Fiction: Tenderness (Will Haunt You Forever)

By Alex Sinclair

When the preacher pulled the pistol Jessica knew she was fucked.

It let her know how deep the shit she was in truly was, but in truth she’d known it was all a mistake the exact moment she’d hightailed out of the Squinting Cat ranch with The Wheezer's money and climbed onto a bus with a bag of donuts in her hand with the crisp notes pressed against her crotch. 

Her name was Jessica but all the tricks called her Puppy-fat because she was chubby and young-looking and seemingly glazed with the innocence that so many tricks seemed to crave.

She wasn’t beautiful and she wasn’t pretty.

She just had something that some men wanted to ruin, except it was an illusion because it was ruined already. The innocence that the wet-lipped mouth-breathers came to her doughy loins to devour was long gone but the illusion of it was enough to keep them coming through the doors of The Squinting Cat and keep The Wheezer rolling in cash. Looking back, Puppy-fat didn’t know why she did it. She was comfortable at the Cat. Comfortable and safe enough under The Wheezer's cancerous wings despite the tricks who asked her to pee on them or play daddy dearest. It was just too much to resist, that was all.

She’d always had an impulse control problem. A lack of tenderness had galvanised her against self-control and she chased the approval of loves filthy substitutes. The notes were sitting in a stack as delicious as any fudge sundae, winking at her from the inexplicably open safe. They were begging to be taken and before she knew what she was doing she had snatched up the notes and packed her bags. She rode the bus til it ran out of tarmac and then she’d hitchhiked the backroads in a chicken truck. She’d been in the town of Tenderness for two weeks. Tenderness was the bottom of the drip tray, nothing but clapboard streets and mosquitoes perched on the precarious edge of the swamp. Snakes and gators and truckers and dredgers with nothing in common but bad life decisions. One greasy diner, one storm-wrecked store that pumped gas and sold an assortment of aged nonsense. She’d gone in there only once for a refill of Twinkies and vowed never to go in again. The store owner was an ancient bastard tall as the gallows and blind as a busload of bats. When he climbed out of his chair he must’ve towered over her seven feet.

“Tenderness will haunt you forever,” he’d said to her cryptically. These swamp folk were something else she’d thought as she noticed the effigies and trinkets alongside the jugs of antifreeze. They allowed superstition to govern over their lives. She took her Twinkies and left. Puppy-fat laid low in a shabby motel until she’d convinced herself with enough boredom and window peeks that not even the Wheezer would bother looking for her down here. Not for three measly grand he wouldn’t. She began servicing tricks out of iron-forged habit. What else was a girl to do, she thought.

The convicted chomo’s and government-protected witnesses that came crawling out of the trailer park were the least of it. Solemn and meek with a persecuted air, all they needed was a fuck to let them know they still passed as human. The genetic mishaps that shuffled to her door from the swam were another fable.

The wet-brained fool at the desk was too pickled to care, even when she hung a cardboard sign on the door proclaiming her services in hastily scrawled magic marker. How funny she thought, how sickly ironic to end up in a town named after the thing that had been absent from her life. As for the shoddy mockery of tenderness that the tricks offered up to her, they could keep it. Nothing but a toxic stew cooked up for their own desire to get off. She’d prefer it if they just tore into her like the animals they were rather than shower her with their creepily elaborate fictions, but they didn’t have the spine for such honesty. Zero spines but enough creativity for anyone. Now looking at the preacher she realised that was the best of it. Whispering fuck me daddy into the ear of a drooling fantasist was the best it was ever going to get and it wasn’t going to get that good again. 

The preacher was crazier than a shithouse rat. There was a hole inside of him a mile wide. There was a hunger in his eyes that was plain to see but it wasn’t for food.

“Lets you and I take a drive, and if you scream I’ll open you up and suck out the air,” the preacher said casually. “What about the money?” Puppy-fat bleated, gesturing toward the notes spread out on the bed. “It ain’t about the money,” the preacher said.

She’d been eating more donuts and counting out The Wheezer's money again note by delicious note, drowning in fantasies of making it to California and getting big in the fuck film business when the preacher had rapped at the door. The distance she had run and the isolation of Tenderness itself had lulled her into a false sense of security. Her own delusion reframed the Wheezer as a reasonable man prone to bouts of uncontrollable forgiveness, so when she saw the gaunt but handsome man of the cloth through the peephole clutching a stack of bibles she’d thought nothing of it.

