The Devil Came Down

© 2004 Lorna Dickson
All rights reserved.

The whole world is cracked and only I can see it. Well, maybe me and Jimmie Simples—

If he could see anything anymore.

God said, "Let there be Jimmie" and there he was, sitting on the front porch of the First Faith Gospel Mission in Greensboro, Missouri. Smoking a cigarette and chewing his matches. His cheeks burned red and his eyes were as bright green as jealousy ... I took one look at him and knew I had to be staring face-down with the Devil.

But I also knew it was too cold for me to go anywhere else. The warm lobby of the post office had closed, every church along the block had already shooed out their faithful, and the bridge under the highway was crowded by run-off from the river. I was an old man but not a stupid one. I knew the night would've got me if it could. That night was one of those black, bottomless nights that had ice-wind teeth and a tidy relationship with Mr. Death himself.

I knew I was being herded. I saw the cracks in the world splintering out all around me in spiderweb pieces and finally congregate around Jimmie Simples.

They sparkled in his teeth like broken glass when he smiled.

"Evening," I said.

The man sneered at me, "That it is, sir. That it is."

I sat beside him on the bench and pulled out a cigarette of my own, "I don't go by sir."

Jimmie lifted his match in salute and then downed it.

It was only after a little talking that I found out his name, then I gave him mine. It slipped out of my mouth before I could do a damned thing about it ... Gilbert. Gilbert Peuse. It's a bad thing to give the wrong kind of man your name. I knew right away I'd made a wrong move, because Jimmie instantly called me Gill. He said it like he was spitting. So, I stared out into the dark night (because it was staring at me) and I asked Jimmie how the Mission was—maybe just to get him to stop spitting my name.

"It ain't too bad. Supper's on in a bit," Jimmie said, telling me just what I wanted to hear, the silver-tongued bastard. "They do an early one and a late one here. The early one's the best ... chicken-fried steak and potatoes, usually, sometimes roast beef ... but if you don't mind cold cuts and soup, I'd say the late supper will do you just fine." Then he giggled and the noise sounded like old rust. "They call it the 'last supper' round here."

"Last supper, eh?" I puffed out smoke and shook my head. But supper was supper, anyway. More than I had at the moment.

Then Jimmie took out one of his wood matches and offered it to me, almost guiltily. I looked at the match, looked at him—the generosity in his eyes was not something a man like myself could ignore, even if it was misplaced. I figured that maybe even the Devil had a bit of charity in him, although where that kind of charity would lead was an altogether different matter.

"They're good," Jimmie said as he held out the match to me. "Good for your stomach, if you got pains."

I couldn't do anything else but take the damn thing.

"Much obliged," I said, and put it in my pocket. I didn't bother to ask Jimmie if he had stomach pains because I figured everybody had pains of one kind or another.

After the prophesized cold cuts and soup, the kindly people of the First Faith Gospel Mission promptly herded everybody into the church for some preachin'. I went along just as easily as the rest of them did; we all figured that we owed a little attention for the food in our bellies, even if it was only a little.

The preacher was a boxy, balding man with cheeks almost as hell-red as Jimmie's. He adjusted his collar for a second, hemming and hawing above the pulpit, waiting for the gathering to be still. The men settling into the pews were just the kind of men I'd expected; sore in the eyes and weak in the knees from all their long years of wandering. A half a dozen men who could've been my reflections, my ghosts.

There was a handful of women, too, only segregated on the left side of the aisle, but they looked twice as haggard as we did. One lady had a long scar chopped out of her cheek, another was swollen with a tired pregnancy. The look of her made my mind betray me, backtracking to old, sore wounds—

She looked like Amanda.

I stared too long at her weary but eternally forgiving face. Thank God the preacher distracted me.

"God is the one who takes our sins," he said in a low, rumbling voice that I knew was going to get louder soon enough. "The Almighty Father will reach down inside you and pluck those sins from your belly as a surgeon cuts out a cancer—you need only humble your mind and ask for the Lord God's holy administrations. As it says in the Book of Jeremy, Chapter 12—"

I caught a few stray glances from the crowd. Quiet but scowling glances.

You see, we'd all been given a Bible at one time or another. There were throngs of righteous fellows always reaching out to the dregs along the outskirts, hoping for one soul to be saved, one more man added to the cause. And if you were given something, you read it—at least those of us who could read. So, I'd read the Bible before, just like every other drifter in the place, and I knew there wasn't no goddamned Book of Jeremy. We all damn well knew it.

