Demon Box Read online

  "So this is why they were up the road from this direction, not down from the highway direction like every other pilgrim. Asshole bums..."

  But there is no heat in the curse. He tips up the bottle again, more thoughtfully now, and somewhat curious. Maybe they're more than bums.

  "Team," he says to the ravens, "I think we ought to put a stakeout on these assholes."

  The birds don't disagree. They seem to have already begun the vigil, hunching their heads deep into their black breasts and settling down on their limbs in the smoky air. Deboree picks up the paperback and the stack of comics and retreats to the wheelbarrow, his finger still hooked in the gallon's glass handle. He selects a blackberry patch about twenty steps from the camp and bores into the brambles from behind, using the wheelbarrow as a plow and the spade like a machete until he has cleared a comfortable observation post in the center of the thorny vines. He tilts the wheelbarrow up and packs it with the Spanish moss from an overhanging oak limb until the rusty old bucket is as comfortable as any easy chair. He settles into his nest, arranging the leaves in front of his face so he can easily see out without having to touch the vines, and takes another long drink of the sweet wine.

  The shadows climb slowly up the tree trunks. The ravens desert, squawking off to their respective roosts after a disappointing day. The air turns a deeper red as the sun, dropping to the horizon, has even more smoke to penetrate. The wine goes down as the Checkered Demon and Mr. Natural and the Furry Freak Brothers flip past his eyes. At last there is only an inch left, and the paperback. He's read it three times before. Years ago. Before heading off to California. Hoping to sign on in some way, to join that joyous voyage, like thousands of other volunteers inspired by the same book, and its vision, and, of course, its incomparable hero.

  Like all the other young candidates for beatitude, he had prowled North Beach's famous hangouts - City Lights, The Place, The Coffee Gallery, The Bagel Shop - hoping to catch a glimpse of that lightning-mouthed character that Kerouac had called Dean Moriarty in On the Road and that John Clellon Holmes had named Hart Kennedy in Go, maybe eavesdrop on one of his high-octane hipalogues, perhaps even get a chance to be a big-eyed passenger on one of his wild rapping runs around the high spots of magic San Francisco. But he had never imagined much more, certainly not the jackpot of associations that followed, the trips, the adventures, the near disasters - and, worse danger, the near successes that almost put Houlihan on stage. Houlihan was Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters, and Lord Buckley all together just for starters. He couldn't have helped but been a hit. But a nightclub format would have pinched his free-flying mind, and no stage in the world could have really accommodated his art - his hurtling, careening, corner-squealing commentary on the cosmos - except the stage he built about himself the moment he slid all quick and sinewy under the steering wheel of a good car: the bigger, the boatier, the more American, the better. The glow of the dash was his footlights, the slash of oncoming sealed beams was his spots. And now, and now, and now the act is over. No more would that rolling theater ever come bouncing and steaming and blaring rhythm and blues and Houlihan hoopla up the drive all full of speed and plans and hammering hearts.

  For now, now, now, the son of a bitch is dead.

  And, with the last inch of wine lifted in a salute before finishing it, Deboree begins to weep. It is not a sweet grief, but bitter and bleak. He tries to stop it. He opens the familiar Kerouac paperback, looking for some passage that will wash out that bitter burn, but the tears won't let him focus. It's getting dark. He closes the book and his eyes both, and enters again the library of his memory, looking under H. Looking for Houlihan, Hero, High Priest of the Highway, Hammer-tosser, Head-twister, Hoper Springing Eternally. Or maybe not so. Now it is the disciple, looking and hoping, hoping to ward off the circling heralds of desolation with some kind of gallant scarecrow, stuffed with some strawhead records showing just who this wondrous Houlihan was, what his frenetic life had meant, stood for, died for. Hoping to stave off the mockery of his hero's senseless death and to buttress himself against those bleak digits by checking out a collection of inspirational Houlihan aphorisms (Six four nine two eight: the complete works of another one of those Best Minds of Their Generation!), anecdotes, anything!

