Tender as Hellfire (14 page)
We walked across the field, crossing down to the road; nothing settled in my mind much except how scared my older brother had looked after he had done it, and that made me feel even worse. He was as scared as me, all right. Maybe because he had never lit anything like that on fire before—I mean, not somewhere public like that, while people were just standing inside watching. Even when he burned that kid’s porch down, it was all deserted and no one was really around. Lighting a fire right in the middle of town in the middle of the day, that was arson, plain and simple. I looked at his face again. It was still pale and white.
“That was really great,” I tried to mumble.
He didn’t offer any sort of reply. He pulled his blue stocking cap down and looked back over his shoulder to see if anyone was coming after us. He suddenly looked a lot older to me. “Don’t talk about it now,” he grunted. “Don’t mention it again or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
I shrugged my shoulders and walked beside him and spit. Nothing made any damn sense to me anymore.
And then it got a whole lot worse.
Before we reached the rows of motor homes, a white squad car barreled down in front of us, skidding to a stop just a few feet from where we were walking along the side of the road.
I don’t think there’s anything you can say that accurately describes what you feel at a moment like that, other than doomed. The squad car’s lights were flashing, its siren screeching, the engine hollering with steam. Pill let out a yelp and began to run again, traversing the weeds, down into the culvert along the side of the road, but the deputy was too quick. He hopped out of his car, passed me, and caught hold of the back of Pill’s shirt. He knocked my brother to the ground and held him there, then pointed to me and said: “Stay where you are, you little asshole.”
My face felt all hot—I was scared as hell. I had never had a police officer swear at me before and I don’t think Pill had either, not even when he lit that hedge on fire in Duluth. The police there had just sat us both down in front of our mother and French and talked about responsibility. No one—no policeman, I mean—had ever knocked my brother down and called me a little asshole before. I was pretty terrified, I guess.
I watched as my brother wrestled around in a thick pile of dirt and leaves, flailing his thin arms. He tried to kick the man in the belly, pulling himself to his feet to run again, but the deputy turned and cracked him in the nose with the back of his hand. My brother didn’t utter a goddamn cry, he just held his nose and kept kicking; the two of them, my brother and the deputy, both kind of snarled and had the same dumb look in their black eyes—anger. Not just anger, but frustration, frustration that didn’t have anything to do with each other or the goddamn fire at the hardware store, I suddenly thought. In that moment, it seemed to me like my brother and the deputy were exactly the same. They had both been cheated out of something they thought they had deserved maybe. They both figured they could get away with lying and cheating, but they both knew they were doomed. That’s how my brother looked, lying there on his back. Already doomed.
The deputy finally slapped a pair of thick silver handcuffs on my brother’s wrists and yanked him to his feet by the back of his shirt. Pill’s nose began to bleed a little from one of his nostrils. He looked pathetic. The deputy pulled that beautiful silver lighter out of Pill’s shirt pocket and shoved us both into the backseat of the squad car, then slammed the doors shut. He fell back into his driver’s seat, coughing a little. I kind of hoped I would die just then, and I watched as the deputy turned around to face us.
“It looks like you both have a lot of explaining to do.”
“Go to hell,” my brother murmured, but it didn’t sound brave at all, it sounded almost like a cry, like he was ready to buckle. The blood on his nose didn’t help him look any tougher either. Me, I didn’t say a word. I was already thinking. I thought I could blame my dumb older brother for most of it, except the part where I knocked the lawn mower over and ran, and even then I was deliberating whether my mom and this policeman might believe it was all just an accident, like maybe I hadn’t known what Pill was going to do and I had maybe tripped over the lawn mower accidentally.
The deputy switched off his siren and asked us where we lived and Pill mumbled it out, and then he drove us toward the trailer park slow as hell, maybe trying to rattle us, I guess. He unrolled his window and lit up a smoke. He let the gray cloud rise from his mouth and drift up, real cool and relaxed, like he was in some movie, starring him of course. I didn’t like this deputy at all. He pulled into the trailer park, right between our motor home and Mrs. Garnier’s, and by then we knew he knew everything and we were done for.
