Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  The old woman limped off back to the bait shop.

  The Devil yanked the engine to life. The pirogue lifted a little under Memory, the prow rising over smooth water and lily pads, and they moved off into the dark.

  Night noises rose around them. Who could tell what made such noises? Nameless things sang and grumbled, buzzed and sawed. Shadows moved between shadows.

  The Devil said, “Allume-toi!” and a tiki torch burned at the very stem of the boat.

  “If you can do that,” said Memory, “then how come—”

  “Because,” rumbled the Devil. “Quiet, now.”

  LIGHT MADE THINGS WORSE.

  In the dark, there was only the dark, but the torch cast a wizard-space around the pirogue, as if they were motoring through a cave made of fire. Around this cave, things moved. Great wings in the air. Great swellings in the water. The whole night seemed to crawl.

  Memory realized that she didn’t feel safe, even though her travel mate was the Devil. Something uneasy haunted his eyes. He didn’t appear frightened, exactly, but something was there.

  “What is it about this man,” she asked, “this Two-John? I asked, but you never said.”

  “Quiet, now.”

  “No. You tell me.”

  The tiki torch darkened. So did the Devil’s eyes. He looked different by firelight. His teeth longer, his hair longer, his eyes coal black.

  The Devil told Memory how there were no more angels on the Earth, but sometimes there were people who looked like them a little. Maybe even made music like them, in their own way, and were dangerous.

  Memory pretended to understand.

  She watched the torch and the dark beyond, and she did understand, now, the Devil’s expression as he steered. It wasn’t fear; it was respect.

  The difference didn’t make her feel better.

  Just then, Memory became aware of a rushing noise. Near or far, it was hard to tell. A world of sound, a roar like a cheering crowd.

  The Devil cursed.

  “Is it wind?” she called out.

  “It’s water!” shouted the Devil. “All that rain. Grab onto something!”

  The universe of noise became a wall of water. It hit them like a train, lifting them up, smashing them down, and dragging them under.

  “I SHOULD HAVE known better,” said the Devil, hours later, at the edge of dawn.

  They crouched in the pirogue, braced against a cypress deadfall, bailing muddy water.

  All around them, mist. The sun had risen, lending the mist a white glow. It was like floating inside a lightbulb.

  “Now what?” asked Memory. “Where are we going?” She pulled her hair back, and wrung it like a rag.

  The Devil pointed with a long, witchy finger.

  Memory looked, and beheld a house on stilts in the middle of the water, anchored by a great, mossy chain.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  THEY DRIFTED UP to what might have been the front of the house. There was a door, a half-rotten porch, and a ladder descending to the water.

  The Devil caught hold of the ladder, and gave a tug that rocked the pirogue a little, but rocked the house, too, and he said in a big voice:

  “Come out, come out, Two-John Spode!”

  The things that were said and the things that began happening, then, felt to Memory like the way things might feel inside a story. As if they had already been told and could not happen any other way.

  From behind a rusted screen door, a crackly voice yelled: “Va-t’en, Diable! Go away, Devil!”

  And the Devil said, “Two-John! Come make a bet with me.”

  Something like a scarecrow appeared on the porch. A tall scarecrow with a red waterfall for a beard, and round glasses for eyes, and hair as long as the Devil’s. The rest of him was hidden away in flannel, denim, and a monstrous pair of green rubber boots.

  “Two times I bet you,” said Two-John, “and two times I win. What reason I got to bet you again? You bet me for my soul I could not charm the 1963 Sugarcane Queen into my bed, and I did, me, and her sister, too, and you had to bring me pirate gold! I hate to make you poor and broke, Devil.”

  “He tricked you?” Memory asked the Devil.

  “He gave me wine,” he explained. “Good wine.”

  “A second time, for my soul,” Two-John continued, “you bet me I could not trap death in my guitar, and when I did you gave me three years’ good luck. I fear you will run out of magic.”

  “Death?” said Memory, in a small voice.

  “Wine,” explained the Devil.

