Read Demon Box Page 22


  BLACKBERRY VINES

  Blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin

  They led me astray, they took me in swimmin

  I reached for a cherry but I got me a lemon

  'Midst blackberry vines and barelegged wimmin.

  DEATH VALLEY DOLLY

  On a barstool in Barstow I met her

  In Kingman I quelled all her qualms

  In Phoenix I fought to forget her

  To the clapping of 29 Palms

  Oh, Molly, my Death Valley dolly,

  You're gone, by golly, you're gone.

  Where the roadrunners run from the coyote sun

  My fierce little falcon is flown.

  Eating noodles in Needles she caught me

  With a Nogales gal on my knee,

  So while brawling in Brawley she shot me

  Then jumped in the sour Salton Sea

  Oh, Molly, my Death Valley dolly

  You're gone, by golly you're dead

  Where the scorpions hide and the sidewinders slide

  You lie in your alkali bed.

  RAGWEED RUTH

  Ragweed Ruth was unmowed maze

  She was nightshade in the morning

  Her ragged flag was often raised

  But she raised it like a warning.

  No mate had she but emptiness

  No family filled her time

  She sipped instead on bitterness

  Just like it was sweet wine

  like it was sweet wine

  She soothed her throat with emptiness

  Just like it was sweet wine.

  The best spread once found anywhere

  Was left by her old man's leaving

  But she farmed those fields like a fool at prayer

  And watered them with dreaming.

  Her hay was wind and wanderings

  Shocked up by forked rakes

  Her grain was threshed by thunderings

  Her trees were tangled snakes

  trees were tangled snakes

  Her grain was threshed by thunderings

  Her trees were tangled snakes.

  Each spring the farmers from around

  Brought axes and advices

  But Ruth would firmly glare them down

  To forge her own devices.

  For she was plenty to herself

  She survived the seasons through

  She was dark bread dipped in health

  She was her own strong brew

  was her own strong brew

  She was dark bread dipped in salty health

  She was her own strong brew.

  Then came the dry when the farming men

  Failed and cracked and fled

  Ruth invited all the families in

  And somehow all were fed.

  Plow never cleft her bottomland

  Nor harrow stroked her sod

  Still, golden ears and marzipan

  Up sprung from where she trod

  sprung from where she trod

  Golden ears and marzipan

  Sprung up from where she trod.

  The passing of her wandering walk

  Could fill a tree with fruit

  At her glare the shriveled stalk

  Would straighten, stand and root.

  The dry time passed as all times will.

  Back to the crippled county

  Returned the rain, the sprouts to till,

  And seeming endless bounty.

  The guests all gathered up and left

  With their advice and axes...

  Old Ruth ragdanced on to death

  Her land was sold for taxes

  land was sold for taxes

  Ragweed Ruth danced on to death

  Her land was sold for taxes.

  PACK OF WALNETTOS

  Sister Lou had a shop on the corner

  Four kids and a veteran in bed

  All day to the old she sold dresses made over

  And dressed soldiers all night in her head...

  God grant me a pack of Walnettos

  And the Good Book to sermon upon

  Let me shine like a flash through the trash in the ghettos

  And I'll light those darkies' way home.

  At the keyboard they found the professor

  Done in by downers and wine

  The bottle still cold on the old walnut dresser

  The metronome still keeping time...

  God give me a pack of Walnettos

  And the Good Book to sermon upon

  Let me burn like a beacon for the weak in the ghettos

  And I'll light those darkies' way home.

  Annie Greengums ate nuthin but veggies

  Rubbed organic oils on her skin

  Wore leg hair and a pair of corrective wedgies

  She had found in the recycling bin...

  God send me a pack of Walnettos

  And the Good Book to sermon upon

  Let me loom like a lamp in the damp and dark ghettos

  And I'll draw those darkies back home.

  Little Lupe learned feminist lingo

  With a lesbian accent to boot

  But she married a ring and a grape-growing gringo

  With weekdays to match every suit.

