I first wanted Bettina Adams when she was still
a baby. Sometimes it's like that. I see one and I know she's got to
end up down here. But Bettina's mother had other plans. Before Betty
could even walk, the widow Adams started in on her. "There is a horrible
man who lives in a horrible place under the ground," she said. "His
name is Satan and the place is called Hell. And if you are bad, you
will go to live with him when you die, and burn in eternal damnation
forever."
Like a one-year-old is going to understand this,
right? But by the time Betty was a little older and had heard it about
a million times, it made an impression. She vowed to always be good
so she could stay out of my clutches.
Betty's little brother Curtis died when he was
four. He opened the oven door to stand on to reach some cookies and
the stove tipped over and crushed him. Served him right, the little
jerk. Betty cried a whole lot about Curtis. She was sure anyone killed
while doing something bad, as she thought climbing onto the oven door
had been, was going to go to Hell for sure. She was wrong. I've never
seen Curtis Adams, and I never expect to. He's in the other place.
When Betty was five, it was time for me to provide
some male type to ensure that she came down here. Fortunately, Tommy
York, who was sure to end up here, was her next-door neighbor. Tommy
was a rotten little kid. I thought I could use him to get Betty, too.
So I had Tommy take Betty off to play doctor.
Mrs. Adams found them behind the garage. "Bad, bad, bad," she said.
"You shouldn't ever let boys touch you. You'll go straight to Hell."
I screwed up with the doctor bit. Because Betty
took all of this crap straight to heart. Not only did she rededicate
her life to the study of What Is Good; worse than that, she became convinced
the way to avoid me was to shun boys forever. And the only way I was
going to have Betty was to get her involved with a man.
Her mother was pleased with these developments.
Betty being such a goody-goody took the pressure off her. She coveted
her neighbor's husband. And I wish she'd ended up with old Wally Walker,
because then I could have had her, too. Except I'm not sure I really
wanted her.
When Betty was in high school, she helped old
geezers in a nursing home after class. She worked with poor people on
the weekends. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You get the picture.
Every few months she'd ask her mother if she
was being good enough to get her into Heaven, and her mother would say,
"Probably, Bettina, but you can never be sure. Evil can sneak up on
you without a moment's notice." Mrs. Adams was a control freak. It was
the only thing I liked about her.
Betty went to State University, where she convinced
herself there were temptations far exceeding those she had ever seen
before. She suspected my agents were lurking on campus, masquerading
as students and professors and janitors, waiting for her to loosen her
resolve for just a minute, whereupon they would swoop down and forever
damn her to hell.
I don't have the staff to spare for stuff like
that. But I still had Tommy. I made sure he went to State, too, where
he continued to be rotten. Tommy had lots of low-class girlfriends,
but he remembered what it was like playing doctor with Betty, and he
started chasing her. Poor dumb Betty didn't know anything about the
other girls. She thought Tommy was pure. I made sure he kept chasing
her, because I really wanted Tommy and Betty to get married.
But she wouldn't even hold hands with him. Somewhere
along the line she'd decided any physical contact with a man was treacherous.
The first time I sent Tommy in to ask Betty to
marry him was right after graduation, when she was about to go off to
join the Peace Corps. Betty was actually kind of fond of Tommy, in a
sterile kind of way. But she refused his proposal, having decided marital
relations were probably almost as nasty as the premarital kind.
So Bettina Adams spent her two years in Africa,
where she worked with irrigation and libraries and all the other stuff
the Peace Corps did over there. By the time she got out she thought
she had reserved her spot in the other place.
I didn't give up. On the day she came home, I
had Tommy rush into her living room and, on bended knee, again beg her
to marry him. He was a bit of a yutz, but he was my best hope. Betty
turned him down again.
And so it went. Every few years her I'd have
Tommy ask Betty to be his wife, and each time she would turn him down.
This went on for several decades. They were both in their seventies
the last time I had Tommy ask Betty to marry him.
And she said yes.
I couldn't believe it. I'd about given up on
having her. But it turned out she'd thought about it and realized this
could be the crowning touch on her life of goodness. She could finally
make Tommy happy, and she wouldn't have to worry about any of that physical
stuff because, after all, they were both too old, weren't they?
And so Bettina Adams became Bettina York. It
was a beautiful wedding, with Betty radiant in her well-deserved white
gown and Tommy resplendent in his tuxedo. When the minister said, "You
may kiss the bride," Tommy did, and Betty, who kept her mouth very tightly
closed, knew Tommy was overwhelmed and that it was a very fine thing
she had done by marrying him.
They were on their way to the reception, Betty
and Tommy in the front and Betty's still very-much-alive mother in the
back, still in control, she thought, when a Mustang convertible in the
opposing lane lurched into theirs and smashed into them head-on. I swear
I had nothing to do with it. That's not the way I work.
Betty's mother, who never fastened her seat belt,
went flying right through the front window. Betty beheld her new husband
Tommy staring at the steering column which had pierced his chest, and
then she lost consciousness.
She regained it outside my office, with Tommy
beside her. I watched on the closed-circuit, and she obviously couldn't
comprehend what was transpiring. I buzzed them in.
I wish you could have seen her face when she
found herself standing in front of a red-skinned fellow with horns and
a tail. Me. She looked around for her mother, but Mrs. Adams was nowhere
to be found, and I knew Betty was trying to figure out how it was possible.
She'd been so good, and her mother not so good, and yet ...
"I'm afraid there's been a terrible mistake,"
she said. "You see, I've been as good as anyone could possibly be, and
yet here I am."
"Mrs. York, the mistake is yours," I said. "Ending
up here or in the other place has nothing to do with good or evil. It's
all far simpler than that. It's all alphabetical. Strictly alphabetical."
The ending of this story popped into my head one morning while I was
making the bed. The rest was harder. It appeared as "A Marriage
Made in Hell" in Phantasm Vol. 1, #3, Spring 1996. I meant
the title to be a play on "a match made in heaven," but I
screwed up. Now I get to fix it. Copyright © 1996 Nathan Walpow.
