Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  “Did you ever smoke?” Pill asked Hildie, lighting up a cigarette. He took a long drag and let the smoke trickle out of his mouth, like he was some sort of real tough guy.

  “Duh,” Hildie said with a smile, plucking the cigarette from his lips. She fit it into her tiny mouth and smiled, taking a short drag and exhaling like a pro, without choking on a lung or coughing up any smoke, the way I guess I usually did. “Did you ever smoke grass?” she asked, taking another drag. I felt my eyebrows shoot up over my forehead. Lord. Grass? One of my mother’s boyfriends, Lenny, used to come over and smoke it all the time. Me and my brother would sit at the top of the stairs and try to get high that way but it never did any good. “Did you ever?” she asked again. I guess I was surprised. Maybe my cousin wasn’t such a clean little pearl at all. Her lips were curled tight around the cigarette, making her whole round face seem kind of shiny and a little older. Maybe she was just like the other high school girls I’d see walking home in town; smoking with their thin hands bent just at the wrist, laughing their fake laughs, talking about who did it with who. It made me want to kiss her even worse. “You’ve never smoked grass?”

  “Sure,” Pill lied. “I’ve done it a couple of times.”

  Hildie finished off the smoke and flicked it into the dirt. Then she just took a seat, right in the grass, and spread her skirt over her thighs. She ran her hand over her sweater and undid the top snap. Then she reached down inside the sweater and pulled out a pink stick of bubble gum from beside the palest skin I had ever seen. She folded the gum inside her mouth and smiled. My God, this girl was trying to be cute as hell. My older brother stared at her hard, not saying a word. His hands were dug into his coat pockets. He looked kind of worried and kind of confused.

  “I’m going back to the house,” he said with a frown. Hildie shrugged her shoulders in reply.

  My brother backed away slow like he was trying to think of something else to say, but then ran out of space to walk. He just shook his head and turned away.

  “What do you guys do around do here for fun?” Hildie asked, snapping the gum in her mouth.

  “We don’t do anything,” I said weakly. Her nose twitched a little when she blew a perfect pink bubble. Her lips made a gentle smacking sound as the bubble snapped and then disappeared back in her mouth.

  “Do you got a girlfriend or anything?”

  “Nope,” I said with a frown. More than anything in my life, I wanted to take her hand and sit down right there and touch her hair.

  “Did you ever French kiss anybody?”

  “Nnn … no.” I had wanted to lie at first, but then it felt like she had pulled the words right out of my mouth. My lips felt dry as I finally got up enough nerve and sat down beside her.

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you ever practice?”

  “No.”

  “No? Never?”

  “No.”

  Of course, I had seen a million naked girls in a million different nudie magazines and imagined kissing them all over, but not one of them had been real.

  “I practice all the time,” she said. “All you have to do is kiss the back of your hand.” She held hers up and smiled, then closed her eyes and began kissing it very, very slowly. I shrugged my shoulders and lifted my hand and started doing the same thing. It felt awful corny to me.

  “No, here, you’re supposed to open your mouth a little.” She took the back of my hand and so gently, so softly pressed her lips there. I suddenly felt like I was going to explode and so I hurried away, tripping over my clumsy feet.

  “Okay, well, thanks,” I said, unsure of what else to say.

  “You all ready for dinner?” my cousin Pettina called from around the side of our trailer. I nodded nervously and walked around to the front door. Pill sat there on the steps with a scowl, tightening his fingers into tiny white fists at his side. Shilo sat before him, its head in his lap. I could hear an argument of some kind inside the trailer, somebody was shouting, but quietly, as my older brother put his hand against my shoulder to keep me from going in.

  “I don’t know why they don’t just run off! Young boys like that! Lucky they don’t end up to be criminals!” came my aunt’s awful voice.

  But my mother and French didn’t say a word.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve been taking them to church?”

  “Sunday school every week, Marie,” my mother answered, which was the truth. Every Sunday morning Pill and I spent an hour with Mrs. Heget, the deacon’s wife, and a roomful of other heathens who didn’t know the difference between wrong and right.

