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.
I did my best to urge the boy out, but still he stayed behind the tree.
“I thought you come by yourself.” Elohim cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. “If there’s anyone else, you come on out now. I don’t like hidden things.”
The boy wouldn’t budge. Not even when I tugged his bony arm. When I asked him why he looked so afraid, he nodded toward Elohim.
“You ’fraid of ’im ’cause he’s a midget?” I asked quiet enough so Elohim wouldn’t hear me call him anything other than short. “He won’t harm ya none.”
The boy chewed his lip. “You sure?”
“He’s never hurt me, and I’ve known ’im my whole life. That’s sayin’ somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Come on out,” Elohim called. “I won’t bite.”
I smelled a whiff of urine as the boy took a small step, still holding tight to the trunk of the tree.
“Can’t see ya.” Elohim wiped his mouth with his napkin.
After a deep breath, the boy stepped out from the trunk completely, though he had stuck his arms inside his overalls and seemed to lose his neck as his chin stayed pressed to his chest. It was as if he were trying to retreat into the overalls, which were wet between the legs.
Elohim gasped the Lord’s name as the napkin fell, landing flat from the wadded ball it’d been in his hand. It was then I saw the still-fresh reddish brown stains on its white fabric.
I looked up and into Elohim’s gaping mouth, his particularly sharp canine teeth showing like icicles below a roofline. “You okay, Mr. Elohim?”
“I don’t know yet,” he whispered. On his way to the porch steps, he walked on the napkin, picking up some of the red-brown stains on his bare foot. “Who did you say this was?”
I cleared my throat and introduced the boy by naming him the devil.
“Fielding, I didn’t quite hear ya correctly.”
“I said devil, all right.” I shifted the bag of groceries to my other arm as Elohim drew down the porch steps, slow and at a slant like he was walking in a large gown he had to be careful not to step on the edge of lest he fall.
I turned and watched a stray dog sniff its way into Elohim’s open garage, where it peed on the tire of his white convertible, an Eldorado from 1956. When I turned back, Elohim was in reach and the boy was so close to my side, our arms were touching. He pointed toward a rusty can, which was out of place by Elohim’s clean porch, asking me in a whisper what it was.
“Mr. Elohim’s can of pop, mashed potato chips, and some sort of poison. What type of poison you say you use again, Mr. Elohim?”
“Poison.” He grunted, his eyes hard for the boy.
“Poison for what?” the boy asked.
Another grunt from Elohim. “Coons.”
A squirrel leaped over to the can. I quickly hissed to scatter it away.
“Wrong animals gonna eat the poison, Mr. Elohim.”
He ignored me and instead jutted his sagging chin toward the boy. “Well?”
“Well, what?” The boy had taken his arms out from his overalls as he stood a little taller.
“You’ve nothin’ to say?”
“What would he have to say?” I shrugged. “Before I forget, Mr. Elohim, I won’t be able to help ya build that chimney this Thursday. My brother’s got a baseball game.”
Elohim chewed the air in his mouth, the gray in his eyes filling out to the corners like smoke.
“You all right, Mr. Elohim?” I watched the sweat get low on his lumped face.
“Mind your own damn business, Fielding.” Realizing his sudden anger, he apologized as he rubbed his eyes. “It’s just too hot. Shouldn’t be this way yet.” In a milder tone, he asked, “You get a chance to read those pamphlets I gave ya, Fielding?”
Elohim’s pamphlets were notebook papers full of his vegetarian thoughts. Things like, animals live a horizontal life while we live a vertical one. According to him, this means when we eat something horizontal, we risk falling down:
It’s like putting a river in a skyscraper. The river is horizontal while the skyscraper is vertical. They are two forces working toward opposite goals. Nothing good will be accomplished. Eventually the skyscraper will shift ever so slightly and start to lean and all because it feels the river pushing at its sides. If the river is not drained, it will keep pushing and pushing against the sides of the skyscraper until one day the skyscraper leans so far, it falls and becomes what it was never meant to be. You can never succeed in what you were never meant to be.