Hell (9 page)

Now Hatcher tries again to move but can only teeter.

“Oh no you don’t,” J. Edgar says. “You’re coming with me.”

Hoover steps to him, crushes Hatcher’s elbow in a fist, and guides him, naked, out the door, down the spiral staircase, and into the backseat of a waiting 1948 Cadillac Fleetwood limousine as black as the night that has just passed.

Once inside the Cadillac, Hatcher understands the unique infernal possibilities of being shut up naked in a tight private space with J. Edgar Hoover, given the long-understood but dangerous-to-pursue story of the man, which even included rumors that the Mafia had photos of him flouncing in a feather boa and a little black dress at a private party. Indeed, Hoover instantly begins to sing in a tiny falsetto, “Nobody gets too much heaven no more,” and Hatcher tucks his private parts out of sight, tightly crosses his legs, and slides over against the door.

Beyond the black privacy window separating the driving compartment there is a scuffling sound and chirpings of pain as the Gibb brothers crowd in. The unseen driver grinds the car into gear and Hatcher is thrown back from the acceleration down the alleyway and then thrown toward Hoover with a sharp turn into Grand Peachtree Parkway. He quickly recovers his ball-crushingly modest pose. Alarmingly, though, Hoover has stopped singing and is now panting heavily. Hatcher presses his face hard against the window and squeezes his legs painfully together. He has no chance to stop the thought to Satan:
Come on, Old Man, I’m just trying to let you say what’s on your mind and you have to turn it into this.
“Oh shit,” Hatcher says aloud, certain that his rashly critical thought will now prompt Satan to fully unleash the libido of the former director of the FBI.

But instead, Hoover’s panting stops with a groan. He cries, “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee” and Hatcher does not listen to the sounds that follow this but concentrates on the extraordinary rate of speed the driver is maintaining through the dense crowd in Grand Peachtree Parkway, the thumping of bodies against the car coming so fast as to blend into a low roar.

Behind the wheel, Richard M. Nixon could be expected to draw some pleasure from the carnage he is wreaking—perceiving, as he does, all the denizens of Hell as his personal enemies—but in fact he is distracted by the acute discomfort of physical contact with the Gibb brothers, who are pressed against him, obsessively jutting their hips and hustle-stepping and shooting their arms up in disco poses that are gradually crushing all the bones in their hands against the roof of the car, their falsetto screams ringing in the driver’s compartment. And inside Dick Nixon:
My old man’s cheeks and forehead would flush bright red and my saint of a mother knew what was coming and his fists rose and I backed out of the kitchen door and I put my hands over my ears because of the sound that would follow, and even the touch of my own hands startled me, nauseated me, made me drop them, and then there was only the running away from the sound. What a coward I was. I ran as fast as I could, but I knew I would be tough someday, I knew I would never back down. And this is perfectly clear. I am not an abuser. With Pat it wasn’t about being tough, it was about touching. When I hit her, it was about touching, and it was about touching whenever I sought out the backseat of White House limo SS100X, my favorite, the one I always insisted on. I was the President. It was the restored midnight-blue Lincoln Continental where Kennedy was shot. I would ride around right in that same backseat. The very spot. They touched him there. And they could touch me if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to run away.

