The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (52 page)

She walked through the living room to the door and studied the handle for a moment. As she reached for it, he lumbered after her, lunged toward her, but already she was opening the door, slipping out.

“Stop! You’ll freeze. You’ll die!”

In the clearing of the forest, with sunlight slanting through the giant trees, she spun around, lifted her face upward, and then opened her wings all the way. As effortlessly as a butterfly, or a bird, she drew herself up into the air, her wings flashing light, now gleaming, now appearing to vanish as the light reflected one way and another.

“Stop!” Eddie cried again. “Please! Oh, God, stop! Come back!”

She rose higher and looked down at him with her golden eyes. Suddenly the air seemed to tremble with sound, trills and arpeggios and flutings. Her mouth did not open as the sounds increased until Eddie fell to his knees and clapped his hands over his ears, moaning. When he looked again, she was still rising, shining, invisible, shining again. Then she was gone. Eddie pitched forward into the thick layer of fir needles and forest humus and lay still. He felt a tugging on his arm and heard Mary Beth’s furious curses but as if from a great distance. He moaned and tried to go to sleep again. She would not let him.

“You goddamn bastard! You filthy son of a bitch! You let it go! Didn’t you? You turned it loose!”

He tried to push her hands away.

“You scum! Get up! You hear me? Don’t think for a minute, Buster, that I’ll let you die out here! That’s too good for you, you lousy tub of lard. Get up!”

Against his will he was crawling, then stumbling, leaning on her, being steadied by her. She kept cursing all the way back inside the cabin, until he was on the couch, and she stood over him, arms akimbo, glaring at him.

“Why? Just tell me why. For God’s sake, tell me, Eddie, why?” Then she screamed at him, “Don’t you dare pass out on me again. Open those damn eyes and keep them open!”

She savaged him and nagged him, made him drink whiskey that she had brought along, then made him drink coffee. She got him to his feet and made him walk around the cabin a little, let him sit down again, drink again. She did not let him go to sleep, or even lie down, and the night passed.

A fine rain had started to fall by dawn. Eddie felt as if he had been away a long time, to a very distant place that had left few memories. He listened to the soft rain and at first thought he was in his own small house, but then he realized he was in a strange cabin and that Mary Beth was there, asleep in a chair. He regarded her curiously and shook his head, trying to clear it. His movement brought her sharply awake.

“Eddie, are you awake?”

“I think so. Where is this place?”

“Don’t you remember?”

He started to say no, checked himself, and suddenly he was remembering. He stood up and looked about almost wildly.

“It’s gone, Eddie. It went away and left you to die. You would have died out there if I hadn’t come, Eddie. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He sat down again and lowered his head into his hands. He knew she was telling the truth.

“It’s going to be light soon,” she said. “I’ll make us something to eat, and then we’ll go back to town. I’ll drive you. We’ll come back in a day or so to pick up your car.” She stood up and groaned. “My God, I feel like I’ve been wrestling bears all night. I hurt all over.”

She passed close enough to put her hand on his shoulder briefly. “What the hell, Eddie. Just what the hell.”

In a minute he got up also and went to the bedroom, looked at the bed where he had lain with her all through the night. He approached it slowly and saw the remains of the mantle. When he tried to pick it up, it crumbled to dust in his hand.

The Goat Cutter

Jay Lake

Jay Lake’s chilling story uses the association of goats and flies with the devil and demons. The equation of flies with the demonic is easily traced to the New Testament. Beelzebub (literally “lord of flies”) is identified as the “prince of demons” in Matthew, Mark and Luke. The goat connection is not as direct: the Greek god Pan was half man, half goat; pastoral, but bestial, he was also a fertility god. Pan and his band of goat-men satyrs were a randy lot and overt sexuality was not a positive with the early Church. Moreover, St Jerome (c. 347–420) interpreted the Hebrew
se’irim,
“hairy ones” (derived from
sa’ir,
or “goat”) in Isaiah’s description of the ruins of Babylon to mean
‘‘
satyr’’. Leviticus 17:7 refers to the practice of sacrificing to the
se’irim
(variously translated into English as “devils”, “demons”, “he-goats”, “goat idols”, etc.
).
Pan’s cloven hooves, horns, hairiness, and prominent phallus were eventually turned into demonic symbolism by artists seeking a way to portray Satan.

