ANDY DUNCAN
“My name is Pearleen Sunday, and this is the story of how I—”
Hold up! Hold up right there! This is my story, Sunday, and I’ll tell it my own way.
“The stories you tell, Petey Wheatstraw, aren’t fit for mixed company, or for any decent folk.”
My, my, my, aren’t we particular. You tell your stories your way, to the company you please, and I’ll tell mine mine, to mine. And if this story ain’t mine, why, then, no story is. After all, I was the one did all the work.
“Fine. Tell it, then. But don’t stretch it out of all recognition, the way you do, with whales in ponds, and farmer’s daughters, and talking dogs that walk into bars, and such as that. Stick to the facts, to the whats and the whos and the wheres.”
I’ll stick to something, all right, if you don’t hush. Hmm, well, let’s see. Where to start? You got to admit, there’s more options this go-round than usual.
“You could start where I come in.”
Yes, and then it’d be your story, wouldn’t it? Right back where we started. No, I think I better start it as far away from you as I can get. And since you grew up in a dime museum in Chattanooga, without even the cost of admission to look at yourself, I reckon my story starts in the upstairs parlor of the finest mansion in New Orleans. Yes, ma’am. Who’s that brownest-eyed, tallest, finest-looking man, in a tailored suit of Eye-talian cloth that fits him like a queen fits a flush, with a Cuban thigh-rolled cigar in one hand and a snifter of muscadine brandy in the other, and posed like he was a framed work of art in the big leaded glass window of the upstairs master bedroom, where he looks down and down and farther down yet upon St. Charles Avenue, the main street of the Gulf, where the streetcars are more posh than the Ritz, and even the panhandlers are ex-mayors who have moved up in the world? Why, it’s Petey Wheatstraw, that’s who! With the most beautiful Frenchwoman in the Crescent City on his arm…
“Baby, please!” said Petey Wheatstraw. “Believe me, I understand the fascination, but don’t make me slosh my brandy.”
“Oh, mon amour, how can you be so calm, when my lover Alcide will be at the door à tout moment maintenant, his anger hot, his swordsteel cold and sure?”
Petey barked what he was pretty sure was a mocking and superior laugh and gulped the last of his brandy with his best approximation of insouciance, which was perhaps the least of the words he had learned from Madeline. “I ain’t studying about old Al,” he said, and hurled his depleted snifter into the fireplace with a most satisfying smash. The remains of five snifters now glittered beneath the grate like the ashes of the gods; he’d soon have to order another set. With the hand now free, he caressed Madeline’s cheek, her tear-streaked powder wet and granular on his fingertips, and said: “Al ain’t got nothing on Petey. Who’s Al’s father-in-law, huh? I ask you.” He softly kissed the tip of her nose, the hand-daubed beauty mark on her left cheek, the covered-up actual beauty mark on her right cheek. “Hold this,” Petey said, and handed her the cigar, on which she took a deep drag while he kissed her neck more intensely, up and down. “Besides which,” he added, between kisses, “any fool gets between me and my favorite stereotypical nineteenth-century Louisiana mistress, why, that’s one fool gone get his gumbo separated from his ya-ya, don’t you worry your mon cher about that.”
“Oh, Petey!” Madeline gasped in ecstatic surrender, and pressed herself against—
Petey, you are stretching your story already. Besides, this ain’t no under-the-counter book.
Oh, fine then! I reckon we’ll just skip to the wild-eyed, sword-wielding Creole kicking down the boudoir door.
“Do not defy me, Wheatstraw!” cried Alcide. He slashed a pornographic arras for emphasis. “I will free Madeline from your loathsome clutches, or die in the attempt.”
“Cool your jets, Al,” said a lounging Petey, his Eye-talian loafers crossed atop the writing desk. “If you’d been here ten minutes ago…and at half past noon…and at eight and eight-thirty this morning…why, you’d have seen my clutches ain’t so loathsome to the lady after all.”
“Please, Alcide, leave us!” cried Madeline, who clutched a drape around herself to emphasize her nakedness. “You do not know this one’s power. He will kill us both!”
Alcide ignored her to advance on Petey. His poised sword gleamed. “I warn you for the last time, you fiend! Stand and fight!”
In reply, Petey lifted one hand to his lips and blew a loud raspberry.
Alcide snarled and lunged, put his sword through the back of the chair where Petey had been a moment before. Only a wisp of smoke and a sulfurous stench remained. Alcide slid the blade from the upholstery. A plume of cotton came with it.
“I’d be faster, if not for all the hard liquor and sex,” said Petey, from over his shoulder. Alcide whirled and slashed the air where Petey had been.
“I expected more from a hero of folklore,” said Petey, who now was overhead, lying on the ceiling. Alcide leaped and stabbed the spot where Petey had been. Plaster dust speckled his shoulders as he landed on his feet. He looked about, wild-eyed.
“How long before you give up?” asked Petey, who now sat cross-legged atop the sideboard.
The answer, it turned out, was twenty minutes, after which Alcide gasped with exhaustion, the room’s furnishings were wrecked, and the miasma of brimstone was so thick that Madeline, having long since dressed and done her makeup, flung open the windows to let some of it escape.
“Face facts, Al,” said Petey, between bites of banana. “Your lady has traded up.”
“Impossible,” gasped Alcide, with the French pronunciation.
Madeline turned from the windows and dusted her palms together. “Allez-vous, Alcide,” she said. “Amscray.” She made shooing motions. “Beat it.”
“You even speak like him,” Alcide said, his lip curled in disgust. “He has eaten your soul, this filth, this demon from Hell.”
Madeline shrugged. “I kinda like him,” she said.
With his last strength, Alcide lunged once more. He ran Madeline through the heart with his sword and killed her instantly. Before she even could slump to the ground, Alcide, too, was dead, Petey having torn off his head.
“That was pretty extreme!” cried Petey. He regarded his bloody hands with horror. “And what am I doing up here?”
Always afraid of heights, Petey grabbed at a nearby chimney and hung on for dear life. His Eye-talian shoes scuffled for purchase on the steeply pitched roof.
Far below, on the sidewalk in front of the building that should have been Petey’s Garden District home, stood a young woman in black tights and Goth makeup, surrounded by a group of people in shorts and T-shirts. They drank from filtered water bottles. They posed beneath selfie sticks. Petey had never heard of selfie sticks, but even in his terror, he knew instantly what they were.
“Hey!” he yelled. “I’m up here! Someone help me!” But the tour group was oblivious.
“This hotel,” said the costumed guide, “marks the site of what was once, in the nineteenth century, the finest private home in New Orleans. According to legend, it was so fine that the Devil himself made it his home, and took a local woman for his lover. But the Devil had a human rival for Madeline’s affections, a local man, and one night, the triangle erupted in terrible violence. The Devil killed his rival and his faithless lover, dragged their bodies to the roof beneath the full moon, and devoured them.”
“Ewww,” Petey said, nose wrinkled.
“From that night on,” continued the guide, “the Devil was trapped on the roof, and the home was uninhabitable.” She stumbled, slightly, on the word uninhabitable. It took her two tries. “Every night, phantom figures reenacted that awful confrontation from long ago. Finally, the so-called Devil’s Mansion was razed to the ground. Today the site is occupied by one of our finest small hotels. Suites start at one hundred and nine dollars, plus taxes and fees, though some restrictions apply. And now, let’s proceed to the next stop on our Bloody New Orleans Tour of Horror!”
As the crowd dispersed, she looked up and met Petey’s gaze. She was Madeline, beauty mark and all. She winked at Petey, the nineteenth-century chimney he clutched dissipated, and he slid screaming off the edge of the twenty-first-century roof, and into space.
