Practical Demonkeeping (2 page)

“C'mon out, you fucking clowns.”

Someone crawled out of the passenger side. It looked like a child—no, thicker—a dwarf.

The Breeze blew on. “Bring a tire iron, you little shit. You'll need it.”

“Wrong,” said the dwarf, the voice was low and gravely.

The Breeze pulled up and squinted into the headlights. It wasn't a dwarf, it was a big dude, a giant. Huge, getting bigger as it moved toward him. Too fast. The Breeze turned and started to run. He got three steps before the jaws clamped over his head and shoulders, crunching through his bones as if they were peppermint sticks.

 

When the Chevy pulled back onto the highway, the only thing left of The Breeze was a single fluorescent-yellow deck shoe. It would be a fleeting mystery to passers-by for two days until a hungry crow carried it away. No one would notice that there was still a foot inside.

All mystical experience is coincidence;

and vice versa, of course.

—Tom Stoppard,
Jumpers

The village of Pine Cove lay in a coastal pine forest just south of the great Big Sur wilderness area, on a small natural harbor. The village was established in the 1880s by a dairy farmer from Ohio who found verdant hills around the cove provided perfect fodder for his cows. The settlement, such as it was—two families and a hundred cows—went nameless until the 1890s, when the whalers came to town and christened it Harpooner's Cove.

With a cove to shelter their small whaling boats and the hills from which they could sight the migrating gray whales far out to sea, the whalers prospered and the village grew. For thirty years a greasy haze of death blew overhead from the five-hundred-gallon rendering pots where thousands of whales were boiled down to oil.

When the whale population dwindled and electricity and kerosene became an alternative to whale oil, the whalers abandoned Harpooner's Cove, leaving behind mountains of whale bone and the rusting hulks of their rendering kettles. To this day many of the town's driveways are lined with the bleached arches of whale
ribs, and even now, when the great gray whales pass, they rise out of the water a bit and cast a suspicious eye toward the little cove, as if expecting the slaughter to begin again.

After the whalers left, the village survived on cattle ranching and the mining of mercury, which had been discovered in the nearby hills. The mercury ran out about the same time the coastal highway was completed through Big Sur, and Harpooner's Cove became a tourist town.

Passers-through who wanted a little piece of California's burgeoning tourist industry but didn't want to deal with the stress of life in San Francisco or Los Angeles, stopped and built motels, souvenir shops, restaurants, and real estate offices. The hills around Pine Cove were subdivided. Pine forests and pastures became ocean-view lots, sold for a song to tourists from California's central valley who wanted to retire on the coast.

Again the village grew, populated by retirees and young couples who eschewed the hustle of the city to raise their children in a quiet coastal town. Harpooner's Cove became a village of the newly wed and the nearly dead.

In the 1960s the young, environmentally conscious residents decided that the name Harpooner's Cove hearkened back to a time of shame for the village and that the name Pine Cove was more appropriate to the quaint, bucolic image the town had come to depend on. And so, with the stroke of a pen and the posting of a sign—
WELCOME TO PINE COVE, GATEWAY TO BIG SUR
—history was whitewashed.

The business district was confined to an eight-block section of Cypress Street, which ran parallel to the coast highway. Most of the buildings on Cypress sported facades of English Tudor half-timbering, which made Pine Cove an anomaly among the coastal communities of California with their predominantly Spanish-Moorish architecture. A few of the original structures still stood, and these, with their raw timbers and feel of the Old West, were a thorn in the side of the Chamber of Commerce, who played on the village's English look to promote tourism.

In a half-assed attempt at thematic consistency, several pseudo-authentic, Ole English restaurants opened along Cypress Street to
lure tourists with the promise of tasteless English cuisine. (There had even been an attempt by one entrepreneur to establish an authentic English pizza place, but the enterprise was abandoned with the realization that boiled pizza lost most of its character.)

Pine Cove's locals avoided patronage of these restaurants with the duplicity of a Hindu cattle rancher: willing to reap the profits without sampling the product. Locals dined at the few, out-of-the-way cafes that were content with carving a niche out of the hometown market with good food and service rather than gouging an eye out of the swollen skull of the tourist market with overpriced, pretentious charm.

