Up Jumps the Devil (21 page)

Eliot knew better. Quietly they climbed a hill of bald stone, where they relaxed and waited. It was Memory who saw it: bright plumage in a green Adirondack tree, nesting high above a forest floor of red pine needles. Feathered spikes crowned its head. Raising its wings like a cape, the creature shook its throat.

ACK-ACKA-DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

Pure jackhammer tones rang in the ancient valley.

Eliot let her take the photograph, and write down the notes, the day, the hour.

Temperate bird of paradise
, she scrawled. The paper shined at her.
Fulker's Hollow, Green Mountains, Vermont. Nine o'clock in the morning,
AD
.

It was the happiest moment of her life.

Everybody has one. It's a good thing they don't know it when it happens.

THE SECOND ALBUM
would be called
Oolong
.

San Francisco, again. Working at Memory's beach house, they wrote lyrics during the afternoon, tapping out music on a rented upright with half-melted candles all over it.

There were half-melted candles everywhere these days. The Devil, usually dressed in sunglasses and a silk bathrobe, seemed to have put himself in charge of making sure they had twenty-four-hour candlelight. It was nice and mellow, but left everything, including musical instruments, dripping with wax stalagmites. Finally, Two-John stole a spatula from a waterfront tortilla vendor and presented it to the Devil with a bow tied around it, saying he was now also in charge of scraping up all the wax.

The Devil complied. He made himself useful in other ways, too. Cooking, sometimes. Putting out kitchen fires. Repairing things in the kitchen. Common work, sure. But work, like drugs, was good for the soul, and it allowed him to keep an eye on the band, the project he had assigned himself for this particular and important stretch of history.

At sunset, the musicians and their bodyguards walked the rocky beach. They were recognized, but Frisco beach crowds were cool. They didn't want a pound of flesh, the way crowds in other places seemed to. They just sometimes waved Hi. Until Two-John borrowed a guitar and they gathered around a bonfire. Someone boiled shrimp, nearby.

It was just the guitar, at first. But then someone brought William Tell a set of bongos.

They were a little high, except Memory and Two-John, who were very high indeed. Memory had taught Two-John how to chase the dragon, because he was better at getting Gus, Jerry, and Pig to talk to dealers. The two of them wore sunglasses.

Two-John played some massive, heavy chords.

Memory sang Indian chants. Her voice seemed to go out and come back, and come from different places around the fire, different parts of the crowd.

Jason Livingston, stuck without a bass, stood nodding his head in rhythm.

The crowd played its part on old bottles and cans and shells.

The fire brightened like a sun.

Everything was gold and night, except Memory felt a little sick, and her heart fluttered. Some anonymous beach hippie kept her from falling into the fire.

Frisco beach crowds are cool, except this one wanted to take Memory to the hospital.

“No way,” said Two-John, who carried her back to the hotel and kept her up all night, shuffling around and drinking water so her heart wouldn't stop.

Two-John was afraid, and trying not to show it. They had both smoked an awful lot of Turkish.

He glared at the Devil, busy washing dishes in sunglasses and harem pants, a silver syringe stuck behind his ear like a pencil. He had discovered smack, and wasn't so much washing dishes as admiring them.

“This isn't what you promised her,” Two-John growled at the Devil.

“She's famous, isn't she?”

You know what I mean.”

The Devil didn't want to talk about it. He cast a spell that made Two-John forget he was there.

Rolling Stone
gave the beach concert five inches in the April issue.

Some of the mainstream newspapers mentioned Memory's collapse.

The papers were not as nice as the beach crowds.

ELIOT CRUMP, THE
bastard, ran off with some teenager to watch birds in India. Memory read about it in the tabloids.

Hurt more than she would have thought possible, Memory started shooting smack instead of chasing the dragon. It was stronger, that way. And she
wanted
stronger.

The house where she overdosed became a stop on Hollywood tour.

It was a nice party. It was golden water in an indoor swimming pool. So warm.

Some parties had more than their share of naked people, and this was one of them. Memory wasn't one of the naked people, though. She never was.

She wore fur, with nothing underneath, if she meant to swim. And she always swam.

This time the gold formed a tunnel, and the tunnel called to her.

It sounded like a jackhammer, like a socket wrench. Like a helicopter. And like music, of course, and shovels digging the earth.

Breathe, said the gold. So she breathed.

The pool, underwater, was like a blue sky, like air.

The gold became a hammer, crushing her chest from the inside.

It was one of those things you know and don't know, when you are becoming clinically dead. She knew, and did not know, that she had joyfully inhaled a double lungful of pool water.

She remembered thinking, sinking in her fur coat, And God knows what else; with all these naked people, there's gotta be more than
P
in this
ool
.

The Devil might have been inspired to snap his fingers and intervene, but he had gotten left behind in Atlanta and was throwing up behind a Piggly Wiggly there.

Things fall apart.

Memory vanished into a hospital. Then she just vanished.

Jason Livingston joined a European band within the week. The European band did an American tour wearing jack-in-the-boxes on their heads.

William Tell went solo with no trouble at all.

Two-John vanished back into the swamp. The rumor mill said he had bricked his guitar up in a New Orleans crypt, so whatever was in it couldn't get out.

The Devil went off to take care of other business.

He had to, with three or four expensive drug habits to support. Like a lot of people in those days, the Devil had discovered escape. Like a lot of people, he felt the world had become the kind of place that needed escaping from.

