“You need Hate,” said the Devil. “You know what this world does to the gentle.”
Nat tossed the Devil an ax.
“All right,” said the Devil.
He walked into the farmhouse behind the barn, where a white family knelt in a circle, bawling and begging in their nightclothes. A tall, tan, bullish-looking man, a fat woman with black hair, and four boys, the youngest maybe three years old.
One of the boys had a bad-boy look to him, and he spat at the Devil.
So the Devil took him first.
It was only death.
HE FLUNG THE AX from halfway across the yard, and Nat had to duck to keep from being twins. Flecks of blood sprayed his shirt. Nat’s stony eyes faltered, then, and for a second or two, his face was a mask of horror.
“Death is a door,” said the Devil. “That’s all.”
“What have we brought ourselves to?”
“Do you doubt this?” said the Devil. “Nothing wrong with doubt. Jesus doubted. But what you’ve done is behaved as if you mattered. You’ve lifted your hand and said you refuse to be worthless, refuse to be what someone else thinks you are. You’ve behaved like a man.”
Nat gave the Devil a blank look, and then he surprised both the Devil and himself by spurring his horse close, eyes blazing in the moonlight. His voice was raw, almost choking. A knife flashed in his hand, pressed against the Devil’s throat.
“What do you know,” he hissed, “about being a man?”
The Devil was inexplicably calm. He returned Nat’s stare with eyes that were full of yearning for this world that could be so much except that it understood so little, and it was all that he had left. They were eyes that wanted to be trusted, but they were angry eyes, and spiteful, too.
“You’re a child, is all you are!” bellowed the preacher. “What have you ever done that wasn’t for yourself?”
They froze that way, glaring fire, and it was the Devil who broke away first, launching his horse with a dreadful cry, and thundering into the woods.
NOT LONG AFTER, the Virginia militia came after them with muskets and hunting dogs. And some of the black men who had followed Nat Turner had signs on their foreheads too faint to see, and these died with the THUMP of a ball hitting flesh and bone, like someone getting hit with a gravy spoon. And they all ran, different ways.
Nat hid himself in a pile of sticks, and prayed. He felt around inside himself for the peace and the winds and the knowing that had always been there—and it was all there, but with its eyes closed like something that has done what it was made for.
Footsteps approached. “Who’s there?” called a soldier.
“Me and the Devil,” called Nat.
Then he looked around, twigs in his hair, and laughed.
“No,” he called again. “It’s just me.”
THE DEVIL APPEARED while Nat waited in jail to be hanged.
He sat in the straw with the preacher and began to preach himself.
“You do not fit in your own time, Nat Turner, the way a dream doesn’t fit daylight. But this had to be fought for. Even if it was only going to end like this. Because people will talk about this fight, and the reasons for this fight, and it will become a story.”
Nat grabbed the Devil’s wrists with impossible speed.
“Look at me, Devil. What do you see?”
The Devil looked the preacher in the eye, and didn’t see a thing.
Nat was a hollow man.
He meant to go down into the grave that way, Nat did. Silent. Hollow. Nothing happening to nothing.
But at the last minute, with the noose around him, bare feet splintering on the scaffold, someone called out to him “What color is God, you reckon, Turner?”
In the years to follow, he knew. And people would expect the story to say certain things and behave a certain way. So he scraped up what little simple joy remained inside him, and answered in a cracking voice, “I don’t know any better than you do, you white turkey. Want to come with me and see?”
19.
O Pioneers!
Chicago, 1974
“I DON’T FEEL RICH,” Fish complained to the Devil.
The Devil shrugged. A fistful of high-end cocaine was skinny-dipping in his bloodstream, and an unholy peace reigned over him.
“Maybe you never will feel rich,” he told Fish. “I’ve heard about that. People who get their money all at once, or in strange ways, always feel like it’s about to fall apart.”
