JOSH WATKINS / I AWAIT THE DEVIL’S COMING
Every full moon the juvenile probation officer cruises country roads on the hunt for foul gatherings; he slurps black coffee and scotch from a plastic Circle K cup; his hands tremor; he declares piercings of the male nose ear and eyebrow to be occult markings, heavy rock and metal to be occult music; his Cadillac idles in school parking lots, he drawls into a Dictaphone as the kiddies come bouncing out, mirrored and distorted in his silvery Ray Bans; his desk is fussy with teen probationary contracts, faith literature, colorful seminar pamphlets; he chickenscratches research onto pads of fine graph-paper; on his life, what darts across the road one night is not a deer…
The juvenile probation officer’s name is Jerry Blackwood Driver and upon entering any building he crosses himself to vouchsafe his soul; of the buildings in Crittenden County, his favorite are Cy Junior’s Q-Shack, Mercy Pentecostal Church, and the Package Store; a curse placed on him by a wiseass youth in Spring of ’91 has yet to matriculate; he declares skateboarding to be suspect behavior; on Monday, his subordinate, Steve Jones, gifts him a bushel of Bartlett pears; after lunch, he lets his staff knock off early; later in the week he’ll surprise them each with a baggie of pork fritters…
Chief Officer Jerry Driver faxes a memo to the West Memphis PD, bidding them to scrutinize the drive-in horror pictures for teenage clusters; east of Proctor sits an abandoned cotton gin the youths have nicknamed Stonehenge, where they smoke grass and spraypaint pentagrams and feel each other’s privates; he recruits high school informants to orbit Stonehenge and gather counterintelligence against their peers; he is fifty-three years old; to his bartender, he whispers that someplace in their zipcode, cannibalism has almost certainly been practiced; his tongue’s tip swells with splinters from toothpicks; his favorite Delinquent he throws in the psych ward, cautions the staff not to let him cast spells; elsewhere, at a gunshow, a man who will never be known buys a Lile hunting knife…
Citizens live in squat brick houses and trailer-homes and RV parks, kudzu smothers the telephone poles, the county seat is Marion; he cannot be sure if utility workers or pagans have fastened black trashbags over ROAD WORK signs on Hinkley Rd; his wife brews coffee for the moonlit hunts and waits up for him, weeping; they ran a husband-wife cleaning service into the ground before he accepted his calling as a juvenile probation officer; he knows each high school secretary by name; student rosters must be purged, truants and cut-ups processed; drinking milk from its carton, he glimpses a missing child’s photo and frowns knowingly…
Juvenile lawmen in Oregon, where the Delinquent and his mother now live, receive several phonecalls and an envelope of documents from Officer Jerry Driver in Arkansas; the county commissioner threatens to nix his emergency resource boost—overtime, new hires, travel funding for seminars on ritual abuse—should he continue to meddle in out-of-state affairs; he kicks and kicks his Cadillac tire until his Laredos are scuffed black; wayward youths take drugs under viaducts, dropouts blast Hellhammer and Pestilence in halfburnt shacks and form copycat bands; he sweeps these locations all winter, for he must never allow Evil to thrive in those shadows cast by the light of Justice…
Today Steve Jones gifts him a wooden doll with jewel eyes, handcrafted by the folklore woman at the farmer’s market; his Delinquent returns from Oregon; the county commissioner offers him a quaint stipend for the Dungeons & Dragons seminar in Tallahassee, all other requests denied; after Wednesday evening service he buttonholes the comptroller, buys him a Heineken, namedrops the county commissioner—an unserious man, a weak link, and hadn’t the comptroller heard those tips about mutilated dogs, sinister trinkets?; the Delinquent’s girlfriend’s parents receive him, he cautions them against the Delinquent, who is a witch; the young lovers, he explains, made plans to birth a child and cut it with a special dagger: an offering to the Morning Star, as children are the gateway from innocence to damnation…
Three eight-year-old boys turn up in a swampy ditch near the I-40 truckstops: hogtied with their own shoestrings, nude, mutilated by blade, skulls caved-in, their bicycles dredged from the gully; the juvenile probation officer is a failed commercial airline pilot; he gulps an asspocket of rye at the YMCA, tries the pull-up bar, collapses, blacks out; a volunteer wakes him with a mug of chamomile; the Delinquent has infected his mind; the crime shreds the nation’s gentle psyche; his undercover informants, gone dark for months, have almost certainly been exposed by the cult, always one step ahead in the shadows…
TV newspaper talkradio buzzards circle West Memphis; half the shops on W Broadway shutter to mourn, accusing the other half of perverse disrespect; he meets with Little Rock detectives, consultants; he fingers evidence bags; there is a high school senior who excites him (the volleyball player with tits like artillery) but he’s too drunk to recall which tract house is hers; the comptroller publicly blames the county commissioner for underfunding youth-forward crime prevention; a reporter makes him feel important; his wife tells a dream she had: prayer warriors amass, comb the curséd viaducts and trailer-homes until they drag out the perp…
But Jerry Driver knows his perp. He will show those FBI cocksuckers his Possible Occult Practitioners list, its crowning name the Delinquent’s; the powers that be shall permit him to lead the interrogation, held at Henrietta Park before citizens, newsanchors; the Delinquent, on bruised knees, will crawl to him and beg for mercy, he’ll almost grant it, but in the last espy the Delinquent’s coathanger tattoo of the unholy archgoat; he will kneel down and cradle the Delinquent’s head like the Pieta, stroke his hair tenderly, whisper in his ear: Christ, not man, forgives; at the public burning, they will confer him the privilege of flipping the chair’s switch; he will watch the Delinquent’s vapors rise and know his crusade has only now begun.
Josh Watkins reads and writes in Chicago. He's at work on a number of novels and stories.