the devil's veiny wings tim denevi I was downtown Santa Cruz after college when I saw the Devil in my brother. We were standing in the wet dark, in front of Hannegan's Bar. I wouldn't give him the keys to his pickup. "Kathryn," he said. He'd pulled out a hunting knife, the one he'd use to jab mud from the wheel wells when it rained. "Kathryn give me the keys or I will cut myself raw." He was drawing the blade over the muscled veins of his forearm. I imagined blood like strands of my red hair dragging behind the tip. I'd been teasing him, trying to lighten the confrontation, dangling the keys and calling him diminutives like "Drunky little bro bro." I'd snatched the keys earlier, when I realized how quickly he was drinking, when I picked up on his red mood. I guess I had seen parts of the Devil in him growing up, during the times I'd held wrapped candy beyond his reach. But not the Devil you and I know, with wings and a tail, with a dark determination to inflict pain by convincing those you love to self-destruct. No, it was just a shadow of that evil, the flicked tongue: my six-year-old brother flinging himself into the wall, scratching his legs until his knees bled. That night downtown, just after I'd graduated from Santa Clara University, I watched his red taillights lash through the town's main road. I was sick with fear and guilt, and though I didn't do it much then, I began to pray. Sure enough, he'd driven the 40 miles back to our family's apricot ranch in Hollister without incident. Because this is what the Devil does. He rises with those veiny wings above the truck, guides it to safety, ups the ante, so when the crash comes, everyone near has to fall, too. Of course this night repeated. With broken bottles instead of knives. With my eventual son screaming in his crib, matching my brother's threats. With other people in the car. I got a phone call one morning. He'd rolled his truck in the fog of the coastal mountains. The girl he was with lost three of her fingers. He broke his leg and had to wait a half-hour for help, the bone shinning through his skin and jeans. God I tried everything. I even joined a group that spoke in tongues, hoping to use the Devil's language against him, to scare him with my determination. I organized an intervention. I told my brother we were taking a family trip to Santa Barbara and we wanted him along. When he realized my two boys weren't in the car, that we were heading north to Los Altos, he began writhing, screaming, his eyes like demonic scabs. The shoulder belt wrapped around his throat, and his cheeks turned blue, bloated, his mouth choking with laughter. Because I swear-I don't care if you believe me-the Devil thinks it's funny, quirky even, when we try to resist; he sees himself in our vanity. We got my brother into rehabilitation. He stopped drinking. Sobriety stretched into days and years, and for a while the Devil couldn't find him. Once in a while I'd get chills and look up, expecting to see the shadow of wings, a darkness against the high-streaked blue of the valley sky, a searching evil that whispers down in the language of tongues and waits, calmly, for a response. Because this is how the Devil works. He give you good moments-the best you'll ever feel-like when my little brother bought my youngest son a metal baseball bat for Christmas, giving me a Carly Simon tape that we all sang to, my whole family down in Hollister, singing, "I'll bet you think this song is about you, don't you, don't you…" My brother married a girl with pointy ears he knew from back in high school. He took over the ranch when my father passed away. He had a baby boy with reassuring blue eyes. One afternoon I got another phone call. My brother had been driving his tractor in the hills, on his way to help out at a friend's turkey farm. I imagined the road to be slick and dark, like the night in Santa Cruz he drove away, though of course that's not possible. A teenage girl was drunk with her little sister in the car. Their truck shimmied into my brother's lane, and he whipped his tractor off the road to avoid them. I imagined the weightlessness he must have felt when he was thrown from his seat-as if he were the one floating above everyone else-in the final moment before he was crushed under tires and weight. But then I imagined what really happened. How he'd been gliding above the girl's pickup truck when he found my brother again. And he'd probably laughed at the coincidence. Because this is what the Devil is. So patient he seems disappointed that you're surprised to hear him swooping down on those you love.