“Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” by B. Morris Allen

Apparently Hades was better. That’s what Angie said, anyway. She’d never been there, but she said she had friends who knew. I had my doubts.

“Penny for your thoughts?” That’s Angie, always kidding around. Anyone with a penny would be long gone from this sea of mud and flesh, instead of hanging around by the one scraggly willow where Charon ties up his boat.

“An obolus for obloquy?” I asked. Here in the underworld, we have a lot of time for vocabulary. “A dollar for damnation?”

“Okay, okay. What’s new?”

New? She’s cute, Angie is, but sometimes I wonder. “The usual. Stuck by Styx, waiting to cross. You?” I could tell she had something to share.

“I was talking to Hamdu, down by the tree, you know?”

“The tree? Let me think. Big leafy thing, right? I’m sure I saw one just the other day.” A few ex-shipwrights tried to take the willow down once for boating purposes; unfortunately, the tree is impervious. Every now and then some newb goes and tries to gnaw a branch off, but it’s a waste of time. Plus, it tastes like bark.

Angie ignored me, as she so often does. “So, Hamdu says this guy found a coin the other day.” She smirked like she’d won the gossip sweepstakes.

“What do you mean, found a coin?” I waved at the acres of wet clay all around us, covered only by sprawling masses of nude humanity. “You think this hasn’t been searched for decades already? Look, there’s Sudarshan over there with his team.” I pointed at a scraggly line of people digging painstakingly through the mud with their hands. They’d been doing it for centuries now. As far as I knew, they’d never found a thing. The underworld is like that.

“No, it’s true. Hamdu says the guy left on the very next boat.”

Could it be true? I dreamt about it, or would have if I slept. A stray coin let fall, somehow, maybe a ring, a bracelet. Charon could be bargained with, when he was in the mood.

But it was an illusion. Nobody dropped coins anymore, if they ever had. Almost nobody came through with coins at all, these days. Thus the crowds.

“Well, good luck to him, then.” No harm in letting Angie keep her dreams alive. Not much else alive down here.

We went on to other topics. The weather, always the same. The quality of the mud, always the same. The new arrivals, ever more difficult to relate to. The topics don’t vary much, but Angie likes to talk, and I like to make her happy. That’s why she puts up with me. That and my fine physique. Slightly above average, I’d like to think.

But I wondered, afterwards. Could someone have found an actual coin? It seemed unlikely. It used to be, so I hear, that everyone came through with a coin on each eyelid or one in the mouth. You only need one, to pay Charon, and no one can take it from you. But it was possible the extras got lost. The excitement built within me. I recognized it, had felt it before. Every decade or so, I spent some weeks frantically churning mud, just like everyone else. And then I gave it up when I realized the odds. But now! Now someone had actually found a coin.

I watched as the rumor spread. Angie had been among the first to know, it seemed. Now, everywhere I looked, I saw backs bending, people going down on their knees to dig and dig and dig.

No one found a thing.

But the next day, after we gathered to watch the Greeks go through (from the small community in Meteora that kept the ancient ways), someone found another coin.

We gathered around her, pushing and shoving as best we could (nothing hurts in the underworld, and nothing ever gets broken, expect in special circumstances), until finally someone lifted the lucky woman on their shoulders.

“Look!” she cried, holding up a dull token. “It’s true! I found a coin!”

The tumult was incredible then. I got shoved to the fringe, and couldn’t hear the rest of what she said, but I got the story later on. Everybody did. It was the biggest thing to happen for decades, and it was all we talked about for weeks.

It seems she’d found the coin right near the willow, when the Greeks were getting on Charon’s boat. The woman herself left on the very next trip, of course. No point in staying here on the border when Hades is calling.

“She could be in Elysium by now,” breathed Angie. That woman could find a silver lining in … well, in the underworld, anyway.

“Absolutely,” I agreed. I mean, I figured the odds were on the Fields of Asphodel (for the bland) or Tartarus (for the evil) but why ruin her day? We don’t get a lot of good ones down here. Technically, we don’t get days either, but we all like to pretend, since in theory we only have to hang around for a hundred years before getting a free pass. No one ever seems to get one, though.

