Over the hills and far away

Zelda Friar sold her soul to the Devil.

The first one to tell me was Tommy Reese. He was a real big-mouthed weasel back then. If you grew up where I did you would’ve known pretty fast anyway, but he didn’t have to enjoy it so damn much. Don’t expect more from a two-bite town taped together by a liquor store, a bowling alley, and a church, I guess. It’s not the kind of place you grow up in and know any better so I don’t really blame Tommy anymore.

I happened to have shared a piece of the Jordana Heights pie with Zelda for whatever cosmic reason plopped us there. She lived just across the street, 47 steps away. At least that’s what she'd told me, bragging that she could do the walk in under 20 if she wanted, 18 at best. I don’t know if I believed her, but I liked to picture her sauntering the distance, awkward and wiry, like a slinky down a mountain. My bathroom window lined up perfectly with her room and on the occasion her drapes were open I’d get a glimpse of her at her desk or her bed, bobbing her head to a tune I’d never hear. I liked to picture Bill Withers for some reason. When people asked what kind of sacrificial rituals she performed I usually just said I didn’t know, even though I knew much of it was uneventful – with one exception – when I woke up late one night to pee and happened to see her awake still, looking out her window. It must have been 3 am. Her saucer eyes reflecting the moon, and the moon reflecting something back to her, something she couldn’t peel away from. As if she was trying to will herself into one of its vast craters. The lights in her downstairs living room where on too, and I could faintly see the shadows of people walking or pacing or dancing. I can't recall which. It’s one of the hot flash memories you get every once in a while; at work, on a jog, just before bed. Of the piss yellow street lights, winter-burnt lawns, and sagging telephone wires I just can't put the picture together long enough to know what was going on, what was keeping them up.

I can’t say much of what I remember here is fact by the way. As you know, some of that stuff gets muddied over time in the trenches of our brains. You dredge knee-deep in brain juice for so long that there’s bound to be some murkiness. For all I know she is the incarnation of a subconscious qualm I never suffered gladly. She appears and reappears as a wavy cameo, a word at the tip of my tongue, a connection not fully dialled in the background of my peddling, suburban summers.

Even so, I still believe in her.

So as the story goes Zelda Friar sold her soul to the devil, and then she came back wrong.

Tommy told me at the church cook out, a dribble of sweet-corn juice and butter running down his chin. He stank of gym socks so I just shrugged and rode my bike home before the thunder caught up. Zelda was pulling into her driveway at the same time, and as she waved at me, I remember imagining her getting gobbled by the lips of hell just beneath her white sneakers. I smiled and waved back.

Zelda wasn’t her real name of course. It was something much more drab like Rose or Ruth, but by the culture of the playground she emerged one day baptized. This girl wasn’t a loose cannon by any means — you’d think someone who’d sell their soul to the devil was but she wasn’t. Not that I recall. She was just like any one of us: a drop of salt-water wading in a tepid suburbia, hurrying to make it home in time before supper.

That’s from what I knew anyway and no one knows much of anything ever, so she came by a lot to look at my fathers telescope and that’s all I cared about. We looked for Saturn and listened to Houses of the Holy.

A week or so before the cook-out, someone at school had heard a rumour that Jimmy Page sold his soul to the devil — it was all the talk. Zelda came in that morning weary, frail like she was, trembling like a blender. That was Zelda, unfortunately for her. She piped up at the chatter though. Told us about the hidden message in Stairway if you played it backwards – the one Jimmy left for the Devil. Said her dad had played it for her one day with his records and that next time he was in town, she’d bring ‘em and show us all. She was buzzing. And in their defence, she was smiling an awful lot, which she did so little of. It was brimming. Flushed. Bright red like a bullseye. I just thought Zelda really loved Zeppelin.

“Well, whoever told you that is full of it. I don’t think that’s true”

It’s probably not true anyway so I said it and left the curious circle that had formed on the grass. The sun fell right on my back, like a hand ushering me inside quickly. I don't think I saw her for a few days after that, she was always sick with something or other so it felt normal. That was enough for the word to spread quickly though; Zelda Friar went right up to her room that night, slapped a price on her and waited for the Devil to come knocking. Some would even go as far as to claim they had seen the imprint of the devil’s hand on her arm the next day. Her brimming, flushed smile turned devious instantly. It was all the talk.

I went to see her the day after the cook-out. I think. Or at least a few days after. Her mom came out lugging 3 bags of garbage to the curb sporting a fat shiner. She noticed me staring and went on a fantastical story about the coyote she had to rip off the spine of their dog, Bentley, just the night before. A little traumatic, she’d said, but everyone’s alright. The reverb of her arm nailed her right in the eye. When I asked if Bentley did that lot because Zelda bruised like a peach too, she already had her back to me.

“She’s pretty shaken up about it still, I don’t know if she’ll coming out for a while” But I knew it wasn’t true. Even before Bentley came bouncing around the porch.

Because Zelda Friar had sold her soul to the Devil.

