Hell

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Poopy butt,” Jessica Savitch says. “Poopy butt.” Hatcher shakes his head sadly. He can hear Jessica make a strangling sound in the next room. Then she improvises. “Motherfuckers,” she cries. “Motherfuckers. Can’t you motherfuckers act like professionals?”

  Hatcher knows the answer to her question. He thinks of poor Carl. And he wonders how Carl went wrong on the Harrowing story. Carl’s ongoing torment—designed by Satan, of course, not only to torment Carl but Hatcher as well—could have deep ironies built in. Perhaps Carl was made to lie about lying. Hatcher rises. All right. He’ll find Peachtree Way and Lucky Street for himself. He bangs his perpetually bruised thigh on the corner of the kitchen table and moves toward the door. “I’m going out for a while,” he calls to Anne.

  “Motherfucker,” Anne calls in return, but rather sweetly, in a Tudor sense perhaps.

  Hatcher hopes that the Hoppers’ door is closed so he can just move past without pausing. But his legs drag him to a stop, and he looks in.

  They are sitting in their chairs.

  They are still arguing. They both glance his way, but Peggy finishes her point to Howard, “If you looked forward to being alone for eternity, how did we end up in Boca together?”

  “Boca wasn’t forever,” Howard says.

  “It felt like it.”

  “Now you complain.”

  “I thought all I ever did was complain, to hear you tell it.”

  “And where would you have gone if not to Boca?”

  “To my sister’s.”

  “Without me.”

  “Of course without you.”

  “To Scranton, Pennsylvania, you’d go?”

  “Yes, to Scranton.”

  “Instead of Florida.”

  Hatcher struggles to lift his feet, to put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.

  “You’re doing it again,” Peggy says.

  “What?”

  “You’re being rude to the famous TV personality.”

  “Me rude? You talk about him in the third person right in front of him. You think he’s deaf?”

  Peggy turns her face to Hatcher and she says, her voice abruptly faint, “He had feelings for me once.”

  There is a long moment of silence. Both Hoppers are looking at Hatcher, though they are seeing through him to a slow page-turning of images from their life together. Howard’s voice also has waned. “Who said so?”

  “You did.”

  They fall silent once more. Hatcher struggles to move.

  “Yeah, but what feelings?” Howard says, low.

  Peggy looks at him. She struggles with something in her mind. “I can’t think of the word,” she says.

  And Hatcher can move. He does. He walks off without a word. He puts the Hoppers behind him. Even in the dark he can see that his alley is wide now, and at the far end is the orange glow of light from the Parkway.

  Hatcher McCord, anchorman for the Evening News from Hell, descends the staircase of his back alley apartment, picks his way through moaning shapes in the dark, and approaches the tumult of Grand Peachtree Parkway. He intends voluntarily to take a long walk through Hell. He will do this for the sake of a story. Sometimes in his head, when things get particularly intimidating, Hatcher runs bits of voice-over narration to his afterlife. This impulse he’s now following, for instance, the passage from his own neighborhood to Peachtree Way and Lucky Street, is intimidating. Of course, Satan knows what he’s doing. Satan probably is the one who’s doing the prompting. And behind that prompting may be torture of some carefully tailored sort. But Hatcher also knows a few things about how it works down here. And he’s aware he has certain privileges. He had privileges in his life on earth for much the same reason. Hatcher McCord is famous , his narrator says. This inner voice helps. At that very moment, Hatcher has approached a barrier to the street—a kneeling, twitching body calling out “Mama”—and he leaps over it with something he feels is no less than lithe grace.

  On the other side of the body, however, he goes abruptly empty. He pauses. He turns. He looks back. The body is crawling off quickly and it vanishes in the darkness. Hatcher wonders why he has turned. He wonders why he is standing here. If his newsman’s instincts are aroused, Hatcher McCord will never let a good story die. Hatcher turns back to the bright orange glow, the tumbling, veering, bumping, compressing, stalling, lurching, rushing, outcrying crowd on Grand Peachtree Parkway. Hatcher McCord does have privileges, thanks to his fame and his importance to society.