Nobody found any more coins for a while, but all the excitement got people moving, and I guess some got overexcited and tried to swim the river, because later on I heard Cerberus growling and chewing for quite a while. The chewing is the worst part, next to the rending and the bone cracking and the screaming and the spitting out (back across the river). The healing is not that great either. Still, it confirmed that nothing fundamental had changed about Hades. Just a couple of folks that got lucky with coins, and some that got unlucky with a big three-headed dog.

Both coins had been found around the tree, and it got pretty crowded down there. Angie and I took turns watching from a high point, which was each other’s shoulders. I was watching when the next coin was found. It was chaos – arms and legs and torsos flying everywhere. As far away as I was, my viewpoint got jostled quite a bit, and even Charon had some trouble getting the boat away. He stopped a little ways on to look back and shake his head sadly. Thing is, I could swear there was a smirk on those thin lips of his. Some other people noticed too, and after a while a rumor started that Charon was dropping the coins himself, just to break the monotony. Old Monimapalos said he’d seen it before, a few hundred years or so earlier.

It didn’t stop us looking for the coins, of course. But there was less violence; no one wanted to give the ferryman the satisfaction.

After a while, the coins stopped coming, so our silent protest was kind of self-defeating when you think about it. Most didn’t mind too much – it gave us something to talk about, but we did it a long way from the willow.

A couple of years later, a woman from my little town in Oregon happened through, and Angie heard about it and told me. She kept tabs on these things. She’s not the jealous type, and down here we all get as much sex as we want; not much else to do, once you get used to a crowd (though I still don’t like the way onlookers call out scores). Anyway, she told me, and I went down to see the woman by the willow. She had a coin – fell out of someone’s shirt when they leaned over the coffin, apparently. Some folks have all the luck. It turned out I’d known her grandmother, and we chatted for a while as she waited for the boat. Most everyone else still avoided the tree. Bitter, I guess.

Charon didn’t say much; just got off the boat and took people’s coins as they got on. He looked pretty pathetic – a lank, bony figure in a dirty rag of a cloak – and I almost felt sorry for him until I remembered what a cruel bastard he was.

I told Angie about it later. “Coin dropping is probably part of his whole spiel. Gets his weird kicks out of it somehow.”

She just pressed her lips together and shook her head. “He’s probably lonely.”

“Lonely?” I wanted to spit, but we were in a crowded part of the mud, and even in Hades, you don’t spit on people without a reason. “He’s a vicious psychopath. Why would he be lonely?” I’ve been practicing my sarcasm for a few decades now, and I think I’ve pretty much got it down.

“Think about it.” As if I weren’t trying not to. “All he does is row that little boat back and forth. Everybody resents him, and all his passengers leave him behind.”

It was true, people pretty much did resent him. What with him taking most to eternal oblivion and all, and so slowly.

“So?”

“So he’s lonely. Just think – eons of this dismal, boring job, and going home alone every night to his little hovel on the other side with nothing to do but sit and wait to do it again.”

She was embroidering; we didn’t know anything about his housing status. But it sounded good, and I was building up a nice head of schadenfreude when she poked me in the ribs. I looked down, and she was doing her big-eyes-fluttering-eyelashes thing. It’s corny as hell, but it works.

“You could help him,” she said.

“Me?!” You can call me a lot of things, but gregarious I’m not. Even ‘friendly’ is a bit of a stretch.

“Well, us, then. But I’m sure he’d like a man to talk to.” Angie’s a hundred years or so older than I am, and she’s never really gotten the hang of the whole feminism thing.

“Sure. We can talk sports. I hear he’s got a view on coin wrestling.” But she did the eyes on me again, and I gave in.

The next day (or what we pretended was one), we sat down by the willow to wait for the boat, and when it came in, she started right in on him. Did he like his job, had he always done this, did he have a girl back home, did he get days off, where did he go on vacation, stuff like that.

He just grunted, but she kept at it. He ignored her, and shoved the boat off with its only passengers – an old Azeri couple.

“Oh well,” I said, but I knew Angie better than that. She used to teach primary school, and she doesn’t give up. We were back the next day, and the next, and the next.

I hated seeing the old guy ignore her, and after a while, I started throwing in questions, just to take the pressure off Angie. He ignored me too.

