Sketcher (20 page)

Anyway, I finally figured out that he wanted me to look at one particular cheerleader. This was his new girlfriend he said he wanted me to meet. Not bad. I showed him a thumbs-up when they were tossin' her in the air. They held her up on a pyramid while the band did a drum roll and she bent one of her legs till she was almost touching the back of her head with it. And her leg was tanned and so toned from all those backflips. And time stands stills. This girl is gorgeous. She's not ultra-slim like a model. She's got meat on her bones, but she's flexible enough to do her own stunts. Maan, if I could sketch, every woman would have meat on their bones.

Suddenly she flips in the air and lands in her team members' hands again. She curls her leg one more time and she looks happy even though she's so bent out of shape, and the guys are playing Boom-boom-dut and the horns are screamin' and I'm movin' through the crowd, tryin' to get a closer look at this hot cheerleader who I have to remind myself is my best friend's girl. Then she dismounts, and the crowd goes crazy, and she is smilin' and her lips are glossy and her chin is all
pointy and she brushes some of the curls from her face in slow motion.
Super slow motion. And
–
freeze frame.

Would you believe it? That cheerleader is Suzy Wilson. And I'm head over heels in love with her.

I must have zoned out the music and the people, cos I didn't even see when the crowd walked away. And Peter walks up to me holdin' Suzy at the waist, and her body is tight and firm and she's still breathin' heavy on account of all those stunts. She isn't sayin' much 'cept, “Hi, Skid. How've you been?” No exclamation mark, no italics, nothin'.

There's somethin' new about Suzy. She's not yappin', and even her eyes have a different kind of light in them. Her skin is softer, her chest heaves higher, and there are these cute drops of sweat on her upper lip that I saw somewhere before. Suzy's wearin' see-through lipgloss, and her pout is a pink hibiscus bloomin' around every word. Sparkly green dust glistens on her cheeks and her neck to match her eyes. I get cold drinks and straws for the both of them, but I make sure hers is really cold, cos I remember she likes restin' the bottle against her neck and her chest, and that should make wonderful things happen now that she's older. Peter doesn't have a clue. Anyway, he realizes we know each other, and he's over the moon. We sit and talk a bit. She didn't go back to Canada. She went to Slidell for a while. Then she says:

“Skid is the guy I was tellin' you about.”

And they laugh at the same time in an inside-joke kind of a way, and then they talk a little bit of French and laugh some more. Now, that's worse than pointin' with your kisser.

Anyway, Suzy, she wraps herself around the straw, sips her drink and puts her head on Peter's uniformed shoulder. She looks up with her teeth bitin' the tip – man, for some reason that was hot – and she's lookin' at me while talkin' to Peter.

“Tell Skid what I told you about him.”

“Oh man, seriously?”

“C'mon! He'll find it funny. Plus it was years ago.”

Peter was sheepish at first, but he made a drama out of it like a newscast. It turns out that when Suzy met Peter she told him there was only one boy she ever really liked: Skid Beaumont. Damn. And she wanted me to sing for her, but I wouldn't, cos I was a bit of a jerk. And she couldn't stand her aunt Miss Fiola – and that's why she got jealous and told ol' Screwdriver Phillips when I did the thrust-and-grind thing. And she knew about my pops fixin' her aunt's stereo.

Well, man, life is a brick, and I felt like a bug. Imagine: the finest girl in Armstrong Park is telling me she used to like me, and I was too blind to see it at the time. If I had made her yap without tunin' her out, then I would have known the whole time that she was tryin' to tell me somethin'. Damn.

So, right as I was addin' losin' Suzy to my list of favourite failures, she started yappin' about Frico and how talented he was – and I began to feel better, cos it made me remember clearly why I couldn't deal with her yappin' in the first place. Then she said there was a State of Louisiana Art Fair Competition comin' up in three weeks, and she thought Frico would do very well in it. That SLAF Competition was every two years, and artists from all over Louisiana submitted work for prizes and all. Ho-hum. My ears were noddin' off when she said: “First prize, five grand. This year's theme is ‘New Orleans 2020: a vision of tomorrow'.”

We–ell now, that just made mad bells go off in my head like three Spanish weddings in the same church at the same time. I jumped on the Beast and rode off to get a flyer so fast I had to come back and ask Suzy where I could get information on the competition on a 4th of July weekend. She took one from her tote bag and wrote a note to Frico on the back. I couldn't wait to tell ol' Fricozoid we could make five grand drawin' the New O'lins of the future. That was it! Money and Pops' dream in one. I discovered the way to make it happen – and it was so simple all along. That Suzy wasn't just hot: she was brilliant. But she was my best friend's girl. Furthermore, I
could see Mai and me in the future, in a city that was about to finally wake up and sweep into the swamps and surprise people like Moms who, for some reason, didn't believe me.

