Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

by Jennifer Percy

  “I’m Red,” he said in an accent that sounded like a wobbling saw. Sweat stood on his skin. He gave me his hand and I took it. “Caleb said to entertain you.” He pointed toward the office where Caleb spoke to the colonel. “He said take her in the growler.”

  They were light utility vehicles with Kevlar seats. This particular growler had eight wheels and looked like a toy race car with an open top and no doors. One seat belt went over the head and strapped across the chest to be buckled on either side of the body. A separate seat belt covered the legs.

  “Want to go for a ride?” he said.

  Caleb stepped out of the office, grinning. “Have fun,” he said. We drove off a washboard ramp and made a hard right onto a country highway. “Yes, ma’am, give me anything with wheels and I’m gravy,” he said. The seats vibrated and Red whistled. He touched his beard.

  We cut down a dirt road and Red stopped the vehicle. It jerked. I put my hand on my seat belt latch. “Racehorse got running today,” he said, stepping out of the vehicle and into the woods. He unzipped his pants and pissed roadside. A wide puddle spread on the red clay earth. He shook his hips. A beetle cooled itself in the pee foam.

  At a nearby town Red went searching for machine parts. The town was a collection of one-story metal buildings with essential purposes: gas, food, truck.

  Red bought lug nuts. I waited in the growler. The wind dragged a paper bag across the cement. Six men came out of the store. Old men with urine-colored beards. The tallest man chewed something. One of them had a fake leg or else a leg so emaciated that when the wind blew, the fabric hugged the width of bone.

  “Where’d you get that car?” he asked. “Woman shouldn’t be in a car like that,” he said.

  “Not all alone she shouldn’t,” the tall man said.

  • • •

  The colonel agreed to give Caleb two growlers at no cost. Caleb agreed to bring in enough profits later to pay him off. We sat at foldout tables at a diner in Carthage called the Village Place. Everyone was ex-military and everyone ordered the Club Deluxe on white bread with mayonnaise served in aluminum packets. The waitresses were cigarette-voiced, young, pregnant, and kind.

  The men talked about submarines and World War II and how it’s better to pilot planes than submarines because at least in a plane you know you’ll come back to the ground.

  One of the factory workers told Caleb about an idea he had for a vehicle called Brute.

  Caleb’s eyes widened and he moved around in his seat.

  The Brute can float and swim. She’s not pretty to look at. She was designed to service oil rigs. Rescue the stranded. Explore uninhabited lands.

  Caleb had mentioned the name to me on the drive, and so I asked, “Wasn’t Brute your idea.” Caleb raised his index finger to his mouth, indicating that I ought to hush. He said don’t talk about the visions.

  The colonel stood to use the restroom. Caleb leaned in. “Red wants to work for me.”

  “And?”

  “I hate redheads,” he said. “Can’t trust them.”

  “What if I showed up as a redhead?”

  “I knew you weren’t just by talking to you on the phone.”

  In the back of the restaurant a man put soap on the metal hook where his hand should have been.

  • • •

  The clouds moved in great white herds. Caleb stacked the vehicles on a multicar trailer hitched to the pickup. In Georgia somewhere we pulled off the highway and parked in a wide dirt area the shape of a horseshoe. Some kids were drinking in their jeep, boys in the front, girls in the back, the trunk a glittery pile of smashed cans. They cheered when they saw the growlers, and then started their engine and sank into the woods. We parked in front of the steep dirt slope that rose almost vertically before it flattened and connected to the area where the kids had just been. Buck pulled out a video camera. Caleb jumped in one of the growlers and crawled up a steep rise of dirt. The growler lurched. Something inside broke. We watched it roll slowly back down the hill. Caleb took his shirt off and swore. “You didn’t just see that,” he said. Caleb sent Buck away to buy the broken parts.

  Caleb looked huge. There were clouds all around him. We sat in the growler and stayed quiet for some time.

  “So you want an example of the Destroyer?” Caleb said. Do you remember the conversation with Buck in the truck?”

