Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  I stood there in the dark, fighting to breathe. The glass eye shifted against my hand, cold in the reach of my dirty coat pocket I held it in my grasp, gritting my teeth, watching as the shadow moved and grew, pacing behind the curtain.

  I knew then what I had to do. I knew why I was standing out there in Lottie’s front yard in the middle of the night. I was there to save that poor girl from being frightened to death. I could feel the darkness as it loomed over me. I felt sure as hell. I never felt more scared in my life. Not scared of what was about to happen, but scared because I knew it was something I had to do. I held that glass eye tight in my palm. I felt its round shape like one single moment shared between me and her, a single moment between us made solid in time, one moment that I couldn’t ignore.

  I turned toward the front window and let the green glass eye go. It rolled off my fingers, a perfect throw, flying through the air without a sound, through the black space in a wide arc, until it met the glass pane of that front window and then the whole dark world broke apart. All that glass shattered and crashed with a terrific BLOOM!!! all over their porch and I was running down the road as fast as I could and I was nearly home before I could check to see that no shadows were following in the darkness of night behind me. I pulled myself into my bed and locked the window tight, curling up under the blankets of my warm blue bed, sure as hell that in a moment I would see his thin black shape and feel his hand upon my throat and then it would be just how French had said. The trap of prison or the grave.

  I laid awake all night, trying to figure out a lie in case Lottie’s father somehow found out it had been me. But nothing I came up with made any sense at all, so I could only hope that I hadn’t been seen. I watched as the sun began to peek through the gray clouds that seemed to gather right outside me and my brother’s window, trying to ask myself exactly what I had done. But there was no easy answer I could give. That glass eye now seemed like it had always been there just so I could do one thing: walk through the dark and break that front window in the middle of the night. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. I had no idea why I had done what I had done.

  Thursday came and I stumbled through it like a fun house maze.

  First of all, poor Lottie wasn’t even in class. I wondered all morning what had happened to her. Maybe I had dreamed the whole thing. Or maybe that glass had broken and the light finally poured in and her wicked old man had just disappeared and now she was free somehow, or maybe she had just run away. I could still feel the way her hand had cupped mine. A thing like that will stay in your heart and head for a while. It was like she was still sitting next to me all day, but when I’d look for her dumb smile, she’d just disappear. The whole school day left me feeling desperate as hell, so I decided to stop by Our Queen of Martyrs Church on the way home for some help.

  I guess there was really nowhere else to turn. I was in need of a miracle, and the way I had always heard it, those things happen all the time in church. But the place was dark and empty. Of course, there was Mrs. Pheeple, the blue-haired lady who played the pipe organ at Sunday mass, humming to herself up in the balcony, paging through her sheet music for evening service, and there was an old priest I didn’t recognize sitting in the very first pew, mumbling something to himself and God. There was nothing but the priest’s whispers and the sighs of the organ keys being set into place, and the smell of incense and the white and blue light that cut through the stained glass windows in opaque shapes, and the clouds of dust that rose above my head from the high glass lamps and the steeple above, and the sounds of all those ghosts making their desperate prayers. I knelt in the last row and decided to do just the same.

  I looked up and saw Jesus nailed up on his cross.

  His hands and arms were outstretched, like he might be listening.

  I closed my eyes and made up a proper prayer.

  I prayed my Jesus would see that I was sincere and look into my poor heart and make a change there that would save my soul and keep me from a life filled with sadness and trouble. I knew he was the one to ask. If he could change water into wine and heal the sick and cure the blind, surely, surely the hopeless soul of an eleven-year-old couldn’t be too much to ask to be saved. Let me pass the test. Let me pass the test Make me smart just for tomorrow. Let me pass that test.

  I opened my eyes and breathed in the dusty air.

  I waited for a sound or a weird glow to appear in my heart, but there was nothing. My armpits boiled with sweat. I felt my stomach turn. Nothing changed—there was no weight lifted off my shoulders. I gripped the edge of the pew and stared up into his sad face.

  No, he seemed to be saying with a frown. This was something I had to do myself. This was something I was supposed to do by myself all along. I nodded, and in my dull red heart, I understood. Jesus was right. Nothing good was ever handed out or just given away. This was something I’d have to do on my own.

  I knelt in the aisle and waved at him just once with a smile.

  I crossed the dirt road home and up to our front steps. Things might be okay. But it was up to me to save myself. I had to pull myself out of my own mess. I sure as hell had no idea how I was going to do a crazy stunt like that. I marched up the steps, trying to think. The screen door was open and right away I could hear my mother crying to herself somewhere inside. I stiffened a little as I saw her sitting on the floor, sobbing beside a brown cardboard box. I knew right away what was inside. All my father’s put-away things. My mother looked up and forced a smile, then wiped some tears from her face, embarrassed, I guess.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. “I don’t know what gets into me. I was just cleaning and I saw the box and then I just opened it up and …” She bowed her head and finished off her sentence with some more crying. Then she took a deep breath and straightened herself up a little and lifted a tiny photo out of the box. “Look what I found.”

