Demon Camp

by Jennifer Percy

  When he told the story, he said he told the Black Thing, “You expect me to fear you? Do you have any idea what I have been through in my life? Your big black ass does not offend me coming here, in my house. You’re not going to scare me. Get the fuck out of my house.” And it left.

  Around this time Caleb started getting his hair cut at a one-room barbershop in Kennesaw from a Baptist named Sophie. She was the kind of hairdresser who talked while Caleb listened. Sophie told Caleb about how a tree branch ripped right through her bedroom window. Caleb offered up his own room. Told Sophie he’d stay in a hotel. She moved in right away. Caleb would be there during the day, usually in the garage, fixing up the car on a rolling board near the cement where it was cool. One of these days Sophie came up to him while he was lying on his back covered in oil. “If you just want to fool around sometime and have sex,” she said, “we can. No strings attached.” Caleb said it doesn’t work that way but they had sex anyway and then they started dating.

  One night, with arms wrapped around Sophie’s small frame, Caleb woke. The moon was near his window. Its light spilled across the floor like a veil. Sophie’s long black hair looked like an oily slick on which her head floated. She put her feet together so that one foot rested in the arch of the other and her hands clasped as if in prayer beneath her chin.

  The Black Thing said I will kill you if you proceed.

  Then Caleb just started laughing. He told the Black Thing—whatever it was, he still didn’t know if it was in his head, or if it was real, or if he was going crazy—he said, “No you won’t, asshole, because I’m going to do it myself.” He grabbed his 9mm, loaded it up. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m checking out. I don’t fit in this world.”

  He was back on the tarmac hearing Kip’s promise of death.

  Caleb told God he couldn’t take it anymore. “I’ve hung in. I’ve done everything I’ve known to do.” He got his gun and drove to a hotel. He pressed the muzzle to his temple. “Now, God, if you’re there and I have a purpose in my life, by the count of three, you better stop me. If you’re that powerful, then you better give me a reason to be alive. You better stop me.”

  Caleb started counting.

  One.

  “If you’re that powerful, God, then you better give me a reason to be alive. You better stop me.”

  Two.

  And on two the phone rang. It was 1:46 in the morning. On the line was his fishing buddy Marshall. His wife was going into labor and he needed Caleb’s help.

  He drove to the hospital. His saliva still tasted like metal when the baby came.

  • • •

  It wasn’t easy to disentangle from his relationship with Sophie. She was still hanging around the house, eating from his fridge. She still had her bags in his living room. She had become friends with his roommate, Ryan. One evening, Caleb thought he heard Ryan giving Sophie a hot oil massage on his bed. He waited outside the doorway, listening. “Caleb will break pretty soon,” Ryan said. “I’ve been sending stuff to him in the middle of the night. I’ve been sending the scariest of all scary things into Caleb’s room in the middle of the night.”

  It was the voice of the Black Thing.

  Everywhere Caleb went he heard its voice. One time, he was in the kitchen, thinking about lunch. Ryan was sitting on the couch. “Tacos or burritos?” Caleb asked.

  Fuck you, Ryan said, this is war.

  “Ryan, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Dude, I want tacos.”

  It happened over and over again. In the end you aren’t going to win, said the voice coming out of Ryan.

  • • •

  So a year had passed. Caleb was still seeing Kip. He was still seeing the Black Thing. Smoke curled through his windows at night. The air smelled like burned flesh. Then, tired of everything, he drove to the Allatoona reservoir, where he’d been spending days fixing up an old canoe. It was the only thing he seemed able to fix. Allatoona had emerald water that deepened in the summer. He pushed the canoe out, jumped inside, and paddled to the lake’s center. He thought about how he should have been on that chopper. He thought about sinking coldly into the lake, letting his lungs starve. Rain filled the canoe and absorbed into his socks. “All right, God,” he said. “I’ll try anything at this point because I’m about to kill myself.” It was about three in the morning. He got out his gun. If he pulled the trigger, the bullet would take his body and set it on the canoe’s side. Blood would spill into Allatoona. “I was built to serve men and right now I have nobody to serve because everybody is dead. I can’t even serve my own children because they’re gone. You give me a reason to live and I will do whatever you want me to do. I’m a soldier and I need a mission.” The rain stopped and showed him the moon. Its light tore and scattered the water. There were voices in the dark. He thought he heard Kip speaking to him, all of them, his dead friends, murmuring in the leaves.