  Please God just a pack of Walnettos

  And the Good Book to sermon upon

  Like a torch send me forth to scorch out the ghettos

  And I'll hotfoot those darkies on home.

  Brother Memphis hit a St. Louis deli

  For a pig's foot and a handful of change

  Got away on a train with a pain in his belly

  Died next day in Des Moines of ptomaine.

  Dear God a pack of Walnettos

  And the Bible to sermon upon

  Shine like a flash through the trash of the ghettos

  Light all us poor darkies back home.

  FINDING DOCTOR FUNG

  "Oh, by the way," is how the question was usually broached, whenever I encountered anybody able to understand enough English, "have you any information regarding the fate or whereabouts of your nation's renowned philosopher, Dr. Fung Yu-lan?" This usually received pretty much the same response - "Fung Yu Who?" - and usually prompted some wordplay from one of my three American companions, such as "Yoo-hoo, Yu-lan?" when they saw me drop back to quiz some citizen.

  This trio - our magazine editor, the sports photographer, and Bling, the Beijing-born Pittsburgh-raised student of Chinese law - had all concurred days ago that the object of my inquiry was, at his earthly most, a mist from China's bygone glories. At his least, just another hoked-up curiosity in Dr. Time's seamy sideshow - like the Cardiff Giant or D. B. Cooper. The quest did lend a kind of Stanley-looking-for-Livingstone class to our tour, however, so they weren't impatient with my inquiring sidetrips.

  Nor was I discouraged by all the blank stares the name produced. I had learned of the missing doctor only a couple weeks earlier myself, on the trip down from Oregon. Instead of flying down to San Francisco to catch our China Clipper, I decided to drive. I had some back issues of our little literary magazine, Spit in the Ocean, that I hoped I could maybe unload in the Bay Area. A whole packed trunk and backseat full of back issues, to be honest. My swaybacked Mustang whined and hunkered beneath the weight so I left Mt. Nebo a good two days before our plane's departure in case the big load or the long haul should delay her. But the old rag-topped nag covered the 600 miles of dark freeway nearly nonstop, like a filly in her prime. When the dim swoop of the Bay Bridge came into view I still had more than a day and a half before our flight, so I swung off at Berkeley to visit an old minister pal of mine that I hadn't seen since Altamont.

  I had a tougher time locating his church than I expected. I found what I thought was the right backstreet and corner but with the wrong building; that, or the defunct woolen mill which had always seemed so suited to the shaggy flock that my friend shepherded had been completely changed. Instead of a drab cement block there was a cute little church fronted with bright
red brick. Wire-mesh factory windows had been replaced with beautiful stained glass, and where a grimy smokestack once angled up from the roof there was now a copper-spired steeple shining in the morning sun. I wasn't sure it was the same place at all until I walked around back: the tin-roofed garage that served as the minister's rectory was the same ratty rundown trash pile from five years ago.

  The vine-framed door was ajar and I went in. When my tired eyes adjusted to the messy gray gloom I saw the man sound asleep and completely naked on a raised waterbed. The huge plastic bladder was as much a mess as the rest of the room, a Sargasso Sea of clutter, with my friend floating peacefully amid the rest of the flotsam. I gave a bare patch of the gray plastic a slap that sent a shimmying swell coast to coast. I saw consciousness slowly rising to the surface of the bearded face. Finally he raised up on a wobbly elbow, causing books and bottles and beer cans and pizza boxes and tarot cards to undulate around him while he squinted at my face. His hard night had left his eyes redder than my long haul had mine. At length he grunted hello, then flopped right back down and drew a turtleneck sweater sleeve across his brow. I pulled up the nearest orange crate and set down to fill him in on all the Oregon gossip. None of my news got more than an occasional grunt out of him, not until I mentioned the reason I happened to be passing through. This heaved him sitting full up like a seismic wave. "You're going where to cover what?"

  "To Peking. To cover the Chinese Invitational Marathon."

  "To Beijing China? Why Godalmighty, mate, you can find out what has become of Fung Yu-lan!"

  "Who?"

