When We Join Jesus in Hell (4 page)

Four

The brewery leans toward the street, its windows vacant, some of them broken. In a way it reminds him of a long abandoned mental institution. He imagines the lost and rambling and weary, those who the world has given up on, but worst of all who gave up on themselves. He shuts the car off and looks at his wife, strokes her cheek, and waits a moment for his nerves to settle. She whispers,
Take us with you, Fist
.

He studies her, shakes his head, feels something shifting inside him as he says, “I can’t take you where I’m going,” because he doesn’t want them to see how brutal and merciless he can be, even if they approve of it, even if it lets them rest.

Bianca climbs down his shirt and into his lap. He touches her absently, wishing he can take the threads of his life and weave something worthwhile of them, take back every harsh word he’s spoken in anger, all of the times Karen has said she wanted to do something and he’s squashed it with a look of contempt, maybe part of him blaming her for helping him forfeit some life that was out of reach now.

Bethany cries in the backseat.

Wind rocks the car.

A bum stumbles by on the sidewalk, and crosses the road, glaring into the car as he treads heavily with a wobbly gate. Fist nods his way, wonders what kind of existence the poor man has had before all he amounts to now. At one time he may have had a family like this. At one time he probably gave and received love and somehow, in the blink of an eye, he’d watched it slip away.

Fist doesn’t know what Karen sees when she looks at him.

For some reason it bugs the hell out of him. He always hoped she’d see the truth, that he’d do anything for her, and he tried to prove it with his actions because he knew words were hollow without them. And his training had proved, early on, that nothing gets results like movement, commitment, tenacity.

Fist says, “This is going to get ugly.”

Karen sighs like his father had sighed and whispers,
It’s life. It’s ugly sometimes
.

“People are ugly,” Fist says. “They’re what make life so difficult.”

Not everybody is bad
, she says.

No
, he thinks.
Everyone is at some point. We can pretend to care and pretend to be civil, but it’s a struggle when it comes down to our darkest moments, when we’re robbed by men, raped by debt, riled by injustice, plagued with cancer
.

Karen squeezes his hand.
Don’t be such a pessimist
.

Bethany says,
What’s a pessimist?

Fist glances back at her and he sees a drop of blood blossom in the corner of her eye and then slide down her cheek. The bruises on her throat dance as shadows drift across her neck. His eyes tear. He trembles. He thinks,
How could anyone ever hurt you, especially like that?

He cries a while and he’s not ashamed. What can men’s judgments do to him? He knows they’re unsubstantial, braced by nothing more than the way they were raised and their own fears. He wipes his eyes but the tears keep coming. He thinks,
You were eight-years-old. You loved horses and thought the world was beautiful
…and the transgressions against her fill his heart with so much hate he chokes.

Fist climbs out of the car with Karen crying,
Take us with you
…

The bricks in the walls scream with the passion of the damned, skewered with time and inattention. Forgotten. Left behind.

He glances up and down the street, looking for the bum, looking for anyone who feels this electricity in the air, this hopelessness and unfairness that squat on the sidewalk, sucking dreams from the air and exhaling nightmares.

He shakes his head.

A grocery cart, rusty and bent, crouches near the corner, bordering a wide and dark alley. He moves to it, a spring to his step because he’s ready, realizes he’s always been ready, he’s only needed something like this situation to bring out the beast inside him. And there’s always been a beast. He remembers those moments while training, before stepping into the ring, when everyone else faded and there was only the weight of the gloves on his fists and the speed and precision that hard work had earned. He remembers before that, when he was much younger, one of the only white kids going to a predominantly black school. Life had been full of intimidation, those rough middle years between childhood and adulthood, but he didn’t back down. His old man told him every time Fist came home with another bloody nose,
Fight till you’re dead, not so people will respect you but so you can respect yourself
.

The memory lingers. The truth of knowing the difference between respecting himself and hating himself and finally owning up to the fact that he really has no one to blame stings. He made his decisions. He says to his family, to Bianca, “I’m sorry I lost my way. I could have done so many things better, with more honesty, with more passion and love. I was weaker than I ever thought I was. So goddamn weak.”

Karen touches his thigh. She says,
You’re
so
strong
.

He shakes his head. He doesn’t see anything noble in his choices. There were a million things he could have done right if he’d followed his heart and not held back or given in to someone else’s demands or manipulations. “No,” he says, “I could have given you so much more.”

It was enough
, Bethany says in that too young voice she’s pushing to sound so grown up, and he looks back and sees her looking out the window and into the dark and he wonders what moves beyond his natural vision and he hopes whatever she sees it doesn’t frighten her. He clenches his hands and thinks,
I’m going to kill Jesus for you, baby
.

