There would be a race of retarded people called Rednecks, kept like a national pet. There would be schools like factories, factories like prisons, and prisons like cities. There would be a machine like an eye, which would talk to people and show them pictures, and people would do whatever the eye said. That was as far as the children could see.
And then the children looked at their mothers and fathers, and said a thing or two about how some people today, right here at home, seemed to spend time in sheds and barns with people who weren’t their husbands or wives—and you never saw a bunch of grown-ups move so fast; they snatched up their little ones, and bore them away to confinement.
FROM HIS WIGWAM at the edge of the forest, the Devil watched the village retreat into itself. He hoped the Pilgrims were thinking about sailing back to England if the children didn’t shut up.
At twilight, Jenny Mather crossed the pasture to stand at his door.
For a moment, her shadow and shape were enough like Pocahontas to make his heart ache.
Jenny untied her bonnet and shook loose her long dark hair, and offered to screw him inside out if he would lift whatever spell he’d laid on the children. The Devil heard himself agreeing. He couldn’t help it.
THE DEVIL AND Jenny Mather did things under the sun, and then the moon, which embarrassed the natural creatures all around.
After she staggered off home, the Devil fished around among his few things—furs and bones, arrowheads and seeds and his pipe—until his wooden fingers closed around a glass ball the size of his fist.
He stared into it. The glass ball was clear as a raindrop. Wasn’t it? Or were there shadows and clouds inside? The more he stared, the more the ball changed. It showed the Devil the same future it had shown the children.
“Why does the future always look so hard?” he wondered aloud.
He put the ball away. It didn’t do to see things he didn’t understand yet.
AUTUMN CAME, AND the Hunter’s Moon. Crisp winds changed direction; the sea and sky turned gray. The Devil lost himself on the deer trails, lost himself in the harvest feasts of the Morning People and the Fish People and the Big Voice People. He lost himself in thinking about her.
He was going to have to stop that. Time moved forward. No one knew that better than he.
The villages of the forest people were smaller than before. Fewer.
“Watani-ay tougash misoughioughi,” one sachem told him. “It is the coughing sickness.”
“Ni quoi quoi ai watha,” said another. “The old ones shit themselves to death.”
These were strong people, and they were dying of children’s diseases.
The Devil remembered to be angry with the Pilgrims. When they died, more Pilgrims appeared from over the sea. When forest people died, perhaps children would be born to replace them, but the children died, too.
When winter came, sure enough, the Pilgrims shut themselves indoors and began to freeze and starve and die. The cemetery bulged. Even the cows died, which saddened the Devil.
These people were not fit to build a nation.
There would have to be fighting. The Falling Water People had fought, at Jamestown. The Devil winced. Pocahontas had hated the fighting.
Still, he went to the forest villages and said, “You should do something about these clowns while you still have some warriors left,” and they agreed.
THE PILGRIM FATHERS were gathered in the meetinghouse, in retreat from a screaming arctic gale, telling scary stories.
“At Jamestown”—John coughed—“they starved so badly they began to dig up the dead.”
“Bosh!” sniffled Miles. “It was only the fresh dead that were eaten.”
Elder Mather tried to add something, but it was lost in a great sneeze, and before he quite recovered, they were interrupted by the watchtower bell, its alarm riding the howl of the wind.
“Indians!” They all coughed, and ran outside to see.
Indians, indeed! They seemed to be part of the storm itself, pouring out of the dark, loosing arrows or throwing hatchets, then vanishing again. It was hard to know what to shoot at.
BOOM! BOOM! Musket and blunderbuss flared on the stockade wall, followed by wheezing and feverish moans.
One Pilgrim fell outside the wall with an arrow in his throat. Another died of the flu while loading the swivel gun.
In the lane by the well, Jenny Mather raised a lantern for the wives and children, who followed her to the meetinghouse, where they coughed and shivered and prayed.
Outside, they heard the wind, and fewer gunshots. More and more, there was the wind and Indian war cries.
