Hell Can Wait

by Theodore Judson

  “I will find it,” said Maternus, eager to get the third task completed and striking Shen as unusually determined. “You will have the notebook by Saturday afternoon.”

  The Roman thought Mr. Worthy was making this task too easy. A half-dozen overweight Americans in a theme saloon did not sound very dangerous to him. He would go to this woman Mrs. Buckman, ask her to hand over the poetry, and everything would be done. That this Ray person and his friends might not be frightened of him in his new and beautified condition did not occur to him.

  At ten o’clock on Saturday the fifth, instead of going to the Shady Grove Rest Home as he usually did, Maternus boarded a bus that took him into Denver, past the bustle of Capital Hill and the shoppers on the Sixteenth Street Mall, to the flood plain of the South Platte River and a neighborhood that had once stood adjacent to the stockyards and the city’s warehouse district. Thirty-five years before, this area had been as close to skid row as prosperous Denver ever knew; during the past three decades the same part of town had undergone significant gentrification, and the local throughway, Larimer Street, was now as famous for its upscale restaurants, after event bars, and the BMWs parked on its sidewalks as it had once been known throughout the Front Range for its flop houses and open-door pool halls. The once infamous smell had traveled northeast to Greeley with the stockyards, allowing the city’s upper-middle class professionals to move into the renovated warehouses which were now optimistically called ‘lofts.’ Unlike their peers in Manhattan and London, Denver’s young professionals dressed down to have fun, and Maternus in his grey cloth jacket and denim pants did not look much out of place among Lodo’s attorneys and accountants in their T-shirts and shorts and on their way to a really great bistro they believed no one else had yet discovered.

  The Fourth Base was located on the ground floor of a massive, three-storey brick building that was not unlike the hundreds of other commercial establishments in the district. On its outside, the bar had a neo-Victorian veneer of high glass windows bearing gold stencil lettering and black, wrought-iron gingerbread lace gracing the eaves and the red front door. Inside the Fourth Base, one found the eclectic decor common to every bar of its type: sporty items such as rotting kayaks and rusty snowmobiles were suspended from the ceiling, photographs of sports greats and old-time baseball cards were pasted on the walls, college age waitresses in striped referee outfits waited tables, and, of course, wide-screen televisions were mounted high on cantilevered platforms and tuned to sundry football games. On this Saturday the majority of the sets were displaying the CU-Iowa State game being played in distant Ames.

  Maternus would not have noticed it — nor would most of the other patrons — but in addition to the twenty-four varieties of draft beer and the baskets of chicken wings being set on the round, semi-wood tables, a great deal of casual gambling was taking place among certain groups of the Fourth Base’s regulars. Among the many CU loyalists in the bar that morning (many of them in gold and black T-shirts), the gamblers seemed to be only a few ultra-passionate fans who, for reasons of their own, were keeping track of the scoring on little sheets of paper and who cheered or swore with a unique enthusiasm whenever a touchdown was made. The Roman had been to several provincial arenas in his lifetime and recognized something familiar in the red faces and often illogical shouts of the sports fans. Because everyone but the serving staff was intently following the course of the game, their gazes were elevated above the human level, and Maternus moved through the tables unnoticed by the clientele. Since he did not know what this Ray Buckman looked like, he was searching for the woman with the fuzzy hairdo he had seen at the poetry slam.

  “Do you want a table, sir?” a waitress intercepted his wandering.

  “I am seeking Mr. and Mrs. Buckman,” he told her.

  “You looking for a job application? We can handle that at the front desk, sir.”

  “I have other business with them,” said Maternus.

  “Try in the back,” the young woman told him, and pointed the way. “Elaine is sometimes there. I think Ray is entertaining a special party.”

  He thanked her and forged ahead, past three more partitions, until he entered a semi-private space in which the televisions were turned off and a solitary woman was seated at a table, busily writing on a lined page. Minus her wig and crazy quilt dress, Maternus needed several seconds to match her conventional, middle-aged face to that of Shen’s rival, Big Mamma Ad-Verse. Intent upon her work, she did not notice the Roman’s presence until he had stepped to the edge of her table and could see she was copying some artistically arranged sentences from an open binder onto another sheet.

