The Summer That Melted Everything (6 page)

While Grand took after Dad's brown hair and blue eyes, I took after Mom. Our hair, in its rib-cage shape, fell in a blackness that wisdom calls night. Its winding way was a narrative of the hills, it was the snakes swimming the river, the crow strapped with worms. Dad called it
scared hair,
the way it curled up into itself at the ends.

This scare would fall to my shoulders then, as it would for the rest of my life, as it does now. Though in youth it was described as swept by the wind, now, in its white and dark gray staying, it is merely disheveled, falling across my shoulders like claws settled in. As is my beard, like a talon on my chest, but I like to think it is my best Walt Whitman.

I tried to count my moles once. The same flat ones she had and which she called chocolate chips. When I was a real small kid, I actually believed the moles were chocolate chips and that if she stood too close to the oven, they'd melt away, so I'd tug on her apron strings and she'd laugh as I led her from the heat.

There was something smeared about our eyes, mine and Mom's, like contact made with ink before it has had the chance to dry. In my youth, such eyes used to look exotic. Now they're just something tired.

“So.” Mom lightly clapped her hands once and turned to Sal and me. “Where would you boys like to go first? We can go to Chile, Egypt, Greece, New Zealand. And all in one afternoon.”

She led us into the house, which she had arranged and decorated as invertebrate versions of the nations of the world. Mom herself had never been anyplace but Breathed, so she based her countries on what books told her and what photographs showed her they were like. Because of this they lacked the culture of the traveler and instead held true to that glittered optimism of the one who has yet to travel beyond the picture on the postcard.

She showed Sal room after room, quietly and with only her nylons swishing. The rooms verged on the gaudy, with trinkets, paintings, bright wallpaper done up in the countries' colors and floras. Fabric was imported. Wood was country specific. The most expensive items were special ordered over the phone, the cheaper charms straight from catalog. She did hire carpenters, painters, artists, any and all who would carve for her the Taj Mahal in our dining room table, Saint Basil's Cathedral in the fireplace mantel, the Great Wall in the crown molding.

Making a world proved to be expensive, and had there been only Dad's income, we would have lost more than the respect of the rooms. But Mom was the daughter of the tennis shoe king of Breathed, and after he died she became the sole heir of Breathed Shoe Company, with the factory located just outside town.

“Folks say I shut myself up, never seein' the world, but I ask ya how can anyone see as much of the world as I see on a daily basis?” She spun in the middle of Spain.

“But they're not the real places.” Sal's statement brought her to a sudden stop. “That Machu Picchu in the other room is smaller than a shrub. Don't you want to see the real places? The real world? Feel the sun on your face as you marvel at the pyramids? Feel the rain while on top of the Eiffel Tower?”

I nudged him with my elbow. “I told ya she's afraid of the rain.”

Mom dropped to the floor, crossing her lanky legs beneath the billowy skirt of her dress. She propped her elbows up on her knees and held her face with a sigh while the shadows of the room lengthened out toward her, making her one of them.

“What's the matter with her?” Sal looked on.

“I'm fine.” Her whisper crippled her words. “You boys go on, have your fun. Don't worry 'bout me. I've a whole world 'round me. Why shouldn't I be fine?”

“C'mon.” I tugged his arm. “I'm starvin'. Let's make some sandwiches.”

“I don't want sandwiches.” He groaned like a true kid as I pulled him into the kitchen. “I want ice cream.”

“Oh, that's right.” I let his thin arm go. On my way to the freezer he asked about Mom's fear of the rain.

“Oh, um…” I tossed around the frozen vegetables, looking for any ice cream. “Don't know, really.”

“You've never asked her?”

“Oh, man, I forgot the groceries on the porch.”

“I said, you've never asked her?”

“Well, yeah, I…” I saw the box of frozen fish sticks. “I think it has somethin' to do with a fish or swimmin' or somethin'. I don't remember.”

“You don't remember why your mother is afraid?”

“We've got Popsicles.” I pulled the open box out of the freezer and peered inside. “Grape is all that's left.”