  "Dr. Fung Yu-lan!" the minister cried. "Master Fung Yu-lan! Merely one of the most influential philosophers in the modern mother world! Or was..."

  He waited a moment for that shock wave to subside, then began Australian crawling his way toward the shoreline.

  "I'm not exaggerating. Twenty-five years or so ago Fung was considered the brightest star in the East's philosophical firmament, a beacon for panphenomenalistic voyagers for fifty years! Then, one day, suddenly - foof! nothing. Not the dimmest glimmer. All trace of him blotted out, buried beneath that black cloud known as the Cultural Revolution."

  I told him that it was supposed to be my primary task to cover a live race, not uncover some buried fossil. "At least this is the opinion of the shoe manufacturers who own the sports mag that's sending me to China. I better stick to their schedule. They are footing the bill, so to speak."

  "That doesn't mean you have to toe their line every step of the way, does it?" he demanded. "You can work it into your story. A little extracurricular shouldn't give them any gripe. If it does, tell the capitalistic shoemongers to go bite their tongues. Tell them to look to their soles. Tracking down Fung is more important than some bourgeois bunion derby. And this isn't just any old fossil, this is a rare old fossil! He, he's a - wait! I'll show you what he is."

  The minister released my hand and stepped back up into his waterbed. He waded through the swell to the bedside wall of orange crates he had nailed up for shelves and bookcases. He began pawing among the books, hundreds of books, checking titles, tossing them aside, all the while keeping up a running rap over his shoulder as he searched.

  "Sixty-some years ago the youthful scholar Fung observed that all of his philosophical peers seemed to be either stubbornly stuck in the Eastern camp or obstinately in the Western. The twain of which are never to meet, right? The Transcendental versus the Existential? The bodhisatva digging his belly button under the bo tree as opposed to the bolshevik building bombs in his basement? These opposing camps have been at each other for centuries, like two hardheaded old stags with horns locked, draining each other's energy toward an eventual, and mutual, starvation. Our hero decided that this was not his cup of orange pekoe. Or oolong, either. Yet what other alternatives were being served? It was either go West, young Fung, or go East. Then, one bright day, he caught a fleeting flash of a third possibility, a radically new possibility, perhaps, for the mental mariner to try. Radical enough that even back then Fung knew better than to go blabbing it around established academia, East or West. He would continue to honor those two classic ways of thought, but he resolved that he would never join either camp. Instead, he would dedicate himself to what I term 'The Way of the Bridge.' He would construct an empirical concept that would span those opposite shores of outlook! Some complicated job of construction, right? This dude was Frank Lloyd Wright, Dag Hammarskjold, and Marco Polo all in one -- get the picture?"

  Not very well but I nodded, always impressed by the extent of my friend's rambling expertise.

  "From that day on he has labored at this colossal bridgework. And get this: Fung's family name means 'power to cross a wild stream' - a mythical river of the barbarian tribes of Manchu, to be precise - and his given names mean 'elite friend.' So this bridge-builder's complete monicker means 'Stream-crossing Elite Friend.' Get it? He lived up to the name, too. For nearly half a century this stream-crosser traveled around our globe, lecturing and publishing and teaching. And learning. In the late thirties he guest-chaired a year at Harvard without pay, claiming all he wanted was the chance to learn about our modern Yankee music. The only reward he took back to China was a footlocker full of swing band seventy-eights his students gave him. Ah! Here he is..."

  He had found the volume he was seeking. He waded out of the waterbed's welter, blowing dust from a black leather cover. Back on the floor he opened the book and bent over a random page in reverent silence for a few moments, as oblivious of the ludicrous picture he presented as one of those nude bronze statues of Rodin's. Then he closed the book with a sigh and raised his eyes to mine.

  "It is so goddamn important to me, old buddy, to enlist you wholeheartedly in this cause, that I am going to break one of my most cardinal rules - I am going to loan a hardbound."