“We’re lost.” Teenage Molly Fellberry sneezed.
The younger children began to bicker about whether ’twas a sin to want to be buried wearing ribbons.
THE DEVIL WAS among the first warriors over the wall.
He set fire to the potato barn and was just about to piss in the well when a dark figure emerged from the driving snow, green eyes inside a woolen hood, reflecting the Devil’s torch.
Jenny Mather looked frightened, but she had come to do something that needed doing. She offered to give the Devil her soul if he would let them live.
The Devil was a sucker for souls.
He said yes before giving it any thought, reached into her hood, and squeezed her jaw until her mouth opened.
Something like a mockingbird fluttered out, and roosted on the Devil’s finger.
He admired its feathers and the sharpness of its eyes, then allowed it to hop back down Jenny’s throat.
“Deal,” he said, baring his long white teeth.
The warriors climbed back over the wall, melting into the storm and the winter woods, and the Devil turned himself into a handsome red fox and ran off smoking his pipe.
HE STOPPED FIGHTING the Pilgrims, after that.
They had a certain practicality of spirit, if Jenny Mather was any indication. He decided to see what they did with it. More ships came and more forts went up along the shore. They built a road, and another village appeared in the woods, some miles from the sea. Then another and another. Winter came and they died, but there were always more.
Some of the seaside Pilgrims even moved away, after a time, to one of the new villages. John and his wife, and Miles, and others, with their children and their things piled aboard oxcarts, made their way around the pasture and down the road to New Coventry and New Lincoln and New Stafford-upon-Welpole and other American places. Sometimes they passed empty Indian villages, but they passed without noticing.
They also failed to notice, in the gathering dark, an extra Pilgrim walking among them. He might have been a farmer or a trader, or both. He smoked a foul-smelling pipe, and you wouldn’t know, unless you touched him, that he was made out of wood.
He walked slowly, letting the Pilgrims pass by, until he came to the tail flap of the hindmost wagon, where two children sat arguing over which of them was most likely to catch sick and die.
They shut up when the stranger smiled at them, then laughed as he reached out and pulled coins from their ears.
“Shiny!” gasped the children.
“That’s gold.” The Devil winked. “Put it in your pockets. Guard it with your lives. Get some more, if you can. Good boy. Good girl.”
He handed them the coins like a farmer planting a seed.
3.
The Death of Dan Paul Overfield
Kansas, 1969
THE KANSAS SKY HAD seen the buffalo roam, and watched them die. It had rained on the horse cultures and the covered wagons crossing oceans of prairie grass, until they were gone. It had hovered over the Depression, with its dust and its hollow men, until those passed away, too.
Now highways rolled between power lines and radio towers, and beside one of those highways, three Volkswagen Microbuses were parked, painted like cars in a circus train. One red and one green, with psychedelic designs, and the third like a picture of outer space. Around the buses, a village of tents and lanterns and campfires
had spilled out. At the center of this village, the World’s Grooviest Guitar Player lay dying.
ROLLING STONE HAD called him that, back in San Francisco. His name was Dan Paul Overfield, and the people of the tent village were his roadies and the kids in his band. They were still young enough, these kids, to think Peace and Love would see them through.
Dan Paul Overfield lay flat on his back in a tent. He refused to go to the hospital and it scared the kids. They didn’t know what to do, but whatever needed doing, they wanted to do it right. After all, Rolling Stone would probably do a tribute piece, and they all wanted to come off as strong and soulful cats.
The huge, twinkling sky was no comfort. It reminded them how far they were from home, home being as many different places as there were constellations.
Memory, the singer, was beautiful and tall. She was called Memory because she had amnesia, and could remember nothing of her childhood or teen years. She guessed she might be around twenty. Doctors would have studied her, if she let them.
Mark Fish, the drummer, came from California. His eyes seemed somehow dishonest. He knew this, and wore sunglasses around the clock.
Zachary Bull Horse, the bass player, from Arizona, was nine-tenths Apache. Zachary was a big fellow, and you could tell he was going to be fat when he got older.
