Hell (19 page)

Judas jumps up and turns and careens around and past the tables and through the front door.

Hatcher sits and tries to be still and think on all this, and he begins to feel a darkness in his head and a faint weakness in his limbs. But these are just his own private feelings going on, he realizes. His body is simply reflecting on these matters as it waits for what he wants it to do next. Hatcher rises and moves to the front of the Automat. Carl is gone. Someone somewhere in the room shouts, “Not convincing? Convince this, shmecklesucker!” Hatcher steps into the street and turns back the way he came.

Behind him, Judas has not burst asunder with his bowels gushing out, which has happened to him before, the most recent time after he spoke to Carl Crispin of many of these very same things. This time, as he rushed headlong into the street, his stomach stopped wriggling and shrank back and he staggered around the corner and sat down on the sidewalk, his back to the metal wall of the diner, and he pulled his knees up under his chin, and now within him, it is the night on Mount Zion, outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem:
The others have gone ahead to the upper room of this house and the Master has let them go up first and I wait upon him and he touches my arm and says “Come with me” and I do and we go around to the side of the house in the dark and the air smells of a wood fire and the Master smells of spikenard and I know Mary the Drastically Redeemed has been at him already and I’m thinking he’s too easily pampered, he’s getting too soft, there’s hard work to be done, man’s work, and I know he knows what I’m thinking, so I say “I’m sorry, Master” and he says “It’s almost over” and it’s me now who knows what he’s thinking and I say “So we’re not going to fight it out” and he says “You know the answer to that” and I do and he says “The stones of this house took long rubbing one against the other before they fit together” and I say “You mean the boys upstairs” and he says “The boys upstairs” and I say “Not enough rubbing” and he says “That would take till I’m gone and come back and gone and come back again” and he laughs and I laugh and I know what’s next and he says “I will ask you to do a thing now that will make you wish you’d never been born” and I say “If it’s what you need” and he puts his hand on my shoulder and even in the dark I can see the tears in the Master’s eyes.

Up the street, Hatcher is moving quickly. Soon he draws near to Administration Central. The Duesenberg is still sitting at the curb, and though he waited for Hatcher to reappear, since his orders were simply to chauffeur him, Porphyrius is not happy to see the TV minion’s approach. He’s starting to feel a little hot under the collar already.

Hatcher nods through the window at Porphyrius in his long-practiced, warm, famous-person-encountering-service-person manner and moves to the back door. He pauses and checks the sky. The sun is stalled high up in what Hatcher now sees as a powder-blue sky. He’s still not certain about a new Harrowing, but Judas’s words are stuck in his head. Get your own shit together. Hatcher climbs into the backseat of the Duesenberg and opens the map, ignoring Porphyrius’s glare in the rearview mirror. He finds the location of his nearest wife and gives his driver directions. They creep off into the crowded street.

And though Hatcher feels that this train of thought is wildly dissociated from what he has just experienced at the Automat—overlooking, as he does, the two underlying associative motifs of a striving for Heaven and books—his deep inner voice remembers:
a magic bus, a book with large colored pictures about a bus full of travelers that flies away and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and I was sitting in a window seat in my room with bright sun coming in and there was a page where a little boy discovers a golden button on the dashboard of a bus and he says to the driver, Push the button, please, sir, push the button, and the driver does, and the bus lifts off the street to the delight of all the passengers inside and, outside, to the surprise of a little girl and a puppy and a passing bird. And the rest of the book has vanished from within me, except for one two-page spread of artwork, and this has returned in dreams and in the moments drifting toward dreams, perhaps two dozen times over the many years since, and the image is this: the boy is looking out the window of the bus—though his looking out was established on an earlier page, for all these years I’ve simply known that the boy has pressed himself hard against the window and the other people have vanished for him—and on these two pages is just what he sees, from a great height: a rolling countryside with trees and a farmhouse and barns and a cornfield and, far ahead, a little village with a church steeple and a school and a neighborhood of white houses and the sun high in the sky and, most importantly, there is a truck, a bright blue panel truck with big round fenders and it is on the road through the countryside and it is heading for the little village and on the side of the truck is the word
BREAD
and when I was a child I imagined that it was my father driving that truck, it was my father, the friendly Bread Delivery Man who smiles all the time and whose breath smells of fresh bread, and later, when I dreamed of this scene, the father part had vanished, the driver simply drove anonymously, invisibly, and it was just the bread truck, but it was still in the perfect countryside, and I knew it was heading toward the place where I wanted to be
.

