The Summer That Melted Everything

  7

  … true in our fall,

  False in our promised rising

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 9:1069–1070

  MY DREAMS THAT first night were of long hallways and burning doors. By the time morning came, I felt burned myself. I lay there in bed. My eyes closed and the fan, a poor help on my face.

  “Those people are here.”

  I looked up at Sal. The window behind him putting his edges in light.

  “What people?” I yawned.

  “Amos’ people.” He tugged at his shirt. It would be a while before my bright, clean clothes looked natural on him. He was more field than town. More old soul pasture than adolescent attitude.

  He left as I threw on a tank and cut-offs. When I got downstairs, I found him in the kitchen with Mom, Dad, the sheriff, and a man with mechanic hands holding a woman who was still wearing her maid’s uniform from last night’s shift. She kept shaking her head at Sal, crying that he was not her Amos.

  “Yours.” Sal was offering the bowl and spoon to the woman.

  “They ain’t mine, honey.” She blew her nose, the gold crosses shaking at her ears.

  As Sal set the things back on top of the counter, Dad whispered to Mom, after which she took me and Sal into the living room, where she turned up the television. We sat on the sofa, listening to the San Francisco lovers on Phil Donahue talk about the shock of testing positive.

  A few minutes later, Amos’ parents were driving away in their rusted Chevette while Dad and the sheriff returned to us in the living room.

  “I was certain he was gonna be theirs.” The sheriff tucked his thumbs into his belt loops. “Well, hell, I’ll continue the investigation. Let ya know what I come up with.”

  Dad brushed the sweaty strands of his hair back. “He can stay with us in the meantime.”

  “I won’t put you good folks out like that.” The sheriff looked about to spit. Only the rug stopped him. “He can stay in the jail.”

  “That boy in that dank basement?” Mom shot up from the sofa. “With drunks and thieves and rapists and murderers? He’ll come outta there all lessoned up in sin.”

  “Now, Stella, I’d put ’im in his own cell. I ain’t stupid, ya know.”

  “Like hell you ain’t. Your bright idea is to put a boy in a basement. I thought you were dumb. I didn’t know you were son-of-a-bitch dumb.”

  “Stella.” Dad winced.

  “We all know why Dottie left you,” Mom continued. “Ran off with that well-to-do fella. If you ask me, she should’ve done it years earlier, instead of stayin’ with a small dick like you. She told us all. Called ya pinky pants behind your back.”

  She started taunting the sheriff with her pinkies, the sweat shining on her forehead like bad stars. When she began to choke on her laughter, Dad was quick to pat her on the back.

  “Calm down, Stella. For Christ’s sake, breathe.”

  “Oh God—” She caught her breath. “I’m so sorry I said those things. I … the heat.” She swept the damp strands of her hair back, unable to meet the sheriff’s eyes. “It’s just the heat. I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.”

  “My apologies as well, Sheriff.” Dad aired his collar. “I think it’s safe to say Sal is wanted, and he can stay here until something more permanent can be decided upon. And again, I’m so sorry for what has been spoken here.”

  You could feel the sheriff’s anger take over the room. Almost like a whooshing past your face. A sort of entity that felt like it could have peeled the wallpaper off the walls and broken the crystal.

  “I best be goin’.” The sheriff straightened as if he were being asked to show how tall he really was. Then he quietly nodded at all of us, very slowly at Mom, before leaving with his hands clenched at his sides, only the pinkies left out like small horns.

  “Well, that was very sudden, Stella.” Dad checked his tie once more.

  “I’m not used to it bein’ so hot. None of us are. We’re not prepared for a heat like this. I can just imagine the things that’ll be had from here on out. We best get cool, and soon. We’re all in a volcano of trouble. I feel it.”

  “Calm down now, Stella.” Dad cleared his throat. “I think I’ll go … I think I’ll take a walk to the cemetery. I’d like to talk this whole situation over with Mother.” He turned to Sal to clarify. “My mother has passed. But she always had a way of clarifying the distinctly strange. I think speaking with her has the great possibility of enlightening me on this matter we have before us.”

