Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  CRACK!

  One of them would catch my dad under his chin with a crowbar, knocking his teeth straight up into his head. My old man would be a lumped shadow on the black ground. Everything would turn to blood under his hands, sticky and hot like the tar. Behind him would be the square shadows of his idling truck and trailer. Night would be like an axe upon his head. He would glance up, trapped, and I would somehow see his face, but he would try to get me to look away. My old man would yank his short knife from his belt, leaning against one of the cold rubber wheels.

  The three shadows would circle around him. Three of them. Three black shadows like crows. My dad would lunge and cut one down, cleaving the knife through one of their hands, sawing three full fingers straight off. The fingers would land in a perfect circle of blood with three drops each. The black blood would soak into the ground and vanish. The three fingers would then become white worms and crawl away. The wounded one would stand without any pain. They were not men. They were spooks or ghosts or Devils or whatever you want to call them. My dad would see he was fighting ghosts and would then nod, gritting his teeth. “Let’s go!” my old man would shout, unafraid. “Let’s go!”

  One of them would catch him with the crowbar again, poking him in his belly.

  Breathe, Dad, breathe.

  He’d let out a grunt, clutching his guts, trying to strike at them with his knife, but his pain would be too much. His belly would tighten as he’d heave to the ground. He would cry out and his teeth would be knocked loose again by another blow. He’d begin to cry, realizing it was the Devil who had finally come for his soul. There’d be sharp-eyed angels with knife-edged wings floating in a halo around my old man’s head. The three shadows would draw tighter and tighter around him. He would howl, trying to fight. The knife would slide through his bloody fingers, dropping from his hands. Breathe, Pops, breathe. He would cough, feeling a shaft of light burning along his spine. The three shadows would pull the silver cab keys from my old man’s front pocket. He would coil like a dead snake at their feet. He would be shivering so bad. He wouldn’t be able to move. His black cowboy hat would blow off his head, disappearing into the night. Depart from me, ye cursed, into the fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.

  He would gurgle up more blood, trying to curse. Then they would steal his heart next. They would lean over and take his soul. The Devil would appear suddenly, a shadow twisted into a shape, spiraling into a single dark form on this road in Texas. In my dreams, the Devil would be the same awful creature I had seen in the haunted barn, a tall man with the head of a hooded lizard, a monster who wore a shimmering cloak of red, dripping with blood. The Devil’s spiny mouth would open just before he set his tiny teeth into my old man’s chest. My old man was going to hell. His ventricles would pump out fire. His teeth would turn to dust and disappear into the highway gravel. His skull would become a stone in the pavement road. His ghost would fold in a flash of sulfur, leaving a little black mark in the dirt.

  I’d wake up too late then, feeling the awful wetness between my legs. I’d lie there, or try to go back to sleep, not wanting to wake my brother, not wanting to be teased, or worse, not wanting anyone to be ashamed of me. I would lie there, shivering a little, wondering if my dad, in heaven or hell or wherever he was, wanted to talk to me as bad as I wanted to talk to him.

  I guess, as my brother explained it, my old man had been a highwayman. His name had been Lou. Everyone called him Lucky. Even my mom. His face was thin with some whiskers and his eyes were bright blue and kind of sad. There was a long scar that hooked from the corner of his lip around to the corner of his eye. He had a different story every time you asked him about that scar. By the time I was born, he was a trucker, the owner and operator of his own rig. Pill said he sometimes smuggled stolen cigarettes. I always thought of him as a cowboy and the happiest person I think I ever knew. They found his body beneath the big black wheels of his eighteen-wheeler somewhere on a nowhere road in East Texas. I was seven at the time. Pill was ten. They wouldn’t let me or Pill see the body when they brought it back up by rail. But me and my brother listened to every word my mother said, weeping on the telephone to her friends and family. Pill said he overheard exactly what had happened to my dad. That’s the benefit of an older brother, though I still don’t know how much of it was true, I guess.

