The Summer That Melted Everything

  “Yeah.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Yeah, I killed someone once. Hey, can I get another?”

  The meal was shit. Made me miss my frozen dinners. Damn Gus, who ended up passing out when I was midsentence and before he saw me, beers later, coming to blows with three silver-haired Iraq War veterans, one in a wheelchair. I can’t make my fists like I used to, but I still got the punch. Bartender and a couple of the other young ones had to break us up. Not sure what started it all, but I never am.

  As I stumbled from the VFW, bloody and bruised, I thought of Dovey. Her care went beyond the resources of Breathed’s doctor, so they sent her up to the hospital in Columbus to monitor the baby. That’s where they took the track star too. He finally made it to OSU, though it was the hospital instead of the track. He would be there for months but not as long as he was in the rehabilitation center. He’d never walk again.

  Later I’d hear he rolled his wheelchair off a train platform while wearing his old lavender and dark purple track uniform from Breathed High. Sometimes the only thing left to do is to flee the life and hope that after we’ve fled we’re spared the judgment of dying wrong.

  He must have been something like thirty-six by then. I sent his mother lilies for the funeral, unsigned. Would have sent them to his widow, but he never married.

  An apology to him was on my lips as I sat down on the sidewalk, not even half a block away from the VFW.

  “Hey, buddy, you okay?”

  A passerby. I flipped him and his nosey dog the bird.

  “Fuck you too, buddy.”

  Finally left in peace, I tried to lie down. Couldn’t, though—on account of the heartburn brought on by the barbecue sauce in that shit meal. As I sat up, a sheriff car went driving by. Partly the night, partly my drunkenness, but I saw Sal looking out the window at me just as he’d looked that June morning when Sheriff Sands drove him away.

  Sitting there on the sidewalk, feeling as certain as any drunk man can feel, I reached for Sal, screaming his name. I was convinced I was seeing him with his face pressed against the glass. I somehow stood up and stumbled out into the road. The sheriff was nearing the turn and by it would turn out of my life.

  I picked up a handful of small gravels from off the pavement. Winding up like I was on the mound, I pitched them, just as Grand had taught me. They pinged and bounced off the car’s trunk, causing the brake lights to flash red and the tires to squeal to a stop. When the sheriff got out, he did so cussing and with his hand on his holster.

  “Now, you just take a step back onto that sidewalk there. You hear me? Goddamn it. I said take a step back. That’s good. Now, why you throwin’ rocks at my fuckin’ car like that?” He used his flashlight to shine on the trunk. “Could’ve broken my damn winda out, you old fool.”

  I stammered as he shined the light into my eyes.

  “Been drinkin’ tonight, have we?”

  “Just a little, sir.”

  “You know you’ve pissed yourself?” He shined the light down.

  “Couldn’t find the bathroom, sir.”

  “Says the man who’s just had a little. You look like a caveman, all that hair, all that beard. You used to be in one of them rock bands or somethin’? Can’t let it go now? You still have to look the part, don’tcha? If I was you, I’d get myself to the barber and only drink coffee from now on, you understand?”

  He was so close, I could smell coffee on his breath. I knew he could smell the beer on mine. I closed my mouth and didn’t breathe. I got light-headed as he asked if I was driving home.

  I shook my head. My lungs tightening, about to burst.

  “How you plan on gettin’ home?”

  My answer was a sharp intake of breath.

  “You drivin’?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ain’t you too old for this shit?” His hand dropped from his holster. “What’s that you got all over your beard? That red stuff?”

  “Barbecue sauce.”

  He shined the flashlight down over the rest of me and my thrift store uniform. “You were in the armed forces?”

  “I was in a war, yes. It was me.” I stabbed my finger into my chest. “It was me who stopped the war.” I made my hand into a gun and whispered a bang. “That was me with the gun.”

  He lowered the light down to my tennis shoes. “Your shoelaces are untied.”

  “I know.”

  “Weird-lookin’ color for shoelaces.”

