Tender as Hellfire (10 page)

“Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked my older brother as we washed up for dinner.

“What, are you some kind of baby?” he snickered, rubbing his wet hands on his T-shirt.

“No, I just …” I didn’t finish and Pill stared me in the face and squinted a little.

“There’s no such thing as spooks,” he said.

“What about Jesus and all that? Souls and all that?”

“Jesus. You mean spirits? You mean like … Dad?” he asked.

I nodded.

“He’s dead. There’s nothing else to it.” He wiped his hands on his shirt once more.

“But you think he’s in heaven, right?”

“I dunno.” Pill’s face looked mean. “He died stealing something. I dunno how it all works. He could be in heaven. He might be in hell too. It doesn’t matter. It ain’t your problem.” He patted me on the shoulder and then frowned.

“But you said there ain’t ghosts, right? So what about God? You believe in Him still, right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think He does anyone any good but Himself.” Pill opened the bathroom door and stepped out.

My hands were still wet. I sat on the toilet wiping my hands on the towel. My older brother didn’t understand. I was convinced that we were both cursed because of our dad, because of what he had done, and how he had died. I was pretty sure that the Chief was right. I was pretty sure that there were ghosts all around and that sooner or later they’d catch up with me.

“Dough, you coming to dinner?” my mother called.

“Yeah!” I shouted back. I hung up the towel and made completely sure I was out of the bathroom before I reached around blindly and flicked off the light.

the king of the tango

Out of nowhere, I began to wake up every night and hear the same strange song, usually just after I had fallen asleep. I’d push open the red curtains that hung from the window in our bedroom and stare out at the new silver trailer next to ours, watching as a square shadow moved in the dark to the
beat-beat-beat
of the night. Usually at about midnight, the old man next door would put on an old tango record and shut off all the lights and then begin dancing, sometimes naked, sometimes not, swaying alone in the quiet dark. His name was El Rey del Perdito. In the day, I’d seen his long gray face and full black pompadour, hair that didn’t look like it belonged on his withered old head. He was large with big shoulders like an old athlete and moved very slow, except when he was dancing, and then he was like dynamite. I guess I had never seen anything like it before in my life. We had lived in that trailer park for nearly two months, and by then I had just about refused to be amazed by anything.

From my bedroom window, I could hear his bare feet as they shuffled and slid across his tile floor. The mobile home would rock a little as he moved, stepping in time to the exotic music that boomed from behind his shiny yellow curtains. I would see the flicker of candles along the windows and his shadow moving on the walls, back and forth, back and forth, swaying in time to the rhythm of the music and his very sad heart, his wide feet sliding across the floor as his thin shadow spun about.

One night I heard French get up and mutter to my mother, “Jesus. It’s past midnight. The damn boys have school tomorrow. Doesn’t he have any goddamn consideration?”

I kept listening, hearing El Rey’s feet move as the tango singer’s voice peaked, shaking the windows in the old man’s mobile home. I flinched as I caught a glimpse of his bare back when he crossed in front of his window. Pill snored in the bunk bed above mine, and I guess I was afraid to wake him, to let him know what was happening.

“That’s it. I’m going over there!” French yelled.

“Oh, don’t be silly,” my mother said. “It’s fine.”

“It’s fine?”

“It’s nice. It’s kind of romantic.”

I rolled my goddamn eyes and laid back down in my bed. I was pretty sure I heard my mother let out a laugh. I shook my head and pulled the pillow over my face as they started doing it, the thin walls of our trailer rocking with their movements. I gritted my teeth and stuck the corners of my pillow in my ears. Heck, I wasn’t stupid. I knew my mother and French did it. But having to listen to it, right in the middle of the goddamn night, and with the old man next door dancing and singing along with the record, it was too much. I shouted some curse word and then French laughed, my mother trying to stifle her giggle.

I woke up the next morning, got dressed, ate some cereal, and watched as my mother gave French a long kiss goodbye right in front of us. She sighed as he took his lunch bag out of the fridge and disappeared, hurrying out the screen door to work. Pill-Bug sat beside me, gulping some cereal down, dripping milk all over his shirt.

“What the hell was that last night?” I mumbled.

“What?” My mother glared at me with a funny look in her eyes.

“What was all that noise?” I was trying to embarrass her so that they’d never think about doing it while I was around ever again.

“The new neighbor next door,” my mother said, “is a dancer.”

“No, not that,” I grunted, staring my mother cold in the eyes. “The other noise.”

“What other noise?” My mother dropped her gaze and poured herself some coffee. She looked over her nails as if they were the most interesting things in the world.

“You know, the other noise.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” She took a sip of coffee very smugly, still staring at her nails.

“C’mon, Mom, you know what I mean. It’s disgusting.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re grossing me out,” I mumbled.

