"Hello, Awfulness. Sorry I can't leave you lurking here in peace, but some lesser being could get bit."
– as I grasped it by its lower jaw and turned for the surface.
I knew what it was. It was the fifty-gallon oil drum M'kehla and I had lost some half-dozen psychedelic 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 whole 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 grabbed was the rusted-out rim below that corner with the air pocket.
I kicked hard, stroking one-handed for 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 bloodstream, 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 fingertips and away, swirling the cold water in derision as it escaped back to its lair.
I squirted gasping into the air, pop-eyed 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, we thought we saw your breath! It was all yellow and stinky. 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 in the Sky 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 was 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 it wasn't any real monster. Percy said so had he. The guys laughed at my joke. But there was no real amusement in the loud laughter. They were all humoring me, I discerned; even my kid.
So I didn't participate much 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 cut-diamond facets. Since it was our national birthday this lens was focused chiefly on our nation, obliging me to view its decay and diseases like a pathologist bent to his microscope.
Flaws previously shrouded now lay naked as knife wounds. I saw the marks of weakness, and woe everywhere I turned, within and without. I saw it in the spoiled, macho grins of the men and in the calculating green 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 and 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 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, plus 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 sit there 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 demonstrated 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? -- and demanded evidence of one area, just one 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. "E-quality?"
"Just look." Dobbs spread his long arms. "We're all at 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 firework finale. Pleased with his diplomacy and timing, Dobbs swung back around in his driver seat and started the bus and 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.