Up Jumps the Devil (11 page)

“I know,” said the Devil.

“They say there's people in New Orleans can raise the dead. I don't go to New Orleans.”

The Devil took a bite out of his apple.

“There used to be a roadhouse here,” said Yeager. “It burned down a couple years ago. Two-John played there sometimes. I never saw him, but they said he was good. He was pretty famous all around here, but he never made a record. Some people say he's dead, some people say he's got him a place back in that swamp there. That's all I got for you. That, and the garage over there opens in the morning. I guess they can put you up at the motel until then. I hope you get back on the road all right.”

The Devil shook Yeager's hand, and Yeager got in his farm truck and drove away.

THE DEVIL RETRIEVED
his fiddle, still wrapped in leather, from the back of the Microbus, and walked toward the bait shop, where a light burned in one window.

His stride was long; Memory hurried to keep up.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Aren't we going to wait for the garage to open?”

“Nope.”

“I thought we could at least get a room at the motel there, you know? Dry off and clean up?”

“Why clean up to go out in the swamp?”

“We're going in the swamp?”

The Devil shot her a wink, and together they mounted two rickety steps to the bait-shop door.

Knock-knock
.

A fantastically old woman opened the door. One of her eyes was gone, stitched shut. The other wallowed in a sea of cataracts, turquoise blue all over. Blind as night, the woman still managed to look right where the Devil was standing. Looked him right in the eye.

She raised a crippled hand, and backed away.

“Je savais que c'était vous!”
she whispered. “The Devil! I knew it!”

And the Devil said,
“Je suis pas ici pour vous, grand-mère
. I'm not here for you, Grandmother.”

The old woman calmed down enough to beckon them inside.

The Devil started to say something.

“Je connais quoi faire t'es icitte,”
said the old woman. “I know why you're here.”

She led them through the shop, and out through a back door, onto a half-rotten dock that creaked under their feet. Black water flowed beneath.

An ancient pirogue, motor bolted to the stern, floated at the end of the dock.

“We're going out in
that
?” whispered Memory. “At night?”

She heard the old woman chuckle under her breath.

“Can't get there in the Microbus,” said the Devil.

He helped her down onto a tiny bench in the prow. In the dark to her left, something belched and went
plop
in the water.

Before the Devil could sit down and take the tiller, the old woman gestured at him, holding out her palm.

The Devil passed her a five-dollar bill.

“
Bonne chance
, Grandmother,” he whispered.

The old woman limped off back to the bait shop.

The Devil yanked the engine to life. The pirogue lifted a little under Memory, the prow rising over smooth water and lily pads, and they moved off into the dark.

Night noises rose around them. Who could tell what made such noises? Nameless things sang and grumbled, buzzed and sawed. Shadows moved between shadows.

The Devil said,
“Allume-toi!”
and a tiki torch burned at the very stem of the boat.

“If you can do
that
,” said Memory, “then how come—”

“Because,” rumbled the Devil. “Quiet, now.”

LIGHT MADE THINGS WORSE
.

In the dark, there was only the dark, but the torch cast a wizard-space around the pirogue, as if they were motoring through a cave made of fire. Around this cave, things moved. Great wings in the air. Great swellings in the water. The whole night seemed to crawl.

Memory realized that she didn't feel safe, even though her travel mate was the Devil. Something uneasy haunted his eyes. He didn't appear frightened, exactly, but
something
was there.

“What is it about this man,” she asked, “this Two-John? I asked, but you never said.”

“Quiet, now.”

“No. You tell me.”

The tiki torch darkened. So did the Devil's eyes. He looked different by firelight. His teeth longer, his hair longer, his eyes coal black.

The Devil told Memory how there were no more angels on the Earth, but sometimes there were people who looked like them a little. Maybe even made music like them, in their own way, and were dangerous.

Memory pretended to understand.

She watched the torch and the dark beyond, and she
did
understand, now, the Devil's expression as he steered. It wasn't fear; it was respect.

The difference didn't make her feel better.

Just then, Memory became aware of a rushing noise. Near or far, it was hard to tell. A world of sound, a roar like a cheering crowd.

The Devil cursed.

“Is it wind?” she called out.

“It's water!” shouted the Devil. “All that rain. Grab onto something!”

The universe of noise became a wall of water. It hit them like a train, lifting them up, smashing them down, and dragging them under.

“I SHOULD HAVE
known better,” said the Devil, hours later, at the edge of dawn.

They crouched in the pirogue, braced against a cypress deadfall, bailing muddy water.

All around them, mist. The sun had risen, lending the mist a white glow. It was like floating inside a lightbulb.

“Now what?” asked Memory. “Where are we going?” She pulled her hair back, and wrung it like a rag.

The Devil pointed with a long, witchy finger.

Memory looked, and beheld a house on stilts in the middle of the water, anchored by a great, mossy chain.

“We're here,” he said.

THEY DRIFTED UP
to what might have been the front of the house. There was a door, a half-rotten porch, and a ladder descending to the water.

The Devil caught hold of the ladder, and gave a tug that rocked the pirogue a little, but rocked the house, too, and he said in a big voice:

“Come out, come out, Two-John Spode!”

The things that were said and the things that began happening, then, felt to Memory like the way things might feel inside a story. As if they had already been told and could not happen any other way.

From behind a rusted screen door, a crackly voice yelled: “
Va-t'en, Diable!
Go away, Devil!”

And the Devil said, “Two-John! Come make a bet with me.”