They were drinking twelve-year-old Scotch in Fish’s Gold Coast apartment, celebrating. That afternoon, a customer named Charlie P. Scott had died at the age of ninety-two. His life insurance policy had paid out ten thousand dollars. Over the thirty years since launching the policy, they had made a quarter of a million off ol’ Charlie.
“Here’s to Charlie,” said Fish, raising his Scotch, leaning against the kitchen bar.
He wore a gold ring, a thin black turtleneck, and lines on his face that most men didn’t have at the age of twenty-six.
“So,” the Devil asked Fish, “are you bored?”
Fish shook his head, sucking an ice cube.
“Not yet. Why? You got your eye on something?”
“I do.”
“Something fun?”
“It’s Zachary,” said the Devil. “He’s working on a project. Could pay off big. But he needs an investor.”
“Zachary?”
“You’re such an asshole,” said the Devil. “Zachary! From the band!”
Fish rolled his eyes.
“The one who was going to change the world.”
“He will, but he needs your help.”
“What about your help? He sold his soul to you, dude, not me.”
Sometimes the Devil wanted to end Fish’s contract on the spot. Smoke him right there on his eighty-grand natural-fibers designer carpet.
Fish misread the silence.
“Cat got your tongue?”
The Devil vaulted into the kitchen, black-eyed, smashed his Scotch tumbler on the counter, and—snicker-snack!—sawed off Fish’s left little finger with broken glass.
He did it because it needed doing, not out of anger. The Devil wasn’t angry. The coke wouldn’t allow it.
Fish opened his mouth as if to scream, but instead stood there, staring and unbelieving until belief and pain took hold.
He still didn’t scream. He understood the lesson enough not to get mad.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.
“Zachary,” said the Devil, pouring himself another Scotch.
“Yes,” said Fish, wrapping his hand in a sixty-dollar dish towel. “Yes, Zachary. Of course. You know, if you give that finger back, they can sew it back on, if it hasn’t been too long.”
The Devil chewed the finger, and swallowed.
“Zachary will change the world. Just not the way he thinks.”
“Zachary,” said Fish. “All right. Hurts. Okay.”
TWO AFTERNOONS LATER, the Devil and the CEO of Assurance Mutual stood across from a jumbled workbench.
“Fish has some money to invest,” prompted the Devil.
Zachary looked doubtful.
He also looked like what you’d expect from a twenty-six-year-old Indian still living at home. His hair was longer than ever; he wore a Black Sabbath concert T-shirt and dirty jeans. But his eyes were keen, and he seemed glad to have company. He seemed less likely to taper off into sleep, or to drool on himself.
“I need fourteen thousand BTUs in a fifth of a second,” said Zachary.
“That’s a lot of energy,” said Fish. “What for?”
“To freeze something so fast that the freezing doesn’t kill it.”
“Something?” asked the Devil.
“A dog.”
The Devil frowned. He liked dogs. “Where the hell do you plan to get—?”
“Leave that to me. It’ll be okay.”
Zachary’s mother walked in just then, through the utility room door. She set a plate of cookies and orange punc
h down on a stack of used tires, and left them alone.
“If the dog works out,” said Zachary, “we freeze a person. Then we try again to get people to register and pay for tanks.”
“And we get rich,” said Fish.
“More importantly, we keep people’s lives from ending for stupid reasons, when they still ought to have good years left. We create a world where people don’t have to be afraid of death, because we can hold death off until we’re ready.”
“You want a world of immortals?”
“You wouldn’t get a world of immortals. You’d get a world where little kids don’t die because a cure is a year away, or people don’t die because the liver they need is on the other side of the country.”
“Well,” said Fish, “that’s good, because it’s a small world. We need for people to die, and make room. Besides—”
“Shut up, Fish,” said Zachary and the Devil at the same time.
Fish shut up, and forked over two hundred thousand dollars.
“Give me a week,” said Zachary.
SO FISH AND THE DEVIL went fishing in the Superstition Mountains, and when they returned, Zachary’s mother let them shower and shave, and brought them sandwiches.
