How the Hula Girl Sings

by Joe Meno

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Came into the gas station with a sore eye and busted lip. Said his daddy was the one that gave it to him.”

  “That so?” Monte’s old man took a short swig of sour mash and swished it from cheek to cheek. “What’s this got to do with you, pal?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Just don’t think you beating on a young boy like that is right.”

  “That so? I guess running down babies makes you an expert, huh?”

  I shook my head quick, trying to knock something loose.

  “I wanted to come talk to you first, before I got hold of the police.”

  “You call the police!” he yelled. “They’ll have a real goddamn laugh. You coming here and telling me how to raise my kid.”

  “Just keep your damn hands off the boy,” I muttered, tightening my fingers into fists.

  “I’ll treat my boy as I see fit.” His eyes were dark and full of ignorant pride.

  “You won’t bruise that boy again, you hear? You won’t hit that boy again or I swear I’ll come back.”

  “Big words from a goddamned lousy convict.”

  Then something snapped.

  I went over and grabbed that fucker by his throat and shoved him down hard against the ground, knocking over his booze. I could hear his plastic pink feet clicking together in fear.

  “Listen to me, fucker. Keep your damn hands off of that boy, you understand? You let that boy grow up by himself fair.”

  I let go of his throat and stepped out on the porch and tried to light a cigarette as quick as I could. My hands were trembling too hard. The goddamn matches kept flashing out. Finally, I lit it and choked the smoke down my throat. I wanted to go back in and crack that bastard hard in his chin. But it wouldn’t have done any good. This Mr. Slates was a man I had seen my whole life. He was lost as any man could ever be, and nothing, no lousy fistfight, would change that.

  “Didn’t hit my dad, didja?” Monte asked. He was sitting on the front porch steps, with his head hung low in his lap.

  “No.” I frowned, taking a long drag on my smoke. “We just sat down and had ourselves a talk.”

  “A talk, huh? That was all?”

  “Sure it was. It’s all clear now. He said he’s gonna keep from hitting you from now on.”

  Monte just sucked in a low breath and shook his head and stared up at his dilapidated old porch. The blue light from the TV flickered in his tiny blue eyes.

  “Didn’t change anything, did it?” he asked.

  The cigarette smoke turned cold in my mouth. There was nothing different I could have done myself. I wanted to go in there and break his goddamn teeth. I wanted to call the goddamn police. But I had lost all of my words.

  I was like a ghost, cursed to do nothing but stand alone and watch and try to utter a word in help, but forlorn, forlorn by a silence I could not control.

  “Doesn’t seem like your dad has his head on that straight,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you, pal. Don’t know what to say. If he lays a hand on you like that again, you let me know and I’ll talk to him again.”

  “Thanks,” Monte mumbled, starting up the porch.

  I flicked out the cigarette and walked away, trying to make it right in my head by saying it a different way.

  the red ventricle along the wall

  The Virgin’s breath revealed a hole in a dark-lit soul. A hole that began to show some light onto the unknown face of a friend.

  The Virgin took a breath, moving along the wall of my room.

  I stared at that beautiful painting all morning. Then I got a notion. Something struck me funny. I got up from the black frame bed and lifted the Virgin right off the wall. Some dust settled to my feet. Some strange light seemed to break right through.

  There was a hole dug right in that wall straight from Junior’s room, reaching through. A hole filled with mysterious things he had placed there to keep hidden. I set the painting on the floor and stared inside, squinting my eyes. These were all things kept close to Junior’s heart. Things I had only heard about but never seen.

  The baby bird’s two black eyes. I saw them right away. They were all dried up and hard and kept between two pieces of green glass. They flickered there dull and lifeless but still full of some kind of sight.

  There was an old Bowie knife. A ball of white string. A piece of chalk and an old red leather dictionary, torn at the binding. I opened up the dictionary and saw a marking right under the front cover. It had been stolen from Colterville Elementary School. I set it back in place as something else caught my eye.

