Tender as Hellfire (12 page)
“It’s indecent is what I think,” Mrs. Garnier said with a frown. “An old man acting like that, it’s indecent. There’s children running around all night and day, what would happen if they saw what was going on over there?”
About a month before, Mrs. Garnier had caught me and my brother smashing bluebird eggs against the side of our trailer. They were from a nest we had found in a small tree in the field behind the trailer park. She had grabbed me by my ear and my brother by his hair and led us around the front of our trailer and told our mother exactly what we’d been doing. “Heathens!” is what she had called us. “Heathens!” Of course, I had seen at least a thousand of her cats murder, maim, and mutilate a million robins, sparrows, cardinals, any unlucky bird that landed anywhere near the shadow of that old lady’s trailer. Once, I had even seen two or three of her cats tear a rabbit apart, strewing its remains all across her front steps. Before El Rey had moved in next door, the only sound at night would be the awful scream of her cats killing poor woodland creatures.
“Now wait a minute.” My mother frowned. “No one said you had to watch what that man does at night. You can just close your curtains if you want.”
“What about the noise? That horrible music blaring. Him banging around all night. It’s inconsiderate, to say the least. Don’t you agree?” Mrs. Garnier turned to French this time for support.
“I guess,” he said. His face was long. It looked like the old lady was wearing him out.
“I’m an old woman, and all I have left is my sleep. We pay too much to live in this park to be disturbed by someone so inconsiderate. When it comes down to it, it’s a question of morals. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your boys to see the things going on over there, would you?”
“No,” my mother said. “But—”
“But nothing. Are you going to sign the petition or not?”
“No, I don’t think so,” my mother said with a frown.
“It’s a shame your boys don’t have better role models to look up to. Bad apples don’t fall far from the tree.”
“Good day, Mrs. Garnier,” my mother announced, opening the screen door for her.
“Hmphh,” the old lady grunted, wobbling down the front steps.
French shook his head, taking a swig from his silver can of beer.
“Who does that old bag think she is to go around bothering people like that?” my mother asked.
“Doesn’t look like it matters. There were enough names on that petition without us.” He sat the beer can down and stared out the kitchen window. Mrs. Garnier pounded on El Rey’s screen just once, then slipped the petition between the door and the frame and waddled away.
“I guess I’ll go work on the car,” French said. I didn’t think that his black Impala was ever going to get off those four concrete blocks. He opened another can of cold beer and patted me on the back. “Feel like giving me a hand there, pal?”
I saw my mother smiling at me hopefully.
“I guess,” I grunted, digging my fists into my pockets. French pulled the rest of his six-pack out of the fridge and stepped outside. I followed, helping him yank the dirty white tarp off the useless black car. We folded it between the two of us and set it down beside the rear blocks.
There it was. Oh, ’72 Impala. What a waste. Even the red rust on the wheel wells looked like it had given up hope. We stood there before it, me shaking my head with a frown, French grinning, patting his belly.
“She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?” French sighed, taking a sip of beer. “Let’s see if she’ll turn over.” He propped open the driver’s door. Turn over? Turn over? That car had never once started before. I leaned against the side of it, shaking my goddamn head.
French slid the silver key into the ignition, closed his eyes, and gave the ignition a quick turn. I don’t know how, but there was a sputter somewhere deep inside. Ol’ French gave it another mean crank.
“Give up,” I mumbled, as French let out a sigh and leaned back in the lush vinyl seat, then took a swig from his silver can.
“Doesn’t look like it’s our day, does it, pal?”
He finished off the beer and crushed the can in one hand, which seemed kind of impressive to me. He yanked another can off the plastic ring and tapped the top three times, staring at me with a wide grin.
“You ever split a beer with your old man?” he asked.
I suddenly felt embarrassed for some reason. I don’t why. I guess I just didn’t like him mentioning my dad.
“Do you feel like tasting a sip?”
I stared at him hard and shook my head.
“C’mon, it’ll put a little hair on your chest.”
I shook my head again and spat into the dirt. French shrugged his shoulders and heaved himself out of the car, then propped up the hood and started poking about. I leaned against the back of the car, staring over at El Rey’s mobile home, watching as the old man hunched over, applying a second coat of paint to his new picket fence. There was sweat all along his bare chest and back. His face looked happy as he moved the thick black brush over the slats of wood, singing to himself some tango or cha-cha-cha. I smiled to myself, then turned and watched French tear out some slinky mechanical device from under the hood.
“Here’s our problem all right.” French smiled through a face full of grease. I shook my head and turned back to watch El Rey running the brush against the wood. His greasy pompadour seemed to glow. Just then, a tall man walked up to the white fence, staring down at El Rey with a frown.
“Yer the man that lives here then?” the tall man asked. His voice was loud and sounded angry. There was a glare off the tall man’s large forehead. He wore a dark blue pair of overalls and had a wide frown on his face. It was Mr. Deebs, the man who worked at the cemetery, the man from the trailer two lots down. He was the person who dug the ditch they dropped you in when you were a goner. He lived alone in a blue trailer, just on the other side of the tiny gravel road. I did not like the looks of him. He used to stand behind his screen door, cleaning his gun, while he watched me and my brother sitting behind our trailer smoking our cigarettes or shooting the bull. He’d just stand there behind his screen with a thin little smile, swabbing out his rifle’s firing mechanism, maybe wondering exactly how long it might take to entirely dissect me and my brother limb from limb.
“I come here to ask you when you plan on leaving.”
I watched El Rey as he put down his paintbrush and smiled. He wiped some white enamel on his pants and stood up. Mr. Deebs just kept frowning, tightening his fists.