  He addressed Two-John again: “I don’t come for your soul! It’s you I want, Two-John. Want you to play your guitar and be famous. Want you and this one”—he indicated Memory—“to be the most famous band there ever was.”

  “I told you once, me,” said Two-John, “I have all the fame and gold I wish.”

  The pirogue had drifted away from the ladder somewhat, and passed beneath the anchor chain. The Devil gave the chain a healthy yank, and the house shook. Two-John looked uncomfortable.

  “Go get your guitar,” said the Devil, “and I’ll tune my fiddle, and you and me will play. If I play better, then you’ll leave the swamp and give back my gold and play music with this pretty one, la jolie blonde. And if you play better, then you can have my fiddle for your own.”

  The Devil reached into the bottom of the pirogue and unwrapped Old Ripsaw. Holding it high in the strange white mist, he let it glow bloody colors, casting red on the water.

  “Foolishness,” said Two-John, but his eyes followed the fiddle as if hypnotized. After a while, he said, “It don’t hurt me, Devil, to take your luck and money. But I will take your bet only if you will take a jar of wine, else they will say Two-John is a poor host.”

  The Devil reached up and accepted a great glass jar, and set it down in the bottom of the pirogue.

  Two-John ducked inside to fetch his guitar.

  “Don’t drink that,” warned the Devil.

  “Don’t you,” said Memory, tucking the jar away under her seat.

  There was a sharp, bloody flash, and the Devil’s fiddle became a fine red guitar.

  The Devil plunked the strings the way you plunk a shot glass on a bar.

  TWO-JOHN RETURNED with his own guitar in his hand. It was the color of an old, forgotten barn. It was worn away in places, where the pick had struck or fingers pressed. It looked experienced and alive the way some people look.

  Two-John sat down at the top of the ladder and hit one string with his thumb, so softly it could have been an accident. A note like a ghost. It made Memory shiver.

  The Devil played a chord so hollow it seemed to come from far away.

  Two-John flexed his shoulders and cracked his red knuckles. The mist moved around him like a soul.

  A frog jumped up on the porch beside him. Behind the house, a Lord God bird took the air like a cloud.

  Two-John grinned his foxy grin, and said, “I will play the blues, Devil, and then you play the blues, and we’ll see who will take what.”

  “Deal,” said the Devil.

  TWO-JOHN SHAPED HIMSELF about his guitar, as if the guitar were a bed he meant to sleep in. His beard and hands and everything about him gained an air of unutterable sadness, and when he played his first note it went out and hung itself by the neck.

  For the longest time it was the only note Two-John played.

  Then another note came along, drunk and bleeding and shoeless, and another like a well. The notes came faster and began to fall like tears.

  They were heavy notes. The kind of notes that sound like empty rooms and twist you up inside.

  He didn’t show off and try to play what Regret sounded like, or make them hear what Heartbreak sounded like, because the blues is not about those things, if you let the blues be what they are. And you could tell Two-John knew it, and let it be what it was, which is the smallest and most lonely of moments and the most distant of sounds, the loneliness and sadness that are there fo
r no reason at all, which maybe only an old man can know, or a man who knows witchcraft, and his blues were so perfect that no one even knew when the song ended and Two-John stopped playing. They might have sat there all day, knowing the strange things the song made them know and remembering the small things it made them remember, gazing dumb-eyed into the fog on the water, if the Lord God bird hadn’t returned, a passing shadow, awakening them with a cry.

  WHEN THE DEVIL started playing, it sounded like a choo-choo train.

  It was so simple, compared to the salt-mine-of-the-soul Two-John had played, that it sounded like a cartoon. Memory thought it was a joke, at first.

  But the chord grew.

  It wasn’t sad. Not all blues songs moan. Sometimes they HOWL.

  Like an old, bent dog, the Devil crashed against his guitar.

  The song was like a car wreck, but with rhythm.

  It was like being stabbed, with rhythm.

  It was razors cutting, with rhythm like a hundred trains, and it sounded like a hundred guitars. The harder the Devil played, the more like the Devil he seemed to become. In all the white mist in the white world of the swamp, his eyes were the only color, shining red like something living kicked apart.

