You Can't Burn Down Hell

Tony Godino

                                                                            1
There’s a string of lights over the cashbox and dusty bottles there. The old kind with big bulbs of blue, purple, orange, red, and green. They been here since I bought the bar 
comin’ up on damn near twenty years now. Didn’t do nothin’ to the place but put my 
name over the door. Gale’s Pub. Nothin’ fancy. Anyhow, I was washin’ pints when the
fellas made the bet, shakin’ my head at ‘em. Good fellas. Shame what happened. I 
‘member Edgar told Bill blue goes first so don’t pick blue, but Bill picked blue anyway.
He’s a mite thick, that one. Then Edgar picked purple which I never understood ‘cause 
ain’t that pretty much just blue? The idea was each of them regulars rolled up a twentydollar bill and slipped it into a bottle of Budweiser beer. When their light went out, they picked another, same color or not, up to them. They kept jumpin’ from light to light until there was none left. Last man standin’ gets a hundred bucks, they said.

          Year after year I watched the lights go out. They’d all stayed with the same color, 
‘cept for Tim. He played the field, switched it up. The other fellas didn’t like it ‘cause it 
could mean splittin’ the pot, ‘cept Bill. Bill didn’t mind. He’d always stand up for Tim, tell the fellas let ‘em be. Bill and Tim was close. Anyhow, Bill’s never went out. He stayed blue. Still is. Funny thing, the last orange bulb went out the day Judd died. He’s got a daughter in college up in Cleveland, got shot in a liquor store robbery. Shame what happened. He never had it easy, all those ex-wives bleedin’ him dry. He was a good man. Then old Joe took a heart attack, but his last red held for a good year after that. ‘Course then Edgar took his life with a rope in his kitchen. He was always quiet, so I guess I wasn’t all that surprised. Shortly after that, Tim did the same but with a needle. Tim died on green a little over four months ago, but green stayed shinin’ all this time. That is, ‘til today when the last green went out. Tim’s gone. I was moppin’ up when Bill come in and told me ‘bout Tim. Bill King still come in here every damn night fixin’ to tie one on, bless his heart. Been lookin’ like hell these days. None’a my business, ‘cept I gotta scrape ‘em off a stool every night at last call. Don’t even try to call him a cab nomore, ain’t worth the fight. I know he ain’t from around here, came to town a few years back, but never says nothin’ ‘bout where he come from. Anyhow, I can see right where he’s headed. Anyone could. Blue is the last man standin’.

                                                                        2
          It’s just me and Gale these days. Every night’s ‘bout the same. I drink ‘til I ain’t 
allowed to and I pay my tab and I get in my truck and I drive home past the brick 
buildin’s on Main and there’s somethin’ dead on the road there next to the train bridge 
so I move a little and go around it. And as I drive, I look at the stars and imagine each 
one as it drops out of the sky and takes somethin’, just one thing, from everyone, so they can see how I feel. Their new car, a few rows of crop, their son, somethin’, so they 
can see how it feels to lose somethin’, how I feel without everything. 
         I open my door and move to the parlor and I step over the spilled mail and I leave 
the lights off so I don’t have to see myself in the TV as I turn it on so I don’t have to hear myself. I kick off my boots and pull off my shirt and I walk into the kitchen to take a Budweiser beer from the fridge. I open it and I lean against the oven and look at the blue light from the moon layin’ dead all over the purple countertop. I look up at the 
orange spots on the drop ceilin’ tiles wonderin’ if the wood up there is strong enough to hold the rope. I follow the rope down from the top and I hang myself alone in the dark. I wonder how long it’d take for someone to find me. Maybe the mailman would smell it. I wonder how much of me would be left. Not much I bet. When they turn the lights on in the dark one night and see nothin’ but red bones on a green carpet, nobody cryin’.
         I pull the plastic knob out and the metal inside rattles and crashes against the 
walls of the drawer. I pick up a knife and look at myself in it. I close my eyes and see the cartoon that crawls around inside, this bucktooth, beer-bellied monster, baldin’ and dyin’out in the open. I walk across the kitchen lookin’ at the knife, draggin’ my bare feet along the floor. When I stumble some, I wonder if I’ll get lucky and land on the knife, if it’ll go through my neck and spill blood out on the old linoleum and I even smile some when I think about it poolin’ around the tiny metal edges of the fridge and oven in a way I bet they’d never really clean up, not completely.
         I set the knife down next to the mayo and walk to the fridge to get another
Budweiser beer and I drink it while I boil a couple hotdogs and I sit on the recliner and I put that hillbilly heroin pill past my lips and the light turns on inside like it has every night for four months and three days now. I know the path I’m on. I’ve been here before. Light to light. I know where it ends. The town down the road shuts up and everything goes dark for them, but not for me. My light doesn’t turn on ‘til a little after last call at Gale’s. 
         I set the pill bottle on the tin TV tray next to a bottle of Budweiser beer and 
shortly after that my eyes close and then they open and I change my shirt and I put my 
shoes back on and I drive to work and I go to Gale’s and I look at the twenties rolled up inside the bottle of Budweiser Beer there under the blue lights and I go home to do it all again and again and again. It can’t go on much longer. One of these days I’ll take what I found when I found Tim’s body and I’ll put it in my arm, just like he did. And with any luck, it’ll be enough to stay asleep. No matter. There’s nobody left to care.

