When We Join Jesus in Hell

by Lee Thompson

  He wipes his eyes, shakes his head, trying to clear it. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder and his dad looks past him for a long, long time and they’re torn in their silence. At last, his father tucks the pistol in his belt, a mirror image of his son, and says, “Did you do that?”

  Fist shakes his head, his brow bunched and more emotions roiling through him than he’s ever felt, unable to fathom how his father could even think that.

  They cross the driveway, stand outside the passenger side, both of them freezing. Fist says, “What would you do?”

  His dad shrugs, staring in the window at Karen. It takes him a long time to look into the backseat and when he does he sighs and can’t seem to look away.

  Fist says, “That’s your granddaughter.”

  Weight presses their shoulders. His father wipes his nose. He says, “Goddamn.”

  “Right,” Fist says.

  His dad says, “You know who did this?”

  Fist nods, racked with fever. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hand, tells his father about the last few hours, and it comes out of him in a rush, in a mere matter of minutes, and yet it brings them closer than the past decade.

  Fist’s dad says, “If you kill him you’ll end up in prison or on the run, always watching over your shoulder.”

  “I know.”

  “But if you don’t kill him then someday, somewhere, another family, or some lonely and sad girl, is going to experience this same pain. And maybe that time no one catches him.”

  “There won’t be another time for him.”

  His dad nods and looks up the road.

  Fist looks too, sees a cop car with its light flashing, painting the night crimson. The state trooper blows by the house. Far-off, firecrackers punctuate the night and someone screams.

  He glances at the car and sees Karen studying him.

  The clock ticks…

  Karen says, Fist, our daughter…

  Fist says to his father, “You’ve missed out on so much.”

  His dad sighs again. He hands Fist his pistol, says, “Never hurts to have a spare.” Then he hugs him briefly, takes one last look inside the darkening car, and moves slowly back to the house tormented by his own ghosts.

  Jesus says, You’re killing her.

  Fist runs a hand over his arms and the gooseflesh there feels like pebbles beneath his fingers. He blinks tears away, thinks about all they’d had at one time, and how easily it all slipped away, and he has believed life was just like that sometimes, that it was all out of his control. But he shakes his head now, whispers, “Lies you told yourself. You never tried hard enough. No one was ever able to take anything from you. You gave it up.”

  His father waves from the front door.

  Fist doesn’t know if when this is all over if he’ll come back here, maybe call the cops from his dad’s phone, or if he’ll shove the pistol in his mouth on some quiet, dirty street and fill the night with fiery sleep.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later he’s cruising down Cicero with his headlights out, people moving in the darkness, and he knows them because one time he used to be them. Back before he’d hung up his gloves, back when the sidewalks had fewer cracks and the street had more light. Fist finds the address he needs and parks alongside the curb. A few blacks stroll by, glance into the car, angry at first because all they’re seeing is this silly white family in their neighborhood, but they’re smart, not stupid, and they see that the woman and the kid are far too pale and the man getting out has blood all over his shirt and they move on down the street without a word.

  Fist watches them go, staring after them, second guessing himself because none of them looked like Jesus but you never know. They could be just as bad. He doesn’t want to leave Karen and Bethany and Bianca in the car but knows that he can’t carry them in and do what he has to do. He rolls the window down to give them a little air, then squeezes his wife’s hand. Music rattles windows, men and women laugh somewhere off in the dark, bodies are slapping, tongues are lapping and he feels like all of it is about to drive him out of his head.

  He tucks the pistol into his pants and loosens his tie. When he turns to face the house he sees a curtain to the right of the door fall back into place.

  “Too late,” he says. “I know you’re here.”

  The air around him thickens.

  The clock ticks…

  He stands at the door. It opens a crack, the smell of meatloaf and something bitter and medicinal clawing its way out, slapping him in the face, reminding him that while the world he knew has ended, other lives go on, and he thinks there is terrible meaning in that, a quiet desperation that rattles the remains of his soul.

  An older black woman pokes her head between the door and jamb. He knows she has her foot against the other side but that if he wants in, and he does, she isn’t going to be able to stop him.

  Her eyes are lined with her own sorrow, her own individual demons and memories, the things she can never let go, the dreams that have faded and taken part of her with them. She looks past him, at the car, at his family and he thinks she might cry, she might hold him the way his mother never had, but she only says, “Jesus do that?” Her gaze goes from the car to his bloody shirt, to his face.

  He nods. “Is he here?”

  She shakes her head, fingers tightening on the door as if any moment now she expects he’ll launch an attack, and he thinks, You’re right. I’m sorry, but I have to take from him what he’s taken from me. Life isn’t always pretty, and it’s rarely fair.

  “Move aside,” he says, pulling the pistol from the front of his pants, the cold steel biting at his palm, making his fingers itch. He puts a hand to the door and pushes in but it catches on a chain. He slams his shoulder to the wood and the chain snaps. The woman shakes her head, her hands up to protect herself. She says, “You can’t just go breaking in people’s houses. You better leave right now. You should—”

  Fist pushes her back down the hall, part of him listening to her, knowing she’s right, part of him trembling as he says, “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” she says, draping her arms across her chest, glaring at him with those sad eyes. She is unmovable now. She is not going to help him. He can see that. He tries to think of her as an accomplice to Jesus’ ways, but she’s not and he knows it. She’s barely hanging on to what love she has for him, and he thinks she must go through hell, knowing her son is what he is.

