“What’s weird about it?” Beth said. “We’re all in the same division, working for the same team. It’s not like Ish would come into the field to find us.”
That got a laugh. Our supervisor was so agoraphobic, he made the Angels’ Charlie look like the top candidate for class president at a pep rally.
“She din’t recruit me,” Reg said. “Ish did. I answered a ad on Craigslist.” After a moment’s thought, he added, “So that place where I interviewed, was that really hell? The Regional Office? Cool.”
Everyone looked at Pog and Pog looked at me. I shrugged, speechless.
Pog turned on Cricket, who still looked like Delilah. “Do you mind not wearing that face anymore? You’re giving me the willies.”
“Okay,” she chirped, as perky as if she hadn’t just startled everybody. While we watched, she gumbied rapidly back into shrimpy Cricket, this time maybe seventeen years old, although it was hard to tell with Cricket. She now wore a childlike young face. Maybe it was her eyes, wide open and fearless, or the tilt of her head, like a hopped-up kitten that never gets tired.
It was clear that Pog knew more than the rest of us, and equally clear that she didn’t want to talk about it. Well, neither did I. I headed for the shower.
My bedroom was the farthest west in the Lair. It was farthest from the kitchen and closest to the street and the elevated train tracks out in front of the building. Every time a train went by, I heard it. Our first two weeks in the Lair, it drove me nuts. Now I barely noticed. So I guess I was finally beginning to acclimate to life in the field.
It didn’t seemed to bother Cricket.
I was exhausted from the sensory overload of the Aquarium—not just the usual overly-scented crowd of socialites and their catered food and booze, but room after room of cases full of living things, their brilliant colors, the waves of light passing through water, the throb of their heartbeats audible to me and my teammates, if not to the people around us. In fact, I doubted my teammates noticed, either. I was still dialed way too high, aware of every living thing, such as their Araguaian river dolphin, which was pregnant, or the Adriatic crab, whose tank stank. Add in sex, and the mixture was too rich.
Thank hell, Cricket had been quiet for nearly an hour.
I’d already decided that I wouldn’t say a word once the lights were out, or she would talk to me all night long.
Then I started to worry. This silence was unlike her.
After an hour and ten minutes, I bit the bullet and spoke. I didn’t like to think of her brooding over that damned party Beth wanted her to do. Or her evidently horrible granddaughter, Sharon.
“The train doesn’t bother you?” I whispered as the El went by. With demon ears, she’d be able to hear me fine—if she was awake.
She answered in a normal voice. “My first husband and I had an apartment on the Howard Line.” She did not sound chipper for once.
That was all. She didn’t volunteer another word.
This was bad.
“How long ago was that?”
After a pause, Cricket said, “Seventy-three years ago.”
I was beginning to appreciate just how much life Cricket had lived, compared to me. While she’d been marrying, giving birth, burying and marrying husbands over and over again, I’d merely been breathing, keeping my head down as an Army brat, then hiding out in the Regional Office.
I’m not good at making conversation.
At random, I said, “Doyle, Beth’s guy? He says everyone has a natural age. The age they are inside.” If she wouldn’t talk about herself, maybe she would gossip. “He says she’s not really fifty inside. He says she’s really a young girl.”
Cricket stayed quiet. Not good.
I babbled, “I’d say she’s really about thirty-six. A ‘mom’ thirty-six. Pushy and bossy and constantly worried she’s not doing the right thing, but she’s got to look like she on top of it, because if she doesn’t, the other moms will steamroll right over her. Like a young lieutenant with fresh bars.”
I was doing math in my head. If Cricket was ninety-eight, she’d been born in nineteen-seventeen. She’d been eighteen in nineteen-thirty-five. A young mother during World War II. I wondered if her first husband went off to war, leaving her with babies.
I was about to break down and ask her when she spoke.
“How do you know about young lieutenants?”
Oh well, I’d asked for it. I rolled over on my back to watch the lights from passing cars cross the ceiling through the venetian blinds. “My dad was career Army. Made colonel ten years before he retired. I saw a lot of young officers.”
