Tender as Hellfire

by Joe Meno

  The cowboy pulled his sandy-colored hat down over his eyes. He yanked himself to his feet, leaning against the door, and tore a big knife from the side of his boot.

  “Looks like I’m going to have to invite myself in then.”

  He dug the blade into the screen, yanking the knife down and across in a big L-shape. Val let out a scream and I shot up in bed, rustling my brother awake. Val backed away from the front door as the cowboy smiled, slowly stalking her.

  “I just want a kiss,” he grunted, tripping through the big tear in the door. “That’s it.”

  He held the knife out before him, the silver knife with its smooth ivory bone handle, grinning like a sick dog.

  “Now you ain’t so proud, are ya?” he snorted.

  Val backed into the kitchen, fumbling behind her for some kind of weapon—a knife, a screwdriver, anything. The cowboy kept smiling and grinning, moving closer. By now, Pill and I had opened the spare bedroom door and were standing right there a few feet from it all, unable to muster a single word.

  “Go back to bed, boys,” Val whispered, still pleasant, still calm. “Henry and I are only playing.”

  But my brother didn’t move. He stood in the doorway, staring at the cowboy’s sweaty face.

  “Don’t move a muscle, boys,” the cowboy grunted, turning toward us a little. “You both stand right there.”

  My hands ached with sweat. My whole head felt light and then heavy and then light again. Val had a tiny screwdriver in her hand but she was shaking. Her hips shivered against the kitchen counter. Her blue eyes were glimmering with big silver tears.

  The cowboy took one step closer and then knocked the screw-driver right from Val’s shaky hand.

  “Don’t you ever tease a man,” the cowboy said, putting the knife against her wrist. “Don’t ever play a man for a fool.” He reached his hand down between the folds of her robe, right between her breasts where her heart must have been beating like a scared rabbit. My mouth was dry and hard with fear. I felt my own knees shaking. Pill looked ready to cry. His hands were clenched tight at his side.

  “Don’t either of you boys move,” he grunted. He stood in front of her, hulking her in his shadow. There was no sound in the whole trailer. No one was breathing. No one could breathe. Then a bit of gravel rattled outside in the dark. A single shot of gravel flew from the ground and ricocheted against the side of someone else’s trailer, then another, the rumble of loose gravel echoing as two double-beams crossed the inside of Val’s trailer, lighting up the cowboy’s face. Then a pickup truck door opened and two boots slid across the dirt and up the steps and then I heard the single sweetest word I’ll ever remember: “Val?”

  Still all silent inside.

  “Val?!”

  Then a trucker stepped through the gape in the screen, a big square-faced man in blue coveralls. His name was scribbled on a patch on one side of his jumpsuit: Buddy. His hair was black and disheveled a bit. He had a jug of wine in one hand and a single daisy in the other. His jaw set tight in his mouth as he stepped inside and saw Val pressed up hard against her own kitchen counter.

  “You best put that knife down, chief,” Buddy whispered, setting the wine and flower down on the sofa. “Before you end up cutting yourself.”

  The cowboy turned and glared. There were no other words needed right there. The cowboy turned and lunged at poor Buddy, taking a wide, drunken swipe at him, cleaving the front of his coveralls. Buddy slammed the cowboy hard in the throat with a solid punch, knocking his sandy-colored hat off, then Buddy dove right at him, shoving the cowboy over the sofa. The two men landed on top of each other, growling and cursing, Buddy on top, trying to wrestle the knife away from the cowboy, who spat and drooled and hissed like a snake. Buddy landed a few more blows, smacking the cowboy’s nose, but then something happened that will always stick in my head because of how awful it all was. The blade of the knife ran straight through Buddy’s right palm, straight through, then clanked dully to the floor. Buddy howled, gripping his wrist; he backed away, bowing over in pain. The cowboy picked up his knife and ran out, dove into his truck, and disappeared. He went right back into the dark night that had made him drunk and evil to begin with. His hat was still lying on the floor. Buddy kind of tumbled into the bathroom, gritting his teeth in pain. He held his hand under the sink, running the water over his wound. Val came up behind him and began kissing his neck and saying, “I’m sorry, so sorry, baby,” and nuzzled her head against his big shoulders. He wrapped a big pink towel around his hand, shutting off the faucet while Val hurried me and my brother back into the spare bedroom, then locked us in. Her face was as white as her sheets and her blue eyes were swimming with tears. She hadn’t said a word to us. She was still shaking. From the keyhole we watched as she quickly stepped back into the bathroom.

