The Summer That Melted Everything (7 page)

Just before I jumped from the plane, I promised myself if I landed on only the yellow blooms, I would take it as a sign of my ghosts allowing me peace. With that peace, I would no longer suffer in the worst shadow of the snake. I would stop skinning peaches. Cease all mad damage. I'd bring an end to splintering my knuckles against picket fences and running chainsaws through rows of American corn.

I'd sweeten my heart. Be gentled by the small of a lover's back. I'd no longer scrape my spine against cinder blocks nor cannibalize myself in perfect bites. I'd get rid of my stash of horns and keep hell out of the honey. I would learn how to say June, July, August, September without scream and as one word. Forgiveness.

If, however, I were to land on one of my sins, I promised myself I would go on with the punishment and the guilt and let the final fangs in to do all their damage. I would stay the shape that best fits the coffin and accept the terrifying permanence of my crimes.

As I readied to jump from the plane, I looked down at those bright yellow fields. Sal once said there was no yellow in hell. That was why I picked North Dakota during its canola season. Those yellow fields gave me my best chance to land in heaven.

As I jumped from the plane, I tried to see my sins, if not to somehow steer away from them. Maybe that was cheating, but who doesn't choose to fall well when such a choice is to be had? I had no say, really, in where I landed. All I could do was trust the fall.

When it did finally come to an end, it was a bumpy landing, a little facedown, a little rolling. Had I landed on one of my sins?

Nothing beneath me. Nothing trapped up in the dragged parachute. I laid it out flat so I could see. I retraced my tumble. The ground clean, too much yellow to be hell. I tilted my head back to the sky and smiled for the first time since 1984.

“That was a real nice landin'. I say, a real nice one.”

I turned to a voice and the man it belonged to standing by the road, his car just parked there, the door still open.

“I saw you comin' down.” He pointed to the plane as his shaggy graying hair dripped over his sunburnt forehead. “Pulled over to watch. It was a good fall ya had. Was it scary?”

“Just the landing.”

He took a few steps into the field as he looked up at the sky, at the plane circling overhead. “I always thought I might wanna do somethin' like that.” He lowered his eyes back to me as I turned to pull in the parachute. “Say, what's that you got on ya?”

“What?” I looked down at myself. “Where?”

“On the back of your pants there. Here, I'll get it.” He stepped closer and plucked something from the back of my pant leg. “Now, what in tarnation is this?” He held the smashed candle up in his hand.

“My sin,” I answered from the back of the cave that had suddenly swallowed me. “That is my sin.”

And so it had been decided I would not be set free from the prison or its bars like eternal candle wicks, burning any chance of escape. All I could do, all I have done, is to sit with the flames, sleep with the heat, smell the burn of flesh filling the urn one ash at a time.

I think about that first night they came to look at Sal, and I think maybe it was beautiful from a distance. The way a flooding river is. Maybe the knuckles, some tapping, some banging at our door weren't so loud from far away. Maybe the faces pressed into our window screens looked like hung pictures. The hollers asking if they could see, maybe they sounded like songs out on the edge. Yes, maybe it was beautiful from far off, but up close it was a crowd. It was a noise. It was drowning under flooding waters.

That first evening, our house swelled. They came to see the devil Flint told them we had. They'd look at Sal, pat him on the head, be a bit disappointed.

“Just a little boy. That's all. Just a boy. Though dark as the night, ain't he?”

“Yeah, but look at them eyes. You don't normally see that color in 'em. Maybe we shouldn't say he ain't the devil just yet. They're just so green.”

Staying outside through all of it was Elohim. I waved for him to come in, but he just took a step back. I still remember the way the gold band gleamed from his ring finger. In his mind, he was a husband, and just in case anyone doubted it, he was going to look the part. Hell, he was going to live the part.

When he got letters or sent them, he put in a
Mrs.
beside his
Mr.,
and when he hung clothes on his line to dry, one could not help but notice the dresses and bras. Perfume and lipstick sat on the vanity in his bedroom, and the strands of his fiancée's hair from the last time she brushed it on Kettle Lane were fossilized in bristles. He was surrounded by a woman who wasn't there. He was one half of a relationship that did not exist.

