When We Join Jesus in Hell (3 page)

She sits in a chair, folds her hands in her lap and stares out the open door a while. When her eyes meet his, she says, “It would probably be more messed up if you didn’t want vengeance.”

He sits across from her. “He raped and murdered my wife. My little girl. She was eight-years-old, he—”

She holds a hand up to stop him.

He says, “Call him in. Tell him you need him here. I’ll take him in the street.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t watch that. I can’t do that.”

Fist slams a hand against the table. She jumps and reaches for the gun, the fear inside her alive and as charged as her need for self-preservation. Fist cocks the hammer of his pistol, the barrel staring at her, him staring at her, as he says, “Call him back here or I will pull the trigger. You’re the only chance I have to draw him in.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. Or I’m going to let him see what he’s done out there and in here before I beat his skull to pulp.”

She raises her chin but her lips quiver. Her eyes dart about the room, settle on her gun again, maybe weighing her chances of grabbing it. Fist says, “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want him. He deserves this. You don’t.”

The clock ticks…

His pulse hammers at his neck, rushes through his veins, in his ears, a mighty ocean in his head with only one need, just one, but she clutches the pistol, he can see her fingers close around the handle, the index find the trigger, and he feels the moment stretch out and voices screeching in his head—his wife, his daughter—because he can’t die yet, he can’t take another bullet, at least not here, not from her, not before he sees this through…

He grabs the table with his left hand and throws it up between them, underestimating his strength as adrenaline pounds through him and some primal beat stamps out music in the street, and the table hits her and she releases the gun, and hits the floor, the table on top of her chest, her neck and head at a funny angle pressed tight to the wall.

He studies her a moment.

He thinks she’s playing opossum.

She doesn’t move.

Fist grabs her pistol. He tucks it in the back of his pants, next to his father’s. He thinks three pistols should be enough to handle just about anything that comes his way tonight.

He grabs the phone from a small table in the corner of the dining room. He dials the number that blazes behind his eyes. It rings three times. A man says, “Yeah?”

Fist says, “I’m coming for you.”

“Who is this?”

“Where are you?”

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Say my name,” he says. “Fist. Say it.”

“What?”

“I’m going to cut your balls off but I have to find a knife first.” He heads into the kitchen and throws drawers open until he finds a thin blade that reminds him of the knife his dad used to use to flay fish when Fist was little. He holds it, the blade catching light coming in from a window over the sink. “Where are you?”

“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to but you got the wrong number, man.”

Fist glances at the handset, at the number on the fridge. “Jesus,” he says.

“I’m not Jesus. I’m hanging up now.”

“He killed my family.”

“I’m going…”

“I’m going to find him and make him suffer.”

“Okay, I hear you—”

“Tell him I’m coming if you talk to him.”

“Okay, man. I will.”

“Tell him his aunt is dead.”

“You killed my fucking aunt?”

“No,” Fist says, “you killed her.”

Two

After he drags the woman out near the road, he finds a gas can in the shed out back. While his family watches from the car, he covers the threshold and porch, his eyes watering from fumes, the clock ticking, people in the street growing agitated, a few drawing nearer. One of them, a kid teetering on that point right before manhood, holds a phone to his head.

Fist thinks,
I need to make this quick and get out of here without hurting anyone
.

He throws the can aside. He thinks that the best thing to do is to erase every trace of Jesus from the earth. It’s solid. It’s what he must do.

He stops outside the passenger door of the car and blows his wife a kiss and raps the back door’s glass, part of him believing that somehow Bethany will turn her head, smile at him, tell him,
You did good, Daddy
. But she remains silent and still.

The guy with the phone approaches. He’s young, still a kid really, swagger to his step, but nervousness in his eyes, caution in the tight bunch of his shoulders. He says softly, stopping just out of arm’s reach, “Whatchoo doing, man?”

Fist pulls the pistol from his belt. The others stay back but he can see the hatred in their eyes and he’s not sure who it’s for. Maybe just life. Maybe everyone who ever gave them the bum rush, every person who pretended to be a friend till they got what they wanted, every enemy who had the guts to disrespect them, their family, their color, their culture, and where they live, because though it wasn’t much, the honest ones made the best of it.