  “The cemetery is a million miles away.” Mom wrung her hands. “You’ll be gone forever. I was plannin’ on makin’ lentil stew. You have to boil lentils, Autopsy. You know how I feel about boilin’ things, all them bubbles poppin’ up. It’s like rain in a pot. And now we won’t be havin’ lentil stew, ’cause you won’t be here to boil it. You have to stay.”

  Dad tugged on the tail of her hair until she smiled.

  “I won’t be gone long.” His long arms wrapping around her was like being somewhere in a wheat field.

  “You’ll be gone forever. Once you start talkin’ to your mother, I become a widow.” She broke the embrace and bit her fingernail hard enough to chip the polish. She frowned at this and more as she said to him, “If you must go, then go, but before you do, bring me my canna for the day.”

  Breathed envied Mom’s cannas, which were tall, tropical flowers done up in colors with familiar names like red, orange, yellow, peach. Yet they weren’t familiar at all. They were the colors of the other side of a journey to another world.

  The job of caring for the cannas was left to me, Dad, and Grand because even though the cannas were just a few feet from the house, Mom never risked the rain. She gardened from the back porch, using us as her hands. We were her reach in the outside world. She told us when the cannas were dry and needed more water. We’d get the hose and give them a drink while she followed through the motions with us, feigning to pull the hose across the yard and then to stand still with her hand up and moving side to side like she was spraying something more than air.

  She examined their growth through binoculars, looking out for insects or other damage. I remember the year the leaf rollers came, a great pest that rolls the leaves of the cannas in order to pupate inside them. Mom instructed me from the back porch to cut off the infected leaves. She held a pair of scissors and cut with me. Then she handed me flour to sprinkle on the remaining leaves as prevention, keeping some flour for herself, which she sprinkled all over the back porch.

  Every day she asked for a canna. I suppose to feel the petals, the leaves, the roots, allowing her to feel somewhat responsible for them.

  “What variety today, my love?” Dad pulled her back to him without much difficulty.

  “Oh, I’d say Alaska.” She tilted her face to his and softly wiped the sweat from his cheeks. “Alaska will do for today. Perhaps it’ll cool me down.”

  “In that case—” Dad kissed her wet forehead. “—I shall get enough Alaska for all of us.”

  The Alaska variety has a yellow middle surrounded by white petals. Pee in Alaskan snow, that’s what I said as I took the flower from Dad.

  “Not pee.” Sal frowned at me. “It’s your mother in her yellow dress and she’s twirling in the Alaskan snow. In the white rain.”

  “I’m off now. You boys be good.” Dad carried his own flower tucked under his arm as he walked out the door.

  Mom watched him go as if he were a feather falling off her wing. “Well”—she turned to us—“what say you boys run down to Juniper’s for me. Get some lentils.”

  “You don’t have any, Mom? I thought that was what you were makin’ for dinner?”

  “Well, my love—” She licked her palm and tried to lay down my cowlick, the same as hers. “—I can’t make ’em if I don’t have ’em, now, can I?”

  “Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand away. “Give me some money so I can go.”

  “And may we have enough to buy ice cream?”

  “Mr
. Elohim flamed all the ice cream yesterday,” I reminded Sal.

  “Hmm, I wonder why he did that.” Mom reached into her change purse. “I’ll give ya some extra so you can getcha some chocolate bars.”

  “C’mon.” I grabbed Sal’s arm once I had the money. “Maybe Mr. Elohim didn’t burn all of it. Maybe they had some hidden in a back freezer.”

  When we came upon the Delmar house, Sal stopped and stared at Dresden, who was once again standing against the oak in her yard, this time with To Kill a Mockingbird. Sal waved and softly called her name. She held the pen in her hand tighter and the book higher, though her freckled forehead and her light eyes peered above the page at him.

  “Tell me something about her, Fielding.”

  “Her dad split a few years back, so it’s just her and her mom, Alvernine. Alvernine’s one of them fancy-pancy ladies and sexy as hell. She’s consumed by bein’ Miss Perfection. She wouldn’t like you.” I smacked a sweat bee away. “Though, maybe if ya gave her a rose. She started a club on ’em.”

