Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“Mom, stop.” I swatted her hand away. “Give me some money so I can go.”

“And may we have enough to buy ice cream?”

“Mr. Elohim flamed all the ice cream yesterday,” I reminded Sal.

“Hmm, I wonder why he did that.” Mom reached into her change purse. “I’ll give ya some extra so you can getcha some chocolate bars.”

“C’mon.” I grabbed Sal’s arm once I had the money. “Maybe Mr. Elohim didn’t burn all of it. Maybe they had some hidden in a back freezer.”

When we came upon the Delmar house, Sal stopped and stared at Dresden, who was once again standing against the oak in her yard, this time with To Kill a Mockingbird. Sal waved and softly called her name. She held the pen in her hand tighter and the book higher, though her freckled forehead and her light eyes peered above the page at him.

“Tell me something about her, Fielding.”

“Her dad split a few years back, so it’s just her and her mom, Alvernine. Alvernine’s one of them fancy-pancy ladies and sexy as hell. She’s consumed by bein’ Miss Perfection. She wouldn’t like you.” I smacked a sweat bee away. “Though, maybe if ya gave her a rose. She started a club on ’em.”

“Is Dresden in the club?”

“Naw. It’s just society ladies, like Alvernine. Why you care so much about this girl anyways?”

“Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.” He gave Dresden one last wave. In response, she hid her face completely behind the book, her frizzy hair sticking out around the cover like red static.

Sal glanced back at her before we left, but his attention was soon placed on the birds flying above.

Papa Juniper’s was on Main Lane, which was a long lane of stores serving as the main route of business in Breathed. Storefronts of wide windows, brick façades, and that summer, flowers and plants wilting in the heat. The soaring elms lining the lane shaped a canopy not unlike a vaulted ceiling, giving rise to the lane’s nickname, the Cathedral. A nickname not just for the ceiling the trees gave the lane but also because the trees were said to be blessed on account of their escape from the Dutch fungus that had obliterated most of the nation’s elms.

In 1984, there were no big-box stores or outside commercial influence. The businesses were Breathed born and bred. Main Lane was a place you could buy books, furniture, music, condoms, a brand-new refrigerator, and finish it all off with a haircut at Chairfool’s barbershop or a meal at Dandelion Dimes, named so by the founder who, in the late 1800s, would accept a yellow dandelion head as payment equivalent to a dime.

Juniper’s, with its whitewashed brick and little blue juniper berries painted on every one, was the only grocery store. Down from it was the butcher’s, and down from there a bakery called Mamaw’s Flour, which every Fourth of July would bake the largest blueberry pie. It sure looked nice, but wasn’t much for taste.

If you needed dressing, there was Fancy’s Dress Shop for the ladies. Contrary to their name, they did sell pants, though they never brought them to the house when Mom called up and said she’d like to go shopping. They would come with their hangers and garment bags, laying the dresses out, knowing just the kind she liked. She’d go over them, point to this one and that one, eventually buying them all, I think because she felt they went to an awful lot of trouble, bringing the store to her.

Across the lane from Fancy’s was the Burgundy Toad, which is where Dad bought his suits and ties, among other menswear, with little burgundy toads embroidered in the labels. While Fancy’s and Toad’s catered to the older shopper, the young ones could find the latest fashion at Saint Sammy’s. Though the sign out front had last had a face-lift in 1954, you could find the latest acid-washed jeans there.

Sal glanced at the mannequin in the window with her purple bikini printed with little neon hearts as me and him passed Saint’s on the way to Juniper’s. Once inside the market, we found all the ice cream had indeed been melted. In the aisle where Elohim had torched it, the concrete floor was left cracked by the heat.

What I knew of Elohim’s punishment for the act of vandalism was that he was to pay for the ice cream, the cleanup, as well as patch the cracks in the concrete.

Because the exhaust fan in the ceiling above had carried out a good deal of the smoke, very little residue remained on the food around. Being as it was burned in the canned food aisle, the cans merely had to be wiped.

When we saw one of the workers passing through with a mop in his hand, we asked him if he was sure there wasn’t any ice cream left undiscovered in the back.

“It all burned. We expect a shipment by the end of next week. You can check back then.” He perched his pimpled chin up on the mop handle while he stared at Sal.

“Well, where’s the chocolate bars and candy?” I looked at the shelves, which were covered in thick brown smears.

“All of it melted, just started oozin’ out all over the place. Ain’t got to cleanin’ all of it off the shelves there yet. Basically anything that can melt, has melted. I mean, the freezers, you see.” He gestured off to some bags of ice and various other perishables stuffed into the freezers. “I managed to save all that, but the rest ain’t nothin’ but somethin’ that once was.”

“You still got lentils?”

“Oh, sure. Those are some heatproof bastards there.”

* * *

With the lentils in hand, me and Sal left Juniper’s.

You could hear the whispers around us.

“There’s the devil.”

“He don’t look like no devil to me.”

“They never do.”

“Didn’t Grady meet the devil once?”

“Naw. Not face-to-face. Just presence-to-presence. Shucks, we all got that goin’ for us.”

In front of the yellow-painted brick of Dandelion Dimes, we ran into Otis Jeremiah with his pregnant wife, Dovey. Otis worked at the tennis shoe factory. He was usually the one to come to the house to update Mom on production.

“Hey, there, Fieldin’.” Otis grabbed my shoulders as if he were testing the strength of them. He always finished with a disappointed look that said I should exercise more.

Otis himself was one of those guys you thought they based video game soldiers on, with his prizefight biceps and log-laid abs. Every day you’d see him running around Breathed, doing his miles in a shirt cut off to his chest to go with his short cut-offs, so tight, cling wrap would’ve been looser. He was the only man I knew who wore shorts shorter than the girls’ and more belly shirts than a toddler. Every day he wore this workout gear, even when he wasn’t working out, which made him seem underdressed in those places without dumbbells.

He was a sweaty sight to behold, with his permed mullet kept back from his pyramidal face by a red, white, and blue sweatband that matched the bands on his wrists, like some sort of signature of Captain America. His striped socks stretched over his wide calves. His bright tennis shoes whitened daily. Forever loyal, Otis wore only tennis shoes that came from our factory. Our trademark was a large eye made of thread and sewn into the back of each shoe. Eyes in the backs of your heels was an image Grandfather had decided upon when he founded the factory.

“You know, Fieldin’, I’ve come up with a new shoe design I think your momma is really gonna love. Square shoes.” Otis moved his fingers in an air square, his pumped-up chest showing like cleavage beneath his neon pink tank.

“Square?”

“Now, hear me out. Ain’t square things easier to store than misshapen things like the average shoe? That’s why we store ’em in shoe boxes ’cause the boxes are square. But if the shoe itself is square, there’d be no need for the box. We could cut costs right there.”