Tender as Hellfire (2 page)

“You live in the trailer park?” she whispered.

I tried to ignore her. “No. Just be quiet.”

“You like living in the trailer park? My father says there’s nothing but trash living out there but I’d love to live there. I think it would be like living in space.”

I shook my head slowly. What was wrong with these people? They were all lunatics. Finally, Miss Nelson finished off the class roster and began writing something on the board. Her white slip showed between her legs as she reached up on her toes. I sighed to myself, wondering what Miss Nelson would look like in the nude.

“Did you come from Nevada?” the girl beside me asked. “My father says everyone’s crazy out there.”

“Do you ever shut up?”

Miss Nelson turned around, staring right through the rows of sleeping faces, right at me. She glanced down at the roster and nodded.

“Dough, do you have something to share with the rest of the class?”

“This girl here won’t shut up.”

“Lottie, is that true?”

Lottie, this piss-girl with three blond pigtails, just smiled and shrugged her shoulders, staring at me like I was crazy.

“Both of you will be quiet from now on, understood?”

I nodded, then looked down at my paper and began to draw a gladiator beheading a stick figure with three pigtails.

* * *

I came home from my first day of school, dragging my book bag in the dirt. The only thing I did like about living in the trailer park was that I didn’t have to mow the lawn. Mowing the lawn was a pain because the mower burnt your legs, but now there was nothing except gravel all around us and dirt. My mother had tried to lay out some orange flowerpots around the front, but she wasn’t fooling anyone. The trailer park was like a stab wound in all our hearts, and that wouldn’t be changed by any number of flower-pots.

In front of the trailer, my mother’s boyfriend, French, was working on his big black 1972 Impala he had on cement blocks. The car itself was a real beauty, but it was all gutted out, its insides strewn about the dust, disconnected and hopeless as hell—the engine had never even turned over. French had bought it from some slimeball back in Duluth who promised to help him rebuild it, but then the guy split town as soon as French paid the car off. Now old French had to walk to work. The plant was only a mile or so away, and most days he could get a ride with someone if he stood out on the road and hitched. My mother had her own car, a blue Corolla hatchback with rusted-out wheel wells and a dangling muffler that she drove to her job at the beauty parlor. Her car was in a poor state too. My old man probably turned over in his grave every time he heard that muffler drag. He had been good with tools. He would have been too proud to let the muffler drag on his wife’s car, but none of that mattered too much now, considering how terrible everything else had become.

“Hey there, Dough, feel like giving me a hand? Hold the flashlight for me?”

French was bent over the hood of the car. His face was greased up and sweaty. He held a yellow flashlight in one hand and an open can of beer in the other. French was the cause of many of my troubles. He was a square guy, really, the least dangerous of all my mother’s boyfriends, but there was no way I was about to offer help to the person responsible for making us move.

“I got homework, French.”

“All right, chief, that’s what I like to see. Smart man like you hitting the books. Your mother will be proud.”

“I guess.”

Mom had a big dinner cooked for us, on account of our first day being at new schools. She had made meatloaf with a raw egg cooked right in the middle and a horrible gray spinach salad or something hellacious like that, but both me and my brother passed and just went to our room, lying in our lousy new beds, half the size of our old beds, neither of us uttering a word.

“You boys all right in there? Not hungry tonight?” my mother shouted through the thin wood door.

“Ate at school,” Pill-Bug lied, shaking his head.

“I got homework,” I grunted, turning on my belly.

At night there were loud silver-legged crickets screeching outside our tiny square window, singing desperate in any direction, just as sad and hopeless as us, as we stared up into the darkness. I fell asleep in my school clothes, watching a daddy longlegs crossing the ceiling on its tiptoes.

The next day, Pill and me ate some doughnuts for breakfast and walked to school without saying a word until we got to the intersection: It was where he had to walk three blocks to the high school and me one street over to the elementary school.

“This place sure sucks,” I kind of mumbled.

Pill nodded. “This town is full of assholes.”

Just then I noticed he had a red stocking cap on instead of his trusty old blue hat. He always wore his blue hat. “Hey, where’s your blue hat?” I asked him.

“I lost it.”