  “Well, I’d like to know what goes on here—really, I would. Have you two even thought about getting married?” my Aunt Marie hissed.

  “We’re not getting married, Marie,” my mother said, banging a pot or pan. “French here is the best man, the best man I’ve ever met, but we both agreed—”

  “Well, it’s not right, the two of you living like this, with those boys around. They’re very impressionable.”

  By then Pill’s face had turned bright red. He hated Aunt Marie worse than me, I think.

  “The whole thing’s not right,” Marie argued. “It just isn’t respectable.”

  Pill gritted his teeth, clenching his fingers tight to the bone. He stood up and spat hard onto our neighbor Mrs. Garnier’s back porch. I pressed my face up against the screen for a peek. My aunt had her fat arms crossed, hovering beside my mother, who was finishing the chocolate cake.

  “And what about their father? What do you think he’d feel about all of this?” Aunt Marie mumbled through her perfect white teeth. I turned away from the screen and shook my head. My older brother threw open the door. He ran into the trailer and snarled, staring up into my aunt’s fat white face.

  “Get out!” my brother shouted. “Get out now.”

  “Pill!” my mother gasped.

  “I mean it. If French is being too quiet to do it, then I will.”

  “Pill!” French hollered, shaking his head.

  “Get out! You don’t talk to my mom like that. My dad would have never stood for that.”

  “Pill,” my mother muttered. “Not another word.”

  “Well, I see exactly how it is!” my Aunt Marie shot back. Her face was all flustered and bright red. She held her hand over her chest like she had never heard such harsh words before. “It’s no wonder these boys cause all the trouble they do. In a madhouse like this, I’m surprised they’re not worse off!” My fat aunt fumbled around for her purse, then stood by the screen door. “This unclean life is not worth living!” she shouted. “And you’re all unclean as rags! Filthy rags!” She turned and wobbled down our front steps and back into her brown station wagon. Her daughters followed her, not saying a word. Of course, Pettina had begun to cry, but my other cousin, Hildie, just frowned and turned, popping a pink bubble in her mouth, rolling her eyes as my aunt pulled their car back down the gravel drive and onto the road. I guess there was something so pretty and kind of resigned in my cousin Hildie’s face. The station wagon turned in the wrong direction, started down the road, then stopped, backed up, and started in the right direction, passing us again. Pill and I stood on the front porch and waved.

  My mother was sobbing now, her face all red and full of tears. She locked herself in the bathroom, crying, running the water so we couldn’t hear how bad she was feeling. French shook his head, staring out the open screen door, then down at his open can of beer.

  “Jesus, Pill, what did ya do that for?” he asked.

  Pill stood beside me, still clenching his fists at his side. “You weren’t gonna say anything.”

  “There’s a time and a place, pal. A time and a place, and this sure as hell wasn’t the time.”

  My older brother glared at French hard and then turned and disappeared into our room. I fell onto the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen.

  “Sorry about all this, Dough.” French frowned. “It ain’t right
to ruin a man’s birthday. This didn’t have anything to do with you at all.”

  Me, I just shrugged my shoulders and glared at the blank screen. That’s exactly how I felt. I guess I just didn’t even care.

  “I’m gonna go talk to your mom,” he muttered, patting me on my head. My dumb dog came and sat beside me and laid its ugly face on my lap. I scratched its fur, rubbing my finger along the empty space where its one black eye should have been. Suddenly I felt sure of something. In that moment, right there, I felt like maybe my aunt had been right. Maybe my brother and me were doomed. Maybe one of the reasons I didn’t have any friends was because of how bad we both acted. I stared down at my dog, who, like always, had fallen asleep in my lap. Its hind legs were kicking in a dream, maybe some nightmare of being chased by something. Its good eye flickered around under its white eyelid, as it breathed heavily against my legs. I guess I shut my eyes for a minute and felt like crying, crying alone on the lousy couch because my birthday had been awful and because I didn’t have a single friend in the entire world. It would have been a fine way to end the worst birthday I had ever had, but I didn’t start crying; I just closed my eyes and tightened my hands into hard white fists to keep it all in.

