The beginnings of the Plan were cause for celebration: The sun and moon were greeted with symphonies. The angels sang like never before.
Lucifer made note of the angels’ joy, which frothed and bubbled. He made note that God didn’t share in this. God was pleased, but He never frothed or bubbled. Lucifer realized then how distant God must be, how different from them all in ways they could never understand.
The Plan continued.
The angels went bananas when the dry land appeared. That was their favorite. Everyone came in for a landing, then took off again, because the dry land was hot. But they sang while rubbing their feet.
“This is Good,” said God, more pleased than ever.
It was a strange idea, “Good.”
Lucifer frowned. If this or that, from now on, was “Good,” then by implication there were things that were not.
“Life” was the most complicated part of the Plan.
“What is it?” asked Lucifer, touring the first sandy beaches with God.
God didn’t quite know.
“It’s sort of like what we have, you and Me and the angels. It’s got question marks all over it, but it will grow in good order, I think.”
“What if it grows in some way you don’t expect?”
“I’m okay with … what did you call them? Surprises? I’m willing to be surprised, within reason.”
“Within whose idea of reason?”
God faced Lucifer, and gave him a very direct, very final kind of look.
“Mine,” he said.
Lucifer stood biting his lip. “Maybe it will choose to grow in good order,” he said.
God’s brow furrowed. “Choice” was another new and uncomfortable idea.
LIGHTNING STROKED the sea.
A few proteins woke up and started putting themselves together like puzzles.
The puzzles were symmetrical, like God and His angels. This pleased God, and He said it was Good.
The puzzles became complicated, and soaked up chemicals from the sea. They turned green, and ate up light as if it were food.
“I didn’t see that coming,” said God, “but I like it. That’s Good.”
The green spread out all over the place.
Some of the protein complexes grew arms and legs like God and the angels (“Good!”). These things crawled up onto the dry land and started eating plants. (“That’s Good, I suppose,” said God. “They’ve got to eat something.”).
One day, God and Lucifer were patrolling the fringes of a hot, misty jungle when they happened upon a small creature eating weeds. There was something calm and satisfying about this little scene, and they paused for a moment to watch.
The moment was broken by another creature, larger and more pointy than the first, which lunged up out of the water, grabbed the herbivore around the middle in a flash of fangs and gore, and dragged it screaming beneath the water.
God shuddered. He put His hands over His face and said emphatically that this wasn’t Good at all.
“Maybe ‘Good’ has nothing to do with it,” said Lucifer. “Maybe it’s just a way of doing things. Maybe Life won’t necessarily do things the way You’d do things.”
Maybe he let impatience creep into his voice. Something in what he said or how he said it got God’s attention. God lifted His face out of His hands and met Lucifer’s eyes. When Lucifer saw God’s face, he stifled a cry, took wing, and fled.
If it was possible to not be God and somehow understand what being God was like, Lucifer understood it, however dimly, in that moment. He hadn’t expected the deep, awful loneliness in those eyes. When You had created everything, and everything was a part of You, then no matter how much You filled up the universe, You were still alone. And when the universe began making its own choices and doing its own thing, everything it did made You feel left out, just a little. There was infinite greatness in being God, of course. But Lucifer saw that there were horror and isolation, too, and that these, too, were infinite.
THE CARNIVORES DIDN’T FAZE Lucifer; he couldn’t get enough of Nature. He wandered the planet night and day, watching the growth and the changes. Particularly, he found himself hypnotized by sex.
Reproduction wasn’t what captivated him; it was the weird business of coupling. Two creatures came together and basically became one, for a time. And you couldn’t watch it happening all over the place without sort of wanting to do it. It looked like fun.
This, of course, was where the real trouble started.
There was this other angel, see.
The other angel wasn’t male or female, because angels hadn’t had those ideas yet.
The angel’s name was Arden, and Arden was Lucifer’s friend. A close friend.
They wandered together and sang together, shared misgivings about “Good” together, and together they watched animals coupling and were equally spellbound.
One day in a forest of lowland cherry blossoms, an awkward suggestion arose.
“You know …” said Lucifer.
“Mmm?” said Arden.
“Nothing.”
“Something, obviously.”
Lucifer pursed his lips, and they went back to watching male squirrels chase female squirrels.
“We could try that,” he said, after a while.
Arden nodded thoughtfully, and said, “I don’t see how.”
Lucifer said that, obviously, some changes would have to be made.
Arden said, “You mean like this?,” and when he looked, Arden had become beautifully, hauntingly, nakedly “female.”
Lucifer made some changes of his own, was flooded with new sensations.
He knew right away that these were animal feelings. Dark, earthy feelings, like hunger. Like pride in his own strength and beauty. Like wanting to love and be close to other creatures, and also, paradoxically, wanting to hurt them.
“Oh,” whispered Arden, eyes wild.
“Oh,” growled Lucifer, eyes burning.
And they came together and were overwhelmed by each other.
IT QUICKLY BECAME the thing to do, among the angels who walked the Earth.
God didn’t like it, of course. Lucifer guessed that sex, more than anything else, made God lonely.
