Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  “You’re an idiot,” I said. “That’s your big plan?”

  He shrugged. “I figure a penny ain’t a big thing. If the Devil does show, he won’t be too put out movin' it.”

  I stared at him. “You serious? That’s your plan? Sit here and wait for the Devil to bend down for loose change?”

  “You got a better one?”

  I grabbed another beer. “No. But if one comes along, I’m for it.”

  Jimmy laughed, and put down the penny, and picked himself up a beer.

  #

  It wasn’t a tourist waking me up the next morning, it was Jimmy, and he was cussing up a storm.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “Well,” he said, looking up from the camera, “the penny’s gone but the camera’s got nothing. All static from midnight on ’til about five, when a possum came in and ate what was left of your sandwich.”

  “Maybe the possum got the penny,” I said, and stood up and stretched. “Or a bird picked it up ‘cause it was shiny.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” His attention went back to the camera. I was already up, so I took a stroll around the ring in hopes of nothing in particular. I could see already the penny was gone, and the only footprints I could spot belonged to Jimmy and the possum, respectively.

  And then the sun busted through the clouds, and I thought I saw something gleam on one of the logs.

  It was the penny. Only it wasn’t on the log, it was in it, jammed halfway deep so that all you saw of old Abe Lincoln was his neck and shoulders. I bent down and looked at it. “Jimmy?” I said. “You might want to bring that camera over and look at this.”

  “Hmm?” But he saw what I was squatting down in front of, and got over there in a hurry.

  “Shit,” he said when he got close, drawing it out to about thirty seconds long and bringing the camera in for a close-up. “You want to try and pull that sucker out of there while I record it? This ought to be good.”

  So I reached in and I got a good grip, and I pulled. The penny didn't go nowhere. It was jammed in there real good. I tried again, wiggling it back and forth, but no dice. It wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Stuck?” Jimmy asked.

  “Stuck,” I said. “You want to try?”

  We switched places, and he gave it a shot. There was a lot of cussing and bullshit excuse-making and Jimmy yelling “I think it’s moving,” but in the end he had to give up, too. We both just sat there on the ground, staring at it when we weren’t staring at each other.

  Finally, I said something. “Jimmy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “When you pulled on it…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did that penny feel, I dunno, kind of warm to you?”

  He looked away. “I thought that was maybe from you. Or the fire.”

  “Uh-uh.” We sat for a minute. “Fire's been out a long time.”

  We sat there a while longer before he got up. “Right, I’m going home. Gonna get washed up, gonna try and figure out what the hell is wrong with the camera, and then I’m coming back. You with me?”

  I stood. “I’m with you as far as going home, but that’s about it. That,” I said, and pointed to the penny, “ain’t right. That’s a warning, Jimmy. We been tolerated thus far. I ain’t willing to push that no further.”

  “C’mon,” he exploded. “Right now, all we got is a penny in a log. Coulda stuck that in there ourselves with a hammer. But we come back tonight—with coffee, not beer, so we don’t fall asleep again—and we keep watching, and we’re gonna get something awesome, man. We’re gonna get the real deal.”

  “I don’t want the real deal,” I said, with a little heat. “I want to go home and sleep in my bed tonight and not come back here none because what you did last night got something riled up, and whatever you got planned tonight, well, I don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “Fine,” he said, and he was suddenly quiet. “Pick up the bottles. We’re getting out of here. I’ll come back here tonight alone.”

  And he did. He tried a couple more times to get me to go with him, but for once in my life I stayed firm and told him no. Around seven he finally gave up, cussing me out for being chickenshit, and drove off on his own. He didn’t take coffee. He did take beer, and the camera, and a sleeping bag.

  They found him in the morning, or at least that’s what the cops told me. Found him ripped to shreds and hung up in the trees. Some of the meat was missing, which had the cops thinking wild animal attack, but his head was fifteen feet up a pine tree, and you tell me what kind of wild animal does that?

