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There are, Johnny’s pastor will tell you, many ways to lose your soul. You can go gambling two towns over (or in the backroom of the Back Porch Bar on Saturdays), or go fishing on a Sunday morning, or sleep with your neighbor’s wife (sleeping with anyone other than your wife, really, will do it). Even a misplaced ‘oh my god’ is enough to damn you half the time, although a muttered ‘good lord’ gets past heaven’s radar, apparently. Disrespecting your mother, disobeying your father, listening to 101.3 FM WMXK, hitting snooze instead of getting yourself to the town revival—make any of a long list of missteps and, bam, there goes your soul, forfeited altogether unintentionally.
When it comes to selling your soul, though, everybody knows there’s only one route for that, and it’s down Creekwood just as the sun sets, when the sky’s so red you’re left squinting at your windshield and praying you’re still on the right side of the dirt road, and behind you everything is already dark. The billboards trying to bring you to Jesus have been steadily increasing in frequency, and then, abruptly, they stop. You’ll hit the brakes, uncertain why you’re doing so, barely even aware of your foot moving, and roll to a stop at an intersection you don’t remember ever seeing even though you’ve lived in this town all your life.
Johnny, though, he’s a bit of a traditionalist when it comes down to it: wears the same work boots as his daddy used to, puts his envelope in the plate every Sunday, plays a beat-up wooden fiddle because the sound is sweet and full and it’s got more history than any eerie contraption of precious metal.
He arrives on foot.
There’s no one at the crossroads when he stops, just red clay and cracked asphalt and fields. When he blinks, though, there’s a shadow across the road that straightens into a silhouette of someone not quite a man, a little too sharp at the edges and a little too hazy around the head.
“Come for that rematch?” the Devil asks as Johnny crosses the road, stiff even in his casual posture. His hands don’t fit right in the pockets of his slacks, all strong angles, like he’s used to wearing jeans and had to show up at a funeral. Or, not that—he was in a suit the last time Johnny saw him, too, and doesn’t seem the type to choke in his tie, but he still seems distinctly out of place, the joint where his thumb meets his palm sticking out of his pockets.
Johnny’s startled by how bad he wants to see the Devil’s fingers. He remembers them flying across the fiddle strings, swift and sure, nails flashing as they caught the sunset light.
“Pretty sure I told you to ask for one if you wanted it, not the other way around,” Johnny says, and the Devil smiles. It isn’t mirthless or anything, but it catches strangely in Johnny’s throat, like swallowing water down the wrong pipe. He takes a deep breath.
“Some other time, maybe,” the Devil says, shifting his right hand to hook a thumb in his belt loop. Johnny tries not to stare at his knuckles. “What brings you here, Johnny?”
His breath catches against his will at the sound of his name in the Devil’s mouth, like some part of his deepest self left his body for a fraction of a second and came rushing back as soon as the Devil’s teeth clicked together beneath his smirk. Johnny shrugs, shoves his hands in his pockets, tilts his head to the side. “Would you believe it if I said I missed you?”
The Devil laughs, short and sharp. His face hovers between expressions, inscrutable, rippling like Lake Sinclair in windy summers. “Not for a second.”
Johnny shrugs again, fingers fidgeting with one another in the safety of the pockets of his jeans. He squints; it hurts to look at the Devil, like staring at snow that’s reflecting the sun on the rare occasion they get any, always thinking he remembers what it’s like. Always figuring out real fast that he doesn’t. “Nobody else plays like that,” he says, raw with the honesty of it. “Battles of the bands and all that, a breeze, have been for years. Playing with you—” he coughs, maybe just to stall, like his body’s asking if he really wants to do this. “It, uh. It was the first challenge I’ve had in a long time.”
“Thrilling, huh?” the Devil asks, raising an eyebrow, but he looks strangely flattered beneath the smug bravado.
“Yeah,” Johnny admits, mouth dry. The grass crunches beneath his boots when he shifts his feet, dead from heat like it gets around this time of year, worse off than it ever is in the winter. He could’ve sworn it was still hanging onto some green when he walked up, though.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he says, blurted like it’s a sudden impulse and not the whole reason he came here. “Play with me again.”
The Devil is, ironically, kind enough not to point out that Johnny just dismissed his jibe about a rematch. “And what’ll I get in return?” he asks instead, shifting, drumming his fingers against his thigh.
Johnny swallows. “Same as last time. You play better than me, you get my soul.”
The Devil’s eyebrows shoot up. “That’s not normally how this works, Johnny. People aren’t fool enough to make the same bet twice, and as for me, it’d get pretty boring.”
