by Tonia Brown
A feminine ‘Dale’, as he wept over the corpse of his best friend?
No, Jonah wouldn’t reduce his friend’s sudden death to a cliché.
Instead, he gathered Dale tighter and said, clear and calm, “This is bullshit.”
Again, no one was there to care what he thought.
“This is bullshit!” he cried.
The traffic agreed with honks and roars.
Jonah looked down at Dale and repeated, “Bullshit. That’s what this is. You didn’t deserve to go to Hell. You might have been a jerk, but you weren’t cruel. Or mean. Or anything that deserves that kind of place. You were… you were just… Dale.” Jonah hugged the body of his best friend again, not wanting to let go but knowing he would have to. Eventually. A sudden and stupid thought caught him and produced a nervous little giggle. “When you said demons, you really meant demons. Geesh, Dale. And all this time I thought the Devil was some big deal I should be afraid of, but it turns out he’s just a two-bit jackhole with nothing better to do than collect innocent souls.”
“Now wait a minute,” Satan said. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Jesus!” Jonah shouted. Dropping Dale facedown on the gravel, Jonah scooted away from the freshly materialized speaker.
Satan cast a freezing shadow over corpse and mourner as he looked down with a long frown. He no longer wore the uniform of an officer; instead, the Lord of Darkness was dressed in a suit as black as an endless night. Jacket, shirt, slacks, shoes were all black. The only splash of color in the whole ensemble was a red handkerchief in the jacket pocket. Otherwise he was quite the same as before, still big, still blond, and still handsome. He stared down at Jonah with those penetrating electric blue eyes, as if he could see into Jonah, or perhaps through him. A bubble of silence enclosed the pair again, which allowed Jonah to hear every sigh and groan of the Devil as he mulled over Jonah’s words.
“That’s something I don’t understand, either,” Satan finally said. “Why is it everyone calls out to Him when they’re surprised? How come no one ever shouts ‘Unholy Lucifer’ when they get a fright? It would make more sense. I mean, half the time it’s one of my guys doing the scaring. Why call out to Him? He ain’t gonna hear you, anyway.”
“What do you want?” Jonah asked.
Lowering to his haunches, Satan poked the corpse, not bothering to look at Jonah, as he said, “I came to defend my honor.”
“Your honor?” Jonah asked. He spat out the last word with great distaste, in very much the same way he would have said ‘syphilis.’ Or ‘gonorrhea.’ Or ‘diet cola.’
“Sure. I don’t like being referred to as a two-bit jackhole.” Satan looked up to Jonah and added, “I don’t like being called a two-bit anything. Four bits maybe. But two? At least give me some credit.”
Jonah had no idea what the Devil was babbling on about, but he wasn’t going to let this second opportunity slip away like the first one had. “Why take Dale? Huh? He never did anything wrong.”
“Yeah, you know all about Dale, don’t you? You were his best pal, so there were absolutely no secrets between you, huh?” Satan shook his head and chuckled. “You humans always think you know each other so damned well. You just don’t see the big picture. I can’t blame you, though. It’s kind of a ‘forest for the trees’ thing, I suppose.” The Devil stood to his full height, his eyes never leaving Dale’s body. When he spoke again, his voice had lost that edge of humor. “He had such dark things to hide. Such terrible secrets. Such horrible desires.” The Devil raised his accusing glance to Jonah, as he added, “You all do. Don’t you?”
“I… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jonah answered, though he sure as hell knew just what the Devil meant. Jonah tried to be a good man, but lingering in the background, there was always a dark streak. A mean undertone, which, on the rarest of occasions, forced its way into his best intentions and turned them nasty.
Satan seemed to sense Jonah’s doubt, because the smile returned, along with a bone-chilling laugh. “Sure you do. I would think you’d be glad Dale finally got his. Isn’t that what you’ve wanted all these years? For Dale to get what he deserved? Mr. Irresponsible finally got what was coming to him, and you aren’t happy about it? It’s what you’ve wished for so many times in the darkness of your scabby little room. Isn’t it?”