He turned around in the front seat and stared at us, shaking his head.
“So you think you can just go and destroy other people’s property and run off like a bunch of cowards, huh?”
We were done for, all right.
“We didn’t light nothing,” my brother kind of mumbled to himself. He sure was out of it. I don’t know. Maybe it had nothing to do with the fire, maybe he was just so sick of being disbelieved and caught and treated like a liar and troublemaker. His eyes kind of welled up with tears and his face got all hot and red as he turned toward the car window. We had lit the can of brooms on fire, the deputy knew we had done it, but my brother couldn’t let it go, he wouldn’t let anyone accuse him of anything, whether it was true or not, even if they had the evidence right there in their hand. That’s the real problem with lying: You never do know when you’re telling the truth or not.
“I got three different folks that said you did it. And this lighter here, which all of them can identify.”
“Screw off,” my brother grunted.
I guess there was no hope, no hope for either of us. I thought about coming clean and spitting it all out, finally snitching on my brother, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Maybe the deputy would think I was innocent, just a tagalong, but my mother would know the truth and punish us both for sure. I could already feel the red-hot length of French’s belt against my hide. I could already hear my mother’s hot crying wallowing in my ears. My lips began to tremble. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth and let it all out in one horrible flush of snot and tears.
“He did it,” I choked out. “My brother did it. He said he’d kill me if I told anyone. Honest. He said he was gonna kill me if I told. Please don’t tell our folks. Please. He won’t ever light nothing on fire again. I swear. I swear. Please don’t tell our folks.”
Pill shook his head in disgust. He stared at me without saying a word, and I knew right then he hated me for sure. Maybe the whole idea of stealing something had been his to begin with, but I had gone along with him because I wanted to see him get away with it, and maybe that wasn’t as bad as what he did, but I knew telling on someone was just about the lowest thing you could do. I had buckled. I had turned on my own brother. I would deserve my punishment because I was a snitch. I was a tattletale. I was a blabbermouth.
“Now ain’t the time to cry, son,” the deputy mumbled to me over his shoulder. “No time to cry when you go around doing stupid things like that.”
He took a long drag, then opened the car door and led us out and on up to our front porch. He knocked on the screen door just once with a big white fist.
“Hello. Sheriff’s Department!” he hollered.
French answered the door in a pair of brown pants and a dirty T-shirt. He shook his head as he caught sight of the both of us, my brother in handcuffs with a bloody nose and me crying like a baby; my God, after all of my mother’s warnings and French’s nodding and frowning along with her for support, they had both been right. We were no good. We were headed straight for the pen.
The deputy flicked his cigarette out into the gray darkness and spoke: “Looks like your boys here got themselves into some trouble.”
I watched as my mother appeared at the door, staring over French’s shoulder.
“What happened? What did you do now?” she shouted.
“We didn’t do a damn thing!” Pill blurted out.
Deputy Lubbock let out a snicker. “Heh-heh, it looks like these boys here lit a fire outside the hardware store in town. I caught ’em with the evidence, red-handed.”
“A fire?” my mother shouted. “Another fire?” She stepped from behind French and smacked me hard on the side of my face. That’s something you don’t ever want to feel, getting smacked in the face by your own mother in front of a stranger and all.
“Pete at the hardware store said he won’t press any charges, though I tried to convince him otherwise. He said as long as these boys don’t come near the store again and they repay what they owe, he’d be willing to let it go.”
“Owe? What do ya mean,
owe?”
my brother shouted.
“Pete said it was in the neighborhood of three hundred dollars or so.”
“Three hundred dollars! We didn’t even light the damn fire!”
“You best find a way to learn these boys the difference between right and wrong, or the next time I might be forced to teach them myself. And believe me, you don’t want to have to learn it from me.”
