Tender as Hellfire (9 page)

But my mother and French didn’t say a word.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been taking them to church?”

“Sunday school every week, Marie,” my mother answered, which was the truth. Every Sunday morning Pill and I spent an hour with Mrs. Heget, the deacon’s wife, and a roomful of other heathens who didn’t know the difference between wrong and right.

“Well, I’d like to know what goes on here—really, I would. Have you two even
thought
about getting married?” my Aunt Marie hissed.

“We’re not getting married, Marie,” my mother said, banging a pot or pan. “French here is the best man, the best man I’ve ever met, but we both agreed—”

“Well, it’s not right, the two of you living like this, with those boys around. They’re very impressionable.”

By then Pill’s face had turned bright red. He hated Aunt Marie worse than me, I think.

“The whole thing’s not right,” Marie argued. “It just isn’t respectable.”

Pill gritted his teeth, clenching his fingers tight to the bone. He stood up and spat hard onto our neighbor Mrs. Garnier’s back porch. I pressed my face up against the screen for a peek. My aunt had her fat arms crossed, hovering beside my mother, who was finishing the chocolate cake.

“And what about their father? What do you think he’d feel about all of this?” Aunt Marie mumbled through her perfect white teeth. I turned away from the screen and shook my head. My older brother threw open the door. He ran into the trailer and snarled, staring up into my aunt’s fat white face.

“Get out!” my brother shouted. “Get out now.”

“Pill!” my mother gasped.

“I mean it. If French is being too quiet to do it, then I will.”

“Pill!” French hollered, shaking his head.

“Get out! You don’t talk to my mom like that. My dad would have never stood for that.”

“Pill,” my mother muttered. “Not another word.”

“Well, I see exactly how it is!” my Aunt Marie shot back. Her face was all flustered and bright red. She held her hand over her chest like she had never heard such harsh words before. “It’s no wonder these boys cause all the trouble they do. In a madhouse like this, I’m surprised they’re not worse off!” My fat aunt fumbled around for her purse, then stood by the screen door. “This unclean life is not worth living!” she shouted. “And you’re all unclean as rags! Filthy rags!” She turned and wobbled down our front steps and back into her brown station wagon. Her daughters followed her, not saying a word. Of course, Pettina had begun to cry, but my other cousin, Hildie, just frowned and turned, popping a pink bubble in her mouth, rolling her eyes as my aunt pulled their car back down the gravel drive and onto the road. I guess there was something so pretty and kind of resigned in my cousin Hildie’s face. The station wagon turned in the wrong direction, started down the road, then stopped, backed up, and started in the right direction, passing us again. Pill and I stood on the front porch and waved.

My mother was sobbing now, her face all red and full of tears. She locked herself in the bathroom, crying, running the water so we couldn’t hear how bad she was feeling. French shook his head, staring out the open screen door, then down at his open can of beer.

“Jesus, Pill, what did ya do that for?” he asked.

Pill stood beside me, still clenching his fists at his side. “You weren’t gonna say anything.”

“There’s a time and a place, pal. A time and a place, and this sure as hell wasn’t the time.”

My older brother glared at French hard and then turned and disappeared into our room. I fell onto the sofa, staring at the blank TV screen.

“Sorry about all this, Dough.” French frowned. “It ain’t right to ruin a man’s birthday. This didn’t have anything to do with you at all.”

Me, I just shrugged my shoulders and glared at the blank screen. That’s exactly how I felt. I guess I just didn’t even care.

“I’m gonna go talk to your mom,” he muttered, patting me on my head. My dumb dog came and sat beside me and laid its ugly face on my lap. I scratched its fur, rubbing my finger along the empty space where its one black eye should have been. Suddenly I felt sure of something. In that moment, right there, I felt like maybe my aunt had been right. Maybe my brother and me were doomed. Maybe one of the reasons I didn’t have any friends was because of how bad we both acted. I stared down at my dog, who, like always, had fallen asleep in my lap. Its hind legs were kicking in a dream, maybe some nightmare of being chased by something. Its good eye flickered around under its white eyelid, as it breathed heavily against my legs. I guess I shut my eyes for a minute and felt like crying, crying alone on the lousy couch because my birthday had been awful and because I didn’t have a single friend in the entire world. It would have been a fine way to end the worst birthday I had ever had, but I didn’t start crying; I just closed my eyes and tightened my hands into hard white fists to keep it all in.

