Up Jumps the Devil (27 page)

Proud Henry, lost in time, looked up from the TV to tell Zachary he had met someone and would be getting married, if she'd have him.

“He means me,” said Zachary's mom.

“Oh,” said Zachary. “Well, good.”

ZACHARY DIDN'T DRIVE
to San Francisco alone, of course. He took a passenger.

April Michael.

April Michael, age four until further notice, made the trip strapped to a boat trailer behind an old station wagon filled with everything Zachary owned. She neither boiled nor drained, carefully checked every two hundred miles. Zachary wondered what he would say if he got pulled over.

He didn't get pulled over.

He did, however, look in the rearview mirror somewhere in the Big Empty, to find the Devil grinning at him.

He almost drove off the road, but steadied himself and drove on, heart beating a little faster.

“Sorry,” said the Devil. “It's just that … well, here you are on your way to the big computer brouhaha in California, finally, and I can reasonably be expected to say, ‘I told you so.'”

“And I can reasonably be expected to ignore you.”

“I told you so.”

Zachary ignored him until the Devil stuck out a wooden index finger and held it just a millimeter from his right ear.

“Stop that,” said Zachary, remembering that this was the kind of crap he and Nita had done to each other in the family car as young kids.

“I'm not touching yooooooooooou.” The Devil giggled.

It was a long trip.

Maryland, 1863

A DEAD SOLDIER LAY FOLDED
over a fence gate. He might have been reaching for something on the ground. Plucking a wildflower, maybe. His uniform was blue turning to gray, and gold-braided. His boots had been taken.

Others lay twisted in the grass along the fence, between the fence and a piece of country road. The smell of them made the air itself feel rotten.

Eggert G. Daughterry stopped to take a picture. The Devil helped him set up his tripod. They had learned the trick of breathing through their mouths.

It was wartime. Not on a transatlantic battleground, but right here in Maryland.

In Mississippi, too, and Tennessee. Places that had been imaginary, for Daughterry, before the war. Places he knew, now. Places he had photographed. He made his way through this universe of horror in a sort of miniature house on wheels, painted white, drawn by mismatched horses, advertising
EGGERT G. DAUGHTERRY, PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST
on both sides.

“People need to know what a horror show war is!” Daughterry often said.

It was why the Devil traveled with him.

He agreed, war was a horror show. He believed if people weren't used to it, they would resist it, and that would mean trouble, in decades to come, when the horror shows would be much worse. People, thought the Devil, needed to
see
war. To learn to see it without feeling sick, or being paralyzed by remorse. Because civilization was going to need war for a while longer, yet. Like an enema or a transfusion, war purged the old and forced in the new. Maybe one day humans would find a better way to advance, but that day hadn't come.

One time, early on, the Devil had found a Confederate corpse, half skeleton, missing its lower jaw. He had replaced the jaw with a tin coffee cup and arranged the whole body on his knee like a talking doll. Daughterry had ordered him to sit still until he'd made his picture. Then they'd traded places, and the Devil photographed Daughterry.

It was the kind of thing you did in your free time, rolling in the wake of monster armies, through the quiet countrysides of the dead.

“Such nasty business,” said the Devil, “you'd think they'd get it done with.”

Daughterry stepped around beside the camera, gave the sun a glance, and removed the lens cap.

“Maybe,” he said, “it's not as easy as you think.” His voice had a buzz to it, like a bee's, and he was in fact shaped strangely like a bee, bottom heavy and always leaning forward.

The Devil thought.

“I didn't say it was easy,” he said. “I just think Lincoln and his fine, educated fellows ought to be able to see a way to get the better of these slaveholding inbreeds—”

“Watch your tongue. This isn't exactly loyal country,” advised Daughterry.

“They don't scare me,” said the Devil. “You know that.”

“That,” said Daughterry, “is because you're the Devil. Care to fold this thing up and stash it in the wagon? We're done here.”

THE DEVIL OWNED
Daughterry's soul.

He'd promised the photographer his pictures would live for centuries, provided that he focused his attention on the dead. Daughterry had given his soul—a bumblebee—on the condition that if the Devil were going to travel with him, he'd pull his share of the load.

It was more than he felt equal to, some days. Daughterry the taskmaster helped keep him mindful that the war was about slavery.

“What's being the Devil got to do with it?” he asked the photographer, breaking down the tripod. “I've been in battle. I strode the plains of Assyria. My sword was heavy with blood.”

“It's not the same for you. It's not as if you were going to die.”

“It's not my fault I'm immortal,” argued the Devil.

They climbed up onto the bench before the miniature house. The Devil took up the reins, and whispered at the horses which way to go.

“I said it's not my fault—”

“I heard you,” said Daughterry, settling back for a nap. He exchanged his top hat for a straw cap, which he planted over his face. Nothing more about it was said for two whole weeks.

Good thing the Devil had the horses for company. They talked about apples. Fern, the elder, preferred apples fresh from the tree. Millie, the younger, liked them better when they'd lain on the ground a while, and had a chance to ferment. The Devil brokered a compromise by casting his vote for cider.

THEY FOLLOWED THE SHORES
of the Chesapeake north, trying to guess where the war might break out next.

