Fine Just the Way It Is

by Annie Proulx

  On the way home from the design show he had also read a japish piece in a screed that called itself The Onion pretending to report on the addition of a tenth circle to accommodate an increasing number of Total Bastards, most of them American businessmen. The Devil had smiled. A tenth circle was not a bad idea, but Hell’s coming population increase would demand much more than providing quarters for tobacco lobbyists and corporate executives. In the long run there was probably no need to build an extension; since nearly all humans were inevitably damned, a simple inversion would do, much like turning a length of intestine inside out and using it as a sausage casing. The earth itself, with no labor on his part, would become Hell Plus. In the meantime he intended to upgrade the current facilities.

  “Today, Duane, we are going to tour the property and see where we can make improvements. I want you to bring your notebook. Andiamo!” They set out on a red golf cart, the Devil wearing only his shooting jacket, Duane, an eyeshade.

  On the way the Devil tossed out infomercial nuggets he had absorbed from his study of the magazines. “It’s not so much that we want to tear things down and start over with restructuring, bulldozers, topsoil and fill and imported rocks. What we want is to see the potential in what’s already here and work with that. The basic bones of the place are good. We know that. We’ll use a construction outfit that has worked in Iraq—Rout & Massacre sounds like our kind of company. Give them a call and get an idea of their fees. If they are too high we’ll forcibly transfer them here and make them a local company.”

  At the main gate the Devil rolled his eyes.

  “Got to keep the sign,” he said. “You can’t really improve on that last line, ‘ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!’ But the gate is boring. Without the sign it’s just another Romanesque stone gate. But if we replace it with something modern like the St. Louis arch and an electric fall—”

  Duane Fork’s furrowed brow and wry face indicated confusion.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the Devil. “You prefer pepper spray?”

  “Oh no! I guess I just don’t know what an electric fall is.”

  “Heard of a waterfall, haven’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “An electric fall is the same thing, but with electricity, not water. Of course we could mix them—that make you happy?”

  “I’m happy with whatever you want to do, sir.”

  “Good. Make a note. Entrance Gate—St. Louis arch with electrified waterfall.”

  At the river the Devil cracked a few jokes with Charon but had no suggestions for enhancing the crossing process after the old man snarled “Fine just the way it is.” Charon’s hot-coal eyes winked spasmodically. He smote five or six naked wretches with his oar and said, “You remember to pick up my eyedrops?”

  “Damn!” said the Devil. “I forgot again! Next time for sure. Try sticking your head in the river.” He floored it and they drove away from the riverbank, whizzed through the suburb of Limbo.

  “Bor-ring,” said the Devil, glancing at the writers and poets standing around the film producers, the scribblers holding manuscripts and talking up their ideas.

  At the second circle, the source of the dark-and-stormy-night literary genre and a warehouse for marital cheaters, the Devil bawled, “Close the wind vent, Minos, it’s wrecking my coif.” As they drove he switched on the golf cart’s headlight and recognized a few of the adulterous spirits maledict. “How they hangin, baby?” he said, slapping Paris on the rump. Duane Fork dared to lick Cleopatra’s left breast. Ideas for reshaping this corner of Hell did not come; it was cast in stone that adulterers would puke and heave in permanent nausea; it would be a waste of time to design anything more than the concrete gutters already in situ.

  It was not until the third circle that the Devil came alive with inventive eagerness. Cold rain and sleet hammered down on soil the consistency of a decayed sponge. Figures writhed in the mud. The Devil paused to hear some of the latest gossip which came in a hundred languages. The hoarse, desperate howling of Cerberus echoed from the black cliffs.

  “Bad boy! Bad boy!” shouted the Devil encouragingly as he tossed the creature a handful of meatballs. Multiple heads snapped at the flying treats, none escaping the triple throat. Cerberus barked out thanks and a bit of news.

  “Did you know that about Sarkozy?”

  “No sir,” said Duane, taking a note.

  “We can do something here,” said the Devil. “What we need are all those things that made New Orleans so great—slippery car tops, floating boards with protruding nails, a lot of sewage in the water, conflicting orders. Or maybe a tsunami once in a while. The place seems made for a classy tsunami. And I would like a heavy miasma to hang over everything. This ground fog is almost worthless.” He looked at the Stygian rock slopes streaming with black water. “Hell, the view alone is worth billions. Breathtaking. I’ve always loved this place.”

  The golf cart lurched through the mire. They skirted the great marsh that prefaced the river Styx, but the sounds of the damned choking on silty mud carried through the humid atmosphere like hundreds of hogs at the trough. On the far shore they could see an unbelievably steep mountain and on its peak the city of Dis outlined against a fiery sky. At the boat landing the Devil whistled shrilly, and in the distance they saw the boatman Phlegyas poling toward them.

  “You know, this is really Charon’s job, but I put him on the Acheron because he’s got a maître d’ personality—ushers in the newcomers with style. And Phlegyas is good enough at what he does.” The powerful boatman lifted the golf cart into the vessel and they set out across black water crowded with floundering swimmers whose numbers impeded the boat’s progress.