Next thing he knew, he stood in the bedroom window again, as the powdered and petticoated Madeline tugged on his arm.
“Oh, mon amour,” she said. “How can you be so calm?”
“How, indeed?” Petey murmured. It was less a reply than a response, involuntary. He marveled at his hands so clean, his floor so level and trustworthy, his companion so vibrant and alive.
Then that jerk Alcide burst in with his sword, and it all happened again.
Petey was aware, throughout, that this sequence of events had happened before, but awareness was not agency. Unable to break free of the loop, he went through the motions of the scene already scripted: avoid, taunt, avoid, taunt, stab, rip, kill, clutch the chimney, be ignored. But this time, he was struck anew by the tour guide’s words:
“Every night, phantom figures reenacted that awful confrontation from long ago.”
“Phantom figures, my ass!” Petey cried. “Those phantoms are me! I mean, us!”
Then he fell again, screaming, and was back in the bedroom again—and so forth, as before.
This happened again.
And again.
And again.
And just as Petey began to realize this was it, this was his life from now on, he fell off the roof and landed in church.
“Sometimes he is called the Evil One, for he is evil in himself, and tempts us to evil.”
“Amen, brother!” the people cried. “Praise Jesus!”
Disoriented and dizzy, Petey now stood in sweltering heat in the back of a small, high-ceilinged, plainly adorned sanctuary. He was pressed on all sides by a crowd of people, their attention riveted on the spectacularly cross-eyed man in the pulpit at the front of the room. Every pew was crammed, every square foot of aisle and vestibule filled by men in knee breeches and women in silks and stays, and all in powdered wigs like an unbroken cloud layer throughout the room. Petey, too, was dressed in this fashion, as was the preacher. Though he did not shout, the cross-eyed man’s voice reached everyone’s ears, as though he spoke individually to each person present. Their natural rivalries aside, Petey sort of admired this. Interjections and affirmations in the crowd were constant, and here and there hands were raised, palms out, as if in supplication, but none of this detracted from the preacher’s inexorably friendly voice.
“Sometimes he is known as the Prince of the Power of the Air, for in the air he doth abide, chiefly, and through the whole world; and all that are not born of God are said to lie in him.”
As he began to recover himself, Petey realized that just as he previously recognized his St. Charles Avenue mansion in New Orleans and knew himself to be in the nineteenth century, so here he understood himself to be in the Congregational Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a century earlier, when New England was still subject to the king. He also saw that he was the only person in the room of African descent, though no one paid him the slightest attention. He was indifferent to the former, but exceedingly vexed by the latter.
“Aye, sisters and brothers, Paul’s words in the second chapter, eleventh verse, of Second Corinthians, are true unto this day: ‘We are not ignorant of his devices.’ No, indeed, my friends. Satan’s devices are known to us. We know that he is an enemy to God and to goodness. He is a hater of all truth. He is full of malice, full of envy, full of revenge. For what other motives could induce him to molest the innocents in Paradise?”
He paused to draw breath, at which point a second voice rang out from the crowd:
“Yeah, well, that’s, like, your opinion, preacher.”
Everyone in the room gasped and moaned in dismay and cast about to see who had spoken, except for the two who knew: Petey, who had spoken the words, and the preacher, who stared straight at him as he did it.
Aglow with delirious indignation, the preacher jabbed a finger at Petey, as if to spear him to the back wall. “I hear you, and I see you, sir,” he cried. “I know you who interrupt the Lord’s word, here in the Lord’s house!”
“Frankly, I’ve seen nicer houses,” Petey said. He sauntered forward in the space that opened up as horrified brethren rushed to distance themselves; he was pleased to see sparks fly up from his every footfall, a nice effect. “And while I am the first to admit my father-in-law has some genuine anger issues, and his impulse control is not so great, nevertheless, I think these good people deserve to hear more of a—what’s the phrase?—a fair and balanced presentation.”
“You dare to challenge me, fiend? I, George Whitefield, in the Colonies, in the employ of the Lord God Almighty? What claim have you on this pulpit, sirrah?”
“I’ll wrestle you for it,” Petey replied—and realized, as he said it, that this confrontation, too, was scripted, just as the one with Alcide had been; that he likewise was enjoying it; that it likewise would not end well.
“Done!” roared Whitefield, who seemed to have grown two feet taller and a foot wider during their exchange. Petey, too, felt larger and stronger. He tested this, as the preacher leaped an improbable distance out of the pulpit, by seizing the nearest pew-end and lifting the long oaken bench one-handed, swinging it as a child would aim a slat at a pinecone.
“You want a piece of me, sucker?” Petey taunted.
He threw the pew at the head of the preacher, who ducked, barreled forward, and head-butted Petey in the stomach.
In the years to come, a population five times that of the colony of Massachusetts would claim to have been present in the small church to see Preacher Whitefield fight the Devil (for so they fully assumed the black man to be), but in fact it was only a couple of hundred people who screamed and rushed into the churchyard, and another couple of hundred townsfolk who came running, abandoning their less-than-sanctified Sunday mornings to see what all the fuss was about. They watched deliriously as Whitefield and Petey Wheatstraw (who was not, of course, the Devil, not even the Devil’s blood kin, having married in) fought their way out of the church, across the yard, three times around the grounds (because three, in these matters, is a sort of the rule), then up the outside wall (a nice trick, that), and into the cupola atop the church steeple, where the bell rang out whenever Petey’s head, or the preacher’s head, hit it. BONG! BONG! BONG! People ran from Salem, from Lawrence, even from Lynn—Lynn, the City of Sin—thinking all Ipswich had burned down, and were pleased to find an even better show under way than that. No one actually wagered against the preacher—that would have been blasphemy—but a good bit of money did change hands based on how, exactly, Goodman Whitefield would prevail, and when. So some in the crowd were more exultant than others when the preacher finally lifted a dazed Petey over his head atop the steeple, yelled, “He’s all yours, Lord!” and flung him into space.
This fall, to Petey, seemed much slower than the one from the Devil’s Mansion rooftop had been. He had leisure to admire the grass-rippling countryside all around, to smell a hint of sweet woodruff on the breeze, to marvel that his wig had not fallen off, to hear the unmistakable sound of his father-in-law’s cackle, and to vow to kick the old man’s ass from West Hell to Ginny Gall, if Petey ever struggled free of this trap to which, he now knew, Old Scratch had consigned him.
Then Petey landed feetfirst on a granite outcrop and rebounded high into the air, as if launched from a trampoline at a circus, or a cannon at a dime museum. Thus propelled, he just kept on, higher and higher, and dwindled into a tiny spot in the sky like a cinder.
The townsfolk congratulated the preacher on his, i.e., God’s, great victory, congratulated themselves for their presence at the great contest, as if it were all their doing, and jostled one another to plant their own feet in the smoldering, sulphurous dents Petey had left in the rock—just to compare shoe sizes, you know. Human nature. Remarkably enough, every single foot, whatever its size, matched the Devil’s Footprints perfectly, which makes sense when you think about it.
And they say that from that day, the Devil was never seen again in Ipswich.
“Here I am, though!” said Petey, who once again stood in the crowd at the back of the church. He knew he was about to mouth off, and get his ass whipped by a cross-eyed man in a powdered wig. He knew this would happen again, and again, just as New Orleans had happened again, and again. He also knew that, like it or not, he was in big trouble this time, and needed some serious help, perhaps even from the distinguished opposition.
Over and over, Petey reenacted the double murder in the Devil’s Mansion in New Orleans, the wrestling match that created the Devil’s Footprints in New England. And in between and among and alongside these episodes, he showed up in other places over and over, too.