“Lost it? But—”

“I said I lost it, okay?” He heaved his book bag over his shoulder and turned down the block toward the high school. That’s when I knew there was going to be trouble. His eyes had that faraway look in them like he was thinking, like he was looking ahead to something that he hadn’t done yet, but knew he ought not to do.

At school, Pill wandered through his classes until lunch. He bought a plate of mashed potatoes and some french fries, then took a seat at the reject table in the corner. Billy Harlo, one of those fat freckled kids who had probably been picked on since he was born, giggled to himself as Pill sat down. Billy Harlo got picked on not only because he was fat but because he had chronic nosebleeds. Pill-Bug didn’t pay the fat kid any mind.

About midway through the lunch hour, the same older kid, Rudy, came right up to the loser table, this time waving my brother’s blue hat right in his damn face. Pill kind of ignored him for a while, then he began snarling and growling like a sick dog, snatching at the cap as Rudy kind of jerked it away. It was awful. Everyone in the cafeteria was watching and grinning, even Billy Harlo and the rest of the reject kids, because for once, no one was picking on them. “What are you gonna do, pussy? Huh? What are you gonna do?” Pill looked away, then leapt to his feet, tripping over his seat. He slid, his arm landing in his mashed potatoes, his whole shirt now covered with brown gravy. Rudy laughed, chuckling as he said, “What? It was just a joke. Why do you gotta get all psycho? Relax.” He handed my brother the dirty blue hat, walking away, high-fiving his friends. Pill looked down, gripping his hat, then ran out through the cafeteria doors again, tearing posters and announcements off the walls as he went. He hurried through the front doors and disappeared somewhere down the street, still shouting.

* * *

The second day for me wasn’t much better. There was some sort of math quiz everyone else seemed to know about, but all I was interested in doing was trying to stare up Miss Nelson’s dress. So instead of answering the math questions, I drew a real sweet picture of a tank fighting a man with a rhinoceros head, right on the quiz paper, and handed that in to the teacher instead. Miss Nelson just shook her head, marking a big red
F
at the top of the page with a frown, and in that moment, I kind of knew that anything between us was going to be hopeless. The pigtailed girl, Lottie, talked my head off that day, saying something about how her father’s chickens were all dying, one by one, waking up with their necks wrung, then she told me about her older sister, Susie, who was pregnant and wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was because she didn’t want their old man to go out and kill the poor fool. I fell asleep at some point while she was chattering and missed some important information about world geography, which I was sure I probably needed to know for another upcoming quiz. Walking home from school that day, none of these dumb kids had comic books or porno magazines or cigarettes or anything, so I walked by myself on one side of the street, then down to the culvert by the trailer park so I could just be alone and think.

There was nobody else around the ditch, so I laid on my back and put my books under my head and practiced spitting. I spat a goober up in the air and practiced catching it, then spitting it again. The grass was soft and kind of wet; it still smelled like summer—green and warm. There were some old pages of a newspaper drifting in the water and an old tire that floated past. I looked around and noticed suddenly that this was a place of death. There was a dead sheep that looked like it had strayed off from somewhere and laid down right beside a gray metal irrigation pipe. Its eyes were cold and black and its ivory teeth were spread apart over its red gums. There were tiny insects creeping all around it. The sheep’s wool was full of brambles and dried leaves and there, caught in one of its teeth, was a bright yellow flower, looking like a prize. Under the irrigation pipe, right along the surface of the water, there were some dead birds, tiny yellow sparrows and shiny black birds, dozens of them, maybe almost twenty, all with their wings spread open, drowned beside one another. I talked to them for a while and asked them about my dad, because he was dead too, and then I walked along the ditch for about a mile, staring into the gray water, and finally turned back home. I didn’t want to go on back to the trailer and have to talk to my mom or French about school, so I waited down by the culvert until it was dark, crawled in through the sliding window to our bedroom, and let my mom think I had come home from school early and fallen asleep so she’d just pat me on my head and let me be.

But my brother wasn’t home. I laid there in the bunk bed all alone until my mother came in. Her lips were warm when she kissed me goodnight and made me think everything would be all right. Those kinds of things I don’t like to mention too often because they always make you look stupid when someone else finds out, being kissed goodnight by your mom and all, but it always gave me a nice feeling I could dream a nice dream to.