  Caleb paddled swiftly back to shore, his clothes heavy and wet. He crawled through the mud on all fours like something just born from the lake, back to his room, into his sheets, into bed.

  • • •

  At Mi Casa, when I mentioned to Caleb that I would be visiting Sergeant Brian Rand’s sister April Somdahl in North Carolina, he asked to see the article about the dead Iraqi man. I handed it to him and his fingers traced the sentences.

  “You shouldn’t go,” he said. “It’s blatantly a Destroyer demon. Blatantly.” It had a name.

  “It’s from Afghanistan?”

  “Afghanistan made it bigger. A Destroyer is a destroyer. It pretty much destroys everything. If this woman has a Destroyer on her, which I know she does, then it’s going to come after you.”

  I must have looked skeptical because he raised his arms above his head to help me imagine it. He had an animal sheen in his eyes that made him look sad, not ravenous in the way he might have wanted right then.

  He explained how he came to know the demons. Another veteran brought him to meet a minister and his wife in the town of Portal, Georgia, where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin, and they removed a demon from Caleb. That was that. The Destroyer, the war demon. The minister called it deliverance.

  “What are you doing carrying around that article?” he asked. “Let me tell you. You’re finding patterns. Now you need to figure how to tell your story. Are you going to tell people that there’s this big old demon that runs around and controls people and makes them flip out and makes them kill themselves?”

  I asked if he saw the demons in the same way he saw me sitting there in front of him. Or was it just a sense?

  “I see them,” he said. “I see them every day. But you get used to it. It’s like if five guys walked in here with guns on their hips, would you feel awkward?”

  I told him I would.

  “Well, I wouldn’t because everyone in combat has guns on their hips. It’s the same thing with demons. Yeah, there’s this big scary beast sitting next to you and you’re just like hi. It can’t really bother you.”

  Caleb said he wanted to teach me something he used to do in the military. He reached his hands across the table. He wanted to practice the sixth sense. “Everyone operates in that state to a degree. It’s not abnormal.” He called to me with his fingers. “Hold them,” he said. “Hold them and look at me.” I wasn’t sure what to make of his stories yet, so I just followed his lead. I took his hands into mine, bony and warm. We stared at each other without blinking and then he told me to shut my eyes. I watched. “Shut your eyes,” he cooed, as if he knew. But when I shut them he was still there, a dark figure on the inside of my eyelids.

  He unleashed his grip, and his eyes fluttered and he scribbled on a notepad with his tongue out, eager as a schoolboy.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’d you get?”

  “I didn’t get anything.”

  He put his elbows on the table, and his eyebrows touched. “I got warrior,” he said. “You’re a warrior and you’re on a mission.”

  Ca
leb’s muscles tightened. He stared past me. “You ever feel the air go cold in the room? A hand on your shoulder? The hair on the back of your neck stand on end?” He said there was something in the room. He stared slack-jawed behind me. I craned my neck to look. When I returned to his face he seemed to smile in this small victory. “You’re going to need something bigger than what you’ve got,” he said. “Angels will show themselves in the form of what they do. Same as demons.”

  “What do you think I have?” I said. I wanted to know his intentions. He started pacing.

  “I’m going to tell you a lot of things that you might not like,” Caleb said. “I’ll throw some words out there—some of them sound like Bible words: good and evil, light and dark. As you talk to these soldiers, what you’re doing is shining a light on the issue, saying here is this big, ugly thing. Then they’re going to get pissed off and come after you. You can fight them. But not if it’s bigger than what you’re walking around with. Then it’s going to make your life a living hell.”

  Caleb pressed his finger to his skull and started to think. He kept tapping his head as if his finger were a magnet and whatever he wanted to say would rise out of him. He seemed to still be figuring out what to tell me.

