Up Jumps the Devil (6 page)

In Wilmington and Philadelphia, too, the Devil spoke softly, and the band was allowed to play. Now they were on their way to Newark. The Devil lit a cigarette and thought about Elvis.

Just fourteen years ago. Was that all?

He couldn't have invented Elvis if he'd tried. And Elvis had
known
he was special. His mama had taught him that.

“Come give mama a kissy-wissy,” she would tell him. Always with those two, it was baby talk.

“Yes, Mama, widdle Elvis give his mama a kissy-wissy,” the boy would answer.

And he was religious. Hardly anybody in the world knew how fucking religious that boy was, now that he was famous for shaking his pelvis.

“Elvis give Jesus a kissy-wissy,” said the Devil aloud, crossing the Delaware.

Elvis hadn't come to the crossroads. No way.

His father had, though. Old Vernon Presley, half drunk, had found the crossroads somehow.

“Got me a boy thinks he can sing,” Vernon Presley had said to the Devil.

“Can he?” the Devil had asked.

“I reckon he can. I'll sell you his soul if you'll make him rich and famous.”

“You can't sell someone else's soul, Vernon. Shame on you.”

Vernon spat in the dirt, looking lost. And finally he said to the Devil, “Well, how about if I sell you mine?”

The Devil thought Vernon Presley's soul was worth exactly shit. But when a man offered his own soul to lift up his son, that soul gained weight.

“It won't guarantee anything,” the Devil told Vernon.

Vernon said he'd take his chances, and the deal was done. Vernon Presley's soul was a cloud of cigarette smoke.

That mama's boy had gone and put the Devil's Music on the charts. Music that put the whole country in touch with its wild side. Exactly the kind of go-juice this new age needed.

They didn't talk anymore, he and Elvis. Their work was done.

The Devil looked over his shoulder at the sleeping stars of the Dan Paul Overfield Band, and tried to get excited about them.

There was the girl, Memory. He was a little excited about her. Less excited about the guys.

Memory reminded him of someone. A long time ago.

“Kissy-wissy,” he said, speeding up, forcing the rest of the caravan to follow him into the fast lane.

THAT NIGHT, THEY
rocked Newark, and rolled north toward the music festival they had their hearts set on.

“They
will
let us go on,” said Zachary, riding up front with the Devil. “Right?”

From a pay phone at a Holiday Inn, the Devil called the festival promoter, a very cool, very smart hippy king named Michael. Softly, he told Michael that if the Dan Paul Overfield Band were allowed to play, he could make sure lots of people came to the show.

“That would be far out,” said Michael. “We'll see you when you get here.”

ON THE FESTIVAL'S
opening day, the Dan Paul Overfield Band ran into traffic. Cars jammed the road for miles.

“They got a whole lot more people than they was expecting,” a cop told them. “Nearest best place to park is probably back past Bethel, and walk back in.”

They drove back to Bethel, slowly, between meadows full of parked cars. Finding nothing in Bethel, they drove past White Lake, until finally they stopped at a farmhouse and called Michael.

“We can't get there from here,” the Devil explained.

“No one can,” Michael replied. “Most of the performers are staying at the Holiday Inn in Monticello.”

“Now you tell us,” said the Devil.

“Yeah,” said Michael. “It's just that there's a lot of people, you know?”

“As promised,” said the Devil.

So they wound up at the Holiday Inn, where they lounged around, digging the air-conditioning and watching TV, and waiting for the phone to ring and tell them what was going on. Sometimes a helicopter landed in the parking lot, collecting other musicians and taking them to the festival.

The news broke in, announcing that the concert site had been declared a disaster area. But the fans they interviewed were happy. They said it wasn't just about music anymore. They said it was about people being beautiful.

The TV showed the road through Bethel, choked with people. A great tribe, it seemed, washed through the farmland toward the stage at its heart.

“Far out,” breathed Zachary.

“It
will
be,” said Fish, “if we get to play.”

“Stop worrying,” said Memory.

“Stop worrying,” echoed the Devil.

They had originally been scheduled to play late Saturday morning. Three times the phone rang, telling them they'd been bumped back to Saturday evening. Later Saturday evening. Maybe really, really, late Saturday night.

Night fell. Morning came. No one could sleep.

The Devil watched the TV with silent intensity.

People dancing, some of them naked. Wildness and kindness, mixed together.

The wildness and the kindness and the faraway war all worked together. In the end, they were part of the same thing. He had planted seeds. The harvest was groovy.

Most important, it made good television.

THE PHONE RANG
, and suddenly there was chaos. The organizers wanted to change the order again, but now they were being bumped up. They would play this afternoon, in a few short hours.

The musicians met their helicopter, carrying what little equipment they needed. A second helicopter scooped up the crew. The Holiday Inn dropped away beneath them. Green fields and woods and summer haze passed below, and in minutes they passed high over the outskirts of the festival, over more people than the eye could handle, and landed behind the stage.

Stagehands and managers hustled them up a wooden ramp, past stacks of equipment, past trucks and litter. The roadies, marshaled by Osgood, began hauling sound equipment off the second helicopter.

The Devil lifted his face into the noontime air, and felt mist and electricity. Was it raining? Hard to tell. The sky had a nasty, ragged look he didn't like. But he liked the electricity, because it came from the crowd happening out there.

They had an hour until showtime. He left the band in the hands of the organizers and wandered off on his own. He hiked over mud and electric cables and pools of standing water, climbed a wooden fence, and let himself be swallowed up by a half million of the nicest people he'd ever met.

