Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“Where you goin’?” I asked of his leaving.

“Got a date.”

“With who?”

“The girl everyone wants.”

* * *

I used Dad’s brown shoe polish and colored my skin before I left the house. Movies I’d seen up to that point, like First Blood, had drilled into me that camouflage is needed when embarking on a secret mission.

I stayed out of the streetlights and the headlights of oncoming cars. I thought I was the shadow Grand said I was. Just as I was a turn away from the sheriff’s, I was suddenly tackled from behind and forced to the ground.

“Got you now.” The voice was more growl than anything else.

The perpetrator’s arms were short but strong. So strong, it was like I could do nothing right to get away from him. He kept me forced down on my stomach, my face pressed against the ground and the prickly blades of dry grass.

I felt something wet and hard embedding in the flesh on my arms. The man was biting me, my skin pinched up between his sharp teeth. He tasted the shoe polish. Spit, cursed, and spit some more.

His hold loosened enough for me to back my head up off the ground and yell for him to get off me.

“Fielding?” The growl was gone from his voice.

“Mr. Elohim? What you doin’?”

“What you doin’?” He quickly let me go and moved back. “Walkin’ the hours of night. All niggered up.”

“I’m camouflaged.” I wiped his slobbers off my arm, maybe some of my own blood. “You really bit me hard, Mr. Elohim.”

He stood as he used his sleeve to wipe the polish from around his mouth. “I was merely usin’ an old army technique to disarm the enemy.”

He looked even shorter in the night, all white shirt and white jeans.

“I ain’t the enemy, Mr. Elohim.”

“Shoe polish makes ya close to it.”

* * *

I sat there long after he left, maybe a little too long. I felt sore in the toes. Like I had been stretched up on them, looking over a ledge, straining to see what was. Up on toes, raising to the truth. Which was what? I wasn’t yet sure. I knew it reminded me of something. Something I’d seen. A tractor breaking cobwebs in a field. Dead spiders on the wheels. That’s what the truth I didn’t yet know reminded me of. That’s what its edge sang to me that night as my toes lowered me back down. Down to the quiet grass. But not for long. I had to pull myself up. I had things yet to hear.

The sheriff lived in a honey-colored brick house close to the center of town. The front of the house was dark, though there was a light in the back. I followed it and peeked through the open windows. The room had a table with three chairs pulled out. There was some hard candy on the table in an offering pile but no empty wrappers. Sal was too smart for that.

I eased down onto the dying grass below the window. I thought they would return to the room, so I sat there and waited so long, I fell asleep.

I dreamed myself, waving. Not hello, but good-bye. The waves falling from my hand in objects. Baseballs. Overalls. Dad’s suits, three pieces at a time. Mom’s aprons. My own fingers, falling. Me crumbling away until no one’s at home. Just a pile of baseballs and aprons.

What was that sound?

The dream getting pushed back behind the reality of a June bug landing on my cheek and its wings buzzing together into a close. I brushed the bug off. It flew away wondering why. It was still night, but the light of the room had been turned off. The lost moment creaked like a door closing.

I headed home. As I was nearing Main Lane, the night filled with crystal sounds. I ran toward those sounds. When I got to the lane, I saw the streetlights were all broken, the lane left in a darkness that allowed whoever was shattering the store windows to do so unseen. I could hear their feet pounding on the brick sidewalks. Sometimes it sounded like one person. Other times it sounded like more.

In the houses close to the lane, lights began to flick on. Porches were lit and screen doors were opened.

Voices called out.

“What’s goin’ on out there?”

“Sounds like glass breakin’.”

“Best check it out.”

And so they came, running toward the lane with flashlights and questions. I was illuminated, while whoever was really at fault was running the other way.

“Hey, it’s that black boy. He’s out here breakin’ the store windas.”

They charged, bright light with feet, blinding my eyes. They were going to teach me a lesson, they said. I felt someone grab my arm. Someone else on the other. I tried to tell them it was me.

“Kill ’im.” A woman’s voice. She said it so casual, I imagined her standing there in her housecoat and slippers and hair rollers, one arm around her waist, propping the other up to her mouth, where a cigarette slipped in and out, smooth like a dream.

Someone wrapped their arms around my neck. I was pulled back into a sweating, bare chest. The hair on it as dense as the foliage of a jungle and me straining not to get lost to the jaguars.

“Hey, let ’im go.”

Was that Grand’s voice?

“I said get off ’im.”

Yes. Superman in Levi’s. Seeing his blue eyes was like seeing the day breaking the night as he punched one in the face and threatened the others with the same. He grabbed the arms that were holding me and yanked them back, kicking their groins. I felt one of the hands slip away on its own.

“His skin’s comin’ off,” the hand said.

Grand stopped. They all did. Flashlights were turned toward the hand, brown shoe polish showing on its palm.

The other hands let go of me. The light left and made a backward turn to themselves, inspecting the color smeared upon them.

“Do you think it’ll make us sick?” one of them asked.

“Don’t know. Don’t know what it is.”

“It’s his skin, just meltin’ off. Must be the heat.”

Even those hit by Grand no longer bent toward their pain. They looked at their own hands to see if they too had the come-off color.

“C’mon, quick, Fielding.” Grand bent down. “Hop on my back. You haven’t got shoes on. Glass is everywhere.”

And so I rode the back of the god across the sky to the safe dark of the woods, where I slid off to the ground. Didn’t want to, though.

“You’re lucky I was out, Fielding.”

“Thought you had a date?”

“She wasn’t my type.”

“I thought she was the girl everyone wants?”

“I went for a walk instead.”

He had layers of sweat. One from the heat. One from the fight. One from his walk. One from the girl he did not want. The sweat making a circle on his shirt at the small of his back like some sort of ripe fruit.

I was about to say something more but the night was speaking my name.

“Sal? Is that you?”

He stepped from the trees.

“You know what’s goin’ on out there, Sal?” I pointed back. “Someone’s broken the windas and the streetlights. They—” I stopped when I saw what he held in his hand. “Why ya got a rock, Sal?”

He dropped it, and the thud sounded like a window breaking.

“Don’t say it was you, Sal.” Grand put his arm out in front of me, the way a mother might in a car suddenly stopping.

“Now, hold on, guys—” Sal took a step toward us.

“It was you. You broke those windas.”

“No, Fielding.”

“You’ve got a rock.”

“Not to break anything, Grand.” Sal’s hands were up in a way I’d only ever seen on cop shows. “I’m gathering them. That’s all. I’ll show you.” He quickly reached behind Grand to grab my arm, his grip hot and strong. “Please, let me show you.”

I let him pull me through the woods with Grand following behind and on the way picking up the rock Sal had dropped. We ended up at the tree house. In the patch of dirt over Granny’s body, a pile of rocks were freshly stacked.