Spring 2007 (29 page)

Pretty soon half a dozen other guys, who all looked like
the first one’s bigger, stronger, nastier older brothers were begging for the
chance to face me in hand-to-hand combat.

“You are all splendid example of our race,” said
Valeria. “I find it difficult to make a choice.” She turned to me. “Lucifer, I
will allow you to choose your opponent.”

“You’re sure?” I said. “I mean, once I choose, you
promise you won’t go back on your word?”

“The word of the High Priestess is absolute law,” she
said.

“Okay,” I said. “I choose you.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me,” I said. “You told me I could choose my
opponent in this here rasslin’ match. I choose you.”

“But I meant…”

“And you told me in front of everyone that the word of
the High Priestess was in purple.”

“Inviolate,” she corrected me. Then she turned to the
assembled warriors and priestesses and lesser beings. “I gave my word.” She
took her crown off and handed it another gorgeous naked lady who I guessed was
her Vice High Priestess.

The crowd formed kind of a circle around us. I’d have
took off my shirt, but I’d been wearing it so long it was kind of stuck to me,
so I just spit on my hands, rubbed ‘em together, and got ready for the referee
to ring the bell.

It was when Valeria punched me in the stomach that I
realized that we didn’t have no referee nor no bell, and when she sunk her
teeth into my ear I figgered out that we didn’t have no rules neither.

I pulled back, leaving some ear in her mouth, and we
started circling around each other. Then she reached out to grab me, and I
reached out to grab her, and a second later she slapped my face again.

“Don’t do that!” she snapped.

I didn’t know whether to apologize or tell her to
protect herself in the clinches, so I settled for circling around her again and
grabbing a little lower this time, which just got me another slap in the face.

“Damn it, Lucifer, are you wrestling me or molesting
me?”

Before I could answer she launched herself through the
air at me, and I fell over backward with her on top of me. After that things happened
real fast for the next few seconds, and then she slapped me yet again.

“No kissing!” she yelled.

I grabbed ahold of her left wrist with my right hand and
her right wrist with my left hand. She wrapped her legs around my waist and
started squeezing the air out of me, and while she was doing that she wrapped
her other legs around my ankles so’s I couldn’t move, which surprised me
because up until that very moment I’d thunk she only had two legs.

Then she wrapped some more legs around my thighs, and then
I heard her legs starting to hiss, and I realized that Bubbles had decided his
mistress was in trouble and had come on over to protect her.

“Foul!” I yelled.

“What are you talking about?” she grated. “I haven’t
done anything to you yet.”

“You get that snake off’n me or I’m gonna bring my godly
wrath down on both your heads!” I said.

She twisted around to see what I was talking about.

“Bubbles!” she cried. “Go back to your dog house!”

Bubbles looked plaintively at her.

“Now!”

Bubbles gave my legs one final squeeze for good measure
and crawled off.

Valeria watched him slither off, and since her attention
was took elsewhere, I gave her a delicate little pinch in a delicate little
place to see if I could encourage her to get off me, and all I can tell you is that
if basketball players could jump like that they’d have to give serious
consideration to raising the hoop to maybe twelve or fifteen feet.

As for me, I figgered if I got up she’d just knock me
down again, and if I actually put any hold on her, she’d either slap my face
(depending on where the hold was) or Bubbles would come hissing and sliding to
her rescue again, so I reasoned that the best thing was to stay right on the
ground where I was.

“Get up, Lucifer!” she snarled. “I’m going to tear you
to pieces!”

“I can’t,” I said. “Your snake done busted up my legs.”

“I didn’t hear anything break,” she said.

“Muscles don’t make as loud a snapping sound as bones
do,” I said. “But if you wanted this to be a fair fight in front of your
people, we’re gonna have to postpone it until I got my legs back under me.”

“All right,” she said reluctantly. “But if you’re
lying…”

“Gods ain’t capable of lying,” I said, crossing my
heart.

“I’d have sworn there were a lot of things gods weren’t
capable of before I got in the ring with you,” she said bitterly.

“I suppose that means you don’t want to kiss and make
up?”

She just glared at me and then ordered a couple of the
bigger guys who had wanted to rassle me to carry me over to the altar, where
I’d have room to lie down and stretch my feet out. One of them pulled his knife
out and turned to her.

“As long as he’s here anyway, Priestess,” he said, “it
seems a shame to waste the opportunity.”

“No, I must keep my word,” said Valeria. “We will continue
our battle when his legs have healed.”

“You know,” I said, “as long as we’re postponing it, we
could pass the word to neighboring continents and sell tickets.”

“What’s a ticket?” asked Valeria.

“What’s a neighboring continent?” asked the guy with the
knife.

Well, I could see that they were just a bunch of
ignorant peasants, half of ‘em beautiful and half of ‘em ugly, and all of them
badly in need of a god what could teach ‘em the ways of civilized societies.
But before I could tell them why they were in serious need of me, Valeria
ordered them all out, except for two nubile lesser priestesses what wasn’t
wearing no more clothes than she herself was.

“On the off chance that you really are a god, you will
stay here in the temple until you can walk again,” said Valeria. “I am leaving
these two handmaidens to bring you food and tend to your wounds.”

“You ain’t staying your own self?” I asked.

I thunk she was gonna slap me again, but instead she
just glared at me for a moment, then turned to the two girls.

“You know your duties,” she said. “But be very careful
whenever you get within arm’s reach of him.”

“But isn’t he a god, High Priestess?” asked one of them.

“Possibly,” said Valeria. “But if so, then he is a dirty
old god. You have been warned.”

Then she was gone.

