The Summer That Melted Everything (27 page)

“I just mean he's not going to stop with me. You know that, Fielding. He's starting to talk at those meetings about you and yours.”

Elohim was still diving below the water, unaware of anything more than the ship and the woman he was trying to save.

“I'm not telling you to hit him.” Sal placed the stone into my hand. “Just let him feel a little splash. Let him know you're willing to fight for and protect those you love. That if he drags out this fray, he will not leave it unscathed. It's a battle we are in, Fielding. And if a few stones can end it, wouldn't you rather have them than a war that goes forever?”

Ready the earth for all she can spare, for it was a war, and already we had lost one on our side. Granny. Death by enemy's poison. Wasn't she worth a splash to his face? And what of this war? If it could be ended by a thrown stone, why not? I'd be a fool to hold out for a fire that could dare hell.

I gripped the stone and heard Grand's voice from when he was teaching me the art of the throw.

“Head up, Fielding. Chin pointed to your target. Get your whole body workin' together. Do you feel it now? Let me see your grip. Fingers over the top. Good. Keep it out on your fingertips now. No, Fielding, not in the back of your hand. Keep it at your fingertips. Good. Use your wrist. Don't let it get stiff. That's right. Now you're ready. You're ready, little man. Throw.”

It was a beautiful throw. The way the stone sliced through an arch down to a large splash that hit Elohim's face.

“Hey”—I smiled—“this ain't so bad.”

Maybe I even called Elohim a dumb midget as he dived, his feet thrashing at the surface to follow him down.

We threw stone after stone, believing with each one we were bettering the war.

But more than this. I was actually having fun doing it. I was laughing even as I said, “C'mon, Mr. Elohim. Can't ya save at least one? Your fiancée sure would be disappointed you can't save her. Hear her screamin' for you, Mr. Elohim? Gosh, I sure do.”

I turned to give Sal a high five, but he was just standing there, his hands empty as he looked out on Elohim as if he were someone we should kindly pull from the water and sit with our arms around. It was then I realized I was the only one still throwing.

“When'd you stop, Sal?”

“We've done enough, Fielding.”

“He deserves this. Remember?”

As soon as I threw, I knew what big sins can be made from things as small as stones. When it hit his chest, it sounded like melons being ripped apart. I waited for the howl. The scream of pain. Neither came. He was quiet and still. The stone sinking in front of him. He could have saved that one. All he had to do was to reach out and put his hand under it and he would've saved it. But he gave it up, to look at me.

He's still looking at me.

Every morning, I get up and think the sunrise might be beautiful. He's looking at me and I know it's not. Every night, I go to bed, thinking I may get some rest, but he's looking at me and I know I won't. The seasons may still exist, celebrations of life, but I don't know, because he's looking at me. Was that a joke you told? I can't laugh, because he's looking at me. With those gray, broken eyes saying,
I loved you once. Maybe like a son. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you hurting me, Fielding?

I didn't return to the bucket for another stone. I didn't return to the bucket, but Sal did. He picked up a stone, the largest of them all. He gripped it tight as he moved through the water.

“You've saved her now.” He placed the stone into Elohim's hand. “You can stop your crying. You've saved her now. No more sinking today.”

I'd never felt more like the devil. I taste the salt of that shame to this day. Teeth marks here. Teeth marks there. This is me.

 

19

 … she for God in him.

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
4:299

A
LL LOVE LEADS
to cannibalism. I know that now. Sooner or later, our hearts will devour, if not the object of our affections, our very selves. Teeth are the heart's miracle. That a mouth should burst forth on that organ without throat and crave another's flesh, another's heart, is nothing short of a miracle.

To fall in love is our species' best adventure, and when love, in its burgeoning industry, coils sweetly around our soul, we surrender to the heart's fang and we pray—yes, we pray—to the infinite span that all love has its fair chance, its own share of miracles. And yet the miracles seem pushed to the side when the lovers are young, as if in their youth, there seems to be an almost certain prophecy to be had.

Maybe the misfortune of young love is just the
Romeo and Juliet
fragments Shakespeare has left us with, or maybe it really is the voyages of fate that youth and love should burn on contact. What is it the Greek chorus sings? Something like,
Young lovers are tragedy's excuse.

I ask you now, what was the excuse of the yellow balloon? Did it escape from celebration? Was it the bloated announcement of a birthday, a wedding, a day at the fair? Is a child to be blamed for its wandering way?

Was it God, Devil, or wind that blew it upon release? Was it God, Devil, or tree that decided it should motor between branches, waiting for us in its harmless ruse?

I must first tell of the day that sparked the possibility of Sal and Dresden ending up together, for always and ever.

That day started by me and Sal throwing water balloons. It'd been my idea, but I had to stop. It reminded me too much of that day at the river. It would be throwing the stone's spirit from then on out.

“We shouldn't have filled 'em anyways.” I stepped on the remaining balloons until they burst. “Dad would be angry if he knew. We're supposed to be conservin' water.”

By the end of August, the heat had made more of a mess. The farmers lost their cash crops due to the drought, and the number of livestock continued to dwindle. Thankfully, the flies had been controlled by a recent spraying of pesticide. While at first the flies were blamed on Sal, they were actually traced to an infestation at an egg farm in the next town.

The rest of the country seemed to have forgotten about Sal and our heat wave, which was a fine relief to us, though Dad and the sheriff were still conducting their own investigation with more theories, more guesses, more places for pushpins to go and lines to be drawn.

I suppose I hoped they wouldn't find out where he came from. He had become my best friend. What boy is ever ready to lose that? It's not like Sal wanted to go back to wherever it was he came from. No boy who wants to go back calls another woman
Mom
or another man
Dad.
He doesn't call the place he's come from
hell
and the place he's at
heaven
.

