The Summer That Melted Everything (18 page)

“So I picked up the phone again, but I didn't dial nothin', I just waited. The dial tone hummed in my ear, then it crackled and I knew. I knew he had picked up.”

I shifted beside him. “He?”

“The devil. I told 'im what I wanted. Told 'im I wanted Helen home. He didn't say nothin', but I knew he understood. The next day I got a call from Helen. I asked her 'bout the man who answered her phone. She said it was just a hotel worker, bringin' more towels and for me not to worry 'cause she was comin' home early. Had booked passage on the
Andrea Doria,
she said. Wasn't I happy? she asked.”

He fell quiet, and together we watched a hawk go flying by. When it landed, he spoke again, rather low in the chest. “The so-called hotel worker came to her funeral. A tall son-of-a-bitch. I recognized his voice when he came up to me to offer his condolences. I hated the way he bent down to talk to me, like I was a damn child. Told 'im that. Told 'im I thought it funny he would come all that way from Paris for a woman he'd just brought towels to.”

The silence that followed was like practicing for death. That lonely silence that describes the dark so well. A fly came and landed on the back of his hand. I shooed it away for him because he just sat there, a concreted form, heavy and still.

“Mr. Elohim? You okay?”

His head seemed unsteady on his neck as he said, “Turned out he was a painter. An artist. I suppose they like that distinction. I saw his work years later in a museum up in Cleveland. He had a paintin' called the
Andrea Doria
. It didn't have the ship in it, though.” He bit and swallowed another fingernail. “It had Helen. Beautiful paintin', I'll give 'im that.”

His trembling hands gripped his knees.

“My momma, God rest her soul, used to say a black boy is only good till he reaches thirteen. After that, he's man bound, and a black man's no good for nothin', especially since they passed all them laws on workin' 'em.

“I thought of my momma and what she had said as that man shook my hand at Helen's funeral. I thought, gee, if only someone had stopped him from growin' up. Just ate his future away, I would still have mine.”

I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what to do, really, except lay my hand on his back and pat like I'd seen Dad do before.

Elohim slowly turned to me. “Don't pat my back like I'm a damn dog, boy. I'm a man, for Christ's sake.” He stood, trying his best to make himself taller. “I think you better go on home. And, Fielding, keep all I just said to yourself. I shouldn't even have said it. It's just sometimes you don't say nothin' for so long, you forget why ya shut up in the first place. Oh, and Fielding? You might wanna let that boy know somethin'.”

“What?”

“Dovey lost that baby.”

He didn't say it cruelly. Nor did he say it as if it were a victory for him and his. He said it like a man tired of describing what
lost
means.

 

13

Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
1:302

I'
VE NEVER BEEN
married, though when I was twenty-eight, I was close to it. Got the tux and everything. Even went to the church. She was a lovely girl. Maybe a little too much hair. She was always putting this white cream on her upper lip. I'd walk into the bathroom, and there'd she'd be, snow on the face.

Years after we were to be married, I would hear she died in a car crash in Minnesota. They didn't find the accident right away. The state was in the middle of a blizzard, and by the time they come upon the car, only its roof was visible. Windshield was in a bad way. They knew she'd been ejected. They shined a flashlight around.
Beam, beam, beam
. Saw something a few feet out. It was her lips. That was all that was seen. The rest of her was covered by snow.

Snow on the face, and I've hated Minnesota ever since.

I don't know. Maybe I should've married her, but when I got to the church, I found myself staring up at its steeple. I didn't have a ladder, so I had to stand on the outside sill of a window and reach up and grab the gutter. Then I just pulled myself up. I used to be strong like that. They heard my feet walking across the roof, that's what they said when they all came out of the church to stare up at me. Said they heard a noise and came out to see.

“What are you doing up there?” they asked.

“Fixing the steeple,” I answered.

I didn't have my tools with me, so I had to improvise. I heard someone down below say I was mad, the way I gripped air and hammered it too. The way I sounded out the sound of steel hitting wood. I had gone temporarily around the bend. Don't we get to at least once in our lives? To go so mad, we survive what it is we are doing. And what I was doing was jilting the woman who loved me. My God, what I must've done to her heart.

I heard someone from below say I had always been good for nothing. I picked up one of my invisible crowbars and flung it his way. He didn't flinch.

I suppose someone told her I was on the roof. She came running out of the church, white dress and all. I heard her mother saying, “Mary, get back inside. He's not supposed to see you yet.”

But Mary didn't care. Mary only ever heard what she wanted to hear. It was her fault we got as far as we did to the church.

One day I said
Mary
and then I said something else, I know I did, but ended it all with a
me.
She thought I'd said
Marry me.
I didn't have the heart to tell her that wasn't what was said at all. She was just so excited. I thought, hell, this girl really wants to marry me. Why not give it a try? Maybe her love would be enough to paradise the hell. But then I realized, I couldn't use her like that. Like a shield in the fray. She deserved to marry a man who loved her for all the things she was and not for all the armor she could be.

As she stared up at me that day on the roof, she knew exactly what I was doing up there. I'll always be grateful for her, how she never asked me to come down like everyone else did. She just took off her veil and told her mother she'd like to stop by Denny's on the way home. She was hungry, she said.

That was the last I saw of her, her white dress piling up against her body like the snow I never saved her from.

I waited for them all to leave. I cringed when I heard a woman call me a no-good son-of-a-bitch. Even the flower girl flipped me the bird. I threw an invisible hammer at her. She just dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head as she walked away, dragging her feet while the flower petals fell from her hand.

Before I climbed down, I yanked some of the shingles off the steeple, kicked it in the side, and broke the stained glass in its little window. A week later, I'd drive by the steeple and see it was still damaged.

