Fine Just the Way It Is Read online

  Swamp Mischief

  It was a fine summer morning, a day predicted to break all heat records. The Devil sat at his fireproof metal desk enjoying a Havana cigar and a triple espresso while he read The New York Times, The Guardian and the Botswana Survivor (asbestos editions). He asked Duane Fork, his private secretary demon, to open the windows so he could enjoy the fresh billows of sulfur from the pits and the stunning vista of multithousands of refineries, ship-breaking yards, oil wells and methane gas pads stretching to the horizon. On the wall hung a steel plate depicting the reverse image of Krakatoa exploding. When he had finished the cigar, the coffee and the papers, he checked his e-mail. As usual, no one had sent anything to [email protected] except spammers promising a larger penis, hot stocks, cut-rate office supplies and surefire weight loss.

  “Duane!”

  “Yessir?” Duane Fork, obsequious and insolent at the same time, half secretary, half butler, was a heavy man with smoldering pants cuffs (when he wore pants) and raccoon eyes who walked as though climbing the steps of a guillotine. Like many shamblers he was a bad speller and so awkward that sometimes, when sitting, he missed the chair.

  “Fetch some e-mail,” said the Lord of Darkness. Although he rarely received any messages himself, the Devil had ordered a few of his hackers roasting over eternal fires to collect strangers’ e-mail from the Upper World. He had been bored the last few hundred years with very little to do but wait ever since he had put certain observations of steam kettles into the head of a young Scots inventor. The kettle epiphany had booted a species—selfish, clever creatures with poor impulse control, suited to hunt, gather and scratch a little agriculture—into a savagely technological civilization that got rapidly out of hand and sent them blundering toward The End.

  “A few hundred years, they’ll all be here with me,” he murmured. And while he waited for the self-reaping harvest he amused himself by manipulating those humans. He adored fashion, and got to as many designers’ openings as he could. He it was who had inspired the butt-freezing Algonquin breechclout, the top-heavy Viking “dilemma” helmet, the intestine-withering whalebone corset and, most recently, transparent nylon gauze trousers for men. He had the warmest feelings for Manolo Blahnik and had ordered a suite prepared for his occupancy with tiger-skin rugs, silver fittings, auk-down comforters and lead crystal decanters. The suite de luxe was equipped with a floor heated to 140 degrees F, and the only shoes waiting in the capacious closet were man-size copies of the master’s own designs. If all went well the Devil had him marked for demon training.

  One of the Devil’s happier pastimes was to read and act upon other’s e-mail messages as if they were addressed to him, to spread agreeable waves of havoc and confusion. For their retrieval services the hackers earned a little respite from their personal barbecues, and the Devil enjoyed the sensation of conducting important business.

  “Yessir. What category—ordinary correspondence, World Bank messages or government correspondence? And if the latter, which governments?”

  The Devil chose the day’s category by randomly opening one of his many unabridged dictionaries and, eyes shut, placing his finger on a page. He had pointed up “ornithologist.”

  “Wonderful! Get me e-mails of ornithologists in Iceland—and America!”

  “Including Canada?”

  “No Canadian stuff today. I’m in no mood for their so-called civility. Get me stuff from the western states.” The Devil had felt himself a westerner ever since he noticed vain cowboys cramming their feet into tiny, high-heeled boots. Here was a fashion that suited the Hoofed One very well, and he had a rare collection of boots decorated with pitchforks, flames licking up from the insteps, an assortment that complemented his numerous bolo ties. (Readers who dispute the Devil’s western identity have only to look at the maps—in Montana the Devil’s Corkscrew, the Devil’s Bedstead in Idaho, in Colorado his favorite Devil’s Armchair and in California, of course, the Devil’s Kitchen. His bathtub, filled with hot scratchy sand, can be found in Arizona.)