  In any case, they’d brought back his camera, and they asked me lots of questions about what was on it. I told them everything I knew, which wasn’t much—that we’d gone out there to shoot a video, that the camera maybe acted a little funny, and that I’d given up before the third night when he wanted to keep on going. I told ‘em where I was that third night, and who could vouch for me, and everything I could think of that Jimmy had said to me and that I’d said to him before he left. After a while, they seemed satisfied, and got ready to go. They asked me not to leave the state, and told me they might have some other questions, but they didn’t think I had nothing to do with it.

  “Wild animal,” one of the cops said. “Santers are back in this part of state, though ain’t no one gonna admit it.”

  I didn’t disagree with him. I didn’t see why I should.

  And a week later, I went back out to the Tramping Ground.

  Dumb-ass idea, I know. The cops would probably want to know why I was going there. Maybe a scene of the crime thing, maybe they’d think I was looking for a souvenir.

  Truth was, I was looking for an answer.

  I pulled up along the side of the road, where that trail back and up into the woods started. There were no other cars there, just a line of yellow police tape cut in half and whipping back and forth in the breeze. That didn’t seem like it ought to stop me, so I grabbed my bag off of the front seat and went walking up the path.

  I left the car unlocked. If everything went well, I wouldn’t be gone long. And if it went the way I thought it might, I wouldn’t be needing the car no more anyhow.

  The Tramping Ground was full of footprints, that much I could see when I got there. Police footprints, paramedic footprints, sightseer footprints, you name it. They’d done a good job of cleaning up Jimmy, but here and there you could still see a little splash of blood, or a little scrap of fabric from something that had maybe been his.

  Fifteen feet up in the trees, they said. It made me want to puke.

  Instead, I reached into the bag and brought out what was in there. It was a bottle of wine, red wine, the best I could afford. I smashed the neck against a rock and it split off, leaving a jagged top and expensive grape juice running down the sides.

  “Here,” I said, and poured out the wine into the circle. “Don’t know if I’m doing this right. Don’t know if I’m damning myself to Hell by doing this. But Devil, if you’re there, this is me, inviting you. This me telling you I want some answers.”

  The last of the wine ran out onto the ground. I threw the bottle away into the woods. It hit a tree and smashed, and the pieces fell to the ground. Off in the distance, somebody’s dog found something interesting and started barking up a storm.

  Other than that, nothing.

  “Well, damn,” I said, and shook loose a cigarette from the pack I was carrying. Struck a light and settled into wait, and when I looked up he was there.

  He was tall, but I’d expected that. For a moment he just stood there, and I took him in. He was dressed in a shabby black suit, cuffs frayed and shoes scuffed, mud on the heels and tie loosened past the first undone button of his sweat-stained white shirt. His face was dead-man pale, eyes bright and sharp under a shock of red hair which itself sat beneath a worn and battered felt hat. If he had horns, I couldn’t see ‘em, but perhaps that’s what the hat was for. At least, that was my thin
king.

  “Your friend was a damn fool,” he said, without waiting for preamble or question. “He was a damn fool and it killed him, and I’m hoping you’re less of a damn fool than him.” As he spoke, he began walking, long loping strides that took him around the perimeter of that circle of dead grass at a goodly clip.

  I took a drag on my cigarette, then stubbed it out against the soggy bark of the log I was sitting on. “You’re the Devil,” I said. “What do I call you? Old Nick? Father of Lies? Lucifer?”

  “You can call me the Devil,” he said with a grunt. “I don’t hold with being too familiar.”

  “The Devil it is,” I agreed, and nodded to let him know I agreed with him. He didn’t acknowledge the gesture, instead choosing to stump round that place where nothing grew, brow furrowed as if by some deep thought. “So, Mister Devil, what damnfool thing did my friend do to get himself killed?”

  The Devil stopped. Looked at me, looked me up and down like a dog looking at a piece of steak that’s fallen onto the kitchen floor. “Three nights,” he said. “Three nights of being a pain in my ass. You were there for the first two,” and he pointed an accusing finger. The nail, I could see, was charcoal black. “You were there for the first two, but you weren’t stupid enough to cross the line. You just wanted to see, and seeing was enough for you. But he wanted to feel it, feel it for himself. Feel what it’s like to have the Devil his own self lay hands on you and cast you out.”

