Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “We haven’t presented any evidence or made the opening arguments…” Banewill protested feebly, “…not that it matters at this point.”

  “Let him go,” said Casio. “He’s suffered enough.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” said Worthy. “And I’m wondering if perhaps neither of you should go back to Hell. I think you should both come with me once we get matters squared away here. I will have some tests for you, tests I feel you will do quite well on. Marcellus will soon be strolling on new feet in green clover, and Casio will be with his wife and children.”

  “Soon you’ll have your hooks into all our older clients,” huffed Banewill. “Thank Lucifer for the twentieth century or the old neighborhood would be empty.”

  “I vote for death,” announced Commodus.

  “Thank you for your input, Mr. Emperor,” said Mr. Worthy. “That makes it two to one: Maternus is found not guilty and is returned to the living. However, before he can reach Heaven,” he said directly to the Roman, “he will have to complete an alternative third test. This matter of Shen Coleman’s notebook is hereby set aside.”

  IX

  Timid Love is not Love

  “Why test him again?” asked Banewill, who had not left his place on the kitchen stool. “You’re obviously going to give him a pass.”

  “I’ll let you set the guidelines,” said Mr. Worthy. “You never know. This time—”

  “—I might get the better of you,” suggested Banewill, anticipating the angel’s words for him.

  “You’re upset,” said Worthy to the demon in the dulcet tones of a preschool teacher addressing his naughtiest young charge. “Why not take some time to construct something really devious for him this time? Go to your place in the Springs, play a few rounds of golf, torment some wealthy inmates at the rehab centers, run over some small desert animals in your convertible, and meanwhile you can collect your thoughts. Everyone of us could use a short lull in the action. I need to situate Mr. Marcellus and Mr. Casio in other quarters. The latter gentleman’s family has been anxious about him for long enough. And before you travel anywhere, Banewill, would you please take the emperor back to wherever he’s staying?”

  “We’re having ice cream on Thursday,” said Commodus and brightened in spite of the lack of bloodshed that evening. “Caligula is turning thirty, again.”

  “Mad emperors,” muttered Banewill. “What are we to do with them? No, I don’t need any down time, thank you. Here’s the plan: I want ape boy to find a girlfriend for this dim bulb, Stephen Kent. Better yet, I want the librarian Cecilia Roberts, the dame who’s smitten with Stephen’s bud, this low-rent hipster friend Shen Coleman, I want her to be the girlfriend. When I say girlfriend, I mean she has to be taken with him, see him as an actual potential husband. Lastly, I give Maternus only two weeks to complete this mission.”

  The demon counted out the provisions for the test on his fingers as he spoke them. Being easily tempted, he had recovered his malicious self-assuredness now that he once more had before him the prospect of possibly defeating the angel.

  “Agreed,” said Mr. Worthy, speaking sooner than Maternus would have wished. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my man does the job in less time than that.”

  The Roman could not be nearly as confident as his divine champion. He had seen how the middle-aged Stephen mooned over the equally middle-aged Cecilia, and how indifferent she he was to him. He had lived long enough in Aurora to understand that the librarian was of a higher economic station than Stephen. He did not see any complications in persuading Shen to forget the librarian; no one could be as important to the poet as he was to himself. Getting her interested in the out-at-the-heels Stephen seemed nearly impossible.

  “Stephan is … different,” he said to the angel. “Miss Roberts might never be attracted to him. Would you be, if you were a woman?”

  “I have been, whenever the need arises,” said Banewill, “and I would say ‘no’ to the doper. I wouldn’t have him if he were as rich as the crocus.”

  “The phrase is ‘as rich as Croesus,’” said the angel. “Croesus was a man — the King of Lydia, no less. A crocus is a flower.”

  “I’m allowed not to know as many things as you,” said the demon. “The powers that be let me forget, otherwise I might get depressed.”

  “Were you more knowledgeable, I don’t believe I would enjoy your company as much as I do,” replied Mr. Worthy. To Maternus he gave the admonition: “Stephen is your friend, and thus you should not despair of him. There must be something in his person you find pleasing, something this woman might likewise find attractive. You have been in the modern world for several seasons and you know to whom you can turn whenever you need advice. Better still, by now you have some inkling of whom not to trust. I have great faith in you, my boy.”

