“Good morning, madam,” said Maternus and bowed.
“Who are you?” asked Maggie.
“I am Matt August, a new volunteer. I have brought you this lovely flower,” he said, and held out the potted iris.
“Are you asking me out, Goliath?”
Maternus had by then read some of the Bible and knew who Goliath was. The part about asking Maggie out escaped him. He thought she was wondering if he was going help her move outside the apartment.
“Only if you wish to leave this place,” said Maternus, setting the potted flower on the end table, next to the small refrigerator.
“You ever a boxer?” she asked, posing a question Maternus had heard before.
“I boxed only a few times,” he said, recalling the times already mentioned. “I won twice,” he said, and did not add that on those two occasions his opponents had been pummeled to death.
“What did you fight with? Chainsaws?” asked the old woman and pawed her chin. “You are one cut up…” and she called him a name Maternus had heard the middle school children call each other in jest, although it was obviously a vulgar term meaning something like: ‘one who does not know his father.’ His first thought was that he had misheard the sweet old woman, so he ignored the remark.
“Do you want the flower there?” he asked. “The man at the shop — he is called a florist — he said the iris should not have too much direct sunlight. I would not put it on the window sill.”
“Why don’t you just shove it up your ass while you’re at it?” Maggie suggested, and she called him another obscene name.
“You do not understand, Mrs. Lambkin,” said the soldier. “I am giving you the flower as a gift. Gifts are a sign of friendship in this social order.”
“Oh, is that so?” said Maggie and made an evil smile. Maternus, unfortunately, saw only the smile and not its modifying adjective. “Come here, friend,” she said and gestured with her little finger for him to come closer to her.
Maternus bent forward, and in a trice Maggie hit him on the head with her metal cane. This veteran, who had fought off the blows of several hundred barbarians with his shield, had not seen the weapon propped against the arm of the sofa before it was too late to parry her blow. Maggie had acted so quickly he did not realize what she was doing until he felt the “clang” sound against his skull and heard her cackle with delight.
“There’s my gift to you, friend, you chuckle-headed side of beef!” she giggled and would have hit Maternus again had he not jumped away from her.
“Why…?” he asked, rubbing his head. “Women do not strike men, not if they aren’t slaves. You cannot strike me.”
He was not struggling with his temper, as he would have been had his assailant been another man instead of a tiny, old woman in a lace-trimmed house coat. Like a cat chased by a mouse, Maternus was more surprised than angry.
Maggie sprung from her comfortable sofa with an agility that would have made an observer not running for his life ask why she had a cane in the first place. Maternus did not ask because she was chasing him about the small apartment and making squeals of delight every time she nearly hit him.
“Get out, you mutton-headed fuck-up!” she screamed. “I’ll call the nurses and tell them you’re a pervert and tried to look up my skirt! Try to buy me with flowers like some kind of two-bit tramp?! Hold still! I’ll stove your goddamned skull in!”
“Are not women of your age in this culture more commonly of a kindly disposition?” Maternus asked while he backpedaled and dodged her blows.
“I’ll show you kindly, you piece of shit! Hold still!” She swore and took another swipe at his head.
Upon pedaling past her front door another time, Maternus swiftly grabbed the knob and sped into the hallway. Maggie emerged a couple of steps behind him and tossed the potted iris at him, narrowly missing his face, and splattering pot and soil against the wall beyond him.
“Stay the hell away from me!” she warned, and slammed her door shut.
The nurse the Roman had gotten the room number from came by while Maternus was still standing in the hall. He was still slightly startled by what had happened and panting from the rush of sudden, unexpected combat. The nurse glanced at the ruined flower and at the red bruise on the side of Maternus’s face and guessed what had happened.
“I see you found our Maggie,” she said and walked on without making another comment.
Being a soldier, and therefore necessarily a strategist, Maternus reasoned that having been routed on his first attempt to meet Maggie Lambkin and make her happy, he would fall back and devise a new plan to gain success. He consulted with Shen and Stephen, as he did not know the lie of this new battlefield and had the false hope his two friends might. They gathered inside Stephen’s room at the rooming house one Wednesday evening, where Stephen and Shen again smoked their peculiar cigarettes while they talked.
“I did not lose my temper,” he told them, and felt rather positive about himself as he recalled his self-restraint. “She hit me, hit me hard, and yet I did not retaliate. I simply rubbed my head and walked away. That was quite thoughtful of me, don’t you think?”
“What could you have done to an old lady?” asked Stephen. “Nobody can hit an old woman. It’s like a rule. A law, too.”
“You don’t see, my friends,” said Maternus. “Years ago, when I was a soldier, I would have lashed out, visiting rage upon whoever had abused my person, regardless of sex or age. A man is a product of the company he keeps, as Aristotle advises us. When I was surrounded by violence, I was violent. Here in Aurora, among pacifists, I am one of you.”
“Technically, I’m not a pacifist,” said Stephen, affecting a more pompous tone now that he was high. “My man here might be. I’m really a Gramiscian anarchist.”
“I have not read enough to know what that means,” admitted Maternus.
