The Summer That Melted Everything (10 page)

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With the lentils in hand, me and Sal left Juniper's.

You could hear the whispers around us.

“There's the devil.”

“He don't look like no devil to me.”

“They never do.”

“Didn't Grady meet the devil once?”

“Naw. Not face-to-face. Just presence-to-presence. Shucks, we all got that goin' for us.”

In front of the yellow-painted brick of Dandelion Dimes, we ran into Otis Jeremiah with his pregnant wife, Dovey. Otis worked at the tennis shoe factory. He was usually the one to come to the house to update Mom on production.

“Hey, there, Fieldin'.” Otis grabbed my shoulders as if he were testing the strength of them. He always finished with a disappointed look that said I should exercise more.

Otis himself was one of those guys you thought they based video game soldiers on, with his prizefight biceps and log-laid abs. Every day you'd see him running around Breathed, doing his miles in a shirt cut off to his chest to go with his short cut-offs, so tight, cling wrap would've been looser. He was the only man I knew who wore shorts shorter than the girls' and more belly shirts than a toddler. Every day he wore this workout gear, even when he wasn't working out, which made him seem underdressed in those places without dumbbells.

He was a sweaty sight to behold, with his permed mullet kept back from his pyramidal face by a red, white, and blue sweatband that matched the bands on his wrists, like some sort of signature of Captain America. His striped socks stretched over his wide calves. His bright tennis shoes whitened daily. Forever loyal, Otis wore only tennis shoes that came from our factory. Our trademark was a large eye made of thread and sewn into the back of each shoe. Eyes in the backs of your heels was an image Grandfather had decided upon when he founded the factory.

“You know, Fieldin', I've come up with a new shoe design I think your momma is really gonna love. Square shoes.” Otis moved his fingers in an air square, his pumped-up chest showing like cleavage beneath his neon pink tank.

“Square?”

“Now, hear me out. Ain't square things easier to store than misshapen things like the average shoe? That's why we store 'em in shoe boxes 'cause the boxes are square. But if the shoe itself is square, there'd be no need for the box. We could cut costs right there.”

Otis was the town kidder. Nobody ever smiled quite like him. His smiles were something that captured you, that took possession of you, that dared you to feel the joy. Above all else, his smiles were his big white teeth, almost even squares, they were. That was why Mom used to call his smiles
the sheets on the clothesline.

“If you made square shoes, there'd certainly be a lot of people tripping.”

“What?” Otis chuckled at Sal, surprised at the loss of the joke. “Say that again.”

“Tripping. Square things on your feet means four corners will have the chance to be successful in eight different ways of making you fall.”

“Well, I…” Otis trailed into his thoughts, which you knew were all square falls.

“How far along?” Sal gestured to Dovey's belly, as rising and as round as one of the hills surrounding us.

“Just over six months.” She giggled with a slight pig snort.

Dovey was as consumed by physical fitness as her husband. While being pregnant kept her back from the more strenuous activities she was used to, she was still the local Jazzercise instructor and wasn't without her spandex leotards and leggings, even while pregnant, which made for a whole
snake swallowed the world
bit.

“Say”—Otis pointed his finger at Sal—“you're the boy they all been squawkin' 'bout to be the devil?”

Sal confirmed with a nod.

Otis grinned. “Well, whatcha wanna give me for my soul?”

“Otis.” Dovey grabbed the bulge in his forearm.

“It's all right, sugar-sock, this kid ain't nothin' but two legs of human.”

Dovey wasn't so sure.

“May I touch your stomach?” Sal held his hand up.

“Uh, gee, I don't know, kid.” She leaned back, but Otis grabbed Sal's hand and placed it on her stomach.

“There ya go, kiddo.” Otis beamed. I doubt there's ever been a prouder father-to-be.

Sal closed his eyes, his hand tenderly cupping her roundness. “It feels like the seven millionth hand.”

Dovey stared at Sal's hand as she asked just what the seven millionth hand was.

Sal began to speak about a staircase between heaven and earth, and as he did, his words were a little deeper, a little bleaker, a little more crafted to the haunt of what it means to speak fine.

“It is called the Staircase of the Fallen, and it is the way down from heaven for those who are too wrong to stay. Like me.

“You may look up, but the staircase is too high above and too far to see from here. Just floating there by itself like it's been stolen from home and somewhere there's a house missing the way upstairs.

“It's a mean thing, falling down steps, it's a thing to matter the most. And as I tumbled down this staircase, I felt every step, all seven million of them. The steps are too there not to be felt, they are too edged not to sober you to the errors of your fray. The pain is smart enough to poet out a space, where bruises are verse and rhymes are moans over and over again.

“It's a terrible thing for an angel to fall, because you cannot survive it by wing. The flight you had before is just a bird magic you'll never have again. How brief the feather to the angel who discovers discontent. After all, isn't that what my fall was? My discontent to just be in place, never to change from the one suit of my life. But I was tired of being the obedient son who cheapened his own self by farming his father's commands. I wanted my own life. I wanted my own good life.

“God is no fool. He has made the fall a touching torture, for with each step, there is a hand that reaches for you in that good, old-fashioned, second-chance sort of way. You reach back and hold tight to it because to do so is deciding to believe that by holding on, you can survive being let go of. But no matter how much you beg, no matter how much of yourself you give to the chance, you are let go of. That is the undeniable torment of the fall. For such a divine event, it's a rather ordinary agony. To have hope raised, only to realize there is no hope to be had. Hope is just a beautiful instance in the myth of the second chance.

“When I came to the last step, the seven millionth step, the hand that reached for me was unlike the others. It was a five-finger shape and yet it was more. As if it had shaped clay before and gone numb from long hours of creation. It was a hand that brought
God
to my lips.

