Joe and Adolf tote Hatcher across the drive and up the steps and through the front door, and striding toward them, framed in the light from enormous veranda doors behind him, is Satan, wearing a red-and-blue-plaid flannel shirt, Armani jeans, and a RUTTIN BUCK camouflage hunting cap with tied-up fleece earflaps. Against his chest he carries a Ruger Deerfield 44 Magnum autoloading carbine with a smoking muzzle. Hatcher expected that through the anticipated long night he would have a chance to prepare himself for this moment. But the abruptness and the intensity of his gathering up and passage here, culminating in his hanging in dishabille six inches off the floor in the grip of two of the most prolific murderers in history, has prevented any preparation for what is, in fact, his first actual physical encounter with Satan. Till this moment he has had only the traditional earthly iconography and Satan’s e-mails and cell phone messages to conjure up the Prince of Darkness. And now: Hatcher thinks of some typical politician with whom he’s only vaguely familiar and who’s declared his candidacy for president and is scoring about four percent in the polls and Hatcher finally meets him in an American Legion hall in Dubuque or Cedar Rapids on a brutally cold December afternoon as the guy benightedly campaigns to win the Iowa caucus vote. That is say, a classic, middle-height, middle-age man with a squarish, slightly pasty, faintly jowly, smarm-ready, white-guy-in-power face. Except in the moment after this face registers on Hatcher, the face flares bright red — nothing else changing, not shape or jowls or even the smarm factor — but it all becomes instantly, luminously, arterial-blood red.
“This one’s late!” Satan roars. “Set him loose out back!”
And before Hatcher can quite get his mind around this, he’s being whisked past Satan and across the floor toward the veranda windows. This much is clear at once: Satan either is mistaking him for someone else or he’s pretending to.
As Hatcher passes through the doors and sees the field before him, he starts to understand. A hundred — or a bit fewer now — naked men, mostly white, mostly paunchy, are running madly in circles in a dozen acres of low, stubbly canebrake. Originally there was one man per pickup truck parked in the front of the lodge, but now there are a dozen or more bodies twitching here and there on the ground, each with a major magnum-hole in head or chest. No doubt, all were hunters in life. Hatcher is being taken for one of these.
“Wait!” he cries, twisting his head over his shoulder to try to address Satan. “I’m Hatcher McCord! Your anchorman! Your interview!”
Joe and Adolf are quickly descending the back steps, Hatcher flopping between them. At the bottom they rush on, across the yard toward the canebrake, and Hatcher is thinking this is what it’s always been about, doing this to him. He was getting to be too important in Hell. But why the hunting motif? He hunted with a couple of presidents over the years but only for show. He never even shot anything. Now he can see before him the whites of the eyes of the naked hunters running around making sounds of terror like the cries of wounded moose. Hatcher tries to reassure himself: it’s only more pain and humiliation. If it wasn’t this way, it would be some other.
But now Satan bellows from behind, “Wait!”
Joe and Adolf stop and turn around, Hatcher still hanging between them.
“Put him down,” Satan says.
They do.
In his desperate relief, something registers on Hatcher about what is beneath his feet, but not quite consciously.
Satan is standing at the top of the stairs to the veranda. His face is pasty white again. “Hatcher McCord!” he cries.
“Yes. That’s me,” Hatcher says aloud, while his inner voice declares The grass isn’t real.
“The anchorman.” Satan has stopped shouting. There is even a tone of dawning recognition in his voice.
“The Evening News from Hell. Hatcher McCord. I’m here for the interview.”
Perhaps the logs in the lodge aren’t real either.
Satan says, “I didn’t recognize you. In person, you’re naked.”
Hatcher is attuned to tones of voice. As an interviewer in his earthly life, he prided himself on being able to discern all the little audible clues that a subject is lying. Hatcher has the odd impression that Satan truly made a mistake about who Hatcher was. Certainly Satan would be adept at feigning his confusion. But why would he bother?
Satan begins to drum the fingers of his right hand in the air. “Come here,” he says. Hatcher is free of the grip of the two tyrants now, and he moves to the veranda and up the steps, Satan continuing to elaborate on his invitation: “Come. Come. Hustle along, Hatcher Thatcher Snatcher. Come to Papa do. Come along comealongcomealong. Here, boy.”
I’m spared for now, and at least trees are innocent.
As Hatcher reaches the top of the steps, Satan backs up a few paces and motions him to stop. “Now,” Satan says, “Hatcher, old bean. Tell me why you come to visit your Papa Satan in the nude.”
“Hoover…” Hatcher begins, and Satan waves his hand to silence him.
“Oh dear oh dear, have you been doing naughty things with Eddie?”
“No. No. Not at all. He burst in unexpectedly… Morning came…”
“Morning came,” Satan says. “Ah, morning came indeed. I made the morning to come, my boy.”
“I didn’t have a chance…”
“Please. Papa understands. Morning. The clarion call of the feathered creatures.” Satan pauses, lifts his face, and makes a bird call of some sort that Hatcher cannot recognize.
“Treedle eedle eedle oodle oodle!” Satan calls, and from behind Hatcher all the naked hunters in the canebrake are compelled to answer with the same call.
“I am riven with guilt at mistaking you,” Satan says. There is a sly overripeness to his tone that clearly signals his insincerity. Hatcher understands he knows nothing, really, but hearing the meaning of this tone makes him have about a twenty percent confidence in his previous impression of Satan’s confusion. There are things to think about in all this, but he does not have time.
“I’ll make it up to you,” Satan says, striding up to him and shoving the rifle into Hatcher’s hands. “Step aside.”
Hatcher does. He turns and watches as Satan lifts a hand and drums his fingers again, and Joe and Adolf approach at a trot. Satan stops them with a wave and then begins to point from one to the other and back again, moving his lips silently, doing an eeny-meeny-miny-moe. Stalin and Hitler begin to quake. Hatcher realizes that both of them have large, liquidy, creepily fetching, feminine eyes. Satan ends with his forefinger pointing at Hitler.
“Strip,” he orders.
Hitler tremblingly complies, peeling off his jumpsuit and then standing straight-spined and naked before Satan, his face rigid in terror. Hatcher, newsman though he be, consciously does not confirm the earthly reports that Hitler had only one testicle.
“Shoot him,” Satan says to Hatcher.
“Shoot him?”
“With the rifle in your hands,” Satan said. “Shoot Adolf Hitler. Shoot him in the face.”
Hatcher is trying to catch up with all this. He looks dumbly at the rifle.