Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  “What the hell are doing at my house?” I said quietly so my mother in the kitchen couldn’t hear.

  Lottie shrugged her shoulders, still picking at her ear. “They got a dead horse out there. That’s where Mr. Furnham hung himself. Right out in the barn.”

  I thought for sure this girl, Lottie, was nuts. Shilo sniffed around the door, rubbing its pink nose against the screen. Kill, I wanted to say. Sic. But I didn’t. I just stared at her round face, looking at the way her eyes never remained still in her head.

  “Well, do ya?” she asked again.

  I stepped back from the screen, itching my eyes like they hurt. A week before, this girl had thrown stones at me, and now she wanted me to go to some barn with her. I didn’t know what to say that would clue her in to how I did not want anything to do with her.

  “There really are ghosts out there,” she whispered.

  I shook my head and decided to lie.

  “I gotta eat soon,” I mumbled. It was only 4:30 in the afternoon. My mother was in the kitchen defrosting a leg of lamb that wouldn’t be ready for another few hours. “Sorry.” I tried to smile but Lottie poked her head right against the screen. Her little round nose had a gray ring of sweat underneath it. She smelled like a boy. My dumb dog sniffed the girl through the door and whined for her attention.

  “Is that yours?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding.

  “That’s a pretty dog.” Lottie smiled, rubbing her hand against the screen so my big dumb dog would lick her palm. “Sure is friendly.”

  “Sure, sure, whatever.”

  “So you’re eatin’ right now?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I lied again, trying to back away from the door. “I just asked my mom. Sorry.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes became small and sad. She moved away from the door as I breathed a breath of relief.

  Of course, just then my mother’s voice rose like song from the other room: “You have plenty of time to go out, Dough. Just be back by 6, okay?”

  “But Mom, I—”

  “No, no, you need to get out of this house and get some exercise. You don’t wanna end up like Joe Landon, do you?”

  Poor Joe Landon, one of our old neighbors back in Duluth, was infamous for never leaving his house. He was a couple of years older then me and my brother, a teenager, I guess. He had a huge white freckled face and a short red crew cut that showed his tiny, pointed ears. There were at least a million neighborhood kids on our block who played stickball or catch-one-catch-all, but this kid, Joe Landon, just stayed inside and ate and slept in front of the TV until he was nearly three hundred pounds and all pasty and white and his parents had to sell their house to put him in some special clinic somewhere in Minneapolis. Joe Landon was someone my mother was always warning me about.

  “But Mom, I’ve got homework and—”

  “You’ve got all night to do it. Stop being rude and go out and play.”

  I gritted my teeth, feeling humiliated.

  “There really is a ghost out there,” Lottie repeated with a smile, pressing against the screen door. I shook my head and pulled my dirty baseball hat down over my eyes. This was going to be worse than going to Sunday school. But I made a plan right there. Stay with her a little while, maybe walk down the long road toward all the farms, then ditch her and run home and make it back to the trailer to doze in front of the TV.

  “You gonna come out then?” Lottie grinned.

  “Yeah, yeah, hold on,” I grunted. I stole one of my brother’s shirts and checked to see if there were a couple crumpled-up cigrettes stashed inside one of the pockets. There were. Three lonely squares. Enough for sure. I unlocked the screen and stepped outside. My dumb dog lapped at the door behind me. I hopped down the gray cement steps and looked around. Most of the trailer park was empty. Most everyone was still at work. There were some little kids running around half-naked, wearing only their diapers, chasing each other in front of a trailer down by the end of the cul-de-sac. There was a skinny mother in a long blue dress sitting on her front porch, combing out her long yellow hair, watching her little naked babies playing in the dirt. The sun was out. The sky was pretty and blue and it was almost as hot as summer. I tightened my baseball cap right down around my eyes again. Lottie was just standing there, staring at me. She was leaning beside the ugliest girl’s bicycle, too small for her for sure, with pink streamers hanging from the handlebars and silver noisemakers in the spokes.

  “That your bike?” I asked.