I offered one toward him. He shook his head and asked again about her fear.

“I told ya, it has somethin' to do with a fish.” I flung the box back into the freezer.

“But you don't know for sure?”

“No, I don't. Lay off it.”

“If I had a mother, I would know for sure why she was afraid.”

“Don'tcha have one?”

He shook his head low.

“I don't know if that's true, Amos.” Dad stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the sheriff beside him.

“Why'd you call him Amos, Dad?”

“I'm not Amos, sir.” Sal looked from the balding sheriff to Dad and then back again.

“You sure fit the description. Best start to come clean now, sonny.” The sheriff crossed his arms over his bulging stomach, his leaner days having been lost.

“Really, I'm not.”

“You said he matched the description. What was it?” I had asked Dad, but the sheriff was the one to answer, “A boy of thirteen. Black. Wearin' overalls. No shoes. A runaway been missin' for two months.”

“Is that all the description?” I looked at Sal.

“It's enough, ain't it?” The sheriff was the type of man who spit aggressively when outdoors. It was a great strain for him to keep from spitting when indoors, and I saw this very strain as he cleared his throat.

“Well, what about his eyes? Do they say if this Amos has green eyes?”

The sheriff looked annoyed with my questioning. “Listen, Fieldin', they don't say nothin' 'bout eye color, but I've no doubt that there boy is this missin' Amos.” His big lips pushed out in a sigh as he looked at Sal. “Your folks will be here tomorrow mornin', rise and shine or rise and dull—either way, this little lie of yours will have run its course.

“In the meantime, since we've no holdin' cell for little boys in our jail, me and Mr. Bliss think it's a good idea for you to roost here till your folks arrive. Hear me, sonny?” The sheriff had hung onto the Arkansas accent of his roots.

“You can stay in my room, Sal.”

“He can stay in one of the spares.” Dad patted his tie, which was safe in his vest. “He probably wants his own room to himself.”

Sal looked up at Dad. “If it's all right, I'd like to stay with Fielding.”

“I don't know.” Dad rubbed some tension out of his shoulder. “It's so terribly hot in here, isn't it? Where's your mother, Fielding? I should talk to her.”

“Somewhere in there. I think Madagascar. Or was it Spain?”

“Well, if that's all, Autopsy, I best be goin'.” The sheriff adjusted his belt, the sweat marks beneath his pits looking like gigantic ponds. “Got a call on the way here about Grayson.”

“Mr. Elohim?” I glanced at Sal. “What about 'im? We just saw 'im.”

“Ah, that midget's all kinds of crazy.”

Dad cleared his throat. “They like to be called
dwarf,
I think. Or maybe
little person.
Course, that makes them sound less than, doesn't it?”

“First we lost
ni—
” The sheriff quickly stopped himself from finishing the word while glancing from Dad to Sal. “We lost the N-word, and now we're losin'
midget.
Next thing ya know, we won't be able to call people ugly. It'll be
appearance impaired,
or somethin' political like that.”

“What'd Mr. Elohim do?” I asked again.

“Well, apparently he went into Juniper's and took all the ice cream outta the freezers and from the back storage. Threw it in a pile in the middle of one of the aisles and used his big propane torch, you know the one he clears brush with, to set fire to it all. Store was unharmed, as the large exhaust fan in the ceilin' sucked up the majority of the smoke. But I hear melted milk is everywhere.”

“So all the ice cream?” Sal slumped. “It's all—”

“Been put to death.” The sheriff's laugh sounded like a shovel scratching sandstone.

“Will you arrest him then, Sheriff?” Sal was as serious as they come. “Arrest Mr. Elohim for murder?”

The sheriff simply smiled, his crooked teeth small and gray. He shook Dad's hand and hollered a farewell to Mom on his way out of the house.

“What a day.” Dad stepped to the freezer, grabbing out a Popsicle. “It sure is smoldering, isn't it?”

Sal sat at the table, removing the bowl and spoon from his overalls and placing them in front of him.

“You still, uh, keeping that thought going?” Dad stood slurping the grape Popsicle, already melting. “That you are the devil?”

