… I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:98–99
MY KNEES KNOW I’m a praying man. The broken dishes, the empty beer bottles, the hole in the wall the size of my fist, all know I am an unanswered man. Why is no one answering me?
It’s been seventy years since I’ve stepped foot onto Ohio soil. The closest I’ve ever been back was fifteen years ago, when one night I stood on the West Virginia side of the West Virginia and Ohio border. I cupped my hands around my mouth to distance my voice over the Ohio River that formed the border as I yelled for everyone I used to know. Hell, I even yelled my own name.
I frightened some birds, heard the river flowing down below, but the biggest reply of all was silence. No one yelled back to me. No one said, Hey, we’re here in Breathed. Come back now. It’s all okay. You can come back. It is just fine. I waited for all the familiar voices to say just this, but I am the unanswered man. I am the inside of silence.
What is it they say about home? You can’t go back again, right? So find a new one, Fielding. I’ve tried. I’ve lived all over. In apartments, in houses, in an abandoned gas station for a short time because I liked the way the sun hit its pumps, but I’ve never had a home again. They’ve all just been places. The place I’m at now? It’s a trailer park called King Cactus.
There are no kings, there are no queens, there is just the unraveled, trying to live. When I first saw the place, I winced and remembered the blood of the beetles. They would swarm Ohio, especially in the autumn, when they would cluster on our window screens, squeezing into our homes, where they would collect in the warm lampshades or crowd around the ceiling fixtures like a pilgrimage. When frightened or smashed, the beetles secreted a pungent odor with their blood. It is that bitter, yellow blood that the trailer park reminds me of and why I knew I would spend the remainder of my life here.
I could afford better, but what’s the damn point? There’s no spouse to be disappointed by this failing trailer. There are no kids or grandkids to care about the overturned milk crate I use as a step to my front door. There are no friends who will be stopping by and thus leave me embarrassed by my lawn chair furnishings or the piles of this life shaping hills as tall as the direction allows. It’s a waste of time to live better when you’ve got no one to care for and no one to care for you.
I’ve been here in Southern Arizona five years now. For all the trees we had in Breathed, here there are saguaros. For all the grass, there is sand. For all the hills, there are rocky peaks, and for all the hollers, there are canyons. There is no river or pond or deer drinking hole to be found. There is an aboveground pool. The last person who swam in it came down with some sort of parasite. I thought at first they said he came down with paradise, so I took a swim myself, diving down beneath the empty beer cans floating on the surface but finding nothing but a dead snake in the bottom.
Did you know that the hottest desert in all of the United States is right here in Arizona? The Sonoran Desert. I call it The Son That Ran. I suppose it’s that running son that has made me settle here. It’s a different heat from Ohio, though. Dry. Less humid. But as long as it makes me sweat, I don’t much give a good goddamn how the flames ripen.
There has never been great wealth in trailer parks, but King Cactus, with its royal moniker, seems particularly spent. It certainly is a far cry from the house I grew up in.
Kettle Lane ended with my house, a big square thing of brick in a tepid brown. At each side, a Victorian learned conservatory full of wicker and vines. It was a house that sat proud, seemingly thrilled by its own existence and the ivy creeping up its sides.
Dad was kneeling in the freshly cut yard with our dog Granny. They were both looking at the small snake Dad held in his hands.
I hollered to Dad, but he didn’t hear me. I was about to call him again, but the boy grabbed my arm and urged me to wait.
“Let’s see what he does with the snake.”
“Why?” I shrugged out of his hot grip.
“You can tell a lot about a man by what he does with a snake.”
Dad allowed the small snake to slip turns through his fingers until Granny barked. The snake hissed toward the sound as Dad stood. He walked to the back of the house, keeping the snake rather close to his chest before releasing it into the dense woods bordering our backyard.
“Well?” I turned to the boy. “It wasn’t nothin’ but a harmless snake anyways. Looked to be a garter.”
“A snake that could harm you, you don’t have much choice to kill. You wouldn’t be able to leave a cobra in your sock drawer. But a snake that is no threat will greatly define the man who decides to kill it anyways.”
“Weren’t you a snake once? If you are the devil, that is.”
“I’ve been called a snake, yes. But haven’t you ever been called something without having actually been it?”
