Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “No wonder your eyes are brown, slick,” said Maggie. “You’re full of it up to there. Were you a foot taller, they’d still be the same color.”

  “Oh, such sour words spoken by such a sweet face,” said Shen playfully. “Let me read you a poem of mine, and you’ll have a change of heart.”

  “Can you read while you’re running, —,” said Maggie, and she called him a name Maternus — who had never seen a comedy special on HBO — did not recognize. The Roman recognized the word she used as being related to the Latin adjective ‘niger,’ meaning “black” or “dark.” From the changed expression on Shen’s face Maternus deduced this new word meant something a great deal stronger. He saw the old woman’s right hand draw forth the deadly cane while Shen was yet stunned by her exclamation, and — as she had done to the Roman — she hit him on the side of the head before the poet realized what she was doing. Unlike Maternus, Shen was unfamiliar with personal combat and did not have the skills to avoid Maggie’s vicious attacks. When Maggie swung a new blow at the poet’s head, he did not duck out of the way or parry the cane with his hands, but absorbed the swing full-force on the side of his already throbbing skull.

  “Goddamn!” he cried and tried to get away from her.

  Shen could not retreat from Maggie’s attack as Maternus had. His usually graceful stride became awkward when he had to move backwards, causing him to stumble inside the tight space of Maggie’s apartment. He ran into the exterior wall and fell over a coffee table the old banshee had positioned in the middle of the living room, apparently for the sole purpose of making an obstacle for anyone she was assaulting.

  “No! Goddamn!” continued Shen, taking a blow to his abdomen when he raised his left hand to cover his face.

  “Is it too late to read her a poem?” asked Maternus, again not striving to be funny, for he took everything literally and Shen had said he would change Maggie’s heart with poetry.

  “Get me out! Get me out! Jesus God Almighty!” yelled Shen.

  Maternus swiftly hoisted up the footrest Shen had been seated on and stepped between his friend and the vicious old woman, using the ottoman as a shield to ward off Maggie’s cane. He absorbed her blow with the shield in his left hand, and in a trice seized the cane with his free right hand and wrenched it from Maggie’s grip.

  The Roman felt the blood pulse through his face, and at once he was returned to a remote battle scene on a cold day in Germania Inferior, when he had stood face to face with a select warrior of the Cimbri; he met the man’s eyes in the instant his powerful right arm pushed his gladius up, under the other man’s armor to split open his opponent’s stomach even as he watched vapor escape the man’s open mouth.

  He blinked and was back in Maggie’s tiny apartment, holding the cane over the old woman’s head. She was no longer giggling, but looked at him, her eyes wide with terror. Maternus remembered the angel’s warning when he saw her expression. Maternus’s moment of rage passed, and his hand held.

  “The gateway to Hell is always close at hand,” he whispered, unaware if either Shen or Maggie heard him.

  Maternus tossed the cane away.

  “You are an evil woman,” he said to the frightened Maggie. “My friend came to read you a poem, to comfort you in your loneliness, and you call him strange names and beat him like a stray dog. I wished to make you happy when I came here, madam. I now see you are not worthy of my effort. You deserve your misery, for you are more vicious than any common soldier I ever served beside. I will not lay a hand upon you. You merit my rage no more than you merit the friendship I wished to offer you. We are going now.”

  Shen was holding his bloodied head in his hands, and though thoughts were not coherent, he still remembered he was there to do something good for an elderly woman. Thus he stumbled around Maternus and attempted to recite a few lines to Maggie.

  Maternus turned his friend around and led him from the apartment and the rest home. Once they had returned to the boarding house Stephen’s Uncle Jerry owned, Maternus relinquished Shen to their mutual friend, and Stephen mended Shen’s wounds with a tenderness that made the Roman regret he ever was angry with this world. Watching Stephen clean and bandage the wounds on the poet’s head, and observing the open friendliness of the other elderly people each time he returned to Shady Grove convinced Maternus that Maggie Lambkin was an oddity; a wicked entity at one with the demons he had witnessed in Hell. In a few years she would surely join her horned brethren in that warmer place and there shriek with inhuman delight as she tortured the souls of the merely mortal among the neverending flames.