But the preacher man kept on preachin, "And the Lord Jesus said, 'Take unto thee the scalpel and knife of your trade, take unto thee the ax or the grinding stone, for there is a sickness upon you, a sickness known as Death, and it resides in that place of you that pains you the most fearfully. Take unto thee the knife, and carve out this Death from your bosom, because in the Kingdom of Eternal Heaven, in the sight of The Father you shall see no death, you shall see no pain; The Father will take these diseased limbs from you and make you pure once more."

I saw a few of the men fidget. Hell, I probably was, too, because I saw the fire rising up in the preacher-man's cheeks when he said diseased limbs. Like it was something out of a dirty magazine. It was then that I realized that I hadn't been paying attention to the cracks in the world at that moment. I squinted and looked—in that way that I look, the way that no one else can—

And I saw that the cracks in the mission weren't like the sparkling, broken-glass cracks that had been outside. No, in this place they were dark, more like crevices really ... long, jagged ravines that I didn't want to see the bottom of. Leering grins full of twisted teeth, like split wood. Like destruction.

The hour had gotten too late for the kindly folks at the mission to let their guests out on the front porch, but there was a backyard. After church, we all got a minute or two to step outside in the fenced-in patch of grass to smoke, to take a breath of merciless night air. Out there they had a rusty swing-set and a Buick put up on cinderblocks. Maybe the church had been meaning to rebuild the car, with the intent of keeping it as a public ride to mass every morning. Maybe they'd been planning to give it away to somebody deserving. I wouldn't know what I'd have done with such a machine. Then, again, I didn't have to worry about it. I was hardly deserving.

Amanda had a Buick, too, but I'd smashed it into the side of the garage one late night after coming back from the bar. That had been the last time I drove. The last time she drove, too, because we'd never gotten ahold of enough money to get a new one. I remember that she'd told me it was fine that she was walking, as long as she was walking with me—

I squeezed my eyes shut for a bit to keep from being reminded.

Along the back porch there were chairs and benches a little more ragged along the edges than the ones the mission folks kept out front. A naked lilac bush sat slumping over the porch rails. I found a seat and lit up my last cigarette. My last one—it would taste the sweetest, for sure, and yet its flavor would stay in my mouth for days as a bitter reminder.

The pack I'd been smoking on I'd gotten after selling plasma in the town down the highway. The place couldn't have been all that reputable because when I offered my blood, they took it. They just needed something, I guess, even if it was the blood of an old booze-hound with the ghosts of needles tiptoeing through the white cells.

Jimmie took a seat by me, again, for reasons that I was beginning to see. None of the other drifters would talk to him. Maybe it was because of Jimmie's habit of match-eating—or maybe it was because the way he was winking when he first slid into the chair. I looked at him for a minute, trying to discern whether or not he was hitting on me, but when the winking didn't stop, I figured it must have just been a tic that I hadn't noticed about him before.

Jimmie noticed me staring (because, of course, the Devil is an attentive bastard) and pointed at his own face with a crooked finger, smiling a crooked smile.

"That's my good eye," he said about the right one, the one that wouldn't stop winking at me.

I knew I shouldn't have asked, but I did. "How's that?"

"Well, you see, my good eye is still the pure one. It doesn't like to look upon impure things. It starts to wink when something impure comes around, like it thinks it can shake the impurity out of it like a piece of sand or something. It just don't know any better."

I nodded.

The mission folks called us back in before I finished the last of my cigarette, which was a blessing, I suppose. I stamped it out carefully on the bottom of my sole, trying not to crinkle the precious tobacco left inside, and then I put it in my mouth and puffed out instead of in. Blew the rest of the smoke out. That way, it wouldn't taste stale when I picked up the rest of it the next day. Then I realized that I'd have a little something to smoke after breakfast ... breakfast and a smoke ... and I smiled. I told myself that I should probably put such thoughts away, otherwise I might start to feel like a rich man.

The lady who called us in was old but still pretty; the skin around her eyes was plump and her hair drizzled down from her church-marm bun in silver-golden curls. "There are baskets by the bathrooms," she said to us. "If you could be so kind as to take one basket and put your clothes in there, that would be wonderful."