  “Is Dresden in the club?”

  “Naw. It’s just society ladies, like Alvernine. Why you care so much about this girl anyways?”

  “Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.” He gave Dresden one last wave. In response, she hid her face completely behind the book, her frizzy hair sticking out around the cover like red static.

  Sal glanced back at her before we left, but his attention was soon placed on the birds flying above.

  Papa Juniper’s was on Main Lane, which was a long lane of stores serving as the main route of business in Breathed. Storefronts of wide windows, brick façades, and that summer, flowers and plants wilting in the heat. The soaring elms lining the lane shaped a canopy not unlike a vaulted ceiling, giving rise to the lane’s nickname, the Cathedral. A nickname not just for the ceiling the trees gave the lane but also because the trees were said to be blessed on account of their escape from the Dutch fungus that had obliterated most of the nation’s elms.

  In 1984, there were no big-box stores or outside commercial influence. The businesses were Breathed born and bred. Main Lane was a place you could buy books, furniture, music, condoms, a brand-new refrigerator, and finish it all off with a haircut at Chairfool’s barbershop or a meal at Dandelion Dimes, named so by the founder who, in the late 1800s, would accept a yellow dandelion head as payment equivalent to a dime.

  Juniper’s, with its whitewashed brick and little blue juniper berries painted on every one, was the only grocery store. Down from it was the butcher’s, and down from there a bakery called Mamaw’s Flour, which every Fourth of July would bake the largest blueberry pie. It sure looked nice, but wasn’t much for taste.

  If you needed dressing, there was Fancy’s Dress Shop for the ladies. Contrary to their name, they did sell pants, though they never brought them to the house when Mom called up and said she’d like to go shopping. They would come with their hangers and garment bags, laying the dresses out, knowing just the kind she liked. She’d go over them, point to this one and that one, eventually buying them all, I think because she felt they went to an awful lot of trouble, bringing the store to her.

  Across the lane from Fancy’s was the Burgundy Toad, which is where Dad bought his suits and ties, among other menswear, with little burgundy toads embroidered in the labels. While Fancy’s and Toad’s catered to the older shopper, the young ones could find the latest fashion at Saint Sammy’s. Though the sign out front had last had a face-lift in 1954, you could find the latest acid-washed jeans there.

  Sal glanced at the mannequin in the window with her purple bikini printed with little neon hearts as me and him passed Saint’s on the way to Juniper’s. Once inside the market, we found all the ice cream had indeed been melted. In the aisle where Elohim had torched it, the concrete floor was left cracked by the heat.

  What I knew of Elohim’s punishment for the act of vandalism was that he was to pay for the ice cream, the cleanup, as well as patch the cracks in the concrete.

  Because the exhaust fan in the ceiling above had carried out a good deal of the smoke, very little residue remained on the food around. Being as it was burned in the canned food aisle, the cans merely had to be wiped.

  When we saw one of the workers passing through with a mop in his hand, we asked him if he was sure there wasn’t any ice cream left undiscovered in the back.

  “It all burned. We expect a shipment by the end of next week. You can check back then.” He perched his pimpled chin up on the mop handle while he stared at Sal.

  “Well, where’s the chocolate bars and candy?” I looked at the shelves, which were covered in thick brown smears.

  “All of it melted, just started oozin’ out all over the place. Ain’t got to cleanin’ all of it off the shelves there yet. Basically anything that can melt, has melted. I mean, the freezers, you see.” He gestured off to some bags of ice and various other perishables stuffed into the freezers. “I managed to save all that, but the rest ain’t nothin’ but somethin’ that once was.”

  “You still got lentils?”

  “Oh, sure. Those are some heatproof bastards there.”

  * * *

  With the lentils in hand, me and Sal left Juniper’s.

  You could hear the whispers around us.

  “There’s the devil.”

  “He don’t look like no devil to me.”

  “They never do.”

  “Didn’t Grady meet the devil once?”

  “Naw. Not face-to-face. Just presence-to-presence. Shucks, we all got that goin’ for us.”

