by Mark Cain
I didn’t like Rockefeller very much. He wasn't a nice guy at all, although very religious in life, not that it did him much good in the end. The only one of those captains of industry from the Guilded Age that I gave a flip about was Andrew Carnegie, and that was mainly because he liked libraries, like me. Not to mention he built Carnegie Hall, were I once heard Isaac Stern play. Rockefeller didn’t bug me as much as Edison and Ford, but he still wasn’t any favorite of mine.
However, meeting him this way could prove fortuitous. “A favor for a favor?” I asked.
Rockefeller was as ruthless as the rest of his kind, so I’d never thought of him being the most giving person. That’s probably unfair, since he set up a substantial foundation that was still doing good in the world in the mid 1990s, when I was killed. His foundation helped the human race, I guess, but would he himself help a single person? I wondered, noticing that he hadn’t even bothered to thank us for our assistance.
“Why should I?” he answered predictably. “I’ve already got what I want.”
I shrugged. “Okay. Orson, help me close this valve again.”
J.D. tried to stop us, but Orson used his prodigious girth to block him. “Okay, okay! Just leave the valve alone. What do you want?”
Orson and I smiled at each other, and I picked up the blueprints from where I’d laid them on the ground. “I’m trying to find a pipe … ”
“Well, look around. We’ve got plenty to choose from.”
“Yeah, I know that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “That’s the problem. Take a look at this.”
Rockefeller took the blueprints from me, and I indicated the green mark that represented the pipe. “Do you know where this is?”
J.D. laughed. The sound was like a carburetor dying. “Yeah, that one I know. I bet even you two assholes could have found it given enough time.” He pointed to a spot fifty feet before us. There it was. A straight green pipe.
I hadn’t really expected it to be green.
“Well, that might make things a little easier,” Orson opined.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks Rocky. Oops! Sorry. That was your grandson, Nelson. Well, if I had a name like Nelson, I’d go by Rocky too.”
“Fuck you, Minion!”
“You too!” I replied gaily. “Have a nice day.”
As we left Rockefeller, I heard a terrible squeak. Turning back to where the man stood, I saw the valve turning itself off. “Aaggh!” he screamed. J.D. grabbed the valve, trying desperately to keep it open, but the valve just continued to close, dragging Rockefeller along the pavement until he flipped over the pipe. He landed on his back, and I heard the crack of fragile bones breaking. “Ow! Damn.”
We left the founder of Standard Oil sprawled on the pavement. As we approached the green pipe, I began to whistle.
“You know, Steve,” Orson said, with a twisted grin, “you’re not always a very nice person.”
“I know, I know. What can I do though? The guy’s a prick, not like Edison or Ford, but still a prick. He wouldn’t have given us the time of day if I hadn’t blackmailed him.”
“True enough. And now, doctor,” Orson said, putting the stethoscope to his ears. “Shall we examine the patient?”
I nodded and stuffed my own rubber ear tips in place. We must have looked pretty odd, two yellow-garbed maintenance types listening for the heartbeat of a fat green pipe. I moved the chest piece up and down the metal cylinder, listening for anything that sounded vaguely like a whooshing sound. Orson did the same. I couldn’t hear a damn thing.
At last, I took the rubber tips from my ears. “Well?” I asked my assistant.
Orson shook his head. “He’s dead, Jim.”
I snorted. “Thank you Mr. Spock. Or should I call you Dr. Spock?”
“I don’t think so. Wasn’t he a pediatrician?”
“Right.” I stuffed the stethoscope in a pocket. “You’re more of a pipe doctor. Besides, wasn’t it Bones who was always saying that, not Spock? Anyway, assuming we can hear the swooshing of souls as they pass through this pipe, then I think the leak must be somewhere above us.”
“That’s a logical conclusion, assuming, as you say, that swooshing souls make a sound at all. We should go someplace where we’re more likely to hear it. Any ideas?”
At that moment, Bik flew across the street. He flamed off and dropped into my pocket protector. Absently, I patted my pocket.
