Up Jumps the Devil

by Michael Poore

  They lived together that way for four seasons.

  The Devil had conquered Assyria and ruled Egypt and driven Sumeria to its knees, but he wasn’t strong enough to walk out on Pocahontas.

  REALLY, WHEN HE LOOKED BACK on it, she left him.

  Winter came, and with it a long, heavy snow, until branches creaked and the forest sighed as if turning in its sleep.

  Pocahontas worried about the white men, in the fortress they were calling Jamestown. The Devil awakened one night to find her sitting up. She had let the deerskin blankets slip aside, and was shivering.

  “They’ll starve,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  It was true. He had watched them from the trees, eating their leather shoes and belts. Eating their dead. Eyeing one another like hungry rats.

  He almost said, “Let them starve,” and she almost said, “Who will we become if we allow such a thing?”

  THEY BROUGHT GAME to the stockade gates, and roasted corn. They brought blankets. They told the white men what trees to cut for wood that would burn hot and burn slowly, and where the sturgeon swam in the winter, and could be caught with nets, sleeping.

  The white man they had saved came forward. He was grateful, and treated them with respect. Now that he was not lost in the woods or about to be killed, he had a good and intelligent light in his eyes, a rare light. The Devil saw that he was a complicated man who wanted complicated things.

  The man wanted Pocahontas to stay. She could be of such value to them.

  She shook her head, smiling, and touched the white man’s cheek. Then they left together, she and the Devil, and returned to their strange, lonely home.

  HER BROTHERS VISITED, painted for war, and told Pocahontas and the Devil how their father had decided that the whites and their fortress must be pushed into the river. They must be stopped before their numbers were too many.

  Pocahontas told them “No!”

  But they didn’t listen. They warned her, warned the Devil, to leave their lodge, because soon it would not be safe there.

  “Come back to the village with us,” they said, but they knew their sister’s answer without having to hear it.

  “Make yourself a spear and come with us,” they told the Devil, who filled his pipe and ignored them.

  The brothers left, and that night Pocahontas slipped away to the fortress and warned the white men there.

  She stayed with them, then. She had no choice, nowhere else to go.

  Pain lanced the Devil’s heart.

  He coughed and gasped, but it wasn’t his heart, really. It was his whole self feeling his love being torn from him. Or worse, getting up and walking away.

  He felt the weight of his years, which was a weight too vast even for an immortal soul. The only thing that could bear such weight was the Earth itself.

  So the Devil returned to the Earth for a time. As he had after Egypt, and after Rome. He walked with a bleak stare into the mightiest, deepest, most unknown forest, among great trees and ancient stones, and there he crouched and closed his eyes and let the snow cover him, let the ice harden on him until he, too, was like a stone. And he stayed that way across five summers or more, until one day two hunters, Corn People, traveling afar, came upon him and remarked how this stone was so like a man. Not just a man, but a man who had been saddened beyond endurance. They poked him with their spears, just as you might stir coals in a fire or dry leaves with your foot, and cried out in surprise when the stone stood, cracking and creaking and shedding ice, gave them a sleepy, irritated look, and stumbled away, yawning.

  The hunters looked at one another in disbelief, and looked off after the Devil until he was out of sight, walking north.

  Then they continued hunting. The deep woods were probably the same everywhere in the world, they thought. Strange things happened there and abided there, and if you wandered there, you got what you deserved.

  42.

  A Silence Encompassing a Thousand Hundred Years

  New York, 2005

  LEAVING THE DREAM was like leaving the woods at night.

  The dark of the woods became the dark of the hospital room, where the Devil had fallen half out of his chair, and sprawled across Memory’s legs. His throat ached from snoring, and drool soaked his cheek.

  He drew himself up straight.

  Then he jumped in the chair, startled.

  Memory’s eyes were open. She was looking at him.

  MEMORY TRIED TO SPEAK, but couldn’t.

  Her jaw creaked. Muscles and tendons were shrunken tight.

  Her throat pulsed, but not in a useful way.

  There were plenty of things Memory would have liked to talk about, now that the Devil was awake.

  Her amnesia was gone, for one thing.

  The memories that flooded in were hard to grasp, at first. But she had been awake for an hour now, and was dealing with it.

  It’s not easy, waking up and remembering that you are an angel.

  It’s not easy remembering that you gave yourself amnesia because you knew if you forgot you were an angel, you might be able to get used to life as an animal.

  Which you wanted very badly, because your boyfriend, the Devil, lived down here. The Devil, who had been your boyfriend for a shockingly long time.

  Your boyfriend, the Devil, who had been asleep across your legs, and who now sat up in his chair, looking at you.

  You would have liked to say something, you really would. But you couldn’t.

  He had figured it out, too.

  “Arden,” he said.

  Memory nodded.

  A single tear fell from the Devil’s right eye.

  He wanted to ask if she planned to stay this time, but wasn’t sure he could handle the answer. So they sat like that in a silence encompassing all the years they had been apart, and Memory kept on remembering things, knowing things.

  She felt her body around her, pinched and dry, shrunken like a mummy. But she felt and knew something else, too.

  She was pregnant.

  Pregnant?