Fist says to everyone within earshot, “Do you know where Jesus is hiding?”

“Put the gun away, okay? I called the cops. Anyone else in the house?”

“Do you know Jesus,” Fist asks.

“I know him.” The kid glances at the car. “He do that?”

Fist doesn’t look back. He nods. He says, “Where would he go?”

The guy who he first assumed a punk, just some new obstacle, frowns sadly. He says, “Why don’t you just tell the cops when they get here? Let them handle this. You’ll get killed out here. You don’t belong here.”

“I know,” Fist says. “I got away and forgot what it was like to feel and struggle, and this is what happens when you forget…somebody comes along and rapes and destroys what you love because they think you won’t fight for it, won’t make a move to protect it anymore, because you’ve softened, they can see it in your eyes, right? The predators know the weak. But Jesus was wrong this time.” He points the pistol at the house and squeezes the trigger. The bullet strikes the metal door and the fumes ignite and someone screams as the walls burst with flames and the windows blow into the lawn. The kid stoops to pick up his phone and nearly falls over. Fist grabs his elbow and helps him stand as the sky burns black with smoke and the house blazes.

His ears ringing, he says, “You’re either my friend or my enemy.”

The kid tries to jerk away but can’t. His eyes water and lips tremble. Fist holds him a moment longer and then releases him. He says, “I have to find him. He won’t pay the price he should if the cops pick him up. He’ll sit in the stir for five years tops, then he’ll be back out, he’ll do this to someone else. Maybe someone you know.”

The kid looks down the dark street, averting his eyes from the fire, and mumbles something.

“What?” Fist says.

The kid meets his eyes. He squares his shoulders and somehow, in the bleakest hours before dawn, he says, “They’ll kill you.” And Fist remembers how he’d said something like that to someone, a long time ago, when he was still a kid, earning respect with his knuckles, with stamina and discipline while his father pushed him and his mother cried silently in the dark because she thought them all fools, that God did not give men gifts to destroy or conquer. He had no idea what she thought he should do; she never said, convinced he would do what he wanted, like so many men before him.

“You hear me?” the kid says. “They’ll kill you. They’re a nasty little gang. The worst of the worst over here. Like a bunch of carnivorous cockroaches, man.”

“I’m ready to die. I’m willing to burn them out, stomp on their heads, whatever it takes. I just have to stay ahead of the cops and surprise Jesus with something direct.”

The kid measures him for a moment, glances back in the car at Fist’s wife and daughter. He says, “Goddamnit, man,” then points down the street and gives him directions to a building Fist knows. From porches and street corners other people shake their heads and watch them. Fist wants to ask them, “What if this was your family?” But he can’t because he has to listen.

The kid says, “You know where the old brewing company is, right? That’s where he’ll be. Him and the others are bad news. If we could have driven them out we would have, but you just get tired of trying, you know? You have to look out for your own.”

Fist thinks they should have tried harder, they shouldn’t have given up, but he knows how hard it is to rail against something forever and to never see any fruits for your efforts.

“Yeah,” Fist says. “You gotta look out for your own. That’s the bottom line. That’s what it comes down to.” He slaps the kid on the shoulder and thanks him. As he climbs behind the wheel he hears sirens in the distance. He rolls the window up, knows the cops are going to hate him for making them come to this part of town but thinks maybe it’ll be good to have some of them tied up here. He pulls away from the curb, the stench of wreckage clinging to him, his shoulder throbbing, his eyes burning so badly he can barely see.

Karen has drawn more flies, slow lazy ones, about to die off in the coming chill, the hard winter. Fist cracks her window and swats them toward the opening. Some buzz dully in his ears. His daughter wails from the back seat and his grip tightens on the steering wheel. It’s fully dark now. The street lights are broken, the world lost in shadow. He thinks,
I can get used to this again. I know darkness more than most people could imagine
.