  “They’re my brother’s, sir. They’re my brother’s shoelaces.”

  “What’s that brownish color on ’em?”

  “Dried blood.”

  He sighed as he clicked off the flashlight. “I should take you in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Public intoxication. Public stupidity. Public stink.”

  “Wouldn’t be my first, sir.” I held out my wrists, ready to be cuffed.

  “I’m on my way home myself.” He turned to leave. “Ain’t got no desire to take you in and do more paperwork tonight. You get home, old timer. I don’t wanna hear you killed no one. I said get home. What are you doin’?” He stepped back around his car to see me lowering myself to the ground.

  I burped and he threw his hands up at me. Mumbled something like jackass before he got into his car and drove away while I sat there and closed my eyes, remembering Sheriff Sands and how he said Breathed wasn’t safe for Sal anymore.

  Dovey’s fall and the track star’s accident were a few days gone when the sheriff came to our house, telling Dad it was being said Sal had a hand in those tragic accidents.

  “I like to think we take care of and solve our own problems,” the sheriff said, “but I don’t want that boy in danger. I think you agree.”

  When Sal was told he would be leaving, he put on the overalls he had arrived in. Dad said he didn’t have to do that. Said he wouldn’t even be leaving until the next morning, but Sal wouldn’t take them off.

  When I woke in the middle of the night, I found him downstairs, scribbling a small tangle of ink in the corner of the reproduction painting of The Great Wave in the room we knew as Japan.

  “What you doin’, Sal?”

  “Leaving something for you to remember me.”

  These remembrances he left throughout the house, from a cut in the sofa’s skirt to a page torn in the Russian-to-English dictionary. Little cuts, tiny slashes, small scribbles that wouldn’t be seen unless you were really looking. Looking for the curtain to have the tiny hole in its valance or the rug to be missing its seventh fringe. Things taken away. That was how he saw his presence. It would be how his presence would be proved in the end.

  The morning he left, he took our names from us. I was not a field growing life. Grand was not Grand. He was just some guy throwing a baseball in the background. Mom and Dad was just the foot and the step standing side by side, and the house was just a square with four sides for all of us but not one for him.

  He looked up at Dad with the type of disappointment people never forget. “You invited me here, Autopsy Bliss. Your invitation, it was why I came. To see for myself. I felt wanted. But it was a lie. You lied to me, Autopsy Bliss. You all did.”

  He got in the front seat with the sheriff before Dad could say anything. I don’t know what Dad would’ve said. Neither did he. Later we heard him walking through the house, rattling off cases one after the other. That was coping to my father.

  Not more than forty minutes later, and Dad was getting a call from the sheriff, who was out of breath, saying Sal had escaped.

  I thought Sal would leave Breathed, go find another Fielding, another Grand, another Dad and Mom who would take him in as their own. But as the day changed to night, I lay in bed feeling like I was just waiting for him to return. How could he not? With little parts of himself still there. In the torn page of the dictionary, the cut sofa, the corner of the painting. Pieces of him coming together into the center we all revolved around.

  I didn’t hear him calling my name at first, not over the hum of the
fans. Finally I heard his nails scratching at the screen of the open window, his face pressed there.

  “Let me in, Fielding.”

  I didn’t dare go for a light as I got out of bed and quietly removed the screen.

  “How’d you get here?” I stepped back as he came in over the sill.

  “I climbed up the ivy.”

  “No, how did you get here? I thought you left with the sheriff?”

  “I’m good at escaping.” He wiped his dripping forehead on his forearm, Breathed’s unofficial gesture of that summer.

  “But how’d you do it?” I replaced the screen as he ignored my question and instead said he was thirsty.

  “Ain’t got a glass up here. Get a couple handfuls outta the faucet.”

  He frantically shoveled the water into his mouth, ending by splashing his face, while I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to tell me about his daring escape.

  “Elohim.” He wiped his mouth and sat down beside me. “He flagged me and the sheriff down. The sheriff got out to talk to him. Elohim said how it was wrong for the sheriff to be driving me out of Breathed and how I should stay. He said he would talk to people. He promised he would keep Breathed a safe place for me.”

