“It’s a mean thing, falling down steps, it’s a thing to matter the most. And as I tumbled down this staircase, I felt every step, all seven million of them. The steps are too there not to be felt, they are too edged not to sober you to the errors of your fray. The pain is smart enough to poet out a space, where bruises are verse and rhymes are moans over and over again.
“It’s a terrible thing for an angel to fall, because you cannot survive it by wing. The flight you had before is just a bird magic you’ll never have again. How brief the feather to the angel who discovers discontent. After all, isn’t that what my fall was? My discontent to just be in place, never to change from the one suit of my life. But I was tired of being the obedient son who cheapened his own self by farming his father’s commands. I wanted my own life. I wanted my own good life.
“God is no fool. He has made the fall a touching torture, for with each step, there is a hand that reaches for you in that good, old-fashioned, second-chance sort of way. You reach back and hold tight to it because to do so is deciding to believe that by holding on, you can survive being let go of. But no matter how much you beg, no matter how much of yourself you give to the chance, you are let go of. That is the undeniable torment of the fall. For such a divine event, it’s a rather ordinary agony. To have hope raised, only to realize there is no hope to be had. Hope is just a beautiful instance in the myth of the second chance.
“When I came to the last step, the seven millionth step, the hand that reached for me was unlike the others. It was a five-finger shape and yet it was more. As if it had shaped clay before and gone numb from long hours of creation. It was a hand that brought God to my lips.
“The other hands had always known they were going to let me go, and in that, they were merely cruel. But that seven millionth hand was a hand in the midst of a choice. Would it let me go or would it pull me up? Would it re-feather me? Would it forgive? Would it call me son once more?
“The hand’s first existence was that of warmth. Its second was that of dignifying my hope by holding my hand tighter than all the others. But above all else, the hand existed as that of pure love. I could near all the hearts of this world and never come near being loved like that again. That was how I knew the seven millionth hand was God’s.
“As I dangled there in the sky from His hand, I knew He didn’t want to let me go. But I also knew that if He did not let go, He would be ruined by holding onto me. So in that choice, I let go of Him. I had to, for His sake. I had to fall as the Devil, so He could stay the God.”
Sal opened his eyes, and it was like several rains coming down his cheeks at once. He looked up at Dovey and told her that touching her belly was like holding and being held by the seventh millionth hand.
“Because above all else, it was love. It was love, and that is what I feel inside you now.”
Dovey wiped her cheeks and smiled as she gently laid her hand upon Sal’s. She was about to say something. I thought perhaps sing a lullaby to him, but the shout kept her from it.
“Devil!”
Elohim was pointing at Sal from across the lane, his arm looking like a trembling sword. “He’ll make you ill, mother-to-be. His touch is the layin’ on of the end. It is death.”
With tears still in her eyes from Sal’s story, Dovey yanked his hand from her stomach. “Don’t—don’t touch me.”
I had never seen a woman look so frightened as she wrapped her arms around her belly. It was as if that whole moment between her and Sal had never happened. I suppose when the life of your child is threatened, you don’t hesitate. When someone shouts devil, you shield against the horns.
As Elohim continued shouting, Dovey quickly turned to take a step, but the toe of her tennis shoe caught the uneven brick in the walk.
All those years of exercising and that experience of jumping up in the air and landing so agile and safe had abandoned her. Falling will do that. It’ll dumb your landing, your ability to catch yourself. Her hands flew up in the air as her back arched and her belly led the way down. It hit first, her belly, in a dull sound as it pushed in on contact with the hard brick. Her face down after, smacking against the brick in a sickening thud.
A woman shrieked about the baby. I didn’t know who, because I was like everyone else, looking at Dovey and the blood on her face. I’m not even sure where it was all coming from. It started at the top of her forehead, but that could’ve just been the spread from her gushing nose. All I know is that she wore the blood like a mask, and it dangled in drops from her chin before falling down to her stomach, where it landed in the half-moon shapes of broken thumbnails.
I heard someone shouting for the sheriff, for the doctor, for God. Dovey just sat there, her hands anxiously gripping her stomach as if trying to feel the baby’s heartbeat with her fingers.
Otis looked lost. He kept looking down at his muscles as if to say, Come on, do something. But they lazed in their size. He suddenly looked as if he regretted ever lifting a dumbbell in the first place. They had not prepared him for what to do for a fallen wife and child. They had not prepared him to keep that from happening, and at this he frowned into his abs.
“Help her up, Otis,” someone from the crowd ordered. It was his job, they said when someone tried to do it for him.
He squatted down as if preparing to perform a dead lift. With his arms around Dovey’s hips, he lifted her up. She was still gripping her stomach. I don’t think she even realized she was being raised. The blood from her nose kept at it as if it had been waiting a long time to gush. She looked at Sal, a bit drunkenlike. Then her eyes widened in that mask of blood.
“I know what it feels like now.” Her front tooth, loosened in the fall, flopped against her lip like a piece of tissue. “I know what it feels like to fall from the seven millionth hand.” And then she laughed. She laughed delirious and sick and sad. Self-shattering through sound.
