Hitchhiking with the Devil by John Brantingham

In my High Sierra camp, I wake from a nightmare that had something to do with the devil. I can remember Satan burning down the forest, chasing me and screaming. It is the vision of evil from my childhood, one I’m too sophisticated to believe in any longer but was burned into my brain by early training. When I wake, I naturally think of Mr. M who taught sixth grade at the Catholic school I attended as a child. He would have loved this vision of the devil as a kind of supernatural bullyboy and no doubt could have told me of a saint who had actually lived the nightmare I described. Mr. M was our favorite teacher. When it came time for religion class, he would tell us tales of the weird and paranormal and then somehow bring that back to a discussion of Christianity.

In my half-sleep, I remember the story he told us about a young woman who was hitchhiking. She knew that it was the wrong thing to do, but she was foolish. She was picked up by a handsome man in an expensive car who drove her to the city. All the while, he told her about the life she could have, a life like his. All she had to do was make a lot of money. He had a dozen ways to get rich, and he started to tell them to her. None of them were legal, but they were foolproof. All she had to do was follow one of his many plans, and she was sure to be rolling in money, clothes, and perfumes. She was being drawn farther and farther into his world when she happened to glance down. That was when she noticed he had hooves instead of feet, and she knew he was the devil. At this moment, Mr. M lifted one finger and said, “Always remember that the devil can never hide his cloven hooves.” Every single one of us in the room gasped.

I’m not sure exactly what the moral was. There are some competing messages. It’s something about not hitchhiking and not committing crimes for easy wealth. Also he seemed to be telling us that people in nice cars are bad, and good looking people are not to be trusted. Maybe he just wanted us to be aware of people’s footwear.

I crawl out of my tent and wonder what those stories all those years ago had to do with religion and why he would bother to tell them. They were not a part of any kind of catechism I can imagine.

He told us about women who stopped being nuns and pledged themselves to Satan. They gained powers, but he wouldn’t tell us what kind. He talked about young men who skipped church and smoked marijuana. He talked about children our age who gave false confessions as a kind of joke. I never understood how that was funny to those kids. It seemed kind of boring. What I did know was that the kids were going to go to hell. Almost all of his protagonists were doomed to burn unless they made abject and tearful confession pledging right then to become priests or nuns. In that case, they generally rose to glory as cardinals or mothers superior. He told us about saints who got into fist fights with the devil, and others who cast demons out of women everyone thought had been fornicators but were just possessed.

The fog rolled in as I was sleeping. Our camp is seven thousand feet high on the side of a mountain, and we must be very close to the top of the cloud because the moonlight is filtering through, lighting up the mist in brilliant white. For years after Mr. M’s class, these woods would have been populated by satanic cult members, who would thrill at the idea that I might commit the smallest sin, thus dooming myself. I would have thought of the devil himself waiting just in the forest trying to decide on a form for himself. It wasn’t real fear but the kind a person gets from an amusement park or a horror movie. I could have populated a forest with the boogey men of late night television.

For a moment, I wish Mr. M. could see this because I think it is what he was trying to get at. There is something of the ridiculous in who he was and what he was doing to us, but he had an incredibly difficult job that he thought was important. He was trying to convince a room full of eleven-year-olds that there are forces in this world much more powerful, much larger than a single person and his names for these forces were God and Satan. The problem wasn’t so much our age, of course. It was that we were city kids who had never experienced the kinds of things that I am tonight.

I am at the top of a bank of clouds and most of the forest and mountains too. There’s just enough cloud here to make it glow, but I know there is likely a world of rain below me and some of the rain is seeping into the mountain and into caves that no one will ever see, and that animals no one has ever or will ever hear of live in their own biospheres cut off from the rest of the world. They are places of eternal mystery. Some of the rain falling tonight will feed those strange creatures, and in a hundred years or more, the rain will find its way back out of the mountain into our world, and people who have not been born yet will drink it.

If the students of Mr. M’s sixth grade class had been allowed to experience my world tonight, to live with direct contact with the earth rather than be separated from it, his job, at least half of it, would have been easy. He would not have had to convince those kids that there were forces in this world that were larger than they were. My guess is that in an hour or so, the wind is going to kick up and drive the clouds up high, and I will be fully engaged in the rainstorm. Maybe the lightning will rage around me. I’ll watch from my tent as the animals shelter, and the trees will bend back and forth in the wind.

In a world like that, it becomes quickly apparent how small each of us is and how powerful everything else is, so he’d have half his job done. Now, he’d only have to convince us that these powers were controlled by God. Maybe that part wouldn’t have been hard either. In any case, he wouldn’t have had to come up with his stories of redeemed sinners who became saints, fallen nuns doomed to hell, or children who foolishly hitchhiked with the devil.

John Brantingham is the Writer-in-Residence at the dA Center for Cultural Arts, and his work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. His books include the short story collection Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods (World Parade Books, 2013) and the crime novel Mann of War (Dark Oak Mysteries, 2013). His newest poetry collection is The Green of Sunset (Moon Tide Press, 2013). He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California, and is the president of the nonprofit San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival. He co-edited the LA Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press, 2016) with Kate Gale.