When We Join Jesus in Hell (2 page)

He hears the clock ticking and his heart is hammering and it sounds like the sky is ripping right down the middle…

Outside, Fist straps Bethany in the backseat and squeezes her hand before he closes the door. He rounds the car and climbs in behind the wheel, hears a fly buzzing somewhere far off, then closer and he has to brush it from his wife’s forehead, and sorrow rocks his body.

He pulls the pistol and sets it on the seat between him and Karen. He puts Jesus’ license against the instrument panel where he can see it clearly. He doesn’t know the area the hoodlum lives in exactly but he knows the road. It runs through the projects.

The clock ticks…

He sets the cup of crickets in the cup holder and Bianca on the seat. She stumbles into Karen’s thigh and curls up there, licking her eyes and then yawning. Fist pets her, smiles sadly, and pulls the car in drive.

Before long he’s parking in front of a house he had no intentions of visiting. He stares at the dark windows, knows his old man is either sleeping or not home, but he squeezes Karen’s hand for strength and gets out anyway. The street is dark, as its always been, and it looks much like it had when he was a child—full of shadows, unexpected places, bullies. It borders the ghetto, and gunshots and alarms pepper the night with music. He shivers, wishes he’d have brought his coat, but feeling this cold draft in his soul is good he thinks as long as it doesn’t stop him in his tracks with grief before he does what he feels needs doing.

He raps on the door with a knotted hand, and the black steel frame rattles. Feet shuffle inside. The hammer of a gun is pulled back. He tenses, knowing his old man could fire right through the door and it really wouldn’t make much difference to him when he looked out and saw Fist bleeding to death in the yard.

“It’s me,” Fist says, struggling to remember the last time he said those words. He was seventeen. His dad had been drunk and they’d just buried Fist’s mother. He and his father had a heated argument that had quickly turned to blows. Fist won but it cost him a roof over his head. He’d always told himself that he at least had his pride, but looking back now he realizes he’d given that up somewhere along the way, too.

His father opens the door wide. A baggy flannel shirt hangs from his bony shoulders. He’s aged more in the last thirteen years than Fist could have ever guessed. He’s holding a pistol that’s older than Fist. He flexes his fingers, some type of blackness dancing in his eyes and Fist thinks,
Last time we swung, this time we’re going to shoot each other
…

The wind moans among the eaves.

His dad says, “You look like you’re about to cry. But I don’t know what the hell makes you think you’re welcome to do it here.”

Fist stumbles forward and hugs him and cries, “I’m sorry,” and it scares him and relieves him for the briefest moment until his father shoves him back across the threshold, saying, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He wipes his eyes, shakes his head, trying to clear it. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder and his dad looks past him for a long, long time and they’re torn in their silence. At last, his father tucks the pistol in his belt, a mirror image of his son, and says, “Did you do that?”

Fist shakes his head, his brow bunched and more emotions roiling through him than he’s ever felt, unable to fathom how his father could even think that.

They cross the driveway, stand outside the passenger side, both of them freezing. Fist says, “What would you do?”

His dad shrugs, staring in the window at Karen. It takes him a long time to look into the backseat and when he does he sighs and can’t seem to look away.

Fist says, “That’s your granddaughter.”

Weight presses their shoulders. His father wipes his nose. He says, “Goddamn.”

“Right,” Fist says.

His dad says, “You know who did this?”

Fist nods, racked with fever. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, tells his father about the last few hours, and it comes out of him in a rush, in a mere matter of minutes, and yet it brings them closer than the past decade.

Fist’s dad says, “If you kill him you’ll end up in prison or on the run, always watching over your shoulder.”

“I know.”

“But if you don’t kill him then someday, somewhere, another family, or some lonely and sad girl, is going to experience this same pain. And maybe that time no one catches him.”

“There won’t be another time for him.”

His dad nods and looks up the road.

Fist looks too, sees a cop car with its light flashing, painting the night crimson. The state trooper blows by the house. Far-off, firecrackers punctuate the night and someone screams.

He glances at the car and sees Karen studying him.

The clock ticks…

Karen says,
Fist, our daughter
…

Fist says to his father, “You’ve missed out on so much.”

