Of Heaven and Hell Read online

  It wasn’t until he bent to ask for Big Jimmy’s help in climbing down that he noticed the brouhaha brewing at his feet. Most of the members were gathered protectively around Big Jimmy, who was hollering himself red-faced at an equally impassioned passerby.

  “... so sick of this shit!” the man—very brawny woman? person in a sparkly ballerina tutu, at all events—was shouting. “Who asked you to come out here tonight? You think being gay’s such a sin, then don’t be it.” Would that it were that easy, Hubert lamented. “But leave us the fuck alone!” the ballerina continued.

  “The Lord God Almighty, that’s who asked me to come out here tonight!” Big Jimmy retorted at the top of his voice. “The Gospel of Mark compels me: ‘Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature!’ ‘How can they hear without someone preaching to them?’ Romans 10:14!”

  “Your God is not the boss of me!” the ballerina hurled back. “From the Book of Kiss My Ass!”

  “‘Whoever rejects the Son will not see life.’”

  “And yet here I am, doing more living than you’ll ever see.”

  “Yeah!” “You tell him!” and “Fuck off!” were among the catcalls from the crowd that reached Hubert’s ears. The swirl of people at his feet was becoming agitated as two, then four, then a dozen angry people surged toward Big Jimmy and the members clustered protectively around him, shoving and yelling variations of “Mind your own business” and “Leave us alone.”

  “Jimmy, knock it off,” Hubert cried. “I need help.” His newspaper box was being banged about and he was starting to fret. “Jimmy?!” There were very few friendly faces in the crowd. Hubert’s angel looked on with some interest, but Hubert was afraid Big Jimmy would put him off the idea of salvation if he started a brawl, and he didn’t want his golden boy to slip away before Hubert could get himself down and steer him onto the path. But if Big Jimmy heard Hubert, he paid him no mind.

  For he’d hit his stride, throwing his favorite Bible verses at the irate ballerina and his/her unruly allies. “‘Flee from sexual immorality!’” Big Jimmy cried.

  “No, see, you flee from sexual immorality,” the ballerina yelled. “We don’t have a problem with our sexuality. You’re the one with the problem. You flee. As in, Get the fuck out of here and go crying back to Baby Jesus.”

  Big Jimmy would not be swayed, and he would certainly not be bossed by a man in a pink dress. He stood his ground, even as the crowd pressed in on him. Hubert saw a man drain his beer and take the empty bottle by the neck. Another picked up a rock. “Jimmy, leave it be,” he begged. “Please help me down. Don’t start trouble, Reverend Jarvis says! There’s a guy over there, I think I can help him. Jimmy, please!”

  But Hubert might as well have been hollering just to hear the sound of his own voice. As the crowd moved in tighter to heckle and harass Big Jimmy, the top of the newspaper box wasn’t seeming like such a hot idea, but he was loath to stumble off it and aggravate an agitator.

  “‘Honor God with your body!’” Big Jimmy went on.

  “Yeah, right,” scoffed the ballerina. “Is that what you do at the buffet, there, Chubs?”

  Big Jimmy was visibly embarrassed. Hubert looked away, but he heard Big Jimmy say, “Hey, this isn’t about my body.”

  “Oh, did the big fat hypocrite get his feelings hurt?”

  “That’s it....”

  Even though he hadn’t seen it, Hubert knew Big Jimmy threw the first punch. Reverend Jarvis wasn’t gonna like this. The mess went from man-to-man to a full-on melee in short order. Hubert heard glass break, heard as many shouts of “Stop!” as he did of “Get him!” and then he lost his footing. The newspaper box went over and Hubert groped frantically to steady himself, grabbing at fistful after fistful of thin air. Just the fall wouldn’t have killed him, naturally, and Big Jimmy wasn’t swinging his “ALL HOMOS GO STRAIGHT: TO HELL!” placard at Hubert, but he was swinging it with all the rage and shame he had in him, which was not inconsiderable. Hubert fell into the wrong place at exactly the wrong time; Big Jimmy had always been more of a football star than any kind of baseball hero, and, as had just been pointed out, his jock days of any kind were well behind him, but when he hit Hubert’s head with that pipe, he knocked it out of the park.