Deputy Lubbock slipped his key into the silver handcuffs and turned Pill free, shoving him a little.
“We will, officer,” French said with a nod, gripping Pill by his shirt.
“I want my lighter back,” Pill grunted through some tears. He stared hard right into that deputy’s eyes and didn’t look away.
“That’s official evidence now, son,” the deputy said. “I’d keep any lighters or matches out of this boy’s reach.”
My mother and French nodded.
The deputy hopped back in his squad car and tore away, kicking up gravel and dust as he went. My mother and French shoved us inside and gave us each a whipping before we could explain anything about the knife or the deputy or the hardware store. French held me by my arm and whacked me with his belt hard on my behind without me saying another goddamn word. Then he did the same to Pill, who just stood still and didn’t cry like me, gritting his teeth a little as the belt hit his behind with a thick smack. The worst part was the look on French’s face: It was stern and serious, but sad and disappointed as hell. He winced with every swing, looking like he was about ready to start crying too. He held me by my shoulder afterwards and looked into my face.
“This is it, boys, this is the last fire you start, understand?”
I nodded, clearing the tears out of my eyes. Pill stayed completely still. His eyes were all hard and black and mean.
“You’re both gonna end up in prison or the morgue pulling shit like that, you hear?”
I nodded again, trying to ignore my sore bottom-side. My mother was in the bathroom crying, maybe mumbling the rosary through her sobs, probably praying for both our worthless souls.
French looked at my brother sternly. “Pill, you’re going to get a job to pay back what you owe.”
“A job? Where am I supposed to get a job?”
“The Pig Pen. I got a fella on my line at work who knows the manager. I’ll give him a call about it right now.”
“I’m not working at some stupid grocery store,” Pill muttered.
“Yes, you will,” French replied. “And you’re going to pay back every cent that you owe.”
After that, French sent me and my brother to our room so fast that I still didn’t have a chance to say a single word. Our damn room didn’t seem any different than the prison or the morgue, I guess. Any way it went, it was like we were still both trapped. My brother laid in the top bunk, not uttering a sound, his face red as hell. I laid there too, beneath him, knowing how mad he was—not at my mother or French, or the deputy or Pete, or even the whole crummy town we both always counted on blaming—but me. Me. My brother was sore as hell at me and it had all happened before I could really think what I was trying to do or say. I had turned on my only brother and it hadn’t done me any good anyway. I laid in my bed looking up, and reached out my hand to where my brother’s weight made the dull blue bunk sag above. There was nothing there but the plastic skin of the old blue bed-liner. I could hear him breathing. I could hear him hating me, lying beneath his soft white sheets. I started crying again, holding my face in the pillow so he wouldn’t hear. I guess maybe I tried so hard to think of something funny to say and nearly said it, but then the words were all gone and I just laid there, making sounds to myself like a prayer.
A couple of weeks later, it still kind of felt like the world was ending. Because I had snitched on him, my older brother refused to talk to me. I would sit next to him when was watching TV or follow him into our room and ask him how his job at the Pig Pen was, but he would just give me a dirty look and then go back to ignoring me. He was sorting through his collection of skin mags one day and I decided to maybe peruse them too, when he looked at me and said: “Don’t touch any of my goddamn things.” I guess he had every right to be mad. I had turned my back on him just to try to get out of trouble. And no matter how many times I tried to apologize, he just sneered and turned away, shaking his head to himself. I had hurt him worse than I had ever hurt anyone. He was my brother, my only brother, and now I had no one in that crummy town to talk to. I barely got to see him anymore, anyway. He worked nearly every day after school at the Pig Pen supermarket, trying to pay back the damage he had done to the hardware store. The rest of his checks went straight into a savings account my mother had helped him set up. He would stare at the little booklet, watching the numbers slowly adding up. And there was a pile of nudie magazines that kept growing, filling a whole shelf in Pill’s dresser. My mother didn’t go in our room anymore; she would stack our clean clothes outside our bedroom door. No one talked about the fire at the hardware store, neither my mom nor French. It occurred to me that if Pill had just gotten a job in the first place, he could have bought that knife instead of lighting those brooms and starting all the trouble that ended with him ignoring me. But I don’t think he ever really caught on to that. He was still quietly stealing cigarettes and candy and nudie books, and then one afternoon I noticed him shove a greasy-green wad of cash into his pocket when he headed to school. After a few weeks of near silence, nothing had changed except the warnings he gave me.
