Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“Now, you just take a step back onto that sidewalk there. You hear me? Goddamn it. I said take a step back. That’s good. Now, why you throwin’ rocks at my fuckin’ car like that?” He used his flashlight to shine on the trunk. “Could’ve broken my damn winda out, you old fool.”

I stammered as he shined the light into my eyes.

“Been drinkin’ tonight, have we?”

“Just a little, sir.”

“You know you’ve pissed yourself?” He shined the light down.

“Couldn’t find the bathroom, sir.”

“Says the man who’s just had a little. You look like a caveman, all that hair, all that beard. You used to be in one of them rock bands or somethin’? Can’t let it go now? You still have to look the part, don’tcha? If I was you, I’d get myself to the barber and only drink coffee from now on, you understand?”

He was so close, I could smell coffee on his breath. I knew he could smell the beer on mine. I closed my mouth and didn’t breathe. I got light-headed as he asked if I was driving home.

I shook my head. My lungs tightening, about to burst.

“How you plan on gettin’ home?”

My answer was a sharp intake of breath.

“You drivin’?”

“No, sir.”

“Ain’t you too old for this shit?” His hand dropped from his holster. “What’s that you got all over your beard? That red stuff?”

“Barbecue sauce.”

He shined the flashlight down over the rest of me and my thrift store uniform. “You were in the armed forces?”

“I was in a war, yes. It was me.” I stabbed my finger into my chest. “It was me who stopped the war.” I made my hand into a gun and whispered a bang. “That was me with the gun.”

He lowered the light down to my tennis shoes. “Your shoelaces are untied.”

“I know.”

“Weird-lookin’ color for shoelaces.”

“They’re my brother’s, sir. They’re my brother’s shoelaces.”

“What’s that brownish color on ’em?”

“Dried blood.”

He sighed as he clicked off the flashlight. “I should take you in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Public intoxication. Public stupidity. Public stink.”

“Wouldn’t be my first, sir.” I held out my wrists, ready to be cuffed.

“I’m on my way home myself.” He turned to leave. “Ain’t got no desire to take you in and do more paperwork tonight. You get home, old timer. I don’t wanna hear you killed no one. I said get home. What are you doin’?” He stepped back around his car to see me lowering myself to the ground.

I burped and he threw his hands up at me. Mumbled something like jackass before he got into his car and drove away while I sat there and closed my eyes, remembering Sheriff Sands and how he said Breathed wasn’t safe for Sal anymore.

Dovey’s fall and the track star’s accident were a few days gone when the sheriff came to our house, telling Dad it was being said Sal had a hand in those tragic accidents.

“I like to think we take care of and solve our own problems,” the sheriff said, “but I don’t want that boy in danger. I think you agree.”

When Sal was told he would be leaving, he put on the overalls he had arrived in. Dad said he didn’t have to do that. Said he wouldn’t even be leaving until the next morning, but Sal wouldn’t take them off.

When I woke in the middle of the night, I found him downstairs, scribbling a small tangle of ink in the corner of the reproduction painting of The Great Wave in the room we knew as Japan.

“What you doin’, Sal?”

“Leaving something for you to remember me.”

These remembrances he left throughout the house, from a cut in the sofa’s skirt to a page torn in the Russian-to-English dictionary. Little cuts, tiny slashes, small scribbles that wouldn’t be seen unless you were really looking. Looking for the curtain to have the tiny hole in its valance or the rug to be missing its seventh fringe. Things taken away. That was how he saw his presence. It would be how his presence would be proved in the end.

The morning he left, he took our names from us. I was not a field growing life. Grand was not Grand. He was just some guy throwing a baseball in the background. Mom and Dad was just the foot and the step standing side by side, and the house was just a square with four sides for all of us but not one for him.

He looked up at Dad with the type of disappointment people never forget. “You invited me here, Autopsy Bliss. Your invitation, it was why I came. To see for myself. I felt wanted. But it was a lie. You lied to me, Autopsy Bliss. You all did.”

He got in the front seat with the sheriff before Dad could say anything. I don’t know what Dad would’ve said. Neither did he. Later we heard him walking through the house, rattling off cases one after the other. That was coping to my father.

Not more than forty minutes later, and Dad was getting a call from the sheriff, who was out of breath, saying Sal had escaped.

I thought Sal would leave Breathed, go find another Fielding, another Grand, another Dad and Mom who would take him in as their own. But as the day changed to night, I lay in bed feeling like I was just waiting for him to return. How could he not? With little parts of himself still there. In the torn page of the dictionary, the cut sofa, the corner of the painting. Pieces of him coming together into the center we all revolved around.

I didn’t hear him calling my name at first, not over the hum of the fans. Finally I heard his nails scratching at the screen of the open window, his face pressed there.

“Let me in, Fielding.”

I didn’t dare go for a light as I got out of bed and quietly removed the screen.

“How’d you get here?” I stepped back as he came in over the sill.

“I climbed up the ivy.”

“No, how did you get here? I thought you left with the sheriff?”

“I’m good at escaping.” He wiped his dripping forehead on his forearm, Breathed’s unofficial gesture of that summer.

“But how’d you do it?” I replaced the screen as he ignored my question and instead said he was thirsty.

“Ain’t got a glass up here. Get a couple handfuls outta the faucet.”

He frantically shoveled the water into his mouth, ending by splashing his face, while I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for him to tell me about his daring escape.

“Elohim.” He wiped his mouth and sat down beside me. “He flagged me and the sheriff down. The sheriff got out to talk to him. Elohim said how it was wrong for the sheriff to be driving me out of Breathed and how I should stay. He said he would talk to people. He promised he would keep Breathed a safe place for me.”

“But … Elohim hates you. Why would he want you to stay?”

He shrugged. “While they were talking, I slipped out the sheriff’s open door.”

Headlights suddenly lit up the dark room. We hunkered down over to the front window, where we saw a car driving up to the house. I didn’t see it was the sheriff until he got out and spit.

“Fielding.”

Me and Sal turned to Dad, standing in the open doorway, the sweat on his face glistening in the moonlight.

“Dad? How’d you know?”

“It’s all right. I had a feeling he might come back here, so I sat up waiting. I saw him crossing the yard.”

Sal shrank into the darkness of the room. “What’s going to happen now, Autopsy?”

Dad placed his hand on Sal’s shoulder. “I’m going to talk to the sheriff. You boys wait in this room. No more running off, you hear?” He squeezed Sal’s shoulder.

Like good shadows, me and Sal snuck downstairs to listen outside Dad’s study door, which hadn’t closed completely in the latch, allowing us to hear the sheriff.

“The woman at children’s services has said that if he returned here after his escape, it meant he felt safe amongst y’all and it’d be more psychologically harmin’ to take him away and place him with a different foster family. Accordin’ to her, he’s in a fragile state at the moment. Possibly abandoned in the first place, so he’s fearful of losin’ another home.”