  At a loss as to how he should proceed from his defeated position, Maternus nonetheless continued to visit Shady Grove twice a week. Despite his impassive manner, which young people sometimes found unnerving, he discovered it was an easy feat to make friends with the residents. When they were gathered in the first floor’s spacious commons room they were eager to entertain any visitors they had, regardless of how large and scary-looking the visitor might be. The old women showed Maternus photographs of their grandchildren, and the old men bent his ear confessing past failings they wanted others to know before they died, meaning they wanted to speak of the girl they might have married or of a business opportunity that went south. Maternus could talk more easily to these elders than he did to other residents in Aurora, as long as he avoided delving into the particulars of his past life. Thus he could talk of warfare to the old men, provided he did not mention spears and short swords. To the sympathetic old women he could narrate the story of his poverty-stricken childhood, as long as he did not tell them about smoky stone hovels or wooden utensils.

  The old people at the rest home did not believe Maternus when he said he was from Montana. They said his accent was wrong (something no one else in Aurora had noticed) and that he had suffered too much to have been born in America. Had he not perhaps been reared in eastern Europe during the reign of the Soviets, they asked. Maternus played along with them and said, yes, that was true, though he was secretly a little hurt that these people he was becoming fond of would fancy he came from a part of the world fit only for Scythian and Dacian barbarians.

  On several occasions he saw Maggie across the crowded commons. He did not approach her. The nurses and the beefy male orderlies were aware of her violent tendencies (she had earlier attacked several other residents with her metal cane, the old people whispered to the Roman), and members of the staff stood guard near her whenever she decided to show herself. The other residents had long ago learned to keep their distance from her. When Maggie caught the Roman’s eye from the crannied settee she shared with no one, she would give Maternus the crooked smile he knew was the banner that preceded her irrational anger, and he never gave her opportunity to carry out the battle plans he realized she was making behind her seemingly innocent face. She represented more of the modern complexity he had beheld in other venues, and Maternus wanted none of it.

  While he was keeping his distance from Maggie, an unexpected and — at the time of his original visits to Shady Grove — an undesired development changed Maternus more than anything he had yet experienced in Aurora, save for the friendship he had made with Shen and Stephen: he found he wanted to visit the rest home every day and talk with the old people in the common room. He came to enjoy these daily visits so much he ceased worrying how he would make another approach at Maggie. Maternus took great pleasure in merely sitting with the residents and letting them speak to him about the families, football games, and motion pictures he had never experienced. For a reason he could not express, he felt welcome there. He enjoyed having the old men call him “big guy” and pretending to spar with him whenever he entered the room. He absolutely loved having the women call him “Mr. Linebacker” and asking him to flex his massive biceps. The men in his legion had admired Maternus’s courage, and his officers had needed him for his battle skills; these old ones wanted him to be among them only because he was a fellow human. They wanted nothing in return other than his com
pany, something that initially made Maternus mistrust the old people, and later caused him to esteem them above everyone else he had encountered in Aurora.

  His favorite among the residents was a wheelchair-bound, brown woman called Juanita, whose name Maternus thought was extraordinarily exotic. His thought was confirmed when Juanita told him her mother had come from Mexico.

  “Your family therefore has origins outside the American empire,” said the Roman over the cup of Sleepy Time tea she had made for him one Tuesday afternoon.

  “If you say so,” said the pleasant Juanita.

  She taught him how to play bridge and declared him to be the best partner in the world because when he was mastering the game the expression on his wide face never changed so one could not tell when he was bluffing. (He would become a poorer player over time, as he would learn how to smile among the old folk and lacked the guile even a puppy would have displayed when he tried to hide his happiness.) Juanita had been a hairdresser in her working years and insisted on pinning a sheet around the Roman’s neck and cutting his hair right in the common room.

