Elohim gasped the Lord’s name as the napkin fell, landing flat from the wadded ball it’d been in his hand. It was then I saw the still-fresh reddish brown stains on its white fabric.
I looked up and into Elohim’s gaping mouth, his particularly sharp canine teeth showing like icicles below a roofline. “You okay, Mr. Elohim?”
“I don’t know yet,” he whispered. On his way to the porch steps, he walked on the napkin, picking up some of the red-brown stains on his bare foot. “Who did you say this was?”
I cleared my throat and introduced the boy by naming him the devil.
“Fielding, I didn’t quite hear ya correctly.”
“I said devil, all right.” I shifted the bag of groceries to my other arm as Elohim drew down the porch steps, slow and at a slant like he was walking in a large gown he had to be careful not to step on the edge of lest he fall.
I turned and watched a stray dog sniff its way into Elohim’s open garage, where it peed on the tire of his white convertible, an Eldorado from 1956. When I turned back, Elohim was in reach and the boy was so close to my side, our arms were touching. He pointed toward a rusty can, which was out of place by Elohim’s clean porch, asking me in a whisper what it was.
“Mr. Elohim’s can of pop, mashed potato chips, and some sort of poison. What type of poison you say you use again, Mr. Elohim?”
“Poison.” He grunted, his eyes hard for the boy.
“Poison for what?” the boy asked.
Another grunt from Elohim. “Coons.”
A squirrel leaped over to the can. I quickly hissed to scatter it away.
“Wrong animals gonna eat the poison, Mr. Elohim.”
He ignored me and instead jutted his sagging chin toward the boy. “Well?”
“Well, what?” The boy had taken his arms out from his overalls as he stood a little taller.
“You’ve nothin’ to say?”
“What would he have to say?” I shrugged. “Before I forget, Mr. Elohim, I won’t be able to help ya build that chimney this Thursday. My brother’s got a baseball game.”
Elohim chewed the air in his mouth, the gray in his eyes filling out to the corners like smoke.
“You all right, Mr. Elohim?” I watched the sweat get low on his lumped face.
“Mind your own damn business, Fielding.” Realizing his sudden anger, he apologized as he rubbed his eyes. “It’s just too hot. Shouldn’t be this way yet.” In a milder tone, he asked, “You get a chance to read those pamphlets I gave ya, Fielding?”
Elohim’s pamphlets were notebook papers full of his vegetarian thoughts. Things like, animals live a horizontal life while we live a vertical one. According to him, this means when we eat something horizontal, we risk falling down:
It’s like putting a river in a skyscraper. The river is horizontal while the skyscraper is vertical. They are two forces working toward opposite goals. Nothing good will be accomplished. Eventually the skyscraper will shift ever so slightly and start to lean and all because it feels the river pushing at its sides. If the river is not drained, it will keep pushing and pushing against the sides of the skyscraper until one day the skyscraper leans so far, it falls and becomes what it was never meant to be. You can never succeed in what you were never meant to be.
These were the curious ideas of a man that spoke more to the fears of the man himself than to any dietary philosophy.
“Well, did you read ’em or not?” He was asking me, but his eyes were on the boy.
“I did read ’em, yes, Mr. Elohim. Thank you.” I looked down because I could still taste that morning’s bacon. It was then I saw the smear of reddish brown on his wrist.
“What is that red stuff?” I pointed to his wrist. “It was on your napkin too.”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s barbecue sauce.” He quickly licked it away.
“What vegetable you put that on?” I looked over his head to the table, a fly circling the gray bowl of macaroni salad.
He didn’t answer. He was slowly lifting his heels off the ground, standing as tall as his toes would allow. All the while, his stare with the boy was something solid, as if their eyes were impaled on the same thorn.
The boy stood taller himself and seemed a little braver. Even his urine spot was no longer a failing, as it was nearly dry, especially in that heat.
