“Ain’t nothin’ but a longnose gar.” I shook my head, unimpressed.
“I told ’im.” He wearily shrugged his shoulders while his bare, dirty feet continued to pound the ground as he looked from me to the boy. “Who’s the cricket you got with ya, Fieldin’?”
The boy was looking up, his wide eyes as seemingly edgeless as the sky he tilted to. His mouth slightly opened in dazzled wonder. What drew those wide eyes? That dazzled wonder? Why, nothing more than a hawk. Just something to glance at for most, but to him it was something more. The way he looked at it made it almost holy, a sort of flying cross. The moment spiritual. He could have sat down on a lawn chair and turned it into a pew.
“This is, um, well”—I grabbed the back of my hot neck—“it’s the devil.”
Flint stopped running in place, though his arms took longer to slow down to his sides. “What’s that you say?”
“He’s the devil.”
Flint scratched his temple like his own dad was prone to do in situations of deep figuring. “Let me get this straight, Fieldin.’ You mean to tell me that this here little tick is the devil? The one come to answer your pa’s invitation?”
“That’s right.” I pulled my words close. They seemed less silly like that.
Still his laugh came. Hard and bumpy like the gravelly path that led to his trailer park. He took a step closer to the boy, clicking his tongue the way one would approach a potentially skittish pony. The boy lowered his eyes from the hawk.
Flint smiled small, like a tapping at a door. “Hey.”
The boy stared back, no tell on his face. Flint didn’t need more than that.
“Wait’ll I tell the fellas.” He pushed his thick glasses up on his nose and took off, his bare feet kicking and lifting the road dust into little clouds that hung long after he’d gone, like swarms of gnats.
“Ain’t no goin’ back now. Flint will make sure the whole town knows who you say you are, so you better be prepared to be just that.”
The boy nodded.
“C’mon then. We’re almost there.” I pointed to the KETTLE LANE sign before us. “My house is at the end of here. There’s an actual kettle buried somewhere on this lane. They say if you find the kettle, you can drink your way to immortality. If I find it, I’ll let you have a sip.”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’tcha wanna live forever?”
“I’m the devil. I am already forever.”
Any further conversation was doubted by the start of a John Deere in the nearby yard. Instead of trying to compete with its blaring rumble, we continued down the lane in silence.
The lane was drenched in sunlight. The trees put their shade down in the large lawns of the large houses that made up Kettle Lane.
The first house on the lane belonged to our neighbor, Grayson Elohim, and was part of an inheritance from Elohim’s banker father.
As we came upon the orange-red brick, we saw Elohim eating on the porch. His feet, too short to reach the floor, hung barefoot. His lunch consisted of macaroni salad and a raw onion sandwich. No meat would be found on his table. At that time, he was the town’s only vegetarian. I used to think this put his sharp teeth to waste.
He ate at the large, dark dining table on his white porch every day for all his meals. The heavily polished table was set for two, with a yellowed lace tablecloth, while a radio in the background played violin. He’d go through the gentlemanly motions of dining with his wife in mind.
At one time he had been engaged, but his fiancée drowned in 1956. Though her body was recovered from the Atlantic and buried in Breathed, he lived as if she were by his side and not low and deep and slowly disappeared by the soft power of the worms.
He showed me her picture once in his red leather scrapbook. A tall woman with lines like string, a very white string at that. As far as loveliness goes, she had something like it. Enough to be far too lovely for an ugly little man like Elohim.
He was named Grayson, for being the son with the gray eyes. In his porridge-lumped face, his gray eyes gave possibility to his high-rising forehead and low-hanging chin. He wore his ashen hair long and slung in a low, limp ponytail. He had started balding in his late twenties following the sinking of the Andrea Doria. By ’84, and in his late fifties, he was completely bald on top, except for this strange growth of hair that grew above his forehead like a limp horn. He turned it into two by parting the meager strands, wearing them long to the corners of his mouth.
“Hey, Mr. Elohim.” I threw my hand up.
“Why, hey there, Fielding.” He spooned more macaroni salad onto his plate.
When I turned to introduce the boy, he was gone.
“Over here.” The boy’s hushed voice came from the other side of a nearby tree.
“Who you talkin’ to, Fielding?” Elohim stood up from the table, craning his brief neck in the tree’s direction.