  I let out a sigh and stood beside her, gritting my teeth. There was nothing in that box that I wanted to look at. My old man was dead and gone. I was still feeling the curse of his life on my own. There was no photograph I cared to see that would somehow make me understand a goddamn thing about all my dark dreams. But my mother smiled, patting me on my greasy mop-head. I looked down and saw, there in her hand, a picture of me and my dad standing beside his old yellow rig. The Hornet. That’s what he had called his truck. There was no faster rig on his line. The Hornet 509. He used to park that big cab out in front of our house back in Duluth and all the lousy neighborhood kids would come by and try to climb around on its huge tires and beg my old man to let them blow its horn. Sitting up in that cab on my old man’s lap, wearing his cowboy hat, gripping the black wheel and tugging the horn that gave a sound like a shotgun exploding, staring out over that dashboard to the road that seemed to stretch out for millions and millions of miles, looking straight into the future and somewhere past it all, well, that was about the sweetest moment I think I ever had with him.

  I gave my mom a good hug around her waist.

  “It’ll be okay, Mom. It’ll be okay.”

  Once again, my mother’s sweet blue eyes were sagging with tears. She placed the photograph back under some of my old man’s clothes and bowed her head again. Then something in that brown box caught my eye. Something that wasn’t right. I moved a pair of jeans aside and shook my head, glaring into the box without saying a word, without making a goddamn sound.

  It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be true.

  My mother looked up with a frown. “What’s the matter, baby? What’s wrong?”

  It was like my heart was beating full of blood. I couldn’t afford a breath. I couldn’t afford a whisper or sigh.

  A green glass eye.

  There, in the bottom of that old box, was a green glass eye.

  My mother gave a little smile and lifted that thing out of its place, cupping the strange orb in the palm of her hand.

  “Oh, this? This was your dad’s. It used to belong to an old uncle of his. They were rea
l close. Your daddy got it after he died.”

  I could hardly speak. I knew absolutely no words to say. “But …”

  “What? What is it, babe?”

  I couldn’t believe it. It was like a secret being passed on from my old man. I suddenly remembered how his voice had sounded. I suddenly remembered all the lines on his face. It was impossible. It didn’t make any sense. I knew I had thrown that eye through Lottie’s front window. I had seen it break her glass.

  “I don’t think nothing makes any sense,” I whispered, feeling my hands shaking at my side. I turned away a little as my mother squinted and then placed the glass eye back in the box.

  “I know that’s how it feels sometimes, hun. There are a lot of things I don’t think I’ll ever understand about your daddy dying. All we can do is try to remember him and accept what we don’t get.”

  But I knew. I knew it was surely a sign of something.

  I felt her lips kiss the side of my cheek as she turned and disappeared into the bathroom. I could hear her begin to cry all over again. The green glass eye sparkled along the bottom of the box, shining and calling and kind of speaking to me, and then, right then, right there I made a plan. I took that glass eye out of the box and made a plan to escape all the things that tied me to trouble. All my things would not end up in a cardboard box. I was not about to wind up like my old man. I ran into my room and dug under my bed for all the stolen girlie mags and cigarettes I had taken from my older brother or boosted from the gas stations and convenience stores all around town. I dumped some of them on my older brother’s bed and the rest I heaved into the trash. I snapped every cigarette at its middle, then threw them all in a black plastic bag and emptied it all in the dumpster a few lots away. I stood there outside the green metal box, eyeing all my mess, staring down at the glossy mold and all the things I’d done when people like French and my mother and Jesus and my teachers told me not to. I’m sure you might say that my old man’s green glass eye was only some sort of coincidence, and so everything I did that followed was some sort of mistake too, and I’d agree, but I guess I felt that a change in the heart doesn’t always have to rely on the truth; more than likely it’s something you just really want or need to believe. I looked down there at all the bad things I had done, smoking stolen squares and reading nudie magazines, and once again I felt like nothing had really changed at all. And so I dug down in there in the trash and saved one nudie magazine and one broken cigarette in case I had been foolish and found out all that talk about redemption and hope was just wishful thinking and I had been wrong again. I kept the magazine and the broken cigarette in my bottom drawer, with my collection of vinyl wallets from Aunt Marie and a shark’s tooth and a scapular and some shotgun shells and the green glass eye from my old man.

  After dinner, I read through all my books and studied as hard as I could for my goddamn exam, but French said I shouldn’t worry about it, that it was not going to be that kind of test. Which was fine, because nothing I read over felt like it would settle in my head. Finally, my mother whispered me off to bed and gave me a kiss goodnight and turned off the light and shut the door and I thought about that green eye just sitting in the bottom of that drawer. I laid awake worried about how I would do on test and what it would mean for me if I didn’t do so well. I wondered if my dad had been around what he might have said to me. He’d probably just say do your best and don’t let anyone call you a quitter. I guess then I really began to think. I guess, lying there, I realized that all those things about my dad that I felt, all those ideas that he had been unlucky, or doomed, or worse, that my older brother and me were going to end up like him, might have been wrong. All the things that had gone bad were because of me. Me and my older brother had done what we had done and it wasn’t anyone’s fault but our own.

