Tim Pratt: Sympathy for the Devil

He took the next exit and pulled into the parking lot of a large truck stop, stopping far from the swarms of eighteen wheelers. He got out and popped the hood.

“You guys should check out the truck stop,” he said. “Buy a magazine or something.” In the few weeks she’d known Secrest, she’d seen him like this several times. Silent, focused, just like solving a problem in math class. She hated it when he acted this way, and stalked off to find the restroom.

When she returned, he was sitting in the driver’s seat, rubbing his hands with an antiseptic wipe.

“What’s the verdict?”

“Unknown. I checked the fuses, the drive belt to the compressor, the wires to the compressor… nothing looks broken. I’ll have to take it to the shop when we get back to Wilmington. You don’t have a nail brush in your purse, do you?”

“A what?”

“A nail brush, for cleaning under your fingernails. Never mind.”

“Don’t forget me,” the Devil said, throwing open the back door. He had a large plastic bag in his hand. Secrest pulled back onto the road and turned down the entrance ramp. The Devil pulled out a packaged apple pie, a can of lemonade, and a copy of Barely Legal magazine and set them on the seat next to him. Secrest glanced back at the Devil in the rearview as he sped up to enter the stream of traffic.

“What have you got back there?”

“Pie and a drink. Want some?”

“No, I want you to put them away. You’re going to get the back seat all dirty.”

The Devil folded down one of the rear seats to get into the hatch compartment.

“What are you doing?” asked Secrest, staring up into the rearview. The car drifted lazily into the path of a Cadillac in the center lane until Secrest looked down from the mirror and swerved back. She turned to look at what was going on and got a faceful of baggy pink Devil butt.

The Devil didn’t respond; he just continued rummaging. Finally he turned and gave a satisfied sigh. He had a roll of duct tape from Secrest’s emergency kit, and he zipped off a long piece. Starting at the front of the floorboards in the back seat, he fixed the tape to the carpet, rolled it up over the transmission hump and over to the other side, carefully bisecting the cabin. A gleaming silver snake guarding the back seat of the car.

“I get to be dirty on this side,” he said. “You can do whatever you want up there.” Then he picked up his copy of Barely Legal and started thumbing through it, holding the magazine up so it covered his face.

Secrest didn’t argue. She looked over at him and noticed he was preoccupied with other matters. Secrest’s hands, still dirty from poking around in the engine compartment, had stained the pristine blue plastic of the steering wheel, and he rubbed at these stains as he drove along.

She could see the speedometer from her seat, and he was over the speed limit, inching up past 70 steadily. He’d also started hanging out in the middle lane, not returning immediately to the safety of the right lane after he passed someone. Traffic thinned out as the land changed from flat plains to rolling hills, but he still stayed in the middle lane. Plenty of folks drove ten miles over the speed limit. That was standard. Secrest probably attracted more attention the way he normally drove-folks were always zooming up behind him in the right lane, cursing at him because he had the gall to do the speed limit. Now he was acting more like a normal driver-breaking the speed limit, changing lanes.

The Devil sat silently on the hump in the middle of the back seat, concentrating on the road ahead. The pie wrapper and empty can rolled around on the seat next to him. She watched the speedometer inch its way up. At 75 Secrest suddenly started to pull over through the empty right lane into the emergency lane.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Then she craned her head around just in time to catch the first blips of the siren from the trooper’s car. Blue lights flashed from the dash of the unmarked black sedan.

The Devil leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “Be cool, I’ll handle this,” he said.

“Goddamn!” she said, and this curse invoked a daydream. In her daydream, she keeps saying “Goddamn!” over and over. Secrest is busy with slowing down, putting his hazard lights on, and stopping in the emergency lane. The Devil is not in her daydream. She pops the door handle and jumps out while he’s still rolling to a stop, losing her footing and scraping her knees and elbows against the pavement as she rolls to the grassy shoulder. She stands up, starts running into the trees along the side of the road. As she goes, she reaches up under her skirt and peels the Ziploc from her panties, but it’s already broken open. Little white packets fly through the air in all directions. They break open too, and it’s snowing as she charges off into the woods. The trooper chases her, and just as the last packet flies from her fingertips, he tackles her. She starts to cry.

Outside of her daydream, the state trooper asked Secrest for his license and registration. He retrieved these from the glove compartment, where they were stacked on top of a pile of oil change receipts and maps. The trooper carefully watched Secrest’s hand, inches away from her drug-laden crotch, as he did this. She was sitting on her own hands.

“Ma’am, could you please move your hands to where I can see them?”

She slid her hands out and placed them flat on top of her thighs.

The trooper took the registration certificate and Secrest’s license, but he kept glancing back and forth from them to her hands.

“Nice tattoo, isn’t it, officer?” the Devil said, pointing to the smeared letters on her knuckles. The trooper slid his mirrored sunglasses a fraction and peered into the back seat of the car, staring the Devil in the eye.

“Not really. You should see the tattoos my Amy got the minute she went off to the college. I won’t even get into the piercings.”

“Kids these days…” said the Devil.

“Yep. What are you gonna do?” The trooper pushed his sunglasses back up on his nose and straightened up. “Well, anyway, here’s your paperwork. Try to watch your speed out there, now.” He smiled and handed the cards back to Secrest.

They stopped for gas near Morganton. There was a Phillips 66 there.

“The mother road,” Secrest said.

“Last section decommissioned in 1984, and now all we have are these lousy gas stations,” said the Devil.

“Ooh, 1984. Doubleplusungood,” Secrest said.

“I’ll pump,” the Devil said. “Premium or regular?”

“Doubleplusregular.”

Inside, Secrest got a large bottle of spring water, another packet of travel-size tissues, and breath mints. She stared at the array of snacks and the jeweled colors of the bottles of soda, trying to decide. Behind the counter, a teenage boy tuned a banjo, twanging away on the strings while fiddling with the tuning pegs.

It took her a long time to decide to forgo snacks altogether, and it took the teenager a long time to tune the banjo. She tried to think of a joke about Deliverance, but couldn’t. Secrest went up to pay, and she headed for the door.

She went around to the side of the building to the ladies’ room. The lock was busted. She sat to pee, carefully maintaining the position of the payload in her underwear. The door swung open and the Devil walked in.

“You know, I’ve been wanting to get into your panties ever since we met.”

“Get the hell out of here, or I’ll start screaming,” she said.

“Oh, that’s a funny one,” the Devil said. “But I’m staying right here. You owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything.” She was trying to remember if she had anything sharp in her purse.

“Of course you do. Why do you think that cop didn’t haul your ass out of the car? You have me to thank for that, for the fact that all that shit in your panties is intact, and for the fact that you’re not rotting in one of their cages right about now.”