          This was the 90’s when I lost everything. There wasn’t any pharmaceutical suits 
on trial or committees or nothin’. More than half the people leavin’ the ER in those days was sent home with a bottle of Percs. These scumbags was makin’ morphine lollipops, for christ’s sake. I hurt my back and they gave me a bottle. The pain didn’t go away and so the number on the bottle got higher. I did, too, and so I never noticed when a few went missin’. Then, my son moved on from the few he took and started snortin’ hard shit, and it wasn’t long after that when he started shootin’ it and left home, started sleepin’ at the trap house and never came back. I got clean, yeah, but not quick enough for my wife. She couldn’t stand the shame, the whole town lookin’ at her. She blamed me for everything with Teddy. Teddy’s my boy. He was a good boy. He’s a grown man now. I think so, anyway. Most days I choose to believe he cleaned up and made it through the sickness I gave ‘em. 
          Anyway, after all that, I overdosed and I lost my job, had a good one, too. And 
when I was leavin’ the ER, I figured nobody’d even know if I’d died. So, I decided I did. I left Michigan, and I came over here to Ohio. Small town, farms, nobody knows me. Bill King is good as dead. Go lookin’, you won’t find ‘em. Not here or anywhere else. Yeah, I started over. But there’s nobody left. ‘Cause hell’ll find you. Shit, maybe I am hell. Anyway, the lights all went out. Odds are my boy’s dead, too. If I can’t survive this, how could he? Hell found me. It’s bound to find him. So, tomorrow I’m havin’ a few at Gale’s, one for each of the fellas and one more for my boy, and then, I’m hangin’ myself.

                                                                          3
I’ve only got the weekend to make it from Grand Rapids to the bottom of Ohio, and god knows what I’ll find when I get there. Could be nothin’, could be a mess. Old Bill King always knew how to make a mess. But I learned the hard way that you gotta forgive.Holdin’ onto hate opens a hole that nothin’ll fill ‘cept drugs and drinkin’. We can save that man. Me and Little Billy King can save that man. Billy’s my boy. Named after his grandaddy. My sweet little Billy. 
          “Daddy?” he said to me, hangin’ from my leg ‘fore I left for work this mornin’, 
“Why you go ahia.”
            I picked him up and I pressed my nose to his and I told him Daddy has business 
in O-hio. I left it at that. That boy’s seen enough. He don’t need to know nothin’ about 
Old Bill King yet. But I do. Jenny and Mamma was quick to call ‘em dead, but I always 
knew he wasn’t. I always knew if I could survive this, he could, too. 
           Anyway, I hate to leave him, my Little Billy King. He’s a good boy. Three years 
old. Favorite food: Hotdogs, favorite color: Blue, just like his grandaddy. Jenny don’t like it when I say that, but I say it anyways. The boy’s healthy, happy, safe, he’ll be just fine. Jenny worries he’ll grow up and do like me and my daddy did, but he’s a good boy. I keep runnin’ the little things through my mind. His smilin’ little face. His mother’s soft touch on his somehow softer brow. The cracklin’ squeal of a should-be-in-bed-already belly tickle. He’s a good boy, my Little Billy King. I keep runnin’ these things through my head and turnin’ down the heat some every few miles to keep me awake as I drive south out of Michigan down i75. When I get to Toledo, I’ll find a motel and start up again in the mornin’, only about, say, another four more hours from there. 
           But I have to be back by Monday. I can’t lose a day of work at CopyCat, just got 
manager. Since Jenny’s RA’s been severe, she can’t punch a clock. She’s a damn good woman and I can’t say I don’t need her at home, but one paycheck ain’t enough. 
‘Specially now with the child psychologist Billy been seein’. Boy saw a lot in that first 
year or two. But we pray every day he didn’t see too much.
           And you know the state ain’t doin’ nothin’ to help Jenny or the boy. We’re 
drownin’ in hospital bills and they don’t send nothin’ but letters. You see ‘em on the 
news, goin’ after CEO’s and things, suin’ the devils who made those damned pills that 
got half this country burnin’. But they’ll never catch ‘em. You can’t fix evil by sendin’ it to hell. They deserve each other, the suits and the state. Us plain folks gotta stick 
together, help our own.
           Anyway, Billy saved our lives. So, I’ll die keepin’ him alive. We were in a bad 
place, Jenny and me. If she didn’t get pregnant, we would’ve died, plain and simple. 
Wasn’t soon enough, though. Never is. We gave Billy more than just a reason to see a 
shrink at three. You see, Billy was born addicted to the shit we was shootin’. His 
seizures—I mean a small baby gettin’ shot with some kinda lab-made junk—if that don’t show you what kinda man you oughtta be then you ain’t no kinda man.
          Anyway, he’s a good boy, my Little Billy King.

