word,” he said.
He swallowed his whiskey in a gulp and coughed violently, ending with a retching sound. He mopped tears from his eyes. “My sisters bawled their eyes out when they read those death notices and they cursed him, but when they went back home they never said anything,” he said. “Everybody, the ones in LaBarge and Dixon and Chadron and god knows where else kept real quiet. He got away with it. Until now. I think I’ll have another whiskey. All this talking kind of dries my throat,” he said, and he got the bottle himself.
“Well,” said Beth, trying to make amends for misunderstanding, “at least we’ve got this extended family now. It’s exciting finding out about all the cousins.”
“Beth, they are not cousins. Think about it,” he said. He had thought she was smart. She wasn’t.
“Honestly, I think it’s cool. We could all get together for Thanksgiving. Or Fourth of July.”
Ray Forkenbrock’s shoulders sagged. Time was swinging down like a tire on the end of a rope, slowing, letting the old cat die.
“Grandfather,” said Beth gently. “You have to learn to love your relatives.”
He said nothing, and then, “I loved my father.
“That’s the only one I loved,” he said, knowing it was hopeless, that she was not smart and she didn’t understand any of what he’d said, that the book he thought he was dictating would be regarded as an old man’s senile rubbish. Unbidden, as wind shear hurls a plane down, the memory of the old betrayal broke the prison of his rage and he damned them all, pushed the tape recorder away and told Beth she had better go back home to her husband.
“It’s ridiculous,” Beth said to Kevin. “He got all worked up about his father who died back in the 1930s. You’d think there would have been closure by now.”
“You’d think,” said Kevin, his face seeming to twitch in the alternating dim and dazzle of the television set.
Duane Fork, the Devil’s demon secretary, rushed around readying the suite of offices. He sprinkled grit and dust on the desktops, gravel on the floor, pulled closed the heavy red velvet drapes and sprayed the room with Eau de Fumier. Precisely on the dot of midnight he heard the familiar hoof steps coming down the hallway and drew up to attention.
“Good morning, sir,” said Duane obsequiously.
“Merde,” grunted the Devil, looking around with a peevish eye. “This place is—unspeakable.” He had just come back from the Whole World Design & Garden show in Milan, where he posed as an avant-garden-furniture designer who worked in crushed white paper. “If it gets rain-spotted and grimy, who cares? Just kick it into the barbecue and burn it up,” he advised. But all the while his guts were twisting with jealous desire as he looked at plastic poolside sofas, walkways beneath pleached tree boughs, tropical palm gardens, rock grottoes and cantilevered decks. On the way back to Hell he leafed through half a dozen design glossies, filled out the subscription blank for Dwell and thought briefly of starting a rival publication to be called Dwell in Hell. Studying the magazines, he understood that his need was more for landscaping, riverside parks and monuments than for architectural design.
“Nothing has been done with this damn place for aeons. It’s old-fashioned, it’s passé, people yawn when they think of Hell. Slimy rocks and gloomy forests do not have the negative frisson of yesteryear—there are environmentalists now who love such features. We need to keep up with the times. Modernize. Expand and enlarge. We’ve got to enlarge now that our Climate Rehab Program is working—deserts, melting glaciers, inundations. We’re starting to look frumpy in comparison. And, Duane, all signs in the Human Abode point to a major religious war on the way; if we don’t get ready for an influx we’ll have a vexing problem.”
On the way home from the design show he had also read a japish piece in a screed that called itself The Onion pretending to report on the addition of a tenth circle to accommodate an increasing number of Total Bastards, most of them American businessmen. The Devil had smiled. A tenth circle was not a bad idea, but Hell’s coming population increase would demand much more than providing quarters for tobacco lobbyists and corporate executives. In the long run there was probably no need to build an extension; since nearly all humans were inevitably damned, a simple inversion would do, much like turning a length of intestine inside out and using it as a sausage casing. The earth itself, with no labor on his part, would become Hell Plus. In the meantime he intended to upgrade the current facilities.
“Today, Duane, we are going to tour the property and see where we can make improvements. I want you to bring your notebook. Andiamo!” They set out on a red golf cart, the Devil wearing only his shooting jacket, Duane, an eyeshade.
On the way the Devil tossed out infomercial nuggets he had absorbed from his study of the magazines. “It’s not so much that we want to tear things down and start over with restructuring, bulldozers, topsoil and fill and imported rocks. What we want is to see the potential in what’s already here and work with that. The basic bones of the place are good. We know that. We’ll use a construction outfit that has worked in Iraq—Rout & Massacre sounds like our kind of company. Give them a call and get an idea of their fees. If they are too high we’ll forcibly transfer them here and make them a local company.”
At the main gate the Devil rolled his eyes.
“Got to keep the sign,” he said. “You can’t really improve on that last line, ‘ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE!’ But the gate is boring. Without the sign it’s just another Romanesque stone gate. But if we replace it with something modern like the St. Louis arch and an electric fall—”
Duane Fork’s furrowed brow and wry face indicated confusion.
“What’s the matter?” asked the Devil. “You prefer pepper spray?”
“Oh no! I guess I just don’t know what an electric fall is.”
“Heard of a waterfall, haven’t you?”
“Yessir.”
“An electric fall is the same thing, but with electricity, not water. Of course we could mix them—that make you happy?”
“I’m happy with whatever you want to do, sir.”
“Good. Make a note. Entrance Gate—St. Louis arch with electrified waterfall.”
At the river the Devil cracked a few jokes with Charon but had no suggestions for enhancing the crossing process after the old man snarled “Fine just the way it is.” Charon’s hot-coal eyes winked spasmodically. He smote five or six naked wretches with his oar and said, “You remember to pick up my eyedrops?”
“Damn!” said the Devil. “I forgot again! Next time for sure. Try sticking your head in the river.” He floored it and they drove away from the riverbank, whizzed through the suburb of Limbo.
“Bor-ring,” said the Devil, glancing at the writers and poets standing around the film producers, the scribblers holding manuscripts and talking up their ideas.
At the second circle, the source of the dark-and-stormy-night literary genre and a warehouse for marital
