“Just hang a calendar on your wall.”
“The walls of hell are not like other walls. I tore a picture of the ocean out from a magazine and hung it on my wall once. An ocean is a good life place. Everyone always seems happy there. And for a moment, I was happy with my picture, but then the blue sky turned gray. The waves, once calm, took a turn to rage. Then came the screams. As I looked closer, I saw the screams came from men drowning in the water.
“All I wanted was a picture of a good life. What I got was a reminder that there is no good life for me. That was the last time I hung anything on my walls. Imagine what would happen if I hung a calendar.”
I shook my head in awe of him. “Say, what are we supposed to call ya? I mean, we can’t just call you the devil all the time. Ain’tcha got a nickname or nothin’?”
He rubbed his palms until I thought he was going to start a fire. “I suppose you can call me Sal.”
“Where’d that come from?”
“From the beginning of Satan and the first step into Lucifer. Sa-L.”
“All right. Sal. I like it.”
Dad called us to the porch, where I informed him and Mom of Sal’s name.
“Welcome, Sal.” Dad placed his hand on Sal’s shoulder before saying he was going into town to speak to Sheriff Sands and would be back shortly. By his orders, we were to stay with Mom, who held out her arms toward Sal, waiting for him to come up the porch steps, where she could yank him into her.
“Welcome, welcome.” She had a drawl like raw vegetables. Hard. Rooted. Not yet ripe.
“You know who you’re huggin’ right now, Mom?” I sat the groceries down on the porch floor and leaned back into the rail as she smothered Sal in her bosom.
My mother was always in dresses then. I don’t think I ever saw anything else in her closet in those days. Her nylon hosiery was as pants as she got. I think because she was always in the house, she was doing her best to be that quintessential housewife. The one in the styled dress that fell full-skirted under her always-worn apron. That day it was the plum gingham apron that she’d made herself with her own chicken-scratch embroidery.
“Oh, he ain’t the devil. He’s too short.” She kissed his cheeks, leaving her wine-colored lipstick smeared there.
She had that tendency to be overaffectionate. It was almost like a nervous tic. It was the staying in the house that did it. She thought if she loved you enough, you’d never want to leave her, and then the house wouldn’t seem so lonely as it could be to her at times, when it was just her and the vacuum.
“Mom, what does bein’ short have to do with it?”
“There are some awful tall men who go to hell.” She released Sal to adjust her shoulder pads. “Just look at Cousin Lloyd. With all them tall men, the leader of hell is gonna have to be tall or else all these tall men are gonna be lookin’ down. No one much respects things they look down on.”
Just then my brother Grand pressed his face into the screen of the back door, his skin popping small through the net of wire.
“That’s my older brother Grand,” I told Sal. “No doubt you recognize him?”
Sal shook his head.
“Hey, Grand, come out here and meet the devil so he can recognize you.”
“The devil, eh?” Grand opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. “Hi, Дьявол.”
“He’s always in the papers.” I smiled with everything I had at my brother. “They say he’s gonna go pro.”
“Pro at what?” Sal asked.
“Baseball. He’s the best anybody has ever seen.”
“Easy, little man.” Grand put on his team ball cap, lowering its lavender bill. “You’ll raise the hopes so high, I’ll never reach.”
Grand had a vernal face of clean, almost transparent skin, like freshly washed windows. His appearance was his own, but he got there by first taking after Dad. Hair dark brown like a wet branch. Eyes blue like the hill fog. His thick brown brow proved a thoughtful underlining to his forehead, upon which stretched a lone wrinkle, deep for his age.
Something about his eyes made me think of Russia. Perhaps because they were so large, the largest country in the world of his face. Then again, knowing what I know now, maybe it was because his eyes were so like matryoshka dolls, hiding the real him within boxes of lacquered mystery. You’d open one box and find another just the same. No matter how many boxes you took away, there was always one more.
Because I told him his eyes were Russian, he decided to learn the language and would at the most unexpected times drop Russian words in a saline accent Tolstoy would have praised, for an Ohioan at least. It was because of this habit we kept a Russian-to-English dictionary on the coffee table within easy reach.