Last God Standing (5 page)

“On what you pay me, ‘Boy’s Town’ would have to be the size of a postage stamp.”

“Hey, any time free room and board get too rough for your delicate sensibilities…”

“Alright… I’ll mow the lawn.”

“Front and back?”

“Yes!”

“And clean the mower blades?”

“I could strangle you.”

“Excellent. Nothing in life sweeter than a ‘twofer’, son. That’s…”

“I know: ‘Twice the goods and/or services for half the price’.”

“Damn right. Well? Get back to work.”

I remembered my promise to intercede on Sauwk’s behalf.

“Why an ostrich?”

Herb shrugged. “The elephant was double booked.”

“The ostrich won’t let you ride, Pop. He’s got arthritis.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Why not try letting Chick try to lasso it in the background while you riff in the foreground? That way you get to improvise, and the audience gets a twofer.”

At the word “improvise” Herb’s face brightened. He was a frustrated actor who fancied himself a master of improvisation. If he hadn’t feared what he called “…an actor’s life, filled with uncertainty” he would have auditioned for Second City. That and his polite phobia of Jews kept him from pursuing a career in show business.

“You’re right. Ostriches are funny without having to try.”

“Alright.”

“And Chick and I can riff till the cows come home. People love it when we riff. That’ll help him pull his panties out of his ass.”

Herb picked up the office phone and dialed Flaunt’s extension. As I headed for the door to the Fortress of Gratitude, he called out to my retreating back.

“Have fun with Susanna, son. Loosen up a little.”

“OK, Pop.”

“And get a haircut. You look like a goddamn spear chucker.”

I pocketed the money and hurried back to work.

At noon, I took an early lunch and headed for Chicago Kutz, a barbershop I had avoided since returning home from Northwestern. But I’d decided to take Herb’s advice: the ’fro was getting a little unruly.

Surabhi and I had been dating seriously for nearly two years. We’d met during a jazz appreciation concert series at Northwestern. The attraction was immediate, the chemistry undeniable. However, I was housebound, still at the mercy of my parents’ escalating war of words. The atmosphere at home was toxic to a burgeoning romance. And since Surabhi shared her small apartment with her younger sister, we had no safe place to go when we wanted to be alone.

I had, of course, experimented with women on the road. A sexual darkhorse, I lost my virginity when I was twenty years old. But my less than imposing stature and sub-standard physique had made successfully wooing conscious women fairly uncommon.

Let’s face it: the irony of my particular situation is that I could “seduce” any woman on the planet, if I were as psychotic as some of my colleagues. Many mortals long to offer themselves to their gods. Zeus ravaged thousands of females, human and otherwise, before he retired to Milwaukee.

The Morrigan, Celtic goddess of war and sex, nearly killed Ireland’s greatest mortal hero, Cuchulainn, for refusing her untimely advances. Since she’d appeared to him during a pitched battle, clothed in her ugliest Aspect, a reasonable deity might assume a modicum of understanding on her part. But this was not the case: the Morrigan’s rampant horniness nearly caused the extinction of the Irish race. I’ve had to speak to her about it at several Conventions. Last year she chased Shango the West African Thunder God into the men’s room at the Boca Raton Days Inn. The two of them nearly reflooded the Gulf Coast. On my last custodial visit I’d barely escaped with my life. I was twenty-three that hot summer, and although the Morrigan is one of the sexiest immortals in existence, she scared the crap out of me. Currently she’s a short, dowdy redhead with thick ankles living in South Boston. She remains unapologetic.

As I walked through the door of Chicago Kutz, my heart was thrashing like an overactive ferret, my mind flashing through a sweaty laundry list of the things I planned to do with Surabhi in our lovers’ suite at the Four Seasons. Beneath my admittedly turgid exterior there thrummed a brief but intense lifetime of frustrated sensuality bursting to express itself.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” a big voice boomed. “Is that Young Billy Dee struttin’ through my door?”

Lumbering toward me across the haircovered floor was the loudest mortal I knew.

“Look at that head. Man, you look like a damn spear chucker!”

Beaufort “BoomBoom” Biggs was exactly that. He was immense in every way a big thing can be. One of his hands could envelop the top of a normal man’s head. At exactly seven feet tall, he weighed three hundred and seventy pounds, most of it muscle covered by a thickening layer of fat. He’d played as a defensive lineman for the Chicago Bears back in the late Seventies, helping his teammates to a historic win during Superbowl X. An avid chef, BoomBoom had used his NFL earnings to buy out the Jigaboos family restaurant chain that dotted the Midwest until the early Eighties. By the early twenty-first century, BoomBoom’s Bigghouse soulfood restaurants had given Type 2 diabetes and hypertension to legions of fat-happy Midwesterners.