The shops along Cypress Street were functional only in that they moved money from the pockets of the tourists into the local economy. From the standpoint of the villagers, there was nothing of practical use for sale in any of the stores. For the tourist, immersed in the oblivion of vacation spending, Cypress Street provided a bonanza of curious gifts to prove to the folks back home that they had been somewhere. Somewhere where they had obviously forgotten that soon they would return home to a mortgage, dental bills, and an American Express bill that would descend at the end of the month like a financial Angel of Death.

And they bought. They bought effigies of whales and sea otters carved in wood, cast in plastic, brass, or pewter, stamped on key chains, printed on postcards, posters, book covers, and condoms. They bought all sorts of useless junk imprinted with:
Pine Cove, Gateway to Big Sur
, from bookmarks to bath soap.

Over the years it became a challenge to the Pine Cove shopowners to come up with an item so tacky that it would not sell. Gus Brine, owner of the local general store, suggested once at a Chamber of Commerce meeting that the merchants, without compromising their high standards, might put cow manure into jars, imprint the label with
Pine Cove, Gateway to Big Sur
, and market it as authentic gray whale feces. As often happens with matters of money, the irony of Brine's suggestion was lost, a motion was carried, a plan was laid, and if it had not been for a lack of volunteers to do the actual packaging, the shelves of Cypress
Street would have displayed numbered, limited-edition jars of
Genuine Whale Waste
.

The residents of Pine Cove went about their work of fleecing the tourists with a slow, methodical resolve that involved more waiting than activity. Life, in general, was slow in Pine Cove. Even the wind that came in off the Pacific each evening crept slowly through the trees, allowing the villagers ample time to bring in wood and stoke their fires against the damp cold. In the morning, down on Cypress Street, the
Open
signs flipped with a languid disregard for the times posted on the doors. Some shops opened early, some late, and some not at all, especially if it was a nice day for a walk on the beach. It was as if the villagers, having found their little bit of peace, were waiting for something to happen.

And it did.

 

Around midnight on the night that The Breeze disappeared, every dog in Pine Cove began barking. During the following fifteen minutes, shoes were thrown, threats were made, and the sheriff was called and called again. Wives were beaten, pistols were loaded, pillows were pounded, and Mrs. Feldstein's thirty-two cats simultaneously coughed up hairballs on her porch. Blood pressure went up, aspirin was opened, and Milo Tobin, the town's evil developer, looked out the front window to see his young neighbor, Rosa Cruz, in the nude, chasing twin Pomeranians around her front yard. The strain was too much for his chain-smoker's heart, and he flopped on the floor like a fish and died.

On another hill, Van Williams, the tree surgeon, had reached the limit of his patience with his neighbors, a family of born-again dog breeders whose six Labrador retrievers barked all night long with or without supernatural provocation. With his professional-model chain saw he dropped a hundred-foot Monterey pine tree on their new Dodge Evangeline van.

A few minutes later, a family of raccoons who normally roamed the streets of Pine Cove breaking into garbage cans, were taken, temporarily, with a strange sapience and ignored their normal activities to steal the stereo out of the ruined van and install it in their den that lay in the trunk of a hollow tree.

An hour after the cacophony began, it stopped. The dogs had delivered their message, and as it goes in cases where dogs warn of coming earthquakes, tornadoes, or volcanic eruptions, the message was completely misconstrued. What was left the next morning was a very sleepy, grumpy village brimming with lawsuits and insurance claims, but without a single clue that something was coming.

 

At six that morning a cadre of old men gathered outside the general store to discuss the events of the night before, never once letting their ignorance of what had happened interfere with a good bull session.

A new, four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the small parking lot, and Augustus Brine crawled out, jangling his huge key ring as if it were a talisman of power sent down by the janitor god. He was a big man, sixty years old, white haired and bearded, with shoulders like a mountain gorilla. People alternately compared him to Santa Claus and the Norse god Odin.

“Morning, boys,” Brine grumbled to the old men, who gathered behind him as he unlocked the door and let them into the dark interior of Brine's Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines. As he switched on the lights and started brewing the first two pots of his special, secret, dark-roast coffee, Brine was assaulted by a salvo of questions.

“Gus, did you hear the dogs last night?”

“We heard a tree went down on your hill. You hear anything about it?”

“Can you brew some decaf? Doctor says I've got to cut the caffeine.”

