“TWO-STEP DEVIL” by Jamie Quatro (Grove Atlantic, 288 pages, $27).
As a teenager I drove my Mustang up and down Ochs Highway, visiting friends in the affluent neighborhoods near the tip, once trekking with friends miles down the mountain’s backside, where we used fake Vanderbilt IDs to rent a bungalow for a Michelob-drenched bash. In just a few miles, the city’s lights had snuffed out, the brick manors with their manicured lawns had dropped away. No more signs about eccentric tourist destinations such as Rock City and Ruby Falls. The ribbon of highway was pitch-dark and wooded on both sides.
I’ve long thought Lookout Mountain would be an ideal setting for a sharp-edged, tangy novel, layered with the region’s mysteries, and Jamie Quatro’s “Two-Step Devil” delivers the goods. Amid the forests of Lookout’s Alabama spur, a widower called the Prophet hunkers down in a remote, filthy cabin crammed with found metal scraps. Outside there’s a privy and a creek where he bathes. He loves to paint. He gets by on a meager income from his vegetable stand. He also struggles with lung cancer, likely triggered by exposure to asbestos. His grown son Zeke has triumphed as a singer in Nashville and is now married with a daughter who attends private school. Zeke has rejected the Prophet’s poverty and hallucinatory, supernatural visions. Quatro presents the Prophet less as schizophrenic and more as savant, a self-taught folk artist in the vein of Howard Finster.
The Prophet’s not alone, however. The demon Two-Step lurks near the stove, jeering at the Prophet’s religious leanings and asocial tendencies. The author metes out her tale in vignettes, cutting back and forth through time, from a present set in 2014 to the aughts to the Prophet’s youth, when he labored for a steel foundry in downtown Chattanooga. He came to the Lord via an unusual path: “The only trinity he knew of was the one the men at the foundry talked about: Government plus Big Business plus Church. Three joined together as one to keep the working class down,” Quatro writes. “He pulled out the Bible and tried to read some pages in the front, but for the most part he couldn’t understand a word. The red words in the back were easier. The things Jesus said. … Red-words Jesus had a whip and a temper. He told people off and didn’t give a damn.”
“Two-Step Devil” springs into action when the Prophet, scavenging a junkyard, notices a trio who show up each Tuesday: an older man and two young women, including a tall teenage girl who changes from street clothes into a sequined dress. Somehow the Prophet believes she wants him to rescue her. For weeks he observes and eventually abducts her. She’s an underage prostitute, doing the bidding of her pimp. Back at the Prophet’s cabin, she’s able to detox from drugs and reclaim a sense of health and selfhood. Her name is Michael — a man’s name, except that one of King David’s wives was named Michael, as the Prophet points out to her. The pair evolve a tender relationship that may — or may not — sustain them.