Killer

I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow,And mark in every face I meetMarks of weakness, marks of woe.

--William Blake

Killer, the one-eyed, one-horned billy goat--rearing fully erect on his hind legs, tall as a man, tucking his cloven hooves beneath his flying Uncle Sam beard, bowing his neck, slanting his one horn and bulging his ghastly square-lensed eye at M'kehla's back--came pile-driving down.

"M'kehla, watch out!"

M'kehla didn't even turn to check. Using the fence post like a pommel horse, he vaulted instantly sideways. Amazing nimble for a man his size, I marveled, not to mention been up driving all night.

The goat's horn grazed his bare thigh, then struck the post so hard that the newly stretched wire sang and hummed all the way to the post anchored at the corner of the chicken house. The hens squawked and the pigeons flushed up from the roof, hooting angrily. They didn't like the goat any better than M'kehla did.

"Choose me off, will you, you smelly bastard!" M'kehla pistoned a furious kick against the blind side of Killer's shaking head--"I'll kick your mother skull in!"-- then two more to the jaw before the dazed animal could back away from the post.

"Hey, c'mon, man. He does this with everybody. It isn't anything"--I had to think a moment to come up with an alternate word--"personal. Honest, he does it with everybody."

This was only partly honest. True, Killer had tagged just about everybody on the farm at one time or another--me, Betsy, the kids playing around the pond--but the goat had seemed to choose M'kehla off special the moment the man had arrived.

It had been early that morning, before anybody was up. I half heard the machine pull in and cut its motor, but I figured it was probably my brother Buddy in his creamery van, out to get an early start on the day's roundup. I rolled back over, determined to get as much sleep as possible for the festivities ahead. A few seconds later, I was jarred bolt upright by a bellow of outrage and pain, then another, then a machine-gun blast of curses that sounded like they were being fired all the way from the ghetto of hell.

Betsy and I were instantly on our feet.

"Who in the world--"

"Not Buddy," I said, dancing into my pants. "That's for sure."

Still unzipped, I reached the front door. Through the open window, I saw a shiny black bus parked in the gravel of our drive, still smoking. I heard another shout and another string of curses; then I saw a big brown man in a skimpy white loincloth come hopping out of the exhaust fumes at the rear end of the bus. He had a Mexican huaracho on one foot and was trying to put the mate on his other foot as he hopped. He looked behind him, then paused at the bus door and began banging the metal with the sandal.

"Open this door, damn your bastard ass! Open this door!"

"It's M'kehla," I called back toward our bedroom. "And here comes Killer after him."

The goat rounded the rear of the bus and skidded to a spread-legged stop in the gravel, looking this way and that. His lone eye was so inflamed with hate that he was having trouble seeing. His ribs pumped and his lips foamed. He looked more like an animated character than a live animal, a crazy old goat man in chin whiskers; you could almost hear him muttering in cartoon frustration as he swung his gaze back and forth in search of his quarry.

M'kehla kept banging and cursing. I glimpsed a face at a bus window, but the door did not open. Suddenly, the banging was cut short by a snorting bleat. Killer had found his mark. Gravel sprayed as the hooves scratched for ramming speed. M'kehla threw the sandal hard at the on-rushing animal's lowered head, then sprinted away, around the front fender.

I could hear him all the way around the backstretch, heaping curses on the bearded demon at his rear, on the bastard behind the bus door, on the very stones underfoot.

When he appeared again at the rear of the bus, I swung open our door:

"In here!"

He covered the 20 yards across our drive in a tenderfooted stumble, Killer gaining with every leap. I slammed the door behind him just as the goat clattered onto the porch and piled against the doorframe. The whole house shook.

M'kehla rolled his eyes in relief. "Lubba mussy, Cap'n," he finally gasped in a high Stepin Fetchit voice. "What you git that bad watchdog? Selma, Ali-bama?"

"Little Rock. Orval Faubus been developing this strain to guard watermelons."

"Orval allus had a knack," he wheezed, rolling his eyes again, bobbing his head foolishly. I grinned at him and waited. Betsy called a greeting from the bedroom and he instantly dropped the field-hand facade. He straightened up to his full six-foot-plus and held out his hand.

"Hello, Home," he said in his natural voice. "Good to see you."

"You, too, M'kehla. Been a while." I put my palm to his, hooking thumbs. "How've you been?"

"Keepin' ahead. Still keepin' at least one step ahead."

He held the grip and we stood for a minute in silence. It had been a long while, and we were studying each other's faces. Since we last saw each other, I had wasted ten foolish months playing the fugitive in exile, then another six behind bars. He had lost one younger brother in Laos, another in a 7-Eleven shoot-out with the Oakland police and an ailing mother as a result. Enough to mark any man. Yet his features were still as unmarred as a polished idol's, his eyes as unwavering.

Then he changed expressions again, as if he had read my thoughts. I saw his eyes go gentle and his mouth curve into a loose grin. Before I could free my hand and duck out of reach, he hauled me close and kissed me full on the mouth. His skin was slick from his scrimmage with the goat.

"Not to mention still sweatin' and smellin'." I wriggled free. "No wonder Charity wouldn't let you back on the bus."

"It isn't Charity, Dev. Charity told me to split for a while. It is a profound mystery to me how come."

He gave me a wicked sidelong glance and went on.

"All that happen was I tell her, 'Get up and give me some breakfast; I don't care if you are pregnant.' And for that she tells me, 'No, you get up, get up and get goddamn gone!' Just like that. So I been going."

He nodded toward the bus.

"That's Heliotrope's pup out there. Little Percy. Percy Without Mercy, he calls himself nowadays." He leaned down to shake his fist out the open window, hollering. "But he better quit dickin' with me, he ever expect to see his momma again ...!"

The face at the bus window paid no attention. He was busy worrying about dangers much nearer. Killer had returned and was down on his foreknees at the front wheel well, gnawing and butting at the tire. The bus was rocking beneath the attack. M'kehla stood up from the window and chuckled:

"Now Percy Without Mercy is stuck out there, with that belligerent billy goat between him and his breakfast cereal."

