Demon Box Read online

  "Dolf? Dolf? Didn't I, yass I did hear tell of a fella supposed to have confiscated all the switchblades in Ensenada - or was it Juarez? - went by that name Lars Dolf, also by the nick of 'Snub,' Snub Dolf the sportswriters called him, used to be a footballer, all-something, all-defensive something of the something, forsook future with the Forty-niners for meditation, which, the way I see it, correct me if I'm wrong, is mainly the exchange of one coach and his philosophy for another coach and another game plan - same game - single wing 'stead of double - this meditation practice probably just as beneficial as tackling practice - rather beat off, myself personally, if it's for spiritual purposes we are considering..."

  And on and on, in a fashion best left inimitable, until the round, grinning face and the ominously unblinking eyes began to affect Houlihan in a manner none of the fans had ever witnessed before. In the face of Dolf s deliberate silence, Houlihan began to stammer. His rap began to rattle and run down. Finally, with his brow creased over the same mystery that Buddy and Deboree had encountered Indian wrestling, Houlihan stuttered to a rare stop. Dolf continued to smile, holding on to Houlihan's hand, watching him fidget in his unaccustomed silence and humiliation. Nobody broke the silence as the moment of victory and defeat was wordlessly accepted and formalized.

  When the victor felt that his power had been sufficiently acknowledged by this silence, Dolf let go the hand and said, softly, "That is the way... you see it, Mr. Houlihan."

  Houlihan could not retort. He was buffaloed. The dozen-or-so spectators smiled inside and congratulated themselves on being present during the decisive settling of this historic duel. They had all known it all along. When it comes right down to it, the mouth is no match for the muscle. Houlihan turned away from the grinning puzzle, seeking some route of escape. His eyes fell again on the idling Mercedes.

  "Well on the other hand hey, what say, Felix, that we take 'er for a little turn?" He was already opening the right side door to climb behind the steering wheel. "Just round the block..."

  " 'Fraid it would have to be one way around," Felix said casually, hands in his pockets as he followed around the front of the car after Houlihan. He took him by a naked arm and drew him back out of the car. He pointed at the bent bumper with his long chin. "Until we get that straightened, the best you could do is keep going in circles."

  "Ah, cocksuck," Houlihan grunted, looking down at the wedged tire in disappointment. It was the first time Deboree had ever heard him use the word. On the contrary, Houlihan was often heard correcting others for cursing; he claimed it was spiritual sloth to allow oneself to stoop to obscenity. But this didn't sound like sloth to Deboree. It sounded more like desperation.

  "Cock suck," he said again and started to walk away. But Dolf wasn't finished rubbing it in.

  "You don't have to... keep going in... circles." Dolf was coming into the garage, walking around the grill, smiling his merciless little Zen smile. "You just have to be... strong enough... to straighten the problem out."

  And while everybody's eyes popped, the little chubby hands reached down and hooked on each side of the bumper, and the back bulged in the ragged turtleneck and, as smoothly and inexorably as some kind of powerful hydraulic device intended for this very work, pulled the heavy metal away from the tire and back into proper place. Gawking, jawhanging, Houlihan couldn't even curse. He left, muttering something about needing to crash, maybe at an ex-wife's digs in Santa Clara, someplace alone, his crew abandoned on the lawn.

  In the years of association that followed, as they became close comrades in adventure and escapade and revolution (yes, damn it, revolution! as surely as Fidel and Che had been comrades, against the same tyranny of inertia, in the guerrilla war that was being fought, as Burroughs put it, in "the space between our cells"), Deboree often saw Houlihan at a loss for words, or, more specifically, at an emptiness of words after days of speeding and driving and talking nonstop had left the dancing Irish voice raw and blistered and the enormous assets of cocky self-made intellect momentarily overdrawn, but never again so completely stymied. At least not so blatantly stymied. For Houlihan had a trick of filling the lapses with meaningless numbers - "Hey, you dig just then that lovely little loop-the-loop cutie doin' the ol' four five seventy-seven jive back thar on the corner Grant and Green, or was it eighty-seven?" - until his stream of consciousness commenced to trickle again and he got back on the track. Nonsense numbers to fill the gaps. An obvious trick, but none of his audience ever saw it as something to cover a failure. It was just noise to keep the rhythm going, just rebop until he found the groove again. And he always seemed to. "Keep rollin' and you'll always eventually cross your line again." And that faith that saw him through his lapses had become a faith for everybody that knew him, a mighty bridge, to see them across their own chasms. Now the bridge was washed out. Now, at long last, it did seem that he had lost it for good, in terminal nonsense and purposeless, meaningless numbers of nothing. Forever.