The baskets had nightgowns in them. Thin white shifts that had probably been donated by a hospital somewhere around the area. I'd been to missions that made you wear those things. At night, you gave up your clothes and all your possessions and entered the upstairs bedrooms with nothing but those shifts on, looking like a cheaply costumed angel from a Christmas pageant. The mission folks did it so no one could bring in knives or liquor—at least, that's what I'd always figured.

But the church lady proved me wrong. As she watched me eyeing the baskets, she cleared her throat and touched me on the shoulder.

"You'll receive your belongings in the morning," she reassured me. "We only do this to discourage our guests from running off in the middle of the night and getting hurt."

The lady had nothing but benevolence gleaming in her eyes. I couldn't stand it for too long. Her hand was too warm. So I turned away from her and picked up a basket, mumbling a thank you—or at least I think it came out as a thank you. My throat had clamped up so badly that my mumble could have sounded like a million different things, from a croak to a whimper.

Her hand had been like Amanda's. Of course, there was nothing on a womanly form that wasn't like Amanda, because Amanda had been the woman to beat all women; she was them all at once, the very peak of what it meant to be a member of the fairest sex. She had something in her—something that helped her ignore everyone else when they called her a fool for hooking up with me. I don't think she was a fool She just had that something.

Something pure and pink, maybe.

I lay shivering under the blankets ... green Army cotton, stretched over a thin cot on the floor ... and tried not to dream. I knew they'd be coming soon, though. I'd been sober too long. The longer I'd stayed sober, the more the walls of memory were broken down, and then the whole shitstorm would come raging in through my skull like the waters from behind a busted dam. I hadn't had a drink or anything else in the last month—not for the lack of trying. The liquor stores always seemed to close up once I got to them. All the drifters on the train or under the bridge seemed to have cleaned up right before I got there. It was all such a cosmic hiccup.

I heard a shuffling from one of the bunks as I started to fade—

—And the dream came to me in colors, first as the color of Amanda's hair.

She'd had yellow hair and eyes the color of a blue glass bottle. She loved pink—but the pink she loved wasn't the pink of cotton candy or bubblegum. Her pink was an insidious color (the color of the Devil, wasn't it?) pink like a bloody sunset, pallid roses, stained sheets. The color she loved was stained everywhere around me for so many years, I can imagine why my vision ultimately turned to red. So much pink, it just got all red once the light was washed out of it.

Red was a wicked pink. My dreams were streaming with it. Red like fire engines and the side of a pack of Marlboros. Red like the forked tongue of the Devil on his hot throne. Red: crisp apples and blood; cherry-sweet lips and flame; campfire flames and matchstick flames; coal flames and gas stove flames like the burning flame behind Jimmie Simples' cheeks—

"Hey man!" Jimmie yelled a whisper at me as he shook me awake. "Hey, Gil ... wake up."

I swam up out of the red sea and surfaced.

Jimmie was still spitting at me. "Gil ... c'mon, wake up, all right? I wanna show you something outside. It's real neat, I promise."

"What—?" I rubbed my face, "But we can't go outside."

"Sure we can. The doors are locked from the inside—we'll just leave them unlocked until we come back. Bring your blankets."

I saw that Jimmie was standing over me with a grin on his lips, shivering in the thin hospital shift like the cheap pageant angel who'd been left waiting too long for his cue. His eye was winking excitedly again. I wondered if it was winking because of me. Maybe I was a red grain of sand stuck in it, because of all the things I'd done. Impure.

But Jimmie didn't seem to agree with his eye. "You gotta come, Gil."

I sat up from the cot. It hurt my back, anyway. Hurt my head.

"Sure," I told Jimmie.

It's a sad thing to have been found by the Devil again, once you'd spent so long running away from him. But, then, the Devil always gets you sooner or later, you know. Better sell that soul before you lose it on your own ... at least you can say you got something for it.

The Devil had taken a particular interest in me a long time ago, I think, when I was a boy back home. The stained glass windows of the Baptist church had been far too glittering, too pristine for me to leave them alone. My slingshot made them crack and crumble. Those windows died with the sound of tinkling glass bells, and ever since then, the Devil's been looking for me, I think. Sometimes he meets me in the road. Sometimes he nestles down in my veins. Blood is good for the Devil, just as good as it is for Jesus.