His dad sighs again. He hands Fist his pistol, says, “Never hurts to have a spare.” Then he hugs him briefly, takes one last look inside the darkening car, and moves slowly back to the house tormented by his own ghosts.

Jesus says,
You’re killing her
.

Fist runs a hand over his arms and the gooseflesh there feels like pebbles beneath his fingers. He blinks tears away, thinks about all they’d had at one time, and how easily it all slipped away, and he has believed life was just like that sometimes, that it was all out of his control. But he shakes his head now, whispers, “Lies you told yourself. You never tried hard enough. No one was ever able to take anything from you. You gave it up.”

His father waves from the front door.

Fist doesn’t know if when this is all over if he’ll come back here, maybe call the cops from his dad’s phone, or if he’ll shove the pistol in his mouth on some quiet, dirty street and fill the night with fiery sleep.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later he’s cruising down Cicero with his headlights out, people moving in the darkness, and he knows them because one time he used to be them. Back before he’d hung up his gloves, back when the sidewalks had fewer cracks and the street had more light. Fist finds the address he needs and parks alongside the curb. A few blacks stroll by, glance into the car, angry at first because all they’re seeing is this silly white family in their neighborhood, but they’re smart, not stupid, and they see that the woman and the kid are far too pale and the man getting out has blood all over his shirt and they move on down the street without a word.

Fist watches them go, staring after them, second guessing himself because none of them looked like Jesus but you never know. They could be just as bad. He doesn’t want to leave Karen and Bethany and Bianca in the car but knows that he can’t carry them in and do what he has to do. He rolls the window down to give them a little air, then squeezes his wife’s hand. Music rattles windows, men and women laugh somewhere off in the dark, bodies are slapping, tongues are lapping and he feels like all of it is about to drive him out of his head.

He tucks the pistol into his pants and loosens his tie. When he turns to face the house he sees a curtain to the right of the door fall back into place.

“Too late,” he says. “I know you’re here.”

The air around him thickens.

The clock ticks…

He stands at the door. It opens a crack, the smell of meatloaf and something bitter and medicinal clawing its way out, slapping him in the face, reminding him that while the world he knew has ended, other lives go on, and he thinks there is terrible meaning in that, a quiet desperation that rattles the remains of his soul.

An older black woman pokes her head between the door and jamb. He knows she has her foot against the other side but that if he wants in, and he does, she isn’t going to be able to stop him.

Her eyes are lined with her own sorrow, her own individual demons and memories, the things she can never let go, the dreams that have faded and taken part of her with them. She looks past him, at the car, at his family and he thinks she might cry, she might hold him the way his mother never had, but she only says, “Jesus do that?” Her gaze goes from the car to his bloody shirt, to his face.

He nods. “Is he here?”

She shakes her head, fingers tightening on the door as if any moment now she expects he’ll launch an attack, and he thinks,
You’re right.
I’m sorry, but I have to take from him what he’s taken from me. Life isn’t always pretty, and it’s rarely fair
.

“Move aside,” he says, pulling the pistol from the front of his pants, the cold steel biting at his palm, making his fingers itch. He puts a hand to the door and pushes in but it catches on a chain. He slams his shoulder to the wood and the chain snaps. The woman shakes her head, her hands up to protect herself. She says, “You can’t just go breaking in people’s houses. You better leave right now. You should—”

Fist pushes her back down the hall, part of him listening to her, knowing she’s right, part of him trembling as he says, “Where is he?”

“Gone,” she says, draping her arms across her chest, glaring at him with those sad eyes. She is unmovable now. She is not going to help him. He can see that. He tries to think of her as an accomplice to Jesus’ ways, but she’s not and he knows it. She’s barely hanging on to what love she has for him, and he thinks she must go through hell, knowing her son is what he is.

“Mind if I look around?” He doesn’t know why he’s whispering. If Jesus is there he’s heard him by now. He says, “Is anyone else here?”

“No.”

The only light inside comes from what he assumes is the living room. He treads softly. An old lamp perched on a scarred end table casts a sickly yellow glow onto a tattered couch. He moves past her, not caring if she jumps on his back. He’s used to extra weight now.