A knock at the door startled me right out of my gloom.

“Hello, Dough,” Lottie whispered, pressing her big white forehead against the screen. “Are you home?”

That girl sure was crazy.

I smiled and nodded my head and stepped out onto the porch. It looked like she had ridden to my trailer as fast as she could. Her face was all sweaty and her pigtails were coming loose on the side of her head. She was leaning against the porch railing with something in her hands, something hidden, closed tightly between her tiny fingers. Her pink bike sat at the bottom of our gray steps. She was smiling, smiling big and wide, winking at me.

“I came because I have something for you,” she whispered, leaning in close to me. “I didn’t wrap it up in paper or anything, but I hope you still like it.”

And then she opened her tiny hands just below my face. There, in the rounded part of her pink palm was the most mysterious thing I had ever seen. A green glass eye. The glass eye that belonged to the richest lady in town. I felt my mouth drop open and my throat drying up. I didn’t know what to say.

“But …”

“I don’t think my dad will notice it’s gone. That lady isn’t gonna die for at least another forty years.”

She placed the eye in my hand, her fingers moving against my skin. There, cool and strange as a dream, I could feel its weight and gravity resting in my palm.

“I shouldn’t take this. If your dad found out—”

“Shush,” Lottie cut me off with a smile. “It’s yours now.”

I wanted to say something really nice, to let her know how it was the best birthday gift I had ever gotten, but the words wouldn’t come out. I felt lucky enough to muster, “This thing is neat as hell.”

Lottie just smiled, all red-faced and embarrassed, I guess. She didn’t say another word, just hopped down my front porch steps to her awful pink bike and rode on home, nodding her head and singing to herself.

I could not believe that green glass eye was all mine.

I held it in my two hands. I laid on the sofa and placed it in my palms and watched it roll on my skin, glittering with light, shining with some sort of indescribable beauty. I didn’t know why I thought it was so lovely but I did. I hid it in my front pants pocket as my mother and French came out of the bathroom. My mother’s face was still a little red. French had his hand on her shoulder. After a little while, he called us to dinner and tried to serve us as best as he could, tying my mother’s blue-and-white apron around his waist and spooning out helpings of her badly burned food. My brother stayed holed up in our room, missing the cake, which sagged all on one side and wasn’t really cooked. But I ate it all, I didn’t give a damn; I forced it all in my mouth with a smile, thinking of the glass eye and Lottie, too, maybe.

After dinner I sat out on the porch by myself, grinning at the way the eye seemed to glimmer and glow, wondering if there was some way to use it to tell the future or to read minds. After a while, I kissed my mother and French shook my hand and I went off to bed, careful not wake my older brother, who laid curled up in his bunk, facing the wall. I slipped under the covers and placed that glass eye right on the sheets above my chest, staring at it as the light from my bedroom windows made it glow with perfect sight. It really was the best gift anyone could have ever given me. I guess there was something so special there, something powerful and mysterious. Sure, there was nothing I could really do with it. And that poor girl was probably going to get the whipping of her life for stealing it. But there was something about it, something otherworldly in that green and white and blown glass, something in its shape, something I could see and stare at, imagining a future of different moments and a world of faraway possibilities. I decided I would show my older brother and hopped out of bed, holding it beside his head.

“Look at what I got,” I whispered.

“What is it?”

“A glass eye.”

“That’s stupid,” Pill mumbled, rolling back over. He coughed a little, then yanked the covers up over his head. My dumb dog sniffed the eye once, then slid its face beneath the covers, crowding me.

I didn’t really care. I placed the glass eye on the sill of the window beside my bed and stared at it until I fell asleep, sure of all the ways everything would be different for me.

When morning came and the eye was still there, gleaming, I stared at it, and for the first time in a long while I felt lucky, lucky for having something no else in the world had. I decided it would be my good luck charm, and that I would carry it around with me all the time. I decided it would be our secret, mine and Lottie’s.

I let her hold it whenever she wanted to, and she did, keeping it in her lap every day during lunch. When she’d hand it back to me, warm from her touch, I would put it back in my pocket, glad to finally have a secret with somebody.

the dollar-eighty-nine story

“Push not pull, pale-face.”

