The Devil Delivered and Other Tales (30 page)

“Hot damn,” Joey sighed. “What a night. And you, Gully?”

“Not sure. I think I’m done, for a while at least. You?”

“Same for me.”

They walked on in silence for a long time after that, and moments before they disappeared from view, their hands simultaneously linked—not in any sexual way, of course, but in a manly, proper way—and then they were gone.

*   *   *

Leaving at long last the end of the octopod’s tale. Kit and Moopsy found Andrew clawing his way out of the mangled back door of the Pyramid. After a long chase, Kit lassoed his former master in a wheat field and trussed the gibbering man up and then unceremoniously dragged him toward a hilltop (really just a rise, but for prairie folk it was a hill, damn near a mountain) where waited a flying saucer. Its ramp was down, and two other octopods riding dogs patrolled the perimeter.

Kit rode Moopsy up the ramp, dragging a weeping Andy Breech in their wake, and then inside, into the blinding white light, where there waited an examination table and odd-shaped instruments with which to probe Andrew’s shrunken genitals for all eternity.

After a moment the outriders also entered the shimmering craft. The ramp rose flush with the saucer’s underbelly. The vessel lifted into the night sky and climbed blindingly fast into the heavens.

*   *   *

Annie Trollop had been crushed ignobly in the rush and subsequent tumble down the endless steps of the Pyramid. So badly mangled was she that no one knew her, no one at all. Brandon Safeword’s body still haunts the alleys and streets of the city, seeking a head worthy of its astonishingly fit and trim body; and Penny Foote-Koobie lived her dreams out in the company of an increasingly exhausted but otherwise contented Neanderthal, who eventually gave up painting and became a stock analyst for four years before returning to his roots and a reunion with nature and the Mother and the cycles of life and death that, generally speaking, are packed with a lot of death.

Arthur Revell and Faye disappeared, but don’t be fooled. They’re out there. Doing art and thereby conspiring the ruination of modern civilization.

Hah hah! Ho ho!

FISHIN’ WITH GRANDMA MATCHIE

THIS IS WHERE I WANT TO START

The Meaning of School and All That:

It’s not my fault! It has to do with a lot of things. Special things, like Bigness. When I think of the world’s Bigness I think of a ball of fishing line that’s all tangled up and no matter how hard Dad tries he can’t find where it starts or where it ends and the tackle box tips over then and he steps on a rubber worm that rolls and the next thing you know Dad’s in the lake. It’s like that.

So you follow the line this way and it loops into a knot and goes off that way. But you just got to keep following it, because Bigness leads to the Truth, and the Truth’s important. If you don’t know what I mean then I’ll show you just like this:

Just like this:

In the Olden Days they used to have Jesters. Jesters talked about Plain Things as if those things were fat and skinny and tall and short. But sometimes the Jesters made those things too fat or too skinny or too tall or too short, and then they were bad and Not to be Tolerated, and then the king would stick them in a corner and make them wear a Dunce Cap.

Now, the corner is a funny place. You stare at the walls where they meet, and you begin to understand the importance of the Bigness of Things. And it all starts Making Sense. This is the place where children who are Not Yet Considered Adults go, when kings and teachers get all fretful about children with Overwrought Imaginations.

You see, when you’re sitting there with your feet not even touching the floor, you stare at those walls where they meet and you know you can’t fit between them because there’s no crack. And that’s when you suddenize that no matter how small you are, you’re never small enough.

Which is just what the kings and teachers want you to suddenize.

LIFE starts with a Foolish Pleading of your case:

But it really happened. Just like I wrote it, three weeks during summer vacation, and summer vacation is the time for dreams. Just because school had started it shouldn’t mean things that were true in the summer weren’t true now. Isn’t that right?

But the Bigness of Things tells you in No Uncertain Terms (that’s what she says: “in No Uncertain Terms”): No, Jock Junior, that is not right.

You’d think she’d know better.

Now, the first day of school and how it all came about:

My teacher was a nose and that’s all she was, just a nose and some wispy hair around it. If she had eyes, they were hiding somewhere in the blackness of her giant nostrils. The nose gloomed over all of us, and snarted hotly, and we sweated a lot in that room.