BoomBoom had even done a commercial for my father; the one in which Herb, wearing a Chicago Bears jersey, helmet and shoulder pads, stands on the fifty yard line at Soldier’s Field during a game between the Bears and the Cleveland Browns, and proclaims, “I’m so crazy about my customers I’ll take a tackle from BoomBoom Biggs to prove it!” As Herb was rolled off the field to the thunderous appreciation of twelve thousand screaming fans, a guilty BoomBoom had accompanied him all the way to the ambulance. Five fractured ribs and a collapsed lung later, the two had become fast friends. When Herb learned that Biggs occasionally dabbled in local community theater, their fates were officially conjoined.

“Damn shame lettin’ your hair get that messy,” BoomBoom hollered. “How you expect people to take you seriously with hair like that?”

“Whaddup, BoomBoom?” His criticism was light artillery compared to the emotional massacre that was Life on the Cooper Plantation. “How’s that last stomach staple holdin’ up?”

“Uh oh,” one of Kutz’s barbers snarked. “Showtime.”

Like most Southside barbershops, Kutz was a place where verbal jousting was the price of admission; where jabs were traded and not only hair got cut. At Kutz, the big dogs ran the show, and BoomBoom Biggs was the biggest dog in town. But fortunately for me, I was raised by wolves.

“Oh, wait a minute now,” BoomBoom thundered. “You wanna play the Dozens, Billy Dee? You’re messin’ with the master!”

“Looks like the only thing you’ve ‘mastered’ is a knife and fork. Call me when you master some situps!”

This evoked a shout of approval from the customers. Ol’ Luke, BoomBoom’s oldest employee and neighborhood instigator, shuddered like a man caught in a violent icestorm.

“Ooh, he got you right out the gate, Beaufort! Young Billy Dee came in swingin’!”

“Least I had a six-pack, once,” BoomBoom crowed, flexing his still massive biceps. “Man, don’t you know you’re looking at the first man in Chicago to deadlift five hundred pounds? Ask your mama: she’s still got my fingerprints on her butt!”

The bystanders howled. “Now that was ugly!”

I was about to launch into a rant about the Bigghouse’s high customer mortality rate when reality ripped itself apart.

The rupture started in the mirror right behind BoomBoom; glowing concentric circles spreading like ripples across a quiet lake. Then a pale hand as large as a minivan reached out of the mirror and passed, wraithlike, through BoomBoom’s body. If it had been “real” in any corporeal sense, BoomBoom would have been skewered by a forefinger the length of a stop sign. As it was, nobody noticed. The finger stopped a few inches from my face. The nail was black, and covered with shooting stars.

“
I’ve been looking for you
.”

Tremors rattled through the sub-atomic structure of the barber shop. I was having a hard time pretending not to notice. The regulars were cackling and elbowing each other: BoomBoom must have let off a hot one. But my rejoinder would have to wait.

“My God,”
the Voice trumpeted.
“For a decade have I searched! Finally I am rewarded for my unflagging service!”

The voice was cold, its timbre unfamiliar. The arrogance however, was not.

Oh no. Not him.

“What do you want?”

“
Let the trumpets sound!
For Holy! Holy! Holy! is the Presence of the Lord!”

The giant hand withdrew back into the mirror, and the ripples of shredded reality healed themselves with a million sizzling snaps as the blare of a thousand trumpets announced to the universe that my day was about to slide down the toilet.

There came a blinding flash, the resonance of a million throats serenading me… well the former me. When my vision cleared I saw that everything had stopped: BoomBoom and Old Luke stood, immobilized in mid laugh. The regulars hovered, trapped between moments. I glanced at the digital clock on the wall: its readout flickered, held in still-time like a fly in amber. Whoever the intruder was, he or she was a Power; someone with lots of heavenly capital to spend and no conscience.

The visitor stepped out of the glow, its shining face averted at just the right angle of prideful deference. It was one of the heavy hitters alright: an archangel. And not just any garden variety archangel either.

“Gabriel. What are you doing here?”

Gabriel had clothed itself in a synthetic human seeming, male and icily perfect. In this body, he was over six feet tall, long limbed and athletically slender. A cascade of curly black hair surrounded silver eyes as bright as a winter lightning strike. Full black lips accented fatal cheekbones and a lantern jaw. Lush, white wings flickered in and out of visibility at his muscular shoulders.

“Eternal Master,”
Gabriel breathed.
“At last.”

