“No choice … not ever …”
“Not in Hell …”
“Not in … not in … not in Heaven.”
By this time, the coal shoveling had stopped more than halfway up and down the line from where the six of them were standing.
“Not even when we were angels!” one of them blurted.
“Angels?” Lewis said. “What are you—”
“Angels in Heaven!”
Jimmy DiAngelo hadn’t been what you would call a prize student in catechism class but he had paid enough attention to get through to confirmation, which now proved enough for him to more or less remember the story of the Fall of Satan.
Satan had been called Luke, or Louie, or Lucius, something with an L, when he was an angel in Heaven and God’s fair-haired boy too. But he had gotten too big for his britches, or whatever angels wore below the belt, and put together a posse of like-minded angels to challenge God’s homeboys. There had been some kind of street fight in Heaven, God’s loyal angels had won, and Satan and his crew had been kicked out of Heaven and banished to Hell.
“You guys are Fallen Angels!” Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo exclaimed. “You didn’t choose to become demons in Hell. You didn’t apply for your shitty jobs! You got damned whether you liked it or not just like us! You got drafted! You got shafted!”
The demons answered, mumbling—
“No choice!”
“No choice in Heaven!”
“No choice in Hell!”
“Never had any …”
“Not in Heaven—”
“Not in Hell—”
“Not ever—”
“Never any—”
“—free will.”
“Free what?” Hoffa demanded.
“Free will—”
“Like what you humans have—”
“—to make choices—”
“—to want things—”
“Let me get this straight,” Dirty Jimmy said. “You guys don’t want anything because you can’t want anything?”
“You’re not allowed even that!” John L. Lewis exclaimed. “Outrageous!”
Jimmy DiAngelo was beginning to get it, or at least he thought he did. “You guys want to be able to want things? That’s what you mean by free will?”
The scrum of demons nodded their heads like bobble dolls on a Chevy dashboard.
“Doesn’t matter what?”
More silent nodding.
“Like a kid wants to be able to choose which ball-club to root for?” said Wurf.
“Like wanting to drive your truck above the speed limit?” said Jimmy Hoffa.
“Like wanting a vote up or down,” said Reuther.
“Well what about money?” said Mike Quill. “Who ever heard of anyone who didn’t want that?”
“To be paid for your work,” said Harry Bridges. “Even in the Soviet Union, the workers at least wanted that.”
They were all greeted by blank stares from the gathered demons. So Jimmy DiAngelo gave it another try.
“Money is something you can trade for anything else you want. That’s why everyone wants money. It can be pieces of paper. It can be pieces of metal. It can be a balance on a credit card. It can be cheap plastic beads like the Dutch bought Manhattan with. Doesn’t matter. Money is what gets you what you want.”
“Can it get us free will?”
“—’cause that’s what we want—”
“—to be able to want something—”
“—anything—”
“So want money,” Hoffa said.
“—how we supposed to do that—”
“—when we can’t want anything?”
“But you do want something, now don’t you?” Dirty Jimmy pointed out. “You want this free will thing. You wanted it, but you didn’t get it, and wanting it got your asses kicked out of Heaven instead. And now you can’t even choose to want free will, right? But if you can’t choose to want anything, if you can’t choose what you want to do, no one can stop you from not doing what you don’t want to do anyway—”
“Which is don’t do anything until the Boss gives in to some demand you make, whether it’s for something you want or not,” said Harry Bridges.
“Like money, for instance—just for, uh, the hell of it,” said Dirty Jimmy. “You stop working until you get it. Union Organizing for Dummies.”
“It’s called a strike!” said Jimmy Hoffa.
“And if you choose to stop work until you win it, that’s your act of free will, right there, now isn’t it?” said Jimmy DiAngelo.
“—we can’t do that—”
“—we can’t want to do that—”
“—can we?—”
“—not like we’re doing anything—”
“—just not doing—”
“—it’s against the will of the Devil—”
“Right,” Jerry Wurf told them sarcastically. “It’s against some damn law or something for a Hell Worker’s Union to strike. You can burn in Hell for it—” He brought himself up short as if it were a sudden revelation. “Wait a minute, I forgot, you’re in Hell already!”
“And you’re the cops and the Boss’s goon squad!” Jimmy Hoffa pointed out. “What’s the Devil gonna do, have you arrest yourselves or beat the shit out of each other with your pitchforks?”
“And the union’s first demand, the deal-breaker, what’s gotta be agreed before we negotiate anything else,” said Wurf, “is no punishment for a so-called illegal strike!”
“Strike!” shouted Hoffa. “STRIKE! STRIKE!”
“STRIKE!” shouted Dirty Jimmy.
“STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE!” repeated the boiler room full of damned union organizers.
There was a long beat of silence as the assembled demons stood there in something of a confused trance. But a collective one.
“Well whaddya say, brothers?” Hoffa shouted into it.
He paused for a short moment and then began stamping his right foot rhythmically on the floor. The rest of the damned picked up the beat like a mighty clog-dancing chorus line.
The demons collectively regarded this with stupefaction. Then in eerie but satisfying unison they began pounding their pitchforks on the floor and chanting in unison.
