Boy's Life (30 page)

     “The man,” my father said as he leaned toward Mom, “is as crazy as a one-legged toad-frog.”

     As the song played, Reverend Blessett raged on about disrespect for the law and the destruction of the family, about Eve’s sin and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He was spouting spittle and flinging sweat, and his face got so red I feared he was going to explode at the seams. “The Beach Boys!” he said with another ferocious sneer. “You know what those are? They’re bums who wouldn’t know a good day’s work if you handed ’em a hoe and paid ’em fifty dollars! They lay around all day out there in California and fornicate in the sand like wild beasts! And
this
is what our young people are listenin’ to day and night? God help this world!”

     “Amen!” somebody shouted. The crowd was getting worked up. “Amen, brother!” another voice yelled.

     “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet, my friends!” Reverend Blessett hollered. He picked up the needle, put his hand flat against the record to keep it from turning, and as the player’s gears whined in protest, he searched for a groove on the disc. “Listen to this!” He disengaged the gears, and he lowered the needle while his other hand rotated the record backward.

     What came out, in a slow groan, was:
Daaadeelsmaaastraaabaaaa.

     “Hear it? Hear it?” The reverend’s eyes glittered with triumph; he had unlocked the mystery at the music’s heart. “The devil is my strawberry! That’s what they said! Clear as a bell! They’re singin’ a song in praise of Satan and they don’t care who knows it! And this thing is goin’ out on the radio waves all over the country right at this very minute! It’s bein’ played by our children and they won’t even know what they’re hearin’ until it’s too late and there’s no turnin’ back! It’s the devil’s plan to snare their souls!”

     “I think they said the same thing about the Charleston,” Dad said to Mom, but his was a small voice in the fevered chorus of amens.

     This is the way the world spins: people want to believe the best, but they’re always ready to fear the worst. I imagine you could take the most innocent song ever written and hear the devil speaking in it, if that’s what your mind told you to listen for. Songs that say something about the world and about the people in it—people who are fraught with sins and complications just like the best of us—can be especially cursed, because to some folks truth is a hurtful thing. I sat in that church and heard the reverend rage and holler. I saw his face redden and his eyes gleam and the spittle spray from his mouth. I saw that he was a terrified man, and he was stoking the hot coals of terror in his congregation. He skipped the needle around, playing more snippets backward that to me sounded like gibberish but to him held satanic messages. It occurred to me that he must’ve spent an awfully long time huddled over that record player, scratching the needle back and forth in search of an evil thought. I wasn’t sure he was trying to protect people as much as he was trying to direct them. In this latter area he was highly successful; soon he had most everybody yelling amens like the cheerleaders at Adams Valley High yelled for touchdowns. Dad just shook his head and crossed his arms, and I don’t think Mom knew what to make of all this commotion.

     Then, with sweat dripping from his chin and his eyes wild, Reverend Blessett announced, “Now we’ll make the devil dance to his own tune, won’t we?” He snapped the wooden box open, and from it jerked something that was alive and kicking. As the Beach Boys continued to croon, Reverend Blessett gripped a leash and made the creature on its other end start dancing crazily to the music.

     It was a little spider monkey, all gangly arms and legs, its face spitting with fury as the reverend jerked its chain this way and that. “Dance, Lucifer!” the reverend shouted, his voice carrying over even those of the Californicators. “Dance to your music!” Lucifer, who had been cooped up in that cramped box for Lord knew how long, did not look too pleased. The thing hissed and snapped at the air, its tail flailing like a furry gray whip, and Reverend Blessett kept shouting, “Dance, Lucifer! Go on and dance!” as he wrenched the monkey back and forth on the end of its tether. Some people got up and started clapping and writhing in the aisle. A woman whose stomach looked as big as a sofa pillow got up on her tree-trunk legs and staggered around sobbing and calling for Jesus as if He were a lost puppy. “Dance, Lucifer!” the reverend yelled. I thought he was going to start swinging that poor monkey round and round his head like a rabbit’s foot on a key chain. A man in the row in front of us spread his arms wide and started shouting something with
God
and
praise be
and
destroy the heathens
in it, and I found myself staring at the back of his sun-browned neck to see if I might find an alien X whittled there.