  “Yeah. It used to be my sister’s. She’s too old to ride now. You can try it if you want.”

  “No, that’s okay, I’ll walk.”

  “You sure? It’s a good bike.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  “Haw. Okay, then.” Lottie shrugged her shoulders and took a seat on her pink bike and began pedaling around me in wide circles as we started down the road toward the Furnhams’ barn.

  “You like living in a trailer park?” she asked, nearly cutting me off as she finished a big figure-eight.

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She circled around me again on her crappy pink bike. Her awkward knees hung out from under her dress as she pedaled. The lousy noisemakers in the spokes sparkled as she rode. “Do you like your name?” she asked.

  I stopped walking and watched her wheel around. “Hey, listen, I ain’t gonna walk with you if you keep asking stupid questions.” I accentuated that with a good solid spit, then started walking again. I fumbled through my brother’s shirt pocket and put a cigarette in my mouth, then took out a book of matches from my own pants and lit the square, coughing a little as I inhaled.

  “How come you smoke?” Lottie asked, swerving past me.

  “What?”

  “How come you smoke?” she repeated.

  “Because I do. Jesus,” I grunted.

  “You do it ’cause you think it’s cool.” She smiled, shaking her head. “You do it ’cause you think it makes you look older.”

  “Shut the hell up for a minute, will ya?” I inhaled and coughed again.

  “Haw! You don’t even know how to do it right.” She giggled, shaking her pigtails behind her round head.

  “Forget it!” I shouted, and stopped walking. “I’m going home.”

  “No, no, don’t go home,” she pleaded. She stopped her bike right in front of me. “I won’t ask any more questions, honest. Okay? I promise.”

  “How ’bout you don’t speak at all?” I said, staring at her lousy face. She smiled and began pedaling again. I started walking.

  “Do you like Miss Nelson?” she asked. Miss Nelson. Oh, Miss Nelson. Of course I liked Miss Nelson. I loved Miss Nelson. But we had gotten off on the wrong foot and there was no going back now.

  “No, I don’t like Miss Nelson,” I said with a frown.

  “Oh, I thought you liked her. I thought you wanted to marry her.”

  “You’re crazy.” I tried to smile, offering a phony chuckle. “You’re nuts, that’s what you are.”

  “I thought you wanted to marry her and run away with her.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you talk a lot?”

  She stopped and shrugged her shoulders. “No.”

  I shook my head and kept walking, taking another drag on my cigarette.

  “Do you like any girls in class?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you like Mary Beth Clishim?” she said with a smile, winking at me a little.

  “What?” I stared at her round face and gray eyes. “No, I don’t like her.”

  “All the boys do.” Her lips curled into a smirk.

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Do you like Laurie Avers?”

  “No.” I swatted at a fly that buzzed past my head.

  “What about Jill?”

  “Jill who?”


  “Jill Montefort. Do you like her?”

  “No, already. Jesus, you don’t ever shut up, do you?”

  “What about Miss Nelson? You like her, don’t you? You can tell me.”

  “You’re giving me a goddamn headache.”

  “Well, you have to like somebody.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Everyone likes somebody.”

  “No, not me. I don’t like anybody. I don’t like anybody anywhere.” I flicked the dying cigarette to the side of the road.

  “Haw. What about your brother? You like him?” This girl was trying to be real funny.

  “What, are you queer? Course I don’t like my brother.”

  “Haw. What about Texas? Do you like Texas?”

  “God, you’re loony.”

  “Sure, sure.” She smiled, pedaling beside me. Her eyes were all bright and shiny, then she said it. “Do you like … me?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, staring at my feet as I walked. “I like you about as much as that rock over there.” I pointed to a round gray stone covered in green moss and grass.

  “Is that a lot?” she asked with a frown.

  “You figure it out.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to be shy with me. My sister told me all about what boys think.”

  “How’s that?”

  She kept tilting her head back and forth like she was singing a song to herself as she spoke. “My sister told me that when a boy acts like he doesn’t like you, it means he really does.”

