Up Jumps the Devil (32 page)

The bartender brought them both beers, and they took a first sip together.

“You sure this is what you want?” asked the Devil.

“What I want,” gasped Fish, “is for you to return my phone calls when I'm in a hotel room full of feds. You promised—”

“I promised you'd have money. You had it.”

“We set up companies and organizations! That's not just money. Those things are meant to last!”

“They do, if you treat them right.”

“You promised!”

“No, I didn't. Anyhow, given what you've got left, which is this bar and that fence, are you sure this is what you want? Because … well, let me tell you something about that fence—”

“I don't want to hear it,” sighed Fish. “If that's all you have for me is some advice about the border, you can shove it up your ass. I want my money back. I want what you promised me.”

The Devil looked disappointed, but not surprised.

A second later, FBI agents from the Brownsville field office burst through the door and performed a felony takedown on Fish. His beer bottle went flying. His broken nose radiated agony. His face pressed the barroom floor.

“You can't!” he cried, struggling to raise his head, to make himself understood. “This is Mexico, you retards!” He spit out a bloody tooth.

“This is Brownsville, numbnuts,” answered the agent responsible for cuffing him. “That's the farm-league baseball park fence you climbed. Way to go. The border's half a block down, still.”

Fish laughed. A little, at first. Then more. He got it under control as they walked him to their unmarked car, but a curious, eerie glow ignited in his eye—not unlike swamp gas or Saint Elmo's fire—and never went out again until the day he died.

Dayton, Ohio, 2005

THE DEVIL, BORED STIFF
with being in the hospital, started sleeping more than was normal for him.

He dreamed about the second time he'd won Arden back, long ago, in Rome.

A SPRING EVENING
, near the beginning of the empire. The Devil crossed the forum in late afternoon, crisp paving stones under his sandals, the smells of the city in his nose. Smoke, food, garbage. Horseshit. Sweat.

Rome reminded him of Egypt, with its bigness: giant temples, giant columns, giant armies. A suitable challenge to Heaven.

Maybe it would be good enough for Arden. Maybe she'd come back.

He was watching a street show when the idea struck him.

The show featured a monkey who pretended to find a coin in his ear.

He had to laugh. Great civilizations boasted the weirdest entertainment. This was and always would be true.

The monkey was a good sign.

AT HOME THAT NIGHT
, the Devil stood in the courtyard, looking up.

“Arden,” he said, “you've got to see Rome. God would have made Rome Himself, if He had an imagination.”

The wind blew. The sky was cloudless, like a sea.

He went inside, and read poetry by firelight until it began to rain, and then he went to bed.

WHEN HE WOKE UP
in the morning, she was there beside him.

The Devil roared with joy and crushed her to him.

Her eyes glowed. She cried his name over and over.

They didn't leave the bed for three days, and when they did, it was just to buy a new bed.

IT BEGAN
like Egypt.

They had a house with a courtyard, at the crest of a hill.

At dawn and dusk, the sun touched the marble city with fire, and they watched from their windows, admiring. This time, they decided, they would not try to push things. He would not teach them astronomy. She would not play angel music for mortals.

They were in Rome. They would be Romans.

For now, they would learn about each other. A thousand years had got between them.

But one day at the local market, when they were shopping for their supper, a clay tile slipped loose from a restaurant rooftop, tumbled two stories through the air, and shattered over Arden's head.

She ducked—too late—and dropped her purchases to hold her head in her hands. But there wasn't much blood, and she didn't even feel dizzy.

The Devil held her to him, shocked and terrified.

“I'm all right,” she said.

So they bought for a second time all the things she had dropped, and went home to supper. And the sun set, and the city, as always, appeared to burn. Then the lights of candles and braziers and the lanterns of boats on the Tiber made Rome a jewel in the dark, the center of Heaven and Earth.

IN THE MORNING
Arden did not wake up.

The Devil was half mad, at first. He screamed and shook her, and would have run through the city in monstrous forms if a storm hadn't broken, bringing him to his senses with lightning and sharp thunder. So he calmed himself, and hired some street urchins to go and bring him a physician.

“What physician?” asked one of the boys, nearly naked and streaked with filth.

“Any physician!” cried the Devil. “All of them!”

And he returned to her and tried again to wake her. What knowledge he knew and what strengths he had, he used. But something in him was no longer able, or allowed, to heal an angel. She was beyond him.

So he had to trust the doctors.

The doctors came and failed, one by one.

“She will awaken or she will not,” they told him.

The first one who told him this, he ate. After that, he was a better listener.

WHEN SOME DAYS
had gone by, he dressed their bed like an altar, and covered her in white silks. When he fed her, she swallowed, like a cleverly made automaton. And the Devil realized that she might lie like this forever. It was so cruel it made him spit laughter, that they would be together, finally … but like this.

He fed and bathed her. He did not feed himself, or bathe.

He stared out windows, at home, or stumbled aimlessly in the streets. He went out less and less often, until a familiar sleepiness began to steal over him. But he knew the dangers of that sleep, and shook it off.

“No,” he said. He stood, and walked to Arden's bedside. He took her hand.

Action was needed.

Inspiration bloomed in him like a bursting sun.

Not just any action, but the sort of action that had brought them together to begin with.

His heart thumped in his chest. His pulse quickened. Slowly, with impossible tenderness, he drew back the bedclothes. Even more slowly, as if handling crystal, he undressed Arden until her sleeping form lay naked on the mattress.