     The place had turned into a madhouse. Dad reached for Mom’s hand and said, “We’re gettin’ out of here!” People were gyrating and jiggling in rapturous ecstasies, and all this time I’d thought Baptists couldn’t dance.

     Reverend Blessett gave the monkey a ferocious shake. “Dance, Lucifer!” he commanded as the music thundered on. “Show ’em what’s in you!”

     And then, quite abruptly, Lucifer did just that.

      The monkey shrieked and, obviously fed up with the shaking and jerking, sprang for the reverend’s head. Those spidery arms and legs wrapped around the reverend’s skull, and Reverend Blessett squalled with terror as Lucifer sank his sharp little fangs into the reverend’s right ear. At the same time, Lucifer displayed exactly what he’d been fed up
on
, as from his rear end spewed a stream of foul matter as brown as Bosco all over the reverend’s white suit. It was a sight that caused all rapture and speaking in tongues to immediately cease. The reverend was staggering around, trying to get that monkey off his head as Lucifer’s bowels sprayed his suit with runny brown patterns. The woman with a sofa-pillow belly screamed. Some men in the front row ran to help the reverend, whose ear was being chewed ragged. As the men reached the struggling reverend and the gnawing monkey, Lucifer suddenly turned his head and saw the hands about to grab him, a bit of bloody ear gripped in his teeth. He released his grip from Reverend Blessett’s skull and with a chattering screech he sprang over the men’s heads, making them holler and duck as more Bosco streamed down upon them. The leash came loose from Reverend Blessett’s hand, and Lucifer was free.

     Like his nasty namesake, the monkey jumped from person to person, snapping at their ears and spraying their clothes. I don’t know what the reverend had been feeding him, but it must have disagreed with Lucifer’s stomach. Mom screamed and Dad dodged as Lucifer sprang past us, and we barely missed getting splashed. Lucifer leaped from the edge of a pew, swung on the light fixture, and then landed on a woman’s blue hat, where he fertilized a false carnation. Then he was on the move again, paws and claws and whipping tail, snapping teeth, a shriek, a splatter. The smell of rotten bananas was enough to knock you to your knees. A brave Christian soldier made a try at grabbing the leash, but he got a wet brown face for his efforts and Lucifer made a noise like a laugh as the man staggered back, temporarily blinded, and his own wife fled from him. Lucifer sank his teeth into a woman’s nose, anointed a teenaged boy’s hair with brown slickum, and leaped from pew to pew like a demonic little version of Fred Astaire.

     “Get him!” Reverend Blessett shouted, holding his bleeding ear. “Get that damn thing!”

     A man did get a hand on Lucifer, but he jerked it back a second later with a fang-stung knuckle. The monkey was quick, and as mean as hell. Most everybody was too busy dodging the flying streams to think about catching Lucifer. I was belly-down on a pew, and Dad and Mom crouched in the aisle. Reverend Blessett yelled, “The doors! Somebody shut the doors!”

     It was a good idea, but it came much too late. Lucifer was already in motion toward the way out, his beady little eyes glittering with delight. Behind him, he left his signature on the walls. “Stop him!” the reverend hollered, but Lucifer danced over a man’s shoulder and swan-dived off a woman’s head and with a screech of triumph he bounded through the open doorway into the night.

     A few men ran out after him. Everybody else started breathing a lot easier, though the air wasn’t fit to breathe. Dad helped Mom to her feet, and then he helped another two men pick up the fat lady, who had fainted and fallen like an oak tree. “Everybody stay calm!” the reverend said shakily. “It’s all right now! Everything’s all right!”