“Hey,” they said to him as he passed, and he smiled and said “Hey” back.

A short hike brought him to one of the lighting towers. Looking up, up, up, the Devil had a moment of vertigo as the peak of the tower seemed to fall backward against the rolling clouds. He reached out to steady himself on the shoulder of a heavyweight hippie with a long black beard.

The heavyweight smiled and said, “Hey.”

The tower was crawling with people. Mostly young men, some of them naked, hanging casually among the steel bars, not far off the ground. Others climbed higher, as if they meant to escape the Earth or at least say “Hey” to the spotlight operators.

Through the crowd, through families with nursing infants, past couples doing whatever under blankets, he moved on. Past people sharing water and food and cigarettes, uphill forever and ever, until the people gave way to green grass and stood in lines to use portable toilets. There was a security headquarters made of psychedelic buses.

He watched a man and woman undress and make love in a meadow. He waded in a pond where young men shaved and shouted and paddled around in canoes. He joined a half circle of stoned people doing yoga.

“Breathe in,” said the yoga master. “Find your root chakra.”

“Hey,” said the stoned people, breathing.

The Devil was making his way back, emerging from the woods, when a guttural, animal sound ripped along the hillside, echoing among the trees. A motorcycle passed on the Devil's left, bearing a wild-haired man in a hand-tooled vest and a pretty woman in a loose cotton dress.

The wild-haired man glanced the Devil's way and he knew this was Michael, the one who'd brought this mad, giant, peaceful thing together.

The motorcycle rumbled toward him, and paused a yard or two away.

“Hey,” said the Devil.

“Hey,” said Michael.

In billions of years, you were bound to meet some people—people with unusual power or vision—who changed the world.

The motorcycle tore off through the grass, Michael saying something that made the woman laugh, and the Devil laughed, too.

THE DAN PAUL
Overfield Band, meantime, was herded up a ramp, between walls of unpainted plywood. Here and there, a famous face looked their way.

One famous face, framed in sunglasses, a groovy headband, and a huge, natural Afro, shined a smile at Memory and said, “Welcome to Mars.”

They were welcome here. They
belonged
here. This was who they were now.

For an instant, with a knifelike pain, she wished Dan Paul were there.

She and Fish and Zachary made small talk, having a tablet of this, a drink of that, and eating pills like Alice in Wonderland. Time was a purple whirlpool.

Then the whirlpool steadied, and they were being herded again, onto the stage at Woodstock.

IT WAS LIKE
being in a Bible story.

An ocean of people. They might have been on their way to the Red Sea or Jordan.

Zachary put on his stone face, and hit them with a slow, snaky bass. Followed by Fish, with a jungle beat. Memory waved her arms over her head, pretending to be tossed by drums and wind.

And the wind
was
rising, pushed from behind by dark clouds.

Memory's voice rode electric currents and flowed out over them all with its soft, impossible echo.

“Like she's accompanied by a ghost,” some whispered, up high on the towers and down below on blankets. They fell in love.

Her head rolled lazily, and her shoulders rolled slowly, and her thin body grooved to one side and the other as if she were a thread weaving through time and the day, and if you were having a good trip on good acid—not the brown stuff—you saw her weaving at the center of bright flashes as if the universe were snapping Kodak pictures; you saw her soul and your soul and everyone's soul together, all part of the same Bible story, and you looked at her and loved her, even though you started feeling real wind toss your freak-flag hair and looked over your shoulder at the clouds racing in, because those clouds looked like a Bible story, too.

IT
WAS
A
Bible story!

That's just what the Devil was thinking, offstage, watching the band and the clouds, but mostly watching the vast, multicolored multitude. Pocahontas would have loved this, he thought, before he could remember not to think about her. The Pilgrims, who talked about peace but prepared for war, wouldn't have understood. These people had outgrown their ancestors. A new world would come out of it, before everything was said and done.

It didn't hurt that there were lots of free drugs, and people humping in the bushes.

THE DAN PAUL OVERFIELD BAND
played only one song at Woodstock.

Melody sang three verses before the clouds began to spit, and some guy with a beard walked out and covered the mike with his hand and said into her ear, “You guys, wow, I'm so sorry, it's about to piss down rain and we have to get the equip—”

“Sure,” said Memory, nodding. “Yeah.”

“You'll be the first back on when … you know … whenever. You know?”

Then he spoke to the crowd. He told them to cover up and be patient and please get the fuck down off the towers.

NO ONE TOLD
the band what to do, so they found their way down a ramp at the back of the stage complex, and stood in muddy gravel behind a crane, trading dumb looks.

“This bites,” said Fish.

“That was wonderful,” said Zachary.

Memory's mind reeled, still high from being onstage. In a minute, she would have shaken it off, but the wind grabbed a canvas sail tied atop some scaffolding, and pulled a tower over right on top of them.

USUALLY WHEN SOMETHING
like that falls on people, the people are killed.

None of the Dan Paul Overfield Band were killed.

There was a rush of things crashing around them: wood splintering, gravel flying, steel pipes and clamps shivering and bending, shrieking.

All around them, voices shouted and cursed. Boots and sandals and bare feet ran toward them, climbed down to them.

“Get someone from the hospital tent!”

Memory was unhurt. Two stories of the scaffold had slammed down around her like a squirrel trap, driving steel into wet gravel.

Fish thought he was unhurt until he saw his thumb lying in the gravel. He felt sleepy and dizzy all of a sudden.