Burnt Tongues

  The muddy floor of the pole barn was wet. Cold patches spread through the knees of my jeans as I knelt over the can, sucking my fill, and everything inside me was light and fizzy. I’m like a balloon, hovering until my soul-head hits the ceiling. The high dissipates and the dots fade, and then you’re connected with the world again. Sort of.

  Huffing gasoline was just one of the creative ways Eric found to pass the time in a small town. We lived in Vernon, a footnote village on the way to the metropolis of Patoka two miles south. Patoka had six hundred folks, a bank, an IGA supermarket where the meat was always bad, and people drove their riding lawn mowers around to visit the neighbors.

  Vernon boasted a population of one hundred, if the white letters on the green highway sign were to be believed. Vernon, where some houses had spare-tire fences and collapsing roofs. Patched-up trailers with cars on blocks, cars that will never run again, missing limbs, put in a yard to warn against invaders. One business, a little diner joint called Joyce’s, and they closed at lunchtime—they only made money from early-rising farmers passing through, and I don’t remember them serving anything but biscuits, gravy, and coffee. Sometimes the place closed early when the biscuits ran out.

  If you lived in Vernon, you didn’t have video games. The commute to baseball practice was too far, and mothers worked. You went outside and passed the time. Dug a hole. Played with a stick. Went turtle hunting in the shit-brown ditch water, then found a turtle and wondered what the hell you were going to do with it, so you painted a number or your initials on the shell and put him back.

  If all of us were out, if Glenn, Patrick, and Jerry were out, we could have even teams. We’d play football or Indian ball, maybe even our favorite, basketball, but on a saggy rim in Jerry’s backyard that didn’t quite make ten feet and leaned to one side. We played hoops in strips of mud where dribbling and old sneakers had worn the grass away.

  In the summers, we would hike down the railroad tracks and camp and pretend packs of coyotes would kill us if we didn’t keep the fire high. We played night tag, slipping down hills with grass wet from the early morning, thinking it made us cool to stay up all night.

  Glenn was the oldest and would smuggle out a couple beers every once in a while, and we’d drink and grimace and act like we liked it. Jerry, ever the jokester, would piss on the dead fire every morning and proclaim that the bacon was cooking as the blackened logs hissed, a joke that never got old. But the burned piss smell feels closer than the memory of him laughing.

  Eric went camping with us, but just once, during our last normal summer. We were all sitting around the fire, Jerry, Patrick, Glenn, and myself. We weren’t Boy Scouts, and Patrick started the fire with a thermos of gas he’d brought with him, then we’d burn whatever we could find. We’d roast wieners over creosote-soaked railroad ties, the heat splitting the hot dogs down the middle, and they tasted like old smoke. We’d cook marshmallows on bent hangers until they were black and bubbling. The treetops would disappear into the dark of night, their trunks lit by the fire—crickets and loons yipping and chirping around us. Sometimes a coyote would yodel, all too close. We’d throw on another log or railroad tie, open another beer, and try not to be the first one to act scared.

  Glenn would tell us about the world. He was an ancient thirteen and a half and had a girlfriend, and he told us stories about where, exactly, the hole to the vagina was located (not up front but underneath, near the asshole). He went through the proper position of the hands during a kiss, which is to say, in all the soft places young hands weren’t supposed to be but wanted to. He chugged a beer when I couldn’t even choke down two sips in a row without gagging.

  “Boys, kissing a girl’s like sucking whipped cream straight from the plastic spike, all wet and sticky.” He sat on a dead stump, a heavy throne only he could heft up the hill and into our campsite. His elbows dug into his knees; as he leaned over, the can of Natural Light in his hand dangerously tilted to the side.

  “Kissing a girl ain’t no big deal,” Eric said. “Done it a bunch.”

  “With your skinny-ass sister,” Glenn said and laughed, then drank his beer.

  Eric sat on his stump, staring at his shoes, never looking at our eyes once the rest of the night. I guess he was my friend at the time. He taught me how to huff gas, how to start a fire with a magnifying glass, and how to skip rocks on shallow creek water.

  Eric brought a spray paint can out of his knapsack and started shaking it while we talked. We all looked at him funny. The balls inside the can sounded like a snake rattle, and he threw the can in the fire.

