Gazing out the passenger window, ten years old but bearing the craggy countenance of an old man, he glanced my way, pupils like sinkholes of despair, troughs of worry furrowing across his forehead. Arms folded, lips pursed, heels pummeling up and down on the floor mat, walled off and pensive. He shifted, fiddling with his seatbelt before giving voice to his trouble.


“Scott, do you believe there’s a God?”


His question struck like an arctic blast knifing through a window crack, bitter and cold,
pinning me against my seat, feeling turbulent, threatening, and instantly transforming our
benign ride into something unnerving. A simple ride home became a white-knuckle
experience, a harbinger of a conversation forever etched in my memory.


Completely caught off guard, I stalled, silently praying, hoping my response would inspire
and transfix. Yet all I could do was turn the question back, speaking softly, gently, hoping to
draw him out.


“Do you?”


He exhaled wearily, eyes fixated on some distant point as if he’d been wrestling with the
question for years. “No.” A hard edge to his tone. “Because nothing good has ever happened to me.” He shook his head, eyebrows pinching into a scowl. “I don’t believe in God because if he was really up there, he would have answered my prayers and helped me and my family. But he never did.” An agonizing pause before he muttered, “But I believe there is a Devil. There has to
be.”


Stunned by his statement, the quiet broken only by the car engine knocking against the cold, pistons pumping hard, belts whining, tire treads searching for traction. A mile marker zipped past, another before I finally managed, “Why do you believe that, Daniel?”


“Cause my whole life, nothing good has ever happened to me.” He groused. “All I’ve ever
known is bad stuff, shit that keeps happening all the time.” Swallowing hard, voice icing over, crackling.  “That’s why I think, even if there is a God,” he fought for control, “I believe the
Devil is stronger because it seems like the Devil is winning. That’s why there is so much evil,
’cause the Devil is stronger than God…”


Tortured silence, both of us, it seemed, playing out the conversation in our minds, fully
aware our conversation was being directed by unseen spiritual forces waging war in Daniel’s
heart, a cosmic battle between good and evil.


When words came, I tried to spout hope, spewing my adult belief in a God who saved me
from whiskey and water. But even to my ears, the words sounded hollow, trite, impotent,
offering little to an almost fourth-grade boy questioning the existence of a higher power. Only in retrospect could my foreboding be called a premonition.


Long after I dropped Daniel off at his foster home that night, I remained troubled, agitated, and unable to sleep. Memories came unwanted, flooding back in a torrent. Scenes from childhood flashed through my mind when it seemed like the Devil took up residence in our home.

My father’s alcoholism and mental illness had veered into the supernatural, the macabre. An ever-present topic fueling his drunken rants. Permeating our house not just with whiskey and water but seemingly something far more sinister. Months where I was convinced evil sat with us around the kitchen table.


Remembering when I was Daniel’s age and my father cursed out the Almighty and forced my sister and me to search for demons in the dead of night…