Sketcher (24 page)

Master Sam was waitin' for her at the train tracks with another red umbrella. He had on a red robe with neck embroidery, but the rain made the lower part of his dress look darker, like someone dipped him in blood. He looked in my
direction, took her by the shoulder, and then those umbrellas just disappeared behind the mangroves.

When I got back, I was soaked. I made sure to walk slow through the showers, cos rain and tears, they look alike. Well, Moms, she was mad and told me I didn't listen when she spoke, and one day I'd get into big trouble for it. She said all this in front of Tony's girl, who was about twenty. Didn't matter, I'd taken a break from older women. And Vietnamese ones too.

Anyway, poor Tony couldn't even get to the car out at the tracks. I remember his girlfriend wanted to get back to her college dorm, and she needed to make a call to her dad. That expensive hand-held phone in her bag was as big as a damn buildin', but she couldn't get no signal out there behind God's back. Ma Campbell said she once heard they don't work well in the rainy weather, but on account of that lovely mermaid story, I think they should have that old woman hooked up to a lie detector all day long.

Twenty-Six

Now, don't you let that clock fool you. It drags your days through the mud, but races off your years when you're not lookin'. So don't be surprised when there's a wrinkle at the corner of your smile and a strip of grey where a milk moustache used to be. My pops said that time should stop when you step into your house, so we never had a clock. But, hell, we weren't livin' at our house no more, so we needed to get used to that big monstrosity of a grandfather clock over at Ma and Pa Campbell's. Now,
there's
one miserable machine to measure your life with. Forget the chimes – the tickin' drove you crazy long before you got there. And those hands, those three hands didn't help you do anything. They were only there to point out your limits, man.

It also didn't help that the thing was so “classic” that it looked like Dracula's vertical casket, no lie – but Ma Campbell, she was proud of that piece of funeral-home furniture. Said it was a “gen'wine Victorian Mellard” – which sounded quite uppity for a woman who would eat the fried skin off anything.

“When you git-a yourself a gen'wine Mellard, you hold it for as long as you can, even if it's brok'n.”

That thing didn't even know it was broken. It still ran, but it never showed the right time. Well, for me, it didn't need to. I already knew that on one hand I was runnin' out of it, and felt like it was goin' too slow on the other. Ma and Pa Campbell were packed and waitin' for family to come all the way from Arizona. They hoped the police would come back and say all was fine with the ballistic report, cos they didn't want to look like they was runnin'. Moms had sold off nearly
all of Pa's goats, and they split the money. We handed off most of the mud crabs to Al Dubois for some more dough, even though they were a gift from Lam Lee Hahn. But there was no way we could eat all that crab in a coupla days. Evin Levine had taken three of Calvin's kids, and we told Pa and Ma to take one and we'd keep the other. The chickens were all dead, 'cept for one dethroned rooster that walked around, tail feathers droopin', wonderin' where his women went. We killed him and sprinkled the blood around the house, cos Ma said demons were advancin' on the place. Pa mumbled that the demons dropped down out of the big ol' day bat when it flew over the swamp. Never mind the fact that it was all over the news what the creature really was.

B2 BOMBER. FIRST-TIME FLIGHT. BRAND-NEW STEALTH PLANE. LATEST WEAPON IN THE WORLD. MISSION TRAINING EXERCISE.

Well, we could ignore Pa and his stories, but nobody was arguing with Ma about her beliefs any more. And if you came home and found a big ol' turkey vulture pacin' back and forth across your dinner table, like a preacher – with his nasty ol' wings spread above his half-rotten head – you wouldn't argue neither. You'd just ask her where she wanted that blood sprinkled. The moon was deep orange for four nights in a row after we chased that vulture out. Strange.

But the strangest thing of all was that everybody started experiencin' things. Suzy Wilson felt like she was underwater drownin' and gaspin' for air, and that's why she had to leave that day. Tony said the place felt stuffy, like there was a plastic bag over your life. Moms began to see things... like her husband's shadow slidin' up the stairs onto the porch. But she'd look up and that shadow wouldn't be attached to a man.

Well, like I said, Ma Campbell, she had the remedy for all that: blood sacrifice. She wanted to kill a goat, but the last goat kid, he escaped with the chain around his neck, and at
night we could hear him runnin' through the goddamn bush, that chain rattlin' like a Rollin' Calf. Now, that's supposed to be a ghost slash bull with fiery eyes and smokin' nostrils – mostly bull, if you ask me. So instead of helpin' the situation, this stupid billy-goat was runnin' around the swamp at night, makin' people wet themselves.