And up ahead, among the denizens in the crowd only a few moments away from suffering the blunt trauma of Dick Nixon, is Patricia Dankowski, once known professionally as Trixie Smith, a Chicago prostitute from Avondale, reared only a few blocks from Saint Hyacinth’s Basilica in a brick semidetached where she was touched for a few years by her father—he’s now, unbeknownst to her, in the basement of a brick semidetached in a very rough neighborhood of Hell where the rapists perpetually rape each other—and she is oblivious to the indiscriminate touching all around of the jostling throng of denizens. She squeezes an arm out of the press of bodies and runs a hand through her over-bleached hair, great clumps of it tearing loose in her fingers, but she does not notice, as she is thinking of the night of September 26, 1960, when she was touched for a brief time by the future President of the United States:
Call me Jack, he says, and he smiles a lot of teeth at me and he’s a good looking man, even better looking than his photos, and we’re at the Ambassador East, which isn’t a first for me, though it’s not a place I’ve been in lately since they’ve come to know me by sight and I advise against it for any clients, so as to avoid a scene. Not that I’ve ever been in the Presidential Suite, where they’ve put him, and he’s got Peggy Lee playing on a phonograph when I come in, though he switches it off as soon as he motions to the bedroom door, which is too bad because I’d like to hear her go on singing “I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good” while I’m working Jack Kennedy, and he asks me “Do you have a TV, Trixie” and I say “Yes, I do, Jack” and he says “I’m going to debate that fellow Dick Nixon on TV in about an hour and a half” and I say “I didn’t just fall off the hay wagon, Jack” and he laughs and he says “Well then, what do you think I should do about Quemoy and Matsu” and I say “Nuke ‘em, Jack” and he laughs again and he’s naked real quick and so am I and I’d just as soon take a little bit longer because when John Fitzgerald Kennedy is inside me I get it in my head that I’m somebody after all but I’m only somebody for what’s got to be less than sixty seconds and then I’m nobody again, just like my old man always said afterwards, but when I’m dressed and passing through the sitting room I get up the nerve to ask Jack to play my favorite song and he waves off all his men already coming in from the other bedroom and he smiles and he goes to the phonograph and he puts the needle on the vinyl and he and I stand there together and Peggy sings to me about how a man is always going to end up making you sing the blues in the night
. And now there is, very nearby, a roaring engine and then a wild flinging of bodies and Patricia Dankowski is hit and shattered by Satan’s chauffeur. She tumbles over the right front fender and along the side of the car, and for a very brief moment, as she hurtles past, she and Hatcher look each other in the eyes.

Having seen the eyes of this woman flying past, Hatcher turns his face from the street. Hoover is moaning—not yet reconstituted from his eyeplucking—and so Hatcher closes his own eyes and waits, and waits. Eventually, the sucking and tucking and zipping sounds of a reconstitution begin and Hoover falls silent. Outside, the roar of body-thumps eventually ceases and there is only the sound of the engine for a while. And when Hatcher finally opens his eyes to look once again upon Hell, he is no longer in the Great Metropolis.

The car is climbing a narrow, curving, empty road into the mountains that Hatcher heretofore has seen only on the horizon. He puts his face to the glass and tries to look back to the city. He sees the slick gray lumpings and soarings and plungings of the mountains as the car twists with the road. And then Hatcher gasps as the city jumps into his eyes: a vast sudden everything: the far horizon and the extreme periphery of his vision, as if he has been plucked into the middle of the air and he dangles before the immense compressed jumble of a billion rooftops and tenement facades and webs of streets and all of it shimmering—not shimmering, quaking—not quaking, writhing—writhing with vast throngs of bodies, tiny from this distance, but Hatcher knows what these great stretches of huddling masses are: millennia of individual bodies and minds and hearts born into life and cast now into this place, shimmering, yes,I shimmering from his view in the mountains of Hell like a scrub fire on a vast plain. He hangs and sees and hangs and he tries to figure out where his body is so he can pull back, and then the city vanishes and it’s just cliff faces and the huddling of boulders until at last the car rushes into a great level plain hidden among the mountain peaks. And there are stands of trees and a vast grassy meadow, or what appear to Hatcher as these things, which he did not know existed in Hell.

He feels a slight nudge on his arm and Hatcher looks to Hoover, who has averted his face. But the G-man is holding an upturned hand to him with a stack of three golden-brown squares. “You’ll need these,” Hoover says. “Honey cakes for the dog.”

