Practical Demonkeeping

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