  “Did this happen in the war?” she asked one day while she was buzzing around him in her electric wheelchair and could see the welts he had on the sides of his head.

  “From napalm,” he told her, for he had read that term in a book about modern war, and it sounded plausible to him.

  Juanita would scold him if he slouched in his chair or wolfed down his lunch as he had learned to do in his legion’s barracks. Maternus bought her little gifts: a coin purse and some turquoise hair clips, the latter of which she proudly wore for him. He whittled her a recorder from a block of cedar and played her several marching tunes. His great square head blushed as red as coral when she praised his musical ability. It did not cross his thoughts that she was mothering him; he only knew he luxuriated in her attentions and that, when he looked at her wrinkled face, his mind’s eye saw images of his own mother on the last day he saw her, squatting beside a smoky hearth and covered with filth while she tended to Maternus’s younger sister.

  The orderlies at Shady Grove had told the other residents that Maggie Lambkin was mentally ill. That was why, they said, she sometimes assaulted those she took a disliking to. Juanita and her companions in the commons room would have none of this. They believed Maggie’s defects were entirely moral. (In truth, the old people did not put much faith in psychology at all, which surprised Maternus, for he had progressed beyond Freud and Jung in his perusal of the Great Books and had presumed modern Americans would accept at least some of the science of the human mind.)

  “She acts the way she does because she knows she can get away with it,” Juanita whispered to the Roman. “What can they do to her? She’s a couple hundred years old. No, she’s not crazy. She’s just mean. As mean as dog water, she is.”

  Maternus could only guess at the definition of “dog water,” but he understood it was an unfortunate thing to be like. (Juanita was fond of many other signature phrases the soldier had not heard before, like: “Pharaoh’s army moves at night” and “as new as old sheep” and “as ugly as last Saturday’s dinner.”) Maternus would repeat some of her unique colloquialisms to Mr. Hamburg at the school, and to Shen and Stephen, and they would each look at him as if he had developed a speech impediment. The Roman thought Juanita’s vocabulary was endearing — not that he would use an effeminate word like endearing. He only knew she and the other old people made him so happy he forgave Aurora for its other shortcomings. He likewise forgot he had previously thought the city’s women to be perverse.

  Among his new friends, Maternus could forget his mission to bring joy to Maggie Lambkin. Shen could not. He was as unused to being rejected by women as he was to violence, and he returned to Shady Grove wanting to do more than give poetry readings. Maggie was miserable, and he was going to change that. He was going to insert some romance into her gray existence. After a week of plotting with the bedraggled Stephen, the one man in the city who probably knew the least about romance, Shen hatched a plan to get Maggie a boyfriend. And he and Stephen made their plot more ridiculous by choosing none other than Stephen’s repugnant Uncle Jerry to be the one to make Maggie’s weak heart beat a little faster. When Maternus ran this ill-considered plot past his new friend Juanita, she confirmed his doubts about the entire scheme.

  “What kind of man is this Uncle Jerry your man Shen is going to bring here?” Juanita asked the Roman one afternoon across a bridge table they were sharing with their two opponents.

  “He is vulgar, hates everyone, makes life miserable for his nephew,” Maternus told her. “Oh, and he watches the television device for up to eleven hours a day,” the soldier added.

  “He’s Maggie in pants,” declared Juanita, and asked if he could bid two spades. “Nobody wants to have herself as a boyfriend. Doesn’t Shen know anything about dating?”

  “He must. Women love him,” said Maternus. “They are ever about him.”

  “They come to look. But they sure haven’t told him anything,” Juanita informed him.

