Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“Help her up, Otis,” someone from the crowd ordered. It was his job, they said when someone tried to do it for him.

He squatted down as if preparing to perform a dead lift. With his arms around Dovey’s hips, he lifted her up. She was still gripping her stomach. I don’t think she even realized she was being raised. The blood from her nose kept at it as if it had been waiting a long time to gush. She looked at Sal, a bit drunkenlike. Then her eyes widened in that mask of blood.

“I know what it feels like now.” Her front tooth, loosened in the fall, flopped against her lip like a piece of tissue. “I know what it feels like to fall from the seven millionth hand.” And then she laughed. She laughed delirious and sick and sad. Self-shattering through sound.

“Dovey.” Otis’ leg muscles tightened as if at any moment he was going to have to run away from her. “Please, Dovey, stop laughin’ like that.”

She did stop, though I preferred her laughter to the screams that followed.

Over and over again, she was already fearing the worst. Otis led her away, saying the doctor would check her out and that everything was going to be just fine. She didn’t believe a word he said.

As one organism, the town watched Otis and Dovey until they disappeared around the corner. Then in near unison, the town turned back to me first, then Sal.

“I seen him push her,” a voice came like nails on a chalkboard. “Pushed her down.”

“Yeah, he did. I seen it too.” Raspy and so sure.

Elohim was still shouting, hopping from one foot to the other, yelling about devils and death. He smiled when the crowd took a step toward us. Another step. Another smile. Fists were bunching up at sides until knuckles went white. Necks were being cracked. Men were pushing up their sleeves. Women flung their purses up into the crooks of their arms, getting them out of the way.

I watched as one woman tied her feathered hair back out of her face while the man beside her shot his arms out from his shoulders the way a boxer walks to the ring.

Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.

“He didn’t do nothin’.” I realized I was trembling. “Just stay back. Y’hear?”

“He pushed her down.” A small voice from a small old lady who spoke for them all when she pointed at Sal and said, as soft as a hill flower, “He’s bad.”

“Just stay back. I’ll tell my dad on y’all. He’s Autopsy Bliss, in case some of you don’t know. He’s a lawyer, and if you do anything, he’ll put you in prison.”

“Devil.” One of them pointed not at Sal, but at me.

“But I’m not—”

“Devil.”

That wasn’t what was supposed to be part of my life as Fielding Bliss. No one ever said you’ve got to prepare to be hated. You’ve got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence. And yet, there I was, sharing the horns with Sal.

I remember how a kid no more than seven started practicing his punches. His mother patted his head. “That’s good, son. That’s real good.”

Friends, neighbors, my fellow Breathanians were advancing on us. The only time I’d ever been truly scared in my thirteen years was when a five-foot black racer chased me out of a field after I got too close to its eggs. The crowd was like that racer, rising up on its tail and hissing at me and Sal.

The light was letting go, and it was violence’s chance. The closeness of that very violence surged through me like an overwhelming disturbance that chilled my blood, a seemingly impossible feat in that heat, but that’s how scared shitless I was.

I tore open the bag of lentils and poured them into my hand. I threw hard, and while the lentils fell, I grabbed Sal’s hand — so sweaty I had to grip twice. Our hands eventually slipped from each other’s as we ran as fast as we could from the open, hungry mouth that had taken chase.

The young girls were the first to fall away, followed by the women whose heels wouldn’t let them go any farther. They threw these heels at us like loose, sharp teeth as they hollered for the men to keep on, keep on and tear us to pieces.

“Make us proud,” they insisted, some still in aprons smelling of home.

Me and Sal dodged the honking cars on the lanes before sticking to the yards, running in between houses and through the spray of a water hose and a man watering his oleander. My legs ached. A cramp was coming on in the right hamstring. I looked back. The crowd had gotten smaller. The older of the men had stopped, clutching their chests in a line like a heart attack parade. My own heart was thumping so badly, I looked down and thought at first I was bleeding from the chest, soon realizing it was just sweat and water from the hose soaking through my red T-shirt.

Our pursuers dwindled until all who remained was an eighteen-year-old from Breathed High who was OSU bound on a track scholarship. Dressed for Breathed track, in the school’s dark purple and lavender tank and shorts, he jumped over fallen logs and fences like hurdles, took turns with the ease of straight tracks and was sprinting to the finish line of our heels. I wanted to keep looking back, stare the cheetah of the Midwest in the eyes, but Sal kept screaming to just keep running.

I could feel the boy’s breath on the backs of my calves, and just when I thought he was going to reach out and grab us, I heard a scream and the squealing of tires. I turned and saw the track star bounce off the hood of a DeLorean, his sweat flinging from his forehead as he flew up into the air, seemingly touching the sun.

The driver was out of the car quick. I could hear him asking the boy to wiggle his toes as Sal pulled me away. I could hear the boy saying he couldn’t, oh God, he couldn’t wiggle his toes.

Just before we crossed into the woods, I saw the red lights of the sheriff’s car.

“That boy.” I bent over and grabbed my knees, feeling I might get sick. “You know he has a track scholarship. To OSU. I wonder … I wonder if … Oh, God.”

“C’mon,” Sal tugged my arm. “We best get lost for a while.”

We climbed up the nearby hill, running until we were deep in its cover of woods and could no longer hear the siren.

Sal caught his breath against a tree. “Where should we go?”

“I know a place. Follow me.”

We jumped every time a twig snapped, every time a wild turkey gobbled, every time a hawk squawked like a scream, fearing they had found us out. He chewed his lip until I thought he would chew it down to his chin.

I was so out of my head, I got lost. I couldn’t stop thinking about that boy enough to remember direction. We must have passed the same deer drinking hole three different times. Eventually I sobered from worry enough to find the overgrown pasture up on the side of the hill. Past it was a pine grove that led by an old abandoned schoolhouse and from there to the tree me and Grand had built a house in.

“This is mine and Grand’s secret place.” I climbed up the slats hammered into the wide trunk. “I’ve never brought anyone here before.”

I paused on the slats, glancing down at Sal climbing up behind me. “I hope her baby’s gonna be all right. Did you see all that blood? Sal? I saw her belly. I saw it push in when she hit. I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you?”

He nodded he had. I turned back to the slats and climbed the rest of the way.

“And that runner.” I paced the spacey boards that made up the floor while Sal leaned back against the tree trunk continuing its growth up through the middle of the house. “I can’t get the sound of the tires squealin’ outta my head.”