“Then make an exception,” Johnny says. “And I promise you aren’t gonna be bored.” He’s barely breathing. He knows this is way beyond even the idiocy his mama and teachers all feared he’d get into someday, but god, his calloused fingers are sore from how hard he’s been playing the last few weeks, chasing the feeling of that night in the field. Nothing’s measured up; even his most soulful playing is watered down compared to when he was facing off against the Devil, that burning gaze on him, everything riding on the next note.
“And what about you?” the Devil asks, his smile only a few degrees off of gentle, taut like a fishing line about to snap. Johnny isn’t sure which of them is about to get away. “What do you get if you beat me again?”
“I dunno,” Johnny says, “I had a gig cancel last week. Fifty bucks wouldn’t hurt.”
The Devil’s lips part—in surprise? Bemusement? It’s hard to tell. Johnny watches himself blink in the Devil’s mirrored sunglasses.
“I don’t always make bets like that, you know,” the Devil drawls, smooth and languid. “My quota’s met, unlike when we first did this. I’m not desperate this time around.”
Johnny looks at him and thinks about statues of salt, watching sand transform to glass at the High when he was younger, learning from his uncles how to tell when someone was bluffing over a dog-eared deck of cards older than he was. Rock to bread and back again, and hunger that follows you anyway. His mama said curiosity killed the cat more than his own name when he was little, knees scraped up from other people’s gardens, barefoot in the middle of the road. He sighs on an exhale, wondering if the Devil ever gets tired; they say he never sleeps, don’t they? Ain’t no way to live, isn’t that the only response in such a time as this?
Hell of a way to die, though. “Aren’t you?”
It’s impossible to tell through the glasses, but Johnny’s sure the Devil blinks. He tries to remember if snakes ever had eyelids, if those got cursed away like the legs. He very firmly does not look down at the Devil’s thighs, sleek and narrow in his suit pants, solid as anything.
The Devil doesn’t laugh, but the corner of his mouth tilts up as he tips his face to the sky. Then he looks at Johnny, and takes his glasses off, and his eyes are low-lidded, which answers that.
“Huh,” he says, and it’s not a chuckle, but it’s not a scoff, either. He holds a hand out; his nails shimmer even in the dim lighting. Johnny had an ex once who got his done like that. He was the kind of out where everybody looks the other way because they all know his daddy and his daddy’s daddy and maybe even some folks on his mama’s side, depending, so he could go to the nail salon every two weeks and still be told he was a nice young man come Sunday morning. The only other kind of out for people in towns like these is for them to get out of the town itself entirely, and it made Johnny jealous sometimes, him having options, even though they weren’t very good ones.
“You’ve got a deal,” the Devil says, and his voice is soft.
They shake on it.
They play like a bonfire sprinkled with gasoline, smoke stretching into the sky the way it was said God would travel way back when. They play like the rapids, like the surge in your chest when the raft almost tips but rights itself so close to the last second that you maybe begin to believe in angels. He fell backwards off the boardwalk at Jekyll once, Johnny remembers, and his mama traced her fingers over his unbruised back and said she was half-expecting handprints. They play like that, like cheating death, and there’s nothing celestial here to catch him this time, just an itch he can’t scratch standing a few feet away, fogging up his mirrored sunglasses with breath that makes Johnny wonder how its temperature compares to hellfire. Johnny’s bow flies so fast he’s shocked it doesn’t catch fire itself, and his fingers burn, and his heart tramples out a path between his ribs, and he walks home with $50 burning a hole in his back pocket and his soul still nestled snug in the center of his ribcage and his blood singing through his veins at top speed.
“A man’s pride can only take so much, Johnny,” the Devil says, setting down his empty glass, but he’s smirking. His fingers still circle the base of the cup where it sweats against the bar. He’s in a seersucker suit again, ironed so the folds cut a sharp line down to his calves, and he looks beat. He looks like he hasn’t made rent in two months, like he’s living on a thin paycheck and a prayer.
Johnny leans in a little closer than he needs to in order to hear him. “Thank you,” he says, and the Devil’s jaw sets hard before he looks at Johnny’s face and realizes he meant it, took the comment for the compliment it was. And he is pleased about it, maybe more than he should be; he’d known he played pretty good tonight, but not that good. He’d tripped over his own fingers at one point.
“I could tell right when you saw me, you know, Johnny,” the Devil says, timely as ever, and his voice is low, and Johnny would put his soul on the line again if it meant getting the Devil to take off his damn sunglasses.
He can already tell, though, that it’s not going to be that kind of night. The Devil would take it for mockery, or worse, pity. Instead, he asks if the Devil can get drunk.