  A knock at the door startled me right out of my gloom.

  “Hello, Dough,” Lottie whispered, pressing her big white forehead against the screen. “Are you home?”

  That girl sure was crazy.

  I smiled and nodded my head and stepped out onto the porch. It looked like she had ridden to my trailer as fast as she could. Her face was all sweaty and her pigtails were coming loose on the side of her head. She was leaning against the porch railing with something in her hands, something hidden, closed tightly between her tiny fingers. Her pink bike sat at the bottom of our gray steps. She was smiling, smiling big and wide, winking at me.

  “I came because I have something for you,” she whispered, leaning in close to me. “I didn’t wrap it up in paper or anything, but I hope you still like it.”

  And then she opened her tiny hands just below my face. There, in the rounded part of her pink palm was the most mysterious thing I had ever seen. A green glass eye. The glass eye that belonged to the richest lady in town. I felt my mouth drop open and my throat drying up. I didn’t know what to say.

  “But …”

  “I don’t think my dad will notice it’s gone. That lady isn’t gonna die for at least another forty years.”

  She placed the eye in my hand, her fingers moving against my skin. There, cool and strange as a dream, I could feel its weight and gravity resting in my palm.

  “I shouldn’t take this. If your dad found out—”

  “Shush,” Lottie cut me off with a smile. “It’s yours now.”

  I wanted to say something really nice, to let her know how it was the best birthday gift I had ever gotten, but the words wouldn’t come out. I felt lucky enough to muster, “This thing is neat as hell.”

  Lottie just smiled, all red-faced and embarrassed, I guess. She didn’t say another word, just hopped down my front porch steps to her awful pink bike and rode on home, nodding her head and singing to herself.

  I could not believe that green glass eye was all mine.

  I held it in my two hands. I laid on the sofa and placed it in my palms and watched it roll on my skin, glittering with light, shining with some sort of indescribable beauty. I didn’t know why I thought it was so lovely but I did. I hid it in my front pants pocket as my mother and French came out of the bathroom. My mother’s face was still a little red. French had his hand on her shoulder. After a little while, he called us to dinner and tried to serve us as best as he could, tying my mother’s blue-and-white apron around his waist and spooning out helpings of her badly burned food. My brother stayed holed up in our room, missing the cake, which sagged all on one side and wasn’t really cooked. But I ate it all, I didn’t give a damn; I forced it all in my mouth with a smile, thinking of the glass eye and Lottie, too, maybe.

  After dinner I sat out on the porch by myself, grinning at the way the eye seemed to glimmer and glow, wondering if there was some way to use it to tell the future or to read minds. After a while, I kissed my mother and French shook my hand and I went off to bed, careful not wake my older brother, who laid curled up in his bunk, facing the wall. I slipped under the covers and placed that glass eye right on the sheets above my chest, staring at it as the light from my bedroom windows made it glow with perfect sight. It really was the best gift anyone could have ever given me. I guess there was something so special there, something powerful and mysterious. Sure, there was nothing I could really do with it. And that poor girl was probably going to get the whipping of her life for stealing it. But there was something about it, something otherworldly in that green and white and blown glass, something in its shape, something I could see and stare at, imagining a future of different moments and a world of faraway possibilities. I decided I would show my older brother and hopped out of bed, holding it beside his head.

  “Look at what I got,” I whispered.

  “What is it?”

  “A glass eye.”

  “That’s stupid,” Pill mumbled, rolling back over. He coughed a little, then yanked the covers up over his head. My dumb dog sniffed the eye once, then slid its face beneath the covers, crowding me.

  I didn’t really care. I placed the glass eye on the sill of the window beside my bed and stared at it until I fell asleep, sure of all the ways everything would be different for me.