“You have got to be kidding,” He said, when He saw what was going on.
He turned away. He shook with wrath. These angels were quite obviously more interested in one another than in Him. This was something new.
“It’s unholy!” He roared, shaking Heaven and Earth. “Everybody up here on the double!” And He waited with His galactic arms crossed, glaring.
“Unholy,” said Lucifer, “I take it, is the opposite of ‘Good.’”
“Lots of things are the opposite of ‘Good,’” answered God. “Shut up.”
They all stood together in the Waters, in a mass of concentric circles, God and Lucifer in the middle like two sixth graders on a playground.
“Clean it up down there,” God demanded.
“What do you mean, ‘clean it up’?”
“You know damn well what ‘clean it up’ means.”
Lucifer told God something He’d never heard before.
He said, “No.”
Part of him was scared when he said it, but part of him was angry and hungry and earthy, too, and his eyes glowed red for the very first time. God took a step back when He saw that. Lucifer showed his teeth. He wanted them to be sharp, so they were sharp.
Some of the angels, the ones who hadn’t discovered fucking, wrung their hands and moaned. Why was this happening?
Lucifer felt their sadness and frustration, but how could he explain that the more earthy angels paid more attention to one another than to God because a lot of them had fallen in love? Would they—would God—understand that kind of love? It was something that happened in the soul and blood of natural creatures, or divine creatures who had sampled natural ways. It was a different kind of love than the love they had for God. You had to earn the love of a natural creature, whereas G
od-love had been sort of automatically installed—by God.
The more he thought about that, the more Lucifer found God’s complaints selfish and puerile, and was damned if he’d explain himself to this crowd of sterile, bootlicking fruitcakes.
So he kept a rebellious silence.
And then God said, “Fine. Wallow in it. It’s all yours. Just get out of here and don’t come back.”
He clenched His fists, and just like that Earth stopped being part of Heaven. It fell away into empty space, dragging Lucifer and Arden and their friends with it.
They fell through space and air, crashing down all over the place in deserts and rivers and oceans and wide, grassy places.
Lucifer stood, raising a defiant fist to the sky.
Then: “Where were we?” he asked Arden, who had fallen to Earth nearby, and they came together, biting sweetly.
SOME OF THE FALLEN ANGELS plunged right in, ruling the Earth with tooth and claw. They took a special interest in the two-legged monkeys that had recently appeared, helping the monkeys plant crops and build cities. The monkeys, in turn, worshipped the Fallen as gods, and it would have been the best of times if most of the Fallen hadn’t had second thoughts.
“We’re not animals,” they told Lucifer. “We want to go home, if God will have us.”
Arden, Lucifer was panicked to discover, was one of these.
“You can’t be serious,” he said to her.
They lay naked beside a river.
“I don’t like feeling this way,” she admitted. “But I’m serious, yes. And I’m frightened.”
“Of what?”
And Arden nodded at the flowing water and said, “Of that.”
“That” was a female hippopotamus, giving birth.
They watched the whole thing from messy, churning, bloody beginning to bloody end, with a tiny new hippo swimming around in its own slime, gasping for air.
“It’s messy,” agreed Lucifer, “but—”
“It’s not just that,” Arden interrupted. “Watch.”
The mother and baby swam around nuzzling each other for a while, and then another hippo came charging through the tall grass in the shallows, roaring and showing its teeth.
The baby’s daddy.
The daddy hippo shoved the mother aside, and killed the baby with a snap of its mighty jaws.
Arden drew up her legs and buried her face behind her knees.
“What do you expect?” asked Lucifer. “The baby would have grown up to be competition.”
“I get it,” snapped Arden. “But I don’t like it, and I don’t think I can stand it.”
Lucifer understood her horror. Living things survived by devouring other living things. A little horror was fine with him, but Arden and many others preferred to endure it from a distance, in a cool and stately Heaven.
Across the red water, Lucifer spied a caravan of warriors on their way to kill people. He was frightened, suddenly. Frightened in a deep, helpless, hollow way.
“I’m leaving,” Arden told him.
She said it softly, like trying to hit someone softly with a stick.
UP THEY FLEW, more than half of the Fallen. The sky opened up with a golden sunburst and took them right in.
Swallowed them, more like it, thought Lucifer, raging.
God had kicked him out of Heaven. That hurt, but he could handle it.
But now God had stolen his girlfriend.
He roared at Heaven.
He stood there by the river, knee-deep in hippo blood, raging and crying and becoming the world’s first broken-heart story.
10.
Bluesmen
Louisiana, 1969
THE MICROBUS BEGAN to lose speed.
The engine rattled and coughed.
“I’m pulling over,” said Memory.
“Yep,” said the Devil, shaking off sleep.
They pulled onto the gravel shoulder and rolled to a halt. Ahead, taillights dimmed out of sight as the farm truck left them behind.
“It wouldn’t kill you, you know,” said Memory, “with a wave of your hand, just once—”
“Not necessary,” said the Devil.
Memory looked, and saw taillights. The farm truck was backing down the shoulder toward them.