“Date any?” Of course Cricket would ask that.
“No.”
She said after a pause, “You must have lived a lot of places.”
“Every big base in the States, including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands.”
“What kind of a soldier was he?” Cricket wanted to know next.
I’d never been asked that before. She was good. “The kind that sits at a desk.” I shoved one arm behind my head, surprised at the bitter note in my voice. “It made him act extra macho. And extra careful.”
“Careful?” Pause. “You mean, he was careful to make sure you and your mom were extra macho? Oh, you know what I mean.”
I smiled in the dark. “No, you’re right. That’s exactly how he was. He wasn’t a leader of men. More a pusher of paper. But he was ambitious. So we had to act invisible. That was ideal, from Army perspective.”
“My two best friends from the neighborhood married military men,” Cricket said. “They said that, too. Invisible. Of course, we were Jews.”
She’d been quiet long enough that I knew another hard question was coming.
“How’d you happen to start working for the devil?”
“He’s the Regional Office CEO now,” I said. When I was a kid we had still called him the devil. Nothing changes so fast on the surface as a mountainous pyramidal hierarchy trying to pretend it isn’t crumbling under its own weight. “I don’t know that I was actually recruited.”
“Didn’t they try to buy your soul?”
I shrugged. “Nobody ever asked for mine. I just slid gradually into employment in the Regional Office. Why, did they buy yours?”
“Nope,” she said happily. “I knew they couldn’t.” That would be Cricket, all right. “Deli—the recruiter admitted the overhead is too much for them. Anyway, how did you?”
I hadn’t thought about this in years. “My Dad got sick and couldn’t travel any more. Couldn’t change bases. My Mom had been sick since I was in high school, but it—she—” There was no way to explain those years. I collapsed it all into one sentence. “I was twenty-four when she died. Dad was fourteen years older than she was. He kept going into the hospital and coming out again. Eventually they retired him. As he got sicker, he pulled some strings and got me a job with a big defense contractor. He wanted me to have job security. I learned computer coding and went to work in the bowels of the cubicle farm. And that was that, really.”
“What was that?”
“Woke up one morning and realized I was working for the Regional Office.” How did Cricket do this? One minute I’m comforting her, the next minute she’s got my guts open on the dissecting table. “I realized I hadn’t had my period in two years. Then I noticed my watch battery had died. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t been home to sleep or change my clothes in...well, I did the math and I forget now, but it was a really long time.”
“Didn’t you eat?” Cricket sounded scandalized.
“Junk food out of the vending machines now and then. Only execs go out to lunch.” I thought about this. “There’s a reason people end up at desk jobs in the Regional Office.”
“Well. You had nothing to live for.”
Ouch. Right to the jugular. “Guess not.”
“Did your dad die?”
“Yeah, eighteen months after my mom. I was still going home from work to take care of him. I guess
after he died I didn’t have a reason to go home. And I was sick of the place,” I confessed. Easier to work overtime than go back to a condo that still stank of Dad’s cigar smoke and his dying bowel flora. I hadn’t been ready to face the next steps: clean up, throw things away, try to figure out how to have a life for the first time in my life.
It hit me like a hammer blow then, how much I owed Delilah and my team at the Lair for getting me out of the office and into the field. For a few long heartbeats I lay boneless on my back. A weight flew up off me—Mom’s death, Dad’s death, a lifetime of being owned by the Army but never being in the Army. My chest felt so big and light that I thought it would fly apart. Then gratitude squeezed me like a hot, comforting hand and, to my amazement, two tears ran out of the corners of my eyes into my ears.
Cricket’s questions erupted. “How could you not notice you were in hell? Did they pay you? Did you get raises? Weren’t you lonely? How about now? Is this better? I would think it was better. This is a great team.”
“Hey,” I whispered, waving my hand feebly in the air.
Miraculously she shut up. There was a sixty second pause. In the silence, I had the space to wonder about the mysteries she’d confronted me with.
