Boys of Blur (2 page)

The sugarcane looked like giant grass, bundles of green sticks taller than men tufted with long dry leaves like scythe blades. Separated by narrow, dark gaps, the rows marched away beneath the quiet blue sky. Not far from where Charlie stood, the sky’s belly was rough with swamp trees. The fields and the trees both ended at the foot of a steep grass-covered dike—an earth wall taller than the white steepleless church and its mound combined.

A breeze slid around Charlie and on through the cane. The air was warm, but the field shivered like an old man with a chill.

Charlie looked at the sky, held up by nothing more than the column of smoke he’d noticed during the service. The flats were wide open, but he still felt strangely enclosed. He felt like he was standing at the bottom of a deep hole, a hole so wide the sky came all the way down inside it.

He didn’t mind.

Charlie was in the cane where his stepfather had been raised and played his first football. Over the dike and across the water, he knew he would find more cane and the town of Belle Glade, where his real dad had been raised and played
his
football.

Both of his fathers had roots in the muck. Maybe Charlie did, too.

“Hey,” a boy said behind him. “I guess we’re some kind of cousins.”

Charlie turned, squinting against the sun. The boy was thin, black, and about Charlie’s height. He was wearing a creased red tie with an untucked dress shirt, canvas sneakers, and jeans. His hair was short, his eyes were big, and his smile was wide.

“I’m a Mack,” the boy said. “Your stepdad is my pop’s coz. So you and me are, too.”

“Not really,” Charlie said. “That would make us, like … step-second cousins.”

The boy shook his head. He took one step and jumped, gliding over the ditch and landing lightly in the cane field.

“Nope,” he said. He stripped the leaves from one of the cane stalks and snapped about a foot from the top. He broke it in two over his knee. “Cousins is cousins.” He tossed one of the pieces to Charlie. “Try it.”

Charlie examined his cane. Where it was broken, the end was gritty and wet with what looked like sap. He nibbled at a green corner. It tasted like sugar. Tiny bits of cane grit crept across his tongue.

“It’s sweet,” he said.

“Sweet?” The boy grinned. “Naw! Not sugarcane.” He laughed, gnawed at the end of his own hunk, and then pointed it at Charlie. “Call me Cotton. Everybody does. I already know you’re Charlie. I even know that your pops
was Bobby Reynolds from Belle Glade who went to jail, but just about everybody knows that. You go to school?”

Charlie nodded.

“I’m homeschooled. My mom’s crazy for books. Stacks and stacks of books I’m supposed to read and that’s about it. And I can’t play football.” He tapped his sugarcane against a wide smile. “But I will. Next year I’ll play. You play football? You fast, Charlie Reynolds?”

“Fast enough,” Charlie said. “But I’ve never played.”

Cotton exhaled disbelief. “You’ve got Bobby Reynolds for a pop and Prester Mack for a step, and you don’t play?”

“Not yet,” Charlie said. He prodded the sticky end of his sugarcane with a fingertip.

“But you will?”

Charlie shrugged. “It’s my dad’s sport. Both my dads.”

Cotton chomped on his stick, studying Charlie. Finally, he dropped it in the trough.

“You scared of snakes?” Cotton asked.

Charlie shook his head.

“Good. Come on, I’ll show you something.” Without waiting for an answer, Cotton began running along the edge of the field, rattling through the leafy fringe.

Charlie dropped his cane hunk and hopped the ditch. When he landed, the damp muck rose around his feet. The first steps were the hardest but none of them were easy, and Cotton kept going faster. Charlie fought to stay in his
new cousin’s wake, thumping his shoulder against cane and turning his face away from brittle, slashing leaves, tugging every step up from the sucking ground.

After forty yards, Cotton suddenly veered, disappearing into the wall of cane.

Charlie followed. Cotton had turned into a narrow dirt road exactly one truck wide. The cane leaned in on both sides.

“Hey!” Charlie shouted. “Where we going?”