  I stood, but cast my eyes down so they wouldn’t meet his. You see things when you meet the Devil’s eyes, or so Mama had always said. You see things it ain’t right to see.

  “So he pitched his tent in there?” I asked, and pointed to a spot where the dead turf looked to be torn up a little.

  The Devil shook his head. “Didn’t even bother to do that much. I think he figured it’d get all messed up, and he didn’t want to deal with that none. He just laid his sleeping bag down and climbed in. Had a couple of beers while he was waiting to fall asleep, that cheap watered down Lite crap. Can’t stand it myself, and then your idiot friend had to go and make things worse by leaving his damn cans in the circle. That’s not the sort of thing I stand for.”

  I stepped closer to the edge of the circle. Maybe two feet of green and mud separated me from that patch of deadness where the Devil waited. He stood there, watching me, arms folded across his chest. He carried himself the way a tough man carried himself. Not a bully, mind you, but a lean, hard man used to working for a living and taking care of his business when he deemed it necessary to do so.

  Then again, he was the Devil, with all that implied.

  “That’s what you killed him for, then? Littering?”

  He glared at me. “That’d have been enough. I’m the Devil, boy. I’m the evil that’s walked this land since the Flood receded and the dinosaurs died. A man looks at me funny, that’s enough in my book for me to work some mojo on him.”

  A couple more steps took me right up to the line where the grass died. I was careful not to cross it. Didn’t want to transgress the circle, for whatever that was worth. Didn’t want to intrude on the Devil’s space.

  Hell, I didn’t want to give him an excuse.

  “So that’s it,” I said cautiously.

  He fixed me with a stare, his head tilted to the side, like a bird’s. “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you—”

  “Don’t interrupt the Devil when he’s talking, son. It’s a bad habit, and it’ll stunt your growth.”

  I shut up. He watched me shutting up for a minute, making sure I wasn’t going to start yammering again, and then continued. “Tell you what. You want to know about your friend so bad, I’ll make you a deal. Truth for truth. You tell me why you came back for real, and I’ll tell you what happened to him for real, and why. The way I look at it, you’re getting the better end of the deal.”

  “My momma told me not to make deals with the Devil,” I heard myself say. I’d have backed away, if my legs were listening to my brain, but at that moment they weren’t. So I stood there, frozen, as the Devil stalked up to me. He faced me then, nose to nose, eye to eye across that line of dead grass.

  “If I wanted your soul, I’d have it a hundred ways before you knew it was missing. Drinking, lying, fornicating, pride—I’ve got my hooks in you so deep they’re meeting in the middle. But like I said, I’m just offering you truth for truth. Neither of us gets anything but words from the other. Oh, and you,” he said, pointing that long finger at me, “go first.”

  I thought about not answering, but that thought didn’t stay long. I’d come back out there wanting answers, wanting to know what had happened to Jimmy, and why. Now here I was with the chance to learn the truth, the real truth, and I was hesitating.

  Afraid.

  Afraid like I’d been that night, scared enough to go home when Jimmy’d been brave enough to stay, brave enough to park his own self right in the middle of the Tramping Ground itself, and to wait for what came next.

  “I came back to see if I could talk to you,” I said. The words surprised me, but they tasted like they were true, so I kept going. “I wanted to know why you did what you did to Jimmy. I wanted to know why you did it. I wanted to know if it was really,” I took a deep breath and looked into those unkind eyes, “you.”

  “That’s most of it,” he said thoughtfully, and sucked on his gums for a minute. “But you’re missing something.”

  “Like what?”

  He spun on his heel and walked six steps, into the dead center of the circle. Without turning around, he spoke. “What you really want to know is why I let you get away. After all, it wouldn’t have been hard to make you stay, if I’d wanted.”

