Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  When Pill had almost finished lunch, an older kid, a senior with dark hair cut in a mullet, walked up to the table and stared down at him. “Hey there, you’re new here, right?”

  Pill nodded, not looking up.

  “We were all wondering if you knew that you looked like a pussy.”

  My brother just lowered his head, shoveling another helping of meatloaf over his lips, trying to swallow. A few more of these older kids with their jean jackets and mullets, some with red-and-white varsity letters pinned to their dirty coats, all gathered around. Poor Candy squealed and folded in on herself. Kenny and the other losers at the table just got all quiet and pretended to be finishing their lunches.

  “Hey, I just called you a pussy, pussy,” the older kid with the mullet and square face grunted again. “Don’t you know I’m talking to you?”

  “Forget him, Rudy, he looks retarded,” one of the other kids said.

  “Don’t you know it’s ignorant to ignore someone when they’re trying to talk to you?” Rudy asked.

  But my brother kept eating, cleaning his plate, shaking his head to himself a little. Finally, he stood up and stared right in that bigger kid’s face without saying a word. Rudy put his arm around my brother’s neck, squeezing him tightly.

  “Just tell me you know you’re a pussy and I’ll leave you alone. Go ahead. Tell me.”

  The one thing Pill-Bug couldn’t stand, quiet and crazy as I knew him to be, was anyone touching him or his stuff. He snarled his lips and clenched his fists, kind of staring at this other kid’s jugular vein, gripping a plastic fork in his trembling hand. A teacher, that day’s lunch room monitor, stared over at them both, eyeballing them hard. Rudy held Pill there, my poor brother almost foaming at the mouth, as the teacher pointed at them, half-heartedly trying to break it up.

  “Get back to your seats,” the lunch monitor mumbled in a lazy tone. Rudy smiled and nodded, then shoved my brother again.

  “Pussy,” Rudy whispered, and quickly swiped the blue stocking cap from my brother’s still-bald head.

  Oh Jesus.

  My poor brother must have just froze with shock and horror. His blue eyes must have went wide and shallow as he glanced around the lunch room. Everyone was looking at the huge blot of red skin where his curly black hair hadn’t grown back. All these goddamn cheerleaders and sluts and student council kids and football players were mumbling and giggling and pointing right at him, their laughter echoing like pins and needles in his brain.

  “You will all die!” he shouted. Then he let out a howl and ran through the lunch room doors, screaming like a madman, down the hall, knocking over a garbage can, tearing a homecoming poster off the wall. He ran right into the boy’s bathroom, hissed and swung his fist through the first mirror he could see, and then jumped out the window into some hedges and ran across the football field, back toward the trailer park, still screaming and tearing up anything that fell in his path.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe I don’t really know what his first day was like. I mean, I wasn’t even there. I guess there were the things he said and the rest of the stuff people told me, so everything else I guess I’ve had to make up. It might have happened that way or not. I guess I’m still trying to figure it all out is what I mean.

  I do know that my own first day was just as lousy.

  I was awful happy at first because the fifth grade teacher was real pretty. Her name was Miss Nelson. Boy, her legs were as long as my whole body, and during the whole damn class, all I could think about was her legs. She just kept smiling and laughing and sitting on the corner of her desk and talking about getting good grades and not being late, just sitting there being nothing but beautiful. Her hair was all straight and black and long down her back. Her eyes were blue and twice as big behind nice black glasses. She wore this short flowered dress that hung just over her knees. I was in heaven, heaven, until she took out the fifth grade roster and started calling out names for attendance. I kind of slunk in my chair, shaking my head, trying to make myself disappear. Miss Nelson worked her way through the alphabet. There was damn near half-a-dozen Johnnys and Jimmys and Jennys in my class. Then she passed the Is and then the Js and then the Ks and then her perfect pink mouth opened like a rose when she said my name

  “Dough?”

  It made my heart sink in my chest. Her eyes scanned the room, over the rounded heads of all the ten-year-olds, through the forest of pigtails and flattops, right to me. Her pink lips parted a little smile as she called my name.

  “Dough Lunt? Is your name Dough?”

  Everyone in the class turned around and stared right at me, all these stupid Johnnys and Jimmys and Jennys, all of them. I kind of raised my head just enough to nod and then slumped back down to the desk.

  “Please say ‘Present’ if you’re here, Dough.”

  Her eyes suddenly seemed mean and black. Her eyebrows cocked over her eyeglass frames as she stared down at me.

  “Present,” I murmured, and dropped my head between my arms, feeling my heart shriveling up in my chest.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Jesus. It was bad enough all these morons knew my name, now she was going to introduce me. I nodded slowly and stared at Miss Nelson’s face for some sort of reprieve. But no.

  “Why don’t we welcome Dough by giving him a nice ‘Hello’?”

  The whole class let out a sigh and the palest, weakest chorus of voices rose from the room.

  “Hello, Dough.”

  A girl with three pigtails in her hair, sitting next to me, squinted and stared.

  “What type of name is that?”

  I didn’t know so I shrugged my shoulders. My old man had been some sort of madman to insist on such a name: I wasn’t named after some famous relative, and neither was my poor brother. We had been in some uncountable number of fistfights because of our lousy names, which had been part of my father’s plan. Our names were like two huge magnets that hung around our necks, attracting all sorts of trouble, I guess.

  “I don’t think that’s a name,” this girl said with a frown.

  I turned and stared her hard in the eyes. Her eyes were brown and kind of crossed. Her hair was blond and pulled so tightly in those three rubber bands that her forehead looked stretched. She smelled mostly like pee and a little like dirt.

  “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.