Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “Hey, get away, ugly!” he shouted and made a pretense of protecting himself.

  Maternus reached out his calloused right hand, and with a sharp twist effortlessly pulled the javelin from the boy. The old warrior had disarmed two-score other men in previous combats, and he now snatched away the piece of steel without giving it a second of conscious thought. The boys on the infield had never seen an adult of middle years move so quickly, and they collectively gasped in appreciation of Maternus’s martial ability.

  “You could hurt someone, young sir,” said Maternus, annoyed to be again reading fear on the faces of those he was not intending to harm. “None of you are wearing armor. Jabbing someone with this could kill him.”

  The boy Cody tried to rally himself in the face of this scary-looking janitor; to do less in front of his classmates would have added to the shame of being so easily disarmed by an old guy.

  “That worn-out piece of crap couldn’t draw blood if you sat on it,” he declared.

  To prove him incorrect, Maternus drew a bead upon one of the wooden poles supporting the lights above the playing field. He thrust out his left foot, braced himself with the right, and hurled the lance at the pole some forty feet distant. The boys saw a silver streak cut through the air, then heard a loud “thunk,” and were astonished to see the javelin’s dull point buried deep in the dead center of the pole while the end of the weapon vibrated in the air like the tine of a tuning fork.

  “Holy God!” shrieked one of the thirteen-year-old reprobates. “Nobody could do that again in a hundred years!”

  Several of the boys ran to the pole and attempted to pull the javelin from the wood. Despite much grunting and a willingness to say crude words they had heard in rap videos, the boys could not budge it. Maternus strolled to the spot and pulled the weapon free with another seemingly effortless twist of his right hand. He sighted a neighboring light pole some forty paces away and once more let fly, striking the second pole in its center and again leaving the spear embedded deep in the wood.

  “Goddamn!” admitted Cody. “How come you can do that?”

  “I was in the army,” shrugged Maternus, which the boys took to mean he had received some sort of special forces training.

  The soldier wrenched the weapon free another time and addressed the boys following him with a stern voice, the one once reserved for the men of his hundred-man century whenever they had a substandard performance in battle. While he spoke, he held the javelin in his hand and emphasized his words with menacing thrusts of the aluminum weapon in the direction of the amazed boys. Since they were afraid of him, he reasoned he would use that circumstance to his favor.

  “So you see,” he told them, “anyone unable to follow the rules could be killed like that. The javelin is that dangerous.”

  Some of the awed boys nodded their heads in agreement. But the demonstration had not yet quieted the rebellious spirit in some of the boys.

  “You can’t give us orders,” said a youth named Jerome, whose name came from a soap opera rather than the saint. “You’re just a janitor. Who cares what you say?”

  “I can tell your teacher of your misbehavior, young sir,” said Maternus.

  The boys laughed long and well at that, not because they thought the Roman’s command of English was ridiculous — they were amused that anyone thought they might fear a supposed authority figure like their gym teacher. The lads at Susan B. Anthony Middle School had learned long ago they could act as they wished, and no consequences would ever be visited upon them.

  “Or that pole might be one of you,” said Maternus, returning to his bluff centurion’s voice.

  He heaved the javelin in the direction of the first light pole, and this time struck his target with such violence the point passed through to the other side and a large chunk of creosoted wood splintered off the pole altogether.

  Thereupon all the boys stood stock still in open-mouthed appreciation.

  “It is time for you to go inside to your baths,” said Maternus, yet the boys stayed, gaping at him. “Go!” he commanded, and the boys sped for the main building like a flight of starlings frightened by a cat — all of them except for Abdul, whom Maternus had caught by the back of his T-shirt before he could get away with the rest of the herd. For several seconds the small, round boy was lifted off the ground so that his short legs continued to sprint through the air while his body went nowhere. Upon discerning he was not going to escape the large, strange man as easily as the others had, Abdul smiled sheepishly at Maternus and tried to negotiate his way free.

