Tender as Hellfire (11 page)

“I am sorry for ruining your life by making you cry all the time.”

“Now kiss her hand,” Mrs. Larue said with a smile.

Mr. Darve reached out and kissed his wife’s hand. Mrs. Larue jabbed him in the eye with the muzzle, backing him toward the door.

“If you ever lay a hand on poor Dolores again, I swear to God, the last thing you hear will be me laughing, just before I pull this trigger.” Mrs. Larue shoved the gun hard against his cheek. “Now go home and sleep it off.”

Mr. Darve shot out of the beauty salon and into the street, holding his eye, mumbling to himself. All the ladies let out a breath, Mrs. Darve still crying. Me, I let out a breath too. My mother untied the apron around my neck, squatted beside me, and said, “Tell French it looks like I’ll be home late, okay?” She reached into her jeans and handed me a dollar.

As I was running out, Mrs. Heget stopped me, touching my shoulder, and said, “We hope to see you again this Sunday, Dough. We missed you last week. Sunday school just isn’t the same without you and your brother.”

I didn’t utter a word, just nodded.

“Oh, they’ll be there,” my mom said, patting me on the head. She leaned beside me and whispered, “Stay out of trouble, okay?”

“Okay,” I said, and ran toward the filling station as fast as I could, wondering what I could blow a dollar on, not wanting to think about having to go back to Sunday school.

Every week Pill and I were supposed to go to Sunday school on account of the both us never being baptized, because at the time our parents weren’t much concerned with things like church. I guess my father dying and the thought of his soul being lost in Purgatory was something I didn’t want to think about. For me, Sunday school was a horror show, the worse way to spend a weekend afternoon. Most of the time we are able to ditch, except when my mom and French went to church, which, thank God, was never that often. Sunday school was held in a tiny classroom in a part of a building that was a recent addition to the church; the roof was sheet metal and it looked like the walls were made of tin.

“What do you mean, kissing is a sin?” Elroy Viceroy shouted. He was fourteen with all kinds of red pimples across his face. He always tried to be a real smart-ass during Bible Class. “That isn’t one of the Commandments.”

Mrs. Heget smiled. Her round face blushed. Every Sunday she’d try to get a bunch of teenagers and middle-schoolers to understand the true nature of the human spirit, helping us to contemplate God’s unconditional love, but it wasn’t easy. No one in the class wanted to be there. I knew I’d rather be asleep or at home watching motorcross or out running around with some matches or trying to teach that dumb dog Shilo how to kill.

“First of all, kissing before marriage can lead to sex and masturbation. And well, sex is sex. And masturbation is not proper behavior for a growing boy. It could lead to damage and injury and even night blindness.”

Mrs. Heget tolerated our lack of enthusiasm to a certain degree. She was polite and calm and was always telling us what we were and weren’t supposed to do and think and say. Heck, I was eleven. I was having a dirty thought every other minute. Jesus seemed nice to me, so did the rest of all the saints, but I guess I didn’t understand anything more than that.

“Night blindness?” Elroy muttered. “How long does it take before you go blind?”

“Not very long.” Mrs. Heget frowned. “It is a sin and something you will either have to confess or pay for in the afterlife. Any other questions about Purgatory?”

“I got one,” I said, raising my hand.

“Yes, Dough,” she answered with a smile, crossing her wide white legs beneath her billowy dress.

“If you’re a good person, right, and you commit some sins, but mostly you’re good, do go to hell or not?”

Pill rolled his eyes at the desk beside mine. He shook his head and resumed staring at the back of Lula Getty’s neck.

“Well, Dough, that is an interesting question.” Her round face stiffened as she figured up an answer. “I think if you’re basically a good person, and you’ve accepted Jesus into your life, well, I think then God would surely find a place for you in heaven.”

“Okay, well, what if you were basically a good person and committed a crime during your life?”

“What kind of crime?”

“I dunno. Stealing stuff.”

Her face tightened even more.

“I think if you’re truly sorry, then God will forgive you. God will always forgive you. He cared so much about all of you to send his only son to die for your sins. He’d forgive you as long as you really wanted to be forgiven.” She took a breath and nodded to herself. “Any other questions?”

