Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Practically a living saint,” said Banewill with a bemused smile. “But there’s more to him than the things that are pleasing to you.”

  “He retains a great reservoir of anger within him,” admitted Mr. Worthy, and fingered the sleeve of his robe thoughtfully. “That mass of rage could burst forth at any moment. He’s lately become a little too vain as well.”

  “Does he think he’s good looking?” asked Banewill and twisted his nose in disgust. “Shave a grizzly bear, and it wouldn’t look any worse. Even after you did away with some of his scars he looks like ground chuck with legs.”

  “As always, you are too critical, Banewill. He’s almost handsome these days, and getting better all the time,” said the angel.

  “Is that from the eighteenth century?” asked Maternus of Banewill’s outfit. “I have seen something similar in a library book.”

  “He’s getting more observant, too,” said the demon. He held out his arms so the soldier could appreciate the clothing in full. “The best of times, the worst of times; the world will never be so young, not ever again. I love the age for its naive possibilities more than for its inadequate results.”

  The angel ignored Banewill’s preening and proceeded to give Maternus the gist of his final test.

  “Shen is going to come to you this week and ask of you a favor,” he said. “You will do as he wishes, taking care at all times to harm no one and contain your still-lethal temper.”

  “I will,” said Maternus. “Will this favor I do for him help save Shen?”

  “Like Stephen, he could go either way,” said Mr. Worthy. “As still could you. You please me in many ways, but I yet sense the rebel in you. I have warned you before that I did not send you to church so you could sleep for an hour every Sunday morning.”

  “They’re so bloody boring handing out their biscuits and grape juice,” said the demon. “And he needs the rest.”

  “The soldier here isn’t tired,” said Worthy to the demon, while keeping his eyes on Maternus. “He is averse to obeying authority of any sort. He sleeps in church as a small rebellion against the institution, and against me and my Master.”

  “Given how he was beaten down in his lifetime, I would have guessed you might be a little more sympathetic to that facet of his nature,” said Banewill.

  “Don’t pretend you care how he feels. He needs to learn he cannot defy everyone and everything. There are some he must serve,” said Worthy.

  He admonished the Roman to relax upon his pillow, then the angel made the familiar arc with his right hand, filling the small apartment with a deep, comforting darkness. When Maternus awoke again, the sun had risen, and light was flooding through the windows.

  In his bathroom mirror that Sunday morning he saw his teeth were perfectly straight and the scars from the lower half of his face had disappeared, just as the ones on his forehead had vanished already. His hair was full and soft to the touch. His once big, flat hands had lost the calluses along their sides that he had gained from the leather strips holding his kit during the long marches of his former life. The scars on his body, reminders of the wounds he had suffered in battle, were the only blemishes remaining on his person. Once fully dressed he was not merely the better looking man he had become after the completion of his first task, he was genuinely comely, in a muscular and still somewhat threatening way.

  “Apollo himself could not shine brighter,” he said aloud, recalling the bright bronze statues of that god adorning the main gates of the frontier forts in which he had served.

  Typical, a vain man, like Shen Coleman, for example, has been aware since he became conscious of his existence that his appearance is superior to those of the general population, and his opinion of himself is expanded a tiny bit every time a woman favors him with a smile or when he senses the jealous animosity of another man. Little by little he grows into a colossus of narcissism. For the resurrected Maternus, vanity burst upon in a single morning with the sudden fury of the great flood that haunts the memory of every nation. The image in the mirror was so pleasing, and the sensations it aroused within him were so novel, Maternus was soon in danger of being drowned in a deluge of self-satisfaction. He went straight to the shopping mall and spent half his paycheck purchasing some tight-fitting suede pants and a dozen muscle shirts, unknowingly turning himself into the very image of a blue collar man on the make. The female librarians snickered at his outfit when he strutted into their building that morning, bouncing along as he was carried on the updrafts created by his new confidence. As he walked to work two different women with big hair honked their horns at him when they passed him on the sidewalk. The children at school whispered to each other that the weird custodian was acting particularly oddly that evening; the man was singing to himself, and was not even wearing an iPod or any other music-making device. Maternus would have bounded about in his new clothes for weeks on end if Juanita had not said something discouraging when he visited the Shady Grove rest home.