I sat up and slung my feet over the side of the altar.
“Well, ladies,” I said, “what’s for dinner?”

“Henry, if they catch him before sundown,” said the one
on the left.

“Are you really a god?” asked the other one.

“Cross my heart and swear to myself I am,” I answered.

“What’s heaven like?”

“Funny you should ask,” I said. “I thunk we might just
experience a little bit of it before we eat.”

“You can actually transport us to heaven?” she asked,
all kind of wide-eyed and trusting.

“Sure can.”

“How?”

“Come on over here and I’ll show you,” I said.

About three seconds later she slapped my face.

“Don’t they teach you anything in priestess school
besides sunbathing and face-slapping?” I asked, rubbing my cheek.

“Don’t they teach you gods anything besides pinching and
grabbing?” she shot back.

“I was just practicing my rasslin’ holds,” I said.

“I
know
what you were practicing,” she said.

“Actually, it looked like fun,” said the other one.
“And, well, if he really
is
a god, it’d be a shame to miss an
opportunity to learn what lies ahead of us in heaven.”

“You know,” said the first one, “I never looked at it
that way.”

“Sure,” said the other one. “And if he’s as clumsy as
Henry, then we’ll know he’s a mortal and we’ll feed him to Bubbles.”

“No,” said the first. “The High Priestess says Bubbles
is gaining too much weight. We’ll just chop him up into little pieces and feed
him to the piranhas.”

“I don’t know,” said the other one. “Then they’ll want
to be fed every day, and it won’t be safe to go swimming.” She paused for a
moment, considering their options. “We could tie him up and put a bunch of
hungry scorpions on his belly.”

The first one made a face. “I don’t like scorpions.”

“Rats, then,” suggested the other. Then she shook her
head. “No, that won’t work. Bubbles has eaten most of the rats. I suppose we
could make him swallow a bunch of
marabunta
and let them eat their way
out.”

“Remember that Chinaman who wandered in here, delirious
from fever, and kept raving about the Death of a Thousand Cuts?” said the
first.

Well, the two of ‘em kept discussing the penalties for
my potential failure in their delicate ladylike way for the next ten minutes,
and got so wrapped up in it that they didn’t even notice that I’d climbed down
off the altar and had made my way to a side door.

“All right,” announced one of ‘em at last. “We’re ready
to be transported to heaven on a sea of sexual bliss.”

“Or else,” said the other ominously.

They may have said some more things, but by then I was
running back down the hill I’d climbed when I first found the lost continent of
Moo, and I didn’t slow down nor miss a step until I’d put quite a distance
betwixt me and it.

I was mentally patting myself on the back for making
good my escape when I felt a thumping somewhere between my shoulder blades.
This struck me as kind of unusual. I knew I had a right powerful brain, but I
didn’t know it was strong enough to translate mental pats into real ones, so I
turned around and who should I find myself facing but Henry, who was covered by
dirt and a bunch of cuts where he’d brushed by thorny bushes on his way out of
Moo.

“I hate you!” he said. “You ruined the god business for
both of us!”

“Maybe not,” I said. “There’s a couple of heavenly
handmaidens in the temple that are just waiting to be transported on a wave of
bliss, or maybe it was a sea of passion. Anyway, it was something wet, I’m
pretty sure of that. Just go back up there after dark and they’ll think it’s
me.”

“What the hell good will
that
do?” demanded Henry.
“I see they ran you off too.”

“No, I run off on my own,” I said. “Believe me, there’s
two beautiful naked priestess just dying for a little male companionship.”

“Really?” he said, his face brightening under the dirt
and the beard.

“I give you my godly word on it,” I said. “Just make
sure it’s dark when you get there, and it probably wouldn’t hurt none to lose
your beard first, or at least convince ‘em it’s fast-growing since I didn’t
have none when I took my leave of them a few hours ago.”

He stuck out his hand. As first I thunk he was looking
for money, but then I realized it wasn’t palm up so I took it and we shook in
friendship.

“I guess you ain’t all that bad a guy, as lying,
backstabbing, claim-jumping bastards go,” said Henry.

“And you’re certainly better than the average greedy,
uncouth, foul-smelling fiend from New Jersey,” I said.

So we parted friends after all, and I figured it was
time to continue my quest for the perfect spot to build my tabernacle. I
wandered across that huge cow pasture for almost a week, and finally I came to
a little outpost made all of logs except for the parts that weren’t, and I
walked in and made a beeline for the bar.

“What’ll it be, stranger?” said the bartender.

“Gimme a shot of your best whiskey and a chaser,” I told
him.

“What kind of chaser?”

“Another whiskey,” I said.

“You’re new around here, ain’t you?” he said. “Where do
you hail from?”

“I just arrived from the lost continent of Moo.”

He stared at me for a moment. “Funny,” he said. “You
don’t
look
Mooish.”

“Tell me something, Brother,” I said. “Where’s the
nearest civilized city what’s got an abundance of sinners, especially of the
female persuasion, that’s in serious need of saving?”

“Well, you for a lot of choices,” he answered. “It’s
getting close to carnival time in Rio off to the east, they say they just
discovered emeralds up north in Equador, I hear tell they found some lost Inca
city filled with gold and other trinkets off to the west in Peru, and the
gauchos are having their annual round-up just south of here and there figures
to be a lot of money at the other end of it, ready to buy a few million tons of
beef, and where there’s money there’s almost always sinners.”

“True, true,” I agreed. “Thanks for your help, Brother.”
I downed my drinks, had a few more, got my face slapped yet again when I thunk
one of the ladies at the bar was looking lonely and lovelorn, and finally I
wandered outside to watch the sunset.