Just as I was about to go out to Elohim, a man bumped into me on his way in the house. With his cowboy hat and spurs, he looked like a man sure of the saddle. He had a Polaroid camera in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. I told him to put it out before he went into the house. He silently took my picture, though he did nothing to the cigarette as he stepped through the front door, adding to the rest of that crowd consisting of our friends, neighbors, and strangers, like the woman in the bright red dress with showy purple flowers who nearly knocked over the vase in the entry hall with her wide swinging hips and rear like a bag of apples.

There was a man who when he bent low to look at Sal, showed the part in his hair and the dandruff there, like shavings of pearl. He was pushed to the side by a woman in a rhinestone belt. She wanted a good look at Sal, and she didn't want anyone in her way. The man in the cowboy hat took her picture, maybe only to remember the woman who chewed her gum as if her jaw was about to be undone from creation.

There was just something about that woman. The ponytail rising out of the very top of her head like a mushroom cloud. The awful stare of her eyes. A shiny viciousness as if when the wolves saw her, they turned and ran the other way, fear putting their tails between their legs.

I felt like telling the sheriff he should go through her house. I was certain he'd find bottles of tampered Tylenol, potassium cyanide, and a scrapbook of newspaper articles from 1982.

As she looked down on Sal before her, she suddenly stopped chewing the gum. Her thin lips settled like a single bleed across her face. The old acne scars like embedded wreckage.

She cleared her throat, and in one easy go of it, she asked, “Is God a nigger too?”

The gasps of the women were like bright cries. Things that knocked their shoulder pads out of balance and put runs in their hosiery right then and there. My mother included. Some of the men shoved their hands into their pockets and looked down at the toes of their shoes. It was their best natural stance. The braver ones looked directly at Sal. Stepped closer to him even. Waiting as one ear for his response.

He hadn't so much as flinched.

If the woman had expected to sword him, she was mistaken. His elegance so apparent, even in the filthy overalls. Maybe in his own wounded thoughts he could not give such chance to dignity, but before us he stood as tall as he could. His chin raised. His eyes upon hers not in anger but almost in pity, as if he already knew her eternity was to writhe in flames over and over again.

It was at this time Dad finally made his way from the back of the room. Pushing through the crowd to stand between the woman and Sal.

My father's fists were clenched so tight it was almost as if his fingers had melted and all that remained were his palms. A layer of sweat seemed to cover him completely. His face so red, it looked like candy. Like one of those fireballs you get out of the machine with a quarter.

He was yelling at the woman, asking her how dare she use such language in his house. She started chewing her gum again. Unchanged by his voice shaking, by the near-to-something mist in his eyes. In fact, she smiled. A smile that had eaten things before.

Angered even more, he lowered his head and shook it, trying very carefully not to lose himself. “You listen to me, you ignorant hill rat, you take yourself and your hateful mouth and get out of here.”

The flames in my father's eyes burned toward the crowd. They had been getting on his nerves ever since their arrival. The way their shoes dirtied the rugs. The way their smoke grayed the rooms. The way they came to look at Sal like a thing on exhibit.

Dad was telling every one of them to get out of our house. I'd never seen my father so angry. Years later, I would find myself dog-earing a page in a book about the ocean. On the page a painting of gray, wild waves. I have since torn that page out of the book and set the painting to frame by the side of my bed. I suppose it is a painting of my father from that night he raged like waves in a storm.

After herding the last of the crowd out the door, Dad slammed it, and sighed into himself, “We haven't even had our dinner yet.”

Not used to shouting, he sounded hoarse as he asked what was for dinner. He dropped down in his chair at the table, tired and looking like he'd just come in from a two-day shift in the mines.

“Those people, my God,” he muttered as Mom brought in the meat loaf.

“Well, we can't have a man on fire at the dinner table. You'll scorch my tablecloth. We must extinguish the flames.” She told him to close his eyes. Then she used his glass of water and her finger to lightly drop the water on his eyelids.

