Sketcher (16 page)

And James said, “I'll keep ya-all ostrich for as long as I can.”

And Pa said the word was “hostage”, and James said: “No, it's ostrich, cos ostriches, they can't fly – and right now, right now I got your wings clipped.” And Pa Campbell said, “Look it up – I ain't got taam with this shit, Couyon!” And Ma is tryin' to calm Pa down, but Pa is hollerin' harder.

“Woman, don't calm
me
down, calm your
son
down!”

Pa is losin' it, and Crazy James “Couyon” Altamont Jackson, he just whips around with flames in his eyes and puts one of the rifles in Pa's white-bearded mouth and pulls the damn trigger. And we all scream loud, cos we're waiting for it to rain brains in there, but there's a click and Pa is laughing still with the nozzle in his mouth – and I didn't even know there weren't no rounds in that other rifle Crazy James was swingin' about. Pa Campbell went ahead and emptied out the chamber when James appeared in the swamp. Then, all of a sudden, there was a thunderin' overhead. And the wind came. And I'm ready to shout hallelujah, cos the Great Beaumont Retribution had begun – but then a light comes through the window, and we all get down real flat on the floor, cos it
became obvious that it was one of those new Coast Guard helicopters with a goddamn freeze-ray tractor beam light on it, and it's thunderin' right over the house and the whole swamp is as fluorescent as the comin' of the Lord. Then I hear Moms above the noise from all the way across the yard. She's chantin' “Jerusalem” and girls are screamin' and Couyon's whole gang is tryin' to get inside, and Couyon himself is tryin' to get outside, and before launchin' through the window he looks me in the eye me and says, “Next time not so much salt in the hush puppies, Skid Marks. That stuff will kill ya before I do.”

Pa saw that the man was fixin' to escape. So he wrung himself free, reached up off the bed and grabbed Couyon, who was already halfway through the wooden window. Couyon spotted the turquoise ring Pa must have been hidin' all evenin' and, in three quick moves, he hit the old man in the face with the back of the rifle, spat on the hand that was holdin' him and easily slid that ring off Pa's finger before tumblin' out backwards into the darkness. Professional.

We all jumped up and burst through the door. And we see James running and the tractor beam from the helicopter looks like a big ol' broom the colour of lightning, and it's sweepin' away shadows left and right, searchin' for Couyon and his gang. He's behind the house when the chopper buzzes over the tin roof and the light swivels around and shines on that sucker through the trees, but it doesn't freeze him like Tony said it's supposed to. Damn. I couldn't believe it, but that bastard kept on running, and him and his boys, they dive straight into the bayou. And the police dogs and Calvin's kids and the Coast Guard and the City Police went in right after him – and Moms, she splashes in right after them as mad as hell with the rifle she retrieved from the house, and she's yellin': “Oi! Oonu try nuh come back 'roun me pickney dem again, y'hear bwoy?” Then she stops and she's standin' knee-deep in the bayou with the rifle on her hip pointin' up. The chopper is
right above her head. There's a big circle on the water around her. The beam sweeps across her face and out into the bayou, and she's not droppin' the rifle like they're tellin' her over the loudspeaker.
Freeze frame.
Bad Ass Pam Grier with a Caribbean accent. And that's the first time I heard my moms speak San Tainos patois. It was like somethin' preserved in a jar, but that jar broke and the stuff flowed out strong and sharp and deadly like moonshine full of broken glass pieces.

And by the way, I swore that would be the last time I listened to any more of Tony Beaumont's predictions. To hell with freeze rays and teletransport and all that. Frico would change the world as we knew it, even though in that instance he didn't do a damn thing.

Sixteen

Well, after the Couyon Gang cleared out of L-Island, we realized they'd cleaned us out as well. Somewhere between the time those boys were drinkin' beer out of the boat and the end of James' ostrich-takin', they disconnected our four eighteen-wheeler back-up batteries, tore down our thirty-foot CB antennae and dug up and sawed through the PVC pipe attached to the well tank just to flood the place. Worst of all, they swiped our big ol' 45-kW generator. I guess they couldn't get inside our house on account of Frico's protection paintin', but they took our electricity, so Moms had to stumble around in the dark to get the rifle, especially since she couldn't find her way around the house without Pops' clutter. After the drama and the police takin' all the city kids home to their finger-pointin' parents, Moms just went inside quietly, and we followed her. We could hear her searching under the cupboard for ever. When she finally emerged, she struck a match and lit this old kerosene lamp that I'd never seen. It was huge with a glass base and a cord wick in it. A jagged flame jumped up, and black smoke spirited off the edges. She put a lampshade over the flame and it settled down a bit. “Home Sweet Home” was printed on the shade in letters that were curly like the smoke. All this time she's hummin' a hymn. She broke the stanza to say: “I guess we can see a lot more stars now, boys.”