  But the section is empty. The H shelf has been stripped, the works all recalled, out of print, confiscated as invalid in the light of Latest Findings. Deboree laughs aloud at his library metaphor and finds his throat dried almost hard. He drinks the last of the wine as though he is fighting a brush fire. "Year of the downer," he says, speaking up through the little arch of berry vines, watching the last rays of the rusty sun fade from the tops of the cottonwoods, staring until the last smolder has drifted away and the wine has carried him back into the forlorn stacks and shelves of his memory. This time he finds a slim volume - not under H at all but under L - about the time Houlihan the famous Fastestmanalive met the renowned Stanford Strongman, Lars Dolf, and lost to Dolf in man-to-man charismatic warfare. Under L, for losing...

  During the late fifties and early sixties, these two giants had towered over the budding Bay Area revolutionaries. Both men were titans of their own special and singular philosophies. Owing to his appearance as a hero in a number of nationally distributed novels, Houlihan's rep was the greater, the more widespread. But in his own area, Lars Dolf was Houlihan's equal. Everybody that had any touch with the hip life on the peninsula had heard of Lars. And because of his Bay Area proselytizing for a Buddhist seminary, many had met him personally and were all in awe of his soft-spoken power.

  One spring partying evening, Lars Dolf had dropped into the Deboree house, across the street from the Stanford golf course. Dolf claimed he had heard of Devlin, and he wanted to meet him, and he was open to invitations, especially concerning wine. Deboree saw immediately that they were due to argue - it was in the way the man placed his feet - and passed him the bottle.

  It was first over art. Lars was an unknown painter, and Deboree could match him that in the field of writing. Then over philosophy. Lars was a graying, wine-torn Zen beatnik champ, and young Devlin was a psychedelic challenger with a higher-than-wine insinuation. And, eventually, naturally, over the much more ancient and basic issue: physical prowess. This category happened to be Devlin's strong point during that time. He was driving three times a week to the Olympic Club in San Francisco hoping to represent the United States in freestyle wrestling in the upcoming Rome Olympics. Lars was also the bearer of such laurels: the All-American Stanford linebacker dropout Kraut. Tales about him were many. The most memorable and oft repeated described him taking on a truckful of Mexican artichoke pickers at a Columbus Day picnic in Pescadero and fighting them to their own national standoff; when local deputies stopped the battle and an ambulance driver examined Lars, the broken points of three Tijuana switchblades were found sticking out of his great round shoulders.

  Deboree can't remember who started the contests that day on the Lane. Probably he himself, with one of the trick feats he had learned from his father, probably going through the broom so supple that Lars Dolf didn't even uncross his legs to try. Then, as he recalls it, the spotlight was wrested from Devlin by his brother Bud, who was down from Oregon for some culture. Buddy went through the broom both forward and backward, which Devlin never had been able to do. It was Buddy who started the Indian wrestling.

  Standing palm to palm and instep to instep, Buddy flipped through one after the other of the gang of awkward grad students, besting them each so easily that he became embarrassed with his one-sided victories and was about to turn the center ring back to Deboree (who hadn't challenged him; the Indian-wrestling issue had long before and many times been decided between the brothers; Devlin was heavier and older and longer reached) when Lars Dolf spoke from his lotus position near the wine:

  "Ex-cuse me. May... I... try?"

  He remembers the way Lars spoke, deliberately slow and simple. He always addressed a listener in odd, singsong phrases that might have seemed
retarded but for the twinkle behind his tiny eyes. That and the fact that he had been an honor student in mathematics before he left the Leland Stanford Jr. Farm for North Beach.

  Now, observe Buddy and Buddha standing there in the middle of a 1962 beer-and-bongos council ring. Observe Buddy, blushing and grinning, enjoying his prowess at the game not out of any sense of competitiveness but out of playfulness, playing only, as all their family had been raised to play, for fun; win, lose, or chicken out. And now see standing opposite Buddy this opponent of entirely different breed, hardly seeming part of the same species, in fact seeming more mechanical than animal, with legs like pistons, chest like a boiler, close-cropped head like a pink cannonball set with two twinkling bluesteel bearings, planting a bare foot beside Buddy's and offering a chubby doll-pink hand:

  "Shall... we... try?"

  Buddy took the hand. They braced, waited the unspoken length of decorum, then Buddy heaved. The squat form didn't budge. Buddy heaved the opposite direction. Still no movement. Buddy drew a quick breath for another heave but instead found himself sailing across the room, into the wall, leaving the impression of his shoulder and head in the particle board.

  Lars Dolf had not seemed to move. He stood, grinning, as inert and immobile and, despite the expression on his round face, as humorless as a fireplug. Buddy stood up, shaking his head.