  “But … Elohim hates you. Why would he want you to stay?”

  He shrugged. “While they were talking, I slipped out the sheriff’s open door.”

  Headlights suddenly lit up the dark room. We hunkered down over to the front window, where we saw a car driving up to the house. I didn’t see it was the sheriff until he got out and spit.

  “Fielding.”

  Me and Sal turned to Dad, standing in the open doorway, the sweat on his face glistening in the moonlight.

  “Dad? How’d you know?”

  “It’s all right. I had a feeling he might come back here, so I sat up waiting. I saw him crossing the yard.”

  Sal shrank into the darkness of the room. “What’s going to happen now, Autopsy?”

  Dad placed his hand on Sal’s shoulder. “I’m going to talk to the sheriff. You boys wait in this room. No more running off, you hear?” He squeezed Sal’s shoulder.

  Like good shadows, me and Sal snuck downstairs to listen outside Dad’s study door, which hadn’t closed completely in the latch, allowing us to hear the sheriff.

  “The woman at children’s services has said that if he returned here after his escape, it meant he felt safe amongst y’all and it’d be more psychologically harmin’ to take him away and place him with a different foster family. Accordin’ to her, he’s in a fragile state at the moment. Possibly abandoned in the first place, so he’s fearful of losin’ another home.”

  “Is that true?” I whispered to Sal.

  He placed his trembling finger to his lips.

  “She says as long as you’re able to provide a safe and healthy environment for the boy, then she don’t have no problem with his stayin’ here for the time bein’. She knows about the accidents but not to the extent of the boy bein’ thought responsible. And after the promise from Elohim today, I feel no need to elaborate on the details with her.

  “Folks only started believin’ those things about the boy ’cause of that midget in the first place, and if he swears he’ll turn things around with their thinkin’, then so be it. Lord knows why he suddenly wants that boy to stay. For the sake of calm, I’ll have to think nothin’ of it, though I’ll keep my eye on Elohim. I advise you to do the same.

  “I told her you and Stella are very willin’ for Sal to stay here. I assured her you’re a respectable family. She likes that you’re a lawyer ’n’ all. She’s gonna be payin’ ya a visit in a couple days to check things out. I suspect she’ll look ’round the house, ask y’all a couple of questions, so I’d make sure Grand and Fieldin’ are here if need be. If she deems it all proper, you’ll be granted temporary custody of the boy.”

  Suddenly the study door was yanked open the rest of the way. Me and Sal slowly raised our heads to see Dad shaking his and looking down at us.

  “Go on up to bed, you two. I’ll be up in a little while.”

  He made sure we climbed up the stairs before returning to the sheriff.

  “So?” I asked Sal once we were in my room.

  “So what?” He fell back in the window bed.

  “I mean ain’tcha happy you’re stayin’? You’re lucky Elohim stopped the sheriff.”

  “I don’t need Elohim. I’m the devil. No one tells me when to stay and when to leave. But it sure is nice to be wanted. I tell you, Fielding, it sure is nice to be wanted right in this very place.”

  9

  Where all life dies, death lives, Nature breeds,

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  These yelling monsters

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 2:624, 795

  SHE CAME IN a large black car with candy bar wrappers all over the passenger seat. Her breath smelled like Butterfingers. Her shirt had coffee stains. Her gold bracelets dangled over the clipboard and her fake nails, in radioactive green, scratched the paper as she put the little checks in the little boxes. She was children’s services, and she spoke mostly to Mom and Dad. She did ask me and Grand things like, Do you get along with Sal? Would you mind him staying with you for a while? Is there any reason his staying would be a bad idea?

  Yes, we answered. No, we said. And if there were any reasons, we couldn’t think of them. We fibbed on that last one, but Dad had said we were not to bring up Dovey or the runner with the gone spine.