You developed a sense for it, if the madness went on long enough. One night in Pennsylvania, having left the Chesapeake behind, they stopped earlier than usual, largely because their senses had picked up a strange rumor. Depending on whom you asked, General Lee had magically transported himself up north. He might be around the next corner, parked in the woods, or camped out in some hollow.

Whether or not they liked to admit it, all Yankees were scared of General Lee. He had a reputation for pouncing out of the night or pouring out of the woods miles from where he was supposed to be. Usually outnumbered, he could, like Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, make a thousand men fight like ten thousand. The Devil often wondered if Lee had a fallen angel somewhere in his family tree; his reputation seemed clearly more than human.

Whatever General Lee was, the idea of stumbling into Confederate pickets in the Pennsylvania dark made Daughterry and the Devil uncomfortable, so they stopped for the night, and rose the next day at midmorning, ready to pick their way forward in the relative safety of daylight.

They fixed beans and corn bread for breakfast, surrounded by an army of crickets, lulled by the heavy smell of mown hay and a light breeze in the woods nearby.

“The trouble with you being immortal,” said Daughterry, picking up the conversation from before, “isn't whether it's your fault or not. It's a matter of
understanding
people. How can you understand what moves people when you don't understand that the meaning of life is death?”

The Devil chewed his beans. He waved his fork in a circle that meant “Go on.”

“Well,” continued Daughterry, “it's not complicated. It's not even philosophy, really. Just a hard fact. When you are doomed to die, that becomes the main force behind your life. You do what you do because you want to be remembered a certain way, or because it is or isn't healthy. You do what you do because you are running out of time. You do what you do because you're twenty years old and that's what twenty-year-olds do, or because you're fifty, and that's what fifty-year-olds do. It's the reason you're careful about what you say when you're forty, because you have to live with consequences, and it's the reason old people say whatever the hell they want. It's the reason people get married and have kids; we have to replace ourselves.”

Daughterry took a sip of coffee.

“It's what makes us happy or sad or mad about things. Because it's all so damn wonderful and so terrible, and it's going to be taken away. And, of course, there's the fact that it's so scary. How does it not drive us mad with panic, every moment, knowing that we are going to end? How strangely nonchalant, how divinely resilient we are! Being mortal means being bedmates with horror.”

“You'd be amazed,” said the Devil, “how boring time can get. You'd go crazy living to be much more than a hundred, let alone a thousand. A life is like a day. Night comes. You get tired. You sleep. You
want
to sleep.”

“Horse balls. That's just the kind of thing an immortal would say. It changes a thing, when you're afraid of it.”

The Devil swished some beans and corn bread around in his mouth. He added coffee, and swallowed.

“So you think I'd be more sympathetic if I were mortal.”

“I know you would. But that's just part of it. You'd … understand more.”

The Devil gave Daughterry a sideways look.

“You think there are things you understand better than I?”

“Yep.”

“Like what?”

“What it's like to be small. Or sick. Or not as smart as you used to think you were.”

“You think I'd find that useful?”

Daughterry picked a stick from the fire, and used the hot end to light a cigar.

“Yep. You've got some awfully big ideas about how people should live. You might understand better why we don't find it easy to be great all the time, if you knew what it felt like to know there was a chance you might not be here a week from now, and to know for certain you weren't going to be here in fifty years.”

Daughterry leaned forward.

“A lot of the things we do, John Scratch, we do for people who'll come along after we're gone.”

“I do
everything
with the future in mind,” said the Devil.

“You work for the future because you have to live in it. If you were going to die, you'd do everything for different reasons. Mere mortals, friend, understand things you aren't equipped to grasp.”

The Devil cracked his knuckles. Despite the warmth of the summer evening, he felt a passing chill. Suddenly the night seemed haunted by more than the specter of Robert E. Lee. The travelers were silent.

Then Daughterry said, “I'll make you a bet you can't stand being mortal for three days without going half crazy.”

“What do you mean, ‘being mortal'?”

Daughterry looked at him in a hot, challenging way that meant “You know what I mean.”

“You mean … like I would shed my immortality for three days?”

“Yessir.”

“And you bet I couldn't hack it as well as any human rag picker, king, or carpenter?”

“Nope.”

“Three days. I could do
anything
for three days.”

“So it's possible, then? You could, as you say, shed your immortality?”

“And lock it away somewhere? Sure. In fact, I'll go you one better.”

“How's that?”

The Devil got to his feet, fetched a beer bottle from a crate inside the traveling laboratory, pulled the stopper with his sharp teeth, and drained it in one swallow. Then he fussed with his trousers, loosed a rugged blue-veined dick, urinated into the bottle, recorked it good and tight, and handed it, softly glowing, to Daughterry.

“You keep it,” he said, buttoning up.

Daughterry's eyes bulged.

He wrapped the bottle in a cocoon of shop towels and dirty laundry, and secured it within the lab, beneath the tool rack.

When he turned back, it seemed to him that the Devil looked smaller.

It had always seemed that there was something extra about the Devil, something hard to focus on, as if there were more of him there than what you could see and touch. As if a desert or an ocean or a starry night had dressed up and grown a beard. You got used to it, traveling with him, but there it was, just the same.

Until now.

“Three ordinary days,” said the Devil, shrugging shoulders that seemed suddenly fragile and temporary.

He already looked a little nervous, thought Daughterry.

He was considering whether to dig out the beer bottle and call off the wager when a column of Confederate soldiers came walking out of the woods.