  As usual, they began making it: Right in that bathroom, Val fell to her knees and unzipped the man’s coveralls and then closed the bathroom door. Then there was the unmistakable sound of that man and Val, like every other Friday night, cinched together, bare and cold, their bodies pressed against the wood door, creating a kind of friction that hurt my heart and teeth and tongue. That was when I wished both those men had been killed right there, that was when I didn’t care anymore that this man was hurt saving Val. This man with the hole in his hand was no different from any of the other men who would come over after Val had put us to bed. He still had that same dumb look in his eyes. That’s what I hated most about all those men. They weren’t any smarter than me. But there was nothing I could do about any of it. I was a dumb kid and all these men had snakeskin boots and red pickups with gun racks, and what could I possibly offer her? How could I make her feel the way they made her feel, held down against the sofa, naked and used and bare? My same brother was already asleep, snoring with the same frustration and hate. I thought of those long white legs and truckers and cowboys and trailers and the whole town, and not just the town, but all of it, everything that hangs over your head when you feel like a man but still look like a kid.

  All that was too much for me. This man and Val were making it right outside the door or on the sofa or in the kitchen, fucking with a kind of rhythm so mean that I slipped on my jeans and shoes and climbed out the spare bedroom window, down into the gravel, skidding past the fading light shot from Val’s black-and-white TV. I stared at this man’s pickup, same as the rest, with their Valiants, Monte Carlos, big Fords, and Chevys. I reached down into the dirt and picked up the sharpest rock I could find and lit a match to what was welling up in me all night. I let that rock fly hard and straight, busting the rearview mirror and the headlights, scratching the deeply honed doors and kicking in the silver chromed grille, until Val’s porch light flicked on and I disappeared back into the darkness, back through the window, and back into her soft, sleepless bed, still shaking with rage. Maybe the trucker cussed or shouted and then took off, maybe he stayed and took his anger out on her again, maybe they laid together not touching each other or even uttering a word, both wishing he had left, but the next morning the trucker was gone and I couldn’t have been any happier.

  When Pill and I finally rolled out of bed, we got dressed and sat at her small kitchen table. We wolfed down big helpings of French toast and burnt bacon. No one talked. Val stared hard into my eyes and didn’t say a damn word; she looked me in my face and then turned away, cold and silent. I didn’t mind her being mad. As long as the trucker was gone, she could be as mad as she liked. I know that sounds selfish, but she had to know there was nothing between her and that man but the both of them being desperate, and me busting up his headlights only put a kind of picture to all of that. We packed our stuff back up in our grocery bag and stepped outside. The trailer park was bright and silver with dust. Maybe I turned around and said goodbye, or maybe I was mean and stone-faced and stepped out onto her porch without muttering a thing, but Val stopped me and put her hand on my shoulder and looked down into my eyes and said something like: “You’re gonna end up hurtin’
someone with all that anger, Dough. You’re gonna end up hurtin’ yourself and someone you love with a temper like that.”

  More than anything I felt like crying, but I didn’t, because Pill was standing by me and would have never let me live it down, and so I nodded and turned away and me and my brother walked across the lots of mobile homes, disappearing back into our own bleak hell, kicking rocks at each other without saying another goddamn word.

  the sounds of midnight

  At night the trailer park belonged to blood and tigers.

