Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  The phone gave a cheer and asked if he needed any money or drugs or pussy or anything.

  THE DEVIL PUT HIS PHONE in his pocket, rode a bus to L.A., got the death limo out of mothballs, and drove east, straight to Memory’s bedside.

  He curled up on the windowsill, thinking, Wake up, wake up.

  Even though she was one of them, he still felt alone without her.

  The Devil. Really, what was that? The people-animals ran laps around him when it came to darkness, to being able to live in sickness and thrive on death. For the first time in his life, he realized that what he was maybe wasn’t so much. Just built to last, was all.

  He tried to shake it off, but it was like a fly that kept buzzing back.

  41.

  Pocahontas

  The New World, 1608

  THE DEVIL FELT TIRED in a way he’d never felt before.

  Kneeling beside Memory’s bed, both hands wrapped around her fists, he fell asleep and dreamed of the one thing he always tried so hard not to remember. He had lost the strength to protect himself from pain.

  The memory took him back four hundred years, into the woods, when the woods were deep and dark. He had come across the sea, to the new world behind the sunset, where he hunted with his hands and slept on raw earth.

  THE PEOPLE WHO LIVED THERE called themselves the Falling Water People and they were afraid of him. They drew lots to see who would try to kill him.

  A young hunter named Wahsinatawah—“Great Big Head”—chanced to be elected, and he approached the Devil without fear.

  Great Big Head was well named. His enormous head nearly creaked atop his shoulders, which had grown muscular in order to support it. Unfortunately for Wahsinatawah, girls found his great head repulsive. He had given up all hope of ever getting one of them to become his wife, and turned all his strength and all his heart to the hunt. He made himself a peerless hunter. Now he hunted the strange, terrible creature.

  Three days into the woods, Wahsinatawah spied a great buck deer leaping through the trees. Instinctively, he nocked an arrow and took aim, muttering a prayer—

  Thud! Something slammed into his left leg.

  An arrow! He’d been shot!

  Something zipped through the brush over his head, and the buck was shot, too. It tumbled across a thicket, pierced through the heart.

  The Devil appeared up the trail. He held a bow in one hand, and a bone knife in his teeth. He approached Wahsinatawah, smoking a bluebird in a long clay pipe.

  “You shot me,” Watsinatawah said to the Devil.

  “You were about to shoot my deer. I chased him all the way from the river.”

  The Devil gave Wahsinatawah a narrow-eyed look, marveling at the size of his head.

  “Tell you what,” he said, pointing with the stem of his pipe at Wahsinatawah’s bleeding leg. “Either I can pull that loose and heal it for you, or you can draw an arrow of your own and shoot me through the heart. Only be warned: Choose to shoot me and miss, and it will be my turn.”

  Wahsinatawah chewed his lip. The hunter in him was hypnotized by the thought of shooting the Devil and carrying him back to his village. It was the only thing that might get him a wife.

  “I’ll shoot,” he decided.

  “It is a good day to die,” said the Devil, backing off a little distance and closing his eyes.

  Watsinatawah nocked an arrow, took aim, and let fly.

  There came a hard thunk as if the arrow had gone astray and lodged in a tree, but it hadn’t. It quivered right on target, stuck in the Devil’s chest as if he were made of wood.

  “Oh, fuck,” said Wahsinatawah as the Devil nocked an arrow of his own. He tried to think of something wise and clever, something lifesaving, to say.

  The Devil loosed his arrow—

  —and missed. The arrow slashed off into the woods.

  Something had distracted the Devil. Watsinatawah turned to see a girl in a buckskin dress, with wild, burning eyes, kneeling beside the dying buck. She waved her hands over the deer, then fell forward as if embracing it.

  The Devil walked toward her. The girl whipped upright, staring.

  Her eyes were uncertain, but not fearful. The Devil opened his mouth to say something to her, but she whirled and shot away through the woods before he could manage a sound.

  The Devil was a streak, right behind her.

