Neverland, p.20
Neverland, page 20
“It is so a sacred place.”
“Every place on earth is sacred to something. Who knows what’s underground anywhere you walk on this earth? You just don’t dig, do you? You know when something’s bad it’s bad, and you stay away.”
“You know something. You tell me.”
“I can’t . . . ”
“You tell me.” Without wanting to, I began bawling like a baby. I couldn’t even see straight for the tears. I had been holding so many fears inside me, so much wondering, that it finally was breaking out through my eyes. I went and held her around the waist just like she was my mother. She smelled of cocoa butter and sweat. I closed my eyes and wished it all away. I wished I was back home in Richmond, and I wished it was Mama I was clinging to, and I wished I would never grow up. “You tell me, ’cause I need to know . . . ”
Her voice steadied as mine broke. “Something I saw. When I first looked at him. I knew.”
“You tell me.”
“I saw a devourer.”
“It is Lucifer.” I was almost comforted by this thought. I knew what you did to ward off the Devil: You pray. You pray real hard and you wait for an answer. You make the sign of the cross. You sprinkle holy water all over the place. You read passages from the Bible. You get your soul saved.
Her fingers combed through my hair. The fabric of her skirt was fuzzy and soft. She pushed me away. “Let me go, just let me go.”
Julianne Sanders leaned over and kissed me on my forehead. “It may be nothing,” she said, tears also in her eyes. “I don’t know, Beau. I don’t know.”
I followed her out back to her Volkswagen Bug, and she squeezed my hand and told me to just stay away from Neverland. I didn’t watch her drive away. I ran around to the front of the Retreat, angry because I didn’t know who to turn to, and I was filled with a giant rage.
I needed to destroy something.
5
It was a childish impulse, but I was a child. The storm inside the house raged out of control, and I stood there and began stepping up and down on the flowers that Aunt Cricket had planted in neat rows to the side of the house. It felt good to destroy.
Voices from the house, familiar and alien: “You don’t love me, so why don’t you just leave.”
“And don’t you tell me how to raise my children, either. It’s not like you were terribly good yourself. You with that damn brush just beating the crap out of us all the time. You think that’s mothering? You think fear’s the way to raise kids up to be good little ladies and gentlemen? You’ve never been anything but cold to me! And don’t tell me how good you were; I don’t want to hear it! Grampa used to tell me the truth about that. He used to tell me about her, about what you did to her, how you drove her—”
“I wish I had never given birth.” Grammy was shouting, too. “I wish I had hollowed out my womb with fire before I gave birth to a girl like you.”
“Christ Almighty!” Daddy cried out, “I am getting the hell out of this sick family. I am getting the hell away from here—you and your insane relatives!”
“Good, good! It’s about time you did something. And don’t come crawling back here tomorrow expecting me to forgive you.”
“Forgive me, forgive me? That’s a laugh, that’s a goddamn laugh! Don’t expect me to come back, either, Evelyn, not to your sick little family and this rundown rat-trap!”
I stomped every flower in that garden and then some.
The front door slammed like a trap, and Daddy came out on the porch cussing and hitting the porch column with his fists.
TEN
Dread Night
1
My father’s face was almost calm. His hair, glistening with sweat, was pushed back away from his high forehead, and there were no wrinkles there. His anger had reached its peak; he was now beyond feeling. Those words, “Don’t expect me to come back,” had removed him from the situation. And the others, “Your sick little family . . . ” Daddy was somehow gone even before he headed for the wagon. His eyes were clear, and the slanting afternoon light flattened his features, leaving him no clear expression.
I stood there, watching him. He would not even notice what I was doing: stomping up the garden Aunt Cricket had planted over and over, each summer, and over and over the garden had died. It didn’t even feel like I was doing the killing of those flowers; it felt like a force of nature unleashed through the soles of my feet. I could see myself watching my father. I could see myself as if from above, standing motionless. I was sure if I stayed very still, Daddy would walk right past me and not even know I was there. His face was fixed with blankness. His long knuckly fingers pumping at invisible tennis balls.
I hated him just then with all my heart.
“Coward!” I shouted.
Again I was removed. I watched a little boy yell at his father. It wasn’t me.
He turned and looked right through me.
“Beau?” He took a hesitant step toward me. He wore the V-neck T-shirt that made him look potbellied. His khakis sagged around his waist.
“You’re a goddamn coward and you know it!”
“Snug, you okay?” He squatted down in front of me. I felt a blast of heat from his body as if he’d been absorbing the sun so much that he had turned into a furnace.
I covered my face in my hands, thinking, Go away, go away.
His fingers gripped my shoulders, digging in. They were as warm as I’d ever felt them.
“I’m just going to St. Badon to run some errands,” he said.
“No you’re not, you’re running out on us.”
“Okay, I’m not. I’m going to go spend a night at a motel in St. Badon. I promise I’ll be back.”
“Liar.”
“I’ll be doing some thinking, too, Beau, but I’m not running out.”
“I don’t believe you. You lie about everything.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that.”
“Well, it’s true. What about you and Aunt Cricket?”
“I won’t lie to you.”
“Well, what about it?”