He wondered if the new world, the new awareness he had wanted for people, was still out there waiting to happen. It felt like a train he had missed, and sometimes, through the fog, this made him sad.

Sometimes, though, he thought they hadn't really missed the train. The train was just different, that was all. It wasn't a world thing. It was personal. It was internal. The new awareness was a wonderful and intoxicating isolation.

And being the Devil on drugs opened up all kinds of possibilities. He could be in Heaven again, if he wanted. He could sleep. He could burst like the sun, or hide and watch it all go by. Like Memory and Purple Airplane, he could blaze like a meteor and fly apart in glory. If he tried hard enough, he could feel a mirage in his heart that was almost like love.

On the outside, he lost his sunglasses and his harem pants started falling apart. His hair grew stringy. He smelled.

On the inside, he burned. Sometimes he was fire, sometimes ashes.

Like the band, like Memory, he started the process of becoming a ghost.

Virginia, 1831

WHITE MEN COULDN'T HELP
being cruel, thought Nat Turner.

It was like a curse God had laid on them. Maybe it was supposed to teach them something.

Nat had been taught to read as a child. He knew the Bible inside and out, and had read more books than most white men. He had a way of talking about things, and people called him “Preacher,” whatever color they were.

White men were cruel because they weren't quite men. They were like children inside. That's what the curse had done to them, he thought.

Nat had a higher standard for black men, free or not. Black men were men, or Jesus would never have given them so much to bear. Now they had to find a way to be free, without losing their lives or their souls.

And when he thought these things, a wind blew inside him, and the voice of Jesus was on that wind, and he would know he was right.

Which is how he knew, the day he followed a noise down an alley in Jerusalem, Virginia, to find seven slaves at liberty and two free black men taking turns at Beulah Carter, the Carters' retarded house girl, he knew God meant for him to say something.

He flung them aside, and preached at them, “How you ever going to be men, when you act just like the animals the masters say you are? A man's got something extra in him, supposed to make him different from a pig.”

He felt lifted up as he talked, light as a feather with Jesus on the wind inside him.

They listened to him. Ashamed, they turned away and went home.

NOT ONLY WAS
Nat well read, not only did he have a way about him and the Jesus-wind inside him, he had visions, too. Nat thought of himself as a peaceful man, but the visions were not peaceful. They were fiery, bloody, and left him writhing as though his head would crack. Lately, terrible dreams had left him shaken and red-eyed.

The Devil, who had a nose for extraordinary people, sometimes turned himself into a bird and watched Nat from trees. He thought Nat might be useful to him, the way Washington had been useful.

The day Nat stopped the men from raping Beulah Carter, the Devil decided to talk to him.

When the preacher stopped on his way home to eat some corn bread and pray, the Devil made himself look like a proper angel, and perched on a nearby log.

Nat was too busy praying, at first, to notice.

“I'm a man of Peace, sweet Jesus,” he was praying. “So how come you send me these dreams of tribulation?”

While he listened for an answer—for it seemed, sometimes, that God
did
answer—the Devil spoke up, and drew his attention.

“Maybe Peace isn't part of God's plan for you, Nat Turner.”

Nat looked a little surprised to find an angel addressing him, but only a little.

“Peace,” he answered, removing his hat, “is what's in my
heart
, angel, sir.”

“God made your heart, Nat Turner. Do you know your heart better than God?”

“No, sir.”

“Why do you think God gave you those great big hands?”

“I don't know, angel. To work, I suppose.”

“No. For killing white people, is why.”

The preacher's eyes narrowed. Slowly, he put on his hat, turned his back on the angel, and started down the road again, toward home.

The angel fished a pipe from its pocket, and lit up a bowlful of earthworms.

NAT FOUND WHAT
the angel had said a trifle suspicious. Not only that, but the angel had a mark on its forehead that troubled him sorely.

All God's creatures bore a sign on their forehead, and Nat could read these signs. There were people marked Confusion, or Weak, or Hard, or Hungry. He knew a horse with a sign on its forehead, saying T
HIS
H
ORSE
M
IGHT
K
ICK
Y
OU
, and the horse kicked a man and broke his leg. Another time there were twin girls, and they both had a mark that was like a heart, except one of them had it stronger than the other, and the other had it like a bruise that was fading, and when it was gone, she died.

The angel wore a devil sign on his forehead, plain as day.

AFTER HE FINISHED
his pipe, the Devil thought about making himself invisible and following Nat home, but he was tired. The kind of tired that comes after you've been angry about something all day long.

The Devil was angry with Americans for being hypocrites. They were so proud of their freedom and their talk of freedom, but so many of the big talkers owned slaves.

America—Earth!—didn't stand a chance with raw evil at its heart, and the Devil thought the solution was plain. The slaves must
seize
freedom, the way America herself had seized it. The way he, Lucifer, had seized it. It was how freedom was won.

It had never been difficult to get men to wage war, but in this case, the Devil had met resistance. Yes, there were voices among the enslaved that urged revolt, but these voices were either silenced by their masters or ignored by the majority, who thought revolt was suicide.

The Devil knew, though, that you didn't have to destroy an enemy to make him change his ways. You only had to destroy him enough to make him afraid. If the right leader could make white Americans
fear
slaves, then a new idea would dawn. Because all you had to do to keep slaves from being scary was give them their freedom. Rebellion could work, if the enemy didn't fight back too hard. And most Americans disliked slavery already. The nation just needed a push.