The Devil Eats Here (Multi-Author Short Story Collection) (11 page)

And then they had to go and lose my one piece of checked luggage.

*

"Can I help you, sir?" asked the girl at the bus station counter.

Great. It was late, wasn't it? I mean really late, like three or four in the morning? The driver hadn't announced the time when we finally pulled into DC, only that we had reached our destination. But he'd spoken in the same voice as this girl: worn out, flat and wishing for sleep. We were supposed to arrive at twelve noon.

"I just found out," I said, "that my seabag is missing."

Good thing this was a college-age girl! Had it been a man--especially a man with a grating voice like that shouting bus driver--I'd have likely given him a sound beating with my Hoover cane.

"I'm sorry." Now her voice was alert, as if the news had woken her up. "What you do is fill out a claim form, listing all the items and their value, and then we try to locate your baggage. We'll search as long as it takes, but if we're just plain unable to locate it, we pay you. I can help you with the form."

"Thank you, I'd appreciate that." With her voice, I was hoping she might consider driving a bus herself, but I decided not to tell her that. "It's a green duffel, Navy issue."

"All right." She scribbled, a quick efficient scratchy sound.

"Mainly clothes--three pairs of polo shirts, two pairs of jeans, one pair of camouflage shorts, eight pairs of skivvies, eight pairs of white gym socks. The really important things I carried in my backpack."

"Good thinking. All right, I'll put this in. I just need the number where you're staying."

"The International Hostel." I recited their number from memory.

"I'm sorry your bus got here so late. I guess it'll be a while before they can come get you--"

"Actually they have a twenty-four hour check-in. I just need a cab."

"Let me get you one." She tapped in a number, ten quick precise clicks. She probably typed eight words or more a minute.

The cab arrived without incident; the girl offered to lead me out to the car. I declined and told her I'd traveled long and visited many places, all on my own, now that my Navy pension had kicked in. Another fifteen or twenty years and the rest of me would go the way of my eyes, so why pinch pennies? And it had always worked for me…until now at least.

"But thanks for your help." I extended a hand. She took it readily--her touch was as smooth as I'd have expected from her voice.

*

Someone rapped on my door. "Mr. Merkel?"

I stirred in my bottom bunk. "Yes?"

"The bus people found your bag. It's downstairs."

I got up, retrieved my jeans and shirt from where I had draped them over the bed frame, thrust my feet into flip-flops and headed in the direction of the voice. The man led me downstairs (not by the hand) and handed me the bag. I handled it, turned it about, set it back down.

"This isn't my bag."

*

Just its weight gave it away. This bag, while as coarse as my own, couldn't have been half full. Whatever was inside didn't weigh much, certainly not as much as the clothes I'd packed; it felt as if it contained cotton. And—I checked—no lock, even. My seabag had been padlocked tight, count on that.

I straightened up, snorted. "I don't suppose," I said, "that this has my name stenciled on the side?" The Navy does that once you're almost out of bootcamp and it's clear you're not going to wash out. For those who do, the Navy reclaims the bags. Mine may have had a half-dozen previous owners for all I know.

Silence for a moment; I pictured the guy looking all around the bag. "No markings of any kind," he reported.

Who would check an unlocked bag? But in my travels, I'd encountered folks who even tried to check plastic shopping bags packed with their junk. The bus lines had to make it an official rule, don't try to check such things, but still they tried it. So I really wasn't surprised—just angry.

"Want me to call the bus lines?" the man asked.

I shook my head. "Got a better idea. I'll carry it over there myself and throw it in their faces." That girl was surely off now, but even so, I'd establish that a guy was standing there behind the counter before committing the act that might cost me my belongings, but bring me a whole lot of satisfaction. The lightness of the bag confirmed my decision.

"Oh." The man sounded surprised. "Well, ah—should I call a cab?"

"Nope. I'll walk it."

"You're sure, sir?"

"I'll be fine. Just tell me the directions."

He did so. I nodded and grabbed the bag; it couldn't have weighed even twenty pounds. Whatever was inside surely could have been taken in a smaller carry-on, but I confess my mind was on other things at the time.

Now armed with my Hoover in my right hand and the duffel in my left, I swept past the front desk, tapping the cane here and there, down the stairs and out the door.

