The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “You haven’t got any pictures, Mr. Bliss.”

  “What do you call those?”

  “I mean you don’t have no pictures of family. Of friends.”

  “They are my family. They are my friends.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bliss.” He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”

  “I’m not sad, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “I should kick you out. The disrespect you have for your elders. I’m a man, goddamn it, you respect that.”

  He stood there, watching me scratch my chin through my beard. I stopped because he began to look worried I may have fleas.

  “You want some ice cream, kid?”

  He quietly nodded.

  “Help yourself. Lord knows I won’t eat it.” I gestured toward the freezer, directing him to move the frozen dinners out of the way to the carton of chocolate ice cream in the back.

  “This carton is all banged up, Mr. Bliss.” He read the expiration date on its side. “This ice cream is from 1984. I’ll throw it away.”

  “No.” I flipped the flimsy chair back as I stood.

  “But it’ll make you sick. You’ve got to let it go.” He stepped away with the carton.

  “You give that to me. Right now, boy. I said give it to me.” I grabbed hold of the carton, trying to yank it from his tight grip.

  “Mr. Bliss…” He held on.

  “Goddamn you to hell.”

  “Mr. Bliss, no—”

  I didn’t realize I’d slapped him until long after he left. I stood the lawn chair back up and sat there, holding the ice cream carton to my chest. At first, it was freezing, and burned my skin through my thin shirt in that way all frozen things can. Eventually, the freeze left. The carton was just cold then, until it wasn’t cold at all. It sweated and dripped down onto my lap. I must have sat there for hours like that, holding onto all that melt.

  “Mr. Bliss?”

  I raised my eyes to the boy. “My God, kid. You came back?”

  “I just wanted to give ya somethin’.” He laid what he had down on the table by the door before leaving.

  With the carton still pressed against my chest, I left the chair and hurried to the table. There was a photograph of his smiling face, a saguaro in the background, the sky yellowed by the sun rising behind him.

  “Damn kid.”

  I opened the carton and stared at the melted ice cream. Before I knew it, I was at the sink and pouring it down, some of it splashing on my shirt, little dark drops of chocolate that splattered like blood.

  I balanced the carton on top of the pile of trash before going to a wall of photographs. I took down one of the frames and replaced the photograph of the steeple with that of the boy. It felt like maybe I was reaching for one of those hands Sal talked about. That whole second-chance hope sort of thing.

  I spent the rest of that night in front of the fan. It was the first time in years I had tried to cool off. I even thought about putting my clothes in the freezer. That was one of Sal’s ideas, to put our clothes in the freezer overnight. By morning, they would be crisp and chilled.

  Word on the cooling regime hit the town, and freezers became a second dresser for many. Everyone had their own ideas on how to stay cool. Mom kept her lotions and creams in the refrigerator so they’d be cold when she put them on. Most everyone carried little spritz bottles of ice water they could spray on their face or back of the neck, though the ice melted too fast for it to make any real difference. A couple of people even went so far as to paint their roofs white under the knowledge dark colors draw heat in.

  Then there was my great-aunt, Fedelia Spicer, who made a habit out of visiting our house in the afternoons to spend time with her only surviving family. Mom was her niece.

  Old Fedelia’s way to cool down was by licking her forearms. There she’d be, the shades of her eyes pulled half closed, her tongue amphibiously long and aggressive.

  “Kangaroos, you stupid boy. Kangaroos.” Her amber eyes lit with rage as she shook her forearms at me when I asked why she licked them.

  It was Scranton who had made Fedelia so angry. He’d been her husband before running away with a blonde in fishnets. Through their marriage, Scranton was the sound of a motel bedspring squeaking.

  I’d seen photographs of Fedelia taken long before Scranton’s infidelity. All that beauty and life. Too bad she didn’t inoculate herself against the disease that was Scranton. Because of him and the anger she held onto, her features reached home to their bones, causing cave and shadow. Her face thinner than her body where the weight collected in the abdomen, hips, and thighs. She ate the comfort she couldn’t find anywhere else. Padding piled upon her as defense for the hard in life. She looked even larger because she wore clothes too big. The woman in bags who wore costume heavy makeup because her face was afraid to go into the world alone, lest she be seen. Lest she have to see herself.