I tried to breathe. My airway was a tiny hot tube. “No.” Once the word was out, I could breathe again.
I couldn’t say out loud to anyone, No, I didn’t think I was lonely. I was grateful to be living alone. If you could call it living. I spent my whole life with my parents, staying invisible in the shadow of the military, caring for them until they died. But I was lonely when I lived with them, lonely and starving for something I couldn’t name. The only thing I ever did that felt like life was— “I was trying to find some women to play softball with.”
“Not basketball?”
“Anything. I just wanted to meet some people enough like me to field a team. I think I had this idea that sports could save me. Don’t ask me why.”
The air in my bedroom rang with the sound of Cricket not-asking why.
So I thought about that. “I played team sports in high school.”
“Your dad let you do that?”
I shrugged against my pillow. “I was good. He liked when we won.”
Mercifully, she shut up again. I breathed shallowly for a while, remembering the smell of steaming hot cats’ pee in my mug at my desk, and crouching in front of my horrible cracked beehive monitor screen until my back ached. I remembered how I had never noticed any of that, how much bone-deep loneliness the Regional Office had numbed for me. I had only barely known I was in hell, and I was glad, because it had beat the shit out of my life.
“I was numb and happy to be numb. Then Delilah came to sit in the cubicle two cubes down from mine. She shattered my focus on staying numb.” I said slowly, thinking aloud, “If Delilah hadn’t told me about this team opening up.”
I didn’t finish that sentence. It didn’t bear thinking about.
“Just casually, I asked her if she played softball. I didn’t really hope. She was too glam. Like Jee. But I hardly ever saw a woman in the Regional Office, so I asked. She just smiled and said, ‘I don’t do sports.’ I remember thinking, ‘What, because you don’t like to lose?’ She had that look. Like Jee, polished and loaded in both barrels. And she said, as if she was reading my mind, ‘No, because I always win.’ Then she left this flyer on my desk.”
I smiled in the dark, remembering that one impersonal touch on my elbow from that elegantly-manicured hand, and finding the flyer lying on my desk. Delilah woke me up somehow. “The flyer said, ‘Female demons wanted. Do you have it in you to become a succubus? Field work. Top pay. Contact Ish Qbybbl.’ And an email address.”
What a moment that had been. The surge of hope. I’d pictured the field for the first time in a decade: green trees, fresh air, sunlight. Suddenly my mug had stunk, my stomach had hurt from all the junk food, my back ached from that crappy chair with one caster missing, and all I could think was, a chance to work with women!
Now, as I lay in bed in the dark, my heart overflowed. After a decade in the Regional Office I wasn’t used to emotion. That’s it, I thought, I’m done, I can’t go there. I can’t stand to feel these feelings.
My body was torquing up in bed like a salted slug, throbbing all over again from that first touch on the elbow, Delilah’s impersonal smile. I smelled my own tears.
I remembered feeling bone-restless and fizzy like this after I read that flyer. My mind had been full of flames.
Working with women for a change. Top pay. Field work.
The word around the Regional Office was that field work was a demon killer. That was why it paid so well. Hell’s soldiers went into the field and they didn’t come back. They went crazy. They went native. They vanished. Some were even said to have died, which wasn’t supposed to be possible.
The minute I read that flyer, I knew I’d risk anything to get out.
And here I was. Going crazy, just like rumor said I would. And I wouldn’t go back for anything.
“She saved us both,” Cricket said in the quietest whisper.
I turned over onto my side and shoved my pillow over my head. Cricket could take me into every dark corner of my mind. She would stay there with me and hold my hand.
It was just too much.
I had to answer one last question, though. It wouldn’t be fair not to. Not after all this hand-holding.
I pulled the pillow away from my mouth and clamped it over my ears. When just my lips were exposed, I said, “Yes. Yes, this is better.”