  “Who told you this was the way to dress yourself?” she asked him.

  “The man from the apartment two doors down from me wears similar clothing,” said Maternus. “He drives a car bearing flames on its sides and goes about accompanied by the sounds of thunder. Stephen says the man’s music is called speed metal.”

  “You look like a trailer park pimp,” said the old woman.

  She had to give a further explanation before Maternus grasped she was saying something derogatory about his new appearance. As quickly as he had become swollen with arrogance upon beholding his new face, the Roman was deflated by a few words from this tiny woman in a wheelchair.

  “I have made you despise me,” he said and hung his head so low his chin rested on his chest. “I am disgraced by your disapproval of me, my dear friend.”

  “You take things too much to heart,” Juanita told him and patted the Roman’s great wide head the way a loving mother would. “Do you have a girlfriend, Matty?” she asked.

  “Where I come from, everything is said with the utmost seriousness,” Maternus told her. “I am not inured to harsh words, not even when they are spoken in what the dictionary defines as hyperbole.”

  “Blessed one, everything said in this world has some meaning,” said Juanita, contradicting what Mr. Worthy had told him on his first day in the city. “The meaning may be twisted around, but it’s not said for nothing. I was only trying to tell you to dress normal, like you sort of did before. Since you brought up your girlfriend, what do you have to tell me about her?”

  She was the one to have brought up the subject, yet Maternus was glad to speak of anything other than how he had disappointed her.

  “I have someone,” he admitted, much to Juanita’s delight. “You might say she’s waiting for me.”

  “Back home?”

  “I am not certain.”

  “You don’t know if she’s waiting for you?”

  “I do not know what to call the place she is in,” said Maternus. “In dreams I see her in a garden. A cold stream runs nearby, one full of slick, brown rocks and trout, much like the streams found in the mountains of Germania Inferior. Ancient trees surround the garden like a peristyle, and there are other stands of oak and hemlock, their trunks covered with green moss and vines, growing in irregular clusters throughout the place. The area is more of a forest grove than a spot that has been designed by human hands. The air is remarkably cool where my Maria is. She, I believe, will nonetheless be as warm as a candle left burning in the window of a house on a long winter night. She is forever present, forever waiting for me, and for me alone.”

  “Is this a real girl or somebody you’re dreaming about?” asked Juanita, more than a little concerned about her large friend’s mental health.

  “She is real, as real as anything in this world. More real than most of what one sees on the television device. That is truly a doorway to a living dream,” said Maternus.

  “I’m with you there, honey,” agreed Juanita. “You can’t trust anythi
ng you see on TV. Except for maybe Wife Swap. You can’t get people to act that crazy. What is Germania Inferior?”

  “A land where I once served while I was in the army,” said the Roman.

  “Then this Maria, she’s foreign? We used to call them war brides,” said Juanita.

  “Something like that,” said Maternus.

  Juanita was thrilled to hear this. She told Maternus he should telephone this Maria that very evening, and hugged his wide, muscular frame and called him a pet name in Spanish the Roman recognized as being close to the Latin for “my wonderful little boy.”

  Back in Juanita’s good graces, Maternus was reasonably happy once more. He was not elated as he had been that morning upon seeing himself in the mirror. Nonetheless, he was pleased to know Juanita cared for him still, and that the old woman approved of Maria. That evening Maternus stored the new suede pants and muscle shirts into the lowest drawer built into his bedroom wall, and again put on the humble denim clothing he had usually worn since his arrival in the city. His attire won a further blessing from his Juanita during his next visit to the rest home.