“Hey, watch it!”
“Sorry. You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” grumbled the little guy. He seemed to be in a bad mood. Probably talking to his grandfather did that. I know it would do it to me, if Surtr had been my granddad.
I showed Orson the diagram. “What do you think?”
He nodded. “Looks right. Besides, maybe we can play a few holes. I haven’t been on a golf course in a long time, except for Beezy’s on Eight, and it’s just one big sand trap. Hey, as long as we’re up there, we can do a work order too.”
As we walked back toward our office, I noticed that Rockefeller was back on his feet, struggling with his stubborn valve. He looked up imploringly, but we just grinned and walked by him.
Once inside our trailer, Orson went to the back wall. He rifled through a tall stack of work orders until he found what he was looking for. “Eureka! It came in this morning. Didn’t seem very important, so I put it in the Dead Letter department, but as long as we’re going to be there anyway … ”
“Sure,” I said, as we headed outside again.
Orson looked at me speculatively. “I don’t suppose we can take the Elevator.”
I shook my head. “No. Besides, you won’t get used to it unless you keep trying. This is a job for SuperBOOH!”
“SuperBOOH?”
“You’ll see.” I whistled loudly. “BOOH!”
BOOH was still glowing with vitality when he scooped us off the pavement. “Skree?” he asked.
“First Level, please. The Pro Shop.” And we were off.
Chapter 22
The sky, or what passed for sky above Level One, was a bright cerulean. The day was beautiful, and I looked for the sun, which was stupid, since there is no sun in Hell. On all the other levels of Hell, the sky was gray and polluted, but in Limbo, every day was grand and the temperature always perfect, owing no doubt to One’s proximity to Gates Level. After all, the people on this level were good. They were just the victims of bad timing.
As I’ve noted, most of the inhabitants of Limbo are babies who had never been baptized. I’m not sure what the age cutoff is, but I think it’s around two. After that, a youngster starts to develop a personality, and in the terrible twos, a kid could quite possibly knowingly do something terrible.
Hey, I already told you I feel bad about this. I don’t like the idea of babies being in Hell any more than you do, not even in the cushy section of the Underworld, but I'm just a humble civil servant. The powers-that-be don't really give a crap about my opinion.
The more interesting residents of One were the virtuous pagans, people like Socrates, Homer, Cicero and other folks like that. I always enjoyed striking up a conversation with a virtuous pagan. You’d often leave with something to think about.
Except for Socrates. Well, he left you with plenty to think about, but he was so irritating I could hardly stand him. What with his constant asking of questions, you’d think he was a failed psychologist. The dialectical method: bah. You can have it.
BOOH set us down at the clubhouse, near the first tee, then skedaddled back down the hole. He wasn’t really supposed to spend time up there, since his very presence tended to scare the shit out of people, and One was not a place for punishment. Limbo was more of a holding tank to put good people who didn’t fit into the scheme of the Catholic universe.
Like I said earlier, Roman Catholicism got to Christianity first, so their beliefs shaped much of the topography of the metaphysical cosmos. There are some elements from Orthodox Christianity and even from the Christianity practiced in Ethiopia, which are al
so quite old, that got worked into the scheme of things, but Lutherans and Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, not to mention the fundamentalists, are usually a bit peeved when they see how much of Heaven and Hell resembles the Catholic view of things. Doubt the Jews and the Muslims like it much either.
It never really bothered me. True, I was raised Catholic, but even if I hadn’t been, well, you’ve got to admit that the Catholics have the best churches and religious art. And Dante: well, his Divina Comedia makes for a lot better read than Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses.
But I digress. We were standing before a fairly modern clubhouse near an emerald green fairway. The scent of freshly-mown grass made me smile. I didn’t get to smell that very often.