The Angel of the Morning dropped to one perfect knee and bowed his head.

“Damn it.”

“Damn what, my Lord? Only show me the soul to be damned and I will carry it to Hell myself!”

“Why have you interrupted my sabbatical, Gabriel? I left strict instructions not to be disturbed.”

Gabriel looked up at me from beneath his midnight tresses. The cosmic devotion shining from his eyes was enough to turn my stomach.

“You must return, Lord. You are needed.”

Gabriel floated across the room, hovering between the beats of a nanosecond as he shimmered through a myriad potential shapes: one moment an elemental spirit wrapped within its throbbing halo, the next a darkling cloud of electrons whirling about a sunbright core, the next a luminous winged humanoid armed with a shining sword.

Two things people don’t know about angels: one, they experience the entirety of their physical existence simultaneously; somatically linked to their future and past selves, they can read a limited distance into their own future or peer into their distant past. Two, I didn’t make them. Well, “I” did, in the sense that all consciousness is the by-product of universes: you, your dog… and most empirically… me. Universal consciousness evolves as its observers develop more complex methods to perceive it. Mortal sentience arises from a universe’s need to understand itself. But Immortal consciousness arises from humanity’s need to control an unpredictable universe. Humans identify patterns in order to master their surroundings. Sometimes those patterns are useful.

For example…

But many times the patterns humans intuit are wildly unreliable.

And when human survival dictated that mortals believe the universe answers to them, they tapped into the Eshuum and defined their gods. Gods then channeled the cosmic power of the evolving universe to forward human agendas like sex, inter-tribal conquest, sex, religious warfare, sex, incest, incestuous sex, genocide, and sex.

Angels, however, exist outside this eternal cycle of creation/awareness/destruction. Each one is a cosmic singularity, and all of them, all nine million of them, are utterly devoted to me. And before you stop to wonder if such devotion is a good thing: Imagine yourself as Daniel Gallagher, Michael Douglas’ character in
Fatal Attraction
. Now imagine Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), only immortal and able to travel vast distances in the blink of an eye. Now imagine all those psychotic demi-divinities violently in love… with you. Finally, remember that there are precisely nine million of them. Angels: cosmic pains in My All Powerful Arse.

“What’s the problem, Gabriel?”

Gabriel’s lightning-hued eyes darkened, but only for a moment.

“I
understand, Lord! You question me to encourage me to
think, that I might grasp Thy Will, and my place within It.”

Gabriel’s brow furrowed with angelic cogitation.

“You want me to choose which aspect of the problem is most pressing, thereby revealing some unfathomed aspect of my spiritual state and illuminating my destiny in ways which reflect Your unrelenting omniscience!”

Never question an angel when it believes you know all the answers. The resulting mental vaporlock could outlast an ice age.

“Exactly. Tell me.”

“An Incursion, Lord. In Rome. The worst in a millennium. Thousands injured.”
Gabriel cackled, gleefully rubbing his hands together like a cub scout warming himself over a campfire.
“At least ten thousand mortals have died
horribly.”

Another angelic fact: angels only help humans because I conscripted them into my service. Without the devotion they feel toward me, most wouldn’t urinate on a burning nun. Angels believe themselves the only beings in all of Creation worthy of God’s attention.

Gabriel averted his eyes. But I didn’t need godlike perspective to mark the ugly smirk on his beautiful face.

“Well?”

“Well what, Lord?”

“Who is it?”

My headache, a dull throb after my duel with Zeus only two days ago, was ramping itself up to a shrill pounding; a sure sign that something was happening.

“The name, Gabriel.”

“Ah! It’s Hannibal, Lord. The GodKing of the Carthaginians. He’s already gutted half of Rome and is marching on the Vatican even as we speak. All of which you already know, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I have the answer, Lord! The ‘problem’, as you put it, is complex in its scope and manifold in its severity. But I have sounded it to a suitable depth to answer your challenge.”

“Perfect. And… your conclusion?”

“Hannibal has mounted a mighty army of the dead to assault the mortal pontiff. Five thousand Nubians, seven thousand Carthaginian revenants, a thousand zombies, a thousand undead elephants! Forgive me, Mighty One. I
know
you know these things, so I will be brief. Hannibal sent a message. Shall I…?”

“Go on.”

Gabriel squared his shoulders and shook the hair out of his perfect eyes. (Did I mention that he was naked? All angels love to display their perfection. Gabriel shone with the energies of the universe, statuesque and perfectly androgynous, the joining at his inner thighs as smooth as a baby’s butt.) He cleared his throat and unruffled his spectral wings.