  I listened to my brother’s breath as he fought to sleep.

  His throat sounded sore and dry. His chest sounded full of weight. I climbed out of my bed and stood beside his bunk and watched him as he slept. His face looked tired and sad. His face looked just like my dad’s. In that moment, right after midnight, I was sure in my heart that both of us were going to be okay.

  I could hear an animal crying somewhere in the night and I took it as some sort of sign. Right in the dark, I stood there beside his bed and folded my hands and made a prayer and mumbled it to myself until I was sure the both of us had been genuinely saved.

  Tomorrow was Friday, the day of my test.

  Tomorrow would come and nothing would be the same.

  hell’s fire has arrived

  The bed above mine burned while I was asleep. I woke up and stared at a cloud of gray smoke blossoming from the top bunk. I pulled myself out of bed and watched as my older brother lit another cigarette. He was lying on his back. He was staring at a tiny spot on the ceiling somewhere above his head. His eyes looked old and tired. His one eyebrow had begun to finally grow back; a black line of hair had sprouted through the thick scab running from the base of his hair to a point right above his nose. He took a long, meaningful drag, then blew a cloud of smoke from his nose, keeping the cigarette clenched between his gray lips. He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye and offered a smile that was grave and full of mystery.

  “Go on back to sleep,” he mumbled. “It ain’t even dawn yet.”

  “I can’t sleep,” I whispered.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Today’s my test. I think I’m gonna fail it.”

  “You ain’t gonna fail it. You’re probably the smartest kid in that goddamn class. This whole damn town is stupid as hell.”

  I shook my head. “I dunno. I still think I’m gonna fail.” I looked down at my bare feet. “Maybe I can just run away. Hide out in some boxcar for a while.”

  “You could, but it wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “What do ya mean?”

  “You can’t change the way you are. You always worry about all the stupid things.”

  He let out some more smoke through his nose and turned on his side, staring right at me. The cigarette was clenched between his lips as his face became very stern and serious.

  “If you still think there’s really such things as ghosts and the Devil and curses and all of that, well, you’re a goddamn fool.”

  He turned away and ashed his cigarette on the blue blanket beside his head. There were still a few hours left before I had to get up so I crawled back in my bed and pulled the covers up over my head and kept my eyes shut and finally fell back asleep.

  When I heard the RRRrrrrrring of the alarm going off, I flew out of bed and made my way into the bathroom and washed my face and got dressed, and by the time I sat down to eat some breakfast, my brother was gone already. There was no cereal bowl in his place. No crumbs or spilled milk where he always sat.

  “Mom, where’s Pill?” I asked.

  “He said he had to get to school early. Had to study for a test.”

  I nodded to myself and finished my cereal and glass of juice and got my things ready and stepped out the door for the worst day of life. My mother stopped me and kissed me on the top of my head.

  “All you can do is your best. Now go on and make us proud, Dough,” she said, and I realized this was her way of saying I was going to be all right.

  I marched through the dust to school by myself, watching my lonesome shadow cross the flat gray space of the empty road. I made it to school and took my seat and just sat there dreaming of what a horror that test would be. Lottie wasn’t in school again and that worried me some too. Then, before the bell rang, I heard from Mary Beth Clishim that Lottie and her sister had gone to live with their aunt in Aubrey. I didn’t know what to think. I guess I felt good that they had gotten away and wished I had gone too.

  After an hour or so, a woman with red hair named Miss Anne came and got me. I looked around the classroom, feeling embarrassed, then followed her, not even noticing all the nice freckles on the lady’s pretty face. My whole stomach was tied in knots. We went d
own to the learning resource room, which I had never been to before, and Miss Anne started explaining all the different kinds of tests I would have to take, but I wasn’t really listening. We got right to it then. At first, there were some puzzles and drawings, mostly shapes which I had to figure out the pattern of, those kinds of things. And then Miss Anne would say a sentence and I would have to choose a word to fill in the blank. And then she had some drawings, some of animals, even, and she would ask me to point to certain things, to see if I could follow directions, I guess. Then came the words which I did not know. I got frustrated but Miss Anne said I was doing very well, which, of course, I didn’t believe.

  After lunch, which I had to eat by myself down in the learning lab, there were more tests, some with more pictures, some with words, some with math. I don’t think I did so well on the math. At the end of it, I closed my eyes and felt like lying my head down on my desk and just letting myself fall asleep. But I didn’t. I finally noticed the freckles on Miss Anne’s nose and asked her, “How did I do?”

  “I think you did very well.”

  “Did I pass it?”

  “Well, we found out some very interesting things today. You scored very high in intelligence.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. But we just have to figure out why you’re having such a hard time following directions.”

  “I have a hard time listening. That’s what my mom says.”

  “Well,” Miss Anne said, “I want you to know that we’re going to get you some help. You’ll be just fine. I don’t want you to worry about it, okay?”