The Summer That Melted Everything (22 page)

The Indianapolis Star
had a quote from an environmentalist who was certain our dying livestock and infestation of flies were the prologue to the disease in us, while
The Miami Herald
listed Breathed at the top of its list of the ten worst places to spend summer vacation.

Then there were the articles less about the heat and more about Sal and what they called his “devil delusion.”
The Columbus Dispatch
quoted a prominent psychiatrist who gave an abridged diagnosis of pediatric schizophrenia while
The Washington Post
gave a detailed description of the therapy and miracles of modern medicine used to treat such a disorder.

The Baptist preacher interviewed by
The Clarion-Ledger
ignored any verdict familiar to the lexicon of the medical and instead said Sal was an energumen, a person possessed. The preacher went further to say that he would be more than happy to perform a Mississippi-style exorcism—for a small donation, of course.

The focus of other papers like
USA Today
was on Sal's race, and their articles were narrations from the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Al Sharpton. To them, Sal was just a black boy who by calling himself devil was personifying the white man's claim.

There weren't as many journalists to come to Breathed as there were articles written. Most of them phoned it in or relied on their fellow journalists, lifting the common themes of heat and race. Those who did come rarely stayed more than a couple days. The heat got to them. The people who wouldn't talk got to them. Not even Elohim and his followers had anything to do with the newspapers. National news was something Elohim did not want to make.

These reporters especially wanted to speak to the family with the boy. Of course to the boy himself. Every notepad, every big city accent, asking, “Say, aren't you—?” we ran away from. Some chased, shouting they just wanted to talk. We ran faster. They wheezed and cursed over their urban knees. And we ran faster.

Aside from Sal's race, the town got darker that summer, beyond a Midwestern tan. No hat, no shade, no night could keep you pale. The heat had its own sun. Even housebound Mom came away with a cook to her normally rinsed skin.

Much to his annoyance, Elohim was also changed. A browning start surely there. It's why he started to wear white. White shirts. White pants. White everything. He was keeping the white in place. It meant so much to him that it stay in place. That meant a great deal indeed.

As the heat increased, Elohim increased his sermons to an ever-increasing audience. At his feet they sat as lumps of soil. He was their sun. He was their water. He was the Father tugging up their growth, occasionally fertilizing with an Old Testament
amen
and pat on the head, bringing him down from the cloud.

Was he God that summer? There in those woods, he was the only one.

There would be no hollering, no stomping feet, no lectern theatrics. He was the Lord with the soft drawl. Sometimes he didn't even speak. He'd hold up enlarged photographs of concentration camps, of disasters and accidents. There Sal would be, in the sunken stomachs of starving prisoners, in the corpses piled in holes. He would be painted badly by Elohim, whose skill was as splotched as putting a canvas beneath a pan of boiling paint.

In the photograph of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Elohim painted Sal in the billowing smoke of the resulting fires. His face was the rubble of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and the bodies by the wreckage. He stared out from the debris of the Johnstown Flood and peered from the shattered windows of the Cocoanut Grove.

He was the 1913 Ohio Flood, the Blizzard of 1888, the explosion in the Monongah mines. Train crashes, bridges collapsed, buses of children careening off the cliff. He was avalanches, stampedes, sinking ships, like the
Andrea Doria.

Elohim had made Sal everything bad. Gone wrong. Gone to death.

And they all sat there, believing it, their common sense melting away one drip at a time. Had it not been the flame's summer, those people would've stood and left Elohim. Probably even called him a son-of-a-bitch.

If only it would've been a normal summer, a summer where the heat was easily alleviated by air conditioners and fans and those cooling stations set up in town for the elderly and those at high risk of heat-related death.

We were all high risk. That heat brought out the throbs in hearts, the fevers, the things that couldn't be let go of. It was a perfect extractor of pain and frustration, of anger and loss. It brought everything to the surface and sweated it out.