Some people might call me lonely because all I got are pictures of steeples and towers and roofs. I do have the neighbor boy's photograph, but he's not mine. Like I said before in Maine, I wouldn't have done much good with a kid if I had one. I did have a dream once that I had a son. In this dream, I went out to the woods with him and put a gun in his young hands. I woke up at the bang.

“Just a nightmare,” I muttered, reaching for the bottle by the bed. “Just a nightmare.”

Maybe I am lonely. Maybe I do hold onto the pillow at night, maybe I have twisted a bread tie around my ring finger just to see what it feels like to have a meaning there. I think of Elohim during these moments.

Him and his Helen.

Too bad he couldn't just let go of what she had done to him. After all, it wasn't the losing of her to the
Andrea Doria
he'd been destroyed by. It was the losing of her to another. It's a gasoline betrayal when the romance of your lover becomes a separate energy from you. It lessens your significance as lover. As man.

Spark, spark, hiss, and burn.

I've been with many Helens. Their legs around me. My head on their husbands' pillows.

Sometimes a husband would come home early. I'd hear his tires crunching over the gravel in the drive. She'd throw my clothes at me, tell me to get out. That the window was the best bet. I'd just lie there.

“What are you doing?” She'd try to pull me up. Fear in her whisper, “He's gonna catch you.”

I could hear his keys in the front door.

“Honey, I'm home,” he'd call, like a sitcom. I could tell his head was down, looking over the mail he'd just brought in. “Honey?” A step creaking on his way up while she yanks on my arm, telling me he has a gun.

“Does he know how to shoot it?”

She'd shriek and look at me with fear like she could already see the blood and all the cleaning up she'd have to do. Blood is hard to wash out, I knew she was thinking, her eyes rolling like washing machines already starting the job.

Only when the doorknob turned with his hand did I grab my clothes and throw them out the window, me jumping after. I'd wait in the yard, thinking he knew. How could he not? How could he not smell me all over her? All over his sheets? His pillow? But the curtains would close and no guns would fire.

Later the bartender would say to me,
you look like you could use a drink
. Later after that, he'd say I'd had enough and I'd have to use my fists to say otherwise.

I dated a girl named Andrea once. I could feel her sinking under me into the downy comforter. I asked her if she ever heard of the
Andrea Doria.
She said no and said for me not to go so fast.

“Gentle, gentle.” She patted my back.

I said, “I'm not a damn dog,” and I came and she went disappointed and rolling off to the side, saying I shouldn't stay over anymore and not to call again and if it wouldn't be too much trouble to hand her some fresh sheets from out of the closet on my way out.

I wonder what lovers Sal and Dresden would've been if that summer would've been hot and nothing else. He would've kissed each one of her freckles and moved his hand up her leg.
Spark, spark, fire
. Orgasm is a many-flamed wonder to the thrusting bodies that in their fond collision makes husbands of boys and wives of girls.

I will say conversation was a long time coming between him and Dresden that summer. They first spoke with their eyes. Every look. Every glance. Every long stare and short one.

He would nail a poem to her oak. They weren't his work, these poems. They were Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, all the old masters and the old standby lure for lovers everywhere.

He'd hide behind one of the other trees and watch her take the poem down from the nail. She'd bite her lip and tuck her frizzy hair behind her freckled ear as she read, sometimes long enough for me to think he'd given her a whole novel. I suppose she was reading the poem over and over again, finding the parts of it that were less Shakespeare and more Sal.

I climbed her tree with him once. She didn't know as she leaned back against its trunk, opening her book and circling its words. I think it was
Gone with the Wind,
but that could just be me going with the wind in my memory.

A few pages in, Sal signaled it was time to press on the branches. We leaned our whole weight in until they swayed. It was hard work, and some of the branches wouldn't move at all. That's an old oak for you. Its long, heavy limbs stretched out more than up to the sky. Limbs that were thick, drooping things like wet rope. One branch was heavy enough to flop all the way to the ground, resting on it as if reaching bottom was the most natural growth for a tree branch.

We stuck to the lighter branches in the middle, and to the even lighter and smaller branches of those branches. The higher you moved up into the tree, the smaller the limbs became and therefore the easier it was to move them.

There was no wind that day, so when she felt the movement of the tree above her, she looked up, frightened. Then she saw Sal and her fear melted away. She never even saw me, and I was really putting my back into it, shifting those damn branches just for her. Didn't even notice. All she saw was Sal.

“What are you doing, you silly boy?” She wrapped her sweater-covered arms around her book and swayed in tune with the branches, her long dress skimming the ground.

“Giving you a breeze on this very hot day.” He lazed over a thick branch and smiled down at her as he used his back foot to stir a small twig, all the while I leaned everything I had into a great big bough. She never once looked over and saw. Instead she laughed at him, one of those laughs that's more open mouth than sound.

“Well, all right then. I'll let you get on with it. Silly boy.”

She returned to her book and stayed long after circling the words on its pages. It was as if she couldn't bear to leave. She would look up at him, saying she was going to have to go soon, that her mother was going to be home. But then she'd lean back against the tree and stay for a while more.

Meanwhile, my arms and legs felt about to break off like the few smaller twigs that had become casualties of my wind. I told Sal I was going home, leaving by walking down the long branch that lay on the ground.

Dresden suddenly turned, surprised to see me. “Where'd you come from?”

“My God. Didn't you see me? I was half of that wind up there.”

Her shrug was limp, and for that moment I genuinely hated her, maybe because I wanted her to see me as much as she saw Sal. I shook my head and kicked a small gravel past her plastic black flat before heading home. Even at the end of the lane, I could see that tree slowly waving one branch at a time. The only tree in Breathed that day in motion.

Sal stayed long after she went inside. By the time Alvernine pulled up the drive in her Mercedes, he was still there. Alvernine wasn't the type of woman to look up in the trees.