Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  “I’ve been meditating, too,” he told them all, over dinner. “I need a solution to the shotgun problem.”

  The shotgun problem was a recent development in the world of movie stunts. Proud Henry, in his youth, had been a respected stuntman. He was even vaguely legendary for falling off a railroad water tower in Riders of the Purple Sage. Now, apparently, stunt purists were complaining that a man shot off the back of a horse by a pistol or a rifle should look different from a man shot off a horse by a shotgun. Proud Henry was on the job.

  They found him meditating at a table in the front window of the trading post one morning, a cup of warm coffee cooling between his hands. His head was down, his hair hanging. He snored.

  “Sleeping,” observed Nita.

  Zachary shrugged. “If he says it’s meditating—” he began, but Nita shook her head.

  “Sometimes it’s just sleeping,” she insisted.

  BUT PROUD HENRY had instincts; you had to give him that. He came home on Zachary’s sixteenth birthday with a locally made guitar, a masterpiece. Depending on how you strung it, you could play bass or regular guitar. It would accommodate six or twelve strings. The body was shallow, like a Les Paul, and polished a deep nut brown.

  It didn’t take long for Zachary to confirm his father’s hunch: He had guitar music inside him, just like Proud Henry had stunts. Despite the guitar’s many possibilities, he soon found he preferred it strung like a bass. Preferred the bottomless vibrations. The way bass notes sounded like a voice.

  Before long, he was improvising whole bass concerts, sitting opposite his meditating sister.

  “It helps,” she said.

  Walter Bull Horse agreed. Sometimes he meditated with them.

  “It’s like a drum,” he muttered, and he would chant so softly he might have been humming, until, like Proud Henry, he began to snore.

  One day when she was ten, Nita let go a long breath, emerging from trance or sleep, and stood to leave. She fell over sideways, one long, muscular leg gone wobbly underneath her.

  Zachary thumbed a sort of falling-down zither on his bass.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Leg fell asleep,” Nita answered. And she made it on the second try.

  That same night, Proud Henry dislocated his shoulder trying to solve the shotgun problem with a backflip off the rear of a horse. He spent four days with his arm in a sling, popping pain pills.

  Zachary wondered afterward if anything would have been different if someone had noticed that Nita’s leg seemed to have a hard time staying awake, more and more.

  They did notice, the day she fell and stayed down.

  “It won’t work,” she hissed, pounding her leg and crying.

  So there were doctors, and the doctors in those days saw right away what the leg’s problem was. They saw a lot of legs and children like that. Nita had polio.

  “Sanitation isn’t what it should be on the reservations.” Her doctor frowned.

  “We don’t live on the reservation,” Proud Henry was quick to inform him. “We own a movie ranch outside Sedona.”

  And the doctor looked at Proud Henry for few seconds. “Riders of the Purple Sage! You were the Indian they shot off the water tank!”

  MOVIE PEOPLE HAVE unusual powers, and as word of Proud Henry’s sick daughter went out over this and that telephone line, those powers flexed.

  A certain movie star got black-market medicine delivered to the ranch, and to Nita’s doctor. Experimental medicine. Serious, desperate, hard-to-get medicine. But it didn’t work.

  The polio germs inside Nita attacked a lot harder than polio germs were supposed to. Most children lost the use of a leg, and wore braces. Nita lost control of both legs. Day by day, she shrank in front of them until her shoulders lost their bigness. She no longer looked like a warrior or a hunter, or even a young girl. Then came a numbness about her abdomen, so that Mother, who brought things, began to specialize in bringing Nita to the bathroom. Nita and Mother became a society of two.

  THE DOCTOR WHO recognized Proud Henry from Riders of the Purple Sage authorized them to keep a shiny, state-of-the-art iron lung at home, in the trading post. He made certain the right wiring was present, the right outlets installed.

  The arrival of the iron lung, which seemed to Zachary a kind of casket shaped like a roll of quarters, knocked the wind out of them all. People who went into iron lungs did not get better.