I should've known that the Devil was gonna take me to a crossroads.

When we got there I stood in the gravel, looking at the one road and then the other, wondering if that was what Jimmie wanted to show me. It was out behind the neighborhood, so there were no houses except the mission behind us. The ghost-shapes of trees stood out from under the glow of the moon.

I wasn't signing anything in blood, I told myself.

Jimmie sat down in the center of the crossroads, holding his Army-issue blanket at his throat and staring up at the sky. From between the branches, the white-blue disk of the moon glimmered—the stars giggled around the old man's face. I took a minute before I sat down next to him. The place had no cracks. None that I could see anyway—at first glance, it really seemed like the ground underneath me was whole and that the shadows around us weren't really lurking with beasties of all kinds, ready to swallow me down.

Jimmie had a small plastic bag with him ... quite an accomplishment, considering all the good-natured searches we'd had to go through before being allowed up into bed.

"Its nice out here, isn't it?" Jimmie asked.

The cold air tangled up my lungs. "Sure is," I said, coughing.

And we sat there for a while without saying anything.

But then Jimmie showed his true intent. "Say, Gil. I was wondering if you could do something for me."

I stayed quiet. .

"It's just—" Jimmie kept on, "I got this thing, you see? This thing that's been needing done for a long time. And I've done a lot of thinking about it, and I think I've decided that it's not the kind of thing I can do myself."

"What?" I asked—even though I knew I should have said 'no' that very minute.

"It's my eye."

"Okay."

"It needs to be gone. The world's just too much for it, you know."

Jimmie's right eye twittered; I didn't know if it was scared or if it agreed with Jimmie. The eyelid winked and jittered and spasmed furiously. When I looked into it, I couldn't see anything but Jimmie's glassy stare.

"How am I supposed to help you with that?" I asked.

Jimmie shrugged. "You can cut it out for me."

I almost laughed. "I'm not gonna cut your eye out, man."

"Please?"

"No." And I squinted at him, meanly. I wasn't considering this favor for just one minute.

Then Jimmie sighed. "Well, what if I give you something for it?"

At first I thought he meant that he was going to give me his eye, and I scooted back—but then I saw that Jimmie had a hand on the little plastic bag. He held it out to me. His fingers quivered slightly as he did it, like he was about to offer something terribly precious and rare.

I have to admit, I leaned back in closer to him to see what was in the bag. I think I could already smell what was in there.

"I'll need some of it, cuz of the pain, of course, but I'll give you some after, too."

Inside the plastic was more plastic and then a tiny pile of white snow. Only it wasn't snow, I was sure of it; this was the kind of snow that was warm. Sometimes it burned after you cooked it in a spoon or it seared the inside of your brain when you shoved it up your nose. Beautiful and sparkling in the moonlight.

It could have been anything: cocaine, meth, heroin—but that didn't matter. I knew it was chemical. Whatever kind of high that accompanied that white powder would be a shot of instant bliss, a bloodstream hallelujah; a shred of heaven so tasty that even heaven wouldn't allow you to have it. That's what I'd figured a long time ago, when things had hit the bottom. Those chemicals were hubris because they stole little glimpses of the heaven you were promised in church. A heaven I wasn't supposed to see. That why things had gotten so bad. That's why Amanda had died. I'd thumbed my nose at the Big Guy and told him that I was taking the heaven whether he liked it or not. He hadn't liked it.

But really, after saying that kind of thing to the Big Guy, there wasn't much else in the world that gave a man pause.

"Got a needle?" I asked Jimmie.

Jimmie shook his head sadly. "I got a straw."

I nodded and took a gander at the rest of the contents of the little plastic bag. The heaven, the straw cut short, a butter knife. And two matches.

"Gotta caught-or-ize the wound," Jimmie told me.

I nodded again. It seemed by head wouldn't stay still at that moment, it just bobbed up and down, trying to breathe in the drugs, maybe, or trying to shake itself 'no' when I was pulling it to 'yes.'

"Okay then," I said simply. "You want me to use the knife?"

Jimmie sucked in an excited breath. "Oh yes! I got a dull one so it would hurt, you know? Suffering brings you closer to God." And then he stretched out on the gravel like it was an operating table.

I picked up the knife. I looked at the white snow one more time.