  No one moved. We waited for Glenn to speak on this particular action.

  “You a retard or something?” he said. “You want to get burned up?”

  Still, no one moved. Jerry, a skinny kid who looked like Howdy Doody, just sat there roasting marshmallows over the hissing can, which was blowing quite a stream of flame out the top where the spray knob had melted.

  “Is that going to blow?” Patrick asked. It was one of his more intelligent questions; he was always kind of slow.

  Then the pop rattled my ears. The explosion knocked me off my lawn chair; I swear the can whizzed by my head. I

  remember Eric laughing at me, at how scared I was. The smell of everyone’s singed hair was heavy, then swept away by a night breeze, my skin intact for now. Eric and gasoline, Eric and fire—I should have known then.

  He laughed at our fear until Glenn pushed him down, the dust puffing up in whooshes around the impact of his landing.

  “Fucking retard,” Glenn said, then drew back like he was going to punch him. Eric flinched, and Glenn dropped his hand, as if he weren’t worth it.

  Eric was the only kid in Vernon who never made it all the way into our group. We were already into sports, starting to prefer them instead of looking for turtles. He made uneven teams and sucked at sports anyway. He went from turtles to looking for kittens on his own. He found a wild litter of kittens, and he kept them in an empty hay barn where he would hang one up by its tail and throw knives at it. One day he invited me to come over and check out his new game, and I did. He lanced a kitten with his first throw, as if he’d practiced long hours to show me how good he’d gotten.

  Felt wrong to see a dead kitten swaying from the end of a rope, no longer squirming or mewing, and I wanted to leave. I wanted to throw the football around.

  “Got six more runnin’ around here, if you want to stay,” he said.

  I left anyway.

  We kept camping out without inviting Eric, and I guess he had enough of that. He invited me to his own campout, right outside his trailer, a dirty white single-wide bitten by rust that had holes in the floor and leaky faucets. Made my little house look like a mansion, so it felt good sometimes to go inside and see how he lived, to see that I was somehow better than he was.

  “My mom’s gone,” he said, standing on my porch. He’d come over just to invite me and waited for the answer like a shy girl, his skinny hands in the pockets of his familiar, hole-filled jeans. “It’ll be better than going out to the tracks. I promise.”

  I was bored, the other guys weren’t camping that night, and he looked sad, so I said yes, but I told him, no kittens. He said he had a can of gas instead.

  I didn’t get out to his tent until after the chores were finished and it was dark. A one-pole tent was set up next to his trailer. No fire, no lantern. The grass was wet, looking white and silvery under the distant sodium twinkle of the streetlights. I wondered if he was even inside, but I heard some muffled noises coming from the tent.

  Can’t really knock on a tent, so I just pulled the flap open. Eric was on top of his older sister. I couldn’t tell if they had clothes on, but I saw her bare shoulders, and his face was buried in her chest. I smelled gasoline mixed with salt and sweat. She didn’t struggle or scream. Her eyes, catlike and open too wide, gleamed in the dark. Figured they were huffed out and didn’t even know I was there.

  “Want some?” he said, knowing I
was there, frozen at the tent door. I don’t know if he meant the gas or to take a turn on his skinny, ugly sister, but I was passing either way.

  After that, I stayed away from Eric. My other friends agreed. We camped and talked about him, comparing notes, and Glenn made the proclamation that Eric was “fucked up,” that he got high on gas and grabbed his sister’s ass when they played in the yard. I told him he grabbed more than his sister’s ass and threw in the story about the kittens, and he was officially banished from our campouts and activities.

  Glenn beat the snot out of Eric a few days later. We were out at the rock pile, where the local townships kept their road chips in huge heaps as high as the power poles. We would play king of the mountain or tag or just plain climb and fall until our sweat mixed with gravel dust to make gray war paint.

  Eric tried to join us near the beginning of August, a scorching day when the rock was hot enough to feel through your sneakers. The top of the pile was flat that summer, making a platform of sorts, perfect for our king of the mountain games. We’d sent Patrick rolling to the bottom at least six times, but he kept scampering back at us. Jerry turned on me in the middle of it; “All’s fair in a royal rumble,” he’d said, and I rolled down so fast that I came to a stop in the high, cool grass of the ditch, laughing and itching.