  “Which one? We were in the truck for nine hours.”

  “The one where he was getting all testy. Do you remember when I cut it off? When Buck was saying, ‘This is what you should do and this is what I think.’ Remember? That was the Destroyer talking.”

  “You’re suggesting that the Destroyer was inhabiting Buck?”

  “It wasn’t inhabiting him,” he said. “It was working through him. He lives with it every day. It’s almost funny because sometimes it’s so overplayed that you’re just like, Okay. Gotcha. I see your ugly head.”

  He’d reminded me about DeeAnne and the boat engine she wanted. The one he was looking for the first day we met. “When I told her I couldn’t find the boat engine she called me a son of a bitch to my face. She told me to burn in hell. She said, Caleb, you’re a failure and you’re a waste. But you’ve got to understand that this lady is just some lady with a broke-down boat. She can call me a son of a bitch to my face as many times as she wants and I’m not mad at her. I don’t think she’s the problem. It’s the other guy at the negotiation table who’s the problem.”

  Caleb picked a gnat out of his eye, wet and dead.

  “Essentially what came out was this big nasty thing.” He made his hands like claws and stretched them apart. “But in the truck the other night with Buck, it was very sly: Here, bite this.”

  An hour passed. Buck returned with no car parts, just cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. We ate the cheeseburgers in the growler, in its shade. No one spoke. The heat was getting to Buck. He shone like a glass ball. Finally he walked away from us and stood silently in the sun with Caleb’s shirt over his head. He looked like someone waiting for an execution but who, in the end, was too unimportant to kill.

  • • •

  Caleb and his wife, Eden, lived in a two-story house near Woodstock, Georgia, not far from Wombly’s sweat lodge. There were acres between homes. Cardboard signs advertising eggs. A few horses twitched from green, large-bodied flies.

  The only light was from the dusk—a soft blue. The house was quiet and the air-conditioning cold. Moths hit the windows, and in the basement a dryer hummed. Caleb sat at a long oak table across from Eden. She was the daughter of the minister who brought Caleb through deliverance. He married her after the exorcism. She was twenty-five, taught kindergarten. Robust in the hips with translucent skin, pale as if descended from Vikings. She had blond hair but dyed it blonder.

  Isabel and Isaac, his children from Allyson, sat between them. He’d lost custody after the divorce. He saw them only a few weeks a year. Isabel wore a Barbie nightshirt, and Isaac, faded sleep pants but no shirt. Isaac looked just like his father. He was five years old but there was very little baby left in him. He looked tan, muscled, and mean.

  The kids gripped forks over empty plates, and Eden stood up to pull a pizza out of the oven, wearing pink running shorts, walking barefoot. Caleb waited at the head of the table, looking ordinary.

  “Would you like some pizza?” Eden said. She took off one oven mitt and ran a hand through her hair, soft like running water.

  Caleb pointed at the living room wall with a fork.

  “The walls,” he said, “they look blue, don’t they?” He wiped his mouth with his hand.

  “But they’re purple. It has to do with the light. I’m actually good at home decorating.”

  “Do you want something to drink?” Eden asked. “We have Kool-Aid.”

  “Kool-Aid is great,” I said.

  We all sat down at the table, drinking Kool-Aid. I asked how she and Caleb met.

  “How did we meet?” Eden said, looking off to the side, biting her lip. She
rested her chin in her hand, touched her pizza with her fork, and then put her fork down.

  “She knows my story,” Caleb said. “Tell her yours.”

  “Well, he was over at my parents’ house,” Eden said, “getting delivered, and when I saw him standing there talking to my dad, he gave me a look like this.” Eden widened her eyes, cocked her head. “He did that with these really big crazy eyes. And I thought, oh, this guy is weird. I shook his hand or whatever and then just went in the other room and played on the computer.”

