The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  Him being an attorney meant tailored suits, always three-piece for him so he could tuck his tie into a vest.

  “That way,” he’d say, “it’ll never catch on a branch and play noose.”

  Even when he wasn’t working, he was formal. He wasn’t the kind for jeans with, say, a ball cap and tennis shoes. It was always ironed trousers, gleaming cuff links, and polished oxfords.

  I always thought he had too demanding a job for someone like him. We are all sensitive to a degree when it comes to the great terrible things in the world, but he was torn apart by them.

  Some cases affected him more than others, like the one with the little girl who was beaten to death by her addict parents. He’d stare at those bloody crime photos over and over again, long after he put the parents away. Then one day he said he was going out.

  He drove a few miles outside of Breathed to a roadside bar and said the types of things you should never say to a biker gang. He was bedridden for six weeks. When I asked him why he did it, he used his one good hand to write I wanted to see for myself on a pad of paper because his mouth was wired shut.

  His jaw would heal, as would his swollen eyes, cracked ribs, and broken kneecap. The bruises would go on their way, the blood would stop lifting to the surface, and his arm would eventually come out of that cast. But he’d still have the scar at his hairline where the beer bottle had been broken. He never tried to hide this scar. He’d brush his thick brown hair back so there’d be no chance of not seeing it. He did just this as he strolled between me and the boy.

  “I feel like someone forgot to tell me just how hot it was to be today.” He removed his suit jacket and draped it over his arm. He kept his back to us as he looked toward the house. “And who, may I ask, are you?”

  The boy didn’t answer, so Dad turned to see why, his blue eyes squinted.

  “He’s the devil, Dad.”

  “Now, Fielding, it isn’t polite to call someone the devil without just cause.”

  “I’m callin’ him the devil ’cause he is the devil. Or so he says. Go on, tell ’im.” I gave the boy a gentle push toward Dad.

  The boy stood there a moment, digging his dirty toe into the ground before confirming in a washed-out voice, “It is true. I am the devil.”

  The grasses at Dad’s palms fluttered as he tried to recall ever seeing the boy before. “Where are you from, son?”

  “Originally, I am from the above. But now, well, now I’m from the below. Fallen there.”

  “Fallen? Salinero v. Pon, is it?”

  “What’s that?” the boy asked, not used to Dad and his court case references.

  “Oh, Salinero v. Pon? Well, it was a case where a man fell from a window, and all because weight was removed. Will you argue like him, I wonder?” he asked the boy in all seriousness. “That the reason you fell is because someone removed your weight?”

  “I wish my defense could be so easy,” the boy answered in the same seriousness.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Dad thrust his hands on his hips. “I’m going to tell you right now, son, I am prepared to believe you, no matter how outrageous it may seem. I am the one who wrote an invitation to the devil in the first place. It would be lousy of me not to believe my invitation has indeed been answered. I did think I had prepared myself for every devil imaginable. Not one of my imaginings looked like you, though.”

  We all three turned to the back porch, where Mom was hollering for Dad.

  “What’s goin’ on, Autopsy? Who’s that boy?” She hovered her foot over the porch steps but would never take them.

  “You boys stay here.” Dad shook his head and muttered about the heat as he left.

  Meanwhile, the boy hadn’t stopped staring at Mom. “What’s her name?”

  “Stella. If you wanna see her, you’ll have to go to her. Porch is the farthest she’ll come.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s afraid of the rain.”

  “It’s not raining.”

  “Naw, but it might start.”

  He looked up at the blue sky, knowing it would not rain.

  “What’s the date?” He dropped his eyes back to the porch, where Mom and Dad stood talking.

  “June twenty-third. Why?”

  “The days … they’ve been blurring together.”

  “Just hang a calendar on your wall.”

