… wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:24–26
FROM THE LOOKS of it, his overalls were his only wearing. Was that a year’s worth of dirt on the strap? The cuffs of the pants? How long did it take to fray the denim like that? To lose the button? To rip that hole by the knee, the biggest of them all?
The only spot not worn was the seat. Did he never sit down? Too busy getting that dirt caked into the thread. That dust settled into the pockets. In some areas, the denim was so thin, you could see his skin lifting like shadow through the thread-baring weave.
He didn’t walk like other boys. There was no bounce, no thrill of movement. I could see him low and deep, peacefully wise below the grass line of the cemetery.
His skin reminded me of when I had been woken by high-pitched screeches outside my window. I rolled out of bed, pressing my face into the screen. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew the birds were close from their battle sounds and the whooshing thud of their wings.
The next morning, a feather lay on the ground beneath my window. It was black on the tip, but the closer it got to the quill, the black began to gray into an almost hurting brown. I thought it a sore color for a feather to have. When I saw the boy, I thought it made for even sorer skin with its reddened tinge.
Once we came to the residential lanes, I watched him as he carefully studied everything from flies on roadkill to a tangle of barbed wire rusting in a field. They were poems handwritten by nature to him, and he was as fascinated with them as I would’ve been about a ticket to the World Series.
“How do you say this place?” he asked.
“Whatcha mean?”
“I mean, the name of the town. How do you say it?”
“Oh, well, most folks think it’s pronounced like the past tense of breathin’. You know, like you just breathed somethin’ in. But it’s not like that at all. Say breath. And then ed. Breath-ed. Say it so the tongue don’t recognize such a large break between Breath and ed. Breathed.”
He repeated after me.
“Yeah, just like that.”
I knew by looking at him, he was the type of boy who got up with the sunrise, already tired, and worked until the sunset, shrunk to the bone. He knew the resilience of a seed, and the vulnerabilities of it also. The blessing of a full field and the destroyed hope of a barren one.
I wondered how many times those dirt-crusted fingernails had tried to pry growth from a drought. How many times those small hands had thrown buckets of water from flooded plains. He knew how to jar and can vegetables the way I knew how to play Mario Bros. We were in the same world, yet to me he smelled of rocket fuel.
“Your eyes…” I stared at his irises, never having seen such a dark yet sparkling shade. They were like July foliage in the sun. “They’re so green.”
“They’re leaves I took as souvenirs from the Garden of Eden.” He said it so certain, I couldn’t doubt its truth.
A truck backfired. Or maybe that was just what that group of kids sounded like as they came bursting from around the corner, nearly knocking the boy over. At first I thought his hands were up in order to catch his balance. Then I realized he was reaching out to the kids. Each sleeve or arm that came close enough he tried to grab hold of but couldn’t. They were passing him by as if he should know better. As if he should know he could never be them. Joyous and free and in pure bliss.
There was someone in the group falling back, calling my name.
It was Flint, always Flint. The boy with Coke-bottle glasses and one eye lazier than the other.
“Hey, Fieldin’.” He ran in place as the others kept forward. “We’re goin’ out to the river for a swim. You comin’? Mason swears he seen an alligator in there.”
“Ain’t nothin’ but a longnose gar.” I shook my head, unimpressed.
“I told ’im.” He wearily shrugged his shoulders while his bare, dirty feet continued to pound the ground as he looked from me to the boy. “Who’s the cricket you got with ya, Fieldin’?”
The boy was looking up, his wide eyes as seemingly edgeless as the sky he tilted to. His mouth slightly opened in dazzled wonder. What drew those wide eyes? That dazzled wonder? Why, nothing more than a hawk. Just something to glance at for most, but to him it was something more. The way he looked at it made it almost holy, a sort of flying cross. The moment spiritual. He could have sat down on a lawn chair and turned it into a pew.
“This is, um, well”—I grabbed the back of my hot neck—“it’s the devil.”
Flint stopped running in place, though his arms took longer to slow down to his sides. “What’s that you say?”
“He’s the devil.”
Flint scratched his temple like his own dad was prone to do in situations of deep figuring. “Let me get this straight, Fieldin.’ You mean to tell me that this here little tick is the devil? The one come to answer your pa’s invitation?”
“That’s right.” I pulled my words close. They seemed less silly like that.
Still his laugh came. Hard and bumpy like the gravelly path that led to his trailer park. He took a step closer to the boy, clicking his tongue the way one would approach a potentially skittish pony. The boy lowered his eyes from the hawk.