“Never!” Jonah shouted. But that was, of course, a lie.
“Sure you did.” Satan took a menacing step over the corpse, toward Jonah. “You’d huddle under your covers, make a little womb out of linen, a little cave out of fabric, then whisper in that suffocating darkness about how much you wished someone would teach that self-righteous, officious ass a lesson. Isn’t that true?”
Jonah just shook his head, because he knew he couldn’t trust his tongue anymore.
“Sure you did,” Satan said, stepping closer and closer to the cowering man before him. “You’d pray that someone would hurry up and take your problems away. But you didn’t pray to Him. Did you? No.” Satan paused and pointed to the sky. “Not to Him.” The pointing finger shifted back to the speaker as he added, “You prayed to me.” Satan lowered himself to a hover over Jonah, hissing his words through gritted teeth. “You’d beg me to teach Dale a lesson he would never forget, to teach all the Dales of the world a lesson.”
“I don’t—”
“Then you’d jack off to some blurry photo of one of his ex-girlfriends, imagining that your tight fist was her cunt and your cock was his, because the truth is you wish you were Dale. You wish you were just like him. You wish you had half the balls. You wish you looked half as good. You wish you were anyone else but poor little ugly, boring Jonah. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” Jonah whispered.
“Isn’t that right!” Satan screamed in a voice full of hate and rage and centuries of self-loathing.
“Yes!” Jonah shouted. He buried his head into his drawn-up knees. “Yes, okay? Yes. It’s true.”
Satan chuckled again as he backed away from Jonah’s trembling form. “Like I said. You’re all the fucking same.”
Jonah raised his head, looked the Devil right in the eye, and said, “Then take me.”
“What?”
“If we are all the same, then take me instead of Dale.”
“Take you?”
“Take my soul instead.”
“I see. Trade up, as it were?”
“Yeah!”
“No way. You might all be the same under the skin, but Dale,” Satan paused and drew a quick breath through his teeth, “He was one of a kind.”
“Either we’re all the same or we’re not.” Jonah scrambled to his feet. “What makes Dale so special?”
“He’s the little fishy that got away.”
Jonah got it then. Satan wanted Dale so badly because Dale must have broken some sort of contract, probably embarrassing the Lord of Darkness a great deal in the process. Satan was peacock proud to have the soul of an escapee back in his clutches. Yet it wasn’t Satan who brought Dale to California. “You never would have gotten him without me.”
“Say what now?”
“You didn’t bring him here. You didn’t lure him here. You had nothing to do with his returning here. This is my fault. I brought Dale here, so I should have some say in this. Take my soul instead. Set Dale free.”
Pursing his lips, Satan took a long, hard look at Jonah. At length, he said, “You know, I never would have pegged that jackass as the kind who’d make such a remarkable friend. He treats you like shit, and here you are willing to trade places with the asshole. Why?”
“Because he might be an asshole, but he’s my asshole.” Jonah couldn’t elaborate more than that. His voice fled at the very thought of explaining fifteen years of complicated friendship. Dale was a terrible person, but in many ways, he was a good man. It just took a certain kind of person to see and appreciate the good and ignore, well, everything else.
“He’s your asshole?”
Jonah nodded.
Satan chuckled. “Man, I wouldn’t go around telling just anyone that. I don’t know what Dale would think about being your asshole.”
Jonah groaned. It was just like dealing with Dale all over again. “I mean, he was a jerk, but he doesn’t deserve this. I do, for betraying him. Take me.”
Satan cracked another mile-wide smile. “No.”
“But—” Jonah started.
“But, indeed,” Satan said, over the outcry. “The answer is still no. The last thing I need in Hell is another driveling, snot-nosed sad sack bringing down the place. I get enough of those, thank you very much.”