Mary Ellen McCord—formerly Mary Ellen Gibson but Mary Ellen McCord even after her divorce from Hatcher as he was being promoted from anchorman of the evening news in St. Louis, Missouri, to network correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Mary Ellen McCord even to the day of her not-really-intentional-but-now-that-it-seems-to-be-happening-oh-what-the-fuck death by drowning off the Cayman Islands on a Golden Years Singles Cruise with two other unmarried sixty-something women friends—is being borne along as one of the multitude thronging Peachtree Street Road Circle. She is trying to get back to her apartment in the Career Mother neighborhood of the Great Metropolis in Hell now that she has been reconstituted after enduring the noontime sulfurous rain that she seems always to get caught in because she seems almost always to be in the street crowd for reasons she can’t even begin to figure out. But this time she actually recognizes the intersection with Peachtree Circle Court Loop and she actually fights her way to the edge of the crowd and actually breaks free to move abruptly into the mouth of the street where she lives just in time to be knocked off her feet and run over by a turning 1932 Duesenberg being driven by the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire and bearing her ex-husband.

 

 

 

Hatcher sits on the running board of the Duesenberg, with Mary Ellen’s twisted, broken body a few feet away, and he waits for her to reconstitute. If he had a pack of cigarettes, he’d smoke one now. This is taking an unusual length of time, with her not showing any signs whatsoever of snapping back. After the initial recognition of who she is, he hasn’t quite looked at her. Finally it all feels terribly familiar: he hurts her and then doesn’t really look at what’s happened; he just waits for things to go back to normal.

He makes himself see her. Not her crumpled, jackknifed body, but her face. He angles his head to the left, sharply, and still more, until his face and hers are aligned across this space between them, eye to eye, nose to nose, mouth to mouth. She looks young. As she was when he was courting her at Northwestern. Suddenly her eyes open. But it’s not clear to Hatcher that she is seeing anything. A moment later her eyes close and they begin to move beneath her lids, as if she is dreaming.

And within Hatcher:
She and I stand on the tiny beach at the curve of Sheridan Road near Fisk Hall, the lake the color of car exhaust, the air stinking from the alewives that mysteriously die in large numbers every spring and wash up along the shore, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, she and I, but not holding hands, and we’re expecting something from each other in light of our imminent graduation, and in light of all the sweet times sneaking her up to the third floor of my rooming house in the still prudish early sixties and clinging to each other very quietly in my narrow bed with the tops of the red maples outside, and I say, “Your folks will be down?” and she says, “You asked that this morning,” and I say, “I’m not thinking clearly,” and she says, “I’m not either,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and she says, “We need not to think,” and I accept this and I say, “Since we’re not thinking, let’s get married,” and she laughs, low, and I let the back of my hand touch the back of hers and her hand is warm and she turns it and I turn mine and we hold hands and the gesture is like a scarlet leaf on the maple outside my window in October and it’s the first one to fall and you’d think that would be the most beautiful secret moment of all for the tree—its quaking with red leaves like it’s on fire and this first leaf letting go and floating away, free—but it really means that winter is coming in and all the beautiful things will fall away and die and the tree will soon be stark and cold.

And behind Mary Ellen’s closed and dream-restless eyes:
Twilight is coming on and he and I are standing on the little beach near the J-School building and we’ve never said a word about it but the time is now nearly upon us when we either go on together or we don’t, and the lake is dark, nearly the color of his eyes and as deep, and he smells of the drug store aftershave he adores—bay rum, the clove smell of an old man—and I know he will someday get a thing like that right without my having to suggest it, and he says, “Your parents will be down?” and I say, “You keep coming back to that. What’s really on your mind?” and I turn my face to him and he turns his face to me and he takes my hand and we both look out to the water and he says, “It’s not a matter of my mind,” and I say, “We need to think clearly,” and he says “No we don’t,” and this makes me happy and then he says, “I want to marry you,” and I lift his hand and I kiss it and it smells of rubber cement from him cutting and pasting his final story for the newspaper, and if I was thinking clearly I’d know this is as good as it’s going to get and I should just kiss that hand one more time and let it go and walk on down the beach and out into the lake and just keep walking till I vanish.

She opens her eyes. She finds her body restored and the promise of more pain perched on the running board of an old automobile. She sits up.

Hatcher rises. Mary Ellen has reconstituted, but her face has turned old, as old as she was when she finally let it all go in the Caribbean Sea. Hatcher makes a vague gesture to help Mary Ellen to her feet, but she waves it off. She stands.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“For what?” she says.

“Running you over.”

“Which time?” she says.

Hatcher shrugs. Not from indifference, but she can’t see that, of course.

“Right,” she says.

“Please,” he says. “Any time. All the times. That’s why I’m here.”

“We’re in Hell, my darling,” she says. “It’s a little late for anything like that.”