Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  “Still,” grunted Franklin, “‘that which is fairly won—’”

  “I’ll let you look in the ball,” said the butter churn.

  Franklin appeared to consider, sidestepping the butter churn as the wind bore him in the other direction, quite missing the steeple.

  “And I’ll assist with your ladder, there, as well.”

  “Done,” said Franklin, passing by once again.

  “Done!” cried the Devil, springing like a jack-in-the-box from the churn. In a trice, the wind came about and planted the ladder squarely around the steeple tip, and the Devil sat on a rung maybe thirty feet up, tipping his hat.

  “Have some respect!” gruffed Franklin. “That’s a church.”

  Thunder rumbled. The few Philadelphians about the streets clutched their hats and rushed for home. The Devil dug in his pockets, produced the glass ball, and tossed it down. Franklin caught it neatly with one hand, and looked.

  Gazing, he saw armies and fields afire. He saw great arguments and new ideas. New machines. He saw his death, and carried what he saw with him all his days. The knowledge, though it saddened him, made him fearless. He stared into the ball for a good five minutes, then pitched the ball back to the Devil, who slipped it into his pocket.

  Lightning flashed and thunder cracked at nearly the same time.

  Franklin unwrapped his lightning rod and regarded it with trepidation.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said to the Devil, now sliding down the ladder toward him, “you’d like to take this”—he indicated the lightning rod—“and attach it to that”—he pointed at the steeple tip—“in the name of science and municipal safety?”

  “No,” said the Devil, reaching the street and pulling his collar high.

  “Whyever not?”

  “It’s your big idea. You do it.”

  “It is mine, sir, to take notes and make observations. Never underestimate the value of good notes.”

  “I won’t. And I’ll wish you the best of everything, and be going.”

  Franklin held the ladder in place with his shoe and wiped his spectacles on his coattails.

  “As you will,” he said to the Devil. “I wonder, then, if you’re not awfully busy, if you wouldn’t mind stopping at the house, on your way, and asking Mrs. Franklin to step out and lend a hand?”

  8.

  Favorite Foods and Good and Evil

  Various highways, 1969

  SO MUCH FOR THE Dan Paul Overfield Band, thought Memory.

  It had been a day and a night since the tower had fallen on them. Fish and Zachary had been admitted to a New York City hospital, where doctors would try to restore Fish’s thumb and would test Zachary for brain damage.

  “We won’t know much for a few weeks,” they told Memory, regarding Zachary. “There’s no point in waiting around …”

  She visited Fish, who lay with his arm in a fat white cast. Doped up on painkillers, he was alert enough to blame Memory for making them play Woodstock, and tell her to fuck off.

  “Whatever,” she said.

  It didn’t much matter what Fish, or anyone else, had to say. A numbness had come over her, as if amnesia were spreading from her mind to her body. She left the hospital in a fog and sat down at a bus stop a block down the street. She watched the pigeons and blinked once in a while.

  It was over. The big dream had died with Dan Paul, come back to life briefly and wonderfully with the Devil, and now it was dead again. It was too much.

  The Devil was conspicuously absent.

  So that’s the kind of friend he is, she thought. Shouldn’t be surprised.

  People gathered to wait for the bus. The bus arrived and departed, and Memory barely even noticed. She sat there for an hour. More people gathered. Buses took them away. Memory stayed, like a stone in a flowing stream. She had no plans to move. No plans of any kind.

  A bus pulled up. Not a city bus this time, but a Microbus.

  The space bus, towing the death limo, both splashed with upstate mud. The Devil rolled down the window and whistled at her.

  “Want some candy, little girl?” he called, winking.

  Memory didn’t move. She wasn’t sure she remembered how.

  The Devil climbed out of the Microbus, scooped Memory off her bench, installed her gently in the passenger seat, and got back behind the wheel. A wave of his hand, and they skated easily through midday traffic.

  “Where have you been?” Memory asked, stirring herself with some effort.

  “Paying off your crew and driving this piece of shit to the city,” he answered.

  Whatever.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked as they crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. “And where are we going?”

  The city dropped away behind them. The Devil lit a cigarette.

  “I thought you wanted to be famous,” he said.

  “I did,” said Memory, propping her bare feet on the dashboard. “I do.”

  It was true, she realized. More than ever. Her numbness receded.

  “We’re headed south,” said the Devil. “You need new musicians.”

  “Why do we have to go south to find—”

  “Just trust me.”

  “Trust you? Are you kidding? I did trust you, until—”

  “Things don’t always happen the way you want,” said the Devil. “It doesn’t mean they won’t happen. And haven’t I held up my end as far as you’re concerned? You want to be famous. I’d say you are pretty much famous, after yesterday.”

  “I want it to last.”

  “All right.”

  She punched him in the arm. The Microbus swerved.

  “No matter what I say,” complained the Devil, “it’s the wrong goddamn thing!”

  He stomped on the brakes and wrestled the Microbus to a stop, half on, half off the shoulder.

  “Tell me what’s the matter,” said the Devil, “and I promise I’ll give you straight answers.”

  Memory exploded.