The pair fell quiet—Satan with the upper hand, and Jonah knowing there was nothing he could offer that the Devil probably didn’t already own in the end. Jonah lowered his head to his knees again and did the only thing he could do. He waited. He waited for the coming tears to claim him and turn him into a driveling, snot-nosed sad sack. He waited for the derisive laughter that was sure to follow as Jonah wept over his own folly. And he waited for the Devil to finally shove off, to leave Jonah to grieve alone. In peace.
Instead of shoving off, the Devil said, “Now, I ain’t willing to trade him, but I am willing to make a different sort of deal.”
Jonah raised his tear-filled eyes to the Father of Lies.
Satan asked, “The question is, are you?”
Normally, when presented with any decision, Jonah had a tendency to dwell on the question, deliberating over every possible answer. As a Libra, he oscillated from point to counterpoint, hoping that his final decision would please not only himself, but all present. It was in his nature, this need to weigh all decisions, this inability to just choose and be done with it.
But this time there was no need to think.
For the first time in his life, Jonah answered without hesitation.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am. Anything. Anything you want, just name it.”
“Anything, you say?” The smile that crawled over Satan’s face was bone chilling in its coldness. Not a shred of warmth was in that grin, not an ounce of humor, not a trace of pity. “Why, Jonah, it would be my honor to take a blank check from such a fine young man as yourself, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be very sporting of me. I’ve been known to go a bit mad when filling out such things.”
“Okaaaay,” Jonah said, in a long slow drawl of uncertainty. “Then just tell me what you want.”
“I want what you want, son. I want you to have Dale’s soul back.”
Not fooled by the simplicity of those words, Jonah narrowed his eyes. “But?”
“But not without effort. I might be in the right here, but I’m also a little bit bored. Smoke?” Satan leaned against the hood of the Focus, pulling a large cigar from his top pocket.
Jonah shook his head.
“Sorry,” Satan said. “I forget it’s not kosher these days. But I guess it depends on how you kill the tobacco.” The Devil paused as if expecting Jonah to laugh.
Jonah did not laugh.
The Father of Lies rolled his eyes and lit his cigar with a flame conjured from his own fingertip. After a few long puffs on the cigar, he waved his hand to extinguish the flame as he said, “Truth is, I’m not just a little bored; I’m a lot bored. Hell is so fucking dull these days. Ugh. The folks I get are either over-the-top freaks with the wrong ideas about what I think is fun, or kids who think they deserve an eternity of punishment because they masturbated to their mother’s picture. I was actually looking forward to getting my hoofs on Dale.”
“You knew you would get him?”
“Let’s say I hoped. And it’s easy to hope when you have a whole network of spies keeping an eye on someone, just waiting for the day he’ll make that simple mistake. What I want to know is who lives so close to the state they can’t enter for peril of their immortal soul? If I were him, I woulda moved clean across the country. Or better yet, out of the country. As far away from California as possible. Wouldn’t you?”
Jonah hadn’t thought about that. Why did Dale live so close to California? It was a good question. One day, once this whole thing was over, he would have to ask Dale. “I hate to seem impertinent, but what exactly do you want from me?”
“Impertinent?” Basking in the wreath of smoke that poured from his cigar, Satan mouthed the word a few times, as if pondering the meaning. “Impertinent. That’s a good word. Back in the day, we used to call that a five-dollar word. Of course, back in my day, five dollars was a lot of money. Im-per-ti-nent.” Satan repeated the word slowly, letting it roll off his tongue in long consonants and lazy vowels. “You know, you’re pretty smart, kid. I admire that.”
While Jonah found it very hard to take a compliment from the Devil, he also found he couldn’t help but grin. “What do you want from me?”
“A bet.”
Jonah lost the grin and tensed at the word. “What kind of bet?”
“An easy one. A fun one! Don’t you trust me?”
No. Jonah didn’t trust him. “What kind of bet?”
“Wow, you aren’t in the mood for chatting, are you?”
