Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  “You’re not my friend!” she shouted, her face creasing with tears. “You’re not my friend at all.” And then she crawled out of the ditch and ran off. I watched to be sure she was gone and then stared at the little fort she had made beside the irrigation pipe. There were a few detached doll heads and a little toy bunny in a pink dress. There were a few miniature tea cups wedged under the pipe. When I held one of the little tea cups in my hand, I got the feeling it was something that was supposed to be a secret, so I placed it back inside the pipe and headed toward home; as I hurried along the ditch, my eye felt sore and raw. I don’t know why but I felt some tears moving down my face, burning along the open cut on my chin. I heard things moving in the high grass all around me; I heard things moving in the dark and held my breath until I got up the front stairs, because I was pretty certain that if I breathed once, I’d be dead.

  dark eye of a dog

  I don’t know why but we were in love with death: On our homework, we drew pictures of the Devil disemboweling corpses with his impossibly large fangs. We collected pocket knives. We bleached animal skulls we found. We wore shark teeth on fake gold necklaces which we ordered from the back of comic books. We watched motorcross in hopes that something would go wrong, praying to witness someone’s fiery ghost rising from the twisted wreckage below. We watched the Faces of Death videos whenever we were left alone. Somehow we understood that the world was a place of unquestionable brutality. Maybe we were looking for clues about our own father’s death in every fly we dismembered. Maybe we hoped that if we came to some understanding of it, we would become immortal, or at least able to change our circumstances. We wanted to be like stuntmen. Or barbarians. We did not want to be afraid anymore, of anything, even the possibility of dying, so we did all we could to become accustomed to death.

  One night, French took a seat beside my brother and me in front of the TV and asked what we thought about going with him to a dog fight. He looked around to be sure my mother was busy in the kitchen. “Well, what do you think?” He talked low as my mother clanged some dishes together, preparing dinner, opening and closing the rusty stove. It wasn’t that French was a bad guy, because he really wasn’t. I mean, he never beat on me or Pill or hit my mother, he never came home drunk and knocked a kitchen table over or threatened to kick our heads in for being unruly, but maybe that made it harder to get along with him. Somehow my mother had fallen for him and somehow he had convinced her to uproot us and sell our house and buy a trailer and move. But there was absolutely no way you could hate him for it. We had been living with him for a little less than a month already and he was still real nice and quiet and never raised his voice at anyone, even when he probably should have. He was still sweet with my mother and always offered to take us all out to dinner at the Sizzler in Aubrey. If he was watching a football or baseball game on Saturday afternoon and you said you wanted to watch a kung fu movie or the Saturday Horror Spectacular, he would take a swig of beer from its cold silver can and nod and watch the goddamn movie with you. My own old man would have laughed right in your face if you ever tried pulling a stunt like that. He would have laughed so hard you would have wondered what you were thinking to ask to change the channel in the first place. French, he never made you feel like that. He was soft-spoken and calm all the goddamn time. The only thing he did that was mildly irritating was urinate real loud at about 6 in the morning when he got up to go to work. Heck, our room was right next to the bathroom and he’d be in there every morning, just urinating for what seemed like hours. But that was about it. He was quiet as hell the rest of the time and always well-mannered. Nothing me or my crazy brother did could get a rise out of him. Maybe that’s what burned us the most about him.

  “Well, what do you think about coming with?” French muttered.

  Me and my brother sat on either side of him, staring at the blue-and-white flicker of the television screen.

  “What?” I asked. “Mom doesn’t know, does she?”

  My mother ran a spoon through a bowl, mixing up another one of her ungodly casseroles. She could take any three good ingredients and make a horrible mess out of it. Any of the meat French brought home from the plant, secondhand meat products that he got real cheap, would turn to unrecognizable things in my mother’s hands. Take three foods you think you like, something simple like turkey, noodles, and celery, right? My mother could mix those things up in a way that would make you wonder what exactly happened from the time she put it all in a pan and put it in the oven and then put it on your plate. I could hear the stove whine as my mother opened the oven door and popped the poor casserole inside.

