UP
JUMPS
THE
DEVIL
MICHAEL POORE
DEDICATION
for Mom and Bill
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1. The Wonderful, Terrible Show
2. The Village
3. The Death of Dan Paul Overfield
4. The Devil’s Unusual Constitution
5. Soulful Cats at the Crossroads
6. Wildness, Kindness, and War
7. The Excellent Mr. Scratch, a Patron of Science
8. Favorite Foods and Good and Evil
9. How God Stole the Devil’s Girlfriend
10. Bluesmen
11. Homes and Gardens in Egypt
12. Fish at the Helen of Troy
13. The Problem with Freezing People
14. Jenna Steele’s Public Bad-Girl Avatar
15. American Werewolf
16. The Chicago Office
17. Down the Rabbit Hole
18. Dreams of Fire and Blood
19. O Pioneers!
20. Taco Restaurant Detox
21. April Michael
22. Daughterry and the Devil Make a Bet
23. Jenna’s Live Multimedia Near Suicide
24. Some Kind of Cult Rip-Off
25. Showbiz in the Time of the Black Death
26. People Don’t Have to Take Your Shit If You Don’t Have Any Money
27. We’ll Always Have Rome
28. The Car Wreck Song
29. Like Having a Psychic Heart
30. Fish in Prison
31. Cutters for Jenna
32. Revelation Ninja
33. The Coma Channel
34. “It’s That President-of-France Guy Again!”
35. Fish Is Raptured or Something
36. Rising and Vanishing Almost Politely
37. Those Games Are About Jesus
38. An Already Pretty Embarrassing Life
39. His Big Season Opener
40. The Devil Goes to Prison
41. Pocahontas
42. A Silence Encompassing a Thousand Hundred Years
43. The Shining Moment
44. The World Without a Rebel Angel
45. The Colony
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1.
The Wonderful, Terrible Show
Dayton, Ohio, 2005
JOHN SCRATCH LOOKED LIKE the Devil.
His fans said so. The All-Celebrity News Channel said so, too.
He climbed from his limo, zipping his pants.
Just as the door closed, cameras flashed on a pair of long, naked legs on leather upholstery.
Cameras swarmed John Scratch as he crossed a street in a low-rent suburb, walked across an unmowed yard to a house with peeling paint, and rang the doorbell.
Cameras rolled while he waited, black ponytail shining.
SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE watched John Scratch ring the doorbell a second time. While they waited, between snacks, they repeated what they’d read on the celebrity blogs.
“If the Devil’s here on Earth, you know this show’s exactly what he’d be doing.”
“But he seems nice.”
“Are you high? You couldn’t be nice and do this show.”
“He looks Italian.”
“He looks like he’s from Argentina.”
“Like you know what someone from Argentina looks like. Besides, he’s an American.”
“How do you know that?”
Shrug. “Everyone knows the Devil’s an American.”
The door opened, and there stood tonight’s guests.
The guests were always different, and always kind of the same. They might be rich or poor. They were always surprised by the lights and cameras. They always seemed a little scared of John Scratch, whom they recognized because, like everyone, they had seen his show. His wonderful, terrible show.
Tonight’s guests were a husband and wife in their thirties. The man wore a tank top and had eyes like knives. He wore the tired, peevish look of a man who had peaked early, maybe in high school. The woman wore a Tweety Bird sweatshirt and a pound of eye makeup. She looked like the kind of woman who enjoyed talking about people behind their backs.
They were in love, though. The TV audience could see it in the way they answered the door like one person with two heads, leaning on each other a little.
John Scratch had come to make them an offer. That’s what his TV show was for.
He offered them five million dollars to move far away and never see each other again.
They laughed, at first.
Then they both got the same exact haunted look.
“I wouldn’t do it,” said some of the sixty million viewers.
“I would,” said others.
“Then something’s wrong with you!”
“Something’s wrong with you!”
That’s how people watched the show.
On-screen, the man and woman talked. Together, first, then one at a time.
They fought, shouting, together.
She agreed to the offer.
He did not. Red-faced, he seized her by the elbow and said something the microphones couldn’t catch. When she twisted away, stumbling, he lunged for John Scratch and had to be restrained.
The airwaves smash-cut to a commercial, and the crew retreated across the street.
JOHN SCRATCH WAS almost to the limo when the live audience around him began to shout and boil. At first it seemed as if they were excited about something.
No. Their voices were fearful.
Someone was pushing his way toward him. Bodyguards and cameras staggered and went down.
It was a mountain in a ski mask and gloves, holding a pistol in both hands.
John Scratch didn’t look at the pistol; he looked at the big man’s eyes. They were angry, but they were mostly frightened. They were complicated eyes. Like the eyes of the couple John Scratch had just destroyed, they were haunted.
They were also familiar.
John Scratch appeared to relax.
He looked up at the man the way you look up at a friend, and said, “It’s going to be okay.”