  He let his fingers trail across the worn cover a final time, then handed me the book. I carried it to the orange crate nearest a dirty window so I could make out what was left of the gold letters on the spine: The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy. Inside the musty cover I read that the work had been translated by E. R. Hughes of Oxford University and published by Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., of London, England, in 1947. The front flyleaf had an embossing that said the book was the Property of the University of California Library Rare Book Room and the date slip at the back indicated it was nearly sixteen years overdue. While I leafed through the yellowing pages, my friend searched the room for his scattered clothes, talking all the while.

  "You're holding volume three of his four-volume History of Chinese Philosophy, a work that is still considered out there in the forefront of the field. Way out. Revolutionary. Because instead of couching the prose in the customary Mandarin idiom of the elite, Fung wrote in common street vernacular, thereby availing the loftiest thinking in China's incredibly long history of cerebral pursuit to the common coolie! An impertinence that continually had him in Dutch with the Manchu feudalist powers-that-were. But, with what must have been some pretty foxy footwork, Fung was able to keep a step ahead of the ax and maintain his position at the university, and to keep on writing his opus.

  "Then, right in the middle of volume four, the Japs take over Beijing. Naturally a wise old fox teaching Mencius and listening to Glenn Miller is soon seen as a potential thorn in the rump of the Rising Sun. One night after class Fung gets wind that he's in Dutch again, this time with the Japanese. He hurries out of his office. Bootsteps approaching down the front hall. Sentries posted at the rear. Trapped! So, thinking faster than Mr. Moto, Fung borrows a charwoman's babushka and broom and sweeps right past the Nip dragnet sent to snare him. He sweeps on off the campus and right on up to the hills, where he joins Chiang Kai-shek and his band of Chinese resistance fighters.

  "By the end of World War Two he is so highly esteemed by Generalissimo Chiang and the Nationalists that he is made chairman of the Philosophy Department at the U of Beijing - permanent. At last, he thinks, he is in harmony with the mighty song of state! Then, ou
t of nowhere, up to the conductor's podium comes Mao Tse-tung and down goes Chiang's band, and Fung realizes he's out of step again and marching right back toward that old doghouse. Not only has he been tight with the Nationalists, he's also published essays that seem to praise China's feudalistic past. In the eyes of the new regime this is a big strike against him. Worse, he hails from a 'landlord background' and has an 'elitist Mandarin education.' Strikes two and probably three. He's already seen a lot of his colleagues sent to the Shensi cabbage collectives for less. So, thinking fast again, Fung decides to make a move before he's cornered. He writes to Mao personally. He confesses his bourgeois background, sops on the self-criticism, and begs the Honorable Chairman to accept his resignation - 'I feel it is in the best interests of our great country and your mighty revolution et cetera that I resign my chair here at the university and go to work on a rural commune, to better acquaint myself with the glorious roots of socialism.' Didn't I tell you he was - oops, watch it - foxy?"

  I looked up from the book almost in time to catch the card table he had knocked over trying to hop into his too-tight Levi's. Pens and pencils and paper clips scattered among the peanut shells and paper cups on the floor. He kept right on hopping and rapping. "As you might imagine, with that kind of hat-in-hand approach, it wasn't long before Fung was back at his position at the university - simultaneously teaching his new works and at the same time denouncing his older efforts as mere maunderings of a misled mind. Mainly trying to keep his profile low and that doghouse distant, if you get the picture."

  I nodded again. I actually was beginning to get a picture of the man behind all this fancy scrimshaw of history, an image faint but fascinating.

  "Then the old maestro, Papa Mao, begins to lose his grip on the podium, not all at once but enough that Mama Mao and her quartet can grab the baton. And, merciful God, the tune that they strike up! It's so erratic and discordant and downright heartlessly juggernaut cruel that even old Fung the Fox can't figure how to stay out of its way. It's like a thundercloud of noise and confusion blasting out in all directions, a poisonous black cloud, boiling with terrible bolts of power and gouts of gore and shrieks of agony, rolling bigger and blacker until it closes over all China, over art and music and the modern sciences, over the poor nation's history as well as its future, and over Dr. Fung Yu-lan."