  She kept her eyes on Caleb but her head turned toward me. “Go on,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “The next day,” Eden said, “we had a bonfire and a cookout, and we were shooting guns. My girlfriends were over and they wanted me to go talk to him. I think he’s thirty-five, I said. And see, I was twenty-five and that would just be gross to date someone that old. Then one girl said, I think he’s only twenty-six. And then another came over and said, yeah, just checked, he’s twenty-six. So I decided to go over there and teach him how to shoot guns because he wasn’t shooting very good.”

  Caleb said nothing. He had his hands folded.

  “Then later Caleb told me I was his wife. He said, you are my wife. You know, you don’t just say that to somebody. I mean,” she added, “men have been using God as an excuse to date me for so long. You know, being a pastor’s kid, men are always saying they were sent by God.”

  Isaac dropped his pizza on the table. He grabbed the pizza and pushed it into his mouth, cheese side down.

  “But I knew she was my wife,” Caleb said. “I’d seen her before. Then I’m thinking, oh, no, that’s this guy’s daughter—that’s the minister’s daughter. How do I tell him? I went back to work and I was sitting there at that dealership and we weren’t making any money. I thought, you know what? My wife is down there and I don’t know what I am going to do for work but if I know anything, I know that that is my wife down there. So I moved to Portal. I called her brother and told him but I didn’t tell anyone why I moved because I knew they’d think I was crazy.”

  Eden took over the story. “Caleb came back to Portal and he didn’t have a place to live and he was hanging around the house during the day, staying in a hotel at night. ‘Are you doing ministry with my parents?’ He said no and walked away. I didn’t really get an answer from him. He looked like he needed some help so I decided I’d help him look for a place to rent. I drove him around town and we ended up in the Walmart parking lot until three in the morning. You know that country radio song about being in the Walmart parking lot?” Eden asked.

  “Never heard of it,” I said.

  “It’s great. I’ll get you a copy. Anyway, it turns out he’d been in Atlanta for a while, praying for a wife.”

  “I was done with dating people,” Caleb said, “and done with not being married. I was aiming to get a wife.”

  “Caleb had three dreams,” Eden said, “one about me as a kid, one about me in my forties, and one about me as an old woman with long gray hair. A month before he came, I was sleeping in my room and I saw something flying around the ceiling. I never saw anything. I’m not a seer. I ran into my parents’ room, screaming, and they got rid of it. Two weeks before I met him I saw it again, flying around the room. All of a sudden I saw this man’s face just looking at me. It was a man’s face,” she said. “And it was his face.”

  “I saw the same thing flying around my room,” Caleb said. “Only it was her face.”

  “But I was so closed off with my heart and my mind because I would be getting married to this other guy with a crazy family. He was really strong and controlling. He was verbally abusive.”

  “Don’t ask about him,” Caleb said. “He doesn’t matter.”

  Eden said she had to pray hard about whether Caleb was her husband. She prayed. Nobody else knew that she was praying. She prayed that everybody in her family—all nine people—needed to hear something from God, on their own. Everybody in her whole family never liked anyone she ever dated, that’s why she asked. Turns out her father had heard already. He was in the bathroom washing his hands when he looked up and heard the Lord’s voice say, That is Eden’s husband.

  Caleb pointed at his chest.

  “When my mom was vacuuming, she heard the Lord say, He will love her more than life itself.”

  Her sisters had dreams.

  “My brother heard from God when we were out shooting. I was shooting his gun, it was huge, and he was standing behind me. He had his left hand on my shoulder, and his right hand out in case I dropped it. I was kneeling down and aiming. It was gonna give me a big kick. The Lord said, Caleb will guide her and protect her. Another lady that we are kinda friends with had something else too.

  “Honey,” she said, interrupting herself, “can you pass me another piece of pizza?”

  “Then turns out we both wrote lists,” Caleb said. “Eden wrote hers when she was sixteen. One hundred and ten things she wanted in a man. I had my own list. Guess what? They were exactly the same.”

  It didn’t take long. Eden canceled her marriage to a man she didn’t love and started a new one with Caleb. They had the ceremony in June 2007. Caleb wore a white tux and the minister walked his daughter up the aisle.

