The Summer That Melted Everything

  “Sal, where are you?” A crackle of twigs. “There you are.”

  He held up the revolver.

  “What you gonna do with that? Sal?”

  “She’s dying, so it isn’t a killing. It’s what has to be done.”

  “No.” I threw myself over her convulsing body. “She’ll be okay. She just needs to throw it up. Yeah, that’s it, throw up the poison.” I wasn’t sure how to induce vomiting in a dog, so I started to pinch her throat. The sticky saliva clung to my hand. I moved down and massaged her stomach as I pleaded with her to vomit. “Please, Granny. Just throw it up. Please.”

  All she did was look up at me with the same eyes she had used to beg for table scraps. Now begging for something else.

  “Why force her to suffer when you can take it all away?” He held the gun out to me.

  “I can’t kill her, Sal. She’s Granny. Like a real granny.”

  “You’re not going to kill her. Death has already started. You’re not initiating anything that isn’t already there. If you’re waiting for God to take care of it, He won’t. He doesn’t do that. By letting her suffer, you risk being God.

  “People always ask, why does God allow suffering? Why does He allow a child to be beaten? A woman to cry? A holocaust to happen? A good dog to die painfully? Simple truth is, He wants to see for Himself what we’ll do. He’s stood up the candle, put the devil at the wick, and now He wants to see if we blow it out or let it burn down. God is suffering’s biggest spectator.

  “Will you wait, Fielding? Will you wait to see for yourself what happens? If you’re strong enough to watch suffering without laying down the pain, then you’ve no place among men, Fielding. You are a spectator on the cusp. You are a god-in-training.” He kneeled and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

  “Just give me some room.” I shrugged him off. “I need to think.”

  He stood back, the gun dangling at his side as if the choice were so casual.

  “Hey, old girl.” I scratched her neck, and her tail wagged as best as it could. Only a dog could show such love in such pain.

  If only she could’ve told me it was okay to pick up the gun, to end her suffering. It’s having to make the decision all alone and them not being able to tell you it’s the right one. All I could see was the fear in her eyes. The fear of not knowing what was happening to her.

  I thought of all the things she had planned for the rest of the day. I could see her almost saying, I’ve got to get up from here. I’ve got to go home. Watch Mom fix dinner. Beg for some table scraps. Watch Dad sit and think. Think with him. Watch my boy yawn and go to bed with him so we can get up in the morning together.

  All the things she always did. Looking in her eyes, I could see these were all the things she wanted so desperately to get back to.

  I hated the way she looked at me as she lay there. Out of all the world, she looked at me, and I wanted to say, Look at the trees. It’s the last time. Look at the sky. It’s the last time. Look there, at that ant crawl the grass blade. It will be the last time you see it. That you see any of this.

  There was something about her eyes that made me see her death as final. There was no place after, her tears said. This was it. Dying animals have that effect. I think because you never see them in church preparing for an afterlife. You never see them wearing crosses around their necks, or lighting candles in Mass. It all seems so final with them. Their dying is not moving on, it’s going out.

  I wiped my eyes with my fists before asking for the gun. Sal didn’t say anything. Just placed it in my hand. I wasn’t sure if distance mattered. I placed the end of the barrel at the side of her trembling skull, beneath her ear, just in case it did.

  My hand was surprisingly still. Though I don’t know how.

  I could no longer breathe through my stuffed nose, so I drew in deep breaths through my mouth. I looked at Sal, so prepared. I hated him for not crying. I closed my eyes and lightly felt the trigger, its slight curve like a smooth tooth, a fang, ready to bite. I flexed my hand. I needed all my muscle. The gun was the heaviest thing I’d ever held up to that point in my life.

  When Granny started to whimper, I threw the gun down and ran. It felt like the only thing I could do. On the way, I tripped over the can and spilled the poison. Even with that, I kept running before stopping by a tree. The sound of the gun made me.

  As if I’d been shot myself, I fell to the ground, curling up into myself. I closed my eyes and rocked as I sang an old song Mom sang to me over the cradle.