Heliotrope was a paraplegic pharmacologist, beautiful and brilliant and a bathtub chemist of some underground renown. M'kehla always liked to pal around with her when he was on the outs with his wife--or when he was out of chemicals. Percy was her ten-year-old. He had boarded with us at the farm occasionally, staying a week, a month, until one of his parents rounded him up. He was red-haired, intelligent and practically illiterate.

"Hello, Montgomery." Betsy came out of the bedroom, belting on her robe. "I'm glad to see you."

She'd seen the two of us go weirding off together too many times to be too glad. But she allowed him a quick hug.

"So." She crossed her arms and scowled at him. "Charity got you gone instead of getting you breakfast? Smart girl. And she's pregnant? She ought to get you neutered, if you ask me ...."

"Why, Miz Betsy, how you talk! Charity don't want nothin' that permanent." He edged around her and shuffled toward the kitchen, the one huaracho flapping on the linoleum. "But speakin' of break fuss ... is you nice folks fetched in yet the aigs?"

"The henhouse is that way," Betsy pointed. "Past the billy goat."

"Well, in dat case ... where y'all keep de cawn flakes?"

While Betsy ground the coffee, M'kehla and I went out to contain the goat and gather the eggs. Percy was delighted. His bright little face followed us from bus window to window, hooting and jeering as we double-teamed the charging animal and manhandled him through the gate he'd butted open. While we were swinging the gate closed, he caught M'kehla a sharp hind hoof kick on the shin. I had to laugh as M'kehla danced and cursed and Percy shrieked from the bus. Even the peacocks and the chickens joined in.

Out in the henhouse, M'kehla told me his story:

"I don't know whether it was my Black Panther dealings or my white-powder dealings. Charity just says get the hell gone and give her some respite. I says, 'Gone it is.' Naturally, I called Heliotrope. Long distance. She's up in Canada with Percy's older brother, Lance, who's dodging the draft, and a bunch of Lance's buddies of like persuasion. Heliotrope persuaded me to sneak Percy off from his old man in Marin and bring him up. Help her start a mission."

We had the chickens fed and quieted and all the eggs that the rats and the (continued on page 202) Killer (continued from page 114) skunks had left us piled nicely in the feed bucket. We stood in the henhouse door, watching an Oregon sun pulling hard for a Fourth-of-July noon, circa 1970.

"A mission? In Canada?"

"Yeah." He was looking away from me, across the chicken yard at his bus. The black door had cracked open and Percy was peeping out to see if the coast was clear. "A sort of modern Underground Railroad."

"You mean leave the States?"

"Heliotrope was very persuasive," he answered.

"You're way past getting drafted."

"But I'm not past knowing bum shit when I see it border to border. Hang around shit long enough, you're gonna get some on you, I also know that."

"Listen. When I was on the run, I came across a lot of American expatriates. You know what I noticed about the whole lot of them, especially the men?"

He didn't answer. He picked an egg out of the bucket and rolled it around with his long magician's fingers.

"I noticed that they were all very damned hangdog apologetic."

"About what?"

"About running away from home with all this bum shit needing cleaning up is what! Besides, what about Percy? He isn't draft age."

"In a way, he is. His square daddy keeps trying to force him to shape up. His teachers are always on his ass--pledge allegiance, cut his hair, mind his tongue."

He paused and watched the little redhead sneak elaborately across our yard to the house.

"There are some pegs, my man, that'll never fit a square hole. No matter how much force is used."

"We can change the hole," I reminded him.

"Can we?" M'kehla carefully put the egg back into the bucket and looked at me. "Can we really?"

This time, I didn't answer. The issue was too long between us for easy answering. During the decade of our friendship, we had shared a vision, a cause. We were comrades in that somewhat nebulous campaign dedicated to the overthrow of centuries of thought control. We dreamed of actually changing the human mind to make way for a new consciousness. Only from this unclouded vantage, we maintained, could humanity finally rise out of the repeating history of turds and turmoil and realize that mighty goal of One World. One World Well Fed, treated fair, at peace, turned on and in tune with the universal harmony of the spheres and the eternal, ever-changing dharma of ... of ... anyway, one wonderful world.

We never claimed to know precisely when the birth of this new consciousness would take place or what assortment of potions might be required to initiate contractions, but always we had taken it for granted that this shining nativity would happen here, out of an American labor.

Europe was too stiff to bring it off; Africa too primitive; China too poor. And the Russians thought they had already accomplished revolution. But Canada? Canada had never even been considered, except recently, by deserters of the dream. I didn't like seeing them leave, these dreamers like brilliant and broken Heliotrope and old comrade M'kehla.

These freckle-faced Huck Finns.

•

After his second helping of eggs, Percy began to yawn, and Betsy packed him away to share Quiston's bunk. M'kehla, though, looked wider-awake than ever. He announced he was ready for action. I explained the day's plan. We had a new string of calves that needed branding and an old string of friends coming out to help. We would brand and barbecue, swim and drink beer and end up at the fireworks display in Eugene at dusk.

"So we have to prepare for the day. We need to spread sawdust, buy beer, reinforce the corral to be sure it'll keep the calves in--"

"And the goat out," Betsy added.

"Why, then," M'kehla said, already heading for the door, "let us so embark."

We got the tractor started and the auger hooked up and holes for new posts drilled. I set the posts while M'kehla tamped them fast with stones gathered from the ditches. We worked hard. I had to hustle to match M'kehla's pace. I was glad when the first visitor showed up to give me an excuse for a break.

It was my cousin Davy, the ex-boxer. His eyes were red and his nose even redder. I asked Davy what he was doing out this early. He said it was as a matter of fact this late, and he had come because in the course of a long night's ramble, he had acquired an item that he thought might interest me.

"For your Independence Day doodah, cousin."

