The Summer That Melted Everything(5)

His fingers twitched. “I was once, if that counts.”

If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.

I reckoned he came from even farther out in the country, where outhouses were still in use and your nearest neighbor was the field you planted.

At that moment, I felt compelled to look at his hands. I thought if he was the devil, they would be singed, charred, somehow influenced by fathering the fires of hell. What I saw were hands experienced in plucking chickens and in steering a tractor over a long haul of ground.

The clock in the courthouse tower behind him began to chime the hour. He glanced back at the clock with its white face, like a plain dinner platter. Atop the roof of the tower stood Lady Justice, poised on the balls of her feet. If it wasn’t for that clock and statue, the place of court would have been just a large wooden house with a wide wraparound porch scattered with rocking chairs and dirty ashtrays. This was what law and order looked like in Breathed. A house with a termite problem that made the gray boards like stewed wood.

The boy’s eyes fell from the clock to the tree in front and its smooth bark and pointed leaves lining the length of the pale gray branches.

“They call it the Tree of Heaven,” I told him. “It’s some sort of ail … ailanthus, Dad calls it. He says they should never have planted it here.”

“Such a name as heaven, you think everyone would plant one in their living rooms.”

“You could plant it in your livin’ room. It’d sure grow outta carpet. Them things grow anywhere. And they just keep growin’. It’s a pest.”

“Peculiar that a tree named after paradise is a pest.”

He spoke all his words in the burdened and slow pace of a pallbearer in wartime.

“Where your folks at? C’mon, I know you’re not the devil.”

From the pocket, he pulled out the bulge, which was a gray pottery bowl with five dark lines of blue circling it. It was followed by a spoon inscribed with LUKE 10:18: I SAW SATAN FALL LIKE LIGHTNING FROM HEAVEN.

“It’s a real shame you don’t have any ice cream. I have everything for it.” He held the items close to his chest.

“We might have some at the house. Ain’t no point in you standin’ here. Don’tcha know the courthouse is shut on Sundays?”

“Is it Sunday?” He held a tightness in his dark brows that stretched to his elbows.

“Yep.”

For what felt like a very long time, he made a quiet study of me. I picked up the bag of groceries and held it like a shield to my chest. Finally he asked, if it was indeed Sunday, why I wasn’t in church.

“Never am.” I shrugged. “Dad will go. He don’t make a regular thing out of it, though. He says the courtroom is his church.” I leaned in as if whispering were the only way to say, “My dad is Autopsy Bliss.”

He too whispered, reciting the last bit of the invitation: “With great faith, Autopsy Bliss.”

I made room for a man and his limping dog. Once they passed, I stepped closer to the boy. “You’re really Satan?”

“Yes.”

“The big man Lucifer?”

He nodded his head.

“The villain of the story?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“If you’re the devil, then you’re the bad one. That’s just the way it is. Well, come on then.”

“Where to?”

“To meet the man who invited you.”





3

… 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?”