Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

“So what about a true love?”

“Well, now,” Staley said. “Seems to me true love’s something that comes to you, not something you can take or arrange.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“That’d be sad, but you make do. I don’t know how other folks get by, but I’ve got my music. I’ve got my friends.”

The stranger regarded her with an odd, frustrated look.

“You can’t tell me there’s nothing you don’t have a yearning for,” he said. “Everybody wants for something.”

“You mean for myself, or in general, like for there to be no more hurt in the world or the like?”

“For yourself,” he said.

Staley shook her head. “Nothing I can’t wait for it to find me in its own good time.” She put her fiddle up under her chin. “So what do you want to play?”

But the stranger pulled his string strap back over his head and started to put his guitar away.

“What’s the matter?” Staley asked. “We don’t need some silly contest just to play a few tunes.”

The stranger wouldn’t look at her.

“I’ve kind of lost my appetite for music,” he said, snapping closed the clasps on his case.

He stood up, his gaze finally meeting hers, and she saw something else in those clear blue eyes of his, a dark storm of anger, but a hurting, too. A loneliness that seemed so out of place, given his easy-going manner. A man like him, he should be friends with everyone he met, she’d thought. Except…

“I know who you are,” she said.

She didn’t know how she knew, but it came to her, like a gauze slipping from in front of her eyes, like she’d suddenly shucked the dreamy quality of the otherworld and could see true once more.

“You don’t look nothing like what I expected,” she added.

“Yeah, well, you’ve had your fun. Now let me be.”

But something her grandmother had told her once came back to her. “I tell you,” she’d said. “If I was ever to meet the devil, I’d kill him with kindness. That’s the one thing old Lucifer can’t stand.”

Staley grinned, remembering.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Don’t go off all mad.”

The devil glared at her.

“Or at least let me give you that kiss before you go.”

He actually backed away from her at that.

“What?” Staley asked. “Suddenly you don’t fancy me anymore?”

“You put up a good front,” he said. “I didn’t make you for such an accomplished liar.”

Staley shook her head. “I never lied to you. I really am happy with things the way they are. And anything I don’t have, I don’t mind waiting on.”

The devil spat on the grass at her feet, turned once around, and was gone, vanishing with a small whuft of displaced air.

That’s your best parting shot? Staley wanted to ask, but decided to leave well enough alone. She gave her surroundings a last look, then started up fiddling again, playing herself back into the green of summer where she’d left her friends.

Robert’s pretty impressed when Staley just steps out of that invisible door, calm as you please. We heard the fiddling first. It sounded like it was coming from someplace on the far side of forever, but getting closer by the moment, and then there she was, standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at us. Robert’s even more impressed when she tells us about how she handled the devil.

After putting her fiddle away, she boiled up some water on a Coleman stove and made us up a pot of herbal tea. We take it out through the woods in porcelain mugs, heading up to the top of the field overlooking the county road. The car’s still there. The sun’s going down now, putting on quite a show, and the tea’s better than I thought it would be. Got mint in it, some kind of fruit.

“So how do I stop this from happening again?” Staley asks.

“Figure out what your music’s all about,” Robert tells her. “And take responsibility for it. Dig deep and find what’s hiding behind the trees-you know, in the shadows where you can’t exactly see things, you can only sense them-and always pay attention. It’s up to you what you let out into the light.”

“Is that what you do?”

Robert nodded. “‘Course it’s different for me, because we’re different people. My music’s about enduring. Perseverance. That’s all the blues is ever about.”

“What about hope?”

Robert smiled. “What do you think keeps perseverance alive?”

“Amen,” I say.

After a moment, Staley smiles. We all clink our porcelain mugs together and drink a toast to that.

Nikki opened the refrigerator. There was nothing in there but a couple of shriveled oranges and three gallons of tap water. She slammed it closed. Summer was supposed to be the best part of the year, but so far Nikki’s summer sucked. It sucked hard. It sucked like a vacuum that got hold of the drapes.

Her pit bull, Boo, whined and scraped at the door, etching new lines into the frayed wood. Nikki clipped on his leash. She knew she should trim his nails. They frayed the nylon of his collar and gouged the door, but when she tried to cut them, he cried like a baby. Nikki figured he’d had enough pain in his life and left his nails long.

“Come on, Boo,” she said as she led him out the front door of the trailer. The air outside shimmered with heat and the air conditioner chugged away in the window, dribbling water down the aluminum siding.

Lifting the lid of the rusty mailbox, Nikki pulled out a handful of circulars and bills. There, among them, she found a stale half-bagel with the words “Butter me!” written on it in gel pen and the crumbly surface stamped with half a dozen stamps. She sighed. Renee’s crazy postcards had stopped making her laugh.

Boo hopped down the cement steps gingerly, paws smearing sour cherry tree pulp and staining his feet purple. He paused when he hit their tiny patch of sun-withered lawn to lick one of the hairless scars along his back.

“Come on. I have to get ready for work.” Nikki gave his collar a sharp tug.

He yelped and she felt instantly terrible. He’d put on some weight since she’d found him, but he still was pretty easily freaked. She leaned down to pat the solid warmth of his back. His tail started going and he turned his massive face and licked her cheek.

Of course that was the moment her neighbor, Trevor, drove up in his gleaming black truck. He parked in front of his trailer and hopped out, the plastic connective tissue of a six-pack threaded between his fingers. She admired the way muscles on his back moved as he walked to the door of his place, making the raven tattoo on his shoulder ripple.

“Hey,” she called, pushing Boo’s wet face away and standing up. Why did Trevor pick this moment to be around, when she was covered in dog drool, hair in tangles, wearing her brother’s gi-normous t-shirt? Even the thong on one of her flip-flops had ripped out so she shuffled to keep the sole on.

The dog raised his leg and pissed on a dandelion just as Trevor turned around and gave her a negligent half-wave.

Boo rooted around for a few minutes more and then Nikki tugged him inside. She pulled on a pair of low-slung orange pants and a black t-shirt with the outline of a daschund on it. Busy thinking of Trevor, she stepped onto the asphalt of the self-service car wash-almost to the bus stop-before she realized she still wore her broken flip-flops.

Sighing, she started to wade through the streams of antifreeze-green cleanser and gobs of snowy foam bubbles. They mixed with the sour cherry spatter that fell from the trees to make the summer smell like a chemical plant of rotten fruit.

There were only a couple of people waiting on the bench, the stink of exhaust from the highway not appearing to bother them one bit. Two women with oversized glasses were chatting away, their curled hair wilting in the heat. An elderly man in a black-and-white hound’s tooth suit leaned on a cane and grinned when she got closer.