Up Jumps the Devil
Read Up Jumps the Devil Online
Authors: Michael Poore
JUMPS
THE
DEVIL
MICHAEL POORE
for Mom and Bill
1. The Wonderful, Terrible Show
3. The Death of Dan Paul Overfield
4. The Devil's Unusual Constitution
5. Soulful Cats at the Crossroads
6. Wildness, Kindness, and War
7. The Excellent Mr. Scratch, a Patron of Science
8. Favorite Foods and Good and Evil
9. How God Stole the Devil's Girlfriend
11. Homes and Gardens in Egypt
13. The Problem with Freezing People
14. Jenna Steele's Public Bad-Girl Avatar
22. Daughterry and the Devil Make a Bet
23. Jenna's Live Multimedia Near Suicide
25. Showbiz in the Time of the Black Death
26. People Don't Have to Take Your Shit If You Don't Have Any Money
29. Like Having a Psychic Heart
34. “It's That President-of-France Guy Again!”
35. Fish Is Raptured or Something
36. Rising and Vanishing Almost Politely
37. Those Games Are About Jesus
38. An Already Pretty Embarrassing Life
42. A Silence Encompassing a Thousand Hundred Years
44. The World Without a Rebel Angel
The Wonderful, Terrible Show
Dayton, Ohio, 2005
JOHN SCRATCH LOOKED LIKE
the Devil.
His fans said so. The All-Celebrity News Channel said so, too.
He climbed from his limo, zipping his pants.
Just as the door closed, cameras flashed on a pair of long, naked legs on leather upholstery.
Cameras swarmed John Scratch as he crossed a street in a low-rent suburb, walked across an unmowed yard to a house with peeling paint, and rang the doorbell.
Cameras rolled while he waited, black ponytail shining.
SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE
watched John Scratch ring the doorbell a second time. While they waited, between snacks, they repeated what they'd read on the celebrity blogs.
“If the Devil's here on Earth, you know this show's exactly what he'd be doing.”
“But he seems nice.”
“Are you high? You couldn't be nice and do this show.”
“He looks Italian.”
“He looks like he's from Argentina.”
“Like you know what someone from Argentina looks like. Besides, he's an American.”
“How do you know that?”
Shrug. “Everyone knows the Devil's an American.”
The door opened, and there stood tonight's guests.
The guests were always different, and always kind of the same. They might be rich or poor. They were always surprised by the lights and cameras. They always seemed a little scared of John Scratch, whom they recognized because, like everyone, they had seen his show. His wonderful, terrible show.
Tonight's guests were a husband and wife in their thirties. The man wore a tank top and had eyes like knives. He wore the tired, peevish look of a man who had peaked early, maybe in high school. The woman wore a Tweety Bird sweatshirt and a pound of eye makeup. She looked like the kind of woman who enjoyed talking about people behind their backs.
They were in love, though. The TV audience could see it in the way they answered the door like one person with two heads, leaning on each other a little.
John Scratch had come to make them an offer. That's what his TV show was for.
He offered them five million dollars to move far away and never see each other again.
They laughed, at first.
Then they both got the same exact haunted look.
“I wouldn't do it,” said some of the sixty million viewers.
“I would,” said others.
“Then something's
wrong
with you!”
“Something's wrong with
you
!”
That's how people watched the show.
On-screen, the man and woman talked. Together, first, then one at a time.
They fought, shouting, together.
She agreed to the offer.
He did not. Red-faced, he seized her by the elbow and said something the microphones couldn't catch. When she twisted away, stumbling, he lunged for John Scratch and had to be restrained.
The airwaves smash-cut to a commercial, and the crew retreated across the street.
JOHN SCRATCH WAS
almost to the limo when the live audience around him began to shout and boil. At first it seemed as if they were excited about something.
No. Their voices were fearful.
Someone was pushing his way toward him. Bodyguards and cameras staggered and went down.