“Aurora isn’t exactly pacifist country, Matt,” said Shen, taking a long drag on the handmade fag he and Stephen were passing back and forth. “Here in the burbs most people are Republicans.”
“Whatever they are,” said the Roman, “they are not warriors, and I thank them for the changes they are bringing about in my soul.”
“Man, there are guys from Aurora serving in the military like you did,” argued Stephen. “Right now they’re fighting overseas.”
“Then your government is mistaken to use them in that manner,” said Maternus. “No man reared in the material luxury and the peaceful atmosphere of this city will want to fight long on a distant frontier of your empire. They will demand to be sent home when they meet with their first difficulties. Their kinsmen here at home will want the same. Does not the nation have any superfluous men they can send to fight?”
“Rural Montana doesn’t have that big a population,” said Shen, and he and Stephen shared a laugh for reasons the Roman did not immediately get. “We’re messing with you, man,” said Shen and patted Maternus on the knee when the Roman did not laugh along with his two friends. “We’re happy to hear you’re not feeling angry with the world, like you say you used to be.”
“Yet I have failed here,” said Maternus. “I did not make the woman Margaret Lambkin happy. Now she has banished me from her quarters.”
“Why do you care so much about this particular old lady?” asked Shen.
“I somehow sense bringing her happiness is my destiny,” lied Maternus, which was easier than explaining about Hell and his three tasks. “Out of everyone in the rest home, she seems the one constantly lost to sadness.”
“Does she still fix her hair?” asked Shen.
“I do not understand your question,” said the Roman.
“Does she have really curly hair?” asked Shen and moved his hand across the waves of his own, seemingly lacquered, coif.
“Yes, I think she does,” said Maternus.
“How about make up? Does she wear lipstick and have a little red on her cheeks?”
“I guess…” said Maternus, remembering as b
est he could.
“Then she still cares how she looks to men,” deduced Shen. “Not to worry about her, Matt. I’ll go with you up to her room next Saturday.”
“What would that accomplish?” asked the Roman.
“‘Cause if she still cares how she looks to men, she’ll care a whole bunch how she looks to me,” explained the poet.
Stephen chuckled at his friend’s high opinion of himself and fell back on the bed they were sitting on.
“He does have a healthy ego, doesn’t he?” he said.
“I’m only being objective,” protested Shen. “Any observer would say I am, by the conventional standards of the twenty-first century, a really interesting- looking guy. I have the global look. I’m not bragging if what I’m saying is true,” he continued as Stephen kept on laughing.
“This is the only reason woman are drawn to you?” said Maternus.
“My looks are definitely part of it,” said Shen, oblivious to the idea he might sound arrogant. “The rest of my appeal is how I carry myself.” (Stephen was still giggling while he listened.) “Women pick up on that right away. Nonverbal communication they call it. My own theory is it goes back to the releaser movements you see in animals during the mating season. I have a gift for moving in a way that excites women, including old women. A wolf holds his tail at a certain angle, and the female wolves go crazy. A peacock does a little dance, and he’s up to his painted tail feathers in nooky. I stroll into a room, hold my head so everyone can see me in profile, and every woman there either wants to have my baby or be my mother. Nothing I can do can turn the power off.”
“Jesus, aren’t we the confident one,” said Stephen.
“Cecilia likes me,” said Shen, being cruel to his friend for the only time that evening. “I don’t even have to try.”
“Cecilia, the librarian woman,” said Maternus. “She likes you that much?”
At the mention of Cecilia’s name Stephen snuffed out the joint and sat upright again. His mood changed from slightly intoxicated amusement to somber gloom, and he dropped out of the conversation.
“I believe so,” said Shen and he took his turn at chuckling. “Not that she’s my type. Any old how, I’ll go with you to visit this Margaret Whatever, and I guarantee she’ll be happy to meet me.”
That easily, Maternus had a new plan. Whether or not he had a good plan was something he could not yet tell, and his friends Stephen and Shen were not going to help him in his judgments. The Roman had seen Shen interact with women and was confident the poet knew what he was doing when he offered to meet Maggie. In this strange new world, Maternus told himself, there was much he would never comprehend. Perhaps the odd things Shen had said about releaser signals were true. Perhaps Shen did have a type of natural power over women. He did not consider that it was also possible for ink to rain in China and for cats to teach kindergarten in Peru and that both possibilities were as likely as the glib Shen charming a withered banshee like Maggie Lambkin. Being a man of action, merely having a plan that others could believe in was enough to let Maternus proceed with confidence. Sometimes, he told himself, it is best to rush into battle. Sometimes the best of generals can over think his plans. When Saturday came round again, Maternus waited downstairs while Shen gave his reading in Shady Grove’s rec room. The old people in attendance were politely silent while Shen rambled on in extremely free verse about the moon in New Caledonia, a girl named Layia, and how the motion of the waves was the godhead’s method of massaging Mother Earth. After the first twenty minutes, those not afflicted by dementia were exchanging confused glances with one another.
“You don’t figure Tiger Woods’s brother to go on like this,” an old man whispered to the Roman.