“Okay, so what if you die in the middle of a crime? Like you’re robbing a bank or something, then you get shot.”

“You’re probably going to hell then.” Her answer was very curt.

I nodded, unhappy with her answer. Who else was I going to ask? It didn’t seem to bother Pill. And as for my mother, who was sometimes so filled with the Holy Ghost that it kept her up at night, praying for all of us, well, I guess I was afraid that if I ever asked her about my dad, she’d just begin sobbing and wouldn’t ever stop.

I raised my hand once again. “Well, what about Purgatory and all that? Doesn’t that count?”

She let out a little sigh, trying to gather herself. She made a little smile and stared at me.

“Like I said, Dough, if the person truly wants to be forgiven, then God willing, they will be forgiven and granted a place in heaven.”

I thought that sounded better. Maybe there was some hope for me and my brother after all.

“Does anyone else have any other questions now?”

I looked around the room and saw that the whole tiny classroom was silent. I turned to my brother who was staring at Lula Getty’s neck. You couldn’t help but think dirty thoughts when you looked at that girl. She seemed very bored with everything and I noticed that she was wearing a gold pendant around her neck in the shape of a wolf. About a week before, I had seen her walking home, smoking, with her right hand bent at the wrist, gossiping about something with some other girl, their red lipstick like wounds on their lips. Of course, then a black Camaro drove by, braking to a dusty stop, and Rudy LaDell got out and hollered a thing or two and Lula swore something back. Eventually, she just shrugged her shoulders and hopped into the car and they just sped away, down the old gray road beside the culvert near our trailer park. I decided to follow and it was there, where the apple orchard started, that I saw the two of them necking, her long fifteen-year-old legs flung apart, rocking the car as I watched from down in the culvert, shaking my head.

I thought this girl, Lula, was as lost as me or my brother. I glanced back at him, his eyes were full of hopelessness and he was making little kisses with his mouth, dreaming of Lula’s lips.

“Pill? Are you all right?” Mrs. Heget asked. Pill snapped awake. He sat straight up and knocked the silver-bound Bible to the floor and then rubbed the side of his face. Everyone in Bible class looked at him and laughed. Lula turned around and shook her head. Her curly red hair hung over her face as she shot my brother a dirty look.

“Creep,” she mumbled.

He reached over and picked up the Bible and started staring at the back of her neck again.

After about an hour of Mrs. Heget’s talking about Jesus, the class would end with Sunday service in the gray pews of Our Queen of Holy Martyrs Church. I’d spend most of the service staring up at Jesus nailed to the wood cross. Through the kneeling and praying, all I would think about was my dad and his funeral, and how cold and gray his casket had looked, how the flowers had dried up because of the heat, and how my mother had cried all day until someone gave her some Valium to fall asleep. I would remember how my fat Aunt Marie had wailed as they heaved the coffin out of the church and that forever kind of sound of the box disappearing down, down, down into that shallow bed of dirt. All those kind of memories would make me feel about as unwelcome in church as anything could. I’d walk home beside Pill, wondering how much of what we had just been told was true, or if like my older brother said, it was just some other lie I had fallen for.

That day I came home from service and stopped outside my new neighbor’s recently erected white picket fence. It surrounded the front of his trailer, making it seem more like a home, which I thought looked nice. My brother had gone to the filling station to try to pick up some smokes so I stood alone beside Mr. del Perdito’s fence and watched as he painted the last remaining slats. I decided I had to say something to him if I ever wanted to try and sleep again.

“Hey, you live here, right?” I grunted, staring at his bare olive-colored chest. There was a tattoo of a brilliant green snake wrapped around his upper left arm and another one of an angel praying just below the opposite shoulder.

“Yes, sir. My name is El Rey del Perdito. What can I do for you, my friend?”

I got right to the point: “Do you think you can cut that noise out at night?”

“Pardon?” the old man said. He stared at me, a little shocked by my lack of politeness. He rubbed some sweat from his face with a small white towel.

“All that music. It’s driving my mother crazy.”

“Oh,
lo siento, perdoname
. I am sorry. I didn’t think anyone minded my dancing. Let us talk about it over a cold soda, shall we?”

“I guess.”

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Dough.”

“Very wonderful name, my friend. Let us retire to the mansion, Dough, to secure some soda, eh?”