Elohim had been an authority on the porch. From there, he could look down on us. But in the yard, standing in front of us, all three feet seven inches of him, we had the advantage of height and were looking down on him. It was as if this was confidence for the boy who knew short men shrink in the shadow of the still-growing adolescent.
“Do you have any ice cream?”
The boy’s question caused the muscles in Elohim’s neck to go to rope.
“To be honest, it’s because of the ice cream that I’m even here.” As if he could not smile, the boy licked his lips.
“I don’t have no ice cream.” Elohim’s hands balled up into fists that shook at his sides, his voice shaking with them. “I have none. Did ya hear me, Fielding?” He turned to me. “I have no ice cream. Anyone want to check my house, they most certainly can.” He looked worried someone was going to take him up on the offer.
“You look like the type of man to have a freezer full.” The boy seemed an inch taller than he had stood before.
“You are mistaken.”
“I must be.”
“You better watch out, boy.” Elohim reached up to stab his finger into the bruises on the boy’s collarbone. “Watch what you speak. You keep sayin’ you’re the devil, and one of these days, someone’s gonna believe you. Then whatcha gonna do? You’re either gonna be the leader of their belief or the victim of it. Both are dangerous things.”
Elohim goddamned his way back toward his porch.
“Where you goin’, Mr. Elohim?” I called after him.
“Gotta check on someone.”
“Someone, Mr. Elohim?”
“Something, Fielding, I said I’ve got to check on something. Now, you get on outta here. And take your snake with you.”
“I’m sorry about your fiancée.” The boy’s words were soft as he looked up at the birds flying overhead.
“How’d you know about his fiancée?”
Elohim took not a step toward the boy but a step back. If I had doubted any fear he might have had in seeing the boy, there was no doubting it in his backing stride. “It all comes out now, does it?”
The boy dropped his eyes to Elohim. “It’s a miraculous thing, how a ship floats. Always a tragedy when it sinks. So many died. Your love among them. For that, sorry just doesn’t seem enough to say, so I won’t say it but I’ll mean it just the same. I want you to know, water is not so bad to die in. I assure you. At first it burns in your chest—”
“Burns?” Another trembling step back from Elohim.
“Yes, you feel fire in water.”
“Fire?” Each step Elohim took made him sound so far away.
“Yes. Fire. Then it goes out. The water puts it out. You don’t feel the rest. It’s just a slip into a sunset death. It’s what I’ve taken to calling drowning. I’ve spoken to many drowned souls, and they all say they’ve seen bursts of colors surrounding a very bright yet falling light. Doesn’t that sound like a sunset to you?”
“Is what you’re tellin’ me supposed to comfort me?” Elohim backed up the porch steps. “You tellin’ me that my heart burned—”
“Just for a moment,” the boy carefully interrupted. “She burned for just a moment.”
“And it was a moment too long. You need to burn to feel just how long it was for someone like her. How would that be? To burn?”
If a look could start a fire, it would have been the one Elohim gave before stomping into his house. The way he slammed the door sounded a lot like the start of a war.
“You shouldn’t have told ’im all that.” I sighed and started walking away. “It was like you were throwin’ her bones in his face. You gotta learn how to talk to
folks better or they’re really gonna start believin’ you are the devil. How’d you know all that stuff anyways?”
“Even in hell we get the newspaper. And those obituaries—well, I don’t know who writes them, but they are awfully descriptive, almost terribly so. Sometimes all you want to hear is a name, not the direction their blood took after leaving the vein.”
Was he serious? In other boys, I would’ve been able to tell. There would be a spark of mischief in the eye, a started smile, a half cock to the head. He was none of these things. He was tired eyes and a yawn, after which he watched the birds fly above.
As we continued down the lane, we passed the Delmar house, where the daughter stood in the front yard, leaning against a large oak. She had a pen and Alice in Wonderland in her hands. She raised her eyes to the boy as we passed.
“She’s got a fake leg,” I whispered to him. “The left one.”
The mannequin-stiff leg was paler than her own skin. Attached to it was a black flat. Not real, just part of the plastic. I always wondered if she hated not being able to change her shoe. Always being the girl in the black flat.