Zachary waited in the garage, still poorly groomed, still wearing his Black Sabbath T-shirt. He looked up as they entered the garage, and met their eyes over the top of something like a miniature ice-cream truck married to a jet engine.
“Catch anything?” he asked.
Shaking his head, the Devil pointed at the machine and said, “Well?”
Zachary showed them his mother’s punch bowl, filled with ordinary tap water. And, like a magician instructing a crowd, showed them the inside of the ice-cream-truck machine, large enough to contain a massage table.
Nothing in his pockets, nothing up his sleeve.
He placed the punch bowl on the massage table. Then he closed what would have been the big side door of the ice-cream truck, and cranked a knob.
There was something like an explosion inside the machine. Air shot out, here and there—freezing, winter, January air—and tossed their hair back.
And then there was quiet.
Zachary opened the machine. Vapor unfurled in a foggy waterfall and covered the floor. From this artificial weather he gingerly removed the punch bowl and set it down on the stack of used tires. “Voilà.”
The water in the bowl was frozen solid. Not only that, but it had not swollen or bulged or broken the bowl.
“That was fast,” admitted Fish, admiring. “Where’s the dog?”
THE DOG BELONGED to Zachary’s neighbors, old friends. Zachary had explained his work to the family, and when their dog began to die of old age, they had come to him.
“Is there room in your experiments for Dooley?” asked Mark, their fifteen-year-old boy, and Zachary had to admit that there was.
“If I can freeze Dooley,” Zachary had explained, “and then thaw him again, I’ll refreeze and store him for you for free. Maybe veterinarians can figure out a way to give him a few more years, and when they do, we’ll thaw him for good.”
Dooley and his masters had nothing to lose.
After the punch-bowl demonstration, Zachary excused himself and walked next door. He returned an hour later with an arthritic, half-blind Airedale on a leash. Fifteen-year-old Mark came with him, petting the dog and looking red around the eyes.
“I’ll bring him back over when we’re done,” Zachary told him.
“It won’t hurt, will it?” asked Mark.
Zachary forced himself to be truthful.
“I’m eighty-five percent sure it won’t.”
Good enough. Mark walked away, and Fish shut the garage door behind him.
IT WENT BEAUTIFULLY.
Dooley lay down on the massage table without a whimper. Zachary closed the door gently, and turned the knob without hesitation.
The machine BOOMed and blew.
Zachary opened the door and shooed the mist away, and there lay Dooley just as if he were sleeping, solid as a rock.
The Devil wondered for the first time if maybe he was wrong; maybe this was how Zachary was meant to make the world better. But he was riding a half dose of Turkish smack, and inclined to have nice feelings about things.
They waited together on lawn chairs. Dooley, defrosting, began to drip. Now and then, Zachary got up to hook the dog up to something, or inject him with things.
“An Airedale,” said Fish, “is a complicated organism.”
“Yeah,” said Zachary, applying electrical current to Dooley’s chest.
“I’m just saying. It’ll be one hell of an accomplishment. That’s all I’m saying.”
Dooley the pioneer dog whimpered and stirred.
“Heads up,” said the Devil.
Zachary lifted the dog down. Dooley staggered a bit—the freezing didn’t seem to have helped his arthritis any—then wagged his tail. Once. Blinking, he took one step toward the garage door. Then another.
Zachary could hardly contain himself.
“Mark won’t believe it!” he said. “Can you imagine what it’s going to be like when, you know, people—”
He was on the verge of opening the door when the dog gave an unearthly shriek.
The Devil’s hair rose.
Fish ran and hid among the used tires.
The dog melted.
Not like ice melts, but like flesh that has suffered a billion tiny explosions all over. He slid apart right in front of them; his scream became a low, sick gagging, and then there was too little of him left to suffer.
Outside, running steps, and Mark’s voice.
“Hey!” called the boy. “Hey, Dooley?”
