Up Jumps the Devil (14 page)

“Let me guess,” said the Devil. “One day they wanted to take their money back out, and you didn't have it.”

“It was busy,” said Fish. “The money was busy making money. A business has to invest.”

“Did you explain that to Jimmy and Bigfoot?”

“I didn't get a chance. I went down to the store and Fong was sitting there with a hole between his eyes. I barely got out of Buffalo.”

The restaurant had emptied, and was silent. The waitress eyed them from the cash register.

“Listen,” said the Devil. “I know you think you're some kind of superpractical hard-ass, but you're not. You're a lazy, deluded candy-ass, and if you keep fucking around in the underworld, the real hard-asses are going to eat your face. You don't need to do anything illegal to take other people's money. So don't.”

“Okay. So what do I do? You have my soul, you know. Isn't it all just supposed to fall out of the sky, more or less?”

The Devil sipped his coffee and looked disgusted.

“You haven't figured out yet,” he said, “that if you want to get money and keep money, you have to work a little. Money is like a fast car or a woman. If you ignore it, it will fall apart or leave you.”

“Thanks for the advice. But—”

“Here's some more advice. Watch out, over by the door.”

“Door?”

“You have company,” said the Devil, pointing.

Fish was startled to discover Jimmy Terwilliger advancing across the restaurant. A tall man in a fake leather, full-length coat. Fur collar. Fur hat. Dressed for winter in Buffalo. One hand inside the coat, gripping something.

How
—
?

Adrenaline and fear took over. Fish threw a chair, and bolted past Jimmy into the lobby.

There was cursing behind him, but Fish didn't look to see if Jimmy was following. In the lobby, he got down on his hands and knees, out of sight, until he reached the stairway, then flew upstairs to his room and locked the door. All without blinking or taking a breath. Now he sank, panting, onto the floor, back to the door.

The Devil was watching
It's a Wonderful Life
in black and white on the color TV.

“How in the hell did you get—!” began Fish, shaking and near tears, but the Devil shushed him until the movie was over.

“WHAT HAPPENED?”
Fish blurted, the moment credits rolled. “How'd he find me?”

“Imagination, kid.”

“When he missed me at the bus station, he bribed or threatened the desk clerk to tell him what bus I took and how far I was going?”

“Was that so hard?”

“No. Except where's Bigfoot? How come it's just Jimmy?”

The Devil threw up his hands. “Does it matter?” he barked. “We've got work to do. You need to understand money a little, if you're going to be rich like you want.”

Outside the door, someone coughed. Keys jangled. A door slammed.

Fish jumped a mile at every sound.

“Can we do this fast?” he asked. “It would solve a lot of problems if I were rich right this exact second.”

“Listen,” said the Devil.

Fish was a jumble of nervous energy. He lit a cigarette. He put it out. He turned the TV off.

“I'm listening,” he told the Devil.

“There's no such thing as money,” the Devil began.

Fish didn't argue. The Devil could have said President Nixon was a psychologically accelerated house cat, and Fish would have agreed.

“Money represents something called
value
, which occurs in something called a
market
. It works like this:

“If someone wants something, its value is whatever they are willing to give up so they can have it. A man might repair a doorknob in exchange for a loaf of bread. In that case, the value of the loaf of bread is exactly the time and effort taken to fix the doorknob. The same is true if he exchanges a ten-dollar bill for a nice dinner, or six pigs for a horse.

“Now, the market won't work for long if exchanges don't make sense. Big things are traded for big things, small things for small things. You can't trade an apple for a horse, because only a fool would trade a horse for an apple. That's the first lesson.”

“I get it,” said Fish. “That was easy.”

“They're all easy. The second lesson is: So what if you
could
trade an apple for a horse?”

“You'd get insanely rich,” said Fish, getting up to turn the TV on again.

As he passed the window, a gun in a leather-clad fist shattered the glass.

Jimmy Terwilliger was back.

Fish peed his pants and screamed like a little girl.

His nerves were shot, but this was a good thing. When your nerves are shot, you become one big reflex. Fish's big reflex made him grab the leather-clad arm and pull it with him to the floor. Jimmy Terwilliger burst through the window, and the two of them collapsed in a heap.

It looked as if there might be wrestling and shooting. Desperate, Fish snatched a heavy ashtray off the top of the minibar and, using both hands, smashed Jimmy's head until it caved like a cantaloupe.

Snow drifted through the broken window.

Fish sat staring at the bloody ashtray lodged in Jimmy's temple. The Devil looked at Fish in wonder. He produced a rum fizz out of thin air and said, “Here, man. Drink this.”

Fish drank.

He could feel his brain trying to have a breakdown. All men wonder if they could kill someone if they had to. Most never find out. Now Fish was left with the murkier question of whether he could manage not to get caught. He finished the rum fizz, and took a critical look at the ashtray.

“Can you bring me a towel to put under his head?”

The Devil grinned approval.

“I'll go you one better,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

Jimmy Terwilliger was gone. The ashtray, clean and emptied, sat atop the minibar again. The window was whole. The rum fizz refilled itself.

“I didn't think you did stuff like that,” said Fish.

“You earned it.”

“Thanks. Where is he? Jimmy?”

“What the fuck do you care?”

“I don't.”

“Then Merry Christmas.”