  The Devil understood the secret of the blues, too, and he knew that the blues are about the bluesman. These blues weren’t loneliness or the smallest of empty moments. These blues didn’t leave them staring into space, feeling sullen and empty. This blues had enough problems without people feeling sorry for it. This blues wanted them scared to death, because somebody was going to PAY, goddammit! The Devil had been kicked out of HEAVEN! and had his true love stolen by GOD! and his true love had left him four different times and he hadn’t seen her for three hundred YEARS! and when he played the guitar it was like strangling Creation because no one ever, EVER had the blues like the Devil had the blues, and even if they thought they had the blues anywhere near as bad, when the Devil finally burned to a stop, covered in sweat and tears and Spanish moss, they were way too scared to say so.

  TWO-JOHN LEFT THE PORCH and went inside. He emerged with a duffel bag over one shoulder, and his guitar in a burlap sack under one arm. Before, he had looked as if he belonged in another world. Now he seemed to be collecting himself in this one.

  He climbed down the ladder, into the mist and the water, and waded over to the pirogue.

  “I don’t think she’ll hold three of us, John,” said the Devil, standing in the stern, looking for something to put in his pipe.

  But Two-John just tossed in his guitar and duffel bag, and said, “I ain’t getting in. You’re getting out.” He grabbed the boat and gave it a wobble, and the Devil pitched over backward into the swamp.

  Memory didn’t fall. She had the sense, in a narrow boat, to stay seated.

  The Devil came up sputtering and steaming, eyes glowing.

  “Calm down,” said Two John. “I need you to help me with something.”

  They had a short, quiet conversation, then dove under the water and didn’t come up for a while.

  THE HOUSE LEANED a particular way, stilts cracking.

  The anchor chain went slack.

  Then Two-John and the Devil, draped in swamp muck, rose up beside the pirogue, bearing a muddy, moss-covered, but nonetheless solid gold anchor as big as a man.

  “You can’t put that in the boat,” said Memory. “I’ll meet you on the shore.”

  She crawled across the pirogue, over the Devil’s guitar—a fiddle again, wrapped in leather—and gave the motor a pull.

  “How far is the shore?” asked the Devil, hoisting his end of the anchor and trudging after the pirogue.

  “It changes,” said Two-John.

  Memory nudged the tiller, aiming between trees. She picked up the jar from between her feet, and drank a little of Two-John’s wine.

  “By the way,” said the Devil to Two-John, “I brought you something.”

  He jerked his chin at the pirogue, and Two-John craned his neck to peer over the gunnel.

  In the bottom of the boat lay a beaten old guitar case. It hadn’t been there a minute ago, Memory was sure.

  “That’s Dan Paul’s guitar,” she said, sipping at the wine.

  “His guitar,” said Two-John, stumbling a little under the weight of the anchor, “but what’s in it belongs to me. Ain’t sure I’m happy it come back.”

  “You’re gonna need it,” said the Devil.

  Inside the case, something moved and scratched.

  “There’s something in there,” Memory observed.

  “Pas de bêtise,” said Two-John. “No shit.”

  Behind them, the house surrendered to the floodwaters and drifted off into the fog. All around, the vines hung low, the moss hung low, and the river ran through it all like coffee.

  THE MICROBUS STARTED just fine, despite spending the night tire-deep in floodwater. The engine was cool, at least. That much Memory absorbed before the wine she had tasted put her to sleep.

  Two-John and the Devil drove fifty miles, slowly, down the flooded northbound highway, until the rear shocks cracked into pieces under the weight of the solid gold anchor and the Microbus fishtailed, hurling the Kennedy limo into a ditch, where it tipped up and sank like a rock.

  Memory woke up with a headache like a mad dog.

  “Told you,” said Two-John. “It’s too heavy.”

  “Shut up,” said the Devil.

  “‘That anchor needs a dump truck or a train to carry it,’ I said. Didn’t I say that, me?”

  “He doesn’t listen,” said Memory, trying to get her eyes to focus.

  “I listen,” complained the Devil.

  “You couldn’t just snap your fingers—” said Two-John.