  Mr. Worthy lifted his hand above his head, a move that signaled the Roman something dramatic was about to occur. Maternus guessed the angel was on the verge of making another exit into the ether, and started to make a final objection from his bed.

  “You see, sir, Stephen is not the sort—” he began.

  “We’re done here,” declared the angel. “Nothing more needs to be said tonight.”

  Mr. Worthy raised his right hand, causing Maternus’s eyelids to become heavy and bringing darkness into the small apartment. When the Roman awoke, he was alone in his flat and hungry for his breakfast.

  Two weeks being a very short time to make anyone fall in love with Stephen, Maternus decided he had to hit the ground running on this project. Not knowing any other way to proceed, he took the most direct approach he could and went directly to Shen, although he no longer had much confidence in the poet’s understanding of romance. He went to the poet only because Maternus remained an unimaginative man and could think of no one else to whom he could turn. The Roman likewise remained as unsubtle a man as he had been when he was a soldier.

  “I do not wish to press you, sir,” he told Shen upon arriving at the boardinghouse, “but I think you now owe me a favor. I want you to help Stephen win the woman Cecilia Roberts as his love. Please do not object. She is much drawn to you, I know, like many other women are.” (While Shen was taken aback by the Roman’s forward manner, he did have to agree with the notion women found him irresistible.) “He is smitten with the woman. None other will satisfy his…” he thought of saying “lust” but settled upon “desire.”

  “Desire?” said Shen. “You sure you want to use that word when you’re talking about Stevie?”

  “I speak English, yet my vocabulary is limited,” said Maternus. “I know no better term for how he feels. He likes Miss Roberts.”

  “Stevie likes a lot of stuff. Most of it he likes for a day or so. You know, he once began to write a book about Japanese fighting kites. Sat up in his room for two weeks straight and read every book on the subject the Denver public library system had or could order for him through inter-library loan. Then one day, while he was still reading, out of his bedroom window he saw a kid walk by, pulling one of those old-fashioned red wagons like Andy Griffith’s kid used to have — not his real kid, I mean the one who got bald and became a movie director — anyway, Stevie sees the wagon, the next thing I know he’s borrowed five thousand dollars to start building retro versions popular toys in his uncle Jerry’s garage. That was right before he thought he would become a gardener. Jerry had to pay back the loan for the toy factory. He also had to pay for all the flower seed and gardening tools Stevie never got around to using.”

  “He moves from thing to thing,” agreed Maternus. “I have read women like a man with diverse experiences.”

  “Stevie’s long ago forgotten most of whatever he experienced,” said Shen, and smiled when he thought of his blowsy friend, which disturbed Maternus, for friendship, along with courage, was one of the few virtues that had grown in the otherwise sterile soil of his Augustus Legion. The Roman had never spoken ill even of the comrades who had murdered him, and he did not think well of Shen for so
readily making light of a loyal companion. “You think he’ll want to be with a woman, the same woman, every day of his life?” asked the poet.

  “He will grow into the habit,” predicted Maternus, remembering what Aristotle had written. “One day he will do as he must, and soon he will do as he has learned to want. We are drawn to the good, and doing good will, in time, become second nature to him.”

  “I never figured you for an optimist, big guy. Are you putting something on your skin? It’s clearing up really nicely.”

  Shen fingered his own cheeks when he asked this. Maternus realized the poet had taken notice of the changes in his appearance.

  “Only soap and water,” said the Roman.

  “Why do you care about Stephen’s love life?” asked Shen, now genuinely interested in someone else’s intentions, not because he sympathized with either Maternus or Stephen, but because what the Roman meant to do was so very odd.

  “I will soon be leaving Aurora,” said Maternus. “I wish to accomplish something here you and my other friends will remember me by. I cannot write poetry as you do. Nor can I influence the course of world events like Stephen.”

  Shen chuckled at Maternus’s reference to Stephen’s letter writing-campaigns. By this time in his sojourn, Maternus also appreciated that Stephen was a bit of a crank, however, a transformation had taken place within the once-brutish soldier that matched the improvement in his appearance, and he had become too kind to laugh at the delusions of someone he cherished.