  WHEN HUBERT came around, it was the absolute quiet that struck him the most odd. His bony butt didn’t hurt from being fallen upon, his head didn’t hurt from being smashed to smithereens, but he’d clearly had his hearing hammered out of him. He was lying in the middle of a crowded street, surrounded by worried, yammering faces, and hadn’t there been five kinds of dance music bouncing through the air two seconds ago? He wondered if he should panic, or try to say something comforting to horror-stricken Big Jimmy, but he couldn’t work up the concern to do more than lie there and take it all in. What did San Francisco use in their asphalt, he wondered, that made it so cloud-like?

  “How’re you feeling, Hubert?” The voice was so deep and resonant Hubert couldn’t be sure if he heard it with his ears or just felt it rumble through his soul, but the golden boy in the angel costume had materialized at his side and made contact with him, which was more than any of the people shaking him and kicking at his legs had been able to do. So he hadn’t gone completely deaf. Phew.

  “Oh, hi,” Hubert said, suddenly eager to sit up. “Did you see? I fell. I think I’m all right, though. Weird: it don’t hurt at all.”

  The golden boy nodded. “Yeah, he thunked you pretty good. You probably didn’t have time to feel it. I s’pose that’s a blessing, huh?”

  Hubert nodded, too. He looked into the golden boy’s friendly face, all wide brown eyes and rosy cheeks, and smiled. Then he wrinkled his nose. “How do you know my name? From everybody saying it?”

  The golden boy smiled with one half of his mouth. “Something like that.”

  “I should let Big Jimmy know I’m okay. He don’t look so good.”

  “Yeah, that’s gonna take him awhile,” the golden boy said. He laid a hand on Hubert’s shoulder and a tingling warmth burst through Hubert like he’d been shot full of sunshine. “You’re gonna come with me, though, want to?”

  “Are you like a doctor?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Cuz that’s quite a healing touch you got there.”

  The golden boy smiled. “Thank you.” He took Hubert helpfully by the elbow and helped him stand. “Feels all right?”

  Hubert shook one leg out, and then the other. Felt his neck, looked around. “Yeah, I feel fine. Great, actually.”

  Big Jimmy and the other Church members and an impressive crowd of looky-loos stayed gathered around the spot where Hubert had lain. Really? No one noticed him get up? They couldn’t have been that concerned. “Jimmy, I’m okay,” Hubert said. He laid a hand on Big Jimmy’s shoulder. He hoped to comfort the big lug, or at the very least get his attention, but Big Jimmy could not be swayed from keening over the empty spot in the street. “Jimmy!”

  “He can’t hear you.” Such a deep voice for such a cherubic face.

  Hubert gave him a startled look. “How come? What, he go deaf, too? Jimmy!”

  “Maybe you should come with me now,” the golden boy said, again taking Hubert by the elbow. Again Hubert’s body responded like the kid had thrown a hair dryer into his bath tub.

  “Why can I hear you?” Hubert asked, suddenly suspicious. “Ain’t no other sound in the world but your voice. Why?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” the golden boy assured him. “There are lots of sounds, sometimes it gets downright noisy. It’s just... how to put this? This isn’t your world anymore.”

  “That don’t make no sense.”

  The golden boy nodded again. “I know. But it will. Come on. Come with me?”

  It didn’t feel right to Hubert to just leave. Without Big Jimmy? Without telling Caroline? Who would tell Granddad where he’d gone? Where was he going? The hospital? Really, he felt fine—besides the hammering his pride was taking when no one seemed to kno
w or care that he wasn’t still lying in the street—but when he looked into the golden boy’s face, he just couldn’t seem to formulate a protest. Who in their right mind would refuse an invitation from this gorgeous, guileless creature?

  “Where are we going?” he managed to ask.

  The golden boy smiled. He gave his shoulders—again mighty and broad for such an apparent innocent—two, then three, quick shrugs, and the wings Hubert had noticed as part of his costume unfurled with a lavender-scented whoosh and a rustle of white, pink, and gold feathers. He took Hubert by the waist—Hubert nearly fainted with the joy of being against him—bent his knees deep, and then jumped. “You’ll see,” he said as they took flight.