  “She told you that?”

  Lottie nodded proudly, giving me another gruesome wink. “Well, your sister is wrong. I don’t like you because I don’t like you.”

  “Haw!” She smirked again and shook her head. “Are you a virgin?”

  “Jesus!” I shouted, shaking my head. “What in the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Are you?”

  “Why the hell would I tell you about any of that stuff?”

  This girl was truly nuts. She was giggling like crazy now, shaking her head and smiling to herself. “Did you ever have sex?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Why the hell do wanna know so bad?”

  “I don’t think you did.” Her gray teeth shone under her nose as she grinned. “Do you know how to have sex?” she whispered, stopping her bike in its tracks. Her face was all shiny with sweat. One of her pigtails began to unravel on the side of her head.

  “Yeah,” I kind of mumbled, looking away from her.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, already, I said I do!”

  She stared at me hard, edging her teeth along her bottom lip. I tried to stare back, squinting a little. Right then, she had to know it was a lie. Her eyes were all sharp and mean and she smiled a little to herself. My face felt hot. The whole back of my neck felt like it was bubbling with sweat. I looked away and began walking again.

  “I think you’re lying. I don’t think you know the first thing about doing it.”

  “So what? What the hell do you care?”

  Lottie shrugged her shoulders and began pedaling again. She wouldn’t stop grinning. Her eyes were nearly crossed from her smiling so hard. I rubbed the back of my neck and scratched my face.

  “Where the hell is this place anyway?” I shouted, digging my hands in my pockets.

  “Right there.” She pointed to a huge red barn, worn and crooked, that stood a few hundred feet away, behind a low wire fence. The barn looked spooky as hell. Sunlight poured through the breaks in the roof in thick silver beams, cutting the dust in the air like the hand of God or something. There was an old red tractor parked beside it and a ways back from that was the Furnhams’ white farmhouse, graying along the porch and roof.

  “That’s it, huh?” I mumbled.

  “You scared?” Lottie smiled.

  “No, I’m not scared.”

  Lottie set down her ugly bike in the long yellow grass beside the wire fence. Then she hopped over like a pro, landing on her feet with a little grunt. I followed, catching my left foot on a loose wire, tripping to my knees as I fell on the other side.

  “There’s their house,” Lottie whispered, pointing to the white building as we walked up the path toward the barn. “And that’s the barn. That’s where he did it.” She frowned. Her eyes were dark and shallow. Her whole face was gray.

  “Did what?”

  “Hung himself,” she whispered again, staring straight at the huge red door. “His crops all died and so he sold off all his equipment, and then one night a man called to tell him that he had lost the land too, and then he went out to the barn and did it. He hung himself right in there and his family had to move away down south, and they left everything the way it was.”

  My mouth felt dry as hell. I kept staring at the big red door, waiting for it to swing open. The sun had already begun to set. I looked over my shoulder. There in the distance was the trailer park, not too far away at all. There was a whole line of silver mobile homes cluttered on the horizon, packed tightly together and looking as dull as anything I could ever imagine. I turned back and stared at the red barn. Posted in huge white letters on a black sign were some faded words. I couldn’t make them out.

  “No trespassers,” Lottie whispered. I nodded and cleared my throat, squinting at the silver light that gleamed from inside. “You ready?”

  I nodded slowly as Lottie dug her fingers between the two huge red doors and gave them a shove. The whole barn creaked and groaned as more dust erupted from the thin black opening. Lottie stopped pushing and turned to me and winked.

  “Do you wanna hold my hand?” she asked with a smile, raising one thin eyebrow.

  “No,” I mumbled.

  “Well, it can be pretty scary,” she said with a grin.

  “Let’s just go in already.”

  Lottie nodded and gave the doors another push. They howled and finally gave, creaking along their metal tracks, sliding apart. Dust spun around us like snow as we stepped inside. The place was dark and damp, with rotting bushels of wet hay, as quiet as a church.