He searches the living room and kitchen and finds no one, but he sees a yellow post-it note with Jesus’ name on it, a number scribbled below. He memorizes it as he hears a voice say in his head,
Say my name. Jesus
.
Say it
.

“Jesus,” he says.

His heart hammers in his ears. He chokes on bile, glancing past the woman, out to the street where dark men pass the dark car and pale bodies. Fist wipes his eyes. The woman says, “Why don’t you sit down. I’ll get us some tea.”

“I don’t need to sit. I don’t need tea. What I need is to find this piece of shit so I can drag him out to the car and let my wife and daughter watch me put a bullet in his head.”

She flinches. He can’t imagine what it’s like being in her shoes. But he gets the feeling she can imagine being in his because her face softens for a moment and she touches his shoulder the way his mother had rarely done, yet he wished she had a hell of a lot more.

She says, “You think hurting him will bring them back? You know it won’t. And where you gonna be then? How will you honor their memory if you’re in prison, a murderer?”

“I don’t care about honoring their memory,” Fist says. “They knew I loved them. No one is going to change my course.”

“You say that now.”

He offers a sharp nod. There are two closed doors. He moves to the first, clenches the pistol, believes that fate is close by, it’s taunting him, teasing him with possibilities and he may just end up dead too, bleeding out in the ghetto with some woman he doesn’t know looming over him, with his wife and daughter waiting for him in some better place and he can’t say that’d be so bad because he knows that the life he’s had up until tonight isn’t within reach anymore.

He twists the knob.

The door opens beneath its own weight.

The room is dark, blankets draped over the windows, and it smells like long-forgotten sex and cigarettes. He raises the pistol, squinting against the darkness, one hand groping the wall to find the light.

The world explodes with a different light, the sharp crack of a bullet cutting air, and Fist staggers, hits the bedroom door jamb, confused because the pain stems from the back of the shoulder and it’s burning through him. He looks to the woman. She points an old revolver at his face. For some reason he thinks it’s his father’s pistol. He figures she must have had it hidden in the fold of her gown. He wants to smile at her but only once she’s sucking breath from the carpet. She’s still sad, and maybe even some of it is for him, but he sees she doesn’t like people breaking into her house and looking to kill her kin. Her hand doesn’t waver much, but a little tick tugs at her right eye and the grimace she wears is pure.

He grins, unsure why, but it disappears as he moves his arm and lights explode in his head. He’s surprised he can still hold the pistol, surprised that he still clings to hope that things will somehow get better. He feels lucky that she was either a bad shot or was only intending to wound him.

She waits for him, this dark grim reaper with her broken scythe. She says, “Set that gun on the floor and I’ll call an ambulance for you.”

Fist thinks,
No. It’s too late for that
.

The clock ticks.

Blood dots his right shoe.

He says, “You protect him and you’re no better. It doesn’t make you a good mother.”

She shakes her head, finger working on the trigger as tears work at her eyes. “I’m not his mother. I’m his aunt. And all I’m doing is protecting my home. Whatever hell Jesus conjures he brings on himself.”

“Set the gun down and I’ll leave.”

“You’re bleeding all over my rug.”

Fist glances at his shoulder. It doesn’t look too bad. It aches like hell, but the wound is clean, the bullet doesn’t appear to have hit any bones. He touches it with a finger and flinches. He meets her gaze and says, “No matter what I am going to kill him. Even if I have to kill you first, but I don’t want that. I don’t want anyone innocent to suffer.”

“Right,” she says softly. “You know all about how the innocent suffer.”

The gun wavers and then lowers. She sobs and sets the pistol on the table. “I don’t know why some men have to make such a mess of other people’s lives.”

“Me neither.”

“He was a good kid.”

“That’s too bad,” Fist says, surprised that he means it. He thinks about other kids he’s known, from the streets, from the gym, who had smarts and charm and so many things going for them but they’d done like he had with his pride and his thankfulness and tossed it to the wayside to pick up something new—drugs, or women, or a job that led to insanity, drug addiction or death. Or just another dead end.