by Ryan Willingham, UC Davis

Posted in on Thursday, Mar 29

“Early this mornin', ooh, when you knocked upon my door/ And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go.” The music flowed out of the speakers of John’s eighteen-wheeler. “Me and the Devil Blues” was one of his favorite songs, and because he was a man who drove all over the country delivering boxes he had a lot of time to listen to music, so he should know. He talked to other people too when he made stops along the way; he met all kinds of people, but they didn’t ride along with him, at least not for too long. “Me and the devil, ooh, was walkin' side by side/ And I'm goin' to beat my woman, until I get satisfied,” Johnson sang.
Robert Johnson was one of John’s favorite musicians; he thought it was a crying shame that the man had died at 27. He could play the guitar like nobody since, and damn was he ever a fine blues singer.
The cab was empty of the fast food wrappers and dog-eared magazines that you would find in some other drivers’ rigs. The seats were black, unstained and soft. His CD case was lined with: blues, country, folk, classic rock, heavy metal, grunge, and alternative. They were all divided by genre and alphabetized, and if there was more than one CD by the same artist, they were arranged chronologically. He knew he would go nuts without something to listen to. John had thought about driving with someone else, but he got tired of people pretty quickly. He kept telling himself he was smart enough to find better work, but then he would have to listen to people droning on about the same old things, never really enjoying their lives. His father had never cared for people much either; that’s why he worked as a fisherman, out on the ocean by himself a lot. John supposed he had picked up the same habit as his old man. Staring at the same cracked blacktop, whether covered with snow like now or burning under an Arizona sun, got dull at times. John found ways to keep himself busy though.
He could feel his bladder asking not so politely to make a stop, so he pulled off and stepped down from his rig. He zipped up his jacket to keep the snow out and walked across the near vacant parking lot to the restrooms. John entered the men’s room and picked out the nearest urinal. He was careful to step around the damp spot below the metal box in front of him. Some folks have piss poor aim, he thought, as he did at nearly every pit stop. As John stood there he began reading the graffiti on the wall. There wasn’t anything of particular interest: “Sheryl’s a bitch”. The first few he read looked as though they belonged on the stall walls of junior high bathrooms. Then one message stuck out, Watch your step there John, written in graceful strokes with a red Sharpie. John’s muscles clenched and he stopped in midstream.
John scanned the words two more times to be sure he wasn’t misreading it. He quickly left the rest stop. As he drove off, he told himself that it was just a coincidence, that John is a common name and it could have been for anybody. After driving for 20 miles, he could feel the clamminess of his hands subsiding and pulled off at a diner to satisfy his stomach. He cursed himself for drinking so much Coke with his pastrami sandwich when he realized he needed to visit a men’s room again. I must be crazy, being afraid of a restroom, he thought. He went to the back of the restaurant and listened to the quiet swish of the pneumatic arm as the door shut behind him. Remembering his last stop, John decided to give the stall a try. He did his business and turned to leave. He stopped suddenly; there was something written on the stall door, no carved into it, and larger than the other message had been.
Did Susie like the ride you gave her? I know she liked the strawberry ice cream you bought her.
John felt sweat coat his face. He shoved the door open hard enough for the handle to make a hole in the wall and bolted for his truck. He looked at himself in the mirror, his lean face now deathly pale. Just about to look back down, John noticed something wrong with the mirror. He squinted and saw that something had been etched into the top right corner: You forgot to wash your hands.
John uttered a low moan in the black well of his throat. He started the engine and slammed the truck into gear. Snow rose in a flurry behind him as he floored the rig back onto the highway. He drove as fast as he dared, not wanting a visit from Mr. Highway Patrol. John felt his back becoming damp against the seat; he had to keep loosening his grip on the steering wheel to get the blood flowing back into his fingers. After two hours of driving he heard a knocking sound coming from the engine. That was the last thing he needed today, to break down on the side of the freezing highway in the middle of nowhere. He switched on the emergency lights and pulled off on the side of the road. After getting out he climbed up the front of his truck. The hinges creaked from the cold as John unlatched the hood and shoved it open. He checked the spark plugs and valves as best he could with the wind and snow circling around him. Everything looked fine, which should have made him feel relieved. So why did he feel something was off? That’s when he saw it. An address for a place that was off the highway 50 miles ahead of him had been scratched into the metal. He closed the hood and got back into his truck. He wouldn’t have trouble finding the place; he’d been on this highway enough times to know it well. John tapped his fingers on the wheel, staring out the frosted windshield. He didn’t like this looking-over-his-shoulder shit, he wanted to find who was fucking with him and end this quick. After getting back on the highway John noticed something: the knocking in his engine had completely stopped.

