The Summer That Melted Everything(15)
“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.”
5
The hell within him
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:20
OLD MAN, WHY do you buy so many rolls of aluminum foil? For my sins, I answer, to make them beautiful.
I write my sins on a piece of foil and place it on the ground with a rock on its corner so the foil doesn’t get carried off. Then I go away from it. Go a distance from it because then, from afar, the sins become beautiful silver things that catch the light of the sun so brightly, heaven is left in want.
I tried. Let it be said I did try. When I was twenty-nine I jumped out of a plane over the sweeping canola fields of North Dakota. Before I got on the plane, I placed my sins amongst the blooming yellow crop. A bullet here, a gun over there, a few baseballs scattered throughout. Really, they were all melted candles. Isn’t that what sin is, after all? Life given too much flame? The devil’s at the wick, and the wax heads south.
Just before I jumped from the plane, I promised myself if I landed on only the yellow blooms, I would take it as a sign of my ghosts allowing me peace. With that peace, I would no longer suffer in the worst shadow of the snake. I would stop skinning peaches. Cease all mad damage. I’d bring an end to splintering my knuckles against picket fences and running chainsaws through rows of American corn.
I’d sweeten my heart. Be gentled by the small of a lover’s back. I’d no longer scrape my spine against cinder blocks nor cannibalize myself in perfect bites. I’d get rid of my stash of horns and keep hell out of the honey. I would learn how to say June, July, August, September without scream and as one word. Forgiveness.
If, however, I were to land on one of my sins, I promised myself I would go on with the punishment and the guilt and let the final fangs in to do all their damage. I would stay the shape that best fits the coffin and accept the terrifying permanence of my crimes.