  Zachary played the bass for her. Nita whispered that she had a hard time getting to sleep without it.

  She slept more and more.

  “Meditating,” she insisted.

  Zachary asked “What do you see?”

  She shrugged. Her shoulders and the gesture were lost behind her neck gasket.

  “I don’t think I see anything. I just feel calmer when I’m done.”

  “Me, too. But I see things. Eagles. Water. Two suns in the same sky.”

  “I want to be outside when I die,” she told him.

  Zachary didn’t know what to say to that. It was the kind of thing she was supposed to say to Mother.

  PROUD HENRY WOKE UP inspired one day, having dozed off in front of their twelve-inch TV.

  “Rope!” he cried, startling his father, dozing in an adjacent chair.

  “Pillows!” he cried, bolting out of the trading post, waking up Nita in the iron lung. Then he vanished onto the back lot, into the toolsheds. They heard him out there, banging around and whistling. It was a good day when he had a new solution for the shotgun problem.

  When Nita had a good day, she could breathe on her own for an hour or more. Walter Bull Horse began wrapping her in a yellow blanket and driving her out by the airport, where the red rock dome overlooked the whole world. Where the wind came straight from the sky, blue and raw. Walter kept an eye on his watch, and was careful to bring her back before she began to struggle.

  When Mother had a good day, lemonade or clean laundry might appear out of nowhere.

  For Zachary, a good day was when he had an idea, like the melody of a song or a fast way to solve a math problem.

  Proud Henry stuffed some throw pillows under his belt line, and tied a lasso around his waist. He lashed the other end around a totem pole. Then he climbed aboard a painted horse, and took off galloping.

  He had sprayed a red X on the ground. This was supposed to be where a shotgun was fired. When the horse galloped past the X, the rope went tight.

  Zachary was watching. It looked good. It looked exactly as if his father had been blasted from the saddle by bad guys.

  Proud Henry landed sideways in a cloud of red dust and dislocated his hip.

  Zachary loped over, concerned.

  Walter Bull Horse had been pretending not to watch from the trading-post window. Now he jogged out, too, cursing.

  He cut the lasso with a pocketknife, and the two of them walked Henry to the trading post.

  In the front room, Mother was right in the middle of draping the yellow blanket over her daughter and her daughter’s machine.

  The blanket floated in the air, filled like a cloud, and settled without a wrinkle.

  Mother didn’t say anything. She took off her glasses, then put them on again.

  “She wanted to be outside,” Zachary started to say, but his voice stuck.

  Proud Henry put his weight on his good hip. The pain made him pale, but he bore it. One injury at a time.

  Zachary stared into the air, meditating with his eyes open.

  THEN ZACHARY and the Devil were back in the living room.

  Ten years had passed, and Walter Bull Horse had passed, too.

  “So,” said Zachary. “What was I supposed to see? My sister dying of a stupid virus they found a cure for less than a year later? I’ve seen that before. It was nice seeing Granddad again, though. Thanks.”

  “That wasn’t the point,” said the Devil, toying with a herald angel on the Christmas tree. “The point,” he said “was to get you thinking about how things might be different if
science had moved faster. And yet here you sit, with your partially electrocuted brain, and won’t let me fix—”

  “I have my reasons,” Zachary snapped

  “The point I see,” he told the Devil, “is that sometimes death is a matter of scheduling. Her being dead when they beat the polio virus was like missing an appointment. What if she could have just been put on hold? What if people all over the place could be put on hold, if needed? People who need a few extra hours to get to a special hospital on the other side of the country? People who will be all right if they can just get a transfusion for a rare blood type, or hang on until the right kidney donor dies?”

  The Devil didn’t like the sound of this.

  “What,” he said, “exactly is it that you propose to do, Mr. Make the World a Better Place?”

  “Invent a way to freeze people so they can be brought back and cured. Give them the time they need.”

  “That’s not a new idea.”

  “I know.”

  “Most scientists say it can’t be done.”

