It took 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 said in the scuffle and Davy and M'kehla sprang apart, glaring; they were already into their karate and boxing stances before we could step between them.
Dobbs mollified Davy with a cold Oly and I convinced M'kehla to come 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 stairwell 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 zebra skin waterbed 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 daisies and 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 wide-eyed.
"Dad!" Quiston yelled up the stairwell. "Percy's found a monster in the pond!"
"What kind of monster, Quis?"
"A big one… crouched on the bottom by the pumphouse!"
"Tell him I'll come out after 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 up 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.
"Do you?" he asked. "Do you really?" And this time I answered right back: Yep, I really did.
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 down to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After about an hour of tepid beer and politics Dobbs tossed away his half-empty bottle out the window.
"Alright e-nuff of this foam and foofarah," 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 in neat little stairsteps, all divided into partitions and each section filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled royal coachman he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.
"Afghany," he said, rolling it along his fingertips 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 peacepipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke Percy came baying up the stairwell 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 in 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 to Percy. The little boy puffed up a terrific cloud.
Davy wouldn't join us, though. "Makes a man too peaceful," he explained, opening another beer. "These are not peaceful times."
"That's why Perce and me are pullin 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."
F. 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 rice-paddy hornet's nests 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 not the least upset by M'kehla's planned defection, especially under the pacifying spell of M'kehla's hash. Davy, on the other hand, 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 paraphernalia just makes a man sleepy."
"I 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," Davy grumbled. "I seen the type on the gym circuit."
"Not a pill. Not a sniff. Well, just a puff of some new flower power stuff. One little hit. But I'll bet there isn't one of you big white fathers with the balls to try half what I am gonna do."
"Me!" Percy chirped.
"Leave that shit alone," Davy ordered, pushing the boy back and tilting the hat down over his eyes. "You half-baked buckeroo."
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 partition marked SNELLED HOOKS. Carefully, he unscrewed the lid.
"- and a little S.T.P."
"Eek," said Buddy.
Dobbs agreed. "Eek indeed."
We had never 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 promoted concentration instead of confusion. These lucky few said it seemed to not only sharpen their wits 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. The wind-stirred brushing on the metal roof stopped. 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 on the bowlful of green mint, three times.