I pulled on the big silver door handle for the hundredth time, my hands trembling in nervous confusion. The old Injun grumbled at me from behind the counter, shaking his head from beyond the glass door.

“Push! Push, fool! Push!”

I kind of shrugged my shoulders and gave the door a good solid push, smiling at the tall, red-faced Injun as he shook his head and turned away. The bell above the door rattled when I stepped inside, right past the sign that read,
Real-Life Indian Artifacts,
standing before the stacks of old Mars Bars and stale candy that lined the shelf in front of the gas station’s counter. Behind me there was a dusty aisle of mud flaps with the outlines of silver girls glued to them, a shelf of miniature Minnesota spoons and shot glasses, and a whole row of realistic-looking porcelain statues of cougars with their young and wolves howling at the moon. Chief’s Filling Station was the only goddamn place in town that would sell cigarettes or dirty magazines to minors. It was about three miles away from our trailer park and a good hike even on a clear day, but depending purely on the mood of the Chief, the owner and only clerk who was almost always drunk, you might walk all that way and not return with a pack of Marlboros or a glossy issue of
High Society
. He was the only Injun I ever actually knew, except the ones from TV, and those were about as real as the naked ladies spread out in the nudie magazines my brother and me tried to steal. Today would be my first time trying to buy smokes without Pill. I had been eleven for nearly two full weeks, almost a teenager, almost a young man. I guess I thought the chances of me getting the smokes were about as likely as me becoming an astronaut, but I felt like I owed it to myself to give it a try.

“Gimme a pack of Marlboros,” I kind of stammered, staring up into the Chief’s thin, porous face, which was wrinkled like an old tree. There was his big bulbous knob right between a pair of eyes that jutted out of his hard skin. There were all kinds of crazy lines running down and around his face like thick branches. His pupils were bloodshot and red as hell. He stank like an open bottle of sour mash. He had long black hair all knotted behind his head in a ponytail, gray along the edges, that ran down his back. He wore a black shirt with a string of beads looped around his neck. He would have been spooky as hell if he wasn’t drunk, and I sure wouldn’t have tried buying smokes from him if I ever thought he might actually be standing behind that counter sober.

“Show me some proof of age,” the Chief grunted, all in slow, single-syllable words. I didn’t know what to do. I thought that kids like me were the only ones keeping him in business.

“Oh, c’mon, man, don’t be a drag.”

His gnarled-up face remained cold and expressionless. He pulled a silver flask from his back hip pocket, uncapped it, and took a long drink. A single bead of liquor ran down between two hard wrinkles on his chin and disappeared. “Do not think I do not know how old you really are,” he whispered, leaning over the counter. “You are nothing but a baby to me.” He let out a loud thick laugh that echoed in his wide throat.

“Oh, c’mon, Chief, stop busting my balls. I’m old enough already.”

“No. No, you have no idea about being old. What do you know? Hmm? What do you know?”

I rubbed my face with frustration.

“Listen, man, I just want some smokes.”

“You listen, little boy, and I will tell you a story about what it means to be old—old enough to call yourself a man.”

He took another shot from his flask and leaned his red face close to mine. I could feel his hot breath on the bridge of my nose.

“Three days before my thirteenth birthday, my father took me out of our home and into the woods. My father was a great warrior and chief of our people, he was on the State Council for Indian Rights. He had helped get a new school built on our reservation and hot water into our homes. His white name was John Cloud. My people called him Great Gray Cloud.”

The Chief’s eyes looked black and stern. The folds on his face tightened into a serious plain of red flesh as he went on with this unrelenting bullshit. Don’t get me wrong, as far as the adults in town went, the Chief seemed like one of the few of them I wouldn’t want to set fire to. I guess he had a kind of nobility about him.

“My father took me out into the woods to observe an old ritual among our people. The passing of a boy into manhood.”

He took a swig from the flask. I didn’t look away. I wanted to see if he would cough. He did.

“He lit a sacrificial fire and asked the great earth spirits to welcome me into manhood, to help me break from my childish ways and become a leader of our people the way his father had. My father took me to the sweat lodge and we sat there for two days and prayed to Coyote and the Four Winds, and there we had visions and he told me of the promise I would fulfill to our people. On my birthday, my father took me on a great hunt.”