  After his death, my brother and I decided that my dad had lost his soul in some sort of deal gone wrong. Maybe it sounds stupid to you, but like I said, I was only seven at the time, and when they shipped my dad home in a mahogany box like some sort of present, it made more sense than anything else anyone had been telling me. Even at that age, I knew my old man had been a troublemaker, just like me and my brother, and I guess I figured that he had gotten himself into trouble with the law, or maybe with the people who hired him to run the stolen cigarettes from town to town, or with someone else. We kind of made up the story that he had sold his soul, and down there in Texas is where the Devil had decided to collect. I do know that my mother had been very religious, even before my old man got killed, and I guess I was afraid that a spook or maybe even his ghost might try to visit us after he died, but she had this beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary which she placed on my nightstand and I was able to sleep without any trouble after that. The Virgin was folding her hands in prayer, all silver and white and gold, with a crack right along her throat, from where I dropped her. I loved that statue. Her feet were bare and treading right over a snake; a barefoot lady standing on a snake like that, so calm and sweet. I was sure a powerful thing like that would scare off any kind of evil, but it broke when we moved to the trailer park, and by then I was convinced that my father had really been taken by the Devil, and me and my lousy brother were sure to go next.

  Ol’ Pill didn’t like talking about our dad that much.

  He’d rather talk about girls.

  We used to go down to the culvert every day after school. We’d smoke cigarettes and look at dirty magazines and just sit there and talk or not talk at all. Every few hundred feet there was a silver pipe that leaked green sewage down into the small stream. We’d go sit on one of the pipes, right along this real steep gorge where brown sticker bushes and small trees grew. There were blue racer snakes and stick bugs and things like that, but mostly we just went there to get away from the goddamn trailer park, because when your home is so tiny, there isn’t anywhere to go to do some thinking but in your room or the bathroom, and you can only spend so much time in either place before you start going a little crazy.

  I’d stare at my brother until he’d pass me a Marlboro and then I’d choke on it as he’d light it. I’d let the smoke charge down my lungs until I thought I was going to die, then I’d try to puff it out real smooth and cool, but it always came out in a cough. Pill would just laugh, shaking his head, not doing much better himself.

  “Did you make it with a girl yet?” I asked him one day. I felt like it was my duty as his younger brother to keep on top of those things. To be honest, I had no way to know if what he told me was ever the truth or not.

  “Nope.” He said this like it really hurt him. His eyes got real thin and black and he stared down into the green creek like he was thinking something so heavy that there was no way he could manage to keep his head up. “But I’ll tell you about the time I fingered Gretchen Hollis.”

  He took a long drag, fighting to keep himself from coughing.

  “We were at her pool party last spring and everyone had gone on home so there was just three of us—me and Gretchen and Bobby Shucksaw—but he had to go on because his sister had a baseball game, and so then it was just me and Gretchen sitting there all alone drying off.”

  I had heard this story at least a million times, and every time, every time, it made my palms sweat and my head feel light.

  “So it’s just me and Gretchen. Then she goes: ‘Do you wanna make out?’ And I go, ‘Yep.’”

  Now, you might think my brother was making something like that up, but I knew Gretch
en Hollis. She was pretty and round-headed with yellow hair. She was the first girl I knew in my old neighborhood in Duluth who got a hickie. Her mother almost beat the hell out of her for it and sent her to school with a black eye not far from the red love-mark on the side of her neck.

  “So we start making out.”

  “What’s that like?” I asked.

  My brother shook his head, like I was a total amateur.

  “Listen, I’m telling a goddamn story here, you can’t keep butting in with your stupid questions, okay?”

  He rubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and lit up another, coughing up great plumes of smoke.

  “So we’re making out and Gretchen has on a two-piece and I decide to go for second base.” He accentuated this last remark by gripping the air with both hands, giving a good squeeze with all his fingers. “So by now we’re in the garage, right behind their car, and we’re still making out and I got my hand up her top and then I hear her old man hollering from her back porch.”