  “Take a note, Duane. We want to put two or three hundred saltwater crocs in here. Order them from Australia. Double our fly-gnat-mosquito-chigger package order.”

  Once landed at the base of the mountain, the Devil made a frame with his fingers and held it up against various vistas. He kept coming back to the city at the top.

  “Location, location,” he murmured. “And we’ve been wasting it all this time. It is the ideal end point for the Tour de France. Pro cyclists have earned a place in Hell. It is twice the size of any Alp.” They set off up the steep slope, swerving around the boulders on the path.

  “Just what I thought. Soft and easy. Let’s take a page from the Paris-Roubaix race, erroneously called ‘the Hell of the North.’ Let’s get some coarse and broken cobbles on the steepest stretches here. I want those guardrails removed from the abyss, and plenty of flints and Clovis points protruding from the final five kilometers. Varied weather will help; sleet storms, parching heat, black ice on the cobbles, hurricane force crosswinds and a few thousand clones of that German so-called Devil guy who dresses up in a smelly red union suit and runs around with a cardboard pitchfork, the jerk. He’s been looking at too many old woodcuts and I’ve got a place for him some sweet day. Every rider will be on drugs and some will go down frothing at the lips like Simpson on Mount Ventoux in nineteen sixty-whatever. And let’s have screaming crowds who throw buckets of filth and fine dust, handfuls of carpet tacks, who squirt olive oil and then piss on the riders. Water bottles filled with kerosene or alkali water. Riders have to fix their own bikes and carry spare tires around their necks. If they fall off and break an arm or leg no one can help them. More dogs on the course. And rattlesnakes. Let’s see—how about an obligatory enema in the starting gate and EPO breaks every thirty minutes? As for the UCI—” He whispered in the demon’s ear.

  “Chapeau!” cried Duane Fork.

  At the city of Dis the Devil told the enraged and tormented inhabitants to get ready for big-time bicycle racing. Gliding down through the next circles the Devil decided on a number of presidential suites modeled on Japanese hotel cubicles and Wal-Mart men’s rooms, added a slaughterhouse nightclub and made the decision that after a newcomer passed through the gate and was discharged by Charon into the main Welcome to Hell foyer he or she would find combined fe
atures of the world’s worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal, complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times and, finally, a twenty-seven-hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage.

  On the climb up to Dis the Devil had noticed a cluster of scorched bowlegged men lollygagging near a boiling water hole. This area was posted as a reserve for Italian Renaissance politicians. Trespassing was forbidden.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s Butch Cassidy and some of his old gang. Cheeky bastards. Let’s plan something good for all the old rustlers and cowboys who have made it over the winding trail. I think we’ll give them a taste of their own medicine. Let’s get the Four Horsemen and some of our assistant imp riders and start herding those cowboys into bunches, cutting them out and moving them into pens. We’ll rope and throw them, castrate, vaccinate and brand them with my big Pitchfork iron. Oh, there’ll be plenty of dust and bawling and pleas. They’ll try to break away. They will screech and gibber. In the end we’ll turn them in to a sand pasture full of cheatgrass, goat-heads, cockleburs and ticks. They can ride the bicycles discarded by the tour racers and listen to Slim Whitman doing ‘Indian Love Call’ over the loudspeaker.”

  “Ranchers, too?” asked Duane Fork.

  “Nah. Nothing here would bother them.” He thought a moment and then said, “Wait! Better yet, give the ranchers herds of irritable minotaurs. And headstrong centaurs for mounts. Which reminds me, order one roasted for my dinner.”

  “Which, minotaur, centaur or ranchaur?”

  “Whatever’s easiest. Medium rare.”

  As they drew abreast of the loungers the Devil called, “Hey, Butch, fucked any mules lately? Ha ha ha ha. Shake that wooden leg.”

  Annoyed by the polyglot babbling of Dis, the Devil decided to standardize. “I think we’ll make the Khoisan language of the Bushmen the official language of Hell,” he said in a fluent stipple of dental, palatal, alveolar, lateral and bilabial clicks. Duane Fork whooshed agreement.

  “Your accent is getting better, Duane, but it is still not crisp enough.” The Devil looked around at the mud and black trona-water fountains. “I don’t see any nettles or leafy spurge or mille-foil or crabgrass or water hyacinth. Let’s get a few of those USDA hacks to work—get some devil’s club in here.”

  The Devil’s thoughts kept turning back to bicycle racers and he called the guard tower and ordered all the Junior Satan Scouts who patrolled the approach to the city to helpfully point racers toward projecting street furniture, pylons, potholes and drop-offs. Now that he was tuned in to something he was mentally calling “Sports of Hell,” the ideas flew like lekking mayflies. Duane Fork’s pencil ripped across the pages, skidding at the end of each line. Soccer alone sprouted eleven hundred improvements, and from soccer it was an easy leap to cricket and caber tossing and on to special arrangements for rental chefs, insecticide manufacturers, world leaders, snowplow drivers.