  The cold truth of that cut at my guts. “Maybe,” I forced myself to say. “Or maybe I’d already seen what I thought I wanted to see, before you ripped Jimmy up.”

  He shook his head, all slow and sad. “Like I said, son, you came to see something, and to bear witness to what you’d seen. That’s why you brought your cameras, and your fancy night vision gear, and all that good stuff that didn’t help you none. You wanted truth, and you got a bellyful, and that was enough to let you walk away with your pride.”

  “But now,” and he spun around, arms out like a showman’s, “you’re thinking maybe you missed something. That your friend dead Jimmy saw something you didn’t afore he died, and you’re wondering if it’s worth seeing. Hell, you’re wondering if it’s worth dying yourself, just to see. Am I right?”

  “You’re right,” I said, and he was. You don’t lie to the Devil, no sir.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re not stupid. Now let me give you your truth, and we can see where we stand.”

  He cleared his throat, and for a moment I thought he might be embarrassed by the whole thing. You know, the Devil telling the truth and all. But then he started talking again, and any thought of sympathy I might have had just melted away.

  “In the basic, your friend’s problem was that he was in my way. That’s a bad place to be, son. Look around you. What do you see?”

  I looked around and didn’t see much. “Trees,” I said. “Mud. Some trash. Grass and weeds, maybe.”

  He nodded. “Right. I’d call it godforsaken, but you’d think I was trying to make a joke. The point is, a man comes out here to a place like this to think. To be alone, to walk to and fro in a little patch of dirt, and up and down in it, and not be disturbed. But then along comes your friend Jimmy, and he just plain pisses me off. And you know why?”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He looked me in the eye, and I looked away. “Because like I said, you were here to bear witness to something bigger than yourself. You wanted a mystery. Jimmy, he wanted to be the center of things. He wanted something to happen to him, so he could go home and tell the pretty girls all about his adventure. He wanted to make this the place for his story, if’n you know what I mean. Well, hell, that ain’t right. That ain’t proper. That ain’t g
oing to happen, not as long as I have power in this world. And I do have power, when I choose to raise it up in me.”

  The Devil’s voice had been rising the whole time until it was practically a shout. His cadence was one a few preachers I’d known would have killed for, a rhythm that picked you up and carried you along until it dropped you in the silence, in the weeds of the whispers.

  “I don’t hold with that,” he said, quiet now, his voice the sound of snake’s tongue going in and out. “This is my place, and it will be until the world burns. The Jimmys of the world don’t get to take that away. Not now, not ever, amen.”

  “Amen,” I caught myself whispering, and the Devil grinned.

  “Very good, boy,” he said, and there was a gleam in his eye I wasn’t glad to see. “Do you have what you came for?”

  I looked down at my feet, half to make sure my toes were outside the circle, and half just to look away from him. “Yes. I understand what happened to Jimmy now. And I’ll leave you be.”

  “Not so fast.”

  I looked up. He was staring at me, still smiling. “I said, do you have what you came for.”

  “Like I said, I know what happened to Jimmy, and that’s what I came here for. And I don’t want to end up like him, so if you’ll excuse me-“

  “Liar.”

  The word hit me like a kick to the back of the knee. It’s one thing when a woman calls you a liar for making up some lame-ass excuse for forgetting to call her. It’s another when the one who invented lying out of whole cloth and the unformed stuff of Creation slaps it on you.

  “Excuse me?”

  He leaned forward, a vulture getting ready to swoop down off his perch. “I called you a liar, boy. You going to argue with me?”

  I shook my head and started backing away. “I think I’ve done enough talking with you tonight.”

  “Then just listen.” I froze. “You and I both know that’s not the real thing you came here for. You came to see, just like you came the other night. Well, now you’ve seen, all right. You’ve seen me. And that’s not something to be taken lightly.”

  “Fact is,” he continued, and started walking toward me. I clung to the notion that it was all right, that he was inside the circle and I was outside, and never the twain should meet. “Fact is that you were maybe a little too eager to see something strange, don’t you think?”