Part 5
...For the next two years, Johnny wandered around the south, never staying anywhere too long, keeping hid, staying off the interstates and out of Georgia. After he left Esther Jane, he had no other refuge from the storm. Only the fiddle sustained his hardened heart for him. He lived only to play...and play, and play. He'd put it down when the stabbing pain began between is shoulderblades every night, and get up to work odd jobs when he had them, and weep quietly, and long for his fiddle. The love he felt for the unearthly and beautiful instrument set daggers in his heart and became a kind of hate.He played his fiddle every night, and while it still enraptured him...He began to realize what it had cost.
No sweet nights of cool beer and warm song, no pretty girls to charm, no warm bed at night, no safe place to lay his head. No more family...And while he was able to make enough money doing odd jobs and drifting? It just wasn't much of a life. Not much but Sweetheart and the music. Not much but survival and fear, like a wild animal. Inside he was cold and empty.
Getting near Christmas time on the second year...he was sitting outside in the truck cab, running the heater to keep warm in some podunk town he'd never heard of....and he saw it.
It was the end.
You wouldn't have thought it was much, it was just a family sitting down to a nice dinner, tucking into fried chicken in a little local place. The dad was drinking his coffee black, Mama dressed pretty, the kids all smiling and clean, drinking their soda pop....
There was a nice warm, cosy familiar love there. It was right there, where you could see it..
Johnny's heart began to gnaw itself from the inside out, burning like fire in his chest. He started to tremble in agony and sadness and rage.
He cranked up the truck. He drove to the edge of town. He pulled up in front of an old gas station that had become a used car lot for a brief time and then closed doors for good. He took the fiddle out of the back, took her out of her case, and laid her on the ground. Gently though, despite what he had it in his heart to do. So gently.
He went and fetched his tire iron from where it was stowed.
Someone else melt her down? No. Johnny was going to melt down the beautiful, alluring, poisonous thing himself! He'd get his own back! He deserved it, after all the misery this seductive bitch had caused!
He roared in rage and brought the iron down on the bridge. *Clink!* The tire iron clattered on the old and gator-skinned blacktop, striking a spark, jarring the hell out of Johnny's arm, stinging his hand.
Johnny blinked. Had the thing moved? No. No, it lay gleaming, seductively as always, on the very same stretch of pavement that he'd laid its' loveliness down on. He swung again, this time not as hard. His tire iron again smote the pavement.
How did that happen? HOW???
Johnny frantically swung and swung, screaming, and each time, he hit to the side of the fiddle. He could not strike it. Furious and desperate, he dropped the tire iron with a clatter. He picked the fiddle up by the head with both hands. He swung the fiddle itself at the ground; only to find, like a magician's trick, he was cradling it instead. As he cradled it he could not help but notice its' loveliness...an unutterably beautiful and mocking thing.
He tried to throw it, and found it was tucked under his arm instead. He tried again, and found it tucked under his chin, tempting him to play, and play, and play, until his hands were wore to the bone, until he was not but a skeleton.
Play, play, play!
He could will himself to harm it, but he couldn't carry through.
He could not.
SO he set the thing down. He picked up the iron, chucked it in the back. Shut the tailgate.
He'd leave it.
He'd just leave the cursed thing.
So he got back in Bessie's cab, cranked her up, started to pull out.
A gleam caught his right eye, and he looked over.
Sweetheart was there, cupped in the divot of the old bench seat. Johnny screamed aloud.
But there it was, sitting there, calling to him...
He reached across, pushed the passenger side door open, pushed her out. The sound she made on the pavement made him cringe. He hit the gas, hauled ass...
A moment later he wasn't surprised to see her golden length sprawled out like a lazy cat.
...He pulled over and cried. Tears of sorrow and desperation, that gradually dried into realization.
He knew what he had to do.
Part 6
How does one go about finding the Devil? Well...tradition has it you go down to the crossroads at the stroke of Midnight. It doesn't say WHAT crossroads. You might take some tobacco and something strong to drink, as the Devil's known to like the liquor.
