Up Jumps the Devil (8 page)

That night, feeling that both he and the beast had earned a reward, he registered them at a respected inn and ordered an entire roasted lamb, which they split.

“This isn't going to be easy,” he remarked to Queen.

Queen didn't care.

COOL AS HE HAD BEEN
with the Devil near at hand, once left alone with the crystal ball, Franklin found its mere presence a challenge.

He didn't look into it.

“Only God may know the future,” he muttered, drafting designs for a lightning rod.

His own future concerned him, certainly. And there was the future of the country, of course. He caught himself straining out of the corner of his eye—

“Dash!” he bellowed, throwing a shop rag over the thing.

A minute later, having returned to the problem of the lightning rod, he stole a look sideways, and discovered that the shop rag had fallen aside.

The ball gleamed at him.

“Get thee behind me!” Franklin hissed, and struggled to concentrate.

WHEN THE WEEK WAS PAST
, Franklin descended to his workshop to find his dog and the Devil waiting. Queen was glad to see him. With a bearlike bound, she cast herself full length upon her master.

“Bosh!” cried Franklin, scratching her behind the ears.

“Good morning,” said the Devil.

“Good morning, indeed!” boomed the scientist. “There's the week, then, and not a tot have I looked in your damned glass. Won't say I wasn't sore tempted—”

“You are a man of uncommon virtue,” said the Devil. So saying, he extended his hand; the ball leaped into his palm and was hidden away in a pocket.

“Thank you,” said Franklin.

“Unfortunately for both your soul and your virtue, however, I have solved your riddle.”

“Ah.” Franklin's stomach turned.

The Devil stood looking down his nose. He didn't always look wicked, but he looked wicked now.

The Devil cleared his throat and said, “A dog will run into the woods … as far as she wishes. No more, no less.”

To which Franklin, with great false modesty, replied that this was not the answer.

The Devil seemed disappointed, but not surprised.

“A dog may run only
halfway
into the woods,” declared Franklin, eyes alight, “because after that, you see, she is running
out!
”

The Devil moaned in despair. Franklin, triumphant, stamped his foot. The Devil—being an angelic creature, by origin, and thus composed entirely of soul-stuff—shrank into the form of something like a black orangutan. Thus reduced, this thing tried to crawl into a woodpile near the stove, but Queen surrounded it with paws and teeth until it leaped with a horrid cry into a butter churn.

Franklin wasted no time in fastening the lid and pounding it snug with a mallet.

The Devil's soul howled within, quite trapped, Franklin's property, fairly won.

FRANKLIN STOOD
several doors down the street, before a looming Presbyterian church. He had with him an astonishingly long ladder—tapered at the end, as if for apple picking—with which he wrestled, trying to bring it to rest against the steeple. At his feet, wrapped in burlap, lay the finished lightning rod, attached to a coil of steel cable.

It was his intention to fasten the lightning rod to the steeple, and this intention had seemed uncomplicated, in the safety of his laboratory. On the street, however, facing the steeple's considerable altitude, he found himself apprehensive.

Dark clouds threatened. A sharp wind swooped upon the street.

Against this wind, Franklin staggered to and fro.

While he was thus engaged, his butter churn came down the street, sort of knocking and kicking as if animated by a spell.

“Let me out!” croaked the butter churn.

Franklin raised his eyebrows and said, “Why would I want to do that?”

The wind and the ladder tugged him down the street a yard or so.

The butter churn followed …
hop, knock, hop
.

“Listen,” it said to Franklin, “I was only trying to be of assistance. And your winning our little wager has merely served to prove my point.”

“Which was—?”

“Your own cleverness. The shrewdness and spirit of your country-folk, by extension. It gladdens me to admit I have underestimated both.”

“Still,” grunted Franklin, “‘that which is fairly won—'”

“I'll let you look in the ball,” said the butter churn.

Franklin appeared to consider, sidestepping the butter churn as the wind bore him in the other direction, quite missing the steeple.

“And I'll assist with your ladder, there, as well.”

“Done,” said Franklin, passing by once again.

“Done!” cried the Devil, springing like a jack-in-the-box from the churn. In a trice, the wind came about and planted the ladder squarely around the steeple tip, and the Devil sat on a rung maybe thirty feet up, tipping his hat.

“Have some respect!” gruffed Franklin. “That's a church.”

Thunder rumbled. The few Philadelphians about the streets clutched their hats and rushed for home. The Devil dug in his pockets, produced the glass ball, and tossed it down. Franklin caught it neatly with one hand, and looked.

Gazing, he saw armies and fields afire. He saw great arguments and new ideas. New machines. He saw his death, and carried what he saw with him all his days. The knowledge, though it saddened him, made him fearless. He stared into the ball for a good five minutes, then pitched the ball back to the Devil, who slipped it into his pocket.

Lightning flashed and thunder cracked at nearly the same time.

Franklin unwrapped his lightning rod and regarded it with trepidation.

“I don't suppose,” he said to the Devil, now sliding down the ladder toward him, “you'd like to take
this
”—he indicated the lightning rod—“and attach it to
that
”—he pointed at the steeple tip—“in the name of science and municipal safety?”

“No,” said the Devil, reaching the street and pulling his collar high.

