“You know a lot about all this, Carl.”
Carl shrugs and turns his face to the window. “I may be a liar, but I’m a good reporter.”
Outside the window, Jezebel’s eight hundred and fifty slaughtered priests of Baal are crowding past, all their wounds still open and running. Unseen to Carl and Hatcher, Elijah is being borne along, squeezed tightly in their midst, cloaked in their blood.
“I can see that you are,” Hatcher says.
Carl lifts his face and then nods toward Judas. “He’s my source on the Harrowing.”
“Judas?”
“Yes.”
Hatcher takes this in. “Would you mind if I talk to him directly?”
Carl laughs softly and cocks his head at Hatcher. “You’re standing on journalistic protocol down here? Asking me?”
Hatcher sees how this would seem odd. He’s not sure he would have asked his reporter for permission only a short time ago.
“Of course,” Carl says. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Hatcher says, and he moves off toward the New Testament table.
As he approaches, Judas has stopped reading, and Rhoda is offering a critique. “Everyone assumes it’s Gnostics because you did it in the third person. You need to rewrite it in the first person.”
“Good suggestion,” Festus says, giving Rhoda a little wink. “Make them wonder. We heard he hanged himself right away. But he took time to write this.”
“Not to mention the irony,” Silas says, also winking at Rhoda.
“What irony?” Festus says with a little more heat than one might reasonably expect. “That’s all you ever say. What’s irony got to do with it?”
Hatcher is beside the table now and the two men abruptly stop their bickering. All four look up at the newcomer in the suit.
“I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m Hatcher McCord.”
“I watch you all the time,” Rhoda purrs.
Festus and Silas both scowl. Judas glances over to Carl and then back to Hatcher. He rises. “I’ll talk to him,” Judas says to the others, and then to Hatcher, “Got nickels?”
Hatcher feels in his pockets. “Yes.”
“Come on,” Judas says, and he leads them to the back wall. He peers through the window of a food compartment and then another and another, moving along the row. “Not much choice today,” he says. “But there never is.” He stops and turns to Hatcher.
“Give me thirty nickels and I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Judas says.
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.”