I shrugged my shoulders and hollered to Dad until he turned from the woods.
Suddenly the boy started laughing. I looked down to see Granny licking his toes and told him her name.
“Why do you call her Granny?” He went to his knees and started scratching the sides of her neck.
“Any other name but Granny would be too young for her. She was born old and gray. Besides, don’t she look like somebody’s granny?”
She stood no taller than our shins. A shaggy mutt with a rickety bark that sounded like a horse and buggy. She had the habit of squinting her eyes like everything was too far away even when it was right in front of her. She always seemed to be searching for her glasses, but like any granny, she couldn’t quite remember where she’d put them last. She’d look up at you, seeming to ask, Do you remember where I put them?
Her fur, more like hair, was longest at the back of her head, where it rolled and swirled and looked like she had it tied in a bun. It was hard not to see her in a schoolmarm dress, a brooch glistening at her collar, a crocheted shawl over her shoulders.
She barked and nuzzled up into his neck until he fell back with her tongue lapping his cheeks, her tail wagging over him and his laughter. At that moment, he was just a boy. That laugh was so innocent, you felt like the worst it had ever done was to love a falling leaf.
I look back and think of all the ways he wasn’t the devil in that moment. The devil would break a dog’s neck, not cradle it in his own. The devil would have a mouth comparable to a crate of knives, not a mouth with teeth that held the curves of marshmallows. I think of all the devils I’ve seen in my long life. I know now how brief the innocent, how permanent the wicked.
I looked toward Dad, still walking from the woods, on the way occasionally stopping to look up at the sky as if it were asking something of him and he was listening.
My dad was a tall man and I always thought remarkable, like somewhere a stained glass window was missing its center. He was like that, centered, responsible to a fault.
He was only forty-nine that summer, but his forehead seemed older, like it was recycled from some centenarian who had lived a hundred devastating years. The wrinkles were long, seemingly circling all the way around as an unofficial equator. The only thing longer were his fingers, which were tall and grasslike when his hands were up. Perhaps that’s why his palms were always a bit moist. They were the wetlands and his fingers the bulrushes that grew at the edges of them.
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 never 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. “Don’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.
“Well, what about his eyes? Do they say if this Amos has green eyes?”
The sheriff looked annoyed with my questioning. “Listen, Fieldin’, they don’t say nothin’ ’bout eye color, but I’ve no doubt that there boy is this missin’ Amos.” His big lips pushed out in a sigh as he looked at Sal. “Your folks will be here tomorrow mornin’, rise and shine or rise and dull—either way, this little lie of yours will have run its course.
“In the meantime, since we’ve no holdin’ cell for little boys in our jail, me and Mr. Bliss think it’s a good idea for you to roost here till your folks arrive. Hear me, sonny?” The sheriff had hung onto the Arkansas accent of his roots.
“You can stay in my room, Sal.”
“He can stay in one of the spares.” Dad patted his tie, which was safe in his vest. “He probably wants his own room to himself.”
Sal looked up at Dad. “If it’s all right, I’d like to stay with Fielding.”
“I don’t know.” Dad rubbed some tension out of his shoulder. “It’s so terribly hot in here, isn’t it? Where’s your mother, Fielding? I should talk to her.”
“Somewhere in there. I think Madagascar. Or was it Spain?”
“Well, if that’s all, Autopsy, I best be goin’.” The sheriff adjusted his belt, the sweat marks beneath his pits looking like gigantic ponds. “Got a call on the way here about Grayson.”
“Mr. Elohim?” I glanced at Sal. “What about ’im? We just saw ’im.”
“Ah, that midget’s all kinds of crazy.”
Dad cleared his throat. “They like to be called dwarf, I think. Or maybe little person. Course, that makes them sound less than, doesn’t it?”
“First we lost ni—” The sheriff quickly stopped himself from finishing the word while glancing from Dad to Sal. “We lost the N-word, and now we’re losin’ midget. Next thing ya know, we won’t be able to call people ugly. It’ll be appearance impaired, or somethin’ political like that.”
“What’d Mr. Elohim do?” I asked again.