  “Mind if I look around?” He doesn’t know why he’s whispering. If Jesus is there he’s heard him by now. He says, “Is anyone else here?”

  “No.”

  The only light inside comes from what he assumes is the living room. He treads softly. An old lamp perched on a scarred end table casts a sickly yellow glow onto a tattered couch. He moves past her, not caring if she jumps on his back. He’s used to extra weight now.

  He searches the living room and kitchen and finds no one, but he sees a yellow post-it note with Jesus’ name on it, a number scribbled below. He memorizes it as he hears a voice say in his head, Say my name. Jesus. Say it.

  “Jesus,” he says.

  His heart hammers in his ears. He chokes on bile, glancing past the woman, out to the street where dark men pass the dark car and pale bodies. Fist wipes his eyes. The woman says, “Why don’t you sit down. I’ll get us some tea.”

  “I don’t need to sit. I don’t need tea. What I need is to find this piece of shit so I can drag him out to the car and let my wife and daughter watch me put a bullet in his head.”

  She flinches. He can’t imagine what it’s like being in her shoes. But he gets the feeling she can imagine being in his because her face softens for a moment and she touches his shoulder the way his mother had rarely done, yet he wished she had a hell of a lot more.

  She says, “You think hurting him will bring them back? You know it won’t. And where you gonna be then? How will you honor their memory if you’re in prison, a murderer?”

  “I don’t care about honori
ng their memory,” Fist says. “They knew I loved them. No one is going to change my course.”

  “You say that now.”

  He offers a sharp nod. There are two closed doors. He moves to the first, clenches the pistol, believes that fate is close by, it’s taunting him, teasing him with possibilities and he may just end up dead too, bleeding out in the ghetto with some woman he doesn’t know looming over him, with his wife and daughter waiting for him in some better place and he can’t say that’d be so bad because he knows that the life he’s had up until tonight isn’t within reach anymore.

  He twists the knob.

  The door opens beneath its own weight.

  The room is dark, blankets draped over the windows, and it smells like long-forgotten sex and cigarettes. He raises the pistol, squinting against the darkness, one hand groping the wall to find the light.

  The world explodes with a different light, the sharp crack of a bullet cutting air, and Fist staggers, hits the bedroom door jamb, confused because the pain stems from the back of the shoulder and it’s burning through him. He looks to the woman. She points an old revolver at his face. For some reason he thinks it’s his father’s pistol. He figures she must have had it hidden in the fold of her gown. He wants to smile at her but only once she’s sucking breath from the carpet. She’s still sad, and maybe even some of it is for him, but he sees she doesn’t like people breaking into her house and looking to kill her kin. Her hand doesn’t waver much, but a little tick tugs at her right eye and the grimace she wears is pure.

  He grins, unsure why, but it disappears as he moves his arm and lights explode in his head. He’s surprised he can still hold the pistol, surprised that he still clings to hope that things will somehow get better. He feels lucky that she was either a bad shot or was only intending to wound him.

  She waits for him, this dark grim reaper with her broken scythe. She says, “Set that gun on the floor and I’ll call an ambulance for you.”

  Fist thinks, No. It’s too late for that.

  The clock ticks.

  Blood dots his right shoe.

  He says, “You protect him and you’re no better. It doesn’t make you a good mother.”

  She shakes her head, finger working on the trigger as tears work at her eyes. “I’m not his mother. I’m his aunt. And all I’m doing is protecting my home. Whatever hell Jesus conjures he brings on himself.”

  “Set the gun down and I’ll leave.”

  “You’re bleeding all over my rug.”

  Fist glances at his shoulder. It doesn’t look too bad. It aches like hell, but the wound is clean, the bullet doesn’t appear to have hit any bones. He touches it with a finger and flinches. He meets her gaze and says, “No matter what I am going to kill him. Even if I have to kill you first, but I don’t want that. I don’t want anyone innocent to suffer.”

  “Right,” she says softly. “You know all about how the innocent suffer.”

  The gun wavers and then lowers. She sobs and sets the pistol on the table. “I don’t know why some men have to make such a mess of other people’s lives.”

  “Me neither.”

  “He was a good kid.”

  “That’s too bad,” Fist says, surprised that he means it. He thinks about other kids he’s known, from the streets, from the gym, who had smarts and charm and so many things going for them but they’d done like he had with his pride and his thankfulness and tossed it to the wayside to pick up something new—drugs, or women, or a job that led to insanity, drug addiction or death. Or just another dead end.

  She sits in a chair, folds her hands in her lap and stares out the open door a while. When her eyes meet his, she says, “It would probably be more messed up if you didn’t want vengeance.”

  He sits across from her. “He raped and murdered my wife. My little girl. She was eight-years-old, he—”

  She holds a hand up to stop him.