Sometimes he landed on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and tried and failed to cheat a six-foot-tall woman farmer named Molly Horn out of the best part of her crop. Each time, her response was the same: she rolled up her sleeves, folded her eyeglasses, set them aside atop a tree stump for safekeeping, then beat Petey like a drum until he hollered for mercy and she flung him headfirst into the bottomless part of the bay called the Devil’s Hole.
Sometimes he paced a forty-foot circle in the piney woods of central North Carolina, where no grass grew beneath his feet. As he stomped the ashen earth of the Devil’s Tramping Ground, he muttered: “Round and round and round he goes, and wherever he stops won’t be where he chose.”
Sometimes he sat on the rocky banks of the Nolichucky River in Tennessee, his back to the water, and craned to look up and up and up at the sheer rock cliff that might just, kind of, sort of, suggest a face, if you stared long enough and were prompted to see a face and were willing to be talked into it.
“Ain’t much of a likeness, though,” Petey mumbled, his voice lost in the rushing waters beneath the Devil’s Looking Glass.
And so it went, over and over, from the Devil’s Armchair to the Devil’s Bake Oven, from the Devil’s Dish-Full to the Devil’s Marbleyard, from the Devil’s Backbone to the Devil’s Elbow, from Devil’s Lake to Devil’s Kitchen—Petey ricocheted from one to the other and back again.
He groaned whenever he found himself in California’s Sierra Nevadas, as he scrambled to walk across a pile of ever-shifting rocks beneath a bluff that looked like a palisade of basalt pillars. Much as he tried not to, he could not prevent picking up a random rock two-handed and staggering, sweaty and footsore beneath its weight, only to drop it in some random spot yards away, then pick up a replacement random rock and head back the way he had come.
As he toiled pointlessly on the Devil’s Postpile, he subvocalized an impromptu incantation:
Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please come around!
Old Petey is done for, if you let him down!
It was far from original—nothing more than a variant on the folk plea to St. Anthony, Patron of Lost Things—but Petey knew better than to call on that micromanaging son of a bitch. And the point of such spells wasn’t novelty, but repetition and focus. All the world’s magic-makers agreed on that.
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please shake a leg!
Old Petey is sorry! Please don’t make me beg!”
Then Petey twisted his ankle and fell yet again, wincing as he anticipated another knee skinned by the jagged slope of the Devil’s Postpile…
…but instead found himself in midair and midfall, to howl wordlessly as he cannonballed once again into a deep, icy pool beneath a South Dakota waterfall. How did he know it was South Dakota? The same way he suddenly knew how to swim, if you could call it swimming. Hell wasn’t known for its aquacades. He thrashed his way to the surface and crested, with many a splutter and a splash, then backstroked his way to the grooved rock wall around the Devil’s Bathtub. He clung there and mumbled, through chattering teeth:
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, throw me a bone!
Old Petey is trapped, and can’t break free alone!”
Because Petey kept rebounding across time as well as space, any claim to know what Pearleen Sunday, the focus of his hopes, was doing at precisely that moment would be presumptuous and inaccurate. Suffice to say only that the waves Petey kicked up in the Devil’s Bathtub sloshed in all directions, everywhere and everywhen, and it was only a matter of time before Pearleen Sunday got her feet wet. Because much as they claimed otherwise, Pearleen and Petey had never been that far apart, not really, not since the widow Winchester had brought them together in the first place. They were a matched set, like March hares and marzipan, the Cassini Gap and the Cumberland Gap, St. Paul’s and Mrs. Paul’s, lightning bugs and lightning. Who can think of one without the other?
So somewhere out there, in another time and another place, on the farthest shore of Petey’s wave function, was a sunshiny bluebell of a July afternoon in the mountains of western Maryland, where the wise woman Pearleen Sunday was walking from Altamont to Bloomington—which is to say, from no place special to nowhere in particular, and downhill all the way. She was on what she reckoned was the direct-est route, along the Baltimore & Ohio tracks.
Now, in many a high and lonely part of North America, the railroad beds make the easiest walking. But railroaders know that particular stretch beneath Pearleen’s feet as the Seventeen Mile Grade, and they speak of it in hisses, like gouts of steam, for it is the steepest railbed in the East, and its 2.4 percent slope can turn a miles-long train of 143-ton coal cars into a cracking black whip that clears the mountainside down to the stumps and the graves. Pearleen did not fear the Seventeen Mile Grade, for she had no burden of weight behind her, and had never been given to acceleration.
She was just a little bitty slip of a thing, no more than yea high and so big around, and looked of course about eighteen years old, give or take a quarter century, which was just as she would look until Nixon’s second term, for wizards age more like mountains than like people. They differ from people in other ways, too, as Pearleen had just begun to realize, that early in her career, though she already had tramped so many miles of these United States, up and down and back and forth and twisted around-y round, that she expected her entry in the Great Ledger, upon her death, to sum up her long life in two words: “Walked, mostly.”
She was dressed for the long walk, too, in sensible boots and riveted denim trousers and a man’s plaid shirt, a denim jacket tied around her waist. A knapsack rode her shoulders, and held loose in her right hand was a whittled staff longer than she was, twisted like a snake that had paused to think things over.
Now, when we say “a man’s plaid shirt,” let us be clear that it was a man’s shirt by size and design. Whether it was ever inhabited by a man, and how it came to be subsequently worn by Pearleen Sunday, is a question to ask her on another day, and preferably from a great distance, perhaps across a couple of state lines.
So Pearleen walked down the railbed, confined her steps to the wooden ties, and avoided the gravel, as a sort of game, though whenever she came across a stray piece of gravel atop a tie, she tried to kick it or knock it back where it belonged. Some people are just like that, tidying the world as they go.
Pearleen knew Savage Mountain well, and she knew before she saw it that she approached the old Thomas spread, the one the late governor cleared, in retirement, to raise alpacas. She knew this by the curve in the railbed, by the crosstie fence at the woods’ edge that marked the start of the half-grown-up pasture, and by the ghost of Governor Francis Thomas himself, who stood where he always stood, at the spot where the 11:57 had killed him back in 1876. He smoked a pipe and fondly watched a half dozen ghost alpacas that grazed the mountainside before him. Two of the alpacas were newborns, cute as buttons; they frolicked around, enjoying each other’s company, a fresh crop of flowering beggar-lice visible through them. That Thomas’s ghost would be fixed to that spot on the Earth’s surface—and not, say, to the official governor’s mansion in Annapolis—made some sense to Pearleen, but she had absolutely no idea why he appeared fully clothed, equipped with a pipe, and accompanied by phantom livestock. Pearleen had seen ghosts, and interacted with them, for years, but that did not mean she understood how they worked. Pearleen tried to live in a world of fact and not of theory. But she still knew her manners.
“Howdy, Governor,” she called to him, when she was just far enough away not to have to raise her voice.
“Miss Sunday,” he said, and gravely nodded his head.
“Mmm mmm mmm,” the alpacas said, in that high-pitched hum they make, their absurd long necks craning as they gathered against the fence to see if the newcomer had a treat for them. As they jostled one another, one of the babies got pressed through the solid wood of the plank fence. First his transparent head emerged, like a mounted trophy, and then the rest of him followed. Pearleen knew she couldn’t pet him, not really, but she reached out to do it anyway. He already had realized his error, though, and missed his family. Peeping in dismay, he whirled and wriggled back through the plank, vanished in sections to reemerge in the pasture where he belonged.
“So well behaved,” said Governor Thomas. “Unlike people,” he added, with unnecessary venom. The governor had had more than his share of difficulties with the legislature.