The first thing you’d notice about that room is that it had four corners, all empty now because it’s the first day of school. And the next thing you’d notice is that none of the corners have cracks, though of course you’d only see that if you were sitting in those corners, one after another. So you can trust me when I say there’s no cracks in them, okay?

And by the window there’s an aquarium with one fish in it. Sometimes I slip him notes, helping him plan his escape, but he never answers them, so I figure he’s got a plan of his own. Thing is, I don’t think he’s very smart.

And I’ll tell you a Secret. Something I’ve figured out. Look at the windows. See those cardboard faces pasted to them? There’s a face for each one of us in the room, except Big Nose herself. Look at them. They have holes for eyes and holes for nostrils but drawn-in mouths. And that’s my Secret. So don’t tell anyone, especially Big Nose.

Of course I’m not old enough to see these things, nor to understand the Importance of Telling the Truth. I’m Not to be Tolerated, I’m Precocious. Only it wasn’t me who said those things, which are Big things. And it wasn’t me who knew how to spell them. But we’re here to learn how to spell.

Tell the truth about what you did in the summer, Big Nose told us sweating faces. And I made my eyes into slivery slits and thought about things, cool and calculating like. It may have been her understanding that there were no little jesters hiding among us, I think. She didn’t say which summer, but we’ve already been taught to understand the need not to have to say Certain Things. But then I think: It may have been her plan to Ferret me out.

The Assignment that Ferreted me out:

I bet I know more than you do. I used to overturn big flat rocks, looking for the Devil. Satan Himself, Grandma Matchie always called him, and always with a shiver jippling all along her skinny shoulders. And her eyes spizzled, like she was showing me what Hades looked like, as if she’d been down there herself and arm-wrassled Satan Himself down to the ground (she did too, but that’s another story). He was hiding, she told me, always hiding. So I overturned rocks, the big flat ones, but all I ever found were ants, carrying eggs back and forth, and getting on my shoes so I had to stimp and stamp and stromp.

I don’t look under rocks anymore, and that’s why I know more than you do.

And I’ll tell you this too. I’ve seen him. I’ve seen Satan Himself. It was easy. All I had to do was follow that fishing line right to the end, and there he was! It was the third and last week in my summer vacation, but before I tell you about that, I have to tell you about the first and second weeks, because, you see, that’s the only way to unravel fishing line.

And that’s not the only reason. Sometimes the Bigness of Things is so big that you’ve just got to be prepared before you run into it. Which means you should take a look at smaller Bigness before you see the Biggest Bigness.

I’m doing this because Old Ladies say I’m nice, and since they got to be so old I figure they know the difference between nice and not-nice.

One last thing. Those Titles are Grandma Matchie’s, one for each of the three weeks. She says Titles are important, and that’s the way they’ve done things since Adam first broke the Egg. I’m not sure what that means, unless it’s that all those Titles fell out when Adam broke the Egg. Personally, I don’t think there’s an Egg in existence that could hold all the world’s Titles. Because if there was, who laid it and where does she live and what does she eat and does she ever visit Sudbury and if she did then why?

So, here’s the first week, and Grandma Matchie’s first Title. The rest of the stuff, and all those smaller headings, is mine and no one’s Legally Responsible but me.

One thing worries me, though. What happens if all those people I talk about come after me?

NO REST FOR THE WICKED

Girls. My face is scrinching up already, but I’m forcing myself because it’s Important to start here. I like pretending they’re not there most of the time, even though they wear pants with zippers and I’m pretty sure they don’t need zippers. They’re funny like that and don’t ask me why because I don’t know why.

So I usually pretend they don’t exist, and that makes them mad for some reason, and then there’s this funny chase thing during recess, where you run after them until your chest hurts. And something Serious and Grim pushes the insides of your head all over the place, as if the chase was More Important than Anything Else on Earth.

It’s sickening. And the girl you’re chasing after looks Different from all the other girls. Stranger, uglier maybe, like she’s always twitching her nose and pulling at her hair.

