He didn’t even look my way. After a long while, he stood up and leaned on a fender and lifted one leg and looked at the bottom of his muddy clodhopper, then put it down and lifted the other and looked at it too. Then he hitched his pants again and headed across the yard toward me. He favored his right leg a little and hardly picked up his feet at all when he walked. He left ruts in the yard like a plow. When he reached the steps, he didn’t so much climb ’em as stand his bantyweight self on each one and look proud, like each step was all his’n now, and then go on to claim the next one too. Once on the porch, he sat down with his shoulders against a post, took off his hat and fanned himself. His hair had a better hold on his head than I thought, what there was of it. Then he pulled out a stick and a pocketknife and commenced to whittle. But he did all these things so deliberate and thoughtful that it was almost the same as him talking, so I kept quiet and waited for the words to catch up.
“It will be a strange and disgraceful day unto this world,” he finally said, “when I ask a gut-bucket nigger guitar player for advice on auto-MO-bile mechanics, or for anything else except a tune now and again.” He had eyes like he’d been shot twice in the face. “And furthermore, I am the Lord of Darkness and the Father of Lies, and if I want to drive my 1936 Hudson Terraplane, with its six-cylinder seventy-horsepower engine, out into the middle of some loblolly and shoot out its tires and rip up its seats and piss down its radiator hole, why, I will do it and do it again seven more times afore breakfast, and the voice that will stop me will not be yourn. You hearing me, John?”
“Ain’t my business,” I said. Like always, I was waiting to see how it was.
“That’s right, John, it ain’t your business,” the devil said. “Nothing I do is any of your business, John, but everything you do is mine. I was there the night you took that fatal drink, John. I saw you fold when your gut bent double on you, and I saw the shine of your blood coming up. I saw that whore you and Jar Head was squabbling over doing business at your funeral. It was a sorry-ass death of a sorry-ass man, John, and I had a big old time with it.”
The hound dogs had laid back down, so I stretched out and rested my feet on one of them. It rolled its eyes up at me like its feelings was hurt.
“I’d like to see old Jar Head one more time,” I said. “If he’ll be along directly, I’ll wait here and meet his train.”
“Jar Head’s plumb out of your reach now, John,” the devil said, still whittling. “I’d like to show you around your new home this afternoon. Come take a tour with me.”
“I had to drive fifteen miles to get to that jook joint in the first place,” I said, “and then come I don’t know how far on the train to Hell and past it. I’ve done enough traveling for one day.”
“Come with me, John.”
“I thank you, but I’ll just stay here.”
“It would please me no end if you made my rounds with me, John.” The stick he was whittling started moving in his hand. He had to grip it a little to hang on, but he just kept smiling. The stick started to bleed along the cuts, welling up black red as the blade skinned it. “I want to show off your new home place. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, John?” The blood curled down his arm like a snake.
I stood up and shook my head real slow and disgusted, like I was bored by his conjuring, but I made sure to hold my guitar between us as I walked past him. I walked to the porch steps with my back to the devil, and I was headed down them two at a time when he hollered out behind, “John! Where do you think you’re going?”
I said real loud, not looking back: “I done enough nothing for one day. I’m taking me a tour. If your ass has slipped between the planks and got stuck, I’ll fetch a couple of mules to pull you free.”
I heard him cuss and come scrambling after me with that leg a-dragging, sounding just like a scarecrow out on a stroll. I was holding my guitar closer to me all the time.
I wan’t real surprised that he let those two hound dogs ride up on the front seat of the Terraplane like they was Mrs. Roosevelt, while I had to walk in the road alongside, practically in the ditch. The devil drove real slow, talking to me out the window the whole time.
“Whyn’t you make me get off the train at Hell, with the rest of those sorry people?”
“Hell’s about full,” he said. “When I first opened for business out here, John, Hell wan’t no more’n a wide spot in the road. It took a long time to get any size on it. When you stole that dime from your poor old Meemaw to buy a French post card and she caught you and flailed you across the yard, even way back then, Hell wan’t no bigger’n Baltimore. But it’s about near more’n I can handle now, I tell you. Now I’m filling up towns all over these parts. Ginny Gall. Diddy-Wah-Diddy. West Hell—I’d run out of ideas when I named West Hell, John.”
A horsefly had got into my face and just hung there. The sun was fierce, and my clothes was sticking to me. My razor slid hot along my ankle. I kept favoring my guitar, trying to keep it out of the dust as best I could.
“Beluthahatchie, well, I’ll be frank with you, John, Beluthahatchie ain’t much of a place. I won’t say it don’t have possibilities, but right now it’s mostly just that railroad station, and a crossroads, and fields. One long, hot, dirty field after another.” He waved out the window at the scenery and grinned. He had yellow needly teeth. “You know your way around a field, I reckon, don’t you, John?”
“I know enough to stay out of ’em.”
His laugh was like a man cutting tin. “I swear you are a caution, John. It’s a wonder you died so young.”
We passed a right lot of folks, all of them working in the sun. Pulling tobacco. Picking cotton. Hoeing beans. Old folks scratching in gardens. Even younguns carrying buckets of water with two hands, slopping nearly all of it on the ground afore they’d gone three steps. All the people looked like they had just enough to eat to fill out the sad expression on their faces, and they all watched the devil as he drove slowly past. All those folks stared at me hard, too, and at the guitar like it was a third arm waving at ’em. I turned once to swat that blessed horsefly and saw a group of field hands standing in a knot, looking my way and pointing.
“Where all the white folks at?” I asked.
“They all up in heaven,” the devil said. ‘You think they let niggers into heaven?” We looked at each other a long time. Then the devil laughed again. “You ain’t buying that one for a minute, are you, John?”
I was thinking about Meemaw. I knew she was in heaven, if anyone was. When I was a youngun I figured she musta practically built the place, and had been paying off on it all along. But I didn’t say nothing.
“No, John, it ain’t that simple,” the devil said. “Beluthahatchie’s different for everybody, just like Hell. But you’ll be seeing plenty of white folks. Overseers. Train conductors. Sheriff’s deputies. If you get uppity, why, you’ll see whole crowds of white folks. Just like home, John. Everything’s the same. Why should it be any different?”
“ ’Cause you’re the devil,” I said. “You could make things a heap worse.”
“Now, could I really, John? Could I really?”
In the next field, a big man with hands like gallon jugs and a pink splash across his face was struggling all alone with a spindly mule and a plow made out of slats. “Get on, sir,” he was telling the mule. “Get on with you.” He didn’t even look around when the devil come chugging up alongside.
The devil gummed two fingers and whistled. “Ezekiel. Ezekiel! Come on over here, boy.”
Ezekiel let go the plow and stumbled over the furrows, stepping high and clumsy in the thick dusty earth, trying to catch up to the Terraplane and not mess up the rows too bad. The devil han’t slowed down any—in fact, I believe he had speeded up some. Left to his own doin’s, the mule headed across the rows, the plow jerking along sideways behind him.