“They are indeed lovely creatures,” said Pearleen, hoping she wasn’t in for a lecture about their behaviors, their care and feeding, and their natural history. Ghosts tended to stick close not only to one spot, but to one subject. She took a second look at the alpacas, though, because they seemed suddenly alert to something, craned their heads and looked up the tracks, up the slope. The two biggest ones, the leaders, separated themselves, trotted off separately, toward whatever it was they saw. The others moved farther down the hill, away from the fence.
“They make excellent guardians of chickens, you know,” said Governor Thomas. His gaze and Pearleen’s followed that of the lead alpaca. “They can spot danger a mile away.”
Now Pearleen heard it, too: a vibration like an oncoming train. They waited and waited, but there was no train, only the vibration that gained in intensity—not in the rails of the tracks themselves, as the 11:57 might have accomplished, but in the air above the tracks. The trees on the other side of the vibration began to shimmy, as they would if the tracks were on fire. As Pearleen stared and listened, the shimmy got more violent, and the vibration louder. It sounded like a high-pitched tuning fork. Pearleen winced and reached for one of her ears to shut it out. But Governor Thomas reacted not at all—and, more surprisingly, neither did the alpacas. They and their owner just looked up the tracks, as if curious.
“Governor,” said Pearleen, “you don’t hear that?”
“Hear what, child?” asked the governor.
Underneath the keening, Pearleen now heard a faint, quavering voice:
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, come talk to me fast!
I’m brief as a sneeze. My time here can’t last!”
Of course they didn’t hear it, Pearleen realized. It wasn’t meant for them.
“Governor, you’ll have to excuse me,” said Pearleen. “Got to see a man about something.” Once she stepped onto the tracks, her clothes moved oddly—not billowing as in a breeze, but fluttering, as if pelted by things unseen. She faced downhill, braced herself, held her staff horizontal in both hands, and added, as a courtesy she nearly had forgotten, “Thank you again for Emancipation.”
“You’re very welcome,” said the governor, pleased to be reminded of another favorite subject, “but I was merely the Lord’s instrument. Why Maryland had not already become a free state before the war, I will never under—”
But he was alone, the vibrating whatever-it-was having already swept down the tracks and snatched Pearleen away. She was briefly visible, a hundred yards downhill, standing upright about a foot above the center of the tracks. She made no discernible lean into the curve as she rounded the bend and whipped out of sight.
“Mmm mmm mmm,” said the alpacas, heads bobbing on their long necks. They thought they had seen it all, and now this. Governor Thomas’s ghost just sucked on his pipe, having already forgotten that Pearleen had been there in the first place. His oblivious presence was reassuring. The phantom alpacas gradually resumed their day, cropped living green grass that stayed intact, swallowed nothing into their transparent stomachs, then regurgitated it into the cud they would happily chew for a thousand years.
It’s a mighty poor place that has only one name, and the nearby place where Pearleen was taken—on the far side of Allegany County, in a mountain hollow near the banks of the Potomac—had been called multiple names through the years. In the early nineteenth century it was called Hermit’s Abode, because only old Ovid McCrackin lived there; in the late twentieth century it was called Chimney Hollow, because the only part left of the McCrackin place was a huge two-story brick chimney with two dark square mouths, once fireplaces, on each floor. But alongside these and other names was a more ominous one, kept alive by generations of kids who defied their grownups by exploring the place at all hours.
“Devil’s Alley,” said Pearleen aloud, still a little dizzy from her wild ride. She had flown just a foot above the B & O line (yes, she forced herself to admit, flown was the word) until she reached the Cumberland station, where no one seemed to pay her any attention at all—probably because she didn’t, in some sense, actually exist at that point, at least not in downtown Cumberland. Just as she looked likely to crash head-on into a locomotive headed for Frostburg, she jumped the tracks, passed over the taverns and/or whorehouses, and resumed her flight above the C & O Canal, its water so still she could have seen her inverted green self below her feet the whole way. But that nauseated her, so she looked forward instead.
Devil’s Alley was to Pearleen only a set of names and a chimney she had passed once or twice, rather than a place where she knew anyone. To her knowledge, old Ovid McCrackin haunted some other spot, if he was anyplace. So she walked past the homeplace, her back to the river, and entered deeper into the hollow, along the bed of a long-gone rail spur that probably led, as most Appalachian spurs did, to the entrance of a played-out mine.
This turned out to be the case, and pacing in the mouth of the mine, just inside the shade, was a rangy and familiar figure, his hands clasped together at the small of his back. He wore knee-high boots and the tailcoat of an earlier era. Someone who didn’t know him to be an ancient scoundrel and penniless flimflam artist with connections would have thought him a young and handsome antebellum man of means, perhaps a free man of color from Baltimore—and Pearleen, who knew him all too well, was willing to grant the handsome part, anyway. As she approached, she heard him mutter:
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please let me in.
I’m weary of devils and shackles and sin.”
She started yelling well before she reached him, and he whirled at the sound, with an embarrassing look of elation.
“What you mean, Petey Wheatstraw? Calling me like I was a saint, or a dog?”
“Pearleen! You’re here!” He ran to meet her as if to hug her to his chest and twirl her three times around, but her glare stopped him a couple of feet away. He stood there, two heads taller than her, and quivered. No two buttons on his fine checked waistcoat matched. “Thank you for coming, Pearleen!—for not ignoring your old friend Petey. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” He clasped his hands before him and shook them over his head, like he had won a fight.
“It ain’t like I had a choice,” Pearleen said. “That spell of yours scooped me up like I was a pile of mine tailings, and dumped me here.”
“Oh, come off it,” Petey said. His manner changed instantly. “Don’t play naïve with me. You could have stepped out of the way, when you heard it coming, and you know it.”
“And I would have, had I known it was you,” Pearleen lied. Corrupted already, she realized. Just by his presence!
“Besides, it was sheer luck you happened to be in the vicinity,” Petey said. “That spell ain’t good for more’n a hundred miles, even if you don’t get interference from temperature inversions and fault tremors and off-year elections.”
“But why bring me here at all, to this…nowhere place?” Pearleen hated to criticize any spot of human habitation, given that she had spent years of happy childhood among the freaks and wonders of a Chattanooga dime museum, but she had to admit, as she surveyed the gray rocks and gray weeds and gray dirt, that Petey normally frequented more happening places.
In reply, Petey thrust three extended fingers at the sky, the knuckles of his trembling hand in her face. He held it there so long, and looked so angry, that she thought it might be an obscene gesture, and was too busy shuffling through possibilities to be offended. “Three times!” Petey cried. “This is my third go-round to this place. And whenever I try to walk out of the hollow, BLIM! I get knocked back on my tailbone. All’s I can do is curse the rocks and the railbed, and wait to be moved to the next place.” To Pearleen’s shock and dismay, a single tear rolled out of Petey’s left eye and down his cheek. “At least here, I don’t get my ass kicked,” he said, “or get shot at by Union artillery, or have to saw wood, or mill corn, or some other work for the white man. Did you know the air percussion can kill you, just as the shell passes by?”
Pearleen spent a few seconds not processing any of this, then said: “Petey, this is a monologue already in progress. You’ll have to back up a ways, really you will.”
“You’re right,” Petey said. He sighed and ran his hands through his close-cropped hair. “Oh, where to start? Pull up a soft rock over there, Pearleen, and I’ll tell you.”
Then, with many interruptions and backtracks, Petey told an only somewhat garbled version of his many repetitious travels and adventures over recent days, from California to New Orleans to New England and back again.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Pearleen said, forgetting for a moment who she was talking to. “You’re under a loconautic spell, repetitions and all.”
“A loco-what? Talk English, girl.”