  Eric pulled up on his bicycle, and we stopped and watched in sick wonder as he walked to the base of the pile and started to climb.

  “Stay off the pile,” Glenn said from the top. “Go fuck your sister or play with your stupid kittens. Do you fuck ’em before you kill ’em?”

  Eric’s eyes met mine. I was perched against the side of the pile, leaning on my elbows so I didn’t slide down near him, and I just kind of shrugged at him. I continued on to the top, where we all stood together, looking down at Eric.

  He tried to climb up; Glenn made him eat gravel. They scuffled but Glenn overpowered him, a for real game of king of the mountain. He threw Eric down onto the loose stones, then rubbed his face back and forth by the hair until Eric’s face was skinned up like someone made him kiss a cheese grater.

  “How important are those sister-fucking balls of yours?” Glenn asked, then kicked him right in the junk. Eric’s breath came out in a squeaking gasp as Glenn cocked his leg slowly and punted Eric’s groin one more time for good measure.

  Eric rolled away from the beating, lying at the bottom, quivering, until he had enough gumption to hobble home.

  He didn’t wait long to retaliate.

  The next day, I went to Glenn’s house to hopefully start up a game of football. It was early afternoon, before the sun was fully over the broken houses in eastern Vernon. The grass all over town was brown and dormant and itched when you fell in it, sticking to sweating skin in dead little bits until you took a bath.

  Never saw Glenn cry before—he was older. Tougher. His beagle, Frankie, was curled up near Glenn’s old shed. The eave of the shed made a slice of shade that Frankie found, and he had his bloody snout tucked against his body.

  The blood was coming from Frankie’s eye sockets. Glenn stroked his fur, comforting him. I could see Frankie’s rib cage pulsing, breathing fast. He was shivering and whimpering.

  “What happened?” I said, kneeling next to them.

  “Eric. Right?” In a town so small, it couldn’t have been anyone but Eric who took out Frankie’s eyes, and it looked like a knife did it. Sloppy work.

  “What do we do?” he asked me. “Can he get all better?”

  I shrugged.

  He grabbed my shirt and screamed, “You’re the smart one. You know what to do, so what the fuck do we do?”

  I asked him if he still had his .22 rifle, because Frankie either needed to be put down or he’d live blind, and we agreed that living blind was no way to live for a dog.

  He shot him right under the eave of that shed, point-blank with his eyes closed. I helped Glenn carry Frankie’s body out to our campout place. The dog never camped with us, but it was our favorite place, and we could visit him often. We dug a hole with little garden shovels and our hands until our fingernails were gritty with earth. Glenn dug slow, crying into the hole, Frankie’s body limp by the growing pile of dirt.

  Eric wasn’t safe on the streets anymore. Even when school started, Glenn hunted him. The school was in Patoka, and kindergarten tots through high school seniors were all under the same roof, making for about two hundred students total. The sidewalks always had tobacco splotches on the concrete. Inside, brown rings were on the white panels of the drop ceiling in every classroom, and they were left that way, so when it rained teachers knew where to put the buckets.

  Glenn caught Eric on the first day of school and dragged him into the boiler room, then flailed at his face until it was bloody. He spit on him. Not a week later, he put him in a figure four leg lock, the corny old wrestling move that looked fake on television, and cranked Eric’s knee so hard, he limped all day in the hallways, cupping his throttled crotch. I do believe Eric’s crotch got kicked more than the soccer balls at recess early that school year.

  Eric was too skinny and weak to fight back when Glenn cornered him. He didn’t run. During our campouts we’d marvel at just how much punishment Eric could take, almost like he enjoyed it. We figured that he was taking it out on his sister’s pussy or on more animals. We laughed and choked down our bitter beers that tasted a little better every time we camped.

  In September that very same year, I remember standing in the crook of my tree, climbing for climbing’s sake. I remember wishing I could kiss a girl soon so that Glenn wasn’t the only one when I heard noises from my pole barn, reminding me that Eric had a key to the padlock. During our brief friendship, my pole barn had been a bit of a clubhouse, where we locked ourselves inside and huffed gasoline or made shitty birdhouses out of scrap wood. But now, Eric wasn’t my friend; he was an intruder.

