The Summer That Melted Everything (8 page)

“All right, Dad. Geez.”

“And not one of you is to use the N-word that horrid woman said tonight to Sal. I swear I wish people were forced to make a list of names and recite them every time they use that word.

“A list of the names of every black man, woman, and child hated, beaten, killed for the color of their flesh. It should be law—by God, it should be law—that if you say that word, you must then say their names.

“No one wants to say one word and then realize it means so many more.” He picked up his glass and took a long drink of water, after which he apologized to Sal for the woman's wrong. “She was a piece of shit.”

“Autopsy.” Mom was sitting down in her own chair by then, opposite Dad's at the table. She was smiling. She knew, as we all did, that when Dad spoke profanity, which he so rarely did, it came out funny instead of bad.

“Well, it's true.” He propped his elbows up on the arms of the chair as he leaned back. “Sometimes this world is like red fences in the snow. There ain't no hiding who we really are.”

Sal leaned back in his own chair, propping his elbows up like Dad. While Dad had been talking, Sal had been listening carefully. Later that night he would say to me, “I've never met a better man than your father. Compared to him, it's as if all other men are homeless dogs that bed in the mud.”

“Was Walt Whitman the one to write about the road less traveled by?” Mom used her napkin to dab her sweat.

“That was Robert Frost,” Grand answered.

“And he was gay?”

“No, Mom, Walt Whitman was the”—Grand glanced at Dad and swallowed the word he was going to say—“the one who wasn't into women. Or so they say. But if he's not in hell, maybe he was straight. Ain't that whatcha said, little devil?” Grand looked across the table at Sal. “That Whitman's not in hell?”

“Homosexuality is not flammable. You can't burn by it alone.” Sal was helping himself to another spoon of green beans.

“Well, they do say it is a sin.” Mom held her glass of ice water to her cheek. “Like my momma used to say, when you play in the thorns, you ain't gonna get nothin' but scratched.”

“Hmm-mmm.” Dad scrunched his brow as he buttered his roll. “I think it's more of a psychological disease. Just something a little off in the mind. They could probably fix it with a little determination.”

“Then there's this new sickness goin' around.” Mom clicked her tongue in sympathy. “I feel bad for 'em, I really do, but some say it's God punishin' 'em for their lifestyle. Maybe He is, punishin' 'em, that is. I mean this sickness is from that moment of 'em comin' together. It makes ya think maybe God is tellin' 'em to stop comin' together. Maybe He's tellin' 'em to stay apart.” She patted the sides of her neck. “Lordy, this heat has a fury, don't it?”

Grand leaned to one side, as if the chair he was sitting in was teetering on an edge and he had to shift his weight to keep from falling over. He asked me to pass the salt, though he never actually used it once I gave it to him. He just held it so tight, before setting it down.

“Sal?” Dad lightly drummed his fork against his plate. “I'm interested, if you are the devil, that is, what is hell like?”

Sal quickly swallowed his mouthful of potatoes and briefly wiped his mouth before saying hell is a hallway of doors.

“And behind each door is a suffering of the individual soul. One door I opened was to a man sitting in a desert. There was nothing scary about it. There was blue sky. White fluffy clouds. Rose-colored sands. There were no snakes hissing at him. No scorpions about to sting. The heat nor the sun was a threat. A thornless saguaro shaded him, and he was neither hot nor thirsty, as he had a full canteen by his side, would always have it full and by his side, no matter how much he drank. To someone else, that empty desert might have been paradise, but to that man it was absolute hell.

“Another door opened to a woman in lipstick and a dress that would cost the farm. She was sitting in a room full of flowers and tea and those little frosted cakes. She was holding a beautiful, gold-fringed blanket, cradling it as if it were wrapped around a child. You could hear the child, hear him crying, hear him laughing, hear him sleeping even. But never was he seen. All she could do was to stare into the empty blanket and will continue to do so even after grief becomes a word too small for the feeling.

