Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (10 page)

On the drive, Caleb only listened to country and Buck to rap. Buck kept switching the Johnny Cash to Tupac. Buck only drank Mountain Dew, and Caleb drank Coke. They spoke with hand gestures and spit their words. We drove late into the night. Caleb said he didn’t need to sleep, ever really. We passed a wide lake torn by the long arms of swamp plants.

“Everyone knows about the war,” Buck said. “You should just go home. We all already know too much about the war.”

Buck started swearing at me, and telling Caleb to stop bringing God into the workings of things. Slurping. Shifting. Buck turned his face back at me, as far as his neck would twist without his body moving. Words came from the side of his mouth.

At two in the morning we stopped at a roadside motel with no hallways. The bedroom windows faced a parking lot. Our rooms shared a wall. In my pillow I heard Caleb and Buck fight over the bed. Buck lost. Thumb-sized cockroaches cleaned their wings. Caleb said to be up early but they didn’t wake until noon. They knocked on my door and I responded through the wood, met them later in the breakfast room, overlooking a leaf-clotted pool. The room had blue carpet, fake Monet paintings, cornflakes, and old ladies on a field trip. The corner television played disaster footage of a flood somewhere far away.

“What’s the grossest thing you ever ate?” Buck said.

“Dead cat,” said Caleb. “We ate bugs and other stuff. Mealworms would squirt in your mouth. Stole a chicken from a farm. I fucking hate chickens. Chickens are dinosaurs with shrunken heads.”

•  •  •

The vehicle factory was in the woods, big as two football fields, full of jeeps with heavy machinery, gun racks, missile launchers. A room marked Top Secret. Greased mechanics with masks stood behind flamed rods. Caleb negotiated with the colonel, who paced with his arms wide and his shoulders square and he had a pair of brows thick and gray as storm clouds. When he spoke he tugged on the belt of his too-high pants, lifting them enough to show high-top sneakers and white socks. Caleb disappeared into an office with Buck and the colonel. He said I couldn’t go in there. I waited in the front seat of a machine-gun-mounted jeep and fell asleep until a shirtless, freckled man, six feet tall and covered in coarse, red hair pushed my shoulder. He had on overalls with an unclasped strap.

“I’m Red,” he said in an accent that sounded like a wobbling saw. Sweat stood on his skin. He gave me his hand and I took it. “Caleb said to entertain you.” He pointed toward the office where Caleb spoke to the colonel. “He said take her in the growler.”

They were light utility vehicles with Kevlar seats. This particular growler had eight wheels and looked like a toy race car with an open top and no doors. One seat belt went over the head and strapped across the chest to be buckled on either side of the body. A separate seat belt covered the legs.

“Want to go for a ride?” he said.

Caleb stepped out of the office, grinning. “Have fun,” he said. We drove off a washboard ramp and made a hard right onto a country highway. “Yes, ma’am, give me anything with wheels and I’m gravy,” he said. The seats vibrated and Red whistled. He touched his beard.

We cut down a dirt road and Red stopped the vehicle. It jerked. I put my hand on my seat belt latch. “Racehorse got running today,” he said, stepping out of the vehicle and into the woods. He unzipped his pants and pissed roadside. A wide puddle spread on the red clay earth. He shook his hips. A beetle cooled itself in the pee foam.

At a nearby town Red went searching for machine parts. The town was a collection of one-story metal buildings with essential purposes: gas, food, truck.

Red bought lug nuts. I waited in the growler. The wind dragged a paper bag across the cement. Six men came out of the store. Old men with urine-colored beards. The tallest man chewed something. One of them had a fake leg or else a leg so emaciated that when the wind blew, the fabric hugged the width of bone.

“Where’d you get that car?” he asked. “Woman shouldn’t be in a car like that,” he said.

“Not all alone she shouldn’t,” the tall man said.

•  •  •

The colonel agreed to give Caleb two growlers at no cost. Caleb agreed to bring in enough profits later to pay him off. We sat at foldout tables at a diner in Carthage called the Village Place. Everyone was ex-military and everyone ordered the Club Deluxe on white bread with mayonnaise served in aluminum packets. The waitresses were cigarette-voiced, young, pregnant, and kind.

The men talked about submarines and World War II and how it’s better to pilot planes than submarines because at least in a plane you know you’ll come back to the ground.

One of the factory workers told Caleb about an idea he had for a vehicle called Brute.