“Dovey.” Otis’ leg muscles tightened as if at any moment he was going to have to run away from her. “Please, Dovey, stop laughin’ like that.”
She did stop, though I preferred her laughter to the screams that followed.
Over and over again, she was already fearing the worst. Otis led her away, saying the doctor would check her out and that everything was going to be just fine. She didn’t believe a word he said.
As one organism, the town watched Otis and Dovey until they disappeared around the corner. Then in near unison, the town turned back to me first, then Sal.
“I seen him push her,” a voice came like nails on a chalkboard. “Pushed her down.”
“Yeah, he did. I seen it too.” Raspy and so sure.
Elohim was still shouting, hopping from one foot to the other, yelling about devils and death. He smiled when the crowd took a step toward us. Another step. Another smile. Fists were bunching up at sides until knuckles went white. Necks were being cracked. Men were pushing up their sleeves. Women flung their purses up into the crooks of their arms, getting them out of the way.
I watched as one woman tied her feathered hair back out of her face while the man beside her shot his arms out from his shoulders the way a boxer walks to the ring.
Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.
“He didn’t do nothin’.” I realized I was trembling. “Just stay back. Y’hear?”
“He pushed her down.” A small voice from a small old lady who spoke for them all when she pointed at Sal and said, as soft as a hill flower, “He’s bad.”
“Just stay back. I’ll tell my dad on y’all. He’s Autopsy Bliss, in case some of you don’t know. He’s a lawyer, and if you do anything, he’ll put you in prison.”
“Devil.” One of them pointed not at Sal, but at me.
“But I’m not—”
“Devil.”
That wasn’t what was supposed to be par
t of my life as Fielding Bliss. No one ever said you’ve got to prepare to be hated. You’ve got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence. And yet, there I was, sharing the horns with Sal.
I remember how a kid no more than seven started practicing his punches. His mother patted his head. “That’s good, son. That’s real good.”
Friends, neighbors, my fellow Breathanians were advancing on us. The only time I’d ever been truly scared in my thirteen years was when a five-foot black racer chased me out of a field after I got too close to its eggs. The crowd was like that racer, rising up on its tail and hissing at me and Sal.
The light was letting go, and it was violence’s chance. The closeness of that very violence surged through me like an overwhelming disturbance that chilled my blood, a seemingly impossible feat in that heat, but that’s how scared shitless I was.
I tore open the bag of lentils and poured them into my hand. I threw hard, and while the lentils fell, I grabbed Sal’s hand—so sweaty I had to grip twice. Our hands eventually slipped from each other’s as we ran as fast as we could from the open, hungry mouth that had taken chase.
The young girls were the first to fall away, followed by the women whose heels wouldn’t let them go any farther. They threw these heels at us like loose, sharp teeth as they hollered for the men to keep on, keep on and tear us to pieces.
“Make us proud,” they insisted, some still in aprons smelling of home.
Me and Sal dodged the honking cars on the lanes before sticking to the yards, running in between houses and through the spray of a water hose and a man watering his oleander. My legs ached. A cramp was coming on in the right hamstring. I looked back. The crowd had gotten smaller. The older of the men had stopped, clutching their chests in a line like a heart attack parade. My own heart was thumping so badly, I looked down and thought at first I was bleeding from the chest, soon realizing it was just sweat and water from the hose soaking through my red T-shirt.
Our pursuers dwindled until all who remained was an eighteen-year-old from Breathed High who was OSU bound on a track scholarship. Dressed for Breathed track, in the school’s dark purple and lavender tank and shorts, he jumped over fallen logs and fences like hurdles, took turns with the ease of straight tracks and was sprinting to the finish line of our heels. I wanted to keep looking back, stare the cheetah of the Midwest in the eyes, but Sal kept screaming to just keep running.
I could feel the boy’s breath on the backs of my calves, and just when I thought he was going to reach out and grab us, I heard a scream and the squealing of tires. I turned and saw the track star bounce off the hood of a DeLorean, his sweat flinging from his forehead as he flew up into the air, seemingly touching the sun.
The driver was out of the car quick. I could hear him asking the boy to wiggle his toes as Sal pulled me away. I could hear the boy saying he couldn’t, oh God, he couldn’t wiggle his toes.
Just before we crossed into the woods, I saw the red lights of the sheriff’s car.
“That boy.” I bent over and grabbed my knees, feeling I might get sick. “You know he has a track scholarship. To OSU. I wonder … I wonder if … Oh, God.”
“C’mon,” Sal tugged my arm. “We best get lost for a while.”
We climbed up the nearby hill, running until we were deep in its cover of woods and could no longer hear the siren.
Sal caught his breath against a tree. “Where should we go?”
“I know a place. Follow me.”
We jumped every time a twig snapped, every time a wild turkey gobbled, every time a hawk squawked like a scream, fearing they had found us out. He chewed his lip until I thought he would chew it down to his chin.
I was so out of my head, I got lost. I couldn’t stop thinking about that boy enough to remember direction. We must have passed the same deer drinking hole three different times. Eventually I sobered from worry enough to find the overgrown pasture up on the side of the hill. Past it was a pine grove that led by an old abandoned schoolhouse and from there to the tree me and Grand had built a house in.
