The idea took his breath away.
In a single moment, purpose rushed back into his life.
Arden might be able to stomach the world the Egyptians were making. There were scholars among them, and artists, and poets! Perhaps she would come to Earth and be his again.
He got up out of the dust and marched into Egypt, determined to win his girlfriend back, and raise the civilizations of Earth until they looked down on Heaven.
HE WHISPERED IN the ears of Egypt’s mathematicians. He labored among her masons. For a time, he wore Pharaoh’s double crown.
He urged them. Forced them.
They were an ancient and religious people, though. They depended to a large degree on fear and mystery, so he put on the body of a lion and the head of a man, and crouched by the roadside, asking riddles. They called him Sphinx, and honored and dreaded him.
The mission of the Sphinx was to help make Egypt wise by eating dumb people.
He would ask travelers, “Who is wiser: a wise man or a fish?”
If the traveler did not answer “a wise man,” maybe because he wished to seem clever, or because he suspected a hidden meaning, the Sphinx would eat him. In this way, he culled the stupid and the pretentious, and improved the Egyptian gene pool.
ONE DAY, the Sphinx crouched by the roadside, and a traveler came by, cloaked and hooded.
“Which is wiser,” asked the Sphinx, “a wise man or a fish?”
“It is a trick question,” said the traveler. “The answer is ‘a wise woman,’ the wisest of all wise things.”
The traveler’s voice was familiar.
She shed hood and cloak, revealing wings and a body of shining light.
Arden.
And they fell, coupling, right in the middle of the road.
THEY WERE HAPPY for a time.
The Devil had been right: the pyramids and the calendars impressed her. They took a modest apartment. Domestic life was something new for them both. With only each other to entertain, they sat together in gardens, or walked in the bazaars.
“This,” she observed, “must be the way lives are supposed to fit together.”
They lay together in bed in the late morning, listening to boats and voices on the canal outside the window. The Devil was happier than he’d ever been.
If you had told him, at that particular moment, that she would be leaving again, he would have just laughed.
Practically every night, he would sit up late, talking with neighbors over the kitchen table, over mugs of beer, and platters of bread and oil. It was difficult for Arden at first, but she got used to chatting sociably and eating little finger sandwiches.
She became close with a woman named Nabiri, a young newlywed. Nabiri’s husband, Apoo, had a good job with the priests, predicting the moods of the Nile. Arden and Nabiri started a kind of neighborhood women’s orchestra. There were a couple of widows with panpipes, Nabiri played the oboe, and Arden sang. Every Tuesday night they practiced, and boatmen would linger on the canal beneath the windows.
The Devil became friends with Apoo, and taught the Egyptian what the stars really were, and Apoo started work on a calendar. The Devil taught him weather, and he drew tables matching rainfall to the way the river ran. When they’d been at this for more than a year, Apoo made a prediction.
“There is going to be a terrible flood,” he said.
The Devil agreed.
Apoo gathered the tables and charts, and rushed off to warn the priests, who would warn Pharaoh and the people. But he was back a short time later, looking tired and stunned.
“They didn’t believe it,” he told the Devil. “I showed them the charts and explained the numbers and the weather. But they dismissed me. My assistance is no longer required at the temple.”
Apoo collapsed into a chair.
The Devil’s eyes darkened.
“It’s about money,” he told Apoo.
“What is?”
“You just told a group of priests—rich priests—that this year’s crop—this year’s money—is going to be wiped out by the weather.”
“I didn’t just tell them. I showed them numbers.”
The Devil spread his arms wide, then let them fall in frustration.
“I’ve always kind of assumed,” he said, “that people would thirst for knowledge and understanding. But they don’t. They thirst to know things that support what they already believe. They especially like to hide from anything that looks like it might cost them money.”