It was a mountain in a ski mask and gloves, holding a pistol in both hands.
John Scratch didn't look at the pistol; he looked at the big man's eyes. They were angry, but they were mostly frightened. They were complicated eyes. Like the eyes of the couple John Scratch had just destroyed, they were haunted.
They were also familiar.
John Scratch appeared to relax.
He looked up at the man the way you look up at a friend, and said, “It's going to be okay.”
The man aimed his pistol and shot John Scratch six times.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!
On camera, it looked so cool, the way the limo door opened right behind John Scratch, and swallowed him up.
No one saw what became of the big man in the mask.
The limo raced for the hospital.
“Jesus, Johnny!” said his backseat companion, former child-star-turned-bad-girl recording artist Jenna Steele.
“Hand me those napkins,” he said, coughing blood. “I'm trying not to bleed on the leather.”
He'd been shot before. In fact, there were very few things that had not happened to him, because John Scratch really
was
the Devil.
The actual Devil. In a limo with Jenna Steele, a bag of Mexican weed, and six bullets in him.
He was an American, too. The fans and blogs were right about that.
He had been an American for a very long time.
The Village
Providence Bay, 1623
THE DEVIL HADN'T WANTED
to be an American, at first.
Not the new kind, anyway. The white kind, with their ships and Bibles, who called themselves “English.”
He much preferred the forest dwellers. He had lived among the Yellow Earth People, hunted with the Big Belly People, and farmed with the Corn People. He had traded with the Big Voice People, and with the Yellow Earth People after they were driven off by the Corn People and became the People Who Wander.
He had been happiest among the Falling Water People, in the South. It was easy to grow sleepy and content in their world, with its endless woods and great rivers. More like Eden than Eden had been.
Then the big wooden ships appeared, like houses on the water. White men stomped ashore, and built a fort they called Jamestown. The Devil moved north to get away from them, joining the Morning People, who lived near the sea where the sun first touched the land. But the big ships came there, too. Before he could say “Hell” they had popped ashore and made a fort. And then a village.
The Devil watched them from the forest, smoking mice in his corncob pipe, scratching his wooden head.
If the white people had a plan, he observed over time, it was this:
Come ashore, build a fort, and starve to death in it.
“People like this can't amount to much,” muttered the Devil.
The Jamestown whites had been stupid, too. They had dug for gold instead of planting food.
“Stupid,” observed the warriors among the Morning People, who attacked the fort and came back all shot up, “but with fabulous weapons!”
“They'll have to go,” said the Devil.
THE ENGLISH WHO
landed in the North called themselves “Pilgrims.” They learned faster than the Jamestown bunch. By the third spring, they learned how to plant food and store it so it didn't run out in winter, and how to cut back the woods to give them room to shoot at the Indians.
The Jamestown bunch had been allergic to work.
Thinking about Jamestown, the Devil couldn't help thinking about Pocahontas.
He tried
not
to think about Pocahontas.
ONE NIGHT, THE
Devil smudged himself with black war paint, and snuck out of the woods, uphill, across the cow pasture, glistening with midnight dew, until he stood among the sleeping cows.
He awakened them with a soft, seductive “Moo.”
“Moo,” answered the cows, and trudged over to have their backs scratched.
Animals either loved or hated the Devil, just as they loved or hated other animals. Cows loved him.
Loved him, as it happened, to a degree the Pilgrims would have found shocking. One by one they turned their hind parts to him, and the Devil satisfied them, one by one.
The Devil wasâalways had beenâa generous and undiscriminating lover. The old bull, Palestine, came thundering up to protest, stopped when he recognized the Devil, and thundered off again lest the Devil mistake him for something he wasn't.
IN THE MORNING
, the cows wandered in and were milked behind the pasture shed. Pilgrim women and children, dressed in black, crouched beside them like crows. The milk filled wooden buckets, steaming in the morning chill, and the buckets were carried indoors.