Caleb’s eyes widened and he moved around in his seat.

The Brute can float and swim. She’s not pretty to look at. She was designed to service oil rigs. Rescue the stranded. Explore uninhabited lands.

Caleb had mentioned the name to me on the drive, and so I asked, “Wasn’t Brute your idea.” Caleb raised his index finger to his mouth, indicating that I ought to hush. He said don’t talk about the visions.

The colonel stood to use the restroom. Caleb leaned in. “Red wants to work for me.”

“And?”

“I hate redheads,” he said. “Can’t trust them.”

“What if I showed up as a redhead?”

“I knew you weren’t just by talking to you on the phone.”

In the back of the restaurant a man put soap on the metal hook where his hand should have been.

•  •  •

The clouds moved in great white herds. Caleb stacked the vehicles on a multicar trailer hitched to the pickup. In Georgia somewhere we pulled off the highway and parked in a wide dirt area the shape of a horseshoe. Some kids were drinking in their jeep, boys in the front, girls in the back, the trunk a glittery pile of smashed cans. They cheered when they saw the growlers, and then started their engine and sank into the woods. We parked in front of the steep dirt slope that rose almost vertically before it flattened and connected to the area where the kids had just been. Buck pulled out a video camera. Caleb jumped in one of the growlers and crawled up a steep rise of dirt. The growler lurched. Something inside broke. We watched it roll slowly back down the hill. Caleb took his shirt off and swore. “You didn’t just see that,” he said. Caleb sent Buck away to buy the broken parts.

Caleb looked huge. There were clouds all around him. We sat in the growler and stayed quiet for some time.

“So you want an example of the Destroyer?” Caleb said. Do you remember the conversation with Buck in the truck?”

“Which one? We were in the truck for nine hours.”

“The one where he was getting all testy. Do you remember when I cut it off? When Buck was saying, ‘This is what you should do and this is what I think.’ Remember? That was the Destroyer talking.”

“You’re suggesting that the Destroyer was inhabiting Buck?”

“It wasn’t inhabiting him,” he said. “It was working through him. He lives with it every day. It’s almost funny because sometimes it’s so overplayed that you’re just like, Okay. Gotcha. I see your ugly head.”

He’d reminded me about DeeAnne and the boat engine she wanted. The one he was looking for the first day we met. “When I told her I couldn’t find the boat engine she called me a son of a bitch to my face. She told me to burn in hell. She said, Caleb, you’re a failure and you’re a waste. But you’ve got to understand that this lady is just some lady with a broke-down boat. She can call me a son of a bitch to my face as many times as she wants and I’m not mad at her. I don’t think she’s the problem. It’s the other guy at the negotiation table who’s the problem.”

Caleb picked a gnat out of his eye, wet and dead.

“Essentially what came out was this big nasty thing.” He made his hands like claws and stretched them apart. “But in the truck the other night with Buck, it was very sly:
Here, bite this.
”

An hour passed. Buck returned with no car parts, just cheeseburgers from Wendy’s. We ate the cheeseburgers in the growler, in its shade. No one spoke. The heat was getting to Buck. He shone like a glass ball. Finally he walked away from us and stood silently in the sun with Caleb’s shirt over his head. He looked like someone waiting for an execution but who, in the end, was too unimportant to kill.

•  •  •

Caleb and his wife, Eden, lived in a two-story house near Woodstock, Georgia, not far from Wombly’s sweat lodge. There were acres between homes. Cardboard signs advertising eggs. A few horses twitched from green, large-bodied flies.

The only light was from the dusk—a soft blue. The house was quiet and the air-conditioning cold. Moths hit the windows, and in the basement a dryer hummed. Caleb sat at a long oak table across from Eden. She was the daughter of the minister who brought Caleb through deliverance. He married her after the exorcism. She was twenty-five, taught kindergarten. Robust in the hips with translucent skin, pale as if descended from Vikings. She had blond hair but dyed it blonder.

Isabel and Isaac, his children from Allyson, sat between them. He’d lost custody after the divorce. He saw them only a few weeks a year. Isabel wore a Barbie nightshirt, and Isaac, faded sleep pants but no shirt. Isaac looked just like his father. He was five years old but there was very little baby left in him. He looked tan, muscled, and mean.

