Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  “Are you okay?” she shouted.

  I nodded, still staring back into the empty red barn.

  “Do you wanna go home?”

  I nodded again, feeling the whole world darkening and closing around me. Lottie led me by the hand down the dirt path to the wire fence; she helped me over to where she picked up her bike and walked it beside me, peering hard into my eyes like she might start to cry too.

  “Do you think you’re gonna be sick?” she asked, rolling the bike beside me. “Do you want to stop by my house and rest?”

  I do not know why but I nodded, watching the dirt road as it drifted under my feet. I was shaking a little, shivering from all the sweat up and down my back. I leaned against Lottie as she stared in my eyes.

  “Here, we’re almost there,” she said. I followed her down a little road that wound beside another wire fence and led up to her house. Behind me, over my shoulder, was the unlit night. The sky was blue and black and moving slowly with clouds. Behind me was that dark red barn, blossoming with blood, trembling with strange silver lights. I decided not to turn around and look again. Up off the road a little ways was Lottie’s house. It was gray and white, a big A-frame farmhouse with a tire-swing hung off a maple tree out front. There were some small white chickens pecking and scurrying about. Their eyes were green in the dark as they squabbled and fluttered beside the front porch.

  “Nobody’s home,” Lottie mumbled, throwing her bike down in the dirt. “We’ll go around back.” She pulled me by the shirt and led me to the back of the house. There was a gray wood porch and some dark cement stairs that led down to a shadowy basement. Lottie dragged me down the steps and pushed open the rusty basement door. Unafraid, Lottie stepped right into the blackness and found a small silver chain attached to a lightbulb, and gave it a pull. The light snapped awake, swinging from her movement, teetering back and forth on its wire.

  “We can sit down here for a while before my dad comes home,” she said with a smile, squeezing my arm. As the lightbulb swung, shadows moved all along the walls, creaking back and forth. There were eyes. Thousands of silver eyes. I felt the spit run dry in my mouth. “Trophies,” Lottie whispered, still holding my arm. “My dad’s a taxidermist. He stuffs them.”

  There were mounted creatures all around my head. There was a huge purple-and-brown quail mounted as if it was in flight along the wall. There was a black-and-white badger poised at my feet, its huge triangular teeth bared in a snarl. There was a buck’s head raised on the wall, its shiny black antlers branching from its brown skull. There were all kinds of fish on brown bits of wood and rock, there was a huge white skull that had been bleached and emptied, there were thick brown and black animal skins that had been stretched along the floor, and there was a huge wooden desk in the corner covered with tools and knives and a hundred glass bottles of all sizes.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  Inside the round glass jars were silver and green stars, shimmering as the lightbulb swung over our heads.

  “Eyes,” Lottie whispered.

  The lightbulb came to a stop. The shadows went still on the wall.

  “Eyes?” I mumbled.

  “Glass eyes.”

  Inside the shiny silver jars were all kinds of glass eyes. Blue eyes, big black eyes, tiny silver eyes, small brown eyes, all smooth and cool as pennies, cold to the touch, but hard and strange and wonderfully mysterious. I held out my palm to feel their weight.

  “These are my favorite,” Lottie said, opening one of the jars. She dug her fist inside and lifted up a tiny black cloth and pulled out two perfectly round glass eyes. They were big enough for a person, green and hard and reflecting the flickering white light overhead.

  “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” Lottie smiled, holding the eyes in her tiny white palm. I nodded. Those glass eyes were the most wonderful things I had ever seen. I reached out to touch one. It was cold, cold but warm from Lottie’s soft skin. The glass cornea was black and radiant inside, staring out as Lottie moved under the light.

  “It’s for a person,” Lottie whispered. “For Miss Dubuque when she dies.”

  “Who?”

  “The lady who lives on the other side of town. She’s going to be stuffed when she dies.”

  “What?”

  “She already paid my daddy to do it. And she wants these green eyes.” Lottie placed one in my palm. It fit perfectly in the tiny recess of my hand, rolling around gently as I stared deep inside. They were perfect. They were the perfect death-eyes for a lady who hadn’t even died. The thought sent a shiver down my spine.

