The Summer That Melted Everything(59)

“I was far too weak to fight off a rabid dog, so I opened the door of the grandfather clock and placed Grand down inside, just below the pendulum. I thought the dog may get me, but at least my baby will be safe. Before I closed the clock’s door, I saw it. A revolver with an ivory handle. I checked to see if it was loaded. Then I took aim and fired. One bullet, that’s all it took to take down an entire system of muscles and vessels and organs and bones.”

I was quiet for a few moments, and then I asked as if I didn’t already know, “What’d ya do with the gun, Mom?”

“Don’t you get any ideas, Fielding. I put it someplace safe. I do not want you fishin’ for it. Mark my words, Fielding, if I find that gun missin’, I’ll shoot you with it.” She took her arm out from around Sal so she could playfully poke me in the stomach. “Bang, bang,” but I couldn’t laugh, because my stomach was in the low from Grand’s punches.

“Oh, poor Mr. Elohim.” She coiled the beads at her neck. “He loved that dog so much. It’s why he puts the poison out. It was a coon gave First rabies.”

*

After Mom went inside to start dinner, me and Sal stayed on the porch. We were there when Dad got home. He asked about my bruises.

“Me and Grand just played too rough.” I shrugged it off.

Grand didn’t come home for dinner. He did call. Told Mom when she picked up the phone that he’d eat with the journalist at Dandelion Dimes and wouldn’t be home for a while.

I thought about Grand and this man in the yellow booth with the dandelion wallpaper around them, the little yellow vase of plastic dandelions between them. The waitress who would come in her yellow uniform to take their order on a yellow pad, before walking past the yellow curtains to the yellow kitchen to serve their food on yellow dishes. Everything so yellow. Grand, I’m sure, remembered back to how Sal said there was no yellow in hell. With so much around him, Grand must’ve thought he was with that man in heaven, forgetting they were merely in Dandelion Dimes.

I stayed up long after Mom and Dad went to bed, pacing the porch while Sal sat patiently on the swing. My nose was still sore and the vision in my right eye was obstructed from my hanging lid. It hurt to stand up tall. It stretched the bruises out on my ribs. I was the beaten boy and feeling it all over. I feel it now. Especially the bruise in my chest, the length of a heart, the width of one too. The pain making me wince.

“You should go up and take a hot bath, Fielding. Help with the soreness.”

I shook my head at Sal. “I’m waitin’ for Grand.”

“What if he doesn’t come back?”

This thought frightened me. Maybe he wouldn’t come back. Maybe I had to go to him.

I ran down the porch steps and was nearly out of the yard when Sal grabbed my arm.

“Let him come home on his own, Fielding.”

“What’s it to you? Huh? He’s not your brother. This is not your family. Stop actin’ like it is.” I pushed him back and ran. I could hear his feet pounding behind me. He hollered that I didn’t even know where Grand was.

But of course I did. He was with our secrets. Where else would he be?

It had been a few years back when I snuck into Grand’s room and took his Eddie Plank card. I only took it to show off to a couple of friends, but I ended up losing it. I turned the world upside down looking for it, but it’d already been given to that place out of reach, so I went to Grand and said I had something to confess.

“What is it, Fielding?” He closed the chemistry book he’d been reading and sat up on the edge of his bed.

“I don’t wanna say, Grand. You’ll hate me.”

“Well, I guess you’re a little man now, huh? Kids are never afraid of bein’ hated for somethin’, ’cause they’re still kids and easily forgiven. But men, they’re not so easily forgiven and live in fear of bein’ hated. I say you’re a little man ’cause you’re still more kid than man, but you got the fear now, so you’re on your way. So what should we do, little man? Should ya tell me and risk bein’ hated by me? Or, should ya keep it a secret?”

“Don’t I have to tell ya, Grand?”

“I have secrets I haven’t told you.”

“What haven’t you told me?”

“The make of a secret is silence, little man. There is a way we could tell our secrets to one another without really tellin’ ’em.”

We went downstairs to the kitchen, where he took the cocoa tin and dumped the last bit of its cocoa into the trash. So we could bury our secrets in it, he said.

“But that’s not really tellin’ a secret,” I insisted.

“Sure it is. And one day when we’re both feelin’ brave, we’ll dig up the secrets and promise each other, right now, that no matter what they are, we won’t turn on each other. We won’t get angry. We will accept the secrets and still … I don’t know … любовь each other.”

“What’s любовь mean, Grand?” I did my best pronunciation of the Russian word. It came out jarred and mumbled, but I already knew what it meant. It was the first Russian word I had learned. Still I wanted to hear him translate it.

“‘Love.’ It means ‘love,’ little man.”

This love echoed in my ears as I got closer to the tree house, where we had buried the secrets. I shushed Sal as we moved low through the brush. We heard the moans before we saw them. It was the first time I’d ever seen sex. It took me a moment to realize that’s what I was seeing.