The King of...

Tennessee, 2016.
The motorcycle cooled off outside. I could see it from my seat in the truck stop window. It was a basic greasy sort of place, about half-full with long-haulers and road warriors, bikers and a few families in the midst of their road trips.  
The waitress stopped by to fill my coffee and take away my empty plate. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes, a decision I’d regret in a few more hours of highway wrangling. No matter. I was a middle-aged British man with a Harley Davidson Fat Boy and I was seeing America, one truck stop at a time.
“You want pie?” the waitress said. “We have apple or cherry or razzleberry.”
Nothing more American than apple pie, despite idiomatic statements to the contrary. “Apple,” I said. “A la mode, if you could.”
“Sure thing, sugar.”
She was away in a flash of yellow dress and dirty white apron and compression stockings. I returned my attention to the parking lot outside, a combination lot and refueling depot that fed customers into the convenience store that adjoined the restaurant.  
Out there on the highway off-ramp, coming in rather too fast, was a rust-red Cadillac. I made it to be a ’58 or a ’59 but I really didn’t know enough to say definitively. All I could tell was that it was old and about a mile long. It drifted into the left lane and back into the right and swept into the lot, bypassing the gas pumps and coming straight into the lot outside my window. The driver expertly guided the car into a space between two giant pick-up trucks and stopped, the car rocking a moment on suspension as soft as watermelon flesh.
The door opened and the driver stepped out, long and lean as his Caddy. He had on tight black jeans and a beige plaid shirt with the collars turned up and pack of smokes in the breast pocket, a corduroy jacket held over one shoulder in the crook of one finger. His hair was long and swept back over his ears showing graying temples. I imagined he would smell of cheap cologne and Brylcreem and maybe a little of Bengay.
In this part of the Midwest, it seemed even little girls wore cowboy boots, but his were tooled, embroidered to within an inch of their lives. I didn’t recognize the leather – eel, maybe, but too pink to be any common skin. And as I watched him walk up to the front doors, it seemed that he left smoking footprints in his wake.
Indeed the whole man seemed to shimmer a little like a long road in the heat of the day. My imagination, surely.
He came in. A little bell rang over the door. The waitress breezed by him bringing my pie. “Sit wherever you like, honey,” she said.
“I’ll take a slice of that and your muddiest Joe,” he said, with a voice like silver coins clinking in a silk purse. I’d never heard silk and silver but I knew it would sound just like that. He walked by me, took the booth next to mine. I wanted to ask if he was a musician but I felt a strange thing: fear. A strange dread sat in my belly and, lower down, a weird attraction.  
I watched the man eat his pie, taking my time over mine. I was here to see the country and he was a part of it, one more colorful character to describe to the family back home, maybe write about some day. He ate fast, almost mechanically, a lazy grin on his teeth between bites. The more I watched, rapt and spellbound, the more I became both fearful and paralyzed. I found I had a bite of pie on my fork, halfway to my mouth, having rather lost an appetite for it.
He was done in just a few minutes. He glanced up and saw me watching. “Gotta stoke those fires, fella,” he said, and chuckled. He produced a money clip in the shape of a dollar sign, peeled off a few singles and dropped them on the table. “See you soon.” Then he strode out, back to his rust-red Caddy. I stared after him long after he was gone from sight.
“Twelve-fifty.”
“Pardon?” I looked in from the window, still holding a forkful of pie halfway to my mouth.
“That’s twelve-fifty, sugar.” It was the waitress, looking perfectly ordinary, banal.
I didn’t have a money-clip, just an ordinary leather wallet in the inside pocket of my biker jacket. I handed over a twenty.
“I’ll get you some change,” she said.
“No, you keep it. Only, can you tell me who that man was? I had the strangest feeling I’d seen him before.”
“Him? He’s in and out of here all the time. Some people say he’s hell on the highway. Some call him Baal or Lucifer.”
“You’re saying he’s literally the devil?”
“No, sir,” she said. “He’s got a name, after all.”
“He does?” I took a deep breath, hoping to be returned then to normalcy.
“Of course he does. That man is Memphistopheles.”