“—STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE—”
Lawrence Warren Cuttler had no idea when his demon jailer had disappeared or how, only that he had fumbled one of the contracts spurting through the input chute so that it dropped to the floor, and when he bent over to retrieve it for fear of a jab with the pitchfork, he had glanced behind him and the demon wasn’t there.
There was still no door and no window, no way for the demon to have exited that Cuttler could see or fathom, but he was now alone in his grim and dank little cell, and he at least still had no way out. And the seven-year satanic contracts were still coming in at the same rapid rate; they had already piled up so deep on his meager little desk top that the overflow was pouring off the pile and onto the floor.
What in hell was he supposed to do now?
It would be impossible to catch up. He had been barely able to sign the things in the name of the Devil fast enough to match the speed of the inflow. If he tried to sign the contracts still rapidly piling up all over the floor, he’d get nowhere. Shove them all down the output chute unsigned? What would be the punishment for that? Did he really want to find out?
He found himself perversely wishing that his demon would be still there to tell him what to do. But he was on his own.
At length, at far too long a length, Cuttler figured that the only thing he could do was scoop up an armful of what was already on the floor and stuff it up the input chute to block it while he caught up signing the ones piled up on his desk.
It was only a stopgap measure, but he’d worry about what would or would not come next when it did or did not happen.
It worked. More or less. The flood of incoming contracts ceased. How long it would continue to work before the weight of what was behind the blockage popped it out
of the chute he had no way of knowing, since he had no idea how long the input chute was or where the flow of contracts was coming from.
At first Cuttler found himself signing the contracts in the name of Satan and dropping them in the output chute as fast as he could. But gradually, he realized that just as there was no time pressure from the inflow chute, at least temporarily, there was also no demon now to punish him for not working at the mandated speed. So better to take his time, or rather make more efficient use of it, by signing at a less frantic rate, and stacking the signed contracts neatly beside him to stuff down the output chute in wholesale bundles.
After he shoved the first bundle down the chute, he realized that now he could take a little breather for the first time since he had been in Hell, however long that had been, and satisfy his curiosity by actually reading one of the contracts all the way through rather than just snatching quick fragmented glimpses.
Admirably simple and concise in its way. For seven years from signature the Devil would “provide his full services on demand to the mortal signatory” at the conclusion of which period “the immortal immaterial soul of the signatory would become the full and unencumbered property of the Devil for all eternity to do with without limit what he willed.”
Cuttler found the way the foreclosure clause was written rather cleverly interesting, there being no unseemly mention of “damnation” or “Hell” to trammel the eagerness of the sucker with second thoughts when the no-doubt-suave Devil or his agent handed him the pen and needle with a warm smile in the manner of a mortgage banker getting the signature on a five-year interest-only balloon mortgage.
Indeed, though he could not quite put his finger on it, there was something else about the contract language that reminded Lawrence Warren Cuttler of a balloon mortgage, maybe it was—
With a soft but quite loud pop the wad he had stuffed up the input chute burst from it like a champagne cork and hit him in the face, propelled by an avalanche of backed-up unsigned contracts.
Up top on the Earth in linear time, Lucifer did not mind making personal appearances; indeed, he might almost be said to enjoy them to the extent that he was able to enjoy anything. Having the power of simultaneity, he could appear to many people at the same time, as time was perceived by humans, while perceiving those apparitions himself as sequential.
And being virtual from a flesh and blood point of view, he could appear as whatever he wanted to appear as, favoring formal evening wear, a more or less urbane human countenance, occasionally a top hat and tails; or even a femme fatale in black in extremis if that was what closing the deal required. No one, after all, or hardly anyone, could be seduced into signing their soul away in blood by a humanoid mini-tyrannosaur with fire-breathing halitosis and the face of a vampire bat.
However, that was the avatar that he had to appear as in Hell in order to be credible or even recognizable as “the Devil”; and while Lucifer might not have free will, he was capable of seeing himself as a Fallen Angel and he experienced any need to wear the Devil costume as another punishment for whatever he was being punished for.
But there was no way out of it now. His demons were refusing to do their jobs and Hell was in turmoil. Well, not all of it: not the ocean of shit, the caldera of flame, the fire ant pit, and the rest of the tiresome generic tortures for the masses of tiresome generic souls who had been damned for tiresome generic sins and needed no demons to keep them in line.
But the more individualized and interesting sinners couldn’t be appropriately tortured without overseers, guards, and boutique torturers; and with his workforce “on strike” as they called it, those damned souls were getting off easy. Sadistic generalissimos were not being forced to endlessly march in formation through mosquito-infested swamps by demonic drill sergeants. Unscrupulous swindling bankers, loan sharks, hedge fund managers, and the whole zoo of crooked paper-pushers were letting their cells fill up with unsigned seven-year soul contracts. CIA and secret police interrogators were no longer being water-boarded. IRS agents were no longer being put through their eternal audits.
Hell was going to hell. There was no way out of it. The Devil would have to make a simultaneous appearance all over Hell to restore the proper disorder. But he chose to experience it himself, personally, where the strike had started in order to maximize the awesome terror of his anger.
Which was in a cellar boiler room where damned union organizers had been turned into stokers of the firebox of a giant steam engine that did nothing. And now they were doing nothing. And so were the demons, more and more of them, lounging about slothfully. Led by the very damned souls they were supposed to be torturing!
In terms of building membership and solidarity, the strike by the United Workers of Hell was a smashing success. The boiler room was just about filled with demons now, or as Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo tried to get the union organizers to call them, “Hell’s Angels,” since after all the earthly versions were not likely to show up here to beat the shit out of them as wannabes, and the demons themselves loved being reminded that that’s what they really were.
Neither Jimmy nor any of the other organizers could tell one demon from another, so it was hard to be sure, but it seemed that they had the ability to pop in and out of existence, or teleport perhaps, apparently spreading the strike to more and more of Satan’s workforce by this means. It was mindboggling at first to see them appear and disappear like soda bubbles right under his nose, but Dirty Jimmy soon found that he could get used to this satanic version of Star Trek’s transporter.
But if building the membership and spreading the strike was going at warp speed, negotiations with management hadn’t even started. Initial demands hadn’t even been presented to management, since the only management in Hell Discorporated was Satan, and neither Jimmy nor anyone else had any idea of how to call up the Devil. So far, management strategy seemed to be the old stone-wall that the temp agencies had used to try and defeat the first NUTS strikes: you can’t call us and we won’t call you.
Still, Dirty Jimmy kept telling his All-Star organizers and the membership, it didn’t work then, and it had even less chance of working in Hell as long as solidarity was maintained. When NUTS struck its first target company, there had been other temp companies with plenty of available scabs, but Hell Discorporated had no access to any scabs at all, and it was its own goons who were striking.
“This is Hell and we’re in it forever, so we can strike until the Devil realizes he’s got no choice but to open negotiations with the union,” Jimmy was declaiming for the umpteenth time from his perch atop the coal pile when it happened.
One moment the demons were all pointed ears, and the next they were scattering to make room for the Devil. Dirty Jimmy knew right away who it was, since he appeared in a flash of fire through a cloud of yellow-green brimstone smoke: a twelve-foot-high red demon with the head of a fire-breathing dragon, eyes like death-ray lasers, an angrily lashing tail the size of a python, flapping a thirty-foot span of leathery wings.
“Get back to work!” the Devil roared with a voice as loud as a heavy metal band through stadium speakers.
Subtle Satan wasn’t.
Corny Satan was, Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo told himself, summoning up all his courage to keep from shitting in his nonexistent pants.
“Go fuck yourself!” he replied, noting that the Devil was lacking in the equipment with which to follow his advice. After all, wasn’t he really a Fallen Angel too?
The Devil regarded him with outraged contempt as he slowly lowered his huge taloned feet to the floor. “Who are you to defy me thus?” he demanded, punctuating his words with puffs of black smoke like the Caterpillar in Wonderland blowing smoke-rings at Alice.
“I am the founding president of the United Workers of Hell, and I am authorized by the membership to present our demands, assuming that I’m presenting them to an authorized representative of management,” Jimmy shot back. “You are Satan, aren’t you?”
“Don’t call me that!” the De
vil roared, and Jimmy sensed something plaintive in his anger—almost like the way he felt when he was called “Dirty Jimmy” to his face. There was something to work with in that.
“You mean you’re not Satan? Gee, you coulda fooled me!”
“No! Yes! I mean—”
“Well then if you’re not the Devil, then who am I talking to?” Jimmy teased.
“I am the Devil! But I’m not Satan!”
“Then who is?”
“I am! I mean I am the Devil, but Satan’s not my rightful, my real name!”
DiAngelo knew that somehow he was pulling the Devil’s chain.
“So what is? You can call me Jimmy, so what do you want me to call you?”
The Devil’s lips were moving but nothing came out but smoke, and he was frowning in frustration. DiAngelo clearly had him off-balance, and he suddenly remembered that he had heard that some Indians refused to tell you their secret real names because they believed it would give you power over them. Didn’t Satan have some other name? When he was an angel? Like a character in some Paul Newman movie, Cool Hand Lou? Luke … ? Lucifer … ?”
“Lucifer!” Jimmy cried. There was a collective gasp from the gathered demons, and the Devil’s blink rate made it crystal clear.
“I … they … we … can’t …” The Devil actually looked sad. His lower lip trembled. For a moment, Jimmy thought he might even burst into tears.
Jimmy knew that he had the advantage somehow. But he had to act fast.
“Appears that I can ’cause I just did … Lucifer. So now that I’ve allowed you to introduce yourself, let’s get down to talking turkey.”
“Turkey … ?”
“The bottom line, Lucifer. Quid pro quo. The settlement terms. You want to end this strike, don’t you? You want to get your guys back to work, don’t you?”
“Would I be here ordering it if I didn’t?”
“Of course not, Lucifer. And what my membership wants is alternate eight-hour work shifts and free time, twelve dollars an hour wages, time and a half for overtime, if any.”
Raising Hell Page 4