  “Is this all some kind of game to you? Two weeks ago you made a deal with all of us, and we forked over what you wanted, and all we’ve gotten since is—”

  “You sang for a half-million people.”

  “Is there going to be more? And what about the guys?”

  “They’ll be all right.”

  “That’s not an answer!” screamed Memory. “Fuck you, man!”

  She kicked her door open and stormed into the tall weeds along the shoulder. Face flushed blood red, she howled, “You said they’d have doors open for them, and where are they? Zachary’s drooling down his chin and Fish will never play again! You have our souls, and you … do you even have a soul?”

  “That’s a complicated—”

  “Shut up! Everything you say is either a lie or just useless! Why couldn’t I have met you in the part of my life I can’t remember?”

  She stomped off down the highway, as if making war on the asphalt.

  The Microbus crept up alongside her.

  “Hi,” said the Devil.

  She ignored him.

  “You’re not done being famous,” said the Devil. “It’s your time. It’ll get better.”

  He stopped the van and hopped out as he spoke, approaching Memory with his hands in his pockets.

  Memory jumped across the ditch and plunged through a narrow stretch of woods, emerging at the edge of a wheat field. The Devil followed, fiddling with his sunglasses.

  “Why haven’t you asked for your memory back?” he called after her.

  Memory faced him.

  “Maybe I don’t want it back.”

  “I think you do.”

  Memory folded her arms across her chest.

  “I don’t think you can give it back to me. Maybe I’m wrong.”

  The Devil grinned a sharp-toothed grin, and fished a long-stemmed clay pipe from his shirt pocket.

  “No. You’re right; I actually tried to wake up your memory one night, but I couldn’t. Couldn’t even find it.”<
br />
  “You tried to bring back my memory without asking me?”

  “I thought it would be a nice surprise.”

  He packed the pipe, lit it with a fiery forefinger, and passed it to her.

  She took it and inhaled.

  “Since when does the Devil do nice surprises?” she croaked, passing the pipe back.

  “People think they know me,” muttered the Devil, smoking. “I can do nice things like anyone else.”

  She turned and looked at him. He must be impossibly old, she knew, and if you looked closely, you could see it. In his tanned face were traces of furrows and scars, like a battlefield healed and grown over. Beneath it all, she sensed hidden rumblings and vibrations. He was like a storm that hadn’t happened yet, a thought you weren’t quite thinking.

  A memory you didn’t have.

  “You said I reminded you of someone,” she said.

  The Devil tucked the pipe away in his shirt pocket.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s partly the way you sing. Maybe I’ll tell you about it if you’ll quit being mad and come back to the van.”

  Memory waited a minute just so he wouldn’t find her too easy, then followed him through the trees, back to the road.

  THEY TALKED ABOUT lots of things, the next few hours. Like favorite foods and Good and Evil.

  They talked about practical things as well.

  “How much did you get for the other vans?” asked Memory.

  “Thousand each.”

  She wrote this down on a notepad. They only had so much money left.

  “And I paid off the crew with the last of your studio cash.”

  “Cool. Why are we going south?”

  “I asked you to trust me.”

  “And I told you no.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Answer me.”

  “When I feel like it. Jump out if you don’t like it.”

  She didn’t like it, but she didn’t jump out.

  The morning became afternoon, then evening, and they stopped at a Holiday Inn. The Devil signed them in as Mr. and Mrs. John Scratch, and the clerk asked no awkward questions.

  FARTHER SOUTH, the next day.

  In the Smoky Mountains, they parked the Microbus on the shoulder of a National Park Service road, and Memory followed the Devil through a silent forest until he stopped at an old, dead tree.

  He stuck long claws down inside, and pulled out something wrapped in leather. He didn’t speak, and she followed him back to the road, where he undid the leather and drew out a fiddle and a bow.

  A fiddle, which might have been wood or solid gold, depending on the light, and a bow made from the same wood or the same gold, strung with what might have been horsehair, but wasn’t.

  “Haven’t needed Ol’ Ripsaw here for a while,” he said, looking the fiddle over from every angle.

  “What do you need him now for?” asked Memory, even though she thought she knew.

  “You need him,” said the Devil. “Because you need a guitar player.”

  He drew the bow across the strings, and Old Ripsaw groaned like an old, sleepy soul.

  “Please tell me where we’re going,” she asked.

  “Louisiana,” he said, drawing sparks with his bow. “To see if old Two-John Spode has been practicing.”

  THE SECOND THEY CROSSED into Louisiana, the radiator blew.

  Memory woke up, saying, “What happened?”

  “This thing’s not even supposed to have a radiator!” complained the Devil, pulling over. “Air-cooled German technology! Who the hell customized this thing?”

  “The studio bought it for us,” said Memory, yawning. “It was cheap.”

  “Well,” said the Devil, “go find us some cheap water to keep it running.”

  “Why don’t you just magically make the radiator not leak? Else what’s the point in being the Devil?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  The Devil walked around behind the bus, and opened the rear doors to hunt for something like a bucket.

  “It would get boring,” said the Devil, overturning blankets, old food wrappers, and an amplifier. “You’d be surprised how much of your happiness has to do with little problems. Like having to go get toilet paper or having to fetch some water. If you just sat around and ‘magicked’ everything, then you’d wind up just … sitting around.”