  “I’ll give you a dollar if you let me go,” he said, sounding cooler than the Roman might have thought he would.

  “I don’t need a dollar,” said Maternus and set Abdul down. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Are you one of those guys like they had on channel nine last Thursday night?” asked the boy, feeling a little more fragile than he had seconds earlier. “The ones that surf the ‘net and try to give kids candy and stuff.”

  The Roman did not know what Abdul meant and felt he could safely shake his head to indicate ‘no.’

  “I want to ask you why you let the others molest you,” said Maternus. “Why don’t you fight back when they poke at you?”

  Abdul did not have to think long to answer that. “Because they’re all bigger than me and they’d come at me four, five at a time. They’d pound me into the ground if I touched one of them.”

  “Do you have a family?” asked Maternus.

  “Sure.”

  “Then your family honor demands you fight back when you are abused, no matter if you suffer a terrible beating in consequence. Otherwise, people will speak ill of you. They will say you and your family have no honor.”

  “No what?” said Abdul, who out of necessity was a clever young fellow and thought he knew a little about handling large people, but now was thinking the janitor was too crazy to be controlled in any conventional way.

  “Honor is the most valuable possession a family or an individual may have,” explained Maternus. “Hasn’t your father told you this?”

  “My dad writes programs for advanced data storage systems,” said Abdul. “He knows just about everything, except I don’t think he ever talks about this honor stuff. Well, once I think he said something about it to my older sister about how she dresses — you know, real short skirts and stuff. Halter tops. He said he was disgracing the family—”

  “He has not told you enough,” said Maternus.

  “What else is there?” asked the boy. “Does it have to do with how boys dress, too?”

  The Roman let go of Abdul’s shirt and sighed. His argument was not having the desired effect upon the boy.

  “I could make the others leave you alone,” he said, trying another tactic.

  “I bet you could!” said Abdul, brightening noticeably as he considered the image of the janitor tossing javelins at his tormentors as they ran screaming toward the distant borders of foreign lands. “They’re already scared of you, I bet.”

  “You will have to do something for me in return,” said Maternus.

  The boy again had some unpleasant thoughts in regards to the unsmiling and stern man in front of him. He might well indeed, thought Abdul, be one of those creeps of whom channel nine had warned the greater Denver area.

  “What’s that?” Abdul asked, now full of dread.

  “Do you know a girl named Edith Pink? She is in your class, I believe.”

  “Edith Pink!” said Abdul and made several odd faces when he said the name. “She’s scarier than a whole school of gym classes. You know Cody? He was the big one you took the javelin from. Last fall in social studies he called her ‘turtlehead’ ‘cause of how her eyebrows look just like the ridge turtles have across their foreheads, and she hit him — pow — like in a movie. A right hook like Winkie Wright might’ve thrown. Cody went flying across the room, laid out on the floor like he’d been shot. Desks, books, everything flying all over the room. Mrs. Grimsly, the
social studies teacher, she had to go run and get the principal, Mr. Hamburg, and he ran and got the nurse. They broke an ammonia capsule under Cody’s nose, and he groaned like grandpa and came around real slow. He could hardly stand up. For days later he walked kind of wobbly. The doctors thought at first she’d damaged his inner ear and thrown off his sense of balance, but then—”

  “I want you to become Edith’s boyfriend,” said Maternus.

  Somewhere, there was a serial murderer who was hearing the sentence of death imposed upon him from the bench, and right then his face might have been contorted by an expression of horror more dreadful than the one that spread across the visage of little Abdul. The boy felt as though he were falling backwards into a yawning pit ending in the vicinity of the earth’s molten core. He saw the impassive figure of the janitor looming above him as he fell, someone who could have rescued him if he so desired, but instead let him sink into the shadowy depths.

  “Edith would kill me,” Abdul murmured to the man standing on the edge of his abyss.