  He was, in fact, something of a clotheshorse. After the Fall, the Devil, once the most beautiful of angels, changed beyond recognition. His rosy complexion metamorphosed into leathery grey sharkskin which kaleidoscoped constantly to thick yellow hair, to scales and exaggerated toenails, to heavy red hide or a dull blue dappled with sores. It was his vanity to show himself occasionally to mortal painters, and he was pleased that the walls of the world were hung with art showing him with antlers, with pronged horns, with tusks, with claws, with hair snakes and limp fuzz, with slavering red lips and goats’ eyes. In his main closet hung tight silk skins in every color. Drawers of featherless wings, many of them enlarged bat wings in stainless steel and other materials such as vinyl or glue-stiffened burlap, lay folded neatly. In a locked bottom drawer to which only he had the key, covered by a gauze veil, reposed the sole relic of his heavenly past—a pair of exquisite butterfly wings. Two painters, Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel the Elder, had not seen but dreamed them into paint. Jackson Pollock had also dreamed the Devil’s wings, but the painting has been lost.

  In the day’s batch of e-mails there was little correspondence between Icelandic ornithologists, but a fairly rich harvest from the American west. Most of the messages had to do with an upcoming bird symposium on the theme of the evolution of delayed plumage maturation. His eyes gleamed, for along with fashion shows, rock concerts, amusement parks (he it was who gave Viliumas Malinauskas the idea for Stalin World), he delighted in symposia. He made a note of the date in his calendar.

  A message from a biologist at a national park, someone who signed himself Argos, caught his eye. The Devil recalled Argos—Odysseus’s dog, the only one who remembered his master after his grinding travels. He knew what most human historians did not—that Argos, who had never liked Odysseus, did not greet him with smiles and wagging tail, but lifted his black lip and growled.

  The ornithologist Argos wrote to someone named James Tolbert:

  Jim buddy, how goes it? Lousy here. Times I want to put Burton through the pencil sharpener. Another damn management meeting that went on for three hours. They all treat me like I’m the janitor. Burton bows and flatters the wolf biologist, the mountain lion biologist, the bear man. Me? I’m just the bird guy, no power, no clout. The ones that count are the guys who deal with big animals that can kill people. What I need is a big dangerous bird. I’d sell my soul for a pterodactyl. They’d pay attention then you bet, especially after a couple tourists got carried off.

  “Carpe diem!” said the Devil. “Duane!”

  “Yessir?”

  “What do you know about pterodactyls?” He pronounced the “p” very distinctly.

  “I believe the pterodactyl was some kind of flying dinosaur, sir. I think it lived in the Jurassic.”

  “You bet. Great times, the Jurassic. Dig out some background. Didn’t we get the pterodactyl started on feathers?”

  “I don’t know, sir. That was before my time.”

  A heavy envelope was sent up from Hell’s research department and the Devil shuffled through the stack of photographs of skeletons and reconstructions.

  “That one looks like my cousin.” He glanced briefly at his own reflection in his mirrored ashtray. “Well, let’s see. Maybe I’ll give this Argos a few sets of pterodactyls. Say about four to start. Go get one of those women who used to make the science films for the BBC so we can find out what pterodactyls eat. We might have to rearrange some of the habitat in Argos’s park.”

  The television woman, Malvina Sprout, came in at a half run. She smelled of charred hair and her hands and arms were black with soot.

  “Sir?”

  “You know what pterodactyls eat?”

  “Pterodactyls? Is this a test? Do I get time off from the flamethrower if I get it right?”

  The Devil frowned fearfully and the woman shrank back.

  “I’m not sure. Ferns, maybe? Cycads? I think cycads?”

  “Don’t they eat meat?”

/>   “I’m not sure. It’s been a long time and I don’t have any of my source material here. We never did much with pterodactyls.”

  “Okay. Back to your flamethrower, sister.” He drummed his fingers, adjusted his chain-link tie. “Duane!”

  “Yessir?”

  “See if we’ve got some dinosaur people here. Get me an expert. And check the bestiary, see if we’ve got any pterodactyls on hand.” He sucked at the end of his tail for a little pick-me-up. (The iconography of Hell often shows the Devil with a harpoon blade at the end of his caudal extremity, an error promulgated by ecclesiastical historians of yesteryear. In fact, the terminal of the Devil’s tail is fitted with a carved ivory stopper, for the tail, like Toulouse-Lautrec’s walking stick, is hollow, allowing the introduction of various liquids and sauces. The Devil keeps his tail charged with fine Spanish brandy.)

  The summoned expert, Professor Bracelet Quean, was not the most reliable authority as he had earned his place in the Devil’s simmering tar pit through plagiarism and fakery; he knew little about pterosaurs or any other extinct creature. But old rhetorical habits never die and he puffed and swaggered as though in possession of the most intimate knowledge.