  French shook his head slowly. He had a long pale face with deep blue eyes. His hair was brown and thinning and he wore it short in a crew cut that showed the shine of the side of his head right above his pointy ears. “Do you think I’m plum crazy? Of course your mother doesn’t know.” His eyes sparkled behind his brown-rimmed glasses like magic.

  I smiled, nodding like a maniac. “Sure. I’ll go.” A dog fight. A goddamn dog fight. I’d never been to anything like that before. The closest I’d ever been was when the Dilforts’ big black labrador got loose and killed Gretchen Hollis’s four white kittens back in Duluth. The dog snapped their necks and left them in a single pool of dark red blood beside the Hollises’ house. The Hollises were so upset that they planted four white wood crosses in the meadow beside their house in memory of the dead kittens and all. That spot was a perfect place to go and smoke a cigarette or stare at a nudie magazine, because it was dark and shady and all the little kids in the neighborhood thought the place was haunted.

  “What about you, Pill?” French whispered. “You in?”

  Pill shrugged his shoulders.

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, do you want to go or not, pal?” French asked with a smile. He pushed his glasses tight against his nose.

  “Sure. Whatever. I don’t care.”

  Apathy was the only thing my older brother seemed to know those days. I just hoped that sooner or later he’d go back to being how he had been in Duluth.

  “All right then. We’ll leave right after dinner. Not a word to your mother now, understand?”

  I nodded excitedly. Pill shrugged his shoulders and continued staring at the television screen.

  “Now go help her set the table,” French whispered, taking another slug of his beer. I shot off the couch like a rocket and pulled the dinner plates from the cabinet. My brother just sighed and took his seat at the table. French flipped off the TV and followed. My mother pulled the casserole out of the oven, placed it in the center of the little round wood table, right on top of the checkered yellow tablecloth, and everyone sucked in their breath.

  “Looks great,” I lied, folding my napkin into the collar of my shirt the way my old man used to. My mother smiled and spooned a big helping on to my plate. It steamed and congealed and oozed mysteriously, but I didn’t falter. I closed my eyes and began to force it down with a fake smile across my face. Pill just poked at his food, mixing it up with his fork, pushing it back and forth. His technique was to spread the poor food all across his plate in a flat plane of creamy ooze so it appeared like he had eaten most of it, but no parent I ever knew was fooled by that trick, so he took a bite and shuddered, spitting it into his napkin for cover.

  “This is great, honey,” French mumbled across the yellow table. “Clean your plates, boys, so we can take off.”

  “Take off? Where are you all heading?” my mother asked, wiping her lips with the edge of her napkin.

  “Well, we were all gonna head over to Aubrey and pick up some parts for the Impala.” French smiled, scraping a fork over his plate. A lie. Ol’ French was lying right to my mother’s face. Maybe this guy wasn’t as perfect as he seemed. He shoved another forkful of yellowed noodles into his mouth and forced it down. “Mmmm,” he said with a smile. “Great.”

  Pill rolled his eyes and spat another mouthful of food into his napkin, folded it up under the
table, and forced it into his front pocket. The horrible glob on his plate was not disappearing. It seemed to be growing, actually, bubbling a little, expanding across his plate. He grunted to himself, shaking his head in frustration. Me, I wasn’t fairing any better. What was left of the horrible casserole had dried up and become a thick substance that felt awful against my gums. I swallowed, nearly gagging, and started to cough. French shook his head, wiping his mouth on his napkin.

  “All right, boys, let’s go.” French crossed his fork and knife over his plate and pushed his chair away from the table.

  “But they’re not even done eating,” my mom said with a frown.

  “Oh, they’re fine.” French smiled, kissing my mother on her forehead. “Besides, we want to make sure we get there before the store closes.”

  French winked at me and I nodded back. This guy couldn’t be all that bad.