He brought it from the back seat of his banged-up Falcon station wagon, a beautiful American flag, trimmed with gold braid. It was a good 20 feet long. Davy claimed to have won it in a contest during the night. He didn't remember what kind of contest, but he recalled that the victory had been decisive and glorious. I told him it was a great item; too bad I didn't have a pole. Davy turned slowly around until he spotted a small redwood that the frost had killed the winter after I planted it.

"How about yon pole," he drawled, then pointed at the last unposted hole where M'kehla and I were working, "in hither hole?"

So the three of us felled the redwood and bucked the limbs off. Davy made a try at barking it with the drawknife but gave up after ten minutes. M'kehla and I deepened the augered hole by hand until it would support the height of our spar and dragged it over. We attached the hooks and pulleys and tilted the pole into the hole just as my best buddy, Fred Dobbs, and his crew were arriving in his cutaway bus. In our hurry to get the flag aloft for their arrival, we just tossed in dirt, promising to tamp it later. Dobbs got out as I pulled the brilliant banner aloft. He and Davy snapped to a rigid salute. They launched into The Marine Corps Hymn with such verve that I came to attention and joined them.

M'kehla had chosen not to honor the ceremonies. He had turned back to our fencing task, reaching around the flagpole and hammering in the last section of wire.

This is when Killer made that pile-driving sneak attack that started this story about verve and nerve, and the loss of it, and old friends, and strange beasts.

It took all three of us to separate the man and the goat, Dobbs and I holding the animal, Davy wrestling with M'kehla. This was a mistake. It very nearly got M'kehla and my cousin into it. Something was done or said and they sprang apart, glaring, and were into their karate and boxing stances before we could step between them.

Dobbs mollified Davy with a cold Oly and I persuaded M'kehla to go down to the pond with me to cool down and scrub off. After his first dip, he was laughing about the flare-up, said it wouldn't happen again ... maybe, however, he should drive his bus down here, out of goat territory. He could park it in the shade of the ash trees on the swamp side of the pond.

I stood in the open stair well and directed him down. The sound of the engine brought Percy straight from his nap and running from the house.

"Look at him hop," M'kehla laughed. "He thought I was leaving without him."

He parked where he could get some of the overhanging shade and still see the water. He swiveled out of the driver's seat and strolled to the rear of his living room on wheels.

"Come on back. Let's get high and analyze the world situation." He sprawled across his zebraskin water bed like an Ethiopian nabob.

The day mellowed. A soft breeze started strumming the bus roof with the hanging Spanish moss. My kids and Percy were splashing in the pond with their tubes; their shouts and laughter drifted to us through the swaying Queen Anne's lace. M'kehla and I sipped Dos Equis and argued. We had just started on the Third World and our fourth beer when someone came banging at the bus door.

M'kehla opened it and my nine-year-old son, Quiston, leaned in, wet and wideeyed.

"Dad!" Quiston yelled up the stair well.

"Percy's found a monster in the pond."

"What kind of monster, Quiz?"

"A big one ... crouched on the bottom by the pump house!"

"Tell him I'll come out after a while and get it," I told Quiston.

"All right," he said and headed back toward the pond with the news, his white hair waving in the weeds. "Dad's gonna get him, Percy! My dad's gonna get him!"

I watched him go, feeling very fatherly. M'kehla came and stood beside me.

"It doesn't worry you, Dad? All this faith?"

I told him nope, not me, and I meant it. I was feeling good. I could see my friends and my relatives arriving up by the barn. I could hear the squawk of the sound system as Dobbs got it wired up to announce the branding, rodeo style. I could see the new honey-colored cedar posts in the corral and the pigeons strutting on the bright new wire. And Old Glory was fluttering over all.

"I got faith in all this faith," I told him.

We drank beer and enjoyed our old arguments and watched the crowd gather. Rampage and his kids, Buddy and his. The Mikkelsens, the Butkovitches. The women carried dishes to the kitchen; the kids went for the pond; the men came to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After an hour of tepid beer and politics, Dobbs tossed his half-empty bottle out the window.

"All right, e-nuff of this foam and foofaraw," he declared, right at M'kehla. "Break out the heavy stuff!"

As a man of the trade, M'kehla always had a formidable stash. He uncoiled from his zebra lounge and walked to the front of the bus. With a flourish, he produced a little metal box from somewhere behind the driver's seat. It was a fishing-tackle case with trays that accordioned out when he opened it, making an impressive display. The trays were divided into compartments and each section was filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled Royal Coachman, he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.

"Afghani," he said, rolling it along his finger tips like the egg in the henhouse.

He pinched off a generous chunk and heated it with a butane lighter. When it was properly softened, he crumbled it into the bowl of his stone-bowled Indian peace pipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke, Percy came baying up the stair well like a hound. He had smelled it all the way to the pond.

"Hah!" he said, coming down the aisle, rubbing his hands. "In the nick of time."

He was wearing Quiston's big cowboy hat to keep from further sunburning his nose and neck, and he had a bright-yellow bandanna secured around his throat with a longhorn tie slide. He looked like a munchkin cowpoke.

He plumped down on the pillows and leaned back with his fingers laced behind his neck, just one of the fellas. When the peace pipe came back around to M'kehla, he passed it to Percy. The little boy puffed up a terrific cloud.

Davy wouldn't join us, thought. "Makes a man too peaceful," he explained, opening another beer. "And these are not peaceful times."

"That's who Perce and me are pulling up stakes and rollin' on."

"Up to Canada, did I hear?" Dobbs asked.

"Up it is," M'kehla answered, reloading the pipe. "To start a sanctuary."

"A sanctuary for shirkers," Davy muttered.

"Well. Dave," Dobbs said, lifting his shoulders in a diplomatic shrug, "patriots and zealots don't generally need a sanctuary, you got to admit that."