“I never even liked your aunt, Beau. She liked me, but I never liked her. She followed me around. But that’s how I met your mother, so it wasn’t all bad. I just have never liked your aunt.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I think you do.”
“I don’t. So why don’t you just get out of here. We don’t need you.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Get out of here, you coward.”
“I’ll be back by supper.”
“I don’t care if you ever come back.”
“All right, then.”
He got up and walked unsteadily to the station wagon. I knew I had hit my father with what he feared most: the scorn of his children.
He glanced back at me briefly as I stood there, and I felt the cold sinking mud of the garden beneath my feet.
My vision went out of focus. I began crying, and, on the inside, I tried fighting those tears, but they wanted out through my eyes. I felt like a Roman candle that was spiraling through the air, hitting whatever came in my path, ready to burst into vivid colors. I aimed for him, running toward him, hoping to wound him some more. I was full of stomping madness. “And don’t you ever come back! Hear? We don’t need you! None of us needs you!” My voice was shrill and stupid, and my lips were curled in a grin, and I began laughing at him.
He got in the car just as I slammed my fist against the hood of the wagon. He started up the engine. His face seemed large, his eyes seemed small. I had the most horrible hallucination as I saw him only half clearly through the dusty windshield: He was doing the exact same thing as I was, and we were the same person, my father and I. We were not even separated: Like the swimming minnows at the bait shop, our minds moved in the same direction without knowing why.
Then I felt a kind of tugging inside me, of my muscles rebelling. “Daddy, I’m sorry,” I panted. He put the car in reverse. He rolled down his window.
I shuffled over to lean against his door. “Daddy, take me, too. Take me.”
“Beau?”
“Can’t I go?”
He reached out with his hand and patted my head. “Your mama needs you right now. I’ll be back.”
“No you won’t.”
“Promise.”
“How long you gonna be gone?”
“A little while. Till tomorrow. I’ll be back by early.” He must’ve read the disappointment in my eyes and thought better on it, because he said, “Tell you what. You go out on the bluffs right when the sun is just barely up over the water and wait. I’ll flash my lights on the tiara bridge—four times—and you’ll know I’m home.”
“You won’t come back.”
“You watch. I’ll never leave you, Beau. Ever.”
He honked the horn as he pulled back out of the drive, in reverse the whole way down to the main gravel road. Dust and big green flies and pebbles sprayed up from the wagon. He flashed his headlights at me and honked the horn. I glared at the dust and flies. I looked down at my feet: Pansies lay crushed there, purple and yellow petals between my toes.
The bunny screams because it is alive.
I wanted to scream, too. I wanted to holler to raise the dead, but I couldn’t even find my voice. What are we gonna do without Daddy? What’s Mama gonna do? How are we gonna get by? What’s gonna happen to Governor without his daddy? The thoughts spun through me in my panic. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and then that I had forgotten how to breathe at all, and I opened and closed my mouth like a fish on land. I watched the station wagon go until it disappeared into the sky. What are we gonna do?
I turned. Behind me the Retreat was unchanged and without calm. I could still hear my mother throwing things around her bedroom, pulling drawers from the dresser, her curses at her own mother. Grammy Weenie, downstairs, shouting up biblical quotes, the squeak of her wheels as she rocked back and forth on the warped floors. Governor was wailing. The television in the den was turned up loud, blaring “Mighty Mouse” cartoons—my sisters’ attempt to tune out the world around them. Where was Sumter? Where had he gone? Was he in Neverland? This was all his fault, his Neverland, his god.
It had to stop.
All this playing.
No more.
The dark giggling, the blood, the sacrifices.
The voice in my head was not Sumter’s, but my own.
Wrong, just like a baby bawling for the first time. Stop Sumter. No more.
I ran back to Neverland on unsteady feet. The mud oozed up between my toes, making obscene sucking noises as I went. I stepped on prickers and kept running, not stopping to pluck them out. I knew my father was gone for good—he’d had enough, he was a coward, he was running, too, perhaps to his own Neverland.
The shack seemed smaller and thinner than it had ever been before. I was just about as tall as it was. Maybe I was too tall for it. Maybe I had grown this summer and hadn’t noticed it. But I almost felt like I was looking down at Neverland. I tried the door, but it was locked from the inside. “You let me in, Sumter, goddamn you, you let me in!”
There was no answer. I could hear the thin wind across the curling yellow grasses. I waited to the count of sixty, and then I still waited to hear him moving inside, but I heard nothing.
I ran around to the side window, pressing my face against the glass. Brown cardboard was taped up on the inside. I slapped my hand against the window, rattling it. “You open up! You hear?” The outer wall gave a little as I leaned against it, as if with a little more effort I could just tip the shack over.
“You show me what’s in that crate, damn you, you show me what you got!” I kicked at the splintered wood of the wall with the ball of my foot, and my toes went right through. My foot came out smarting with splinters, but I didn’t care. I kicked again. “You open up or I will kick this place to shreds, you hear?” The pain from my foot was shrieking, but I slammed it again into the wall. I kicked so hard that I fell down in the mud on my butt, barely missing a large rock. Using both hands, I lifted the rock and threw it at the window. The glass broke in a neat chunk where the rock went through, and when I heard a small yelp, I actually thought it was the window that had screamed.