“Well,” her face became bright red, her eyes still fixed on the rim of her coffee cup, “I am sorry. I forgot whose house this is.”

“Yeah. It’s gross as hell,” Pill grunted, staring her in the face. “You’re supposed to be an adult and all that. Can’t you wait until we aren’t around to do that stuff? It’s sickening. Really.”

“Well, some of the things you boys do gross me out a little, to be quite honest. All those magazines in your bedroom. Don’t you think that makes me feel a little grossed out?”

Pill’s face went bright red. My mother looked right at him and he lowered his head, finishing off his breakfast in one quick gulp.

“Those are Pill’s,” I said.

“I’m gonna be late for school,” my brother said and threw his cereal bowl into the sink. He grabbed his books and shot out of the trailer. My mother smiled a little, whistling to herself, washing my brother’s dirty bowl. She scrubbed it clean, then placed it in the dish rack to dry. Her eyes met mine silently. There was nothing else to say. I looked away, shoving another spoonful of Crunchy-O’s in my mouth. The lines of her shoulders were soft and round as she wrung the dish towel and stared out the kitchen window, still whistling to herself.

Then she turned, kind of studying me, and said, “After school, you better come by the parlor.” She stood beside me, touching my unruly brown hair. “You really need a trim. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, hoping she’d forget. But when I ran out after Pill a few minutes later, she mentioned it again, and I knew better than to ignore her, unless she started revealing all the terrible secrets she had on me.

I did not like the beauty parlor. All the women there made me want to squirm. With the cackle of those ladies’ awful cigarettetinged voices, and their gossip, and their whispering, it was enough to make me squeal in pure agony. The Curl Up ’N Dye Beauty Parlor was located in town a few blocks from the Pig Pen supermarket and a few streets over from the hardware store. One Thursday every month, my mother would cut my damn hair and I’d have to endure that awful pink parlor filled with cheap spray perfume from blue tear-shaped bottles and fork-toothed gossip I wasn’t supposed to understand.

“Be still, darlin’,” my mother warned, snipping the scissors along, tickling my neck.

Clip.

A lock of brown hair curtsied to the tile floor.

“Well, when I told Danny, my first husband, God rest his soul, that I was pregnant, he said, ‘What if I don’t want a kid?’” Mrs. Larue whispered this from under her green cat’s-eyes glasses, her mouth full of smoke. To me, it seemed like Mrs. Larue had had at least ten million ex-husbands. Heck, I wasn’t even sure if they were all dead or if she had just been divorced half-a-million times, but from all the different stories she had about different men, I kind of guessed her marriages only lasted a week or so. Mrs. Larue sat in a silver salon chair, smoking, her legs up on another vacant seat. Her face was narrow and white and her own hair was like a great blue tuft of cotton candy stuck in place by a thick coat of hairspray. Mrs. Larue wasn’t so much beautiful as she was glamorous. There were big black-and-white photos of her pasted up all around the store from when she was younger and had been a winner of the Miss Teen Minnesota beauty pageant. Her hair looked exactly the same, like she had applied a thick coat of makeup and some styling spray to her face and hair to preserve it for all eternity. Mrs. Larue also wore the tightest pants I ever saw, bright pants too, like polka-dot pink or bright green that showed her wide, divine hips.

“So I say, ‘Danny, if you don’t want a kid, you better split town now because it is on its way, honey, and there ain’t a damn thing to do about it now.’”

“Men.”

“You can’t change ’em and you can’t shoot ’em.”

“Oh, you can shoot them.”

All the ladies nodded and laughed and then took drags on their smokes at exactly the same time. There was Mrs. Larue in the silver salon chair, and Mrs. Darve in the chair beside her, and the deacon’s fat wife, Mrs. Heget, who didn’t even work there but stopped by afternoons just to gossip. She was standing next to my mother, admiring the job she was doing.

“My husband, Lucky, he was the most stubborn man you ever met,” my mom said. I sat up, listening, turning a little in the metal chair. “He’s the one who insisted on their names,” she whispered.

Mrs. Larue nodded knowingly. “Oh, I can believe it.”

“We had an awful row about it.
Pill-Bug
. What type of name is that for a boy?”

“It’s not a family name?” Mrs. Heget asked. Her fat face was crossed over a frown.

“That’s what we argued about. I asked him if it was some relative or friend or someone he was naming our boy after, but he said, ‘No, I just like the way it sounds.’ I said, ‘Why do you want to name your first born that?’ And he said, ‘A name like that will make the boy tough.’ I guess he named Dough here for the same reason.”

“What?” Mrs. Heget said. “I don’t think I understand.”

“He figured these boys would grow up tough and mean from other kids teasing them about their names all the time. He thought they’d get in plenty of fights and then they’d have to grow up strong and learn exactly how to be men or die trying. He was a fool. My Lucky, oh my, he was a fool all right. He’s been dead for four years now.”