  “You have your dead grandma,” he said. “Now. Let’s say this gal April in North Carolina were to have a Destroyer on her. The Destroyer has more rank in the angelic realm than April. What would you do in that situation to fight this thing? How would you combat this thing?”

  I said nothing.

  “These things can jump on to things that don’t have authority over them. If you don’t have protection they can jump right on to you too. If they’re bigger than the army you’re walking around with, it’s going to make your life a living hell. It’s tough. You don’t have authority by yourself. You only have authority with the army. Deliverance is like entrance into the army.”

  “So if I get this army then I can observe a deliverance session?”

  “You have to receive deliverance to get the army.” His eyes travel over me in a slippery way. “Like I said, you’re going to need some bigger guns than you have.”

  “How do you know if you’ve been demonized?”

  “You don’t know. You’ll probably never know. Unless you’re Jesus Christ or have been through deliverance you’re probably going to have a demon on you. Might not be as bad as the next guy. It will give you protection—an army—against this thing when it comes after you. Call it PTSD. Call it demons, call it whatever you want, but if that gal has a Destroyer on her, it’s going to come after you. I guarantee it.”

  He recommended I talk to the minister in Portal. “Stick around, Georgia,” he said. “And you’ll witness.”

  His mouth was as thin and dark as a line of pencil. “This whole demon thing. It’s just like the military. The demons don’t have a high ranking. Unless you’re in the kingdom of darkness thinking.” He got up, went to the bathroom, and came back.

  I asked if he ever knew anyone he killed. I asked him all those questions you’re not supposed to ask, about killing, and how many you killed, and death and destruction, and I asked him about morals.

  “Was the war moral? Was that a woman, or was that a kid? Did you kill people? I’m tired of all these questions. There’s no moral or immoral. All that shit goes out the window. You don’t even think about it. You make a decision so fast it’s like a car crash. After 9/11 everyone wanted us to hunt these guys down. But then, when we’re out there in the blood and guts, pulling the trigger, everyone’s like: you’re immoral. The world is different over there. Women and kids pull guns on you and try to kill you. Five- and six-year-olds running around out there with AKs.”

  Caleb jiggled his Coke. “You usually can tell if someone’s pulled the trigger. Go to a bar and find the biggest shit-talker, the one saying, ‘I can’t wait to pull the trigger’ or ‘I mowed down those dudes’ or ‘I killed them.’ Those are the guys that have never climaxed, but once they get to climax, they’ll never brag about it. They’ll never do it. Never. But I’ve seen people that are very antikilling anybody yank that trigger and hose people down because it came to them or theirs. Would I do it again if I had to? Yeah. Would I walk around and drink a couple beers and try to fight somebody? No. I won’t fight somebody to take their girlfriend home. If I’m going to fight someone, I’m going to fight to kill. People have some issues with the whole contracted killer thing. I don’t have a problem with it. I may have just been there too long,” he added. “I don’t know.”

  A few motorcyclists cramped a nearby booth. They used tortilla chips to sponge spilled beer. One of their women did a stripper dance with her eyes closed.

  “Now,” he said, “losing your virginity is a good metaphor for killing.”

  He’d lost it to a girl named Tamika. He took off his clothes and asked, what do I do? And Tamika took off her clothes and leaned against the bed with her hands pressed against the mattress. And then, again, he said, what do I do? And she showed him what to do in the way a mother might show her child how to fold a napkin. When it was over Caleb went to the railroad tracks and watched a tangerine sunrise and thought, big fucking deal.

  “Big fucking deal,” he said about killing.

  He stood up. He was like a bird making his feathers known. “Imagine,” he said, and then he sat down again and tucked his hands away from me. “Imagine that you’re in a room and it’s just you and this friend and the room is full of big guys. These big guys corner you. One of the big guys says, Who is going to get raped? Here’s the deal. You’re not a virgin. She is. You have to choose who gets raped.” He slopped a triangle of quesadilla in his mouth. “Who gets raped?”

  He put a plug of tobacco in his cheek, pressed it deep with his thumb.