  “How—?” she tried to say, but only croaked.

  The Devil sat there looking at her, with that one tear falling down his face.

  How, indeed!

  “Oo ASTARD!” she screamed through locked teeth.

  “What?” he said, his eyes worried. He leaned closer.

  Good thing for him that her muscles were out of tune. He had no idea that she was straining to beat the hell out of him. As it happened, all she could do was sit there and give him an intense stare.

  She tired quickly, and calmed down.

  She remembered the strange night in Rome, across a universe of time, when he had held her with such love that it made him shake, trying to bring her back to him. He had tried it again, only this time there wasn’t enough left of him to do it right. What was happening to him? Maybe angels, on Earth, waxed and waned like the moon. Maybe they grew old, at last, and died. Maybe they fell asleep … what was the difference?

  She wouldn’t allow it. She would protect him from time itself, if necessary. From himself, if necessary.

  There was no way she would let him just wink out or fade, not now when, finally—

  She lay still, feeling the odd warmth below her belly, the tiny pulse.

  Did he know?

  She wouldn’t tell him. Not yet. Serve him right.

  He took her hand. Another tear left his eye.

  He quietly cried himself to sleep in his chair, almost four years of waiting finally catching up with him.

  He snored horrible snores, beastly and snaggletoothed.

  “Astard,” Memory croaked at him.

  She commanded her arm to work, and gently stroked his hair.

  SHE MADE AN EFFORT to stretch her arms and legs. To crack her neck and roll her head around. To work her jaw until it opened and shut. To breathe in and out, and swallow and think and be awake.

  Around midafternoon, some guys from the Coma Channel burst in, having caug
ht her awakening on the live feed, from the hidden camera in the ceiling.

  “We’ll do a special!” they crowed.

  One of them shook her hand, which hurt.

  “We’ll do a miniseries!” cried another.

  Her exercises paid off. First she threw a water pitcher at them, then the cup, and both pillows. Mostly it was the look in her eyes, which seemed superhuman, somehow, and pissed off. When she threatened to rip down the hidden camera and feed it to them, they scuttled out of the room sideways, afraid to turn their backs on her.

  The Devil slept through it all.

  43.

  The Shining Moment

  Washington, 1962

  THE DEVIL HAD FALLEN ASLEEP thinking how good things could be now, and from now on, if they didn’t screw it up.

  Things had been good before, after all, and then gone south.

  He dreamed of a time when he’d almost thought they had it made, down here on Earth, just a few decades back, when America had a nifty new president called JFK.

  JFK HAD BEEN HANDSOME. He was a war hero. He had a million-dollar smile and a million-dollar wife and a million dollars. People loved him whether they meant to or not, and everything he did just installed him deeper in the department stores of their hearts.

  Trouble was, it was a dangerous time, too. America and Russia each had thousands of hydrogen bombs, and any day they might blow up the planet. Just when there were so many new consumer products to buy, and department stores in which to buy them.

  It would be just like people, thought the Devil, to commit a whole planet full of suicide just when things were going so well. JFK might be a swell guy, but the Devil doubted he, or any other human, no matter how handsome, could stop the Unthinkable once it got rolling.

  Which was why the Devil took a jet airplane flight to Washington, caught a taxi to Pennsylvania Avenue, slipped past the White House guards and up to the second-floor residence, where he found JFK eating breakfast alone, reading the first of several newspapers.

  The Devil flew in through his ear and curled up in his brain and looked out through the president’s eyes.

  Time to go to work. Just as soon as he finished the president’s breakfast.

  JFK’s wife wafted into the room just then, wearing a robe of loose-fitting silk.

  The Devil’s eyebrows shot up.

  Breakfast and work could both wait a little while, he decided.

  SOME THINGS CHANGED around the White House, in those first few weeks. For one thing, JFK suddenly paid a lot more attention to his wife. The poor gal didn’t know what hit her.

  “What’s got into you?” she gasped once, after the fifth time during one Tuesday morning.

  JFK had a brother named RFK, whom he had made attorney general. He didn’t listen to him enough. That also changed, which was good, because RFK was smart, and he could be mean. The Devil sent RFK to be mean to people who weren’t worried enough about hydrogen bombs.

  THERE WERE OTHER problems besides the bombs.

  Some people from the NAACP came to see JFK. They were black leaders from communities in the South, where black people didn’t have the same rights as white people. They explained to the president that not everybody was inclined to be so damn happy about all the new consumer products, because they were worried about getting lynched.

  The Devil knew about it already, of course. In recent years, though, black people had started doing something very interesting and impressive. They began boycotting things white people needed them to spend money on.

  Even rednecks are smart enough to hate losing money.

  The black leaders had new plans, too. They told JFK they were going to ride into Alabama on Trailways buses and do things black people weren’t supposed, in Alabama, to do. Like eat at white lunch counters in the bus stations, and wait in white waiting rooms.

  And the Devil thought: At last! They were rising up again, and this time they would strike hard enough to end slavery for real. Sometimes, the Devil knew, it took a little violence to get the ball of Justice rolling.

  “We are committed to nonviolence,” added the leaders.