*

I had turned left outside the door, walked three long blocks, turned left again, and covered another two of the seventeen blocks to the bus station when I thought I felt the bag move in my hand. At first I ignored it. Washington DC in May brings a stifling heat and a humidity I'd rarely known in California, but tonight the air was cool and bracing, and when combined with anticipation, put me in a mind to walk and disregard things I might have otherwise picked up on. After another half block I felt it again, strong enough now to make me stop.

The bag had kicked. As if something was alive inside of it.

I set it down, switched the Hoover to my left hand and felt over the bag, pressing different points along the bottom part. The bag moved again, this time almost violently as if someone had come along and given it a swift kick. It even shifted on the sidewalk with a soft scrape against the concrete.

I jerked back my hand. "Woah."

Now I could think of only one thing. Some nut case had put one or more live animals inside this bag and checked it that way. Or tried; I had no way of knowing if this bag had ever actually traveled on a bus. Cats came to mind.

But wouldn't they meow like nobody's business?

Maybe not. Probably not. If this was really what it was, then the poor animals were probably half-dead...

Quickly I felt over the bag, found the latch, undid it and pulled the mouth wide.

And for that moment—that moment only—I saw again. It was the only time since my accident at age thirty-two that I actually registered sight; and I saw not my surroundings, not the city lights or buildings or trees in the park, but only what was in the bag as it surged out.

Friends, listen to me. It was the devil himself.

I only recall flashes now--my brain's blocked out most of it, and I'm still trying to sort out what I do remember--but it was him. Flying by, he appeared as a streak of intense crimson that you would know right away it's not from anything belonging to this earth. No mere minion, no "demon"—after this experience, if I should ever see one of them I wouldn't even be fazed, their boss himself is so fearsome. I kind of blacked out, my whole body seized up, and it was a good thing I was already squatting close to the sidewalk or I'd have been knocked flat. As it was, I only fell back on my butt, and sat there with my arms out to my sides, the backs of my open hands touching the sidewalk, sort of like a hysterical caricature of the lotus position, minus the crossed legs.

My mind was scrambled, as if struck by lightning. It struggled to pick up the pieces, to make some kind of sense of the whole thing.

How? Did the bus company...something occurred to me. Normally they called you to come

pick up your lost luggage, even if blind. It was the airlines who delivered it. But they'd brought it, and left it inside the hostel lobby.

Maybe the bus company thinks they're off the hook, free of whatever in the world happened to saddle them with that bag--was the devil really trapped inside somehow, or was it some game of his? And those bus bigwigs, this very moment maybe, raising glasses and sighing with relief, thinking now it's going to be the hostel who loses reservations, or can't start

a city tour on time, or whose laundry machines break and lockers jam.

But I had taken the bag outside.

And I remember one more thing. I thought I'd sat there a long time, people swirling around me as their voices waxed and waned. But someone ran up to me and bent down and asked, "You all right, man?"

"Did you see anything?"

Yes. He had, just a second ago. And his description confirmed my fear: something like a crimson missile shooting out of the bag, flashing across the street and making a beeline down the street.

"Bear with me. Where are we right now exactly?"

"Um—K Street Northwest. We're right by the City Museum."

I clutched at his arm; I couldn't help it, I needed to touch another human, to have a person close to me. "Which way was the—thing—headed?"

"Straight down New York Avenue." Sensing perhaps that I was going to ask the exact direction, he added, "Toward the southwest."

"You're sure?" I clutched and clawed at his arm. He found my hand, patted it, and very carefully removed it from its grip.

"Yeah. I'm sure. Man, what was that?"

The rest of the conversation, or how if he helped me back to the hostel or I got back there some other way, I don't remember. But I do remember what I was thinking.

The devil was headed straight for the White House.

So what now? Will it only be skyrocketing taxes, or a storm of scandals, Congressmen missing their sessions and bills not getting passed, or Air Force One breaking down now instead of buses?

But what I keep thinking of is, America still has nuclear weapons....

When will I know?

