Demon Box

I realized what it was then, to some extent. There was somebody else with him, standing near at the other end of the line so he was grooming his voice for more than just his gra

"In fact it could be your night to party as well. Better throw some stuff in a sack."

After we hung up I was in a kind of dither to think who. I started to turn my program back up, but it was the ad for denture stickum where the middle-aged ni

I picked up Emerson T's field glasses from my sill and took them out of their leather case. They're army glasses but Emery wasn't in the army; when they wouldn't let him be a chaplain he became a conscientious objector. He won the glasses at Bingo. I like to use them to watch the passenger trains arrive Monday nights, but there isn't much to watch of a Friday noon. Just that new clover-leaf, smoking around in circles and, O, whyever had I let him make me say yes? I could still hear my pulse rushing around his words in my ears. I turned the glasses rear-way-round and looked for a while that way, to try to make my heart slow its pit-a-pat (nope, it hadn't been Betsy or Buddy, nor none of his usual bunch that I could think of offhand), when, without so much as a by-your-leave or a kiss-my-foot, there, right at my elbow, sucking one of my taffy-babies and blinking those blood-rare eyes of hers up at me was that dadblessed Miss Lawn!

"Why Mrs. Whittier -"

Made me jump like a frog. Her eyes, mainly. Vin rose bloodshot. She puts away as much as a quart before lunch somedays; she told me so herself. "- don't you realize you are looking through the wrong end again?" She shuffles from foot to foot in those gum-rubber slippers she wears then, in a breath that would take the bristles off a hog, she coos "I heard your television go off, then when it didn't come back on I was worried something might be the matter…?"

She wears those things for just that purpose, too: slipping. I know for a fact that as soon as she hears my toilet flush or one of my pill bottles rattle she slips into her bathroom to see if my medicine cabinet is left open. Our bathrooms are back-to-back and the razor-blade disposal slot in her medicine cabinet lines right up with the razor-blade disposal slot on my medicine cabinet, and if she don't watch out one of these days I'm going to take a fingernail file and put one of those poor bloodshot eyeballs out of its misery. Not actually. We're old acquaintances, actually. Associates. Old maids and widows of a feather. I tell her if she must know I turned it off to talk over the telephone.

"I thought I heard it ring," she says. "I wondered if it might be Good Book Bob dialing you for dollars again."

Once KHVN phoned and asked me who it was said "My stroke is heavier than my groaning." I remembered it was Job because the Book of Job was the only book of the Bible Uncle Dicker ever read aloud to me (he claimed it was to help me reconcile my disfigurement but I personally think it was because of him constantly suffering from his rupture), and when I answered right and won forty dollars and a brass mado

"Well, it was not Good Book Bob," I assure her, "it was my grandson."

"The famous one?"

I just nodded and snapped the field glasses away in their case. "He's coming in a special bus this afternoon to take his grandmother to a big surprise party everybody's giving her." I admit I was rubbing it in a bit but I swear she can aggravate a person. "I'll probably be away to the festivities all evening," I says.

"And miss Reverend Poll's special service? and the donuts and the Twylight Towers Trio? Mrs. Whittier, you must be delirious!"

I told her I was attending another service, and instead of those soggy donuts was having a fantastic cake. But I didn't have the heart to Lord it over her about the Sounding Brass, though. Them eyes were already going from red to green like traffic lights. In the entire year and a half she's lived in the apartment next door I believe the only visits she's had from the outside is Jehovah's Witnesses. I says, I am, Miss Lawn: dee-lirious, and that I was going to have myself a good long hot soak in Sardo before I popped with delirium. So, if she would excuse-a pliz -- and went strutting into the bathroom without another word.

I like Miss Lawn well enough. We went to the same church for years and got along just fine, except her seeming a little snooty. I reckoned that came from her being a Lawn of the Lawn's Sand & Gravel Lawns, a rich old Oregon family and very high society around Eugene. It wasn't till Urban Renewal forced her to follow me to the Towers that I realized what a lonesome soul she actually was. And jealous… she can't hardly stand how people make over me. She says the way people make over me you'd think I was the only one in the building. I always say, Ah, now, I don't know about that, but I am glad people like me. Well, she says, they ought to like me; I never done anything to make people dislike me! I say, All I do is try and be nice and she says, Yeah, but you're too nice with them, gushy, whether they're good folks or bad; if I had to get friends by being too gushy like that I don't want 'em. Actually, I'm pretty snippy with people, but I say, Yeah, well, if you're go

Forlorn old frog; what other world could she expect with that kind of outlook? Like Papa used to say: It's all in how you hold your mouth. Oh well, I don't know. A little later I called out to her that there was a bottle of cold wine in my Frigidaire.

I filled my tub just as steaming hot as I could stand and got in. The Sounding Brass! The last and of course only other time I'd been fortunate enough to hear them was after Lena left home to marry Daniel. I got so blue that Emerson drove me back to Arkansas for a family reunion and on the way back through Colorado took me to the Sunrise Service at the Garden of the Gods where the Brass family absolutely stole the show. Afterwards Emery became the Deacon Emerson Thoreau Whittier and traveled to a lot of religious shindigs. I usually begged off accompanying him; somebody needs to keep track of the farm, I'd say. After the house burned and we moved into town I came up with other excuses. Like Emerson's driving being so uncertain that it gave me the hiccups. Which it did. But it wasn't just that, nor just cars. It's anything scurrying around, helter and yon; get here, get there; trains, buses, airplanes, what-all. Right this minute my lawyers tell me I am taking a loss of sixty-five dollars a month on my gas check simply by putting off journeying to Little Rock to sign some papers in person. But I don't know. Consider the lilies, I say, they toil not, speaking of which I hear my Frigidaire door slam as Miss Lawn got over her snit in the other room, then the lid of my cut-crystal candy dish, then my television came back on. The poor old frog. When I finally finished my rinse and come out in my robe it was still on, blaring. Miss Lawn was gone, though, as was most of the candy I'd pla