“Stay away from my shit,” was all he would grunt now before he walked away. That was me and my older brother.
The only other person I’d even bother talking to, Lottie, had been grounded for a month, having gotten in trouble for stealing that beautiful glass eye. During school, we would write each other notes and draw pictures of monsters no one else had ever invented half-tiger/half-vampire, or a Mud-Man, or a creature that was part cheetah, part lizard, part boy—but after school she wasn’t allowed out of her house. By then all of the other kids in class had heard of the fire at the hardware store and no one would speak to me, let alone shoot marbles or have a spitting contest or even share a smoke.
I decided to go visit the Chief one afternoon to buy some cigarettes and bother him for some kind of company. I stepped right up to the counter with a big smile, holding some money stolen from my mother’s purse in my greasy palm. I watched carefully as the Chief turned, taking a swig from his silver flask. The filling station was silent as a tomb. There was a thin gray dust coating all the candy bars near the counter and the floor looked like it hadn’t been swept in weeks. There were dry insects stuck to the front windows, married to the cobwebs on the flickering lights overhead. The Chief looked bad. His eyes were deep red with fleshy gray bags. He was teetering a little in his seat, staring off into space with an empty-toothed frown.
“How are things, Chief?” I asked, not looking at him. He was staring right over my head, twitching his lips at something just out of sight.
“Fine,” he grunted. The Chief’s eyes turned on me then, cold and deep red.
“What is it you need?” he asked. His nose twitched a little as he cleared his throat.
“A pack of Marlboros,” I said with a frown, glancing at the knot of wrinkles at the center of his forehead. The Chief dug behind the counter and placed the smokes on the white linoleum in front of me. I reached for them, but the Chief swatted my hand away and leaned over the counter close to my sweaty face.
“These things are a curse, boy. But you are too young and dumb to see that, aren’t you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. I thought he was just drunk, like always, and maybe being ornery and mean. His hot breath hung in the air; he smelled like he had been pickled, like his organs had been embalmed in some kind of gasoline.
“Do you know what I think? I think I should not sell cigarettes to you anymore, boy. I think I should not add any more misery to your foolish little life.”
He laughed a little, then uncapped his silver flask and spilled some more liquor into his mouth. It seemed like the only thing that made him laugh was bullshitting dumb kids like me and taking a swig from his flask. He drank deeply, then capped the lid and placed it back beneath his greasy black shirt.
“Well, what do you think? Don’t you think you are already cursed?” He winked and stared at me hard.
“I don’t know,” I said in a mumble, looking away.
“You don’t know?”
Me, I backed away and shrugged my shoulders. The stolen money felt dull and heavy in my palm, like it might slip and drop to the floor and I’d never be able to pick it up. The Chief leaned further over the counter, his face coming as close to mine as it ever had.
“It is like carrying a wound. Something that will not go away. Every day, it is always there, the curse. Every night, it is always part of you. The curse is what makes you who you are. It is what makes you who you will be. It is something you cannot escape … even with a good drink.” He laughed, his face seeming old and wooden like the side of a maple tree. He nodded to himself once more, then leaned back. “But like I just said, you are too young and stupid to know anything.”
He snickered to himself a little, then punched the register with a snarl.
“One dollar eighty-nine.”
