Ken Kesey - Demon Box

"Laughing gas," Buddy said.

To a man with thirty-five years' experience in refrigeration, that little tank at least looked familiar. "Is the valve threaded left or right?"

I held it for him, but he didn't have the strength to turn it. I had to deal it – to my father first, then my brother, then myself. I dealt three times around this way and sat down. Then we flashed, this man and his two fullgrown sons, all together, the way you sometimes do. It wasn't that strong but it was as sweet as dope ever gets… at the end of our trip on the edge of our continent, as the sun dipped and the breeze stopped, and a dog a mile down the beach barked a high clear note… three wayfaring hearts in Mexico able to touch for an instant in a way denied them by gringo protocol. For a beat. Then Daddy stretched and yawned and allowed as how the skeeters would be starting now the breeze had dropped.

"So I guess I'll go inside and hit the hay. I've had enough. Too much dipsy-doo'll make you goony."

He stood up and started for bed, his reputation for giving everything a fair shake still secure. It wasn't exactly a blessing he left us with – he was letting us know it wasn't for him, whatever it was we were into, or his hardheaded generation – but he was no longer going to crawl to Washington to put a stop to it.

He went through the latticed door into the dark room. Then his head reappeared.

"You jaspers better be sure of the gear you're trying to hit, though," he said, in a voice unlike any he'd ever used when speaking to Buddy or me, or to any of the family, but that I could imagine he might have used had he ever addressed, say, Edward Teller. "Because it's gonna get steep. If you miss the shift it could be The End as we know it."

And that is what reminds me most of the Tranny Man show. Like Daddy, he knew it was gonna get steep. But he wouldn't make the shift. Or couldn't. He'd been dragging too much weight behind him for too long. He couldn't cut it loose and just go wheeling free across a foreign beach. When you cut it off something equally heavy better be hooked up in its place, some kind of steadying drag, or it'll make you goony.

"Drive you to distraction is what!"

This, the Tranny Man tells me at the post office. I stopped by to see if there was any jumping-bean news. There's the Tranny Man, suntanned and perplexed, a slip of paper in each hand. He hands both notes to me when he sees me, like I'm his accountant.

"So I'm glad she took off before we both had some kind of breakdown. It's this crazy jungle pushed her over the edge if you ask me. Serves her right; she was the one insisted on coming. So there it is, Red." He shrugs philosophically. "The old woman has run out but the new transmission has come in."

I see the first note is from the estacion de camiones, telling him that a crate has arrived from Arizona. The second is also from the bus station, scrawled on a Hotel de Sancto coaster:

"By the time you get this I will be gone. Our ways have parted. Your loving wife."

Loving has been crossed out. I tell him I'm sorry. He says don't worry, there's nothing to it.

"She's pulled this kind of stuff before. It'll work out. Come on down to the bus depot and help me with that tranny and I'll buy you breakfast. Chief?"

The old dog creeps from behind the hotel desk and follows us into the cobbled sun.

"Pulled it lots of times before… just never in a foreign country before, is the problem."

He used to do reckless things - - not thoughtless or careless: reckless - - like to toss me an open bottle of beer when I was down in the utility room, hot with cleaning. What could it hurt? If I dropped it there was no big loss. But if I caught it? I had more than just a bottle of beer. Why did he stop being reckless and become careless? What was it caught his attention and stiffened him into a doll? What broke all that equipment? - - is what the Tranny Man's wife is thinking on her way to the American Consulate in Guadalajara to try to cash a check.

They wouldn't let me on the plane with the ticking five-gallon can of jumping beans. I had to take the bus. At the Pemex station outside Tepic I saw the Tranny Man's Polaro and his trailer. He was letting old Chief squat in the ditch behind the station. Yeah, he was heading back. To the good old U.S. of A.

"You know what I think I'm gonna do, Red? I think I'm gonna cross at Tijuana this time, maybe have a little fun."

Winking more odd-eyed than ever. How was his car? Purring right along. Heard from his wife? Not a peep. How had he liked his stay in picturesque Puerto Sancto?

"Oh, it was okay I guess, but - -" He throws his arm across my shoulders, pulling me close to share his most secret opinion: "- if Disney'd designed it there'd of been monkeys."

Listen to that bark and beller out there.

Something extraordinary to raise such a brouhaha, to get me walking this far this late into the pasture this damp with dew… They've quitted, quieted. But it isn't done they're just listening, there's something – mygod it's Stewart fighting something right here! Yee! Gittum Stewart, gittum! Yee! Get outta here you phantom fucker you whatever you - - I can't tell if it's a fox, a way-out-of-his-woods wolf or a rabid 'possum.

Bark bark bark! Bark and beller and pound my heart while every hair for acres around springs to rigid attention. Stewart? Pant pant pant. Good gittin', Stew Ball. Who was that strange varmit? Your foot okay? Probably a fox, huh, some teenage fox out daring the midnight. Probably the same one that will sometimes slip up outside my cabin window in the hollow squeaking shank of a strung-out night to suddenly squawl me up out of my swivel chair three feet in the air then disappear into the swamp with yips of ornery delight.

Hush, Stewart. Hush. Let things settle down, it's twelve bells and hell's fire! What's that in the moony mist just ahead, that big black clot? It must be Ebenezer, back in that same spot beside the dented irrigation pipe. So, the drama is still running, after all these days. Over a week since that labor in the stickers and longer than that by almost another week since the slaughter, and she's still by the pipe. Well, it's a good drama and deserves a long run. Not that it has a nice tight plot, or a parable I can yet coax a clear meaning from, but it's a drama nevertheless.

It has a valiant hero, and a faithful heroine. Despite the masculine moniker, Ebenezer is a cow. She got her misleading name one communal Christmas before we communers were cognizant of such things as gender in the lesser life forms.

She is one of the original dogies, Ebenezer is, appropriated that first year I was out of jail and California – back in Oregon at old Mt. Nebo farm. Betsy had moved there with the kids while I did my time, and all the old gang had followed. That first giddy year the farm was loaded with lots of loaded people trying to take care of lots of land without much more than optimism and dope to go on. One enthusiastic afternoon we drove the bus to the Creswell livestock auction and bid into our possession eight baby "bummers." In the cattle game a bummer is a two- or three- or four-day-old calf sold separately because the owner wants to milk the mom instead of raise the calf, and sold cheap because, we found out a few hours after we got our little string home to their straw-filled quarters, they seldom survive.

The first went to the Great Round-up before the first night was over and the second before the second, their skinny shanks a mass of manure and their big eyes dull from dehydration. By the end of the third night the other six were down. They wouldn't have made it through the week but for the introduction of my brother's acidophilus yogurt into their bottles. True to Buddy's claim, the yogurt fortified their defenseless stomachs with friendly antibodies and enzymes and we pulled the remaining six through.