A narrow road led off the highway, barely visible in the storm. It was a tight fit, especially for a truck, but he managed to follow it. Soon he came to a barn that looked as though it hadn’t been used much since the horse was the preferred mode of transportation; the white layering the roof made it look like a snowed-over carcass left to rot. After parking the truck, John turned around and leaned over behind his seat. He moved a box of clothes and maps out of the way, pulled out a box from beneath the seat and then sat down. He put in the combination 1938 and felt relief as the lock clicked open. John pulled back the lid and reached in, extracting a .357 Magnum. He didn’t have to worry about the sound it would make if he used it; with the wind screaming outside no one would hear the shot. He released the chambers and checked to make sure all six were loaded with hollow point rounds. John pulled three extra speed loaders out of the box and attached them to his belt, along with a holster. He looked at the gun in his hand, turning it from side to side, his eyes crawling over its gray surface and black handle with the grooves where his fingers fitted perfectly into place. This would drop whoever was in his business. It would teach’em to stay the hell away from him. After returning the box, he opened the door and entered the big white empty outside his truck.
John locked the truck to ensure that whoever was out there didn’t try to run him over with it. He wasn’t sure which way to go; the message had instructed him only to meet near the barn, so John started heading in that direction. He moved slowly, scanning the blank whiteness around him looking for anyone who might be there. John thought over whether he should draw his gun, but in case he was being watched, he didn’t want to let on he was armed just yet. There was nothing around him, except a barn and the banged-up mailbox that had been described in the message. Out of the whiteness came a voice that sounded like a girl’s voice. John knew it didn’t make sense; he shouldn’t have been able to hear it with the wind screaming around him but he could. A black shape began to form out of the distance, approaching John on his right but still too far away for him to make out who it was. He stopped and faced the shape. The voice cut through the wind again, this time saying, “Where are you? Take me away, please I’m scared!”
John knew whose voice it was and felt as though his heart rate had just tripled.
He then heard it again, except it sounded different now, still feminine but older. It sounded like a teenager.
“You know what the last thing I saw was? The fish starting to eat my eyes.”
It changed again, the voice now a young man’s, saying, “Sure, I’ll give you directions; I have a map in my car. Come and I’ll show you…The next thing I felt was a blade going in my back as I was spreading the map out on the hood of my car.”
The figure was finally close enough for John to see it. He rested his hand on the butt of his gun, his muscles going taut. The person looked to be roughly his height, but every few moments it seemed to change, growing shorter and taller, as if trying on different clothes but unable to decide what fit. John finally saw that it wasn’t a man but a woman, and it felt as though his knees were dissolving when he saw who. She looked like the woman he had killed in Wichita two months ago. The light red hair, the spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, everything was the same except her eyes. When he had given her a ride, her eyes had lit up like firecrackers, but now they hammered into him with a hatred colder than the snow blowing in her hair. She stopped, standing twenty feet from him. She was wearing the black jeans with the patches and stitches running up and down the legs and the jacket and T-shirt she’d worn before, except now they were stained red and black, the way they’d looked just before he’d buried her.
As she stood staring at him, her face changed, the cheekbones expanding outward, her head growing larger and her shoulders wider. She still resembled the woman but now also a businessman, the same man that John had clubbed in Firebaugh out in California six months ago. She changed again, now looking like the brother and sister, somehow both at once, that he’d dragged out to the Arizona desert. He had tied them down and kept them alive for four days, letting the coyotes take a sample of them occasionally before he handed them over to be eaten. He had watched and shouted the coyotes on as they went to town on them, their jaws turning from dark brown to bright red. She changed one last time, now resembling Susie, the girl whose voice he had heard before the woman had approached him. It can’t be her, I shot her with my sawed off shotgun three weeks ago in South Carolina. He had found her at a truck stop, and by the time her mother realized she was gone they were going for their little drive together.
“Johnny I wanted to see you so I left my notes for you so we could play.”
“You, you can’t be her or him or any of them. No one knows what happened!” he said drawing the gun from his belt.
“I know about everything John,” she said, this time in the businessman’s voice.
“You like to go back and forth from state to state on America’s highways and byways, making your deliveries like any other person would. Except you prefer to pick up souvenirs while you're on your merry way, killing someone’s daughter here, someone’s brother there, someone’s husband,” she said her eyes now black instead of the blue they had been.
“What I do is my business, and what does it matter who I pick up along the way? It’s only a few people in the big picture,” John said, trying to mask his fear by keeping his hands steady.
“Yes, but ya see, folks don’t care much for being tortured and keelled. They get plenty scared over something like that, and pissed. They feel like they got fucked over royally, know what I mean?” the woman said in the dead brother’s drawl.
“All ‘em feelings they start to build up after a spell and pretty quick that pile of fear and rage starts to grow, like a snowball rolling downhill,” she said, now as the sister.
“Know what happens ‘ventually? Someone gets plowed over by that snowball,” she said, grinning with a look of satisfaction on her face.
“You won’t be rolling over me,” John said and raised the gun.
It boomed, it’s flash lighting up the deepening darkness of night. The slug hit her square in the chest but she wasn’t blown back. John’s eyes widened and he pulled the trigger again, unloading the other five chambers into her. She remained standing. He rolled out the chambers of the gun and dropped the shells into the snow, reaching for one of the speed loaders. As he reloaded she charged him, reaching behind her back. John had gotten the bullets in the gun, but she was faster. He looked up just as she brought the bowie knife upwards into his stomach, slicing up almost to his collarbone. She pushed him down on his knees, his gun falling to the snow, which was quickly turning red.
“Does the knife look familiar John? It should, you hid it after killing Jose Vasquez in Nevada. You had to ditch it because you thought the police were getting too close and you didn’t want to be caught with one of your toys, did you?” she said.
He looked up into her face, her lips pulled back, skin tight against the bone, making her look like Death. She leaned closer, and he could smell wet earth on her skin. It’d ha’ been on her breath too, if she breathed.
“Don’t worry about the cold; it’ll be plenty warm in Hell,” she said into his ear.
She pulled out the knife, twisting it as it went, more blood pouring out of him. He fell over onto his side, still looking up at her. The woman turned and walked off into the snow. As she began to fade from his vision, he swore he could here her sing, “You may bury my body, ooh, down by the highway side/ So my old evil spirit, can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.”
The last lines of “Me and the Devil Blues” faded as the white blanket of ice embraced her once more.

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