Up Jumps the Devil (36 page)

They seemed to know exactly how long he could last without water and food. His days became long tunnels of dark between sudden, violent washings and feedings.

Every now and then, they thought up new horrors.

One day they shoved an actual corpse in there with him, on top of him like a lover, and closed the drawer again. The weight made it almost impossible to breathe. In the dark, the dead nose touched his.

Horror and panic broke fresh.

He tried to die.

Tried to horror himself to death, think himself into a coma.

Couldn't.

He tried to go mad.

Maybe he could pass into a kind of wonderful insanity, an escape to an imaginary personal universe where he lived in a cabin in the middle of a wildflower meadow, but the second he got a grip on what that might look like, the dead man on top of him began to jerk. He knew, he had heard stories, that dead people were apt to do all kinds of strange things as their systems died. They might belch or pass gas, or even sit up or open their eyes.

The dead man jerked and shuddered. His chin dug into Fish's shoulder.

The dead man began to leak. Something dripped on Fish's face, and stung.

Clarity like a searchlight in the rain.

He saw the face of Harry Truman at the sawmill, and the faces of the other thousand grandfatherly paper shufflers in the white-collar prison, and understood that even these venal, greedy little fuckers were ten times the man he was, because they were smart or talented or aggressive, and things like this, this drawer, were what happened to men who inconvenienced them.

Money was meant for that sort of person. Not for little turds like him who thought it would be neat to be rich. Little turds like him who didn't understand just how real the real world was.

It was a tiny, useless realization in his bed of rot and horror.

And whatever the dead man was dripping on him must be something really caustic, because it was burning his face, dripping and running.

And one day there was a blur of light and a momentary coolness, and the dead man was removed.

Fish heard someone gag.

Then they slid him back into darkness.

Sometimes, in the dark and silence, he would hear or feel something of the outside world. A muffled voice, or a vibration in the walls as other drawers slid open, slid closed. The intrusions scraped at his senses, and he screamed for them to Be silent and Go away!

When they finally took him back to his cell, he didn't know it was real for almost a week. He sat on the floor shitting himself, tugging at his beard, and it took a while for him to know his dreamworld from the real.

When he returned to the general routine, to the cafeteria and the exercise yard, he was not the same. How could he be? He was not visited again by Truman and his wingtipped gang. He served them best now as a cautionary tale. He saw them sometimes pointing him out to new inmates.

His beard had grown in straight, long and gray, except where embalming fluid had bleached a river down the side of his face, and his eyes had grown deep without growing wise. He was thin, now. His walk had a bounce, as if he walked to a strange music.

He sat by himself and read by himself and kept his thoughts to himself, and every day for the rest of his life was a struggle not to feel dead.

Dayton, Ohio, 2005

THE DEVIL WAS JUST
starting to run out of interesting crap to watch on TV when Presto! Jenna Steele made a televised speech from her hospital bed. Still bruised, still in a double arm cast and neck brace from her Dumpster jump, she nevertheless looked stunning.

“Johnny,” she was saying, speaking directly to the camera, “if you'll take me back, I've got a list of things I promise.”

There was a pause, and you could barely hear her hissing to someone off camera: “Hold the list up, dumbshit.”

The list, read aloud by Jenna, went like this:

“I promise to always wear that magenta lipstick you like so, so much, that I never wore enough because of that allergic thing.

“I promise to try and like clams, which I don't like, but I'll try to like them.

“I will go to this psychic woman I know who does previous-life charts, and find out for sure if we were lovers back in history, because I swear to God we were, Johnny. I can feel it.

“I promise I will let us get a dog, if we move in together.”

(“How about promise not to shoot me,” said the Devil, “you self-absorbed, bipolar cunt?”)

“I promise,” she was saying, “not to shoot you again, no matter what.”

Then she said, “This is just for you,” and somehow, with both arms in casts, lifted her hospital gown to expose her breasts.

The TV cut away a moment too late.

God, she had nice ones, he thought. He couldn't help it.

ONE OF THE NURSES
woke the Devil with a snap of the blinds, bright daylight. He squinted, raised one arm to cover his face, and said, “Man!”

“This is your fault,” the nurse whispered, flicking on the TV and dropping the remote in the middle of his wound pattern.

The TV told him—and showed him—how Jenna's nurse had entered her room that morning to find that the megastar had cut herself. Not to death, not even badly. Just a ladder of tiny slices, inflicted with the sharp-edged lid of a disposable coffee cup.

Jenna was a cutter.

“Who'da thunk it?” said the Devil.

But the celebrity news snippet wasn't over.

It went on to tell how thousands of teenage girls all over the world were cutting themselves in exactly the same ladder pattern, to show support for Jenna, and to protest against Johnny Scratch for not forgiving her.

The nurse who brought the Devil lunch paused after setting the tray down, pulled up the cuff of her uniform pants, and showed him a ladder of tiny slash marks. Neatly healing, but still red, and smeared with antibacterial gel.

He had to get out of Dayton. The place made people crazy.

“We're
everywhere
,” the nurse whispered at him, glaring.

THE DOCTOR
was taken aback that afternoon when he walked in and caught the Devil cutting himself with a plastic cafeteria knife.

It was unpleasantly difficult, the Devil had discovered, with plasticware. There was no way for it to be sharp enough, so you had to saw. So far, his little ladder only had three rungs in it. He would stop at four. After all, he was just curious.