  Over the years, her anger piled her hair atop her head in a ratty heap of tangles and frizz. Looking to recapture the color of her youth, she would spray her hair with dye in a can that was supposed to be auburn but left her with an orange that cost all who saw it their respect of carrots. Her roots somehow managed to escape the dye and were such a bright white, they always looked like the start to something holy.

  Amongst the orange were tied ribbons, a dozen in all. Each a different color, though faded, and representing a different woman Scranton had shared betrayal of Fedelia with over the long years of their union. She’d tell how the tattered teal ribbon was for the woman who waddled, while the dull fuchsia was for the woman with the feather boas.

  She never removed these ribbons, so over time her hair wrapped around them. The way they wove, they could sometimes look like slithering in an undergrowth. It was as if she were the infected Eden, the snake still turning through Eve.

  She would reach up to the ribbons, making sure they were still there as if she was afraid they would fall out or leave her like Scranton. On occasion, she’d pull one tighter, just for insurance.

  Outside of Scranton, Fedelia’s conversations with Mom that summer centered on the heat and that new disease that would come to define the 1980s.

  As Grand came into the living room reading the newspaper, Fedelia jerked it out of his hands to read the front page.

  “This new goddamn sickness. AIDS.” She held the word for a long time. “Unusual fuckin’ name for a disease. You know, I wonder what it’ll do to Ayds? You know, them appetite-suppressin’ chocolates I’ve been eatin’. Goddamn.”

  Those appetite-suppressing chocolates that did not work. That did not keep the lonely woman from eating the company of food. Bandages on a plate for all the wounds inside.

  She continued to read the newspaper. “I wonder if Scranton will get AIDS. They say it comes with the fuckin’, you know.” She seemed both pleased and distressed by the thought, though it was hard to tell with the heavy black liner she drew across her white brows. “That old rat bastard. If anyone deserves it, he does.”

  Grand tried to swipe the paper back from her, but she began to bark and growl at him like a dog. He backed, along the way grabbing up his baseball glove from the table.

  “I’m goin’ to practice.” He pecked Mom on the cheek.

  He made a last attempt for the paper but this time Fedelia bit him on the left forearm, leaving behind her red lipstick that smeared across his skin like blood.

  “Goddamn, Auntie.” He grabbed his arm.

  “There’s more where that came from, you piss-ant.” Fedelia rolled and pointed the paper at him, her cruel smile made even more monstrous from the lipstick having been smeared around her mouth, spreading so far from her lips, it reached her cheeks in claw-mark strides.

  “Cука,” Grand mumbled out the door.

  Fedelia threatened that when she found out what that meant, she was going to kick his ass good. Then in a sudden turn of emotion, she looked toward Mom. “Before I forget, have you heard
about Dovey?”

  Fedelia, the wheel of gossip.

  “She’s still in the hospital up in Columbus, ain’t she?” Mom picked up her crochet hook and yarn, pretending to be more interested in finishing the crocheting of her afghan square than anything else.

  “Oh, my, yes. Might lose that baby. Fall really done her in. Or was it a push?” Fedelia puckered her lips, the wrinkles emphasized and parading around her mouth like thorns of flesh.

  A push. That was the idea laying pipes through town. Elohim did as he told the sheriff he would, which was to clear Sal’s name. Still, the thought was too hard to abandon for some, and once it was said, it became like most gossip, drama that ruins.

  As Fedelia kept chatting with Mom, someone knocked on the front door. It was the sheriff come to speak to Dad. While Sal stayed in the living room, staring at Fedelia’s hair, I crouched down in the entry hall, at the side of the screen door so I could see and hear the sheriff and Dad out on the front porch.

