The Devil's Gonna Get You (Fiction)
Jauntell floated south in her inner tube, a cigarette perched precariously in the left corner of her mouth. She was determined not to touch the cigarette, to smoke it the whole way down with her hands in the cold river.
It was a classically miserable southern day. The sun beat down and the humidity was unrelenting. The leaves of the trees lining either bank, flat and fleshy-green just a month before, had curled in on themselves in the heat, browning in spots. But the river held memories from higher elevations; somewhere upstream the forests were still cool and dark. And somewhere, yet further up, in the mountains, there was still snow.
“That better not be cigarettes I smell,” Jauntell’s mother said, years ago.
“No, ma’am,” was her automatic reply, quiet like. She forgot the smell was still on her. She had grown accustomed to it, didn’t even think twice before clanging through the screen door.
Her mother, hands in batter, stared over reading glasses, and on the checkered kitchen linoleum, Jauntell stood straight and rigid. If there was one thing she had learned in her mother’s house, it was to receive stares with patience.
Fortuitously, the oven began dinging. “My preheat is over,” it said in its language of dings. Her mother mashed the OK button with a knuckle.
“Go shower before dinner,” she said, pulling a baking sheet out of the cupboard, “and put on some fresh clothes.”
Sticking her left hand deep into the cold water, Jauntell steered her tube across the wide river, to the east bank. Her cigarette was down to the nub, and so she spit it out over the side of her inner tube. When it hit the water, it sizzled, and, as she grabbed a small scrub-tree to tether herself to the bank, the current swept it away and out of sight.
She had succeeded in smoking the whole thing down without the use of so much as a finger. But this feat had required an unusually quick consumption—no real way to take breaks for fresh air—and she felt queasy. Her vision was a bit dark around the edges, like a vignette photograph, and her heart rattled irregularly in her chest. She had important business to attend to up on the bank, but she stayed floating in the shallow water, hanging onto her scrub-tree, waiting the nicotine out.
It was a big day on the river. The current carried by a motley human jetsam: families, couples, groups of kids that were, Jauntell thought, far too young to be out all by themselves. Some paddled kayaks or canoes, but most, like her, lay lazily in donuts of air.
Some moments of people watching, and Jauntell felt better. She pulled herself closer to the bank, knowing that it was time to do what had to be done, that there was no use in putting it off any longer. But she paused, for a new family, just floating into view, caught her eye. They were in a foursome out in the middle of the river, their tubes tied together with rope. Jauntell looked on intrigued; there weren’t too many other black folks that came up this far from the city. Being up here, where the hills got bigger and the accents thicker, could feel like sticking your neck out.
The two little boys splashed each other, back and forth, while the mother said to the father, “I told you it was on the seventeenth and not the fifteenth.”
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” he asked. “What’s done is done.”
“You know good and well what I want you to do,” the mother said. “I want—” but her words were cut short by her own involuntary inhalation, as a splash of icy water soaked her from behind. “Boys!” she shouted, turning back to face them. “Cut it out!”
The boys relented from their splashing, but otherwise unphased, continued the conflict that lay beneath it.
“Nuh-uh,” the smaller one said, “I told you, I don’t have a crush on anybody.”
“Dad!” the other one hollered. “Jerimiah’s lying. You know he loves Sophie. You know it.”
“Boys and girls can be friends without loving on each other,” the mother intervened with grace. “Maybe you don’t remember, Brandon, but when you were Jerimiah’s age, Fransha was your best friend.”
“Fransha?!” he blurted, clearly baffled by an incomprehensible piece of information.
“Yeah, Brandon,” said the little one, folding his arms in satisfaction. “I told you.”
Brandon looked grave. He thought hard for a minute, but didn’t come up with anything major. “Yuck,” he said finally, as if that settled the matter.
Jauntell craned her neck to follow the family with her eyes and ears, but they were floating out of range. She let go of the scrub-tree, and the current took her again, propelling her forward in the shallows along the bank.
Her mother didn’t ask, all those years ago, why Jauntell had been smoking. She chalked it up to her usual conspiracy, that out of some inborn defect, Jauntell was bound and determined to become the Devil’s favorite child before she turned eighteen.
But Jauntell had just been sad. Not the specific, linked-to-tragedy type of sad, but the general, je ne sais quoi one. And according to all movies that Jauntell had ever seen, when a person felt that way, they smoked cigarettes. They did it alone, usually in the dark, often under a street lamp.
“I’ll take one,” she said nervously to Annie, who sold the things for a dollar a piece during the lunch hour.
“You?” Annie said with surprise. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” Jauntell said, but less than confident.
Annie took Jauntell’s quarters and pulled a single cigarette out of her pack. “Just be careful. You’ll be hooked before you know it.”
All these years later, Jauntell remained unhooked. She was proud of that. She’d managed to keep tobacco relegated to a very specific function in her life, and whenever it had tried to sneak past those prescribed bounds—like when her mother finally kicked her out, and she’d spent a week sleeping on the hard, hard floor of Harry’s little apartment, smoking a pack a day—she was able to catch it by the tail before it got away from her, and reel it back in.
“Would you put that thing out,” the father said sharply. “I got kids here.”
It took a moment for Jauntell to realize that he was talking to her. Without thinking, mindlessly, she had unzipped her day pack and started in on a second one.
Heat rushed to her face. “I’m sorry,” she said, shoving the freshly lit cigarette into the river, this one, too, making a sizzle.
Four sets of eyes stared across the glimmering water to where she floated along the bank. Those belonging to the little boys were bugged out extra wide. The invisible forcefield separating his contained family unit from the strange and possibly threatening external world had been broken. As a child, Jauntell remembered, this was always an alarming event.