Angie thought we were making progress, though. “Did you see him smile?” she asked. “His lip twitched a little when I told him that story about my great-Aunt Maude and the pickled garlic.”

“Not a chance, Ange. It’s a good story, I admit. I laughed, and I’ve heard it a hundred times. But Charon? No way.”

The next day, she told her story about the kid with crayons in his nose, pretending to be a dinosaur. It’s a dumb story, but there’s something about the way she tells it. You just can’t help but laugh, especially when the kid tries to roar, and one of the crayons shoots out and hits one of those baking soda volcanoes, and … Trust me, it’s funny.

Even a grim old ferryman can’t withstand Angie at her best. He was grinning before she even reached the part where the principal comes in and is hit by a hail of crayons. It was a scary sight – teeth like exposed bone behind lips as dry as summer – but it was a grin.

“What followed?” he ignored the two newcomers lucky enough to have had coins on them when they died.

Angie’s excitable, but she’s no fool. “Oh, I’ll tell you tomorrow. I can see you’re busy.”

With a long, inscrutable stare, he turned and left.

The next day, he stalked straight over to Angie. “What followed?” he asked, in his grating voice.

She just looked at him, and they stood in silence for a while.

He broke first. “In your story. The school. What followed?”

“Oh, you mean about dinoboy? And his missing fang?” She stuck a finger in her nose and looked around wildly while imagined crayons flew left and right. She explained how she’d told the principal they were studying ballistics as part of the math gravity paleontology lesson, and he’d approved it last week, and …

By the end, people who’d only heard the story a hundred times were rolling in the mud. I had a good laugh myself.

Charon grinned. It was just as scary as before, but it kept going and going until I was afraid his face would split. When the story finally ended, he patted his hands together in a kind of feeble clap.

“This is a good story,” he said. Angie just smiled. “It is humorous.” His eyes got a far-away look, and I could see he was about to wriggle free.

“Don’t get much humor across the river?” I asked. “All damnation and retribution, is it?”

He gave me a dubious look. “It is the underworld. Mostly damnation, yes. Some retribution.”

People stared at him in amazement.

“Char, my friend,” I said. “You just made your first joke.” Not a funny one, mind, but we all start somewhere.

“Charon,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“My name is Charon. Not Char. I am the ferryman. I am not your friend. I have no friends.” He said it with the same dry, dusty tone he used for everything. No sorrow, no self-pity, just a statement of fact as he turned back to his waiting ferry.

“You have us, Charon.” Angie put into it all the warmth and pity and goodness in her soul, and that’s a lot. I put my arm around her and squeezed, just to tell her how good she made me feel. It’s something you can’t put into words, though she just had.

I think Charon didn’t know what to do with it. He stood there with his back to us, looking over the river to the other side, and his home and whatever he did there. He stood there for a long, long time, and I was starting to think he’d frozen, when Angie pulled away from me. She stepped up beside him, and put one warm arm around his bony body.

“You have us, Charon,” she repeated. “And we’ll look forward to seeing you tomorrow. And the next day, and the next.” She squeezed. “Now, your boat is waiting.” She let him go.

He stepped into his boat, with its one wide-eyed, coin-clutching passenger. It may have been the slowest Styx crossing in history. Every few strokes, Charon would just let his pole drift, standing there in the stern of the ferry like a statue until a ripple, or a breeze, or a noise would remind him of his job.

When he reached the other side, he pulled the ferry up on the shore, and let his passenger go. Then, ponderously, he turned back to look at us.

With a whoop, Angie waved, and jumped up and down, and did a little dance around me. He can’t have heard it, and heaven knows what he thought she was doing, but he watched until she waved again and the whole group of us joined in. He half-lifted his pole in what might have been a tentative wave, then laid it gently in the boat and shambled off up the bank.

It turned out Angie’d been pretty close to the target about Charon’s home life. He was lonely and bored. He even admitted dropping the coins, in a shamefaced way. Said it was the only entertainment he got, and since we couldn’t hurt, he figured there was no real harm. I wanted to give up the friendship thing right there, but Angie just scolded him and went right on with her social improvement program.