CRICKET
Early next morning, Cricket woke to an empty bedroom. Her phone blinked: twenty-five unanswered texts, twelve unheard voicemails. She went looking for Amanda, and was just in time to spot her come out of the bathroom in jogging clothes and sneakers and trot down the hall toward the stairs to the factory floor. Cricket followed, feeling a bit like a kid shadowing the popular big girl who didn’t think much of her. But there seemed to be no one else around.
Amanda thumped down the noisy metal stairs. Cricket followed.
Out on the factory floor, Amanda went straight to where racks of old boards and metal pipes hung on the wall. Then she walked to the wall and climbed straight up it! Cricket ran closer to watch.
There was a steel ladder stuck to the wall! Amanda climbed up it easily. When she got to the top of the ladder she stepped out onto a rickety-looking metal board and walked along it, comfortable as a cat on a fence rail, until she came to a platform slung under one of the milky skylights at the very top of the arched ceiling. Miraculously, greenery was growing on the platform—bushes? trees? Cricket couldn’t tell.
Amanda disappeared into the greenery.
Cricket heard her moving around up there, and her sneakers making faint metallic noises, and other tantalizing sounds.
She found the ladder and climbed up after Amanda. It amazed and tickled her how easy this was for her strong demon body.
Her eyes adjusted to the gloom at the top of the ladder. She found the walkway Amanda had used. It wasn’t too narrow to manage, seen from up here. Cricket walked it carefully. There was, she saw, a rope slung on metal loops screwed into the wooden ceiling at intervals, so a person could grab onto the rope if they felt nervous.
Cricket wasn’t nervous. She was thrilled. A new experience!
The platform was pretty large. There was room for Cricket to stand at one end and not be too much in the way while Amanda did stuff to the plants.
It was hot up there under the skylight. Sunshine filtered through the aged plastic bubble. The plants gave off a wonderful smell after Amanda watered them.
Cricket squatted on the platform deck, enchanted by the aerial jungle. It was like the runner bean patch in the garden at the Loriston Home. The longer she stared into the thin, sawtoothed leaves, lit warmly by filtered sunlight, the more colors she could see.
Amanda moved quietly and surely around the platform. She watered the big bushy plants with a hose, inspe
cted roots and tops, and snipped off blobby flower-buds and gently laid them in a plastic tub. Cricket could tell she was aware of her. Amanda seemed shy, like a deer, surefooted and silent in a wood.
Cricket wallowed in the sensations of hiding in a make-believe forest, watching a big live beautiful deer within arm’s reach. She made herself small among the leaves.
She guessed these plants were marijuanas. If so, they were bigger and fancier than the ones her grandson had been growing in his basement in 1975. She took a fresh interest in the parts Amanda was harvesting in her plastic tub.
She had a lot of questions about marijuana. She decided to ask them later, when Amanda was in a talking mood.
Eventually Amanda put a top on the plastic tub, put it in a paint can on a rope, and lowered the can to the factory floor. Then she finally looked directly at Cricket.
She looked really pretty in this light, with growing plants all around her. Much nicer than when she was made up for sex demoning.
Cricket smiled.
Amanda smiled back. Then she clambered off the platform, walked the plank to the steel ladder, and descended to the floor.
Cricket watched from her leafy new hideaway up under the roof.
Down on the floor, Amanda put the tub of marijuana harvest on the edge of the basketball floor and then began a series of stretches, lunges, crunches, goodness! She really was athletic! After a while she fetched a basketball out of a drum near the front door and practiced running layups. Then she practiced free throws.
Two of Cricket’s husbands had been basketball fans. Cricket crept across the metal bridge, climbed down the ladder, and curled up in a lawn chair by the barbecue to watch.
Amanda worked out for forty minutes. Her movements were pure joy, smooth and sure, so that even fast moves seemed ballet-perfect. Cricket could see why Amanda really loved sports.
Cricket remembered playing field hockey in school, oy, over eighty-five years ago! She’d always been the smallest kid in class. She’d taken a real beating, getting tripped, run over, or fallen on. She hadn’t minded. But her aunt was aghast. After her first year, she wouldn’t let her play sports any more. You’ll break your tselke that way. Who will marry you then?
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 64