Because she wore long dresses to hide the leg, she was immediately taken out of the catalog culture. No miniskirts for her. Her body was not clung to by neon lights. She was never without a buttoned sweater, while her loose and wispy dresses dated her in old-fashioned florals and muted colors. Seeing her in those dresses made me think of lace and lavender and radio theater.
She wasn’t thought to be the prettiest of girls. Her hazel eyes were a little too aslant. Her wrists were a little too bony. Her freckles were a little too much. She had a sedateness about her that most girls her age didn’t have. You’d never find her reciting the lyrics to Van Halen or hanging a poster of the latest crush on her wall. You looked at her and knew when she went to bed, she’d rather be blowing out a candle than flicking a light switch. Modernity was lost on her and died in cobwebs in the background to her old-fashioned grace.
“What’s her name?” The boy looked as if he could’ve taken her hand right then and there.
“Dresden Delmar.”
His wave came slow. His hand starting first on his stomach, then sliding up to his chest, his neck, until his fingers rolled out from under his chin and his hand was finally held up to her. Because there was no actual waving motion, it looked as if he were showing her something on his palm.
She quickly ducked behind the book, doing her best to tuck her red, frizzy hair behind her ear.
“Is she shy?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve seen her ’round school. I think I might’ve had English class with her. I know she doesn’t talk much. Sits in the back, things like that.”
She quickly disappeared around the tree until he could no longer see her. Then he said how her hair reminded him of the color of leaves in the autumn.
“Red and burnt by an October oven.”
And then he smiled for the first time, and she peeked around to see it.
4
… I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:98–99
MY KNEES KNOW I’m a praying man. The broken dishes, the empty beer bottles, the hole in the wall the size of my fist, all know I am an unanswered man. Why is no one answering me?
It’s been seventy years since I’ve stepped foot onto Ohio soil. The closest I’ve ever been back was fifteen years ago, when one night I stood on the West Virginia side of the West Virginia and Ohio border. I cupped my hands around my mouth to distance my voice over the Ohio River that formed the border as I yelled for everyone I used to know. Hell, I even yelled my own name.
I frightened some birds, heard the river flowing down below, but the biggest reply of all was silence. No one yelled back to me. No one said, Hey, we’re here in Breathed. Come back now. It’s all okay. You can come back. It is just fine. I waited for all the familiar voices to say just this, but I am the unanswered man. I am the inside of silence.
What is it they say about home? You can’t go back again, right? So find a new one, Fielding. I’ve tried. I’ve lived all over. In apartments, in houses, in an abandoned gas station for a short time because I liked the way the sun hit its pumps, but I’ve never had a home again. They’ve all just been places. The place I’m at now? It’s a trailer park called King Cactus.
There are no kings, there are no queens, there is just the unraveled, trying to live. When I first saw the place, I winced and remembered the blood of the beetles. They would swarm Ohio, especially in the autumn, when they would cluster on our window screens, squeezing into our homes, where they would collect in the warm lampshades or crowd around the ceiling fixtures like a pilgrimage. When frightened or smashed, the beetles secreted a pungent odor with their blood. It is that bitter, yellow blood that the trailer park reminds me of and why I knew I would spend the remainder of my life here.
I could afford better, but what’s the damn point? There’s no spouse to be disappointed by this failing trailer. There are no kids or grandkids to care about the overturned milk crate I use as a step to my front door. There are no friends who will be stopping by and thus leave me embarrassed by my lawn chair furnishings or the piles of this life shaping hills as tall as the direction allows. It’s a waste of time to live better when you’ve got no one to care for and no one to care for you.
I’ve been here in Southern Arizona five years now. For all the trees we had in Breathed, here there are saguaros. For all the grass, there is sand. For all the hills, there are rocky peaks, and for all the hollers, there are canyons. There is no river or pond or deer drinking hole to be found. There is an aboveground pool. The last person who swam in it came down with some sort of parasite. I thought at first they said he came down with paradise, so I took a swim myself, diving down beneath the empty beer cans floating on the surface but finding nothing but a dead snake in the bottom.