Hatcher takes them and they are densely heavy and sticky and their smell is so sweet that it makes Hatcher’s teeth ache. He holds them in his palm and puts his other hand over them just as the Cadillac brakes sharply and fishtails to a stop. Before him is a rustic-style hunting lodge—classically shaped in one story of stacked rough logs with a low-pitched gable roof—but even from where Hatcher sits, a hundred yards away, the lodge is so massive as to utterly fill his sight, the rough wood trunks of its walls as large as sequoias. Hatcher has an instant stab of sadness, realizing that the seeming utter absence of nonverminous animal life and growing things in Hell has always given him a sweet little dangerous pulse of pleasure, that whatever the reasons are for a very high percentage of humanity seeming to be here, there is some code of justice—however severe—at work, since the nonhuman living things of that previous life are spared from this place. What were the sins of these trees? he wonders now, with the bloom of a sharp pain behind his eyes.

And having wondered about the unworthy sequoias, he suddenly finds himself face to muzzle with three dogs. Or, more precisely, the three heads of one dog, Cerberus. The faces of the Hound of Hell are not, as they are variously portrayed in the earthly life, like combinations of lion or bear or wolf or, in latter days, pit bulls. Cerberus is a rabid, grossly outsized Jack Russell terrier, slobbering and barking and leaping incessantly, his three heads each as big as a midsummer watermelon. For the moment, however, he has ceased his jumping and is concentrating on slobbering and barking at Hatcher’s window.

“Roll the window down just a bit and feed him,” Hoover says.

Hatcher grasps the window handle and starts slowly to turn it, bits of slobber instantly flying in and burning acutely on his forehead, the tip of his nose, his chest.

“Watch your fingers,” Hoover says.

Hatcher does, opening the window just enough to thrust the end of a cake out, averting his face from the slobber, and he starts feeding the heads. Each one falls silent in turn, and then Cerberus abruptly backs away and trots off, chewing laboriously at the sticky cakes.

“Now,” Hoover says and he pushes Hatcher’s shoulder.

Hatcher opens the door and steps into the driveway before Satan’s mountain lodge. He is acutely aware once more of his nakedness as two powder-blue jumpsuited minions rapidly descend the long front stairs and head toward him. He crosses his hands over his crotch and looks away. In the field to the side of the lodge he sees rows of pickup trucks, a hundred or more. And then gunfire flurries from behind the lodge. This brings Hatcher’s face back to the approaching minions, and the two mustaches are unmistakable. One a modified Walrus and one a classic Toothbrush. If asked which two people in history he would least wish to be naked before, Hatcher would probably have answered something like “my mother and Hillary Clinton.” But now that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are at each side of him and grabbing him firmly by the elbows and, at once, lifting him off the ground and reexposing him, he has a new respect for Satan’s insight.

Joe and Adolf tote Hatcher across the drive and up the steps and through the front door, and striding toward them, framed in the light from enormous veranda doors behind him, is Satan, wearing a red-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt, Armani jeans, and a
RUTTIN BUCK
camouflage hunting cap with tied-up fleece earflaps. Against his chest he carries a Ruger Deerfield 44 Magnum autoloading carbine with a smoking muzzle. Hatcher expected that through the anticipated long night he would have a chance to prepare himself for this moment. But the abruptness and the intensity of his gathering up and passage here, culminating in his hanging in dishabille six inches off the floor in the grip of two of the most prolific murderers in history, has prevented any preparation for what is, in fact, his first actual physical encounter with Satan. Till this moment he has had only the traditional earthly iconography and Satan’s e-mails and cell phone messages to conjure up the Prince of Darkness. And now: Hatcher thinks of some typical politician with whom he’s only vaguely familiar and who’s declared his candidacy for president and is scoring about four percent in the polls and Hatcher finally meets him in an American Legion hall in Dubuque or Cedar Rapids on a brutally cold December afternoon as the guy benightedly campaigns to win the Iowa caucus vote. That is say, a classic, middle-height, middle-age man with a squarish, slightly pasty, faintly jowly, smarm-ready, white-guy-in-power face. Except in the moment after this face registers on Hatcher, the face flares bright red—nothing else changing, not shape or jowls or even the smarm factor—but it all becomes instantly, luminously, arterial-blood red.