  Worse! That it had all been a trick, that he had never known purpose, that for all the sound and fury, those grand flights, those tootings, had all, always, at bottom, been only rebop, only the rattle of insects in the dry places of Eliot, signifying nothing.

  Forever and ever amen.

  So. Strung out and distracted and drunk in the dark, Deboree starts awake in his nest of moss in the wheelbarrow in the blackberry bush. Through the darkness he hears again the twang made when fence wire is strained, its barbs plunking through the staples as the barrier is breached by a head of stock forcing its way through, where no breach is intended, or by a foot climbing over. The twang is followed by a curse and a chorus of giggles and the crashing of sticks. He leans forward in his nest far enough to see a battery-powered lantern wheeling through the shadows of the cottonwoods that line the border of his swamp and his neighbor Hock's pasture. Followed by more crashings and cursing, the light comes toward him, erratically, until it breaks into the clearing around the stump and is hung from a branch. It is the two hitchhikers loaded with packages and sacks, followed by Sandy Pawku. Sandy is carrying an enormous stuffed teddy bear. So loudly is she cursing and staggering about with the bear that the blond puts down his load and turns back to hush her.

  "Cool it, huh? You want that old fart and his dogs down here?"

  "I don't want that old fart and his dogs at all," Sandy answers. "You two farts will do, to share... for Sandy and her bear."

  Fascinated, Deboree watches from the brambles as Sandy waltzes in a slow circle, then leans the huge doll against the stump and sits in its lap. "Give us a hand," she says, picking at the button of the collar taut across her throat, "an' a drink." Blackbeard draws a half gallon of wine from one of the grocery sacks. He uncorks it and drinks beneath the gently swinging light, his eyes on the fat woman and the doll. He lowers the bottle and takes a big summer sausage from the other sack and begins to chew the plastic wrapping away. Blondboy kneels beside Sandy, giggling, to help with the buttons of her blouse. Blackbeard watches, and Deboree. The 10:10 toots past at the Nebo junction. The shadows rock. The fumbling fingers have the garment off one shoulder when, abruptly, Sandy's head falls back to the bear's shoulder and she begins to snore. The giggle bubbles louder over the healthy teeth as Blondboy hefts the bra strap up and down.

  "What kinda credit card got you these, mama?"

  Sandy sags and snores louder. The boy tries to reach behind her sleeping back to find the clasp. Blackbeard is going through her shopping bag. He takes out a little transistor radio and turns it on. He leans against the oak tree, gnawing the sausage and tuning the radio as he watches his partner wrestle with the sleeping woman's brassiere. At last, Deboree has to close his eyes to the spectacle, and the dark swirls over him. His head is ringing. He hears the radio dial travel on until it finds The Beach Boys' hit. The harmony softens Sandy's snores and grunts and covers the crunch of twigs. Deboree can barely hear any of it. It comes from a long way off, through a twining, leafy tunnel. The tunnel has almost twined shut when he hears
Blackbeard speak.

  "What did she say he was doing out there on the railroad tracks? Counting?"

  "The ties," Blondboy answers. "Counting the ties between Puerto Sancto and the next village. Thirty miles away. Counting the railroad ties. They got him doped up and dared him and he did it, didn't he, hee hee?"

  "Houlihan," says Blackboard's voice, gentler. "The great Houlihan. Done in by downers and a dare." Blackbeard sounded honestly grieved, and Deboree found himself suddenly liking him. "I can't believe it..."