Cotton laughed and kept moving. His feet were lighter than Charlie’s, barely touching the ground. Where Charlie planted and pushed, Cotton quick-stepped, floating into the air, gliding between the tire tracks and soaring over puddles. Charlie was quick enough, and he had never been clumsy, but trailing Cotton made him feel like a bulldog puffing after a greyhound.

Cotton turned again, and this time the road ran beside a ditch full of black water. Up ahead, something that looked like a busted old tire slid off the bank and splashed into the ditch.

Charlie wanted to stare at the water and get a better look at his first gator, but Cotton was still moving.

One more turn, and then trees. Cotton slowed and stopped. Charlie staggered up beside him, wiping his face on the sleeve of his suit coat. He was breathing hard, grass cuts stung his hands, and at least one blade had nicked his face. Cotton didn’t seem to be breathing at all.

A narrow grass strip ran between the cane field and a deep canal. On the other side of the canal, thick swamp forest overwhelmed the bank. Ahead, a three-foot-high mound ran out of the swamp, bridged the canal, and disappeared into the cane. Swamp brush and scraggly trees crossed the canal on the mound’s back and even grew out in the cane—a finger of wild stretching into tamed fields.

“This is it?” Charlie asked. “This is what you wanted to show me?”

Cotton’s eyes were hooded. “The trees have been creeping,” he said. “A lot longer than I’ve been alive. The mound has a stone core—tractors can’t till it.”

Cotton scrambled onto the mound. Charlie followed, grabbing slender trunks as he did. The ground was suddenly firm beneath his feet and with just that little bit of elevation he could see over the cane—the narrow mound ran through the field directly toward the little white church on its hill.

Cotton was moving again. Charlie turned and followed him along the top of the mound toward the swamp.

“Old shacks back in there,” Cotton said, pointing toward the trees. “Shacks for cane workers—Haitians mostly. Now they just use tractors.”

Cotton stopped over the middle of the canal, before they reached a wall of looming cypress trees slung with vines and bearded with moss. Charlie saw a snake on the far side slip down into the black water. The mound didn’t
just bridge the canal, it worked like a dam. On one side, a murky pool spread back into the trees, surrounding dozens of trunks. A tongue of water slid through a deep notch in the top of the mound and ran down into the canal on the other side. Cotton hopped the thin stream and crouched down.

At the boy’s feet, embedded in the mound, was a chalky stone the size of a manhole cover but not quite circular. It was more egg-shaped. Cotton was scraping moss off the edges.

Charlie didn’t care about the edges. Right in the middle of the stone, there was a dead snake, gray and speckled and twisted halfway onto its back. Beside it was a small dead rabbit.

“You killed them?” Charlie asked.

Cotton shook his head. “I didn’t. I don’t know who does. Sometimes I just think they come here by themselves when they’re ready to die. Or someone collects them and leaves them here. There’s always something, usually pretty small. Rats. Birds. Squirrels or skunks. Once they’re here, nothing touches them. Nothing eats them.” He looked at Charlie and lowered his voice. “When I found this stone, it was under moss and a whole pile of little bones.”

He pointed into the trees at a short row of broken-down shacks. Only one still held up its own roof.

“I put all the bodies and bones in there,” Cotton said. He looked at Charlie. “Wanna see?”

Charlie did want to see. And he didn’t. The black water beside him and the looming trees and the chalk stone and the bones all felt very different from the cane fields with the white church on the hill beneath the blue sky and the sun.

“Well?” Cotton asked. Charlie nodded, staring at the collapsed and rotten shacks. And then something moved in the shadows.

Cotton picked up the snake by the tail and stood, grinning. “Wanna hold it?”

“Cotton,” Charlie said, and he took a step back.

Cotton laughed and jiggled the snake. “Dead. See?”

A tall man stepped out from under the trees and into the light.

“Cotton!” Charlie grabbed his cousin and scrambled backward, smacking into a young tree.

Cotton dropped the snake and spun around. The man was walking toward them. He stepped onto the mound.

He was wearing a helmet.

He was holding a sword.