  For some reason I began to suffer the worst nightmares I’d ever had in my life. Nightmares that made me sweat right through the white sheets of my bunk bed, nightmares that made my blood run cold and kept my older brother up with cries of my terror. I would lie awake and imagine that there were things there in the dark armed with claws and fangs, animals with rabies, animals like spitting snakes, horrors Pill used to try to scare me with. All he’d have to do was whisper the word “tiger” at night from the top bunk while I was trying to fall asleep and I’d nearly wet my bed. In Duluth, it had been quiet at night. Here, in Tenderloin, I was surrounded by the unfamiliar sound of nature around us all the time: crickets chirping outside our bedroom window, coyotes howling, birds screeching in the dark. Jungle cats, slick, unthinking, leopards and cheetahs and tigers, began to invade my dreams. They would lunge at me in my nightmares and snap my neck. I would wake up and feel their claws around my throat. I would lie there, pretending to be dead, sure some wild animal was lurking outside my window, searching the night for the sound of my heart.

  During the day, I tried to sleep in class. But Lottie, the slow girl who sat beside me, the one with the three or four pigtails that pulled the skin on her face tight across her forehead, well, this girl began to annoy me more and more. Her constant jabbering was always getting me in trouble with Miss Nelson and my grades were beginning to suffer. So I used to just lay my head down on my desk and stare through my fingers at her; tired from not sleeping at night, I would watch her tiny mouth make huge spit bubbles and kissy-faces. Her tongue would shoot in and out until I would kick her or pull her hair. This girl, Lottie, wasn’t all bad, she would let me cheat off her tests most of the time, but she wasn’t much smarter than me, so it didn’t really help. At recess, she would ask me to play a game and instead of tag, I would give her an Indian burn. I guess I pulled her hair and spat at her because I thought I could. She was a girl, and as girls go she was probably the worst of the bunch. She was the kind of girl who other girls in class hated and picked on, the girl who boys pushed down on the playground to cop a feel off of, the girl who teachers ignored because she was so slow and awkward that somehow there wasn’t any room left to pity her.

  One day, right in the middle of class, only three weeks after we had started school, Lottie stood up and started screaming. I hadn’t even been paying attention. Maybe I’d been staring out the window dreaming, or maybe I had fallen asleep feeling the tiger’s jaws around my neck. I turned and faced something that made me shiver.

  “Miss Nelson … ?!”

  Lottie was crying, holding her hands between her legs, and there was blood, plenty of blood, all from under her dirty yellow dress. Her eyes were wide with terror and shock. I just froze as Miss Nelson’s face went red.

  “Miss Nelson, I’m bleeding …”

  There was blood all over Lottie’s legs and starting to drip beneath her chair on the floor. I felt myself shuddering as Miss Nelson led Lottie out of class and down to the nurse, I guess. “You’ll be all right …” we heard Miss Nelson whispering.

  No one in class said anything, no one but Dan Gooseherst, this fat round-headed kid who sat behind me, you know the one, with the red crew cut and freckles, the kid who had been held back from the sixth grade. He was awful mean most of the time because of it. He sat behind me grinning and laughing, making a big horse face.

  “She got her period,” he whispered too loud. “She didn’t even know.”

  My mouth felt dry and hard.

  They sent in Bucko, the grade school janitor, this guy in flannel with a bright red face, who used to drink from a tiny green bottle behind the dumpster in back of the building. The janitor mopped up the mess and disappeared back into the hall. Some of the boys began to laugh and make jokes. The girls in class were making faces at each other. I didn’t know what to think. I mean, how was I supposed to know about any of this? No one had ever mentioned it. They never showed a girl getting her period on TV; hell, my brother sure never talked about it. Dan Gooseherst kept laughing and pointing, with the other boys joining in.

  I guess then it hit me. No one had told poor Lottie. Who was going to tell her? Her old man? Her dumb older sister? She didn’t ever seem to speak of a mother. The rest of the girls in class and the teachers sure didn’t talk to her much. I looked around the room, listening to the other kids whispering and giggling, as Miss Nelson reappeared with Lottie. The poor girl went and got her jacket and book bag from the back of the room. Her dirty yellow dress was all stained with blood. Everyone was quiet. The room smelled like disinfectant now; its odor made me want to vomit.

  As Lottie was walking out, Dan Gooseherst, from the seat behind me, whispered something to Bunny Rayburn beside him, and then laughed, just once. Lottie’s face went white. I felt a knot turn in my gut. Miss Nelson’s face froze. Her thin eyebrows snapped in place as she turned and faced the class.

  “Who did that?” the teacher asked. “Who’s laughing?”