Fred C. Dobbs had served in the early days of our inglorious "police action" as a Marine pilot, flying the big Huey helicopters in and out of the hornet's nest of the Cong. After four years, he had been discharged with medals and citations and the rank of captain and a footlocker full of Burmese green. He was the only vet among us and was not the least upset by M'kehla's planned defection, especially under the pacifying spell of M'kehla's hash. On the other hand, Davy was growing less and less happy with M'kehla and his plan. You could see it in the way he brooded over his beer. And when M'kehla's Indian pipe came around to him again, he slapped it away with the back of a balled fist.

"I'll stick to good old firewater from the Great White Father," he grunted. "That flower-power stuff just makes a man sleepy."

"I've been driving since noon yesterday," M'kehla said softly, retrieving his pipe." "Do I look sleepy?"

"Probably popping pills or sniffing snow all the way," Davg grumbled. "I seen the type on the gym circuit."

"Not a pill. Not a sniff. Well, maybe one puff of some flower-power stuff. One little hit. But I'll bet there isn't one of you big whit fathers with the balls to try half what I do."

"Me!" Percy chirped.

"Leave that shit alone," Davy ordered, tilting the hat down over the boy's eyes.

"You half-baked buckaroo."

I stepped up to get between Davy and M'kehla." I might try a taste. What is it, like smoking speed?"

M'kehla turned without answering. He reached a clay samovar down from his staples cupboard and opened it. He pinched out a wad of dried green leaves.

"Not much," he answered, smiling. "Just a little ordinary mint tea--"

He thumbed the wad down into the bowl of the pipe, then took a tiny bottle out of his tackle box from a compartment marked snelled Hooks. Carefully, he unscrewed the lid:

"And a little STP."

"Eek," said Buddy.

Dobbs agreed, "Eek, indeed."

None of us had tried the drug, but we all had heard of it--a designated bummer, developed by the military for the stated purpose of confusing and discouraging enemy troops. The experiment had reportedly been dropped after a few of the hapless guinea pigs claimed that the chemical had prompted concentration instead of confusion. These lucky few said it seemed to not only sharpen their with but double their energy and dissolve their illusions as well.

Nothing the Army wanted to chance, even for our own soldiers.

The sight of the little bottle had produced a twisted silence on the bus. Everybody watched as M'kehla drew from his hair a long ivory knife with a very thin curved blade. He dipped the point into the bottle and put a tiny heap of white powder into the bowlful of green mint, three times.

"Observe," he said and raised the pipe to his lips.

With the lighter boring a long blue flame into the stone bowl, M'kehla drew one deep breath and held it, eyes almost closed. Within seconds, we all saw his eyes snap wide, then narrow, glittering afresh with that dark, sharp humor. He breathed out an inviting sigh and lifted the pipe toward my cousin. Davy dropped his eyes and shook his head.

"Not this father," he muttered.

"I guess I might try one blade tip," I ventured, feeling that somebody should defend the family honor. "For the sake of science."

We all watched as M'kehla repacked the pipe. He swayed as he worked, singing in a sweet, incomprehensible whisper. His hands danced and mimed. When he picked up the vial, a dusty sunbeam streamed through the window and illuminated the green glass. The hair on my arms stood up. I cleared my throat and looked at my brother.

"You want to join me, try some of this superstuff?"

"I never even tried it in my car. I'll get the dry ice ready for the brand. Come on, Percy. Learn something...."

Buddy stood up and started for the door, pushing Percy ahead of him. I looked at Dobbs. He stood up, too.

"I guess I gots to finish the sound, boss."

Rampage was supposed to be picking up the keg at Lucky's, and Bucko had to take a leak. One by one, they ambled to the front and out the door, leaving only M'kehla and me.

And the pipe. I finished my beer and set the bottle back under my stool.

"Well, as you say ... let us so embark."

M'kehla hands me the pipe and fires it up with his little blue flame. Green smoke wriggles out of the stone hole. The mint mild in my throat. Not like the hash ... cool, mentholated, throat raw smoke Kool throat raw smoke Koo.

Everything stops. The green wriggle, the dust motes in the sunbeam. Only M'kehla is moving. He glides into my vision, his eyes merry. He asks how it goes. I tell him it goes. He tells me to ride loose sing with it never let it spook you. Riding loose here. Good, and don't move until you feel compelled. Not moving, boss. Good, and what is the terrain this time? It looks, this time it looks, it looks to me like ... you're right! It looks like the future!

M'kehla smiled and nodded. I shot to my feet.

"Let's go get them cows!" I yelled.

"Yaa-hoo!" M'kehla yelled.

We stepped out into the Fourth-of-July noon just as Dobbs cued up James Brown and the Famous Flames blaring Out of the Blue over the airwaves, and the breezes blew and the leaves danced and the white pigeons bloomed above us like electric lilies.

I was a new man, for a new season.

•

In the pastures, we moved with the smooth certainty of a well-trained army--M'kehla commanding the right flank, me the left, Betsy at the rear calling out calm instructions and the fleet-footed kids filling in the gaps. The herd would try to escape to the right and M'kehla's force would advance. They would try to plunge left and I would press my platoon forward. We corralled the entire herd without one renegade's breaking through our lines.

The branding was even more efficient. The kids would cut out a little maverick and haze him into a corner of the corral, and M'kehla and I would rush in and throw him on his side and hold him. While Buddy stirred the big metal brand in a tub of dry ice and methyl alcohol, Betsy would shave the animal's side with the sheep shears. Then everyone would hold everything while Buddy stuck the icy iron against the shaved spot for the required 60 seconds. If the spot was shaved close enough and the brand was cold enough and the animal held still long enough, the hair would grow back out in the shape of the brand--snow white.

Nothing moved, yelled or bellowed during this holy minute. Just Buddy's counting and the calf's heavy breathing. Then Buddy would say, "Sixty!" and we'd turn loose with a cheer. The branded dogie would scramble to his feet and scamper away through the escape chute, and the army would be advancing on the next wild recruit.

If I had been impressed earlier by M'kehla's strength and agility, I was astounded at my own. We were catching and throwing animals with ease, some topping 200 pounds, one after the other. I had no doubt that we could keep it up with calves twice as big and a herd ten times as great. From just the tiniest pinch of powder! It dawned on me why it had been nicknamed after the superslick race-car additive; I was not only newly powered but freshly lubricated as well, functioning without friction, without deliberation. No debates over right or wrong, good or bad, to impede the flow and delay decisions. In fact, no decisions. It was like skiing too steep or surfing too far out on the curl of a breaker too big: full go and far past time for decisions.

And the women couldn't even tell we were high.

Davy stood near the keg, sipping beer and watching from under a defeated scowl. He made no move to help, and the only time I saw him smile was when Percy drawled a suggestion of how we could avoid this unnecessary toil:

"Say you know? What Ah say we ought to do ... is cross these calves with all these damn pigeons." He hitched at his belt like a Hollywood cattle baron. "And get you a herd of homing cows."

Everybody laughed in spite of the count. Percy whooped and slapped his leg and elbowed Quiston. "What do you say to that, Quizzer? Homing cows ...?"

"Good idea!" Quiston agreed. "Homing cows!" Always an admirer of the older boy's style, Quiston hitched at his britches, albeit unbelted, and drawled, "But what Ah say we ought to do ... is we ought to go down to the pond and get that thing out, like Dad said he would."

"What thing?"

"That monster thing."

"Hey, damn straight, Quiz," Percy remembered. "Haul him out an' brand him!"

"At the pump house, you say? That's a deep dive--"

"I dove it."

"Yeah, Dad. Percy dove it."

I stood up and looked around me, tall as a tower. Everything seemed under control. Pastoral. Bucolic. The fresh cedar shavings like soft golden coins under the sun. The calves all cowed and calm. The huge flag not so much waved by the breeze as waving it, like a great gaudy hand stirring the air to keep the flies away.

Buddy plunged the frosted brand back into the fogging tub, watching me.

"How many more?" I asked.

"Just three," he told me. "Those two easy little Angus and that ornery spotted Mongol over there."

I took off one of my gloves and wiped my stinging face. I realized I was rushing like a sweaty river. Buddy was focusing hard on my face.

"We got more than enough to finish up here. Why don't you go on down and cool off? Capture their dragon. Get them out from underfoot."

Everybody was watching. I took off my other glove and handed them to Buddy along with my lariat.

"All right, I will. We'll geld this Gorgon ere he spawns."

"Yaahoo, Uncle Dev!" yelled Percy.

And Quiston echoed, "Yaahoooo, Dad!"

I followed the boys past the shade maple where Dobbs was fussing in his sound scene. He had a cold beer in one hand and a live microphone in the other, as happy as a duck in Disneyland.

"How-dee!" he greeted us in booming stereo. "Here's some of our gladiators now, rodeo fans. Maybe we can get a word. How's it going out there in the arena, podnah? From up here, it looks like you're drubbing those little dogies pretty good."

"We got 'em on ice!" Percy answered for me, pulling the microphone to his mouth. "We're letting the second string finish 'em off."

"Yeah, Dobbs," Quiston added. "Now we're going after that thing at the bottom of the pond!"

"Hear that, fans? Straight from the barnyard to the black lagoon without a break. Let's give these plucky wranglers a big hand."

The women making potato salad across the lawn managed a cheer. Dobbs settled the needle on a fresh record:

"In their honor, friends and neighbors, here's Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers doing their immortal Cool Water. Take it away, Bob!"

He thumbed off the mike and leaned close. "You OK, old-timer?"

I told him sure, better than OK. Super. Just going along with these, rinse the, get this grit off before dinner, it smells great. I better catch those kids.

The smell of the meat sizzling on the barbecue was, in fact, making my throat constrict. But I didn't feel like I needed sustenance. Every cell in my body seemed bursting with enough fuel to keep me cooking for a decade.

The pond trembled in the sun. The boys were already shucking clothes into the daisies. From up the slope behind us, I heard a cheer rise as the wranglers caught the spotted Mongol, and Dobbs's boozy voice joining the Sons of the Pioneers on the chorus, declaring: "He's a Devil, not a man/And he spreads the burning sand/With water--

"Cooool, cleeeer wah-ter."

I knew it would be cool, all right, but none too clear. Even when it wasn't glinting at you, spirogyra and pondweed made it difficult to see more than a few feet beneath the surface. I sat down and started unlacing my boots.

"OK, lads, where is this mooncalf a-lurking?"

"I can show you exactly," Percy promised and scooted up the ladder to the top of the pump house. "I'll dive down and locate it. Then I'll blow a bunch of bubbles so you can bring it up."

"When you locate it, why don't you bring it up?"

"Because it's too big for a kid, Uncle Dev. It's too big for anybody but a man."

He pulled his goggles over his eyes and grinned at me like some kind of mischievous kelpie. He sucked in a deep breath and jumped out into the air, hollering, "Yaahoo!" all the way to the water. His splash shattered the glint, and for a moment, we saw him frog-legging down. Then the surface closed over him. Quiston came and stood beside me. I finished pulling off my boots and Levi's and tossed them inside the pump house. I shaded my eyes against the bounce of the sun and stared hard at the water. There wasn't so much as a freckled flicker.

After nearly a minute, Percy came spewing up through the surface. He paddled to the shore where I could give him a hand out.

"Didn't find him," he panted, his hands on his knees. Finally, he looked up. "But I will!"

He clambered back up the ladder and dived right back in. No yell. Again the water snatched him from our sight. Quiston reached up to slip his hand into mine.

"Percy said it had teeth like a shark and a hide like a rhinoceros," Quiston said. "But he's probably just fooling."

"Percy's never had a reputation for reliability."

We squinted at the water for his signal. Nothing but the chromium undulation. Quiston squeezed my hand. At length, Percy spurted to the surface again.

"It's a deep pond, Percy."

"I knew you were fooling," Quiston claimed, relieved.

Percy flushed red and thrust a fist under Quiston's nose:

"Listen, you, you see this? Mess with the Perce, go home in a hearse!"

"Take it easy, kid. Forget it. Let's go down to the shallow end, hunt some tadpoles."

"Yeah! That's it!" Quiston had never been greatly fond of this dark water by the pump house, anyway, even without monsters. "Tadpoles in the cattails!"

"I'm not after tdpoles." Percy fumed back up the ladder. He snatched off his goggles and flung them away as though they had been the problem. He drew a deep breath and dived.

The water pitched, oscillated, slowed and stilled. I began to worry. I climbed up the ladder, hoping to decrease the angle, as impervious as rolled steel. Quiston called up at me, "Dad...?" I watched the water. Percy didn't come up. I was just about to dive in after him when I saw his face part the surface.

He lay back, treading water for a long while before he paddled for shore.

"Never mind, Percy," Quiston called. "We believe you, don't we, Dad?"

"Sure. It could have been anything--a sunken branch, that deck chair Caleb threw in last fall...."

Percy refused Quiston's offered hand and pulled himself up the muddy bank to the grass. "It wasn't any branch. Wasn't any chair. Maybe it wasn't any monster, but it wasn't any goddamn furniture, either, so fuck you!"

He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered. Quiston looked up at me on the pump-house roof.

"Ok, I'll take a look," I said. Both boys cheered.

I removed my watch. I tossed it to Quiston and stepped to the high edge of the pump-house roof. I hooked my toes over the tar-papered plywood and started breathing. I could feel my blood gorging with oxygen. Old skindiver trick the kid didn't know. Also, he'd been jumping too far out, hitting too flat. I would go straighter down ... breathe three more times, crouch low, spring as high as possible and jackknife.

In the middle of the leap, I changed my dive.

Now, I'm no diver. My only period near a diving board was the year we spent in Boyes Hot Springs while my father was stationed at Mare Island. Buddy and I were about Quiston's and Percy's ages. A retired bosun friend of my dad's devoted many afterschool afternoons to teaching us to go off the high board. Buddy learned to do a respectable one and a half. The best I could accomplish was a backward cutaway swan, where you spring up, throw your feet forward and lie backward in the air, coming past the board close with your belly. It looks more dangerous than it is.

All you have to do is get far out enough.

And when I took off from the pump house, I knew I was getting plenty far out. I was so pumped by the distance and height my wonder muscles had achieved that I couldn't help thinking, The future is now, and I went into my cutaway.

For the first time in more than 20 years. Yet everything was happening with such controlled slowness that I had plenty of time to remember all the moves and get them correct. I lay back with a languid grace, arms spreading into the swan, chest and belly bowed to the astonished sky. It was wonderful. I could see the pigeons circling above me, cooing their admiration. I could hear the Sons of the Pioneers lope into their next ballad--"An old cowpoke went riding out...."

I could feel the breeze against my neck and armpits and the sun on my thighs, smell the sizzle of the barbecue--all with a leisurely indulgence. I could browse over these simple pleasures for ages if it suited me, just hanging there. Then, somewhere beneath all these earthly sensations, or beyond them, remote and at the same time disturbingly intimate, I heard the first of those other sounds that were to continue to increase all the rest of that awful afternoon and evening. It wasn't the familiar howling of decapitated brujos that you hear on peyote comedowns, nor the choiring arguments of angels and Devils that LSD can provoke. Those noises are merely unearthly. These sounds were un any thing--the chilly hiss of decaying energy, the bleak creaking of one empty space scraping against another, the way balloons creak. Don't let it spook you, he said, ride loose and sing.

And I came loose from the sky.

I tilted on backward and down, shooting past the pump-house roof and through the seamless water. My body had become flawless, fictional in its perfection, like Tarzan in the old Sunday funnies, with every muscle and sinew inked clean, or Doc Savage after 40 years of ferocious physical training. The water sang past me, turning cold and dark. I was not alarmed. I wasn't surprised that I seemed not to have to perpetuate my deepening plunge--the dive had been that frictionless--and I wasn't startled when my outstretched hands finally struck the jagged mystery at the pond bottom. It seemed perfectly natural that I had arrowed to the thing, like a compass needle to the pole.

"Hello, Awfulness. Sorry I can't leave you lurking here in peace, but some lesser being could get bit--"

And I grasped it by its lower jaw and turned for the surface.

I knew what it was. It was the 50-gallon oil drum M'kehla and I had lost some half-dozen summers before. We had been using it to cook ammonium-nitrate fertilizer, piping the gas out the threaded bung through a hose down under the water so we could catch the bubbles in plastic bags, trying to manufacture nitrous oxide. It had been an enormous hassle but had worked well enough that the entire operation--me, M'kehla, hose, barrel and Coleman stove--had all tumbled into the water, flashing and splashing.

We saved the stove, but the lid came off and the barrel went down before we could catch it. It must have landed at a slant, mouth down, because a pocket of air still remained in the corner, so that it rocked there on the blind bottom, supporting itself at an angle, as if on its haunches. What I had grabbed was the rusted-out rim below that corner with the air pocket.

I kicked hard, stroking one-handed toward the dim green far above. I felt the thing give up its hold in the mire as brute inertia was overcome by my powerful strokes. I felt its dumb outrage at being dragged from its lair, its monstering future thwarted by a stout Tarzan heart and a savage right hand. I felt it tug suddenly heavier as it tilted and belched out its throatful of air in protest. A lot heavier. But my inspired muscles despaired not. Stroke after stroke, I pulled the accursed thing toward the light. Upward and upward. And upward.

Until that stout heart was pounding the walls in panic and that savage right hand no longer held the thing; the thing held the hand. That discharge of its buoyant bubble had jerked the rusty teeth deep into my palm. To turn it loose without first setting it down would mean letting those teeth rake their way out. All I could do was stroke and kick and hold my own and listen to that alarm pound louder and louder.

Everything was suddenly on the edge of its seat. The ears could hear the panic thumping through the water. The eyes could see the blessed surface only a few feet away--only a few more feet!--but the burning limbs consulted the heart, the heart checked with the head and the head computed the distance as already impossible and getting more impossible by the instant!

When the lungs got all this news, the sirens really went off. The nerves passed the signal on to the glands. The glands wrung their reserves into the blood stream, rushing the last of the adrenaline to the rescue, giving the right hand the desperate courage it needed to uncurl and release its grip on the damned thing. I felt it rip all the way to the finger tips and away, swirling the cold water in derision as it escaped back into its lair.

I squirted, gasping, into the air, popeyed and choking and smearing the silver surface with my lacerated palm. I splashed to the bank. Quiston looked as terrified as I felt. He took my arm to help me out.

"Oh, Dad! Percy ran to get help. I thought something got you...."

His face was as white as his hair and his eyes were wild, going from me to the pond and back to me. The tears didn't begin in earnest until he saw my hand.

"Dad! You're hurt."

I watched him cry and he watched me bleed and we couldn't do a thing for each other. The water shined, the Sons of the Pioneers chased ghost riders overhead, and in the distance, beyond M'kehla and Dobbs and Buddy, sprinting toward us from the corral, I saw the flag, dipping foolishly lower and lower, though the noon sun had not budged an inch.

•

As Betsy cleaned and wrapped the wound, I forced myself back to a presentable calm. I had my place and my plans to see to, not to mention my reputation. I can put up a front as well as the next fool; I just didn't know how long I could keep it up.

I tried to assuage Quiston's fears by reassuring him that it had been just a rusty old barrel, at the same time trying to amuse Buddy and Dobbs and the rest of the gang by adding, "and it's a good thing it wasn't a rusty young barrel."

Quiston said he had known all along that it wasn't any real monster. Percy said so had he. The guys laughed at my joke. But there was no amusement in the loud laughter. They were humoring me, I discerned; even my kid.

So I didn't participate in the remaining events of that day. I put on my darkest shades and wired on a grin and stayed out of the way. I was stricken by a fear so deep and all-pervading that finally, I was not even afraid. I was resigned, and this resignation was, at last, the only solid thing left to hold on to. Harder than fear, than faith, harder than God was this rock of resignation. It gleamed before me like a great gem, and everything that happened the rest of that shattered holiday was lensed through its facets. Since it was our national birthday, this lens was focused chiefly on our nation, obliging me to view our decay and diseases like a pathologist bent to his microscope.

Flaws previously shrouded now lay naked. I saw the marks of weakness, marks of woe everywhere I turned, within and without. I saw it in the spoiled, macho grins of the men and in the calculating eyes of the women. I saw it in the half-grown greed at the barbecue, with kids fighting for the choicest pieces only to leave them half-eaten in the sawdust. It was in the worn-out banter at the beer keg, in the insincere singing of old favorites around the guitar.

I saw it in the irritable bumper-to-bumper push of traffic fighting its way to the fireworks display at the football stadium--each honk and lurch of modern machinery sounding as doomed as barbaric Rome--but I saw it most luridly in an event that happened as we were driving back from the fireworks late that evening....

The display was a drag for everyone. Too many people, not enough parking space, and the entrance to the stadium had been manned by a get-out-of-Vietnam garrison, complete with pacifist posters and a belligerent bullhorn. A college football stadium on the Fourth of July in 1970 is not the smartest place to carry anti-American signs and shout Maoist slogans, and this noisy group had naturally attracted an adversary force of right-wing counterparts.

These hecklers were as rednecked and thickheaded as the protesters were longhaired and featherbrained. An argument over the bullhorn turned into a tussle, the tussle into a fight, and the cops swooped down. Our group from the farm turned in our tracks and headed back to Dobbs's bus to watch from there.

The women and kids sat out on the cut-open back porch of the bus so they could see the sky; the men stayed inside, sampling M'kehla's tackle box and continuing the day's discussion. M'kehla kept his eyes off me. All I could do was lie there on the zebraskin with my hand throbbing, my brain like a blown fuse.

The cop cars kept coming and going during the show, stifling drunks and hauling off demonstrators. Davy said the whole business was a black eye for America. M'kehla maintained that this little fuss was the merest straw in the wind, a precursor of worse woes on the way for the U.S. of A. Dobbs disagreed with both of them, grandly claiming that this demonstration was a demonstration of just how free and open our society really was, that woven into the fabric of our collective consciousness was a corrective process proving that the American dream was still working. M'kehla laughed. Working? Working where? He demanded evidence of one area, just one mother area, where this wonderful dream was working.

"Why, right here before your very eyes, bro," Dobbs answered amiably. "In the area of equality."

"Are you shitting me?" M'kehla whooped. "Ee-quality?"

"Just look." Dobbs spread his long arms. "We're all in the front of the bus, aren't we?"

Everybody laughed, even M'kehla. However pointless, it had scotched the dispute just in time. The band in the distance was finishing up Yankee-Doodle and the sky was surging and heaving with the fireworks finale. Pleased with his diplomacy and timing, Dobbs swung back around in his driver's seat and started the bus. He headed for the exit to get a jump on the crowd. M'kehla leaned back in his seat, shaking his head, willing to shine it on for friendship's sake.

But on the way out of the lot, as if that dark diamond were set on having the last laugh, Dobbs sideswiped a guy's new white Malibu. Nothing bad. Dobbs stepped out to examine the car and apologize to the driver, and we all followed. The damage was slight and the guy amiable, but his wife was somehow panicked by the sudden sight of all these strange men piling out. She shrank from us, as though we were a pack of Hell's Angels.

Dobbs wasn't carrying a license or any kind of liability, so M'kehla offered his, along with a $100 bill. The guy looked at the tiny nick in his fender's chrome strip, then at M'kehla's big shoulders and bare chest, and said, "Ah, forget it. No big deal. These things happen. Prudential will take care of it." Even shook hands instead of taking the money.

The last glorious volley of rockets spidered across the sky above; a multitudinous sigh lifted from the stadium. We were all bidding one another good night and heading back to our vehicles when the woman suddenly said, "Oh" and stiffened. Before anyone could reach her, she fell to the pavement, convulsing.

"Dear God, no!" the husband cried, rushing to her. "She's having a seizure."

She was bowed backward almost double in the man's arms, shuddering like a sapling bent beneath a gale. The man was shaking her hysterically.

"She hasn't done it for years! It's all these explosions and these damn police lights! Help! Help!"

The wife had thrashed her way out of his arms and her head was sideways on the asphalt, growling and gnashing her teeth as if to bite the earth itself. M'kehla knelt to help.

"We got to stop her chewin' her tongue," he said. I recalled that Heliotrope was also an epileptic; he had tended to convulsions before. He scooped up the woman's jerking head and forced the knuckle of his middle finger between her teeth. "Got to gag a little, then--"

But he couldn't get in deep enough. She gnashed hard on the knuckle. M'kehla jerked it back with an involuntary hiss: "Bitch!"

The guy immediately went nuts, worse than his wife. With a bellow, he shoved the woman from his lap and sprang instantly to his feet to confront M'kehla:

"You watch your dirty mouth, nigger!"

It rang across the parking lot, louder than any star shell or horn. Everybody around the bus was absolutely stunned. Hurrying strangers stopped and turned for 50 yards in every direction, transfixed beneath the reverberation. The woman on the pavement ceased her convulsions and moaned with relief, as though she had passed some demon from her.

The demon had lodged in her husband. He raged on, prodding M'kehla in the breastbone with a stiffened hand:

"The fuckin' hell is with you anyway, ass hole? Huh? Huh? Sticking your fuckin' finger in my wife's mouth! Who do you think you are?"

M'kehla didn't answer. He turned to the crowd of us with a "What else can I tell you?" shrug. His eyes hooked into mine. I had to look away. I saw Quiston and Percy watching over the rear rail of the bus porch. Quiston was looking scared again, uncertain.

Percy's eyes were shining like M'kehla's, with the same dark, igneous amusement.

It was after midnight when we chugged up the farm driveway. The men were sullen' the kids were crying; the women were disgusted with the whole silly affair. It was nearly one before all the guests had gathered up their scenes and headed home. Betsy and the kids went to bed. M'kehla and I sat in his bus and listened to his Bessie Smith tapes until almost dawn. Percy snored on the zebraskin. The crickets and the spheres creaked and hissed like dry bearings.

When the first light began to sift through the ash leaves, M'kehla stood up and stretched. We hadn't talked for some time. There had been nothing to say. He turned off his amplifier and said he guessed it was once again time to embark.

I mentioned that he hadn't had a wink in 48 hours. Shouldn't he sleep? I knew he could not. I was wondering if either of us would ever again enjoy that blessing that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.

" 'Fraid not, Home. Me and Percy better get out before it closes up on us. Want to come?"

I told him I wasn't ready to pull stakes quite yet, but keep in touch. I walked up the slope and opened the gate for him, and he drove through. He got out and we embraced and he got back in. I stood in the road and watched his rig ease out our drive. Once, I thought I saw Percy's face appear in the rear window, and I waved.

I didn't see any waving back.

The farm lay still in the aftermath, damp with dew. It looked debauched. Paper plates and cups were scattered everywhere. The barbecue pit had been tipped over and the charcoal had burned a big black spot on the lawn. Betsy's polebeans were demolished; someone or something had stampeded through the strings in the heat of the celebration.

The sorriest sight was the flag. The pole had leaned lower and lower, until the gold braid of the hem was trailing in the wood chips and the manure. Walking to it, I noticed cousin Davy passed out in the back of his station wagon. I tried to rouse him to help me take it down and fold it away, but he only rooted deeper into his sleeping bag. I gave up and climbed over the fence and shuffled through the wood chips to do it myself, and this is the last scene in my story:

I was on my knees and my elbows at the base of the pole, cursing the knot at the bottom pulley--"God bless this goddamned knot!"--because my fingers were too thick to manage the thin cord, musing about M'kehla's invitation, about Percy, when, all of a sudden, the sky about me erupted in a dazzling display of brand-new stars.

That curse had been a prayer, I realized, and these stars heralded heaven's answer! The knot was blessed even as it was damned. Trumpets celebrated this celestial intervention--bells rang, harps twanged--and I sank to the sawdust certain that my number up yonder had been called.

In this attitude of obeisance, I felt the lightning of the Lord lash me again. Ow! I recanted my recanting. Crawl off to Canada? Never! Never never and service for-evermore to You and Your Great Land Lord only forgive me!

I heard an answering roll of thunder and turned just in time to see Him launch His final chastising charge, His brow terrible, His famous beard flying like amber waves of grain, His eye blazing like cannon fire across the Potomac.

Davy finally managed to drive Him from me with a broken bean stake. He took me under the arm and helped me over to the water trough. It was empty. We had forgotten to turn it back on. The cows were all gathered, thirsty. Davy found the valve and turned it on. I watched the crimson sparkle in the rush of water on the tub's rusty bottom.

The cows were edging near, impatient. Behind them were calves, cautious, each with one side freshly clipped. The peacocks hollered. The pigeons banked over in a curious flock and lighted in the chips.

My cousin sat down on the battered brim of the trough. He handed me his wet handkerchief, and I held it to the oozing lump where I had been driven into the flagpole. Tears were beginning to run with the blood. Davy turned away and watched the milling array of beasts and birds.

"Homing cows," he reflected aloud. "Not a half-bad idea for a half-baked buckaroo."

"'There are some pegs, my man, that'll never fit a square hole. No matter how much force is used.'"