Charlie winced and pulled away from his mother. The motel hand towel was rough and scalding on his face. Their room was small, but clean. Two beds were separated by a small antique table and a lamp.

“He’s fine,” Mack said. He’d taken off his jacket and tie, and his collar splayed wide around his thick neck. “Believe me, I’ve had enough of those cane leaf cuts to know. They sting, but they’re just scratches.”

Natalie Mack sat down on the motel bed next to her husband. She sighed. “You look like a cat attacked you, Charlie.”

“Kitty cat!” Molly shouted. She climbed onto the bed behind Charlie and began to jump. Charlie shook with each impact.

“I’m fine,” Charlie said. “They don’t feel worse than paper cuts.”

His mother winced with sympathetic pain.

“Be glad you had long sleeves,” Mack said. He dragged a big hand down his face. He had worn a huge ring to the funeral—a state championship ring from long ago. It was golden rubbed down to nickel in places, with red colored glass pretending to be ruby. It was a dingy thing compared to the other rings Mack kept locked in a case at home, but it was the ring he’d won under Coach Wiz.

“A sword and helmet,” Mack said. “You’re sure the guy had a sword?” He’d already asked half a dozen times.

“I’m sure,” Charlie said. “All rusty and jagged. The helmet was beat-up, too, but not as bad.”

Mack’s phone began to buzz in his pocket. He stood up and walked toward the door to answer it.

Charlie was left with his mother, her worried eyes, and her worried hands still fiddling with the wet towel. Molly climbed around her brother and dropped into his lap. She was talking to herself. Or her hands were talking to each other.

“You don’t like it here,” Charlie said to his mom.

She glanced around the simple motel room. “I’d rather be in Palm Beach, by the airport.”

“I don’t mean the room,” Charlie said. “You don’t like it
here
.”

Molly put her small hand up over Charlie’s mouth.

“Shhh,” she said. “Monster coming! Hide!”

Charlie kissed his sister on the head, then she dropped
to the floor and raced toward the window to hide in the long curtains.

His mom smiled. “Coach Wiz meant a lot to Mack. I was happy to come. I’ll be happy to go. No one ever threatened my son with a sword in Buffalo.”

“He didn’t threaten me,” Charlie said. “He was just there.”

Mack finished his call. He leaned against the wall with his big arms crossed. “I think Charlie and I are going to grab a Coke,” he said. “Come on, Char.”

As he turned toward the door, Molly exploded out from behind the curtains.

She wanted a Coke, too. She needed a Coke. She had to have a Coke.

Molly’s muffled sadness followed her brother down the hall even after the door had closed behind them.

Then a television turned on, and sadness became joy.

Charlie trailed his big stepfather as they descended the stairs, passing a gargling vending machine on a landing. Two stories down, Mack led Charlie around a pair of plastic plants and through the lobby. No one was behind the front desk, but someone had propped a handwritten card against an old bell.

Five minutes later, Charlie and his stepfather were leaning against a propane tank in a gas station parking lot. The sun was down. Evening sky blues were turning to black. Charlie held a cold can between his hands, but
Mack’s drink was in a brown bag. Neither of them had said a word since they’d left the room. Charlie didn’t mind. Their best times together rarely involved words.

Charlie took a swallow and listened to the liquid squelch down his throat. The town of Taper was still. The air was still. The cane one hundred yards behind them wasn’t even rustling. A laugh, blocks distant, trickled to them over the broken asphalt. A dog bark chased it away.

“Cotton made it home fine,” Mack said. “That was his mama called me at the motel.”

Charlie stared at his can. He hadn’t even worried about Cotton. Out in the cane, Cotton had seemed faster than a rabbit.

“Funny thing,” Mack added, studying the brown bag in his hand. “He didn’t say anything to her about a man with a sword. Said he just told you some stories and messed with a snake and then you spooked.”

“What?” Charlie blinked. Confusion bubbled into outrage. His stepfather was looking down at him with eyebrows up. “Why would he say that? I wouldn’t run from a snake.”

Mack looked up at the dark sky.

“I didn’t make it up,” Charlie said.