His expression is withering even without Johnny being able to see his eyes. “I believe I invented drunkenness.”
“Is that a yes?” Johnny asks, grinning, and when the Devil huffs and nods, he wonders what other sorts of sins he took on a test run before sowing the ideas amongst humanity. How often he might still indulge in the name of product testing, or keeping up appearances, or sheer want.
“Can I buy you a drink?” Johnny asks, and yes, there’s the proof: even the Devil sure can want.
“Sure,” the Devil says, and he knocks back the shot Johnny buys him—“No time,” he’d said when Johnny suggested a beer—and in this light, Johnny can’t quite tell if his tongue is forked or not when it darts out to catch the last drop of alcohol on his lip. And then the Devil has thanked him and left, just like that, unimaginable self-control from the number one advocate for yielding to temptation.
“Work to do,” he’d said by way of explanation, and Johnny had nodded, trying hard not to think about what that entailed but knowing better than to let slip the “Good luck” he was holding tight between his teeth.
That night, Johnny dreams he walks an old hunting trail for hours, then the woods abruptly open on a clearing. It’s all tall grass and tiny blue and yellow flowers except for two worn-down dirt paths meeting in an X. Johnny keeps walking. Stops in the center. He knows the Devil is behind him long before he turns around.
The hairs on his neck don’t stand up, but his teeth feel sharp when he runs his tongue along them as he looks the Devil up and down. Then he takes the Devil’s hand, leads him over to the trees, and lays him down right there in the Spanish moss. Lays his own body down on top of him like water over a creek bed. Brings his hand to the Devil’s face.
He’d have thought the Devil’s skin had burnt him, but the pain is in the wrong places: on his forearm, his neck, the back of his calf. He scratches his skin, frantic, but he can’t reach everywhere at once, and new red-hot points of pain multiply across his body the more he tries. He scans his arms and recognizes the chigger bites; he staggers his way to the grass, shaking off moss that clings to his shoes, seeming to wrap around his ankles, and writhes on the ground.
The Devil follows him.
After a minute of just sitting beside him in the grass—helplessly, Johnny thinks, and then can’t remember why that’s the wrong word—the Devil slowly brings the tip of his index finger to rest on one of the bite marks. The touch soothes, cool and sharp. But when he takes his hand away, it only itches worse, so bad Johnny can’t think of anything else. When he was younger, his daddy told him about how once, as a teenager, he’d mowed a neighbor’s overgrown backyard barefoot. Poison ivy had gotten into a cut in his foot, and it’d felt like the itch burned all the way to his bloodstream. “Been deathly allergic ever since,” the story had ended, and he wasn’t kidding.
Johnny clenches his teeth against a scream and wakes up sweating, his sheets at strange angles like he’d been thrashing all night.
“My ears’ve been burning,” the Devil says in place of a greeting when Johnny sees him next, at a festival in Lincolnton. “Don’t suppose you’d know anything about that.”
“All good things, I swear,” Johnny says easily, and the Devil laughs, short and bright like he’s surprised to be doing it.
“You gonna play?” Johnny asks, nodding at the stage, and the Devil smiles.
“I only play for an audience under, shall we say, special circumstances.” The middle of nowhere, with Johnny high off his own pride. The sun setting and the grass dying beneath their feet, forming a golden-brown arena as their music tangled in the humid air. Wishing he could see the Devil’s eyes, even then.
“Shame,” Johnny says, absent-mindedly fiddling with a tear on his worn case without looking away from the glint in the Devil’s lenses. “Maybe some other time.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” the Devil drawls, and chuckles when Johnny stiffens. It’s the Devil’s turn to pause, though, when Johnny holds out a calloused right hand.
The Devil reaches for his sunglasses, folds them, and sticks them in his shirt pocket. His pupils aren’t slitted, exactly, and his irises aren’t yellow, or not quite, and his gaze isn’t harsh, or at least, there are better words for it. It’s intense like the longing for even a single ice cube on your tongue or melting down your back on days when it’s over a hundred degrees on the front porch. The kind of thing Johnny understands how people could die for it.
“You know how some folks traditionally seal arrangements like this,” the Devil says, tongue wetting his bottom lip, and maybe it wasn’t forked at the bar that time but it sure is now.
Johnny’s left hand stalls on the fiddle case, then stills to the point of being idle. The Devil nods his head towards it as he brings his palm to meet Johnny’s still-outstretched one.
“Careful. Somebody might interpret that as an invitation.”
Johnny swallows. Nods. “I know.”