“Look,” huffed Jonah. “I wish I were in more of a chatting mood, as you put it, but considering that my best friend’s corpse is lying on the side of a busy highway, rotting in the midday sun while the Devil goes on about the price of words, I think I have a right to feel out of sorts!”
Satan raised a dark brow at Jonah, but said nothing.
“Sorry,” Jonah said. “Just… please, just tell me what you want.”
This solicited another wide smile from the Devil. “That’s more like it. Listen, son, I have a simple proposition for you. Nothing outlandish or crazy. Just a simple bet. Are you a betting man? No, I wouldn’t think so. Then here is your chance to make your very first wager and make it worth something. Make it meaningful.”
“What do you want?” Jonah asked again, in a very tired, very worn voice. It was the same voice he used when he was sick of arguing with Dale about something. The fact that Dale and the Devil were so very much alike struck Jonah as a disturbing coincidence.
“I propose a race.” Satan’s blue eyes twinkled with mischief.
“A race? Against who?”
“Father Time.”
Jonah groaned. This whole conversation was like running up a down escalator—getting nowhere, fast. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“What I propose is a simple race against the clock. A little on-the-road hide and seek, as it were.” Satan reached into his jacket and pulled out the beer bottle. Even under the shower of sunshine, Jonah could see the soft glow of the trapped soul behind the brown glass. Satan continued, “I’ll take Dale’s soul to an undisclosed location and hide it. Then you do the seeking. Find where I’ve hidden it in a week, and I’ll give it to you.”
Snapping his eyes from the bottle to the Devil, Jonah asked, “What do you mean give it to me?”
“I’ll relinquish Dale’s soul, free and clear. No harm, no foul. Yes?”
Jonah ran the fabric of this proposal under his intellectual microscope and found a million snags. The whole thing sounded like a setup. It sounded like the plot to a bad novel. It sounded ridiculous. No, this whole idea blew right through ridiculous and came out the other side. There was no dick about it. It was ricockulous. And Jonah knew, without a doubt, that he was going to fall for it. Cock and all.
“If I find where you’ve hidden Dale’s soul in seven days,” Jonah started, pointing to the bottle, “you swear you will give it back?”
Satan nodded. “You have all the time it took to make the world.”
“And I’m expected to just believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Just take you at your word?”
“Yup. I guess you’ll have to trust me.”
“Why should I trust you? You’re the Devil.”
“Because I’m also the one offering you the only chance you’ll ever have to get your friend back.”
Jonah paused
at this. In his worldview, the word ‘Devil’ was synonymous with the word ‘liar’, which meant this whole thing was a complete load of crap. But on the other hand (or was that ‘on the other hoof’?), it was Jonah’s only chance. And as such, it was deathly serious. He needed to face it head on. He decided the best way to avoid panicking was to approach it like he would any other offer. When buying a car, or choosing a long-distance carrier, or presented with a possible life-or-death deal with a being of infinite evil power, Jonah always did the same thing.
He haggled over it.
“I’ll only accept if you agree to a few ground rules,” Jonah said.
“I would expect nothing less,” Satan said. “Rule away.”
“His soul has to remain on Earth. No running off to hide it in Hell.”
Behind a veil of rising smoke, Satan snorted. “I’d planned on it. Why jaunt off to Hell if you can’t follow? Where’s the fun in that?”
“And the hiding place has to be in the States.”
Satan lowered the cigar and tapped away the ashes. “Why?”
“Like you said, why jaunt off somewhere I can’t follow? I’m a man of limited funds. If you go sauntering off to Italy, I’ll never find you guys. It’s not a very fair wager if we don’t share equal resources.”
“Fair? Now there’s a word I don’t hear every day.” Sarcasm dripped from his voice, poisonous honey from a dangerous hive. “Well, in the interest of playing fair, I’ll concede to your request. But if I have to hide it in the U.S., then you have to give me something.”