  “He doesn’t do that,” Memory told him.

  “Fine!” said the Devil. Half turning in the driver’s seat, he offered Memory a courtly, if sarcastic, bow. He climbed out of the Microbus, straightened his hat, and snapped his fingers.

  The limo hauled itself out of the ditch.

  The bus roared to life, good as new, or better, and bounced on perfect shocks.

  The solid gold anchor flew out the back doors, and lay across the limo’s backseat.

  The Lincoln sagged, but the Devil snapped his fingers and the car steadied itself. He climbed in behind the dripping wheel, raced the engine, and waved goodbye.

  “See you soon,” he called, passing on the shoulder and accelerating north, leaving a muddy wake behind.

  “Which way is civilization?” Memory asked Two-John.

  “That way,” he answered, pointing south. “New Orleans.”

  BY THE TIME they crossed Lake Pontchartrain and rolled down the city streets, Memory felt more or less herself, except for an uneasy stomach. She looked for a pay phone to call Bubble Records in California.

  They were halfway down Bourbon Street when a tavern manager gave a yelp, leaped tables, and went down before her on one knee, kissing her hand.

  Two-John shuffled beside her. He didn’t feel clear yet about his role, where Memory was concerned. Was he supposed to protect her? Romance her? Treat her like a sister, what?

  He decided the tavern manager wasn’t a threat, which he wasn’t.

  He was a fan.

  He babbled that he’d seen her on television, on the news, that people were still talking about the Woodstock concert and everyone who’d played there, including the mystery band who’d played part of one song and then vanished during the rainstorm.

  Memory was the Amelia Earhart of rock ’n’ roll.

  Would she sing with his musicians in the tavern that night? He’d give her all the receipts just to be able to say she had sung at his little dive.

  Memory said she would. Then she asked to use the phone, and he tugged her indoors.

  Two-John bought himself a Miller beer and sat at a nearby table, watching Memory through his long hair.

  Memory got through to California. Dan Paul’s old studio boss wasn’t in the office, but the office went nu
ts and patched her through to his home in Malibu.

  She told him Hello when he answered, and then sat and listened while he talked—yelled, really—for almost an hour.

  Her eyes got bigger and bigger.

  Two-John drank his beer and gave his guitar case the evil eye. Something inside plucked a low note.

  “Frème ta djeule,” growled Two-John. “Quiet, you.”

  11.

  Homes and Gardens in Egypt

  The Northbound Highway, 1969,

  and then Egypt, 2500 BC

  THE DEVIL DROVE NORTH with the top down. The humid southern air turned his hair into a long, wet whip. He drove the Natchez Trace amid the ghosts of thieves and madmen. He drove by roads that were strange and half real, and near Memphis he stopped for chili. Near Franklin he stopped at a Holiday Inn, where he toweled his hair dry and stared out the window, watching taillights on the highway.

  Then he cranked the air conditioner, smoked half a cigarette, and fell asleep dreaming a memory of long ago, when he had won back his true love in Egypt.

  HE REMEMBERED walking like a giant among the Earth’s first kingdoms.

  The Fallen who stayed behind were kings in those days. They rutted and mated and made children who were gods and monsters.

  As the centuries passed, though, the Devil met fewer of the Fallen. Earth wore at them in a way Heaven had not, and one by one they were claimed by a bottomless sleep. He sometimes felt this great sleep grasping at him, but he was stronger than the others, and the pain of his broken heart sustained him. He missed Arden until finally he thought his loneliness must rival God’s. That was the day he lay down in the desert and slept for hundreds of years.

  HE MIGHT HAVE TURNED to dust and blown away if the desert hadn’t started to move over his head.

  He sat up to see what was happening.

  People were building mighty cities on the Nile River.

  The Devil, coughing sand, blinked in amazement.

  These were a new kind of people. Enterprising, and busy with impressive work. They knew mathematics and astronomy and architecture. They built pyramids, temples, and whole cities of painted stone. They called their nation “Egypt.”

  People like this, thought the Devil, might someday make Earth the envy of Heaven.