  Hubert squealed in surprise; then he laughed with delight. He was flying! He’d never flown before. Not in an airplane, not in a hot air balloon, and certainly not in the arms of a beautiful boy with wings like great walls of feathers who smelled like summertime. He figured he should probably be afraid—apprehensive, at the very least—but as they soared into the night sky, he was agog at the magic of the moment. Immediately they were above the rooftops, and soon ascending far beyond the city, which twinkled beneath them, surrounded by the silvery waves of the Bay, the Golden Gate, and the great heaving Pacific. They climbed through the clouds, prickly cold against Hubert’s face, and then soared across unending sky, sailing on the winds with only the very occasional push from the golden boy’s sparkling wings.

  In the quiet violet of the night, the golden boy was aglow, radiating light from his hair and heat from the pillowy sculpture of his body. He held Hubert with all the effort of a three-year-old lugging his care-tattered blanket, and the ecstatic roll of his eyes betrayed each stroke of his wings as a delight rather than a chore. Occasionally he pulled Hubert tighter against him. “Are you okay?” would rumble through him, and Hubert could only laugh and nod yes into his chest. By the time he figured out he was dead, Hubert’s only lament was The Church’s blanket rejection of any and all discussion of reincarnation. Because if it was always like this, he rather thought he wouldn’t mind dying again.

  “You really are an angel,” Hubert all but gushed when the golden boy set him gently down on a rolling sea-front lawn.

  The golden boy nodded with a grin. “We find that the news is easier for you all to take if we show before we tell. Fun, right?”

  “Super fun! But, where are we? I mean, how did you know...?”

  “It’s our job to know. This is kind of what we do.”

  For the golden boy had delivered Hubert straight to the patch of Sonoma coast on which he’d longed to live ever since he caught a glimpse of it in a Church video detailing the miracle of Creation. And if ever Hubert had witnessed a miracle with his own two eyes, it was the vista from this cliff-top hillock. The towering rocks, stoic against the rhythmic battering of the foamy surf, gathered in small clusters so as never to miss even one riotous red sunset; the flocks of sea birds fishing and frolicking in the waves, resting and nesting in the crags of the cliffs; the green grass gamboling from tree to tree, the scent of eucalyptus skittering by on the breeze. Tucked up against the first stand of trees stood the small, stalwart home he’d always dreamed of building, maybe with Big Jimmy’s help: nothing but wood and windows, an unobtrusive shelter that was the closest thing Hubert could imagine to living on a picnic blanket in the grass and still have protection from the wind and rain. It was a dream come so painstakingly true, Hubert was bowled over.

  “It’s for me?”

  “If you can dream it, we can do it.” The golden boy grinned.

  “You did this?”

  “Well, ‘we,’ you know, the team. I’m not on the Realization side. I’ve been in training pretty much my whole life.”

  “For what?”

  The golden boy looked taken aback. “Well, for taking care of you, obviously. Did I forget to tell you that? I’m not any old angel, Hubert. I’m Bartholomew.” Hubert’s face betrayed no reaction, so the golden boy went on. “I’m your angel.”

  “What, like my guardian angel? I just died at twenty-nine, and you were there. Maybe you needed more training?”

  Bartholomew chuckled. “We don’t ‘guardian’ you down there,” he said. “What with Free Will and all, you’re pretty much on your own. Thankfully. I mean, last night was fun and all, but I can’t imagine spending years and years on Earth. That place is a mess. It’s a mob scene, for one thing. Do you really need all those cars? And the coffee’s terrible. I was glad you died quick, I really wasn’t looking forward to one of those hospitals.”

  “There’s coffee here?”

  “They could hardly call it heaven if there wasn’t.”

  Hubert cast a dejected look at his feet. “I can’t have coffee,” he said. “Caffeine is a sin.”

  Bartholomew put his arm around Hubert and started with him up the hill toward the house. “Hubert, hun, you can do whatever you want. This is your heaven. Would you like me to fix you a cup of coffee?”

  “I’d better don’t,” Hubert said. “But maybe I could have some ginger ale? And maybe a sandwich?”

