In The Lap Of The Gods

by John B. Hendricks

  Lucifer shifted in his chair with a bit of discomfort.

  “That’s how it was, Nate,” Lucifer said. “7 days a week in the grind. It was like a living Hell.”

  Nate nodded thoughtfully and looked around his restaurant. “Sometimes I feel trapped here, you know, like I could have done something bigger with my life.” Nate rubbed a cloth unconsciously on the counter, eyes distant. “You know Sam; I always thought I could be a writer. Back when I was a kid, I wrote all kinds of crazy things. Vampires, haunted houses, smart-alecky heroes, stuff like that. All my English teachers just swooned. ‘You’re so talented! What a way with words! You definitely have a future in writing!’”

  “So what happened?”

  Nate shifted his aching feet. “Well, that’s when I met the missus, and boom boom boom, I needed a real job before Nate. Jr. made his unfortunate early appearance.” Lucifer nodded knowingly. “But sometimes, Sam, I’ll wake up in the morning with the perfect idea for a book, and I think, Nate, go write that down before you forget it. It’s a golden idea, a book that they’ll be forced to read in every high school in the country. Nate chuckled. “But then the old lady starts stirring, griping about something or other, fumbling for her cigs, and bang, my golden idea is gone in a puff of smoke.”

  Nate walked back to the kitchen and returned with Lucifer’s order, a mahi-mahi poor boy with fries and hushpuppies. Lucifer was slapping the bottom of the catsup bottle with his palm when he heard the door chime open. Nate looked at the new customer and smiled.

  Lucifer took a big bite of his sandwich. It was fresh, warm, and made Lucifer feel like everything was going to go his way for a change.

  However, the big hand smacking him on the shoulder reversed his galaxy of good feelings in the opposite direction.

  “So, Lucifer,” the Archangel Raphael said as he thumped his trumpet violently on the counter and jumped onto the stool. “What’s this I’ve been hearing about the end of the world?”

  Chapter 19[19]

  Lucifer was not easily surprised. Thousands of years of torturing people, hearing their screams and their tales of woe had safely insulated him from that. But an angel showing up at this lunch counter, especially Raphael, well, you could have knocked him over with a jelly doughnut.

  “Raphie?” Lucifer stammered.

  “In the angelic flesh, old nemesis.” Raphael held up his hand to Nate. “Got any gumbo?”

  “Best damned gumbo in the state,” Nate replied.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Raphael laughed. “Make it quick. I don’t think we have much time.”

  “So what brings you to the East Coast, Raphie?” Lucifer asked.

  “Why, you of course,” Raphael answered. “Word gets around when the Prince of Darkness makes a surprise appearance after centuries of self-imposed isolation.”

  “Isolation? Hey, what about World War II? Don’t I get any credit for that?”

  “Lucifer, you and I both know that these days mankind doesn’t need the Prince of Darkness to come up with some awful things. You haven’t had a hand directly in anything since you pretended to be Gabriel and recited all that nonsense to Muhammad back in what, the 7th century?”

  “Blessed be he,” Lucifer said, raising his St. Pauli Girl and quaffing it down.

  “It mostly seems like some of your lesser minions just fooling around. They are not even clever, I mean, which one of those morons came up with the idea for backwards masking? How would that ever influence anybody? I couldn’t make a word out on it. You know how hard it was to play a record backwards?”

  “That would have been Abraxas,” Lucifer said. “He worked the music circuit in the 60’s and 70’s. He did okay with flower power, Timothy Leary, Spiro Agnew, but when he convinced Carlos Santana to name an album after him, he got the big head. He convinced another one the freelance minions, Abaddon, to do a riff on a torture that Abaddon had devised in one of the Pits. To both of the demons’ disgust, the dance caught on and made the Bee Gees a bazillion dollars and earned them both eternal ribbing from their demon buddies. They never showed their faces in the Pit again. They did write a book about their personal contributions to pop culture. Vanity press, but I got a copy. It’s actually well-written, except they use a ton of adverbs.”

  “Excessively used adverbs are exceedingly becoming an editor’s nightmare,” Raphael agreed knowingly.

  Lucifer nibbled on a hushpuppy. “Where’s the rest of the Celestial Magnificent Seven?

  “Here and there,” Raphael answered. “They started drifting off when all the Old Testament guys died and Jehovah disappeared after the Jesus Gambit-”

  “Whoa there pardner,” Lucifer said. “Jesus Gambit?”