He says to his wife, hoping she can hear him, some part of her presence still with him until this is all over because he needs her even if she doesn’t need him anymore, “Remember the first time we met? You know what my philosophy was on women then? Did I even tell you?” He shrugs, can’t remember. They cruise deeper into the projects, past houses crammed with mice, poverty, diseases and hopelessness, to the heart of the industrial section where truckers sleep with their doors locked, with weapons close at hand, debris catching in the gutters and shadows shifting between buildings.

Fist says, “I always thought women change you, and not for the better.” He glances her way, raises an eyebrow, and laughs at himself. “But I changed myself, didn’t I? I tramped down a path I thought you expected of me and it only created more discord, and you loved me less the more I buried the man I used to be, the one you fell in love with, and this other guy, this worker bee with heavy wings, burst forth, ready to bustle and do what he had to do to give you guys what a family should have. And neither one of us were wrong or right, but that doesn’t make things easy. It may only make it harder because there isn’t much middle ground. You can’t be all things to all people or you’re nothing.” He shakes his head, reaches over and takes her hand. “There’s no way to go back.”

Her head turns and her eyes are blacker than the cesspool outside the car. She whispers,
We strangled each other with expectations
.

“I know.” He watches the street, unable to meet her gaze. He says, “You have to change to adapt, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it, and that’s where I messed up. I tried to like it. I wasn’t being myself. I could have done like my dad and trained someone, been a mentor to some kid on his way up, some underdog with enough passion and heart to see him through, but I let it fall to the wayside because I thought you needed something else.”

She squeezes his fingers.

I never needed you to be anyone else
…

A sob racks his body and he doesn’t want to talk anymore. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve and looks for a napkin to blow his nose but he’s kept the car cleaned out for years now, and so he sniffles and watches the black world roll by, unable to measure the pain accumulating in his chest, the meaning of suffering. He wants to pull over and hold her and Bethany and just cry,
I love you so much! Don’t leave me! Don’t go
! But a thickness fills his heart, the black bile of reality, and he presses the accelerator.

Three

This city has always been alive with roaming darkness.

Fist watches a man grab a woman and jerk her into the mouth of an alley stationed between two weatherworn and crumbling buildings. Karen doesn’t have to say anything. He pulls over and jumps out, a pistol in his hand, cold and solid, as he leaps on the sidewalk, sees the man undoing his belt, his forearm shoved into the girl’s throat. Fist doesn’t care that his shoes are slapping the concrete like gunshots, in fact, he finds comfort in that, maybe a little crazy with passion, with doing what he can now to set things right. The man spins, and the girl’s eyes are on him, and Fist, quick, some of the nimbleness coming back to him as each second grinds down, plants his dad’s .38 in the man’s forehead as the man holds a knife with one hand and his cock with the other until Fist sees Jesus laughing in the dude’s eyes, and he pulls the trigger, the guy falling back, bone and blood painting the girl’s hair red and white, a soft auburn hiding beneath.

The man hits the bricks, twists for a moment in agony, reaching for whatever it is the dying reach for. Fist stomps on his ruined face, feels and hears the nose crack, bone splinter. The man stills. The girl trembles against the wall. Fist says, “Get the fuck off the street.” She nods and slides away, into the shadows, out of one horrible moment and headed for another, and there’s truth in that that Fist can’t deny.

He thinks,
I can’t protect everyone. Half of them would never even want it
.

But he wants to save the hurting, defend the weak, offer direction to the lost.

Goddamn he wants to.

When he jumps back in the car, Bianca climbs on his leg. She stares up at him through the gloom and part of him fears she’s about to impart some bit of wisdom, the thought so strong that he almost puts his hand over her mouth.

Karen whispers that choked whisper that wrenches Fist’s heart,
She loves you, that’s all. She wants to be close to you because you protect her. She’s safe in your presence. You’re her whole world
…

Fist pets Bianca, picks her up, kisses her cute little head then sets her on his shoulder so she can pretend to see where they’re going. She curls up into the hollow behind his collar bone. He searches the rearview for his daughter’s face, just a pale orb in the darkness, and he can see her lips moving, whispering,
We all love you
…