These three sat crowded around Dan Paul, who looked like God might have looked when He was thirty. He lay with his shirt torn open, half asleep.
Things would have been great for him and his band (the Dan Paul Overfield Band), except his heart was weak.
“It might stop any day,” he had told them a year ago when they first started playing for money. “Any second.”
They believed him, but it hadn’t seemed real until today, when they had pulled over to camp in Kansas. Dan Paul, as usual, made a fire and started cooking. And he fell over. He was lucky he didn’t fall straight into the fire.
“Put him in the red bus!” Memory had cried. “The one that hasn’t broken down yet. Where was that last town we passed through? Is it closer than the next one?”
“Fuck me,” growled Fish. “Who’s got a map?”
Zachary, the giant, lifted Dan Paul in his arms, and started for the red Microbus.
“Just put me in my tent,” said Dan Paul.
SO ZACHARY LAID Dan Paul in his tent, and they gathered around him. Memory ripped his shirt open because it seemed the thing to do.
She sat cross-legged now, with Dan Paul’s head in her lap, rubbing his temples, and humming.
Zachary hulked over his left side like an Apache Buddha.
Fish burst head and shoulders into the tent, and hovered there over Dan Paul’s ankles.
“Why don’t you want to go to the hospital?” he demanded.
Dan Paul whispered something in a weak voice.
“He says it’s too late,” said Memory.
Dan Paul whispered something else.
He wanted them to sing.
“Jesus,” said Fish.
Memory tried to think of just the right song.
All their songs had been written by Dan Paul. Back in San Francisco, Rolling Stone had asked him what his songs were about.
He said he had a happy outlook on life, but his ticker might stop any second. “So,” he explained, “I write campfire songs about death.”
It was true. Their songs, even the sad ones, had a lighthearted sound. They were easy to sing. Easy to memorize. You could dance to them. And they were about death, every one. The radio and the record stores ate it up. In less than a year, the band had campfire-sung and groovy-guitared their way to the edge of fame.
Before they sang, Fish produced a big fat joint and they passed it around, just like they did before concerts.
Then Memory started a song called “Down in the Hole.”
Zachary and Fish joined in. Dan Paul had made them practice harmony until it was second nature, and they sounded all right, now, even with their voices cracking and sad.
There’s a hole in Russell’s farm
Bigger than a baby or a lucky charm
Smaller than a granny in a rocking chair
Everything he loses ends up down there
Russell lost his cow
He took more milk than the cow allowed
How much does it take to fill a bottomless bowl?
The cow jumped the moon and came down in the hole
Russell lost his barn
Crows built a nest in the fire alarm
Ashes, ashes, all fall down
Ashes in the hole, but the smoke made town
Russell lost his wife
Sixteen beers and a sugarcane knife
Red is the color of his true love’s hair
Look down the hole and see her slumbering there
Russell lost his way
Between the state pen and his gettin’-out day
Between the moon and the night and the rain and the wind
Can a man down a hole find his way up again?
In a perfect world, they would have looked down then to find that Dan Paul had slipped peacefully away while they sang.
What happened instead was that a roadie named Osgood came crawling into the tent just then, without really looking where he was going, to announce that some of the crew had gone off to hide in the woods in case the cops came.
Dan Paul groaned. “Ozzy, bro, you’re on my leg.”
Those were his last words.
QUIETLY, THE NEWS PASSED from tent to tent, to the woods, to the cook fire, to the Microbuses and back.
Some of the roadies searched the galaxy with stoned eyes, looking for signs of the groovy soul departing.
“Now what?” Fish sulked. “We’re the Dan Paul Overfield Band without Dan Paul. It’s not fair.”
He kicked at the weeds outside the tent.
Zachary started to say something about how Fish ought to be thinking about Dan Paul instead of himself. But Fish had only said what was on everyone’s mind.
The three of them talked for a while about Dan Paul and how much they would miss him. How much they had loved singing and playing his songs.