As tiny streams of water slipped down his cheeks, he opened his eyes and she looked deep into them as she smiled and said, “Not a fire for miles.”

She kissed him on the forehead before returning to the kitchen to bring out the mashed potatoes, green beans, and rolls, while the rounded skirt of her dress reached and whispered to the tablecloth as she passed. She had changed from the afternoon into a bright yellow dress, and Sal couldn't help but stare at her as she floated about the table like a motored cloud.

“What is it, Sal?” She tightened under his watchful gaze, holding her hand to her flat stomach as if the problem were there. As if it could be anywhere in her tall, narrow frame, wide only in the pads at her shoulders.

“Your dress.” He raised his hand as if he was going to reach out and touch it. “It is just so yellow.”

She apologized, looking as though she really meant it. “I can go up and change.” She held her arm toward the stairs, her bracelet all dangle below her thin wrist.

Sal looked almost worried. “Please leave it on. It's such a pretty yellow. There's no yellow where I come from. There is a lot of black. A lot of brown. But none of those colors like yellow. I mean truly yellow. There are yellow things, of course, blue things, purple things. But they are always black first and therefore never anything more.”

“I'm home.” Grand came in, dropping his ball bag down to the floor. His hair was wet. I inhaled its peppermint smell as he passed.

“What's the deal with this heat? We could barely practice. Had to take a cold shower at the school. We all did. You should've seen the sweat goin' down the drain.” He pulled his chair out, opposite me and Sal at the table, and sat down. “Ah, Mom, why'd ya make meat loaf and potatoes? It's a million degrees outside.”

Mom made sure to give him an extra-large pile of potatoes that steamed even more.

“Tell us about where you come from, Sal.” Dad grabbed a roll. “You sound like you might be from up north. Cleveland? Close to there, are you?”

“He's from the south, Dad. You know. Hell.” I opened my can of Pepsi. “What's hell like, Sal?”

He pulled at his bottom lip. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Like, who's there?”

“Cousin Lloyd is definitely there.” He reached for a roll. “What he did to those little boys was horrible.”

Mom was standing at Sal's side by then, about to serve him a slice of meat loaf, but upon hearing about Lloyd, she gasped, causing the fork in her hand to turn downward and drop the slice onto Sal's leg.

“How'd you know about what Lloyd did?” She pointed the fork at him.

He was silent for a long time, staring down at the meat loaf on his leg, its hot juices oozing into the thin denim of his overalls.

“I asked you a question, young man.” She continued to point the fork at him. “How do you know about Lloyd?”

He looked up at her. “I know the sins of everyone who comes to hell. That's part of my misery. To know and feel theirs.”

“Autopsy?” Mom turned helplessly to Dad. “How does he know about Cousin Lloyd?”

Dad squinted his eyes. “I suppose he could have looked it up in a newspaper. When Lloyd was charged with the pornography, it was in the paper.”

“Oh, yes.” Mom sighed as she stabbed the meatloaf on Sal's leg with the fork. “That must be it. You silly boy. You had me scared there for a minute.”

“But I didn't look in any newspaper,” Sal tried to tell her, but she was already convinced as she plopped the meat down on his plate. He stared at it like it was his cross to bear.

“What about Walt Whitman?” Grand asked as Mom reprimanded him for using the tablecloth as a napkin. He apologized to her and asked Sal again about Whitman. “We're reading him in English. ‘Song of Myself.' Is he in hell?”

“Walt Whitman?” Sal was on his second roll. “He's not in hell.”

“I'm surprised. I mean, he writes well enough. I celebrate myself and sing myself and all that, but I heard he was into other guys.” Grand's voice went off to the side, like crumbs on a counter being wiped away.

“What does that have to with hell?” Sal shrugged.

“I mean, don't all fags go to hell?” Grand asked it so casually, he might have been asking if there was any more pop.

Dad grabbed his forehead. “What is with all this language today? There is to be no more of it in this house. Do you hear?” He pounded his finger down into the table until the nearby gravy boat shook. “No more words that say something about our own ignorance. Grand, are you listening? Look at me. You are not to say that word again. Grand?”