  I noticed the lock limp against the bracket and knew it was him inside. I eased the door open and saw Eric kneeling by my mom’s riding mower, sucking on a piece of garden hose. The delivery end of the hose was spitting into a plastic mixing bowl he’d brought from home. I didn’t know anything about siphoning back then, but I guess he couldn’t get gas anywhere else.

  Eric had glassy eyes but not from the huff. Maybe sadness. He held a girl’s doll, one with ratty, hay-colored hair and

  no clothes.

  “Watch,” he said, and I watched. I couldn’t beat him up anyway. He was thirteen, tall and lean, and I was almost eleven. He dipped the doll’s head in the gas-filled bowl. He lit a match. The doll became a two-foot torch, and Eric showed off, making glowing circles in the air as he swung her around, proud, but he couldn’t control the flame that was melting her face off in pink drops. He threw the burning doll at the pole barn wall and shook his hand, like it burned him.

  A single ember of her burning hair fluttered through the air, rocking slowly down like a single snowflake, landing in the gasoline, setting off a geyser of flame.

  Eric kicked the bowl to keep the rising pillar of flame away from him, and I didn’t duck. I just stood there, the smart one, paralyzed by the swelling, twirling ball of fire that twisted in midair, hypnotized like we all were by the spray paint can in the fire. The gas ball hit me right in the shoulder, eating the fuel of my shirt and swelling. The flames smarted with their hot tips and rooted into my right arm, shearing the flesh away with their sharp bite.

  I heard Eric screaming to stop, drop, and roll. I did. I rolled until my head hit the lawn mower, and I got up, my leg still on fire, and I beat it out with my bare hands, slapping my jeans until the fire was gone.

  I looked around, the smoke from my own skin making me squint. Eric was gone, and I heard the clopping of his frantic steps against the gravel outside as he ran away. I stood there, stupid me, smoking, hairless, charred, and dying, falling to my knees.

  People sometimes ask me if it hurts to be on fire. The answer is no. It only hurts after you put yourself out. That pain is measured by how m
uch nerve damage you’ve done. Third-degree burns, like the ones on my arm, burn to the bone. No nerves left to register any pain. But second degree? Like the ones on my neck, lip, chest, arm, elbow, and torso? Like the ones on my leg? The nerve endings are exposed. The pain explodes and dots form in your vision, but this isn’t like huffing gas. You don’t see Jesus.

  I didn’t know what you do after you put yourself out, but going inside and calling my aunt and uncle seemed like a good idea; Mom was at work. They took me to the hospital, my fat uncle refusing to speed, my aunt hysterically telling him that no cop would actually keep us stopped. Clear fluid was dripping from my face and chest—burns don’t bleed; they leak. I couldn’t help myself and looked into the rearview mirror and saw pink and black, orange and brown, my raw skin spread back in little curls.

  The doctors stuck multiple IVs inside me and cut off my clothes. The sneakers, shirt, watch, and pants all melted to my skin, torn away like Band-Aids. Sterile lights in my eyes, the shadows of grown-ups huddled over me, working me over like a pit crew. They used tweezers and other cold instruments to tear off the dead, charred pieces of skin, to remove the blisters, to make my wounds as raw and clean as possible. They jammed fingers in my ass and asked if I could feel it.

  I told anyone who would listen that Eric stabs kittens, fucks his sister, huffs gas, and burned me on purpose. I told them he threw the gas on first, then tossed a lit match at me and said, “That will teach you.”

  I was in the hospital for three months, with every visitor, every nurse, and every doctor reminding me that the burns were not my fault.

  When I went home, my friends came to see me. I heard that Eric tried to go to school, but Glenn would hunt him every day and put a vicious beating on him—only now, teachers would look the other way. Glenn told me that men with suits and clipboards visited Eric’s house one day, and then Eric wasn’t in school anymore. He told me that I was still a poindexter, my brain wasn’t burned, and chicks dig scars, but I was growing up fast by then. I knew better.