Something like a scarecrow appeared on the porch. A tall scarecrow with a red waterfall for a beard, and round glasses for eyes, and hair as long as the Devil's. The rest of him was hidden away in flannel, denim, and a monstrous pair of green rubber boots.

“Two times I bet you,” said Two-John, “and two times I win. What reason I got to bet you again? You bet me for my soul I could not charm the 1963 Sugarcane Queen into my bed, and I did, me, and her sister, too, and you had to bring me pirate gold! I hate to make you poor and broke, Devil.”

“He tricked you?” Memory asked the Devil.

“He gave me wine,” he explained. “
Good
wine.”

“A second time, for my soul,” Two-John continued, “you bet me I could not trap death in my guitar, and when I did you gave me three years' good luck. I fear you will run out of magic.”

“Death?” said Memory, in a small voice.

“Wine,” explained the Devil.

He addressed Two-John again: “I don't come for your soul! It's
you
I want, Two-John. Want you to play your guitar and be famous. Want you and this one”—he indicated Memory—“to be the most famous band there ever was.”

“I told you once, me,” said Two-John, “I have all the fame and gold I wish.”

The pirogue had drifted away from the ladder somewhat, and passed beneath the anchor chain. The Devil gave the chain a healthy yank, and the house shook. Two-John looked uncomfortable.

“Go get your guitar,” said the Devil, “and I'll tune my fiddle, and you and me will play. If I play better, then you'll leave the swamp and give back my gold and play music with this pretty one,
la jolie blonde
. And if you play better, then you can have my fiddle for your own.”

The Devil reached into the bottom of the pirogue and unwrapped Old Ripsaw. Holding it high in the strange white mist, he let it glow bloody colors, casting red on the water.

“Foolishness,” said Two-John, but his eyes followed the fiddle as if hypnotized. After a while, he said, “It don't hurt me, Devil, to take your luck and money. But I will take your bet only if you will take a jar of wine, else they will say Two-John is a poor host.”

The Devil reached up and accepted a great glass jar, and set it down in the bottom of the pirogue.

Two-John ducked inside to fetch his guitar.

“Don't drink that,” warned the Devil.

“Don't
you
,” said Memory, tucking the jar away under her seat.

There was a sharp, bloody flash, and the Devil's fiddle became a fine red guitar.

The Devil plunked the strings the way you plunk a shot glass on a bar.

TWO-JOHN RETURNED
with his own guitar in his hand. It was the color of an old, forgotten barn. It was worn away in places, where the pick had struck or fingers pressed. It looked experienced and alive the way some people look.

Two-John sat down at the top of the ladder and hit one string with his thumb, so softly it could have been an accident. A note like a ghost. It made Memory shiver.

The Devil played a chord so hollow it seemed to come from far away.

Two-John flexed his shoulders and cracked his red knuckles. The mist moved around him like a soul.

A frog jumped up on the porch beside him. Behind the house, a Lord God bird took the air like a cloud.

Two-John grinned his foxy grin, and said, “I will play the blues, Devil, and then
you
play the blues, and we'll see who will take what.”

“Deal,” said the Devil.

TWO-JOHN SHAPED HIMSELF
about his guitar, as if the guitar were a bed he meant to sleep in. His beard and hands and everything about him gained an air of unutterable sadness, and when he played his first note it went out and hung itself by the neck.

For the longest time it was the only note Two-John played.

Then another note came along, drunk and bleeding and shoeless, and another like a well. The notes came faster and began to fall like tears.

They were heavy notes. The kind of notes that sound like empty rooms and twist you up inside.

He didn't show off and try to play what Regret sounded like, or make them hear what Heartbreak sounded like, because the blues is not about those things, if you let the blues be what they are. And you could tell Two-John knew it, and let it be what it was, which is the smallest and most lonely of moments and the most distant of sounds, the loneliness and sadness that are there for no reason at all, which maybe only an old man can know, or a man who knows witchcraft, and his blues were so perfect that no one even knew when the song ended and Two-John stopped playing. They might have sat there all day, knowing the strange things the song made them know and remembering the small things it made them remember, gazing dumb-eyed into the fog on the water, if the Lord God bird hadn't returned, a passing shadow, awakening them with a cry.

WHEN THE DEVIL
started playing, it sounded like a choo-choo train.

It was so simple, compared to the salt-mine-of-the-soul Two-John had played, that it sounded like a cartoon. Memory thought it was a joke, at first.

But the chord grew.

It wasn't sad. Not all blues songs moan. Sometimes they HOWL.

Like an old, bent dog, the Devil crashed against his guitar.

The song was like a car wreck, but with rhythm.

It was like being stabbed, with rhythm.

It was razors cutting, with rhythm like a hundred trains, and it sounded like a hundred guitars. The harder the Devil played, the more like the Devil he seemed to become. In all the white mist in the white world of the swamp, his eyes were the only color, shining red like something living kicked apart.

The Devil understood the secret of the blues, too, and he knew that the blues are about the bluesman. These blues weren't loneliness or the smallest of empty moments. These blues didn't leave them staring into space, feeling sullen and empty. This blues had enough problems without people feeling sorry for it. This blues wanted them scared to death, because somebody was going to PAY, goddammit! The Devil had been kicked out of HEAVEN! and had his true love stolen by GOD! and his true love had left him four different times and he hadn't seen her for three hundred YEARS! and when he played the guitar it was like strangling Creation because no one
ever, EVER
had the blues like the Devil had the blues, and even if they
thought
they had the blues anywhere near as bad, when the Devil finally burned to a stop, covered in sweat and tears and Spanish moss, they were way too scared to say so.