“Well, apparently he went into Juniper’s and took all the ice cream outta the freezers and from the back storage. Threw it in a pile in the middle of one of the aisles and used his big propane torch, you know the one he clears brush with, to set fire to it all. Store was unharmed, as the large exhaust fan in the ceilin’ sucked up the majority of the smoke. But I hear melted milk is everywhere.”
“So all the ice cream?” Sal slumped. “It’s all—”
“Been put to death.” The sheriff’s laugh sounded like a shovel scratching sandstone.
“Will you arrest him then, Sheriff?” Sal was as serious as they come. “Arrest Mr. Elohim for murder?”
The sheriff simply smiled, his crooked teeth small and gray. He shook Dad’s hand and hollered a farewell to Mom on his way out of the house.
“What a day.” Dad stepped to the freezer, grabbing out a Popsicle. “It sure is smoldering, isn’t it?”
Sal sat at the table, removing the bowl and spoon from his overalls and placing them in front of him.
“You still, uh, keeping that thought going?” Dad stood slurping the grape Popsicle, already melting. “That you are the devil?”
“I am the devil.”
Dad held the dripping Popsicle over the sink. “Prove it. Prove that you’re really him, really the Lord of Flies. Go on. Show me your horns.”
“I’ve never had horns. That’s always been something made up to decorate my story and clog my chance not to be a beast.”
“Well, what about your wings? You were once an angel, right? Wings can’t just be decoration of that story. So where are your wings, Lucifer?”
“The moment I fell, my wings wilted like roses left too long in the vase. The misery of the bare back is to live after flight, to be the low that will never again rise.
“To live on land is to live in a dimming station, but to fly above, everything sparkles, everything is endlessly crystal. Even the dry dirt improves to jewel when you can be the wings over it.
“To be removed from flight is to be removed from the comet lines, the star-soaked song. How can I go on from that? How can I be something of value when I’ve lost my most valuable me? Land is my forever now, my thoroughly ended heaven. No sky will have me, no God either.
“I am the warning to all little children before bedtime. Say your prayers, be done with sin, lest you become the devil, the one too sunk, no save will have him.”
Dad stared in wonder, as if in the presence of a poet and his pain. “How old are you again?”
“I can show you what is left of my wings.” Sal stood and unbuckled his overalls as he turned around to reveal two long scars on the edges of his shoulder blades.
“No matter what form I take, the scars take it with me. I turned into an earthworm once and they turned into it with me.” He rebuckled his overalls and sat back down.
Dad laid the dripping Popsicle in the sink before taking a seat at the table. “You can change into anything you want?”
“Not anything with wings. I’ll never have them again.”
“So what we see before us now, it isn’t really you after all?”
Sal sighed so light, it was almost hidden if not for the slight raise in his shoulders. “What you see before you is what lost reflects when it looks into a muddy puddle.”
Mom turned an electric fan on in the next room. The battle between heat and home had begun.
I spoke next. Dad was too busy. His eyes were trying to help his thoughts find the seams in the boy before him.
“What about this Amos?” I asked. “Sal?”
He nodded his head. “I know about him. I met him.”
“Where?” Dad sat up.
“It smelled like … cinder blocks.” Sal looked down at the bowl and spoon. “I’d like to wash these, if I may?”
Dad nodded as he tapped his fingers on the table, clearly in a hurry to put the puzzle before him together and solve the mystery. “I’ll give you this, son, you are convincing, but I got a feeling when those parents show tomorrow morning that you will be their son. A very imaginative son, but a son nonetheless.”
Dad left, saying he was going to check on Mom.
As Sal washed the bowl and spoon, I stared at the wing scars on his back, following his blades of shoulder. No one could be blind to the scars’ near perfect sameness.
“I wish I could fly.” I said it more to myself than to him.
The spoon clanked against the sink’s side and he flinched. “Has your father ever thrown you up on his shoulders? Carried you around?”
“Sure, when I was a cricket.”
“Then you’ve felt what it feels like to fly. It is being carried by something that raises you up while at the same time promises to never drop you.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then when you flew I guess you knew what it’s like to be carried by a father.”
He stopped washing the bowl, the running water the only sound. He turned it off, and in its place of rushing, he came slow to say, “And yet why is it I stand here not knowing just that? Knowing only the feeling of falling, the blood dripping like red feathers down my back.”