  Some other voice in Hatcher’s head sighs. Not some other. Also his. Also Hatcher McCord. Idiot. Hell is full of famous people without privileges. I’m useful. Useful to Satan. If you’re listening, Chief, and I’m sure you are, I have to stress that I’m not being ungrateful. You see the anguish I’m in, so surely that makes it all right. I’m useful to you—the Lord of the Flies, the Former Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven, the Infamous Big Cheese—and that’s like winning the sweeps with a fifty share. That creature I so gracefully leaped over—I’m right, aren’t I, O Supreme One? I was quite wonderfully graceful?—that creature might have been Mick Jagger or Dwight Eisenhower or Dan Rather—not Henry VIII, I suppose—why do you let him flounce around as a young man?—but of course it’s to torture me—and Anne too, I suppose—I hope it’s torture for her—I leaped over that body quite elegantly, whoever it was, didn’t I?

  Hatcher blinks and shakes his head furiously as if a hornet has flown into his ear. He is still subject to great pain, of course, personal and public. Like this. How simple this little inner dialogue is, but it is torture to him. He does know that he can move from one place to another without being waylaid and savaged mercilessly like most denizens. He is damned, but he is still a journalist. Or, as Hatcher McCord himself might rephrase that as he tries to answer the enduring question of this place—why are you here?—he is damned, so he is still a journalist. Or even, he is a journalist, so he is damned. He will move now as a journalist through the main thoroughfare of the Great Metropolis, and he has the journalist’s classic place in the world: he is part of the suffering humanity all around him but really he is not, he is an observer, his pulse quickening at the pain he observes, his deep brain sparking in delight at the possibility of a story and at the gravitas of that, the importance of that.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Hatcher says aloud, addressing himself.

  He waits. He has indeed seemed in his head to have shut the fuck up.

  And so he stands in the mouth of his alley and waits as a megabyte of Internet gossip bloggers lurches by, the men in starlet-at-the-beach bikinis with celluloid-ravaged thighs and acid-seeping hard-ons, the women paunchy droopy naked but for Speedo trunks, weighed heavily about their necks with molten-hot gold pop-star bling, and all of them—a thousand or more—pass by in a long, dense gaggle, pinching and punching at each other. Hatcher’s neighborhood has many journalists, and this gossip-blogger group lives at the very edge, at a distant turning of the Parkway where other denizens never actually go in person, where only this subset of bloggers huddle together over laptop screens, zinging each other. At last they pass, and Hatcher pushes onto Grand Peachtree Parkway, turns toward the place of the Ancient Harrowing, and presses into an unsorted crowd of denizens.

  He is soon carried into the adjacent neighborhood, where many of the poets and playwrights and fiction writers dwell. He is moving more or less steadily now in a narrow corridor of space at the edge of the great flowing street crowd, squeezing along storefronts and piss-stained apartment stoops, the way often pinching shut from the veering of the crowd but then opening again. He passes by bookstore after bookstore, their windows dark, their shelves full of long-unsold remainders of all the local writers. The stores will open with hopeful new owners at the next sunrise and will be out of business by the next sundown.

  Then in front of Hatcher a man lurches from the darkness of a doorway into a sudden flare of orange sodium vapor light. He is draped in a toga that perhaps long ago was white but now is
dark with stains and spattered with what appear to be bird droppings, though Hatcher has never seen a bird in Hell. The man’s hair is cropped close and his face is pasty and he has no nose, only a jagged outline of one in the center of his face as if he were an ancient marble statue.

  “Please, denizen,” he cries. “I am here to guide you.” His hands flutter up in front of him as if he will grab at Hatcher.

  Hatcher pulls back and wonders if he needs to defend himself. But it is more thought than instinct, and so he hesitates.

  The man’s hands fall, and he says, “Please. I know the way.”

  “Who are you?” Hatcher says.

  “Publius Vergilius Maro.”

  The name sounds vaguely familiar to Hatcher, but he can’t place it.

  “I was a poet for the great Augustus,” the man says.

  “You’re Virgil,” Hatcher says.

  “The Emperor is not so great now.”

  “Why do I connect you to Hell already?”

  “But neither am I. I am but a broken image of myself.”

  Hatcher remembers. “The Inferno.”

  Virgil wags his head sharply, fighting off thoughts of his own past greatness, and he refocuses on Hatcher. “I’ll guide you,” he says.

  “Like Dante,” Hatcher says, meaning it as a little literary joke.

  Virgil rolls his eyes. “Oh please. He was a pain in the neck.”

  Hatcher doesn’t understand. “He was really here?”

  “You’d never guess it from his poem.”

  “What Hell was it that you showed him?”

  Virgil shrugs. “This one. But low-tech.”

  “He really came here?”

  “And then he lied.”

  “He’s back, isn’t he.”

  “He doesn’t go out much. He’s still obsessed with the girl, always dreaming of joining her in Paradise.”

  “His Beatrice.”

  Virgil steps very close to Hatcher now. He is a surprisingly tall man, for his era, his face fully in Hatcher’s. He reeks of rotten sardelles and Cyprian garlic. “You need to come with me,” Virgil says.

  Hatcher realizes this is one of those oh-right-I’m-in-Hell-and-thisisn’t-really-a-matter-of-choice moments. He and Virgil look at each other. The crowd is jostling noisily by, but Hatcher can clearly hear the Roman’s whistley breathing through his fragment of a nose. “Okay,” Hatcher says.

  Virgil turns abruptly and moves off. Hatcher follows. The poet turns in at the next alleyway.

  In the narrow passage, the sounds from the Parkway abruptly cease. Hatcher hears only the scrape of his shoes on the pavement. This alley feels almost pristine beneath his feet—none of the offal squinch underfoot of his own alley—this sound echoes back from the tenements in the dark on either side. And somewhere far off he can hear the sound of a police siren. He has never heard that sound in Hell before. Virgil suddenly veers left and vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher stops, and instantly Virgil’s voice urges him on. “In here,” he says.

  Hatcher steps into the blackness. Dimly he can see the poet’s toga ahead, and he hears a knock. A door opens, and standing framed there in the jaundiced glow of bare bulb light is a man in a snap-brim and wide-lapeled suit. His face is in deep shadow.

  Virgil says to the man, “He’s here.”

  “Thanks,” the man says. And from the timbre of the voice and the shibilant “s”, Hatcher instantly knows who it is. Humphrey Bogart turns to the side to clear the door. The light falls on his creviced face, and even though his eyes are still in the shadow of his hat brim, Hatcher can see their sad, dark depth.

  Virgil vanishes in the shadows. Hatcher steps forward.

  “You’re late,” Bogey says.

  Hatcher moves past him and into the back staircase landing of a tenement. The lightbulb juts nakedly from a fixture in a side wall, and mounting the opposite wall is a vast dark shadow of the staircase banister. Hatcher looks around him with the panic of an actor’s dream. He’s on and he doesn’t know his lines.

  Bogey steps up beside him. “Her note said 4D.”

  “4D,” Hatcher says.

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Put your hat on.”

  Hatcher realizes there’s something in his hand. He looks down. He holds a gun-metal gray snap-brim fedora. He puts it on.

  The rasp and hiss of a match turns his face to Bogey, who is lighting a cigarette. Bogey drags once and exhales. He reaches into his inner coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He flicks one partway out. It’s a Camel. He offers it to Hatcher.

  Hatcher actually hesitates because he smoked as a teenager and then stopped in J-School and he is reluctant to start again. For his health.

  Hatcher laughs a sharp, ironic laugh at this and takes the cigarette.

  Bogey strikes another match. “I don’t expect much from her either,” he says, understanding the laugh in a way that Hatcher now also understands. What can this dame have to say?

  Bogey holds the flame to the tip of Hatcher’s cigarette. Hatcher inhales. As with all the everyday earthly physical pleasures, in Hell there is only a niggling disappointment, though occasionally there is, of course, searing pain of one sort or another. With this drag on a cigarette, for Hatcher there is niggling disappointment. Followed by the brief searing pain of feeling like a teenager.

  “Let me do the talking,” Bogey says.

  Hatcher is suddenly all right. He nips with his thumb and forefinger at the tip of his snap brim. “Right,” he says.

  The two men climb the stairs. The light at the landing draws the shadow of the banister posts across their bodies first one way and then, when they turn, the other way, as if they are pacing in their jail cell.

  At the fourth floor, their two fedoras come up from the light below and into the dark at the top of the stairs. Hatcher and Bogart stop on the threadbare runner that trails down the center of the corridor. At the far end is a thin slice of light at the bottom of a doorway. Bogey nods toward it. They move to the door and Bogey knocks.

  From inside, a woman’s voice says, “Come in.” It’s a high, thin, nasally voice.

  Bogey draws a sharp breath. Hatcher looks at him, but his face is a mask of black in the dark corridor. Bogey pushes the door open.

  The tenement apartment is one room, simple and seedy, as simple and seedy as a cheap hotel room in some dirty little working-class burg. A sagging couch, a desk, a few chairs, a blank wall where the Murphy bed hides, all of it in colors that don’t even deserve the name “color.” Dingy grays and tans. And rising from a chair in the center of all this is the dame. A tiny body, fragile, chiseled features and dark, feverish eyes. Her lips are scarlet, painted large, like Satan’s own butterfly.

  Hatcher and Bogey are standing before the dame and she’s looking at the two of them, one at a time, back and forth, like she’s trying to figure out which one of them is going to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out of a burning building.

  Hatcher waits for Bogey to do the talking, but his partner isn’t saying a word. He looks at Bogey, whose face is lambent with repressed anguish, though nobody in the room would know what “lambent” means, even Hatcher at that moment, who is now very much Bogey’s fellow private eye. Hatcher lifts an eyebrow and rolls his shoulders in his wide-lapeled suit, wondering what’s going through his partner’s mind. Bogey doesn’t act like this around dames.

  Finally Bogey speaks. “You’re not who you said you were.”

  “Who’d I say I was?”

  Bogey hesitates. “Nobody.”

  “That’s me,” she says.

  “You’re not who I thought.”

  “I got no control over what you think.”

  Abruptly Bogey turns to Hatcher. “You talk to her.” And Bogey heads for the window, which looks out into utter darkness. “I thought she’d be someone else,” he says, low.

  Hatcher looks at the dame. She looks at him. She’s wearing a flimsy little flower-print butto
n-front dress, and the buttons are big and dazzling white, just asking to be undone.

  Hatcher still doesn’t know his lines, but he’s catching on.

  He takes a drag on his cigarette, and being a gentleman, he turns his head slightly, blowing the smoke just past the dame’s right ear. He flips his head at the chair behind her, and she does what she’s told. She sits. Hatcher stands over her, but he parks his Camel in the corner of his mouth, casually brushes his suit coat open, and eases his hands into his trouser pockets. Just to put her a little at ease.

  “So?” he says. The cigarette loosens and starts to fall from his mouth.

  Hatcher grabs for it.

  Meanwhile, Bogey stares into the nothing out the window as if it was something, and the voice in his head speaks: I thought it was going to be her. I don’t have any reason in this forsaken town to expect anything to turn out right, but somehow I thought it was going to be Baby at last. What a sap I am. Of course this is the way it ends up. You drink a lot. You crack some heads. Even to get her, there was the price of running out on your wife, and then maybe you even run around a little on her, out in the middle of the ocean heading for Catalina. You wouldn’t have done that except for Baby getting seasick and never being able to go with you on the ocean in the boat you enjoy so much. Even if it’s a little screwy, you try to keep a kind of a code about things. And you try to do your job straight. And you’re true to your friends. You give away your last two fingers of bourbon. But you find yourself running into a brick wall. The thing they call your flawed humanity. So you end up in a cheap room in a hot climate and your cigarettes all taste like dust and it looks like you’ve got an extended booking. Still, I wanted it to be Baby real bad. I wanted her to have her back to me when I came through the door and there’s just that thin long body and the rip curls of her dirty blond hair and she waits a beat or two before turning. Baby is Bacall, after all. She has a swell sense of timing. So she turns, and the hair falls a little over her face but you can see both her beautiful eyes, those wide-set eyes, and she gives me that little half smile and we’re together again. That’s what I wanted real bad. I may be a sap but I’m not stupid. I know what I’m wishing for. That Baby is spending eternity in Hell. I should be wanting real bad never to see her again. I should want her to be in Heaven playing a harp and looking swell in a white gown and wings. But I don’t want that. I want her with me. Which probably is why I’m here.