Flint smiled small, like a tapping at a door. “Hey.”
The boy stared back, no tell on his face. Flint didn’t need more than that.
“Wait’ll I tell the fellas.” He pushed his thick glasses up on his nose and took off, his bare feet kicking and lifting the road dust into little clouds that hung long after he’d gone, like swarms of gnats.
“Ain’t no goin’ back now. Flint will make sure the whole town knows who you say you are, so you better be prepared to be just that.”
The boy nodded.
“C’mon then. We’re almost there.” I pointed to the KETTLE LANE sign before us. “My house is at the end of here. There’s an actual kettle buried somewhere on this lane. They say if you find the kettle, you can drink your way to immortality. If I find it, I’ll let you have a sip.”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’tcha wanna live forever?”
“I’m the devil. I am already forever.”
Any further conversation was doubted by the start of a John Deere in the nearby yard. Instead of trying to compete with its blaring rumble, we continued down the lane in silence.
The lane was drenched in sunlight. The trees put their shade down in the large lawns of the large houses that made up Kettle Lane.
The first house on the lane belonged to our neighbor, Grayson Elohim, and was part of an inheritance from Elohim’s banker father.
As we came upon the orange-red brick, we saw Elohim eating on the porch. His feet, too short to reach the floor, hung barefoot. His lunch consisted of macaroni salad and a raw onion sandwich. No meat would be found on his table. At that time, he was the town’s only vegetarian. I used to think this put his sharp teeth to waste.
He ate at the large, dark dining table on his white porch every day for all his meals. The heavily polished table was set for two, with a yellowed lace tablecloth, while a radio in the background played violin. He’d go through the gentlemanly motions of dining with his wife in mind.
At one time he had been engaged, but his fiancée drowned in 1956. Though her body was recovered from the Atlantic and buried in Breathed, he lived as if she were by his side and not low and deep and slowly disappeared by the soft power of the worms.
He showed me her picture once in his red leather scrapbook. A tall woman with lines like string, a very white string at that. As far as loveliness goes, she had something like it. Enough to be far too lovely for an ugly little man like Elohim.
He was named Grayson, for being the son with the gray eyes. In his porridge-lumped face, his gray eyes gave possibility to his high-rising forehead and low-hanging chin. He wore his ashen hair long and slung in a low, limp ponytail. He had started balding in his late twenties following the sinking of the Andrea Doria. By ’84, and in his late fifties, he was completely bald on top, except for this strange growth of hair that grew above his forehead like a limp horn. He turned it into two by parting the meager strands, wearing them long to the corners of his mouth.
“Hey, Mr. Elohim.” I threw my hand up.
“Why, hey there, Fielding.” He spooned more macaroni salad onto his plate.
When I turned to introduce the boy, he was gone.
“Over here.” The boy’s hushed voice came from the other side of a nearby tree.
“Who you talkin’ to, Fielding?” Elohim stood up from the table, craning his brief neck in the tree’s direction.
I did my best to urge the boy out, but still he stayed behind the tree.
“I thought you come by yourself.” Elohim cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. “If there’s anyone else, you come on out now. I don’t like hidden things.”
The boy wouldn’t budge. Not even when I tugged his bony arm. When I asked him why he looked so afraid, he nodded toward Elohim.
“You ’fraid of ’im ’cause he’s a midget?” I asked quiet enough so Elohim wouldn’t hear me call him anything other than short. “He won’t harm ya none.”
The boy chewed his lip. “You sure?”
“He’s never hurt me, and I’ve known ’im my whole life. That’s sayin’ somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Come on out,” Elohim called. “I won’t bite.”
I smelled a whiff of urine as the boy took a small step, still holding tight to the trunk of the tree.
“Can’t see ya.” Elohim wiped his mouth with his napkin.
After a deep breath, the boy stepped out from the trunk completely, though he had stuck his arms inside his overalls and seemed to lose his neck as his chin stayed pressed to his chest. It was as if he were trying to retreat into the overalls, which were wet between the legs.
Elohim gasped the Lord’s name as the napkin fell, landing flat from the wadded ball it’d been in his hand. It was then I saw the still-fresh reddish brown stains on its white fabric.
I looked up and into Elohim’s gaping mouth, his particularly sharp canine teeth showing like icicles below a roofline. “You okay, Mr. Elohim?”
“I don’t know yet,” he whispered. On his way to the porch steps, he walked on the napkin, picking up some of the red-brown stains on his bare foot. “Who did you say this was?”
I cleared my throat and introduced the boy by naming him the devil.
