A Gentle Hell Read online

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “It’s Tuesday,” she said.

  “How did you get Thatch’s number?”

  “Can you come over?” Tuesday asked. “Momma won’t mind. The boyfriend went out last night and got drunk, so he’s hung-over now, passed out on the couch.”

  “Tuesday-”

  “-Bill. Please come over,” she said. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

  “I tell you what, Bill,” Thatch said when I handed him back his phone, “you fuck that girl and you’re going to hell.”

  “Everyone’s gone mad,” I said.

  “The Triple Goddess said madness has gone down thirty percent since Jehovah died.”

  “Was this a double-blind study?” I asked. “Who funded this study?”

  “I think the temple of the Triple Goddess funded it,” Thatch said.

  “Of course,” I said, “so it’s biased.”

  “Well, yeah,” Thatch said, “but maybe people have something to hope for now, you know what I mean.”

  “Have you converted?” I asked.

  “Hell no,” he said, “you know I’m an atheist.”

  **********

  I had a dinner of ramen and headed out to Mimi’s trailer alone. By the time I got there, the night dark settled down in a haze and Tuesday stood in the driveway waiting for me.

  “I'm going to die soon,” she told me when I got out of my car, “now that he knows I know what happened to Julie.”

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked.

  She smiled.

  “Why did you want me to come?” I asked.

  “I can’t be alone anymore,” she said.

  “You’re not alone,” I said, “You have Mimi, and all your brothers and sisters.”

  “I'm still alone,” she said.

  I said nothing. The lights were on inside the trailer and I heard the children playing inside, with Mimi screaming, “Keep it down, goddamn it, or I’ll smack you kids to sleep!”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” I said to Tuesday.

  She slipped her hand into mine. “We’re not doing anything,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

  She took me around the back of the trailer. I saw the prophet's house across the field, past the darkened deadwood and gray atmosphere like ash. His lights were on.

  “Do you know who that is?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “he’s lived there all my life. His name is Gregory. He used to be Momma’s boyfriend. Before the one she has now.”

  “Did you like him?” I asked.

  She turned toward me, walking backwards as she led me through the field.

  “No, not really,” she said.

  “Do you like any of your Momma’s boyfriends?”

  “No,” she said, “not really.”

  I stopped walking.

  “Don’t stop. Why did you stop?” she asked.

  “I’m not really sure why I’m here,” I said.

  “But you came, that's all that matters.”

  I let her lead me to the mouth of sickened trees, their branches heavy with parasitic mistletoe, crushed under the weight of smoke and black and feral green.

  “I used to go in there when I was a kid, she said, indicating the mouth of the trees, “and I’d hide. I’d pretend I was a fairy and I hid.”

  “You’re still a kid.”

  “But now I’m scared to go in there. Isn’t that funny? You’re supposed to get less scared when you get older, not more. I wonder why I’m so scared.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you going to marry me, Bill?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “no, I can’t.”

  “You know what happens in nature when a male and a female get together?” she asked me. “He pretends he loves her, and then when she runs away he hunts her down. Then she leaves him with the children. All animals do this. That’s why we have marriage. So we don’t run. So we’re not alone.”

  “I thought that’s what love was for,” I said.

  “Love doesn’t exist,” she said, “just children.”

  In the dark, Tuesday had no face. Her gray skin ran down her collarbone, her flavor cold, her animal eyes fixated on a point far beyond me. For every world there is a lower world. Beyond her world of Mimi’s trailer and bruises beneath the hips there existed a fairy world in these asphyxiated, hollow nested trees.

  “Julie was going to get married. Then she died,” Tuesday said.

  “I know, you told me. Did Julie kill herself?” I asked.

  “No, but you already knew that.”

  I said nothing.

  “What do I have if I don’t have you?” she asked.

  “The Triple Goddess, I guess. Or God, if he hadn’t died,” I said.

