“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
OLD 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.
Just before I jumped from the plane, I promised myself if I landed on only the yellow blooms, I would take it as a sign of my ghosts allowing me peace. With that peace, I would no longer suffer in the worst shadow of the snake. I would stop skinning peaches. Cease all mad damage. I’d bring an end to splintering my knuckles against picket fences and running chainsaws through rows of American corn.
I’d sweeten my heart. Be gentled by the small of a lover’s back. I’d no longer scrape my spine against cinder blocks nor cannibalize myself in perfect bites. I’d get rid of my stash of horns and keep hell out of the honey. I would learn how to say June, July, August, September without scream and as one word. Forgiveness.
If, however, I were to land on one of my sins, I promised myself I would go on with the punishment and the guilt and let the final fangs in to do all their damage. I would stay the shape that best fits the coffin and accept the terrifying permanence of my crimes.
As I readied to jump from the plane, I looked down at those bright yellow fields. Sal once said there was no yellow in hell. That was why I picked North Dakota during its canola season. Those yellow fields gave me my best chance to land in heaven.
As I jumped from the plane, I tried to see my sins, if not to somehow steer away from them. Maybe that was cheating, but who doesn’t choose to fall well when such a choice is to be had? I had no say, really, in where I landed. All I could do was trust the fall.
When it did finally come to an end, it was a bumpy landing, a little facedown, a little rolling. Had I landed on one of my sins?
Nothing beneath me. Nothing trapped up in the dragged parachute. I laid it out flat so I could see. I retraced my tumble. The ground clean, too much yellow to be hell. I tilted my head back to the sky and smiled for the first time since 1984.
“That was a real nice landin’. I say, a real nice one.”
I turned to a voice and the man it belonged to standing by the road, his car just parked there, the door still open.
“I saw you comin’ down.” He pointed to the plane as his shaggy graying hair dripped over his sunburnt forehead. “Pulled over to watch. It was a good fall ya had. Was it scary?”
“Just the landing.”
He took a few steps into the field as he looked up at the sky, at the plane circling overhead. “I always thought I might wanna do somethin’ like that.” He lowered his eyes back to me as I turned to pull in the parachute. “Say, what’s that you got on ya?”
“What?” I looked down at myself. “Where?”
“On the back of your pants there. Here, I’ll get it.” He stepped closer and plucked something from the back of my pant leg. “Now, what in tarnation is this?” He held the smashed candle up in his hand.
“My sin,” I answered from the back of the cave that had suddenly swallowed me. “That is my sin.”
And so it had been decided I would not be set free from the prison or its bars like eternal candle wicks, burning any chance of escape. All I could do, all I have done, is to sit with the flames, sleep with the heat, smell the burn of flesh filling the urn one ash at a time.
I think about that first night they came to look at Sal, and I think maybe it was beautiful from a distance. The way a flooding river is. Maybe the knuckles, some tapping, some banging at our door weren’t so loud from far away. Maybe the faces pressed into our window screens looked like hung pictures. The hollers asking if they could see, maybe they sounded like songs out on the edge. Yes, maybe it was beautiful from far off, but up close it was a crowd. It was a noise. It was drowning under flooding waters.
That first evening, our house swelled. They came to see the devil Flint told them we had. They’d look at Sal, pat him on the head, be a bit disappointed.
“Just a little boy. That’s all. Just a boy. Though dark as the night, ain’t he?”
“Yeah, but look at them eyes. You don’t normally see that color in ’em. Maybe we shouldn’t say he ain’t the devil just yet. They’re just so green.”
Staying outside through all of it was Elohim. I waved for him to come in, but he just took a step back. I still remember the way the gold band gleamed from his ring finger. In his mind, he was a husband, and just in case anyone doubted it, he was going to look the part. Hell, he was going to live the part.
When he got letters or sent them, he put in a Mrs. beside his Mr., and when he hung clothes on his line to dry, one could not help but notice the dresses and bras. Perfume and lipstick sat on the vanity in his bedroom, and the strands of his fiancée’s hair from the last time she brushed it on Kettle Lane were fossilized in bristles. He was surrounded by a woman who wasn’t there. He was one half of a relationship that did not exist.