Yeah right. I wasn't goin' outside
ever again
. Her face looked tired by lamplight. Doug brought her some tea. The KeroGas stove was about the only thing that still worked. Our sink was piled high with gummy pots and pans from the shindig. In the sad lighting, the CB radio sat cold. Those neon-red digital numbers and lights that would greet you in
the dark when you woke up at night and those voices from the static of some far-off American highway were all gone. I guess we all felt more foolish than afraid, and across Moms' brows you could see her thinkin' that she'd made a mistake – or a couple of 'em. She was barely thirty-eight years old, and she was fixin' to go grey any day. But this episode wasn't over by a long shot.

Harry T turned up next morning when Moms was still sleepin'. That's how early it was. The guy had pedalled in the half-darkness all the way into the mist of the swamp. Crazy. We heard a tappin' at the window, then a copy of a gossip tabloid,
Télépathie
, was slapped against the louvres. Even through the frosted glass you could read the headline: “
SHIN-DIG SEVENTEEN: DARING RESCUE IN SWAMP
”. We tumbled out onto the front porch, and below the headlines there was a photo of a chopper and the story of the whole drama. Well, at least their version of it. They said it was around midnight that Couyon hijacked the party. Hogwash. They said we were all tied down to beds and tortured. Bullshit. They didn't even mention the Morse code or Moms' runnin' after the gang and the police tellin' her to stand down. Hell, it wasn't even seventeen of us.

They had a very eerie picture of our house in it, all painted up and lookin' spooky. They “reported” that supernatural elements from the swamp were takin' over the city. Man. Only one thing was true in that whole fake story, and that's the fact that the police caught Shotput and Boogers the same night they dived in the bayou. Shotput gave himself up to let Couyon get away, but that Boogers guy prob'ly got caught cos he was swimmin' with one hand up his nose.

Well, we couldn't believe what we were readin', and I'm sure Belly felt the same way, but we couldn't say for sure cos Aunt Bevlene, she was packin' him up and gettin' him ready to be shipped off to Atlanta like a bat out of hell as soon as those stories started flyin' around. Poor guy begged her to let him
“touch the swamp again one last time”, but she said “over my dead body” and sent him off. And she was smart too, cos pretty soon we were all catchin' hell at school in the city.

Doug said after that night his girl fans' parents forbid them to come into the swamps. And all of the fans that didn't come to the shindig, well they saw the papers and just couldn't believe that the Great Doug Beaumont lived in a one-room, rundown shack in the swamps. So, pretty soon he wasn't cool any more, especially after he busted a guy's lip for callin' Moms a witch and the coach put him on the team bench for the whole soccer season.

Now, over at Long Lake Free Gospel Church, one Sunday after the rumours caught on, we got an hour-and-a-half sermon dedicated to us and our witchcraft. Of course, even though they didn't call any names, everybody kept lookin' over at us, shakin' their heads and fannin'.

Moms had more serious problems to think about uninformed sermons and gossip columns. She seemed more concerned that she wasn't hearin' from our pops even in all this excitement.

Pa Campbell reassured her that he was still gonna be lookin' out for her, so she needn't worry. As if. Then, changing subject, he started bragging from his wheelchair.

“Matter of fact, Valerie, as soon as Couyon got up out o' my house dat night, I wriggled myself free and, in the middle of the hollerin' and the helicopter and the barkin', I took a shot in the dark. Ma got free and grabbed the barrel to save her son, but even in the noise, I know the sound of a bullet findin' flesh, I tell ya dat.”