  I used to think that her dad was a goddamn monster. He had a square jaw and plenty of whiskers and once I’d seen him kick a dog that wasn’t even his.

  “And her dad keeps calling for her and by then I had both my hands up her top and she was still trying to kiss me and I was starting to get scared. I could hear her old man out on the porch looking around and so I try to stop. But she won’t stop kissing me.”

  That’s the part of the story I always had trouble believing, but it was Pill’s story so I kept it to myself.

  “Then I can see Mr. Hollis’s shadow, he’s standing right in front of the goddamn car, hollering and cussing, and poor Gretchen is trembling in my arms and my hands are all stuck up her top and I’m worried as hell too, but I can’t make a move and I feel his shadow pass right over us and he goes back in the house.”

  He let out a breath like he hadn’t breathed all day, shaking his head with a horrible grin.

  “That’s when she told me she wanted me to do it with her, right there.”

  I would imagine Gretchen Hollis’s tiny lips as they made those words over and over again in my head.

  Do it with me.

  Do it with me.

  Do it with me.

  I would imagine her eyes as silver as stars and her perfectly round head. In my fantasy, her curly blond hair stank of chlorine. I would imagine her tiny white fingers locking with my brother’s, showing where she had bit her fingernails. Every time I heard that story I’d feel my stomach tighten and my palms get greasy whenever he got to that part. A girl in her garage, half-naked, smelling like chlorine, and the words, Do it with me, I guess that always seemed like a moment of endless possibilities.

  My brother flicked his dying cigarette into the green creek and looked away to finish his story.

  “But I didn’t wanna get her pregnant or anything like that, so I just fingered her instead.”

  “What’s that feel like?”

  “I’m telling a goddamn story, if you don’t mind.”

  He shook his head, staring down into the creek as a little paper cup floated by.

  “Then she went in the house, and as I was leaving I heard her old man screaming and hollering and I took a goddamn brick and threw it against the side of their house and I shouted, ‘I fucked Gretchen Hollis!’ loud as I could.”

  His voice cracked a little at the end. He lit a few matches and tossed them down into the creek to watch them sizzle out. He had a look like he had just said too much maybe.

  “God, I hate this fucking town. I wanna get the hell outta here.”

  He sounded helpless. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “C’mon, we better get on over to Val’s,” I said.

  He stood and stared down into the creek and then nodded.

  I looked up and saw that the trees along the drainage ditch had become thin. Their leaves were clumped in tiny piles as we climbed along. There was the taste of burning wood in our teeth. Summer was over. Fall, unwelcome as it might have been, was already here.

  When we got to Val’s trailer, she looked awful, like a poor pink flower. She was trying on an ungodly chiffon bridesmaid’s gown that she had been forced to buy for two hundred dollars. It looked gruesome. It was the color of peppermint antacid, the ugliest pink you could ever imagine. We crowded in her tiny bathroom, watching her as she turned, trying different poses, looking for one that didn’t seem so awful. But no position worked. It was like the dress was haunted.

  “It can’t be as ugly as I think it is, can it, Dough? Pill?”

  I didn’t say a word, only shrugged my shoulders. Pill did the same. I guess her younger sister, Dottie, was getting married in a few weeks, which meant a few weeks of having to see Val trying it on over and over again.

  “I hate to say it, but this is the most repulsive dress I’ve ever seen,” Val muttered, turning once more before the full-length mirror. “I pray this is my sister’s idea of some kind of bad joke.”

  I turned away, taking a seat on the edge of the tub, and that was when I saw it: them. I looked up and noticed Val’s lacy black panties and brassiere drying along the shower curtain rod. I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I stared at them hanging there. Pill noticed them too, his face already turning red. He looked at them for a few moments, then hurried out of the bathroom to go sit on the porch and smoke a cigarette with his shaky hands.

  “It feels like I’m wearing some sort of punishment,” Val said. She turned and glanced over her shoulder at the monstrous pink bow that rippled at the base of her spine. “What in God’s sweet name is that supposed to be?” The bow was huge, puffy, and knotted.

