Robert Butler - Hell

“It’s not that,” Hatcher says.

“He’s small beans, though. Comparatively speaking, yes? Comparatively. Numbers, boy. Numbers.”

Hatcher does not understand his own hesitation. Adolf Hitler, after all. Big numbers.

“You’re a sportsman, is that it? Adolf. Run around.”

Hatcher looks at his rifle once more, the stock and the forearm a smoothly unbroken run of apparent walnut.

“You can do it,” Satan says. “You’re a great shot here. Just point and shoot. Squeeze, don’t pull. Point and shoot, anchorman.”

Hatcher lifts his eyes and Adolf Hitler is running around in circles twenty yards in front of him, with each circuit lifting that famous face to Hatcher with wide, frightened eyes. Adolf fucking Hitler. Hatcher puts the rifle to his shoulder and squeezes the trigger. Hitler’s head explodes in bloody fragments and the body falls.

Hatcher pants heavily. He trembles. All the muscles of his hands and arms and chest trill with jumpy happiness. “Go ahead,” Satan says.

Stalin turns his face from the fallen Hitler. He looks Hatcher in the eyes with that familiar avuncular smugness. Big numbers. And Hatcher pulls the trigger again. Stalin’s head vanishes in a pulpy red plume and the body falls.

Hatcher’s chest pumps up instantly full, as if he was drowning and has unexpectedly leapt into the air. The headless bodies of Hitler and Stalin lie shuddering beside each other. And now, before Hatcher can even lower his rifle, one of the hunters — a corpulent jowly man with a Brylcreem-rigid pompadour — dashes this way from the canebrake, as if to run up the veranda steps and past them and escape out the front door.

Satan rattles a rapid ID: “He shot his best friend to death in a planned hunting accident so he could fuck the wife in their double-wide with her twin eight-year-old girls locked outside in the snow.”

Hatcher hesitates. The man’s dash has suddenly turned into glutinous slow motion. Every one of us had the trying-to-run-but-can’t nightmare on earth, Hatcher thinks.

“One man or a million,” Satan whispers. “It’s the same. Fuck big numbers. The nova of a star or the splitting of an atom. In the great scheme of things, the difference is inconsequential.”

Hatcher hears this and it seems true and the pompadour’s best friend deserved better, but when it comes down to it, Hatcher is simply still holding that big, beautiful chestful of air from Stalin, and it needs a proper release. He pulls the trigger. The man flies backward, his belly blown open. Hatcher’s full chest huffs happily empty, and he breathes deep again as a lanky, hatchety-faced man leaps through the steam of the gut shot of the fallen hunter and heads for the veranda.

Satan says, “This one never ate a thing he killed. He just got off on seeing those cute little birdies explode.”

Hatcher pulls the trigger and catches the lanky man in a shoulder, spinning him around screaming.

“Again,” Satan says. “We shall not forget even one sparrow.” Hatcher shoots once more, cutting the man in half at the middle of his spine.

This time he sighs a calm, sweet, quiet sigh. Poor little birds.

Hatcher feels the rifle being gently tugged from his hands. He resists for a moment. But it’s Satan.

“Look how talented you are,” Satan says.

Hatcher lets go of the rifle.

“And righteous,” Satan says. He looks away from Hatcher, toward the lodge, and flicks his head to someone.

Hatcher is in a state of calm quietude, like after a sauna and a massage and about four glasses of wine with a Xanax dissolved in the first one. Hands are upon him, squaring him around at the shoulders, poking at the back of a knee. “Lift your leg,” a woman says. He does. “Now the other.” He does. His arms are lifted one at a time and there is a zipping.

His head begins to clear. He looks down. He is wearing a powder-blue jumpsuit.

They sit in the lodge great room with a walk-in fireplace roaring intensely behind Satan. Hatcher sinks deep into an overstuffed chair before the Old Man. He crosses his leg. He realizes he is also wearing powder-blue-coordinated Nike Dunks. Behind him is a top-of-the-line Sony HD Camcorder set up on a tripod. The camera was unattended when they sat down a few minutes ago and Satan has been rattling on and on ever since about how this is the first-ever interview he’s granted, that even William Randolph Hearst tried unsuccessfully to get an interview for the Hell Times Herald Examiner Journal Standard , which Hearst published for a long while until the Internet came along and he was forced to shut down and now Hearst’s off in a blogger cubicle writing about his own dick and its previous billionaire adventures, weeping at his loss all the while, and he can’t turn off his keyboard Caps Lock and is thus the object of severe and constant ridicule by his fellow bloggers for always shouting.

But Satan stops talking abruptly, looking at something over Hatcher’s shoulder. Hatcher turns. Adolf Hitler is standing beside the camera. His head has been reconstituted, but imperfectly, his face a maze of raw scars. An old, bleached-blond woman, her arms and face and neck a dense patchwork of liver spots, is hovering beside Adolf with a bottle of iodine and a dingy wad of cotton. She heavily doses the cotton, the burnt-orange liquid splashing everywhere, and she swipes at the join-lines of Adolf’s face. He cries out in pain and she cries out in the same pain, and she does the cotton again and they cry out together again. He seems unable to stop her from these painful ministrations, his hands hanging unmoving beside him, his head held rigid. Both Hitler and the woman are wearing blue jumpsuits — hers short-sleeved to feature her age-and-sun-ravaged arms.

“Stop stop stop!” Satan cries to the woman.

Hatcher expects that the woman will back away and Hitler will operate the camera. But it’s Hitler who bows. He takes the bottle and cotton from the woman, and he withdraws. The woman looks to Satan and Hatcher, for a moment blinking hard, trying to focus on them. The face seems familiar, but in a mid-seventies, heavily made-up, heavily nipped-and-tucked New York-to-Miami retiree way — his second wife Deborah’s people. The woman looks away to where Hitler is marching out of the room.

“Leni,” Satan says sharply. “Focus. Glory times have come for you again. This will be your masterpiece. Marching millions in the dark. Torchlight. And naked racing bodies. Leaping and soaring and running. All captured solely in my words. The grandiloquence of the Prince of Darkness. Now turn that thing on and back away and hold very still, you bitch. No fucking with the camera.”

And Leni Riefenstahl focuses. She bows from the waist and steps behind the camera. Hatcher turns to face Satan, whose eyes are lasered on Hatcher’s. He’s reading even this thought that I think he’s reading this thought, Hatcher thinks.

“Any time,” Satan says. “Shoot.” He laughs loud. “Shoot. Shoot. Quick.” Satan jumps up and pantomimes shooting and he roars on. “Point and squeeze. I’m out running in the canebrake. Shoot quick. Shoot me with your questions, Hatcher McCord. Shoot me with your 44-magnum brilliance.”

As Satan is going on, Hatcher tries to focus on the questions, the notes for which he left behind with his clothes. But it’s difficult. He has an image caught in his head: Adolf and Leni beside the camera. And what Hatcher is seeing are collegial powder-blue figures, minions of Satan, joined with the Old Man, and here Hatcher himself sits dressed in the jumpsuit of a minion and he’s about to willingly — eagerly — give Satan a wide, public voice. But. But. I’m a journalist. I do not judge. I report. Let the public judge. And it takes an informed public to make good judgments. This all suddenly sounds to Hatcher like bullshit of a very strange sort, and he shakes his head sharply back and forth.