Elohim quickly controlled his disgust as he turned from the spit that had landed on the leaves of the hostas, which were drying and yellowing in the drought, though still relevant and lining the front of his porch.
“It would do none of us any good, runnin’ an evil off like we’re too weak and too scared to take care of our own problems. As if we zero in bravery and sword. We can’t forget, we are the lords of our own ’round here, and we alone hiss back the serpent.”
“Now, Elohim, I’m warnin’ ya right now to leave that boy alone. I trusted you to do no harm. You waited till the Blisses got custody, and now you’re startin’ up again. You best get used to that boy. Their custody might not be temporary after all. We’re talkin’ ’bout a boy that could be part of their family permanently. Every family is part of this town. Don’t hurt the town, now, Elohim. You hurt us all, and there ain’t gonna be enough bandages to heal every wound.”
“Sheriff, I am merely keepin’ information and knowledge alive and healthy.”
“Shit, Elohim.” The sheriff crossed his snakeskin boots at the ankles. “You got more followers than the church now.”
“That’s ’cause the preacher finds it hard to point the snake out. That preacher has always been on the cautious side of things. Him and his khakis. He’s from Canada, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is he doin’ down here? We ain’t his people. He ain’t one of us. He ain’t got Ohio soil shakin’ off his roots, he ain’t got hands for squeezin’ river mud through fingers, and he sure the hell ain’t got the holster that the hills and the hollers put at our hips.”
“I ain’t got Ohio soil on my roots either. You forget that?”
“But ya got the South on ’em, and ain’t that a magnolia closer than anything Canadian? Listen, it ain’t my fault if that careful preacher can’t keep an audience. Folks come to me ’cause I’m one of ’em. Maybe more than that, they come to me ’cause I don’t candy the horns and I certainly don’t dignify the demon.
“But don’t you worry your badge, Sheriff. We are a refined group, me and mine. We don’t force our ideas or pamphlets on nobody, we simply offer them. As I will offer them to you now.”
The sheriff accepted Elohim’s offered pamphlet with a grunt. As the sheriff started to read it, Elohim spoke more about his group.
“Our meetin’s are held out in the woods, far from the town. You don’t have to hear or see us if you don’t wanna. We are simply a concerned group. I can assure you we are not on hunt. We are merely on guard.”
The meetings were held, just as Elohim said they were, out in the woods in that abandoned one-room schoolhouse close to the tree house. The schoolhouse had at one time caught fire, burning the roof away and leaving only the brick shell. Inside this shell, Elohim raised his religion to his followers, which at first was a small group that steadily gained members over the course of that summer. It was a funny thing. One day you’d hear someone warning about Elohim’s cult. Then the next day that very someone would be at the meetings like they’d always been there.
Elohim was smart to hold the meetings out in the woods, where there were no fans, no air conditioners, no way of alleviating or escaping the heat. The heat was his partner. It was what connected his words to their sweat, his furnace to their melt.
Those meetings consumed Elohim. Before, he could be gone from Breathed for months at a time as his work took him across the country. There wasn’t enough steeplejacking to be done in Breathed alone to be profitable. Long-held travel was necessary.
His obsession with Sal forced Elohim to find other work closer to home, like roofing jobs, burning brush with his propane torch, and patching concrete like what he did in Juniper’s.
I hadn’t worked with him on a roof since before Sal arrived, so on that day, after the sheriff left, I followed Elohim to a job. When he put all his tools into a small wagon, I knew the roof would be close by.
It ended up being a cinder block house, a few lanes away.
As he stared up at the chimney of pale, beige brick, I went to him with my head down. We hadn’t spoken since the night he attacked me. His teeth marks were gone from my skin, but they were fossilized underneath. Branded upon my bone. I have no doubt they would show up on X-ray. I am his walking dental record.
“Hey, Mr. Elohim.”
He dropped his eyes from the chimney to me. The way he looked at me was as if he were looking at someone taller, at someone wider, at someone more beast-sized than human. I was no longer the boy he used to know. I was friends with the demon, and in that friendship, I became transformed as such.
“What you want?”
What I wanted was the Elohim I used to know. The man who taught me how to repair belfries, how to hold a chisel properly, how to save myself from roofs. The man who once saved me when I wasn’t saving myself. When my foot slipped and I was going down, it was him who kept me from falling two stories below. That is what I wanted. The saving hand.