The truck stopped. A door slammed. A watery figure appeared, shrugging its way into a poncho.
Memory and the Devil got out, shoulders hunched against the rain.
The driver of the farm truck had green eyes like searchlights, and a deeply grooved face. The kind of features that can look either friendly or mean as all hell, depending on the person who wears them. These features were friendly.
“Thought you might be having engine trouble,” he said. “Else you’da passed me a long time back. Richard Yeager.”
“John Scratch,” said the Devil, shaking hands.
Memory said, “Memory.”
“Ma’am. Listen, I got some cable in here, and a towing hitch. I can tow you on into St. Judy. Might be like driving a train, since you already got a car in tow, but we’ll take it slow. They’ll fix you up proper if we can make it there.”
“All right,” said Memory, and they got busy doing what needed to be done.
“YOU’LL HAVE TO KEEP IT in neutral,” Yeager told the Devil, when the chains were in place. “And—”
“Tell the driver,” said the Devil, nodding at Memory.
Yeager gave some instructions about watching his taillights and leaving the steering wheel alone.
“That way, we’ll all get into St. Judy in one piece.”
Before Yeager could climb back in his truck, the Devil said, “We’ve come looking for a fellow called Two-John Spode.”
Yeager’s eyes darkened.
“Never heard of him, brother,” he said.
FLASH! Lightning, then thunder, close enough to rattle teeth.
“That’s all right,” said the Devil, turning back to the Microbus.
“HE’S LYING,” said Memory, smoothing wet hair out of her face. “Why would he lie?”
“Why does anybody lie?”
“Because they’re scared.”
“There you are. He’ll change his mind before we get to St. Judy.”
Ahead, the farm truck eased away. The chains caught with a jerk, and they were on the highway again.
HOURS LATER, when rain-dark had yielded to night, Yeager towed them off the road, into a wide gravel lot.
A hundred colored lightbulbs hung between utility poles. The lot served as parking for a gas station, a diner, a motel, and a bait shop. Beyond this roadside oasis, swamp jungle towered, wild with Spanish moss.
Yeager got out and knelt between the vehicles, pulling at the chain.
The Devil joined him. He leaned over Yeager with one boot on the Microbus bumper.
Yeager looked uneasy.
“When you asked about Two-John,” he said, “I shouldn’ta said I never heard of him.”
The Devil pulled an apple out of nowhere, polished it on his sleeve, and began to peel it with a rusty pocketknife.
“Maybe I’m superstitious,” said Yeager. “People don’t like to talk about Two-John, same way some people don’t like to talk about the dead. Down here ain’t like the rest of the country, you know.”
“I know,” said the Devil.
“They say there’s people in New Orleans can raise the dead. I don’t go to New Orleans.”
The Devil took a bite out of his apple.
“There used to be a roadhouse here,” said Yeager. “It burned down a couple years ago. Two-John played there sometimes. I never saw him, but they said he was good. He was pretty famous all around here, but he never made a record. Some people say he’s dead, some people say he’s got him a place back in that swamp there. That’s all I got for you. That, and the garage over there opens in the morning. I guess they can put you up at the motel until then. I hope you get back on the road all right.”
The Devil shook Yeager’s hand, and Yeager got in his farm truck
and drove away.
THE DEVIL RETRIEVED his fiddle, still wrapped in leather, from the back of the Microbus, and walked toward the bait shop, where a light burned in one window.
His stride was long; Memory hurried to keep up.
“Where are you going?” she asked. “Aren’t we going to wait for the garage to open?”
“Nope.”
“I thought we could at least get a room at the motel there, you know? Dry off and clean up?”
“Why clean up to go out in the swamp?”
“We’re going in the swamp?”
The Devil shot her a wink, and together they mounted two rickety steps to the bait-shop door.
Knock-knock.
A fantastically old woman opened the door. One of her eyes was gone, stitched shut. The other wallowed in a sea of cataracts, turquoise blue all over. Blind as night, the woman still managed to look right where the Devil was standing. Looked him right in the eye.
She raised a crippled hand, and backed away.
“Je savais que c’était vous!” she whispered. “The Devil! I knew it!”
And the Devil said, “Je suis pas ici pour vous, grand-mère. I’m not here for you, Grandmother.”
The old woman calmed down enough to beckon them inside.
The Devil started to say something.
“Je connais quoi faire t’es icitte,” said the old woman. “I know why you’re here.”
She led them through the shop, and out through a back door, onto a half-rotten dock that creaked under their feet. Black water flowed beneath.
An ancient pirogue, motor bolted to the stern, floated at the end of the dock.
“We’re going out in that?” whispered Memory. “At night?”
She heard the old woman chuckle under her breath.
“Can’t get there in the Microbus,” said the Devil.
He helped her down onto a tiny bench in the prow. In the dark to her left, something belched and went plop in the water.
Before the Devil could sit down and take the tiller, the old woman gestured at him, holding out her palm.
The Devil passed her a five-dollar bill.
“Bonne chance, Grandmother,” he whispered.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 7