  “A sandwich? Hubert, I’m an angel. I can make you anything you want. You could have an endless buffet. I’m talking about an eternally endless spread of all your favorites. Chocolate waterfalls, fountains spraying champagne, a bottomless bacon pit, you name it. You’re dead, babe—live a little!”

  “Anything?”

  “Anything.”

  “You got any of that Swiss cheese? You know, the kind with all them little holes? Cuz I sure like that on my sandwiches, but Granddad won’t never let me have none. He says the Swiss are godless moneylenders and besides, it’s our duty to eat American cheese. But I don’t particularly care for American cheese.”

  Bartholomew gave Hubert’s shoulders a good squeeze. “You want Swiss cheese, baby, you got it. Maybe we can work up to the chocolate waterfall.”

  “But don’t chocolate have caffeine in it?”

  “Okay, so we got a few things to work on. You’ve only been here five minutes. We’ve got an eternity for you to get the hang of it.”

  The small house was largely empty—Hubert had spent very little of his daydreaming time on decorating, and Realization hadn’t known what to put in it besides a bed and maybe a bathtub, Bartholomew explained—but there was a small table inside the door, humbly offering Hubert a ham and Swiss sandwich and a can of ginger ale. “It’s for me?”

  Bartholomew slapped Hubert lightly on the back. “You go to town.”

  If Bartholomew was disappointed that a lifetime of Food and Beverage Manifestation training had culminated in the decidedly unspectacular production of lunchmeat and ninety-nine-cents-worth of cheese between two slabs of bread, Hubert was bowled over—quite literally; the golden angel had to summon a couch to catch his fall—by the most tantalizing ham sandwich it had ever been his delight to put in his mouth. The bread wasn’t spongy or crusty, the cheese had just the mildest tang, and the ham hinted at smoke and honey. There was the thinnest layer of the freshest mayonnaise, and when Hubert finished the last bite, his pea-sized tummy sent forth a sigh of utter satisfaction. He didn’t feel full, but neither did he crave more. After the last swallow of ginger ale he felt, well, perfect.

  “That was great!” he gushed.

  “I’m glad.”

  “And this couch ain’t so bad, neither. This really is Paradise, huh?”

  Bartholomew fluffed his wings and brushed the mop of curls out of his eyes and behind one ear. He stood before Hubert in his near-naked glory with his hands on his hips and said, “If I do my job right, it’s gonna make Paradise look like a bad neighborhood.”

  The tour was brief, and not strictly necessary, seeing as how the house had been plucked from Hubert’s imagination and plopped on the hill. The front room ran the width of the house. The side that faced the sea was all windows, each panel on a slide that could open onto a different section of the deck. A doorway led behind the front room to a hallway, and this ra
n past a small kitchen and a small bathroom to a small bedroom that was also mostly windows. The only stick of furniture in the room was a large wood-framed bed, piled high with pillows, each the same beige as the butter-soft sheets, which matched the beige of the black-out curtains to such a precise degree of boring that Bartholomew uttered a “Blah” faster than he could censor it.

  “Really, Hubert? This color? For eternity?”

  Hubert shrugged. “What I’d love would be purple,” he said. “It’s my real favorite color, but Granddad says it’s for girls. I saved up and bought me a pair of purple socks, but he wouldn’t let me wear ‘em. He took me down to the Walmart, made me exchange ‘em for brown ones. Then he wouldn’t let me wear them, neither. Said they reminded him of the purple ones. He gave ‘em to the clothes drive down to the Church, said white socks was good enough for boys in his day, they was good enough for me.”

  “Yeah, but Hubert, this is your heaven. Your granddad doesn’t want purple in his heaven, he won’t have it. Would you rather these sheets were purple?”

  Hubert hesitated. He shook his head. Then he wrinkled his nose. Did he dare ask? “Maybe one of the pillows?” he squeaked.

  Bartholomew spared an understanding smile. “Okay, we’ll start with one of the pillows. Which one?”

  Hubert considered this. There were so many. Just like how the beds must be in a fancy hotel, he figured. “The one I’m gonna lay on, I guess?”