He pulls Karen from the car, surprised by how light she feels in his arms, and he sets her gently in the shopping cart. He returns for his daughter, places her between her mother’s legs, both of them looking forward, always ahead, unafraid of the darkness crowding the path in the distance and unafraid of the building looming over them because
this moment is important
, Fist thinks, the last time they’ll all be together. He kneels in the open driver’s door, not caring that his work slacks are wet with street water. He extends his hand, places it gently on the seat. Bianca can’t see him. Her tongue lashes out and she hobbles nearer, still a little sick but stronger than he ever imagined. She tries to cling to his wrist, force his hand open with her snout so she can lay on his palm, but he can’t take her and risk her life too. Fist wants her to live, to be there when he returns, to help him deal with the sorrow he knows is coming once he’s taken the final action and the darkness closes in.

He wishes he would have left her with his father.

He thinks,
Maybe something so small and beautiful and innocent could have been the thing to bring us together
. But it’s too late to go back now. He can only go ahead. He lets her sit on his palm a moment and nudges a cricket against her snout. After she’s fed, Karen and Bethany sing quietly as he grabs the cart and pushes them toward the entrance where large double doors loom. Echoes issue from within. Wild laughter, prayer, meditation, threats.

Five

He’d expected crackheads, men with bandanas and tattoos and guns, miscreants and dealers, but the hall is empty and subdued by shifting shadows as if a light somewhere up ahead spirals toward him. Fist clenches the shopping cart and inches forward. A wheel squeals as bats whip by, small, then larger, then smaller again, from murk to light to murk, their leathery wings the sound of a thousand tornados. He stops for a moment and pulls out one of the pistols. He doesn’t want Jesus getting the jump on him. His eyes strain to see farther down the corridor, and he wonders why he can’t see the main floor yet, in his mind imagining it’d be one big open area, not laid out like a hospital. But there are rooms and closed doors protecting them; the acrid scent of pale and long unused equipment, moldy beer, sweaty bodies.

A stinging sensation spreads from his shoulder and works its way down his arm. Karen looks up at him and whispers,
Your wound is bleeding
.

“I’ll live.”

The hall shimmers beyond her and he wipes his eyes to clear them. He says, “I always thought we’d grow old together, thought we’d make it through that rough patch somehow even though we blamed each other, that the day would come we’d be able to admit to ourselves it was both our faults.”

Music thumps deeper in the building; something tribal, ancient, as old as the sun and as fresh as newly fallen rain. He tilts his head. Karen and Bethany do the same. They say,
Follow the music
.

He grips the cart, ignores the noisy wheel and comes to the first door. The drum beat is still farther ahead, but he can’t walk by any of the rooms without first checking to make sure Jesus isn’t in there hiding. His heart slams in his ears. He rubs a hand on his pant leg and checks the pistol to make sure there are bullets in it. He can’t tell whose gun it is… his father’s? Jesus’ aunts?

It’s loaded. Pain flares in his shoulder and a trickle of blood runs down his chest. Bethany sings a song softly and he tells her to be quiet, a little too harshly and he feels bad for it, but he needs silence right now but someone is still pounding the drum and the shopping cart spins in circles and bats scream, hunting in the gloom. Fist grabs the knob and twists it and eases the door open. The room is dark, silent, and he only hears the quick rustle of his breathing, the sweat accumulating on his skin, and the vows he made to Karen almost a decade ago.

She says,
Till death do us part
.

He shakes his head, eyes adjusting to the near-blackness of the room and he realizes he should have brought a flashlight the moment he knew he had to come here. And he should have known as much as he loved her when he married her that not even death could rip them apart. She fuels his purpose as much as she had when he was in the ring, when he fought for her and his father as much as he did to prove something to himself. A horrible loneliness suffuses his anger for a moment and he struggles with it, pushes it away, has to, otherwise he’ll fall right there in the threshold, his mind seeing into a room that isn’t there, his daughter in her bed with bruises on her throat, her still and open eyes, her pajama pants around her ankles.

Fist steps back into the hall. He doesn’t care if Jesus gets the jump on him. He believes he can take it and he weeps as the hole in his shoulder weeps and part of his spirit rends a little more. They move down the hall and the darkness opens up and it waits for them with welcoming arms.

The main room is huge and crammed with rusty and dark equipment, most of it jutting above the pale gray partitions somebody has put up in the room. It reminds him of a maze. The wheel whines as he enters, the sides of the cart nearly bumping the walls of the tunnel, and the music grows louder yet more brittle and he knows it’s not natural, not alive, just some recording that has been looped. He expects chanting, the hiss of ugly incantations, the devil himself to be waiting around the next corner. Shadows hug nooks and crannies. The music drowns Bethany’s screech. Her eyes bulge, hands locked on the sides of the cart as she presses her back into her mother and Karen holds her, runs fingers through her hair, whispering,
It’s okay, we’re safe now
…

A man works over two bodies. They sit together on a park bench, holding hands, the man young and blonde and staring at the floor with eyes like death, something about his posture that screams of tragedy, and the woman next to him much older, nearly twice his age, his mother maybe, with streaks of gray in her dark hair and lips attempting a smile that can never reach her eyes again. And in those eyes he sees himself and the suffering they share. Agony. Grief. Misfortune. Fist watches the man reposition the corpses, take a brush and give color to their faces so that at this distance they appear alive. He turns their heads so they face each other. Clothing rustles. The Artist breathes heavily and it sounds as if he’s crying. The room is filled with the living dead, with photographs of them in various dress and facial expressions, hanging from clothes line and stapled at jaunty angles along the gray moveable walls.