A while back, Level One had been converted to a gated golf community. That added to the security of the place. People didn’t try to sneak in very often, but every once in a while, one of the damned attempted to use the Stairway to Heaven or Hell’s Elevator to get to One. They were seldom successful, and even when they were, they were quickly tossed down the Throat of Hell, only to land at the Level from which they had escaped. Yet these occasional stowaways disturbed the locals, so Satan upped the security. He keyed the Elevator to only allow a handful of people - like me and Orson - access to the level. He had the two of us install a pretty impregnable door off the Stairway, so people couldn’t get into One that way either. For a while, Beezy even had us dismantling the Stairway itself - but that’s another story. Around the perimeter of the First Circle, Satan had brick walls and gates installed. I’m not sure what the purpose of that was. I don’t know how anyone could slip in from the outer edge of Circle One without falling back to a lower level or, shudder, spinning out into Chaos, which is what I assume to be the only other possibility. Still, Satan was taking no chances.
Orson and I didn’t work on the renovation. Beezy oversaw that himself, and he even had some help from Heaven. The result was a rather beautiful spot, with lovely little bungalows for the residents that backed up to the many fairways down here. Some of the homes even had swimming pools. Nice.
And the golf courses: I have no idea how many of them there were. I tried to count them once but gave up at around a thousand. Yet they needed that many. Level One was the largest Circle in Hell. It had to be to accommodate all the babies. You’d be surprised how many people die in infancy. Kind of sad really, especially since that leaves them on the short side to really enjoy a good eighteen holes. Hell, the walk alone is killer, but most of them buzzed around in dinky little golf carts and used custom-made clubs. Some of them were even pretty good players.
The First Circle has courses that ranged widely in difficulty. The easiest is the Par One, dead center in the Circle. That one only has nine holes. Well, to be more accurate, it has nine fairways, and a single hole, which is the Throat of Hell. The Throat is so huge, it’s pretty much impossible not to knock the ball in. Even if you duff it, the fairways are only a few feet long; there’s also a slight downhill pitch to the land near the Throat, so the ball will eventually roll in. See? You made par. Must be great for building self-esteem.
I don’t know what happens to the golf balls. Probably most of them burn up on descent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if occasionally some poor damned idiot on a lower level of Hell gets clobbered on the noggin with a golf ball, without the advance warning of someone yelling “Fore!”
The other courses are at varying levels of difficulty. Many people actually like a challenge, to play a golf course that’s really hard, and even though Limbo is only the first level of Hell, it is in Hell, and man, do we know how to make golf courses. Naturally, up here, the courses are merely difficult. On the lower levels of Hell, where golf is used for eternal punishment, you could spend a decade in the rough or a sand trap, or knock ball after ball into a water hazard the size of Lake Michigan. On the golf courses of Two through Eight, foursomes queued up to tee off can have a century-long wait. That may not sound like much as far as eternal punishments go, but my friends who play the game say the wait is agony. There are lots of reasons for the slowdowns. For example, a great golfer might be paired with three beginners. The length of the holes could be another factor; some of them are as much as a thousand miles, and that might be for a par three. The biggest problem, though, is that everyone has either a wicked slice or hook, assuming they can get the ball in the air at all, and not just dribble it down the grass a dozen feet, or miss the ball entirely. Those damned golfers who can get some heft on their balls, though, drive them so far to the left or right that they could end up in the rough of a fairway on another course entirely. There are no golf carts on the lower levels, either. Everyone must walk and carry their own clubs, usually in their hands, instead of in a bag, and if they do have a bag, it’s often covered with barbed wire. Satan seems to really like barbed wire.
But here on One, the hard courses are merely hard, often designed by famous golfers of days gone by, like Ben Hogan or Bobby Jones or people with nicknames out of ‘The Wizard of Oz’: lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. These individuals of course don’t reside on One. They are just allowed to consult on a project before being sent back to whatever eternal damnation Satan has devised for them. The courses they have created, however, are marvelous, and quite beautiful. Aside from lush grasses, towering trees, pure white sand traps and shimmering blue water hazards, many courses had views that would put Pebble Beach to shame. Green fees on One are really cheap, too.