When it seemed okay to do so, they talked about what to do about Dan Paul’s body.
“He would want to be buried right here,” said Zachary. “Under the stars, with a few words.”
“We can’t,” said Memory. “It’ll seem suspicious.”
Some of the roadies were supposed to be in Vietnam. They couldn’t afford suspicion.
It was decided that they would drive Dan Paul into the next town and see what the funeral home had to say. They weren’t broke, exactly. They could afford something cheap and legal.
Memory wandered down the highway a hundred yards while Zachary wrapped Dan Paul in a sheet. She sat down on a guardrail over a starlit creek.
Fish was right. Bubble Records was recording their songs and getting them on the radio. Bubble Records was spotting them three used Microbuses and gas money. They had just been invited to play a huge outdoor rock festival on some guy’s farm in New York. They had been within an inch of getting everything they ever wanted.
For the first time, Memory felt how badly she wanted what she wanted.
Which was what? Fame?
Yes.
But didn’t everyone want to be famous, at least some of the time?
Sure. But this felt different. It wasn’t want. It was a need with deep, hungry roots.
Was it some psychological shit, like thinking you wanted fame, but really your imaginary fans were a substitute for sex or love or being popular in high school? Maybe, for her, fame was a substitute for remembering. Maybe fame was her way of making sure the rest of her didn’t disappear.
What difference did it make? Dan Paul was dead. Her magic beanstalk had fallen.
She felt fame fading out of her future, and the rest of her fading along with it.
“Fuck,” she sang, one sad note.
IT WAS ZACHARY who brought up the Devil.
T
hey had gone through several phases in the hours since Dan Paul had died. Eating supper. Going around in a big circle with the rest of the camp, saying nice things about Dan Paul. Then everyone doing their own thing for a while.
It was after midnight.
It was the time of night best suited for talking about strange things. A quiet and mysterious time. They might never have even talked about the Devil if the crew had been dancing and singing, or trading stories again, or if the noise of people fucking had gotten loud enough to invite applause, or if it had rained.
But it was this, instead: Clouds sailed in, with clear stars behind, as if the sky had split into different rooms. Joints and cigarettes glowed here and there, some by the fire, some by the road, some by the woods.
Zachary and Memory were sharing a plate of cold beans when Fish sat down across from them. He didn’t say anything.
It was necessary that no one speak for a while, to clear the way for strange ideas.
Finally, Zachary said, “You know what they say about Robert Johnson.”
“Uh-huh,” said Fish.
“What do they say?” asked Memory.
“They say he met the Devil at the crossroads and sold his soul to be a big star.”
Then it was necessary that there be a second chapter of the silence, which there was.
“You think we oughta go down to the crossroads,” said Memory, laughing.
Zachary shrugged.
Memory looked from Fish to Zach and back again.
“Bullshit,” said Fish. “That’s just part of how the producers sell records. Every time somebody great comes along, especially if he plays the guitar, there’s got to be some story that says he sold his soul or has a guitar made in the Underworld. They say Howlin’ Wolf went to the cemetery and got his guitar tuned by a dead man, right? Remember what they said about Dan Paul?”
Memory looked puzzled.
“It was before your time,” Zachary told her.
“Dan Paul used to be just another folkie,” said Fish, “traveling around and playing bars. He heard about this other guitar player named Two-John Spode who supposedly had won a guitar duel with the Devil and trapped his own death inside his guitar. So Dan Paul went down to Louisiana and found him back in the swamp, and tried to get him to help start a band. Way back before he found us. They had a guitar contest between the two of them, the idea being that if Dan Paul won, Two-John would come with him, and if Two-John won, he got to keep Dan Paul’s guitar. And Two-John did win, but he was so impressed that he let Dan Paul keep his guitar. Not only that, and this is the important part, he put his death in Dan Paul’s guitar, which is how Dan Paul was able to play the way he did, sounding like two or three guitar players, because Two-John’s death was plucking the strings from the other side.”
Up Jumps the Devil Page 2