  When morning came and the eye was still there, gleaming, I stared at it, and for the first time in a long while I felt lucky, lucky for having something no else in the world had. I decided it would be my good luck charm, and that I would carry it around with me all the time. I decided it would be our secret, mine and Lottie’s.

  I let her hold it whenever she wanted to, and she did, keeping it in her lap every day during lunch. When she’d hand it back to me, warm from her touch, I would put it back in my pocket, glad to finally have a secret with somebody.

  the dollar-eighty-nine story

  “Push not pull, pale-face.”

  I pulled on the big silver door handle for the hundredth time, my hands trembling in nervous confusion. The old Injun grumbled at me from behind the counter, shaking his head from beyond the glass door.

  “Push! Push, fool! Push!”

  I kind of shrugged my shoulders and gave the door a good solid push, smiling at the tall, red-faced Injun as he shook his head and turned away. The bell above the door rattled when I stepped inside, right past the sign that read, Real-Life Indian Artifacts, standing before the stacks of old Mars Bars and stale candy that lined the shelf in front of the gas station’s counter. Behind me there was a dusty aisle of mud flaps with the outlines of silver girls glued to them, a shelf of miniature Minnesota spoons and shot glasses, and a whole row of realistic-looking porcelain statues of cougars with their young and wolves howling at the moon. Chief’s Filling Station was the only goddamn place in town that would sell cigarettes or dirty magazines to minors. It was about three miles away from our trailer park and a good hike even on a clear day, but depending purely on the mood of the Chief, the owner and only clerk who was almost always drunk, you might walk all that way and not return with a pack of Marlboros or a glossy issue of High Society. He was the only Injun I ever actually knew, except the ones from TV, and those were about as real as the naked ladies spread out in the nudie magazines my brother and me tried to steal. Today would be my first time trying to buy smokes without Pill. I had been eleven for nearly two full weeks, almost a teenager, almost a young man. I guess I thought the chances of me getting the smokes were about as likely as me becoming an astronaut, but I felt like I owed it to myself to give it a try.

  “Gimme a pack of Marlboros,” I kind of stammered, staring up into the Chief’s thin, porous face, which was wrinkled like an old tree. There was his big bulbous knob right between a pair of eyes that jutted out of his hard skin. There were all
kinds of crazy lines running down and around his face like thick branches. His pupils were bloodshot and red as hell. He stank like an open bottle of sour mash. He had long black hair all knotted behind his head in a ponytail, gray along the edges, that ran down his back. He wore a black shirt with a string of beads looped around his neck. He would have been spooky as hell if he wasn’t drunk, and I sure wouldn’t have tried buying smokes from him if I ever thought he might actually be standing behind that counter sober.

  “Show me some proof of age,” the Chief grunted, all in slow, single-syllable words. I didn’t know what to do. I thought that kids like me were the only ones keeping him in business.

  “Oh, c’mon, man, don’t be a drag.”

  His gnarled-up face remained cold and expressionless. He pulled a silver flask from his back hip pocket, uncapped it, and took a long drink. A single bead of liquor ran down between two hard wrinkles on his chin and disappeared. “Do not think I do not know how old you really are,” he whispered, leaning over the counter. “You are nothing but a baby to me.” He let out a loud thick laugh that echoed in his wide throat.

  “Oh, c’mon, Chief, stop busting my balls. I’m old enough already.”

  “No. No, you have no idea about being old. What do you know? Hmm? What do you know?”

  I rubbed my face with frustration.

  “Listen, man, I just want some smokes.”

  “You listen, little boy, and I will tell you a story about what it means to be old—old enough to call yourself a man.”

  He took another shot from his flask and leaned his red face close to mine. I could feel his hot breath on the bridge of my nose.

  “Three days before my thirteenth birthday, my father took me out of our home and into the woods. My father was a great warrior and chief of our people, he was on the State Council for Indian Rights. He had helped get a new school built on our reservation and hot water into our homes. His white name was John Cloud. My people called him Great Gray Cloud.”