  Maternus told the poet the scheme would not work, but he could not prevent Shen from getting Jerry shaved and bathed one Saturday after bribing the old man with the promise of a new flat-screen TV. Shen brought Jerry to one of his readings in the common room and later took Steven’s uncle upstairs to meet the horrific Maggie. The Roman would never ask Shen what transpired up on the second floor that day or why Shen and Jerry came charging down the stairs only five minutes after they went up. When Maternus next met Jerry at the boarding house, the old man had a red knot over his left eye, and the Roman also did not bother asking him how he got the wound.

  “Miss Shen should’ve told me his lady friend at Shady Grove was a lesbian,” Jerry complained, and showed Maternus the new wide screen he had in the middle of his cluttered living room. (Were the soldier aware how much the thing cost, he might have asked how Shen could have afforded to buy it for the evil old man.)

  Maternus continued not to dwell upon Maggie, whom he had come to believe was a lost cause, yet he continued to make daily visits to the rest home’s common room and mixed freely with the residents, becoming more comfortable with their company with each visit. He was still not thinking of Maggie when Juanita asked him where he went every afternoon after he left the old folks and their stained card tables.

  “I am the evening janitor at a middle school,” he told her.

  “Middle school?” she said, sounding more interested in the revelation than Maternus was. “That’s what they call junior high these days, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose,” said Maternus, who was browsing through a photo album full of pictures of young brown women in long skirts and tall white socks — some of them strongly resembled Juanita — and other pictures of dark men, half of them in khaki uniforms. Juanita had said the photographs were from “the war.” Maternus’s reading at the library had informed him of so many wars in America’s recent past, he was not sure to which conflict she was referring, but played along for the sake of her feelings.

  “They would be about twelve to fourteen or fifteen?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, not glancing up to observe how excited Juanita was becoming.

  “You are so lucky to be working with children,” she gushed. “They must be wonderful to have at hand.”

  “Not these children,” he said, and was he becoming so free with his emotions he risked a brief laugh at the thought of the children he saw every day being wonderful in any sense of the word. “Susan B. Anthony seems to accept only the city’s worst youth. Our students share a perverse obsession with bodily functions, much like certain criminals I have being witnessed tossed into the oceans. They are loud, rude, and have no inkling of how to behave in public. They are constantly making crude noises and drawing scatological pictures on the toilet walls. The hallways are their waste baskets. Granted, the boys are worse than the girls. Mr. Hamburg — he is our principal — apprehended three boys this past week using a cell pho
ne to capture the image of a fourth boy sitting on the throne. They find amusement in such things. From what I have read at the library, there is great debate among experts as to whether such behavior is the result of corrupt genetics or bad parenting. A minority among the learned claims our young hooligans are the creations of environmental pollution; things like lead poisoning or insecticides that have killed too many of their brain cells before they were fully developed.”

  “I would love to meet some of them,” said Juanita, practically singing the word ‘love.’

  “Why?” asked Maternus, looking up from the photos. He was startled to see not only Juanita, but most of the thirty-seven residents present, leaning toward him, expecting him to say something that would please them.

  “So we could talk to them,” said Juanita. “Isn’t there some organization at the school that does civil duty? The boy and girl scouts, maybe?”

  Maternus reflected upon an afternoon at the school when he had observed Abdul Rathman dressed in short pants and a khaki tunic not too much different than those the soldiers in Juanita’s album were wearing, except that Abdul had worn a red neckerchief about his throat. “Boy Scouts” had been the whole of his explanation when Maternus had inquired into the meaning of the outfit. This must be, he reasoned, the very organization his elderly friend had in mind.

  “I suppose,” said the Roman.

  “Maybe you could get some of them to visit us?” suggested Juanita, and at least half the residents present seconded her suggestion.

  “I… Do you not worry they might injure you?” he said. “They are a very undisciplined group.”

  “They will be good when they are here,” insisted Juanita.

  “They are little beasts, really,” said Maternus. “I fear they will do great harm to your frail persons.”

  “They’ll behave,” said Gloria, one of the other residents eavesdropping on the conversation. “Kids behave around anybody like their grandparents.”