When We Join Jesus in Hell Read Free

child—full of shadows, unexpected places, bullies. It borders the ghetto, and gunshots and alarms pepper the night with music. He shivers, wishes he’d have brought his coat, but feeling this cold draft in his soul is good he thinks as long as it doesn’t stop him in his tracks with grief before he does what he feels needs doing.
    He raps on the door with a knotted hand, and the black steel frame rattles. Feet shuffle inside. The hammer of a gun is pulled back. He tenses, knowing his old man could fire right through the door and it really wouldn’t make much difference to him when he looked out and saw Fist bleeding to death in the yard.
    “It’s me,” Fist says, struggling to remember the last time he said those words. He was seventeen. His dad had been drunk and they’d just buried Fist’s mother. He and his father had a heated argument that had quickly turned to blows. Fist won but it cost him a roof over his head. He’d always told himself that he at least had his pride, but looking back now he realizes he’d given that up somewhere along the way, too.
    His father opens the door wide. A baggy flannel shirt hangs from his bony shoulders. He’s aged more in the last thirteen years than Fist could have ever guessed. He’s holding a pistol that’s older than Fist. He flexes his fingers, some type of blackness dancing in his eyes and Fist thinks, Last time we swung, this time we’re going to shoot each other …
    The wind moans among the eaves.
    His dad says, “You look like you’re about to cry. But I don’t know what the hell makes you think you’re welcome to do it here.”
    Fist stumbles forward and hugs him and cries, “I’m sorry,” and it scares him and relieves him for the briefest moment until his father shoves him back across the threshold, saying, “What the hell is wrong with you?”
    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