  “She already fancies you, young sir,” said the Roman. “I hardly think she is going to kill you. Unless that is some modern ritual I have not yet read of in the library.”

  “You think she likes me?” said Abdul, grasping for a handhold that would break his descent.

  “How old are you?” asked Maternus, whose stolid manner had remained unchanged throughout the conversation.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Then I don’t expect you to marry her,” said Maternus. “No one should get married before fifteen.”

  “Marry her?” echoed Abdul and felt himself start falling deeper.

  “You will only have to perform the duties being a boyfriend entails. Do you know what those are?” asked Maternus, devoutly hoping the boy did know, because the Roman certainly did not.

  “You have to be nice to her,” explained Abdul with a shudder. “Carry her stuff around the school like a slave. Smile at her like you mean it. You even have to dance practically every dance with her at the eighth grade social mixers.”

  “Well, there you are,” decided Maternus with an affirmative nod. “Such tasks will be easily completed. Given your physical condition, I would estimate you are hardly going to have a better girlfriend than her. Be happy with this opportunity fate has given you.”

  “Why do you care if Edith Pink has a boyfriend?” whined Abdul. “Nobody likes Edith.”

  “Her father … her father is a dear friend of mine,” lied the Roman, thinking on his feet. “Her mother is as well. We were in the army together — I mean the father and I were; her mother never served in the ranks.”

  “Listen, Mr….” Abdul glanced at the name sewn on the front of the janitor’s coveralls, “Mr. Matt. If Edith doesn’t use my head for a soccer ball the first time I talk to her, the other guys are going to go crazy when they see me with her. They’ll dog on me like you can’t believe, and then they’ll really want to pound me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because having a girlfriend is gay,” said Abdul.

  “Of course it will make you happy. Everyone wants a girlfriend,” said Maternus, who, in spite of his ignorance of middle school vocabulary, had such an inspiration right then he would later wonder if Mr. Worthy had not used his angelic powers to send the thought to him. “What’s more, once Edith Pink and you are together, who is going to dare lay a hand upon you? That is to say, are the other boys not frightened of her?”

  A light came on inside Abdul’s jack-o-lantern head. He suddenly stopped falling into the pit and miraculously found himself standing upright on solid ground. A world of wonderful possibilities was making itself known to him, possibilities he could know without pain or humiliation.

  “Yeah, they are!” he said, and felt his chest become larger and his spine straighten. “She’d be like having a force field around me!”

  “I take it that is a good thing?” said Maternus.

  “You got a deal, Mister Matt,” said Abdul and shook the janitor’s hand.

  The boy went to shower in the locker room, something he did only after his classmates had departed for their next class, for Abdul had long ago learned that if he got naked with others about he would be making himself a target for dozens of snapping towels. When Maternus next saw the boy, a week later, Abdul was struggling up a classroom hallway carrying a double load of text books in both of his arms and an overfull pack upon his back. The plump lad was sweating like a glass of iced tea on a hot day, making his I Lost my Heart in SF T-shirt wet across its front and under his armpits.

  The boy’s appearance held the janitor’s attention only a brief moment, for at Abdul’s side there was a sashaying vision of lavender and white, the most ambitious of feminine apparitions ever to don an ankle-length floral skirt in a school where even the women instructors wore khaki trousers. The vision at Abdul’s side was wearing strawberry lip gloss and some vanilla cologne, which even an uninformed observer like the janitor could immediately tell were far more enthusiastic than subtle and, were it not for the heavy line of black eyebrows on the vision’s forehead, Maternus could not have told that this creature with a ribbon crowning her newly permed hair was none other than the previously terrifying Edith Pink. In her new condition she was — for lack of a stronger word — reveling in the sweaty attentions the hard-working Abdul was showering upon her.

  “You’re so sweet to carry my things to class,” Maternus heard her say, and she put her shoulders close to her ear lobes and giggled. “You’re the nicest boy.”

  “Whatever you say,” said the prosaic Abdul.

