Practical Demonkeeping

demon said, shaking his head.
    Travis surveyed the steam rising from the radiator and wondered whether he might not have been a little hasty in giving way to his anger. “Can you get it out of the ditch?”
    “Piece of cake.” The demon hoisted the front of the car and began to walk it up onto the berm . “But you’re not going to get far without a new radiator.”
    “Oh, you’re all of a sudden an expert mechanic. Mr. help-me-I-can’t-change-the-channel-while-the-magic-fingers-is-on all of a sudden has a degree in automotive diagnostics?”
    “Well, what do you think?”
    “I think there’s a town just ahead where we can get it fixed. Didn’t you read that sign you bounced off of?” It was a dig. Travis knew the demon couldn’t read; in fact, he often watched subtitled movies with the sound off just to irritate Catch.
    “What’s it say?”
    “It says, ‘Pine Cove, five miles.’ That’s where we’re going. I think we can limp the car five miles with a bad radiator. If not, you can push.”
    “You run over me and wreck the car and I get to push?”
    “Correct,” Travis said, crawling back through the car window.
    “At your command, master,” Catch said sarcastically.
    Travis tried the ignition. The car whined and died. “It won’t start. Get behind and push.”
    “Okay,” Catch said. He went around to the back of the car, put his shoulder to the bumper, and began pushing it the rest of the way out of the ditch. “But pushing cars is very hungry work.”

4
ROBERT
    Robert Masterson had drunk a gallon of red wine, most of a five-liter Coors minikeg , and a half-pint of tequila, and still the dream came.
    A desert. A big, bright, sandy bastard. The Sahara. He is naked, tied to a chair with barbed wire. Before him is a great canopied bed covered in black satin. Under the cool shade of the canopy his wife, Jennifer, is making love to a stranger—a young, muscular, dark-haired man. Tears run down Robert’s cheeks and crystallize into salt. He cannot close his eyes or turn away. He tries to scream, but every time he opens his mouth a squat, lizardlike monster, the size of a chimpanzee, shoves a saltine cracker into his mouth. The heat and the pain in his chest are agonizing. The lovers are oblivious to his pain. The little reptile man tightens the barbed wire around his chest by twisting a stick. Every time he sobs, the wire cuts deeper. The lovers turn to him in slow motion, maintaining their embrace. They wave to him, a big home-movie wave, postcard smiles. Greetings from the heart of anguish .
    Awake, the dream-pain in his chest replaced by a real pain in his head. Light is the enemy. It’s out there waiting for you to open your eyes. No. No way.
    Thirst—brave the light to slake the thirst—it must be done.
    He opened his eyes to a dim, forgiving light. Must be cloudy out. He looked around. Pillows, full ashtrays, empty wine bottles, a chair, a calendar from the wrong year with a picture of a surfer riding a huge swell, pizza boxes. This wasn’t home. He didn’t live like this. Humans don’t live like this.
    He was on someone’s couch. Where?
    He sat up and waited in vertigo until his brain snapped back into his head, which it did with a vengeful impact. Ah, yes, he knew where he was. This was Hangover—Hangover,
California
. Pine Cove, where he was thrown out of the house by his wife. Heartbreak,
California
.
    Jenny, call Jenny. Tell her that humans don’t live this way. No one lives this way. Except The Breeze. He was in The Breeze’s trailer.
    He looked around for water. There was the kitchen, fourteen miles away, over there at the end of the couch. Water was in the kitchen.
    He crawled naked off the couch, across the floor of the kitchen to the sink, and pulled himself up. The faucet was gone, or at least buried under a stack of dirty dishes. He reached into an opening, cautiously searching for the faucet like a diver reaching into an underwater crevice for a moray eel. Plates skidded down the pile and crashed on the floor. He looked at the china shards scattered around his knees and spotted the mirage of a Coors minikeg . He managed a controlled fall toward the mirage and his hand struck the nozzle. It was real. Salvation: hair of the dog in a handy, five-liter disposable package.
    He started to drink from the nozzle and instantly filled his mouth, throat, sinuses, aural cavity, and chest hair with foam.
    “Use a glass,” Jenny would say. “What are you, an animal?” He