  “What does she want green eyes for?” I asked.

  “Who knows? My dad says she’s got more money than she knows what to do with.”

  I held the glass eye in my hand tightly. The thing felt heavy and indestructible against my skin.

  “Don’t break it now,” she whispered. She stared at my face, smiling at my smile. “Nice, huh?”

  I nodded again.

  “Bet you thought I didn’t have anything good at my house,” she said. “Here, I better put them back.” I held the glass eye for one more moment, then handed it to her, staring as she gently placed it back in the glass jar and covered it with a tiny black blanket, to help the eyes sleep, I guess. In the other corner of the room was a huge brass drum that dripped water into a dirty brown bucket. It dripped, dripped, dripped quietly, splashing against the shiny liquid inside.

  “That’s my dad’s still. Supposed to stay away from that. Moonshine,” she said with a wink. I nodded, finally understanding something she had said. One of my mother’s worst boyfriends, Joe Brown, who had been a drinker and awful mean to Pill, would take long, angry sips from a gray jug he kept in the trunk of his car. He nearly sent my older brother to the hospital for breaking the radio antenna off his beloved El Dorado. I looked at the still again and suddenly there were heavy, clumsy footsteps pounding against the floor overhead.

  “Lottie?!”

  I flinched as the footsteps clambered around a little then stopped right above our heads. It sounded like someone dropped a glass, which then shattered on the floor.

  “Lottie, get down here and clean up this mess!” the cold, gravelly voice shouted. Lottie froze, then held her breath.

  “That’s my dad,” she said, staring into my eyes. “I’m not supposed to be down here.” She sighed, glancing up at the floor-boards.

  “Lottie?!” he called again. “You better not be down in my things!”

  “You better go,” she squeaked, opening the back door. I shrugged my shoulders and nodded and ran up the stairs and then around the side of the house, stopping to look over my shoulder to make sure I was alone. There, in the front window, along the faded blue curtains, was a huge shadow, tall and square, the shadow of her father, a man who knew how to use knives to cut and sew and sever. There, behind that window, was a man who kept the eyes of a rich woman in a glass jar on his desk, a man whose voice was hard and mean as if his throat had been overgrown with rust, a man whose own eyes had to be two cold black pits along the side of a long, narrow, serpentine head. Here was a man I had met a dozen time before, men like the kind my mother would bring home once or twice who would then disappear, swearing at her from their cars in the middle of the night. Here was a man I knew how to hate without a single thought. He stood in the front window and watched me run along the dirt as my shadow skittered from dark spot to dark spot, as I hurried down the gravel path and out to the long road that led home.

  About half a mile away, I turned around once more and looked back into the darkness, back at Lottie’s house, rising there on its little gray hill. Even though I was scared and my legs were weak at the knees, I stopped and turned back and stared hard, kind of hoping that poor girl was following me. For some reason, I felt myself wishing she was right behind me, but she wasn’t, she was trapped in that house, like a ghost, hiding there alone in the basement, holding her breath the same way as me.

  the birthday surprise

/>   Me, I turned eleven without a sound. It was my first birthday away from Duluth and I felt hopeless spending it with just Pill and my folks. There would be no party with streamers and foil, no stupid party games like Pin the Tail on the Donkey or Spin the Bottle, no birthday kisses from the older girls on my old block. Worst of all, I guess, there’d be no extra presents, all wrapped up nice and neat in newspaper and bows, no gifts from the other kids in my class who I might have invited. My eleventh birthday was going to be spent with my lousy family in a lousy new town.

  It just happened to fall on a Saturday, September 28, so my mother was real sweet and made everyone keep quiet to let me sleep in late. But that damn dog woke me up anyway. I didn’t really care. My mom was going to make a huge dinner of all my favorites: pork chops and applesauce and a huge chocolate cake. It all sounded great. I was going to lay around the trailer all day and watch a kung fu movie or an old black-and-white monster show because it was my birthday and French said I could watch what I pleased. But then, about two hours after I woke up, just as I was settling into that lumpy sofa with a nice can of grape soda, well, then there was the most awful surprise, the sound of which started with a knock against the screen door.

