Sympathy for the Devil - By Tim Pratt Page 0,7

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.

“Yessir?” Ezekiel looked at me sorta curious like, and nodded his head so slight I wondered if he’d done it at all. “What you need with me, boss?”

“I wanted you to meet your new neighbor. This