Just as I was about to go out to Elohim, a man bumped into me on his way in the house. With his cowboy hat and spurs, he looked like a man sure of the saddle. He had a Polaroid camera in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. I told him to put it out before he went into the house. He silently took my picture, though he did nothing to the cigarette as he stepped through the front door, adding to the rest of that crowd consisting of our friends, neighbors, and strangers, like the woman in the bright red dress with showy purple flowers who nearly knocked over the vase in the entry hall with her wide swinging hips and rear like a bag of apples.
There was a man who when he bent low to look at Sal, showed the part in his hair and the dandruff there, like shavings of pearl. He was pushed to the side by a woman in a rhinestone belt. She wanted a good look at Sal, and she didn’t want anyone in her way. The man in the cowboy hat took her picture, maybe only to remember the woman who chewed her gum as if her jaw was about to be undone from creation.
There was just something about that woman. The ponytail rising out of the very top of her head like a mushroom cloud. The awful stare of her eyes. A shiny viciousness as if when the wolves saw her, they turned and ran the other way, fear putting their tails between their legs.
I felt like telling the sheriff he should go through her house. I was certain he’d find bottles of tampered Tylenol, potassium cyanide, and a scrapbook of newspaper articles from 1982.
As she looked down on Sal before her, she suddenly stopped chewing the gum. Her thin lips settled like a single bleed across her face. The old acne scars like embedded wreckage.
She cleared her throat, and in one easy go of it, she asked, “Is God a nigger too?”
The gasps of the women were like bright cries. Things that knocked their shoulder pads out of balance and put runs in their hosiery right then and there. My mother included. Some of the men shoved their hands into their pockets and looked down at the toes of their shoes. It was their best natural stance. The braver ones looked directly at Sal. Stepped closer to him even. Waiting as one ear for his response.
He hadn’t so much as flinched.
If the woman had expected to sword him, she was mistaken. His elegance so apparent, even in the filthy overalls. Maybe in his own wounded thoughts he could not give such chance to dignity, but before us he stood as tall as he could. His chin raised. His eyes upon hers not in anger but almost in pity, as if he already knew her eternity was to writhe in flames over and over again.
It was at this time Dad finally made his way from the back of the room. Pushing through the crowd to stand between the woman and Sal.
My father’s fists were clenched so tight it was almost as if his fingers had melted and all that remained were his palms. A layer of sweat seemed to cover him completely. His face so red, it looked like candy. Like one of those fireballs you get out of the machine with a quarter.
He was yelling at the woman, asking her how dare she use such language in his house. She started chewing her gum again. Unchanged by his voice shaking, by the near-to-something mist in his eyes. In fact, she smiled. A smile that had eaten things before.
Angered even more, he lowered his head and shook it, trying very carefully not to lose himself. “You listen to me, you ignorant hill rat
, you take yourself and your hateful mouth and get out of here.”
The flames in my father’s eyes burned toward the crowd. They had been getting on his nerves ever since their arrival. The way their shoes dirtied the rugs. The way their smoke grayed the rooms. The way they came to look at Sal like a thing on exhibit.
Dad was telling every one of them to get out of our house. I’d never seen my father so angry. Years later, I would find myself dog-earing a page in a book about the ocean. On the page a painting of gray, wild waves. I have since torn that page out of the book and set the painting to frame by the side of my bed. I suppose it is a painting of my father from that night he raged like waves in a storm.
After herding the last of the crowd out the door, Dad slammed it, and sighed into himself, “We haven’t even had our dinner yet.”
Not used to shouting, he sounded hoarse as he asked what was for dinner. He dropped down in his chair at the table, tired and looking like he’d just come in from a two-day shift in the mines.
“Those people, my God,” he muttered as Mom brought in the meat loaf.
“Well, we can’t have a man on fire at the dinner table. You’ll scorch my tablecloth. We must extinguish the flames.” She told him to close his eyes. Then she used his glass of water and her finger to lightly drop the water on his eyelids.
As tiny streams of water slipped down his cheeks, he opened his eyes and she looked deep into them as she smiled and said, “Not a fire for miles.”
She kissed him on the forehead before returning to the kitchen to bring out the mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls, while the rounded skirt of her dress reached and whispered to the tablecloth as she passed. She had changed from the afternoon into a bright yellow dress, and Sal couldn’t help but stare at her as she floated about the table like a motored cloud.
“What is it, Sal?” She tightened under his watchful gaze, holding her hand to her flat stomach as if the problem were there. As if it could be anywhere in her tall, narrow frame, wide only in the pads at her shoulders.
“Your dress.” He raised his hand as if he was going to reach out and touch it. “It is just so yellow.”