  “Hello? Is anyone home?!” came the whiny voice. I sat up and rolled my eyes.

  “Hello, Marie!” my mother screamed, shoving the chocolate cake into the oven, dropping her green cooking mitts to the floor. She fumbled at the latch and pushed the screen door open wide. I shook my goddamn head because just then I could smell my aunt’s horrible pink perfume like some sort of invisible claw choking my throat. I knew, oh brother, I knew, it was my Aunt Marie and all her stupid kids.

  Aunt Marie was my father’s older sister. They had both been born and raised in Duluth. By the time my dad was old enough to drive, both of his parents had died, so Aunt Marie thought it was her duty to raise her younger brother, who took more joy in fist fighting and kissing girls than anything else.

  At the age of twenty-two, my old man married my mom, according to Pill, because he had knocked her up. Since she was pregnant when she got married and didn’t insist on a church wedding, Aunt Marie never forgave my mother. After Pill was born, my old man began doing odd jobs, in addition to working ten to twelve hours a day as an auto mechanic. Mostly, he fenced stolen goods. My mother took care of her baby, cut her neighbors’ hair, and started going to church as often as she could. A few years later, I guess they had me, and by then my old man had gotten his trucking license and was working pretty steadily. But the way my aunt saw it, my father had always been a hoodlum and it was only a matter of time before it all caught up with him, leaving us to fend for ourselves, which is exactly what happened.

  “Where’s the birthday boy?” my aunt asked with a grin. Her face was so big and round that her eyes seemed like two soft black dots pressed into her flesh. Her nose was tiny and snub, and her damn perfume made me sick as she hugged me. I could feel the ridges of her lips as she squeezed me hard and planted the most greasy kiss on my cheek. “How does it feel to be eleven?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. There’s never an easy answer to get you out of a dumb question like that. Pill grinned like a bastard, shaking his head. He was lucky. He was thirteen, too old and too ugly to be hugged by anyone. But not me. Me, I was still kind of short and pudgy. Aunts and old ladies thought it was real goddamn cute to go and squeeze your cheeks or smother you with their lousy lipsticked mouths. I wiped her makeup off my cheek with my sleeve and stepped aside. Two girls stood behind my aunt, staring at us silently.

  “Now don’t be bashful. These are your cousins, Dough. This is Hildie. You remember her, don’t you?”

  Wow. This girl looked like no cousin I ever had. Her hair was short and blond and curled loose down around her ears. She had on a white sweater with a nice plaid skirt and black shoes and thigh-high tights. I guess I hadn’t seen Hildie in a few years. Back then, she had been a runny-nosed little goat. Now she was different. Now this cousin of mine was fourteen. Now she was as pretty and clean as a pearl. Her hands were fidgeting behind her back. Kissing cousins. The words popped in my mind. I suddenly couldn’t get the thought of kissing Hildie out of my head.

  “And this is Pettina,” my aunt said. My God. Pettina had gotten the short end of the ugly stick. Pettina. Apparently, this poor girl had been named after Richard Petty, number 43, the stock car driver. My Uncle Dirk, Aunt Marie’s husband, was a real Nascar fan, and according to Pill anyway, he’d had an abscess on his penis and had to have it lanced, and so he only had two daughters, no son, and so my aunt had let her husband pick their youngest’s name. Pettina sure was huge. Next to her slender older sister, she looked like some kind of pink pear. She was biting at her nails. Each finger looked like a pork sausage that she kept nibbling at. I began to wonder if, like me, her awful name had led her to all kinds of unhappiness.

  “Hello,” Pettina kind of snorted all in a huff, like it cost her a lot just to get that single word out. Pettina wore a white-and-pink dress with yellow ribbons in her hair.

  “Here you go, sweetheart,” my Aunt Marie said, pulling a thin present from her huge black purse. “Just a little something for one of my favorite nephews.” This gift looked sad, even wrapped in its dull yellow paper and lousy silver bow. It was too small and thin to be anything good. She handed it to me and I gnashed my teeth.