The man aimed his pistol and shot John Scratch six times.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
On camera, it looked so cool, the way the limo door opened right behind John Scratch, and swallowed him up.
No one saw what became of the big man in the mask.
The limo raced for the hospital.
“Jesus, Johnny!” said his backseat companion, former child-star-turned-bad-girl recording artist Jenna Steele.
“Hand me those napkins,” he said, coughing blood. “I’m trying not to bleed on the leather.”
He’d been shot before. In fact, there were very few things that had not happened to him, because John Scratch really was the Devil.
The actual Devil. In a limo with Jenna Steele, a bag of Mexican weed, and six bullets in him.
He was an American, too. The fans and blogs were right about that.
He had been an American for a very long time.
2.
The Village
Providence Bay, 1623
THE DEVIL HADN’T WANTED to be an American, at first.
Not the new kind, anyway. The white kind, with their ships and Bibles, who called themselves “English.”
He much preferred the forest dwellers. He had lived among the Yellow Earth People, hunted with the Big Belly People, and farmed with the Corn People. He had traded with the Big Voice People, and with the Yellow Earth People after they were driven of
f by the Corn People and became the People Who Wander.
He had been happiest among the Falling Water People, in the South. It was easy to grow sleepy and content in their world, with its endless woods and great rivers. More like Eden than Eden had been.
Then the big wooden ships appeared, like houses on the water. White men stomped ashore, and built a fort they called Jamestown. The Devil moved north to get away from them, joining the Morning People, who lived near the sea where the sun first touched the land. But the big ships came there, too. Before he could say “Hell” they had popped ashore and made a fort. And then a village.
The Devil watched them from the forest, smoking mice in his corncob pipe, scratching his wooden head.
If the white people had a plan, he observed over time, it was this:
Come ashore, build a fort, and starve to death in it.
“People like this can’t amount to much,” muttered the Devil.
The Jamestown whites had been stupid, too. They had dug for gold instead of planting food.
“Stupid,” observed the warriors among the Morning People, who attacked the fort and came back all shot up, “but with fabulous weapons!”
“They’ll have to go,” said the Devil.
THE ENGLISH WHO landed in the North called themselves “Pilgrims.” They learned faster than the Jamestown bunch. By the third spring, they learned how to plant food and store it so it didn’t run out in winter, and how to cut back the woods to give them room to shoot at the Indians.
The Jamestown bunch had been allergic to work.
Thinking about Jamestown, the Devil couldn’t help thinking about Pocahontas.
He tried not to think about Pocahontas.
ONE NIGHT, THE Devil smudged himself with black war paint, and snuck out of the woods, uphill, across the cow pasture, glistening with midnight dew, until he stood among the sleeping cows.
He awakened them with a soft, seductive “Moo.”
“Moo,” answered the cows, and trudged over to have their backs scratched.
Animals either loved or hated the Devil, just as they loved or hated other animals. Cows loved him.
Loved him, as it happened, to a degree the Pilgrims would have found shocking. One by one they turned their hind parts to him, and the Devil satisfied them, one by one.
The Devil was—always had been—a generous and undiscriminating lover. The old bull, Palestine, came thundering up to protest, stopped when he recognized the Devil, and thundered off again lest the Devil mistake him for something he wasn’t.
IN THE MORNING, the cows wandered in and were milked behind the pasture shed. Pilgrim women and children, dressed in black, crouched beside them like crows. The milk filled wooden buckets, steaming in the morning chill, and the buckets were carried indoors.
The Devil, like the Pilgrims, became crowlike. He roosted in the thatch atop the blacksmith’s forge, and cast a dark eye all around. He tried not to think about Pocahontas. She wouldn’t have understood.
The Pilgrims did as they were used to doing. Some of them shouldered their blunderbuss guns and took to the woods a-hunting. Others tended gardens. Their leaders gathered by the creek, arguing about whether to build a mill and a waterwheel, and about whether it was a sin to put berries in porridge.
“Everything can’t be a sin, Elder Mather,” said one.
“Life itself is a sin, Miles,” said Elder Mather, the minister. “Original sin.”
And someone else said, “Balls!” and another someone said, “Language, John,” and Miles said they needed to strengthen the fort before they thought about luxuries like waterwheels. To which John replied that if a wheel and mill were a luxury, then eating must be a luxury, to which Miles replied that not getting eaten by Indians would be a luxury, too, if they didn’t watch out.
Meanwhile, from the houses round about came a general mutter of discontent, and by and by the wives came out into the little lane between their homes.
William, Miles, John, and the other notables marched over to see what was the matter.
“The butter won’t come,” said the minister’s wife, Jenny Mather.
The other wives echoed this complaint. It didn’t matter how they knocked about with the paddle, neither butter nor buttermilk would form.
“You’re stirring too fast,” suggested John.
John’s wife suggested that she had been churning butter for thirty years and knew how fast to stir.