  "Dang," he marveled. "That was something."

  "Care to try... again?"

  And again his brother was sent flying to the wall, and again and again, each time getting up and coming back to take the pink hand without any kind of anger or chagrin or hurt pride but with Buddy's usual curiosity. Any marvel of the physical world interested Buddy, and this squat mystery tossing him to and fro absolutely fascinated him.

  "Dang. Something else. Let me try that again..."

  What the mystery was Deboree couldn't see. Squat or not, Dolf still probably outweighed Buddy by close to a hundred pounds.

  "He's just got too much meat and muscle on you, Bud," Deboree had said, his voice testy. He didn't like the way his little brother was being tossed around.

  "It isn't the weight," Buddy answered, panting a little as he got up to take his stance before Dolf again. "And it isn't the muscle, exactly..."

  "It's where a man... thinks from," Dolf explained, grinning back at Buddy. There didn't seem to be any hostility coming from him, or any cruelty, but Deboree wished they would stop. "When a man thinks from... here" - incredibly sudden, the pink hand shot out, one bullet-blunt finger extended. It stopped less than a quarter inch from poking a hole between Buddy's eyes - "instead of here" -- his other hand came forward from the hip in a hard fist, right at Buddy's belt buckle, this time stopping even nearer and opening, like a gentle flower, to spread over Buddy's solar plexus - "he is of course... unbalanced. Like a Coca-Cola bottle... balanced mouth-to-mouth with another Coke bottle: too much weight above... and below... and no connection in the middle. See... what I mean? A man must have balance, like a haiku."

  It had been too pompous for Deboree to let pass. "What I see is less like poetry and more like ninety pounds Buddy is giving away."

  "Then you try him," Buddy had challenged. "I'm curious to see how you do, hotshot, giving away only maybe a third of that."

  The moment he took Lars Dolfs hand he had understood Buddy's curiosity. Though he knew the round little form still had the advantage by perhaps two dozen pounds, he could feel immediately that the difference was not one of weight. Nor was it speed; during his last three seasons on the Oregon team Deboree had been able to tell within the first few seconds of the opening round whether his opponent had the jump on him. And this man's reactions were almost slothlike compared to those of a collegiate wrestler. The difference was in a kind of ungodly strength. He remembers thinking, as Dolf snatched him from the floor with a flick of his forearm and hurled him through the air into a crowd of awestruck undergraduates watching from the daybed, bongos mute in their laps, that this would be what it was like to Indian-wrestle a 250-pound ant.

  Like his brother, Deboree had risen and returned to battle without any sense of shame or defeat. To take the hand, to be thrown again and again and return again and again, more out of amazement and curiosity than any sense of masculine combativeness.

  "It's where you think from, do you begin to see? The eye that seeks the lotus... never sees the lotus. Only the search can it see. The eye that searches for nothing... finds... the garden in full bloom. Desire in the head... makes a hollow in the center... makes a man... ahm!" -- as he threw Deboree into the particle-board wall, with its growing array of dents and craters - "unbalanced."

  When Lars Dolf left after that evening, he took three of the undergraduates back to the city with him - two psychology majors and a frat boy who had not yet settled on a field - to enroll them in the Buddhist seminary on Jackson Street, never mind that spring term at Stanford was only two weeks short of over. Deboree himself was so impressed that he was half considering such a transfer until Lars informed him that the sutra classes began at four in the morning six days a week. He decided to stick it out at the writing seminar instead, which only met three times a week, and at three in the afternoon, and over coffee and cookies. But, like his brother and everyone else, he had been awestruck. And Lars Dolf had reigned as the undisputed phenomenon of the peninsula until the next fall, when a Willys jeep with a transmission blown from driving it too far too fierce too fast had brought Houlihan into his yard and his life.

  The famous Houlihan. With his bony Irish face dancing continually and simultaneously through a dozen expressions, his sky-blue eyes flirting up from under long lashes, and with his reputation and his unstoppable rap, Houlihan became a sensation around the Stanford bongo circuit before the tortured jeep had hardly stopped steaming. He was a curiosity easily equal to Lars Dolf in charisma and character and, without the heavy-handed oriental dogma, a lot more fun to be around.