  In front of the yellow-painted brick of Dandelion Dimes, we ran into Otis Jeremiah with his pregnant wife, Dovey. Otis worked at the tennis shoe factory. He was usually the one to come to the house to update Mom on production.

  “Hey, there, Fieldin’.” Otis grabbed my shoulders as if he were testing the strength of them. He always finished with a disappointed look that said I should exercise more.

  Otis himself was one of those guys you thought they based video game soldiers on, with his prizefight biceps and log-laid abs. Every day you’d see him running around Breathed, doing his miles in a shirt cut off to his chest to go with his short cut-offs, so tight, cling wrap would’ve been looser. He was the only man I knew who wore shorts shorter than the girls’ and more belly shirts than a toddler. Every day he wore this workout gear, even when he wasn’t working out, which made him seem underdressed in those places without dumbbells.

  He was a sweaty sight to behold, with his permed mullet kept back from his pyramidal face by a red, white, and blue sweatband that matched the bands on his wrists, like some sort of signature of Captain America. His striped socks stretched over his wide calves. His bright tennis shoes whitened daily. Forever loyal, Otis wore only tennis shoes that came from our factory. Our trademark was a large eye made of thread and sewn into the back of each shoe. Eyes in the backs of your heels was an image Grandfather had decided upon when he founded the factory.

  “You know, Fieldin’, I’ve come up with a new shoe design I think your momma is really gonna love. Square shoes.” Otis moved his fingers in an air square, his pumped-up chest showing like cleavage beneath his neon pink tank.

  “Square?”

  “Now, hear me out. Ain’t square things easier to store than misshapen things like the average shoe? That’s why we store ’em in shoe boxes ’cause the boxes are square. But if the shoe itself is square, there’d be no need for the box. We could cut costs right there.”

  Otis was the town kidder. Nobody ever smiled quite like him. His smiles were something that captured you, that took possession of you, that dared you to feel the joy. Above all else, his smiles were his big white teeth, almost even squares, they were. That was why Mom used to call his smiles the sheets on the clothesline.

  “If you made square shoes, there’d certainly be a lot of people tripping.”

  “What?” Otis chuckled at Sal, surprised at the loss of the joke. “Say that again.”

>   “Tripping. Square things on your feet means four corners will have the chance to be successful in eight different ways of making you fall.”

  “Well, I…” Otis trailed into his thoughts, which you knew were all square falls.

  “How far along?” Sal gestured to Dovey’s belly, as rising and as round as one of the hills surrounding us.

  “Just over six months.” She giggled with a slight pig snort.

  Dovey was as consumed by physical fitness as her husband. While being pregnant kept her back from the more strenuous activities she was used to, she was still the local Jazzercise instructor and wasn’t without her spandex leotards and leggings, even while pregnant, which made for a whole snake swallowed the world bit.

  “Say”—Otis pointed his finger at Sal—“you’re the boy they all been squawkin’ ’bout to be the devil?”

  Sal confirmed with a nod.

  Otis grinned. “Well, whatcha wanna give me for my soul?”

  “Otis.” Dovey grabbed the bulge in his forearm.

  “It’s all right, sugar-sock, this kid ain’t nothin’ but two legs of human.”

  Dovey wasn’t so sure.

  “May I touch your stomach?” Sal held his hand up.

  “Uh, gee, I don’t know, kid.” She leaned back, but Otis grabbed Sal’s hand and placed it on her stomach.

  “There ya go, kiddo.” Otis beamed. I doubt there’s ever been a prouder father-to-be.

  Sal closed his eyes, his hand tenderly cupping her roundness. “It feels like the seven millionth hand.”

  Dovey stared at Sal’s hand as she asked just what the seven millionth hand was.

  Sal began to speak about a staircase between heaven and earth, and as he did, his words were a little deeper, a little bleaker, a little more crafted to the haunt of what it means to speak fine.

  “It is called the Staircase of the Fallen, and it is the way down from heaven for those who are too wrong to stay. Like me.

  “You may look up, but the staircase is too high above and too far to see from here. Just floating there by itself like it’s been stolen from home and somewhere there’s a house missing the way upstairs.