The day after that, Pill and me walked to school together. He was wearing his blue hat again but by then I was too worried about Miss Nelson and fifth grade and having to listen to this girl, Lottie, ramble to me all day, that I wasn’t paying much attention to my brother and his problems. I did notice he was carrying a black plastic bag, all shiny and heavy and stiff with something, just holding it there by his side. I stared at my older brother as we stood at our intersection, eyeing each other hard.

“What the hell’s in the bag?” I grunted.

He just kept staring at me, then muttered, “Don’t let anyone push you around, Dough. You understand? Don’t ever let anyone push you around.”

I nodded and walked down the block a little. Then I turned around to see him, but he had already walked off and it was too late for me to do anything because I could hear the first bell already ringing.

He didn’t go right off to school.

He stood in front of a white A-frame house, smoking feverishly. A gray cloud trailed out from between his lips and ran around the end of the square jammed between his two fingers. He stood under a wilting maple tree, turning the book of matches over and over again in his pocket. The black plastic bag was sitting at his feet. He squinted a little, smoking hard. Pill had gotten into a fist-fight with nearly every kid back home in Duluth. He had plenty of teeth knocked out, his nose broken, clumps of his hair torn out; Diffy Morrison once sicced his dog on Pill and he had to get fifty-two stitches from it. He had been smacked by my mother’s old boyfriend, Joe Brown, at least half a dozen times, hit by the school bus once, not to mention getting his hair and eyebrows burned off the day before we left Duluth. He was a tough kid and no one knew it better than me, but this was different, he wasn’t in Duluth and he wasn’t fistfighting just one bully. He hated the whole town already, and when the fat girls and the retards at the round table in the cafeteria laugh at you, it gives you a certain feeling that makes you want to stare at things by yourself and maybe smoke a Marlboro for a while. He had something awful to do and he knew it. He wasn’t a moron; he wasn’t a monster either; maybe people like to think that when you know you’ve got something awful to do, you just don’t think about it first, but that wasn’t true. He had something awful he was about to do and he knew it and maybe that’s what made it worse.

For a long time, he stared at the blank silver mailbox, turning the book of matches over in his palm again and again.
LaDell
the mailbox read. The driveway was empty. No one was home. Their grass glimmered green with the morning light. Pill stood there a long while just thinking and smoking. The smoke hung around his face. The matches became soft with his sweat. He lit another cigarette and took a long drag. He stared at the shiny green grass, seeing how each blade moved like a whisper, like a single sigh, like a curse word spoken over and over again. He flicked the cigarette into the grass, picked up the black plastic bag, slammed the red metal flag down on the mailbox, and walked up to the nice white porch.

Snap.

Snappppppp.

Snappppppppppppp.

The bell clanged: It was already lunch time.

Pill nodded to himself and walked inside the high school cafeteria, holding his hands inside his pockets as he marched down the rows and rows of brown tables and chairs, kind of sweating a little along his forehead. His eyes were shiny and black like he was about to cry, but he wasn’t; his blue cap was nearly pulled down over his eyebrow and the hard black scab. He pushed through the line of kids in their dull flannel school clothes, the jocks in blue jeans and yellow-haired girls in denim overalls who were all giggling and pulling on each other’s sweaters. He got his food and walked past them all, right up to the back round table.

When Rudy LaDell and his buddies walked past, Pill looked up from his lunch and glared.

“What? You got something to say, pussy?” Rudy asked, but Pill only smiled and looked back down at his awful food.

After school, Pill waited in the parking lot, watching all the groups of kids hurrying into their beat-up cars or onto the bus. He was waiting for Rudy LaDell. When the older kid appeared, his jean jacket tight against his shoulders, Pill watched as he climbed into his rebuilt black Camaro, the screech of some unidentifiable heavy-metal guitar solo echoing from its speakers. Rudy slipped on a pair of sunglasses, lit a joint, and began laughing with his friends, who all piled into the backseat. When he saw my brother standing there staring, he stopped talking to the bright-eyed girl leaning against the driver’s side door and stared back, flipping him the bird. Pill looked away as Rudy LaDell’s Camaro peeled out, the back end of the car fishtailing a little as it flew over the gravelly road.