The Summer That Melted Everything(62)

My hands hurt me the most. You wanna know the hurt? Hang a piece of wood up and punch it from sunrise to sunset. See the sick swells of your knuckles, like balls of tightening wire. Pain is our most intimate encounter. It lives on the very inside of us, touching everything that makes us. It claims your bones, it masters your muscles, it reels in your strength, and you never see it again. The artistry of pain is its contact. The horror of it is the same.

Pain is a thing that speaks, and what the pain is telling me is that I’ve been irresponsible in resting my body. From the time I was seventeen, I worked every single day at breakneck pace, climbing up and down ladders, dismantling brick and stone while pushing my body to stay agile across the expanses of roofs.

While steeplejacking was my preferred occupation, I was like Elohim and did all kinds of work. I burnt brush, laid concrete, any and all construction I could get—hell, I was even a logger for a bit. I’ve done ironwork, rigging and welding and working with heavy steel. I took the shifts no one else wanted. I’d go from one job to another. Then there was all the f*cking I did, which is its own toll on the body. I was trying to earn my way to sleep. It did not happen.

And thus I am pain in every inch of my mind, in every inch of my body. I am the endless flailing, the endless falling, the endless story of what happens to a man who cannot let go.

I think about my death. I know it is the long hallway of burning doors that awaits me. I know it is the real devil I go to eternity with. I wonder about the body I leave behind. How soon the flies will come. How soon I will be found. They’ll put me into the ground, not for respect but to be rid of the smell. There will be no handkerchiefs drying in the horizon. I will go to death without the give of tears. Maybe the neighbor boy will shed something. Maybe he will say my name like I mattered.

I might show the boy my scrapbook. Red leather like Elohim’s. Sometimes I think the scrapbook is full of Grand and Sal, Mom and Dad, and even Elohim. It’s hard to tell the difference between a picture of them and one of a chimney taken apart. I feel like I’ve felled them all.

The other day I asked the boy if he’d like to go for a walk. I haven’t walked with anyone in thirty years. And suddenly there we were, walking down the road past saguaros and desert. I thought maybe we just might keep walking all the way to Ohio, and it might be all right if we did because I’d have him by my side.

But then we saw it, lying by the edge of the road.

“Poor fella.” I approached its lifeless form.

“Mr. Bliss?”

“It’s okay, boy. It’s just a deer. Been hit, poor thing.”

I squinted and saw antlers that by their size made the deer a young buck. Its blood had a breakfast quality to it, like something to be spread on toast.

I turned back to the boy. “It smells like strawberries.”

“Mr. Bliss, maybe the heat is gettin’ to ya. Maybe we should go back home?”

I looked back down at the deer and saw its belly rise. “My God. It’s still alive. What pain it must be in.” I thought of purpling organs. Of wounds with brutal edges. Of veins unraveling into rivers on a map to the grave. “We’ve got to help it on its way. Put it out of its misery. I’ll do it. You’re still just a boy.”

I pulled the small piece of pottery out of my pocket as I knelt down and patted the deer.

“I wish I had the gun,” I told it, as if it would understand that.

I dragged the pottery’s sharp point across its throat, expecting flesh to open and blood to pour. When that did not happen, I tried again, but the deer would not be cut.

“Mr. Bliss, please stop.”

“I can’t. Don’t you understand? It’s suffering.”

I began to go after the deer’s death rather than help it to it. Over and over, I cut the pottery across its throat. The deer started to resist, or at least I was holding its body down as if it were.

“Mr. Bliss, stop.”

I felt the boy’s arms come gently though determined around my neck, pulling me back.

“It’s not a deer, Mr. Bliss, it’s not a deer. It’s just a cardboard box. Must’ve fallen off a truck.”

“No, you’re wrong. It’s…”

I looked down at what I thought had been a struck deer but was in reality a banged-up cardboard box. The pair of sticks that could be antlers if you needed them to. Then there was the strawberry jam I’d believed was blood. It seeped from the broken jars, oozing wide and then tapering as if the way to eternal glory is one long, narrow passage. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to get there. Our sins widen us until the narrow way is something we can never go through. We have no choice but to languish in the boiling of what’s left, as I have been languishing.

Oh, God, just burn me away until I’m all gone.

“Mr. Bliss, look here. One of the jars didn’t break.” The boy held the miracle up in the sun, the light shining through the jam and blessing each seed.

I took the jar from him and tried to twist its lid off, but these damn hands, shortened by the swelling and the knots. I stared at his long, tall fingers as they opened the jar with ease. A boy opened what I could not. I was suddenly the midget and he the tallest man in the world. For that moment, I hated him.

He tasted the jam, it squeezing out to the corners of his mouth.

“Did I ever tell you I had a brother? His name was Grand.”