Then I heard him, knocking things over, tripping around all that junk that was piled around inside there.
“You let me in,” I whispered, “or I’ll tell them everything.”
The door creaked open. Sumter stood there, his dark-encircled eyes glaring at me. I hadn’t noticed, but he’d gotten thinner in the past week, almost like he was shrinking in on himself. He looked wizened; he looked like he was dying.
“All right,” he said.
I limped to the open door.
2
“Your daddy’s gone,” he said, without his usual tone of superiority. He stood back, away from the door. He held a trowel in his hands. It was caked with dirt. Spiraled around his left arm was some of Aunt Cricket’s laundry cord.
I remained in the doorway. “Did Lucy make him leave?”
Sumter looked surprised, like this hadn’t occurred to him. “I wouldn’t—Lucy wouldn’t do that. Lucy doesn’t care about grown-ups.”
I glanced around the shack. It was cold and smelled like the meat drawer in our refrigerator back home. The candles were lit, and in their center, the crate. Next to the crate was a ditch. A shovel was thrust in the dirt.
“I’ve been burying something,” he said quickly, but I could tell he was partially lying. He had that look.
“Another sacrifice?”
I thought he smiled, but his face was pained. It was a grimace. “No.”
“What’s in the crate?”
“Lucy.”
“No, I mean, what’s really in the crate?”
“You have to see through the crate to Lucy. And to our father. I know you seen him. I know it. He is the devourer. He is the Feeder Who Walks in Shadows. And he loves us like we were his own. And there’s this . . . ” From the dirt he withdrew the small animal leg that he’d shown me before—a dog’s leg. “This was my brother’s.”
“You ain’t got a brother.”
“I had one just like you have one. Only mine was a year older than me. She kept him here. She nursed him here.”
“Who?”
But he ignored me. “We come from her body and we must return through her body. My daddy’s waiting.”
“Your daddy’s drunk, if you ask me.”
“My daddy’s waiting. God is a feeder, don’t you know that? Everything eats everything. Let me show you what I seen, Beau, what I seen with my mind’s eyeball,” and he reached over with that paw and scratched across the back of my hand, and it hurt really bad, and I wanted to scream, but it was like a strong electric shock and I was thrown across the room, against the wall. When I looked up, the color of the light had changed in the shed, and it smelled new; it smelled fresh.
From outside, the sunlight entered, a violet sunlight like it was early morning, and Sumter was no longer there with me. The strange dwarf woman with the white hair was in his place. Lucy. Her frog eyes rolling up into themselves. She had stitches across her forehead, just above her eyes, and she was tearing at them with her fingernails, and they were popping out. Into the chasm of her open skin she poked around with her fingers and moaned as if someone were tickling her, and then she giggled, pressing down harder with her fingers into her open forehead, her eyes twitching, her legs rubbing against each other like she had to go to the bathroom, and I heard some noise in the corner, from the shadows, and there were eyes staring out at her, and there was the paw, reaching from the dark to the light.
And the creature that the paw belonged to.
Moving clumsily, like the baby it was, into the light.
Its lips slippery with saliva.
It was small and ugly as it moved, with its one paw, its hand on the other arm clutching at the air, searching for nourishment.
The woman giggled as her fingers dug more deeply into her scalp.
The child that crawled toward the woman had no eyes, and I would not have screamed because of its one paw, for Grammy had often told stories about monster children who were the cross-bred sons to farm boys, or old women who had daughters with enormous heads filled with water. But the scream came up through my stomach and into my throat and out into the air because of the baby’s tail, which was like a fish’s, swimming upstream in the air as it moved forward.
And the resemblance.
Not to the giggling mother.
But to the brother.
To my cousin.
Sumter.
My real mama, Beau, his voice pricked into my mind. She had found a way into another world, where my father lived. Where nothing hurt. Nothing. They all lie, the grown-ups. All lie, and all feed. And my daddy is the All that Must Feed. I look like my mama, but I am my daddy’s son, and this is my daddy’s house. I was born to devour. I was born to feed. Where I am is Neverland. I am Neverland.
“Sumter,” I gasped. The light in Neverland extinguished, and I lost control of my body—my shorts were moist where I had suddenly urinated.
Then I opened my eyes: They had been closed all along, I had been dreaming standing up.
Sumter stood close to me, his breath tickling my face.
“Who is Lucy?”
“You know. Or are you stupid?”
“Who is she?” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “You tell me!”
He snarled, “Who do you think she is?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s my mother. My real mother. The Weenie killed her. The Weenie is evil. The Weenie stopped Lucy from taking me to Neverland, so now I have to bring Neverland here. Out. We won’t never have to grow up and be like them.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, too, with strength I didn’t know he had.
“Let go.” I tugged myself free of his grasp and stepped into the circle of candles.
“Beau, what they did to her—was bad. They’re bad people. We don’t never got to be like them. We can change the whole world. We can make everything Neverland. Just one more sacrifice. One more.” He pointed to a place near the crate. Next to the crate was the ditch, only it was more than a ditch. It was a long hole.