The fascination of ugliness:

But then you catch her. You force her into a red bricked corner behind the school, and suddenly she looks mad. I can’t figure that. She glares at you and she’s breathing hard and her cheeks are red and her eyes are wild in a way that makes you think of stupid things, like wrestling.

It’s that corner stuff all over again. The Bigness of Things that can make your face scranch up while you’re thinking of more stupid things, like mint-sucking piano teachers and little violins wearing flowery dresses. I know it’s stupid!

And it gets worse and worse. You plant a grin on your face like the ones you’ve seen in horror movies just before the blonde woman throws up her hands and screeks, and she stares at it, those eyes going big, because you’ve grown fangs. It makes you even sicker when you suddenize how dumb you look. But in spite of all that, in spite of everything, you close in.

What do you do then? Maybe you punch her, maybe she punches you. And you ask yourself in horror: Whose arm is going to be sore? It’s the most Awful Decision of your life, that one.

Or, worst of all, nothing happens! And no matter what, you feel luzzy for days afterwards. Ignoring her giggling friends you follow her next recess, trying to make her run away so you can splurt after her, so maybe something’ll happen this time. But it’s awful, because now she’s ignoring you!

So I hate her and that’s all there is to it. And my face scrunches up when someone says her name, and that Grim and Serious thing in me makes me want to barf.

The Secret of Wanting to Barf:

Oh, I know all about it now. I’ve studied the way those bumps on my sister’s chest gromered all bigger underneath her shirt, until she had to tie them up so she could see where she was stepping, so there wouldn’t always be dog-do on her runners.

Only girls and fat men have those things. And only girls tie them up, which is why fat men sag and slumple and I get out of their way so I don’t get brolled on and skirbled flat.

I also know why girls exist. It all started that first week of summer vacation at Rat Portage Lake, when, feeling Grim and Serious, I threw a dead frog in Sis’s hair and it came back to life. Up until then nothing I had ever thrown in her hair had come back to life. Not worms all liddlelimply gray, not minnows all bladed white, not even big black flies from the windowsill which are never really dead anyway! And the live things I threw in her hair all died instantly. It’s true! The garter snake up and died! Went stuckled as a stick and stuck out its tongue and rolled up its eyes!

But the frog came back to life, all because Sis had grown those Infernal Bumps. I stood back in amazement and watched the poor thing struggle in the torngle of her long hair, while Sis blawed and screamed and clabbed at her pointy head. Then she managed to grab one of its kicking legs and she threw it high into the air. Limbs Splayed, it hung up there against the sky, then down it went hitting the lake with a batralp.

I’ll never forget those Splayed Limbs in all my life. And now, when I chase a girl into a corner behind school, I know that those Splayed Limbs will be just another one of those stupid thoughts. The whole thing makes me sick.

And that’s how it all started, as we stood by the dock with the tigerflies brazzling over our heads and the water purbling up on the little beach and the pine trees hisspering behind the cabin, the whole family every one of us waiting for Grandma Matchie to arrive.

Even normal families like mine got Secrets:

Grandma Matchie is that Secret. I’m not supposed to talk about her. I think it’s because she embarrasses Dad alot, even though she’s Mom’s Mom. So I won’t talk about the times she embarrassed Dad and I’ll keep it to the Plain Facts nobody would argue about.

Grandma Matchie lives in a two-story wooden lodge that has been under water since 1899. That was the year the dam was opened. Fifty feet down, she says, all lit up so that the astronauts can see it whenever they pass overhead. She sleeps down there and comes up most mornings after breakfast, but sometimes earlier.

But it was already our second day at the cabin. And the sun was hot, making us all clampy while we tuddled around the cabin, or skiddled up on the Precambrian Rock skirmelling blueberries into our mouths and collecting deer antlers and putting them in trees and throwing pinecones at wasp nests and running away when all the wasps come stungling out. Our second day away from the city, away from Appalled Neighbors and Urban Miscreants who want to recycle everything in our house or at least bottles. Our second day at Rat Portage Lake, and Grandma Matchie hadn’t come up yet.