“Okay.”

ON THE BED
, Fish made a little fort out of pillows and buried himself in it. His brain was sort of giddy. The fort was a psychological fort. “So,” said Fish. “How can you get people to trade horses for apples?”

The Devil stood at the window, watching the morning sun on new snow in the Helen of Troy parking lot. “Well,” he said, “what if the value of a thing is fuzzy?”

“Fuzzy value? Like what?”

“Life.”

Fish retreated into the fort, but remained visible.

“You mean—”

“I mean your living life force. Beating heart, thinking brain, blood in your veins. What do you think it's worth?”

“It's not like that. It's priceless.”

The Devil leaned over the fort in a way Fish didn't like at all. “How much did Jimmy Terwilliger think your life was worth?”

Fish made a humming noise.

“Point being: Your life is valuable to
you
. To everyone else, it's worthless.”

“Bullshit! My mother—!”

“If you fell over dead, your mother would get over it faster than you think.”

“Are we still talking about money?”

“We're talking about life insurance. Money people pay to insure their lives. They trade you a horse, over the course of many years, and when they die, you trade them back an apple.”

“That's sick!”

The Devil shrugged. “People love it,” he said. “They like that the insurance company thinks they have value.”

“You want me to go into
insurance
?”

“You want money, right? Well, you don't like to work and you don't have any special talent, so taking advantage of people looks like a fit for you.”

“Fuck you, man,” said Fish. But he said it in kind of a whisper. He was already thinking it over. It was already making sense to him.

“I gotta go down to my car for something,” said the Devil. “We're almost in business, except you're going to have to study for a licensing exam.”

The fort sagged.

“Money,” said Fish. “I don't have money to pay for this room, let alone start-up cash!”

“Have faith,” said the Devil, and shut the door behind him.

He returned shortly, dragging an enormous gold anchor.

“Here's your money,” he grunted, heaving it onto the bed, which collapsed.

“Okay,” said Fish, standing at the door, eyes wide.

Something was bothering Fish. He was forgetting something.

“All right,” said the Devil, shaking his hand. “See you when I see you.”

Fish frowned.

Forgetting something.

The Devil was gone.

He was back a minute later, though, knocking at the door. Maybe he had remembered the thing Fish was forgetting, thought Fish.

It wasn't the Devil, though.

“Merry Christmas, shithead,” said Bigfoot Terwilliger, seven feet tall, grabbing Fish by the arm and forcing him back into the room.

“Ah,” said Fish.

This was the thing he'd forgotten.

Bigfoot drew a gun from his pocket.

Pulled back the hammer.

And caught a glimpse of the anchor.

“Whuzza …?” he began to say, but just then the Devil walked in through the door, saying he
knew
he'd forgotten something. He waggled his rings and fingers at Bigfoot, and Bigfoot vanished, screaming, in a sheet of hot blue flame.

Bits of his clothing survived, and a handful of twenty-dollar bills.

“Pocket money,” said the Devil. “I meant to leave you some pocket money.”

“What was
that
?” wheezed Fish, waving at the space where Bigfoot and the blue flame and the gun had been.

“We had a contract,” said the Devil.

“That's what happens when a contract is over?”

“That's what happens when
his
contract is over. He was an asshole.”

Fish collected the twenties off the floor.

The Devil paused on his way out the door.

“Don't be an asshole,” he warned, and left.

Apache Junction, Arizona, 1969

THE DEVIL LEFT TROY
and turned onto I-75. The road took him south to Dayton and west to Arizona. He turned left at the Superstition Mountains, cruised into Apache Junction, spent the night in a motel room Elvis had slept in, and in the morning he went to see Zachary, the electrocuted bass player, who had moved back in with his parents.

At the door, the Devil was very pleasant to Zachary's mother, who led him to her son.

Zachary was sitting like a sack of dirt on the living room couch, watching television. His mother brought them lemonade. An artificial Christmas tree sparkled in one corner.

The television was between programs. There was a news break, and at the end of the news break there was a show where you could win a new car. Then there was another news break about a concert in Houston that had been raided for drugs. The concert featured a new band, Purple Airplane. Purple Airplane starred Memory Jones, the chick who had disappeared after Woodstock.

“
Jones
?” said the Devil. “What, she get her memory back? Her name's Jones?”

“Studio clowns hung it on her, I'll bet,” said Zachary.

The band also featured a Cajun phenomenon named Two-John, who played an acoustic guitar as if something dark were trying to get out of it.

“I kinda thought that guy was a myth,” said Zachary.

The Devil shrugged. “Who says he's not? It's working, whatever they're doing. I can't turn on the radio without hearing psychedelic this-and-that.”

“Did Mom offer you something to drink?”

The Devil rattled the ice in his glass.

“You miss it?” he asked Zachary. “The music thing?”

Zachary shrugged. “Never had it,” he said, “except for two minutes at Woodstock.”

“A heavy two minutes,” said the Devil.

Zachary slumped again. He seemed to wind down as fast as he wound up.

“I'm different from Memory,” he said. “That two minutes was all I ever wanted from that bass guitar. It was great, and it was enough, you know?”

Listlessly, he pointed at the TV. “She needs it, like, her whole life long. Maybe Fish, too, I don't know. But I don't. You seen Fish?”