The Devil sipped his coffee and looked disgusted.
“You haven’t figured out yet,” he said, “that if you want to get money and keep money, you have to work a little. Money is like a fast car or a woman. If you ignore it, it will fall apart or leave you.”
“Thanks for the advice. But—”
“Here’s some more advice. Watch out, over by the door.”
“Door?”
“You have company,” said the Devil, pointing.
Fish was startled to discover Jimmy Terwilliger advancing across the restaurant. A tall man in a fake leather, full-length coat. Fur collar. Fur hat. Dressed for winter in Buffalo. One hand inside the coat, gripping something.
How—?
Adrenaline and fear took over. Fish threw a chair, and bolted past Jimmy into the lobby.
There was cursing behind him, but Fish didn’t look to see if Jimmy was following. In the lobby, he got down on his hands and knees, out of sight, until he reached the stairway, then flew upstairs to his room and locked the door. All without blinking or taking a breath. Now he sank, panting, onto the floor, back to the door.
The Devil was watching It’s a Wonderful Life in black and white on the color TV.
“How in the hell did you get—!” began Fish, shaking and near tears, but the Devil shushed him until the movie was over.
“WHAT HAPPENED?” Fish blurted, the moment credits rolled. “How’d he find me?”
“Imagination, kid.”
“When he missed me at the bus station, he bribed or threatened the desk clerk to tell him what bus I took and how far I was going?”
“Was that so hard?”
“No. Except where’s Bigfoot? How come it’s just Jimmy?”
The Devil threw up his hands. “Does it matter?” he barked. “We’ve got work to do. You need to understand money a little, if you’re going to be rich like you want.”
Outside the door, someone coughed. Keys jangled. A door slammed.
Fish jumped a mile at every sound.
“Can we do this fast?” he asked. “It would solve a lot of problems if I were rich right this exact second.”
“Listen,” said the Devil.
Fish was a jumble of nervous energy. He lit a cigarette. He put it out. He turned the TV off.
“I’m listening,” he told the Devil.
“There’s no such thing as money,” the Devil began.
Fish didn’t argue. The Devil could have said President Nixon was a psychologically accelerated house cat, and Fish would have agreed.
“Money represents something called value, which occurs in something called a market. It works like this:
“If someone wants something, its value is whatever they are willing to give up so they can have it. A man might repair a doorknob in exchange for a loaf of bread. In that case, the value of the loaf of bread is exactly the time and effort taken to fix the doorknob. The same is true if he exchanges a ten-dollar bill for a nice dinner, or six pigs for a horse.
“Now, the market won’t work for long if exchanges don’t make sense. Big things are traded for big things, small things for small things. You can’t trade an apple for a horse, because only a fool would trade a horse for an apple. That’s the first lesson.”
“I get it,” said Fish. “That was easy.”
“They’re all easy. The second lesson is: So what if you could trade an apple for a horse?”
“You’d get insanely rich,” said Fish, getting up to turn the TV on again.
As he passed the window, a gun in a leather-clad fist shattered the glass.
Jimmy Terwilliger was back.
Fish peed his pants and screamed like a little girl.
His nerves were shot, but this was a good thing. When your nerves are shot, you become one big reflex. Fish’s big reflex made him grab the leather-clad arm and pull it with him to the floor. Jimmy Terwilliger burst through the window, and the two of them collapsed in a heap.
It looked as if there might be wrestling and shooting. Desperate, Fish snatched a heavy ashtray off the top of the minibar and, using both hands, smashed Jimmy’s head until it caved like a cantaloupe.
Snow drifted through the broken window.
Fish sat staring at the bloody ashtray lodged in Jimmy’s temple. The Devil looked at Fish in wonder. He produced a rum fizz out of thin air and said, “Here, man. Drink this.”
Fish drank.
He could feel his brain trying to have a breakdown. All men wonder if they could kill someone if they had to. Most never find out. Now Fish was left with the murkier question of whether he could manage not to get caught. He finished the rum fizz, and took a critical look at the ashtray.
“Can you bring me a towel to put under his head?”
The Devil grinned approval.
“I’ll go you one better,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
Jimmy Terwilliger was gone. The ashtray, clean and emptied, sat atop the minibar again. The window was whole. The rum fizz refilled itself.
“I didn’t think you did stuff like that,” said Fish.
“You earned it.”
“Thanks. Where is he? Jimmy?”
“What the fuck do you care?”
“I don’t.”
“Then Merry Christmas.”
“Okay.”
ON THE BED, Fish made a little fort out of pillows and buried himself in it. His brain was sort of giddy. The fort was a psychological fort. “So,” said Fish. “How can you get people to trade horses for apples?”
The Devil stood at the window, watching the morning sun on new snow in the Helen of Troy parking lot. “Well,” he said, “what if the value of a thing is fuzzy?”
“Fuzzy value? Like what?”
“Life.”
Fish retreated into the fort, but remained visible.
“You mean—”
“I mean your living life force. Beating heart, thinking brain, blood in your veins. What do you think it’s worth?”
“It’s not like that. It’s priceless.”