  “Why don’t we drive the limo and tow the bus?”

  The Devil looked offended.

  “That car,” he said, “is not a tow truck.”

  “How come I’m the one who’s got to get the water?”

  “What’s the point of being the Devil if I can’t make people bring me water?”

  He appeared at her window with a bucket.

  There was water in the ditch. She fetched three buckets of ditch water, the Devil plugged the radiator with a piece of black-cherry bubble gum, and they went another fifty miles.

  SWAMP TREES AND KUDZU framed the road at first, then gave way to flat country and fields of green sugarcane.

  The horizon piled high with clouds. Thunder spoke, far away.

  The second time they needed water, they happened on a gas station. After they had filled the radiator, Memory climbed behind the wheel.

  “What are you doing?” asked the Devil.

  “Driving. If I gotta fetch the water, I should at least get to drive some.”

  “Do you have a license?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But she didn’t move, except to turn the key and start the engine.

  The Devil walked around to the passenger side, and they rolled on south. Before long, the cane fields gave way to swamp forest again, and not long after that, it came down raining.

  MEMORY TRIED TO get the Devil to tell her what was so special about Two-John Spode.

  “You heard what the boys said,” he reminded her.

  “They made him sound about half real.”

  “He’s real.”

  “Then—”

  “Watch the road.”

  Rain slathered the windshield. Not far ahead, red taillights glowed, and Memory slowed to follow an old farm truck.

  “Why wouldn’t you tell me where we were going when I asked?”

  “You wouldn’t have come. I had to wait till we were too far down the road.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to catch some sleep.

  “That’s some devious shit,” said Memory, “for somebody who wants to be trusted.”

  “I suppose it is,” said the Devil, without opening his eyes.

  The rain made a fog, which crept and rose. Everything beyond the windshield might have been a trick of the eye, except for the red lights of the farm truck, which sped up, and then slowed again.

  “It’s like driving between worlds,” Memory told the Devil.

  The Devil had fallen asleep.

  “Yep,” he said, nonetheless.

  9.

  How God Stole the Devil’s Girlfriend

  Heaven and Earth, the Age of Creation

  THE DEVIL DREAMED.

  When most people dream, it’s a casserole of wishes and fears. Being several billion years old, the Devil had a lot of memory backed up—and you can wind up with issues if you don’t sort through it all somehow. So when the Devil dreamed, he remembered. It kept him from talking to himself more than he did.

  Dreaming in the passenger seat, he remembered the very oldest things of all. Before he was the Devil. When he was Lucifer, in Heaven.

  Back before Heaven and Earth were separated, because there was no Earth. There was hardly much of anything except God and the angels, surrounded by something called “the Face of the Deep,” and something called “the Waters.”

  “The Waters” were a kind of flood, about six inches deep, and quite calm. You could either walk around in it all the time, or sprout wings. The angels sprouted wings.

  No one knew what the Face of the Deep was, except that it was deep and surrounded t
he Waters.

  “What is it?” the angels sometimes asked, but God only answered with a proud, inscrutable silence.

  A lot of angels thought God was kind of self-absorbed and crazy right from the Beginning, and would have left Him more or less alone if He hadn’t insisted they sing to Him around the clock.

  This wasn’t as awful as it might sound. There was something bright and correct about God, plus it gave the angels the idea of Competition. In this scramble for excellence and holy favor, Lucifer emerged as God’s undisputed Golden Child, shining over them all like a cherry atop a sundae.

  ONE DAY, out of nowhere, God said, “Let there be light.”

  Something like a nuclear FLASH tore across the Deep, causing the singing to falter into blindness and screaming.

  When his eyes cleared, Lucifer approached God and asked what that was all about.

  “I’m not sure,” He said. “But look!” He waved at the Deep with an expression of dumb wonder.

  Stars and galaxies exploded all over the place.

  The angels staggered around God in their ranks and millions, and sang to Him in shaking voices.

  God was impressed with Himself, of course, but at the same time, Lucifer could tell He was troubled.

  “I didn’t know it was going to do that,” He told Lucifer, indicating the expanding universe overhead.

  They splashed through the Waters, side by side.

  Lucifer shrugged and said it was a nice surprise.

  “Surprise.” It was a new idea.

  “It was an impulse,” God complained. “I won’t fly off blind like that again. There should be an order to things.” He looked over his shoulder at the neat, concentric choirs of angels.

  Lucifer asked if God planned to create more things, besides just light.

  “I do,” answered God.

  “Like what?”

  And God answered.

  The Plan (as He called it) would take effect over billions of years. Step-by-step, God would fill Heaven with living wonders—and he had it all figured out in advance this time. Oceans and streams of water and air, rich with new forms and structures.

  But as he watched the universe spreading out like so much radioactive spaghetti sauce, it seemed to Lucifer that this creation had a wild seed in it. He wondered if the Plan was going to proceed with the order God intended. While ideas like “surprise” and “wild” were fascinating to Lucifer, he suspected God would be less than overjoyed with their effects.