Ma Campbell drained out all the rooster blood around the house, dipped the rooster in hot water, sloughed off the thick feathers and singed away the finer ones over a fire, before turnin' him into dinner. She put the candle of the Blessed Virgin against the mirror “to double the light in the room”. We burned frankincense and put a large brass crucifix in the doorway. The shadow fell across the porch. The last of the blessed lake water was sprinkled to keep spirits out. But we also had to keep an eye on the gators that wandered across the front yard at night, preferrin' the brackishness in the lake over the gas bubbles in the dead pond. Mai's mother had said some people somewhere in Africa saw bubbles in a lake and thought it was nothin' until the entire lake rose up one night, swallowed up the village and burned everybody to the bones. I thought of Frico sketchin' a levee around the house, but to me, the real repairs had already been done. Now it was just a matter of time.

Bein' at school only made the waitin' worse. The first week after we packed and moved everything, it was pain all over, like I was arm-wrestlin' with Kuan Am. Man, my brain was dead tired too. Most days at school, I just sat lookin' out the window, wonderin' about life and listenin' to that piano in my head that kept hittin' one key all day. When I glanced around in the classroom, all those kids looked like they knew where they were goin' – or at least like they were OK with not knowin'. Maybe I was takin' myself too seriously, but I wasn't baby Beaumont any more. I would be sixteen in a month. And these brothers of mine, they set the bar real high for me. I was smart, I guess, but no genius – and I wasn't athletic. I wasn't a comedian, and I definitely can't dance. And it sucks
when all your teachers already taught your genius brothers. You're screwed to suffer a life of comparisons, I'll tell you that. Long and short – I had to do somethin' big.

This event
had
to happen. But behind the glass window of Schoolroom 2E, with water runnin' down the windows and drippin' off everythin' and dirty clouds drapin' themselves over the world, you'd think God dropped his cleanin' cloth on top of the globe and went off to take care of somethin' else.

Now just to keep an eye on things in the city, I started bikin' it all the way home after hangin' out with Peter Grant. It took me an hour every day, but that way I could watch for any development all the way from the city to the swamp. Moms didn't like the idea. Said it was dangerous.

One evening, I came home to see that they'd taken down the Lam Lee Hahn fence. Sittin' on the crab-crawl porch, away from the bayou, I could see farther up the creek now that the fence was gone. It's weird how small a piece of land looks when you take stuff off it. Like once you move things, you say: “Now, how did they fit all that into that space?”

I could see the ponds left open and empty, and there was a sorry-lookin' wooden boat, beached far off on the lakeshore. When it got grey in the swamp, you couldn't tell the true distance between things. I was tempted to take a stroll on the other side but there were the sinkholes. I didn't want to discover one by accident. Worse than anythin' else, that place was haunted by Mai.

When breeze came across the yard from the Lam Lee Hahn side, Mai was in it: her smell – the same incense that was burning in the corridor that day I kissed her and met Master Samadh.
Nag Champa
was the name of it. The scent was still strong, even though no one was over there. That's prob'ly because there was a big frangipani tree in full bloom right beside where the fence was. They would use those frangipani flowers to make Nag Champa. To this day, I can't go near a
frangipani tree without whippin' my head all around lookin' for that lanky Vietnamese girl.

“Soak your memories in a song or the scent of a woman,” Pops always said. “Those things preserve them for ever.” Corny as ever, that coward.

But it was true. And I knew that when I sat there and breathed in, I was just punishin' myself. And I could just hear Master Sam's warning in my head: “Your nose, your nose!” But I couldn't help it. The only thing that rescued me from missin' Mai was the reality of the swamp in those last few days. That place dryin' up was no trick of my smellin' or my sight or anything. That was the real stench of rottin' rivers and dyin' trees.

Usually I just got mad and blamed Frico, cos he could fix all this stuff with a pencil. But I told myself that this place was so low it could only get better, and any day now would be the new beginning.

Moms was makin' movin' arrangements. Aunt Bevlene said we could stay with her on Honey Drop Drive until we got a place, since she had an extra room now. Moms was goin' to help her get the place ready, but by that Thursday evenin' we realized that we should have been gone long ago.

