The Summer That Melted Everything(46)

I wonder what lovers Sal and Dresden would’ve been if that summer would’ve been hot and nothing else. He would’ve kissed each one of her freckles and moved his hand up her leg. Spark, spark, fire. Orgasm is a many-flamed wonder to the thrusting bodies that in their fond collision makes husbands of boys and wives of girls.

I will say conversation was a long time coming between him and Dresden that summer. They first spoke with their eyes. Every look. Every glance. Every long stare and short one.

He would nail a poem to her oak. They weren’t his work, these poems. They were Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, all the old masters and the old standby lure for lovers everywhere.

He’d hide behind one of the other trees and watch her take the poem down from the nail. She’d bite her lip and tuck her frizzy hair behind her freckled ear as she read, sometimes long enough for me to think he’d given her a whole novel. I suppose she was reading the poem over and over again, finding the parts of it that were less Shakespeare and more Sal.

I climbed her tree with him once. She didn’t know as she leaned back against its trunk, opening her book and circling its words. I think it was Gone with the Wind, but that could just be me going with the wind in my memory.

A few pages in, Sal signaled it was time to press on the branches. We leaned our whole weight in until they swayed. It was hard work, and some of the branches wouldn’t move at all. That’s an old oak for you. Its long, heavy limbs stretched out more than up to the sky. Limbs that were thick, drooping things like wet rope. One branch was heavy enough to flop all the way to the ground, resting on it as if reaching bottom was the most natural growth for a tree branch.

We stuck to the lighter branches in the middle, and to the even lighter and smaller branches of those branches. The higher you moved up into the tree, the smaller the limbs became and therefore the easier it was to move them.

There was no wind that day, so when she felt the movement of the tree above her, she looked up, frightened. Then she saw Sal and her fear melted away. She never even saw me, and I was really putting my back into it, shifting those damn branches just for her. Didn’t even notice. All she saw was Sal.

“What are you doing, you silly boy?” She wrapped her sweater-covered arms around her book and swayed in tune with the branches, her long dress skimming the ground.

“Giving you a breeze on this very hot day.” He lazed over a thick branch and smiled down at her as he used his back foot to stir a small twig, all the while I leaned everything I had into a great big bough. She never once looked over and saw. Instead she laughed at him, one of those laughs that’s more open mouth than sound.

“Well, all right then. I’ll let you get on with it. Silly boy.”

She returned to her book and stayed long after circling the words on its pages. It was as if she couldn’t bear to leave. She would look up at him, saying she was going to have to go soon, that her mother was going to be home. But then she’d lean back against the tree and stay for a while more.

Meanwhile, my arms and legs felt about to break off like the few smaller twigs that had become casualties of my wind. I told Sal I was going home, leaving by walking down the long branch that lay on the ground.

Dresden suddenly turned, surprised to see me. “Where’d you come from?”

“My God. Didn’t you see me? I was half of that wind up there.”

Her shrug was limp, and for that moment I genuinely hated her, maybe because I wanted her to see me as much as she saw Sal. I shook my head and kicked a small gravel past her plastic black flat before heading home. Even at the end of the lane, I could see that tree slowly waving one branch at a time. The only tree in Breathed that day in motion.

Sal stayed long after she went inside. By the time Alvernine pulled up the drive in her Mercedes, he was still there. Alvernine wasn’t the type of woman to look up in the trees.

As night came, Dresden pulled a chair to her front bedroom window so she could sit and watch him move the branches just for her. It was late and she tried desperately to keep her eyes open. Before she knew it, her head was in her hands. Then it was on the windowsill. And then it was on the pillow in her bed. She apologized to him in her sleep.

Even with her asleep and curled up with her back to him, he did not stop. He was up in that tree until the middle of the night, when a real wind came and made his something special into something everywhere.

He crawled home, hunched and sore. All that for just one girl. I asked him why, out of all the girls in the world, why Dresden Delmar?

He winced from his sore limbs as he told about the time he went on a drive.

“I went with my—” He stopped himself, swallowing what he was going to say.

“With who, Sal?”

“With a man and a woman I used to know. The man’s eyes drooped from tiredness. Her eyes drooped for that and more. The two of them together could stunt a chance. Still, the drive looked to be a fine one. The woman even turned on the radio and sang along. I didn’t know she knew any songs. I certainly didn’t know he did. I certainly did not know they could make music together.

“Everything seemed all right. I even think I sang with them. And then the man lost control of the car and we swerved to a stop by the side of the road. Something had punctured the tire, and we didn’t have a spare. The man was angry because it was the woman’s idea to go driving in the first place. It was autumn. She had wanted to see the leaves.