  He says, “Call him in. Tell him you need him here. I’ll take him in the street.”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t watch that. I can’t do that.”

  Fist slams a hand against the table. She jumps and reaches for the gun, the fear inside her alive and as charged as her need for self-preservation. Fist cocks the hammer of his pistol, the barrel staring at her, him staring at her, as he says, “Call him back here or I will pull the trigger. You’re the only chance I have to draw him in.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will. Or I’m going to let him see what he’s done out there and in here before I beat his skull to pulp.”

  She raises her chin but her lips quiver. Her eyes dart about the room, settle on her gun again, maybe weighing her chances of grabbing it. Fist says, “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want him. He deserves this. You don’t.”

  The clock ticks…

  His pulse hammers at his neck, rushes through his veins, in his ears, a mighty ocean in his head with only one need, just one, but she clutches the pistol, he can see her fingers close around the handle, the index find the trigger, and he feels the moment stretch out and voices screeching in his head—his wife, his daughter—because he can’t die yet, he can’t take another bullet, at least not here, not from her, not before he sees this through…

  He grabs the table with his left hand and throws it up between them, underestimating his strength as adrenaline pounds through him and some primal beat stamps out music in the street, and the table hits her and she releases the gun, and hits the floor, the table on top of her chest, her neck and head at a funny angle pressed tight to the wall.

  He studies her a moment.

  He thinks she’s playing opossum.

  She doesn’t move.

  Fist grabs her pistol. He tucks it in the back of his pants, next to his father’s. He thinks three pistols should be enough to handle just about anything that comes his way tonight.

  He grabs the phone from a small table in the corner of the dining room. He dials the number that blazes behind his eyes. It rings three times. A man says, “Yeah?”

  Fist says, “I’m coming for you.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Say my name,” he says. “Fist. Say it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to cut your balls off but I have to find a knife first.” He heads into the kitchen and throws drawers open until he finds a thin blade that reminds him of the knife his dad used to use to flay fish when Fist was little. He holds it, the blade catching light coming in from a window over the sink. “Where are you?”

  “I don’t know who you think you’re talking to but you got the wrong number, man.”

  Fist glances at the handset, at the number on the fridge. “Jesus,” he says.

  “I’m not Jesus. I’m hanging up now.”

  “He killed my family.”

  “I’m going…”

  “I’m going to find him and make him suffer.”

  “Okay, I hear you—”

  “Tell him I’m coming if you talk to him.”

  “Okay, man. I will.”

  “Tell him his aunt is dead.”

  “You killed my fucking aunt?”

  “No,” Fist says, “you killed her.”

  Two

  After he drags the woman out near the road, he finds a gas can in the shed out back. While his family watches from the car, he covers the threshold and porch, his eyes watering from fumes, the clock ticking, people in the street growing agitated, a few drawing nearer. One of them, a kid teetering on that point right before manhood, holds a phone to his head.

  Fist thinks, I need to make this quick and get out of here without hurting anyone.

  He throws the can aside. He thinks that the best thing to do is to erase every trace of Jesus from the earth. It’s solid. It’s what he must do.

  He stops outside the passenger door of the car and blows his wife a kiss and raps the back door’s glass, part of him believing that somehow Bethany
will turn her head, smile at him, tell him, You did good, Daddy. But she remains silent and still.

  The guy with the phone approaches. He’s young, still a kid really, swagger to his step, but nervousness in his eyes, caution in the tight bunch of his shoulders. He says softly, stopping just out of arm’s reach, “Whatchoo doing, man?”

  Fist pulls the pistol from his belt. The others stay back but he can see the hatred in their eyes and he’s not sure who it’s for. Maybe just life. Maybe everyone who ever gave them the bum rush, every person who pretended to be a friend till they got what they wanted, every enemy who had the guts to disrespect them, their family, their color, their culture, and where they live, because though it wasn’t much, the honest ones made the best of it.

  Fist says to everyone within earshot, “Do you know where Jesus is hiding?”

  “Put the gun away, okay? I called the cops. Anyone else in the house?”

  “Do you know Jesus,” Fist asks.

  “I know him.” The kid glances at the car. “He do that?”

  Fist doesn’t look back. He nods. He says, “Where would he go?”

  The guy who he first assumed a punk, just some new obstacle, frowns sadly. He says, “Why don’t you just tell the cops when they get here? Let them handle this. You’ll get killed out here. You don’t belong here.”

  “I know,” Fist says. “I got away and forgot what it was like to feel and struggle, and this is what happens when you forget…somebody comes along and rapes and destroys what you love because they think you won’t fight for it, won’t make a move to protect it anymore, because you’ve softened, they can see it in your eyes, right? The predators know the weak. But Jesus was wrong this time.” He points the pistol at the house and squeezes the trigger. The bullet strikes the metal door and the fumes ignite and someone screams as the walls burst with flames and the windows blow into the lawn. The kid stoops to pick up his phone and nearly falls over. Fist grabs his elbow and helps him stand as the sky burns black with smoke and the house blazes.