  “The walls of hell are not like other walls. I tore a picture of the ocean out from a magazine and hung it on my wall once. An ocean is a good life place. Everyone always seems happy there. And for a moment, I was happy with my picture, but then the blue sky turned gray. The waves, once calm, took a turn to rage. Then came the screams. As I looked closer, I saw the screams came from men drowning in the water.

  “All I wanted was a picture of a good life. What I got was a reminder that there is no good life for me. That was the last time I hung anything on my walls. Imagine what would happen if I hung a calendar.”

  I shook my head in awe of him. “Say, what are we supposed to call ya? I mean, we can’t just call you the devil all the time. Ain’tcha got a nickname or nothin’?”

  He rubbed his palms until I thought he was going to start a fire. “I suppose you can call me Sal.”

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “From the beginning of Satan and the first step into Lucifer. Sa-L.”

  “All right. Sal. I like it.”

  Dad called us to the porch, where I informed him and Mom of Sal’s name.

  “Welcome, Sal.” Dad placed his hand on Sal’s shoulder before saying he was going into town to speak to Sheriff Sands and would be back shortly. By his orders, we were to stay with Mom, who held out her arms toward Sal, waiting for him to come up the porch steps, where she could yank him into her.

  “Welcome, welcome.” She had a drawl like raw vegetables. Hard. Rooted. Not yet ripe.

  “You know who you’re huggin’ right now, Mom?” I sat the groceries down on the porch floor and leaned back into the rail as she smothered Sal in her bosom.

  My mother was always in dresses then. I don’t think I ever saw anything else in her closet in those days. Her nylon hosiery was as pants as she got. I think because she was always in the house, she was doing her best to be that quintessential housewife. The one in the styled dress that fell full-skirted under her always-worn apron. That day it was the plum gingham apron that she’d made herself with her own chicken-scratch embroidery.

  “Oh, he ain’t the devil. He’s too short.” She kissed his cheeks, leaving her wine-colored lipstick smeared there.

  She had that tendency to be overaffectionate. It was almost like a nervous tic. It was the staying in the house that did it. She thought if she loved you enough, you’d never want to leave her, and then the house wouldn’t seem so lonely as it could be to her at times, when it was just her and the vacuum.

  “Mom, what does bein’ short have to do with it?”

  “There are some awful tall men who go to hell.” She released Sal to adjust her shoulder pads. “Just look at Cousin Lloyd. With all them tall men, the leader of hell is gonna have to be tall or else all these tall men are gonna be lookin’ down. No one much respects things they look down on.”

  Just then my brother Grand pressed his face into the screen of the back door, his skin popping small through the net of wire.

  “That’s my older brother Grand,” I told Sal. “No doubt you recognize him?”

  Sal shook his head.

  “Hey, Grand, come out here and meet the devil so he can recognize you.”

  “The devil, eh?” Grand opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. “Hi, Дьявол.”

  “He’s always in the papers.” I smiled with everything I had at my brother. “They say he’s gonna go pro.”

  “Pro at what?” Sal asked.

  “Baseball. He’s the best anybody has ever seen.”

  “Easy, little man.” Grand put on his team ball cap, lowering its lavender bill. “You’ll raise the hopes so high, I’ll ne
ver reach.”

  Grand had a vernal face of clean, almost transparent skin, like freshly washed windows. His appearance was his own, but he got there by first taking after Dad. Hair dark brown like a wet branch. Eyes blue like the hill fog. His thick brown brow proved a thoughtful underlining to his forehead, upon which stretched a lone wrinkle, deep for his age.

  Something about his eyes made me think of Russia. Perhaps because they were so large, the largest country in the world of his face. Then again, knowing what I know now, maybe it was because his eyes were so like matryoshka dolls, hiding the real him within boxes of lacquered mystery. You’d open one box and find another just the same. No matter how many boxes you took away, there was always one more.

  Because I told him his eyes were Russian, he decided to learn the language and would at the most unexpected times drop Russian words in a saline accent Tolstoy would have praised, for an Ohioan at least. It was because of this habit we kept a Russian-to-English dictionary on the coffee table within easy reach.