  “Construction workers!” the Devil shouted. “Their hard hats will melt, their scaffolds collapse unceasingly. Ice cream truck vendors? A hot coal in each scoop of vanilla. Goat turds in the chocolate—I’ll make them myself.” He seized two fire cones from the roadside dispenser for refreshment. Then a glimpse of roasting moneylenders in the distance made him think of banks and loans, bills and taxes.

  “Canada Revenue! We’ll let them play hockey, their national sport, down on Circle Nine’s ice.”

  “Wouldn’t the IRS be better? More infamous?”

  “Duane, the IRS is a babe in the woods compared to Canada Revenue. There is no agency on earth as contumacious, bureaucratized, power-obsessed, backhanded, gouging, red-taped, cavernous and carnivorous as Canada Revenue.”

  “But if hockey is their national sport, won’t they take pleasure in playing it?”

  “I think not. The blades will be inside the skates. And those blades will be warm.”

  But the idea of a tenth circle haunted him. He might do it. It would have to be something utterly unexpected, a stunning surprise, a coup. As he steered the golf cart it came to him—an art museum. Not just a collection of works earthly museum directors wished to consign to Hell but depictions of himself through the millennia in every guise from monstrous yellow-eyed goats to satin-winged bats, the fabulous compartments of the Nether Regions and, of course, a catalog of human vices and evils, of plummeting sinners.

  His ideas tumbled out. In one of the museum’s galleries he would set up the Musical Inferno which Hieronymus Bosch had painted so cleverly. He would have all of Goya’s witches and his stinking hordes, toothless, pierced, howling, wracked and terrified. He would have every piece of Satanic art even though many showed him as humbled by upward-gazing saints; he always had the last laugh there. Venusti showed a fatuous Saint Bernard holding him chained, but a moment later the chain had melted. The painter had not dared to show that. Michael Pacher had given him a fabulous frog-green skin, but the deer antlers and the buttocks-face were overdone. Gerard David’s portrait was finer. A special room for Gustave Doré, whose inventiveness he cherished. Very pleasant as well were the many harvest pictures where he tossed damned souls into his fireproof gunnysack. He would crowd the museum with all the Last Judgments, the damned dropping into the inferno like ripe figs from a tree. Signorelli—he couldn’t understand how Signorelli had known to give his demons green and grey and violet skins—a lucky guess perhaps. And surely one of Signorelli’s demons was Duane Fork biting at a man’s head? He might ask the painter—if he could find him. They had to start compiling a database of the damned and their particular niches; it was impossible to find anyone in Hell.

  Still on the idea of the art museum, he planned a solitary room with no other paintings where he thought he would hang William Blake’s Satan Instigating the Rebel Angels, which showed him as the most beautiful angel of all, more handsome than any Greek god, before the rebellion failed and he was cast down and out. But thinking of that time made him morose and he decided to eschew the Blake; he’d have Rubens instead and Tiepolo. As he made his mental list of the paintings and sculptures he intended to gather, he realized what a terrific labor it would be to pry them away from the Prado, the Duomo, the Louvre, the Beaux-Arts, various art institutes and bibliothèques, private collections and monasteries, cathedrals and churches. The plan abruptly crashed. Well, well, there was the rub; he was not going into any monasteries or churches. And there the renovation plans stopped. His one-track mind could not get past the monasteries, cathedrals and churches.

  He ought to have plucked some professional art thieves from their fiery labors and sent them up to do the job, but the story says nothing about that.

  Them Old Cowboy Songs

  There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.

  ARCHIE & ROSE, 1885

  Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P. H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and the springy waves of auburn hair that seemed charged with voltage. He usually lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a leathery prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. They chinked the cabin with heavy yello
w clay. One day Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for their doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, to see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel.

  “He’ll keep the mice down,” said Rose.

  “Yeah, if the bastard don’t bite somebody,” said Archie, flexing his right forefinger. “And you’ll wear them windows out, warshin em so much,” but he liked the way the south glass caught Barrel Mountain in its frame. A faint brogue flavored his sentences, for he had been conceived in Ireland, born in 1868 in Dakota Territory of parents arrived from Bantry Bay, his father to spike ties for the Union Pacific Railroad. His mother’s death from cholera when he was seven was followed a few weeks later by that of his father, who had whole-hog guzzled an entire bottle of strychnine-laced patent medicine guaranteed to ward off cholera and measles if taken in teaspoon quantities. Before his mother died she had taught him dozens of old songs and the rudiments of music structure by painting a plank with black and white piano keys, sitting him before it and encouraging him to touch the keys with the correct fingers. She sang the single notes he touched in her tone-pure voice. The family wipeout removed the Irish influence. Mrs. Sarah Peck, a warmhearted Missouri Methodist widow, raised the young orphan to the great resentment of her son, Bunk.