“Fielding, I didn’t quite hear ya correctly.”
“I said devil, all right.” I shifted the bag of groceries to my other arm as Elohim drew down the porch steps, slow and at a slant like he was walking in a large gown he had to be careful not to step on the edge of lest he fall.
I turned and watched a stray dog sniff its way into Elohim’s open garage, where it peed on the tire of his white convertible, an Eldorado from 1956. When I turned back, Elohim was in reach and the boy was so close to my side, our arms were touching. He pointed toward a rusty can, which was out of place by Elohim’s clean porch, asking me in a whisper what it was.
“Mr. Elohim’s can of pop, mashed potato chips, and some sort of poison. What type of poison you say you use again, Mr. Elohim?”
“Poison.” He grunted, his eyes hard for the boy.
“Poison for what?” the boy asked.
Another grunt from Elohim. “Coons.”
A squirrel leaped over to the can. I quickly hissed to scatter it away.
“Wrong animals gonna eat the poison, Mr. Elohim.”
He ignored me and instead jutted his sagging chin toward the boy. “Well?”
“Well, what?” The boy had taken his arms out from his overalls as he stood a little taller.
“You’ve nothin’ to say?”
“What would he have to say?” I shrugged. “Before I forget, Mr. Elohim, I won’t be able to help ya build that chimney this Thursday. My brother’s got a baseball game.”
Elohim chewed the air in his mouth, the gray in his eyes filling out to the corners like smoke.
“You all right, Mr. Elohim?” I watched the sweat get low on his lumped face.
“Mind your own damn business, Fielding.” Realizing his sudden anger, he apologized as he rubbed his eyes. “It’s just too hot. Shouldn’t be this way yet.” In a milder tone, he asked, “You get a chance to read those pamphlets I gave ya, Fielding?”
Elohim’s pamphlets were notebook papers full of his vegetarian thoughts. Things like, animals live a horizontal life while we live a vertical one. According to him, this means when we eat something horizontal, we risk falling down:
It’s like putting a river in a skyscraper. The river is horizontal while the skyscraper is vertical. They are two forces working toward opposite goals. Nothing good will be accomplished. Eventually the skyscraper will shift ever so slightly and start to lean and all because it feels the river pushing at its sides. If the river is not drained, it will keep pushing and pushing against the sides of the skyscraper until one day the skyscraper leans so far, it falls and becomes what it was never meant to be. You can never succeed in what you were never meant to be.
These were the curious ideas of a man that spoke more to the fears of the man himself than to any dietary philosophy.
“Well, did you read ’em or not?” He was asking me, but his eyes were on the boy.
“I did read ’em, yes, Mr. Elohim. Thank you.” I looked down because I could still taste that morning’s bacon. It was then I saw the smear of reddish brown on his wrist.
“What is that red stuff?” I pointed to his wrist. “It was on your napkin too.”
“Hmm? Oh, it’s barbecue sauce.” He quickly licked it away.
“What vegetable you put that on?” I looked over his head to the table, a fly circling the gray bowl of macaroni salad.
He didn’t answer. He was slowly lifting his heels off the ground, standing as tall as his toes would allow. All the while, his stare with the boy was something solid, as if their eyes were impaled on the same thorn.
The boy stood taller himself and seemed a little braver. Even his urine spot was no longer a failing, as it was nearly dry, especially in that heat.
Elohim had been an authority on the porch. From there, he could look down on us. But in the yard, standing in front of us, all three feet seven inches of him, we had the advantage of height and were looking down on him. It was as if this was confidence for the boy who knew short men shrink in the shadow of the still-growing adolescent.
“Do you have any ice cream?”
The boy’s question caused the muscles in Elohim’s neck to go to rope.
“To be honest, it’s because of the ice cream that I’m even here.” As if he could not smile, the boy licked his lips.
“I don’t have no ice cream.” Elohim’s hands balled up into fists that shook at his sides, his voice shaking with them. “I have none. Did ya hear me, Fielding?” He turned to me. “I have no ice cream. Anyone want to check my house, they most certainly can.” He looked worried someone was going to take him up on the offer.
“You look like the type of man to have a freezer full.” The boy seemed an inch taller than he had stood before.
“You are mistaken.”
“I must be.”
“You better watch out, boy.” Elohim reached up to stab his finger into the bruises on the boy’s collarbone. “Watch what you speak. You keep sayin’ you’re the devil, and one of these days, someone’s gonna believe you. Then whatcha gonna do? You’re either gonna be the leader of their belief or the victim of it. Both are dangerous things.”