  There was an old photograph placed in that dark cubbyhole. It was one of the strangest pictures I had ever seen. It was black-and-white and mostly out of focus, grayed along the edges and wrinkled in certain spaces around the center. It was a photo of a girl with two round cheeks and closed eyes surrounded by flowers on all sides, lying on her back in the dirt. This girl was smiling the biggest smile I had ever seen. Her little stubby teeth were all unwrapped under her chubby round lips and gray gums. She had on a nice white dress and colored ribbons strung up in her dark curly hair. There was some writing along the back of the picture that gave away the girl’s name. EUNICE, it read in firm capital letters. EUNICE. This girl EUNICE was like a little princess of the garden. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Her cheeks were still chubby with baby fat. I held that photo in my hand a long time. I wondered if it was an old girlfriend of Junior’s. His first love maybe.

  I put all the things back in the hole in the wall right before I noticed there was a huge wad of cash all rolled up, jammed into another opening. There had to have been a few hundred dollars there, just hidden away, tied up tight with white string and nestled in a crack. I gave a little smile thinking of Junior keeping all those things like that, kind of like a little kid, hiding all his most precious things in a hole behind a painting. I put the Virgin back into place, got dressed for work, and headed on out.

  There was a new message on that shiny silver sign out front of the gas station.

  Auto repair done cheap

  in-expensive as a trip

  down a lusterd stream

  I squinted a little as I read it, then stepped inside. Junior was behind the counter, staring at the wall. His round face looked tired and worn.

  “How do, pal?” I smiled, stepping around the counter.

  “Not so good, Luce, not so good.”

  “Looks like you haven’t slept in a week.”

  “Not that long. Just the last few days is all.”

  “What do you think it is?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Something running loose in my head. I can fall asleep all right, but then I have these dreams and I end up waking up and just lying there the rest of the night. I dunno. I can’t sleep in those rooms all alone. I keep hearing things.”

  “Hearing things? The guy above me has a lady over almost every night.” I smiled.

  “No, I keep hearing something in the room with me. Whispering … whispering something to me from the closet all night.”

  I looked up into Junior’s wide white face.

  “You know there’s nothing in that room with you. It’s all your imagination, pal.”

  “It’s hard to think of that when you’re sure something’s breathing down your neck.” Junior stepped out from around the counter.

  “Where you headed?” I asked.

  “Take a walk, I guess. Maybe down to the river. Set my mind at some ease.”

  “Good luck, pal. I’ll bring home some whiskey tonight to help you sleep.”

  “Thanks.”

  His large feet led him right to the river’s edge. It was warm and sticky along his skin. Some insects muttered little songs to themselves. The water was green and heavy and dark. He could see his own reflection, cast dismal and black, moving right under the surface. He leaned over and lowered his hand, making the two Juniors meet.

  Then he was gone.

  He set the saw against her le
ft shinbone first.

  He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. Then he began to move. A little at first, then in a steady, unyielding stroke, running the saw’s blade against the skin, back and forth, back and forth, until the tendons and muscles gave and the tiny gray foot dropped right off. It fell into the dirt with a quiet little stirring sound. He opened his eyes quick, then placed the sawblade against her right shin and began to cut.

  He would fix it all right.

  He would make everything all right.

  He cut off her other foot and dropped it in the black plastic bag, then tied it tight.

  Blood dripped down along his big white hands.

  He placed the sawblade against her middle, closed his eyes, and set his body into motion against her fragile weight. The blade made it through the flesh in quick, clean strokes, severing the tissue and bone, moving through her innards and flesh with a gluttonous wet sound, on down, on down, splitting her spine. Then she was undone. Right in two. Two nearly equal halves, two souls of her own. He slipped her belly-mess into the bag and then began to undo her lower half, splitting apart her thin gray hips. Then her legs, and hands, and her head from her neck. Then it had all been done. Then she had been unmade like an old sweater or broken toy and he had separated all the pieces into different bags, leaving her head and torso nearly intact. He lit the match and poured the gasoline over the bags evenly. They began to smolder and burn, shrinking in on themselves, twisting and turning into fleshy black knots that flickered with flames. He placed the burning bags on the tiny wood raft, then returned to the shed and stared at her middle and face. There were flies all over her skin, buzzing and hissing about, stealing tiny beads of sweat from her closed eyes.

