The Summer That Melted Everything(16)

As I readied to jump from the plane, I looked down at those bright yellow fields. Sal once said there was no yellow in hell. That was why I picked North Dakota during its canola season. Those yellow fields gave me my best chance to land in heaven.

As I jumped from the plane, I tried to see my sins, if not to somehow steer away from them. Maybe that was cheating, but who doesn’t choose to fall well when such a choice is to be had? I had no say, really, in where I landed. All I could do was trust the fall.

When it did finally come to an end, it was a bumpy landing, a little facedown, a little rolling. Had I landed on one of my sins?

Nothing beneath me. Nothing trapped up in the dragged parachute. I laid it out flat so I could see. I retraced my tumble. The ground clean, too much yellow to be hell. I tilted my head back to the sky and smiled for the first time since 1984.

“That was a real nice landin’. I say, a real nice one.”

I turned to a voice and the man it belonged to standing by the road, his car just parked there, the door still open.

“I saw you comin’ down.” He pointed to the plane as his shaggy graying hair dripped over his sunburnt forehead. “Pulled over to watch. It was a good fall ya had. Was it scary?”

“Just the landing.”

He took a few steps into the field as he looked up at the sky, at the plane circling overhead. “I always thought I might wanna do somethin’ like that.” He lowered his eyes back to me as I turned to pull in the parachute. “Say, what’s that you got on ya?”

“What?” I looked down at myself. “Where?”

“On the back of your pants there. Here, I’ll get it.” He stepped closer and plucked something from the back of my pant leg. “Now, what in tarnation is this?” He held the smashed candle up in his hand.

“My sin,” I answered from the back of the cave that had suddenly swallowed me. “That is my sin.”

And so it had been decided I would not be set free from the prison or its bars like eternal candle wicks, burning any chance of escape. All I could do, all I have done, is to sit with the flames, sleep with the heat, smell the burn of flesh filling the urn one ash at a time.

I think about that first night they came to look at Sal, and I think maybe it was beautiful from a distance. The way a flooding river is. Maybe the knuckles, some tapping, some banging at our door weren’t so loud from far away. Maybe the faces pressed into our window screens looked like hung pictures. The hollers asking if they could see, maybe they sounded like songs out on the edge. Yes, maybe it was beautiful from far off, but up close it was a crowd. It was a noise. It was drowning under flooding waters.

That first evening, our house swelled. They came to see the devil Flint told them we had. They’d look at Sal, pat him on the head, be a bit disappointed.

“Just a little boy. That’s all. Just a boy. Though dark as the night, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, but look at them eyes. You don’t normally see that color in ’em. Maybe we shouldn’t say he ain’t the devil just yet. They’re just so green.”

Staying outside through all of it was Elohim. I waved for him to come in, but he just took a step back. I still remember the way the gold band gleamed from his ring finger. In his mind, he was a husband, and just in case anyone doubted it, he was going to look the part. Hell, he was going to live the part.

When he got letters or sent them, he put in a Mrs. beside his Mr., and when he hung clothes on his line to dry, one could not help but notice the dresses and bras. Perfume and lipstick sat on the vanity in his bedroom, and the strands of his fiancée’s hair from the last time she brushed it on Kettle Lane were fossilized in bristles. He was surrounded by a woman who wasn’t there. He was one half of a relationship that did not exist.

Just as I was about to go out to Elohim, a man bumped into me on his way in the house. With his cowboy hat and spurs, he looked like a man sure of the saddle. He had a Polaroid camera in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. I told him to put it out before he went into the house. He silently took my picture, though he did nothing to the cigarette as he stepped through the front door, adding to the rest of that crowd consisting of our friends, neighbors, and strangers, like the woman in the bright red dress with showy purple flowers who nearly knocked over the vase in the entry hall with her wide swinging hips and rear like a bag of apples.

There was a man who when he bent low to look at Sal, showed the part in his hair and the dandruff there, like shavings of pearl. He was pushed to the side by a woman in a rhinestone belt. She wanted a good look at Sal, and she didn’t want anyone in her way. The man in the cowboy hat took her picture, maybe only to remember the woman who chewed her gum as if her jaw was about to be undone from creation.

There was just something about that woman. The ponytail rising out of the very top of her head like a mushroom cloud. The awful stare of her eyes. A shiny viciousness as if when the wolves saw her, they turned and ran the other way, fear putting their tails between their legs.

I felt like telling the sheriff he should go through her house. I was certain he’d find bottles of tampered Tylenol, potassium cyanide, and a scrapbook of newspaper articles from 1982.

As she looked down on Sal before her, she suddenly stopped chewing the gum. Her thin lips settled like a single bleed across her face. The old acne scars like embedded wreckage.

She cleared her throat, and in one easy go of it, she asked, “Is God a nigger too?”