Ma Campbell found a bunch of stuff under her house that Pa didn't even remember stashin' away. He'd started stockpilin' things before the shindig: petrol, canned goods, medicine, batteries, a sand filter and other doomsday supplies that we could easily sell off to Evin Levine. But by the time we got to the bottom of that army crate, we came upon the worst thing. Two sheets of bright yellow paper, both sayin' the same thing:

State of Louisiana
30 DAYS NOTICE TO VACATE

It had a fancy logo on it from some firm in Tennessee. It said that company was the new owner, our lease was up and we
should have been off the land from the first week of August. Hell, we didn't even know we had a lease. Moms trusted Pops with everything, and that was crazy. The notice said some other things that all simply meant we were trespassers overnight. So Benet was also a coward. He sold the land out from under us, so someone else could give us the bad news and the ol' heave-ho. There was no reason to stay anyway, but we were officially out of time, and the notice said Moms and the Campbells could be arrested.

Ma was patient with Pa when he admitted that he rolled around one day in his wheelchair and collected the yellow signs off the doors with a stick. He hid them when no one was lookin', but only because he thought it was a scare tactic from Pops or Backhoe Benet again. Moms said he must've been damn drunk – and he shouldn't be drinkin' in his condition. Pa Campbell told her not to talk about him like he wasn't there, especially when she was shelterin' under his goddamn roof.

Well, after that it got pretty uncomfortable, and Moms, she went and packed some more things into boxes. Everything 'cept toothbrushes, man. She was ready. When that moon slid up over the trees that Thursday night, it looked big and amber, like lookin' through the bottom of a tumbler with whiskey in it – and seriously, we all felt drunk. That heaviness was in the air. In the mornin' the dead bayou was boiling. The brown sludge had begun to blow single bubbles, huge twelve-inch-wide domes that took one minute to pop open. We put hankies over our faces and decided not to go so close again.

Moms would try to contact the company or the City Council to get an explanation. She said any one of us who thought this meant school was out for the day was makin' a mistake. It was better to be out of the swamp for more hours of the day anyway. Well, by the time I got to school I had a headache. I couldn't tell if it was the bubbles or the eviction notice, or because I realized I'd left my already overdue assignment. Damn
thing had been packed away in a box. Thanks, Valerie. Well, that just sounded like a classic whopper to the whole class, and they put me in the Hall of Fame for stupid homework excuses. I had to stay back and complete the thing, worst of all on a Friday evenin'. Afterwards, I pedalled to Peter Grant's place, and he told his old man I didn't want to ride into the swamp too late that day. So Mr G, he said he'd help me out. He musta been tired of obligin' me, but he was too cool to show it.

Well, look. That day, he didn't have to take me whole way. When we got closer to the New O'lins city limits, there was a “
DETOUR
” sign up ahead. Mr Grant honk-honked at the guys with flags, but they wouldn't come talk to him. So he sighed and said he would drive around, but that would be miles if we went through Michoud then right up along the coast to get me into the swamp from the east side. So I told him it was OK, I could just walk in. Peter said, “Hell, no,” and was insisting – and when his old man started backin' up the tractor trailer to turn it around, I saw this puff of black smoke. Nothin' unusual. Just a puff of black smoke a little way off near that first overpass when you're comin' out of the swamps. Then there was another one and another one and then one more, like a smoke signal.

Peter's old man was about to rev the engine when I heard a distant rattle and a rumble and a whistle in the air. Maan, that tractor trailer was suddenly too slow for me. I grabbed my bicycle from behind the seats, flung it outside. You shoulda seen me jumpin' outta that tractor trailer – damn near broke both legs. Peter shouted somethin'. The word “crazy” was in it – the rest was all bubbles under water.

I stood up on the Beast and pumped the pedals and didn't look back. Up a slope – down a slope – up a slope – round a bend – down a steep grade, and then – bam – goose pimples. Cos, maaan... I see machines.
Freeze frame.
Big, beautiful, tangerine, heavy-duty machines.
Freeze frame.
Everywhere
I turn, there are cement-churnin' trucks and excavators and front loaders with their claws in the air. And massive bottomdumper trucks and cranes that look like ladders stretchin' to the sky with wreckin' balls swingin' on the end of them. And they're all blowin' exhaust into the air and workin' hard along that crack on the map. They're pullin' down the overpass.
Freeze frame.
They're grabbin' at the ground and movin' buckets of earth and dumpin' it in those trucks – and my eyes are gettin' filled up and I ride around the machines whoopin' and yellin' until two burly-lookin' guys in helmets, they chase me away.

So I turn to home, and I'm ridin' hard like the devil, but I'm praisin' the angels – and I don't know how long I'm takin' on this nine-minute ribbon of road, but I don't care, cos the machines are movin'. That one piano note in my head turns into a full song, with big timpani drums, brass horns and a frickin' violin. And you should see me. I'm ridin' even harder but I can't see nothing. My eyes are runnin' over like the Great Mekong River that feeds the delta – but I'm laughin' at the same time and talkin' to myself.