The kids gripped forks over empty plates, and Eden stood up to pull a pizza out of the oven, wearing pink running shorts, walking barefoot. Caleb waited at the head of the table, looking ordinary.

“Would you like some pizza?” Eden said. She took off one oven mitt and ran a hand through her hair, soft like running water.

Caleb pointed at the living room wall with a fork.

“The walls,” he said, “they look blue, don’t they?” He wiped his mouth with his hand.

“But they’re purple. It has to do with the light. I’m actually good at home decorating.”

“Do you want something to drink?” Eden asked. “We have Kool-Aid.”

“Kool-Aid is great,” I said.

We all sat down at the table, drinking Kool-Aid. I asked how she and Caleb met.

“How did we meet?” Eden said, looking off to the side, biting her lip. She rested her chin in her hand, touched her pizza with her fork, and then put her fork down.

“She knows my story,” Caleb said. “Tell her yours.”

“Well, he was over at my parents’ house,” Eden said, “getting delivered, and when I saw him standing there talking to my dad, he gave me a look like this.” Eden widened her eyes, cocked her head. “He did that with these really big crazy eyes. And I thought,
oh, this guy is weird.
I shook his hand or whatever and then just went in the other room and played on the computer.”

She kept her eyes on Caleb but her head turned toward me. “Go on,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“The next day,” Eden said, “we had a bonfire and a cookout, and we were shooting guns. My girlfriends were over and they wanted me to go talk to him. I think he’s thirty-five, I said. And see, I was twenty-five and that would just be gross to date someone that old. Then one girl said, I think he’s only twenty-six. And then another came over and said, yeah, just checked, he’s twenty-six. So I decided to go over there and teach him how to shoot guns because he wasn’t shooting very good.”

Caleb said nothing. He had his hands folded.

“Then later Caleb told me I was his wife. He said,
you are my wife
. You know, you don’t just say that to somebody. I mean,” she added, “men have been using God as an excuse to date me for so long. You know, being a pastor’s kid, men are always saying they were sent by God.”

Isaac dropped his pizza on the table. He grabbed the pizza and pushed it into his mouth, cheese side down.

“But I knew she was my wife,” Caleb said. “I’d seen her before. Then I’m thinking, oh, no, that’s this guy’s daughter—that’s the minister’s daughter. How do I tell him? I went back to work and I was sitting there at that dealership and we weren’t making any money. I thought, you know what? My wife is down there and I don’t know what I am going to do for work but if I know anything, I know that that is my wife down there. So I moved to Portal. I called her brother and told him but I didn’t tell anyone why I moved because I knew they’d think I was crazy.”

Eden took over the story. “Caleb came back to Portal and he didn’t have a place to live and he was hanging around the house during the day, staying in a hotel at night. ‘Are you doing ministry with my parents?’ He said no and walked away. I didn’t really get an answer from him. He looked like he needed some help so I decided I’d help him look for a place to rent. I drove him around town and we ended up in the Walmart parking lot until three in the morning. You know that country radio song about being in the Walmart parking lot?” Eden asked.

“Never heard of it,” I said.

“It’s great. I’ll get you a copy. Anyway, it turns out he’d been in Atlanta for a while, praying for a wife.”

“I was done with dating people,” Caleb said, “and done with not being married. I was aiming to get a wife.”

“Caleb had three dreams,” Eden said, “one about me as a kid, one about me in my forties, and one about me as an old woman with long gray hair. A month before he came, I was sleeping in my room and I saw something flying around the ceiling. I never saw anything. I’m not a seer. I ran into my parents’ room, screaming, and they got rid of it. Two weeks before I met him I saw it again, flying around the room. All of a sudden I saw this man’s face just looking at me. It was a man’s face,” she said. “And it was
his
face.”

“I saw the same thing flying around my room,” Caleb said. “Only it was
her
face.”

“But I was so closed off with my heart and my mind because I would be getting married to this other guy with a crazy family. He was really strong and controlling. He was verbally abusive.”

“Don’t ask about him,” Caleb said. “He doesn’t matter.”

Eden said she had to pray hard about whether Caleb was her husband. She prayed. Nobody else knew that she was praying. She prayed that everybody in her family—all nine people—needed to hear something from God, on their own. Everybody in her whole family never liked anyone she ever dated, that’s why she asked. Turns out her father had heard already. He was in the bathroom washing his hands when he looked up and heard the Lord’s voice say,
That is Eden’s husband.