Just a stupid preacher peddling his flimsy fantasies she thought, wondering if she could somehow tempt him into abandoning his faith for her flesh. She could be a devious tease as if in rebellion against the warped version of adolescence forced upon her by the pederastic tendencies of her clients, and fuck it, the preacher was handsome. She was a woman goddamn it with a woman’s urges and if she could lure the preacher into her bed then what the hell. She’d have the preacher speaking in tongues alright.

The drunk at the counter was comatose with whiskey and when they got outside to the preacher's car the preacher led her to the trunk. It was already popped and lined out with sheets of plastic shower curtain.

“Get in,” he said and to her horror, she felt her body obey. It had always been the same. She’d always trotted beside fate, ready to jump when it clicked its fingers.

She opened her mouth to protest which is when she saw a white flash and tasted metal. The preacher had hit her and when the lid of the trunk came down she fought the urge to scream. Is this what death was going to be like? An absence of light for eternity? The thought scared her because it was nothing new to her. She couldn’t bear the idea that the end would be the same as the beginning, forever and ever on a loop. The shitty dirt roads of Tenderness treated her rougher than her tricks usually did. They bounced her around and threw her face into the trunk lid so hard she saw stars again.

The preacher pushed another fistful of Benzedrines into his mouth as he handled the car across the road toward the swamp. It drew him in like blood sucked into a syringe.

The preacher's name was Everett. Everett wasn’t a real preacher but people confessed their sins to him all the same once they saw the gun and the collar. They all did. People got real honest with him when the end reared its ugly head over the hill of their lives. Fate nominated him alone to hear the worst of their deeds and better him than no one at all, lest the big man damn them for it. The collar provided a sense of comfort, even if it had been part of the ruse that had brought them to the end. They saw the bible and thought it enough. Maybe they wagered if they told the truth the preacher would spare them. But he didn’t. He’d killed more people than cancer but it wasn’t like he enjoyed it. He wasn’t a sicko, it was just that punching someone's ticket was as easy as putting out cigarettes for him. Everett was afflicted with a terminal lack of feeling. A lack of tenderness. He’d been cold as a stone since that mule had kicked him square in the face and separated him from his senses. He hadn’t been quite right ever since. Everett’s daddy had been a door-to-door preacher for real and had tried to preach the rightness back into his strange son but it was no use. When the good book failed his father had used a bullwhip and a cattleprod to disperse the demons but it only seemed to multiply them. It was odd. The preacher couldn’t remember killing his father. All he could recall was the sight of the flames on the farmhouse licking the sky as his father's blood dripped from his fingers.

Puppy-fat decided in the stuffy coffin of the trunk that her one chance of survival was to give the preacher a taste of tenderness. Perhaps if she gave him a little of what she herself needed perhaps he’d spare her. She guessed he was driving her out into the swamp to leave her for the gators. She could smell it. A foetid primordial reek had slithered into the trunk to welcome her but the tender rot of it provided no comfort.

Puppy-fat slipped in and out of a feverish half-sleep plagued by visions of her stepfather Johnny Van Gogh smiling in the dark at her. Johnny Van Gogh the burglar with his missing ear and his breath foul with cigarettes. At some point, the car came to a halt. The trunk lid popped and she gasped in a ragged lungful of swamp air, expecting a pistol shot to tear through her head. But there was only the swamp. There it was with its arms outstretched for her, fronds and vines and a liturgy of bullfrogs burping out her funeral march. The steam swirled around them like a legion of freshly exorcised spirits.

The preacher pulled her out of the trunk and Puppy-fat immediately pressed her wasted flesh to him. Now or never she thought, thaw out this cold fish or die here. She’d only been wearing an oversized t-shirt and some skimpy undies when he’d snatched her. Her body was right there for him.