“You alright, honey?” the mother asked her, after a moment of stares.
Jauntell had been alright—she really had—but now she wasn’t. Now she was about as unalright as she could ever remember being.
The littler of the boys leaned over the side of his tube toward his mother. “Mamma, is she crying?” he asked.
The mother shifted uncomfortably in her tube. There was no denying that Jauntell was, in fact, crying, but even for the graceful mother, the path forward was unclear.
“Howdy!” interrupted a voice from the opposite side of the river, and all eyes turned to look. It was a white college boy, travelling in a gaggle of yet more white college boys. There were many such gaggles that rode the river, loud, beer-drinking, irreparably sunburnt.
“Howdy,” the one said again, raising his beer in salutation and grinning dumbly.
“Afternoon,” the dad replied on behalf of the lot of them. He said it carefully, measured, like the shepherd speaking to the wolf.
The college boy’s eyes fell on Jauntell’s tear streaked face. “Say,” he said, wriggling to an upright position in his tube and squinting his face forward to get a better look. “Say,” he said again, more slowly this time, changing the tenor of his voice in a way that made Jauntell’s tear ducts close right up, “everything alright here?”
“Everything is fine,” the dad said with an even colder authority than before.
The college boy held his squint a moment longer, his head jutting forward from shoulders that were broad and burnt. No one seemed to breathe. But then, unceremoniously, the college boy shrugged and flopped back into his tube with a slight splash.
Somehow, his gaggle was floating much faster than Jauntell and the family, already moving past them. Jauntell wondered how that could be, as they were all in the same river, subject to the same currents. Perhaps the college boys had small motors attached to the undersides of their tubes, propelling them along. Perhaps they knew something she did not about how to sit in an inner tube for the least waterly resistance. Or maybe it was not that they were faster at all. Maybe it was that her and the family were the slow ones, that something heavy and cumbersome held them back. Whatever the case, the college boys passed quickly, and all eight of the family’s eyes came back to rest on her.
“Honey, what’s going on?” the mother probed once more.
“Oh, nothing,” Jauntell managed, grabbing the nearest root along the bank, stopping her southward journey abruptly. “I’m sorry about the smoke.”
The mother looked as if she might cry herself. “Honey—” she began again, only to be stopped.
“Let her be,” the father said, gently this time, but with finality.
As the river pushed the family away from her, the littler boy leaned over in his tube again. “Mama,” he asked, “Why was that lady crying?”
“Hush, Jerimiah,” she said.
Jauntell bobbed with the current. She looked down at the wet, largely unsmoked cigarette in her hand.
“A person has got to stay vigilant,” her mother said. “A person has got to know that He’s always out to get you, that you’ve got to keep a look out. But Jauntell? He must love her. She goes beating down His door, I swear it. She’s easy pickings.”
“She’s just a child, Angie,” Mrs. O'Neil said from the driver’s seat. “You know as well as I do, He leaves children alone.”
Jauntell kept her eyes pressed shut in her carseat. She knew that if she so much as breathed loud she’d give herself away and would never know the adults’ true thoughts. Next to her, across the mound of wet towels and swimsuits, lunchboxes and water bottles, Annie was really and truly asleep.
“You saw her today,” her mother continued. “Every five minutes it was something. Throwing rocks at the birds, stealing Annie’s candy, lying right to my face.”
Mrs. O'Neil sighed. “It’s children stuff, Angie. Children will be children.”
“Easy for you to say,” her mother almost snapped. “Annie’s a saint.”
Mrs. O’Neil sighed again, and it was quiet for a while.
Jauntell’s little face smushed up against the right side of her carseat as the minivan took a sharp left. Then she felt the unmistakable up, down of the speed bumps on Jitney Street. They were nearly back.
“If she can’t watch out for herself,” her mother said at last, “I’ve got to do it for her.”
Even as the minivan door opened loudly, Jauntell kept feigning sleep. Her mother’s hands shook her lightly. She opened her eyes and looked up at the woman.
“Jauntell, honey,” she said in a voice as soft as Jauntell had ever heard, “we’re home.”
Up on the river bank, Jauntell reached into her daypack and pulled out a long, thin box. She removed the lid and peered inside. She thought about how the little boy had asked why she was crying, and how it probably wouldn’t have made any sense to him if he was presented this box by way of explanation. It was too big a cognitive leap for a child to make. It was almost too big a leap for her.
The largely unsmoked cigarette had dried out, and she lit it. Leaning on a sturdy tree, she looked out over the river, at the people passing. She wished the family would come back, the little boys, the stern father, the mother who called her “Honey.” Perhaps if the mother had asked her what was wrong just once more time, she would have let it all out. It was too bad the current only went one way.
The cherry of her cigarette grew dangerously long. Decisively, she reached down to the open box, knocked her fingers together, and let the tobacco ash fall in with the rest.
“Take that mama,” she said, watching the red ember fade until it became indistinguishable from the ashes of her mother. She meant it to be mean act. For once, she had wanted to do something really and truly terrible on purpose, to call the Devil near and shake his hand. But the cruel words felt weak on their way out, and she found herself crying again. She felt somewhat disappointed, but as she wiped her face, she supposed she could be spiteful and sad at the same time, that she could hate her mother, but also miss her.
“Enough of this,” she said at last, stuffing the cigarette back into her mouth and picking up the box. She marched over to the river, and dumped it. The ash fell, mostly, in a clump on the water’s surface, but the wind picked up some and carried it out over the weak rapids in a thin, dusty cloud. She watched it disperse until the little grains became imperceptible.
Up the river, to the north, a fresh gaggle of white college boys were coming down the way. Jauntell smiled. Soon, she thought, they’d be breathing in her mother.