The Devil leaned over the fort in a way Fish didn’t like at all. “How much did Jimmy Terwilliger think your life was worth?”
Fish made a humming noise.
“Point being: Your life is valuable to you. To everyone else, it’s worthless.”
“Bullshit! My mother—!”
“If you fell over dead, your mother would get over it faster than you think.”
“Are we still talking about money?”
“We’re talking about life insurance. Money people pay to insure their lives. They trade you a horse, over the course of many years, and when they die, you trade them back an apple.”
“That’s sick!”
The Devil shrugged. “People love it,” he said. “They like that the insurance company thinks they have value.”
“You want me to go into insurance?”
“You want money, right? Well, you don’t like to work and you don’t have any special talent, so taking advantage of people looks like a fit for you.”
“Fuck you, man,” said Fish. But he said it in kind of a whisper. He was already thinking it over. It was already making sense to him.
“I gotta go down to my car for something,” said the Devil. “We’re almost in business, except you’re going to have to study for a licensing exam.”
The fort sagged.
“Money,” said Fish. “I don’t have money to pay for this room, let alone start-up cash!”
“Have faith,” said the Devil, and shut the door behind him.
He returned shortly, dragging an enormous gold anchor.
“Here’s your money,” he grunted, heaving it onto the bed, which collapsed.
“Okay,” said Fish, standing at the door, eyes wide.
Something was bothering Fish. He was forgetting something.
“All right,” said the Devil, shaking his hand. “See you when I see you.”
Fish frowned.
Forgetting something.
The Devil was gone.
He was back a minute later, though, knocking at the door. Maybe he had remembered the thing Fish was forgetting, thought Fish.
It wasn’t the Devil, though.
“Merry Christmas, shithead,” said Bigfoot Terwilliger, seven feet tall, grabbing Fish by the arm and forcing him back into the room.
“Ah,” said Fish.
This was the thing he’d forgotten.
Bigfoot drew a gun from his pocket.
Pulled back the hammer.
And caught a glimpse of the anchor.
“Whuzza …?” he began to say, but just then the Devil walked in through the door, saying he knew he’d forgotten something. He waggled his rings and fingers at Bigfoot, and Bigfoot vanished, screaming, in a sheet of hot blue flame.
Bits of his clothing survived, and a handful of twenty-dollar bills.
“Pocket money,” said the Devil. “I meant to leave you some pocket money.”
“What was that?” wheezed Fish, waving at the space where Bigfoot and the blue flame and the gun had been.
“We had a contract,” said the Devil.
“That’s what happens when a contract is over?”
“That’s what happens when his contract is over. He was an asshole.”
Fish collected the twenties off the floor.
The Devil paused on his way out the door.
“Don’t be an asshole,” he warned, and left.
13.
The Problem with Freezing People
Apache Junction, Arizona, 1969
THE DEVIL LEFT TROY and turned onto I-75. The road took him south to Dayton and west to Arizona. He turned left at the Superstition Mountains, cruised into Apache Junction, spent the night in a motel room Elvis had slept in, and in the morning he went to see Zachary, the electrocuted bass player, who had moved back in with his parents.
At the door, the Devil was very pleasant to Zachary’s mother, who led him to her son.
Zachary was sitting like a sack of dirt on the living room couch, watching television. His mother brought them lemonade. An artificial Christmas tree sparkled in one corner.
The television was between programs. There was a news break, and at the end of the news break there was a show where you could win a new car. Then there was another news break about a concert in Houston that had been raided for drugs. The concert featured a new band, Purple Airplane. Purple Airplane starred Memory Jones, the chick who had disappeared after Woodstock.
“Jones?” said the Devil. “What, she get her memory back? Her name’s Jones?”
“Studio clowns hung it on her, I’ll bet,” said Zachary.
The band also featured a Cajun phenomenon named Two-John, who played an acoustic guitar as if something dark were trying to get out of it.
“I kinda thought that guy was a myth,” said Zachary.
The Devil shrugged. “Who says he’s not? It’s working, whatever they’re doing. I can’t turn on the radio without hearing psychedelic this-and-that.”
“Did Mom offer you something to drink?”
The Devil rattled the ice in his glass.
“You miss it?” he asked Zachary. “The music thing?”
Zachary shrugged. “Never had it,” he said, “except for two minutes at Woodstock.”
“A heavy two minutes,” said the Devil.
Zachary slumped again. He seemed to wind down as fast as he wound up.
“I’m different from Memory,” he said. “That two minutes was all I ever wanted from that bass guitar. It was great, and it was enough, you know?”
Listlessly, he pointed at the TV. “She needs it, like, her whole life long. Maybe Fish, too, I don’t know. But I don’t. You seen Fish?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s he doing? Getting what he wanted?”
“Yeah.”
Zachary watched a pain-pill commercial, drooling again.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I slip back and forth. That’s why it’s just as well I don’t feel like I have to play bass and be famous and all that.”
“You can’t play?” asked the Devil.
“It’s like my brain doesn’t talk to certain parts of me anymore, or only talks when it wants to.”
His leg, as if to illustrate, gave a jerk.
Zachary raised his hands like he meant to say something else, but then he just froze that way.