Did you know that the hottest desert in all of the United States is right here in Arizona? The Sonoran Desert. I call it The Son That Ran. I suppose it’s that running son that has made me settle here. It’s a different heat from Ohio, though. Dry. Less humid. But as long as it makes me sweat, I don’t much give a good goddamn how the flames ripen.
There has never been great wealth in trailer parks, but King Cactus, with its royal moniker, seems particularly spent. It certainly is a far cry from the house I grew up in.
Kettle Lane ended with my house, a big square thing of brick in a tepid brown. At each side, a Victorian learned conservatory full of wicker and vines. It was a house that sat proud, seemingly thrilled by its own existence and the ivy creeping up its sides.
Dad was kneeling in the freshly cut yard with our dog Granny. They were both looking at the small snake Dad held in his hands.
I hollered to Dad, but he didn’t hear me. I was about to call him again, but the boy grabbed my arm and urged me to wait.
“Let’s see what he does with the snake.”
“Why?” I shrugged out of his hot grip.
“You can tell a lot about a man by what he does with a snake.”
Dad allowed the small snake to slip turns through his fingers until Granny barked. The snake hissed toward the sound as Dad stood. He walked to the back of the house, keeping the snake rather close to his chest before releasing it into the dense woods bordering our backyard.
“Well?” I turned to the boy. “It wasn’t nothin’ but a harmless snake anyways. Looked to be a garter.”
“A snake that could harm you, you don’t have much choice to kill. You wouldn’t be able to leave a cobra in your sock drawer. But a snake that is no threat will greatly define the man who decides to kill it anyways.”
“Weren’t you a snake once? If you are the devil, that is.”
“I’ve been called a snake, yes. But haven’t you ever been called something without having actually been it?”
I shrugged my shoulders and hollered to Dad until he turned
from the woods.
Suddenly the boy started laughing. I looked down to see Granny licking his toes and told him her name.
“Why do you call her Granny?” He went to his knees and started scratching the sides of her neck.
“Any other name but Granny would be too young for her. She was born old and gray. Besides, don’t she look like somebody’s granny?”
She stood no taller than our shins. A shaggy mutt with a rickety bark that sounded like a horse and buggy. She had the habit of squinting her eyes like everything was too far away even when it was right in front of her. She always seemed to be searching for her glasses, but like any granny, she couldn’t quite remember where she’d put them last. She’d look up at you, seeming to ask, Do you remember where I put them?
Her fur, more like hair, was longest at the back of her head, where it rolled and swirled and looked like she had it tied in a bun. It was hard not to see her in a schoolmarm dress, a brooch glistening at her collar, a crocheted shawl over her shoulders.
She barked and nuzzled up into his neck until he fell back with her tongue lapping his cheeks, her tail wagging over him and his laughter. At that moment, he was just a boy. That laugh was so innocent, you felt like the worst it had ever done was to love a falling leaf.
I look back and think of all the ways he wasn’t the devil in that moment. The devil would break a dog’s neck, not cradle it in his own. The devil would have a mouth comparable to a crate of knives, not a mouth with teeth that held the curves of marshmallows. I think of all the devils I’ve seen in my long life. I know now how brief the innocent, how permanent the wicked.
I looked toward Dad, still walking from the woods, on the way occasionally stopping to look up at the sky as if it were asking something of him and he was listening.
My dad was a tall man and I always thought remarkable, like somewhere a stained glass window was missing its center. He was like that, centered, responsible to a fault.
He was only forty-nine that summer, but his forehead seemed older, like it was recycled from some centenarian who had lived a hundred devastating years. The wrinkles were long, seemingly circling all the way around as an unofficial equator. The only thing longer were his fingers, which were tall and grasslike when his hands were up. Perhaps that’s why his palms were always a bit moist. They were the wetlands and his fingers the bulrushes that grew at the edges of them.