  “This section is reserved, mister,” she said without looking up. “You’ll have to find a table in another section.”

  “I am not here to drink, madam,” said Maternus. “I am here to see you.”

  She condescended to lift her head and have a look at him. From his stocky frame and the way he carried his weight on the balls of his feet and how he seemed coiled, ready to strike, she deduced the stranger was one of the ex-jocks who sometimes showed up at the Fourth Base looking for work.

  “You’re not quite big enough to have played football,” she said. “Too short for basketball. I’m guessing you were a wrestler.”

  “I was a fighter, madam,” he said.

  “You’re face is too pretty for that. The fighters I’ve seen all have faces like tree stumps.”

  “I never lost,” explained Maternus, sidling around the edge of the table to get a better look at the notebook from which Elaine was copying.

  “If you always won, you’d be famous,” she said, becoming somewhat disturbed by how this stranger with the unexpressive face was pressing closer to her. “Would I have heard of you?”

  “My fighting career took place long ago,” said Maternus and for once smiled. “I am much older than I look, madame. Is that not the property of Shen Coleman?” he asked of the book she was copying.

  There it was, right in front of him! He could not believe his good fortune. Surely, he suspected, surely Mr. Worthy was yet again manipulating the contest in his favor and had put the notebook of poems directly in his path.

  “What? What do you know about that creep Shen Coleman?” asked Elaine, putting her elbows over the prized volume in an effort to protect it from this man who did not look like he could possibly know the effete Shen. “I think you should get out,” she said. “Ray is right out there.”

  “I will be going now,” nodded Maternus. “But this will come with me.”

  Mrs. Buckman was a formidable woman, as anyone with twenty years in the saloon business would be, and would have been an obstacle for any man possessing normal hand speed. Matched against a swordsman with the decades of battlefield practice Maternus had, she was only quick enough to gasp after he had snatched the notebook from her control and had already turned toward the exit.

  “I wish you a pleasant day, madam,” Maternus grumbled, “although you are clearly a thief.”

  “Raymond! Raymond!” Elaine shrieked from her table. “Get your fat ass in here, Raymond!”

  The much-wanted Raymond and three beefy comrades appeared in the gap at the edge of the faux wood partition, the husband wiping the last bit of ketchup from his mouth with his back of his hand. Though none of them had run much in the twenty-first century, Ray Buckman and his friends wore loose-fitting jogging clothes that hid their once svelte waistlines under generous folds of polyester weave. Maternus focused upon Ray’s hair (it was a feathered pageboy, much favored by baseball players during the 1970s, when Ray had been a minor league catcher) and the heavy gold chains the men wore around their necks, jewelry that reminded the Roman of the gold chains the criminals of his day had purchased as a type of portable wealth.

  “What?” said Ray to his wife through his most recent mouthful of burger.

  “This jerk’s from Shen Whatshisname!” boomed Elaine from her station. “He stole my book!”

  “You steal my wife’s b
ook?” demanded Ray of Maternus, and the other three men with him spread out from Mr. Buckman’s sides. “I’ll have whatever you stole.”

  A round table with three chairs tucked under it separated Maternus from Ray’s group when the first words were exchanged. Two men remained flanking Ray on the opposite side of the table, while the fourth man, one of the fat Stevenson brothers — it did not matter at the moment which one it was — edged around the table to a point on Maternus’s right.

  “Give it back and we won’t hurt you,” said the Stevenson close to his boss.

  Maternus slipped the notebook under his belt and zipped his jacket over it. He surveyed the weapons at hand and swiftly plotted the choreography of his next actions.

  “This is feeling too familiar,” a small voice within him said. “Mr. Worthy warned you precisely about this sort of thing.” He nonetheless shifted his right leg behind him and felt the heat rise in his face.

  “Let me pass,” said Maternus, “and you may yet live.”