“It’s too warm,” said Miles, and was ignored.
“Something frightened the cows, perhaps,” said Elder Mather.
“The wind!” someone suggested.
“Wolves!” said another.
The wives sighed and went about other chores.
“Frightened, indeed,” muttered Jenny Mather, who had green eyes like a cat. She gave the pasture and the woods a long, hard look, and headed home to do the spinning.
THE NEXT DAY and the next, no butter came.
It was a hard thing, for these new Americans. Butter was one of their few comforts.
The Devil put on his best gopher-skin leggings and went to trade furs inside the fort. The Pilgrims preferred to trade with Indians who had been baptized. They called them “Praying Indians.” So a lot of the Morning People, including the Devil, got baptized in order to do business.
“Who’s there?” asked the guard at the gate.
“A brother in Christ,” said the Devil, and the gate opened.
Between transactions, he played softly upon his fiddle, Old Ripsaw, and surveyed the village with a secret eye. The Pilgrims seemed glum, distracted, like a holiday turned inside out.
Good.
The blacksmith, who came to trade a hatchet for a sack of fox hides, was a quiet man to begin with, and practically mute today. His thoughts were elsewhere, and the Devil easily cheated him two whole furs.
“What’s wrong?” he asked Giles Dorrit, a fisherman. “Bad weather coming?”
“The butter won’t come,” growled Giles. “This beaver fur has a hole in it.”
The Devil explained that beavers had holes for breathing underwater. Giles shrugged, and paid full price in dried mackerel.
It wasn’t so much that there was no butter to eat, the Devil understood. Religion and superstition were much the same, and cows that gave no butter meant evil was afoot.
A few months of this might see them on their way, the Devil thought, kneeling to gather his stock and profits.
But a shadow fell over him, and he looked up into Jenny Mather’s cat-green eyes.
“The butter,” said Jenny Mather, “would come again soon enough if you left the cows alone.”
It was an inconvenient fact that some folks had eyes to see strange things, and the Devil was sometimes recognized.
“You wouldn’t need to worry about me or the cows,” he answered, rising, “if you were to load them on ships and sail back to England.”
Jenny Mather was a handsome woman. The Devil looked at her down the length of his wooden nose and felt a powerful twitching all over his skin, and when Jenny Mather said, “If you leave the cows alone, I’ll kiss you,” he found himself saying, “Deal.”
They slipped into the curing shed, where fifteen hams and a steer hung from the beams, and Jenny kissed the Devil deep and slow.
The Devil, gambling that a bargain for a kiss might go further, once begun, was breathless and disappointed when she pulled away and was gone without so much as a squeeze.
Still.
The Devil could cheat and the Devil could lie, but a deal was a deal.
He’d miss the cows.
The butter came back, and the glumness and the superstition faded, and things were much as they had been. The Devil watched it all from an apple tree, disappointed with himself and smoking baby birds like crazy.
SPRING TURNED TO summer. The fort grew. The trees retreated before the Pilgrims’ axes, and the hunters foraged deeper than ever into the woods.
The Pilgrims had brought disease with them, and
Indians died. Lots of them.
The Devil resolved once again to be rid of the English.
This time his eye fell on the children.
He entered the children’s dreams one night and whispered to them, then crouched behind the henhouse to await morning.
At dawn, the hunters went a-hunting. The notables gathered by the well, arguing about whether to send to England for a gunsmith.
“There’s Indian sign on the deer trails,” said John, who knew a man who knew a man who’d been skinned alive in Virginia.
“The Indians are dead,” spat Miles. “Mostly.”
“But the ones who are not,” said Elder Mather, “are desperate and afraid, and may pool their numbers to attack. I think we’ll always have Indians, in great numbers or not, which begs the question of the gunsmith.”
Indians prowled their dreams. They were in the closets and under the beds. Indians were blamed for everything from dull razors to spiders in the firewood.
Down in the lane between houses, a column of children appeared.
The arguing notables fell silent all at once, and stared.
Not a passel of children or a mob, but a column, as if they were soldiers. Ten children? Thirty? It looked like all the children in the village, from Molly Fellberry (young for thirteen) to tiny Abigail Fetters, less than two.
There was something disquietingly unchildlike about them. The men discerned an unnatural wisdom about their eyes, something otherworldly in the way they marched without making a sound.
This strange column turned left at the stockade gate, and filed in silence out of the fort.
The notables, followed by a number of wives and some fishermen, found the children stopped in two neat rows, like a choir, just this side of the pasture fence, staring at the woods below the hill. The adults looked at the children, then looked at one another. They were reaching for the children when the children began, all at once, to speak.
The children described the future as if it were something that had visited them in their sleep. They pointed at the woods as they spoke, because the woods were west, and the future was west.
They said that the Indians would die of mumps and pox and tooth decay, and other white diseases.
They told how the new country, starting right here in their churchy little village, would grow up rooted in blood and gold and slavery.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 1