  If he had been listening closely, that would have caught the Devil’s attention. But he was too busy congratulating himself for bringing America to this moment.

  The Freedom Riders were going to need help. He picked up the phone and said, “Miss Lincoln, uh, get me RFK.”

  IT WAS SO, so, so terrible.

  People thought the Freedom Rides were just about people going places they had been told not to go, but it was also about people getting beaten half to death while cops looked the other way.

  Which was what happened in Alabama.

  Klansmen set one of the Trailways buses on fire with half the people still in it. Those people got out, some badly burned, and the Devil couldn’t believe it when they didn’t fight back. He sank into his desk chair, and winced. JFK had a bad back. He took pills for it.

  He picked up the phone.

  “RFK,” he said.

  RFK didn’t answer the phone. He came over to the White House in person.

  He showed up in a limo with a famous black preacher called MLK. And the three of them went for a walk together around the south lawn of the White House, and MLK told JFK, “Love your enemies, Jack.”

  His voice was big and hot. He was not a tall man, but everyone who met him came away thinking he was.

  It was a mild day on the south lawn. Two yellow birds spiraled by, chasing each other.

  JFK said, “‘Love your enemies’ doesn’t, ah, make sense, Martin. It’s something only preachers can afford to believe in.”

  MLK told JFK, “You can’t build a house with fire.”

  MLK took his time, in his long, slow, Sunday-morning way, telling JFK that how you made a thing was as important as the thing itself. And if you made a thing with violence, then that thing would be a violent thing. What a tragedy, then, if black people tried to make freedom out of violence, and enslaved themselves again with a violent freedom.

  “I’d say, uh,” said JFK, “a violent freedom is what you have now.”

  And MLK drilled him with hot prophet’s eyes and said, “Exactly. It’s not enough.”

  “Love can be a weapon, Jack,” said RFK. He wasn’t always mean.

  “A tool,” corrected MLK, turning to make his way back to the limo. RFK followed.

  When they were gone, the Devil turned to look at the great white fang of the Washington Monument out on the Mall.

  Was it possible? Had he underestimated people? Could they improve in ways beyond his own comprehension? The idea was exciting.

  Sitting on a bench to keep his back from spasming, he only had a hunch that this nonviolence thing was as naturally a part of America as Gettysburg. That the hall of earthly fame would value nonviolence as much, if not more, than a man on the moon.

  Weird.

  A man on the moon, though. There was an idea he could understand.

  He hurried back to make some notes, make some calls, and locate that sexy wife of his.

  WHEN KHRUSHCHEV MADE HIS MOVE and tried to set up rockets down in Cuba, JFK knew what was going on, and knew how to stop it.

  Which was not the way his generals advised him.

  “Hydrogen bombs on rockets!” they thundered. “Ninety miles off of Florida! There’s no choice but to attack! Attack, attack!”

  “And, uh, then what?” he asked them.

  Then, the generals explained, one thing would lead to another, and Russia and America would launch hydrogen bombs at each other. But it was either that or be a big pussy.

  JFK didn’t take the bait. “We’ll, ah, reconvene this afternoon,” he said, “after we’ve examined, ah, some more options.”

  In the end, the problem was solved by a lot of quiet conversation instead of a war. It was one of the most reasonable moments in history.

  The Devil was beside himself! This was America’s Shining Moment! This was the combination of power and progress he had alway
s wanted for the world. His world!

  He meant to let JFK have his wife and his job and his body back after that, he really did. But it was too much fun to take the ball and run with it. Who could blame him?

  He got up in front of Congress and dared the country to put a man on the moon. (Challenging God on His own high-and-mighty turf. See how He liked that!)

  Then he took JFK’s wife on a working vacation to Dallas, and was drop-kicked out of the president’s head by a bullet.

  For years, the Devil read that JFK’s last words went something like this:

  The first lady of Texas had just turned around in her seat, supposedly, and said, “You can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President!” to which he had replied, “No, you sure can’t.”

  The Devil knew, although he kept it to himself, that in fact he had just turned to his own first lady and said, “Gee, Jackie, this sure is a swell car.”

  Then POW! The shining moment was over.

  WHEN THE DEVIL WOKE UP again in the hospital room, Memory had fallen back asleep.

  This alarmed him, at first. But her breathing was the breath of a woman taking a nap. The twitch of her eyes beneath her eyelids was lively.

  She’d wake up again, soon enough.

  But … Aw, hell, he wouldn’t be here. Today was a workday. They were broadcasting the comeback episode of Think It Over, somewhere in Ohio.

  He stood. Found his jacket. Ran his fingers over stubbled cheeks.

  He’d be back that night. That would have to be soon enough.

  Kissing Memory’s forehead, he felt happiness and frustration at war inside him.

  Memory was awake! Memory was Arden!

  The thought of going to work made him feel mean as a snake.

  A lot of people probably feel that way on days they’re going to get shot.

  44.

  The World Without a Rebel Angel

  Dayton, Ohio, 2005

  THE DEVIL FLEW TO OHIO, where he met his TV crew at the Dayton airport. His heart and mind stayed behind with Memory. He saw her face on every woman-animal who walked by, even the trolls.

  Then he saw something that sort of focused him.