Something felt wrong. I can still picture it clearly. It’s that pulsing feeling you get when you walk into your home and you know someone was there wearing your coats. Or knowing that a picture frame is crooked by just the tiniest fraction of an inch. A pin-prick in the back of my lizard brain that could feel the white hot stare of the predator. It was a discomfort too mature to articulate in childhood, so it felt like the Devil. If nothing else can survive the swamp waters of the brain, this does, and perhaps has curdled in my gut long enough to keep me awake. But I was just a kid then, so instead of prying I turned around, and biked away. Luckily she stayed away too, like her mom told me.

Now, If you ask people when they last saw Zelda Friar, most will tell you it was the night Sid Montoccio played with his grandmother's Tarot cards. I don’t remember it, but they say I was there. For some reason, everyone thinks the Devil came then to corrode her insides, something about the cards ‘sullying’ the transaction. That’s all just a bunch of mythical bollocks everyone ate up after the shock. She didn’t leave the park with her head on backwards either. On all accounts she left in some sort of hysterics, some say after being doused with holy water. Some versions of the story have her leaving from a crowd throwing rocks. That, I find more believable.

I had a dream about her later where she came in through my window and a deck of tarot cards fell onto my vent. I tried picking the cards up but I could only pick one, the Five of Cups. I pick them all up but they are all the Five of Cups. I don’t even know how I could possibly know that’s a card in the deck but I looked it up later, and it is.

As for me, I happened to talk to her alone, one last time. It was coincidentally the time I figured out that Zelda Friar had in fact not sold her soul to the Devil. So to me it became last time I saw her no matter the truth. No matter if I did sit there in that grassy knoll at Sid Montoccio’s tarot reading exactly one day later. I biked to the quarry on the hottest day of August and when I saw her I felt something, maybe deja vu. She had peppermint eyes and was an awful bone colour. It had been so long since we’d last talked, too much time since we last stared up into space. Now the space lay between us, thick like jelly.

“It’s not true.” She breathed out. Her voice further away than she.

“Okay.”

“Okay. Well I know you don’t care anymore. But I wanted you to know that God isn’t listening. Not to me at least. But even then I didn’t pray to the Devil”

We were 11 and between us a silence too wide. Wider than 47 steps. I can only hope I held her in my arms and told her I do – I care. I promise I do. But I was too afraid and knew too little then, so I just watched her turn around, and bike away.

And then she was gone.

Months and months after, I dreamt of her at a garage sale of all things. I kept dreaming she was at a garage sale so much I scoured the neighbourhood for long after hoping - naively - to see a red head bobbing around some rusted lamps. I figured that’s something she’d have done, join some grand North American garage sale tour. But maybe that’s something else I like to imagine.

I do remember she used to count a lot, like when she counted 47 steps from her house to mine. Or it could have easily been me the many times I went up the her front door and froze mid-knock only to sprint back to mine in under 20 steps, 18 at best. I like to think she kept count of her steps though, it seems like that’s something she could have told me.

Later in high school, I learned that when you reach the speed of light time stops, but I had already figured as much when I watched her ride off that day. I figured she must’ve counted up to a light year and then time stopped for her, so she can come back to visit in dreams, looking for lamps at garage sales and dropping tarot cards on my window sill. That much of her, I still have.

Jordana Heights vibrated to the reverb of loss for decades. Things got better for a while. But eventually, it all became just another legend, another riddle, told and retold, scattered and put back together, so often and so wrong that it was everyone's memory, and then no ones. There was a picture of Zelda that hung at the church for years after, before it was demolished for remodelling. They made us watch a film every September 10th at school, all about how to ask for help and how we were never alone and about gratitude, and right after the credits her face would appear on the rotting monitor one more time, wavering for 5 seconds before dimming into nothing like in my dreams. They even dedicated a bench to her in the same schoolyard where the seed of her own demise was planted on that fateful, sunny day. The funny thing is, she would’ve hated the bench and she hated that church but there she was now, smiling a half smile that hid every and all the secrets she took with her.

In the end, we all do what we can to gut the drain of our clogged up conscience. It’s only much, much later that you learn about how people can be suffering inside their skulls, or hiding in plain sight at 3 am, out a window, in a sick little suburb where no noise can escape. All those minuscule imprints on hands, the way people can walk uneven, unkempt, and unsure, carrying an essence that might disguise something deeper, darker than themselves — but not so mystical as the devil. Not mystical at all. Not even far from the likeness of our own palms. The careless hurling of thoughts and words that can, at the right moment and with a single perfect shot, slice through the soft, tender flesh of a heart. A small, terrified, lonely heart.

See, the depths of the swamp waters of the brain can vary; a puddle to Mariana’s trench. On the shore of my sweltering childhood summers, fragments of card games, bike trails, and blanket tents wash up. Much further are the missing pieces, those that broke off and failed to push to the surface – for better or worse. She floats somewhere in the middle, in a window across the street or basking under a streetlamp too far in front of me, where I can only catch her if I hold my thumb and index close together. This is possibly all she ever was, or all I choose her to be. I asked my parents later and they don’t remember the telescope nights like I do. They said it could have happened a couple of times, but they can't recall.

I dream of her at that garage sale even still. She is thumbing through milk crates of old vinyls and vintage soda bottles. She looks OK, like a picture frame that’s finally even. There is always such a strong breeze, warm like august, and when she feels it she always smiles and says to me;

“You know, it reminds me of someone I miss”

Me too.