“Whyever not?”

“It's your big idea. You do it.”

“It is mine, sir, to take notes and make observations. Never underestimate the value of good notes.”

“I won't. And I'll wish you the best of everything, and be going.”

Franklin held the ladder in place with his shoe and wiped his spectacles on his coattails.

“As you will,” he said to the Devil. “I wonder, then, if you're not awfully busy, if you wouldn't mind stopping at the house, on your way, and asking
Mrs
. Franklin to step out and lend a hand?”

Various highways, 1969

SO MUCH FOR THE
Dan Paul Overfield Band, thought Memory.

It had been a day and a night since the tower had fallen on them. Fish and Zachary had been admitted to a New York City hospital, where doctors would try to restore Fish's thumb and would test Zachary for brain damage.

“We won't know much for a few weeks,” they told Memory, regarding Zachary. “There's no point in waiting around …”

She visited Fish, who lay with his arm in a fat white cast. Doped up on painkillers, he was alert enough to blame Memory for making them play Woodstock, and tell her to fuck off.

“Whatever,” she said.

It didn't much matter what Fish, or anyone else, had to say. A numbness had come over her, as if amnesia were spreading from her mind to her body. She left the hospital in a fog and sat down at a bus stop a block down the street. She watched the pigeons and blinked once in a while.

It was over. The big dream had died with Dan Paul, come back to life briefly and wonderfully with the Devil, and now it was dead again. It was too much.

The Devil was conspicuously absent.

So that's the kind of friend he is, she thought. Shouldn't be surprised.

People gathered to wait for the bus. The bus arrived and departed, and Memory barely even noticed. She sat there for an hour. More people gathered. Buses took them away. Memory stayed, like a stone in a flowing stream. She had no plans to move. No plans of any kind.

A bus pulled up. Not a city bus this time, but a Microbus.

The space bus, towing the death limo, both splashed with upstate mud. The Devil rolled down the window and whistled at her.

“Want some candy, little girl?” he called, winking.

Memory didn't move. She wasn't sure she remembered how.

The Devil climbed out of the Microbus, scooped Memory off her bench, installed her gently in the passenger seat, and got back behind the wheel. A wave of his hand, and they skated easily through midday traffic.

“Where have you been?” Memory asked, stirring herself with some effort.

“Paying off your crew and driving this piece of shit to the city,” he answered.

Whatever.

“Why are you still here?” she asked as they crossed the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. “And where are we going?”

The city dropped away behind them. The Devil lit a cigarette.

“I thought you wanted to be famous,” he said.

“I did,” said Memory, propping her bare feet on the dashboard. “I do.”

It was true, she realized. More than ever. Her numbness receded.

“We're headed south,” said the Devil. “You need new musicians.”

“Why do we have to go south to find—”

“Just trust me.”

“Trust you? Are you kidding? I
did
trust you, until—”

“Things don't always happen the way you want,” said the Devil. “It doesn't mean they won't happen. And haven't I held up my end as far as you're concerned? You want to be famous. I'd say you
are
pretty much famous, after yesterday.”

“I want it to last.”

“All right.”

She punched him in the arm. The Microbus swerved.

“No matter what I say,” complained the Devil, “it's the wrong goddamn thing!”

He stomped on the brakes and wrestled the Microbus to a stop, half on, half off the shoulder.

“Tell me what's the matter,” said the Devil, “and I promise I'll give you straight answers.”

Memory exploded.

“Is this all some kind of game to you? Two weeks ago you made a deal with all of us, and we forked over what you wanted, and all we've gotten since is—”

“You sang for a half-million people.”

“Is there going to be more? And what about the guys?”

“They'll be all right.”

“That's not an answer!” screamed Memory. “Fuck you, man!”

She kicked her door open and stormed into the tall weeds along the shoulder. Face flushed blood red, she howled, “You said they'd have doors open for them, and where are they? Zachary's drooling down his chin and Fish will never play again! You have our
souls
, and you … do you even
have
a soul?”

“That's a complicated—”

“Shut up!
Everything you say is either a lie or just
useless!
Why couldn't I have met you in the part of my life I can't remember?”

She stomped off down the highway, as if making war on the asphalt.

The Microbus crept up alongside her.

“Hi,” said the Devil.

She ignored him.

“You're not done being famous,” said the Devil. “It's your time. It'll get better.”

He stopped the van and hopped out as he spoke, approaching Memory with his hands in his pockets.

Memory jumped across the ditch and plunged through a narrow stretch of woods, emerging at the edge of a wheat field. The Devil followed, fiddling with his sunglasses.

“Why haven't you asked for your memory back?” he called after her.

Memory faced him.

“Maybe I don't want it back.”

“I think you do.”

Memory folded her arms across her chest.

“I don't think you
can
give it back to me. Maybe I'm wrong.”

The Devil grinned a sharp-toothed grin, and fished a long-stemmed clay pipe from his shirt pocket.

“No. You're right; I actually
tried
to wake up your memory one night, but I couldn't. Couldn't even find it.”

“You tried to bring back my memory without asking me?”

“I thought it would be a nice surprise.”

He packed the pipe, lit it with a fiery forefinger, and passed it to her.

She took it and inhaled.