                                                                          4
I don’t know what’s got into that boy ‘a mine. Leavin’ Jenny and Little Billy at home, 
drivin’ all the way down to the bottom of Ohio. I just got him back and he wants to go 
see that man. That drinkin’ man. That smackin’-me-around-with-a-baby-in-me man. 
That devil-on-each-shoulder, no good man. Teddy says he’s alive. Teddy says a while 
back he was leavin’ the hospital with sweet Little Billy and he ran into some nurse, his
old sponsor from his meetin’s. Nurse asked Teddy if his daddy was doin’ alright. Teddy 
told ‘em we had all figured Wicked Bill for dead when his landlord called us lookin’ for 
rent sayin’ all Wicked Bill’s clothes and things was on the curb. Nurse said nuh-uh, said he saw Wicked Bill King walk right out the ER and into a Greyhound headed south for Ohio a few years back. Course Teddy couldn’t let it go. He was always- oh well you know Teddy- he’s obsessed! So, he calls up every ER and dive bar from here to 
Hazard. I mean this boy wasted damn near four months on his lunch lookin’ for a junkie that never gave him nothin’ but a name.
            And then he calls me up last night. Says he found ‘em, Old Wicked Bill King. 
Says he’s alive. Says he’s living damn near five hundred miles south a here, some 
nowhere farm town. I told him don’t that tell you nothin’? He don’t wanna be found. But the boy don’t listen, never did. Says he’s drivin’ outta town soon as he locks up the copy shop Friday night. Just made manager! Asks me if I’ll come up from Lansing to help Jenny with the boy. Oh, that sweet little Billy King. I told him think of the boy! But he don’t listen. Never did. Never will. Always gotta learn the hard way. You ask me I say to hell with Bill King. That’s where he belongs. Either leave him there or he’ll bring it back with him.

                                                                           5
This is hell. Trying to get this bar ready for a Saturday night’ll make me madder than a 
wet hen, but I know the sun don’t come up to hear me crow, so why complain. I get by,
listenin’ to my music, a little Boston, a little Zeppelin, while I dry glasses, and set
napkins out on the bar. Always a rush come in after the game. Always busy when we 
play Valley View. All you see in here is purple shirts when we play Valley View, damn 
near whole town turns up, showin’ pride. But nothin’s doin’ yet. Just me and the old 
timers all been here since we opened. ‘Til a man come thunderin’ in, says he’s Bill’s
boy, the one who called here a few days back askin’ ‘bout Bill King. I told ‘em yeah I 
know Bill King and what of it. Boy just hung up. I don’t think much of it ‘til he come in 
here in a huff askin’ where Bill lives. I tell him take Main outta town past the train bridge and it isn’t much but a fifteen-minute drive down the 93. I tell him 93 might be backed up when he hits the high school, big game, it’ll be hell tonight, Valley View, that’s our rival, so he can just take Sherwood down to Biddlebaum if he’s in a rush, which he should be I tell ‘em, cause Bill was in here not but an hour ago with the devil in ‘em somethin’fierce. I tell ‘em about Tim. I tell ‘em that when Bill was in here before, he was lookin’ a lot like Tim did the last time I saw him, noddin’ off and droolin’ on the bartop, and we all know how that ended.
            So, the boy says thank you real big like and he’s rushin’ out but ‘fore he does he 
turns around and looks at the last light flickerin’ over the cashbox. Says it’s time I buy a new string. I tell him go bother somebody else and then the cold wind comes fast in 
when he opens the old green door and the red napkins blow off the damn bar all over 
the orange floor and the first bunch of purple shirts comes in so I turn ‘round to see to 
‘em but before I do I see that last blue pop and I wonder if it ain’t too late for old Bill 
King.