Looking For The Devil

Tom was woken by fire and brimstone spewing from behind yellowed teeth. He could taste his father’s spittle, watered-down Jim Beam. Still half asleep, ten-year-old Tom took off his shirt and got on his knees. Reasons fell out of the old man’s mouth like cracked marbles, but he was always more eloquent with his leather belt. Forgotten chores, an unfinished plate, imagined back talk. In between that made-up litany, one recurring refrain: you have the devil inside. Wincing at the belt’s biting commentary, Tom stroked his right arm, the one that felt the summer rains coming after the night he had finally talked back. The last time he talked back. The night he said his father had the devil in him, too.

That phrase, you have the devil inside, was tossed around like comments on the weather. It was good for every season. One night, a bloody tissue stuck up his nose, Tom prayed to Satan because God didn’t seem to be listening. Please, he begged, just leave me alone. Get out of me. I never did anything to you. But the devil and Jim Beam remained in that house.

One cool summer evening, when Tom was in the throes of teenage hormones and nearly of an age to enlist his way out, he felt like the dark one was calling out along with the screeching cicadas. Alex. Long-haired and confident, Tom saw him leaning against an old, restored Cadillac. He couldn’t take his eyes off Alex’s full lips, the color of a blood moon. Couldn’t resist their taste, either. At the edge of the woods, they looked for a hint of heaven in each other’s arms. Something hell could not abide. Monstrously silent, Tom’s father yanked him from the back seat of the Cadillac. Ducking back in, he rained down a flurry of fists until Alex’s lips were swollen and cracked, drained of blood. Tom got to his knees and hung his head, waiting. The angry drunk ripped the shirt from Tom’s back and chanted his Psalm after each strike. Again and again, Tom heard him say You have the devil inside. Even after the metal prong of the belt buckle stuck in his shoulder like a fishhook and took an ounce of flesh on its way out, he hissed You have the devil inside. A crack split the night and silenced the cicadas’ screams. Alex stood over Tom’s father, tire iron in hand. He took Tom’s arm and they jumped into his car to make their escape. More than anything, Tom wanted to leave this moment, this town, his past. But if the devil’s inside, he can’t be left behind for long.

In the years after his escape, Tom put together a collection of broken hearts cracked by a tongue well-versed in the language of a whip. Honing those words, he became a journalist, funding and covering his hunt for the devil. Fueled by obsession and Jameson’s, he traveled the world looking for clues and found them everywhere. War, greed, and the molestation of man and nature. Tom found hints of the great antagonist in every city and village. Even if they didn’t believe in Satan or any of his names, Tom would find evidence that he had passed through. In all these travels, he started to pick up hints of older stories. Found pieces of maps that had no rhyme or reason, but pointed him in new directions. Year after year, he circled the globe, always feeling he was just one step behind the monster from his childhood. That he would open a door one day, maybe on some quiet street where no one would think evil like this could exist. There he’d be. Year after year, he searched until he found the final piece. Stepping into a small sailboat, grey-haired and tired, he steered by the stars toward the darkened horizon.

Four days sober, Tom stepped onto the island. Birdsong drifted on the breeze, a cacophony of praise for another beautiful day. The trees felt old but vibrant. They might bow in respect to a hurricane's winds, but they would never break. In a small cove, not too far from where he moored, Tom found the devil floating. Basking like a lizard in the morning sun. Standing on the beach, it felt like the only thing keeping him from vomiting was the pounding heart in his throat. Tom stuck his toes in the sand and waited for an audience. At first, when the demon he’d sought all his life walked towards him through the gentle waves, Tom thought he looked like just another man. No wings after all, those had been torn off some time ago. Then he couldn’t breathe. Given a million languages, he could not have described the sense of awe this celestial being inspired. He seemed to be the reason humans had invented the word for beautiful and all its iterations. When he spoke, it felt like the birth of music.

“Few come to visit me here. Even those who claim to be everywhere.”

The words spilled out of Tom, “I had to come. I had to understand. Why? Why do you cause so much pain? Why visit all these horrors upon the world? Why my father? Why me? Why did you have to be inside me?”

Lucifer, the morning star, smiled with a pity that shook Tom’s soul loose, “I have no idea who you are.”

Lashed by the words, Tom crumpled onto the sand. Lucifer sat next to him and told his immortal story in brief. That while his home moved from age to age, he had not left the garden since he offered Eve, not an apple, but himself and his dreams. He had left nothing in the world except perhaps a stain on her heart from understanding what he knew. All we want is a father who loves us for who we are and what we want to be. Yet we seem damned to disappointment. In that way, he said, I know who you are. I know that pain. As to any clues Tom might have thought he found, they were just the bloody shards of stories humans tell themselves to make sense of their actions.

Tom curled up on the beach, and Lucifer lay down, holding him while he cried. A dam had opened, and he was awash with the pain inflicted upon him and that he had inflicted on others. Reservoir drained, nothing left but a small puddle of mud, Tom could finally look at the devil inside with clarity. Just another broken part he would have to learn to forgive, maybe even love, when it told him the summer rains were coming.