Ma Campbell wasn't worried, cos she said most days Pa didn't even remember who was in the mirror, much less what happened that night. And maybe she was right, cos apart from them catchin' Boogers and Shotput, there was no report of any of them finding Couyon or any of his gang killed or injured.

Moms was looking for ways she could secure her family. What she wanted was money from Pops, and for a few months that wasn't forthcomin'. We also needed him to come put some things back in place after Couyon cleaned us out. So Doug and Tony drove around and went lookin' for him in New O'lins at all his usual hangouts, includin' Copper Stills Bar on Bourbon Street, but no one said they saw him.

That pretty much meant we were on our own, so Tony, he took over and put some makeshift things in place. He sent me and Frico under the house to get some car batteries and a car alternator that he salvaged from Benet's junkyard. Well, after Frico dragged out the first battery, he brushed off his hands and he was done. I had to crawl on my belly to pull out the other four, one by one. Then Tony, he sent me back for the car alternator, and at the time I had no idea what I was lookin' for.

“It looks like a turbine!” Tony was shoutin' from inside the house through the floorboards above my head.

“A whaaat?”

“A motor kind-of-a.”

“A what?”

I heard them all laughin' through the floor. “Skid, just bring out anythin' you've never seen before.”

So I brought out this metal cylinder with a grill around it, three huge eggs and a strange rectangular card the size of a driver's licence. The card had been down in the dirt for a while, but it was covered with Scotch tape, so you could still see that it had weird markings on it, like those yellow envelopes somebody dashed into the yard. Moms was worried that an alligator had laid eggs under our house, cos it meant the bayou was risin' again and under the house was gettin' swampy. Frico and Doug were debatin' whether I should have touched the eggs or not, as I told 'em there must be about forty more. They said mother gators can count, so she'd come lookin'. And since I smelt like her kids now, and my face was
lookin' as rough as her babies, she'd come hug me in my bed at night. Jerks.

Meanwhile, Tony was makin' use of the car alternator. He hooked it up to the batteries and mumbled about “regulators” and “rpm” and “groundin' wires” and blah, blah, blah, and said he'd give us at least some “low-voltage electricity” by nightfall. So that night, when we were lookin' at the card with the weird markings in Tony's fluorescent light, Moms went over to Pa Campbell and then came back and snatched up that card from in front of us and went back over to Pa – and when she finally returned, her face was dark again. I thought it had something to do with the old Cajun tale that an alligator under your house means someone's goin' to die – but it wasn't that. She held up the taped-up card.

“This is a seal that your father planted. I'm not goin' to go into what that means, but they're all over the yard. Now, don't none of you go searchin' for them. But if you
do
see anything that looks like this, don't take it in here. Just let me know where it is and I'll come get it. Understand?”

We nodded. I felt a “Let's Hold Hands and Pray” comin' on. After the prayer, I looked down at the kitchen table disappointed. I thought the seal was some kind of disc that was all metally and shiny and carved like some of the golden-dragon decorations over at Lam Lee Hahn. I thought that when you found them, they would glow like in the cartoons – but no. Just plain ol' paper. Pa Campbell said to shuddup about cartoons and never to underestimate the seals' power. Then Moms bought a coupla chickens, and prayed over every one of them, and let them loose in the yard and threw buckets of water on the ground so the chickens would start diggin' and scratchin'. And everyday you'd see her checkin' around the house to see if any of the seals had come up.

“That won't stop it, Valerie, it's too late! They're too many buried over theah,” Pa called out one evenin' from his porch.

Moms didn't answer until Ma Campbell stuck her head through a wooden window and asked: “Too many berries over where?” and “What won't stop what?”

Moms answered without lookin' around.

“Tryin' to get these yard fowls to stop diggin' up the yard, Ma!”

“So why'd you buy them in the first place, chile? Lawd, Val, that's what free-range chickens do, they dig! For the life of me... you young people! Tell her, Pa.”

“I told her, Ma. I told her.”

“Well, tell her again!”

And Pa, he cleared his throat and glanced back at Ma Campbell, who was over his shoulder, and then hollered out:

“That won't stop Valerie! There're too many chickens over there. And lots of chickens means lots of diggin', gurl!”

And Ma was satisfied and closed the window again, mumblin' that she taught us all the common sense in the world until she was sick of it – and what the hell were we gonna do when she was dead and gone.