  Down in the hills of Ohio,

  there’s a babe at sleep tonight.

  He’ll wake in the morn’ of Ohio,

  in the peaceful, golden light.

  “Fielding?”

  I opened my eyes to Sal standing over me, the gun held by the smoking barrel in his hand. “She’s still now. Like water healed of its ripples. She’s calm and at peace.”

  “I couldn’t do it, Sal.”

  “It’s all right, Fielding.” He sat down beside me. I heard the gun plop off to the ground on the other side of him.

  When he brought his hand up to his mouth to bite his nail, I saw the blood on the inside of his wrist.

  He saw me staring and lowered his hand. “It got on there from when I was checking for her pulse.”

  “I don’t want another dog.” I wiped my nose hard on my arm.

  “I never said anything.”

  “Folks always say that. ‘We’ll get ya another.’ I don’t want another one.”

  “All right.”

  For a long time, the only sound made was that of me finding my way back to breathing through my nose.

  “Sal?” I took a deep breath. “Not doin’ somethin’, am I a god-in-trainin’, like ya said?”

  He squinted, and I thought how like Dad he looked when he did that.

  “No. You’re just a boy. A boy holds a gun but cannot fire it, even when he knows it is the right thing to do. A god would never hold the gun in the first place. So you’re a man-in-training. And on the day you are asked to hold the gun once more, you will have to decide whether to stay the child … or finally become the man.”

  10

  A summer’s day, and with the setting sun

  Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 1:744–745

  WHEN I THINK of her as a grandmother, as old as I was young, with gray hair and a shawl around her frail shoulders to keep out the chill, what happened in those woods becomes something much harder to bear. Granny was my first loss, my first emptying. She was the something that matters for eternity.

  I haven’t had a dog since, though the neighbor boy has his mutt. The other day, I watched the two of them together. The dog did his best to catch the ball the boy threw. I tried to teach the boy to throw better, the way Grand taught me.

  I didn’t show the boy I framed his photograph, but he saw it just the same and smiled a little too much. I even told him so. He asked if I wanted to drop by his trailer for dinner. He said his mom was making her famous meat loaf and she always made too much of it, he said. I got to thinking about my place at their table.

  “Say, kid, I never see your old man around. Where’s he at?”

  I knew it wasn’t going to be a clean answer, the way he slowly dragged his finger across the dirt on my kitchen counter.

  “Mom says he’s in the jungle, findin’ the cure for cancer.” He kept his eyes on the counter. “Even though he died of it six years ago.”

  “Jesus.”

  He looked up at me. “So you comin’ to dinner?”

  How the hell could I refuse after that? Besides, it was meat loaf, and I haven’t had meat loaf since my mother’s, but when I got to their yellow trailer across the road from mine, it was too damn nice. The smell of dinner. The young mother in a dress. The table set and the boy and his dog just smiling away. To tell you the truth, I was a little scared. I don’t know how to be in that world anymore. That world of dinner and niceness. So I ran aw
ay as fast as I could. I sat there in the dark of my trailer while the light of theirs shined a yellow glow.

  A while later the boy came over, carrying a plate of food. I didn’t go to the door when he knocked, so he placed it on the milk crate and headed back home. I opened the door before he got too far away.

  “Why you like me so much, kid?”

  I didn’t say it loud, and for a moment I thought he didn’t hear me, but then he stopped and stood there. He was looking across the road at his own trailer, at his mother there in the window doing the dishes in the warmth of the light.

  “I remember one Halloween my dad dressed up like an old bum.” He softly smiled. “He looked like you.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he walked across the road and into his trailer.

  I sat down in the doorway of my own and stared into that clear shot of their kitchen, where I could see the boy give his mom a kiss on the cheek. He stayed there by her side, helping her wash the dishes, sharing suds between their fingers.