  He took the hammer and held it tight in his hands. He held it tight and square and stared hard at her shiny white teeth, then closed his eyes and took a solid, momentous swing, then again, then once more, making sure there would be no way to trace, no way to identify the parts of her body once they began to wash up from the river somewhere downstream. He placed her head and torso on the tiny little wood raft, then lit the match and poured out the rest of the gasoline and gave it all a good push and watched it slip slowly down the stream, drifting away, disappearing down, down, down into the cold green murk once it was taken up by the current. He dug up the bloody dirt with his fingers and wiped the place clean with an old gas-can rag, then buried it all somewhere beneath the woodshed and closed the door.

  He held the hammer tight in his hands. He nailed the woodshed shut and walked with the tool alone through the dark.

  It was all done.

  It was all done.

  He was in his own room now. Now he was standing before his closet door and had Old Lady St. Francis’s hammer and seven nails in his hands and pounded the spikes through the closet door into the frame, nailing it shut tight and good. Then the next nail, straight through the door into the frame, cracking the wood a little as he slammed the hammer harder and harder against the head of the nail. Then the next, then the next, and so on, until the dull black closet door had been nailed shut and tight. Then poor ol’ Junior fell on the floor and placed the end of one of the nails against his forearm and dug a new hole, a new word, drawing his blood through the letters and his skin.

  STAY.

  He was crying hard now, gripping his arm tight, as he bled all over the wood floor and his clothes and wrapped an old shirt around his arm and held it there until he had himself burrowed between the tiny wire bed and the space along the wall.

  At eleven o’clock there was no sound coming from his room. I knocked on the door once, then gave the knob a turn and stepped inside. There was poor ol’ Junior curled up in a ball between the bed and the wall.

  “Christ, Junior, are you all right?” I asked, switching on the lightbulb.

  “Fine,” he whispered. “Go away. I’m fine.”

  “Like hell you are,” I muttered. “What the hell is all this? Blood? Blood? Where’s all this blood from?”

  There was a quiet little smattering of blood all over Junior’s clothes and dried up along the dull wood floor.

  “Christ Jesus, Junior, are you OK?” I stood over him, shaking my head. Then I saw the letters along his fleshy white arm. I saw the word the letters spelled out.

  STAY.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked. “Christ, Junior, get up off the floor and let me take a look at that cut.”

  “No,” he mumbled. “It’s mine.”

  Then I knew what this poor fool was talking about right away.

  STAY.

  Poor old Junior wanted to keep that pain and anguish all to himself. He wanted it to live and breathe and speak inside of him.

  I looked down at his face. It was all round and caked in blood and sweat.

  “Here,” I whispered, placing the bottle of whiskey on his bed. “Have a drink with me. We’ll stay up and talk this all out.”

  “No,” Junior replied softly. “It’s too late. It’s already too late.”

  “Too late?” I tried to smile. “What are you talking about, too late?”

  “Don’t you see, Luce, we’ve already made our mistakes. The worst mistakes anyone can make. Nothing can make us whole again.”

  Big Junior Breen was trembling. He began to cry again, burying his face into the side of the bed.

  “Junior …” I started to whisper. But there was nothing else I could say. I reached out my hand and patted him on his back, then stepped away and into my room.

  I lay down on the bed. I tried to close my eyes. I thought about the letters on Junior’s arm all night. I could feel the wounds moving there within my own heart.

  The draft along the wall kept shaking the Virgin Mary’s frame and I could hear Junior crying and mumbling to himself until sometime in the morning when I finally fell asleep.

