Neverland, p.6
Neverland, page 6
I AWOKE in the middle of the night with someone standing over my bed.
“Beau? You awake?” It was Sumter, although I could not see his face because of the dark.
“I am now.”
“I can’t sleep. Everybody’s snoring except you.”
“You can’t sleep here. Not enough room. And I’m mad at you. You lied about the crab.”
“I’m mad at you, too.”
“Oh.”
“I lied ’cause if I didn’t lie they’d tear Neverland down.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It didn’t hurt you, anyway. And you squealed.”
“I did not . . . well, nobody believed me.”
After a moment he said, “I could sleep on the floor.”
“I guess.”
“Beau?”
“Huh?”
“‘Member Grampa Lee? When he was alive?”
“Only way I do remember him.”
“He seems like a shadow to me. I can’t even remember his face. ’Member his stories? About W. W. Two?”
“About the Pacific?”
“Uh-huh. And the beautiful bomb. How people just disintegrated and it went down whoosh and then went up again like a giant mushroom up above Japan. He said it was a good bomb ’cause it stopped worse things. You think that’s true? Things being good just ’cause they stop worse things?”
“I am so sleepy I can’t even think straight. Go to sleep.”
“Grampa Lee said it was ‘Lights out for the Rising Sun.’”
I was just falling asleep when I realized he was still talking, droning on. “That’s what I feel like, sometimes. Like I just want it to be Lights out. Lights out and no sun to come up, no sun ’t’all. You think if there’s a god of light, there’s one for the dark, too? I mean, you know, let there be dark, and it was good. Just like Lights out.”
SOMETIME later, as I was struggling through some intense but forgotten dream, I felt Sumter climb up into bed and press his sweaty back against mine. It almost hurt to wake up, and I was too tired to protest and tell him to sleep on the floor or back in his folks’ room. Instead I moved over closer to the window and dropped down again into sleep, the left side of my face pressed against the rough, cold wall.
THREE
Rabbit Lake
1
I knew it was morning because it was still dark but the damn mockingbirds were already singing outside my window. The pane was stuck three quarters of the way down, and there was no way of shutting out that hellacious warbling. The air was still and moist, and it felt like I was stuck in some kind of limbo. I was pushed up against the wall and knew that I’d be aching from sleeping in such a strange position. Sumter had apparently taken up most of the bed. I turned to shove him over, but he was not there at all. I was alone in the bed, and my cousin had gotten up sometime in the night and gone back to his parents’ bedroom to sleep. I wondered if he had really come into my room at all or if I had just been dreaming.
I lay in bed for a while longer, trying to figure out my dreams, waiting for the mockingbirds to shut up and for the light to appear outside, when I heard a soft rap at my door. It was my father. In early morning, before any other soul was up, he always looked refreshed and ready for the day. It must have been a magical time for him, before the rest of the family could bother and worry him. He was wearing a sweatshirt and khakis and his clodhoppers. His hair was still wet from the shower, and it made him look shiny and new. He came in and sat on the edge of my bed, scruffing up my hair. “Beau, hey Beau,” he whispered. “Uncle Ralph and I are taking you boys out to the lake this morning. Just us guys.” I could still taste Aunt Cricket’s Mystery Loaf in my mouth. Dad helped me sit up, rubbing my feet and my hands to help get the circulation going. My circulation was so bad some days it would take about half an hour to get me moving.
“Why does it always have to be me?”
“Beau?”
“I got crooked teeth and a sunken chest and bad circulation. It’s like I’m a hundred years old.”
“Those things don’t mean anything.”
“Yeah, huh.”
“You’ve got everything in the world. Look at your cousin.”
“Sumter does what he wants and gets what he wants.”
“Getting what you want isn’t much. Nobody knows what they really want until they’ve had it awhile. And some folks want things all the time just because they want to want.”
“Well, I’ve had this circulation awhile and I don’t want it and I don’t want to want it. And don’t tell me it makes me special. I don’t want to hear it.”
“Mr. Grump.”
“And I don’t really feel like going to a swamp at five in the morning to catch dirty old catfish.”
