maledict. “How they hangin, baby?” he said, slapping Paris on the rump. Duane Fork dared to lick Cleopatra’s left breast. Ideas for reshaping this corner of Hell did not come; it was cast in stone that adulterers would puke and heave in permanent nausea; it would be a waste of time to design anything more than the concrete gutters already in situ.
It was not until the third circle that the Devil came alive with inventive eagerness. Cold rain and sleet hammered down on soil the consistency of a decayed sponge. Figures writhed in the mud. The Devil paused to hear some of the latest gossip which came in a hundred languages. The hoarse, desperate howling of Cerberus echoed from the black cliffs.
“Bad boy! Bad boy!” shouted the Devil encouragingly as he tossed the creature a handful of meatballs. Multiple heads snapped at the flying treats, none escaping the triple throat. Cerberus barked out thanks and a bit of news.
“Did you know that about Sarkozy?”
“No sir,” said Duane, taking a note.
“We can do something here,” said the Devil. “What we need are all those things that made New Orleans so great—slippery car tops, floating boards with protruding nails, a lot of sewage in the water, conflicting orders. Or maybe a tsunami once in a while. The place seems made for a classy tsunami. And I would like a heavy miasma to hang over everything. This ground fog is almost worthless.” He looked at the Stygian rock slopes streaming with black water. “Hell, the view alone is worth billions. Breathtaking. I’ve always loved this place.”
The golf cart lurched through the mire. They skirted the great marsh that prefaced the river Styx, but the sounds of the damned choking on silty mud carried through the humid atmosphere like hundreds of hogs at the trough. On the far shore they could see an unbelievably steep mountain and on its peak the city of Dis outlined against a fiery sky. At the boat landing the Devil whistled shrilly, and in the distance they saw the boatman Phlegyas poling toward them.
“You know, this is really Charon’s job, but I put him on the Acheron because he’s got a maître d’ personality—ushers in the newcomers with style. And Phlegyas is good enough at what he does.” The powerful boatman lifted the golf cart into the vessel and they set out across black water crowded with floundering swimmers whose numbers impeded the boat’s progress.
“Take a note, Duane. We want to put two or three hundred saltwater crocs in here. Order them from Australia. Double our fly-gnat-mosquito-chigger package order.”
Once landed at the base of the mountain, the Devil made a frame with his fingers and held it up against various vistas. He kept coming back to the city at the top.
“Location, location,” he murmured. “And we’ve been wasting it all this time. It is the ideal end point for the Tour de France. Pro cyclists have earned a place in Hell. It is twice the size of any Alp.” They set off up the steep slope, swerving around the boulders on the path.
“Just what I thought. Soft and easy. Let’s take a page from the Paris-Roubaix race, erroneously called ‘the Hell of the North.’ Let’s get some coarse and broken cobbles on the steepest stretches here. I want those guardrails removed from the abyss, and plenty of flints and Clovis points protruding from the final five kilometers. Varied weather will help; sleet storms, parching heat, black ice on the cobbles, hurricane force crosswinds and a few thousand clones of that German so-called Devil guy who dresses up in a smelly red union suit and runs around with a cardboard pitchfork, the jerk. He’s been looking at too many old woodcuts and I’ve got a place for him some sweet day. Every rider will be on drugs and some will go down frothing at the lips like Simpson on Mount Ventoux in nineteen sixty-whatever. And let’s have screaming crowds who throw buckets of filth and fine dust, handfuls of carpet tacks, who squirt olive oil and then piss on the riders. Water bottles filled with kerosene or alkali water. Riders have to fix their own bikes and carry spare tires around their necks. If they fall off and break an arm or leg no one can help them. More dogs on the course. And rattlesnakes. Let’s see—how about an obligatory enema in the starting gate and EPO breaks every thirty minutes? As for the UCI—” He whispered in the demon’s ear.
“Chapeau!” cried Duane Fork.
At the city of Dis the Devil told the enraged and tormented inhabitants to get ready for big-time bicycle racing. Gliding down through the next circles the Devil decided on a number of presidential suites modeled on Japanese hotel cubicles and Wal-Mart men’s rooms, added a slaughterhouse nightclub and made the decision that after a newcomer passed through the gate and was discharged by Charon into the main Welcome to Hell foyer he or she would find combined features of the world’s worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal, complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times and, finally, a twenty-seven-hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage.
On the climb up to Dis the Devil had noticed a cluster of scorched bowlegged men lollygagging near a boiling water hole. This area was posted as a reserve for Italian Renaissance politicians. Trespassing was forbidden.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s Butch Cassidy and some of his old gang. Cheeky bastards. Let’s plan something good for all the old rustlers and cowboys who have made it over the winding trail. I think we’ll give them a taste of their own medicine. Let’s get the Four Horsemen and some of our assistant imp riders and start herding those cowboys into bunches, cutting them out and moving them into pens. We’ll rope and throw them, castrate, vaccinate and brand them with my big Pitchfork iron. Oh, there’ll be plenty of dust and bawling and pleas. They’ll try to break away. They will screech and gibber. In the end we’ll turn them in to a sand pasture full of cheatgrass, goat-heads, cockleburs and ticks. They can ride the bicycles discarded by the tour racers and listen to Slim Whitman doing ‘Indian Love Call’ over the loudspeaker.”
“Ranchers, too?” asked Duane Fork.
“Nah. Nothing here would bother them.” He thought a moment and then said, “Wait! Better yet, give the ranchers herds of irritable minotaurs. And headstrong centaurs for mounts. Which reminds me, order one roasted for my dinner.”
“Which, minotaur, centaur or ranchaur?”
“Whatever’s easiest. Medium rare.”
As they drew abreast of the loungers the Devil called, “Hey, Butch, fucked any mules lately? Ha ha ha ha. Shake that wooden leg.”
Annoyed by the polyglot babbling of Dis, the Devil decided to standardize. “I think we’ll make the Khoisan language of the Bushmen the official language of Hell,” he said in a fluent stipple of dental, palatal, alveolar, lateral and bilabial clicks. Duane Fork whooshed agreement.
“Your accent is getting better, Duane, but it is still not crisp enough.” The Devil looked around at the mud and black trona-water fountains. “I don’t see any nettles or leafy spurge or mille-foil or crabgrass or water hyacinth. Let’s get a few of those USDA hacks to work—get some devil’s club in here.”
The Devil’s thoughts kept turning back to bicycle racers and he called the guard tower and ordered all the Junior Satan Scouts who patrolled the approach to the city to helpfully point racers toward projecting street furniture, pylons, potholes and drop-offs. Now that he was tuned in to something he was mentally calling “Sports of Hell,” the ideas flew like lekking mayflies. Duane Fork’s pencil ripped across the pages, skidding at the end of each line. Soccer alone sprouted eleven hundred improvements, and from soccer it was an easy leap to cricket and caber tossing and on to special arrangements for rental chefs, insecticide manufacturers, world leaders,