  I often found myself opening that dictionary and trying to learn all that foreign. Mom and Dad didn’t bother with learning it. It was enough for them to be able to look the meaning up quickly, if at all. But for me and Grand, the foreign was something we had an innate desire to learn.

  “Kind of young to be the devil, ain’tcha?” Grand smiled at Sal.

  Grand was traditionally handsome. His hair was not worn long and loose like mine or his friends’. His was short and tight like that of a father in the 1950s.

  I think about the way the world wanted him to be. As classic as a front porch post. Clean direction, straight up and down. But really he was as wild and as twisting as the honeysuckle vines. Bending and exploding in uneven wonders. Moveable and crooked, crossing in awesome curves and beautiful bends.

  As far as small town fame goes, my brother was a star. The boy who always did what was expected of him in every aspect of his life. He looked like a heartbreaker, so he broke hearts. He looked like a brain, so he never missed making the honor roll, and he looked like an athlete, so he became the one Breathed pinned its Major League hopes to.

  As fate would have it, Grand was born with an arm for pitching with a precise windup and an acceleration and follow-through that everyone said would get him to the Majors.

  His forkballs and curves were guaranteed strikes that palsied the batter into a trembling swing. In the games of light rainfall, he would throw a God-given spitter the ump wouldn’t be able to shout illegal on. His cutters might’ve been a swarm of midges, for the bats hit the air more than those pitches, while his four-seam fastballs were always food for the catcher’s mitt.

  Grand was the very meaning of his name. I wanted to be just like him. There wasn’t a sport I was really great at, but I could climb. That was why Elohim asked me to join him on his jobs. He’d seen me climbing the tree in front of his house. As I was climbing, one of the branches broke beneath my foot. I was quick and fell only for the second it took to find another branch. I didn’t panic. I merely accepted the fact. That particular branch was gone, and I had to find me another. It was because of this that Elohim said I had the feet of a steeplejack.

  “Where you goin’?” Mom gently grabbed Grand’s arm.

  “I got baseball practice.” He leaned in for a kiss. “See ya later.”

  “In time for dinner?”

  “не пропустите это для мира.” He took his smile close to her ear, where he whispered the translation, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  I looked at his shoelaces and their reddish brown staining. He saw me and tipped his ball cap before jumping to the ground from the top porch step. And I smiled, as in love with my older brother as any young boy could be.

  “It’s volcano weather ’round here.” Mom slung her head back, trying to toss her long black hair. As usual, the ends were tied up in her apron strings, looking like a tail at her backside. A tail Dad would’ve come up behind and tugged, if he’d been there.

  While Grand took after Dad’s brown hair and blue eyes, I took after Mom. Our hair, in its rib-cage shape, fell in a blackness that wisdom calls night. Its winding way was a narrative of the hills, it was the snakes swimming the river, the crow strapped with worms. Dad called it scared hair, the way it curled up into itself at the ends.

  This scare would fall to my shoulders then, as it would for the rest of my life, as it does now. Though in youth it was described as swept by the wind, now, in its white and dark gray staying, it is merely disheveled, falling across my shoulders like claws settled in. As is my beard, like a talon on my chest, but I like to think it is my best Walt Whitman.

  I tried to count my moles once. The same flat ones she had and which she called chocolate chips. When I was a real small kid, I actually believed the moles were chocolate chips and that if she stood too close to the oven, they’d melt away, so I’d tug on her apron strings and she’d laugh as I led her from the heat.

  There was something smeared about our eyes, mine and Mom’s, like contact made with ink before it has had the chance to dry. In my youth, such eyes used to look exotic. Now they’re just something tired.

  “So.” Mom lightly clapped her hands once and turned to Sal and me. “Where would you boys like to go first? We can go to Chile, Egypt, Greece, New Zealand. And all in one afternoon.”

