced,” Micro Dotty whispers by way of explanation. “In fact she’s been on the pill nearly a year.”
   Quis goes back after the bass, Dotty goes off to bother Betsy in the garden, I come back upstairs. The swallow watches from the wire. Quiston and Caleb head off across the field with Stewart to meet Olafs kid, Butch. The sun edges toward the end of its longest workday of the year.
   The girl returns to the Microbus and gets a sleeping bag and a paperback by Anais Nin. Under my window she smiles up at me. “Okay with you if I nest down by your pond? I like to sleep under the stars and I might like a little sunset swim in the open. Know what I mean?”
   “I do indeed,” I tell her. Nest anywhere you choose; swim open as you please mercy yes. “Okay with me.”
   The swallow swoops. The wasp takes a break from his mud daubing to buzz out for a better look. Betsy and Dot go inside to cook sugar peas. The sun makes it to Mt. Nebo. I decide I better make the rounds, feed the ducks, check on the pond; don’t want any sunset calamities.
   She is sitting on the bank with her dripping arms wrapped around her knees, watching the ducks and being by them watched. She smiles. I hunker and toss the food into the water’s edge. The ducks come gabbling after it. “Wheat?” she asks.
   “Brown rice,” I say. “We got two gunny sacks of it, left by some macrobiotics that lived with us. It was all they would eat.”
   “Ugh. Did they like it?”
   “I don’t think so. There used to be a dozen. Ducks, I mean, not macrobiotics. Something got the six drakes. A fox, we think.”
   “That’s too bad.”
   “Nature,” I say. “Red in tooth and claw.”
   “Still, it is sad. The poor lonely sweethearts…”
   “Yeah.”
   The sky got gold and we watched the ducks for a long time without saying anything else. I felt good, virtuous, almost righteous, as that first day ended and I enjoyed the dawning realization that my dual fast was actually working: I hadn’t gone near the TV and I didn’t want to screw any of those ducks.

Blackberry Vines


Blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin
They led me astray, they took me in swimmin
I reached for a cherry but I got me a lemon
‘Midst blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin.