Robert Butler - Hell

Hatcher is thrown by this for a moment.

“Just kidding,” Judas says. “I need three. For spinach. We can get two forks.”

Hatcher gives Judas three nickels, and the ex-apostle feeds them into a slot by one of the dispensing doors. “I’m good about sharing,” he says.

They bear their creamed spinach and forks out among the crowded tables, and ahead, a couple of Old Testament guys at a table for two suddenly burst into flames and leap up and run together out the front door. Judas nods to the newly vacated table. “Someone is looking out for us,” he says.

They sit.

Judas sticks one of the forks in Hatcher’s side of the white china Horn & Hardart bowl and pushes it slightly toward him. The dark green of the spinach can be seen in striations beneath the cream, but the cream itself is faintly wriggling. Judas takes a bite and grimaces. “Jesus Christ, this tastes bad,” he says.

He and Hatcher look at each other, stopped by the expletive. Judas laughs loudly. “The Master doesn’t mind. He likes a good irony.”

“He’s coming back here?” Hatcher says.

“For me. It’s the deal.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“His last night. When he asked me to do this thing for him. Somebody had to do this thing so all the rest of you would come to realize who he was. But see, then he couldn’t take me out of Hell the first time round. I just barely got here, and for him to end up being what he had to be, I had to take the heat for a long while. He was crucified for your sins, but I was vilified for your sins. You see what they write about me?” Judas rolls his head. “Oy,” he says. Then he motions at the spinach. “Eat up.”

“No thanks.”

“I don’t blame you. It’s nothing but vegetables, world without end.”

Hatcher nods toward the change booth. “The sign says meat tomorrow.”

“That sign’s always there and it never happens. Just about everyone in this room thinks they’re getting out of here on the next go-round. Most of them are convinced it’s about sacrifice. They didn’t kill enough goats or bullocks, so they need the animals. They need to do their ritual thing to be worthy. The management keeps promising, but come on. It’s not going to happen. Me, however. The Man and I had an arrangement. He needed me to do what I did. I knew His powers. You think I’d send myself to a place like this for thirty pieces of silver? You think anybody’s that stupid? He was the Man. I didn’t have the preaching skills or the church-building skills, but I had the skill to do what needed to be done, even if it was dirty work.”

And what’s going on in Hatcher’s nose? The smell of animate creamed spinach, certainly. And perhaps that is affecting the workings of his deeply intuitive, Northwestern-J-School-trained, field-tested, Emmy-Award-winning appendage, but hearing Judas Iscariot talk of his expectations, hearing his thoroughly adapted voice, Hatcher isn’t sniffing the story so strongly now. Not to mention the irony. Hatcher tries to reason with his nose. Maybe it’s the irony that’s causing the doubt. Judas Iscariot keeping his faith in Hell. Shouldn’t that actually give him credibility? And he’s adjusted over the years, as everyone is torturously required to do. Hatcher’s own Anne rarely sounds the way she must have sounded in the sixteenth century. They all are compelled to watch television, after all. If Judas had the skills he claims were necessary to do what he had to do in his mortal life, then those same skills would turn him into the Judas Iscariot sitting across from Hatcher right now, keeping his faith, talking wise-ass. And gobbling down the rancid creamed spinach.

“You sure you don’t want yours?” Judas asks as he finishes exactly half.

“I’m sure.”

Judas compulsively eats on, though every bite is clearly intensely unpleasant to him. Finally he presses his wrist against his mouth and jumps up and runs out the front door. Hatcher sits and waits and lets the possibilities of this story renew themselves. He looks around at all the others here. Also keeping the faith in their own ways, apparently.

Judas returns and sits. He says, “It’s not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man but that which cometh out.”

He waits a beat, as if he expects Hatcher to react. Hatcher doesn’t.

“Just kidding,” Judas says. “Man, if I’m to be judged by what just came out of my mouth, forget about it.”

“How do all these others expect to make their sacrifice? Do they think they’ll get a shot at the animals before the kitchen deals with them?”

“They’re not thinking clearly, most of them,” Judas says. “A few think putting their nickels in and pulling out a great piece of roast lamb and then throwing it away would do the trick, under the circumstances.”

“And do you think he’s coming back only for you?”

Judas shrugs. “Who knows? We can only account for ourselves in the end, right?”

There’s one more bite of creamed spinach in the china bowl. Judas has been poking at it with his fork. Now he scoops it up and puts it in his mouth and squeezes his eyes shut at its taste. He swallows hard. “Why’d I do that?” he says.

“You thought someone knew and expected it,” Hatcher says.

“Someone always knows,” Judas says.

Hatcher does not reply.

Judas leans intently forward. “That’s why I’m going to get out. What I did at Gethsemane. He knows why.”

“When will he come for you?”

“Soon.”

“How do you know?”

“There are signs.”

“Like what?”

“I came to learn them secretly,” Judas says. “I’m not at liberty to say. But they’re happening. Patterns of the pain. Certain arrivals to this place. Cadging nickels, how that goes. Things to come. A screaming in the night sky. You have to understand, man. There’s a bunch of holy, picked-out-by-God people still here. Published. And the main players in the books too. All big time. The biggest. Still here. He’s coming for them , right?”

“I thought he got them before.”

“So it was said.”

“He didn’t?”

Judas shrugs.

Hatcher presses him. “He didn’t take them out of Hell?”

“Nobody down here knows for sure. I can tell you there’s a bunch of shit-if-I’m-here-and-he’s-here-who-isn’t going on. But I’ve got the faith, man. I’ve got it.”

“So you figure there’ll be quite a few going out next time?”

“Like you said, you’d think the big boys would be gone by now. But they’re not. The direct-from-the-source guys. The holy destroyers of unbelieving nations. The scourge of the infidels and the heretics. And I’m talking the scourgers from both sides, from all sides. You’d figure somebody got it right. Not a chance. But my guy was full of surprises, don’t forget. He could pick any tax clerk or hothead with fishing tackle off the street. Just get your own shit together is my advice.”

Judas suddenly stiffens and looks down at his stomach. It swells rapidly and presses tight against his tunic and a wriggling begins there, as if the things in the cream of the spinach have suddenly grown up and are ready to raise a ruckus. “Oh fuck,” he says. “I shouldn’t have been saying all this.”

Judas jumps up and turns and careens around and past the tables and through the front door.

Hatcher sits and tries to be still and think on all this, and he begins to feel a darkness in his head and a faint weakness in his limbs. But these are just his own private feelings going on, he realizes. His body is simply reflecting on these matters as it waits for what he wants it to do next. Hatcher rises and moves to the front of the Automat. Carl is gone. Someone somewhere in the room shouts, “Not convincing? Convince this, shmecklesucker!” Hatcher steps into the street and turns back the way he came.