“Lie to him!” advised the Devil.
“Yes,” breathed Zachary, drooling a little.
He opened the garage door just enough to roll outside in his own private cloud bank, and for a while they listened, Fish and the Devil, to raised voices. Then lower voices.
Zachary came back in. His eyes were red.
“I need a million dollars,” he told Fish. “At least.”
Fish stared at him.
The Devil raised his eyebrows.
“On one condition,” said Fish, slowly.
20.
Taco Restaurant Detox
San Francisco, 1975
NO MATTER HOW HARD she tried, Memory couldn’t feel good about the disco album.
It might sell. Nothing wrong with that.
She sighed.
And it might be seen as a desperate last stab by a washed-up, drug-addled former star.
That was it.
Clap, clap!
“Open your eyes,” said a soothing male voice.
Memory opened her eyes. She sat facing a man with eyes like a wounded puppy. All around them, other pairs of strangers sat facing each other.
They were the clients of the beloved Bay Area therapist Raymond Utrecht, aka “the Bay Area Buddha.” Raymond Utrecht loved getting his clients together in large groups. The groups were called “Encounter Sessions.”
Memory had started seeing Dr. Ray because he thought he could help her kick heroin. But she was mostly here because Dr. Ray also thought he might be able to cure her amnesia. She didn’t really want to kick heroin, but Dr. Ray didn’t need to know that. She kind of did want her memory back.
“Talk to each other,” urged Raymond Utrecht softly. He walked among them in his socks, sometimes touching them on the head.
He touched Memory on the head.
“It doesn’t matter what you say,” said the Buddha. “Just talk. Discover each other.”
“I know,” said the wounded-puppy guy, “Dr. Ray said we were supposed to try and ignore that you’re this big celebrity, but I feel it actually adds to the experience. I also feel like it has to be talked about, or at least acknowledged, before we can discover anything new.”
The group was spread out all over some kind of rented minigym.
Dr. Ray made everyone take t
heir shoes off. The minigym smelled like Ben-Gay and sock feet.
“You’re probably here because of drugs, right?” said Wounded Puppy.
Memory focused on his eyes. Tried to be mature.
“That’s not really fair. Are you making assumptions just because I was in a band? Maybe being famous is a disadvantage to me in this situation. Think about it. What are you here for?”
“It’s not a prison sentence,” said Wounded Puppy. “We’re not being punished. But since you ask, I’m here because my kid frustrates me and I’m afraid I’ll beat him.”
“You’d better not!”
Dr. Ray was there, touching their heads.
“Anger is okay,” he said. “Everything’s okay. This is a safe place.”
“I’ll bet this asshole already beats his kid. ‘Might beat my kid,’ my ass.”
“You’re trying too hard to control things,” soothed Dr. Ray. “That’s the addiction talking.”
“I’m an addict because I point out this fucker is an abusive coward?”
“She’s right,” whispered Wounded Puppy. “But I’m here to talk about it, aren’t I?”
Dr. Ray said something about Responsibility, but Memory was on her feet.
She tried hard not to storm out. The tabloids loved to write articles when famous people stormed out of places.
She stormed out.
As the alley door closed behind her, she felt broken concrete through her socks, and realized she’d forgotten her shoes.
Fuck!
No way was she going back. Not this week.
MEMORY WAS HAVING a year full of shitty moods.
A week before, she had read an article in a music-industry magazine. The writer had marveled at how fast Memory Jones had aged, after the collapse of Purple Airplane. She wasn’t like a grandma, yet, said the writer, but a far cry from the willowy space child she had been just five years ago.
“She’s more like one of those barmaids with five kids you run into all the time,” the article said. “That’s the kind of ‘old’ she is.”
Memory missed being treated with respect. She wanted to storm out again, but she was already out. She was home.
She took some pills.
THE BAY AREA Buddha had contacted Memory through her old L.A. studio, after reading about her amnesia. It had taken the studio a month to deliver the message.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 16