FOR A WEEK AFTER his big season opener, the Devil got mixed reactions in public.
Driving around in the Kennedy limo, top down, John Scratch was easily recognized. People shouted at him and took pictures with their phones.
Others watched him pass in an uncomfortable silence.
He kept wondering what Memory would think. About the show, and other things. The weather. Lightbulbs. Medical billing. Ostriches. She had become his compass, he admitted. He needed her.
Pulling up to a stop sign, the Devil waved to fans. Girls hooted at him. Some boys pumped their fists in the air.
Needed? He was getting soft.
He was getting soft because the world was getting soft.
“Humans have such small souls these days,” he growled. “We live in small times. Otherwise people would talk about stuff that really happened, not what they saw on TV last night.
“Who are you pissed at?” he asked, as if in reply. “What’s the real problem here?”
He realized he was sitting at a stoplight, hyperventilating and talking to himself.
Some girls on the opposite corner took his picture.
LIKE A SNAPPING TURTLE, he hardened on the outside. His eyes were charismatic lances; his TV smile shone like a mouthful of combat knives. He tried not to think about what was happening on the inside. He didn’t look there anymore.
There were more shows to film, of course, now that they knew Think It Over was solid TV gold.
They filmed a show in a school, where he dared a teacher to tell the parents of his students what they really needed to hear. So the guy told a group of parents, at Open House, what everyone knew but wouldn’t say: that kids in America were getting dumber by the minute because parents, at home, didn’t challenge them to read or behave themselves. The parents got indignant. The teacher got fired, but he walked to his car with a big smile on his face.
They filmed a show where anonymous and respectable people, pillars of communities, were offered five hundred dollars to walk around the parking lot of a Babies “R” Us letting the air out of pregnant women’s tires. Most of them wouldn’t do it. It was a surprising episode. They came back the next week and offered a thousand, and it was a whole different story.
Their ratings went up and up.
Then they did a show with a woman whose husband beat her and threatened to kill her if she left, and she had been going around saying she was going to kill him, first.
This show became known as “The Mistake.”
John Scratch showed up and dared the woman to put her money where her mouth was. The producers assumed that she wouldn’t be able to do it, and the point would be that saying something like that and doing it were two different things. The night of the show, she let the cameras in the house an hour before the abusive jerk got home from work. When he walked through the door, she opened a cabinet, pulled out a sword—a sword!—and ran him straight through the gut.
The camera crew, and Scratch himself, came diving out of the next room and pulled her off, but the jerk died on the way to the hospital.
His wife went off to prison with her head high.
The Devil had better lawyers, so he got out on bail for a while before his trial started. Right away, he fled south to the Never-ending Mexican Party.
People brought him drinks and pills, and showed him new dances. He began to feel almost free, but the lawyers found him and brought him back to reality.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” they cautioned. “You’re going up the river unless you know some kind of magic spell, ha-ha.”
Ha-ha. Assholes.
He was drinking alone in a third-floor bedroom when the Great Dane, Fidel, appeared before him.
“Listen,” said Fidel. “You’re going to learn something in prison. Something hard, but very important.”
“Far out,” belched the Devil.
Fidel turned to go, but stopped at the door.
“Just so you know,” he said, “the thing you’re going to learn? It’s something dogs have known for a long time.”
Then he lifted his leg, drowned a basket of geraniums, and disappeared around the corner.