  There were, in fact, no real similarities between the two men. But comparisons could not be avoided. As fast as Dolf was phlegmatic, as sinewy and animated as Dolf was thick and stolid, poor Houlihan was matched with the Buddhist Bull before he was even aware of an opponent's existence. By mid-fall term, all the talk in the hip Palo Alto coffeehouses was about the latest Houlihan blitz - how he had climbed on stage during Allen Ginsberg's reading in Dinkelspiel Auditorium, without a shirt or shoes, carrying a flashlight in one hand and a flyswatter in the other, to stalk invisible scurriers about the podium: "Maybe so, Ginsy, but I saw the best mice of my generation destroyed by good 'ol American grit - there's one take that you rodent you oop only winged 'em there he goes anyhow - you were saying? Don't let me interrupt"; how he had talked the San Mateo deputy sheriff into giving his stalled sedan a jump start instead of a speeding ticket after being pulled over on Bayshore, and, so persuasive and brain-boggling was Houlihan's rap, got away with the cop's cables in the bargain; how he had seduced the lady psychiatrist who had been sent by a distraught and wealthy Atherton mother to save a daughter deranged by five days' living in the back of the family's station wagon with this maniac, and the mother who had sent her when they all got back to Atherton, and the nurse the family had hired to protect the daughter from further derangement. Usually, eventually, these coffeehouse tales of Houlihan's heroics were followed by conjecture about future feats and finally, inevitably, about the meeting of the two heroes.

  "Wonder if Houlihan'll be able to mess with Lars Dolf's mind like that? Should they ever lock horns, I mean..."

  Deboree saw the historic encounter. It took place in the driveway of a tall, dark-browed, spectral law student named Felix Rommel, who claimed to be the grandson of the famous German general. No one had given much credence to the claim until a huge crate arrived from Frankfurt containing - Felix had announced - his grandfather's Mercedes. Lars Dolf had been phoned to find out if he would like to see this classic relic from his fatherland. He arrived on a bicycle. There was a champagne party on Felix's wide San Mateo lawn while t
he car was ceremoniously uncrated and rolled backward into the garage under the lights, gray and gleaming. Lars looked it over carefully, smiling at the double-headed eagle still perched on the radiator cap and some of the Desert Fox's maps and scrawled messages Felix showed him in the glove compartment. "It is a beaut," he told everybody.

  The car had been carefully preserved, unscratched except for the right side of the front bumper, which had been bent in shipping and was crimped against the tire. Felix even started the engine with a jump from Deboree's panel. Everybody drank champagne in the yard while the big engine idled in the garage. Felix asked Dolf if he would like to drive it when the bumper got straightened, that there might be a chauffeur's job open as soon as the California bar exams allowed Felix to practice. Felix said he couldn't legally drive it himself for another nine months because of a DUIL, and his wife wouldn't drive it because she was Jewish, "So I need somebody."

  Dolf was politely thanking the couple for the offer but was saying he would probably stick with his old Schwinn - "For my German vehicle" - when into the drive came a steaming, lurching '53 Chevy with a noisy rod about to blow under the hood and noisier driver already blowing wild behind the wheel. Houlihan was out the door and into the startled yard before the signal from the ignition had reached the poor motor, shirtless and sweating and jabbering, zooming around to open the other doors for his usual entourage of shell-shocked passengers, introducing each to everybody, digressing between introductions about the day's events, the trip down from the city, the bad rod, the good tires, the lack of gas, and grass, and ass, and of course the need for speed - "Anybody? Anybody? With the well-known leapers? Bennies? Dexies? Uh? Preludins even? Oops? I say something wrong?" - admonishing himself for his manners and his hectic habits, complimenting Felix on his idling heirloom, kicking the tires, clicking his heels and saluting the two-headed hood ornament, starting all over again, introducing his bedraggled crew again only with the names all different... a typical Houlihan entrance that might have gone on uninterrupted until his departure minutes or hours later, if Felix hadn't distracted him with a huge joint that he drew out of his vest pocket as though he'd been saving it for this very occasion. And while Houlihan was holding the first vein-popping lungful of smoke, Felix led him by the elbow to the little cement bench in the shadow of the acacia where Lars Dolf had retreated to sit in full lotus and watch. Without speaking, Dolf had slowly untwined his legs and stood to take Houlihan's hand. Houlihan had resumed his chatter, the words spilling out as irrepressible as the smoke: