Demon Box

TRANNY MAN OVER THE BORDER

– hibiscus blooms fall with heavy plops, lie sprawled on the sunny cobblestones and cement benches like fat Mexican generals, scarlet-and-green parade uniforms, gawdy and limp, too hot and tired to rise back to the rank of their branches. Later, perhaps. Now, siesta…

"Not good!" yells the gray crewcut American from Portland with his fifty-year face running sweat and his new Dodge Polaro sitting behind a tow truck outside the Larga Distancia Oficina. "Not three thrown in less than five thousand miles!"

Yelling from Puerto Sancto, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona, where he'd bought his last transmission after buying his second in Oroville, California, where he'd paid without much complaint because it is possible to strip the gears with the hard business miles he'd put on it, but a tranny again in Tucson? And now, less than a week later? The third blown?

"Not good at all! So listen up; I'm gonna jerk the thing out and ship it back first train your direction. I expect the same promptness from you garage boys, right? I expect a new transmission down here in time for us to make the festival in Guadalajara one week from tomorrow! There's no excuse for this kinda workmanship I can tell you that!"

What he didn't tell the garage boys in Tucson was that he was pulling a twenty-four-foot mobile home.

"I been a Dodge man ten years. We don't want a ten-year relationship to blow up from one fluke, right?"

He hung up and turned to me. Next in line, I had been his nearest audience.

"That'll get some greasemonkeys' asses smoking in Tucson, won't it, Red?" He leaned close, as if we had known each other for years. "They aren't a bad bunch. Fact is, I hope I can find me a mechanic down here with a fraction the know-how as those Arizona boys."

Reaffirmation of Yankee superiority left him so flushed with feeling for his countrymen that he chose to overlook the stubbled look of me.

"What's your name, Red? You remind me of my oldest boy a little, behind that brush."

"Deboree," I told him, taking his hand. "Devlin Deboree."

"What brings you to primitive Puerto Sancto, Dev? Let me guess. You're a nature photographer. I saw you out there after those fallen posies."

"Way wrong," I told him. "It isn't even my camera. My father sent his along. He came to Sancto last year with my brother and me, and nobody took picture one."

"So Dad sent you to bring back the missed memories. He musta been a lot more impressed than I been."

"Wrong again. He sent me to bring back jumping beans."

"Jumping beans?"

"Mexican jumping beans. When we were down here last year he met a mechanic who also grew jumping beans. He bought a hundred bucks' worth of this year's harvest."

"Jumping beans?"

"Five gallons. Dad's going to give one bean away with each quart of his new ice cream, to publicize the flavor. Not Jumping Bean – Pina Colada. We run a creamery."

" 'Debris,' huh?" He gave me a wink to let me know he was kidding. "Like in 'rubbish'?"

I told him it was more like in Polish. He laughed.

"Well, you remind me of my kid, whatever. Why don't you join me in the Hotel Sol bar after your call? We'll see if I remind you of your old man.

He winked again and left, roguishly tipping his fishing cap to the rest of the tourists waiting to contact home.

I found him under a palapa umbrella by the pool. His look of confidence was already a little faded, and he was wondering if maybe he shouldn't've also had a good U.S. mechanic come with the transmission – pay the man's way now, fight it out with the Dodge people later. I observed some of these Mexican mechanics were pretty good. He agreed they had to be pretty good, to keep these hand-me-downs running, but what did they know about a modern automatic transmission? He pulled down his sunglasses and drew me again into that abrupt intimacy.

"You can take the best carburetor man in the whole country, say, and turn him loose in an area he isn't qualified in, and you're going to have troubles. Believe me, numerous troubles…"

This truth and his drink made him feel better. The grin returned and the ungreased whine of panic was almost oiled out of his voice by his second Seagram's and Seven-Up. By the bottom of his third he was ready to slip 'er into whiskeydrive and lecture me as to all the troubles a man can encounter along the rocky road of life, brought about mainly by unqualified incompetents in areas where they didn't belong. Numerous troubles! To steer him away from a tirade I interrupted with what I thought was a perfectly peaceful question: How many did he have with him? One eye narrowed strangely and slid over my backpack and beard. With a voice geared all the way back into suspicion he informed me that his wife was along and what about it.

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. "Overcharge!" 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?"

"I see, si," says the mechanic. "Why you don't use the big garage mecanicos?"

"They won't work on it until Monday is why."

"Are you in such a hurry you cannot wait for Monday?"

"I already called and told Tucson I was shipping the thing back to them by Monday. I like to get on these things while they're hot, you see."

"Si, I see," says El Mecanico Fantastico, fanning himself with the tortilla again. "Hokay. I come down mañana and take it out."

"Can't we get on it now? I'd like to be sure of getting it on that train."

"I see," says the Mexican. "Hokay. I get my tools and we rent a burro."

"A burro?"

"From Ernesto Diaz. To carry my tools. The big garage locks their tools in a iron box."

"I see," says the Tranny Man, beginning to wonder how to pin down a reasonable estimate for labor, tools and a burro.

Suddenly there is a big brodie of squeals and yelps in the dust. The sow's red-bristled boar friend has dropped in and caught Chief making eyes at his lady. By the time they are pulled apart Chief has one ear slashed and has lost both canines in the boar's brick hide.

But that isn't the worst of it. Giving away all that weight has been too much for dog's aged hindquarters. Something is dislocated. He has to ride back down strapped atop a second burro. The ride pops the dislocation back in so he can walk again by evening, but he is never able afterward to lift a hind leg without falling over.

They've been there a week now. They are flat-tiring back from the beach to the south in a rented Toyota open-top. The left rear blew out miles back. There is no spare. And a ruptured radiator hose is spewing steam from under the dash so they can barely see the road ahead.

Finally the wife asks, "You're going to just keep driving it?"

"I'm going to drive the sonofabitch back to the sonofabitch that rented me the sonofabitch and tell him to shove this piece of broken Jap junk up his overpriced greaser ass!"

"Well, drop the dog and me off at the Blums' first, then, if you're going to – if we get close."

She didn't say If you're going to make a scene. There was steam and furor enough.

The Tranny Man missed the before-siesta mail out and he's promised himself to get a letter to his sister finished to take down to the post office when it opens after siesta. He's at the Blums' rented villa, alone except for Chief. The dog is stretched on a woven mat, tongue out and eyes open. Wally Blum's at the beach surfcasting. The Tranny Man doesn't know where Betty Blum and his wife have gone.

The Blums' hacienda is not down in Gringo Gulch but up on the town's residential slopes. The yard of a shack across the canyon-of-a-street is level with his window, and three little girls smile at him across the narrow chasm. They keep calling Hay-lo mee-ster, then ducking back out of sight in the foliage of a mango tree and giggling.

That tree is the whole neighborhood's social center. Kids play in its shade. Birds fly in and out of its branches. Two pigs and a lot of chickens prowl the leafy rubble at its roots. All kinds of chickens – chickens scrawny and chickens bald, chickens cautious and chickens bold. The only thing the chickens seem to have in common is freedom and worthlessness.

The Tranny Man watches the chickens with a welcome disdain. What good can they be, too sick to lay, too skinny to eat? What possible good? Inspired by the inefficiency, he launches into his letter:

"Dear Sis: Gawd, wot a country! It is too poor to know it's ignorant and too ignorant to know it's poor. If I was Mexico you know what I would do? I would attack the U.S. just to qualify for foreign aid when we whup 'em (ha ha). Seriously, it sure isn't what I had hoped, I can tell you that."

A green mango bounces off the grill of his window. More giggles. He reads the last line with a sigh and lays down his ballpoint.

Wish you were here, Sissy, with all my heart. He drains his Seven-and-Seven and feels a kind of delicious depression sweep over him. A poignancy.

An accordion in one of the shacks begins practicing a familiar tune, a song popular back home a couple years back. What was it? Went la la la laa la la; we'd fight and neh-ver win… That was it! Those were the days, my friend; those were the days…

The poignancy becomes melancholy, then runs straight on through sentiment to nostalgia. It stops just short of maudlin. With another sigh he picks his pen up and resumes the letter:

"I think of you often on this trip, Old Pal. Do you remember the year Father drove us to Yellowstone Park and how great it was? How wonderful and bright everything looked? How proud we felt? We were the first kids coming out of the Depression whose Father could afford to take his family on such a trip. Well let me tell you, things are not bright anymore and not very likely to get so. Ferinstance, let me tell you about visiting Darold, in 'Berserkly.' That about says it. You simply cannot believe the condition that nice college town has allowed itself to get into since we were there in '62 for the Russian-American track meet -"

He stops again. He hears a strange clucking voice: "Qué? Qué?" In the yard across the way he sees a very old woman. She appears to be swaying her way along a clothesline with an odd, weightless motion. Her face is vacant of teeth or expression. She seems unreal, a trick of the heat, swaying along, clucking "Qué? Qué? Qué?" She sways along until she reaches a frayed white sheet. She gathers it from the line and starts feeling her way back to her shack. "Qué? Qué? Qué Qué?"

"Blind," says the Tranny Man, and rises to check Wally's cupboards. He's bound to have something to pick up where the Seventy-seven left off, something stronger if possible: eighty-eight… ninety-nine! He bobs this way and that around the strange kitchen, awash with sweat, rendered rudderless by the jagged apparition of the blind crone. He is drifting fast now toward the reefs.

The Tranny Man's wife arrives half an hour later with Wally Blum's wife, Betty, in Wally's nice little Mexican-built Volkswagen jeep loaded with gifts for the gals back home. She has barely begun telling Betty Blum how grateful she is for the ride not to mention the company when she is pulled about by her elbow and scolded so loudly for going off without taking the mail – so unfairly -- that the world is suddenly billowing silent about her, all the street sounds ceasing, the hens not clucking, the kids not chattering on the rooftop, the mariachi not pumping his accordion… even the river half a mile down the hill, stopping its sparkle around the rocks. The kneeling girls are raised from their wash to listen: how will the gringa señora take it, this machismo browbeating?

"Understand?" the Tranny Man demands in closing. "Sabe?"

The evening leans forward from its many seats. Betty Blum begins to take blame and croon apologies in the familiar catty pussyfooting of one browbeaten señora coming to the defense of another. The unseen audience starts to sigh, disappointed. But before the Tranny Man can begin his grumpy forgiving, the Tranny Man's wife hears herself speaking in a voice stiff with care at the delivery of each syllable, telling her husband to let go of her arm, to lower his shouting, and to never treat her as though she were drawing a wage from him – never again speak to her like she was one of his broken machines.

"If you do I swear I'll kill you, and if I can get to him I'll kill Donald, and if I can get to them before I'm stopped I'll kill Terry and the grandchildren and then myself, I swear it before God!"

Both her husband and Betty stare dumbstruck at this outburst. Then the two of them exchange quick small nods: shoulda seen something like this coming… woman this age… all those rum-and-Cokes. The Tranny Man's wife is no longer paying attention. She knows she has been effective. For a moment she feels as though the intensity of this effect will set her aflame, that her flesh will melt and run off her bones.

Then the pulse of the street begins to rush again. The kids on the roof whisper excited reviews. The chickens gather in the lobby of shade under the mango branches. The accordionist doesn't resume his practicing, but, the Tranny Man's wife feels, this is out of a kind of consideration, as one musician in the twilight to another, not criticism.

The Tranny Man stalks back into the hacienda; Betty Blum gives his wife a ride back to the Hotel del Sol. When she returns she has a bottle of Seagram's, a pack of cold Seven-Up and a warm smile that hints she can be as sympathetic to misunderstood husbands as to browbeaten wives.

Wally shows up with two yellowtail and the Tranny Man accepts their invitation for supper. After fish and white wine he borrows a pair of trunks from good ol' Wally and a safety pin from bountiful Betty to keep them from falling off his skinny ass, and they all go for a midnight swim. Then they come back and drink some more. He tells Wally it's always the kids that keep a marriage together, but with these kids these days! Is it worth it? Then he confides to Betty – who is still wearing the bikini that looks damned decent for a woman her age – how one thing the kids these days do have on the ball is getting rid of all those old-fashioned notions about sex being evil. It's natural! Betty could not agree more.

When he figures it is late enough that his wife has been adequately disciplined, he borrows their car to drive back to the hotel with old Chief. "I bet she's there by now," he bets.

He wins; she's asleep on the couch. It will be the last time he'd win such a bet.

Things can be trusted. Things do not break. Things are not gyps. Pull chains on light switches are not manufactured to snap off inside the fixture just to force a poor sucker to shell out dinero for a complete new rig-up that isn't fair.

"Ten pesos for a rum-'n'-Coke? They only cost five pesos two blocks from here!"

They have been drinking at the hotel all afternoon. "This is the beachfront," his wife reminds him. "Besides, these have straws."

The waiter rewards her logic with a grand denture display. Betty and Wally order. The drinks arrive. Betty sips her margarita like a bee choosing a blossom from acres of clover.

"Feh," she drawls. "Not great but feh-uh."

"I love the way you Miami women talk, Betty." The Tranny Man is drunk. "In fact I love all women. From the young uns with papaya titties to the old uns with experience!" He spreads his arms. "I love all people, actually; from these -"

He stops short. He has seen something that nips his declaration in the bud. The Tranny Man's wife follows her husband's gaze to see what has stymied this tribute. Across the beach she sees the reason in the shade of a canvas-covered icecream pushcart, wearing lime green barely to the crotch, as provocative as a Popsicle. Busted, her husband leaves it unfinished. He turns his scrutiny to the cover of the Mexican edition of Time that Wally has bought from a newsboy. There's a picture of Clifford Irving on the cover. He reads over Wally's shoulder, lips moving.

His wife continues to stare at the young morsel at the icecream stand, not out of jealousy, as she knows Betty Blum is silently supposing, but with a sense of sweet wonder, as one stares at a pressed flower discovered in a school annual, wondering, What had it meant when it was fresh? Where did it go? Feeling herself suddenly on the verge of finding some kind of answer she rises from the shaded table, no longer in the mood for oyster cocktail, and walks across the sand toward the surf.

There is a silence as the Tranny Man frowns after her. When he looks back, Betty Blum extends him brown-eyed condolences over the salty rim of her margarita, as if to advise, Don't let her mess with your mind.

"Time," declares Wally Blum, "is one of those things you can trust because you know just how much to allow for political bias."

The Tranny Man regains himself with a robust "Right!"and turns back to the question of nevermind who's Clifford Irving who's Howard Hughes?

The three of them walk back to the hotel restaurant and order Lobster Supreme, picking at the shells till nearly ten. Finally the Tranny Man yawns it's his bedtime and excuses himself, letting all present know by the twinkle in his roguish eye that he is far too much a man to let some menopausal bitch mess with his sleep let alone his mind! Over Wally's protests he peels two hundred-peso bills from his wallet and places them beside his plate. To Betty's request that they buy a bottle to drink up on his balcony he graciously explains that ordinarily he would be more than happy to oblige, but tomorrow is the day his new transmission should be coming in from the States, and he likes to get on these things while they're hot. Another time. He squeezes Betty's hand and turns and mounts the stairs, giving them his most erect exit.

Here it comes again: the turmoil, the chaos, the hubbub and howls – the nightdogs again – the pre-dawn yapping that starts in the hills south and sweeps across the town, just when you were sure the sonofabitches had, at last, exhausted the shadows and were going to settle down and let you get some rest.

Old Chief whimpers. The Tranny Man burrows under his pillow cursing the night, the dogs, the town, his crazy wife who had suggested in the first place coming to this thorny wilderness, goddamn her! Why here, he demands of the darkness, instead of Yosemite or Marineland or even the Shakespeare festival in Ashland? Why this goddamn anarchy of thorn and shadows?

A fair question. I had been forced to deal with it there once myself. You see, one day, not long after Betsy had announced we were finally broke, we all finally knew that my father was going to die (of course I am reminded of him by the Tranny Man – not by the person himself but by certain things particular to this type of American: the erect exit, the wink, the John Wayne way he spoke to machinery and mechanics… many things). The doctors had been telling us for ages that he only had so much time, but Daddy had continued to stretch that allotted time for so long that Buddy and I secretly believed that our stubborn Texas father was never going to succumb to any enemy except old age. His arms and legs shriveled and his head wobbled on his "goddamn noodle of a neck," but we continued to expect some last-minute rescue to come bugling over the horizon.

Daddy thought so too. "All this research, I figure they'll whip it pretty soon. They better. Look at these muscles jump around -" He'd draw up a pantleg and grin wryly at the flesh jerking and twitching.

"- like nervous rats on a leaky scow."

Yeah, pretty soon, we agreed. Then one September day we were out at the goat pasture sighting in our rifles and talking about where we were going to take our hunting trip this fall, when Daddy lowered his 'ought-six and looked at us.

"Boys, this damned gunbarrel is shaking like a dog shitting peach pits: Let's take some other kind of trip…"

– and we all knew it was going to be our last. My brother and I talked it over that night. I knew where I wanted to go. Buddy wasn't too sure about the idea, but he conceded I was the big brother. We presented the plan to Daddy the next day over his backyard barbecue.

"I don't object to a journey south, but why this Purty Sancto? Why way the hell-and-gone down there?"

"Dev claims there's something special about it," Buddy said. "He wants to show off where he hid out for six months," Daddy said. "Aint that the something special?"

"Partly," I admitted. Everybody knew I'd been trying to get the three of us down there for years. "But there's something besides that about the place – something primal, prehistoric…"

"Just what a man in his predicament needs," my mother put in. "Something prehistoric."

"Maybe we oughta fly up to that spot on the Yukon again," Daddy mused. "Fish for sockeye."

"No, damm it!" I said. "All my life you've been hauling me to your spots. Now it's my turn."

"A drive across Mexico would shake him to pieces!" my mother cried. "Why, he wasn't even able to handle the drive to the Rose Parade up in Portland without getting wore to a frazzle."

"Oh, I can handle the drive," he told her. "That aint the question."

"Handle my foot! A hundred miles on those Mexican roads in your sorry condition -"

"I said I can stand it," he told her, flipping her a burger. He turned to eye me through the smoke. "All's I want to know is, one: why this Puerto Sancto place? and, two: what else you got up your sleeve?"

I didn't answer. We all knew what was up my sleeve.

"Oh no you don't!" My mother swung her glare at me. "If you think you're going to get him off somewheres and talk him into taking some of that stuff again -"

"Woman, I been legal age for some time now. I will thank you to leave me do my own deciding as to where I go and what stuff I take."

Years before, at the beginning of the sixties, Buddy and I had been trying to grow psilocybin mushrooms in a cottage-cheese vat at the little creamery Daddy staked Buddy to after he got out of Oregon State. Bud made up some research stationery and was getting spore cultures sent to him straight from the Department of Agriculture, along with all the latest information for producing the mycelium hydroponically. Bud and I plumbed an air hose into the vat, mixed the required nutrients, added the cultures and monitored the development through a microscope. Our ultimate fantasy was to produce a psilocybin slurry and ferment it into a wine. We believed we could market the drink under the name Milk of the Gods. All we ever made was huge yeast-contaminated messes.

But in one of those culture kits Buddy ordered they very helpfully included a tiny amount of the extract of the active ingredient itself – I guess so we could have something to compare our yield to, were we ever to get one. Daddy brought this particular package out to the farm from the post office. He was skeptical.

"That little dab of nothing?" In the bottom of a bottle smaller than a pencil was maybe a sixteenth inch of white dust. "All that talk I heard about those experiments and that's all you took?"

I dumped the powder in a bottle of Party-Pac club soda. There wasn't so much as a fizz. "This is probably about the size dose they gave us." I began pouring it in a set of wineglasses. "Maybe a little bigger."

"Well, hell's bells, then," Daddy said. "I'll have a glass. I better check this business out."

There were five of us: Buddy, me, Mickey Write, Betsy's brother Gil – all with some previous experience – and my Lone Star Daddy, who could never even finish the rare bottle of beer he opened on fishing trips. When we'd all emptied our glasses there was still a couple inches left in the Party-Pac bottle. Daddy refilled his glass.

"I want enough to give me at least some notion… I'm tired of hearing about it."

We went into the living room to wait. The women had gone to the shopping center. It was about sundown. I remember we were watching that last Fullmer-Basilio fight on TV. When the shopping run got back from town my mother came popping in and asked, "Who's winning?"

Daddy popped right back, "Who's fighting?" and grinned at her like a goon.

In another hour that grin was gone. He was pacing the floor in freaked distress, shaking his hands as he paced, like they were wet.

"Damn stuff got down in all my nerve ends!" Could that have had something to do with getting that disease? We all always wondered, didn't we?

By the merciful end of a terrible hell of a night, Daddy was vowing, "If you two try to manufacture this stuff… I'll crawl all the way to Washington on my bloody hands and knees to get it outlawed!"

Not a fair test, he later admitted, but he was damned if he was going to experiment further. "Never," he vowed. "Not till I'm on my deathbed in a blind alley with my back to the wall."

Which was pretty much the case that September.

The three of us flew to Phoenix and rented a Winnebago and headed into Mexico, usually Buddy at the wheel while Daddy and I argued about our selection of tapes – Ray Charles was alright, but that Bob Dappa and Frank Zylan smelt like just more burning braincells.

The farther south we went the hotter it got. Tempers went up with the temperature. A dozen times we were disinherited. A dozen times he ordered us to drop him at the first airport so he could fly out of this ratworld back to civilized comfort, yet he always cooled down by night when we pulled over. He even got to like the Mexican beer.

"But keep your dope to yourselves," he warned. "My muscles may be turning to mush but my head's still hard as a rock."

By Puerto Sancto Daddy had thrown out all the cassettes and Buddy had picked up some farmacia leapers. We were all feeling pretty good. I wanted to take the wheel to pilot her in on the last leg of our journey, then, the first bounce onto a paved street in hundreds of miles I run over a corner of one of those square Mexican manhole covers and it tilts up catty-corner and pokes a hole in our oilpan. We could've babied it to a hotel but Daddy says no, leave it with him; he'll see to it while we hike into town and get us a couple rooms.

"Give me one of those pep pills before you go," he growled, "so I'll have the juice to deal with these bastards."

He took a Ritalin. We eased it on to the biggest garage we could find and left him with it. Buddy and I went on foot across the river and into town where we rented a fourth-story seafront double, then walked down to the beach action and got burned forty bucks trying to buy a kilo of the best dope I ever smoked. From a hippie girl with nothing but a tan and a promise.

We waited three hours before we gave up. On the defeated walk back through the outskirts we passed a bottled gas supply house. I spoke enough Spanish and Buddy had enough creamery credentials that we talked them out of an E tank of nitrous. By the time we'd had a hit or two in the stickerbushes and got on back to the garage, the oilpan was off and welded and back on and Daddy knew the first names and ages and family history of every man in the shop, none of whom spoke any more English than he did Spanish. He had even put together the deal for the jumping beans.

"Good people," he said, collapsing into the back of the Winnebago. "Not lazy at all. Just easy. What's that in the blue tank?"

"Nitrous oxide," Bud told him.

"Well I hope it can wait till I get a night in a hotel bed. I'm one shot sonofagun."

We all slept most of the next day. By the time we were showered and shaved and enjoying room-service breakfast on our breezy terrace, the sun was dipping down into the bay like one of those glazed Mexican cookies. Daddy stretched and yawned. "Okay… what you got?"

I brought out my arsenal. "Grass, hash, and DMT. All of which are smoked and none of which last too long."

"Not another fifteen rounds with Carmen Basilio, eh? Well, I aint cared about smoking ever since a White Owl made me puke on my grandpa. What was in that tank, Bud?"

"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."