Luci’s the runt of the family, but unlike you lot, we don’t take runts out back and shoot them.

Oh. Oh, wait. I’m hearing that’s an outdated practice in your timeline.

Well, fine. We don’t leave them at the pound indefinitely.

We make them do chores, and Luci had a knack for polishing.

I guess that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. If we’d just put him on sweeping duty or something, the big guy wouldn’t be rubbing his smiting hands together right about now.

Not that I care, really, but my routine’s been thrown off. It’s all anybody wants to talk about these days. Now, of course, Luci’s absence cast suspicion on him, but none of us believed that he could actually pull something like this off.

We all assumed he’d sparked, and we moved on with our lives. Sure, it hadn’t happened to anyone in a couple thousand spins, but Luci was small. And weak. Of course it’d be him.

And anyway, it made more sense than him getting away with robbing the vault.

But when little Charlotte mentioned my name—well, one of them—in her Sunday prayers, I set my sights on Cliff Ridge, Georgia. There, sipping lemonade in a hat larger than a tractor tire, was Luci.

A small cloud of dust trailed him as he pushed his feet along the ground, and he swung his head this way and that as he passed rickety wooden stands. Whenever he paused anywhere to shuffle fruit around, the nearby humans discontinued their conversations with the vendor and moved to stalls on the other side of the dirt parking lot.

As Luci plunged his hand into a crate of blueberries and two vendors exchanged looks of horror, a pair of boot-wearing overalls sidled up to him.

Don.

All this time—Don’s been with Luci all this time?

Don had volunteered to go look for Luci half a spin ago, and then he never came back.

Now, in the parking lot of a church where little Charlotte had called to me, Don clasped a hand on Luci’s shoulder and guided his diminutive frame away from the blueberries. They stood near a truck filled to the brim with boxes of peaches. I could see their lips moving, but Sunday morning brought too much prayer chatter for me to listen in.

I watched them, though, and tried to figure out why Don hadn’t brought our favorite little defector—and thief?—back for a reckoning.

I finally understood when I saw Don wedge a silver rod between a few of the boxes of peaches.

Several minutes after the truck drove away, Luci reached into a satchel at his side. Eyes wide, he looked at Don.

Maybe I couldn’t listen in, but I could read Don’s lips clearly enough: “You lost it again, Luci?”

I could meddle, but I have a busy schedule of basking in prayers.

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Note: This is the first post of my ongoing “Devil’s Road Trip” series, which started as an attempt at a song-inspired story for “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band (with some extra color inspired by this comedian’s song). The idea ended up taking on life of its own, so it’s now a series that’ll be posted in installments, and I’ll be taking creative liberties with some myths as I go.