  "Don't let it bother you, bro. He was fried, you know? Gangrened. But c'mere and check this. I bet this makes you take that wienie outta your mouth..."

  Deboree tries to lift his eyes open, but the tunnel is twining too fast. Let it close, he tells himself. Who's afraid of the dark now? Houlihan wasn't merely making noise; he was counting. We were all counting.

  The dark space about him is suddenly filled with faces, winking off and on. Deboree watches them twinkle, feeling warm and befriended, equally fond of all the countenances, those close, those far, those known, those never met, those dead, those never dead. Hello faces. Come back. Come on back all of you even LBJ with your Texas cheeks eroded by compromises come back. Khrushchev, fearless beyond peasant ignorance, healthy beside Eisenhower, come back both of you. James Dean all picked apart and Tab Hunter all put together. Michael Rennie in your silver suit the day the earth stood still for peace, come back all of you.

  Now go away and leave me. Now come back.

  Come back Vaughn Monroe, Ethel Waters, Krazy Kat, Lou Costello, Harpo Marx, Adlai Stevenson, Ernest Hemingway, Herbert Hoover, Harry Belafonte, Timothy Leary, Ron Boise, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lee Harvey Oswald, Chou En-lai, Ludwig Erhard, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Mandy Rice-Davies, General Curtis LeMay and Gordon Cooper, John O'Hara and Liz Taylor, Estes Kefauver and Governor Scranton, the Invisible Man and the Lonely Crowd, the True Believer and the Emerging Nations, the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, Elsa Maxwell, Dinah Washington, Jean Cocteau, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Jimmy Hatlo, Aldous Huxley, Edith Piaf, Zasu Pitts, Seymour Glass, Big Daddy Nord, Grandma Whittier, Grandpa Deboree, Pretty Boy Floyd, Big Boy Williams, Boyo Behan, Mickey Rooney, Mickey Mantle, Mickey McGee, Mickey Mouse, come back, go away, come on back.

  That summer-sweet Frisco with flowers in your hair come back. Now go away.

  Cleaver, come back. Abbie, come back. And you that never left come back anew, Joan Baez, Bob Kaufmann, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gordon Lish, Gordon Fraser, Gregory Corso, Ira Sandperl, Fritz Perls, swine pearls, even you black bus Charlie Manson asshole. And you better get back to Tennessee Jed come back, get back, now come back afresh.

  We are being summoned. We get a reprieve, not just rebop. He wasn't just riffing; he was counting. Appear and testify.

  Young Cassius Clay.

  Young Mailer.

  Young Miller.

  Young Jack Kerouac before you fractured your football career at Columbia and popped your hernia in Esquire. Young Sandy without your credit card bare. Young Devlin. Young Dylan. Young Lennon. Young lovers wherever you are. Come back and remember and go away and come back.

  Attendance mandatory but not required.

  THE SEARCH FOR THE SECRET PYRAMID

  I: SAFARI SO GOOD

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

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

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

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

  October 1, Tuesday. Succoth, the First Day of Tabernacles. Enoch of Ohio runs a tattoo parlor where he specializes in tattooing women and pierces nipples on the side. The walls of his shop are filled with color Polaroids of his satisfied customers. When we arrive he is buzzing a rendition of Adam and Eve Being Driven from The Garden into the flaccid flank of a forty-year-old housewife from Columbus, wiping aside the ooze of ink and blood every few seconds. Krassner stares as I question the artist.

  Enoch tells us, over the whir of the needle and the whine of the housewife, what he knows about the secret underground temple. Enoch of Ohio is a famous Astral Traveler and has visited the Valley of the Kings often in his less corporeal form. He is full of information and predictions. His eyes burn brighter as he talks, and his needle produces more flourishes and blood. The housewife continues to groan and grimace until we can barely hear his prophecies.

  "Okay, Sweetmeats, that's enough for today. You look a little pale."

  I follow him to the back of his shop where he washes his hands clean of the stain of his trade, still expounding on ancient and future Egypt. A gasp and a crash from the other room rushes us back. But the housewife is fine. Krassner has fainted.