  “You won’t marry me because I’m not a virgin,” she said.

  “No, that's not it,” I said.

  “Then why not?”

  “Because I don't know you.”

  “That's not so strange,” she said, “I've never known anyone before.”

  The coyotes began to howl. We shrank. The deadwood rose up like ribcages, like the dead fields where my father used to drag horse corpses to rot and return to the earth. Sometimes death happens, he said to me once. Death always happens.

  A shot rang out.

  I grabbed Tuesday’s hand and we ran out away from the copse, toward Mimi’s trailer, jumping over wet fennel and thick weeds and death death death, the color flash of her dress. Another shot. Mimi’s back porch lights came on and we appeared in the light, flushed and wild-eyed. Mimi came busting through the door in her blue flannel nightgown with a .12 gauge at her hip. The children peered out from behind her with dripping fists and red arms.

  “Tuesday,” Mimi said, “you hear that shot? What the hell is going on out here? What you doing out here, girl?”

  “Momma,” she said.

  “Terribly sorry about this, Mimi,” I said.

  “Officer Redding, is that you?” Mimi asked.

  The coyotes stopped howling. The grass rustled behind us. I grabbed Tuesday by the shoulders and whirled her around in front of me to try to protect her. Mimi raised her gun. I ducked down, caving my body around her.

  The prophet of the Triple Goddess came through the grass into the light, squinting, sweat on his glass-fish skin, his shotgun raised above his head.

  “What the fuck are you doing out here, Gregory?” Mimi said.

  “I heard trespassers. They were talking outside my house. They were going to steal my Grandma’s old rocking horse. That thing is probably worth five hundred dollars by now. It's a real antique.”

  “You’re still a damn fool, Gregory; it’s just Officer Redding and my girl Tuesday. They don’t want to steal your Grandma’s damn rocking horse.”

  The prophet of the Triple Goddess lowered his gun.

  “Officer Redding,” he said. He looked at me. “You came to my house earlier. For dinner.”

  “Yes,” I said. I realized I was still holding onto Tuesday, my nails constricting her collarbone. I released her. She took a few steps back, toward Mimi. Mimi still pointed her gun at the prophet's chest.

  “Ah,” the prophet said, “hello Tuesday.”

  “Hello Gregory,” Tuesday said.

  “I suppose if there isn’t going to be any issue, I better get home,” I said.

  “Bill,” Tuesday said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just really sorry.”

  I left with the sweat sticking to my scalp, with the warm imprint of Tuesday’s hand in mine, her kiss on my forehead like a mark of Cain.

  I got back home and turned on the television and lay in bed with my head between my elbows and my nails in my scalp. They were still constantly running coverage on the new policies of the Triple Goddess on the news channels, and the Triple Goddess often appeared in persons and made speeches about how much better the world was going to be now, how much different, now that the evil demiurge Jehovah wa
s dead.

  I scratched at my forehead and scraped my skin underneath my nails and cried.

  **********

  The next time Thatch and I got called back to Mimi’s trailer, it was because Tuesday was missing.

  “I know that girl wouldn’t have gone off and killed herself,” Mimi said, “she was too strong. I mean, Julie, well, she was a little fucked in the head. I caught her smoking Mary Jane once, can you believe that.”

  “You know these things can sneak up on you,” Thatch said.

  His cell phone rang.

  “Hold on, I’ve got to take this call,” he said. “Bill, you can take over from here?”

  “How long has she been missing?” I asked as Thatch walked across the back of the house talking on his cell phone.

  “Ever since that night I found you and her being chased outside by that crazy fucker,” Mimi said.

  “And you didn’t call until now?” I said.

  “Sometimes the kids go missing,” Mimi said. “They usually turn up eventually. But Tuesday, she wouldn’t be gone for this long. She’s a good girl.”

  “How many are in the house now? Kids, I mean.”

  “Well,” Mimi said, “about eight. Any idea what could have happened to her?”