You would have thought Charon was set – top of the ferryman ladder, no competition. He had dreams, though. Apparently, he had his eye on the desert circle of hell, or maybe overseeing Sisyphus. He said he’d petitioned the ruling council for a change, but they said he’d have to wait until they could choose a new ferryman. After a millennium or so, they offered him Tantalus, but I guess eons of rowing people across the same damn river got him tired of water, and he turned it down.

“Better the devil you are,” he told us.

Angie told him her story about how once they offered her a high school class, but she decided to stick with fourth grade. I didn’t see the connection, but he seemed to like it.

In any case, his story got me thinking, and after a bit, I realized he’d been going at the thing all wrong.

“Here’s the thing, Chary,” I said.

“Charon.”

“Charon, then.” I guess it was only Angie that he was on a nickname basis with. “Here’s the thing, Charon. I used to be in PR.” He looked confused. “I mean, it’s not much in a small coastal town, but I made up some mean posters in my time.”

“What are posters?”

“It doesn’t matter. I read a lot of books too. Here’s the point: look at you.”

He looked himself over – the tattered grey cloak, the bony arms, the big pole in one hand. “Yes?”

“You look terrible.” Angie winced, but I kept on. “Not to put too fine a point on it, you look half dead.”

“I’m all dead. That’s how I got the job.”

“Yeah, okay, good point. But whatever you are, you look pretty bad.”

He looked at Angie, who smiled, but said, “It’s true, Chary, you do sometimes look a little tired.” Tired! The man was a walking skeleton.

“What difference does it make how I look? I don’t need to look good to pole the boat.”

“Forget about the boat. The boat doesn’t matter. It’s your bosses that matter. The guys who can reassign you.” He just looked at me, hairy eyebrows knotted over those deep-set eyes. “Don’t you get it? Dress for success, man! Dress for the job you want, not the job you have!” I could have gone on, but if there’s one thing a PR man knows, it’s how to let the customer sell himself.

He thought about it for a while, rubbing a sleeve between his fingers. Charon’s robe was a thin piece of dingy grey cloth with a ratty hood. It looked like he’d been wearing that same thing for centuries. Maybe millennia. It also looked like he wasn’t wearing much underneath, but I prayed to Pluto there was a loincloth under there somewhere. “If I dress differently, I can be reassigned to Sisyphus?”

“You got it.”

Angie was smiling now. “That’s a great idea! Ooh, I know just what to do, too. What kind of cloth can you get, Chary? Something in blue, maybe? With a little silver, to set off that grey hair? In fact, you need a haircut. Oh, this is going to be such fun!” She went on, chattering away about ideas, until he had to take his passengers over.

When he came back, he looked different. It took me a while, but I realized his cloak was clean. Cleaner, anyway.

“Oh, Chary! You look wonderful. And you shaved!” It made him look even more skeletal, but that’s Angie. If there’s a bright side, she’ll see it. He did look a lot less scraggly. Even his hair was combed.

“I have asked for some clothing.” From whom, I wondered? Was there an underworld mail-order service? “The demons will bring it. Blue, with some silver.”

“Chary, that’s wonderful! Here, let me fix your hair for you.” Before you know it, she had the whole mess tied off into a ponytail. Greasy, but not half bad looking, really. Almost dignified.

Bit by bit, under Angie’s tutelage, he got better and better. At the end of a month, I hardly recognized him. First off, his robe wasn’t grey anymore. It was a dark navy, with belled sleeves and a thick belt tied around his bony waist. His hair, which used to be flung into the hood any old way, was clean and combed and braided so it hung down into his hood, which was trimmed with silver. And he was smiling. When he landed the boat, he stepped out gracefully, instead of the usual lurch and thump.

People noticed, too. They started handing over their coins with a smile when he handed them into the boat. They chatted with him on the way over, and they waved back at him when he dropped them on the other side. We could see it from under our willow.

He was happier. Even I could see that. He smiled a lot, and once I heard him laugh. It sounded like the death rattle of a tubercular crow, but I gave him credit for trying.

Other people came around too. After a while, the willow was the place to be again. Not to look for coins, but because it was the most interesting thing going. Charon would tell stories about the parts of hell Angie encouraged him to visit on his off time, and we’d all tell stories about the places we’d lived. It was fun.

