Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

We didn’t speak the whole way. That’s brothers for you. A splintering silence. A lonely cope. A quick pace to the house we shared and the home we hoped would always be there.

And this is where so many of my nightmares begin. Walking up the porch steps and finding the man with the notepad. He’d been talking to Sal. Grand interrupted their conversation by asking, “Who are you, Незнакомец?”

“A journalist from The New York Times, ” Sal answered for the man.

Grand gave a fatherly sigh toward Sal. “Whatcha been tellin’ him?”

“We’ve just been talking about the heat.” The man tucked his pad of yellow paper into his back pocket. “You know your shoelace is untied?” He gestured down to Grand’s shoes. “What’s that on the laces? Chocolate stains?”

“Bloodstains.”

“Funny stain to be on shoelaces. Either way, it’s a pleasure to meet you, kid.” The man offered his hand.

It was unnatural how the man called Grand kid. There wasn’t enough distance in age between them. I figured the man was in his early twenties. Hair copper like fused pennies. Eyes dark like casual shadows. Lines around the mouth from Marlboro Country.

The way he moved, he was like a human saxophone, with jazz in his step. Of course, it probably had something to do with his skin. Such a glow you’d never think he’d ever been sick a day in his life.

“Aren’t you going to shake my hand, kid?”

Grand leaned into the porch rail, the man watching the sweat glistening on Grand’s bare chest. Watching the way that strand of damp hair fell across his eye, like a sort of whole world holding.

“Perhaps if I introduce myself.” The man kept his hand offered. “I’m Theodore Bundy. Just call me Ted.”

This was the type of thing to get Grand grinning. To get him to the man’s hand. I wish mine would’ve been a knife to Ted Bundy right then and there. I wish I would’ve been bigger than myself, the thing to make him nothing but the slowly bleeding dust.

After Grand introduced himself as Michael Myers, they seemed to hold hands a little too long. Grand was the first to let go. Something told him to. Maybe something that was still being said back on the ball field.

The man looked at his own hand, slender like the rest of him but now sullied from ball diamond dust. Maybe some oil from Grand’s baseball glove and pine tar from the bat. This dirt on the man’s hand was painful to him. He was so spick-and-span, like he washed in a Maytag, spinning out on gentle cycle.

He wiped the dirt off his hand. “I feel like maybe we should give our real names now.”

“Let’s not.” Grand squinted at the bright sun. “I like our fake names.”

“You don’t mind being a murderer?”

“It’s better than bein’ the victim, ain’t it?”

The man coughed into his hand. “Who said you had to be either?”

“The day has said it.” Grand laid his glove down and didn’t look at it again.

“All right, to escape being the victims, we shall continue to be the murderers. But only if you promise not to kill me with your big knife, Mr. Myers.”

“If you promise not to kill me, Mr. Bundy.”

The man leaned in, against Grand’s chest, and whispered like he was whispering to the rest of Grand’s life, “I might not be able to help myself.”

Grand smiled, and for a moment I thought of dragging him back to his vomit, of dragging him back to the ball field, asking him if he still wanted to smile. I thought if the man was there, he would.

I realize now the man was a suffix to Grand’s life, offering something new to the old that had ended on the baseball diamond. His was a test-tube romance upon which Grand could experiment. The man knew this. It was why his eyes looked like sheets being spread on the bed.

“I could take you ’round.” Grand offered the man Breathed. “Make our town more than the devil and the heat. Make it серъёзная(ый).”

“Why do you throw in Russian?” The man’s smile was a line of clean, white teeth.

“My eyes are Russian.” Grand winked at me before asking the man, “You wanna see the real Breathed?”

“I’d like that.” The man skipped down the porch steps like a little boy getting everything he wanted.

I grabbed Grand’s arm, feigning reasons he must not go with the man. Reasons like Mom would be angry if he went out. Dinner’s going to be soon. He’s got to clean his room.

“My room is clean, Fielding.”

“Then let’s bomb the Atari.”

“Later, Fielding.” He bounded down the porch steps.

I screamed so loud, I felt like I’d broken something in my throat. I wondered if they even made a cast for that.

Grand returned to me in a gentle kneel. “What’s the problem, little man?”

“I don’t want you to go, Grand.”

“Why don’t ya want me to go? Why you cryin’? Geez, little man.” He pinched my nose the way Dad sometimes did.

“Remember how I used to take the shortcut home from school through Blue-eyed Glen’s vineyard? It was winter and all the grapes were gone but one. I thought how great it was to find a grape in winter, so I ate it. Remember how sick I got later?”

“Little man, you didn’t get sick ’cause of the grape.”

“It was the grape, Grand. I shouldn’t have eaten it ’cause it grew outta season. It didn’t follow the rules of nature. You’ve got to follow the rules, Grand, or you’ll get sick.”

“Hey, kid. We going or not?” The New Yorker wiped his forehead like an experienced Breathanian. I followed his cologne to his beautiful neck, to his strong jaw like something to have. I knew somewhere a billboard was missing its man.

“I’ll be back later, little man.” Grand stood and tousled my hair.

I regret it — Lord, I regret it — but I said the only thing I thought would make him stay.

“Faggot.”

I try to see his face at this moment, but in memory, his eyes, his nose, his mouth, are blurred until they’re smears of blue. Like watercolors in the rain. Somehow this makes it worse. To see his hurt as something he’s vanishing by, and to know I am responsible for that very vanishing.

“What did you say to me, Fielding?”

What did I say in that one word of six letters, sometimes only three? I suppose I said, I don’t want you to be gay. I don’t want you to be happy, and no, it isn’t fine that you want to be with a man. Faggot. Isn’t that what that one word is supposed to mean? Faggot? One word that said I was scared. That I didn’t understand. That no one ever sat us down and patted our heads and said sometimes a man loves another man and they make something nice together.

Above all else, I said with that one word, I hate you. How can it ever be believed I loved him above all others?

“Say it again, Fielding.” He grabbed me by the collar. As he shook me under him, one of his tears fell onto my cheek. To have my brother’s tear slide down my face cut worse than the world’s sharpest knife. He screamed over and over for me to call him a faggot just one more time.

So I did.

Before I knew it, I was down with Grand’s fists pummeling into my face and stomach. I did my best to shield against them, but he was Grand and I was Fielding and there was no way I wasn’t going to get the shit kicked out of me.

“I hate you, you little bastard.” His voice trembled. “I hate you.”

I could feel my tears mixing with blood from my nose. This mixture felt old, like something pulled from the past. I suppose I was feeling the tears and blood of every boy before me who had a brother who would never have a wife and to whom no one had ever said that was all right.

It was Sal who pulled Grand off of me, leaving me to curl up into my beaten self and whine like a baby.