“I have not met Shen’s brother, sir,” whispered Maternus in reply.
“The nurses said he was Tiger’s brother,” said the old man. “You think we’d put up with the endless crap he’s spouting if he wasn’t?”
“Does he not resemble his brother?” asked Maternus, who had no idea what sort of man Tiger Woods might be. He had said that because he had learned the safest way to respond to a question in Aurora was with another question.
“A little,” conceded the old gent. “This one’s got enough hair for the whole family. Pity he turned out the way he has. I guess every family has at least one like him, no matter how hard the parents try.”
After the performance, Shen shook hands with nearly everyone present, and several insisted on having a picture taken with him. He thought the elderly folk had loved his poetry and would have been surprised to learn the picture takers wanted to prove to their relatives they met with the brother of the world’s greatest golfer every Saturday.
“I’m good to go,” the poet told Maternus when they were alone, and Shen could have jumped at the sun right then, he was so buoyed by his latest triumph in the rec room.
“I thought you would come with me to Mrs. Lambkin’s residence,” said the Roman.
“That’s where I’m headed. I’m going to get you a dictionary, Matt. You miss out on things.”
Maternus led the way up the stairwell, moving in his careful, plodding way. While Shen remained behind him during this progress, the poet bounced up the steps, animated by the desire to move on to another triumph. In the lull preceding every battle, Maternus had become accustomed to doubting everything, including his own prowess in combat. The more battles he fought, the more he doubted. As he and Shen walked into the hallway running past Maggie’s door, the soldier was having second thoughts about the plan Shen had formulated.
“She did say she didn’t wanted me to come to her apartment a second time,” Maternus remembered when they were directly in front of room 256.
“I wasn’t with you then, man,” Shen reminded him. “This will be smooth. Everything’s going smooth with me today.”
“She is not a pleasant woman,” said Maternus, becoming increasingly put off by his friend’s confidence.
“Hey, old women enjoy small talk. I’ll compliment her decor, her dress. Ask about her grandchildren.”
“Mrs. Lambkin never had children,” said Maternus.
“Then I’ll ask about her cats.”
“The rest home doesn’t allow pets.”
“Plants?”
“That is a bad subject with her,” said Maternus, recalling Maggie’s reaction to the potted iris.
“Then we’re down to the weather, love, and my gifts,” said Shen and knocked on the door, unaware their expedition had not a prayer of ending well. “The big three,” noted Shen.
“Who in the sanctity of the U.S. Congress is there?” called a voice from within and made the muscles in the nape of Maternus’s neck tighten as taut as the A string on Isaac Stern’s violin.
“A visitor, Maggie my dear,” replied Shen. “One you have waited for all your life.”
“Ed McMahon?” asked Maggie Lambkin.
“No, better than that,” said Shen.
“The angel of death?” was Margaret’s second guess at who her unexpected guest might be.
“Now you’re breaking my heart, dear one,” said the poet. “Won’t you let us in?”
“The door’s always unlocked,” murmured Mrs. Lambkin, sounding unnaturally vulnerable to Maternus’s ears. “Come in and say ‘hello’ to an old woman.”
Shen entered as free of caution as the second ewe into the slaughterhouse. The more hesitant Roman followed a couple steps behind his friend. Margaret Lambkin of course recognized Maternus. In spite of her earlier warning that he “stay the hell away,” she said nothing of the Roman’s presence. Like many other women, upon first beholding Shen her attention appeared to be focused entirely upon the handsome poet.
“Good morning, slick,” she cooed to the dark, slender stranger dressed in a neon green polo shirt, and gliding across her carpet with such studied grace one half expected him to have his own background music. “Aren’t you the looker?”
“I don’t know. Am I?” said Shen, moving as cl
ose to modesty as he ever got.
“Looks like Sam Cooke, dresses like Sammy Davis Junior, talks like a sex worker on a nine-hundred line,” was Maggie’s summation of Shen after she had examined him from jelly curl to shiny plastic loafer.
“Do you really think I look like Sam Cooke?” asked Shen, settling onto the footrest directly in front of Mrs. Lambkin. “More importantly, what would a sweet girl like you know about nine-hundred lines? You been running up the phone bills listening to the honey talkers, have you, darlin’?”
“I use the phone at the basement nurses’ station,” said Maggie, intent upon Shen and fingering something with her right hand. Maternus, keeping a sage distance behind Shen and remaining on his feet in case he had to retreat again, took a step to his left and spied the silver top of the old woman’s deadly cane. “I tell ‘em I’m talking to my grandkids,” added Maggie.
“But you have no grandchildren,” noted Shen.
“Good looking and you’re a swift thinker to boot,” smiled Maggie. “You’re here because…?”
“Because I felt a moral tug in your direction, my dear.”
“I hope it didn’t yank you hard enough to do you any harm, slick,” said Maggie. “Look around — I don’t have anything here worth stealing.”
Since she said this with a smile, Shen responded with a burst of laughter and told her, “I’m here to bring some light into your room, Mrs. Lambkin.”
“Light?”
“My words are sunshine to illuminate the soul.”
Hell Can Wait Page 15