“The other hands had always known they were going to let me go, and in that, they were merely cruel. But that seven millionth hand was a hand in the midst of a choice. Would it let me go or would it pull me up? Would it re-feather me? Would it forgive? Would it call me
son
once more?

“The hand's first existence was that of warmth. Its second was that of dignifying my hope by holding my hand tighter than all the others. But above all else, the hand existed as that of pure love. I could near all the hearts of this world and never come near being loved like that again. That was how I knew the seven millionth hand was God's.

“As I dangled there in the sky from His hand, I knew He didn't want to let me go. But I also knew that if He did not let go, He would be ruined by holding onto me. So in that choice, I let go of Him. I had to, for His sake. I had to fall as the Devil, so He could stay the God.”

Sal opened his eyes, and it was like several rains coming down his cheeks at once. He looked up at Dovey and told her that touching her belly was like holding and being held by the seventh millionth hand.

“Because above all else, it was love. It was love, and that is what I feel inside you now.”

Dovey wiped her cheeks and smiled as she gently laid her hand upon Sal's. She was about to say something. I thought perhaps sing a lullaby to him, but the shout kept her from it.

“Devil!”

Elohim was pointing at Sal from across the lane, his arm looking like a trembling sword. “He'll make you ill, mother-to-be. His touch is the layin' on of the end. It is death.”

With tears still in her eyes from Sal's story, Dovey yanked his hand from her stomach. “Don't—don't touch me.”

I had never seen a woman look so frightened as she wrapped her arms around her belly. It was as if that whole moment between her and Sal had never happened. I suppose when the life of your child is threatened, you don't hesitate. When someone shouts
devil
, you shield against the horns.

As Elohim continued shouting, Dovey quickly turned to take a step, but the toe of her tennis shoe caught the uneven brick in the walk.

All those years of exercising and that experience of jumping up in the air and landing so agile and safe had abandoned her. Falling will do that. It'll dumb your landing, your ability to catch yourself. Her hands flew up in the air as her back arched and her belly led the way down. It hit first, her belly, in a dull sound as it pushed in on contact with the hard brick. Her face down after, smacking against the brick in a sickening thud.

A woman shrieked about the baby. I didn't know who, because I was like everyone else, looking at Dovey and the blood on her face. I'm not even sure where it was all coming from. It started at the top of her forehead, but that could've just been the spread from her gushing nose. All I know is that she wore the blood like a mask, and it dangled in drops from her chin before falling down to her stomach, where it landed in the half-moon shapes of broken thumbnails.

I heard someone shouting for the sheriff, for the doctor, for God. Dovey just sat there, her hands anxiously gripping her stomach as if trying to feel the baby's heartbeat with her fingers.

Otis looked lost. He kept looking down at his muscles as if to say,
Come on, do something.
But they lazed in their size. He suddenly looked as if he regretted ever lifting a dumbbell in the first place. They had not prepared him for what to do for a fallen wife and child. They had not prepared him to keep that from happening, and at this he frowned into his abs.

“Help her up, Otis,” someone from the crowd ordered. It was his job, they said when someone tried to do it for him.

He squatted down as if preparing to perform a dead lift. With his arms around Dovey's hips, he lifted her up. She was still gripping her stomach. I don't think she even realized she was being raised. The blood from her nose kept at it as if it had been waiting a long time to gush. She looked at Sal, a bit drunkenlike. Then her eyes widened in that mask of blood.

“I know what it feels like now.” Her front tooth, loosened in the fall, flopped against her lip like a piece of tissue. “I know what it feels like to fall from the seven millionth hand.” And then she laughed. She laughed delirious and sick and sad. Self-shattering through sound.

“Dovey.” Otis' leg muscles tightened as if at any moment he was going to have to run away from her. “Please, Dovey, stop laughin' like that.”

She did stop, though I preferred her laughter to the screams that followed.

Over and over again, she was already fearing the worst. Otis led her away, saying the doctor would check her out and that everything was going to be just fine. She didn't believe a word he said.

As one organism, the town watched Otis and Dovey until they disappeared around the corner. Then in near unison, the town turned back to me first, then Sal.

“I seen him push her,”
a voice came like nails on a chalkboard.
“Pushed her down.”

“Yeah, he did. I seen it too.”
Raspy and so sure.

Elohim was still shouting, hopping from one foot to the other, yelling about devils and death. He smiled when the crowd took a step toward us. Another step. Another smile. Fists were bunching up at sides until knuckles went white. Necks were being cracked. Men were pushing up their sleeves. Women flung their purses up into the crooks of their arms, getting them out of the way.

I watched as one woman tied her feathered hair back out of her face while the man beside her shot his arms out from his shoulders the way a boxer walks to the ring.

Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.

“He didn't do nothin'.” I realized I was trembling. “Just stay back. Y'hear?”

“He pushed her down.” A small voice from a small old lady who spoke for them all when she pointed at Sal and said, as soft as a hill flower, “He's bad.”

“Just stay back. I'll tell my dad on y'all. He's Autopsy Bliss, in case some of you don't know. He's a lawyer, and if you do anything, he'll put you in prison.”

“Devil.” One of them pointed not at Sal, but at me.

“But I'm not—”

“Devil.”

That wasn't what was supposed to be part of my life as Fielding Bliss. No one ever said you've got to prepare to be hated. You've got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence. And yet, there I was, sharing the horns with Sal.

I remember how a kid no more than seven started practicing his punches. His mother patted his head. “That's good, son. That's real good.”

Friends, neighbors, my fellow Breathanians were advancing on us. The only time I'd ever been truly scared in my thirteen years was when a five-foot black racer chased me out of a field after I got too close to its eggs. The crowd was like that racer, rising up on its tail and hissing at me and Sal.