Twenty-Two

When I rolled into the swamp on the Beast that Sunday mornin', everybody was crowdin' the creek – at the same spot where Broadway and Squash went into the earth.

Everybody from L-Island was there, people from farther downswamp and all of the Lam Lee Hahn fishermen with their Sam Pan hats hangin' down their backs like a turtle shell.

I had the one Mai gave me on my head. They all looked up when I rounded the mangrove, and I felt a little silly, so I dropped it down my back as well.

But my hat was the least. Pa Campbell had been wheeled halfway across the new footbridge built a little ways off from the sinkhole. People were listenin' to him speak.

I dropped the bicycle and went down the slope to stand beside Moms and Frico.

“It's a sign! It's a
sign
. I keep tellin' you people dat this place is 'bout to be cleansed!”

People looked sheepish. Some half-smiled – nervous laughs.

Chanice Devereaux and her girls were the first to leave. Then Evin Levine bummed a cigarette from Moms, tipped his hat and took off. His dog stuck around playin' with Calvin's kids, before dartin' off to follow him over the bridge. But Pa was just gettin' warmed up.

“We should've known when we saw that snow last winter. Snow? In Louisiana? It was a sign. It snowed for about
seven
minutes right heah in these swamps! If you went to take a piss you'd miss it. Do you know what dat was?”

“You tell us Pa!” Miss Gladys was eggin' him on so she could have proper gossip for the east side of the swamp.

“Dat was God throwin' salt over her shoulder, is what dat was.”

They respected the old man, but this wasn't the Pa Campbell they knew.

Ma Campbell patted his shoulder. She'd given him his fair share of time to embarrass himself, but she really didn't want him to start rattlin' off about—

“Seals and spells and yellow letters! They're all over this place! Picked some up myself a'ready! I tell you the wrath of the gods of every religion is on us! They gave us a garden and we ruined it. Furdermore, dose two teenagers who died in dat dere hole, theah spirits are thirsty. And all that waada, won't quench it! Ha! But you wait! There will be more tears than rain in these parts. So run away, greedy men and women. Take your greed with you!”

The whole time he's glarin' at Mai's mother and the fishermen, who he thought was his major competition in the business that he no longer ran. You could see that Parkinson's wasn't Pa's only problem. He was just plain losin' it. Ma Campbell grabbed the chair handles and spun the old man around. In the sharp turn he caught my eye and started screamin' at me.

“Skid! You ol' Jonah! I told you, and you told
no one
? Now see the sign! Ha!”

A cold streak did a dash from my head to my bells. Last thing I wanted was to look like I was part of Pa Campbell's demented rantin', especially in front of Mai. As his chair rolled back into the mornin' mist and the crowd dissolved from the banks of the creek, I saw it. The sign. The creek, the whole, entire creek that fed the bayou in front of our house since we were born, was now pouring down into the sinkhole where the Benet boys died. The full flow of the water was literally disappearin' into the hole and makin' a hollow sound.

The riverbed beyond the sinkhole was emptied, but still wet, and some poor minnows were marooned on smooth river
stones, still flappin' their gills. This happened overnight. It was like our little river lost its way in the dark.

“That last earthquake must have caused it. Don't get too close.”

Moms was tryin' to sound like Tony. He was a city boy by then. This was the first time we wouldn't hear the scientific chapter and verse of why this happened. I would have to try and figure it out. Frico wasn't interested in fallin' in, so he held on to a tree on the bank and leant over to look into the hole. Moms got hysterical. And for the first time I heard that boy stand up to Valerie Beaumont and tell her to relax. After all, I was nearly fifteen, and he was a year and more older than me.

Moms lit a breakfast cigarette and walked away, turnin' back twice when she saw Frico holdin' on to the tree with one hand and me holdin' on to his other arm and reachin' over further to look down into this strange thing. The water was way down in the sinkhole now. You couldn't see the surface once the creek poured in. Frico spoke between grunts.

“I hear this happened in Florida one time.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, the ground swallowed up a whole river.”

“After an earthquake?”

“Hm. Don't know, but...”

“By the way, on Sinkhole Night, and the last earthquake, all that shakin' started out in the yard – under Moms' feet.”

He sucked his teeth. I felt his grip loosen.