“But that’s insane!” cried Apoo, stomping his feet like a child. “Ignoring it doesn’t stop it from happening! And if they acted, they could build dams and levees! They could dig ditches to redirect accumulated rain, and save it in reservoirs! They could build terraces in the hills, and farm away from the floodplain! We’d have to find a way to get water to higher elevations, but how hard can it be? Do you have a stylus? I need something to draw on …”
This, thought the Devil, with fire in his eyes, was what humans were supposed to sound like!
“I think we could build some kind of wheel that would carry water,” said Apoo, “and—”
“Who’s going to build all this?” asked the Devil. “You just got fired.”
Apoo struggled for a response. Instead, crushed, he gathered his charts and slunk out the door.
“YOU COULD HELP THEM,” said Arden, later that night. They lay side by side in bed, arms crossed on the windowsill, gazing over the moonlit canal.
“What?” asked the Devil. “Snap my fingers and change the weather?”
“Why not?”
The Devil caressed her arm, thinking.
“You used to build or destroy whole kingdoms. Your sword was heavy with blood. Anyone who wouldn’t listen, you sliced them up.”
“I know better now,” he answered. “You can’t make people see reason. I think they have to suffer. They don’t learn something until it hurts them.”
“They’re not stupid, though,” said Arden. “They’re complicated, but bad at dealing with complicated things. They like to simplify problems but don’t see that you have to understand complexity before you can simplify it.”
The Devil looked at her in amazement. Already, he was learning from her. It gave him an erection.
“The flood will be like a teacher,” he said.
Arden began to protest, but the Devil silenced her with a kiss. Embracing her, he brushed her neck and shoulders with soft lips and sharp teeth, and didn’t hear her when she gasped, “Don’t count on it.”
THE FLOOD CAME down from Upper Egypt like a wall. Fat and dark, the river rolled over the plain, washing everything away, until it smashed at the walls of Memphis, and roared through its streets and temples.
The fields and canals were erased. Even Pharaoh was inconvenienced. Leaving the palace at the last moment, the royal barge nearly capsized in heavy water, and a nephew of some sort was snatched away by a crocodile.
Arden and the Devil watched the flood from atop the highest of the pyramids.
When they came back into the city, they found that the priests had lashed Apoo to tide stakes, in the mud that had been his own patio. Calling him a witch, they had blamed him for the flood. How else could he have known, how else could he have told them the strange things he had told them?
The rising water had drowned him.
Nabiri sat above the waterline, on a ledge beneath their bedroom window. She hugged her knees and stared down at Apoo, who had begun to swell and draw flies. Arden hugged her close, but Nabiri didn’t even know she was there.
The Devil waded in knee-deep water, gnashing his teeth.
“Animals,” he said aloud, kicking at a chair as it floated by, “can at least face facts.”
Leaving Arden with Nabiri, he went to sort through the dreck and wreckage of his own home. Arden came home just as he finished burning their wrecked furniture, and they went to sleep on the floor.
After midnight, Arden woke him up. She stood over him, glowing. Her
wings folded like a hood over her head.
“I’m going back,” she said.
He was too sleepy, at first, to panic. He just said, “Why?”
“Because nothing has changed.”
“But people have grown. They’ll grow more. It’s a process.”
“I can’t wait here while that happens. The world is still terrible. It’s like the Earth and everything on it was made to tear itself to pieces.”
She ached to recoil from everything around her—he could sense it, smell the fear on her. She loved him—he could smell that, too—but revulsion overwhelmed her.
The Devil spread his own wings, which had become leathery in all these years on Earth. He tried to soothe her, as a lizard might soothe a dove, and she screamed at his touch. With a look of bottomless agony, she flashed like the sun and was gone.
THE NEXT DAY, too numb to feel angry, the Devil became the Sphinx and sat along the northern highway, beyond the reach of the floodwaters.
Eventually, a Nubian traveler came down the road.
“Which is wiser,” the Devil asked him, “a river or a stone?”
The traveler started to answer, but the Devil was feeling rejected and mean. He ate the poor fellow up before he could say anything at all.
HE AWOKE with a start.