  French pinched his glasses against his nose as he patted me on the back. “Well, go ahead, pal, open it,” he whispered. My brother, Pill, shook his head. Not another goddamn wallet. Not another goddamn wallet.

  I felt the gift in my hands.

  No. There was no luck anywhere in the world.

  This gift was going to be another goddamn plastic wallet. I knew it. I could tell. It was too thin, too light to be anything else. I peeled off the yellow paper and forced the worst fake smile on my face. Another goddamn plastic wallet. My lousy Aunt Marie had gotten me a goddamn plastic wallet for every birthday ever since I was about three. I never used them. Heck, I didn’t have a thing to put in them. I mean, I was a kid. So they just ended up collecting dust in the bottom drawer of a dresser full of old junk, like shark’s teeth and arrowheads and old holy scapulars I had forgotten how to roll. This year’s wallet was vinyl brown, not even simulated leather, with gold trim. There, embossed in one corner, was the single word, Hawaii. I didn’t even bother to sigh.

  Of course, Pill let out a squeal. He laughed and grinned. Sure, this was all a regular riot.

  “We got that for you when we went to the islands last summer,” my aunt said, smiling. I nodded, not saying a damn word. “We know how old you’re getting and a man needs a good wallet.” Or one hundred crappy plastic ones, I thought.

  “Say thanks, Dough,” French whispered.

  I shook my head like I suddenly forgot how to hear.

  “Say thanks,” he whispered again. I clamped my teeth together and folded my lips in. There was a dull silence in the air, waiting, waiting, waiting for me to say thank you or thanks what a great gift, gee, thanks, but I didn’t say a damn word, I just held my breath until my dumb dog, Shilo, marched right up and licked the back of my hand.

  “What in the world is that creature?” my aunt whispered.

  “That’s our dog,” I grunted, scratching the top of its ugly head. Shilo rubbed its face against my leg and then sniffed at Aunt Marie’s feet. Its empty eye rubbed against her fat gray thigh as it laid its big paw on her chest.

  “It certainly is the ugliest animal I’ve ever seen.” Aunt Marie frowned, shaking her head. “What happened to it?”

  “It got hit by a truck.”

  “June, what kind of dog is that?” my aunt called to my mother in the kitchen.

  “Oh, you know, the boys found it so we gave it a home,” she called back.

  “Certainly doesn’t seem healthy to have a dog like that just roaming around.”

  My older brother shook his head and got up off the sofa. He pulled on his gray hooded sweatshirt, looking like h
e was about to leave.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” I asked in a kind of plea.

  “Someone needs to take the dog for a walk,” he lied, pulling on Shilo’s big black collar. That bastard Pill had never taken the dog for a walk before. But now, since my aunt was there, he was looking for any way out he could find.

  “Why don’t all you kids take the dog for walk? It’ll give us adults some time to talk,” my mother said, stirring some punch in a big plastic bowl.

  “That sounds nice. It will give the adults a chance to catch up,” my aunt said, grinning falsely.

  “Christ,” Pill muttered with a frown.

  “Pill, watch your mouth!” my mother hollered. My brother shook his head and kicked the screen door open and all four of us stepped outside. The sky was blue and bright with big clouds that hung over our heads like ice cream. Shilo hopped down the stairs and back around the trailer to the wide field that began just a few hundred feet away. There, right in the distance, was the haunted barn, a dark red dot sticking out from the blue sky like a scar. I knew that in the barn lived the Devil, who was the cause of the worst nightmares I had ever had in my life. I turned from its awful sight and stared down at Hildie’s black shoes.

  “I’ll wait here,” Pettina said with a frown, taking a seat on our gray cement steps.

  “Fine by me, stay here if you want,” Pill muttered, pulling his blue stocking cap down over his scab. He dug into his pockets and pulled out a pack of smokes. He kept mumbling to himself, kicking at the dirt as he fumbled for a match. I paid my brother no mind. I kept staring at my cousin Hildie’s black shoes. Her socks ended just below her bare knees. That white space, between the bottom of her skirt and the top of her knees, seemed pretty perfect to me.