What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [105]
Satan stepped over to help speed up the transaction, which he accomplished by shoving the old woman toward the door. “You! Where are the cones?”
“I’m sorry?” asked the cashier.
“Oh!” said the old lady.
“The cones? Where are the cones?”
“What on God’s green Earth are you talkin’ about?”
Satan grabbed the cashier by her collar. “I want some of that ice cream,” he said, “but…” He breathed a calming breath. “…there are no cones.”
The cashier made a sound like a duck might be expected to make if he were suddenly to find himself substituted for a football seconds prior to a kickoff or a field goal attempt. Satan loosened his grip.
“They’re on the side.” She pointed to the far side of the machine, and immediately leaned over to catch her breath.
Satan peered around the side of the machine, and saw that there were indeed cones. “Oh good,” he said. “Thank you.” He grabbed one and took a step back to regard the flavor options.
“Sir?” a man in a white shirt with buttons and short sleeves tapped Satan on the shoulder. His clip-on tie imbued him with an air of managerial authority.
Satan declined to look at the man, opting instead to treat him as a co-conspirator. “What do you think? Swirl, or just plain chocolate?”
“I’m sorry?” asked the manager.
“Or maybe I could start with chocolate, and then do the swirl, and then some more chocolate? You know – kind of a chocolate-heavy mix. Hmm…”
“Excuse me, sir,” said the manager, “but—”
Satan held up his hand, as if to instruct the man to cease speaking immediately, which he did, but only because he disappeared in a singular puff of blue flame. This also shut up pretty much everyone else in the restaurant, but only for a moment. The silence gave way almost at once to a flurry of activity and sound.
The word “flurry” is, perhaps, an overstatement. It was really only a flurry in the same sense, for example, that the original super-continent Pangaea could be said to have engaged in a flurry of activity by breaking up into the modern array of smaller continents.
This geologically-paced flurry, accompanied by a barrage of crotchety, half-hearted – in the I’ve-got-several-blockages-and-am-suffering-from-mild-mitral-valve-regurgitation-and-so-my-cardiologist-says-it’s-like-I-only-have-half-a-heart sense – screaming.
The Devil pulled the lever that caused the machine to extrude a stream of chocolate-and-vanilla swirl ice cream, and then turned to watch the geriatric horde stream – again, an overstatement – out the front door of the restaurant. This, however, required more patience than he was prepared or, indeed, equipped to give, so he took his ice cream treat, and went off in search of El Jefe.
He didn’t get very far before he found himself confronted by a line of gray-haired gentlemen in blue engineer’s coveralls. All but one had black handguns, which they pointed at Satan. The one unarmed man was busy fumbling with some kind of leather pouch attached to his walker.
Satan continued to eat his ice cream.
The man with the walker quit fumbling with the pouch – which turned out to have been a holster – and now raised a trembling, gun-laden hand.
“Put that damned ice creamed down,” said the old man in the center of the line.
“No,” said Satan.
“Do it.”
“No.”
The old man raised his gun to hold the barrel at Satan’s eye level. “Do it.”
Satan locked eyes with the man. He raised the cone, stuck out his tongue, and licked.
Usually, when a gun goes off, it makes a noisy sound that is a little like a cross between a pop and a snap, but much, much louder. In movies, this is usually accompanied by the Doppler-induced “fwang!” or “kerpow!” that small, high-velocity objects – such as bullets – make as they travel a relatively large distance or ricochet off a rock. In real life – particularly in smallish, enclosed spaces – all you get is the ear-splitting popping sound, which lasts about as long as it takes the bullet to lodge itself in a wall or a bit of someone’s anatomy.
The gun held by the