Those followers of Elohim all had their own Helens, their own
Andrea Doria
s, their own devils they needed to blame. It was a support group for the wronged. Like the brother of the twin killed in a gas station being robbed by a black man in a black ski mask. There was the father whose daughter had been made a vegetable by the drunk driver who was drunk, black, and very, very drunk. And a wife who'd been raped while coming out of a bar in Toledo. Three rapists, all one color. Black. Black. Black.

That color brought Elohim and his group together. It was the color of their devil, and they needed their devil to have a color so they could find him again.

Elohim became the one they all looked to because he amplified their tragedies and in that addressed their desperation to be heard and to matter. To them, he was the someone who was going to give them the opportunity to take action on what before had seemed to be out of their hands. Elohim placed retribution within their reach, and he was helped by the heat and of all things by Sal himself, who came in the right color, willing to be called devil.

Elohim always ended the meetings by handing out vegetarian recipes. It was because of him the sale of meat was down but that of lettuce was up. The butcher nearly went out of business. We should've known right then and there the control Elohim had. All he had to say was buy lettuce and they bought lettuce. Chuck your bacon and they chucked their bacon.

All around me, madness. Madness in the woods, but madness in the town too. Yes, common sense was melting away. At first people followed the old logic that light colors and light fabric are easier to breathe in when hot. Then I started to see a black T-shirt here and dark denim there. Was that flannel? And a leather jacket and some woolen socks instead of bare feet. Those who had painted their roofs white, climbed back up the ladder to paint them black. Instead of iced tea being ordered at Dandelion Dimes, it was hot tea, sent back because it simply wasn't hot enough.

Would it happen to me? Would I one day wake up, put on mittens, and wrap a scarf around my neck? Go out into the woods and nod trustingly at Elohim? Would I start buying frozen vegetables in bulk? Would I see in Sal what they did?

I frightened at these thoughts. I needed to feel like a boy in the summertime. Nothing made me feel more like that than watching Grand play ball. That's baseball for you. A bat-and-ball cure for any boy lost and looking to run home.

The baseball field was behind the high school. It sounded like wasps that summer because the small shed by the field had a nest of them. I walked past the empty bleachers, a pair of dirty cleats tied to the rail. A fly hovering above them.

I smelled pine tar and sweat as I clung to the holes of the chain-link fence surrounding the ball diamond. The fence was painted the deep, dark shade of purple that represented one half of the school colors. The other being lavender. The color of the dugouts and the main color of the team's home game uniforms.

Though there was hardly, if any, grass left in that drought, the nearby lawn mower gave off its heat and fumes of just-worked mechanics. I moved a little farther down the fence, where the air was less gasoline.

Grand was on the mound, waiting impatiently for the ball to come to him from the outfield. It was a practice in which they wore no shirts. Even the thinnest cotton shirts could feel like parkas. I swear, they dripped like faucets.

I once asked Grand what it was like practicing in that heat. He said it felt like being the only ashtray in the world open for business.

“Imagine that, little man, all them cigarettes dumpin' down their hot ash. And you, unable to breathe.
в ловушке
.”

When it came time for Grand to pitch to Yellch, it was a pitch no doubt given. Their friendship hadn't been the same since Yellch went running from Grand. Grand was trying to take things back with a pitch forward. Make it the same as it always had been, but Yellch wasn't ready. He threw all his anger into the swing, sending the ball in a line drive back to Grand, who managed to duck before it cracked open his skull.

The tail of Yellch's mullet flapped as he ran the bases, eventually sliding into home, with the ball in the catcher's mitt only seconds behind.

As the dust settled and Yellch pushed his glasses back up on his nose, the coach and other teammates gave the usual congratulatory gesture by slapping Yellch on the behind. They were quick slaps like water flicking from fingers.
Slap, slap, slap.
Then Grand and his slap that reminded Yellch why he had run in the first place.

He pushed Grand back. “What the hell you think you're doin'?”

“What?” Grand hugged his glove.

“Don't fuckin' touch me, man. Didn't y'all see 'im?” Yellch asked of his teammates. “He just touched my ass.”

