“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.
“I looked at his narrow eyes and said to myself, those are the eyes of a devil. I looked at his hands, his rough hands with their filthy nails, and said those are the hands of a monster. Ignoring they were merely the hands of someone who works construction.
“He sat still through the whole trial, never once batting an eye when his daughter on the witness stand described the gruesome details of being violated by him. Yes, I said, he is no father. He is the devil.
“Everyone cheered when he was convicted on all four counts of rape. Hell, I cheered. I had put the devil through the filter and the world was cleaner for it.”
Dad stepped over to the window, where he laid his sweating forehead against the glass.
“Just this last January, the girl—now thirty-three—came forward. Said she falsely accused her father for the same reason the ex-girlfriend had. All that man seemed guilty of was making the women in his life angry.