Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

Robert nodded. “Maybe this time the devil was listening and you know what he’s like. He purely hates anybody who can play better than him-’specially if they aren’t obliged to him in some way.”

“Only person I owe anything to,” Staley said, “is my Grandma and she was no devil.”

“But you’ve been at the crossroads.”

Staley was starting to understand what he meant. There was always something waiting to take advantage of you, ghosts and devils sitting there at the edge of nowhere where the road to what is and what could be cross each other, spiteful creatures just waiting for the chance to step into your life and turn it all hurtful. That was the trouble with having something like her spirit fiddle. It called things to you, but unless you paid constant attention, you forgot that it can call the bad as well as the good.

“I’ve been at a lot of places,” she said.

“You ever played that fiddle of yours in one?”

“Not so’s I knew.”

“Well, you’ve been someplace, done something to get his attention.”

“That doesn’t solve the problem I’ve got right now.”

Robert nodded. “No, we’re just defining it.”

“So what can I do?”

“I don’t know exactly. Thing I’ve learned is, if you call up something bad, you’ve got to take up the music and play it back out again or it’ll never go away. I’d start there.”

“I already tried that and it only made things worse.”

“Yeah, but this time you’ve got to jump the groove.”

Staley gave him a blank look.

“You remember phonograph records?” Robert asked.

“Well, sure, though back home we mostly played tapes.”

Robert started to finger his guitar again, another spidery twelve-bar blues.

“Those old phonograph records,” he said. “They had a one-track groove that the needle followed from beginning to end-it’s like the habits we develop, the way we look at the world, what we expect to find in it, that kind of thing. You get into a bad situation like we got here and it’s time to jump the groove, get someplace new, see things different.” He cut the tune short before it could resolve and abruptly switched into another key. “Change the music. What you hear, what you play. Maybe even who you are. Lets you fix things and the added bonus is it confuses the devil. Makes it hard for him to focus on you for a time.”

“Jump the groove,” Staley repeated slowly.

Robert nodded. “Why don’t we take a turn out to where you’ve been living and see what we can do?”

I call in a favour from my friend Moth who owns a junkyard up in the Tombs and borrow a car to take us back up to Staley’s trailer. “Take the Chevette,” he tells me, pointing out an old two-door that’s got more primer on it than it does original paint. “The plates are legit.” Staley comes with me, fusses over Moth’s junkyard dogs like they’re old pals, wins Moth over with a smile and that good nature of hers, but mostly because she can run through instrumental versions of a couple of Boxcar Willie songs. After that, so far as Moth’s concerned, she can do no wrong.

“This guy Robert,” she says when we’re driving back to the bar to pick him up. “How come he’s so fixed on the devil?”

“Well,” I tell her. “The way I heard it, a long time ago he met the devil at a crossroads, made a deal with him. Wanted to be the best player the world’d ever seen. ‘No problem,’ the devil tells him. ‘Just sign here.’

“So Robert signs up. Trouble is, he already had it in him. If he hadn’t been in such a hurry, with a little time and effort on his part, he would’ve got what he wanted and wouldn’t have owed the devil a damn thing.”

Staley’s looking at me, a smile lifting one corner of her mouth.

“You believe that?” she says.

“Why not? I believed you when you told me there was a boy under the skin of that rabbit.”

She gives me a slow nod.

“So what happened?” she asks.

“What? With Robert? Well, when he figured out he’d been duped, he paid the devil back in kind. You can’t take a man’s soul unless he dies, and Robert, he’s figured out a way to live forever.”

I watch Staley’s mouth open, but then she shakes her head and leaves whatever she was going to say unsaid.

“‘Course,” I go on, “it helps to stay out of the devil’s way, so Robert, he keeps himself a low profile.”

Staley shakes her head. “Now that I can’t believe. Anybody hears him play is going to remember it forever.”

“Well, sure. That’s why he doesn’t play out.”

“But-”

“I’m not saying he keeps his music to himself. You’ll find him sitting in on a session from time to time, but mostly he just plays in places like that bar we found him in today. Sits in a corner during the day when the joint’s half empty and makes music those drunks can’t ever forget-though they’re unlikely to remember exactly where it was that they heard it.”

“That’s so sad.”

I shrug. “Maybe. But it keeps the devil at bay.”

Staley’s quiet for awhile, doesn’t say much until we pull into the alley behind the bar.

“Do you believe in the devil?” she asks before we get out of the car.

“Everybody’s got devils.”

“No, I mean a real devil-like in The Bible.”

I sit for a moment and think on that.

“I believe there’s good in the world,” I tell her finally, “so yeah. I guess I’ve got to believe there’s evil, too. Don’t know if it’s the devil, exactly-you know, pointy horns, hooves and tail and all-but I figure that’s as good a name as any other.”

“You afraid of him?”

“Hell, Staley. Some days I’m afraid of everything. Why do you think I spent half my life looking for oblivion in a bottle?”

“What made you change?”

I don’t even have to think about that.

“Malicorne,” I tell her. “Nothing she said or did-just that she was. I guess her going away made me realize that I had a choice: I could either keep living in the bottom of a bottle, and that’s not living at all. Or I could try to experience ordinary life as something filled with beauty and wonder-you know, the way she did. Make everyday something special.”

Staley nods. “That’s not so easy.”

“Hell, no. But it’s surely worth aiming for.”

William drove, with Staley riding shotgun and Robert lounging in the back, playing that old Gibson of his. He worked up a song about their trip, a sleepy blues, cataloguing the sights, tying them together with walking bass lines and bottleneck solos. Staley had made this drive more times than she could count, but all those past trips were getting swallowed by this one. The soundtrack Robert was putting to it would forever be the memory she carried whenever she thought about leaving the city core and driving north up Highway 14, into the hills.

It took them a couple of hours after picking Robert up at the bar to reach that stretch of county road closest to Staley’s trailer. The late afternoon sun was in the west, but still high in the summer sky when Staley had William pull the Chevette over to the side of the road and park.

“Can we just leave the car like this?” William asked.

Staley nodded. “I doubt anybody’s going to mess with it sitting here on the edge of Indian land.”

She got out and stretched, then held the front seat up against the dash so that Robert could climb out of the rear. He kicked at the dirt road with his shoe and smiled as a thin coat of dust settled over the shiny patent leather. Leaning on the hood of the car, he cradled his guitar against his chest and looked out across the fields, gaze tracking the slow circle of a hawk in the distance.

“Lord, but it’s peaceful out here,” he said. “I could listen to this quiet forever.”