The Devil lives in Houston by the ship channel in a high-rise apartment fifty-seven stories up. They say he’s got cowhide sofas and a pinball machine and a telescope in there that can see past the oil refineries and across Pasadena all the way to the Pope in Rome and on to where them Arabs pray to that big black stone.

He can see anyone anywhere from his place in the Houston sky, and he can see inside their hearts.

But I know it’s all a lie. Except about the hearts, of course. Cause I know the Devil lives in an old school bus in the woods outside of Dale, Texas. He don’t need no telescope to see inside your heart, on account of he’s already there.

This I know.

Central Texas gets mighty hot come summer. The air rolls in heavy off the Gulf, carries itself over two hundred miles of cow shit and sorghum fields and settles heavy on all our heads. The katydids buzz in the woods like electric fans with bad bearings, and even the skeeters get too tired to bite most days. You can smell the dry coming off the Johnson grass and out of the bar ditches.

Me and my best friend Pootie, we liked to run through the woods, climbing bob wire and following pipelines. Trees is smaller there, easier to slip between. You gotta watch out in deer season, though. Idiots come out from Austin or San Antone to their leases, get blind drunk and shoot every blessed thing that moves. Rest of the time, there’s nothing but you and them turkey vultures. Course, you can’t steal beer coolers from turkey vultures.

The Devil, he gets on pretty good with them turkey vultures.

So me and Pootie was running the woods one afternoon somewhere in the middle of summer. We was out of school, waiting to be sophomores in the fall, fixing to amount to something. Pootie was bigger than me, but I already got tongue off Martha Dempsey. Just a week or so ago back of the church hall, I even scored a little titty squeeze inside her shirt. It was over her bra, but that counts for something. I knew I was coming up good.

Pootie swears he saw Rachel MacIntire’s nipples, but she’s his cousin. I reckoned he just peeked through the bathroom window of his aunt’s trailer house, which ain’t no different from me watching Momma get out of the shower. It don’t count. If there was anything to it, he’d a sucked on ’em, and I’d of never heard the end of
that
. Course I wouldn’t say no to my cousin Linda if she offered to show me a little something in the shower.

Yeah, that year we was big boys, the summer was hot, and we was always hungry and horny.

Then we met the Devil.

Me and Pootie crossed the bob wire fence near the old bus wallow on county road 61, where they finally built that little bridge over the draw. Doug Bob Aaronson had that place along the south side of 61, spent his time roasting goats, drinking tequila and shooting people’s dogs.

Doug Bob was okay, if you didn’t bring a dog. Three years back, once we turned ten, he let me and Pootie drink his beer with him. He liked to liquor up, strip down to his underwear and get his ass real warm from the fire in his smoker. We was just a guy and two kids in their shorts drinking in the woods. I’m pretty sure Momma and Uncle Reuben would of had hard words, so I never told.

We kind of hoped now that we was going to be sophomores, he’d crack some of that Sauza Conmemorativo Anejo for us.

Doug Bob’s place was all grown over, wild rose and stretch vine and beggar’s lice everywhere, and every spring a huge-ass wisteria wrapped his old cedar house with lavender flowers and thin whips of wood. There was trees everywhere around in the brush, mesquite and hackberry and live oak and juniper and a few twisty old pecans. Doug Bob knew all the plants and trees, and taught ’em to us sometimes when he was less than half drunk. He kept chickens around the place and a mangy duck that waddled away funny whenever he got to looking at it.

We come crashing through the woods one day that summer, hot, hungry, horny and full of fight. Pootie’d told me about Rachel’s nipples, how they was set in big pink circles and stuck out like little red thumbs. I told him I’d seen that picture in
Hustler
same as him. If’n he was gonna lie, lie from a magazine I hadn’t stole us from the Triple E Grocery.

Doug Bob’s cedar house was bigger than three doublewides. It set at the back of a little clearing by the creek that ran down from the bus wallow. He lived there, fifty feet from a rusted old school bus that he wouldn’t never set foot inside. Only time I asked him about that bus, he cracked me upside the head so hard I saw double for days and had to tell Uncle Reuben I fell off my bike.