  “They’re doing it wrong.” Zachary leaned forward. “I’m not talking about curing death,” he said. “Just stopping the clock. Like a time-out in football, you know? Listen: You said, ‘What if the polio researchers had been able to move faster, think faster?’ Well, what if that’s already happened? What if my brain already does move faster?”

  The Devil frowned. “Go on,” he said.

  Zachary came to his feet, energized. “Ask me a math problem. Something crazy.”

  “Seven thousand eight hundred forty-three times sixteen,” said the Devil.

  “One hundred twenty-five thousand four hundred eighty-eight,” answered Zachary. “More.”

  “Nine trillion times pi.”

  “Twenty-eight trillion two hundred sixty billion.”

  “That’s it? No decimals? Pi contains an infinite number of decimal places.”

  Zachary shrugged. “I used two decimal places, just like on math homework. But the answer I gave you is right. It’s a whole number.”

  “Could you do this before?” asked the Devil. “You were smart before.”

  “Not this smart. Before, maybe I could have figured out a way to freeze people in a way that they could be brought back, and maybe not. Now I’m sure I can do it. Right now, out there somewhere, is some little kid with cancer or a bad liver, who just needs someone to push a pause button long enough for circumstances to change. And I’m going to make sure that pause button is there.”

  He blinked purposefully at the Devil.

  “It’s not,” said the Devil, “that it doesn’t make sense. It’s just that I’ve seen the future, and it’s not what you’re supposed to do. You sold me your soul in exchange for a destiny, and freezing people is not it.”

  “How do you know? You got a crystal ball?”

  The Devil fished his crystal ball from his pocket and waved it in the air. “If that’s what it takes. Look!”

  “No,” said Zachary. “Let me show you something! Should have shown you right away. Follow me.”

  And he led the Devil through the utility room to the garage, to a workbench cluttered with plastic bottles and something like a chemistry set.

  “The trouble with freezing people,” he said, “or animals or anything, is that ice expands. Since our cells are all made of water, mostly, freezing them makes them explode. That’s why lettuce gets mushy when you freeze it. So I need to invent a liquid that won’t expand when it freezes. And we pump the bodies full of that when they die. Then we freeze them.”

  He was trying to make an intravenous freezing solution using everyday household products.

  “Over here,” said Zachary, pulling the Devil by the arm.

  At the front of the garage, lined up on a strip of greasy carpet, were five old-fashioned milk jugs: metal jars about three feet tall.

  Zachary pulled on goggles and gloves.

  “You might want to keep back,” he told the Devil.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Zachary unscrewed the first milk jug, and heavy vapor poured loose, covering the floor. Zachary pulled something free, something wrapped in plastic.

  He stood there holding it, looking around.

  “Shit,” he said. “I forgot to get out that ironing board, first.”

  The Devil fetched an ironing board from a Peg-Board rack, and opened it.

  “You forgot,” said the Devil. “But you don’t want me to fix your brain.”

  Zachary laid the plastic wrapping on the ironing board, and stepped back.

  “What’s all the fog?”

  “Dry ice. I fill them with my solution, to keep the cells from exploding, then immerse them in dry ice.”

  “Immerse who?”

  Zachary pulled the plastic apart with leaf-shaped salad tongs, and there lay a coyote.

  It didn’t look particularly dead. A little brittle, maybe, especially about the eyes.

  The Devil frowned. The longer he looked at the thing, the more it did look dead, and not brittle at all. Then he realized that it was changing right in front of him.

  “Fucksticks,” said Zachary.

  The coyote liquefied in less than a minute. Even parts of the skeleton and teeth dissolved into gray pools, dripping away into the crawling mist.

  Zachary took off his goggles.

  “Needs less Clorox,” he muttered. “Or more underarm deodorant.”

  Sensing opportunity, the Devil waved his crystal ball under Zachary’s nose.

  “Look here! It’s not that you’re failing in your experiment,” said the Devil. “It’s the wrong experiment for you, is all! Now look. Look!”