“What are you…” the preacher began as she kissed the sallow wax of his bloodless neck. His flesh was lifeless as something propped up in a museum exhibit, so she tried to breathe hot life into it. She tried to resuscitate him. She guessed his was a lonely life. His soul was lost in a vast interior wilderness and so she called out to it. Her pussy gummed his trouser leg until it was soaked and she nibbled his ear and let her hands crawl past the pistol tucked into his belt line, shooing away thoughts of snatching it up and plugging him with it. The swamp was no place for heroics. Only survival. The preacher stiffened as her hands found him, electrocuted with frigidity. She questioned whether he had ever felt a woman. She guessed his life had been one of reform school walls and crying silently into the dark. A life bereft of tenderness.

“Put your hands on me,” Puppy-fat murmured into his ear, and the preacher only gulped in response. Gulped and stood mute, a rabbit in the headlights. She pulled him down to a patch of grass on the bank of the swamp and laid out her large shirt as a crude mattress. The preacher looked away nervously at the sight of her rude nipples glistening in the silver syrup of the moonlight, looked away and licked his lips.

When it was over he lay panting beside her, staring skyward as if studying the constellations above. Puppy-fat caressed his chest and make-believed she loved him so hard she fooled herself. A part of her started to believe she loved him. Because if she loved him he wouldn’t kill her. She showered him with her most believable pillow talk, ignoring the bitter taste he passed into her mouth when they kissed and when he’d arrived at his climax he’d giggled uncontrollably. Puppy-fat laughed along with him as his come dripped down her legs, deceived by the same act that had stripped the preacher bare before her, tricked out by her own phoney, method-acted intimacy. For a moment they were lovers for real sharing a private post-coital joke. Two lovers laughing until the preacher suddenly sat up and took up his gun.

“The Wheezer wanted me to do you slow but because you showed me something sweet I’m gonna finish you quick. The wheezer asked me to roll you up in tape and drop you into the swamp but I ain’t gonna do you like that. You got heart kid so I’m gonna do you quick.”

Puppy-fat felt herself split into two jagged halves. She went outside herself. One half begged and sobbed and tugged on the preacher's trouser leg like some fairy book beggar whilst the other part watched from an eerily detached vantage.  

But I love you she heard herself wail, I love you my god I love you I love you. She smelled herself add to the stink of the swamp and it started to go black before the preacher even pulled the trigger. An abyss rose out of the swamp and when she locked eyes with it she knew she’d been a fool her whole life. She thought she knew darkness but what she’d seen was nothing compared to what was waiting. It started to swallow her up but there was nothing she could do except wonder what would happen to her body once the bullet evicted her soul from it. She knew the answer in her bones when a bull gator indolently hissed, as if on cue. She went to pieces then. Went to the pieces that the reptiles would tear her into and her separated half returned to its frantic twin in a rush of adrenaline. The damndest thing was she’d never felt so fiercely alive. Every cell in her body cried out for just one minute more of urgent life and her blood surged like lightning and she didn’t want to die. She wanted to return The Wheezer's money and she wanted to say sorry and she wanted to fuck the preacher again and eat all the donuts in the world but she knew like she knew her own face she didn’t want to die. Not here. Not like this. But the preacher's face told her it was too late.

 

#

 

On the way out of town, the preacher stopped at the store for gas.

The preacher looked in the rearview mirror and wiped away a speck of blood from his cheek before he climbed out. He couldn’t understand why the girl got so bent out of shape. He’d promised to do her quick. What was the problem?

The preacher smiled at the wonky Cola sign and pushed his way into the store.

Dust swirled in the gloom between aisles of long-forgotten produce, and at the far end sat the store owner, motionless in an old rocker in front of a darkened doorway.

“Howdy,” the preacher said. The store owner said nothing. He just stared as the preacher regarded long-expired bags of chips gnawed senseless by mice.

Even sitting down the preacher could see that the store owner was huge. Huge and ancient and bent up with the torments that time had unleashed on him. His hands were gnarled as a pair of excavated tree roots.

“For the gas,” the preacher said, losing his facade of godly patience, waving some notes in front of himself. The store owner made no attempt to move. He just sat there staring out from beneath the low brim of a stove pipe hat shiny with grease. The eyes below the brim were milky with cataracts, but they shone with a weird and eerie light.