“You want to stay and go to the mainland and go shopping with your mama and the girls?”
Shopping with my mother was a draining experience, more so than going fishing in the malarial swamp called Rabbit Lake, which was a freshwater runoff from the bay that the Gull Island peninsula encircled. Shopping or fishing: Either way it was a toss-up. If I’d had my druthers, I would’ve stayed home and watched TV, but that would mean dealing with Grammy Weenie.
“No,” I replied in the smallest voice I had. The feeling came into my arms and legs, and I got up to dress. The day would be a long one, and by the end of it I would be bumpy with mosquito bites.
Two miles down the road from the Retreat, going Up Island, as we erroneously called it—as all things were misnamed on an island that was not an island, a retreat that was no retreat, a lake that was no lake at all—at the nearest edge of the bay was Shep and Diane’s Nightcrawlers-Live Bait Shop—open all nite—Fireworx—Coca-Cola on Ice. It was the emporium of bait shops, and Shep Miller liked to brag that he had 400 different items on sale, each one multiplying 400 times a night.
There were long tanks, bubbling with minnows of all sizes—some fish that seemed too long to be properly called minnows, some that were too tiny to see. Huge fruit crates, reinforced with chicken wire on the outside, packed with dark pungent earth, wriggling with foot-long worms, some with their heads or tails (I never knew which) hooking out of the chicken wire like beckoning fingers. The boards under our bare feet were warped and splintery and unpainted, and beneath them the dark water lapped gently against the log pilings thrust like stilts into the shoreline. Tiny sea horses galloped in their own special tanks, surrounded by plastic deep-sea divers and gurgling treasure chests. Another tank was filled with hermit crabs, another with baby eels, and another brimming with armies of black translucent snails. Not all creatures in the shop were bait: Some were for pets, to be kept for the few days or weeks families spent on the island and then, no doubt, flushed down toilets or dumped out on the beach. The smells pervading the shop came up at you like you were coming up from the waves right into a wreath of bulbous seaweed, a dead fish caught in its center. The firecrackers were sold behind the counter, and kids were not allowed to purchase them unless their parents were with them.
Diane, Shep’s girlfriend of twenty-four years, worked the cash register from two-thirty in the morning until noon, at which time Shep took over. I never truly believed they had any business between midnight and three a.m., but still they kept the shop open. The longevity of their relationship was attributable, Shep said, to their never seeing each other. This was also the reason why they never married, and yet they didn’t live together because Diane was a devout fundamentalist and feared the fires of Hell with a capital H. She was a large woman with an unkind face and moles spotting her chin, always reading the Bible while she worked, and behind her on the wall she had framed a black-and-white photograph of Shep holding up several bluefish, beneath this a saying in large block letters: BE YE FISHERS OF MEN.
In spite of her religious fervor, on sale also behind the counter were Playboy and Penthouse magazines, but I never dared to sneak behind it and get a peek at them because Diane Cooper terrified me more than any god or devil ever could. She was wall-eyed, which gave you the feeling she was always watching you even when she probably was not.
Sumter was still mad at me for squealing, although I still wasn’t positive I had told Grammy Weenie anything about going in Neverland. In the car on the way down to the bait shop, he didn’t even glare or sulk; he just acted sweet as pie, which, with Sumter, meant he was mad as all get-out. “I slept well,” he said. “Something about sleeping near the ocean, it makes you feel well rested. You well rested?” he’d asked me. I was still in my grouch morning mood and didn’t reply.
“You’re full of beans this morning,” Uncle Ralph told his son, beaming with fatherly pride, leaving me feeling that I had somehow disappointed my dad, who wasn’t saying much.
Sumter grinned broadly, obnoxiously, and said in the unnatural cadences of a child who’s trying to put something over on his parent, “Oh, yes, indeedy, it sure enough is good to be alive on a fine morning such as this. Beau, if you just act enthusiastic, then you’ll be enthusiastic.”
I wanted to punch him, but I was too sleepy.