REJECTION LETTER

by John Hoddy

“Ms. Heidi Rayne
Flat 2
4, The Terrace
Oakhurst Green OG1 5ZB

Dear Ms. Rayne:

If I weren't right in the middle of a reading and evaluation period with a deadline looming … if your name were Danielle Steel or Nora Roberts or even Anne Rice … if you wrote deathless prose and were one step removed from the Pulitzer…”

Jared Williams glanced from his Smith-Corona as raindrops smacked the dingy pane of the single office window like birdshot. The peeling casement with its years of accumulated grime framed a world gone gray. Going to make for a miserable walk to Morrie's Bar.

Gnawing a lip, he returned to his one-page opus. He was over the top on this one. Over the top, down the other side, halfway up the next slope… What the hell. Heidi—a bitch’s name. Damn all bitches.

“… if the demons from the abyss threatened to rip out my tongue with red hot pincers, I'D STILL NOT PUBLISH YOUR WORK!!!!!!! Send your stupid stories elsewhere. I won't read them. Don't bother to reply because I'll trash anything you send me.

Have a nice day.”

Williams peeled the letter from the typewriter carriage, gave the text a once-over, and stuffed it into the return envelope dutifully provided by the ever-hopeful Heidi. He took a swig of cold, stale coffee to wet his pasty tongue, licked and sealed the envelope, and tossed it with the others on his blotter pad.

The damned coffee tasted worse than the envelope. He rooted around in his desk drawer, came up with a donut of unknown provenance, crunched a bite, and threw the rest into the wastebasket. His gaze lingered where it came to rest amid the dreck from all the fools who hadn't had the sense to send a SASE.

Trashed. Three years of his life. No better than a stale donut. Damn Laurie Swinson!

He mulled over the letter he'd just written and lifted the envelope from the table. Heidi Rayne wasn't a bad writer. Sometimes she was a very good writer. This story might not measure up, but-- To hell with it! He threw the letter back with the rest. She was just another bitch wanting a piece of him. Everybody in that foot-high slush pile wanted a piece of him.

And what had Laurie wanted? All of him and more. “You’re never here… We never talk anymore… All you want is sex… I don’t need a drunk for a lover… You spend more time with a bottle at Morrie’s than you do with me…” and then: “Don’t come back.”

A face and body like hers—what was he supposed to want but sex? And talk? Like he could get a word in. If she’d spent less time hassling him, maybe he’d have spent less time at Morrie’s.

None of that mattered now. At least Morrie’s still waited, where a friendly corner and a quart of scotch would give companionship for the evening. Then it would be off to find some fleabag hotel to call home until he could come up with a place.

Williams pushed back from his paper-strewn desk and glanced about his twelve by twenty world: half-open files, a stack of rejection letters ready for the post, that soul-eating slush pile—to hell with the place! So he had a deadline. If he came up short, he’d pull something off the top of the stack, publish it as a joke, call it the novice corner. A friendly scotch beckoned from a dark corner of a bar where nobody wanted a piece of him.

Drawing his trench coat around him, Williams paused one last time to consider the pile of letters. He’d unloaded a couple of times and more. More than one writer, he’d never hear from again. Maybe he should let them rest the night. If he did, he’d likely never mail the half. Which meant he’d have to write them all over. He gathered up the lot. So he’d lose some writers. The morrow’s post would bring more. He switched off the light, locked the office, made his way down two flights of stairs, and dropped the letters through the postal slot in the lobby. Done. And Laurie be damned!

Williams stepped out into driving rain. This wasn't a gentle shower like those caressing the cheeks of a dozen and more empty-headed bitches in that tripe he’d waded through in today’s readings. This was the kind of rain that sucked the life from the day and the warmth from a man’s bones.

Morrie’s lay a block and a half distant. He leaned a shoulder into the wind and trooped down sidewalks dim from streetlights struggling to penetrate the downpour, past storefronts and brownstones used up and tired. Even the hookers had taken shelter in building entryways, calling out half-hearted come-ons at his passing. A rat scuttled out from under the steps of a dilapidated row house and hugged the building before dropping through the bars of a broken basement window, his only companion. Footsteps splashed icy water that soaked through the top of his socks. Damn the rain. Passing traffic made a steady hiss. Damn the traffic. A Greyhound snarled by, plowing a curbside bow wave and trailing a scent of sodden diesel as it sought to shake urban confines for the open road. Damn the bus.