Fist says over the blaring stereo, “Who are they?”

The Artist glances over his shoulder. He has one very dark eye and one that seems covered in cataract. He straightens, studies Fist, then his gaze lingers on Karen and Bethany. He smiles a little, sets the brush on a work table, and kills the radio. He says, “They’re a couple.” He points at the young man. “He died young. She lived on but what they had never faded, it burned so intensely that she could never even get close to anyone again, even as a friend. He was gone but she dreamt of him, wrote him poetry, watched their favorite shows and pretended he was there with her. She never let a broken heart take her. But time did, man.” He glances at them again, wipes dust from the dead man’s shoulder. “I think they’re beautiful.”

Fist nods. It’s a nice story he thinks. He thinks he has that type of love, that it is never going to lessen and in a way it scares him because he’s not sure how long he can handle this kind of loneliness. He says, “What’s up with your eyes?”

“One is for viewing the living. The other for appreciating those not.” The Artist wipes his hands down his shirt and says, “What are you going to do with those two?” He points at Fist’s family, appraising them with the cataract eye.

“They’re here to watch me kill someone.”

The man raises his chin as if in challenge, as if Fist saying something so direct is a slap in the face.

Fist watches him approach. The Artist stops near the cart. His hands are empty but he’s much larger than he first appeared. Close to six-five. The Artist says, “What’s their story?”

He shrugs, releases the cart, says, “It’s complex. And it’s not over yet.”

“Their pain is your pain.”

Fist nods. “More than you can imagine.”

The Artist leans forward, one hand on the edge of the cart, his fingers curling over Bethany’s hand. Fist doesn’t like that. He never understood how a stranger could touch someone so easily.

The Artist pulls Karen’s robe open and smiles. He cups one breast and squeezes gently, his eyes misty. He says, “It’s funny how they can still feel alive if you imagine hard enough.” His fingers dig into her a little as he looks back at the couple on the park bench, and Fist has his hands full too, holding the pistol and rage, shocked for a second because he thinks,
Who in the hell would touch someone else’s wife like that? Who would disrespect the dead?
And his jaw is a firm line, his hand a guided missile, only the gun is gone, as if somehow part of him knows that he can’t fire a shot yet, not until Jesus is pleading, and the fillet knife is tight in his grip and he slashes quickly. A thick red line sprouts from the Artist’s wrist, sprays Karen’s exposed chest in both heavy gouts and mist, and Fist says, “Do you think that’s beautiful, too? Are you happy to be part of their story?”

The man holds his wounded arm to his stomach. His eyes fill with tears. His lips stammer but pain makes him mute. Fist lunges forward and slashes the back of his hand, his cheek, clips his neck, and blood showers them. The Artist grows pale. He manages to whimper. His eyes say he envies love, true love, that he’s witnessed it, that’s all he’s ever done, and he doesn’t know why and now he never will. Fist thinks the man should have kept his hands to himself, and that he will like watching him die, but the enjoyment never comes. The artist curls up on the floor and bleeds out. He shivers, holding himself, and Fist kneels next to him. He watches the light fade from his eyes and hopes it will feel more rewarding when it’s Jesus at his feet embracing the final darkness.

Karen says,
The clock is ticking
.

Fist says, “It’s winding down now, babe. Just hold on.”

His daughter laughs. She says,
Things are moving in the shadows behind your eyes, Daddy
.

Fist shivers. He wipes a cold hand across his forehead, part of him afraid that he’s already dead, has been for a long time.

No
, he thinks.
The dead are helpless. I am not helpless
.

He glances at the blood on his hands. He whispers, “I’m not done.”

He strokes Karen’s hair, his fingers twisted and tight, and he hurts from the inside out. Pain flares in his shoulder as he grabs hold of the cart and leaves The Artist behind, those on the park bench watching them until Fist is out in the hall where darkness pools on the floor and inches toward him. Ahead, he sees something small and light flicker on the concrete. It bursts forward in a flash of motion and he realizes its Bianca. He follows her, his wife and daughter crying, gripping the cart with pale hands, fighting the darkness and unknown with sad yet hopeful smiles.

He thinks they’re proud of him, but he doesn’t know for what. This is not the life he’d imagined for any of them. He just wants them at peace. It was something his mother never had. Something he didn’t believe many people had. The noisy wheel screams. Bethany hums along. Bianca races around the corner and something hitches in Fist’s chest because he’s afraid somehow he’s failed her too.

Blood hardens beneath his nails.

He shakes his head, dizzy and hit by sudden weakness.

But he pushes on.

He thinks,
The darkness has no power over us
.