  In that early-morning light, Junior pulled himself up off the floor. He lifted the Virgin Mary painting off the wall and took all the things he had hidden there. He strode out of his room and down the hall and outside and down to the banks of the Boneyard River.

  Junior walked right to the edge of the river, clopping through the high brown grass. His boots were full of mud now. He was sweating a little as the sun began to peek out over the trees and reflect down on the shiny blue-green river as it muddled on past. Junior squatted in place, staring as the water rushed up to the ends of his boots. Then he placed each object—the twine, the baby bird’s eyeballs (he threw the dictionary and the knife)—one by one and watched them drift and disappear down the river, sinking and growing darker as they vanished beneath the wake. Then he held the photograph of EUNICE in his big hands, smearing it with all the sweat and grease from his fingertips. He took a deep breath and placed it along the water’s rippling edge, then pulled his hand away. The photograph took off, sailing downstream, twisting and turning as it moved along beside the bank. Junior gave a little whimper, then shook his head and chased after it, whimpering and murmuring as it sailed downstream, disappearing farther and farther down the bank. The picture could not go. He needed her face.

  “Mmph,” Junior whispered, getting his shoes all muddy and wet. He nearly tripped over a wet log and some high bank grass that itched beside his waist, fighting to keep the photograph in sight. He scrambled down the river’s bank and lunged, slipping into the river up to his thick knees, catching the tiny gray image in his big white hand. He looked at it quickly, then stuck it in his shirt pocket and pulled himself out of the river, huffing and heaving as the cold water soaked through his clothes.

  “Looks like you fell in all right, mister,” a little voice bloomed. Junior looked up and gave a little smile to a tiny girl in a pink dress a few feet away who was sailing a little boat on the end of a string.

  “Looks that way.” Junior frowned, staring at his wet clothes. His shoes squeaked with water as he stepped down the bank.

  “Is it cold?” the little girl asked.

  “Sure is.” Junior frowned again. “You best
stay out of it.”

  “I aim to.” The girl smiled. “But my boat sure likes it a lot.”

  “Looks like it does, all right.”

  “My name’s Mary Margo Underlein. I live down the road.”

  “Is that so? My name’s Junior. Junior Breen.”

  “That’s a silly name.” Mary Margo smiled.

  “It sure is. I pray for a new one every night but it just hasn’t come yet.”

  “My dad says I got to pray every night before bed to get the things I want. He says I gotta hold my hands together tight and pray for all the things I need, and if it’s a good thing, it’s bound to come true.”

  “Your daddy sounds like a smart man.”

  “He is. He built me this boat and painted it yellow. That takes smarts to do.”

  “I’ll say.” Junior smiled. Then he looked up and froze where he stood. There was the sheriff sitting in his squad car, shaking his head to himself real slow, shaking his head and mumbling something. He had been watching Junior all along. Junior looked away, feeling the sweat bead along the back of his neck. He stared out across the water to the sailboat, feeling the heat of the sheriff ’s gaze upon his bones.

  “Look at it go,” Mary Margo giggled.

  The little yellow boat sailed along, drifting downstream, creating a tiny wake as it passed. Junior patted the girl on the head with a frown.

  “I have to go now.”

  “Why?” Mary Margo asked.

  “Just do, sweetheart.”

  “Can’t you stay for a little while longer? I’ll let you sail the boat if you want.”

  “Sorry, kiddo. I’ve got to go now.”

  “You have to go to work or something?”

  “That’s exactly where I have to go.”

  “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight.” She smiled.

  “How’s that?” Junior asked.

  “Before you go to bed tonight. Don’t forget to say ’em so you get yourself a new name.”

  “I won’t.” He patted her soft straw hair again and walked away, staring up into the empty space where the sheriff ’s squad car had been. He headed down the road hoping he left no wake where his feet moved, holding the photograph in his hand as he walked toward work, not leaving a trace of his own weight upon the ground.