  Wahsinatawah drew his knife, and was torn between whether to cut the arrow from his leg or dress out the deer.

  He did the deer first. Then his leg. Then he passed out.

  “STOP, GIRL!” the Devil commanded.

  “Why?” she called out. “So you can drag me home to eat?”

  “I’m not a monster,” he said.

  “You’re the Devil, aren’t you?”

  The Devil leaped forward, scooped her up, and came to a stop with her in his arms.

  “Being the Devil and being a monster are not the same thing,” he explained.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, lifted her head, and looked into his eyes. She must have liked what she saw.

  “Take me swimming,” she said.

  WAHSINATAWAH WOKE UP in the weeds, with the dead buck hanging nearby, and felt a touch of fever behind his eyes. He knew he would have to get home and let the healer rub snake piss on the wound, or it would kill him. Cutting down the deer, he packed up the best meat and limped off through the forest.

  If he hadn’t been distracted with fever, things might have gone better for him.

  Certainly he would have heard voices, or maybe even smelled something out of place. As it happened, though, he came stumbling into a clearing where five men sat around a smoky campfire. They wore shining helmets, and had great, horrible beards and bad eyes and pale skin, like dead men.

  They stared at him, astonished by his sudden appearance and his enormous head, but they got over it quickly, and clubbed him unconscious.

  AT THE RIVER, the Devil was surprised when the girl stepped out of her dress without hesitation, and plunged into the water.

  He followed.

  They didn’t play games with each other. There were no coy words, no hard to get. Just a certain looking and knowing and wanting. In minutes, they had fallen in love. It happens that way sometimes.

  They came together in the water like one fish. She rubbed against him, gasping, and although the Devil’s desire was quickly obvious, she stopped short of taking him inside her. The Devil ground his teeth, but didn’t press her.

  They curled up together amid cypress roots, and she told him she was called Pocahontas, that her father was a chief and her brothers were hunters, and that they were likely to come looking for her if she didn’t return home in a day or two.

  He would take her back to her father and brothers, and they would be married. He didn’t say so, but he didn’t have to. And she didn’t agree, not in so many words, but she didn’t have to either.

  THE DEVIL couldn’t sleep.

  He was troubled with love.

  Not for the first time. He had taken wives, from time to time. Always, though, he reserved the very core of his heart for Arden. Until now.

  Was it ridiculous to compare a thousand hundred years with the sport of a single afternoon?

  But it wasn’t a trial of arithmetic. He was in love, that was all, and for the first time he thought perhaps it was time to settle for what he could have and grasp here on Earth. Pocahontas was who she was, and he wanted to dive into it like a river, run in it like a forest, and hunt there, and sleep under its stars.

  He said her name, once, quietly, and finally fell asleep.

  IN THE MORNING, he awoke to find that she had captured fish with her bare hands, and cooked them, wrapped in leaves. They ate, and they swam again, and after a while they dressed and turned toward her village.

  They were holding hands, lost in separate thoughts, when they made exactly the same mistake poor Wahsinatawah had made. They walked into a broad, open field, and there on the other side were white men in si
lver helmets keeping watch outside a crude fort.

  The Devil dropped out of sight in the tall weeds, pulling Pocahontas down with him, cursing.

  “Who—?” she whispered, curious about the white men just as she seemed curious about everything.

  He had to pull her down again, shushing her.

  He had come a long way to get away from white men. No good could come of them crossing the ocean. He would have to convince her of this. Just as he was about to explain it to her, something happened to silence him.

  Five white men emerged from the woods not too far away, dragging Wahsinatawah between them.

  “Your friend,” whispered Pocahontas.

  “He’s not—”

  “You have to help him. Or else I will.”

  “Fine,” sighed the Devil. He was her slave. He wondered if she knew it.

  THAT NIGHT, the Devil slipped over the stockade wall, and found a shadow to hide in.

  A lot of pale men sat around various cook fires, talking in low tones, sometimes pausing to eye the treetops swaying above and beyond their fort, as if they feared the night and the land itself.

