"You're coming back to get me, aren't you?"
Something both doomed and dangerous.
"I don't know," I confessed. "I'll have to think about it."
And handed him his duffel. As I pushed it out the door at him, I felt something hard and ominous outlined through the canvas. It gave me pause.
"Uh, you think you'll need more than three bucks?" I felt compelled to ask. He had turned and was already walking away.
It had felt about the size and shape of an army.45. But, Christ, I couldn't tell. I didn't get much wiring purchased, either. I couldn't decide whether to leave him at the Dairy Queen, or call the cops, or what. I kissed off the electrical shop and went on to the video rental to trade in "Beatles at Shea Stadium" for a new tape, then I circled back by the Dairy Queen. He was already out on the curb, sitting on his duffel, a white paper bag cradled under his chin as though to match the chalky swatch on his cheek.
"Get in," I said.
On the way back to the farm he started coming on again about the hard-hearted Easterners, how nobody back there would help him whereas he had always helped others.
"Name one," I challenged.
"What?"
"One of these others you've helped."
After some thought he said, "There was this little chick in New Jersey, for example. Real sharp but out of touch, you know? I got her out of the fuckin hypocritical public junior high and turned her on to a true way of living."
Made me mad again. I turned around and drove the little bastard back to the freeway. That evening when I came back from dropping my daughter off at her basketball practice, there he was, hunching along Nebo Road with his duffel over his shoulder, heading toward the farm.
"Get in," I said.
"I wasn't going to your place. I'm just looking for a ditch to sleep in."
"Get in. I'd rather have you where I can keep an eye on you."
So he ate supper and went to the cabin. He wouldn't let me build a fire. Heat bothered his rash, and light was starting to hurt his eyes. So I turned out the light and left him lying there. While we were watching our video tape I couldn't help but imagine him, stretched out down there in the black and cheerless chill, eyes still wide open, not scratching, not even brooding, really, just lying there.
The movie we were watching was Alien.
The next day Dobbs and I loaded up the pickup for a dump run to Creswell and I went down to stir Patrick up.
"You better bring your bag," I told him. Again he gave me that you-too-huh-you-fuckin-vampire look, then lifted his duffel from the floor and sullenly swung it up to his shoulder. The harsh right-angle object was no longer outlined through the khaki.
He was so peeved at being hauled away he barely spoke. He got out while we were at the dump unloading and wouldn't get back in.
"Don't you want a ride to the freeway?" I asked.
"I'll walk," he' said.
"Suit yourself," I said and backed the rig around. He stood in the mud and gravel and Pampers and wine bottles and old magazines, the duffel at his side, and watched us pull away, his round gray eyes unblinking.
As I jounced out of the dump I felt those cross hairs on the back of my neck.
The next day he phoned. He was calling from the Goshen Truck Stop, just down our road. He said his poison oak was worse and he was considerably disappointed in me, but he was giving me another chance. I hung up on him.
And last night my daughter said she saw him through the window of the school bus, sitting on his duffel bag in the weeds at the corner of Jasper Road and Valley. She said he was eating a carrot and that his whole face was now painted white.
I don't know what to do about him. I know he's out there, and on the rise.
Dobbs and I went carousing this afternoon with ol' Hunter S. Thompson, who's up to do one of his Gonzo gigs at the behest of the U of O School of Journalism. We stopped at the Vet's Club to help him get his wheels turning in preparation for his upcoming lecture – his "wiseman riff" he called it – and we talked of John Lennon, and Patrick the Punk, and this new legion of dangerous disappointeds. Thompson mused that he didn't understand why it was people like Lennon they seemed to set their sights for, instead of people like him.
"I mean, I've pissed off quite a few citizens in my time," the good doctor let us know.
"But you've never disappointed them," I told him. "You never promised World Peace or Universal Love, did you?"
He admitted he had not. We all admitted it had been quite a while since any of us had heard anybody talk such Pollyanna pie-in-the-sky promises.
"Today's wiseman," Hunter claimed, "has too much brains to talk himself out on that kind of dead-end limb."
"Or not enough balls," Dobbs allowed.
We ordered another round and mulled awhile on such things, not talking, but I suspected we were all thinking – privately, as we sipped our drinks – that maybe it was time to talk a little of that old sky pie once more, for all the danger of dead ends or cross hairs.
Else how are we going to be able to look that little bespectacled Liverpudlian in the eye again, when the Revolutionary Roll is Up Yonder called?
THE DEMON BOX: AN ESSAY
"Your trouble is -" my tall daddy used to warn, whenever the current of my curiosity threatened to carry me too far out, over my head, into such mysterious seas as swirl around THE SECRETS OF SUNKEN MU or REAL SPELLS FROM VOODOO ISLES or similar shroudy realms that could be reached with maps ordered from the back of science fiction and fantasy pulps:
"- is you keep trying to unscrew the unscrutable."
Years later another warning beacon of similar stature expressed the opposite view. Here's Dr. Klaus Woofner:
"Your trouble, my dear Devlin, is you are loath to let go your Sunday school daydreams. Yah? This toy balloon, this bubble of spiritual gas where angels dance on a pin? Why will you not let it go? It's empty. Any angels to be found will not be found dancing on the head of the famous pin, no. It is only in the dreams of the pinhead that they dance, these angels."
The old doctor waited until his audience finished snickering.
"More and more slowly, too," he continued. "Even there. They become tired, these dancing fancies, and if not given nourishment they become famished. As must everything. For the famine must fall eventually on us all, yah? On the angel and the fool, the fantastic and the true. Do any of you understand what I'm talking about? Izzy Newton's Nameless Famine?"
Dr. Woofner was still asking this straight at me, black brows raised, giving me the full treatment (like a cop's flashlight, somebody once described the analyst's infamous gaze). I ventured that I thought I understood what he was talking about, although I didn't know what to call it. After a moment he nodded and proceeded to give it a name:
"It is called, this famine, entropy. Eh? No ringing bells? Ach, you Americans. Very well, some front-brain effort if you please. Entropy is a term from conceptual physics. It is the judgment passed on us by a cruel law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To put it technically, it is 'the nonavailability of energy in a closed thermodyamic system.' Eh? Can you encompass this, my little Yankee pinheads? The nonavailability of energy?"
Nobody ventured an answer this time. He smiled around the circle.
"To put it mechanically, it means that your automobile cannot produce its own petroleum. If not fueled from without it runs down and stops. Goes cold. Very like us, yah? Without an external energy supply our bodies, our brains, even our dreams… must eventually run down, stop, and go cold."