Ken Kesey - Demon Box

I gaped, amazed. He thinks that I meant how many troubles meaning his wife or whoever meaning I'm trying to cast some snide insinuation about his family! Far out, I thought, and to calm him I said I wished my wife and kids were along. Still suspicious, he asked how many kids, and how old. I told him. He asked where they were and I said in school -

"But if I have to wait much longer for these jumping beans I'm going to have them all fly down. Sometimes you have to skip a little school to further your education, right?"

"Right!" This brought him close again. "Don't I wish my woman'd known that when my kids were kids! 'After they get their educations' was her motto. Right, Mother, sure…"

I thought he was going to get melancholy again, but he squared his shoulders instead and clinked his glass against mine. "Decent of you and your brother to take a trip with your old dad, Red." He was glad I had turned out not to be some hippy rucksack smartass after all, but a decent American boy, considerate of his father. He twisted in his chair and called grandly for the waiter to bring us another round uno mas all around, muy goddamn pronto.

"If you aren't a little hardboiled," he confided, shifting back to wink at me, "they overcharge."

He grinned and the wink reopened, but for one tipsy second that eye didn't match up with its mate. " Over charge!" he prompted, commanding the orb back into place.

By the time the drinks arrived the twitch was corrected and his look confident and roguish again. For a moment, though, a crack had been opened. I had seen all the way inside to the look behind the looks and, oh gosh, folks, that look was dreadful afraid. Of what? It's difficult to say, exactly. But it wasn't of me. Nor do I think he was really afraid of the numerous troubles on the rocky road ahead, not even of getting stranded gearless in this primitive anarchy of a nation.

What I think, folks, looking at the developed pictures and remembering back to that momentary glimpse into his private abyss, is that this guy was afraid of the Apocalypse.

The Tranny Man's wife is younger than her husband, not much, a freshman in high school when he was a football-hero senior, at his best.

She's never been at her best, although it isn't something she thinks about. She's a thoughtful person who doesn't think about things.

She is walking barefoot along the stony edge of the ocean with her black pumps dangling from a heel strap at the end of each arm.

She isn't thinking that she had too many rum-and-Cokes. She isn't thinking about her podiatrist or her feet, spreading pudgy over the sand.

She stops at the bank of the Rio Sancto and watches the water sparkle across the beach, rushing golden to the sea. Upriver a few dozen yards, women are among the big river stones washing laundry and hanging it on the bushes to dry. She watches them bending and stretching in their wet dresses, scampering over the rocks with great bundles balanced on their heads, light little prints spinning off their feet elegant as feathers, but she isn't thinking We're so misshapen and leprous that we have to drink more than is good for us to just have the courage to walk past. Not yet. She's only been in town since they were towed in this morning. Nor is she asking herself When did I forsake my chance at proportion? Was it when I sneaked to the fridge just like Pop, piled on more than a seven-year-old should carry? Was it after graduation when I had those two sound-though-crooked incisors replaced by these troublesome caps? Why did I join the mechanical lepers?

Her ankles remind her of the distance she has walked. Far enough for a backache tonight. Looking down, her feet appear to her as dead creatures, drowned things washed in on the tide. She forces her eyes back up and watches the washwomen long enough not to appear coerced, then turns and starts back, thinking, Oh, by now he'll either be finished with the call or ready to call it off if I know him.

But she isn't thinking, as she strides chin-raised and rummy along the golden border. They saw anyway. They know that we are The Unclean, allowed nowdays to wander among normal people because they have immunized themselves against us.

"And if he's not ready I think I'll take a look around that other hotel." Meaning the bar. "See who's there."

Meaning other Americans.

The Tranny Man has to climb the hill into the hot steep thick of it, to find the man Wally Blum says will maybe work this weekend and pull the Tucson transmission. He has to take his dog. The dog's name is Chief and he's an ancient Dalmatian with lumbago. There was no way to leave him in the hotel room. Something about Mexico has had the same effect on old Chiefs bladder as on the Tranny Man's slow eye. Control has been shaken. In the familiar trailer-house Chief had been as scrupulous with his habits as back home, but as soon as they'd moved into the hotel it seemed the old dog just couldn't help but be lifting his leg every three steps. Scolding only makes it worse.

"Poor old fella's nervous" – after Chief watered two pinatas his wife had purchased for the grandchildren this morning.

"We never should have brought him," she said. "We should have put him in a boarding kennel."

"I told you," the Tranny Man had answered. "The kids wouldn't keep him, I wasn't leaving him with strangers!"

So Chief has to climb along.

The map that Wally Blum scribbled leads the Tranny Man and his pet up narrow cobblestone thoroughfares where trucks lurch loud between chuckholes… up crooked cobblestone streets too narrow for anything but bikes… up even crookeder and narrower cobblestone canyons too steep for any wheel.

Burros pick their way with loads of sand and cement for the clutter of construction going on antlike all over the mountainside. Workers sleep head uphill in the clutter; if they slept sideways they'd roll off.

By the time the American and his dog reach the place on the map, the Tranny Man is seeing spots and old Chief is peeing dust. The Tranny Man wipes the sweat from under the sweatband of his fishing cap and enters a shady courtyard; it's shaded by rusty hoods and trunk lids welded haphazardly together and bolted atop palm-tree poles.

In the center of a twelve-foot sod circle a sow reclines, big as a plaza fountain, giving suck to a litter large as she is. She rolls her head to look at the pair of visitors and gives a snort. Chief growls and stands his ground between the sow and his blinking master.

There is movement behind the low vine-shrouded doorway of a shack so small that it could fit into the Dodge's mobile home and still have room for the sow. A man ducks out of the doorway, fanning himself with a dry tortilla. He is half the Tranny Man's size and half again his age, maybe more. He squints a moment against the glare, then uses the tortilla to shade his eyes. "Tardes," he says.

"Buenas tardes," the Tranny Man answers, mopping his face. "Hot. Mucho color."

"I spik Engliss a little," says El Mecanico Fantastico.

The Tranny Man recalls reading somewhere how that was where the slur "Spik" came from. "Thank heaven for that," he says and launches into a description of his plight. The mechanic listens from beneath the tortilla. The sow watches old Chief with voluptuous scorn. Burros trudge past the yard. Small children drift into sight from El Mecanico Fantastico's shack; they cling to their father's legs as he listens to the Tranny Man's tale of mechanical betrayal.

When the tale finally dribbles to an end, EMF asks, "What you want for me to do?"

"To come down to that big garage where they towed it and take the danged transmission out so I can send it to Tucson. See?"