  “Yeah,” Raphael sighed. “After the Flood, there was a feeling of great expectations in Heaven. Everyone believed that Noah was a good choice for the new Adam and thought that Mankind could finally get on the straight path. Jehovah had some bounce back in his step and it looked like all us hard-working angels were finally up for some vacation. But, as you in particular know,” Raphael glared at him. “This went away quickly. Conflict at every corner. Egyptians, Greeks, Trojans, Carthaginians.” Raphael sighed. “We were strung out very thin.”

  “Then, to make things even worse, it turns out some of Jehovah’s previous work in the Mankind area were in the God business as well. Greek gods, Roman gods, Egyptian gods,” Raphael said, ticking them off on his fingers one by one. “Sticking their handsome noses in everything. I can’t tell you the number of times I had to kick Apollo’s ass to keep him from meddling in every war that was being fought.”

  “Do you need a beer or something?” asked Nate, his crazy-meter pegging red about this guy with the horn.

  “Something diet would be great,” Raphael said. “Unless you have some green tea?”

  Nate snickered and filled a cup with ice.

  “Anyway,” Raphael continued. “Jehovah finally came up with a plan, an absolute masterstroke. He had boxed himself in a corner with his promise to Noah about never destroying the Earth again with a flood, so he didn’t have many options. He decided to come to Earth himself, take up the bully pulpit, and restate his vision for Mankind.”

  “You mean the ‘worship me or die’ vision?” Lucifer asked snidely.

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” Raphael answered. “It went okay for a bit, and he had planned on preaching the gospel for a long time, but it got cut short.” He eyed Lucifer.

  “Not I,” Lucifer shook his head. “I didn’t know anything about Judas Iscariot. In fact, I’ll have to admit something to you.” He leaned his head close to Raphael. “I thought Jesus was a fraud. A pretender. A wannabe.” He leaned back. “That period of time was pretty heavy with potential messiahs; Judas of Galilee, Athronges the Shepherd. A dozen others claiming to be the son of God himself made flesh. I did the same thing with all of them. Taunted them when starving, took them to the top of high buildings and mountains, you know, to put the scare on them. Some of them folded like a cheap lawn chair, but most were so damned convinced they were right. One guy almost threw me. I told him to turn stones to loaves of bread so he wouldn’t starve in the wilderness and he actually did it. I was flabbergasted. I don’t know he pulled that off” He paused. “Boy, this is good coleslaw. Want a bite?” He offered a forkful to the angel.

  Raphael declined.

  “But Jesus, he wasn’t any different that the others. Just a glint of something in his eye that made me a little uncomfortable, but never anything I could actually put my finger on. Now it makes sense. It was my old master, Jehovah, the great pretender, in the flesh.”

  Raphael nodded. “In the flesh is really accurate. He was one hundred percent human. He couldn’t bring his powers with him, so it was just him and his persuasive abilities. No miracles or magic tricks. That was all just after the fact public relations. He had a True Message.”

  Raphael was wearing a cocoa-brown woolen overcoat to conceal his wings. Lucifer could feel the empty sockets in h
is back where his had been ripped out. The sockets ached sometimes, reaching out for his lost wings, or maybe because of a change in the weather, like an arthritic knee. He missed flying, but he never realized how much until sitting here with the Angel with the Trumpet.

  “After the Crucifixion, Jehovah returned to the City of God and shut himself up in his office for a long time. Even the seraphim weren’t allowed in, so no one knows what happened. Finally, the Thrones got so concerned that they busted down the door, even at the risk of incurring his Divine Wrath. The office was empty. A note on the desk said, “Things that are done, it is needless to speak about. Things that are past, it is needless to blame.”

  “Confucius?”

  “Yep, Jehovah was a huge fan of Confucius. ‘Now that’s the kind of guy that I never would have thought up when I started this process,’ he had told a group of us before he went down for the Jesus Gambit. ‘Sometimes I think he should have been the Creator and I should have been the philosophizing wanderer.’”

  Jehovah had bailed on Project Mankind. It gave Lucifer some I-Told-You-So satisfaction. Pride, he thought, Truly does goeth before the Fall. He hoped Solomon appreciated this literary gem that Lucifer gave him for Proverbs, a fallen angel being an expert on both topics.

  The air conditioner hummed coolly in the background, the sizzle and pop of the fryers giving syncopation to the atmosphere.

  “So Lucifer, what are your plans?” Raphael asked.

  “I take it this is the true purpose of our little chat,” Lucifer responded. “This isn’t just a social call to reminisce the old times.”

  Raphael chuckled. “Well, despite the battle for Heaven and all, I never had any hard feelings toward you. I always felt that the fact that Jehovah didn’t smote your ungrateful ass was a sign that he wanted you to be a part of the big picture, so I grudgingly accepted all the interference here on Earth and in some ways, appreciated the art of your efforts. But I still don’t trust your conniving soul and I’m here to find out your intentions and if necessary…”

  Lucifer arched his eyebrows.

  “Try to talk you out of it. Lucifer, I’ll tell you this, no one has the stomach for the big battles anymore. With Jehovah gone, the angels have all slowed down and stayed out of the business of people. We still get tons of requests for things, prayers for the sick and the like, but except for a few things related to the St. Louis Cardinals, we’re just been laying low.” He looked inquiringly at Lucifer.

  “I’m here on a sabbatical,” Lucifer lied easily. “Taking a break from the old grind and the old lady. Seeing the country. You’ve never been to Hell, have you Raphael?”

  “Nope. I’ve only seen the Jack Chick tracts here on Earth. Fiery pits, lakes of fire, the John Milton stuff.”

  “Oh, it’s much worse that that, “Lucifer said, “and I love it and all, but…” he gestured around. “I needed to see what was happening in the real world. Maybe get a new slant on some torments, some trials, and some tribulations.”

  Raphael grabbed his trumpet and brought it up to his lips. Lucifer put his hand over the bell. “Not the big Tribulation. Small t tribulations. It’s okay.”

  Raphael eased the trumpet down. His eyes had the bugged-out look of a man who just realized he had forgotten his wedding anniversary. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s a reflex in me to blow this thing to signify the end of the world, but lately I’ve been tempted to blow it and just get this crap over with. I’m torn. An angel with no direction.”

  “I can relate,” Lucifer said. “Why don’t you just go back to Heaven and stay out of it all?”

  “It’s pretty embarrassing,” Raphael said. “I lost my book. It was a bit of an awkward situation. A woman. An angel. An unanticipated return of a gargantuan husband.” He flushed red. “So I fled abruptly, buck naked. I was lucky to remember to grab my horn.”

  Lucifer’s eyes narrowed. “When did this happen?”

  “Down in Florida last year. I went back to get it, but the woman told me her husband had confiscated it. Never knew what happened to it. He probably sold it on Ebay.” His eyes narrowed. “You do have one, don’t you? That’s the only way to get into Heaven, so that’s what you’re doing here, isn’t it? You’re going to storm the gates of Heaven!”

  “Nyet,” Lucifer said. “No book. I lost it years ago in Pit #18. I’ve had traitors and anti-popes diving for it for years to no avail.”

  “Let me pat you down anyway.” Raphael frisked him thoroughly. He sighed, relieved for now. “Okay, I guess you’re clean, as they say on television.” He still had his suspicions, but nothing concrete to act on.

  “Here’s your gumbo, pally,” Nate chimed in, pushing a steaming bowl in front of Raphael. He plowed right into it.

  “This is fabulous,” Raphael said. “I thought all gumbo had seafood in it. What meat is this? It has a very unusual texture.”

  “It’s best not to ask,” Nate responded. “That’s between me and the health inspector.”

  Lucifer wasn’t listening. He was trying to figure out how to persuade Slim to book a few gigs in the sunny state of Florida.

  Chapter 20[20]

  The Green Valley Grasscutters World Tour wasn’t going well.

  The New England style wasn’t nearly as hot as they had imagined, and they were playing to half-empty halls. The band was only a step beyond playing seedy bars with chicken wire screens and 50th anniversary hoedowns. Slim was despondent.

  “Damned Old Jim Green,” he said. “The bastard was right all along.”

  Lucifer had been just as unsuccessful on his quest as well. The band had toured north up the Atlantic Coast and he had taken the opportunity to visit every used bookstore, Goodwill, and cranny wherever a discarded book might end up. He haunted library sales and garage sales to no avail. In his search, he had acquired a good collection of modern literature, which he had given up on earlier after he read Moby Dick and the House of the Seven Gables back to back. “He paints with words” he had told his book group. “Unfortunately, the reading part is like watching the paint dry.” He had stuck with the European classics from then on.

  “Sam, we’re gonna try Florida like you suggested,” Slim said. “Least we might get a tan down there.”

  It rained a lot.

  “I can’t believe how bad this weather is,” Dinky said. “It reminds me of home. Bloody hell.”

  They were sitting at Mexico Phil’s Grill and Bar just outside of Osceola. An unsuccessful gig at the local VFW had dampened everyone’s spirits even worse than the rain. One old codger had hit Brad the Bass Player with a dud grenade, causing the whole band to flee the building, causing scattered applause from the bored and suddenly vicious small crowd.

  “Boys, we reached the end of our rope,” Slim announced. “We’re out of cash, gigs, and alcoholic beverages. All we have left is the van and a tankful of premium gas. It’s time to wrap up the tour and return to our previous occupations for a spell.”

  Great, thought Lucifer.

  Slim was sad. There were actually more alcoholic beverages hidden away, but he was saving them for severance pay for the boys. If he gave it to them now, it would be a trip home heavy with angst, bitter feelings, and intense vomiting. ‘Bout the same as his home life, he thought, even sadder. God, he dreaded getting back to his wife.

  Lucifer was in a quandary as well. All he had was a couple of dozen books, $300 dollars cash, and an accordion. Sounds like a country song, he thought, pulling out his notebook and jotting some lyrics down.

  “So, mate,” Dinky said, dropping all Appalachian pretenses. “Where are you off to? I’m thinking of just staying right her in the Sunshine State, you know. Put down some roots. Maybe meet an American bird, have some kiddies.” He looked across the parking lot. “You’re from North Carolina, right?”

  “Right.” Lucifer was beginning to miss his cabana more and more every day.

  Dinky said. “Whatta you say we pair up, get us a place right here. We’ll booze it up a bit, bet on some jai-
alai, and get bloody indifferent!” Dinky shouted. “Watch out America. The Brit is coming!”

  “I’m short on cash,” Lucifer said. “I can’t cover much.”

  “Don’t worry about it, mate. When the World Wide Web was kicking off, I bought 26 domain names, just for sport, you know, one for each letter of the alphabet. Me and a couple of pals had a contest. Joey C., he was quite a kidder but he took the game serious-like. Anyway, he wanted to swap for me G name, so I let him have www.garageband.com for his G. The bloke laughed his bloody head off. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I misspelled www.goggle.com. Sucker!’”

  Dinky smirked and pulled out his titanium Visa card. “I say we rent a Mercedes. Unless, of course, you’re in a Jaguar mood?”

  Chapter 21[21]

  It all started with ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ and ended with Dinky on a plane back to England with two representatives of the United States government.

  Dinky was driving a Honda Element, a beautiful pumpkin-orange box on wheels that he thought was the best vehicle in the world. The built-in satellite radio had opened up some new musical avenues for him and had sent him on a merry trip down musical memory lane. It was on a classic 70’s station that he heard the Cat Stevens classic song ‘Wild World’ for the first time in decades. It took him back to his carefree youth. His carefree youth actually was not much different from his carefree adulthood, but sentimentality can see the world through childlike glasses sometimes, and Dinky had driven home teary-eyed. He got online and looked for Cat Stevens records and ordered them all, including a new one Cat had just released under his Muslim name, Yusuf. Dinky didn’t care for it much. Too dirge-like and too hard to stifle a yawn during.

  The giant computers at Homeland Security, however, were not qualified to judge the quality of the pop star turned Muslim Yusuf’s lyrics or melodies. It could, however, tie together the purchase of a Yusuf cd, a credit card receipt for lunch at a Lebanese restaurant, and the unfortunate coincidence that Dinky’s middle name, Nigel, had been misspelled when typed into a database by a disgruntled clerk working for the Florida Department of Revenue. The clerk, irked about a reprimand from his boss for the civil servant’s habit of waiting for people to blink before taking their license picture, had hurriedly typed in a bunch of names into the database with great anger. The typo, which converted Dinky’s middle name to Ghazawan, which means ‘the warrior companion of the Prophet,’ red-flagged him as a potential terrorist, sparking a visit from Homeland Security, and after a heated exchange and several references to the agents as ‘Republican Nazi Brownshirts,” Dinky was headed back to Mother England courtesy of Uncle Sam.