His eyes were twinkling like stars in the sky, far away and silver and blue. He was drunk now for sure.

“There was an old wolf that had been raiding our chicken coop ever since I was a child. This was no ordinary wolf. No. This was a great spirit wolf with the marking of Coyote, the trickster. He would leave only two paw prints, side by side in the snow where he tracked. Two prints like a man. He would wring the chickens’ necks but not touch their eggs, and when my mother would collect the eggs and crack them open, there would only be blood. My father had been tracking the wolf for years. He was a great hunter. He would set traps for the wolf, and when he would go to check them, they would always be empty. He had raised a whole litter of dogs to track the wolf. The pack he had raised fought with the wolf a dozen times, but the wolf would always escape. Only once had my father ever really seen the wolf, and it was that time I was ten and he had taken me with him to hunt pheasant. This all made it very clear for him. My father said that the wolf was waiting. The wolf was waiting for me to be old enough to hunt it.”

I guess I was starting to get pretty interested as the Chief took another swig.

“On my thirteenth birthday, my father and I set out to hunt the wolf. He brought his dogs along and I had my mighty Winchester .22 and he had his compound bow and we tracked the two-footed wolf down into a shallow valley all covered with snow. Two paw prints ran down the valley, side by side. The walls of the valley were too steep for the wolf to climb out of. The valley ended in an old brick dam that was also too steep to climb. My heart was filled with fire. I felt humbled. If I shot and killed the wolf, I would be made a man. If I somehow missed, I would forever lose my father’s respect. My father stopped at the ridge of the valley and nodded to me. He unleashed the pack of dogs and they ran down the ridge. They tore through the snow. They barked loudly. They disappeared into the darkness. They had the great wolf trapped. I could hear it. I marched down the trail and then looked back at my father. He stood there like a mountain, with his hands in his pockets. He could tell me nothing else. I was on my own. I switched off the safety on my gun. The mighty barrel had turned to sweat in my cold hands. The dogs were silent now. The cold white wind was silent now. All was quiet. Everything was waiting. Would I be made a man like my father? Or would I fail and bring shame upon myself?”

I guess my own hands were covered in sweat too. I couldn’t The Chief leaned in even closer, his big gnarled nose nearly touching my ear.

“The dark shadows of the valley fell upon my back. There was the end of the valley. There was the old dam. There were my father’s dogs, who were silent. They sat there completely still. They sat beside one another in a kind of half-moon. The wolf was there, in the darkest part of the valley. He was white and silver. He was black. His head was huge. His front haunches may have came up to my shoulders. His snout was long and sharp. His eyes were the deepest blue. He stood completely still, staring right back into my eyes, his sides breathing with the cold in my chest.

“Then he moved. A silent move, a move of grace. He ran through the dogs, right up the middle of the valley toward me. I felt my finger along the trigger. I felt his heart in my throat. His eyes were my own eyes. His breath was my own breath. The wolf bounded right before me. I closed my eyes. I heard him speak. I pulled the trigger. There was no sound. There was nothing. Then there was only a sigh, like snow falling on soft ground. The sky above me turned black. The wind whipped against my face. The game had ended and I turned back.”

My face was bright red as I waited for him to finish. But he was silent. I tapped on the counter, staring up at him.

“What the hell happened? Did ya kill it?” But the Chief only leaned back, lowering his head. His eyes sparkled a little, then turned black. It was like something had welled up in his face that made him look fine and dull and old. He stared down at me and shook his head, then pulled a pack of Marlboros from behind the counter and slid them across to me.

“Dollar eighty-nine,” he mumbled.

“What? Well, what the hell happened? Did ya kill it?”

“Do you want the cigarettes or not?”

I guess I stood there, dumbfounded, looking up into his dark face. He didn’t even see me anymore. I placed my money on the counter, still stunned. He hit the cash register and placed the money inside. I backed toward the door, feeling all the weight of my body in the back of my knees. The little bell above the door rang as I pulled it open.

“I killed the wolf,” I heard him whisper to himself. He let out a hard little cough that made my lungs hurt in my chest. “That was the worst day of my life.”

The cigarettes felt like a thousand pounds in my hand. They were slick with sweat. Somehow I was already outside my trailer. Somehow I had walked home already.