  While this epitome of young romance was sprouting from the seemingly infertile soil of Susan B. Anthony Middle School right in front of the astonished (and slightly repulsed) Maternus, a group of raucous boys led by the fearsome Cody came parading down the hallway toward the young couple. This group had, as one would expect, already observed the change in Abdul’s relationship with Edith and Edith’s transformation into something akin to the heroine in a particularly silly romance novel, and the boys were in their coarse way much amused by both of these developments. The gaggle whispered among themselves in not quite hushed tones as they drew near Edith and her beloved Abdul and they struggled — but not too hard — to contain their laughter.

  “Hey, Rathman!” Cody called out upon coming parallel to Abdul. “Nice girlfriend!”

  Because he was young and an idiot besides, Cody had not learned from his own experiences. Only when Edith balled her hands into fists and her eyes flared red beneath the unbroken line of her eyebrow did Cody recall what had happened the last time he had been so foolish as to mock Edith Pink. He blanched and at the last second held out his hands to put up a feeble defense, but she had been provoked, and that was enough to bring her into action before Cody had an opportunity to offer her an apology. Edith feinted with her left, causing Cody to raise his left in anticipation of parrying her famed right, which hand she adroitly brought full force into the boy’s solar plexus rather than hooking him in the face. The blow landed with a deep ‘thump’ such as a club would make when smashed against a hollow tree. Maternus, veteran that he was, was impressed by how hard she struck him. Cody’s eyes rolled toward the drop panels of the hallway ceiling and he pitched forward with a moan. Edith stepped on her tiptoes toward the fallen boy’s companions, who shrank away from her in the direction whence they had come.

  “Anybody else?” she demanded of them. They were already retreating and had no more to say.

  Once they disappeared around the nearest corner and while Cody remained groaning on the floor, Edith smoothed the front of her skirt and turned to her unmolested Abdul.

  “Are you all right?” she asked and ran her hand along his round face.

  “I guess so,” admitted Abdul.

  “You’re so sweet,” said Edith and reverted at once to her previously sweet incarnation. She sighed softly, adjusted her coif, and led Abdul through a classroom door while she chattered gaily about how pleased sh
e was that Abdul had helped her with her algebra homework the previous evening. He was so sweet, she again observed. As he passed Maternus, Abdul beamed a contented smile at the Roman and gave him a thumbs up signal to show the janitor all was right in the boy’s world, and getting better every day.

  Maternus went to the fallen Cody and helped the boy get to his feet.

  “I hope for your parents’ sake that they are both dead and will not have to hear reports of this,” he told the weeping bully.

  That afternoon when the Roman watched the gym class on the running track from afar, he observed that Abdul could trot or walk at any pace he wished and the other boys did not bother him as they passed his bouncing figure. Only the gym teacher dared shout insults at the boy, which meant nothing, because Abdul had long ago inured himself against anything an adult might do, knowing that none of them would strike him. Abdul wore his shortest shorts and flounced about the high-jump pit like a beribboned woodland nymph from the imagination of one of the more flamboyant Dutch grand masters, and he occasionally paused to put the shot with a grunt even Maternus could hear, yet the other boys strenuously ignored him. When class was dismissed and the boys were plodding toward the showers inside the school building, Maternus overheard Abdul singing the opening song from A Chorus Line as he skipped to where his somber classmates were headed. None of the others lifted their eyes to look at him.

  Two nights later, Maternus awoke from a dreamless sleep and beheld the angel Mr. Worthy and the demon Banewill standing at the end of his bed a second time. The former appeared very contented and the latter, dressed in a sequined white jumpsuit and sporting a luxuriant pompadour of black hair, was frowning behind an oversized pair of sun glasses with pink lenses.

  “We’re one for one, my friend,” declared the angel. “Your first assignment completed and the summer isn’t over.”

  “I really haven’t done much, sir,” said Maternus. “The girl and the fat boy are merely associating. I would hardly say they have a romance.”