  We piled into my mother’s rusted-out Corolla and drove out to the barn where the dog fight would be taking place. French had met some guy while he was drinking at the bowling alley a few nights before and he told French all about it. Nearly every man in town would be there. No women, no girls. They were pitting Lester Deegan’s young shepherd against Stu Freeman’s old pit bull. I guess the way they did it was they’d beat on the poor dogs, riling them up with rods and broom handles, and then turn the two animals loose on each other. The barn was off Mill Creek Road, way out of town, in the gray brush behind someone’s ranch. The barn was shiny and red like it had just been painted. There was a line of cars, mostly pickups and big Chevys with V-8s, some stock GMs, all parked one beside another. There was some yellow light breaking between the panels in the barn walls. “This is it.” French patted me on the head. He turned off my mother’s Corolla and hopped out of the car. The autumn air was cool around us as me and Pill followed French toward the barn.

  “Hey there, French, glad you could make it,” some guy with a red mustache said, smiling as we walked through the side door. French: I was surprised that some guy knew his name. Maybe they worked at the plant together. Heck, I guess French was a supervisor. People were bound to know him around town. We stepped inside and the glare of the big yellow lights made me squint.

  Nearly every man in Tenderloin was packed into this barn. Thick plumes of cigar and cigarette smoke drifted in the air under the bright lights. There were old men with pale gray faces and white cowboy hats sitting on stools in the back and younger boys with mussed brown hair running around, pushing each other into the dirt. There were middle-aged men in their coveralls and work clothes passing around silver flasks of booze. There were big-shouldered teenagers spitting tobacco into the gray dust with conviction, while me and my brother followed French, edging our way toward the middle of the crowd.

  In the center of the barn was a ring. It was a small section of about ten feet rounded out by some chicken wire about five feet high. There were breaks in the fence at opposite ends where some crude gates had been built. French patted me on the shoulder and pointed across the ring. “There’s Lester Deegan’s dog,” he whispered. The dog was big, a brown and black German shepherd with a long, thick snout. Its eyes were nearly green and its gums were pinkish with blood. Its tongue flagged in and out of its red metal muzzle, which kept its jaws closed tight.

  “That’s the champeen,” this kid, Billy Pillick, mumbled, elbowing me in the side. Billy was a year younger than me but twice my size. He had a pug nose and it seemed like most of his teeth were missing. He was always getting in trouble at school for eating some other kid’s lunch. I would see him on the playground at recess, putting other kids in headlocks. The dog’s owner, Mr. Deegan, had a brown hunting jacket on and his face was shadowed by a white cowboy hat. He held his dog on a leather leash, keeping him close, right outside one of the gates. Mr. Deegan looked like he was more intelligent than the rest of the men there. He was the local livestock veterinarian and I kind of wondered why he’d put his dog through such a thing. His face was stern and serious, his mouth tight-lipped. His dog, the shepherd, had the same quiet calm, the same stern look in the black of its eyes.

  Mr. Deegan led the shepherd, Lance, by the leash into the rounded metal ring, tying the dog to a metal hook, still looking calm and resigned the whole way. There, on the other side of the pen, was the challenger, a pit bull. This dog was pale, blue-white almost, pink-nosed with silvery trails of drool that ran from its muzzle. There were pink scars all along its body. This white dog was huge. Nearly twice the size of the other poor dog. It kept snorting out loads of drool from its square jaws, flicking its triangular ears as some flies swarming around its head. This dog was going to tear that other dog to pieces. It kept yanking on the metal leash, trying to get free, rearing up on its big square paws.

  Mr. Freeman, the pit bull’s owner, yanked the metal chain, leading it through the gate. He wore a red hunting cap with the furry bill nearly covering his red eyes. His face was dark and whiskered. He sold propane and rented moving vehicles. I guess he had fallen off a thresher when he was a kid and had lost a foot to the awful machine, so now he walked with a limp, shifting his weight to one side of his body, then back, limping along with his huge white dog. The pit bull suddenly reared up on its hind legs, tearing at the wire fence with its enormous paws.

  “Down!” Mr. Freeman yelled. “Down, you mangy mutt!” Mr. Freeman’s face was red and pock-marked. A sheen of sweat had begun to form along his forehead.

