Tim Pratt: Sympathy for the Devil

Once they made it north out of Wilmington, the drive was uneventful. He kept the needle exactly on 65, even though the Honda didn’t have cruise control. He stayed in the rightmost lane except when passing the occasional grandma who wasn’t doing the speed limit. After he had recounted some current events he’d gleaned from the paper, they dug into the plastic case of mix tapes he had stashed under his seat. She nixed the jazz, and he vetoed the country tapes she’d brought along as too depressing, so they compromised and listened to some forties bluegrass he’d taped especially for the trip.

“You’re going to be hearing a lot of this when you’re in grad school in the mountains,” he said.

She was bored before they even hit Burgaw, and her sketchpad was in the hatchback. She pawed the dash for the Sharpie that she’d left there, then switched to the glovebox where she found it living in parallel with a tire gauge and a McDonald’s coffee stirrer. She carefully lettered WWSD on the knuckles of her left hand.

What Would Satan Do? Satan would not screw around, that’s for sure. Satan would have no trouble hauling some drugs to the mountains. She flipped her hand over and stared at it, fingers down. Upside down, because the d was malformed, it looked like OSMM. Oh Such Magnificent Miracles. Ontological Secrets Mystify Millions. Other Saviors Make Mistakes.

In Newton Grove, she demanded a pee break, and she recovered her sketchpad from the hatch. Just past Raleigh, they left the interstate and found the Devil’s Stomping Ground with few problems, even though there was only a single sign. She had imagined there’d be more to it, a visitor’s center or something, at least a parking lot. Instead there was a metal sign that had been blasted with a shotgun more than once, and a dirt trail. He slowed the Honda and pulled off onto the grassy shoulder. Traffic was light on the state road, just the occasional overloaded pickup swooshing by on the way to Bear Creek and Bennett and further west to Whynot. He pulled his camera from the duffel bag, checked that all the car doors were locked, and led the way down the trail into the woods. It was just after noon on a cloudy day, and the air smelled thickly of pine resin. Squirrels chased each other from tree to tree, chattering and shrieking.

It was only two hundred yards to the clearing. The trees opened up onto a circle about forty feet across. The circle was covered in short, wiry grass, but as the guidebook had said, none grew along the outer edge. The clearing was ringed by a dirt path. Nothing grew there, but the path was not empty. It was strewn with litter: smashed beer bottles, cigarette butts, and shredded pages from hunting and porno magazines were all ground into the dust. These were not the strangest things on the path, though.

The strangest thing on the path was the Devil. He was marching around the path, counter-clockwise; just then he was directly across the clearing from them. They stood and waited for him to walk around to their side.

The Devil was rail-thin, wearing a too-large red union suit that had long since faded to pink. It draped over his caved-in chest in front and bagged down almost to his knees in the seat. A tattered red bath towel was tied around his neck, serving as a cape. He wore muddy red suede shoes that looked like they’d been part of a Christmas elf costume. His black hair was tousled from the wind, swooping back on the sides but sticking straight up on the top of his head. His cheeks bore the pockmarks of acne scars; above them, he wore gold Elvis Presley-style sunglasses. His downcast eyes seemed to be focusing on the black hairs sprouting from his chin and upper lip, too sparse to merit being called a goatee.

“This must be the place,” she said.

The Devil approached, neither quickening nor slowing his pace. She could tell that this was unnerving Secrest a bit. Whenever he was nervous, he sniffed, and that was what he was doing. Sniffing.

“You smell something?” asked the Devil, pushing his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Fire and/or brimstone, perhaps?” The Devil held up both hands and waggled them. His fingers were covered in black grime.

Secrest just stood still, but she leaned over and smelled the Devil’s hand.

“Motor oil!” she pronounced. The Devil reeked of motor oil and rancid sweat masked by cheap aftershave. “Did your car break down?”

“I don’t know nothing about any car,” the Devil said. “All I know about is various plots involving souls, and about trying to keep anything fresh or green or good out of this path. But speaking of cars, if you’re heading west on I-40, can I catch a ride with y’all?”

“Uh, no,” Secrest said, then he turned to her. “Come on, let’s go. There’s nothing to see here.” He sniffed again.

“Nothing to see?” cried the Devil. “Look at this circle! You see how clean it is? You know how long it took me to fix this place up?”

“Actually, it’s filthy,” Secrest said, poking his toe at the shattered remains of a whiskey bottle, grinding the clear glass into a candy bar wrapper beneath.

The Devil paused and glanced down to either side.

“Well, you should’ve seen it a while back.”

Secrest turned to leave, tugging gently at her sleeve. She followed but said, “C’mon, I’ve picked up tons of hitchhikers in my time, and I’ve never been messed with. Besides, there’s two of us, and he’s a scrawny little dude.”

“A scrawny little schizophrenic.”

“He’s funny. Live a little, give the guy a ride. You’ve read On the Road, right?”

“Yes. The Subterraneans was better.” Secrest hesitated, as if reconsidering, which gave the Devil time to creep up right behind them.

“Stay on the path!” the Devil said, smiling. “Forward, march!”

Secrest sighed and turned back toward the path to the car. They marched along for a few more steps, and then he suddenly reached down, picked up a handful of dirt, then spun and hurled it at the Devil.

The Devil sputtered and threw his hands up far too late to keep from getting pelted with dirt and gravel.

“Go away!” Secrest said. He looked like he was trying to shoo a particularly ferocious dog.

“What did you do that for? You’ve ruined my outfit.”

She walked over and helped brush the dirt off. “C’mon, now you’ve got to give him a ride.” The Devil looked down at her hand and saw the letters there.

“Ah, yep, what would Satan do? Satan would catch a ride with you fine folks, that’s what he’d do. Much obliged.”

From there back to the interstate the Devil acted as a chatty tour guide, pointing out abandoned gold mines and Indian mounds along the way. Secrest had the windows down, so the Devil had to shout over the wind blowing through the cabin of the Honda. Secrest wouldn’t turn on the AC until he hit the interstate. “It’s not efficient to operate the air conditioning until you’re cruising at highway speeds,” he had told her. That was fine with her; the wind helped to blow some of the stink off of the Devil.

A highway sign showed that they were twenty-five miles out of Winston-Salem. “ Camel City coming up,” the Devil said, keeping up his patter.

“Yeah, today we’ve rolled through Oak City, the Bull City, the Gate City, all the fabulous trucker cities of North Carolina,” Secrest replied. “What’s the nickname for Asheville?”

“ Ash City,” said the Devil.

“Fair enough,” Secrest said.

They got back on the interstate near Greensboro, and Secrest rolled up all the power windows. When he punched the AC button on the dash, though, nothing happened. The little blue led failed to light. Secrest punched the button over and over, but no cool air came out. He sniffed and rolled down all of the windows again.