Once out of the car, he raced into the shop, with me lagging behind. “Hey-hey, Miz Cooper, got any crabs?” Then he went: “Haw-haw-haw.” He clomped around to the worm crates and lifted a handful of snaking earth, putting it near his mouth. “Spaghetti for breakfast, mm-mm, good!”
“Don’t even think about it,” she snapped from behind her Bible.
“I wasn’t doing nothing,” Sumter said, and his voice was light and sweet. He dumped the worms and dirt back into the crate.
“You never do nothing, way I figure, but what you ain’t supposed to do.” She may have been the only one on the island besides me and Grammy Weenie who could see through my cousin’s games, and I wasn’t always sure I could see through them. Turning to me she said, “Good to see you back, Beauregard, but I see you left your smile hanging up in your closet.”
“It’s early.”
“You boys should be like the lilies of the field. They don’t toil, they don’t sweat, they just grow in God’s sunshine.”
“I’d trample ’em,” Sumter said, “and then I’d pick them apart, petal by petal.”
“They’d just grow up again.”
“And I’d dig them up.”
“You have a mouth on you, boy.”
“That I do. The Mouth of the South.” Then he began singing off-key, “Whoa, Big Mama, why’n’t you turn your damper down?”
I was almost happy to see Sumter’s nasty side start to come out after his earlier syrupiness.
“I said, whoa-oh, Big Mama, why don’t you just turn your old damper down? ’Cause when you flap those big lips, just makes me wanta frown.” He stomped his bare feet down on the boards, causing half the shop to rattle. Minnows scattered in spotty schools along the edges of their tanks, cutting through the water at right angles.
“The fire’s eternal, Sumter, it don’t just go out,” Diane muttered, but returned to her scripture.
Sumter finished his song and dance, moving back around to the fish and creepy-crawlies. He pressed his face against one of the tanks and made fish lips. “Don’t you feel sorry for these poor suckers?” he asked me, and now I knew he had at least momentarily forgiven me for whatever it was I was supposed to have done. “They wait here for someone to put a hook through their middles and while they’re dying they get pecked at by snappers and catfish. But, on the other hand, if they were just swimming down at the lake now, they’d probably have been eaten by now.” He shrugged.
The minnows looked to me like slivers of silver skin, moving together in perfect strokes as if they had not fifty fish minds between them, but one will.
“Daddy!” Sumter yelped. “I want a sea horse! Can I have one?”
Uncle Ralph snorted, and Sumter made a face at his father’s back. My dad was looking at a set of fancy lures, and I heard Uncle Ralph say, “Dab, those are for pussies.” My father looked back to see if I’d heard, and I looked back at the tanks and played dumb.
“You’d know,” Dad told him.
“They got Caymans this year.” Sumter grabbed my hand and yanked me over to one corner of the store.
There was a screen stapled down to the top of a wood-frame aquarium, scratched plexiglass all along the lower edges. Sumter and I leaned over it, and a stink came up like Don’s Johns at campgrounds during sticky summers. “Take a whiff.” Sumter gargled the air into the back of his throat and coughed it out. A thin layer of brown water coated the tank bottom; clumps of hairy moss floated lazily like unanchored gardens. A chunk of sepia-tinted hamburger was pushed up against a corner. There were two Cayman lizards: They were like baby alligators, but somehow more exotic because they were called Caymans.
“I want one of them,” he said.
“They’re neat.”
“I bet they eat virgins for breakfast.”
My only knowledge of virgins at that age was the Virgin Mary. Our neighbors in Richmond, the Antonellis, had a blue Virgin Mary in their garden, and I imagined her surrounded by hungry Caymans.
“I bet they eat fingers,” he said, grabbing my wrist and slapping my hand against the top of the screen. I pulled my hand away from him. The lizards swished their tails, splattering the sides of the tank as they moved swiftly, practically burrowing under the floating moss. When they rested, their pop eyes came just above the water, the bumpy ridge of their tails like tiny spikes in a perfect trail behind them. “I bet they get real big.”
“Yeah, huh,” I replied.
“How much you think they are?”
“Ten dollars.”
“I bet twenty.”
“No way. Ten.”