  “What did they eat? Well, let’s just see now.” He paused for effect. “I would say fish, they ate fish.” There was another pause.

  “Snakes.” He was silent for nearly a minute. “And ducks and birds. Insects—the giant dragonflies of the Jurassic, you know—and probably some plants. Cycads.”

  “Cycads, eh?”

  “Yes. Cycads are rather like giant carrots.”

  “Make a note, Duane.”

  Duane wrote down “cicads.”

  “And what sort of habitat?”

  “Swamps. Heavy, moist, extensive swamps. And shallow seas. Very warm and moist climate.” The professor was cooking now. “They’d skim over the seas snapping up ducks and flying fish. There would have been plenty of palm trees and giant horsetails. And the giant carrots.”

  The Devil looked glum. It was one thing to throw together a few cacti and some scorpions, but an inland sea and extensive swamps called for advanced engineering and almost certainly a rearrangement of the yearly budget. Still, he had all those interstate highway engineers—he could put them to work. Perhaps they could skip the inland sea and make do with just the swamp. And if worse came to worst he would go to Plan B although it strained his powers.

  “El visible universo era una ilusión,” he said, quoting Borges. “Okay. Back to the book mutilation section, Professor. And snap it up!” His index finger released a stinging green ray that caught the academic on his left buttock.

  The first to notice anything unusual was a retired hog farmer from Missouri. On his way out of the park he saw a ranger scraping canine ordure from the sole of his high-laced boot and stopped to talk.

  “You know, I thought I was in Missoura there for a while—all them cicadas—just like in the Mark Twain National Forest back home. I didn’t think you-all had cicadas out here.”

  “We don’t. Where did you see them?”

  “Didn’t see them. Heard them. Thousands and thousands. Up in that swamp. They don’t live in swamps back home.”

  “Swamp?”

  “Yep. Show you on the map.” He pointed at the north corner where two lakes—Big Gramophone and Little Gramophone—were joined by a small stream.

  “Thought I’d try a little fishing at the lakes here, and I hiked in, but there’s no lakes, just a swamp. I seen a cowboy in there and asked him but he just took off. Guess you been in a bad drought situation?”

  “It has been a little dry,” said the ranger, thinking that the lakes had looked high and full only two weeks earlier. Maybe the man had missed the trail. He tried to remember any swampy areas near the lakes.

  “Well, I say you got some mighty powerful cicadas. Hope you get some rain and get those lakes filled up. It’s probably globular warming. So long.”

  “Vaya con Dios,” said the ranger, thinking he might take a run up to the Gramophones.

  In Hell there was a commotion. There were no pterodactyls; a selection of English sparrows, the omnipresent birds of Hell, had had to be biologically modified and enlarged. Then these faux pterodactyls had to be recalled when someone discovered they lacked serious dentition.

  “Call these things pterodactyls?” raged the Devil, who cherished the image of shark-mouthed flying horrors in a Frank Frazetta painting. “They look more like pelicans. Get some teeth in these things.”

  The bestiary manager, who had run a petting zoo in the Upper World, said he thought this was the natural state of the creatures.

  “They didn’t really have much in the way of teeth, sir.”

  “I don’t care. We’ll have our dentists do some implants. I want to see teeth before we send them out on their mission. The ornithologist Argos seems to think they had stupendous teeth. Fix them up.”

  Most of the dentists had earned their way to the nether regions through multiple affairs with receptionists, assistants, hygienists and X-ray techs. Dr. Mavis Brooms had indulged in all of these venereal delights, with the UPS man thrown in for dessert. Still, she had been an excellent dentist and relished the chance to fit a few pterodactyls with teeth. She longed to take photographs of the procedure, write it up and send it to Experimental Dentistry, an impossible wish as the only mail that came to Hell consisted of bills for the inhabitants and no mail at all went out. There were computers, but they were programmed to crash randomly five times a minute.

  She spent considerable time working out a plan. Because there was no dental lab in Hell she had to persuade a farrier to hammer out the implants. The farrier was a cretin from Bessarabia who had died in 1842 from alcohol poisoning. It was difficult to make him understand what she needed. Anything beyond horseshoes seemed too much for him. In the end he whanged out something passable and Dr. Brooms put an automotive technician to work refining the shapes. The teeth were slightly more successful, fossil shark teeth stolen from a collection at a natural history museum in Valparaiso.