His eyes drank in her pale skin. The sheer bareness and simplicity of her whispered to his blood, which ran faster, until his jaw slackened and his breath became a lumbering, heavy thing. Trembling, he stripped away his own clothes and lay down beside her. Pressed against her and kissed her still lips until sadness and desire became a single thing inside him.

He rose to his knees, gasping because the weight of desire was almost too much. Shaking, he parted her legs, and it was all he could do not to just let himself fall over her.

He stroked her thigh with an unsteady hand. Stroked the softness of her lower belly.

His blood and breath heaved like a hundred work gangs, but he forced himself to concentrate, to move softly. He coiled his arms around her legs, lowered his open mouth between her thighs, and kissed her there with a sad, yawning hunger until night fell dark around them.

But she didn't awaken, and she didn't move.

At dawn she lay still against him, and didn't move, and when the pulsing and heaving crested inside him and surged and flooded the bedsheets, he lifted his head at last and screamed a silent scream. In the red light of morning, he fell exhausted against her and slept without dreaming.

THAT EVENING
, shuffling in rags past the open baths, he found himself, by chance, in one of Rome's quiet places. It was a pleasant slope of manicured lawn, peppered here and there with white stones, low shrubs, and stands of umbrella pine.

The place had a serene quality that worked on him, and within minutes, if he could not be said to have quite returned to himself, he at least felt less as if something were devouring him. His senses cleared, and he became aware of several voices, nearby, in earnest conversation.

One of the voices was familiar.

No … it wasn't the voice. It was a sense of presence, like a trembling on the air, as if someone had just strummed a harp.

“It can't be,” said the Devil to himself.

The last time—the
only
time—he had sensed this presence, had been twenty years ago on a hill over Bethlehem, in Judah. He and two astronomers from the East had followed the light of an exploding supernova, and stumbled across a Jewish family caring for a baby in a cowshed. The woman had given birth to a boy, and the boy lay in a feeding trough with this supernatural soul music playing all around him.

The astronomers, like everyone else, were silly with religion. They immediately connected the child with the exploding star, and fell to worshipping. Everyone seemed to expect the Devil to do the same, so he fetched from his camel a curiosity he'd picked up in Babylon, a wooden puzzle box containing frankincense, and presented it to the father.

The Devil assumed the baby was descended from some long-dead fallen angel, although he had never seen the supersoul effect to quite this degree before.

“This little guy is turned all the way up,” he remembered thinking, that night in Bethlehem. “We'll be seeing more of him, someday.”

And there he sat, in a grove of pines, amid other youths: olive-skinned, with long hair and shocking, multicolored eyes. He toyed with the grass between his knees, looking troubled.

“What's happening?” asked the Devil, ducking into the grove.

“Micah dared Jesus to shave off his beard,” said the roundest of them.

“And he did,” said a redhead with one eye.

“And now,” said the round one, “he's mad.”

“Not mad,” said Jesus. “Just not sure it was the thing to do, after all.”

“See?” said another of the youths. “There's the Uncertainty Constant. I told you we couldn't predict how he'd feel about it later.”

“My parents,” said Jesus, looking up at the Devil, “never did get that puzzle box open.”

“Who's this?” someone asked.

“A friend,” said Jesus.

The Devil, having traveled in Judah and knowing how Jewish men felt about their beards, appreciated that Jesus might have regrets.

“Why'd you do it?” asked the Devil.

“He told Berlios,” said One-Eye, before Jesus could answer for himself, “that the mysteries of the heart were stronger than the Law, and Berlios said, ‘Even Jewish Law?' and Jesus said, ‘Of course,' so Berlios dared him to defy Jewish Law by shaving off his beard, and Jesus said, ‘It's not so much a law as part of the
spirit
of the Law,' and Berlios said that was even better, and … so. There we are.”

“Took him three days to make up his mind,” observed a dark-eyed youth. “It's not like I pushed him into it.”

Jesus stood, gathering up a burlap shoulder sack.

“Tomorrow?” he asked his friends, looking from face to face.

They all nodded. They almost seemed to bow, and the Devil realized that despite the jokes and bantering, this circle of young men had a respect for Jesus akin to wonder and dread.

The Devil bowed goodbye and followed Jesus out of the glade. They hiked together uphill in gathering dusk.

“I missed some kind of argument,” said the Devil.

“A debate,” said Jesus. “I'm teaching them how to explore ideas through argument, the way we study the Torah in Judea. And they're teaching me Skeptical philosophy.”

“Skeptical—?”

“It's a method of inquiry. Teaches you to ask questions, that there are always more questions, that nothing is ever known completely, or for certain.”

“What's in it for you?” asked the Devil.

“Let's just say I'm sharpening myself.”

“To practice law?”

“Beyond law. Law, we have. Nature has law. Scripture gives us Law. Rome gives us law. What I want to find is our
heart
. Man's heart. I wonder if people can't learn to be good and fair to each other out of love, not just because the law compels them.”

The Devil considered.

“You'd meet resistance,” he said. “They'd have to take responsibility for their own actions, and thoughts and words and feelings, instead of laying it all on some faceless authority.”

“That's the trouble,” Jesus replied, pausing to pick a rock out of his sandal, grasping the Devil's shoulder for balance. “People always want to bring God into it. They might not want to hear that they, themselves, are in control. Who do you use for a crutch, when you're in control? Who do you blame things on?”