When We Join Jesus in Hell Read Online Free PDF

her cute little head then sets her on his shoulder so she can pretend to see where they’re going. She curls up into the hollow behind his collar bone. He searches the rearview for his daughter’s face, just a pale orb in the darkness, and he can see her lips moving, whispering, We all love you …

Four

    The brewery leans toward the street, its windows vacant, some of them broken. In a way it reminds him of a long abandoned mental institution. He imagines the lost and rambling and weary, those who the world has given up on, but worst of all who gave up on themselves. He shuts the car off and looks at his wife, strokes her cheek, and waits a moment for his nerves to settle. She whispers, Take us with you, Fist .
    He studies her, shakes his head, feels something shifting inside him as he says, “I can’t take you where I’m going,” because he doesn’t want them to see how brutal and merciless he can be, even if they approve of it, even if it lets them rest.
    Bianca climbs down his shirt and into his lap. He touches her absently, wishing he can take the threads of his life and weave something worthwhile of them, take back every harsh word he’s spoken in anger, all of the times Karen has said she wanted to do something and he’s squashed it with a look of contempt, maybe part of him blaming her for helping him forfeit some life that was out of reach now.
    Bethany cries in the backseat.
    Wind rocks the car.
    A bum stumbles by on the sidewalk, and crosses the road, glaring into the car as he treads heavily with a wobbly gate. Fist nods his way, wonders what kind of existence the poor man has had before all he amounts to now. At one time he may have had a family like this. At one time he probably gave and received love and somehow, in the blink of an eye, he’d watched it slip away.
    Fist doesn’t know what Karen sees when she looks at him.
    For some reason it bugs the hell out of him. He always hoped she’d see the truth, that he’d do anything for her, and he tried to prove it with his actions because he knew words were hollow without them. And his training had proved, early on, that nothing gets results like movement, commitment, tenacity.
    Fist says, “This is going to get ugly.”
    Karen sighs like his father had sighed and whispers, It’s life. It’s ugly sometimes .
    “People are ugly,” Fist says. “They’re what make life so difficult.”
    Not everybody is bad , she says.
    No , he thinks. Everyone is at some point. We can pretend to care and pretend to be civil, but it’s a struggle when it comes down to our darkest moments, when we’re robbed by men, raped by debt, riled by injustice, plagued with cancer .
    Karen squeezes his hand. Don’t be such a pessimist .
    Bethany says, What’s a pessimist?
    Fist glances back at her and he sees a drop of blood blossom in the corner of her eye and then slide down her cheek. The bruises on her throat dance as shadows drift across her neck. His eyes tear. He trembles. He thinks, How could anyone ever hurt you, especially like that?
    He cries a while and he’s not ashamed. What can men’s judgments do to him? He knows they’re unsubstantial, braced by nothing more than the way they were raised and their own fears. He wipes his eyes but the tears keep coming. He thinks, You were eight-years-old. You loved horses and thought the world was beautiful …and the transgressions against her fill his heart with so much hate he chokes.
    Fist climbs out of the car with Karen crying, Take us with you …
    The bricks in the walls scream with the passion of the damned, skewered with time and inattention. Forgotten. Left behind.
    He glances up and down the street, looking for the bum, looking for anyone who feels this electricity in the air, this hopelessness and unfairness that squat on the sidewalk, sucking dreams from the air and exhaling nightmares.
    He shakes his head.
    A grocery cart, rusty and bent, crouches near the corner, bordering a wide and dark alley. He moves