“It don’t matter, anywho,” he patted me on the back, “ ’cause I’m gonna get one for free.”
“Yeah, huh.”
“If I have to kill fat old Diane to do it.” He managed to undo one of the staples from the screen. He slipped his hand down into the tank, into the far corner, away from the resting Caymans. His fingers squished into the old raw hamburger and pulled it up. When he’d freed his hand from beneath the tank’s screen, he lifted the hamburger to his nose. “Smells like a toad turd.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Gross me out.”
Sumter popped the disgusting meat into his mouth and swallowed, snapping his teeth together so they clicked. “I was getting kinda hungry.”
2
I hated fishing.
But what I hated more than fishing were the stories Uncle Ralph would tell in the little dinghy we rented to go out on Rabbit Lake. We launched it into Rabbit Lake, our feet stinging with damp prickers, mud oozing between our toes. Sumter was up to his butt in the water before he leaned into the boat, head and arms first, feet last, sliding in, his teddy bear tucked under his arm.
When he got all settled in, he said to me, “Bernard doesn’t like you.”
“It’s just a stuffed toy,” I said, “and your daddy’s right, you’re too old.”
“If you keep talking like that, I’ll be mad enough to spit tacks, and Bernard’ll eat you before you can blink.”
“That thing ain’t gonna eat nobody, it’s just gonna lose its stuffing.”
“A good bear can tear you limb from limb. I read up on grizzlies, and they’re the meanest. Bernard is part grizzly and part something else.”
“Yeah, huh,” I said, reading the label beneath Bernard’s tail, “part polyurethane.”
“Quiet,” Uncle Ralph whispered, swatting at the air. “You’ll scare the fish away.”
Uncle Ralph was an avid fisherman, wasting no time: The sun was almost completely up, it was nearly six a.m., and his bad jokes could wait no more. “There was this fella who goes to his doctor and the doctor says to him, ‘I’m gonna need a urine sample, a stool sample, and a sperm sample,’ and the guy goes, ‘Well, hey, why’n’t I just give you my underwear?’” Sumter laughed so hard he started hacking, and Uncle Ralph had to slap him on the back. Sumter hawked a loogie out the starboard side, and we watched it splash down and create ripples. A small sunfish came up to nip at it.
“Good one, Daddy, but tell the one about you know the guy who you know gets caught on a you-know-whatever of spit.” Sumter tied a lead weight to the end of his father’s line. Whenever Sumter played with hooks, I stayed as far away from him as possible. He had poked half a dozen hooks through Bernard’s ears, and probably would’ve been just as happy to put them through mine, too. “You know, Daddy, that one about drinking spit. You know.”
Uncle Ralph had a face like a moose, and his blubbery lips parted in a smile-snarl as he chomped down on a wad of tobacco. “Okay, there’s this guy walks into a bar and he goes, ‘Ain’t got no money, but I’ll do anything for a drink,’ and the bartender goes, ‘Howsabout you take a sip from the spittoon and I’ll give ya a shot of bourbon,’ and the guy goes—”
“Ralph, I think you should stop while you’re ahead.” When my father spoke to his friends or family, his voice was low and authoritative; the stammer he had in his business life never carried over into personal matters. I used to stand in front of a mirror and try to imitate that deep, unaccented sound, but never could.
Uncle Ralph paused momentarily, but went right on, “Reminds me of this one about this guy . . . ”
We sat in muddy water, me in the very back—because I didn’t want to be up with Sumter and Uncle Ralph—and my father baiting his hook.
I popped the top of a chocolate Yoo-hoo and took a swig. The drink was warm. I leaned back, resting my head against one of the life jackets, and gazed out over the small lake.
Dragonflies whizzed around us as mosquito larvae giggled in aquatic swarms around the edge of our boat. Cattails and reeds swiped at the oars, but we stayed still, and except for the droning sound of Uncle Ralph’s voice and my father’s trying to get him to shut up, we floated like the moss in the Cayman tank, waiting for something to bite. Every now and then Sumter would make a growling noise and pretend it came from his bear, and each time Uncle Ralph looked like he was ready to bite his own boy’s head clean off.