Something about the old man unnerved the preacher. Perhaps it was the Bennies or the lack of sleep but the preacher felt on edge. He’d been stretched too tight for too long. He was one loud noise away from a shooting spree

The smile on the store owner's face put the preacher in mind of a wound stuffed with piano keys. The preacher had seen such a grin before in the face of a chimp at a roadside carnival before it had flung a ripe pile of shit into his father's face. When they got home his father had beat him as if he’d flung the shit himself. The store owner's smile made the preacher angry. It activated some long-buried fear deep within himself, detonated it like a foot finding a land mine and the preacher felt himself shake as he remembered his father's shit-flecked face on that silent ride home from the carnival, shit-flecked and dark as a storm. He felt like shooting the store owner where he sat for having a face that exhumed such terrible memories.

The preacher was in no mood. Murder always made him tired.

He needed to flop out on a motel room bed. He needed a bed and he needed a good shot of dope to submerge him into a vat of ice once again.

“I’ll leave the money here for you,” he said, placing the bills on a shelf next to a can of tuna before about-turning toward the door.

He had his hand against the glass ready to push his way out to the lot when the store-owner finally opened his mouth.

“What's a man of god doing carrying a gun?”

His voice rustled out like air let loose from a prised open coffin lid.

“I don’t need eyes to see you, boy. I don’t need eyes to see what you really are.”

The preacher stifled a chuckle and turned to look at the old man.

“You best not keep her waiting boy. Your newlywed won’t be happy if you keep her waiting much longer.”

The preacher looked out the window at the car. There was a figure in the back seat but he couldn’t make out who it was. It had started to rain and it was hard to see.

“Who the fuck is that?”

“That ain’t no way for a man of god to talk. You know who it is preacher. You know.”

“I had a thirst for damnation as deep as a well. A hunger that brought me down here. For whisky, for women, for devilment. I’d have cut out a man's heart for a coin in those days.”

The preacher saw the gold coin in the store-owners gnarled fingers and something black and wrinkled as a desiccated piece of fruit in the other.

“There was one beauty here I wanted for my own but she was frightened of me. She was just a whore but her eyes were emeralds and I wanted them. We only did it the one time. She preferred the affections of a stable boy no less and I just couldn’t take it. I’d tried all the hexes I could but they didn’t work. Nothing worked, not even the dolls and their pins so I made a deal with the boss and he made it so I could keep Effy for my own so long as I did it in the swamp. The boss made it so she would stay with me forever so long as I let her blood run into the water, but the boss isn’t without his sense of humour.”

The preacher's family were hill-folk and he’d heard his share of hocus pocus. That's all this was. Hocus pocus.

“When the boss said forever that's exactly what he meant because I slit old Effie's throat 300 years ago and I ain’t even close to dying. I’m as close to dying as old Effy is to living. Ain’t that right Effy?”

Something stirred in the doorway behind the old man and a voice said: “That's right dear.”

It wasn’t a woman that spoke. Whatever had spoken didn’t sound like a human at all. The preacher jumped clear out of his skin and pulled his gun.

“What I’m trying to say is that Tenderness will haunt you forever,” the old man said. “The deal I made with the boss applies to you. You ain’t the first. You won’t be the last.”

The preacher emptied the pistol into the store-keeper but when he got outside he thought he could hear the old bastard cackling. Cackling or the thing behind him was.

When he got in the car it was empty. There wasn’t anyone there but him. 

He laughed. 

“Ain’t nothing haunting me,” he said aloud. There weren’t no ghosts he thought. There was no way of haunting a man without any feelings. He inoculated himself nightly against such an occurrence with morphine, his numb hymn against remorse.

And then he saw her in the rearview behind him and realised he did have feelings. The fear in his heart he’d buried with drugs and murder came climbing out of its grave for him. The sight of her black eyes made it claw its way out of his chest.

“Oh shit,” he said. She wasn’t alone but he couldn’t bring himself to look at them all. He knew his daddy was among them because he could smell the gasoline and the chimp shit. They were all there waiting for him. Every single one of them. Her hands were ice against his skin, her tongue a dead leech. She had a lot to tell him about where she’d been and where he was going. She had a lot to tell him about tenderness.

Alex Sinclair is a writer from London. He is the author of the novel Dead Orchid (Anxiety Press) which is available on Amazon, and you can find his work in a variety of publications. If you don't follow him on X under the handle  @Alexrites he will be very disappointed.