“Another door opened to a day. The third Wednesday in an October. It was a country festival, the Pumpkin Show, they called it, where thousand-pound pumpkins were being judged and autumn leaves were confetti in the air. No one was crying. No one was sad. No one was noticing the man whose hell this was and who stood in the middle of the largest pumpkin pie ever baked and screamed. He screamed long. He's screaming still, but no one hears him but himself … and me.

“People think hell is about flames and demons, but I employ no demons. There are fires, yes, each door burns. I've started none of these fires, not even the one that burns my own door. And just as I cannot put out my own, I cannot put out theirs.

“I have tried. I've carried buckets of water to these doors, but the more water I splash on the flames, the bigger they get and I have to turn away in the throbbing torture of it all. I am not the ruler of hell. I am merely its first and most famous sufferer turned custodian with the key to the gate in my back pocket.”

Mom sighed for us all. “You're such a sad little boy.”

“That ain't what I thought hell would be like at all.”

“What did you think it would be like?” Sal turned to me.

“Don't know. I guess I thought demons. I thought proddin' with cattle rods. I thought just a lot of blood. The way you describe it, it's even more frightenin'.”

“You know where the name
hell
came from.” He crossed his hands on his lap. “After I fell, I kept repeating to myself,
God will forgive me. God will forgive me.
Centuries of repeating this, I started to shorten it to
He'll forgive me.
Then finally to one word,
He'll. He'll.

“Somewhere along the way, I lost that apostrophe and now it's only Hell. But hidden in that one word is
God will forgive me.
God will forgive me. That is what is behind my door, you understand. A world of no apostrophes and, therefore, no hope.”

 

6

Our torments also may, in length of time,

Become our elements

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
2:274–275

A
COUPLE YEARS
ago, a woman sold me a time machine at a yard sale. It looked like an ordinary window. The wood spiked along its sides, a result of it being hastily and carelessly removed from the house it once sat in. The glass was filthy, and tape was placed over the hairline crack in the bottom pane.

“I could tell by lookin' at ya that you got some business needin' to be done in the past,” she said, her faded American flag scarf flapping in the breeze. “Lucky for you, that there winda only opens to the world we done had, and I'll let it go for what it costs to buy a six-pack. You ain't gonna find time travel cheaper than that.”

“Does it really work?” I asked.

She spoke kindly, if not with some pity, “What we doin' here, mister?”

I scratched my chin through my matted beard. “You're selling me a time machine.”

“You don't have a problem with that?” All her wrinkles seemed to be pulled up with her arched eyebrow. “I got a cane over there you might like. Got some shampoo too. When's the last time you washed this hair of yours?”

She redirected her hand to fan her face. “I hate this damn heat. I mean just look at this ground beneath us.” We both looked down at the cracked earth. “You know another town 'round here has gone completely dry. Everyone in it had to pick up and move away.

“I remember a postcard of Arizona I saw when I was a little girl. Beautiful blue sky, some flowerin' cactuses. It was the type of place you'd wanna drive your convertible in. A good life place. Turned out, it ain't nothin' but another hell.” She glanced from me to the time machine. “What year is it you're headed to?”

“1984.”

“Of all the junk I thought I'd be sellin' today, I never thought I'd be sellin' a time machine.”

After I'd given her the money, she mumbled with just a bit of grief, “You know it's not a real time machine, right?”

I nodded and started to drag the frame back toward my trailer.

When I got home, I used Grand's old pocketknife to carve
May 1984
into the sill.

If I was going to travel back and see my family, I had some cleaning up to do. I went inside the trailer and slipped out of the pajama pants I'd been wearing for the past few days, along with the T-shirt stained from canned spaghetti. I brushed my teeth, showered, and trimmed my hair and beard. Hell, I even bothered with deodorant. I figured time travel would be sweaty.

While I was putting on my tennis shoes, laced but not tied with Grand's old shoelaces, I heard the shattering from outside. When I got out there, I saw the neighbor boy standing by shards of glass on the ground. He had a baseball in his hand. The one he throws to his dog.