  Following his nose from shadow to shadow, the Devil found Wahsinatawah writhing on a wooden table, held down by white men stripped to the waist. They were digging in his wounds with red-hot knives. The Devil understood that these men were trying to help the young hunter. To heal him. Maybe to slaughter and eat him later, who knew?

  The Devil stepped up to this assembly, nine feet tall, breathing fire. They scattered to hide in barrels and sheds, and the Devil picked up Wahsinatawah like a dead turkey and leaped with him over the wall.

  Into the meadow, Pocahontas had lashed together a rough sled of saplings and green branches, upon which Wahsinatawah could be pulled through the woods.

  The young hunter had fallen unconscious immediately upon his rescue. He now woke up to say “Thank you,” and stayed awake just long enough to have a peek up Pocahontas’s skirt.

  THE DEVIL WASN’T too surprised when he sniffed the air, just before dawn broke, and listened to the wind, and discovered that they had been followed.

  Goddammit! All he wanted to do was hold Pocahontas and sing songs to her and put his knobby wooden cock in her and be happy, and these white men were fucking it all up.

  He put down his side of the travois, ran deerlike through the woods, over moss-fat stones and dead trees, until he nearly stumbled over what looked like a knight.

  The Devil remembered knights. This one wore chest armor, and had stopped to refresh himself at a stream. He had dipped his helmet in the cool water and appeared quite relaxed, but the moment the Devil came flying out of the woods, he hopped to his feet and drew a long, bright sword.

  The Devil allowed the sword to break off in his side, and bashed the knight unconscious with his fist. The man went down hard in the creek, and would have drowned if the Devil hadn’t pulled him onto the sand.

  As he was performing this act of mercy, three very serious-looking hunters—Falling Water men—came jogging up the creek bed, hallooing and waving.

  It took a minimum of conversation to make it plain that these fellows were looking for their sister. The Devil introduced himself with discretion, and, with the armored man slung over his considerable shoulder, led them back to where Pocahontas sat doing her best to keep poor Wahsinatawah’s wounds clean, and humming a prayer-song to herself.

  She leaped up when she saw her brothers, who hugged her and fussed over her and scolded her some. Then this strange party struck out together for home, arriving just in time for lunch.

  “Just in time for lunch!” cried the village children, leaping about Pocahontas.

  Pocahontas beamed, hoisting a tiny girl on one hip, and placing a boy on the Devil’s shoulders. The remainder of the children boiled around them as they walked, clutching at her dress, reaching for her hands, and singing her name.

  Children, the Devil, saw, loved Pocahontas the way animals loved him.

  LUNCH, SERVED IN THE VILLAGE longhouse, took a while. There were speeches.

  There was a speech from each of Pocahontas’s brothers, welcoming the Devil to their village and hearth, wondering aloud what his intentions were and what he’d already tried. Their father, a thick, strong man of middle years, wondered more about the white man in the damaged armor. The Devil had left him propped up outside the door, and every once in a while they heard a metallic ding! as the village children threw rocks at him.

  It was decided that they would lay the white man on a stone and smash his head. “Then we’ll go kill the rest of them, too,” said the chief.

  The three brothers stripped the woozy, terrified knight to his pantaloons, dragged him to a big rock in the middle of the village, and forced him to rest his head on it. The eldest brother was swinging a war club around his head when Pocahontas came storming through the crowd and threw herself over the knight in a thoroughly inappropriate way.

  “Get off of him!” commanded her father.

  She did get off, but she stood over him like a mother lynx, tense and hissing.

  “This is senseless!” she spat.

  No one met her eyes.

  “They will come here,” answered her eldest brother. “More and more of them. It’s true, and you know it.”

  She didn’t answer him. She looked at the Devil, who stepped forward. They parted for him, and he carried the white man away from the stone and out of the village, with Pocahontas beside him, still angry, still glaring.

  “Fools,” she hissed.