“My, my, a magic term even Petey Wheatstraw don’t know. That must be arcane. Well, your ignorance ain’t too surprising, I guess. All’s I know about loconautics, myself, is the definition. See, loconautics enables a wizard to travel from place to place by skipping around. You board a train in Cumberland because you want to get to Baltimore, but you got to go through Hancock and Hagerstown and a lot of other places you don’t care about. Well, loconautics avoids everything that ain’t where the wizard wants to be.”
“But all us wizards go where we please, normally,” Petey said. “I mean, sure, you walk every step of your path, ’cause you’re stuck on that I-must-walk-the-Earth thing—but you don’t have to. You don’t even need the train or the tracks. So how’s this loco-whatsis different?”
“It sort of does need a track, but the track ain’t anything you can map with a compass. It’s a track the wizard lays down, independent of the surface features of the Earth. The track is based on other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like how many dogs live in a place, and how many of them are happy, or sad. You could make you a track, for example, that connected the places with at least a hundred and thirteen happy dogs, or the places where at least one person is aged exactly nineteen years, three months and six days, or all the places in North America where Roman coins have been dug out of the Earth. Or you could just do it the easy way, by place name. That’s the track you’ve set yourself, Petey. You’re on the way to visiting every place named after the Devil himself. It’s the longest and oldest and crookedest track there is.”
“Now wait a minute! This ain’t my doing, I tell you. I ain’t no, what-do-you-call-’em, loconauticator.”
“Loconaut. It’s like the old song says:
“My lover is a loconaut,
She moves through space and time.
Her travels take her far from me,
But her heart is always mine.
Some days a girl in pigtails,
Some days she’s old and gray.
I wonder who has aged her,
In those lands far away.
She brings me ice in summer sun
And roses in the snow.
How I wish that I could go along
Wherever she does go.”
“Huh,” Petey said. “That’s right pretty—the way you sing it, anyway—but I never heard that song before.”
“Oh, you probably heard an earlier version. You know how the old songs change topics, and shake themselves, and bleed one into the other, and take on new words with time. This one, when I first heard it, was about an aeronaut, but loconaut scans just as well, don’t you think?”
“Uh-huh. Since when did that song get a loconaut in it?”
“Why, I just now put it there, come to think of it. Because what’s happening to you ought to be real, and nothing is real until there’s a song about it. But Petey, you’re right about this being none of your doing. To build a track for someone else to ride on, and to be stuck on for the rest of their days, that would take a powerful loconaut indeed—and I mean powerful like a high tide, or a baby’s smile, or a volcano. Only the one who gave you that ticket can take it away, Petey, and until they do, you’ll ride that ride till you drop. But who put you on that Old Crooked Track, I cannot say. I don’t know anyone that powerful.”
“You don’t, huh? Well, I sure do. And you already met him, once, I believe.”
Pearleen looked blank, which is hard for a wise woman to do.
“When you were just a girl,” Petey continued. “In the front yard of the Winchester House. Only you were a lot bigger than him, at the time.”
“Oh, my Lord!” Pearleen said, though that oath was precisely the opposite of who she had in mind. “You mean your father-in-law!”
“Yes, my infernal majesty father-in-law, who you last saw trapped in a Civil War soldier’s old boot,” Petey said. “I figured that shoe would drop directly, pardon the pun. A girl don’t meet the Devil every day.”
“You don’t know much about girls, then, but Petey, what did you do to make the Devil so mad at you? Did you run around on his daughter? Steal from the cashbox? Bargain for souls one-on-one, and cut out the Old Man?”
Petey looked fidgety from the beginning of the recitation, and more so by the end. “I wouldn’t put it quite that-away,” he finally said. “It’s not stealing if you intend to pay it back…and bargaining don’t enter into a straight-up offer of trade, take it or leave it…And as for what you good girls call ‘running around,’ well, I prefer to think of it as spreading the seed of corruption, which is my job, after all. Besides, that wife of mine done ‘run around’ farther than the entire staff of the House of Blue Lights—and having met that house’s entire staff, I know whereof I speak. Not that I criticize her, mind you. Why, I admire her gumption. A girl ought to see the world before she settles down, especially if she ain’t never gone settle down…eh, Pearleen?”
“If you dare to wink at me, Petey Wheatstraw, I will turn my back on you this instant and every instant to come, forever.”
Frozen in a half-wink for a second or two, Petey got out of it by flexing his face grotesquely, as if for jaw exercise, though he was careful to shut neither eye. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Petey said and rubbed his cheek. “I get a little tic there, when I’m tired. The muscles seize up.”
“I’ll seize something,” Pearleen said. “Well, if it’s Old Scratch who’s loconauted you, you are slap out of luck. You’ll just have to throw yourself on his mercy, to get out of it one day.”
“Oh, believe me, if I could get in the same place as him, even for one skinny minute, I’d put an end to this business, all right. I got a plan for that. But Pearleen, I can’t even talk to him! As long as he stays off the track I’m on, I’ll never see him again. No, what I need, you see, is someone to intercede on my behalf.” He gave her a look that was half exhilaration and half nausea, which Pearleen had learned through painful experience was meant to convey abject supplication.
“Oh, no,” Pearleen said.
“Someone who can go wherever they please…”
“Oh, no,” Pearleen said again.
“…and track down the Devil, wherever he may be…and, ideally, someone the Devil already sort of, kind of, owes a favor to.”
“You can go to hell and wait on that,” Pearleen blurted, then stomped her foot in dismay. Among the countless frustrations of conversation with Petey, his daily existence put so many of her favorite oaths into a terrible new register of literality. “Dammit,” she said unhappily, and knew that Petey had done again what he did so often and so well: talked her into something that she just knew was a bad idea.
Meeting at a crossroads was, of course, expected, but the one in the Mississippi Delta, the famous one, had been burned long ago. Tourists!
So Pearleen went instead to Saluda County, South Carolina, where US 378 and State Highway 391 come together in a roundabout three hundred feet across, so unusual at the time it was built that all the neighbors just called it “the traffic circle,” as if it were the only one. National Guard pilots used to bomb it with sandbags, for practice, because from above it looked like a target, as so many things do.
Pearleen hoped she looked like one, as she stood ramrod straight in the middle of the new-mown grass at the center of the circle at noon. She didn’t appreciate being in the hot, but for a proper meet-up, the clock had to say twelve—everyone knew that—and she certainly did not want to attract the attention of Old You-Know-Who at the other end of the day, in the black dark.
To make sure she was visible to him, she made herself invisible to everyone else. Well, not so much invisible—that never worked out too well—as just beneath everyone’s notice, so none of the troopers in patrol cars and young’uns in school buses and commuters in station wagons who drove around her would pay the least bit of attention to the girl-woman in heavy boots who stood in the grassy midpoint of the traffic circle with a cardboard sign that said, in red Sharpie, “HAIL SATAN.”
Through the decades, she had accumulated countless reasons to suspect that she had the old man’s attention already. But this was the first time she had tested her suspicion.
She stood there and stood there in the heat of the day, until everything she’d eaten for lunch at the Circle Diner—a fried-baloney sandwich with cheese, with pigskins and pimiento on the side and a big carton of Hickory Hill chocolate milk—started to wear off, except maybe for the pigskins that would be with her always, and she wished she’d brought some bonus baloney with her. But whenever she checked her cathead pocketwatch, she saw that it was still noon, and that was a good sign.
Finally, all the traffic in the circle drove away in all directions, toward Saluda or Batesburg or Prosperity or the lake, and was replaced by no traffic at all. At the moment she realized this, she also registered that the breeze had died, that the leaves in the trees were still, that all the visible businesses, the diner and Buddy’s Marine and the VFD, now looked deserted, as no one came in or out. A squirrel in the edge of the nearby grass was frozen in place in midair, as if arrested in midjump, and she felt sorry for it. But she knew the squirrel didn’t have long to wait, because she could hear the Devil’s car a-coming, from the direction of Batesburg.