And then you wait. He ain't gonna just show up the first night.
...Johnny started driving until he found what felt like just the right place. It took him a couple of days...Down by the river.He was driving along and when he passed the place where the rough gravel ways passed, the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and he knew. It felt right.
It was swampland, untenanted, obviously flooded often, now left alone. Not a house for a ways. Cypresses loomed like troubled souls off the sides of the old county gravel way that was crowned at the top and sloped downward like giving way...a man-made thing through the kind of place where the moccasin makes you watch your step, where the gators would look out of the filthy water with wary eyes. But it was too cold for that now.
Not an icy cold, but a dank painful gnawing cold, and the sky was overcast, dark, ominous. Like it might want to murder you but was content to sit off and wait a spell.
Johnny found a little spot right handy to camp out in the truck. There was a house there, covered in weeds. The roof caved to abandonment, the old windows like empty eyes.
That first night he walked the little ways down to the crossroads. He sat and waited, smoking some, with the fiddle on his lap. There was nothing, nothing.
The second day turned colder, with a howling wind that rattled the rusted-out roof of the dead house, and a damp driving drizzle. Damn, but it was cold.
He mostly stayed in his sleeping bag
He cooked food over a sterno can in the back of the truck with the cap vents open, and waited.
When it was midnight he dutifully returned to the crossroads; despite the rain, but no luck.
The third day, the overcast lightened a little, and the weather got a bit warmer. The rain stopped. Johnny was getting mighty sick of ramen and canned beans, but he knew he had to set it out.
...This time he showed up to the crossroads early with his good whiskey and his tobacco...and he was able to play. His fingers, stiff from the cold, soon warmed up and he felt that familiar golden glow.
And then a presence.
Something stood there, blacker than blackest night.
Someone he'd met before.
********************************************************
Johnny poured the Devil a shot, pouring himself one too.
...A hand too dark to see took the Jack and the figure knocked it back. He handed over a cigarette. The figure managed to light the smoke on his own, and the cherry glowed.
"Well there, Johnny, and well-met again." Said a man's voice sweet as honey."I see you've need to talk to me again."
"Devil-man," Johnny said,"I may be the best that's ever been, but some things just ain't meant for men. This is one'a them."
"I know, my friend, I know." A head nodded, indecipherably in the flowing dark."But I was under orders, as always."
The Devil took a good pull on his smoke, and then sighed.
"I trust you've been taking care of her?" He asked.
"Yessir, yessir,." Johnny replied. "Though I tried to harm her at the end. Couldn't do it."
"That's because it wasn't made by a maker who wanted it harmed," the Devil said mildly.
"Huh," Johnny said.
Then, after a minute's thought, "You knew it was gonna wreck me, din't you."
"The lovely thing has wrecked before." The being replied."She's wrecked in many guises. I knew she would do so." He paused. "I'm quite sorry," the Devil said.
The Devil took his smoke in one hand, poured himself another whiskey shot, knocked it back, then replaced the cigarette in an unseen mouth.
A hand extended. "Let me see that fiddle, my friend. Let me see her."
Johnny handed over the fiddle, as a hand reached out to take it. As the Devil touched the lovely, shining thing the shadows went away like they'd never been, and revealed was a many winged being of blinding glory, such that Johnny's eyes watered, but he could not look away, he could not...
A bow was extended of fire, and the being began to play...it was unearthly. The watering of his eyes mixed with tears of joy at the music. It was music that wounded and healed all at once. It was like nothing Johnny had ever heard, or ever would again, and it was nothing...NOTHING that he could ever hope to play as good as.
Johnny was listening to the best that had ever been.
The being played the song to its' finish, and bowed a head made of fire.
"Thus I have played in my Father's house...long ago." The being said. The shadow covered over the light again...and the devil was gone, gone as if he'd never been...except for the cherry of the cigarette, winking like a little eye in the dark as it too disappeared.
Does feel weird, doesn't it?
Fuck.