  No one offered a breath. You could hear Ralph the asthmatic, in the back of class, fighting to breathe.

  “I said, who just laughed?”

  Miss Nelson’s fist snapped against her desk. Her eyes were black. “I want to know who was laughing right now or everyone’s staying after school.”

  Dan Gooseherst raised his hand. I couldn’t believe it. That loudmouth was going to turn himself in. I kind of shrugged my shoulders. Miss Nelson stared at Dan.

  “Dan?”

  “Dough Lunt, ma’am.”

  I turned and stared him right in the face.

  “You’re a goddamn liar …” I muttered.

  “Dough!”

  “Take it back …” I grunted.

  “I can’t. You did it,” Dan said with a smile.

  Miss Nelson stood right over me. I could feel the heat of her shadow boiling against my skin. I could feel the whole room swelling with silent stares. I looked Dan Gooseherst right in his eyes, then around the room, searching for some sort of glimmer of honesty, for something, but there was nothing, all their eyes were black as coal.

  “You will both stay after school.”

  “But I didn’t …” I mumbled.

  “Not another word, Dough. Lottie, get your things, your sister will be here soon.”

  Miss Nelson led Lottie out of class once more as Dan Gooseherst smacked me in the back of the head. The rest of the day was a gray blur, until everyone else got to go home, everyone but me and Dan. Miss Nelson sat us down in front of her desk and lectured us for about a half hour about things I don’t now remember and sure as heck didn’t understand. All I knew was that I hadn’t done a goddamn thing and Dan Gooseherst was going to get his house lit on fire. I would get my brother to help me take care of that.

  “Do you understand?” was how Miss Nelson ended the lecture. We both nodded and put on our coats and stepped out into the playground to walk home. Once we were a block away from school, he grabbed me by my coat and said, “I’m gonna kick your ass for telling on me,” and then he shoved me against a tree.

  I pulled free, pushing him back. He was about my height but a lot heavier. He shoved me again and I smacked him on the side of his head with my fist.

  “Let go, fat-ass,” I said.

  “Homo.”

  The gray sky loomed over us as we traded blows, walking down the block. At the corner, I knocked him into a bush and smiled. He sank into the green shrub, stuck, his legs and arms kind of wavering over his round body like
an overturned bug. Then he pulled himself to his feet and chased after me. I started running toward the fields, hoping to lose him in the high grass, then stopped. Lottie, in her blue winter coat, was sitting up in a tree. For a moment, I thought she must have been a ghost. Then I saw that she had a handful of stones in her arms, and she started tossing them down at me, the first one hitting me right on the chin, the second one bouncing off my temple. I fell on my face as the whole world turned upside down. I laid on my side, covering my head, looking up into the sky as Lottie hurled a flat gray stone against the top of Dan’s head, then a second, then a third.

  “But he—” Dan tried to shout, but Lottie caught him on the forehead. Another stone hit his ear and then it started to bleed. From where I was laying, I noticed that Lottie was up there crying, she was shouting something, screaming in some undecipherable language, a stutter of cries and mumbles and hisses unrecognizable to the human ear, but I had heard it all before, I had spoken it, the cry of the defeated, the speech of the humiliated, the sound you make when your older brother sits on your chest and makes you hit yourself with your own hands. It was a sound I could recognize for sure. I got myself to my feet and started running away. I turned back once and saw she was still crying. Dan Gooseherst had managed to run back toward the school. He fell down a few feet away, then got up again and limped toward his home. I stopped running and crouched in the high prairie grass, holding my hand over the sore spot on my head, trying to breathe as quiet as I could.

  I watched Lottie climb down out of the tree. She had her hood up and ran through the grass, still crying to herself. I waited until I was sure she was gone, then poked my head up and hurried down toward the culvert that led back toward the trailer park. I ran as fast as I could along the ditch until I saw something a few yards ahead. Kneeling down beside an irrigation pipe was Lottie, still whispering to herself, poking at the ground with a sharp stick. It must have been one of her hiding spots; there were old calendars with pictures of animals, tin cans, bottles with paper doll clothes pasted on them, and a few old suitcases filled with rocks. She looked up at me and I froze in my tracks.