Elohim goddamned his way back toward his porch.
“Where you goin’, Mr. Elohim?” I called after him.
“Gotta check on someone.”
“Someone, Mr. Elohim?”
“Something, Fielding, I said I’ve got to check on something. Now, you get on outta here. And take your snake with you.”
“I’m sorry about your fiancée.” The boy’s words were soft as he looked up at the birds flying overhead.
“How’d you know about his fiancée?”
Elohim took not a step toward the boy but a step back. If I had doubted any fear he might have had in seeing the boy, there was no doubting it in his backing stride. “It all comes out now, does it?”
The boy dropped his eyes to Elohim. “It’s a miraculous thing, how a ship floats. Always a tragedy when it sinks. So many died. Your love among them. For that, sorry just doesn’t seem enough to say, so I won’t say it but I’ll mean it just the same. I want you to know, water is not so bad to die in. I assure you. At first it burns in your chest—”
“Burns?” Another trembling step back from Elohim.
“Yes, you feel fire in water.”
“Fire?” Each step Elohim took made him sound so far away.
“Yes. Fire. Then it goes out. The water puts it out. You don’t feel the rest. It’s just a slip into a sunset death. It’s what I’ve taken to calling drowning. I’ve spoken to many drowned souls, and they all say they’ve seen bursts of colors surrounding a very bright yet falling light. Doesn’t that sound like a sunset to you?”
“Is what you’re tellin’ me supposed to comfort me?” Elohim backed up the porch steps. “You tellin’ me that my heart burned—”
“Just for a moment,” the boy carefully interrupted. “She burned for just a moment.”
“And it was a moment too long. You need to burn to feel just how long it was for someone like her. How would that be? To burn?”
If a look could start a fire, it would have been the one Elohim gave before stomping into his house. The way he slammed the door sounded a lot like the start of a war.
“You shouldn’t have told ’im all that.” I sighed and started walking away. “It was like you were throwin’ her bones in his face. You gotta learn how to talk to folks better or they’re really gonna start believin’ you are the devil. How’d you know all that stuff anyways?”
“Even in hell we get the newspaper. And those obituaries—well, I don’t know who writes them, but they are awfully descriptive, almost terribly so. Sometimes all you want to hear is a name, not the direction their blood took after leaving the vein.”
Was he serious? In other boys, I would’ve been able to tell. There would be a spark of mischief in the eye, a started smile, a half cock to the head. He was none of these things. He was tired eyes and a yawn, after which he watched the birds fly above.
As we continued down the lane, we passed the Delmar house, where the daughter stood in the front yard, leaning against a large oak. She had a pen and Alice in Wonderland in her hands. She raised her eyes to the boy as we passed.
“She’s got a fake leg,” I whispered to him. “The left one.”
The mannequin-stiff leg was paler than her own skin. Attached to it was a black flat. Not real, just part of the plastic. I always wondered if she hated not being able to change her shoe. Always being the girl in the black flat.
Because she wore long dresses to hide the leg, she was immediately taken out of the catalog culture. No miniskirts for her. Her body was not clung to by neon lights. She was never without a buttoned sweater, while her loose and wispy dresses dated her in old-fashioned florals and muted colors. Seeing her in those dresses made me think of lace and lavender and radio theater.
She wasn’t thought to be the prettiest of girls. Her hazel eyes were a little too aslant. Her wrists were a little too bony. Her freckles were a little too much. She had a sedateness about her that most girls her age didn’t have. You’d never find her reciting the lyrics to Van Halen or hanging a poster of the latest crush on her wall. You looked at her and knew when she went to bed, she’d rather be blowing out a candle than flicking a light switch. Modernity was lost on her and died in cobwebs in the background to her old-fashioned grace.
“What’s her name?” The boy looked as if he could’ve taken her hand right then and there.
“Dresden Delmar.”
His wave came slow. His hand starting first on his stomach, then sliding up to his chest, his neck, until his fingers rolled out from under his chin and his hand was finally held up to her. Because there was no actual waving motion, it looked as if he were showing her something on his palm.
She quickly ducked behind the book, doing her best to tuck her red, frizzy hair behind her ear.
“Is she shy?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve seen her ’round school. I think I might’ve had English class with her. I know she doesn’t talk much. Sits in the back, things like that.”
She quickly disappeared around the tree until he could no longer see her. Then he said how her hair reminded him of the color of leaves in the autumn.
“Red and burnt by an October oven.”
And then he smiled for the first time, and she peeked around to see it.