  After dinner Caleb shuffled to the freezer. It made a growling sound. He disappeared into its cold light, returned with Popsicles. “Thai Thai,” he said. “Isabel Goose,” he said. The children ran to him. He kneeled.

  “When God speaks,” I said, “what does that sound like to you?”

  “When God speaks,” she said, “it’s a very strong inner thought. People are lying if they say they hear God’s voice because it’s not a voice. It’s a consciousness.”

  “It plays like a video,” Caleb said, putting his elbows on the table.

  “I don’t get those,” Eden said. “Sometimes it’s just knowledge. Everyone has different styles. Even when it’s crazy like what Caleb saw in the army.”

  “Remember how I told you there’s going to be a flood in July?” Caleb said. He’d had a few prophecies for me. One included a flood in July and another that I’d marry a dirty farm boy. “Well, when this stuff comes down the pipe people will say, oh, how’d you know that? Because the day before you were crazy.”

  “But you are crazy, honey,” Eden said, rubbing his back. “The Lord is actually talking all the time. It’s like a radio station. You have to tune your ear into it. I don’t know why, but I’m a little slower than others. I’m trying to figure out how to trust my own instinct. Once you start to get it, he will talk to you more and more and you will start to see crazy things. My sister, she has the gift of seeing, just like my dad.”

  “It’s like how we trained in Special Ops. The sixth sense. It works both ways. The dark side has the same giftings. I view it as a war, as a battle going on out there. You are either fighting on one side or the other.”

  “What if you don’t hear anything?” I said.

  “If you don’t hear anything,” he said, “then you aren’t on either side.”

  • • •

  Before he met Eden, Caleb’s time with Wombly gave him headspace enough to hire eight men from flyers stapled to telephone poles. He started a construction company that served rich people in the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, fixing unnecessary technology like voice-automated torchlights for driveways, refrigerated wine cellars with video security. He was running a profit until one of the workers stole all the money and ran away. It wasn’t much, but it was everything. He worked three months with no pay so that he could give paychecks to the rest of his men.

  Once again, he’d lost everything.

  Caleb quit the construction job and started work at Canton Chevrolet. Quit that too. Started work at Meineke. The cement there was always cool and he liked the way it felt on his skin when he pressed his hands on the ground to lower himself beneath a truck. He knew the inside of a truck as he knew a body; he kept it alive, seeing the complicated map of silver pipes and wires as a delicate
surgical task. Sometimes, when the rain would start with the quick, static sound of an electric fuse, he’d push himself from under the truck, rising to watch the rain fall on all four sides of him, enclosing him in a soft blue world where he felt safe. He worked long hours until the sky turned orange and he returned home, still renting a room from his buddy Ryan.

  On a Thursday, a man stepped into his office at Meineke. He told Caleb to shut up because he had some things to say. Caleb folded his arms, leaned back in his chair. “Do I owe you money? Did one of my guys screw you over?” The man told Caleb he wasn’t there about his business. “Your business is a piece of shit,” he said. Instead the man offered Caleb enough money to take a flight to Rhode Island the following week to attend a conference on theophostics—god (theo) and light (phostics)—where people came to be delivered from phobias, addictions, disorders, post-traumatic stress.

  Caleb told the man he didn’t want his money. The man left it anyway. An envelope of cash. The man told Caleb he needed help. Many years later, Caleb would say that this man was sent by God.

  At the time, Caleb owed money for rent but he did what the man said and traveled to Rhode Island anyway. At a session, the leader fluttered her hands around Caleb and told him he was holding on to darkness. She brought Caleb to the center of the room. He stood under fluorescent lights, bowed his head. “Have you ever heard anyone pray in tongues?” the woman said.

  “No, ma’am, I haven’t.”

  She prayed in tongues, under her breath, reminding Caleb of those languages he’d never understood in the Middle East and Afghanistan. “Now, Caleb, do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

  “Well, sure.” He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.

  “Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”

  “I see the back of my eyelids.”

  “Father, show him what he needs to see!”