Free When We Join Jesus in Hell by Lee Thompson Page A

sometimes, how quickly chaos pounced, never the discriminator. And also how easy it was for the little lizard to love without expectations. So easy to please. So true about her motives. He wanted that back.
    Fist put one foot in front of the other, up the stairs, his buzz winding down and nerves rattled because he didn’t want another fight with Karen. He knew she didn’t like him drinking because it brought out his sharp edges, made his kindness evaporate, made him more like his father. But he wasn’t feeling it tonight. He only wanted to sleep, go to work in the morning, pretend for a little while longer that it all mattered.
    The bedroom door was shut. For a moment he considered sleeping on the couch, then decided against it, thinking, I pay the bills. I bought the goddamn bed .
    He stepped inside, the light so bright it flashed around in his skull, bouncing between his eyes and he heard someone grunting and someone whimpering and it took a moment to get his bearings. He glanced at the bed where two bodies moved, intimate, close, and for a moment he thought he’d stepped into the Twilight Zone, walked back in time to find himself making love to his wife, both of them enjoying it, but no, that wasn’t right. The man in the bed was black and he kept saying, “Say my name. Jesus. Say it.” And Karen tried but a hand held her mouth shut and those hips kept pounding into her and Fist thought, Here we go. This ain’t so mundane, is it?
    But deep inside he was hurting. He loved her, always had, and knew he always would. She wasn’t the problem. He was. He was too normal now, too plain, too tired . So she was fucking a dude on the side. So he’d caught them. He didn’t really blame her though he’d wished she would have done it somewhere else. That would have made it a little easier to swallow.
    He watched them for a minute more, let his sorrow roar inside him, not sure if he should just leave them to it or go down stairs and grab a butcher knife, the whole time the black guy saying, “Say my name. Jesus. Say it.”
    Karen whimpered and that wasn’t something she did when she was enjoying it. At least she hadn’t ever done it with Fist. He approached the bed, wanting to tell the guy to ease up on her, let her have some fun too and quit demanding so much because it was getting old, even for him, an innocent bystander.
    Jesus must have heard a floorboard creak. He whipped his head around, met Fist’s gaze, and Fist saw the knife the kid held, the blade pressed up just beneath Karen’s chin. He stopped moving. They all did. Karen had tears in her eyes. He felt them gather in his own. Fist said, “Get out of my bed.”
    “What?”
    “Get off of my wife, you stupid motherfucker.”
    “You know who you’re talking to?” He pulled the blade up, as if to say, See, I got a knife. I could kill this bitch, kill you too, if I want and there ain’t nothing your rich ass can do about it.
    But Fist was done talking. He knew this moment was burned into their lives, there was no erasing it, there was only time to step up to the plate and right what he could for his wife’s sake, and he knew it was impossible to make things better for her, nothing could fix this, and it tore him up. And he just wanted to hold her, tell her that everything would be all right, if the lies helped.
    He stepped to the closet. He slid the door open. The kid jumped out of bed, said, “What you doing, man?” The urgency in his voice suggesting that Fist was going for a gun, maybe a nice Benali 12 gauge, something he used to hunt ducks on trips with high-dollar clients.
    Jesus grabbed a handful of Karen’s hair and jerked her from the bed, digging the knife into the side of her neck. She trembled, pale and a bit flabby, and though Fist couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her naked, he thought she could easily be a looker in no time if she just went for a walk three times a week. He shook his head and pulled a baseball bat from the