“I could teach you how to swim.” Sal stood before her. “I can’t say you’ll never drown in the rain, but at least it will never be because you don’t know how to swim.”
She stared at him until his fish lips made her laugh. He grabbed the afghan from her and tossed it to the sofa.
“Oh, you silly, silly boy.”
He gently pulled her hand until she was up on her feet. She tightened her apron strings and giggled like a shy little girl as he swam around the room, performing the breaststroke.
He directed her arms to do the same until she started doing it on her own, swimming around the room after him, soon kicking her heels off so she could swim faster. Her skirt billowed out behind her, the apron strings bouncing as she swam lap after lap, exhaling loudly through her mouth like a swimmer counting off her breaths.
“You too, Fielding.” Sal bumped into me as he passed.
I did the doggy paddle when they did, the backstroke, the butterfly, the deep dive, and the surface breach. We swam laughing all through the house like this, one country to another, until Yellch came quick and stomping down the stairs from Grand’s room, yelling for Grand to just stay away from him.
Grand followed so closely on Yellch’s heels they almost tumbled down the stairs together.
“I didn’t mean nothin’ by it. Honest, Yellch.”
Yellch wiped his lips hard with his sleeve. “What’s the matter with you, man?”
“I’m sorry. I thought—” Grand’s voice shook, and for the first time in my life I was embarrassed by him. By that fear I’d never heard in him before. That clinging to Yellch like, well, I didn’t know.
“You’re fucked up.” Yellch said it so steady, so grounded in tone that it seemed such a sobering truth.
He was fast out the door, his mullet bouncing in that near run. Grand also wiped his lips as he watched Yellch leave.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself. When he turned to see us all watching, our arms raised midswim, he asked us what the fuck we were all looking at before picking up a vase. He wound up like on the mound and pitched it into the wall.
While Mom was yelling at him for doing such a thing, I couldn’t help but be in awe at how perfect a pitch it was.
15
Here in the dark so many precious things
SOMETIMES I THINK I see your shoulder. Then I realize it’s just a jar of honey. I scream out your name and am certain I see your mole, but it’s only the last grape on the vine. I grab hold of your neck, but it’s no more than a piece of rope. I reach toward your rib, but it’s simply a grain of rice. I hold your hand, sorrowed to find it is my own.
Who you are, I cannot say for certain. Who you are, Grand, I can never find my way to. You are always just something else. No matter how hard I look for you, I cannot find you.
I try. In the dark, I do try because I was once told you can imagine anything in the dark. So I sit here at night in my trailer with all the lights out, with all the sheets drawn on the windows. I sit here trying to find you and I sit here imagining I do until the light comes back on and I realize you’re just something else.
A light coming on and beaming through the thin sheet on the window by the door. I get up from the lawn chair, on the way knocking into and rolling an empty bottle across the carpet. I remind myself to make a stop at the liquor store. Not the one by the pawnshop. He never has forgiven me for breaking that bottle against the wall.
I open the door to the neighbor boy and his light in my eyes.
“What are you doin’ in the dark?” He lowers the light to my side. “What are you holdin’, Mr. Bliss?”
I turn my hand over, the light shining on the white leather and red stitching.
“It’s just a baseball.” I drop it. He keeps the light on the ball as it rolls across the floor. Once the ball stops, he shines the light in my face again. I squint past it to his eyes on me, quick from thought to smile.
“I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you, Mr. Bliss. It’s just that your trailer was so dark. Not one light. I thought maybe somethin’ happened. That maybe you fell.”
I look at his young face and wince. “How old are you?”
“Thirteen.”
“Damn it.”
“What’d you say, Mr. Bliss?”
“I said leave me alone. Wait…”
“Are you okay, Mr. Bliss?”
I hold my head and try to remember. “Have you seen Sal?”
“Who, Mr. Bliss?”
“The boy.” I shake my hands at him. How can he not know who I’m talking about? “Have you seen the boy? We must get him … we must get him away.”
“Are you sure you’re all right, Mr. Bliss?”
“Oh, stupid man.” I slap my head. “Stupid, stupid man. No, no, I’m fine.”
“Who’s Sal?”
“Doesn’t matter. I know where he is. You go home. I’ll be okay.”
“All right, Mr. Bliss. Hey, I’m sorry about breakin’ your—”
I slam the door before he gets to the time machine part. I shuffle back toward the lawn chair. On the way, I scoot my feet over the carpet until I feel the smooth side of glass with my bare toes. I pick up the bottle and tilt it all the way. Not even a damn drop left.
I carry it over to the lawn chair and sit down. Don’t turn so much as a lamp on. I’m okay without electricity. During that summer, we often had none for extended periods of time due to them blackouts rolling across Breathed. By the end of July, they became a daily occurrence. The electric company issued warnings for us to do our part in conserving energy, such as keeping unnecessary appliances unplugged.
In an effort to keep cool, Dad ate heat on everything. He made chili and soup, using hot peppers from the garden as spoons. When I asked him why, he said because ingesting heat cools the body from the inside out.
I wasn’t convinced as I watched him drip over bowls of soup, unintentionally slurping up his sweat. A few days after eating nothing but heat, he threw his hands up in the air and said, “Fuck it.”
Needless to say, he went back to sucking on ice cubes.
Interrupting the heat were the phone calls. Always anonymous, but always voices we knew and who called us nigger-lovers, devil-worshippers. Sometimes both at once. These calls sent Dad to the drawer to pull out the newspaper with his invitation in it.
“What’s wrong, Autopsy?” Sal watched Dad silently read the invitation.
“If I knew there was going to be this much trouble, I would never have done it.” He laid the paper back down into the drawer.
There was a fan on top of the table, and he stood there in front of it, holding his arms out and twisting his body, allowing the air flow to oscillate as best it could through his vest and button-up shirt. As he did this, he spoke over the fan’s whir to tell me and Sal about one of his early cases.
“It was when I first started. It was a case involving a fifteen-year-old girl who had accused her father of rape on four different occasions. The father denied the allegations, but there was evidence of trauma to the girl’s, well—” He cleared his throat, that too coming just as loud as his voice over the fan’s drone.
“Neighbors came forward, said the girl often went around the house in very little clothing. Furthermore, that her father never seemed to mind this near nudity of his own daughter. They said they might remember instances where his hand landed a little too low on her back for their liking. Perhaps a kiss or a hug between father and daughter lingered just a little too long.
“One of the girl’s friends, a young boy, gave testimony that he had on more than one occasion walked in on the father naked and sleeping in the daughter’s bed. The father was known to drink too much and had in the past been charged with rape. The woman who accused him was an ex-girlfriend who later dropped the charges and said she filed only because she was mad at him. Still, I was certain of his guilt in regards to his daughter’s rape.