“All right.”

He opened up the screen door and held it for me as I stepped inside. El Rey’s motor home was mostly empty. There was a small record player in one corner, a cardboard box full of records beside it, an old gray refrigerator at the opposite end of the place, some pillows and blankets thrown in the middle of the floor. El Rey opened up the refrigerator and pulled out a cold can of soda and placed it in my hand.

“Hey, who’s that?” I asked. There was a black-and-white picture of a dark-eyed woman with long hair that was decorated with a number of jeweled combs. The photo sat right on the floor beside the old man’s makeshift bed. In it, the woman’s dress was a tight corset, sparkling with more jewels around her shoulders. I picked up the picture and stared at her round face.

“That was my wife. Dolcita. The Tango Queen of Santa Ana,” he said, staring up at the ceiling. “Her feet were hummingbird wings. The way she moved when she danced, it was like flying.”

El Rey made a little dance move, holding one hand to his hips, while his other gripped the hand of some imaginary dance partner. He began to turn in time to the rhythm in his head.
Da-da-da, da-da-da.”
He turned and stopped and stared down at me.

“She died last April. Cancer. In her stomach. There was nothing we could do to save her.” He stared down at the picture and smiled. “Sometimes I feel like I am caught in the worst nightmare of my entire life and there’s no way to escape it. Sometimes I think I don’t ever want to sleep again. Did you ever lay in your bed too scared to fall asleep? You feel like the whole world is on your head and you’ll never be able to rest again?”

I shrugged my shoulders and then nodded.

“That’s the time I dance, my friend. That’s the perfect time right there.” He strode over to the tiny black-and-gold record player and pulled a record from its sleeve, then set it in place. He dropped the black arm and needle into the proper plastic groove. “That is the best time in the world to let all that agony out right through your feet.”

The tango music boomed on. His bare gray chest began to get sweaty as he moved.

“C’mon, Dough, dance. Dance with me, no?”

He grabbed my hand and set me into motion, swinging me about. He was old and thin but still kind of strong. He danced beside me, then spun me across the room.

“That’s it, my friend. Now you’ve got it. This is the only way to keep her alive. The dance!” he shouted over the music. He gave a little hop, then did a quick turn and bowed just as the music ended. He held his position and blew a kiss to an imaginary audience. “Bravo!” he shouted, taking another bow. He picked up the tiny white towel and began to wipe his forehead and bare chest.
“Bien. Muy bien.
You’re well on your way to becoming a great dancer.”

He patted me on the back.

“Hey, listen, Mr. Rey, I was wondering, well, do you think you can cut that music out at night? My mother …”

“Yes?”

“It’s just too noisy for her.”

He studied my face and then said, “I see. Well, I will do my best to keep it down. How is that?”

I nodded, looking around the empty trailer.

“Well, I must go and finish my fence. And also I must practice the cha-cha-cha. If you don’t practice, you forget everything, I’m afraid.” El Rey closed the door behind me and I cringed as I heard the needle strike the record, the sound of the cha-cha-cha reverberating from within the empty motor home.

I opened up the screen door and stepped inside our own trailer. My mother and French were at the kitchen table with the old lady that lived in the lot behind us, Mrs. Garnier. She was the one who lived with at least three million cats, all of them ugly, underfed, scrawny animals with rotten faces and worms that bled from their rectums, cats that scratched at her screen door all night and hissed and left dead birds on her front door and fought each other in the gray gravel dirt of the trailer park. I guess Shilo had nearly torn one of those cats apart a few weeks before, catching the poor thing in its gray jaws before me and my brother could pull the damn thing loose. Shilo had pulled a hunk of fur and skin from its mangy neck. When it happened, Mrs. Garnier had come stomping over, threatening to sue unless we kept poor Shilo chained up. That dumb dog was not happy about sitting at the end of a length of chain. But now the dog hopped around in front of the trailer during the day on his three legs howling and snarling like a deformed puppet because there was nothing else we could do.

I looked over at my mother, who smiled at me as I slumped onto the sofa. Shilo came up and dropped his head into my lap. Mrs. Garnier had a piece of paper all knotted up in her gray fists and was talking so excitedly that it was hard to understand what she was saying.