Watched almost a whole game show that way, until his mother padded in and gently pushed his arms down, placed his hands on his knees.
She offered the Devil more lemonade, and he accepted.
“Sometimes,” she said, nodding at Zachary, “you’d swear he wasn’t even in there at all. Then he’ll wake up and quote that whole stupid show back to you, word for word.”
She looked like she was about to cry.
She went to get the lemonade.
“LISTEN,” SAID THE DEVIL, leaning forward, tapping Zachary on the knee. “I can help, you know. Your nerves are scarred. I can change that.”
“No,” said Zachary. His eyes focused, and he gave the Devil a no-nonsense look. “I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t go doing it when I’m not looking, either. I may look half asleep, but I’m watching you.”
The Devil pinched the bridge of his nose. Chinese monks had told him this could stop a headache. Sometimes it worked.
“It’s up to you,” he said, puzzled. “You were going to change the world, remember? And I don’t do refunds.”
“It’s not that.”
“Tell you what,” said the Devil. “Let me show you something.” The Devil waved his hand, and everything around them vanished.
THEY STOOD ON A ROCK the size of a capitol dome, with windswept trees growing from cracks and fissures. It was the kind of rock you climbed because you could see forever.
There were other domes and cliffs, visible far away, with gulfs of space between, and wind. It was one of the world’s giant places. You could feel the earth turn.
On the dome’s highest cap stood an Indian, weathered like a stick. In his arms he held a little girl, wrapped in a yellow blanket.
Beside the Devil, Zachary made a painful noise.
The old Indian laid the girl down on the rock, and began to sing. He wrapped the girl’s head in his hands and just sat there, staring across the great world space. The Earth turned. The wind blew.
It was a scene from ten years ago.
This was Zachary’s grandfather, Walter Bull Horse, and the girl in the blanket was Zachary’s sister, Nita, who had polio and couldn’t breathe well on her own anymore.
Walter Bull Horse picked up his granddaughter, and drove her home.
Home was an Indian movie village on the other side of downtown Sedona, tucked among red rocks and spruce trees, so movie crews could film the village and pretend it was a hundred years ago.
A movie crew was in the village now, in fact, cameras rolling, as Walter Bull Horse returned with his granddaughter. Walter didn’t give a damn if they were filming or not. He carried Nita right through the middle of the scene, to the fake trading post that doubled as the Bull Horse family home, and let the door slam behind him.
Outside, the director threw a tantrum.
Walter heard his son, Proud Henry, apologizing. Proud Henry had built the movie village, and liked to keep the movie crews happy.
Walter placed his granddaughter in her iron lung, and waited while her breathing steadied.
Back outside, among the spectators, the Devil drew Zachary’s attention to a particular, dark-eyed teenage boy. Zachary himself, on his fifteenth birthday. The boy watched his father apologizing to the director, and looked troubled.
“Aw, shit,” said Zachary.
“I wonder what he’s thinking,” said the Devil.
“You know goddamn well what he’s thinking.”
Young Zachary was wishing he were wise enough to know who was right, his father or his grandfather. He was thinking that his sister wasn’t old enough to die.
&n
bsp; It would have surprised the Bull Horse family to learn that young Zachary considered himself unwise. He had been known since birth, after all, for deep and considered thought.
“It’s not that I don’t like traditional Indian clothing,” he had told his grandfather when he was eight, “or that I like white clothes better. I have no preference. If there’s a place in my Apache mind where such preferences live, that place is a void.” And he made a sort of circle in the air with both hands, describing the void.
His grandfather had taught him meditation. Walter Bull Horse was a medicine man, or at least he said so. “Medicine men invented meditation,” he told them. “We’re the ones who sold it to the Japs. Chinese. Whatever Buddhists are.”
“That boy has lightning in his head,” was Walter’s opinion.
“You’re boring,” his sister told him, because he meditated so much.
Zachary wasn’t like his grandfather. He cared what people thought. So he taught Nita to meditate, and she changed her mind.
Nita, before she got sick, looked like she might grow up to be a warrior. She had clear, liquid eyes and a soft voice, but she was tall for her age, and had square shoulders. When she was six, her legs were long and strong enough to grip and ride a horse.
She allowed Zachary to teach her to meditate. Other than that, she preferred to be outdoors and moving, doing something, like her father.
Zachary wasn’t like his mother either. She brought people things. Drinks. Mail. Old photos. Articles in the newspaper. It was a job certain people seemed to have. They were Thing-Bringers.
“HOW DO YOU KNOW you’re meditating right?” Nita asked him one day. They sat facing each other in one of Proud Henry’s movie tepees.
“If you say you’re meditating,” he told her, “then you are. There’s no right and wrong way.”
“I’m meditating,” she said, and sat with her eyes closed for ten minutes until she slipped sideways and curled up on antelope fur, on the floor, asleep.
By the time she turned nine and he was fifteen, they could both get to a point where their bodies seemed to peel away, where they couldn’t feel the floor beneath them or the clothes on their backs. Sometimes, afterward, they talked about what they saw in their minds (stars, rabbits, water, the color blue), or drew pictures.
Proud Henry affected to understand them.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 10