“I said, when do you plan on leaving?”
“I don’t think I understand.” El Rey grinned. “I just moved in. I just put up this fence. I don’t plan on leaving for some time, my friend.”
“I don’t think you understand what I mean.”
“No, I think I do.”
“Well, you might consider being gone real soon is all I’m gonna say.”
“I am going to have to ask you to please leave now.”
Mr. Deebs clenched his jaw and shifted his weight, tightening his shoulders in place. He twitched his lips a little, then looked down at the tiny white fence. “I don’t think I will,” he said.
I looked back and saw that French was watching what was happening too, from around the hood of the Impala. “You all right over there?” French called out.
“Yes, yes,” old El Rey replied. His face looked tired and gray. French set down his wrench and grabbed an oily rag, wiping off his hands. He strolled slowly over to El Rey’s fence, nodding with a big smile.
“Is there something I can help you with?” he asked Mr. Deebs.
“Nope. It ain’t got nothing to do with you,” the tall man answered.
“I think it might be a good idea if you go on back home there, pal,” French said, and then, misjudging the situation, he reached up and put his hand on Mr. Deebs’s shoulder. From where I was standing, I saw at once it was the wrong thing to do. Mr. Deebs knocked French’s hand off his shoulder and then gave him a shove. French was still smiling, lifting his hands up, trying to make it clear that he didn’t want any trouble, but Mr. Deebs took a wild swing, catching French in the corner of his left eye with a sharp knuckle.
At that point, French stopped smiling and lunged forward, wrapping his arm around the other man’s neck, wrestling him to the ground, getting him in a headlock.
“Go on, be still!” French shouted. “Be still.” He kept squeezing hard until Mr. Deebs gave in and just laid there, kicking his foot in little circles. “Don’t come around here again, do you understand? We don’t want trouble, okay? Stay on your side of the road and we won’t have any more of this.”
Breathing hard, Mr. Deebs grunted something through the dust. French let him up, and the thin man took off down the little street, back into his blue trailer, leaving some of his pride there outside El Rey’s house.
“You okay?” French asked El Rey.
The old man smiled, his face wrinkled with worry. “I’m going to go inside now. It’s too much for me.” His face looked empty and old. The tattoos on his arms suddenly seemed dull, the grace in his step gone.
“I think that’s maybe a good idea,” French said. He turned, holding his shoulder, and looked me right in the face. Me, I didn’t move. I didn’t say a word.
He kind of stumbled toward our trailer, clenching his shoulder and gritting his teeth. “C’mere,” he whispered, tightening his face in pain. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and wandered over to where he stood in front of our trailer door. His long thin face was covered in sweat too. His eyes were small and dull like was about to fall asleep.
“Be a sport and go get me my beer.”
I ran over and pulled the rest of the six-pack off the roof of the black car and placed the plastic ring in his hand. He sat down on our porch with a groan, then took the four cold metal cans and placed them against his neck, rubbing his shoulder with a frown.
“I think I threw out my shoulder. Jesus.”
I stared at him, watching as his left eye began to swell up.
“Don’t think this is the way you’re supposed to handle things, pal,” French mumbled, wiping some blood from his neck with the palm of his hand. “Because it’s not. You should always try to talk things out. But sometimes it’s not so easy. Sometimes, well, people won’t let you talk, but you got to try at least.”
French was still breathing hard. I guess he was as stunned as me.
“Let’s go inside now and tell your mother what happened.” He stood and spat hard into the gravel. That was maybe the first time I realized that he wasn’t planning on skipping out on us anytime soon. I mean, he put up with me and my crazy brother and my mother crying by herself at night. He was in for the long haul, and maybe the best thing I could do was just get used to it.
I opened up the screen door for him, watching as he stumbled inside. My mother was on the sofa and turned to smile, but then caught sight of French’s swollen eye.
“June,” he mumbled. “Don’t get excited. But there was some sort of fight.”
“What happened to your eye?”
Of course, my mother broke into tears right away, hurrying to get some ice to put on his face. French let out a little groan as he took a seat on the couch, adding a little sigh for some sympathy. And sure enough, that night I heard my mother laughing, the sound of them doing it echoing through the walls and their bedroom door.
After school the very next day, El Rey’s mobile home was gone.
And no one said a word about it.
For about a week after he left, I stared out the window at night to try to see if he maybe might come back. I pushed the red curtains aside and pressed my nose against the dirty glass. But he had really disappeared. His mobile home was gone. The echo of his records, of his singing, had vanished too. It was as if he had never been there at all. I laid in bed and wondered what happens to people when they go, if they become like shadows, if they fade away when they disappear from your life. The only thing I could see was the broken picket fence. The only sound I could hear was the cry of birds being killed in the night.
On that Halloween, which was the worst Halloween ever, because I dressed up as the Wolfman and Pill refused to dress up at all, my mother and French let us watch
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
and about a day or so later I started wetting the bed like a little cry-baby. It happened almost every night afterwards. In the morning, my brother would look at me and shake his head, then my mom would come in and pull off the sheets, trying not to look embarrassed for me. What I had been afraid of at first, leopards and tigers, had become something different in my dreams, something so frightening that I’d wet myself before I could even wake up. It was the Devil, the one I had seen in that lonely barn; he would appear in my dreams every night and my father would be there too. They would both meet somewhere on a lonely road in Texas, one black strip of tar, brilliant with blue and gray stones, the whispers of wild animals growling in the dark. There was no beginning to my dream. There was only an end.
Shadows would surround my old man, three of them. My dad would turn to face them, unafraid to meet his maker, which was the way he was, and then they’d come down on him with their crowbars and knives.
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 Gretchen 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.