  This small incident did give him a troubling premonition of what might happen when he at last met Maria in the land beyond death. She might not, he thought, be as compliant to his every desire as he ofttimes fancied she would be. She had been full of brass the first time he met her. Maria was a woman — or should he now think of her as a female angel? —and women were clearly difficult to decipher. The book on what women wanted was not to be found anywhere in the library’s Dewey decimal system, and clearly the advice men offered concerning the desires of the other sex was not very reliable.

  Look, he told himself as he lay in his fold-out bed that night, look at the errors his friends had made when they advised him about Edith Pink and Margaret Lambkin. Could Maria be as obstinate, as mysterious, and as demanding as the women he had met in Aurora? He had once imagined that coming to her would mark the end of conflicts, the end of mysteries, and the start of carefree, sunny days and comforting, dreamless nights in the cool, shady darkness of paradise. For the first time since he was given a second chance at salvation, Maternus could envision the possibility that going to her might mark the beginning of a test that would never end. What if she had formed expectations of him? Was he going to have to change himself to please her? If a little thing like clothing could upset an old woman like Juanita, what could set off an actual wife like Maria? The question worrying him the most — keeping him awake until Monday had become Tuesday — was why the tests Mr. Worthy had given him had so much to do with the other sex.

  Not until Wednesday, the second of November, did Shen approach Maternus to ask the favor Mr. Worthy had told the Roman to anticipate. Maternus had stopped by the boarding house after work, and he and Shen were standing at the sink washing dishes inside the ground floor kitchen while Stephen served dinner to Uncle Jerry in the living room. The angry old man was eating creamed corn and hot dogs on the sofa while he watched Wheel of Fortune and made loud remarks regarding Vanna White’s bottom.

  “You may have noticed he has a new flat-screen,” said Shen.

  “I saw, when I came in tonight, that Uncle Jerry had a new, larger television device,” said Maternus, momentarily distracted by the feel of slick soap bubbles on his hands. “Soap is such a simple thing,” he said. “How odd it was not discovered sooner.”

  “Yeah, sure,” commented Shen, who was not interested in the history of cleanliness. “You know I bought it for him.”

  “For Uncle Jerry? I did not know you liked him. I did not know anyone did.”

  From the living room came a sound like an asthmatic cough wedded to a raven’s caw. “You simple-brained fuck head,” said the old man to his nephew, after the latter man had let a dollop of creamed corn fall onto the already filthy carpet. “I wouldn’t step on you if you were shit in the yard.”

  “The new TV was the bribe I gave him to get him to go see that Maggie person,” said Shen, nearly sounding sheepish for a fraction of a second. “That didn’t turn out right,” he laughed.

  “Your failure was for the best,” said Maternus. “I am told Edith Pink visits Margaret Lambkin every other day. They are kindred spirits, and Margaret is content at last.”

  “Whatever. Any old how, to buy that flat-screen TV out there, I had to sell some poetry.”

  “Really? Congratulations, brother. To what publication did you sell them?”

  “No, you don’t get me,” said Shen and shook his head. “I didn’t sell them to any magazine. I sold them to somebody, a person.”

  “A poetry collector?”

  “Sort of. Do you remember that poetry slam we took you to?”

  “I went under my own power to the Great Blue Heron coffeehouse,” recalled Maternus.

  “As our guest. The woman who won, the one with the big fake Afro?”

  Shen held his arms about his head to demonstrate the size of the woman’s hair.

  “Big Mamma Ad-Verse,” remembered Maternus. “Her real name was something else.”

  “Elaine Buckman,” said Shen. “She’s really not ethnic. She and her husband Ray own a big sports bar in Lodo, down by Coors Field. Maybe I told you that. It’s called the Fourth Base. Nothing but fat guys in ball caps watching a dozen different games on these big overhead TV sets and eating cheese fries all day long.”

  “What do Mrs. Buckman and her husband’s business have to do with your poetry?”

  “She was the one buying them,” whispered Shen.

  “I would have thought she was something of a rival to you.”