It was a turquoise 1933 Essex-Terraplane Eight, the kind the bank robbers had favored, and its running board and headlamps gleamed so, you’d think detail work was the only job left to the damned. Pearleen couldn’t quite make out the driver, so bright was the finish in her eyes. The car went into the circle widdershins and went around, and went around, and went around, thirteen times all told, until it pulled to a stop, still in the road, and sat there, rumbling. The back door nearest Pearleen opened by itself, to reveal nothing but a wall of shadow, an utter absence of light. It was like the mouth of a cave, or a sewer pipe, or a rifle barrel. But Pearleen took a deep breath, muttered, “The things I do for you, Petey Wheatstraw,” cinched her pack tighter, walked across the grass, and got in.
The plush back seat was right comfortable, except for the door that slammed shut behind her without agency, and the dead man at the wheel whose head lolled sideways. His glassy eyes in the rearview mirror seemed to stare just past her at something awful. Someone had shot him in the temple, and the blood was caked and dry. Riding shotgun was an enormous bloodhound that filled the front seat; his buttocks crowded the driver, and his muzzle fogged the side window. The hound’s focus was outside the car. He emitted a low growl.
“You leave that squirrel alone,” Pearleen said, and at that moment, the small critter came unstuck and bounded away into the grass.
“ARF!” said the bloodhound—not the sound of a dog’s bark, but the sound of a deep-voiced man yelling, “ARF!” As if that were a command, the driver’s flopping dead hand shoved the gearshift into place, and the car rolled forward, picked up speed around the circle, around the circle, around the circle, thirteen times until Pearleen was nauseated and the Terraplane slingshotted down US 378 toward the lake, the scenery a blur. Pearleen sat forward at an inopportune time, just as the dog emitted a long, eye-watering fart, to see for herself the speedometer needle that spasmed at the unmarked right end of the gauge. “SIDDOWN!” yelled the dog, and Pearleen fairly jumped back in the seat. Something went thump thump beneath the car, and Pearleen thought sure a tire had blown and she was done for—but no, on the straightaway ahead, as far as the eye could see, small animals dashed into the road from left and right just in time to be run over. Their broken furry bodies continuously smacked the undercarriage, thump thump thump thump thump. The car made a screeching turn to the left that tossed Pearleen against the passenger door, which was hot like a stovelid. She shoved herself back into the middle of the seat just in time for a second screeching turn to the right. Pearleen managed to brace herself and sit up straight that time, but the lifeless driver slumped forward, his face wedged into the corner between dashboard and door, and never moved again. The bloodhound peered back at her. Drool from his jowls beribboned the back of the seat as he said: “Ain’t it a smooth-riding car?”
“Oh, yeah,” Pearleen murmured, barely audible over the quickening thump thumpthumpthump.
“You know what they say,” added the dog, his voice trending louder and more manic. “On the sea, it’s aquaplaning! In the air, it’s aeroplaning! And ON THE ROAD, IT’S TERRAPLANING! Haw haw haw!” He rolled off the seat with laughter, fell onto the brake pedal, and the car stopped dead with a screech that was mostly Pearleen screaming, her hands over her face, certain that in the next instant the car would flip over, and she’d be dead. But nothing happened except her scream, and she eventually slacked off, spread her fingers, and looked around to find the car’s interior unchanged, and the scenery no longer moving. The door through which she had entered now popped open with a hiss of rushing air, as if a pressurized seal had broken. From just out of sight in the front seat came the abrupt sounds of ripping and gulping: the dog had begun to eat the driver. Pearleen scrambled out of the car and ran blindly, her only thought to get far from the befouled Terraplane, and in the process ran twenty feet across a freshly raked dirt yard. She stopped herself just a couple of inches away from the bottommost of a set of plank steps.
“Young lady, I do not recommend you set foot on those steps,” said a harsh nasal voice like claws on slate, “less’n you intend to be my houseguest till half past eternity.”
Pearleen looked up. Sitting on the wide front porch of a two-story white house with clapboard siding, baked beneath a purple sun in a red sky, were Asmodeus, the Unclean, and the Stranger to All; Baphomet the Tempter, the First Beast, and the Father of Lies; the Senior Senator from the Great State of Bigotry and Hatred and Status Quo; the Son of the Shadows; the Prince of Air and Darkness; the Lord of the Flies, and of Misrule, and of This World; Plague-Bearer, Light-Bringer, Accuser and Adversary, Lodestar and Belial; Old Massa, Old Nick, Old Scratch—all those and a thousand more compressed into a single unshaven, plug-chewing, undershirt-wearing, wattle-necked, pussel-gutted little peckerwood, just enough yellow-white hair left on his bald head to stick out in all directions like a Van de Graaff halo. He sat in a rocking chair and fanned himself with a derby hat, his many titles and responsibilities buzzing around him like a swarm of blowflies. His tiny, close-set eyes, embedded in wrinkles like a pair of snake-eye dice in a dead man’s palm, gazed at Pearleen with distant disinterest, as they might have gazed at a dried-out cow patty in the road. He was just plumb awful, but Pearleen immediately felt a little better, just to see him; she had known his type long since, and was no longer afraid. She did, however, make a little curtsy, being ever mannerly, and nobody’s fool.
“I appreciate the warning, sir,” she said, “but I’m a little surprised you gave it.”
“My magnanimity surprises me, too,” the Devil said, “but I reckon we’re all a mass of contradictions. Take you, for example, Miss Sunday. You look like the Sabbath for which you are named—or like its popular conception, at least—all cream and strawberries in an unchipped bowl. And yet you must be at least half-full of live bait, to survive the trip to my lake house in the first place.” His jumbled, dark-stained teeth gleamed in the wrongness of the sun. “I don’t believe I caught your name.”
“You just said it,” Pearleen replied.
“Did I, now? That was so long ago, I can’t remember. I don’t think you’ve given it to me, though. Not handed out freely, pink and squirming in your hand. You’ve yet to give me anything like that.”
“Just your freedom,” Pearleen retorted. “You remember me, Old Scratch. My name is Pearleen Sunday, and you saw me last when you were just a tiny thing, and were trapped by a wizard from Yandro Mountain. His hex-magic laced you inside a boot from the Civil War. I said the words that sprung you, and I swung that old boot over my head three times and let it fly, and you were freed and loose in the world again. I did that not for your sake, but for the sake of he who trapped you. I did it for the soul of Wendell Farethewell, the Wizard of the Blue Ridge, and I am not sorry for it. Do you remember me now, Old Many-Shaped?”
The Devil’s chair was placed, for maximum annoyance, on the sweetest spot of a creaking floorboard, which voiced its torment each time the Devil rocked forward. “How about that,” the Devil said. Creak. “Ain’t that something.” Creak. “Well, my, my, my.” Creak.
This went on for a while, until Pearleen got impatient. “How long you gone rock there,” she asked, “and not answer my question?”
“Sometimes it’s more diplomatic,” the Devil said, “just to make noises with your mouth, and say nothing at all. And be careful what you ask me, little girl. You might not like the answer. But the fact is, that I don’t seem to recollect even one little tee-ninchy bit of this fairy-story you’re a-telling me.” He shook his head and scratched his balls. “Gals are so big for their britches these days. I blame literacy. They start looking at the pretty dresses in the Woman’s Home Companion, and next thing you know, they’re sounding out the words too.”