It took the Devil a minute to remember where he was. The rattling air conditioner. The soapy smell of the Holiday Inn.
The dream faded slowly. His waking self, his waking heart, straddled centuries.
He made a choking noise, drawing a deep breath.
He held his head between sharp, crooked fingers, too lost to cry.
12.
Fish at the Helen of Troy
Troy, Ohio
Christmas Eve, 1969
THEY WOULDN’T LOOK for him here, thought Fish.
He stood outside a Greyhound station in Troy, Ohio, ankle-deep in snow, in the clothes he’d been wearing for two days. There hadn’t been time for luggage. He’d been lucky to escape Buffalo with his life.
Luck.
In Buffalo, he had run into the bus station, just when there was no line at the window he wanted. Got a ticket for a bus scheduled to leave in five seconds, and pulled out just as Jimmy and Bigfoot Terwilliger ran onto the platform, looking this way and that, with twenty buses to choose from. Fish had slid down low in his seat, ball cap over his face, and stayed that way until he estimated the bus had gone forty miles.
Out of the frying pan, for now. Other problems presented themselves.
Like avoiding freezing to death. Troy, Ohio, swirled with snow, all closed down for the night. Fish aimed himself in a downtownish direction, and found that if he walked hard and kept his left hand in his pocket, he warmed up.
His right hand wouldn’t fit in a pocket, because it was still in a cast. Pins kept his reattached thumb from twisting off. That hand had felt cold since Woodstock.
It was warmer than Buffalo, at least. Jesus, that place!
He had fled his apartment without a coat, but at least was layered in T-shirts, a flannel waffle shirt, flannel outer shirt, and flannel quilted shirt. Heavy socks, too. His shoes were impractical. Some kind of leather zip-up boots. They’d seemed hip, two months ago, just out of the hospital, back in New York.
There was downtown, a few blocks away. A town square, with Christmas lights. Would he find a motel? How would he pay for it if he did? Could he get someone to put him up and give him time to make some phone calls, have some money wired?
Shit. Call who? Money wired from where?
He might have to sleep in a shelter, some church basement. But he realized, as he plodded on around the square, that the churches of Troy, Ohio, probably didn’t have shelters, didn’t need them. This wasn’t Buffalo. Here, the churches were for church people.
Once in a while, a family car hushed down the street, on its way to Christmas Eve services. Midnight church, with candles and Christmas carols. They passed him by. They sometimes waved.
He stopped.
Christmas Eve services! Eureka! Every town had them! Every church, maybe. He’d get to huddle inside and warm up awhile. Maybe get a bite to eat, if there was a coffee hour afterward. The idea cheered him.
He was just beginning to hum “Midnight Clear” when the cops pulled over to wish him a merry Christmas.
The cops weren’t necessarily looking for someone to hassle, Fish told himself. They just saw somebody having a rough time in dumb shoes on Christmas Eve.
“Merry Christmas,” said the driver, rolling down his window and extending a hand in a way, Fish knew, that meant “Hello” but also “Stop.”
He stopped. He said “Merry Christmas” back, and shuffled over to the cruiser.
“Can we give you a lift somewhere?”
Fish decided to almost be truthful with them.
“I was trying to get to Miami by bus,” he said. “Ran out of money. Now I’m just trying to find someplace warm till I can call a friend or two, have them wire me something. I’d be willing to work for a room and a sandwich. I don’t want trouble.”
“What a coincidence!” The driver grinned. “Neither do we!”
They invited him to ride in the back while they drove him up Main Street to a place called the Helen of Troy, a local motel and restaurant beside the interstate. They didn’t embarrass him by escorting him to the front desk. Instead, the driver managed to call the desk on his radio.
Specifically, he called “Deb,” who was on duty, and whom he seemed to know.
He asked if they’d put Fish up overnight, or until the banks opened after the holiday.
And Deb said, “Sure, Ricky. It’s Christmas, ain’t it?”