“He's proud of ya for hittin' a homer.” The coach and his chest-high shorts came in front of Yellch. “The heat is gettin' to ya, boy. Why don'tcha sit in the dugout a bit? Pour a bucket of ice over your head.”

“Yeah, Yellch,” one of the other boys agreed. “Why ya actin' like a dick?”

“'Cause I don't want no dick.” The veins in Yellch's neck popped like long stems. “You hear me, Grand? I don't want no dick. And I don't wanna play ball with someone who does.”

Grand looked to be one sweat drip away from disappearing as the team urged Yellch to give further explanation.

Grand tucked his glove under his arm and held up his trembling hands like Yellch had a gun. “C'mon, Yell. Don't. I'm sorry, okay? Please. Don't say anything.”

But Yellch had to say it. If he didn't, what would it mean for him? Would it mean he liked what Grand did to him? If he didn't yell it out, if he didn't respond with anger, wouldn't that be what people thought if they ever found out about the time Grand Bliss kissed him on a bed while Anthony Perkins played on the TV downstairs? Yes, Yellch had to say it, for his own sake.
Fuck you,
he must've thought as he pointed at Grand and said without doubt, “He's a fag.”

My brother. A fag? It was like seeing American flags impaled on white picket fences. He had been red, he had been white, he had been blue and July Fourth. But now, the mythology of him was over. He who was so handsome, as children all the girls thought they would marry him and leave the earth for the stars.

Yellch's accusation was a lingering echo. A full-bodied thing, pumping and veering like poison-dipped arrows. It was as if the entire, astonished world was right there on a ball field in Breathed, Ohio. Between teammates and coach, the little things of years began to be added up.

The quick peeks in the locker room, the lingering hugs, the slaps on the rear that went beyond congratulations. That was enough for them to see him coiling with the snake. It was enough for him to become something they could not sweetly accept.

“Grand, I think you should go home.” The coach squinted behind his 1950s glasses.

“Do you mean go home just for today?”

“Grand—”

“I have a right to know if I'm still on the goddamn team. Whatcha gonna do for pitcher, Coach? Hmm? Use Arly?”

“I ain't so bad,” Arly came to his own defense. “I've been layin' off the sodium. Think I took off the drag.”

“Your arm's dead, Arly. You see its goddamn funeral every time you pitch.
мертвых
.”

“Arly will be fine.” In those four words, the coach stripped Grand of the pitcher mound.

I never thought I'd see my brother defeated. He was always so strong. The boy with the durability of linoleum. On that day, I realized the linoleum was just an accessory for effect, and underneath it, he was just as fragile as us all. My brother. The one I thought was marked for eternity, and yet here I am, and where is he? Maybe forever on that ball field. Forever being revealed and they forever stepping back as if he's sickness between sickness.

It was small use to remind them of how they'd say,
I love you, Grand Bliss,
in the golden glow of a big win. Even smaller use to say he was once their friend. The buddy who bought them all tickets to the Reds game, and drove all the way to Cincinnati and back. The pal who stayed sober when they got drunk. The one who punched the guy who would've punched them.

He was the heart they could all be loved by, and yet not one of them loved him back. I wanted him to shout. To cancel out what they were telling themselves. To deny until he won. To shape back his hero self and put on the cape to become my perfect brother once more. But all he did was squeeze his glove and walk away.

When he saw me at the fence, it was like it was through a microscope against his brow, magnifying me to the point of shocking him into a run that was so fast, I would never have caught up to him had he not stopped to get sick.

“How long were ya by the fence?” He wiped his mouth in one long gesture.

“I just showed up as you were leavin'.” I couldn't bear for him to know I'd seen it all.

He turned a cheek to his vomit. “Really?”

“Really. I'm stumped why ya left practice so early.”

He looked at me and knew, but the lie offered him a chance. All truth could do then was to tap us on the back. We never turned around.

“Heat's made me sick. Coach said it was all right for me to go home.” He lifted his cleats, checking his shoelaces to see if any vomit had splashed.