  I didn’t want to say, well, the woods swallowed her. We have a new god but our faces remain the same. You cannot be protected by cold bones and cross chains when you cry in the night. Tuesday was right. Loneliness is our origin and epitaph.

  “Officer Redding, she didn’t run off with some boy, did she?” Mimi asked.

  “No,” I said, “I think she's dead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I broke out into a run around the trailer and into the fields. Mimi called after me. I passed by Thatch on his cellphone. He yelled out my name as I jumped over a low, broken fence and into the grass. I ran toward the tree mouth, hung with mistletoe, gaping, and bent-fanged. I stopped. I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl through the trees.

  In Tuesday’s faery hollow I found the four missing children, dead. Their limbs intertwined, their mouths and eyes socketed with spring dogwood blossoms, skin growing gray and grayer. I found Tuesday on her back with her dress pulled over her hips, her skin bruised purple around her wrists and throat and thighs. Her mouth was open. Fingers broken and nails scratched into the dirt. Her wrists slashed.

  Thatch found me a few minutes later with my hands in her hair.

  “They're dead,” I said. I choked. “They're all dead in here. Call somebody out here to get all these bodies.”

  I crawled out of the faery den, sick with vertigo.

  “Jesus Christ,” Thatch said.

  Mimi walked over to the two of us, followed by some of her feral, green-eyed children. “What's going on?” she asked. “What happened to Tuesday?”

  “She's dead,” I said. “Somebody killed her. She's dead.”

  Thatch put a hand on my shoulder. “You going to be okay?” he asked.

  Out across the field near the prophet's house I saw movement in my periphery. I turned my head and saw the prophet of the Triple Goddess standing on the porch, holding a ragged cat. He looked straight at me, his eyes bleary pale, then turned and went into the house.

  “Hold on a minute,” I told Thatch.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To talk to the prophet,” I said. “Wait here.”

  I walked across the field toward his house. I pushed a lounging cat out of the way of the steps with my shoe and knocked on the door. No response.

  “Gregory?” I called. “Open up, it's me, Bill Redding. You had me over for dinner one night, you remember?

  The door opened. The prophet of the Triple Goddess stood heavy in the doorway. Up close I could see his eyes were bloodshot, with dark and puffy lids.

  “Hey Bill,” he said, “What's going on?”

  “You knew Tuesday, didn't you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “Yeah. I did.”

  “She's dead.”

  The prophet said nothing.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  “Oh well,” the prophet said, “I think not.”

  My hands curled into fists. I dug my nails into my palms. I felt a sharp pain in my forehead where I'd scraped my nails against it last night.

  “Explain to me why your goddess did this to that girl.”

  He said nothing.

  “Can you do that, Gregory? Can you explain why your goddess claims she is all-powerful and yet allows girls to be murdered and their bodies hidden in faery graves? Can you explain to me why a goddess who exists inside of everything breaks the spines of our children, why she separates us from those who could truly love us so that she may gain power through our love, without loving us in return?”

  Gregory trembled. He began to pray with eyes half-closed. He said, “Oh goddess, please protect your faithful servant from your enemies. Please protect me from the world, for the world hates those who love you.”

  “You got that right, Gregory,” I said.

  Thatch walked up the steps. “Bill,” he said, “what the hell are you doing?”

  “Just having a chat with the prophet of the Triple Goddess here,” I said.

  “Come on, Bill,” Thatch said, “these murders. This is big. This is real big. We're going to get the state police out here to investigate.”

  “I'll be seeing you again, Gregory,” I said. The prophet said nothing and closed and locked the door. I turned around and walked with Thatch out back to the field.