  October 2, Wednesday. I throw Lu, The Wanderer, and am ready to move on. But Krassner has had enough of the arcane. "They'd probably search me and find out that I am circumcised," he says and flies back to San Fran.

  I buy a creamo '66 Pontiac convertible from a furniture designer and head out to Wendell Berry's in Port Royal, Kentucky, hoping to enlist him in the cause. I hear over the car radio that the earliest frost in fifty years has smitten the Kentucky tobacco crop. Fields on both sides of the road are full of limp leaves and dour farmers. Much as I dislike cigarettes I can't help but be touched by these forlorn figures in overalls and baseball caps. There is a quality timeless and universal about a farmer standing in the aftermath of a killer frost. It could be a hieroglyph, a symbol scratched on a sheet of papyrus depicting that immortal phrase of fruitless frustration: "Stung!"

  October 3, Thursday. Birthday of St. Theresa. Another record-breaking cold night. After biscuits and eggs Wendell and I hitch up his two huge-haunched Belgian work mares and gee and haw out into the cold Kentucky morn to see if his sorghum survived. The leaves are dark and drooping but the stalks are still firm. We cut a few samples and head on up to the ridge for the opinion of two old brothers he is acquainted with.

  "The Tidwell twins'll know," Wendell allows. "They been farming this area since the year 'ought-one."

  The wagon rumbles along the winding, rocky ruts, through thorn thickets and groves of sugar maple and osage and dogwood. We find the brothers working a lofty meadow high above the neighboring spreads. No woe is frosted on the faces of this pair; their tobacco crop is hanging neatly in the barn since well before the cold snap, and they are already disking under the stalks. Erect, alert, and nearing eighty, the picture presented by these two identical Good Old Boys might describe another hieroglyph: Them as Didn't Get Stung.

  They examine Wendell's stalk of sorghum and assure him how it ain't hurt in the joint, which is what roorins the crop.

  "Don't let no cows into it, though," they warn. "Freeze like that makes prussic acid sorghum. Mought make a animal sickly..."

  Listening to these two old American alchemists one can better understand why Wendell Berry, an M.A. from Stanford and a full professor with tenure two days a week at the U of Kentucky, busts his butt the rest of the time farming with the same antiquated methods the land of his forefathers; there is a wisdom in our past that cannot be approached but with the past's appurtenances. Think of Schliemann finding ancient Troy by way of Homer.

  On the way back down from the ridge I tell Wendell of the team
of scientists from Berkeley who tried probing the pyramids with a newfangled cosmic ray device in search of hidden chambers. "What they found was that there was something about the pyramids that thwarted our most advanced gadgetry. The only thing their ten tons of equipment accomplished was to electrocute a rat that tried to nest in the wiring."

  "Killed a rat, did they?" says Wendell, tromping the brake to keep the wagon from overrunning the mares down the steep slope. "For Berkeley scientists, that's a start."

  October 4, Friday. Dateline Paris (Kentucky, that is).

  Looking for the Bible in the drawer of my ancient hotel room, I find a phone number penciled onto the unfinished wood of the drawer bottom, a dark number, etched deep and certain, after which is penciled even darker this rave review:

  EPIK FUCK!

  The phone is on the nightstand right next to the drawer and I must admit I'm housed upstairs alone with the classic traveling-salesman horniness. I look at the number again, but farther back in the drawer there's the Bible, after all. Besides, I have hired out to do an article, not an epic.

  The passage I am seeking is Isaiah, chapter 19, verses 19 and 20. It is a pivotal quote in the first volume of a four-volume set on pyramidology that I bought in S.F. for sixty bucks, but the author has written the passage in its original Hebrew, fully aware that your usual reader will have to refer to the Bible to find out what is said. The only thing else he lets you know about the passage is that it contains 30 words and 124 Hebrew letters, and that when the numerical value of these ancient words and letters is added up by a process known as gematria the sum total of the passage equals 5,449, which is the height of the Great Pyramid in pyramid inches.