We entered the pro shop. Many of the ancient Greeks had become particularly good at golf, and they took turns staffing the office. It really wasn’t much of a hardship, because they got to play with the equipment, chat with people or have a beer with their buds at the 19th Hole (that’s the bar, for all you non-golfers). Behind the counter was Socrates.
Lucky me. My favorite Hellene.
“Γιατί δεν έρχεσαι;”
It was Greek to me, but fortunately Orson and I could both understand it. English is sort of the Lingua Franca for most of Hell (sorry about that, France), but on Level One, we mostly heard Greek and Latin, so we had to be reasonably proficient in them. Even the virtuous pagans whose native tongues were not one of these two had picked them both up over the centuries.
What he said was, “Why do you come?”
To which I responded, “Ήρθα για αυτή τη σειρά εργασίας,” which means, “I came about this work order.” I’ll translate from now on.
The old Greek looked at me questioningly. Do you not come seeking truth?
Great. It was going to be one of those kinds of conversations. Like I said, you usually got a philosophical third degree from Socrates. He did love his dialectical method.
No, I mean yes, I mean, oh here, take a look at the work order, I said, shoving it in his hand.
Is this work order real, or is it only seeming real? Is it merely a shadow on the wall of a cave, and are we poor brutes, chained to …
Shit, Socrates! Can we not play this game today? I’ve got a lot on my plate.
Is the plate half empty or half full?
I slammed my hand on the corner. Would you stop it and just look at the fucking work order?
The old philosopher - he was indeed pretty old for an ancient, having slammed back a shot of hemlock (not his idea) at about the age of seventy - looked a little sheepish. Sorry. Old habits die hard.
No kidding.
Let me just take a look at this. Socrates studied the paperwork. Ah, yes. The ball washer at the sixth tee of the clubhouse course. You know, this is the most popular course in Limbo, since it’s so close to the bar. And this ball washer being down, well it’s been very inconvenient. Players have had to go an entire two holes with a dirty ball. At this rate, the extra use of the washer for the seventh hole will shorten its lifespan, though who can predict what the lifespan of a ball washer can be?
Enough with the questions, please, Orson chimed in. He sounded about as irritated with the old Greek as I was. Thanks for telling us
where it is. We’ll go take care of it now.
Orson and I hurried to the exit. The door was just closing behind us, when we heard Socrates begin, What is the care that a ball washer needs when …
Brother. That guy drove me crazy.
To speed things up, we commandeered a golf cart from Homer. Orson and I argued about who got to drive, but a round of rock, paper, scissors ended that discussion pretty quickly.
“Quit grumbling,” Orson said from behind the wheel. He was whistling. “Just relax and enjoy the ride.”
It was a nice day, and riding beat walking, so things could have been much worse. It’s just that driving a golf cart is so damn much fun.
In no time, we were closing on the sixth tee. Four virtuous pagans had just pulled up to the tee box. Two were dressed in tunics, one in a kilt, and the fourth in a polo shirt and khakis. All were wearing golf cleats.
My guess was that the two in tunics were Greek and the others Roman. I’ve always found the Greek pagans more traditional. The Romans would borrow from anybody - especially the Greeks - and that included fashions.
The four were gathered around the broken ball washer. They’d look to the golf balls in their hands, then to the washer, then back to their balls again. They were completely nonplussed, but they visibly relaxed when they saw us draw up behind their golf cart.
Steve, and Orson too! cried one of the men in tunics.
Now that we had pulled up to the tee, I recognized the foursome. Hi, Sophocles. How goes?
Great, now that you’re here. We weren’t sure what to do.
Aye, said the fellow in the kilt. That was Aeneas. Aeneas had told me once that he learned to play golf from St. Andrew himself. Andy had nothing to do with the invention of golf, but since the town in Scotland that was named after him was widely considered to be the birthplace of the sport, he was an early adopter, even considering himself the patron saint of golf, which of course was not true. Andrew was a very good player by all accounts, however, I don’t think he was as good as his brother Peter.