Well, I been kissed more than I want to, and I don’t know nobody with a suit, no matter the color, and there ain’t no choir ever going to sing me to my rest now, except if maybe they’re playing bob-wire harps and beating time on burnt skulls. But Doug Bob’s bus, it sat there flat on the dirt with the wiry bones of tires wrapped over dented black hubs grown with morning glory, all yellow with the rusted old metal showing through, with the windows painted black from the inside and crossed over with duct tape. It had a little vestibule Doug Bob’d built over the double doors out of wood from an old church in Rosanky. The entrance to that vestibule was crossed over with duct tape just like the windows. It was but number seven, whatever place it had come from.
And bus number seven was covered with them Bible verses written in goat’s blood, over and over each other to where there was just red-brown smears on the cracked windshield and across the hood and down the sides, scrambled scribbling that looked like Aunt Cissy’s drool on the lunch table at WalMart. And they made about as much sense.
I even seen Doug Bob on the roof of that bus a few times, smearing bloody words with his fingers like a message to the turkey vultures, or maybe all the way to God above looking down from His air-conditioned heaven.
So I figured, the smoker’s tipped, the tequila’s broke, and here’s my long bus bound for glory with Bible verses on the side, and the only choir is the katydids buzzing in the trees and me and Pootie breathing hard. I saw the door of the wooden vestibule on the bus, that Doug Bob never would touch, was busted open, like it had been kicked out from the inside. The duct tape just flapped loose from the door frame.
I stared all around that bus, and there was a new verse on the side, right under the driver’s window. It was painted fresh, still shiny and red. It said, “Of the tribe of Reuben were sealed twelve thousand.”
“Pootie.”
“Huh?” He was gasping pretty hard. I couldn’t take my stare off the bus, which looked as if it was gonna rise up from the dirt and rumble down the road to salvation any moment, but I knew Pootie had that wild look where his eyes get almost all white and his nose starts to bleed. I could tell from his breathing.
Smelled like he wet his pants, too.
“Pootie,” I said again, “there ain’t no fire, and there ain’t no fresh goat been killed. Where’d the blood come from for that there Bible verse?”
“Reckon he talking ‘bout your Uncle?” Pootie’s voice was duller than Momma at Christmas. Pootie was an idiot. Uncle Reuben never had no twelve thousand in his life. If he ever did, he’d of gone to Mexico and to hell with me and Momma. “Pootie,” I tried again, “where’d the blood come from?”
I knew, but I didn’t want to be the one to say it.
Pootie panted for a little while longer. I finally tore my stare off that old bus, which was shimmering like summer heat, to see Pootie bent over with his hands on his knees and his head hanging down. “It ain’t his handwritin’ neither,” Pootie sobbed.
We both knew Doug Bob was dead.
Something was splashing around down by the creek. “Aw, shit,” I said. “Doug Bob was — is — our friend. We gotta go look.”
It ain’t but a few steps to the bank. We could see a man down there, bending over with his bare ass toward us. He was washing something big and pale. It weren’t no goat.
Me and Pootie, we stopped at the top of the bank, and the stranger stood up and turned around. I about shit my pants.
He had muscles like a movie star, and a gold tan all the way down, like he’d never wore clothes. The hair on his chest and his short-and-curlies was blond, and he was hung good. What near to made me puke was that angel’s body had a goat head. Only it weren’t no goat head you ever saw in your life.
It was like a big heavy ram’s head, except it had antlers coming up off the top, a twelve-point spread off a prize buck, and baby’s eyes — big, blue and round in the middle. Not goat’s eyes at all. That fur kind of tapered off into golden skin at the neck.
And those blue eyes blazed at me like ice on fire.
The tall, golden thing pointed to a body in the creek. He’d been washing the legs with purple soap. “Help me with this. I think you know how it needs to be done.” His voice was windy and creaky, like he hadn’t talked to no one for a real long time.
The body was Doug Bob, with his big gut and saggy butt, and a bloody stump of a neck.
“You son of a bitch!” I ran down the bank, screaming and swinging my arms for the biggest punch I could throw. I don’t know, maybe I tripped over a root or stumbled at the water’s edge, but that golden thing moved like summer lightning just as I slipped off my balance.
Last thing I saw was the butt end of Doug Bob’s ragged old knife coming at me in his fist. I heard Pootie crying my name when my head went all red and painful.
The Devil lives in your neighborhood, yours and mine. He lives in every house in every town, and he has a telescope that looks out the bathroom mirror and up from the drains in the kitchen and out of the still water at the bottom of the toilet bowl. He can see inside of everyone’s heart through their eyes and down their mouth and up their asshole.
It’s true, I know it is.
The hope I hold secret deep inside my heart is that there’s one place on God’s green Earth the Devil can’t see.
I was naked, my dick curled small and sticky to my thigh like it does after I’ve been looking through the bathroom window. A tight little trail of come itched my skin. My ass was on dirt, and I could feel ants crawling up the crack. I opened my mouth to say, “Fine,” and a fly buzzed out from the inside. There was another one in the left side of my nose that seemed ready to stay a spell.
I didn’t really want to open my eyes. I knew where I was. My back was against hot metal. It felt sticky. I was leaning against Doug Bob’s bus and part of that new Bible verse about Uncle Reuben under the driver’s window had run and got Doug Bob’s heart blood all down my back. I could smell mesquite smoke, cooked meat, shit, blood, and the old oily metal of the bus.
But in all my senses, in the feel of the rusted metal, in the warmth of the ground, in the stickiness of the blood, in the sting of the ant bites, in the touch of the fly crawling around inside my nose, in the stink of Doug Bob’s rotten little yard, there was something missing. It was an absence, a space, like when you get a tooth busted out in a fight, and notice it for not being there.
I was surrounded by absence, cold in the summer heat. My heart felt real slow. I still didn’t want to open my eyes.
“You know,” said that windy, creaky voice, sounding even more hollow and thin than before, “if they would just repent of their murders, their sorceries, their fornication, and their thefts, this would be a lot harder.”
The voice was sticky, like the blood on my back, and cold, coming from the middle of whatever was missing around me. I opened my eyes and squinted into the afternoon sun. Doug Bob’s face smiled at me. Leastwise it tried to. Up close I could tell a whole lot of it was burnt off, with griddle marks where his head had lain a while on the smoker. Blackened bone showed through across the cheeks. Doug Bob’s head was duct-taped to the neck of that glorious, golden body, greasy black hair falling down those perfect shoulders. The head kept trying to lop over as he moved, like it was stuck on all wompered. His face was puffy and burnt-up, weirder than Doug Bob mostly ever looked.