To Hell and Back

“On days like this, I wish there was more room back here,” Gruff said to Travis. “Then we could just burn everything.”

They were shoveling the overflow of trash that had poured over the big drums kept in the back as far away from the house as possible. All the usual suspects—coffee grounds, egg shells, banana peels and the like—had slipped out of the paper bags they had sogged and split. Night creatures had come by and helped the process along.

“That’s what we do up in Maine,” Travis said, as he exchanged his shovel for a rake to gather up the smallest bits of detritus. “We don’t have garbage men up there. It’s too remote.”

Gruff pivoted one of the barrels on its edge to role it back and forth down the side alley to the truck in front of the house. He stopped to swat a horsefly digging into the back of his neck.

"Spawn of Satan," he said as he slapped the fly down.

“Why doesn’t the house have garbage pickup?” Travis asked.

“Too expensive,” Gruff said.

“The city doesn’t collect the trash?”

Gruff set the drum to rest at the entrance of the alley and wiped his brow with his massive gloved hand. Sweat was already soaking his white Italian undershirt. Travis had never seen anyone in real life who had such a physique. You only saw those kinds of muscles in cartoons or on the covers of body builder magazines in a general store like the one back home. The man was huge!

“The city’s been fighting the union for years,” Gruff said. “Carla won’t have anything to do with a city service if we have an alternative.”

“And that alternative would be—us, right?”

“Grab your barrel, partner,” Gruff said over his shoulder as he hoisted the barrel right off the ground and headed down the alley.

Travis duck-walked his to the street, where he was met by Louise.

“I hear you like driving this beat-up shit bag of a truck,” she said, pointing to the old GBU jalopy that Travis and Jonah had first driven to Jack’s farm.

“Yeah,” Travis said. “It was cool.”

“Most excellent,” Gruff said and handed him the keys.

Louise got in on the passenger’s side and slid along the bench seat to Travis. The smell of stale cigarette smoke wafted into his face.

“I need to be aired out,” Louise said, as if she had a direct line to Travis’s nostrils. “Goin’ along for the ride.”

They drove up the hill into the country in silence. At one point, Louise made to shake a cigarette out the pack she carried around like a rabbit’s foot, but a glance from Gruff and she thought better of it.

“You ever in the service?” Travis asked Gruff, partly to make conversation but also because this man fascinated him.

“Nope,” Gruff said. “Too old.”

“Old?” Louise said. “You ain’t forty.”

“Well, I beg to differ,” he said. “I turn forty-three this fall.”

“Shit,” Louise said. “You’re pretty well pickled.”

To Travis, forty-three qualified as, if not antique, then surely old. He had grown up with multiple warnings about trusting anyone over thirty. He dismissed that idea, of course. Most of the older people he knew were pretty wise. But they were also, well, old.

It was early afternoon on the one day of the week that Travis had no classes after 10:00am. The fall air was heavy with the last humid heat of Indian summer. Once again, he was in this battered old truck driving in the country, and once again he was loving it. It reminded him of home, of the drives he and his buddies took in late summer the year he graduated from high school. The light in the air brought with it a sense of impending autumn, with its beauty and its endings. Some of the trees were starting to turn their leaves into fire.

“So, how did you excape the draft?” Louise asked Travis.

“I’m deferred while I’m in college,” he said. He was a little surprised by the question. Everyone knew college kids were deferred, didn’t they?

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Gruff said. “It’s a hell hole over there.”

“And to no good purpose,” Louise added.

Travis was beginning to understand what the odd collection of characters he had met at the house had in common. Most of the people he hung out with on campus were in favor of the war. Greenbush University wasn’t Berkeley or NYU. It attracted the traditional, patriotic sons and some daughters of rural upstate New York and northern New England. This crowd with LIA was something else all together. He was comfortable with them in most ways, but their political views were still a stretch for him. When hot topics came up, the war and all, he kept his mouth shut, not because he was afraid they would reject his views, or him, but because he had the good sense (he prized his good sense!) to realize that, whatever position these people had on the big issues of the day, those positions had been formed by experiences he could not even begin to imagine.

+++++++++++++++

The dump was set back from the road about a quarter of a mile and well before Travis could see it, he could smell it. It was a still day and the air on the dirt road was fetid with noxious smells: the sweet, sickly odor of decaying food mingled in equal parts with the acrid smell of smoke. They rounded a last turn and drove up to the edge of an enormous pile of trash. But that was just the dumping off point; beyond it lay a plain of unsettled ground, much of it burned and melted plastic and metal strewn in a huge bed of smoldering ash. For a little town the size of Greenbush, he was amazed at the size of the place.

They joined a short line of vehicles, trucks mostly, waiting to be relieved of their own reeking and seeping burdens. Blessedly, no effort was made to sort any of what they brought. Gruff got out and heaved their refuse onto the edge of the pile and in short order they were out of the place.

He didn’t know why, but Travis was shaken by the experience of so much smoldering stench. Maybe it was the maggots he saw on some of the garbage closest to him in the truck. He hated bugs, and worms, he was sure, were created by God only for the purposes of skewering on the end of a fishhook.