It didn’t work, though. After several months, dressed in his best, hair trimmed, combed, and styled, Charon approached the council again. He gave the speech I’d worked up for him, and let me tell you, it was a hell of a speech. But they turned him down. They said since he seemed so happy in his job, they’d let him keep it for another century.

The day after the council meeting was a dark one. We all sat around glum, not talking. Well, Angie talked, but even her usual spark was dimmed. It takes a lot to make dead people more depressed, especially when one is Angie.

Charon didn’t hold it against me, though. “Win some, lose some,” he said. “You pay your money and you take your chances.” He was a good student.

“Hold that thought,” I said.

He made a catching gesture with one hand. “Got it.” Grim ferryman of death to grinning jokester in one short year.

“Success. I mean, you look good.” He nodded graciously. “But here we all are, right? I mean, there are millions of us piled up here.”

“I’m sorry about that.” He meant it, too.

“It’s not his fault,” Angie pointed out. “There are rules.”

“Sure, sure. But the point is, people aren’t getting across. So the whole ferry thing isn’t really a success.”

“We know you’re doing your best, Chary.” Angie patted his hand, but she looked worried.

“We need to show the council that not only do you look the part, you’re actually good at your job. That you deserve a promotion.”

“A promotion? I just asked for another job, and they turned me down.”

“You asked for a transfer.” A man who’s done the same thing for eons isn’t often up to speed on the latest employment trends. “If we can lick this, we’ll show them you’re so talented that they need to give you a better job. Maybe something in a desert.”

“Okay.” He trusted me, I think, but more important, Angie trusted me, and she was doing her everything-will-be-all-right smile.

“So, we need to get people across the river, but you’re supposed to get a coin for each one. Right?”

“Yes.”

“What do you do with all those coins, Charon?”

“I… Well, I store them near the house, mostly, in a big pit. Every century or so, a demon comes by to pick them up. I think they use them for tempting misers. Fourth circle.”

“So, they’re just sitting around, mostly.”

He nodded. “The next demon isn’t due for another fifty years or so.

“There must be something we can do with that.”

Everyone agreed, but no one had any bright ideas. Eventually, we gave it up, and Charon gathered up his little bag of coins and stepped into the ferry.

“I should make him a little shoulder bag,” said Angie. “Silver would look nice, to match the trim on the robe.”

I watched him set the coins down, and made the sort of mumble Angie expects from me at times like that. For once, though, I really thought about what she said, and the germ of an idea grew.

“So, Angie had this idea,” I said. Charon had barely stepped off the boat, but I couldn’t keep it in.

“Well, it was really your idea.” She’s modest, my Angie.

“I admire you both too,” said Charon with a smirk. “What is the idea?”

“Here’s how I see it, Char.”

“Charon.” It seemed we were never going to be that close, but I was excited.

“You take your little bag of coins, right?”

“Right.”

“And you set it in your boat, in the … in the thwarts, or something.”

“Under the thwarts, yes. The thwarts are—”

“Doesn’t matter. You put it in the boat.”

“Right.”

“Then you take it out at the other end, and put the coins in the pit.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why what?” His bushy, but nicely brushed eyebrows knit together at the center.

“Why take them out? What would happen if you just left them in the boat?”

“I… That’s not…” I could see him trying to think out an idea not backed with millennia of tradition. He was getting much, much better at it. “Nothing,” he said, at last.

“And what would happen if you just took that bag of coins and shared it out on this side?” We were on firmer ground here, since he’d already dropped coins a few times.

“Nothing!” cried Angie, getting the idea. Angie excited is hard to withstand, and Charon didn’t have much in the way of defenses. He wasn’t entirely sold, but he got on board nonetheless.

From then on, every time he came across, Charon brought a boatload of coins with him. Literally. We’d hand them out, and pretty soon there were more souls waiting to cross than we could handle. Charon started making several trips a day. I pointed out to Angie that now we had coins, we could cross anytime, but she wanted to see the thing out, and to tell the truth, I was having more fun than I’d had since I died.