  “I get raped,” I said. And he nodded as if this were evidence of my decency. “Once you experience the death and destruction, it’s the same kind of feeling.”

  The waitress refilled his Coke. The virginity metaphor continued.

  “Think about it this way. When you make out and you almost get to climax without any repercussions, well, then, climax is like this dangling carrot. It’s something you want to experience. So many climaxes. So much getting ready. There comes a point when the carrot looks tastier than waiting on the carrot. Eventually you’ll cross the barrier, and when you cross that barrier, it’s not what you expected it to be. So now that you’ve had sex, you don’t go around talking about it as much.”

  He reminded me of the day he stepped off the Evil Empire and picked the severed fingers out of the tie-down rings, like a cold-blooded American killer, he said. “I know those maintenance guys are still swapping scary stories about me. All bloody and crazy.” But Caleb saw it differently. “I was sitting there in tears, all alone, by myself, washing blood out of the aircraft, praying none of those guys had to see what I just saw.”

  He sucked ice out of his Coke and let it melt and crack between his teeth. “What happened to the fingers?”

  “I gave the fingers to the medics,” he said. “They tried to put them back on.”

  • • •

  Caleb had an appointment to meet a man he called colonel at a military vehicle factory near Carthage, North Carolina, not far from the place where he completed SERE school at Camp Mackall. He needed to pick up two vehicles for his company. The colonel would give them to Caleb at no cost. He invited me along. Caleb said he couldn’t tell me the name of the factory, but when we arrived the name was on a sign outside the building.

  It took us two days. We made the drive with Buck, the broker from Kennesaw. Buck was bald and turned red when he spoke. A few years ago, Buck jumped out of a plane, landed wrong, legs straight instead of bent, and bones broke, femur to skull. “My wife had to wipe my ass for six months after the fall,” he said. He thanked her for this openly and in a serious manner at a barbecue that was also a religious gathering. He ran his fingers over the place where his spine humped.

  On the drive, Caleb only li
stened to country and Buck to rap. Buck kept switching the Johnny Cash to Tupac. Buck only drank Mountain Dew, and Caleb drank Coke. They spoke with hand gestures and spit their words. We drove late into the night. Caleb said he didn’t need to sleep, ever really. We passed a wide lake torn by the long arms of swamp plants.

  “Everyone knows about the war,” Buck said. “You should just go home. We all already know too much about the war.”

  Buck started swearing at me, and telling Caleb to stop bringing God into the workings of things. Slurping. Shifting. Buck turned his face back at me, as far as his neck would twist without his body moving. Words came from the side of his mouth.

  At two in the morning we stopped at a roadside motel with no hallways. The bedroom windows faced a parking lot. Our rooms shared a wall. In my pillow I heard Caleb and Buck fight over the bed. Buck lost. Thumb-sized cockroaches cleaned their wings. Caleb said to be up early but they didn’t wake until noon. They knocked on my door and I responded through the wood, met them later in the breakfast room, overlooking a leaf-clotted pool. The room had blue carpet, fake Monet paintings, cornflakes, and old ladies on a field trip. The corner television played disaster footage of a flood somewhere far away.

  “What’s the grossest thing you ever ate?” Buck said.

  “Dead cat,” said Caleb. “We ate bugs and other stuff. Mealworms would squirt in your mouth. Stole a chicken from a farm. I fucking hate chickens. Chickens are dinosaurs with shrunken heads.”

  • • •

  The vehicle factory was in the woods, big as two football fields, full of jeeps with heavy machinery, gun racks, missile launchers. A room marked Top Secret. Greased mechanics with masks stood behind flamed rods. Caleb negotiated with the colonel, who paced with his arms wide and his shoulders square and he had a pair of brows thick and gray as storm clouds. When he spoke he tugged on the belt of his too-high pants, lifting them enough to show high-top sneakers and white socks. Caleb disappeared into an office with Buck and the colonel. He said I couldn’t go in there. I waited in the front seat of a machine-gun-mounted jeep and fell asleep until a shirtless, freckled man, six feet tall and covered in coarse, red hair pushed my shoulder. He had on overalls with an unclasped strap.