“ Pull me up.”

I waited till I was completely vertical again before I challenged him.

“I'm tellin' you. I was there. Outside with her. Just last week.”

“This is goin' to starve the bayou that gives us all the catfish and crawfish you scarf down. Why would
momma
do that?”

“Ha-ha. I notice you ain't sayin' she couldn't. You're just sayin' she
didn't
. Big difference.”

“Big deal.”

He was gettin' that tired look in his eyes again. I felt the Art Fair flyer in my pocket and changed the subject. He threw pebbles in the hole like he'd rather be doin' somethin' else, while he listened to me talk about the Fair.

“Some of these things are bogus, so you can't guarantee me winnin' the five grand. But I'll do it. Sounds like fun. Just get me a coupla things.”

CHARCOAL

6 BLUE PENCILS

SHARPENER

CONSTRUCTION PAPER

ALL-PURPOSE GLUE

1 DRAWING PEN

GEOMETRY SET

LARGE ERASER

T-SQUARE

FRENCH CURVE

COCA-COLA

SNICKERS

PISTACHIOS

Damn. Didn't see that superstar backstage list comin'. So I went in to ask Doug to up-front the money on the project. He was out at the sinkhole earlier, but went back into the house in a hurry.

“I got nothin', Skid. And you shouldn't be fixin' to spend anythin' on foolishness now. These are serious times and this swamp ain't what it used to be. See that hole this mornin'? Well, that was my cue to come back in here and start crunchin' numbers. See how much we need to get on up outta this hellhole.”

I could have told him that Moms been savin' from our runnin' Pa Campbell's catch-and-sell seafood business, but he was in one of those moods. So I borrowed a few chickens from the yard and sold them to the Lam Lee Hahn Floatin' Market when Moms wasn't lookin'. One of the younger Vietnamese fishermen pretended he didn't understand English. I wasn't barterin'. I needed cash.

Three days later we waited two hours for Tony to drive into the swamp on his first visit since movin' out to New O'lins. He said he'd take us into the city and show us around and help us shop for art supplies for the project even though I didn't bother lettin' him in on the secret agenda behind the whole thing. Doug said he'd come along. Now Tony was behavin' like a big shot. He had his friend's ride, a Honda Accord, and was playin' that Tears for Fears song about rulin' the world. The car came down the slope, but he didn't get out. He had white shoes on.

“What the hell? Where's the creek?”

“Long story,” Doug told him. “You can hear it on the way.”

“How's Momma?”

“She's at work. Let's go.”

“Dang, this place looks different.”

“You been gone only a month man, just stop.”

“Yeah and look how y'all made it go to waste, dang.”

“Just drive.”

Tony smelt like the city: English Leather and cement.

There was also somethin' else in the air there. Somethin' burnin'. And it wasn't just the asphalt and rubber. I couldn't tell what it was. I just knew that the swamp and the city smelt different. Anyway, it was Tony's girl's new car, I figured, what with the red pumps and leg warmers behind the driver's seat, the purple-hair Troll hangin' on the rearview and the stacks of Photo Romance magazines we had to share the back seat with. But the sound system was his idea, no doubt.

We told him about the quake and the creek and waited for his take on it again, but he was too busy bellowin' out the chorus of the song to explain anythin' to us. He was yappin' about city things like parallel parkin' and mergin' into traffic. He wanted to take a road trip to Silicon Valley with a group of his former high-school friends. His pals took and developed photos of the road trips he'd been on with them since he left the swamp: Silicon Valley, California, palm trees everywhere. New York. A rash of buildin's and the Empire State in the middle, stabbin' the sky like a big ol' syringe. Construction happenin' on every corner. Peter Grant said tourists go to Manhattan just to take pictures of the advertising. Then there was a picture of this flood of taxis rushin' past a cathedral. All that yellow made the world look like I borrowed Backhoe's 1960s San Tainos sunshades.

“Hey we should take a road trip! The Great Beaumont Escape.”

I didn't say anything. The last “Beaumont whatever-it-was” left me pissed off. Suddenly, Tony shoved a camera at Frico.

“Happy Birthday when it comes!”

The camera was second-hand, but Frico's eyes bugged out and a big ol' grin flashed across his face. Seein' the guy actually smile was a rare thing. The camera had a long lens on it and a filter and everything. Frico turned the lens into the sky and took a couple of shots just as we zoomed under the massive first overpass. City-boy Tony chaperoned us to places where we could get the stuff from Frico's list: bookstore, corner store and then to the library to get a photocopy of a map of New O'lins.