I could tell the whole coin giveback thing made Charon a little uncomfortable, though. For a servant of hell, he had a pretty strong righteous streak. I pointed out it wasn’t stealing, since the coins weren’t going anywhere; we were just borrowing them, and eventually, they’d end up right back in his money pit.

After a while, Charon got a bigger boat. He said the new clothes helped him sell the idea to the council, but I think it was just his new confidence.

He upped his transfer schedule again, until he was spending most of his time poling the ferry back and forth. After just a few decades, the shores of the Styx were starting to look downright bare, and Charon went back to taking evenings off. One time he even brought over some Elysian grass seed he said he’d traded for. He didn’t say what he’d traded, but he blushed when Angie teased him about it. The stuff didn’t grow all that well, but in just a decade, we had a tree and a scraggly little lawn.

It couldn’t last, of course. Eventually, the money demon came by, and all the coins on the other side of the river just vanished – even the bag Charon happened to have on the ferry. The demon knew his job too, I guess.

It was a setback, no doubt about it. But Angie didn’t call me the Clever One for nothing. I hadn’t expected this, but for a few years, I’d been thinking about a new plan, and now I put it into practice.

“Listen up, you two.” Charon and Angie looked up from where they’d been sitting on the edge of the boat, him in his natty blue robe, her in her slightly muddy altogether. Sex surplus or not, I still liked to look at her. “So, what we were doing was using Charon’s store of coins to bring people over the river with, right?”

They nodded.

“So it was just the same coins, right? Over and over again.”

“Right!” Charon was smiling now, and I could see Angie was getting it too.

“So, we didn’t really need a pit full of coins.”

“We just needed a boatful!” That was Angie. “I mean, a boatful of persons full. A coin for each person.”

“Right.” Charon nodded. “I just take the coins right over, then bring them back. Until the demon comes again, of course.”

“But he only took the coins on that side.” We’d had a crew of Eastern Orthodox come in at the same time, and they’d kept their coins. A few more had come in since.

“Sure.” Charon could see the outlines of it, and I gave him my masterstroke.

“So what if the coins never get there? What if you just leave them here when you go?”

I don’t know what his expression was, because my arms were suddenly full of Angie, and my face was covered in kisses.

It worked, too. I thought that when Charon was set to go, he’d just dump the bag on shore, and we’d share them out for the next trip. Angie turned it into a little ceremony, though. People would give Charon their coins and he’d drop them in a little tub. Then after he pushed off, the passengers would pick out their coins again and throw them back to the waiting crowd. It was a small crowd these days, but they all gathered round for the coin toss anyway.

I thought it was nice, but more to the point, Charon said it fit the letter of the infernal law.

“I get paid,” he said. “Not my business to account for it all.” And since the coins never reached the other side, we figured they’d be safe from the demon.

“Welcome aboard,” Charon said as we handed over our coins at last. His smile was toothy, but his breath was fresh. “I’ve been waiting for this.” Angie gave him a hug. She’d washed all the mud off special today. I had too, but clean looked better on her.

He poled gently across. We all knew it was the end of something, and we wanted the moment to last.

“You know, I like you guys. I’m going to miss you.” He stared off at the far shore as he said it.

“Thanks,” I mumbled. Angie just kissed his bony chin.

“I’ve heard lots of interesting stories these past years,” he said. “Like about you two. Finding love in the underworld. That doesn’t happen often enough.”

“There was Persephone,” Angie pointed out. She’s up to speed on all the gossip.

He waggled his head. “Some problems there with consent. Wouldn’t fly these days. And that’s a good thing.” He beamed. “I’ve been doing some reading.”

“Well aren’t you the smart one?” From me, that would have come out as sarcasm, but she meant it.

He smiled and just poled for a while.

At last, I said, “I really think the council will promote you now, when the time comes.”

“I’m sure they will,” said Angie, smiling at us both.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose they will.” He poled some more. “I’ve been thinking, though. I might get the council to ease up on the whole payment thing entirely.”

“That would be simpler,” I admitted. “And they’re not making any money from it.” Not that they need to but it’s hell, after all.

“I was thinking of building a bridge,” Charon said.

“A bridge?” Angie asked.

“Like, across the river?” I’m as sharp as Angie, when I put my mind to it.

“That’s right. I mean, that way people wouldn’t have to wait for me to go back and forth.”