“This isn't what it looks like,” the Devil told the doctor.

“It's a cry for help,” said the doctor, trying to soothe him.

“If you try to help me,” barked the Devil, “I swear to
God
—!”

“Are you
crying
?”

The Devil pulled the sheets over his head and said, “I
hate
you people! I hate you
all
!”

San Francisco, 1997

THE DEVIL PICKED FISH UP
in the JFK limo the day he got out of prison. Stepping out through a double set of postern gates, Fish wore loose, white clothing, sandals, and really long hair. It was a little thin on top, but long in the back. A chemical burn scarred his face from scalp to jawline.

They were going to drive out to San Francisco, but halfway across Missouri Fish almost leaped from the car, screaming, “Stop! Far out! Stop!”

The limo ground to a halt outside an impressive, diamond-shaped building. It was a church, but not like any church Fish had ever seen. It might have held an army. From a duck pond by the parking lot rose a fifty-foot fiberglass Jesus.

“Wonderful!” cried Fish, flying from the car and racing across the empty parking lot.

The Devil parked the limo, muttering under his breath.

“Fucksticks,” he said. Churches, predictably, annoyed him. People fell into religion because they were drawn by the company and approval of others. It was the oldest drug on the market. People who said they had found Jesus had really found Jesus people.

He caught up with Fish inside.

Fish wandered, gaping, across an open lobby an acre wide, with couches and chairs arranged in groups beneath soaring steel rafters and enormous skylights. On the far side, he found three sets of heavy double doors, flung the middle pair wide, and there he stopped.

The Devil caught up with him, and together they looked out over a landscape of ten thousand theater chairs, all facing a raised dais, way far away down there, with two lecterns, a piano, and enough musical instruments for a whole rock festival. Television sets gazed from every wall, mounted in banks ten screens wide.

“Do you think it's fair to say,” asked Fish, a little breathless, “that these people are
addicted?
”

The Devil nodded. “It's called a Megachurch,” he explained. “They have TV stations and everything.”

“I can work with these people,” said Fish.

“It's a crock,” said the Devil, who remembered the real Jesus, and felt he owed it to Him to say something.

“It's money waiting to happen,” said Fish, “is what it is.”

FISH TALKED THE DEVIL
into staying for worship service that evening. The Megachurch had services every single night, it turned out.

“Because the Devil never rests!” boomed a preacher, one of four.

“Blow me,” whispered the Devil, slumped in a chair along the back wall. Fish sat on the Devil's right, trembling with excitement.

The preacher seemed to fly above his congregation on all sides, on a hundred screens, floating and smiling, his hair a Missouri buzz cut, his eyes football-coach bright.

It was hard not to get swept up in the service. The cavernous church, thundering with electric guitars and underscored by a choir on high reverb, literally rocked. The air itself seemed charged with adrenaline. Here and there, individuals rose, lifted their hands, then fell back as if shot.

And then Fish was running down the aisle, white prison-issue pimp suit fluttering behind him, beard like a worn-out flag, shower shoes flapping.

The Living Water technical crew were savvy dudes. Before Fish was halfway to the dais, spotlights caught him in a blaze of white soul-light. He looked gauzy, like a special effect, and seemed to waft onto the dais, where the preacher, who knew a money moment when he saw one, surrendered the microphone without greeting or preamble.

FISH TOLD THEM
how he had awakened to a new life, in prison.

They loved him. The volume rose. Here and there, shouts of encouragement.

“Everyone talks about the cross,” echoed Fish, expertly turning, giving equal time to all sides. “The cross this, and the cross that. But until hard times come down on you, sometimes it's easy to forget what the cross means. That the cross means hard choices. That sometimes you have to break something before it can be made whole. I think how the cross was the instrument of our Lord's agony, and I think of all the terrible things He has forgiven me for and all the terrible things that are done and waiting to be done, and I think of all the forgiving that's needed out there in that bad world. Forgiving that can't start until some confessing gets done and some changes get made!”

They were stomping now. Ten thousand people.

“I'm sick and tired of this great nation pretending that every change is a good change, and every new thing is a good thing! Some things are good because they're simple, like what makes a marriage, what makes a person a person whether they've been born yet or not, and what makes truth! Can you dig Jesus? Can you TAKE Jesus? Are YOU READY TO DISH HIM OUT?”

It was Thunderdome.

Fish floated on-screen, high above, arms outstretched, beard flying.

The Devil found himself on his feet, hands raised high, feeling the spirit.

Embarrassed, he collected himself and went out to wait in the car.

LATER, AFTER MIDNIGHT
, the Devil left town alone. Fish stayed behind to take over duties as Projected Revenue Accountant for Living Water Ministries, Inc., which maintained nonprofit status despite owning interest in a publishing house, a profitable summer camp, and a chain of family-friendly video stores.

The Devil headed for L.A., where Memory answered her door in a slinky warm-up outfit. Nearing fifty, she looked great. She kept on getting her body tightened and firmed and vacuumed, which the Devil liked. Her sitcom had tanked, after two okay seasons, but she still worked in commercials and the occasional miniseries.

They made love, and then watched TV by candlelight.

“Fish is out of prison,” he told her.

“I know.”

“He found Jesus.”

“I
doubt
it!”

“He found a church that wanted an accountant. And he's actually not a bad preacher. You start to believe if you spend enough time around those people. They're like soccer fans.”