There was nowhere else in town I would even consider trying to buy cigarettes or dirty magazines from after that. Even if some other place would have sold them to me, the Chief’s Filling Station had some kind of hold on my heart. I used to go there about every other day after school, buy some smokes like an old pro or maybe just a candy bar, and old Chief would always be there behind the counter, a little drunk but as stern-faced as a priest. He was one of the few people in that lousy town who seemed like he had any kind of heart at all, drunk as he may have been.

“Do you know what is out there waiting for me?” the Chief whispered one day. I had placed a Mars Bar on the counter.

I stared up into his gray face and shook my head.

“Nothing. No one,” he grunted. He took a long pull from his flask, licking his lips as he swallowed. “No peace. No sleep. No father, no mother, no wife. No baby. There is no great meeting place. There are no feasts. Those are poor dreams a fool believes so that he may feel better about being deceased.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “You don’t believe in heaven?” I asked him.

“No.” He hit the
Sale
button and the cash register drawer flew open. “If there was a heaven, it would be a cold, cold place. There is nothing good waiting for anyone when they die. There is only your fear. Only your fear, which is cold and black.”

I counted out my change, dime, dime, quarter, and slid it across the counter. His breath seemed to gather around him in great gray fumes. He was drunk worse than I had ever seen him before. Then I noticed something. There was a tiny blue baby shoe sitting on the counter beside the register. There were two small silver bells tied to the ends of the laces. Those laces were untied and frayed, dangling and worn. The rest of the shoe looked nearly new. I stared at it, biting my lip. The Chief looked me in the face, then pushed the shoe away, dropping it in a drawer.

“My boy,” he whispered. His eyes were filling with tears. He began to scare the hell out of me. He reached across the counter and grabbed my shoulder. “How old are you?” he said between breaths.

“Eighteen,” I muttered. His eyes were dark black and huge. His lips were pink and looked dry enough to bleed.

“How old are you?” the Chief shouted now, shaking me hard.

“Eleven!” I let out like a coward, dropping the candy bar from my hand.

“Eleven,” he said with a smile. “You’ve had eleven years to yourself. Eleven years to breathe.” He held me in place and I felt my knees knocking together. His face seemed enormous and very wrinkled. His skin branched out all over his face in thick grooves of flesh.

“There is nothing to believe,” he whispered. Thick tears broke down his cheeks. “Tell me what am I supposed to believe …”

His fingers were digging into my shoulder, gripping my collar. My bottom lip was trembling. My eyes were filling with tears too. I guess it felt like he was right inside my heart, like what he was saying was coming right from my dreams.

“There is no good. No good in this place, is there? There are things you love and things you have that all go and burn and die. There are things that are part of you and your heart that fall to pieces and leave you stranded like a dog.”

He shook me once.

“Tell me what will help me …” he muttered.

“Please just let me go,” I whimpered.

“Tell me what will help me …”

“You’re hurting me,” I whispered, trying to pull free. He let go, his long, thin fingers turning loose as I tripped backwards, falling to the floor.

“I am sorry,” he said quietly. “I am sorry. Take whatever you want. Take it all. You can have anything you want.”

He laid his head down on the counter and began to sob. I slowly pulled myself to my feet. His voice was like an old woman’s as his shoulders shook. His sobs were dry and hard and empty. I began to back toward the door. My fingers moved along the silver door bar. I began to pull it open slowly. The bell above it gave a little twinkle.

The Chief lifted his head and stared into my eyes. “Don’t go to sleep. There are so many ghosts waiting for you there.”

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine as I ran out and then back to the trailer park and into my bedroom, trembling under my covers until my older brother, Pill, came home and told me to get lost so he could look at his dirty magazines alone. I went outside and crawled under the trailer, right between the thick gray cement blocks, smoking a cigarette, waiting for all the mobile homes around me to light up and for my mother to call,
Supper’s ready
, and for my brother to give me a shot to the arm so that none of that whole afternoon would have felt the way it did and everything would seem okay again, but it didn’t happen. My mother called, then again, and I just sat under the trailer until French came out and asked me, “Are you okay, pal?” and I nodded and felt all the ghosts in the world moving toward me in the dark that had just fallen.