  The sheriff spit over the railing. The glob colored red from his cherry hard candy. He wiped his mouth on his arm before saying, “You know how I’ve been lookin’ into some of the surroundin’ counties for missin’ boys? Well, now, I’ve come up with somethin’ quite interestin’.”

  “What’s that?” Dad asked.

  “An abundance of missin’ boys. Not much ruckus has been raised about these disappearances. Furthermore, these vanishin’s have happened over the course of years. I can’t say they’re all related, yet I can’t say they ain’t. I mean we’re lookin’ at boys disappearin’ at exactly thirteen years of age. Same as the boy you got in your livin’ room. Boys from poor families. Judgin’ by the clothes he showed up in, he ain’t no Rockefeller. I’d say he’s some farm pup. Plus, all these kids, they were all black, Autopsy.”

  Dad wiped his hand over his mouth. “Any suspects?”

  “No sir-ree Bob.” The sheriff leaned back into his heels, causing his bulbous stomach to lead out. “Most folks ain’t gonna pay a lot of attention to a kidnapper if they ain’t even aware there is one. These stories of these kids, only two were even mentioned in their local papers. The rest were just police files. And most of ’em was put down as runaways.”

  “No linking evidence?”

  “Nothin’ hard. There was one thing. A shirt was found belongin’ to one of the boys. Found by a series of railroad tracks. At first they thought the spots on the shirt were bloodstains. Tests proved it chocolate. Better chocolate than blood, I reckon. Gave the momma hope her son was still alive. I imagine the truth will eat her up sooner or later though. It’s a thing to eat any parent up. Losin’ a child is a thing with teeth.”

  “Were there photographs in the police files?”

  “Some.”

  “Any of these boys, the recent ones to go missing, any of them look like Sal?”

  “A bunch of little black boys?” The sheriff’s laugh reminded me of Elohim’s. “Sure they looked like him.”

  Dad sighed and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. “Be fair.”

  The sheriff spit over the porch rail and cleared his throat. “Listen, there were three possible cases reported that fell in the timeline of when that boy arrived. One of ’em was that boy Amos. The other two cases had photographs supplied by the parents. They had their likenesses to that boy in there. But they ain’t him. Shucks. Never found those green eyes of his in any of ’em. That’s not sayin’ much.

  “I mean maybe the family he disappeared from just never filed a police report. Or maybe they did, but who knows what state they did it in. Maybe the kidnapper ain’t just in Ohio. Maybe he’s done this all over. I’d like to talk to the boy. First, I gotta tend to some issues over at one of the farms. A shitload of cows have just died.

  “These animals ain’t built for such heat. We ain’t either.” He used his sleeve to wipe the sweat from his cheeks. “You know, I could use some help puttin’ flyers on cars. Remindin’ everyone not to leave pets and children in vehicles. Already had an infant had to be rushed to the doctor with heatstroke or heat rash or some sort of heat sickness after bein’ left in his momma’s truck.”

  “I’ll help you hand the flyers out.” Dad said so without much care. He was still thinking of all those missing black boys.

  “Listen, this evenin’ is clear for me. Would you bring that boy by later, Autopsy? Not to the station. We’ll question him at my house. Make him feel comfortable, at ease. He’ll talk, I’m sure of it.”

  I slipped back into the living room. Fedelia was reading aloud the articles in the newspaper about the fields drying up, livestock collapsing, and the recent infestation of flies. As she got to the article about home remedies for heat rash, Sal sat at her feet and stared up at her hair.

  “Can I ask you something, ma’am?”

  She folded the paper and smacked it down hard on the table. “Devil gonna ask me a question? Shit, this oughta be good.” She sneered, showing how the bright lipstick had smudged across her yellowed teeth. “Shoot, green eyes.”

  “Do you count your days well spent?”

  She batted her eyes, the false lashes about to fling off. “Are you offerin’ to buy my soul? Goddamn.” The sweat on her face was little beige droplets, colored by her heavy mask of makeup. “Do I count my days what now?”

  “Well spent.”