  She banged on the white man’s armor. “Him and his kind, too.”

  They passed over streams and open meadows until they came to the edge of the land’s broadest river.

  There was a different look in her eyes when she said she wanted to stop there, a look like a clear sky or clear water. She reached between his leggings, took hold of him in a way she hadn’t before, and made him gasp. Her dress came apart like spidersilk in his fingers, and then they were in the water.

  The Devil had seen Pocahontas run like a doe and swim like a fish, but this did nothing to presage the animal she now became. His erection wobbled between them, and she drove herself upon it with a scream, convulsing in every part, tightening around him like a snake. They slipped underwater, twisting until their lungs burst and they surfaced, shrouded in her hair, gulping air. She made love to him as if she meant to devour him, opening her legs until her hip joints popped, until their eyes locked and stayed locked, and they were tender with each other the way lions must be tender.

  When they had exhausted each other, Pocahontas and the Devil sprawled naked on the sand. The Devil reached for her, afraid she’d be cold, but she pulled away.

  What?

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t … how can I say it? I can’t be this.” And she gestured in frustration, indicating herself, her body.

  Couldn’t be what? Flesh? Human?

  “It’s too much,” she said. “It’s like lightning! It’s like having a storm inside me!”

  He held her face in his hands, and looked deep, and there she was.

  “Arden,” he gasped.

  “Yes.”

  They held each other’s eyes for a long time. Long enough for shadows to shift around them. For the tide to turn in the river, and fall back toward the ocean, and for gulls to begin their evening cries.

  SHE EXPLAINED THAT the body she wore, this nut-colored girl-goddess, was not hers. She had chosen to share a body already human, already grown, because she thought maybe this way she wouldn’t be shocked by the world and its flesh.

  “But it’s too much.”

  “You can—” he began, desperate.

  “I can’t!” she wailed, beating at his chest. “You don’t understand! It’s like taking a creature bred in a cave and plunging it into the sun! It’s like being on fire!”

  “Yes!” he crowed. “Wonderful, glorious fire!”

  “I h
ate it!” she screamed, and, like a slippery fish, squirmed loose. She ran, and he gave chase.

  It was like before, except without joy or the thrill of play. It seemed to the Devil that he was trying to catch everything he thought he’d given up, and the thing he’d given it up for. Without her, there was nothing.

  With a wild leap, he bore her to the sand, turned her over, and struggled for words.

  But she was gone.

  The girl in his arms was a magnificent woman-child, but she was only that.

  He gathered his pride. He still had that. He spoke to the girl, wanting to make her feel safe, but this proved unnecessary. She knew nothing of the angel who had possessed her. Instead, she remembered everything that had happened as if she had done it herself. She was proud of her words at the killing stone. She was glad about what they had done in the river. She did not quite remember the things that had been said afterward, or why she had run from him, but shrugged it off the way young people do, blaming youth and passion.

  She resolved upon taking the white man to his fortress town, and maybe they would all become friends. Maybe they could keep fear from turning into fighting.

  Even without Arden inside her, thought the Devil, this girl had some fallen-angel blood in her family, way back sometime.

  Walking naked beside him as they returned down the beach, she was not self-conscious. Indeed, she held up her head and seemed to appreciate the wind in her hair and on her skin, even to appreciate the wind in his hair, and the woodenness and smoothness of his skin, taking his arm as they walked.

  He nearly choked, thinking of Arden, but remembered that he was proud.

  HE SPENT THE NEXT YEAR grasping at shadows.

  They lived together in a lodge of green branches and buckskin, between the forest and a slow, deep stream. He built wickets and caught fish, and they hunted together and sang hunting songs together, and when they made love they looked deep inside each other with a sadness neither spoke of.

  He knew he should leave her, but he couldn’t.

  She allowed each day, as it came, to be enough. She loved the man-demon who was sometimes able to love her back. She felt the Earth turning beneath her feet, and let that be enough, too, and was thankful.