Up Jumps the Devil (15 page)

“Yeah.”

“How's he doing? Getting what he wanted?”

“Yeah.”

Zachary watched a pain-pill commercial, drooling again.

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled. “I slip back and forth. That's why it's just as well I don't feel like I have to play bass and be famous and all that.”

“You can't play?” asked the Devil.

“It's like my brain doesn't talk to certain parts of me anymore, or only talks when it wants to.”

His leg, as if to illustrate, gave a jerk.

Zachary raised his hands like he meant to say something else, but then he just froze that way.

Watched almost a whole game show that way, until his mother padded in and gently pushed his arms down, placed his hands on his knees.

She offered the Devil more lemonade, and he accepted.

“Sometimes,” she said, nodding at Zachary, “you'd swear he wasn't even in there at all. Then he'll wake up and quote that whole stupid show back to you, word for word.”

She looked like she was about to cry.

She went to get the lemonade.

“LISTEN,” SAID THE DEVIL
, leaning forward, tapping Zachary on the knee. “I can help, you know. Your nerves are scarred. I can change that.”

“No,” said Zachary. His eyes focused, and he gave the Devil a no-nonsense look. “I'm serious,” he said. “Don't go doing it when I'm not looking, either. I may look half asleep, but I'm watching you.”

The Devil pinched the bridge of his nose. Chinese monks had told him this could stop a headache. Sometimes it worked.

“It's up to you,” he said, puzzled. “You were going to change the world, remember? And I don't do refunds.”

“It's not that.”

“Tell you what,” said the Devil. “Let me show you something.” The Devil waved his hand, and everything around them vanished.

THEY STOOD ON A ROCK
the size of a capitol dome, with windswept trees growing from cracks and fissures. It was the kind of rock you climbed because you could see forever.

There were other domes and cliffs, visible far away, with gulfs of space between, and wind. It was one of the world's giant places. You could feel the earth turn.

On the dome's highest cap stood an Indian, weathered like a stick. In his arms he held a little girl, wrapped in a yellow blanket.

Beside the Devil, Zachary made a painful noise.

The old Indian laid the girl down on the rock, and began to sing. He wrapped the girl's head in his hands and just sat there, staring across the great world space. The Earth turned. The wind blew.

It was a scene from ten years ago.

This was Zachary's grandfather, Walter Bull Horse, and the girl in the blanket was Zachary's sister, Nita, who had polio and couldn't breathe well on her own anymore.

Walter Bull Horse picked up his granddaughter, and drove her home.

Home was an Indian movie village on the other side of downtown Sedona, tucked among red rocks and spruce trees, so movie crews could film the village and pretend it was a hundred years ago.

A movie crew was in the village now, in fact, cameras rolling, as Walter Bull Horse returned with his granddaughter. Walter didn't give a damn if they were filming or not. He carried Nita right through the middle of the scene, to the fake trading post that doubled as the Bull Horse family home, and let the door slam behind him.

Outside, the director threw a tantrum.

Walter heard his son, Proud Henry, apologizing. Proud Henry had built the movie village, and liked to keep the movie crews happy.

Walter placed his granddaughter in her iron lung, and waited while her breathing steadied.

Back outside, among the spectators, the Devil drew Zachary's attention to a particular, dark-eyed teenage boy. Zachary himself, on his fifteenth birthday. The boy watched his father apologizing to the director, and looked troubled.

“Aw, shit,” said Zachary.

“I wonder what he's thinking,” said the Devil.

“You know goddamn well what he's thinking.”

Young Zachary was wishing he were wise enough to know who was right, his father or his grandfather. He was thinking that his sister wasn't old enough to die.

It would have surprised the Bull Horse family to learn that young Zachary considered himself unwise. He had been known since birth, after all, for deep and considered thought.

“It's not that I don't like traditional Indian clothing,” he had told his grandfather when he was eight, “or that I like white clothes better. I have no preference. If there's a place in my Apache mind where such preferences live, that place is a void.” And he made a sort of circle in the air with both hands, describing the void.

His grandfather had taught him meditation. Walter Bull Horse was a medicine man, or at least he said so. “Medicine men invented meditation,” he told them. “We're the ones who sold it to the Japs. Chinese. Whatever Buddhists are.”

“That boy has lightning in his head,” was Walter's opinion.

“You're boring,” his sister told him, because he meditated so much.

Zachary wasn't like his grandfather. He cared what people thought. So he taught Nita to meditate, and she changed her mind.

Nita, before she got sick, looked like she might grow up to be a warrior. She had clear, liquid eyes and a soft voice, but she was tall for her age, and had square shoulders. When she was six, her legs were long and strong enough to grip and ride a horse.

She allowed Zachary to teach her to meditate. Other than that, she preferred to be outdoors and moving,
doing
something, like her father.

Zachary wasn't like his mother either. She brought people things. Drinks. Mail. Old photos. Articles in the newspaper. It was a job certain people seemed to have. They were Thing-Bringers.

“HOW DO YOU KNOW
you're meditating right?” Nita asked him one day. They sat facing each other in one of Proud Henry's movie tepees.

“If you say you're meditating,” he told her, “then you are. There's no right and wrong way.”

“I'm meditating,” she said, and sat with her eyes closed for ten minutes until she slipped sideways and curled up on antelope fur, on the floor, asleep.

By the time she turned nine and he was fifteen, they could both get to a point where their bodies seemed to peel away, where they couldn't feel the floor beneath them or the clothes on their backs. Sometimes, afterward, they talked about what they saw in their minds (stars, rabbits, water, the color blue), or drew pictures.