  “I can only do a few small acts to show I care about Stephen’s future,” Maternus continued his explanation, “and love seems to be what he most wants and is least likely ever to know.”

  “Making somebody hot for old Stevie will be an uphill fight,” agreed Shen. “Are you thinking of letting him in on your plans? Or is this going to be some kind of surprise? I don’t mean a surprise like Cecilia jumping out of a cake or something. I’m just wondering how much Stevie will be willing to take part in this. Then if he does decide to put a move on Cecilia, if Stevie has any moves, how do we keep her from rejecting him? Stevie in heat has got to be a scary presentation.”

  “We should talk to him now,” decided Maternus. “I have no wish to deceive him.”

  They had to but open the door of Shen’s room to get to Stephen, who was sitting on his bed, his nose buried in Westword magazine, engrossed in an article about the illegal drug traffic coming from Latin America. New ideas were flooding into Stephen’s brain as swiftly as the Tijuana cartel was swamping the American southwest with crystal meth. Like many enthusiasts, Stephen saw the key to everything lay in his particular field of study. The physicist views the universe as an equation. The lawyer sees the same as half argument, half agreement. The economist knows all of creation is divided into profit and loss. The sports fan knows it is all one great game. Stephen was different from those other enthusiasts only in that he had so many fields to shape his world view. At the moment Shen and Maternus walked into his room, Stephen realized everything that had transpired in the world over the past fifty years had happened because of the secret schemes of shadowy drug lords. He naturally wanted to share his discovery with the first people he met.

  “I’m never smoking another joint,” he announced to his guests in lieu of saying “hello.” The look in his eyes startled the Roman, and could have had a similar effect on any sane person. Shen, however, was familiar with the look; it meant Stephen had mounted another hobbyhorse and was riding it, with rabid enthusiasm, straight toward the edge of a high cliff.

  “Very admirable,” said Maternus. “I understand from my readings that cannabis causes various psychoses in lab monkeys.”

  “It’ll lower your sperm count, too,” said Stephen. “That’s nothing, though. The money from drugs is the fuel powering all the evil in the world!”

  “You’re sure of this?” asked Maternus, for even he, a stranger to this version of the world, could think of some other reasons for evil that had nothing to do with drugs.

  “The Iran-Contra business was financed by drugs,” said Stephen, and he held up the magazine article as proof of that assertion. “Afghanistan, Iraq, Columbia: they’re dope money at play.”

  Stephen’s energy level was somewhere between a televangelist on stage on Easter Sunday and a teenage girl who had just French kissed John Meyer. No one in the Roman’s time had ever let himself become so excited, not even on the point of death in the arena.

  “I don’t keep up with these matters as you do, sir,” said Maternus and glanced at Shen, who did not seem to have listened to anything Stephen had said and was studying an aviation poster on the bedroom wall.

  “Where do you think politicians get their money when they run for office?” asked Stephen, getting uncomfortably close to Maternus’s face.

  “Drug lords?” asked Shen from the poster.

  “They use it to manipulate the GDP, the price of oil, everything,” said Stephen. “Vietnam, Korea, Panama: they were swimming in drugs and drug money. Fifty-six trillion dollars passes out of this country every year, sometimes every month — all for drugs. It’s bigger than computers, bigger than ten thousand Bill Gates. If the people in this country knew, they would rise up and tear the Demopublicans and Republocrats to pieces. They’d get into their houses and—”

  “You smoke a little extra this morning, Stevie?” asked Shen.

  “Only a little,” Stephen confessed. “Not so much. I said I was quitting.”

  “You want to take in a movie?” asked Shen, although this was something he and Maternus had not discussed in the poet’s bedroom.

  “What do you want to see?” asked Stephen, immediately forgetting the worldwide drug conspiracy once Shen had mentioned a movie.

  “I thought we’d take your uncle’s car, go to that cheap place on University in Denver that shows last season’s movies for two bucks a head. We’ll probably have to take Jerry to shut him up. I thought we’d also ask Cecilia, you know, from the library. She likes to go with us to stuff like that.”

  “I guess,” said Stephen, doing a very poor job of hiding his excitement when he heard her name.