The cops didn’t even stay to watch and make sure he was nice to Deb. They backed out, leaving black tire tracks in fresh snow, and rolled off downtown again, toward the square and the Christmas tree.
Two minutes later, Fish was in his room, which smelled like cigarettes and shampoo, and had a color TV. He took off his ball cap, and ran his fingers through long, greasy hair.
It occurred to him that he could take a shower. Hell, he could probably find a way to wash some clothes, at least his underwear.
He ran the water hot. Decided on a bath, instead. The room steamed like Niagara Falls.
Fish sank in and let the heat sting him. Let it run through him and clear him out, loosen him up. He found himself making plans.
The plans included work. Fish didn’t like work, but had no choice.
Maybe they would have enough Ohio goodwill to set him up for a few days washing dishes or pushing a broom. Enough to get him bus and lunch money to Miami. Then …
He fell asleep in the tub.
When he woke up, the water was lukewarm, and all he could think of was getting between a set of those crisp Helen of Troy sheets. He dried himself halfheartedly, stumbled naked into the relative chill of the bedroom, lit now only by the blue glow of the color TV, where the Devil sat at the little round table by the window, crushing out a cigarette in a big glass ashtray.
Fish clapped his hand over his mouth and won a quick struggle for control.
The Devil got up and flicked the TV off. “We need to have a conversation,” he said, “you and me.”
“How the fuck did you get in here?”
“Does it matter? Get dressed,” said the Devil. “We need coffee.”
IT TURNED OUT you could get breakfast in the middle of the night at the Helen of Troy. So the Devil bought steak and eggs for himself and an omelet for Fish.
The Devil stared at Fish while he ate. He wore a brace of heavy rings, and kept his nails long. It was like being stared at by someone who owned a pawnshop.
“How’d you come to be almost freezing to death in Ohio?” asked the Devil.
“Don’t you know?”
“Humor me. And watch the attitude.”
“I got out of the hospital after they rebuilt my hand,” Fish said, “and they had me on painkillers. I had just a little bit of cash save
d back from what they paid us up front on our record deal, and—”
“The short version.”
“I was in a bar having some drinks, and I met a guy named Fong, a bail bondsman. I shared some of my painkillers with him, and we cooked up this idea for selling prepaid bail bonds.”
“Sounds like a great idea on booze and pills.”
“Why have to wait around in jail when you fuck up, if you were the kind of person who was likely to fuck up, when you could just have bail waiting for you like an insurance policy? We’d use my money for capital, and Fong would be the people person, the bond expert, because he already knew the clientele. The plan was geared toward certain kinds of people, see—”
“People like Jimmy and Bigfoot Terwilliger,” said the Devil.
“You do know,” said Fish.
The waitress came. She poured coffee. She left.
“So where have you been,” said Fish, “if you knew I was in trouble?”
“No, keep going,” said the Devil. “Your stupidity amuses me.”
“I was on painkillers,” Fish reminded him. “So, yeah. Bigfoot and Jimmy are these guys who like to strong-arm the taxi companies for protection money, and they found us a convenient way to store and launder stolen cash.”
“Let me guess,” said the Devil. “One day they wanted to take their money back out, and you didn’t have it.”
“It was busy,” said Fish. “The money was busy making money. A business has to invest.”
“Did you explain that to Jimmy and Bigfoot?”
“I didn’t get a chance. I went down to the store and Fong was sitting there with a hole between his eyes. I barely got out of Buffalo.”
The restaurant had emptied, and was silent. The waitress eyed them from the cash register.
“Listen,” said the Devil. “I know you think you’re some kind of superpractical hard-ass, but you’re not. You’re a lazy, deluded candy-ass, and if you keep fucking around in the underworld, the real hard-asses are going to eat your face. You don’t need to do anything illegal to take other people’s money. So don’t.”
“Okay. So what do I do? You have my soul, you know. Isn’t it all just supposed to fall out of the sky, more or less?”
Up Jumps the Devil Page 9