  She and her clipboard went through the house, wanted to see where Sal slept, things like that. At the end, she gave Dad and Mom some papers to sign. Temporary is what the papers said, though Dad still kneeled in front of Sal and said he was one of us now.

  “Did you know that before you came along, Sal, our four-person family was too small to own our name?” Dad held up the piece of paper he’d written our name on so he could illustrate his point. “I had the B, Mother there had the L, Grand had the I, and Fielding had the S. But this second S here has been waiting to be claimed this entire time. You, Sal, you are the last S in our name. You are the wholeness of our family.”

  So we were, suddenly a family of five, and June wasn’t even over yet. By that time, sweat lived on us, leaving our skin stuck between the sensation and the response to that unbearable heat. While the sweat dripped, dropped, and flowed, it seemed at times to press upon us like dry twigs threatening to spark.

  Owing to that longstanding advice on how to stay cool, an aerial view of Breathed would have captured a town of pastel seersucker and beige linen. No one wore anything heavier. There were those who dared to free themselves of clothes altogether and nap quietly bare on the banks of the river or stretch out in their backyards with the garden hoses. At first those who went naked tended to unintentionally build fences of young masturbators, but soon orgasms, even the most triumphant ones, became too minuscule a wage for the labors of the hand in such a roasting heat.

  At that time, not many homes, especially the older ones like ours, had central air, so we had air conditioners sitting bulky in windows for rooms like the living room and the kitchen.

  Even with air-conditioning, we relied on electric fans. We had a couple stored in the attic. Dad bought more at the hardware store before they sold out. He did then what others did, which was to drive to the surrounding towns to buy what fans they had. Fans became the statement of our house and their steady hum-buzz was like living in a beehive. To influence the temperature of their flow, Dad would place bowls of ice water in front of their blades, which brought a cool, though not cold, relief.

  Even now, I sweat from that heat. People think it’s Arizona that makes me sweat, but it’s always been Ohio.

  Did I tell you the neighbor boy brought me over a fan the other day?

  “I just thought you looked awful hot,” he said as he set it up on the table. “Do ya like it?”

  “It’s not going to help.”

  “Sure it will. And I got somethin’ else tha
t might help ya.”

  He ran out of the trailer, returning minutes later with a cane.

  “I just worry you’re gonna fall down. I used my allowance to get it. It’s not new. I got it at a yard sale, but I think it’ll work just fine.”

  I slapped the cane down to the floor. There is nothing more angering than being told you’re old, and nothing tells it quite like a cane.

  “Don’t you know I was friends with the devil once?”

  As if that will make me greater than just another old man.

  “I’m awful sorry, Mr. Bliss. I just thought it’d help.”

  Good intentions slapped down to the floor is a hard scene to come away from. I sighed and did my best.

  “Listen, kid. My shoelaces are untied. That’s why I look like I’m about to fall. No cane can ever help me with that.”

  “But, Mr. Bliss.” He looked down at my bare feet. “You’re not wearin’ any shoes.”

  “That doesn’t matter. The laces are still untied.” I pointed down at the old pair of dirty tennis shoes on the floor.

  “But how can they trip you up if you’re not even wearin’ ’em?”

  “Because those laces are everything, and when everything gets untied, you don’t stop tripping just because the shoes are off.”

  He stepped over to the shoes, where he bent down and ran his fingers over the eyes threaded into the backs of their heels. “There’s somethin’ on the laces.” He grabbed hold of them and looked closer.

  “Blood,” I answered as if I were carrying armloads of it, exhausted by that very thing.

  I thought he would let go of the laces. Instead, he tied them.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I found myself not stopping him.

  “I’m tyin’ them. So they won’t trip you anymore.”

  It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in years. It was so kind, I had to sit down.

  After he tied both shoes, he stood and walked around the trailer, staring at the photographs of chimneys and steeples framed on the walls.

  “That one over there was one I did in San Francisco,” I told him from my lawn chair. “That one beside it is from a small town called Sunburst—that’s in Montana, in case you don’t know. The big one there is from Baton Rouge, and—”