“I am the devil.”

Dad held the dripping Popsicle over the sink. “Prove it. Prove that you're really him, really the Lord of Flies. Go on. Show me your horns.”

“I've never had horns. That's always been something made up to decorate my story and clog my chance not to be a beast.”

“Well, what about your wings? You were once an angel, right? Wings can't just be decoration of that story. So where are your wings, Lucifer?”

“The moment I fell, my wings wilted like roses left too long in the vase. The misery of the bare back is to live after flight, to be the low that will never again rise.

“To live on land is to live in a dimming station, but to fly above, everything sparkles, everything is endlessly crystal. Even the dry dirt improves to jewel when you can be the wings over it.

“To be removed from flight is to be removed from the comet lines, the star-soaked song. How can I go on from that? How can I be something of value when I've lost my most valuable me? Land is my forever now, my thoroughly ended heaven. No sky will have me, no God either.

“I am the warning to all little children before bedtime. Say your prayers, be done with sin, lest you become the devil, the one too sunk, no save will have him.”

Dad stared in wonder, as if in the presence of a poet and his pain. “How old are you again?”

“I can show you what is left of my wings.” Sal stood and unbuckled his overalls as he turned around to reveal two long scars on the edges of his shoulder blades.

“No matter what form I take, the scars take it with me. I turned into an earthworm once and they turned into it with me.” He rebuckled his overalls and sat back down.

Dad laid the dripping Popsicle in the sink before taking a seat at the table. “You can change into anything you want?”

“Not anything with wings. I'll never have them again.”

“So what we see before us now, it isn't really you after all?”

Sal sighed so light, it was almost hidden if not for the slight raise in his shoulders. “What you see before you is what lost reflects when it looks into a muddy puddle.”

Mom turned an electric fan on in the next room. The battle between heat and home had begun.

I spoke next. Dad was too busy. His eyes were trying to help his thoughts find the seams in the boy before him.

“What about this Amos?” I asked. “Sal?”

He nodded his head. “I know about him. I met him.”

“Where?” Dad sat up.

“It smelled like … cinder blocks.” Sal looked down at the bowl and spoon. “I'd like to wash these, if I may?”

Dad nodded as he tapped his fingers on the table, clearly in a hurry to put the puzzle before him together and solve the mystery. “I'll give you this, son, you are convincing, but I got a feeling when those parents show tomorrow morning that you will be their son. A very imaginative son, but a son nonetheless.”

Dad left, saying he was going to check on Mom.

As Sal washed the bowl and spoon, I stared at the wing scars on his back, following his blades of shoulder. No one could be blind to the scars' near perfect sameness.

“I wish I could fly.” I said it more to myself than to him.

The spoon clanked against the sink's side and he flinched. “Has your father ever thrown you up on his shoulders? Carried you around?”

“Sure, when I was a cricket.”

“Then you've felt what it feels like to fly. It is being carried by something that raises you up while at the same time promises to never drop you.”

“Well, if that's the case, then when you flew I guess you knew what it's like to be carried by a father.”

He stopped washing the bowl, the running water the only sound. He turned it off, and in its place of rushing, he came slow to say, “And yet why is it I stand here not knowing just that? Knowing only the feeling of falling, the blood dripping like red feathers down my back.”

 

5

The hell within him

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
4:20

O
LD MAN, WHY
do you buy so many rolls of aluminum foil? For my sins, I answer, to make them beautiful.

I write my sins on a piece of foil and place it on the ground with a rock on its corner so the foil doesn't get carried off. Then I go away from it. Go a distance from it because then, from afar, the sins become beautiful silver things that catch the light of the sun so brightly, heaven is left in want.

I tried. Let it be said I did try. When I was twenty-nine I jumped out of a plane over the sweeping canola fields of North Dakota. Before I got on the plane, I placed my sins amongst the blooming yellow crop. A bullet here, a gun over there, a few baseballs scattered throughout. Really, they were all melted candles. Isn't that what sin is, after all? Life given too much flame? The devil's at the wick, and the wax heads south.