Pearleen ignored this provocation, and the Devil’s rubbing himself, and his fixed stare aimed not at her face. “You don’t remember, do you? Well, then, tell me this, Old Deceiver. If you weren’t beholden to me big time, if you didn’t owe me a favor of favors, why’d you come a-running when I called you, just like a good little poodle dog?”
This snapped him into focus. The Devil sat forward in the chair, eyes flashing. “I didn’t come to you, Little Britches. I brought you to me.”
“It works out the same,” Pearleen said. “There’s a tie that hauls us together. What braided that rope, Old Thing Without Breath, if not the good turn I did you?”
He sat back with a frown, and flapped his hand in an oh-do-get-on gesture. In the process, he noticed his jagged fingernails. “Let’s not say good,” the Devil said, fingers in his mouth, gnawing himself a manicure. “I did just eat my dinner. Let’s say only that I wanted a better look at you than I got last time—you being older and more interesting to a man of the world, and me being more presentable than I was.” He hooked both thumbs beneath the straps of his undershirt and snapped them against his scrawny shoulders. “So, Miss Sunday, what’s this wholly unearned favor-of-favors you got in your eyeteeth? What you want from me, other than the right to live to see your next time of the month?”
“I want you to release Petey Wheatstraw.”
The Devil went very still, and every window in the front of his fine house shattered.
“I don’t believe I know the name,” the Devil said, as glass shards fell and smashed all around.
“You do, too. He married your daughter.”
“I got lots of daughters,” the Devil said. “They all whores and harelips. They got lots of husbands, and wives too—if you define the terms broadly, in a common-law way.”
“You got only one as powerful as Petey Wheatstraw,” Pearleen said, enjoying the way the Devil winced at the repetition. “That’s why you put him on the Old Crooked Track. Because you’re scared of him.”
“You are so full of shit,” the Devil said, “and believe me, I should know. Where’d you say he is, your friend what’s-his-name, this Peter Dickstraw?”
“He’s everywhere named for the Devil, a thousand thousand places but nowhere else. He’s confined to those places over and over, in all time periods, all over the world.”
The Devil shook his head. “Not the world, honey. Only the United States. Don’t you know nothing? That’s the extent of my jurisdiction. I got no authority outside the United States at all.”
This stopped Pearleen short. Her jaw dropped.
“Whyever not?” asked Pearleen.
The Devil shrugged. “Don’t ask me. For whatever reason, y’all are the last Satan-fearing nation on Earth.”
“But,” Pearleen said. “But.”
The Devil shook his head, made a clawlike gesture of dismissal. “Honey, I do not make the rules, remember? That’s why I quit Heaven in the first place. But as for your friend Pecker Woodsman, why shouldn’t I keep him just where he is?”
“It ain’t fair,” Pearleen said. “Not as handsome as he is, and as smart, and as kind. Not when he’s so well-placed to do so much good in the world, with all his powers, and all he’s learned from you, through the years.” She went on in this vein for some time, and enjoyed the Devil’s growing discomfiture, the angry flush on his cheeks. “Oh, now, mind you, he’s done a lot of good already, right there on the Old Crooked Track. Why, at Devil’s Den, on the Gettysburg battlefield, he consoles the wounded, and brings them water, and is ever so helpful. At the Devil’s Punchbowl in Oregon, he dips out drinks for everyone, like the thing is bottomless, and I don’t know what he spiked it with, but old enemies who ain’t spoken to one another in decades, why, they hug and make up and show each other photos of the grandbabies. At the Devil’s Courthouse in North Carolina, he hands out pardon after pardon, forgives every sinner in the place, the defendants and bailiffs and judges and even some of the lawyers, and just wipes the slate clean.” By now the Devil was sky-purple with rage, hunched over like a whistle-pig as he gnawed splinters out of the arm of the rocking chair, his eyes like twin eight-balls spinning into pockets. “I mean, Petey Wheatstraw plumb does everything he can, and if he keeps at it another century or so, why, your name will stand for nothing but goodness and mercy, all across the map. But just think how much more he could do if—”
“Silence!” roared the Devil, in a voice that cracked the posts that held up the porch, rearranged into obscene designs the dirt of the yard, and busted the radiator in the Terraplane. Over the hiss of the leak and the bloodhound’s panicked barks, the Devil said, “So that’s what he’s up to, is he? I’ll cut out his goozlum, I will.” He stomped to the front door, hitching up his britches, and yelled through the screen: “Hey! Middle management! Get your useless business-school asses out here!”
In moments, a dozen cubicle dwellers, all in ill-fitted gray suits—too large for some, too small for others—tumbled through the doorway and cowered before the Devil, wringing their hands, each face a rictus of abject subservience and eagerness to please. They were men and women both, black and white and brown, and though they were not literally kissing the Devil’s hind knickers, Pearleen had no doubt they would, and more besides, if he but said the word. The Devil turned to face Pearleen, happy again, and waved his hand at the whole miserable lot.
“Multicultural as the day is long,” the Devil said. “I used to run a segregated shop, but you got to change with the times.” He spat a long plume of tobacco juice onto the nearest cubicle dweller’s shoes. “Besides,” he said, “I like to think of myself as a progressive. Now how fast can you all bring ’round my two finest horses, all saddled up and ready to go, you yes-men and yes-women and how-highers and focus-group fuckfaces?”
The answer was, about two minutes thirty seconds, during which time the Devil stomped and cursed, the bloodhound chased its stinking tail and barked, and Pearleen held her breath and marveled that so far, the Devil’s gullibility had lived up to all Petey’s expectations. The middle managers finally led around the house two magnificent liver-red chestnut stallions that neighed and reared, flaxen manes tossing and nostrils flaring. With the inexpert help of half the crew, the Devil, who wriggled and squealed like a piglet, eventually managed to mount the larger of the two horses. Pearleen conceded that he looked fairly at home on horseback, once he finally got situated.
“This one here,” said the Devil, “is Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name, or Low for short. Yours is Thy-Kingdom-Come, but he answers to King.”
“Mine?” asked Pearleen. But the middle managers already had scrambled to help her into the saddle. This turned out to be a far easier job than the Devil had been.
“I named ’em,” said the Devil, wheeling about, “after the one who gave ’em to me in the first place.”
“You mean?” asked Pearleen.
“The very same,” said the Devil. “It was the only time He ever give me anything, really, since the late unpleasantness. And He wouldn’t have done that, if I hadn’t a jumped out from behind a bush on December twenty-four and yelled ‘Christmas gift!’ You can sneak up on Him, sometimes. But you can’t sneak up on me!”
Settled in, she stroked King’s neck and murmured into his ear, “Easy, big fellow.” He nickered companionably. She was glad he couldn’t talk, at least.
“You’re my one-woman posse, Pearleen Sunday. You and I are gone ride down that sanctimonious, bad-name-ruining, not-blood-kin-in-any-way-whatsoever son of a bitch Petey Wheatstraw, and you will both see that once a place on the map is named for the Devil, by God it stays named! Yaaaaah!”
Waving his derby overhead like a cowboy as the middle managers cheered him on, he spurred Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name out of the dirt yard and down the gravel lane. Without her doing a thing, Thy-Kingdom-Come bolted forward after them. It was all Pearleen could do to hold on. For a few yards the bloodhound loped alongside, barking, but King quickly picked up speed and left him far behind. Just before he was out of earshot, the bloodhound yelled after them: “SHOWOFF!”
They caught up to Petey in Indiana, at the Devil’s Mill.
Petey had stood just behind the miller all morning, as the farmers of the neighborhood brought in sackfuls of corn to be ground. Though he was invisible to them, Petey wore a many-pocketed apron identical to the miller’s, a soft gray cap identical to the miller’s, even a bristly red mustache identical to the miller’s. And as each customer approached, Petey provided advice likely identical to what the miller would have come up with on his own.
