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said you were under an obligation and you said,
    “Indirectly. G-d damn it, yes. Indirectly.”
    “Come on, sweetheart,” you said, ‘you’re awfully g-ddamn hard on me.”
    “That’s why I’m in Hell? That’s why?”
    “And what about the time you coveted your neighbor’s wife? You had a big boner.”
    I coveted no one, I was never unfaithful, I practically chased that woman away.”
    “You didn’t honor your father and mother.” Ellerbee was stunned. I did. I always honored my father and mother. I loved them very much. just before I was killed we were planning a trip to Phoenix to see them.”
    “Oh, them. They only adopted you. I’m talking about your natural parents.”
    I was in a Home. I was an infant!”
    “Sure, sure,” God said.
    “And that’s why? That’s why?”
    “You went dancing. You wore zippers in your pants and drove automobiles. You smoked cigarettes and sold the demon rum.”
    “These are Your reasons? This is Your explanation?”
    “You thought Heaven looked like a theme park!”
    Ellerbee shook his head. Could this be happening? This pettiness signaled across the universe? But anything could happen, everything could, and Ellerbee began again to pray.
    “Lord,” he prayed, “Heavenly Father, Dear God-maybe whatever is is right, and maybe whatever is is right isn’t, but I’ve been around now, walking up and down in it, and everything is true. There is nothing that is not true. The philosopher’s best idea and the conventional wisdom, too. So I am praying to You now in all humility, asking Your forgiveness and to grant one prayer.”
    “What is it?” God asked.
    Ellerbee heard a strange noise and looked around. The damned, too, were on their knees all the lost souls, all the gargoyles, all the demons, kneeling in fire, capitulate through Hell like a great ring of the conquered.

    “What is it?” He asked.
    “To kill us, to end Hell, to close the camp.”
    “Amen,” said Ellerbee and all the damned in a single voice.
    “Ha!” God scoffed and lighted up Hell’s blazes like the surface of a star. Then God cursed and abused Ellerbee, and Ellerbee wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d damned him, no surrogate in Saint’s clothing but the real McCoy Son of a Bitch God Whose memory Ellerbee would treasure and eternally repudiate forever, happily ever after, world without end.
    But everything was true, even the conventional wisdom, perhaps especially the conventional wisdom-that which had made up Heaven like a shot in the dark and imagined into reality halos and Hell, gargoyles, gates of pearl, and the Pearl of Great Price, that had invented the horns of demons and cleft their feet and conceived angels riding clouds like cowboys on horseback, their harps at their sides like goofy guitars.
    Everything. Everything was. The self and what you did to protect it, learning the house odds, playing it safe -the honorable percentage baseball of existence.
    Forever was a long time. Eternity was. He would seek out Ladlehaus, his murderer’s accomplice, let bygones be bygones. They would get close to each other, close as family, closer. There was much to discuss in their fine new vocabularies. They would speak of Minneapolis, swap tales of the Twin Cities.
    They would talk of Ron, of others in the syndicate. And Ladlehaus; had seen May, had caught her in what Ellerbee hoped was her grief on the Six O’clock News. They would get close. And one day he would look for himself in Ladlehaus’s glowing blisters.

Part II The Bottom Line
    Ladlehaus was chewing the fat with Ellerbee, reminiscing about his days as an accomplice and accessory.
    “You used to be a handbag?” Ellerbee said.
    “A handb-? Oh yeah. You know I never used to get jokes? I could tell them once I heard them, I had a good ear, but I never understood why folks laughed. That’s interesting, too,” he said.
    “If a fellow told a joke I thought it was a true story. I never laughed at punch lines. It was only when