Proud Henry affected to understand them.

“I've been meditating, too,” he told them all, over dinner. “I need a solution to the shotgun problem.”

The shotgun problem was a recent development in the world of movie stunts. Proud Henry, in his youth, had been a respected stuntman. He was even vaguely legendary for falling off a railroad water tower in
Riders of the Purple Sage
. Now, apparently, stunt purists were complaining that a man shot off the back of a horse by a pistol or a rifle should look different from a man shot off a horse by a shotgun. Proud Henry was on the job.

They found him meditating at a table in the front window of the trading post one morning, a cup of warm coffee cooling between his hands. His head was down, his hair hanging. He snored.

“Sleeping,” observed Nita.

Zachary shrugged. “If he says it's meditating—” he began, but Nita shook her head.

“Sometimes it's just sleeping,” she insisted.

BUT PROUD HENRY
had instincts; you had to give him that. He came home on Zachary's sixteenth birthday with a locally made guitar, a masterpiece. Depending on how you strung it, you could play bass or regular guitar. It would accommodate six or twelve strings. The body was shallow, like a Les Paul, and polished a deep nut brown.

It didn't take long for Zachary to confirm his father's hunch: He had guitar music inside him, just like Proud Henry had stunts. Despite the guitar's many possibilities, he soon found he preferred it strung like a bass. Preferred the bottomless vibrations. The way bass notes sounded like a voice.

Before long, he was improvising whole bass concerts, sitting opposite his meditating sister.

“It helps,” she said.

Walter Bull Horse agreed. Sometimes he meditated with them.

“It's like a drum,” he muttered, and he would chant so softly he might have been humming, until, like Proud Henry, he began to snore.

One day when she was ten, Nita let go a long breath, emerging from trance or sleep, and stood to leave. She fell over sideways, one long, muscular leg gone wobbly underneath her.

Zachary thumbed a sort of falling-down zither on his bass.

“All right?” he asked.

“Leg fell asleep,” Nita answered. And she made it on the second try.

That same night, Proud Henry dislocated his shoulder trying to solve the shotgun problem with a backflip off the rear of a horse. He spent four days with his arm in a sling, popping pain pills.

Zachary wondered afterward if anything would have been different if someone had noticed that Nita's leg seemed to have a hard time staying awake, more and more.

They did notice, the day she fell and stayed down.

“It won't work,” she hissed, pounding her leg and crying.

So there were doctors, and the doctors in those days saw right away what the leg's problem was. They saw a lot of legs and children like that. Nita had polio.

“Sanitation isn't what it should be on the reservations.” Her doctor frowned.

“We don't live on the reservation,” Proud Henry was quick to inform him. “We own a movie ranch outside Sedona.”

And the doctor looked at Proud Henry for few seconds. “
Riders of the Purple Sage!
You were the Indian they shot off the water tank!”

MOVIE PEOPLE HAVE
unusual powers, and as word of Proud Henry's sick daughter went out over this and that telephone line, those powers flexed.

A certain movie star got black-market medicine delivered to the ranch, and to Nita's doctor. Experimental medicine. Serious, desperate, hard-to-get medicine. But it didn't work.

The polio germs inside Nita attacked a lot harder than polio germs were supposed to. Most children lost the use of a leg, and wore braces. Nita lost control of both legs. Day by day, she shrank in front of them until her shoulders lost their bigness. She no longer looked like a warrior or a hunter, or even a young girl. Then came a numbness about her abdomen, so that Mother, who brought things, began to specialize in bringing Nita to the bathroom. Nita and Mother became a society of two.

THE DOCTOR WHO
recognized Proud Henry from
Riders of the Purple Sage
authorized them to keep a shiny, state-of-the-art iron lung at home, in the trading post. He made certain the right wiring was present, the right outlets installed.

The arrival of the iron lung, which seemed to Zachary a kind of casket shaped like a roll of quarters, knocked the wind out of them all. People who went into iron lungs did not get better.

Zachary played the bass for her. Nita whispered that she had a hard time getting to sleep without it.

She slept more and more.

“Meditating,” she insisted.

Zachary asked “What do you see?”

She shrugged. Her shoulders and the gesture were lost behind her neck gasket.

“I don't think I see anything. I just feel calmer when I'm done.”

“Me, too. But I see things. Eagles. Water. Two suns in the same sky.”

“I want to be outside when I die,” she told him.

Zachary didn't know what to say to that. It was the kind of thing she was supposed to say to Mother.

PROUD HENRY WOKE UP
inspired one day, having dozed off in front of their twelve-inch TV.

“Rope!” he cried, startling his father, dozing in an adjacent chair.

“Pillows!” he cried, bolting out of the trading post, waking up Nita in the iron lung. Then he vanished onto the back lot, into the toolsheds. They heard him out there, banging around and whistling. It was a good day when he had a new solution for the shotgun problem.

When Nita had a good day, she could breathe on her own for an hour or more. Walter Bull Horse began wrapping her in a yellow blanket and driving her out by the airport, where the red rock dome overlooked the whole world. Where the wind came straight from the sky, blue and raw. Walter kept an eye on his watch, and was careful to bring her back before she began to struggle.

When Mother had a good day, lemonade or clean laundry might appear out of nowhere.

For Zachary, a good day was when he had an idea, like the melody of a song or a fast way to solve a math problem.

Proud Henry stuffed some throw pillows under his belt line, and tied a lasso around his waist. He lashed the other end around a totem pole. Then he climbed aboard a painted horse, and took off galloping.