  “Well spent? Fuckin’ philosopher here. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “You do not count your days well spent. How could you? Not with all the anger you have. Why have you built infinity for your husband’s mistresses upon your head?”

  The circles of blush bounced as her lips twitched like boiling water. “You little shit. How dare you.”

  “What else would you call it but a place for them and their damage to live forever upon you?”

  “It is none of your damn business anyways, boy.” Her roar shook her dangling earrings.

  “Have you ever heard of the paradise shelduck?”

  “Fuck you,” she whispered through clenched teeth, her hand beating at her chest as if she couldn’t quite catch her breath.

  “The rule is female ducks are less colorful than their male counterparts. The paradise shelduck is the exception. While the male has a boring black head and an even more boring gray body, the female has a head of bright white with a body of chestnut and gold. The female paradise is a rarity in the duck world. She beats the beauty of the male.

  “You, Fedelia Spicer, are meant to be paradise. Look at the white hair there at your roots. As white as the head of the female shelduck. But these colors of the other women. They feather you away from paradise. You must let go of them.” He reached up to a ribbon, but she grabbed his arm.

  “I can’t.” Her voice tore at the edges. “Don’t you understand?”

  She sat there in the chair looking so fragile, I thought if I touched her with my little finger, she would instantaneously break like a plate being struck by a sledgehammer. Mom tried to comfort her, doing her best to keep Fedelia’s false lashes from falling with the tears.

  Dad had long returned from the porch and had listened quietly to the exchange between Fedelia and Sal. Now he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Fielding, why don’t you and Sal go be a couple of little boys for a while.”

  I waved for Sal to follow me outside. Dad stopped him with just a finger gently pressed into his chest. “You are unusual, aren’t you, son?” He looked down into Sal’s eyes, waiting for a big answer. All he got was a small shrug.

  “Well,” Dad sighed, “don’t be gone too long.”

  We went out the back door, and once we were through the yard and into the woods, I told Sal the sheriff wanted to see him.

  “What about?”

  “They think you’ve been kidnapped.”

  “By you guys?”

  “Naw, by kidnappers. Were you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I’m kidding. Don’t be so serious, Fielding.”

  With a smile he to
ok off, his head start giving him a lead we traded to the tree house. Granny followed, staying to sniff the trees below as we climbed up the slats into the house.

  “This ain’t good racin’ weather.” I swept back the strands of hair stuck to my forehead.

  “What are these?” He was over by the pair of handprints on the wall.

  “That’s my hand on the right, and Grand’s is on the left. We made ’em years ago.” I felt my finger as I remembered the knife and shoelaces.

  As he continued to stare at the prints, even placing his own over mine, I began to toss through the board games that me and Grand kept in the tree house. Me and Sal never did decide on one of those games. We got to talking about movies instead, and I found myself explaining the plot of Ghostbusters. Just when I was about to tell him about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, he shushed me.

  I didn’t hear what he did, but still I followed him down the slats and continued to follow him through the woods, the dry shrubbery and briars scratching my legs. As I stopped to wipe small dots of blood off my shins, I heard the low cries. It was then I saw Elohim’s rusty can. A few feet from it lay a pile of gray.

  Please, God, I prayed as I ran to her. Already I felt the tearing inside myself, and by fear alone, I knew home would never be the same again.

  I fell down by her side, unsure of where to touch her, for she seemed in pain everywhere.

  “Oh, Granny. Hey, old girl. How much of the poison you think she got?”

  “Enough.” Sal gently fell to his knees beside me.

  “What do we do?”

  Her tremors became spasms that convulsed her whole body. Sal would later tell me I screamed for God. All I really remember shouting for was help.

  He stood, wiping his hands on his red shorts as he walked away. I asked him where he was going, but he didn’t answer. I tried to soothe Granny by saying all would be fine as I scratched behind her ears, her favorite place. It was hard to avoid the thick saliva dribbling from her mouth. Over and over again, she jerked, and in the sharpness each jerk was the corner of so many things I just kept running into.