“Men,” Mrs. Larue mumbled.

“Do you know what?” Mrs. Darve whispered. She was thin and had a pale white face. She didn’t have eyebrows. Instead, she’d draw them on for herself. Two deep brown smudge marks than ran over her blue eyes. It didn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. Mrs. Darve smiled. Her fingers pulled the cigarette away from her mouth. “Last weekend when I went over to Aubrey to visit my sister for a day, I forgot to make a dinner for Eddie and so he ate half a jar of mayonnaise instead.”

All the ladies let out horrible, wheezy laughs all at once.

Mrs. Larue grinned. “Men,” she said again.

I gripped the silver swiveling chair tightly, squirming under the white plastic apron that fit me like a dress, tied too tight around my neck and too long for the rest of my body. My mother snipped again, leaving a few freshly cut hairs stuck to the sweat on my neck.

“Don’t squirm, Dough.”

I guess, watching these other women, and then looking at my mother, I began to think she was okay, even pretty, not pretty like Val but pretty like a mother ought to be, like the Virgin Mary or a mom you might see on TV. She had her black hair nearly cut to her shoulders in a nice bob and she never wore any tight pants or anything embarrassing like that. Most of the time, she was quiet and gentle the way you’d want your mother to act, but sometimes she’d just surprise the hell out of you. I glanced at her in the mirror as she worked on the hair around my left ear, and then the shiny silver door to the beauty salon flashed open, slamming against the frame. Mr. Darve strode in, scaring the whole parlor with the look in his blackened eyes. He wore a blue-and-gray work shirt from his job at the service station. His hair was greasy and black and stood up in the back. His face was all whiskered and red and hard, a look I had seen on a number of my mother’s boyfriends.

“Okay, I’m just gonna ask once. Where is it, Dolores?” He strode right up to his wife and gripped her by her wrist. Mrs. Darve’s smudged eyebrows seemed to tremble. “Let’s not argue. Just tell me where you put it.” He shook her hard, snapping her head back and forth on her thin shoulders.

“It’s gone,” she mumbled, trying not to cry, but the tears were already there. “It’s all gone. I poured it out this morning.”

Mrs. Larue snapped to her feet and forced herself between Mr. Darve and his wife, inching her wide hips in front of him. I looked over at the commotion as my mother stopped trimming my hair.

“Just a minute, Eddie, you aren’t bursting into my store and starting some trouble.”

“Can it, Edna. This is between me and my wife.”

“No,” my mother muttered. “This is Edna’s place. You can’t just come in here drunk and start trouble.”

Mr. Darve shot my mother a cold, mean look, still gripping his wife by her wrist. “I just want to know what you did with my liquor,” he whispered, turning to his wife again. The deacon’s fat wife, Mrs. Heget, backed away, standing in the shadow of the bulbous hair dryer.

“You let go of her, Eddie,” Mrs. Larue warned, “before I call the police.”

“You call the police. ’Cause doing what she did is a crime too.”

“She didn’t do anything wrong,” my mother said, her hands on her hips. “All she did was pour it out.”

“Is that right? You really poured it out?” Mr. Darve asked. Tiny blue streams of tears ran down Mrs. Darve’s face as she nodded. “Why did you do that, honey?”

“I told you. I was scared.”

“You’re gonna pay me back for what you poured out. Do you understand?”

Her blue eyelids flickered with tears. “Yes.”

“Good.” He let go of her wrist. “Go get your purse. I’ll take what you got now.”

Mrs. Darve trembled to her feet and ran into the back of the store, sobbing. Mrs. Larue followed, pushing open the tiny pink curtain and disappearing into the back room. Mr. Darve’s face was bright red. He sneered at my mother, holding his hands on his hips like a proud fool. Looking at him, I felt a hard black knot in my stomach.

When Mrs. Larue returned to the room, she was holding her hands behind her back.

“Well, where the hell is she?” Mr. Darve asked.

I could not believe my eyes. In Mrs. Larue’s hand was a small, shiny .22, powerful enough to blow a hole right through Mr. Darve’s skull.

“Don’t move,” Mrs. Larue warned, sticking the muzzle right against his chin. “Don’t move or Dolores is going to be a widow.”

Mr. Darve let out a little squeak.

“It’s okay, Dolores. Come on out,” Mrs. Larue said quietly. “Come on out.” Mrs. Darve appeared from the back room, holding herself. Her face was red and puffy from crying. She stepped in front of her husband, staring at his face.

“Now you tell this poor woman you love her. Go ahead. Tell her, you bum!” Mrs. Larue shouted.

“I love you,” Mr. Darve said, squinting hard.

“Tell her she is the only one for you,” Mrs. Larue muttered.

“You’re the only one for me.”

“Tell her you’re sorry for ruining her life by making her cry all the time!” the preacher’s wife shouted.