I placed the wrinkled dollars on the counter and slid them across to his gray hand. He shook his head and unfolded the bills, then hit the
Sale
button. The register opened with a ring. He slid the cigarettes across the counter without another goddamn word. His black eyes glimmered with light. Then he returned his gaze to the white space above my head, the exact spot where he had been staring before, not making a sound, not moving his eyes or nose, his lips still twitching.
Hell, I just slipped the cigarettes into my pocket and ran out of that damn place, straightening my collar as I got out onto the road. I left the damn smokes in my pocket and walked home without even lighting one, rubbing the perspiration from my forehead with my sleeve. The Chief was crazy all right. Going around scaring kids like that. I began to wonder why I bothered to go there at all. I began to wonder why the hell I even bought cigarettes in the first place.
I headed up the gravel road that led to the trailer park, then crossed between Mrs. Garnier’s and Mr. Deebs’s mobile homes, down one row to where Val’s silver trailer stood. I had decided that I would visit her and see if we could maybe watch some TV together. But as I walked around the side of her trailer, I froze in place when I spotted a white squad car parked out front. I felt my heart go blank. Val? Not Val. I made a quick prayer that nothing awful would ever happen to her, that she would be safe. But there was the silver star that read
Sheriff
along the side of the car’s door. I crept around to see what had happened, my legs shaking with each step. When I made my way around to the front of her trailer, I saw the most awful sight:
The deputy was holding Val close, kissing her softly, their lips locked together in a long embrace. A bouquet of red flowers was pressed between their bodies tight as they whispered and kept on kissing. And there were his hands on her hips. And there was her mouth moving against his lips. I felt all the spit dry on my tongue. All the blood nearly drained from my head. The sight was enough to make me sick. I picked up a stone and threw it hard against her porch and then turned around and spat into the dust. The sound of them whispering together rang loud in my ears. The quiet murmur of their lips pressed together made me want to find a mailbox of some kind to burn. I ran to our trailer and pulled open our screen door, gritting my teeth to keep from crying, hurrying toward my room.
Before I made it to the end of the hall, I saw the sorrowful stare of my mother and French, silent at our kitchen table, stopping me where I stood. They looked like a pair of parents from TV, trying to smile, sitting beside one another so quietly. French’s voice spoke up, a sad little choir sealing my doom.
“Do you think we can talk to you for a minute, Dough?”
“Huh?”
French had on a long face behind his black glasses. His lips were curled in a weak smile. Him and my mother were holding hands. Her face looked like a painting of a saint. It was then that I heard the last four words I ever wanted to hear: “Your teacher called today.”
“She did?”
I took a seat at the table and glanced at my mother’s face. It was mostly sad-looking, not all lit up or angry. I tried to remember what I’d done in goddamn school that day. I tried to think quick so I could come up with a good lie before I walked into their trap.
“Your teacher says you haven’t been doing so well with your assignments and tests and everything,” my mother murmured. “She says she’s afraid you might have some sort of learning disability.”
“Huh?” I mumbled again.
Disability
? The word fluttered like a sickly bird around my head.
“You’ve been getting straight F’s. You haven’t passed one single test. She says all you do is draw pictures-and daydream or look out the window and fall asleep. She says she’s afraid you might have some sort of learning disorder.”
“Huh?” It sounded like someone was trying to call me stupid, which I didn’t even care to argue with. Me being not so bright was something I didn’t think I could ever change.
“She says there’s other things too.”
“Huh? What other things?”
“She says part of the trouble isn’t just your grades. She says you just don’t seem to get along with any of the kids in your class. You don’t talk or play with the other kids so well. And at lunch you just eat and lay your head down. She says it seems like you don’t want to even try and fit in.”
I didn’t know what to say. My mother stared into my face, her eyes bright with silver tears. I’m sure she could see the truth without me saying another word. Of course Miss Nelson was right. Other than Lottie, I didn’t have a damn friend in class or in town or in the whole world. And as far as I was concerned, the rest of those kids could burn. I didn’t care if they wanted to be friends with me or not.