“This is mine and Grand’s secret place.” I climbed up the slats hammered into the wide trunk. “I’ve never brought anyone here before.”
I paused on the slats, glancing down at Sal climbing up behind me. “I hope her baby’s gonna be all right. Did you see all that blood? Sal? I saw her belly. I saw it push in when she hit. I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”
He nodded he had. I turned back to the slats and climbed the rest of the way.
“And that runner.” I paced the spacey boards that made up the floor while Sal leaned back against the tree trunk continuing its growth up through the middle of the house. “I can’t get the sound of the tires squealin’ outta my head.”
He stared at the two red handprints on the wall. “If this is yours and your brother’s place, why’d you bring me here, Fielding?”
“Ain’tcha like me and Grand? I mean maybe you and me ain’t brothers, but I mean we ain’t just friends. We’re in this together now. They weren’t just chasin’ you, Sal. They were chasin’ me too.”
On the floor was a wooden crate with one of Mom’s afghans draped over it. I threw the afghan off as I said, “There’s too many people confused ’bout what they think happened back there. They got it in their damn heads that you pushed her. Hell, they think I pushed her too. We’ve got a right to protect ourselves against that confusion, don’t we?”
He came and nudged the crate with his toe as I sat down, happy to be closer to the floor I thought I was going to collapse down to at any moment. My hands were still shaking, little vibrations as if they were being chewed on by gnats.
When I pulled the revolver out of the crate, Sal took it from me by its ivory handle.
“Cool, huh? Me and Grand found it in the attic a few years ago. We never did tell Mom and Dad ’bout it. Parents get … worried ’bout guns.” I opened the chamber to show him the bullets inside. “It’s only missin’ one.”
He closed one eye and peered down the barrel of the gun.
“Sal? Was that true back there, ’bout the staircase ’n’ all?”
He looked deeper into the barrel and then held the gun up, aiming it at the wall behind me. “It’s true.”
“What’d you mean when ya said you were discontented with the one suit of your life?”
I thought for a moment he was actually going to fire the gun, but he slowly lowered it to his lap as he asked, “Have you ever tried on one of your father’s suits?”
I shook my head.
“You will one day.”
“Are you sayin’ that’s all ya did? Was try on one of God’s suits?”
“I just wanted to try it on. See if it fit me or one day might.” For the first time, he seemed more sweat than skin. “The thing about trying on your father’s suit is that if you wear it outside the closet, you are no longer merely trying it on. You are wearing it. Some may think this is you trying to replace your father.”
“Did ya step outside the closet, Sal?”
He nodded. “But only because there were no mirrors in the closet and I just wanted to see how I looked. That was all. I just wanted to see how I looked in my father’s suit.” He lowered his eyes to the gun. “It didn’t fit.”
8
Melt, as I do,
. . . . .
… bliss on bliss
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:389, 508
IN LIEU OF family and friends at the dinner table, I’ve piled laundry in the chairs to avoid the emptiness. Still it’s not easy to dine with dirty jeans and stained shirts. Yesterday I tried something new. I had dinner at the VFW. It was my first time there with them veterans of foreign wars.
When I walked in, they leaned back in their chairs and nodded sympathetically, like I was one of them. Maybe that was because of the service uniform I was wearing and had bought at the thrift store down the road.
As soon as
I sat down at the bar, a guy attached to my side, asking what war.
I pretended not to hear him. He smelled like a dog fight. Sweaty. Bloody. A little scared.
When the bartender came, I placed my order for a beer and the BBQ ribs meal.
“I asked ya what war were ya in?” The drunk beside me took a swallow or two of his beer.
“The big one.” I sipped my own beer the bartender had just served.
“Yeah, the big one.” The drunk’s eyes got even glassier. He knew exactly what war I was talking about, even if he didn’t.
“Hey, I forgot to ask for your card.” The bartender had returned. “Your membership card.”
“This is my membership card.” I tapped the uniform.
“Amen.” The drunk threw back his beer and asked for another.
“You’re over your limit, Gus. Look”—he turned back to me—“I gotta have the card.”
“Leave ’im alone.” Gus slapped my back, a little too hard. “He was in the big one.”
The bartender looked from Gus to me and waited. I picked up my glass of beer in case he was going to try to take it away from me.
“I don’t have a card.”
“You’re not a veteran?” The bartender slung his towel over his shoulder and leaned onto the counter. “We only serve veterans.”
“I’m a veteran. Just not of the United States Army or Navy or whatever the hell this is.” I pinched the uniform.
“You said…” Gus slurred. “You said you were in the big war.”
I finished the last of my beer in a great gulp. “I was.”
“He’s my guest.” Gus kept turning his glass up to his lips even though it was empty. “He don’t need no card if he’s a guest of someone with a card. And ain’t ol’ Gus here got a card?” He flipped his card out from his pocket. It was creased until his name had faded.
The bartender shrugged and returned to wiping the counter.
“You ever kill anybody?” Gus perched his chin on my shoulder and wobbled on his stool. A few more, and I’d be wobbling with him. Two old birds singing on the same old wire.