  She led us into the house, which she had arranged and decorated as invertebrate versions of the nations of the world. Mom herself had never been anyplace but Breathed, so she based her countries on what books told her and what photographs showed her they were like. Because of this they lacked the culture of the traveler and instead held true to that glittered optimism of the one who has yet to travel beyond the picture on the postcard.

  She showed Sal room after room, quietly and with only her nylons swishing. The rooms verged on the gaudy, with trinkets, paintings, bright wallpaper done up in the countries’ colors and floras. Fabric was imported. Wood was country specific. The most expensive items were special ordered over the phone, the cheaper charms straight from catalog. She did hire carpenters, painters, artists, any and all who would carve for her the Taj Mahal in our dining room table, Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the fireplace mantel, the Great Wall in the crown molding.

  Making a world proved to be expensive, and had there been only Dad’s income, we would have lost more than the respect of the rooms. But Mom was the daughter of the tennis shoe king of Breathed, and after he died she became the sole heir of Breathed Shoe Company, with the factory located just outside town.

  “Folks say I shut myself up, never seein’ the world, but I ask ya how can anyone see as much of the world as I see on a daily basis?” She spun in the middle of Spain.

  “But they’re not the real places.” Sal’s statement brought her to a sudden stop. “That Machu Picchu in the other room is smaller than a shrub. Don’t you want to see the real places? The real world? Feel the sun on your face as you marvel at the pyramids? Feel the rain while on top of the Eiffel Tower?”

  I nudged him with my elbow. “I told ya she’s afraid of the rain.”

  Mom dropped to the floor, crossing her lanky legs beneath the billowy skirt of her dress. She propped her elbows up on her knees and held her face with a sigh while the shadows of the room lengthened out toward her, making her one of them.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Sal looked on.

  “I’m fine.” Her whisper crippled her words. “You boys go on, have your fun. Don’t worry ’bout me. I’ve a whole world ’round me. Why shouldn’t I be fine?”

  “C’mon.” I tugged his arm. “I’m starvin’. Let’s make some sandwiches.”

  “I don’t want sandwiches.” He groaned like a true kid as I pulled him into the kitchen. “I want ice cream.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” I let his thin arm go. On my way to the freezer he asked about Mom’s fear of the rain.

  “Oh, um…” I tossed around the frozen vegetables, looking for any ice cream. “Do
n’t know, really.”

  “You’ve never asked her?”

  “Oh, man, I forgot the groceries on the porch.”

  “I said, you’ve never asked her?”

  “Well, yeah, I…” I saw the box of frozen fish sticks. “I think it has somethin’ to do with a fish or swimmin’ or somethin’. I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember why your mother is afraid?”

  “We’ve got Popsicles.” I pulled the open box out of the freezer and peered inside. “Grape is all that’s left.”

  I offered one toward him. He shook his head and asked again about her fear.

  “I told ya, it has somethin’ to do with a fish.” I flung the box back into the freezer.

  “But you don’t know for sure?”

  “No, I don’t. Lay off it.”

  “If I had a mother, I would know for sure why she was afraid.”

  “Don’tcha have one?”

  He shook his head low.

  “I don’t know if that’s true, Amos.” Dad stood in the doorway of the kitchen with the sheriff beside him.

  “Why’d you call him Amos, Dad?”

  “I’m not Amos, sir.” Sal looked from the balding sheriff to Dad and then back again.

  “You sure fit the description. Best start to come clean now, sonny.” The sheriff crossed his arms over his bulging stomach, his leaner days having been lost.

  “Really, I’m not.”

  “You said he matched the description. What was it?” I had asked Dad, but the sheriff was the one to answer, “A boy of thirteen. Black. Wearin’ overalls. No shoes. A runaway been missin’ for two months.”

  “Is that all the description?” I looked at Sal.

  “It’s enough, ain’t it?” The sheriff was the type of man who spit aggressively when outdoors. It was a great strain for him to keep from spitting when indoors, and I saw this very strain as he cleared his throat.