“Your teacher she says she wants to give you a test to see if you’ve got learning disabilities or not.”
“A test? When?”
“Two days from now. Friday. During school.”
“Friday? Why do I have to take it during class?”
“She says it’ll be on all the things you oughta know. All the subjects. Even some listening skills.”
My face flushed bright red. A goddamn test on Friday during school. Which meant all the kids in my class would know. I suddenly realized that Miss Nelson didn’t give a damn that she was ruining my life.
“What are you thinking, pal?” French asked, still holding my mother’s hand.
“Huh?” I looked up into their faces, holding back some tears. “I think I’ll take that test and fail and then all of you can be glad when you finally see how dumb I really am.”
“Dough!” my mother cried, biting her lips. “We just want you to be happy.”
“If you wanted me to be happy, we would have never left home.”
My mother hung her pretty little head low in shame.
“That’s not a nice thing to say to your mother, Dough,” French said, frowning. “You ought not talk to her like that.”
I gritted my teeth. “Don’t tell me what I can say.” I didn’t care how nice he treated my mother. He wasn’t my father and never would be. And anyway, it was his fault, everything that happened. He was the one who forced us to move to that lousy town in the first place.
French squinted a little, making a real stern face. “We’re not trying to blame you, pal. We just want what’s gonna be the best for you.”
“This is what I say: Nobody cared what was best before we moved to this lousy place. Now I don’t have any friends and now I’m getting crummy marks. Tell me how that’s supposed to be the best.”
I looked over at my mother as shook her head, muffling a sob with her sleeve. French wiped his glasses off and placed them back on his nose.
“Don’t think we don’t see you’re hurting here, Dough. But there’s nothing we can do to take it all back. You yourself haven’t given it much of a chance though, pal. Running around like a little maniac, stealing things and starting fires, how did you think you’d make any friends like that?”
My eyes were wet with tears now too. My hands were clenched, gripping the end of the table. French’s face was a blank white plain. More than anything, I wanted to let out a growl and spit right in his goddamn eye. But something stopped me deep down in my gut. Something in me up and turned and I knew that French might somehow be right. I kicked my chair away from the table and stood, staring into his eyes.
“Tell my teacher I’ll take that test and pass it just so she can see how dumb everyone else is.”
French blinked and smiled a little. My mother coughed once and stopped crying, still holding French’s hand. I marched into my room and laid down on my bed and buried my face in the blankets, hoping to suffocate. Tears kept rolling out of my eyes harder and harder until my mother called me for dinner, but I didn’t even move. I heard French tell her to just give me some time alone. I turned over and watched my shadow on the wall until I eventually fell asleep.
When my lousy older brother came home from work, he turned on the bedroom light since it was too much trouble to let someone suffer in goddamn peace.
“Turn off the damn light!” I shouted, and then I realized it was the first thing I had said to him in about a week. I didn’t give a damn because all my lousy tears had dried and made the skin around my eyes swell and burn and it was hard to even see. I buried my head back under the pillow to go back to sleep, but I could hear my brother eating dinner by himself and French and my mother talking and watching TV and the dog howling to be taken out. When you were feeling bad, that dingy hellhole of a trailer was about the worst place to be. I gritted my teeth together to keep from shouting. I made my hands into tiny white fists at my sides and kept my eyes shut until my brother climbed in the bunk and went to sleep. I wanted to tell him that he was the worst brother a kid could ever have. I wanted to just give in and cry and tell him I didn’t have a friend in the world and Val was making it with the deputy now and I had to take a goddamn test just to prove I wasn’t dumb and I had made my mother cry
again
and all of us were definitely cursed, and this town, this whole town, this whole year was the worst thing that had ever happened to me—but I just kept my eyes closed and held it in to myself and stared at my hand above my face until I saw a faint cloud of breath appear against the glass of my bedroom window.