  “Sure she is, but the truth is, Elaine’s not a real writer. She’s a performer in a dopey wig. I drop her a couple poems every month,” said Shen, and he continued to whisper lest anyone in the other room overhear him. “Several others in our group do the same. You didn’t think she writes all the great stuff she recites, did you? Poetry, like everything else, is a racket.”

  “Which was the great stuff?” asked Maternus, uncertain as to what loud proclamations he had heard on that night in the coffeehouse fell into that category. Had Shen paid close attention to what others said, he might have been offended.

  “Don’t tell Stevie about this,” Shen added. “I’m sort of a hero of his, and, you know, he’s kind of naïve about how the world works.”

  “I do not divulge secrets.”

  “So I went to the Fourth Base last Sunday, and must not have been thinking that day because I took my whole notebook of poems with me. Three hundred and fifty-four of them, all of them handwritten, plus the outline and the first seven stanzas of my narrative epic about the Aztecs. I was going to sell her a couple pages, like I usually tear out for her, but when I get there, Ray, her husband, and his bunch of buddies are there watching the Broncos game broadcast from down in Atlanta. These are pretty big guys hanging out with Ray Buckman — two of them are the Sanderson twins; they played for Littleton twenty years ago, then Bobby went on to CU and Billy to CSU; both of them were starters in the offensive line — big guys without any necks. Elaine is setting in the back of the sports bar, around a table with Ray and this pack of assholes, and when I show up and hand her a couple pages, she says, ‘For eight hundred bucks I should get the whole damn book.’ Billy Sanderson is right there behind me, and he snatches the book out of my hand and tosses it to her. That wasn’t the deal. That was not the deal, Matt. I’ve never sold her more than three at a time, and she knows it. They’re all sitting there drinking beer and laughing at me. I say, ‘Give me back my book.’ And the two brothers — Ray uses them like sort of bouncers — they grab me and throw me out to the street. So it stands. That book is two years of work, and now she’s got it and can use it like every poem is hers!”

  “Have you contacted the police?” asked Maternus. “There is a poster at our school proclaiming that one should contact the police if anyone steals something from you or touches you in an improper manner.”

  “Shee-it,” said Shen, backing away
from the sink and shaking the water from his hands. “Ray and Elaine have one of the biggest sports bars on the Front Range. Her name is the one on all the poetry awards. I’m somebody the cops have never heard of. Who do you think they’re going to believe wrote the poems in my notebook? Elaine will say they’re hers, and that will be that.”

  “I see. Time does not chasten the corrupt or bow the powerful.”

  “I was wondering,” said Shen, his voice dropping into a lower register as he wiped his hands with a dishcloth, “if you might have any old army buddies here in Denver? I mean, you are a pretty tough guy, I think, and maybe you could get some friends together and you could, you know…”

  “You want me to retrieve the book for you?”

  “Not you alone — you can’t do that. I can’t ask Stevie to do anything, not with his disability and everything. I’d go with you downtown, but I have a herniated disk in my back, and I can’t risk taking a hard fall or I might never walk again. I don’t have any money right now. How about I give you five hundred dollars sometime after Thanksgiving? There’s another woman in Thornton who goes to poetry slams, and she—”

  “I will not accept any money. You are a friend. One does not demand money from a friend. Have Mr. Buckman or any of his friends had combat training?”

  “Why would they?” asked Shen. “I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them haven’t had karate classes and that sort of stuff. Have you?”

  “Twenty-seven years of it,” said Maternus, sounding much too proud of his martial skills in spite of the angel’s recent admonitions. “Though none of what I learned was of the exotic sort you mention. Four or five civilians do not sound particularly dangerous. I will do as you ask. Is this the only great favor you wish me to perform?”

  “I guess,” shrugged Shen. “I wouldn’t call it a ‘great’ favor. It’s a small one, really. As long as you’re careful. Ray and Elaine live right over their bar, by the way. Which may sound kind of old world, but it’s better than it sounds. They’ve got a whole loft.”