workers!” the Devil shouted. “Their hard hats will melt, their scaffolds collapse unceasingly. Ice cream truck vendors? A hot coal in each scoop of vanilla. Goat turds in the chocolate—I’ll make them myself.” He seized two fire cones from the roadside dispenser for refreshment. Then a glimpse of roasting moneylenders in the distance made him think of banks and loans, bills and taxes.
“Canada Revenue! We’ll let them play hockey, their national sport, down on Circle Nine’s ice.”
“Wouldn’t the IRS be better? More infamous?”
“Duane, the IRS is a babe in the woods compared to Canada Revenue. There is no agency on earth as contumacious, bureaucratized, power-obsessed, backhanded, gouging, red-taped, cavernous and carnivorous as Canada Revenue.”
“But if hockey is their national sport, won’t they take pleasure in playing it?”
“I think not. The blades will be inside the skates. And those blades will be warm.”
But the idea of a tenth circle haunted him. He might do it. It would have to be something utterly unexpected, a stunning surprise, a coup. As he steered the golf cart it came to him—an art museum. Not just a collection of works earthly museum directors wished to consign to Hell but depictions of himself through the millennia in every guise from monstrous yellow-eyed goats to satin-winged bats, the fabulous compartments of the Nether Regions and, of course, a catalog of human vices and evils, of plummeting sinners.
His ideas tumbled out. In one of the museum’s galleries he would set up the Musical Inferno which Hieronymus Bosch had painted so cleverly. He would have all of Goya’s witches and his stinking hordes, toothless, pierced, howling, wracked and terrified. He would have every piece of Satanic art even though many showed him as humbled by upward-gazing saints; he always had the last laugh there. Venusti showed a fatuous Saint Bernard holding him chained, but a moment later the chain had melted. The painter had not dared to show that. Michael Pacher had given him a fabulous frog-green skin, but the deer antlers and the buttocks-face were overdone. Gerard David’s portrait was finer. A special room for Gustave Doré, whose inventiveness he cherished. Very pleasant as well were the many harvest pictures where he tossed damned souls into his fireproof gunnysack. He would crowd the museum with all the Last Judgments, the damned dropping into the inferno like ripe figs from a tree. Signorelli—he couldn’t understand how Signorelli had known to give his demons green and grey and violet skins—a lucky guess perhaps. And surely one of Signorelli’s demons was Duane Fork biting at a man’s head? He might ask the painter— if he could find him. They had to start compiling a database of the damned and their particular niches; it was impossible to find anyone in Hell.
Still on the idea of the art museum, he planned a solitary room with no other paintings where he thought he would hang William Blake’s Satan Instigating the Rebel Angels, which showed him as the most beautiful angel of all, more handsome than any Greek god, before the rebellion failed and he was cast down and out. But thinking of that time made him morose and he decided to eschew the Blake; he’d have Rubens instead and Tiepolo. As he made his mental list of the paintings and sculptures he intended to gather, he realized what a terrific labor it would be to pry them away from the Prado, the Duomo, the Louvre, the Beaux-Arts, various art institutes and bibliothèques, private collections and monasteries, cathedrals and churches. The plan abruptly crashed. Well, well, there was the rub; he was not going into any monasteries or churches. And there the renovation plans stopped. His one-track mind could not get past the monasteries, cathedrals and churches.
He ought to have plucked some professional art thieves from their fiery labors and sent them up to do the job, but the story says nothing about that.
There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.
ARCHIE & ROSE, 1885
Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P.H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and the springy waves of auburn hair that seemed charged with voltage. He usually lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a leathery prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. They chinked the cabin with heavy yellow clay. One day Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for their doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, to see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel.
“He’ll keep the mice down,” said Rose.
“Yeah, if the bastard don’t bite somebody,” said Archie, flexing his right forefinger. “And you’ll wear them windows out, warshin em so much,” but he liked the way the south glass caught Barrel Mountain in its frame. A faint brogue flavored his sentences, for he had been conceived in Ireland, born in 1868 in Dakota Territory of parents arrived from Bantry Bay, his father to spike ties for the Union Pacific Railroad. His mother’s death from cholera when he was seven was followed a few weeks later by that of his father, who had whole-hog guzzled an entire bottle of strychnine-laced patent medicine guaranteed to ward off cholera and measles if taken in teaspoon quantities. Before his mother died she had taught him dozens of old songs and the rudiments of music structure by painting a plank with black and white piano keys, sitting him before it and encouraging him to touch the keys with the correct fingers. She sang the single notes he touched in her tone-pure voice. The family wipeout removed the Irish influence. Mrs. Sarah Peck, a warmhearted Missouri Methodist widow, raised the young orphan to the great resentment of her son, Bunk.
* * *
A parade of saddle bums drifted through the Peck bunkhouse and from an early age Archie listened to the songs they sang. He was a quick study for a tune, had a memory for rhymes, verses and intonations. When Mrs. Peck went to the land of no breakfast forever, caught in a grass conflagration she started while singeing slaughtered chickens, Archie was fourteen and Bunk in his early twenties. Without Mrs. Peck as buffer, the relationship became one of hired hand and boss. There had never been any sense of kinship, fictive or otherwise, between them. Especially did Bunk Peck burn over the hundred dollars his mother left Archie in her will.
Everyone in the sparsely settled country was noted for some salty dog quirk or talent. Chay Sump had a way with the Utes, and it was to him people went when they needed fine tanned hides. Lightning Willy, after incessant practice, shot both pistol and carbine accurately from the waist, seemingly without aiming. Bible Bob possessed a nose for gold on the strength of his discovery of promising color high on the slope of Singlebit Peak. And Archie McLaverty had a singing voice that once heard was never forgotten. It was a straight, hard voice, the words falling out halfway between a shout and a song. Sad and flat