  The mutt, left outside, came smelling the meat loaf. I removed the foil and set the plate on the ground, letting him have the meal that was too nice for me. Once full, he yawned and lay down on his side. I had to look away because it was how we had laid Granny in her grave. I believe that dirt from burying her is still under my fingernails.

  We used some loose pieces of sandstone to break up the dry dirt. It was evening by the time we left the woods. We forgot the sheriff wanted to see Sal. When we got home, we told Dad Granny had been hit by a car. If we’d told him about the poison, then we would’ve had to tell him about the gun, after which we would’ve been punished for having the gun in the first place.

  When he asked to see Granny’s body, we said we had already buried her in the woods by the tree house in a small funeral. We showed our fingernails as evidence.

  Sal had grown agitated the whole time we were digging the hole, laying her body down in it. He wouldn’t even look at the gunshot wound. I knew what he had done was rubbing at him like little grains of sand scraping his bone. As I sat grieving by her grave, he said something that surprised me. I had to ask him to repeat it.

  “You heard me. You make me sick. You didn’t even have to do it. I did. So shut up your crying.”

  We didn’t speak the rest of the way home. I was relieved when Dad took him away to the sheriff’s. I went up to my room, sat on the edge of my bed, feeling on the edge myself. The sadness like a motor, idling inside me. Idling still. Sometimes vroom, vroom. But never off.

  “What’s wrong, little man?”

  Grand stood in my doorway, his dark brow trying to figure out on its own what was making his little brother cry on the edge.

  “Granny, she’s…” I didn’t say hit by a car. I told him the truth as he came in and sat beside me. I told him about the poison, the gun, the bang, the pile of dirt in the woods.

  He put his arms around me and pulled me into him. For seventy-one years I’ve been trying to find that feeling of being held by my brother. The other day I bought a bunch of those plastic-wrapped bread loafs. Unsliced. Wheat brown like the Midwest. I put them in the oven to warm, and when I took them out, I carried them to my bed and lay down with them, feeling their warmth. Holding that very thing and begging it to hold me back.

  Please, Grand, won’t you hold me back?

  “You know, little man, Sal did the right thing. When somethin’s dyin’ like that, you gotta end it. If I was sufferin’, dyin’ a slow death, I’d wanna end it early. Wouldn’t you?”

  I was quiet. He said that was all right. He asked where Sal was. I told him he was at the sheriff’s.

  “You let ’im go alone?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s not the Fielding I know. The boy who tiptoes behind. Listenin’ to and watchin’ all the things we try to hide. You are a тень. A shadow. I know this ’bout you, Fielding. That’s why I spray my cologne on your clothes. So I can smell you comin’. Smell you out.”

  He tousled my hair. “You need a haircut.”

  “No way. The girls like it. They think I’m a rock star.”

  He laughed as he ran his fingers through his own short hair. “Okay, rock star. Hey, you been puttin’ that sunscreen on I gotcha? The sun’s a bastard this summer, Fielding, and you gotta be careful with all them moles of yours. I read in the paper about somethin’ called mela—”

  “Mom’s got moles and you never got her sunscreen.”

  “She’s never outside, little man. Don’t be a smart-ass.” He lightly punched my arm before saying I should go to the sheriff’s to listen in. “Just make sure you’re not seen. Dad’ll be angry if he finds you sneakin’ ’round.”

  “Where you goin’?” I asked of his leaving.

  “Got a date.”

  “With who?”

  “The girl everyone wants.”

  * * *

  I used Dad’s brown shoe polish and colored my skin before I left the house. Movies I’d seen up to that point, like First Blood, had drilled into me that camouflage is needed when embarking on a secret mission.

  I stayed out of the streetlights and the headlights of oncoming cars. I thought I was the shadow Grand said I was. Just as I was a turn away from the sheriff’s, I was suddenly tackled from behind and forced to the ground.

  “Got you now.” The voice was more growl than anything else.

  The perpetrator’s arms were short but strong. So strong, it was like I could do nothing right to get away from him. He kept me forced down on my stomach, my face pressed against the ground and the prickly blades of dry grass.

