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?”
“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 co
uld 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.”
He pushed his blanket off to the side and stood to kneel by the window bed, his elbows up on the cushions, his palms together. I climbed back up into bed and switched the fan to low so I could hear him. I laid back and closed my eyes.
In his earthy voice, his prayers sounded like the haymaking I heard one time when passing a field in harvest. The cling clang of sharpening the scythe’s blade. The sharp scythe swiping and cutting the grass in crunching whooshes. The rake coming softly but scratchy as the cut grass is gathered and rolled into bales. Bales to be kept back and saved in the very seconds that had made them.
The Summer That Melted Everything Page 6
