by Gene Wolfe
I said, “Certainly,” and handed him the money, at which the demon snickered.
“Just don’t you let Ma find out.”
When the old man had gone, the demon fished business cards from his vest pocket; I did not trouble to read the one that he handed me, knowing that nothing on it would be true. Eira read hers aloud, however, with a good simulation of admiration. “ ‘J. Gunderson Foulweather, Broker, Commodities Sales.’ ”
The demon picked up her skillet and tossed her chicken a foot into the air, catching all four pieces with remarkable dexterity. “Soap, dope, rope, or hope. If it’s sold in bulk, I’ll buy it and give you the best price anywhere. If it’s bought in bulk, I sell it cheaper than anybody in the nation. Pleasure to meet you.”
I introduced myself, pretending not to see his hand, and added, “This is Eira Mumble.”
“On your way to St. Louis? Lovely city! I know it well.”
I shook my head.
She said, “But you’re going somewhere—home to some city—in the morning aren’t you? And you’ve got a car. There are cars parked outside. The black Plymouth?”
My vehicle is a gray Honda Civic, and I told her so.
“If I—you know.”
“Stay in my room tonight.”
“Will you give me a ride in the morning? Just a ride? Let me off downtown; that’s all I ask.”
I do not live in St. Louis and had not intended to go there, but I said I would.
She turned to the demon. “He says this’s close to Hell and the souls of people going there stop off here, sometimes. Is that where you’re going?”
His booming laugh shook the kitchen. “Not me! Davenport. Going to do a little business in feed corn if I can.”
Eira looked at me as if to say, There, you see?
The demon popped the largest piece of chicken into his mouth like an hors d’oeuvre; I have never met one who did not prefer his food smoking hot. “He’s giving you the straight scoop though, Eira. It is.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Talk around that chicken like that.”
He grinned, which made him look like a portly crocodile. “Swallowed it, that’s all. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten since lunch.”
“Do you mind if I take the others? I was warming them up for myself, and there’s more in the refrigerator.”
He stood aside with a mock bow.
“You’re in this together—this thing about Hell. You and him.” Eira indicated me as she took the frying pan from the stove.
“We met before?” he boomed at me. I said that we had not, to the best of my memory.
“Devils—demons are what he calls them. He says there are probably demons sleeping here right now, up on the second floor.”
I put in, “I implied that, I suppose. I did not state it.”
“Very likely true,” the demon boomed, adding, “I’m going to make coffee, if anybody wants some.”
“And the . . . the damned. They’re going to Hell, but they stop off here.”
He gave me a searching glance. “I’ve been wondering about you, to tell the truth. You seem like the type.”
I declared that I was alive for the time being.
“That’s the best anybody can say.”
“But the cars—” Eira began.
“Some drive; some fly.” He had discovered slices of ham in the refrigerator, and he slapped them into the frying pan as though he were dealing blackjack. “I used to wonder what they did with all the cars down there.”
“But you don’t anymore.” Eira was going along now once more willing to play what she thought (or wished me to believe she thought) a rather silly game. “So you found out. What is it?”
“Nope.” He pulled out one of the wooden yellow-enameled kitchen chairs and sat down with such force I was surprised it did not break. “I quit wondering, that’s all. I’ll find out soon enough, or I won’t. But in places this close—I guess there’s others—you get four kinds of folks.” He displayed thick fingers, each with a ring that looked as if it had cost a great deal more than Eira’s. “There’s guys that’s still alive, like our friend here.” He clenched one finger. “Then there’s staff. You know what I mean?”
Eira looked puzzled. “Devils?”
“J. Gunderson Foulweather”—the demon jerked his thumb at his vest— “doesn’t call anybody racial names unless they hurt him or his, especially when there’s liable to be a few eating breakfast in the morning. Staff, okay? Free angels. Some of them are business contacts of mine. They told me about this place; that’s why I came the first time.”
He clenched a second finger and touched the third with the index finger of his free hand. “Then there’s future inmates. You used a word J. Gunderson Foul-weather himself wouldn’t say in the presence of a lady, but since you’re the only lady here, no harm done. Colonists, okay?”
“Wait a minute.” Eira looked from him to me. “You both claim they stop off here.”
We nodded.
“On their way to Hell. So why do they go? Why don’t they just go off,” she hesitated, searching for the right word, and finished weakly, “back home or something?”
The demon boomed, “You want to field this one?”
I shook my head. “Your information is superior to mine, I feel certain.”
“Okay, a friend of mine was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey. You ever been to Newark?”
“No,” Eira said.
“Some parts are pretty nice, but it’s not, like, the hub of Creation, see? He went to France when he was twenty-two and stayed twenty years, doing jobs for American magazines around Paris. Learned to speak the language better than the natives. He’s a photographer, a good one.”
The demon’s coffee had begun to perk. He glanced around at it, sniffed appreciatively, and turned back to us, still holding up his ring and little fingers. “Twenty years, then he goes back to Newark. J. Gunderson Foulweather doesn’t stick his nose into other people’s business, but I asked him the same thing you did me: how come? He said he felt like he belonged there.”
Eira nodded slowly.
I said, “The staff, as you call them, might hasten the process, I imagine.”
The demon appeared thoughtful. “Could be. Sometimes, anyhow.” He touched the fourth and final finger. “All the first three’s pretty common from what I hear. Only there’s another kind you don’t hardly ever see. The runaways.”
Eira chewed and swallowed. “You mean people escape?”
“That’s what I hear. Down at the bottom, Hell’s pretty rough, you know? Higher up it’s not so bad.”
I put in, “That’s what Dante reported too.”
“You know him? Nice guy. I never been there myself, but that’s what they say. Up at the top it’s not so bad, sort of like one of those country-club jails for politicians. The guys up there could jump the fence and walk out. Only they don’t, because they know they’d get caught and sent down where things aren’t so nice. Only every so often somebody does. So you got them too, headed out. Anybody want coffee? I made plenty.”
Long before he had reached his point, I had realized what it was; I found it difficult to speak, but managed to say that I was going up to bed and coffee would keep me awake.
“You, Eira?”
She shook her head. It was at that moment that I at last concluded that she was truly beautiful, not merely attractive in an unconventional way. “I’ve had all I want, really. You can have my toast for your ham.”
I confess that I heaved a sigh of relief when the kitchen door swung shut behind us. As we mounted the steep, carpeted stairs, the house seemed so silent that I supposed for a moment that the demon had dematerialized, or whatever it is they do. He began to whistle a hymn in the kitchen, and I looked around sharply.
She said, “He scares you, doesn’t he? He scares me too. I don’t know why.”
I did, or believed I did, though I forbore.
“You p
robably thought I was going to switch—spend the night with him instead of you—but I’d rather sleep outside in your car.”
I said, “Thank you,” or something of the kind, and Eira took my hand; it was the first physical intimacy of any sort between us.
When we reached the top of the stair, she said, “Maybe you’d like it if I waited out here in the hall till you get undressed? I won’t run away.”
I shook my head. “I told you I take precautions. As long as you’re in my company, those precautions protect you as well to a considerable extent. Out here alone, you’d be completely vulnerable.”
I unlocked the door of my room, opened it, and switched on the light. “Come in, please. There are things in here, enough protection to keep us both safe tonight, I believe. Just don’t touch them. Don’t touch anything you don’t understand.”
“You’re keeping out demons?” She was no longer laughing, I noticed.
“Unwanted guests of every sort.” I endeavored to sound confident, though I have had little proof of the effectiveness of those old spells. I shut and relocked the door behind us.
“I’m going to have to go out to wash up. I’d like to take a bath.”
“The Hopsacks have only two rooms with private baths, but this is one of them.” I pointed. “We’re old friends, you see; their son and I went to Dartmouth together, and I reserved this room in advance.”
“There’s one other thing. Oh, God! I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a jerk.”
“Your period has begun.”
“I’m on the pill. It’s just that I’d like to rinse out my underwear and hang it up to dry overnight and I don’t have a nightie. Would you turn off the lights in here when I’m ready to come out of the bathroom?”
“Certainly.”
“If you want to look you can, but I’d rather you didn’t. Maybe just that little lamp on the vanity?”
“No lights at all,” I told her. “You divined very quickly that I am a man of no great courage. I wish that you exhibited equal penetration with respect to my probity. I lie only when forced to, and badly as a rule, and my word is as good as any man’s. I will keep any agreement we make, whether expressed or implied, as long as you do.”
“You probably want to use the bathroom too.”
I told her that I would wait, and that I would undress in the bedroom while she bathed, and take my own bath afterward.
Of the many things, memories as well as speculations, that passed through my mind as I waited in our darkened bedroom for her to complete her ablutions, I shall say little here; perhaps I should say nothing. I shot the night bolt, switched off the light, and undressed. Reflecting that she might readily make away with my wallet and my watch while I bathed, I considered hiding them, but I felt certain that she would not, and to tell the truth my watch is of no great value and there was less than a hundred dollars in my wallet. Under these circumstances, it seemed wise to show I trusted her, and I resolved to do so.
In the morning I would drive her to the town in which I live or to St. Louis, as she preferred. I would give her my address and telephone number, with twenty dollars, perhaps, or even thirty. And I would tell her in a friendly fashion that if she could find no better place to stay she could stay with me whenever she chose, on tonight’s terms. I speculated upon a relationship (casual and even promiscuous, if you like) that would not so much spring into being as grow by the accretion of familiarity and small kindnesses. At no time have I been the sort of man women prefer, and I am whole decades past the time in life in which love is found if it is found at all, overcautious and overintellectual, little known to the world and certainly not rich.
Yet I dreamed, alone in that dark, high-ceilinged bedroom. In men such as I, the foolish fancies of boyhood are superseded only by those of manhood, unsought visions less gaudy, perhaps, but more foolish still.
Even in these the demon’s shadow fell between us; I felt certain then that she had escaped, and that he had come to take her back. I heard the flushing of the toilet, heard water run in the tub, and compelled myself to listen no more.
Though it was a cold night, the room we would share was warm. I went to the window most remote from the bathroom door, raised the shade, and stood for a time staring up at the frosty stars, then stretched myself quite naked upon the bed, thinking of many things.
I
started when the bathroom door opened; I must have been half-asleep.
“I’m finished,” Eira said. “You can go in now.” Then, “Where are you?”
My own eyes were accommodated to the darkness, as hers were not. I could make her out, white and ghostly, in the starlight, and I thrilled at the sight. “I’m here,” I told her, “on the bed. It’s over this way.” As I left the bed and she slipped beneath its sheet and quilt, our hands touched. I recall that moment more clearly than any of the rest.
Instructed by her lack of night vision (whether real or feigned), I pulled the dangling cord of the bathroom light before I toweled myself dry. When I opened the door, half-expecting to find her gone, I could see her almost as well as I had when she had emerged from the bathroom, lying upon her back, her hair a damp-darkened aureole about her head and her arms above the quilt. I circled the bed and slid in.
“Nice bath?” Then, “How do you want to do it?”
“Slowly,” I said.
At which she giggled like a schoolgirl. “You’re fun. You’re not like him at all, are you?”
I hoped that I was not, as I told her.
“I know—do that again—who you are! You’re Larry.”
I was happy to hear it; I had tired of being myself a good many years ago.
“He was the smartest boy in school—in the high school that my husband and I graduated from. He was valedictorian, and president of the chess club and the debating team and all that. Oh, my!”
“Did you go out with him?” I was curious, I confess.
“Once or twice. No, three times. Times when there was something I wanted to go to—a dance or a game—and my husband couldn’t take me, or wouldn’t. So I went with Larry, dropping hints, you know, that I’d like to go, then saying okay when he asked. I never did this with him, though. Just with my husband, except that he wasn’t my husband then. Could you sort of run your fingers inside my knees and down the backs of my legs?”
I complied. “It might be less awkward if you employed your husband’s name. Use a false one if you like. Tom, Dick, or Harry would do, or even Mortimer.”
“That wouldn’t be him, and I don’t want to say it. Aren’t you going to ask if he beat me? I went to the battered women’s shelter once, and they kept coming back to that. I think they wanted me to lie.”
“You said that you left home yesterday, and I’ve seen your face. It isn’t bruised.”
“Now up here. He didn’t. Oh, he knocked me down a couple times, but not lately. They’re supposed to get drunk and beat you up.”
I said that I had heard that before, though I had never understood it.
“You don’t get mean when you’re drunk.”
“I talk too much and too loudly,” I told her, “and I can’t remember names, or the word I want to use. Eventually I grow ashamed and stop talking completely, and drinking as well.”
“My husband used to be happy and rowdy—that was before we got married. After, it was sort of funny, because you could see him starting to get mad before he got the top off the first bottle. Isn’t that funny?”
“No one can bottle emotions,” I said. “We must bring them to the bottles ourselves.”
“Kiss me.”
We kissed. I had always thought it absurd to speak of someone enraptured by a kiss, yet I knew a happiness that I had not thought myself capable of.
“Larry was really smart, like you. Did I say that?”
I managed to nod.
“I want to lie on top of you. Just for a minute or so. Is that all right?”
I told her truthfully that I would adore
it.
“You can put your hands anyplace you want, but hold me. That’s good. That’s nice. He was really smart, but he wasn’t good at talking to people. Socially, you know? The stuff he cared about didn’t matter to us, and the stuff we wanted to talk about didn’t matter to him. But I let him kiss me in his dad’s car, and I always danced the first and last numbers with him. Nobody cares about that now, but then they did, where we came from. Larry and my husband and I. I think if he’d kept on drinking—he’d have maybe four or five beers every night, at first—he’d have beaten me to death and that was why he stopped. But he used to threaten. Do you know what I mean?”
I said that I might guess, but with no great confidence.
“Like he’d pick up my big knife in the kitchen, and he’d say, ‘I could stick this right through you—in half a minute it would all be over.’ Or he’d talk about how you could choke somebody with a wire till she died, and while he did he’d be running the lamp cord through his fingers, back and forth. Do you like this?”
“Don’t!” I said.
“I’m sorry; I thought you’d like it.”
“I like it too much. Please don’t. Not now.”
“He’d talk about other men, how I was playing up to them. Sometimes it was men I hadn’t even noticed. Like we’d go down to the pizza place, and when we got back he’d say, ‘The big guy in the leather jacket—I saw you. He was eating it up, and you couldn’t give him enough, could you? You just couldn’t give him enough.’
“And I wouldn’t have seen anybody in a leather jacket. I’d be trying to remember who this was. But when we were in school he was never jealous of Larry, because he knew Larry was just a handy man to me. I kind of liked him the way I kind of liked the little kid next door.”
“You got him to help you with your homework,” I said.
“Yes, I did. How’d you know?”
“A flash of insight. I have them occasionally.”
“I’d get him to help before a big quiz too. When we were finishing up the semester, in Social Studies or whatever, I wouldn’t have a clue about what she was going to ask on the test, but Larry always knew. He’d tell me half a dozen things, maybe, and five would be right there on the final. A flash of insight, like you said.”