We stopped at a diner somewhere along the Mississippi. Through the window I could see cranes hundreds of feet high reachin' down and offloadin' containers from ships on the khaki-coloured river. I kept askin' Tony questions, but he was shushin' me all the time, cos some infomercial-type message was on the diner TV about that same thing Pa Campbell
blabbered about: natural-gas extraction in the swamps. They had guys in pristine white shirts talkin' into the camera. They had on white helmets with little green logos on them. There was always a fresh, grassy field and pretty blue sky behind them. But in the background there'd also be a metal tower in every scene. Tony said the tower was a drillin' rig for gas or oil. I didn't have nothin' to say, so I told him that if they were gonna be diggin' around, I hoped they'd find some of the grimoire seals that Pops planted in the ground.

Tony stopped watchin' TV.

“Seals? We should be more concerned about the fracking and the chemicals they must be dumping around there. It's time for everybody to leave that swamp.”

I agreed with him. But sometimes he sounded as crazy as ol' Pa Campbell with his science mumbo-jumbo. Sure the swamp was lookin' shabby, and everything looked contaminated, but he had no right to talk, since he's the one who bailed out and left us there.

Then, sittin' beside him in his slick city clothes, it came to me: Tony Beaumont hated lookin' and feelin' like a swamp boy. And I kinda felt the same way sometimes. I mean, even though we went to school in the city and hung out around it, we were still
aliens
to New O'lins. Take our shoes, for example. They were a dead giveaway. While everybody in the diner, includin' Tony, was in white Nikes or Adidas or whatever, we had on some strange waterproof, half-muddy footwear that they wear on boats, for godssake. The kind of boots that don't go with T-shirts. To prove my point, two punks looked across at us from their table and snickered. And I just lost it.

“See you in the swamps... soon!” I shouted across the table. And it was a really dumb thing to say – and I really meant the whole entire city, but in their ears it sounded like some kind of threat. So one of them, the one who looked like his parents gave him everything, including a big ol' overbite, he said he was goin' to call a cop, so we left our lunch in a hurry.

Tony couldn't wait to drop us all off back in the mud, and this time he stopped all the way up at the train tracks just because we made him hurry his lunch at one of the “best hangout spots in town”. Well, when we came down the slopes with our hands full of drawin' paper, we saw a squad car and wondered if those punks had gotten them to follow us. But then we saw Pa Campbell out in the yard cussin' at the officers. He was wavin' his arms and tryin' to roll over them with his wheelchair. His old TV set was out in the yard sittin' in the dirt. He'd gone nuts and shot the thing full of holes. Said it was now dangerous to watch TV, cos no one's tellin' the truth any more, especially the news. He screamed at the officer that they shouldn't take his rifle, cos it was on “Condition One” since the shindig.

“I need that rifle! One bullet can buy you some extra breathin' out in dese parts dese days. Out heah's becomin' worse than the city! I tell my wife, we need to be on Condition One, like it's Beirut! Cocked, locked and ready to rock! Smell that air, officers. That's death's bad breath. I – need – my – rifle!”

Man, I hated to see him like that. But when the cop said they were takin' his rifle and ammunition to undergo tests and they wanted to question him about his friendship with Alrick Beaumont, it all fell into place for us, all at once. Pa cussed and frothed at the mouth. The cops took his gun and left him alone, cos he looked insane. Then he stared into the sky with his usual cataract stare. One shaky arm shot out from beside him and went up to heaven, pointin'. He let out a yell that made your bones rattle. We looked up, and the clouds were curdled milk. Now that was depressin', but not scary.

“Look!
Look!
” We all strained to see what Pa was pointin' at. He leapt from the chair as Ma was pullin' it backwards. He landed in the dirt and crawled towards the house frantically, lookin' over his shoulder in horror. The officers looked
up, their fingers twitchin' beside their side arms. Then we saw it. A thing flying. Emerging from the clouds. A majestic sky creature comin' at us from the north. It was a spirit, an animal and a machine in one. It was black and then gunmetalgrey when the sun came through the clouds and hit it, but the skin gave off no glisten. The creature slid over our heads without a sound. Dark wings two hundred feet wide, body seventy feet long, Frico guessed. Bigger than an archangel, I thought. Doug looked for jets. There were none behind it. All we saw was the shadow of the thing running along the ground towards us like a liquid. I felt cold when it hit us. The shadow seemed to rustle through Pa Campbell's sugar cane and slip into the bayou. It disappeared among the trees out in the water, and in seconds the creature itself was a dot over the Gulf.