Tender as Hellfire (15 page)

A breath upon the windowpane.

A quiet whisper in the night.

I shot up in bed, terrified, until I saw who it was. I quietly slid open the glass. Of course, it was that crazy girl, Lottie, holding her pink bike, dressed in a winter jacket and an old flannel nightgown, wearing her older brother’s construction boots.

“Dough, are you still awake?”

I nearly burst out of my skin. I reached over and pulled on one of my brother’s crooked blue sweatshirts and wrapped it around me good. I climbed on down and followed Lottie around to the back side of our trailer, where we both took seats in the dirt, grinning like mad. My God, seeing her dirty face and one hundred pigtails and stupid pink bike made me want to break down right there and cry again, but I couldn’t stop myself from smiling.

“Do you know what?” Lottie said quietly. “I got big news. My older sister just had her baby. Just a couple of minutes ago.”

Her face was all flushed and sweaty. It looked like she had pedaled nonstop from her house to mine. The silver glimmer off the trailer’s siding glowed behind her hair like holy light. There was something in her little smile that made me want to think there was such a thing as hope. Something that made me want to believe it all might be true. But then in a whisper that was gone too.

“She had it right in her bed at home. But it didn’t make it. It was born blue.”

“Blue?”

“It didn’t even get to breathe. It was dead. Her poor baby is dead,” she mumbled.

“Dead … ?”

“My sister didn’t get to the hospital in time so she had it right on the bedroom floor.”

Then I understood what the Chief had meant.

I was cursed. Not in a usual way, not like my old man or even my brother, but cursed in a way to watch everyone I ever cared for suffer around me. Cursed as my mother or French or Lottie or even the Chief. Cursed to just stand there and watch the awful hand of fate fall upon all the unlucky people I ever held near to my heart. Cursed in the same way everyone else was cursed, I guess.

“Her poor baby,” Lottie whispered, her eyes wet with tiny tears.

“Do you think your sister is all right?”

Lottie nodded. “The doctor says so anyways.” Her eyes were gray and small in the dark. She nodded to herself, squeezing my arm.

“Do you know what my daddy said?” she asked in a quiet voice. He. Her father. The Devil behind the windows. The man in the dark. “He said that maybe the baby was better off to die now than to be sick and break all our hearts worse.”

Lottie’s eyes shimmered with more tears.

“He said that maybe it was too young to have a soul. He said if it had taken a breath and died then it would have been something, but like that it was only skin and bones.”

I felt my teeth begin to chatter in my head. Maybe Lottie’s old man was right. Maybe it was lucky never to breathe, never to suffer, maybe it had only been skin and bones, but it had been a part of someone else, a part of Lottie too.

“Did your sister name it?” I asked, looking away.

“No name,” Lottie mumbled. “That’s what the doctor put on his report. No name, no father, not even a tombstone. My dad is gonna bury it out back behind the fields without a marker to maybe help the crops grow.” Her eyes became wide and dark. “Maybe that’s the only reason it came. To help the plants grow.”

Her face was lit like a saint and her fingers gripped my hand hard.

“I oughta go on home.” Lottie frowned. “My father’s probably missing me as it is.”

I nodded. There was so much I wanted to tell her, so many things I think I wanted to say. But nothing seemed like it made any sense on my lips.

“Just thought you might wanna know,” she said.

I saw that her eyes had run dry as she let go of my hand and hopped on her bike. She pedaled back along the dirt road, skidding from shadow to shadow up the path toward her home. I sat behind the trailer awhile longer. My fingers felt tight and stiff. I could still feel the heat of her hand upon mine.

I pulled myself back inside my window and suddenly felt like I wasn’t there alone. My brother was fast asleep, snoring like a sawmill, clutching his sheets like he was in the midst of some awful dream. I shook my head and looked around. Everyone in our trailer was asleep. But there was still this feeling that someone else was in that room with me. I could feel it moving around my head, making me uneasy and uncomfortable as hell. I stared out the tiny window once more, looking for her breath.

But the glass was dry and clean.

I thought for sure that poor girl was home by now, creeping through that horrible house in the dark, trying not to make a sound, moving through the shadows and the night to find the quiet of her lonesome bed. I could see her quiet and alone, hidden under her covers. I could smell her sweet, sugary breath full of spit and fear.

I quickly pulled on my own drawers and shoes, put on my brother’s stocking hat, then dug into the dark of my dresser for the cold shape of the thing I most needed, placed it in my pocket, and climbed back outside.

I felt the cold gravel as it moved right under my feet without a sound. I pulled that hat down to my eyes and crept through the dark night, walking along the culvert, but not too deep, ducking if the yellow crossbeams of a truck or car flew by. Then I was there, at the end of the lonely dirt road, hiding behind a thin barren tree. A bulb flickered in Lottie’s house, right behind those blue window shades. I held in my breath, feeling the sweat spread along my back. I moved close to the ground, skipping from dark shadow dark space, holding my body against a tree, then a woodshed that stood a few feet from her big white porch. The lightbulb flickered and I could see a form made in black, a shadow, a man’s tall body as it moved behind the shade.

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 real 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.