  I looked over and saw French as he pulled a plug of tobacco from inside his jacket, then cut a nice piece of chaw from its slick black mass and planted it in my hand. Heck, I had never even seen the man spit tobacco before in my life. He didn’t say a word either, just handed me some and stared across the ring at the brown shepherd, Lance, like he had handed me tobacco a hundred times before.

  “Do you want some there, Pill?” French asked, cutting another piece loose. Pill shook his head. He was about as friendly as a goddamn tick. It was beginning to make me angry. Here French was, going out of his way to try to be nice, offering us chaw like our own old man might have, and Pill was being a dickwad about it all. French just sunk the chaw between his gums and cheek and put the plug back in his jacket. He leaned in close and whispered, “Don’t swallow any of that spit now or you’ll get a sore stomach.”

  I nodded, watching how French had placed the chaw in his mouth. I slipped the tobacco between my bottom lip and gum. It tasted sweet like molasses and began to liquefy, bleeding syrup down the back of my throat. I gagged a little.

  “Spit,” French said, smiling out of the corner of his mouth. I nodded and spat a load of slick brown juice like a pro, watching it plop in the dust. My face felt good because I was smiling. I felt like a man all right, spitting tobacco and watching these other men swear and swig from the passing flask of whiskey. French winked and patted me on the back.

  “Who do you boys favor?” he asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, spitting again. “I like that shepherd.”

  “Yeah? That pit bull looks awfully mean,” French said.

  “That other dog’s gonna tear that shepherd in two,” Pill muttered.

  “We’ll see,” I mumbled, leaning against the wire fence. I looked around the ring again. The pit bull was growling and snarling and drooling as Mr. Freeman jabbed it in the side with the end of a broom handle. The dog yelped and snapped at the handle, unable to open its jaws on account of the silver muzzle. Mr. Freeman jabbed at the dog again. The other dog stood at the opposite end of the ring, scratching in the dust as it flicked its ears.

  After some time, they turned those poor dogs loose.

  My dog, the shepherd, Lance, was awful quiet. It hadn’t even begun snarling, even when its owner began riling it up, jabbing its flanks with the end of a stick. Mr. Deegan pulled the red muzzle off and untied the leash, then hopped out of the ring. I felt like closing my eyes right then. That poor dog was going to be ripped apart.

  The pit bull was snarling and spitting and nearly ready to climb up ove
r the wire fence. Mr. Freeman yanked the muzzle and leash free, then hurried through the opening in the gate.

  My dog was as good as doomed. There was a single moment when all the men got quiet and it seemed like even the dogs were silent, right when those two animals first locked eyes, when they first saw each other beneath those shiny yellow lights. A single drop of sweat fell from my forehead and made me feel like dying.

  My dog lunged forward, not making a sound. Its clean jaws bit down on the pit bull’s front right paw, clamping it right at the joint, tearing and drooling spit and dark red blood. The pit bull just sat there for a moment. Then the dog tried to yank its paw free, not snarling or biting back; it yelped a little and tried to pull away. Blood broke out along the white dog’s flesh, spilling along the gray dirt in perfectly round dollops.

  “Kill! Shilo, kill!” Mr. Freeman yelled, shaking the wire fence. But his dog wouldn’t move. It snarled a little, as good old Lance snapped at the bloody front paw again, clamping down hard once more and snarling. The shepherd shook its head wildly, tearing the other dog’s front paw from its joint.

  “Je-sus!!” someone shouted. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away. I clenched the wire fence and held my breath as more blood darkened the dirt around the white dog’s flanks.

  “Kill!” Mr. Freeman shouted. “Shilo, kill, you lousy mutt!”

  There was a milky-white silence in the pitt bull’s pink eyes. The shepherd growled, going for the pit bull’s throat now.

  “Kill, Shilo, kill!”

  Suddenly the white dog snapped awake; its black eyes darkened as it bled from its missing paw. It snarled and lunged, clamping some fur around the shepherd’s neck, tearing it loose with one huge swipe.