  I felt something wet and hard embedding in the flesh on my arms. The man was biting me, my skin pinched up between his sharp teeth. He tasted the shoe polish. Spit, cursed, and spit some more.

  His hold loosened enough for me to back my head up off the ground and yell for him to get off me.

  “Fielding?” The growl was gone from his voice.

  “Mr. Elohim? What you doin’?”

  “What you doin’?” He quickly let me go and moved back. “Walkin’ the hours of night. All niggered up.”

  “I’m camouflaged.” I wiped his slobbers off my arm, maybe some of my own blood. “You really bit me hard, Mr. Elohim.”

  He stood as he used his sleeve to wipe the polish from around his mouth. “I was merely usin’ an old army technique to disarm the enemy.”

  He looked even shorter in the night, all white shirt and white jeans.

  “I ain’t the enemy, Mr. Elohim.”

  “Shoe polish makes ya close to it.”

  * * *

  I sat there long after he left, maybe a little too long. I felt sore in the toes. Like I had been stretched up on them, looking over a ledge, straining to see what was. Up on toes, raising to the truth. Which was what? I wasn’t yet sure. I knew it reminded me of something. Something I’d seen. A tractor breaking cobwebs in a field. Dead spiders on the wheels. That’s what the truth I didn’t yet know reminded me of. That’s what its edge sang to me that night as my toes lowered me back down. Down to the quiet grass. But not for long. I had to pull myself up. I had things yet to hear.

  The sheriff lived in a honey-colored brick house close to the center of town. The front of the house was dark, though there was a light in the back. I followed it and peeked through the open windows. The room had a table with three chairs pulled out. There was some hard candy on the table in an offering pile but no empty wrappers. Sal was too smart for that.

  I eased down onto the dying grass below the window. I thought they would return to the room, so I sat there and waited so long, I fell asleep.

  I dreamed myself, waving. Not hello, but good-bye. The waves falling from my hand in objects. Baseballs. Overalls. Dad’s suits, three pieces at a time. Mom’s aprons. My own fingers, falling. Me crumbling away until no one’s at home. Just a pile of baseballs and aprons.

  What was that sound?

  The dream getting pushed back behind the
reality of a June bug landing on my cheek and its wings buzzing together into a close. I brushed the bug off. It flew away wondering why. It was still night, but the light of the room had been turned off. The lost moment creaked like a door closing.

  I headed home. As I was nearing Main Lane, the night filled with crystal sounds. I ran toward those sounds. When I got to the lane, I saw the streetlights were all broken, the lane left in a darkness that allowed whoever was shattering the store windows to do so unseen. I could hear their feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. Sometimes it sounded like one person. Other times it sounded like more.

  In the houses close to the lane, lights began to flick on. Porches were lit and screen doors were opened.

  Voices called out.

  “What’s goin’ on out there?”

  “Sounds like glass breakin’.”

  “Best check it out.”

  And so they came, running toward the lane with flashlights and questions. I was illuminated, while whoever was really at fault was running the other way.

  “Hey, it’s that black boy. He’s out here breakin’ the store windas.”

  They charged, bright light with feet, blinding my eyes. They were going to teach me a lesson, they said. I felt someone grab my arm. Someone else on the other. I tried to tell them it was me.

  “Kill ’im.” A woman’s voice. She said it so casual, I imagined her standing there in her housecoat and slippers and hair rollers, one arm around her waist, propping the other up to her mouth, where a cigarette slipped in and out, smooth like a dream.

  Someone wrapped their arms around my neck. I was pulled back into a sweating, bare chest. The hair on it as dense as the foliage of a jungle and me straining not to get lost to the jaguars.

  “Hey, let ’im go.”

  Was that Grand’s voice?

  “I said get off ’im.”

  Yes. Superman in Levi’s. Seeing his blue eyes was like seeing the day breaking the night as he punched one in the face and threatened the others with the same. He grabbed the arms that were holding me and yanked them back, kicking their groins. I felt one of the hands slip away on its own.