“That’s very generous,” said Angie warmly.

“Won’t you miss all that conversation, if there’s a bridge?” After a few millennia in the underworld, I tend to see the dark side. That’s why I stick with Angie, to balance things out.

He just smiled. He’d really internalized the whole niceness thing. “It’s true,” he admitted. “But you know, it’ll give me time for vacation whenever I want. And,” he scuffed his foot, “I know it sounds silly, but there’s this tormentrix down in the third circle. I met her on one of my trips, and we just hit it off. So there’s that.”

“Oh, that’s sweet!” Angie cried, and gave him a quick hug. It threw off his poling, and the ferry rocked a bit. No one fell in, though, and Charon apologized to the passengers.

He’d colored up a bit, and I realized that some of this was still new to him. It was a good act, but deep inside, he still wasn’t used to being treated as a person rather than a figure of legend. That’s Angie. She can put anyone at ease.

“I guess that’d ease the bottleneck at the river,” I said to fill the gap.

He smiled at me gratefully. “Yeah. More work for the judges of the underworld, of course, but they’ve been streamlining procedures, so the backlog is coming down.”

“But what would you do with your time?” asked Angie.

“Well, I figured I’d set up a little stall, just chat with people as they come by, you know. Maybe collect a little oral history or something.”

“That sounds nice,” Angie said. It sounded dull to me, but then I hadn’t spent the first half of eternity being grouchy and uncommunicative. Angie might differ about the grouchy part.

“Plus, I’ve got this idea.” He looked around as if Olympian spies had for some reason hidden themselves amid the dead souls on the boat. “Take a look at this.” At the downstroke of his pole, he reached into a pocket and pulled out what seemed like two oboloi. They looked like regular coins, but with holes in them. “Read it,” he said proudly.

The front side said “Welcome to Hades.” The other side said “Now get the Hell out! ”. Just like that, with the smiley face.

“Mine says ‘Put your money where your mouth is’,” said Angie. “And ‘I’ve got my eye on Hades’.”

“They’re souvenirs,” he said. “I’ve got a whole line of them, for after the coin thing gets worked out. What do you think?

I wasn’t sure about the long-term appeal, but I was proud of him. Whatever makes you happy, you know, and the truth is, he seemed pretty happy.

The bow swushed up onto the fine black sand of what we used to call the far side. Upriver, one of Cerberus’ heads growled, but it sounded like a token effort.

“Don’t mind him, he’s friendly,” said Charon. “Rending’s just part of the job, you know. Not much call for it these days, and he doesn’t mind the time off.”

I held out my hand, and he shook it. “You’re a good guy, Charon,” I said.

Angie hugged him, holding his skinny body tight while he turned all shades of red. “Good luck with that tormentrix,” she said, letting him go at last.

“And with the bridge,” I added, to give him a chance to recover. I’ve been hugged by Angie too. “Maybe we’ll be on the work crew or something.” No telling where you’ll end up in Hades.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. He opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again. “I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, “but listen. Have a good time wherever you end up, okay? A good time.” With that, he shoved off again. I thought about tossing him my memento in sort of the reverse of Angie’s coin-tossing ceremony, but I kind of liked the thing.

We stood there, hand in hand, watching a man happy with his work. After a minute or so, he turned around. He got this big smile when he saw we were waiting there. We waved, he waved back, and then he was busy catching his balance again.

“He’s really gotten good at friendliness, don’t you think?” Angie asked, as we turned around and headed for the crowd milling around the judges. “Something to think about.”

The crowd was big, and it looked like another long wait, but it didn’t bother me now. I just kept thinking back to Charon’s last words. I told Angie what I thought they meant. She just shrugged; she’d never had any doubts. So, whenever our turn for judgment comes up, we’re ready. Elysium, here we come.

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B. Morris Allen is a biochemist turned activist turned lawyer turned foreign aid consultant, and frequently wonders whether it’s time for a new career. He’s been traveling since birth, and has lived on five of seven continents, but the best place he’s found is the Oregon coast. When he can, he makes his home there. In between journeys, he works on his own speculative stories of love and disaster. His story collection Chambers of the Heart came out in 2022.

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