     I wondered about a man who could say that when his ear was half chewed off and his white suit covered with monkey mess.

     The sinful song we had all gathered to hear was forgotten. That seemed a minor thing now, in perspective. People started to get over their shock, and what took its place was indignation. Somebody hollered at Reverend Blessett that he shouldn’t have let that monkey get loose, and somebody else said that he was sending his cleaning bill over first thing in the morning. The woman with the bitten nose squawked that she was going to sue. The voices rose and clamored, and I saw Reverend Blessett shrink back from them, all the power sucked out of him. He looked confused and miserable, just like everybody else.

     The men who’d chased out after Lucifer returned, sweating and breathless. The monkey had scrambled up a tree and gone, they said. Maybe he’d turn up somewhere when it got light, they said. Then maybe they could snare him in a net.

     People trying to snare Lucifer instead of Lucifer snaring people. That struck me as peculiar and funny at the same time, but Dad put a voice to the thought. “Dream on,” he said.

     Reverend Blessett sat down on the podium. He stayed there, in his fouled white suit, and he looked at his hands as his congregation left him. On the record player, the needle ticked… ticked… ticked.

     We went home, through the humid summer night. The streets were quiet, but the symphony of insects droned and keened from the treetops. I couldn’t help but think that from one of those trees Lucifer was watching. Now that he had gotten free, who could put him back in his box again?

     I imagined I smelled the burning cross again, wafting its taint over my hometown. I decided it must be somebody cooking hot dogs over an open fire.

6
Nemo’s Mother
& a Week with the Jaybird

THE SUMMER MOVED ON, AS SUMMERS WILL.

     Reverend Blessett tried to keep the furor going, but except for a few people who wrote to the
Journal
demanding that the song be banned from sale, the steam was gone from the reverend’s engine. Maybe it had something to do with the long, lazy days of July; maybe it concerned the mystery of who had set that cross afire in the Lady’s yard; maybe people had listened to that song for themselves and made up their own minds. Whatever the reason, folks in Zephyr seemed to have decided that Reverend Blessett’s campaign was nothing but hot air. It ended with a slam when Mayor Swope visited his house and told him to stop scaring people into seeing demons that weren’t anywhere but in the reverend’s mind.

     As for Lucifer, he was seen traveling in the trees by a half-dozen people. A banana cream pie cooling on a shady windowsill at the house of Sonia and Katharina Glass was utterly destroyed, and at any other time I’d have said the Branlins did it but the Branlins were lying low. Lucifer, on the other hand, was swinging high. An attempt was made by Chief Marchette and some of the volunteer firemen to snag Lucifer in a net, but what they got for their trouble was monkey business all over their clothes. Lucifer evidently had a sure aim and a steady spout, both front and rear. Dad said that was a pretty good defense mechanism, and he laughed about it, but Mom said the thought of that monkey loose in our town made her sick.

     Lucifer stayed pretty much to himself during the day, but sometimes when night fell he shrieked and screamed loud enough to wake up the sleepers on Poulter Hill. On more than one occasion I heard the crack of gunshots as someone, roused from sleep by Lucifer’s racket, tried to put a hole through him, but Lucifer was never there to catch a bullet. But the gunfire would wake up all the dogs and their barking would awaken the entire town and therefore the Zephyr council passed an emergency ordinance forbidding gunshots in the town limits after eight o’clock at night. Soon afterward, Lucifer learned how to clang sticks against trash cans, which he liked to do between three and six A.M. He avoided a bunch of poisoned bananas Mayor Swope laid out for him, and he shunned a trip-wire trap. He started leaving his brown mark on newly washed cars, and he swung down from a tree one afternoon and bit a plug out of Mr. Gerald Hargison’s ear when the mailman was walking his route. Mr. Hargison told my dad about it as he sat for a moment on the porch and puffed a plastic-tipped cheroot, a bandage on his diminished left ear.