  Almost at once, I knew it: This is His place, the Devil’s place, His place of death. Above our heads were thousands and thousands of cobwebs, crossing and crisscrossing in gray translucent cocoons. There were husks of dead insects left dangling in the light, hung by their empty shells by long thin strands cast by tiny black spinnerettes. I held my breath, gritting my teeth together as I followed Lottie inside. There was a stack of cut wood, coated in moss now, piled in one corner. There were some shovels and rakes and scythes and huge metal tools crowded along the wall. Then there was something left in the corner, a large brown and black mass at one side of the barn.

  “There it is,” Lottie whispered. “The dead horse.”

  The dead animal was huge. The old horse was a lump of loose skin that had begun to rot and fester. Flies buzzed everywhere, darting past our heads, up past the silver cobwebs and back down to the horse’s head. There, along one side of the animal, I could see some whitish ribs sticking out of its belly. Then I could see its head, long and thin, resting on its side. It was thrown back with its huge white teeth open. I felt my stomach go sour. Maybe it was the heat or maybe all the insects buzzing, but I was sweating now, sweating right through the bottom of my feet.

  “Do you wanna see its guts?”

  I shook my head, but this crazy girl just pulled my hand and led me around the front of the dead animal, pointing at its innards. The belly was split open, all the organs had spilled between its legs in a variety of colors and dull, pungent odors. “There’s its intestines,” she said, pointing at a white length of flesh that looked like a bloated worm. “There’s its stomach. Look how big it is.” Another yellowed mass, spotted with red and pink and white dots, hanging out emptily, along its exposed belly. There was a puddle of dried blood that ran in a ring around its head and belly; some dust and insects rising from its emptied eyes made the damn thing seem still alive.

  I was speechless. Lottie gripped my arm and led me d
eeper inside toward the center of the barn, and then she stopped. She squinted a little at all the dust and then looked up, staring past the silver light into the rafters above.

  “That’s it. That’s where he did it.”

  I swallowed hard and looked up. There was a thick wooden beam that ran over our heads. It was surrounded by thin eaves of spiderwebs and dust and empty insect bodies. Sunlight split between the boards overhead and poured down across the rafter’s edges. There, directly above our heads, was a black mark, thin but still dark, a scrape, a burn caused by the rope rubbing against the beam as Mr. Furnham swung beneath and fought hopelessly for his life. I couldn’t move. I stared up, unable to say anything, unable to blink, the dust circling around my head while I imagined the rope cinching around my neck, getting tighter and tighter until I dropped and my neck snapped and my teeth ran against each other in my cheeks and my eyes fell to the back of my head and my hands clenched and my spine became stiff and my stomach hard and I fell straight through my body to my own death. I noticed just then that my hands were trembling and I forced them into my pockets quick.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Lottie asked, but I still couldn’t move. All I could see was the black mark on the beam overhead. I kept staring up at the rafters, and suddenly, the silver light disappeared and all the shadows vanished. The twilight settled in through the wooden roof, and through all the tiny cobwebs, I thought I could see a face.

  There was a face in the dark above us.

  A long serpentine body crept along the rafters above us where we stood, with a long black-and-red cloak hanging around its thin arms and legs and head. Its face was like a reptile, a lizard, sharp and thin and mean, with a hood of skin that ran from its skull, darkening its black eyes with shadows it had stolen from midnight. I knew I was seeing it and not seeing it, all at once, recognizing the sound of its steps along the wooden beam, the same quiet inching I had heard every night since we had moved. There, right above my head, was what I was sure was the Devil, dark as blood but quiet as a prayer.

  “Are you okay?” Lottie repeated. “Do you wanna leave?” But it was too late. Its long red fingers reached down, brushing against the cold skin of my chest, past my clothes to my poor red heart. Fire began to burn all around my head, flames leapt from my skin and in the air behind me, as the Devil hissed and laughed, the curse, the curse burning bright red in my heart as Lottie pulled me by the arm and through the barn door. I almost started to cry. My teeth were chattering in my head. I stumbled out of the barn and Lottie shook me hard.