  They got the state police down there soon enough. They dragged the bodies out while the feral green-eyed children watched and Mimi smoked cigarette after cigarette and the boyfriend paced around the trailer drinking a scotch and coke from a tall glass. They took pictures of the crime scene. They did tedious and expensive DNA testing to try to figure out who murdered this poor white woman’s sick and small-backed children. They found the prophet of the Triple Goddess’ spit in their mouths and his fingerprints on their wrists and throats. Big scandal. Thatch said he knew that man was a crazy, but everyone knew that.

  Mimi said she knew it too, because he used to handcuff her to the bed and choke her during sex when they were living together.

  “Don’t be dumb, Mimi,” the boyfriend said, “plenty of people do that and they aren’t serial killers.”

  “What do you think of all this?” Thatch asked me.

  “She knew she was going to die,” I said, “and there wasn’t anything any one of us could have done. There's been an insidious force in this universe from the beginning, trying to keep us apart from each other.”

  “Maybe you should go home and rest for a while there, Bill,” Thatch said.

  “No,” I said, “I've rested enough.”

  **********

  When the police went into arrest the prophet they found him kneeling on the floor in his kitchen, praying underneath his breath. When they hauled him up and put him into handcuffs, then led him away, he started to scream, “The goddess will deliver me! The goddess will deliver me!” all the way out to the police cruiser.

  A limousine pulled up at Mimi’s trailer. The Triple Goddess came out of the car, her bodies wearing Chanel perfume and hip-tight black.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Mimi said.

  We were all standing outside of the trailer in ninety-five degree heat, Mimi, Thatch, the boyfriend, the police, the Triple Goddess, the prophet in handcuffs, and me.

  “So he wasn’t lying,” I said, “he really was their prophet.”

  One of the bodies turned toward me through the crowd. Her eyes were gray. She wavered in the heat.

  “Yes,” she said to me, “this is an unfortunate incident.”

  “But you’re a goddess,” I said. “Shouldn’t you have known this would have happened?”

  The three bodies of the Triple Goddess rose like arches above the crowd in their tall heels, their veins hard like shock rods against their necks and hands.

&
nbsp; “Unless you knew he was a murderer, and you just didn't care,” I said, “unless you knew and you did nothing.”

  “We value all human life,” the Triple Goddess said.

  “If you valued life, you wouldn't have let your prophet live and Tuesday die. See him in the back of that car there? He's still praying for his protection. He wants to be saved so he can continue to kill children.”

  “This was an unfortunate accident,” she repeated.

  “You didn't know, then? Then you’re not omniscient, like you claim to be,” I said, “you're just like Jehovah. You really know nothing about humanity at all.”

  “Bill,” Thatch said. He put his hand on my shoulder. All three bodies turned to look at me now. The crowd silenced.

  “You’re not even benevolent, are you?” I asked. “You don't value human life, not really, only insomuch as it benefits you. Your powers are limited. Your powers are no powers at all. You’re not even a god.”

  “Bill,” Thatch said again, “come off it.”

  “That’s the secret, isn’t it?” I said. “Jehovah wasn’t a god and neither are you. You’re just the same kind of thing in a different body, whatever you are.”

  The Triple Goddess said nothing. The police cruiser holding the prophet backed out into the road and drove off. The crowd began to disperse. Mimi and the children and the boyfriend went back into the trailer. The Triple Goddess climbed back into the limousine and the limousine drove off. Eventually the state police left as well, so that it was just Thatch and I standing out there in the red dirt with the sun scrawled heavy on our backs.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” he said, “sometimes things just happen this way.”

  “There never was a god, was there?” I asked. “Not one that cared for us, that wanted to cure our loneliness.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “None of us know that. After they found Jehovah dead off the coast we thought well, here’s the fake god, and then She stepped forward and well, here’s the real god, but-”

  “-But it doesn’t work like that,” I said, “it’s never as simple as that.”

  “I suppose not,” Thatch said. “You want to go back to the station now?”

  “No,” I said, “no. I’ll catch up to you later.”

  Thatch left. I stood there for a while out in the front, back poised like a knife. I walked away from Mimi's house toward the field.