  I sat on the edge of the tub, trying to smile, but my Val was right: It looked like some kind of pink curse.

  “I look hideous. Hideous. I look like a hooker, don’t I? I look like trailer trash.”

  And then Val began to cry. Sweet Jesus, help me, she began to cry. I didn’t know what to say or do. I looked up at her, trying to smile.

  “I guess it can’t be that bad,” she muttered, holding her hand over her mouth. And then she started crying even harder, sitting down on the bathroom floor, sobbing into the folds of her awful gown. “I look horrible. Horrible … like a …”

  I watched as tears ran down her smooth white cheeks, turning the pink gown darker where her teardrops landed. I fought to think of some words I could use, something I could say that would make her stop crying, but nothing came. I guess Val did look horrible in that dress. I was afraid there were no words in the world that would change that. Somehow, dressed up in that chiffon gown, she did look cheap. I began to wonder if that was the way she always looked and maybe I had just never noticed. Under the fabric of that awful pink dress, the truth was now as bare and stunning as the black mole on her white shoulder. I began to think that maybe Val, with her dingy little job at the diner, and all her men, maybe she was exactly like the rest of us.

  “I heard Mrs. Heget in the supermarket whispering to that Mrs. Groves,” Val whispered. “She called me a tramp. She said, ‘There goes that little whore!’ I hate it here. I hate people thinking I’m a whore. Why can’t I find a nice man? Why can’t I meet someone who is nice to me for more than a week?”

  I felt my teeth begin to ache as she kept on talking.

  “I wish I could just pack up all my things and leave. Go somewhere where no one knows me. Where no one thinks bad things about me.”

  “I don’t think bad things about you,” I whispered.

  “I know you don’t, sweetie,” she said. “I know.” Her big black eyelashes flashed with tears and dripped mascara down her cheeks.

  She pulled my hand to her face, holding it beside her lips. Then she kissed each finger, each of my fingers just once, still crying, still dripping makeup from her puffy pink eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dough. I’m sorry to make a fuss.”

  She kissed each of my knuckles and tried to smile, then pulled herself to her feet and began to take the dress off. Her fingers fought around behind he
r back.

  “Do you think you can unzip me?”

  I felt my heart stop and my mouth went dry. Both my ears felt red hot.

  “Sure,” I mumbled, trying not to collapse.

  At the base of her back, above that ungodly pink bow, was a thin silver zipper. I held my breath and pulled the zipper to its lowest point, nearly fainting as the two folds of fabric fell open and showed the top of her bare behind.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” she said over her shoulder, holding the pink dress up against her naked flesh. I could honestly say that there, right there, more than anything in my life, I wanted to touch her and tell her all the things I thought I felt—that she was more beautiful than anyone or anything I had ever seen, that no dress could make her look cheap, that beneath it all there was a kind of beauty that no pink dress could ever disguise. But I guess I felt that saying those things would be a lie, and a lie that I didn’t want to ever have to admit. I backed out of the bathroom, holding my fingers in a tight fist against my side.

  I did not stare through the keyhole to watch Val take her bath. I did not try to marvel at the sight of her bare white thighs or shiny blond hair. I held my face against the fabric of her red velvet sofa, feeling lousy.

  A little while later, my older brother went out and picked up a few bags of greasy fried chicken and we all sat down and ate, but I swear it was like nothing had a taste.

  “Don’t you like your fried chicken?” Val asked with a smile. Her blue eyes were still swollen from crying.

  “I don’t know, I’m not hungry tonight,” I said with a frown. We all cleaned up the plates and silverware and set them in the sink. After dinner, it was time to sit out on the porch and tell jokes and take sips of Val’s gin and soda, but for some reason I just couldn’t look at the way she pretended to cross her eyes, making funny faces. I just didn’t think it was so hilarious when she snorted a song through her nose. I thought all the jokes she told were corny and the way her hair was done up in a ponytail looked ugly. I finally decided to fake a stomachache and wander off to bed.