What difference would it make? Maybe I'd even be handed a medal for carving out the Devil's eye. My grip tightened on the knife slowly, as I realized my righteousness. Hell yeah. I was doing every soul on earth a favor.

"Make sure you get it all out," Jimmie added before I began. "Be clean about it, you know?"

Oh, I'd be clean.

When I started to lower the knife, Jimmie suddenly twitched. I was going for the wrong one, he told me. It was the right eye. I hadn't even bothered to look. I wasn't thinking about what I was about to do. Hell, I probably could have accidentally taken out his left nostril or his upper lip before Jimmie's protests got to me. In my mind it was snowing ... long, flitting blizzards seeping into the cracks. But I ultimately regained myself well enough to get the butter knife over Jimmie's left eye. Jimmie was saying how I'd have to slide the butter knife under the eyeball and pop it out. If it burst, it would be all that much harder to retrieve the pieces left in his skull. And it needed to be clean. Nothing could be left of the unhallowed body part, lest it torture him still.

I took my other hand and stretched out Jimmie's eyelid. Then I touched the cold metal to the soft, pink underside of his skin. Jimmie whimpered. Wasn't he ready for this? He'd sure seemed ready. Well, he shouldn't have damn well asked me to do it if he wasn't ready, because I was doing it ... I was sliding that flat blade down under the round white of Jimmie's eye ... and I was doing it probably a little faster than I should have. Jimmie started to howl. Trickles of red ran out like tears.

(I'd cried tears like that once, as I'd stood over Amanda's beaten body. Only they weren't blood. It had been all the red in me, draining out in the flow of weeping. Jimmie was good to get rid of his red, even if he needed someone else to help him with it.)

Jimmie screeched suddenly when I tried to pry the eye out, but then he stopped just as quickly as he'd started. The eye didn't go anywhere ... it didn't go bouncing out into the gravel like a rubber ball, like I'd expected. It just kind of flopped suddenly. Not even a real burst, but a flop. It caved in on itself. I had pink goo all over my hands and I lifted up the knife. The skin of Jimmie's eye stuck to the end of the knife like wet toilet paper. I shook it off onto the ground and then looked at Jimmie.

Something must have happened while I'd been discarding the eye, because Jimmie's face was splattered. Speckles of black stuff shimmered in the moonlight, all over his chin and his forehead and his cheeks. And his cheeks had gone pale. No more fire. No more burning Devil underneath his match-eating grin.

I picked up the bag ... now I was shivering, I couldn't seem to get a grip on my own fingers ... and I lifted the whole thing up to my face.

Black was a wicked red, for sure.

I laid there in the gravel, floating in the black. It swallowed me up and took away—it was like I'd just slipped through a crack in the world. Lazily tiptoeing over the edge, just like Amanda had.

The black on Jimmie's cheeks made me think of the black that had been speckled on Amanda, only then it had been mixed with bloody purple blossoms. She'd been so pretty like that. Her last breath had the sound of glass bells and shattered stained glass windows. My veins had burned at the time. My veins burned for the longest time, as if something was trying to crawl through them, crawl out maybe—or maybe it was fire and brimstone trying to get in. I had no idea. My hands were black, my face was speckled too.

Some part of me wanted to think that I'd opened up that crack in the world, the one that Amanda had fallen through, but I couldn't believe it. She'd brought it on herself. She'd been the Devil. All that pink, all that purity could've only been a front; lies to keep me distracted, to keep me off my game. There was no such thing as purity. It couldn't have existed. Not for me.

But no matter how many times I killed the Devil, he just kept coming back.

I threw off the blanket and stood up from the gravel, tasting the stray heaven on my upper lip. Yes, I looked like an angel at that moment, for sure. Standing there in the glow of the moon, hovering above the dead Jimmie-Devil, glowing with my angel shift, the heaven cascading off my face in the form of a halo. An angel.

With my new, clear vision I could see the cracks that had been hiding from me in this place, under the crossroads and over the moon, and the cracks started to swim toward me. They snaked up with their grinning ravine mouths and their broken glass sparkling. I raised my hands out to meet them. They knew, as I did, that this wasn't the last Devil I was going to have to kill. Oh, no, they whispered to me, he just keeps coming back. Then they curled up around my ears and they giggled nervously—he'll just keep coming back.

When he did, I'd be ready.

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