  When they brought their plan to Jerry in the living room, he called them each several filthy names to thank them for asking him to come along. Maternus understood the old man was mocking Stephen’s and Shen’s sexuality when he called them “faggots;” he did not grasp Jerry’s meaning when the old man called the Roman “a lumbering creep.” As Maternus understood the terms, ‘creep’ meant either the act of moving in a stealthy fashion or one who moves in such a manner, and ‘lumbering’ was an adjective meaning clumsy or awkward, which would contrast strongly with the noun it was modifying. Maternus also understood he would be wasting time to point this out to Jerry. The old man said he would be glad to go, so long as he could call shotgun and they were seeing a movie neither Shen or Stephen might enjoy.

  Convincing Cecilia to go to the cinema was an easier chore. Sunday morning (a time Maternus knew the pious reserved for church) found her sipping coffee with her girlfriend Lucy in the condo they shared in east Aurora. Shen had been there before. The poet nonchalantly strolled past the faux-jade lions guarding the front door, and did not have to wait long after he rang the doorbell and called out his name to the two women beyond the Spanish Colonial entryway. Cecilia was flushed and as giddy as anyone can be on very short notice, such as school boys when they are seated behind a pretty girl, co-eds when they meet their first male college professor, and journalists during an unexpected happy hour. She and Lucy could not go to the movies as they were then arrayed and demanded a few minutes to prepare their persons, ostensibly to make themselves pleasing for whomever they might meet at the theater, when they were obviously intent on impressing Shen.

  The four men had to wait in a living room that smelled of vanilla candles and pet cats while the two women cleaned up and dressed in the fifteen-hundred-square-foot condominium’s only full bathroom. The room’s decor of hand-knitted afghans, and the mat
ching rose patterned sofa and love seat elicited the comment from Stephen “that women sure kept stuff neat.” Shen scanned through a large coffee table book of Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings and commented she would have been a woman worthy of one of his poems. Uncle Jerry said he could smell the women’s genitalia, except he used a vulgar term and laughed in a manner as crude as his expression.

  While Maternus observed how Stephen kept pushing his hands in and out of his jeans’ pockets and how the poor man jumped up from his seat every time he heard a noise that might be the women coming out, the Roman could not see the lover Mr. Worthy desired. Shen was meanwhile taking too much comfort from the difficult situation, behavior that would continue for the rest of the day. Often during the outing, the Roman caught the poet smiling to himself, as if he were amused by how emotionally clumsy Stephen was while in the vicinity of the librarian.

  He believes he is showing me how impossible the task is, thought Maternus. Angels and men: they both think I am so dense I have to be taught by example.

  When at last the two women were ready, Cecilia showed no interest in Stephen and instead cleaved as closely to Shen as she could. Upon climbing into Jerry’s car, Cecilia sat on Shen’s lap in the back seat, and Lucy the nurse wedged next to Maternus in the same crowded back seat. The latter woman likewise showed no interest in Stephen, yet both she and Cecilia did betray a new fascination with the Roman and his changed appearance.

  “I didn’t realize you were this gorgeous when I met you at the Great Blue Heron,” said Lucy, pressing close to Maternus’s side. “I can hardly tell you were ever a boxer.”

  “Matt’s been using face cream,” said Shen. “The old soldier’s practically a metrosexual.”

  “In truth, I prefer women,” said Maternus, misunderstanding what Shen had said. “I think it is your clean Colorado air that has aided my complexion.”

  Maternus would have enjoyed the women’s attention more had the two of them acted like ladies of the age they were. The Roman had already observed that while the modern world had many gifts to offer, individual dignity was not one of the treasures it held forth, at least not to those who were neither wealthy or celebrated. The people he had met in Aurora were more compassionate, more sensitive, and more tolerant than those he had known in his previous life, and yet those same modern people insisted upon acting as though they were children, regardless of their real age or station. Cecilia and Lucy, both educated and hard-working professionals, tittered as if they were fourteen and had the cutest boy in eighth grade over to play Twister in the basement without adult supervision. Everything everyone said was funny to them as the tightly packed car progressed through the city streets and Stephen sat behind the wheel and nervously licked his lips. Everything Shen said was especially funny and delightful. The Roman hoped in his heart this behavior was an entirely modern innovation and Maria would behave like an adult. Otherwise an eternity with her in Paradise would pall after a very brief time.