“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.
Behind him, Judas has not burst asunder with his bowels gushing out, which has happened to him before, the most recent time after he spoke to Carl Crispin of many of these very same things. This time, as he rushed headlong into the street, his stomach stopped wriggling and shrank back and he staggered around the corner and sat down on the sidewalk, his back to the metal wall of the diner, and he pulled his knees up under his chin, and now within him, it is the night on Mount Zion, outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem: The others have gone ahead to the upper room of this house and the Master has let them go up first and I wait upon him and he touches my arm and says “Come with me” and I do and we go around to the side of the house in the dark and the air smells of a wood fire and the Master smells of spikenard and I know Mary the Drastically Redeemed has been at him already and I’m thinking he’s too easily pampered, he’s getting too soft, there’s hard work to be done, man’s work, and I know he knows what I’m thinking, so I say “I’m sorry, Master” and he says “It’s almost over” and it’s me now who knows what he’s thinking and I say “So we’re not going to fight it out” and he says “You know the answer to that” and I do and he says “The stones of this house took long rubbing one against the other before they fit together” and I say “You mean the boys upstairs” and he says “The boys upstairs” and I say “Not enough rubbing” and he says “That would take till I’m gone and come back and gone and come back again” and he laughs and I laugh and I know what’s next and he says “I will ask you to do a thing now that will make you wish you’d never been born” and I say “If it’s what you need” and he puts his hand on my shoulder and even in the dark I can see the tears in the Master’s eyes.
Up the street, Hatcher is moving quickly. Soon he draws near to Administration Central. The Duesenberg is still sitting at the curb, and though he waited for Hatcher to reappear, since his orders were simply to chauffeur him, Porphyrius is not happy to see the TV minion’s approach. He’s starting to feel a little hot under the collar already.
Hatcher nods through the window at Porphyrius in his long-practiced, warm, famous-person-encountering-service-person manner and moves to the back door. He pauses and checks the sky. The sun is stalled high up in what Hatcher now sees as a powder-blue sky. He’s still not certain about a new Harrowing, but Judas’s words are stuck in his head. Get your own shit together. Hatcher climbs into the backseat of the Duesenberg and opens the map, ignoring Porphyrius’s glare in the rearview mirror. He finds the location of his nearest wife and gives his driver directions. They creep off into the crowded street.
And though Hatcher feels that this train of thought is wildly dissociated from what he has just experienced at the Automat — overlooking, as he does, the two underlying associative motifs of a striving for Heaven and books — his deep inner voice remembers: a magic bus, a book with large colored pictures about a bus full of travelers that flies away and I couldn’t have been more than three or four years old, and I was sitting in a window seat in my room with bright sun coming in and there was a page where a little boy discovers a golden button on the dashboard of a bus and he says to the driver, Push the button, please, sir, push the button, and the driver does, and the bus lifts off the street to the delight of all the passengers inside and, outside, to the surprise of a little girl and a puppy and a passing bird. And the rest of the book has vanished from within me, except for one two-page spread of artwork, and this has returned in dreams and in the moments drifting toward dreams, perhaps two dozen times over the many years since, and the image is this: the boy is looking out the window of the bus — though his looking out was established on an earlier page, for all these years I’ve simply known that the boy has pressed himself hard against the window and the other people have vanished for him — and on these two pages is just what he sees, from a great height: a rolling countryside with trees and a farmhouse and barns and a cornfield and, far ahead, a little village with a church steeple and a school and a neighborhood of white houses and the sun high in the sky and, most importantly, there is a truck, a bright blue panel truck with big round fenders and it is on the road through the countryside and it is heading for the little village and on the side of the truck is the word BREAD and when I was a child I imagined that it was my father driving that truck, it was my father, the friendly Bread Delivery Man who smiles all the time and whose breath smells of fresh bread, and later, when I dreamed of this scene, the father part had vanished, the driver simply drove anonymously, invisibly, and it was just the bread truck, but it was still in the perfect countryside, and I knew it was heading toward the place where I wanted to be.
Mary Ellen McCord — formerly Mary Ellen Gibson but Mary Ellen McCord even after her divorce from Hatcher as he was being promoted from anchorman of the evening news in St. Louis, Missouri, to network correspondent in Washington, D.C., and Mary Ellen McCord even to the day of her not-really-intentional-but-now-that-it-seems-to-be-happening-oh-what-the-fuck death by drowning off the Cayman Islands on a Golden Years Singles Cruise with two other unmarried sixty-something women friends — is being borne along as one of the multitude thronging Peachtree Street Road Circle. She is trying to get back to her apartment in the Career Mother neighborhood of the Great Metropolis in Hell now that she has been reconstituted after enduring the noontime sulfurous rain that she seems always to get caught in because she seems almost always to be in the street crowd for reasons she can’t even begin to figure out. But this time she actually recognizes the intersection with Peachtree Circle Court Loop and she actually fights her way to the edge of the crowd and actually breaks free to move abruptly into the mouth of the street where she lives just in time to be knocked off her feet and run over by a turning 1932 Duesenberg being driven by the greatest charioteer of the Eastern Roman Empire and bearing her ex-husband.