When a rich farmer approached, Petey said, “This fellow can afford to pay a higher rate. He won’t even miss it. Toll him heavy, Mr. Miller, toll him heavy.”
When a farmer of only middling success approached, Petey said, “Here’s a man of ambition. He wants to be where the rich farmer is, so why deny him? Toll him heavy, Mr. Miller, toll him heavy.”
When a half-starved sharecropping widow woman stumbled in, three wailing waifs clutching her spindly shanks, Petey said, “Their little bit of corn ain’t gone keep them alive another winter. It’d just go to waste. Toll her heavy, Mr. Miller, toll her heavy.”
“You don’t owe me nothing, Mrs. Prentiss,” said the miller. “And here’s five dollars. Buy you a sack of groceries while you’re in town, and God bless you.”
“Well, how do you like that?” Petey snorted, as the little family hobbled out of the mill rejoicing, and as the miller’s chest swelled with unearned pride and satisfaction. “That is a sign of a first-rate liar. Pearleen said she would make me out to be some kind of good-deed-doer, and damned if it ain’t coming true.”
“What in the world is that?” asked the miller, of no one in particular.
A ways off down the road, a three-story cloud of dust hung over the bare cornstalks. It was closing fast, and at the lead edge were two figures on horseback, the nearest of whom had spindly legs stuck out like a child’s.
“Pearleen, I take it all back,” said Petey. He pulled off his apron and cap and mustache and discarded them and cracked his knuckles as he walked down the ramp into the millyard and muttered to himself what was less a spell than a set of vows of what he planned to do, and how often, and to whom. But vows are like spells, too, Petey knew; they’re prayers to ourselves, and they work even better, if heeded. Petey continued to talk to himself as he began to run, straight toward the oncoming Devil.
“Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!” screamed the Devil, who was of course a big John Wayne fan, and he spurred Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name onward, his impulse to run Petey right over in the dirt, and keep going.
Seeing the Devil’s murderous intent, Petey did not turn tail and flee, did not try to dart out of the horse’s path. Instead, he ran even faster—impossibly fast—and jumped, like an enormous cricket, right over the Devil and his mount.
“Whoa!” cried the Devil. “Whoa, I said!”
By the time he got Low slowed down and wheeled around, Pearleen had slowed King enough for Petey to spring up and climb on behind her. He reached both arms around her, felt her stiffen, and said, “Don’t worry, this is nothing personal. Just to keep from falling off, y’understand.”
“Good luck,” said Pearleen, and whispered into King’s ear words he never had heard before, and was never likely to hear from his master, either. The horse reared and whinnied in triumph, and took off even faster than before, headed straight for the mill. The Devil on Low followed, eating dust in their wake.
“Damn you, Wheatstraw!” the Devil yelled, redundantly, as he choked and coughed amid a yellow cloud.
Head down, ears flattened, in a full-out gallop, King scattered farmers every which way as he streaked through the millyard, leaped the stone wall at the edge, and ran straight up the waterwheel. At the top, the horse ran in place, and the wheel spun ever faster beneath him, kicked up great sprays of water that gouted into the pursuing Devil’s face as from a fire hose. Blinded, half drowned, nearly knocked out of the saddle, he spluttered and flailed as Low turned tail and ran away. By the time the Devil regained control, King had leaped off the wheel and had galloped away through the corn, clearing a path of flattened stalks. Both the Devil and his mount were enraged now. They dashed down the new-made corn lane, all froth and fume, chasing Pearleen’s and Petey’s laughs and whoops up ahead.
And so it went—Petey and Pearleen in the lead, the Devil in hot pursuit—through the Indiana cornfield and down the middle aisle of a Massachusetts church and up the main stairway of a New Orleans mansion and along a rocky ridgeline in Colorado and into a cave in Utah that opened out in Tennessee, through dozens of locations across four centuries. They terrified and impressed hundreds of people as they went, and spawned legends, myths, ghost stories, and religious movements, in addition to countless outright lies and a number of jokes that weren’t half bad.
Finally, somewhere along South Mountain in Pennsylvania, Pearleen and Petey heard the Devil holler, way back behind:
“You win! You win!”
“He’s dismounted,” Petey reported, looking back.
“Just as well,” Pearleen said. “The horses need a rest.”
They trotted back to where Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name slurped water from a brook. Beside him, the Devil sat on a rock, mopped his face with an unexpectedly dainty lace handkerchief. It looked even as if it might be scented, though Pearleen had no desire to find out. Petey dismounted first, then reached up to help her. This pleased her so that she let him, but remembered once she alighted that she needed no help and had no use for Petey anyway. Thy-Kingdom-Come drank companionably from the brook alongside Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name, their brief rivalry forgotten.
“Pull up a rock,” the Devil said, “and set a spell.”
“There are quite a lot of rocks,” Pearleen said. “More rocks than anything else, really. What place is this?”
Petey replied, “It’s the Devil’s Race Course. What did you expect?”
“I’ve heard of this place,” Pearleen said. She rummaged through her pack, produced a small hammer. “I’ve always wanted to try this. Listen.” She stood up, bit her lip in concentration, and brought down the hammer where she’d been sitting. On impact, the rock chimed, a high note that lingered for several seconds before it died away.
“Ringing rocks!” Petey said. “Let me try that.”
They all three took turns, for the next few minutes, making the rocks ring all around. Annoyed, the horses whickered and walked downstream to crop grass.
“I wonder what causes this,” Pearleen said. “I mean, what the rocks are made of.”
“Don’t ask me,” the Devil replied. “Geology ain’t my area.”
Petey opened his mouth to say something, but the Devil waved him off.
“Don’t even ask,” he said. “Your curse is lifted. You are officially off the Old Crooked Track, and free to go.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where my mind was, that I delegated it to you in the first place. Should’ve known you’d just ruin it.”
“Well, I thank you,” Petey said.
“Thank her,” the Devil said, and nodded toward Pearleen, who had lined up rocks of various sizes and rang them experimentally, like a xylophone. “She’s the one that pled your case.”
“But it was Petey that knew what to do, once we got here,” Pearleen said. “It was both of us.”
“But mostly me,” Petey and Pearleen added, in unison.
“Y’all make quite a team,” the Devil said. “I recommend that you go off in separate directions, and never see each other again.”
“We got a story to finish up first,” Pearleen said.
“Suit yourself,” said the Devil. He stood up, dusted the seat of his pants—which scarcely could have been made dirtier by his rock-sitting interval—and said, “I best get on back to the South Carolina district of Hell. Leave things in the hands of middle managers, next thing I know, they’ll lower the thermostat and hand out ice water.” He whistled. “Hee, yaw! Hallowed-Be-Thy-Name! Thy-Kingdom-Come!” He walked two paces toward the horses and vanished.
“I had wondered about that,” said Petey.
“Wondered what?” asked Pearleen.
“Well, he took me off the Old Crooked Track, but the track still exists, right? I mean, he didn’t dismantle it or anything. So it’s still there to be walked…if you’re unwary enough to step on it, that is. Who knows? The Devil right now may be in Devil’s Hole on the Eastern Shore, getting his ass kicked by Molly Horn.”
“Oh, come on. He ain’t that stupid, surely.”
“Well, if he was all that smart,” said Petey, “he wouldn’t be the Devil, now would he?”
Pearleen shook her head. “I don’t do theology,” she said. “Ain’t you heard? I’m a musician.” Grinning, hammer in hand, she pinged on her rock instrument an old, old song she just made up:
“Dah dah dah is a loconaut
She moves through dah dah dah.”
“It’s still my story, you know,” Petey said.
Pearleen sighed and said, “Whatever.”