“Gehenna on earth,” he mumbled as Gruff climbed back into the truck and slammed the tinny door shut behind him.

“What’d you say?” Gruff asked.

Travis shifted the truck into gear and steered them out of the parking area.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “We always burn our stuff.”

He reached the main road and turned left, heading back to the city.

“You ain’t the queasy kind, are you?” Louise asked him.

“Nah, you know I’m not,” he said. “You’ve seen me corralling the trash at the end of a meal and taking it out back. It’s the shear size of the place, I think, and it reminded me of Gehenna.”

“What the hell is that?” Louise asked.

“Actually,” Travis said, “you got it right there. Gehenna is hell.”

“So why not just call hell ‘hell,’” Gruff said. “You ain’t aiming to impress us, are you? Being college educated and all.”

“He knows better than to try that shit,” Louise said.

“No, not at all,” Travis said. “Jonah was just talking about Gehenna in class the other week, and I remembered what he said.”

Travis went on, explaining to them that in Jonah’s New Testament class someone had tried to corner their priest-professor by asking him if he believed in hell and the eternal damnation of sinners. It was a question that Travis had thought of, too, but was afraid to ask. He was growing in respect and even love for this gentle man who had saved him from ruin after the affair of the mermaid, and dreaded the possibility that someone who was so good would confirm what he had learned in grade school catechism class, with some degree of horror, about the implacable judgment of God.

“So what’d he say?” Gruff asked.

“I’m thinking I can’t tell you,” Travis said, “without sounding like some college-educated punk.”

That got a laugh from both of them, and he continued.

“I don’t remember all the details,” he said, but went on to tell them about the biblical origins of the fire and brimstone of hell: Jesus was approached in the gospels with questions about hell on a number of occasions by people who, Travis suspected, were as trepidatious as he was about how the kind master would respond. This was because on occasion Christ would warn his followers about avoiding the fate of the wicked, which he described as consignment to “hell,” a place of unquenchable fire where the worm never dies.

Jonah explained that in the Greek original of the gospels, the word interpreters translate as “hell” is “Gehenna,” and that Jesus probably got the word—and its associations with fire and worms—from the Hebrew prophets, particularly Jeremiah and Isaiah, whose poetry is rife with threats against those who do evil, thundering that they would be killed and their bodies thrown into Gehenna.

“Sounds pretty straightforward to me,” Gruff said. “You sin, you die, you burn. Just like we were taught.”

“It’s actually not what most people think, though,” Travis said.

The prophets were referring to an actual place outside Jerusalem: the valley of Hinnom. This valley seems to have been a site that was sacred to the people who controlled the area before the arrival of the Israelites at the place that would become their capital city. When the previous occupants were routed and banished, the new owners turned the Hinnom valley into a garbage pit to desecrate what had been a pagan shrine.

“So, when the prophets talk about throwing a body into Hinnom—the Greek form of the word was ‘Gehenna’—they weren’t talking about eternal damnation,” Travis concluded.

“They were talking about garbage disposal,” Gruff said.

“Yuch. I can be a pretty vindictive bitch,” Louise said. “But even I wouldn’t throw my enemy’s body in a dump.”

“Oh, yes you would,” Gruff chuckled. “Where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies.”

“So, when Jesus refers to Gehenna—hell—as the eventual destination of the wicked,” Travis said, “he may have just meant that when evil people die they don’t go to heaven to enjoy eternal happiness with God. Instead, they just die and are tossed into a pit to rot in oblivion.”

The three of them drove in silence for a while. They were heading down Red Mill Road past GBU and it was easy to be distracted by the view that opened up ahead of them: the tops of the biggest buildings across the river poking up out of the city’s shroud of smoke and dust.

“Camus said that hell is other people,” Louise said.

“What?” Travis said, surprised once again at what came out of the woman sitting next to him.

“It was Sartre, not Camus,” Gruff said, and he leaned forward to face Travis at the other end of the seat. “And I know what you’re thinking .”

Travis blushed.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “how DO you know about Sartre and Camus.”

They were nearing Fourth Street and Louise was back at it with her pack of cigarettes.

“Oh, there’s much you don’t know about us,” she said.

“That’s for sure,” Travis said.

“You haven’t been at the house on a Friday night yet, have you?” Gruff asked.

“True,” Travis said, but was beginning to get the picture. On Fridays after supper, the group gathered for sessions called “Clarification of Thought.” They were modeled after the program originally set up by the Catholic Workers in New York back at the beginning, when Peter Maurin was still around.

“You talked about existentialists on a Friday night?”

“Hey,” Gruff said as Travis pulled up to the curb outside the house. “We’re anarchists, aren’t we?”

Right, Travis thought, anarchists.

The usual collection of people had lined up along the street under the storefront sign, “Love in Action.” They hurried out of the truck and through the front door into the building. They had a meal to serve.

[Up next: The Key]