His stories, his language, his way of manner said a child is not here, and yet there the child would poke its head. When he ran giddy to the tree house. When he sat up all night, telling me ghost stories in the dark, trying to deepen his voice to mystery over the light of the flashlight under his chin. When he wanted to learn how to play the piano in the living room. Or baseball or
Mario Bros.
Mom taught him the piano. Me and Grand taught him the rest.

There was a boy at home. He just wasn't ready to say it yet. And maybe he was afraid. I mean, it was the devil who'd been invited in the first place. Maybe he was afraid that being the devil was the only way he could stay.

Being the devil made him a target, but it also meant he had a power he didn't have when he was just a boy. People looked at him, listened to what he said. Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn't that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?

It's not like anyone was coming looking for him. No mother showed up on our doorstep. No father either. Major newspapers from all over the country wrote at least once about him and various media outlets from TV reported on him in their local broadcasts, yet no one came saying they'd been looking for him and that he was theirs. No one came saying they wanted him back. Maybe if they had come and said that, he would've went with them. It was their not coming that kept his staying.

After bursting the balloons, we walked down the lane. When we came upon the Delmar house, Dresden stood up against the oak. I noticed her face right off.

She watched us approach over her book,
Lord of the Flies.
When I asked what was on her face, she answered it was makeup. In truth, it was construction paper, cut, trimmed, and taped into blush, lipstick, and purple eye shadow with long black lashes. The most unflattering was the pair of arching black lines placed over her own faint brows, giving her a sort of exaggerated madness.

She sighed like we were bothering her as she returned to her book and began to circle words.

“Why do you do that every day?” Sal asked.

“One should write in their diary every day.” She flipped through the pages, showing how circling a word here and there made sentences like,
Today was not so bad,
and
I hate my leg.

“I'm no writer, but still I want to record my days. And books have given me all the words I need. I just go through and take the ones that belong to me for the day. I like having my life entwined with literature's great tales. It makes me more—” She closed her eyes and found the word. “—significant.”

I tried not to stare at that leg. I couldn't see much of it. She wore a long, flowing dress, one of her many muted floral ones that went below her ankles, but the leg's silhouette was still there. Its unbending form and black flat, which went against the bareness of her other foot.

“There's a pool in the backyard.” Her frizzy hair stuck out as if it too had its own life to seize. “You guys could go for a swim.”

We walked around the house, which was a large whitewashed brick, the white fading in places to the rusty tinge beneath. It had green shutters and green trim that matched the green bushes of the rose garden.

The heat would not prevent Alvernine's roses from blooming. When the sun's rays were too much, she would shade the roses by setting up tents, the kind used for parties and events. She would drape the bushes with dampened blankets to regulate their temperature, and she used fans, reaching from the house by extension cord, to keep them cool.

Each rose was so perfect and just like the next, they were almost unreal. Like they were machine printed. A garden of wallpapered walls. Later, we would come to learn Alvernine had been siphoning water from the forgotten artesian well at the top of the hill to keep her roses hydrated.

If found out, the well would've been seized by the town, and Alvernine would've paid a fine for breaking regulation. Worst to her, the town would've stopped her use of the well, and her roses would've died like most of the gardens in Breathed.

We still had our cannas, but only because Mom insisted we still water them, which we did so by driving to the river and bucketing it up, though the river too was getting low.

There by the rose garden was a sweeping inground pool with a diving board. Sal was looking down into its clear, clean water as he asked if he could go into the house. He had to use the bathroom, he said.

Dresden looked at the back door and frowned. “Mother doesn't like … strangers in the house.”

“Is she home now?” I asked.

“No, she'll be gone for the day, but still—”

“Please.” Sal stepped closer to her.

“All right. It's, um, just through the back door there and … Well, here, I'll just show you.”

With them in the house, I went over to the edge of the pool, where I dipped my toe in. The pool had been filled in late spring, before the water regulations would've made such a thing impossible.

“You can get in if you want.”

Dresden was back and looking at my bare chest. I couldn't tell if she approved or not. It's hard to be shirtless in front of a girl who may wish you weren't.

The summer had tanned her usually pale skin and given her freckles their own sort of triumph.

“You can swim, can't you?” She laid her pen and book down on top of the patio table. “Mother will be upset if you drown in her pool.”

“I can swim.” I headed toward the diving board but stopped when she asked if Sal was a nice boy.

“Whatcha mean?”

“I mean is he nice?”

“I'm nice.”

Her sweat wet the edges of the construction paper. Even the heat was trying to undress the clown. She certainly didn't look like Dresden, the girl who in her simple beauty could make two boys give her the wind.

I brushed by her, feeling her on the back of my hand. Sometimes the briefest touch is the one that lasts the longest.

“Wanna swim with me, Dresden?”

“I think I might drown with you.” She said it softly, the way someone may speak of floating instead of sinking.

“I wouldn't let you drown.”

“I don't think you'd be able to help it, Fielding.”

I told myself she was wrong. That there was no reason for that sadness in her voice, because no one would ever drown with me. I would be enough to save them all, I said to myself, feeling confident in that great, big lie.

“And what if you swim with Sal?” I asked. “Would ya drown with him too?”

“Girls don't drown with boys like Sal. They live eternity with them.”

I walked by her, didn't brush her again, though. I returned to the diving board, not realizing I had said her name until she said mine.

“Yes, Fielding?”

The splashes of my cannonball reached her, but she didn't shriek like other girls would've. She just stood there, a wetter girl than the one before.

I followed the cannonball with a few laps. By that time, Sal had come back, apologizing for taking so long. I climbed out of the pool, my jeans shorts hanging low from the water, the denim's heavy fray splotched and matted against my legs.