“Bill thinks it was a bitch in heat started the barking, but it was all over town.”

“Did you get any sleep? I couldn't get back to sleep.”

Brine raised a big paw to signal that he was going to speak, and the old men fell silent. It was like that every morning: Brine arrived in the middle of a discussion and was immediately elected to the role of expert and mediator.

“Gentlemen, the coffee's on. In regard to the events of last night, I must claim ignorance.”

“You mean it didn't wake you up?” Jim Whatley asked from under the brim of a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap.

“I retired early last night with two lovely teenage bottles of cabernet, Jim. Anything that happened after that did so without my knowledge or consent.”

Jim was miffed with Brine's detachment. “Well, every goddamn dog in town started barking last night like the end of the world was coming.”

“Dogs bark,” Brine stated. He left off the “big deal”—it was understood from his tone.

“Not every dog in town. Not all at once. George thinks it's supernatural or something.”

Brine raised a white eyebrow toward George Peters, who stood by the coffee machine sporting a dazzling denture grin. “And what, George, leads you to the conclusion that the cause of this disturbance was supernatural?”

“Woke up with a hard-on for the first time in twenty years. It got me right up. I thought I'd rolled over on the flashlight I keep by the bed for midnight emergencies.”

“How were the batteries, Georgie?” someone interjected.

“I tried to wake up the wife. Whacked her on the leg with it just to get her attention. I told her the bear was charging and I have one bullet left.”

“And?” Brine filled the pause.

“She told me to put some ice on it to make the swelling go down.”

“Well,” Brine said, stroking his beard, “that certainly sounds like a supernatural experience to me.” He turned to the rest of the group and announced his judgment. “Gents, I agree with George. As with Lazarus rising from the dead, this unexplained erection is hard evidence of the supernatural at work. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have cash customers to attend to.”

The last remark was not meant as a dig toward the old men, whom Brine allowed to drink coffee all day free of charge. Augustus Brine had long ago won their loyalty, and it would have
been absurd for any one of them to think of going anywhere else to purchase wine, or cheese, or bait, or gasoline, even though Brine's prices were a good thirty percent higher than the Thrifty-Mart down the street.

Could the pimple-faced clerks at the Thrifty-Mart give advice on which bait was best for rock cod, a recipe for an elegant dill sauce for that same fish, recommend a fine wine to complement the meal, and at the same time ask after the well-being of every family member for three generations by name? They could not! And therein lay the secret of Augustus Brine's ability to run a successful business based entirely on the patronage of locals in an economy catering to tourists.

Brine made his way to the counter, where an attractive woman in a waitress apron awaited, impatiently worrying a five-dollar bill.

“Five dollars worth of unleaded, Gus.” She thrust the bill at Brine.

“Rough night, Jenny?”

“Does it show?” Jenny made a show of fixing her shoulder-length auburn hair and smoothing her apron.

“A safe assumption, only,” Brine said with a smile that revealed teeth permanently stained by years of coffee and pipe smoke. “The boys tell me there was a citywide disturbance last night.”

“Oh, the dogs. I thought it was just my neighborhood. I didn't get to sleep until four in the morning, then the phone rang and woke me up.”

“I heard about you and Robert splitting up,” Brine said.

“Did someone send out a newsletter or something? We've only been separated a few days.” Irritation put an unattractive rasp in her voice.

“It's a small town,” Brine said softly. “I wasn't trying to be nosy.”

“I'm sorry, Gus. It's just the lack of sleep. I'm so tired I was hallucinating on the way down here. I thought I heard Wayne Newton singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.'”

“Maybe you did.”

“The music was coming from a pine tree. I'm telling you, I've been a basket case all week.”

Brine reached across the counter and patted her hand. “The only constant in this life is change, but that doesn't mean it's easy. Give yourself a break.”

Just then Vance McNally, the local ambulance driver, burst through the door. The radio on his belt made a sizzling sound as if he'd just stepped out of a deep fryer. “Guess who vapor locked last night?” he said, obviously hoping that no one would know.

Everyone turned and waited for his announcement. Vance basked in their attention for a moment to confirm his self-importance. “Milo Tobin,” he said, finally.

“The evil developer?” George asked.

“That's him. Sometime around midnight. We just bagged him,” Vance said to the group. Then to Brine, “Can I get a pack of Marlboros?”