  The pterodactyls were difficult patients and had to be strapped into the chair. They fought terribly and, as there was no anesthetic in Hell, moaned, but Dr. Brooms was hardened to moans, which rose from every corner and alley. The results were not good. The pterodactyls could not manage their shark teeth and constantly bit their own lips. Twigs and leaves stuck in the dental interstices. The Devil commanded that the creatures be whetted up on meat and took away their vegetation.

  “Give them twenty-four hours’ prey-capture training and get them up into that park!” shouted the Devil, “while they can still chew.”

  Park Superintendent Amelia McPherson, seven biologists (including Argos the ornithologist), the ranger and an unknown fellow with a deep sunburn in cowboy boots and bolo tie, presumably someone from Public Relations, gathered at the edge of the swamp. The din of cicadas was extraordinary.

  “What about these cicadas?” shouted Fong Saucer, the wolf biologist, a big hirsute man with a nose like a kumquat and an electric yellow beard. “What are they doing here?”

  “They must have been introduced,” said the ornithologist with a poisonous glance, “like your wolves.”

  “This horrid swamp,” mourned Superintendent McPherson. “Where are my lakes?” For a just-completed aerial survey had showed an extensive swamp but no lakes.

  “What is that?” said the wolf man, catching sight of a pterodactyl with a thirty-foot wingspread, striking in crimson and green feathers, the primaries edged in black, the breast showing violet spots, gliding toward them through the dead trees.

  “Hilfe!” shrieked Warwick the bear biologist (raised in Germany, where his father had been stationed) as the pterodactyl bore down on him. It snapped ghastly teeth and released a stream of pterodactyl manure from an oversize cloaca. It wheeled and came back again, its great claws curling for the grab. In seconds the bear biologist was skimming over the swamp. The cicada din was terrific.

  �
�Help me, Gott! Gott, hilfe, help!” bellowed the bear man and the pterodactyl dropped him like an oversize hot potato. The biologist fell headfirst into the swamp, sending up a gout of mud and gnawed sticks.

  The creature sailed off into the dead snags at the far end of the swamp and they all heard the distant crack of branches as though something heavy had settled in dry limbs. The PR man moved back a little from the group. The shimmering horizon seemed to tilt slightly, as though the phantom cube of spatial balance in each viewer’s mind had slipped a little.

  “I think we just saw a pterodactyl,” said Argos calmly, feeling a tiny but odd grip inside his chest as though someone had nipped a paper clip onto a vague and minor part of his interior works. Then he shrieked, “Just saw a pterodactyl! This is better than the ivory-billed woodpecker!” He began to caper and shake his arms. He rolled his head and hissed through his teeth, all the motions and cries one produces when confronted with fabulous impossibilities. A flash of scientific doubt shut him up.

  “Got to get Reggie out,” said Superintendent Amelia, staring at the kicking legs of the bear biologist. She looked at the swamp. The black water was interrupted by great tussocks of saw-edged grass. Below lay sunken logs slippery with green algae. In the distance something plunged. She reached for her cell phone.

  “Hello, Security? I’m out at the swamp—where the lakes used to be. I said, out at the swamp. The noise? It’s cicadas…. Cicadas! Never mind that. Get a rescue helicopter out here. We’ve got a man drowning in a mud hole and can’t get to him.”

  But the bear biologist was far from drowning. His head and upper torso were wedged in the remnants of a beaver dam, and while it was not a pleasure retreat, the flow of water was minimal.

  “It’s the Final Days,” he whimpered. He prayed in German and English, for he was a religious man, a member of a group of hallucinated enthusiasts, Penecostal Grizzly Scientists, who met once a month in the back room of a taxidermist’s shop. Now he drew heavily on his spiritual bank account, and it seemed to him that with every prayer he uttered the beaver dam structure gave way. In ten minutes he was able to pull himself out of the enmeshed branches. The swamp around him had cleared in a two-meter circle and a path of sparkling water stretched to the shore. He was gripping a log unusually large for a beaver dam, large enough, in fact, to be used as a watercraft.