  The four aging jocks thought this was a hilarious declaration for a trapped man to make. The fat beneath their chins wriggled as they laughed, and Maternus did not see four middle-aged chums sharing a joke — he saw the mocking faces of corrupt praetors and senior officers laughing while he and his comrades starved in a desolate frontier fort. Anger rose from his chest like a cloud emerging from a volcano, filling his mind with immoral urges, and changing the lens over his eyes so that everything turned blood red before him. At that critical moment, the Stevenson stealing around the table to his right made the terrible mistake of throwing a sucker punch at Maternus’s kidneys. The former football player gave a small squeak of surprise when his fist struck something with the consistency of stone, and the Roman did not so much as flinch.

  “Are you attempting to strike me, sir?” Maternus asked him.

  “You attemptin’ to hit him, Billy?” asked Ray from his side of the table, and he and the two men next to him shared another round of laughter.

  “Ray, I don’t know if this—” began Billy Stevenson, looking at his fist in disbelief. He was going to ask if taking on this muscle-bound stranger was really a good idea. Before he could, Maternus had smashed his left fist into Billy’s upper chest and broke the man’s collar bone in two.

  Another man charged around the table and over the moaning Billy. The Roman caught him with one of the chairs, dealing him a blow that made the man’s feet kick as high as his head, scattering his teeth across the carpet where his feet had been a heartbeat earlier, and making the felled man scream like a wounded horse being brought down on the battlefield.

  The second Stevenson brother reached across the table, putting himself in a vulnerable position that Maternus exploited by lifting his side of the furnishing into Bobby’s round face. The stunned lineman was holding his face in agony as Maternus picked the table off the floor and rammed it like a heavy shield into Bobby, whose head made a loud ‘bonk’ the instant the table split in half and sent the big man flying backward through the wooden partition and onto a group of patrons on the other side. The startled customers screamed in terror and jumped away from the heap of overturned chairs and broken beer steins the unconscious Bobby was now lying on.

  Ray had been knocked to Maternus’s left when he caught part of the shattered table. He had fallen on his rump atop the carpet and was staring in disbelief at his two friends writhing in pain on the floor, and the third lying belly-up with his feet sticking through the smashed partition. He was suddenly having second thoughts about getting up while the Roman lingered in his presence. Maternus nodded at him and again took some steps toward the front door, as horrified patrons and waitresses leapt from his path.

  “Ray!” screamed Elaine. “He’s gettin’ away!”

  Gallantly — if not intelligently — honoring his wife’s clarion call, Ray rose to his feet and made one last rush at the Roman’s back. He besmirched his own bullheaded courage by grabbing a beer mug and raising it over his head to swing at Maternus’s skull. Turning with a speed Ray could not have anticipated, Maternus caught Ray’s arm on its downward arc as effortlessly as a centerfielder snagging a pop fly; Maternus then snapped the bone backward above the elbow and brought the dead limb and the heavy mug straight into Ray’s soft nose. The saloon owner collapsed onto the floor once more. His head fell backward and his eyes rolled into his forehead. Maternus was left standing, holding Ray’s slack arm, and for the time it took him to inhale he considered wrenching the limb from its socket. The red screen lifted from his eyes, leaving him standing in the middle of a bar, holding the wrist of a man he did not know.

  “I lost my temper,” he said aloud and tossed Ray’s arm away, thus allowing the saloon owner to fall flat on the carpet. “I lost my temper.”

  He walked away then. Back to the bus stop. Back to Aurora. All the way home he sat in a seat in the rear of the bus and knew he had lost his salvation. In every face he saw the leer of the demon Banewill, the expression he would see for the rest of eternity. He stopped at the Kent boardinghouse and gave the notebook to Shen, who (in contrast to Maternus) was overjoyed at his good fortune. The poet ran to Stephen’s room, proclaiming he had reclaimed the title of the best of his kind on the Front Range, leaving Maternus to slip away to his apartment, where the Roman brooded in the semi-darkness of his one room until the sun had set and he went to bed on what he assumed would be his last night on earth.

  “I’m sorry, Maria,” he told the blackness around him. “I’m sorry I was not worthy of you.”

  VIII

  Foxes at the Goose’s Trial

  As he had known in his heart would happen, Maternus awoke a little past midnight on the morning of Sunday the sixth of November, and beheld the familiar faces of the angel and the demon at the foot of his bed. Banewill was ready to jump out of his oily skin with glee. He was rubbing his hands and grinning at the Roman as the shark does at the shad. As Maternus’s eyes were fixed upon the pointed teeth in the demon’s mouth, he needed several seconds to realize Banewill was that night dressed in the striped, formal toga of a Roman senator. Mr. Worthy stood passively to one side, shaking his head, and Maternus was too ashamed to meet the angel’s gaze.

  “He’s mine! Completely mine forever!” declared the demon, clawing at the ends of the bedclothes. “I’m going to roast the tongue and the flesh and the bones! I’ll eat the ape boy’s guts first! Then I’ll set the rest of him on a skewer and let him wriggle for, oh, ten or twenty thousand years! I’ll make a coffee cup out of his thick skull, after I’ve skinned him and stapled his hide back on!”

  “You won’t do anything for the time being,” said the angel.

  Mr. Worthy’s mild objection to Banewill’s gory plans turned the excited demon into a whining, frustrated supplicant for a lost cause.

  “But, W, you promised,” he begged.

  “Extenuating circumstances exist in this case,” said the angel, not taking his eyes off Maternus, who could feel Mr. Worthy’s stare boring into him, although the Roman dared not yet lift his own eyes from the bedspread in front of him. “Yes, he lost his temper, the very sin I warned him to avoid. It is also true these were aggressive, thuggish men he battered, and they did strike the first blow. We both have the tape, Banewill. One could argue he acted, in part, in self defense, and under divine law one can protect oneself.”

  “Come on,” sneered Banewill. “Now you’re getting into another of those fine print arguments of the sort that provide sufficient grounds for just wars and capital punishment for especially terrible crimes. You really want to quibble over details? Can’t you just get some of your Jesuits and rabbinical scholars to go talk to some of our semantics professors and let them hammer out something suitably obtuse? In the meantime, a deal should be a deal: let me have my hands on him while the eggheads are negotiating!”

  “No, first there has to be a tribunal to decide his guilt,” said the angel. “If they decide against him, you shall have his soul posthaste. Should he be exonerated, he
still owes us a final test. This business involving the notebook will then be voided.”

  The demon stepped away from the foot of the bed and sat on one of the high bar stools in Maternus’s tiny kitchen. Banewill mulled the situation for a spell, then it was his turn to shake his head in disapproval.

  “I know where this is headed,” he said. “You’re going to get all Stephen Vincent Benet on me and summon up Daniel Webster or some such baggage, some sap who’s going to give an oration on sunrises and freedom, and the twelve reprobates I’ve selected as a jury will get all weepy-eyed and set the ape boy free. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me three hundred forty-six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-one times, and it looks bad on my record, old man. I can’t let you do this to me again.”

  “You are referring to a work of fiction,” replied Mr. Worthy and grinned, sensing the arrangement shifting in his favor. “A demon of your standing is afraid of made-up stories? At any rate, that story was about Americans, a people in love with the abstract notion of freedom. We are here speaking of a second-century Roman; he comes from a people jaded by power and weary of the burdens they carried. They were pagan hedonists, Banewill. What would they care about freedom? One in every three of them was a slave.”

  “I don’t know…” said Banewill, who deeply resented that the angel was much, much smarter than he, yet he was too proud to admit that fact; having no sense of self-consciousness, he could not even confess it to himself.

  “You can shape the proceedings into a flying court martial,” suggested the angel. “I’ll let you select the judges. To sweeten the bargain, I toss in the opportunity for you to have the first pass at our next client.”

  “Our next client is a political consultant,” scowled the demon. “In New Jersey. Like there was any chance our side wasn’t going to get him, anyway. I just don’t know…”

  “Consider, my evil friend, my making the offer turns this into a game of chance, an occasion to test the possibilities, to match your will against the chaos of the numbers,” said the angel.