“I didn't mean to break your winda.” He hid his eyes under his ball cap. “I'm awful sorry, Mr. Bliss.”

The ball had shattered the top pane. It was my foot and tennis shoe that shattered the bottom one. The anger came, and a kick was the least I could do.

Over two years have gone by, and the boy still apologizes every time he sees me. I know it wasn't a time machine. And yet, when I later crawled through the gaping hole of the gone window, there was a brief moment in crossing the sill I almost believed I would come out the other side to a neon light and in that I could save everything.

I had yet to know what having Sal in our lives would mean, so that first night me and him spent together in my room, I was excited to have him, though I was hot as hell as I kicked the blankets off to the floor and fell back, sweating on the sheets.

Sal was lying in the large window bed, lined with cushions and pillows, where I would sleep myself during past summers when it was especially hot because I could press my face against the cold glass of the pane. I told Sal he could do the same, but he seemed at peace with the heat, lying with his blanket up to his chin and choosing a pair of my pajamas that were long sleeved. Mom had tossed his overalls in the washer after dinner, not saying anything about their stale urine smell. She told me to share my clothes with him. It would be a while before I saw him in those overalls again.

“This heat is humongous.” I kicked the air. “How we gonna sleep?”

I reached over to my bedside table and turned the fan on high, directing it so it'd blow on my face as I lay there with my arms folded behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, which was painted as the jungle top canopy of the Amazon rainforest.

My bedroom was Brazil, and in it an anaconda coiled around a branch, scarlet macaws were painted in flight on the walls, and leaf frogs were carved on my bedposts. Mom had made her Brazil more Amazon than anything else, though there was a little Rio de Janeiro on my double closet doors that when closed formed two halves of Christ the Redeemer.

“Fielding?” Sal spoke over the hum of the fan.

“Yeah?”

“Do you like Mr. Elohim?”

“You know what a steeplejack is? It's where you fell chimneys and build steeples, do things like that. It's all roof work, is what it is. And he's teachin' me the art. He's a nice guy. Hey, Sal? I've been wonderin'. I mean, if you're the devil, you've met God. What's He look like?”

“What do you think He looks like?”

“Like a cotton swab, thin and white with too much hair on His head and too much hair on His feet. Wouldn't that be funny? A cotton swab? Kind of makes ya think twice 'bout stickin' a Q-tip up your nose, don't it? Though, thinkin' 'bout it now, maybe if we left a swab in our ear, we'd start behavin' a little differently. Havin' God inside our ear just might make us all, I don't know, a little … more.”

“Also make you a little more deaf with only one ear whose hearing is not sacrificed by a plug of cotton.” He leaned up on his elbow as he asked me to tell him about a day. A day I felt loved.

I turned in the heat, thinking, but not thinking long.

“January seventh of this year. It was my thirteenth birthday, but that didn't stop the sore throat or the coughin'. I had a forehead of lava. I had to stay in bed. Suck back that horrible cough syrup.”

I did my best hacking cough, feigning to fall out of bed until he laughed.

I stayed sitting on the floor, up against the bed, as I told him how Mom came in with a bowl of chicken noodle soup.

“She didn't give it to me. She sat it right here on the floor. Then she went out and Dad came in with a bowl. He did the same damn thing she did and left without a word. When Grand come in, I asked what the hell was goin' on but he didn't say a thing, just sat his bowl down beside Mom's and Dad's.

“This was how it went, them bringin' in bowl after bowl of chicken noodle until there were thirteen. Dad laid saltines so they floated on top of the soup and so Mom could stand a birthday candle up on each cracker. It was Grand who lit the wicks.

“Mom said it was the birthday cake for boys who are sick. ‘So get out of bed and get down here with us to make a wish quick,' Dad said, ‘before the candles sink.'

“You know what I wished for, Sal?”

“What?”

“To be sick for every birthday. That day, I felt loved.”

He looked down at his chest as he said, “Then you already know.”

“Already know what?”

“What God looks like.”