Grandpa Leon was light in his arms, Beau’s adrenaline adding layers of iron to his muscles. He pushed through the brush and stopped at the edge of the pool.
“Madre de Dios,” Leon muttered. He put his hands out to feel the hairy purple blossoms shifting like flotsam atop their spiny stalks. There were so many of them bunched together, fighting for the sunlight that punched through the canopy above the dry pool.
Old brown thorns pricked Beau’s hands as he dug down into the peat. It was damp and rich. He held it under Leon’s nose. The old man inhaled deep.
“I can’t smell it, but it’s gotta be there. Like the sandwich?” he asked.
“Pretty close,” Beau said. In fact, it was really close. Beau’s eyes had started watering even before he bent down close to the earth.
Leon took a great pinch of the loose peat and crammed it into his mouth. He ground it between his teeth, washing the stuff back and forth across his tongue like some fancy sommelier, before spitting it back on the ground.
“Let’s light her up,” he said.
They stood upwind to set the flame. Grandpa Leon’s hands shook so it took him ten fumbles on the wheel before he could bring a spark. The flame rose gracefully above his bouncing fingers and soon crawled off the wick and across the pile of dead thistle stalks.
“What’s ‘gotta be there’, Grandpa? Is this the fountain of youth?”
Leon laughed. “I thought your mother told you not to believe my prattle.”
“She did. So did everybody else.”
“That’s the thing about a really good secret. You keep it to yourself and people will spend all their time and money trying to wrest it from you. You tell it out loud, in just the right way, and everyone knows you for crazy.”
“I ain’t no good judge of that,” Beau answered. “Far as I could tell, you were just my Grandpa.”
Leon pulled his eyes away from the flames, the hot ribbons rising now into the outside edge of living stalks and the purple hairs above beginning to wither in the heat.
“Beau, I never knew if you believed me—I mean, you heard more parts of my story than anyone. But I never knew if you believed or just accepted it…or accepted me. I would have given up if wasn’t…” The old man’s eyes traced about Beau’s face as if by noting each part he would better remember the whole. “Well, let’s just say you have kept me dry in the wet seasons.” Leon squeezed his grandson’s shoulder before turning his gaze back to the fire. Beau brushed the smoke and water out of his eyes and watched with him.
“There is no fountain of youth,” he added as the fire grew, smoke curling up into the sunlight and sparks snapping and popping. “Everyone’s guessed that now. I’ve been telling you what there was, though—ever since your dad left and we’ve been coming out here. What have we been coming out here for, Beau?”
“You want something to grow, or something to heal, you burn it,” Beau answered. “Fire makes more thistles.”
“What else?” Leon asked, unbuttoning his shirt as if to save it from the sweat starting to roll down his neck.
“To cook a salamander or a baby alligator for our bellies.” The old words made him feel eight years old again and he stared at the flames as if they were alive.
The fire was hungry and the more it ate the wider its mouth spread. Purple blossoms fell as their stalks were eaten out from under them. The flames reached up above their heads as the fire dug into the layers of brush in the dried pool.
“Salamanders, Beau,” Leon said. “The Indians put them in springs to keep them cold and asleep. So the water did have some curative—but it was always the salamanders you had to find.”
The wind pushed the smoke into Beau’s face. He took a step back from the hot ash, and the oily spice that was somehow intensified by the heat. Leon took the wash of smoke with relish, inhaling again out of habit.
Retreating broke Beau’s nostalgic reverie and he suddenly saw Leon was naked, save for the scars that outlined the smooth skin image of a younger Beau held to his chest.
The wind pushed again, and this time brought enough heat that the gray hair on Leon’s shoulders crisped. As if that first burning touch was an invitation, Leon stepped forward and the flames closed around the old man like a slamming door.
“Grandpa!” Beau shouted. His legs coiled to spring, then began to shake. He knew the pain that was in there and was not strong enough to take its embrace.
“What the fuck did I do?” Beau moaned and dropped to the ground.
On his knees, Beau could see a little farther under the smoke and rising flame. Leon, too, had gone down to the ground. The fine, gray hair across his scalp had melted to a black paste sliding down his neck.
The fire had gone deep into the dry pool. Little geysers of steam and sputtering mud erupted from what moisture was left, buried under all that peat. Leon knelt in it and then his hands were wrestling with a coal. The hot white nugget sent spires of smoke up from his scorched palms. It was so hot, Leon could not keep hold of it, as if it were melting his skin and slipping out of his grasp. The struggle kicked up sparks and cinders, thickening the smoke around him.
The wind shifted and then Beau saw his grandpa trap the fire between his smoking, cupped hands. The old man turned, struggling to his feet, and thrust the white-hot coal into his mouth. Leon bit down and blue sparks exploded out from between his lips.
The fire on Leon’s body was nothing to the fire inside him. He walked back to the edge of the pool and the flesh across his frame looked like a scorched mud flat. It peeled back from the flames that poured out of his mouth and nose. More fire flickered between the deep cracks splitting his chest into pieces.
Beau stepped back as his grandpa stepped out of the flame. Like holding a flashlight behind a thumbnail, Leon’s gut glowed as the bright salamander flopped about.
Charred muscle began to fall off in big chunks: Leon’s left thigh, his right shoulder, a long curling peel down his left forearm. Jet-black hair pushed free the tattered old scalp. Eyelids blinked away the milky cataracts beneath. He took a deep breath through his nose and laughed.
Leon jumped up and down, like a workman trying to knock dried mud off his boots. The last ashen bits of flesh shook loose and mixed with the ash of the flowers drifting around them.
Naked, with hot, pink skin—scoured pink instead of the seared pink it should have been—Leon stood smiling. The toasted smell of cayenne and cinnamon wafted off him and, though it was overwhelmingly potent, Beau recognized it as the same scent he had found as a child, burying his face in the neck of his grandpa.
Leon pulled out a white-hot salamander tail from between his teeth. It blackened his lips where it touched and cooked the tips of his fingers where he grabbed it. His lips healed almost as quick as the little coal had seared them. Leon bit the dead skin that curled away and spat it off his tongue. He held the tail out to Beau.
“Doesn’t that hurt?”
“Salamander fire hurts worse than anything, but when you go about eating fire salamanders, that’s a pain you gotta get used to,” Leon answered.
Beau took the tail, feeling the healing fire of it char the skin down to the bone.
Other works by Daniel Tyler Gooden:
The Unmade Man
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