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CHAPTER 1
tenderloin
They split us up at the end of summer.
Now most people will call you a liar if you tell them a truth they don't want to hear, but I know me and I know my brother, and looking back, before our bare-legged Val left town all covered in blue bruises or Shilo got shot in the neck or the deputy just disappeared, before my brother lit a black match to all his hatred, before any of that, they decided to split us up, and I guess that's where the trouble really began.
"This place is hell. This place is shit."
Pill, my brother, nodded his head, agreeing with himself as he lit the match. There was that sharp striking sound of the match-head against the thin strip of flint, snappppp, then a big blossom of fire crinkling down along the match's spine. He held the flame to the end of his Marlboro and inhaled, taking a drag that crept out of the side of his mouth in a quick spurt.
We spent that first morning before the first day of school in that lousy new town smoking in the dirt, taking drags on my older brother's stolen cigarettes. We sat right behind our new mobile home, hiding in its square shadow, the trailer shining silver from its aluminum siding, refusing to sit level on its concrete blocks. Pill tapped another square out of the pack and handed it to me, then struck the flame from the match cover and lit the cigarette's tip jutting from the end of my lip.
"This place sucks," I grunted, coughing up smoke through my nose.
I was ten: which was how old I was four years ago, when all of this happened. Pill-Bug had just turned thirteen. I'm a year older now then he was at the time, which seems awful funny to me. As I think on it now, in that moment there wasn't anything better than sitting in the dusty gravel beside him, sharing a cool smoking square, not because he was especially talkative or insightful or anything like that, but he would always share what he had just stolen or show you a new wrestling move or tell you about an unfamiliar dirty word or two. My brother had on his blue stocking cap, half pulled down over his eyes, past the black scab where one eyebrow should have been. It was a wound he got lighting our neighbor's hedge on fire the day before we left Duluth.
In the shadow of that morning, Pill had his legs spread out in front of him, lying back against the concrete base of the trailer, staring at his dirty brown shoes. I had just finished buttoning up my brand-new school shirt, one of my brother's old red-and-black flannels, which was long enough for me to half-tuck in my underwear. Nothing in those stolen cigarettes or dirty clothes gave us any idea that we might both be doomed, doomed past any of our years or any of the fairly illegal things we had already done.
"Do you know what a girl's pussy smells like?" Pill asked, staring up into the cool blue sky, taking a long drag that turned the length of the cigarette gray.
I kind of shrugged my shoulders.
"Well, yes or no?" he asked, leaning forward.
"No. I guess not," I mumbled.
"It's like being stung by an electric eel. It makes you want to fuck anything that moves."
I sucked my teeth in reply.
"Get to school!" my mother shouted, shaking her fist, hollering from inside the godawful silver trailer.
A trailer: back in Duluth, we'd had a whole house to ourselves. We even had our own rooms, but now we had to share a crummy bunk bed. My older brother got the top bunk after a short skirmish that ended up with him sitting on my neck. Also, there were shadows on our walls at night that looked like skulls. Also, there were dead mice everywhere, and even when we thought we had got rid of them all, we found some of their pink babies which we tried to feed but which died. Also, if you glanced in the bathroom mirror with the lights off, you could see ghosts standing behind you with bloody hands. Also, we discovered a stack of dirty Polaroids in a shoebox that had been left in one of the closets — they were mostly of different women lying topless in bed, which, of course, my brother kept for himself. Also, there were silverfish crawling all over the floor. Also, the nearest comic book and baseball card shop was forty-three miles away in a town called Aubrey. Also, nothing in this place was any damn good. My mother's boyfriend, French, had gotten a supervisor's position at the meat-packing plant in this town of Tenderloin and my mother packed us all up to move hundreds of miles into a lousy goddamn trailer and now we were all unhappy.
"You better be going!" my mother shouted again, knocking the gray screen door open. My brother hoisted his book bag over his shoulder and I followed, kicking up dirt as we headed toward school.
In Tenderloin they split me and my brother up good. Pill and I had been going to the same school ever since I'd been attending, but here they sent me to the elementary school and him to the high school, even though he had never really graduated eighth grade back in Duluth. He would have graduated, but he was on probation from a fistfight he'd gotten into. And then what happened was his homeroom teacher, Mrs. Henckel, this ghastly old hag who I'd say had it out for Pill-Bug, found near a dozen porno magazines and a single box of Marlboro cigarettes in his locker.
They expelled him a week before graduation, no matter how much my mother pleaded, glad as hell to be rid of him, I bet.
Three days: That's all it took before Pill lit another kid's house on fire. To be truthful, I didn't think he'd last that long. Back in Duluth, he used to get in a fight almost every day with some fool or another. My brother, Pill, he liked to get in fistfights, don't ask me why. In Tenderloin, he waited three days though before starting any trouble.
It all began at lunchtime, or that's what he told me. The high school was small enough so everyone had to eat all at once, together, in a big cafeteria painted red and white, the stupid school colors. The walls were decorated with these big paintings of a side of beef with little arms and legs, right with the school motto, Fightin' Meat Packers. All of these dumb kids must have been going to school together since they were born. Maybe all of them were cousins. It was the same way it is now: all the big ugly football players with their own lunch table, and the cheerleaders with their own, and the snotty student council kids, and the big red-haired, red-lipped sluts with their own rectangle. In the corner was a round table with a broken leg where all the losers and faggots were sent to sit. Pill was no faggot, no way. He was so crazy about girls that he would have masturbated every hour on the hour if he could, but he was the new kid in school, so the only spot he could find was at the loser table in the corner. Sitting at the center of the table was this huge fat girl, Candy, no shit, her name was Candy, I'm not lying, and she filled up half one side of the table, her blob of a body kind of undulating and wavering above her three trays of food, which of course was mostly snack items and several helpings of sloppy joes, and which left deep orange stains all over her fat fingers and round chin. Then there was Kenny, who rode the short bus to school; he had grabbed a kite string off an electrical wire and gotten severe brain damage. He had to ride in an electric wheelchair and wear a protective helmet all the time. People didn't like him because he used to try to run you down in the hall between classes, or sometimes, I guess, during football games, he'd ride around the track and no one would try to stop him. Beside him, there was some flitty kids and some real brainiac types who didn't even bother eating lunch because they were so worried about studying and getting good grades and getting the hell out of that town. Then there was my brother, Pill, who didn't fit anywhere there at all. He was short and dirty and mostly mean-looking. He had one eyebrow and a huge black scab in the other eyebrow's place. He wore his dirty black drawers and a gray flannel jacket and his godawful blue stocking cap that no one could convince him to take off, because his hair was growing back from the fire and there was still a bald spot big as a fist right on the crown of his head.
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tender as Hellfire"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Joe Meno.
Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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