“That’s odd.” I set the bag of groceries down to open the wrapper. The chocolate oozed and dropped. I said the first thing that came to mind: “It died.”
“Dead, you say?” The boy looked down at the chocolate splattered on the ground.
“Well, it’s melted. Ain’t that death for chocolate? It ain’t even that hot.”
“Isn’t it, though?” He tilted his face to the sky, the light illuminating the green in his eyes to a yellowed shade as he stared at the sun the way every adult in my life up to that point had warned me not to.
“Isn’t it, what?”
His eyes fell slowly from the light to me as he asked, “Isn’t it hot?”
My sudden awareness of the heat was a pop, the way the bubble joins the water in a boil. I felt lit, a change told in degrees, steadily climbing upon my internal thermometer. From a distance, maybe I was a car with its headlights on. Up close, I was flames burning up.
The lukewarm past had been overtaken by the scalding now. Gone was the perfect temperature. The breeze. All replaced by an almost violent heat that turned your bones into volcanoes, your blood into the lava that yelled their eruptions. Folks would later talk about that sudden onset of heat. It was their best evidence of the devil’s arrival.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “This heat, it puts sweat on the skull. Where the hell has it come from?”
He was looking across the lane. It was then I saw bruising on his collarbone, though fading one blue shade at a time.
I swallowed, suddenly conscious of my thirst. “Whatcha doin’ here in front of the courthouse anyways?”
“I was invited.”
“Invited?” I squinted like Dad. I went on like that until a man humming “Amazing Grace” continued past us on the sidewalk. The man glanced back at the boy but never stopped his humming, though it did slow to a more concerned pace. Meanwhile, I chewed at my already short nail. “Who were you invited by?”
The boy reached into the bulging front pocket of his overalls. He worked around the bulge to pull out a folded newspaper.
My eyes darted from the invitation on its front page to him. “You don’t mean to say that you’re…”
He said nothing, neither with words nor with face. I could have pushed at him until the day’s end and never got anything of a telling expression.
“Are you sayin’ that you’re the devil?”
“It is not my first name, but it is one of them.” He reached down to scratch his thigh. It was then I noticed the denim was worn at the knees more than anywhere else. Over top of the wear were layers of dirt, as if kneeling were all the time for him.
“You’re lyin’.” I searched his head for horns. “You’re just a boy.”
His fingers twitched. “I was once, if that counts.”
If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.
I reckoned he came from even farther out in the country, where outhouses were still in use and your nearest neighbor was the field you planted.
At that moment, I felt compelled to look at his hands. I thought if he was the devil, they would be singed, charred, somehow influenced by fathering the fires of hell. What I saw were hands experienced in plucking chickens and in steering a tractor over a long haul of ground.
The clock in the courthouse tower behind him began to chime the hour. He glanced back at the clock with its white face, like a plain dinner platter. Atop the roof of the tower stood Lady Justice, poised on the balls of her feet. If it wasn’t for that clock and statue, the place of court would have been just a large wooden house with a wide wraparound porch scattered with rocking chairs and dirty ashtrays. This was what law and order looked like in Breathed. A house with a termite problem that made the gray boards like stewed wood.
The boy’s eyes fell from the clock to the tree in front and its smooth bark and pointed leaves lining the length of the pale gray branches.
“They call it the Tree of Heaven,” I told him. “It’s some sort of ail … ailanthus, Dad calls it. He says they should never have planted it here.”
“Such a name as heaven, you think everyone would plant one in their living rooms.”
“You could plant it in your livin’ room. It’d sure grow outta carpet. Them things grow anywhere. And they just keep growin’. It’s a pest.”
“Peculiar that a tree named after paradise is a pest.”
He spoke all his words in the burdened and slow pace of a pallbearer in wartime.
“Where your folks at? C’mon, I know you’re not the devil.”
From the pocket, he pulled out the bulge, which was a gray pottery bowl with five dark lines of blue circling it. It was followed by a spoon inscribed with LUKE 10:18: I SAW SATAN FALL LIKE LIGHTNING FROM HEAVEN.
“It’s a real shame you don’t have any ice cream. I have everything for it.” He held the items close to his chest.