  At first, there was only a sort of swirling, like the vapor on the garage floor. Then Zachary saw himself hunched over a cluttered worktable, elbow-deep in wires and circuit boards.

  “This is you changing the world,” whispered the Devil. “This is what your destiny looks like!”

  “Of course!” Zachary bellowed. “That’s me working on instrumentation! These things are going to need monitors that can tell when they’re getting too cold or getting too warm!”

  The Devil couldn’t believe it. Four thousand years after Egypt, you still couldn’t get people to see what was right before their eyes, not if they didn’t want to see it.

  “That’s as far as your imagination goes?” said the Devil, his voice rising. “Building a better thermometer? If you can build instrumentation to do that, you can build an instrument to do anything! Why settle for just freezing dead people? It’s like inventing the airplane and saying it’s just for delivering the mail.”

  “It depends,” said Zachary, “whether the inventor is interested in the airplane or the mail. In this analogy, I’m a mailman. Let someone else invent the airplane.”

  “Let someone else change the world.”

  “Mail can change the world.”

  “This is a stupid analogy.”

  “Look,” said Zachary, already at work mixing Clorox and carpet cleaner, “you bought my soul with promises of support. If you’re not going to help, give me my soul back and get out of the way.”

  The Devil sighed. Some people had to learn the hard way.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked.

  A smile crossed Zachary’s big face. He drooled a little.

  “Investors,” he said.

  SO THE DEVIL placed ads in the paper.

  The ads basically said a small scientific organization was close to figuring out how to freeze people so they could live forever, and they needed money. Anyone who contributed a certain amount of money would be guaranteed frozen storage when they died. Anyone who wanted to know more could come to a special meeting.

  The meeting took place in Zachary’s parents’ living room. It drew thirty people, including his parents, most of them over seventy years old. Zachary wore a business suit and only drooled a little bit. He explained a thing or two about freezing and unfreezing things. He was careful to point out that this wa
s all one big experiment, but every day of research and every dollar invested made success more likely. The Devil had printed up some posters with illustrations and columns of numbers, which made it all sound terribly scientific.

  And the old folks were convinced. They contributed with zeal.

  When the house emptied and Zachary’s mother and father had gone to bed, Zachary and the Devil sat down at the kitchen table and counted.

  They counted twice. They couldn’t believe it.

  “Forty-three dollars and ten cents,” said Zachary.

  “It’s an old-people thing,” said the Devil. “People in their seventies in 1969 wouldn’t have been the shaped-by-the-Depression generation. They don’t tip well either.”

  Zachary shook his head.

  “This is enough for eighteen bottles of Clorox,” he said.

  “Get your mom to iron that suit,” said the Devil. “Tomorrow we’ll hit the bank.”

  THE BANKERS WERE ARMED with calculators—enormous things, like typewriters—and amused themselves for almost twenty minutes getting Zachary to spin calculations into the billions, to six decimal places. They enjoyed the lunch the Devil uncovered in their boardroom, and the tea laced with trace amounts of local Indian whiskey. They enjoyed the pictures he painted of the future, drawing with words and with elegant fingers. Appealing to their “obvious good taste” and “preternatural sense of things to come,” he made them feel good. Even generous, almost.

  Almost. They said no.

  “SHIT,” SAID THE DEVIL.

  They sat on a curb in downtown Apache Junction, eating sub sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. It bothered the Devil that he had failed to convince a boardroom full of bankers to shell out half a million bucks.

  It’s a difficult age, he reflected. The people with the money and the people with the vision aren’t the same people.

  A van full of movie cameras and sound equipment rolled through town, followed by trailers and a police escort.

  Zachary thought he’d find out where they were filming. His dad would want to go watch. Maybe someone would recognize him from Riders of the Purple Sage. Every once in a while, someone did. It thrilled the hell out of the old man when that happened.

  “Keep working that Clorox and Pine-Sol,” said the Devil, rising. He walked off toward the Kennedy limo. “Someday soon, we’ll talk to your buddy Fish.”