Demon Box

“Yesterday. I just heard. I was in the airport in Oakland this morning when I ran into this little hippie chicky who knew me from Mountain View. She came up to the bar and advised me that the great Houlihan is now the late great. Yesterday, I guess. Chicky Little had just got off the plane from Puerto Sancto, where Houlihan had been staying with her and a bunch of her buddies. At a villa right down the road from where we lived. Apparently the poor maniac was drinking and taking downers and walking around at night alone, miles from nowhere. He passed out on a railroad track between Sancto and Manzanillo, where he got fatally chilled from the desert dew. Well, you know, Dev, how cold it can get down there after sunset.”

It was Sandy Pawku all right, but what a change! Her once long brown hair had been cropped and chromed, plated with the rusty glint of the car’s grill. She had put heavy eye makeup and rouge and lipstick on her face and, over the rest of her had put on, he guessed, at least a hundred pounds.

“Dead, our hero of the sixties is, Dewy, baby. Dead, dead, dead. Of downers and drunk and the foggy, foggy dew. O, Hooly, Hooly, Hooly, you maniac. You goon. What did Kerouac call him in that book? The glorious goon?”

“No. The Holy Goof.”

“I was flying to my aunt’s cottage in Seattle for a little R and R, rest and writing, you dig? But that news in Oakland—I thought, Wonder if Dev and the Animal Friends have heard? Probably not. So when the plane stopped in Eugene, I remember about this commune I hear you all got and I decided, Sandy, Old Man Deboree would want to know. So Sandy, she cashes in the rest of her ticket and rents a car and here she is, thanks to Mr. Mastercharge, Mr. Hughes, and Mr. Avis. Say, is one supposed to drive these damn tricks in Dl, D2, or L? Isn’t L for driving in the light and D for driving in the dark?”

“You drove that thing all the way here from the airport in low gear?”

“Might have.” She laughed, slapping the flimsy hood with a hand full of jeweled fingers. “Right in amongst those log trucks and eighteen-wheelers, me and my pinkster, roaring with the loudest of them.”

“I’ll bet.”

“When it started to smoke, I compromised with Dl. Goddamn it, I mean them damn manufacturers—but listen to me rationalizing. I probably wrecked it, didn’t I? To tell the truth? Be honest, Sandy. Christ knows you could use a little honesty…” She rubbed the back of her neck and looked away from him, back the way she had come. “Eee God, what is happening? Houlihan kacked. Pigpen killed by a chicken-shit liver; Terry the Tramp snuffed by spades. Ol’ Sandy herself nearly down for the count a dozen times.” She began walking to and fro in the gravel. “Man, I have been going in circles, in bummer nowhere circles, you know what I mean? Weird shit. I mean, hey listen: I just wasted a dog on the road back there!”

He knew he must have responded, said, “Oh?” or “Is that right?” or something, because she had kept talking.

“Old bitch it was, with a yardful of pups. Whammed her good.” Sandy came around the front of the car and opened the right door. She tipped the pink seat forward and began hauling matching luggage out of the back and arranging it on the gravel, all the while relating vividly how she had come around a bend and run over a dog sleeping in the road. Right in the road. A farmwife had come out of her house at the commotion and had dragged the broken animal out of the culvert where it had crawled howling. The farmwife had felt its spine then sentenced it to be put out of its misery. At her repeated commands, her teenage son had finally fetched the shotgun from the house.

“The kid was carrying on such a weeping and wailing, he missed twice. The third time, he let go with both barrels and blew bitch bits all over the lawn. The only thing they wanted from me was six bits apiece for the bullets. I asked if they took credit cards.” She laughed. “When I left, goddamn me if the pups weren’t playing with the pieces.”

She laughed again. He remembered hearing the shots. He knew the family and the dog, a deaf spaniel, but he didn’t say anything.