That would of been a better lie if I’d of recollected that my bike’d been stolen three weeks gone. Uncle Reuben didn’t beat me much worse than normal, and we prayed extra long over the Bible that night for forgiveness.

Doug Bob was pretty nice. He about never hit me, and he kept his underpants on when I was around.

That old smoker was laid over sidewise on the ground, where it didn’t belong. Generally, Doug Bob kept better care of it than anything except an open bottle of tequila. He had cut the smoker from a gigantic water heater, so big me and Pootie could of slept in it. Actually, we did a couple of times, but you can’t never get ash out of your hair after.

And Pootie snored worse than Uncle Reuben.

Doug Bob roasted his goats in that smoker, and he was mighty particular about his goats. He always killed his goats hisself. They didn’t usually belong to him, but he did his own killing. Said it made him a better man. I thought it mostly made him a better mess. The meat plant over in Lockhart could of done twice the job in half the time, with no bath in the creek afterward.

Course, when you’re sweaty and hot and full of piss and vinegar, there’s nothing like a splash around down in the creek with some beer and one of them big cakes of smelly purple horse soap me and Pootie stole out of barns for Doug Bob. Getting rubbed down with that stuff kind of stings, but it’s a good sting.

Times like that, I knew Doug Bob liked me just for myself. We’d all smile and laugh and horse around and get drunk. Nobody got hit, nobody got hurt, everybody went home happy.

*    *    *   

Doug Bob always had one of these goats, and it was always a buck. Sometimes a white Saanen, or maybe a creamy La Mancha or a brown Nubian looked like a chubby deer with them barred goat eyes staring straight into your heart. They was always clean, no socks nor blazes nor points, just one color all over. Doug Bob called them
unblemished
.

And Doug Bob always killed these goats on the north side of the smoker. He had laid some rocks down there, to make a clear spot for when it was muddy from winter rain or whatever. He’d cut their throats with his jagged knife that was older than sin, and sprinkle the blood all around the smoker.

He never let me touch that knife.

Doug Bob, he had this old gray knife without no handle, just rags wrapped up around the end. The blade had a funny shape like it got beat up inside a thresher or something, as happened to Momma’s sister Cissy the year I was born. Her face had that funny shape until Uncle Reuben found her hanging in the pole barn one morning with her dress up over her head.

They puttied her up for the viewing at the funeral home, but I recall Aunt Cissy best with those big dents in her cheek and jaw and the one brown eye gone all white like milk in coffee.

Doug Bob’s knife, that I always thought of as Cissy’s knife, it was kind of wompered and shaped all wrong, like a corn leaf the bugs been at. He’d take that knife and saw the head right off his goat.

I never could figure how Doug Bob kept that edge on.

He’d flay that goat, and strip some fatback off the inside of the hide, and put the head and the fat right on the smoker where the fire was going, wet chips of mesquite over a good hot bed of coals.

Then he’d drag the carcass down to creek, to our swimming hole, and sometimes me and Pootie could help with this part. We’d wash out the gut sac and clean off the heart and lungs and liver. Doug Bob always scrubbed the legs specially well with that purple horse soap. We’d generally get a good lot of blood in the water. If it hadn’t rained in a while, like most summers, the water’d be sticky for hours afterward.

Doug Bob would take the carcass and the sweetbreads – that’s what he called the guts, sweetbreads. I figured they looked more like spongy purple and red bruises than bread, kind of like dog food fresh outta the can. And there wasn’t nothing sweet about them.

Sweetbreads taste better than dog food, though. We ate dog food in the winter sometimes, ate it cold if Uncle Reuben didn’t have work and Momma’d been lazy. That was when I most missed my summers in the woods with Pootie, calling in on Doug Bob.

Doug Bob would drag these goat parts back up to the smoker, where he’d take the head and the fat off the fire. He’d always give me and Pootie some of that fat, to keep us away from the head meat, I guess. Doug Bob would put the carcass and the sweetbreads on the fire and spit his high-proof tequila all over them. If they didn’t catch straight away from that, he’d light ’em with a Bic.