Sketcher (7 page)

“E-Skid-eh?”

I heard music. I loved it when her French accent made a little sandwich of my name and left dainty sounds at both ends. Ahhh.

She bends down and smiles at me. And even in the breeze there is sweat on her upper lip, and there's another drop of it runnin' down her neck, and her curls are messy now. Her eyes are jumpin' left and right, and I'm suddenly nervous and confused, cos I'm in love with her and I hate that I'm in my worst clothes, that I didn't have my moustache yet and that I came here with Harry T and his ridiculous hairstyle. And when I was busy hatin' Frico for bein' so damn selfish – who appears in the doorway behind Miss Fiola but my pops in his sad ol' boxer shorts? My eyes bugged out. His eyes bugged out.

“Why – what are you doing out here?!”

He dashed behind the door, so I said to hell with handing him the note. I just pulled my eyes off Miss Fiola and started to read Moms' note:

Behold, Alrick Beaumont. I know thy works!

This wasn't the first time Moms was usin' her King James Bible verses to express herself – but hell, it was the
worst
time. And Heaven knows I wished I hadn't come. I reckoned those bastards – Frico, Tony and Doug – knew about these ninja missions and must've thought it was my turn to bear the bad news. But something tells me I was the only one who ever completed one of them.

Well, Miss Fiola, she ducked inside, but my father rushed at me through the door in a pink bathrobe that he had obviously just dragged on. So I start runnin' like a lucky Thanksgivin' turkey, cos I've never seen my old man so mad. He's gallopin' behind me cursin' my mother and me. And Harry T, he's laughin' and ridin' right alongside me just ahead of my old man, hollerin' that I should get on the bicycle handlebars. But a whoopin' with that bedside slipper in Pops' hand is more likely at this point, so I just keep goin' until my old man decides it's not very decent to run about the neighbourhood in his drawers and a pink bathrobe.

So I get home, and Harry T is wonderin' if the mission is over so he can go watch TV. I'm quietly sobbin', not quite sure if I'm sorry for Moms or angry because my father was fixing Miss Fiola's stereo on Saturday night.

Then, right after the ninja mission, Pops moved out of the swamp, and I felt like it was my fault, even though it was Moms who told him she didn't want him and his ways no more and he was never to come back. His Ford Transit van took him away, together with all the stuff he was repairin'. And Ma and Pa Campbell, who were on the porch when he was packin' up, they just went back inside and turned off all their lights. Soon I could hear Pa Campbell on his harmonica brewin' up some bittersweet breeze, and I wanted to just hurl a rock at his house.

When Pops drove out, I ran to the corner of the L and watched as the van splashed through the creek and rode up the slopes and got to the train tracks. And the back lights, those back lights, they just burned red-hot and then went dead-dead cold. And the van turned right and disappeared behind the mangroves out at Lam Lee Hahn, and there was no sound except for the whole swamp sinkin'.

I saw Pops set foot back there a few weeks later, after dark, as I was dousin' a mosquito fire in the yard. I knew someone was out there, but Calvin, he wasn't makin' a fuss, so I wasn't too scared, until I saw this tiny red glow bobbin' through the trees and I was thinking it was one hell of a firefly or an angry baby
fifolet
.

Then Pops stepped out of the darkness behind a cigarette and stooped down beside me. I hadn't seen him smoke in a long time, so he smelt weird, but I wanted to hug him. That would have been even weirder than the cigarette smell, though, so instead I just said, “Hey Pops.” Then he whispered to me that he was sorry, but he needed one of Moms' pictures so that he could keep her close to his heart. That sounded good, so I brought it, gold frame and all, and gave it to him without askin' her, and he went away without even saying thanks. All he left me was that smoke curling up.

By that Thanksgivin', we were broke as hell and, like they say, it was hard in the Big Easy and outside the city limits where we lived. So hard that one day, me and Doug, we even saw Moms leaning against the house and crying in the rain after coming back in from Lam Lee Hahn. Man. You never ever get that out of your head. See, in that high-water wilderness, you could prob'ly catch panfish or crawfish or some small game, but not quickly or easily enough to feed four growin' boys. At least not without bein' adapted to it. We were like fugitives who ran away from the city but were sittin' waitin' for it to come catch up with us. Even after so many years we still weren't ready for country livin'. We had no serious
practice huntin' or fishin'. We couldn't predict the tides that came in from the Gulf, not to mention those storm surges that either chase you out or lock you in for days. We could try it, but my moms, she wasn't ready to adjust. She had hardcore beliefs and practices, includin' the culinary ones. Thanksgivin' mornin' we heard her mumbling to herself that “on Turkey Day or any other day, me and my kids won't be eating no rattlesnake or squirrel or possum pie, or any kind of chit'lin's. Where I come from we don't eat that stuff.” Me and Doug decided it wasn't the best time to tell her that we'd been samplin' swamp rats over at Pa Campbell's. And those suckers weren't half bad.

Anyway, with all the tough times, at least we had entertainment. I was fully ten years old before we got this beat-up colour television set from Pa Campbell. Tony hooked it up to the CB antennae, and I got to see what a real ninja looked like.

Meanwhile, I was still trying to get Frico to sketch Harry T and make him look like Michael, the King of All Music Everywhere. Now, even though Harry T didn't really believe in all this sketchin' business neither, at least he was ready to give it a shot, cos he was always up for adventure and all that. And – would you believe it – Frico
agreed
to do it, but he told us to go search for the best picture of Michael that we could find so he could use it as some kind of reference.

Well, Harry T and me, we saved for weeks and rode around to record stores to compare prices. We checked phone boxes in the city for spare change and of course I asked Doug for money. But he said he was saving to buy some fancy white tennis shoes and some soccer boots, even though Moms asked him where inside these swamps he was goin' to wear white shoes. So anyway, we only got enough to buy two cassettes after all that. Harry took out the cassette jackets and borrowed some ol' magazines from a barber shop, but every time I thought we had found the perfect MJ photo, he said he could find a better one. It was always “he don't look like that
no more” or “that one isn't new enough” or “his hair is more curlier now” or some other story. So every couple of days I would glance into the dresser mirror and see Frico beside the bed, lookin' at me and smilin' weird, cos I guess he knew that the King would keep changin' and that me and Harry T wouldn't be able to agree on one damn photo.

Seven

“That's blood, not ink.” Moms was smellin' the writin' on those strange letters that were delivered to our house one full-moon Saturday night. Well, not delivered, more like flung into the yard: nobody actually delivered mail in those parts. So it was creepy when me and Frico came into the kitchen Sunday morning with sixteen bright-yellow envelopes in our hands, all addressed to “VALERIE BEAUMONT & HER OFFSPRING”.

“Where did you get these?”

Moms wiped her hands. The envelopes had strange diagrams.

“Outside. The whole yard is littered with 'em. There's more. It's the same letter again and again.”

“Well – did y'all hear me say it's
blood
?”

Sixteen envelopes fell to the floor.

“Go wash your hands. And next time, don't
nobody
take this kind of thing in here, y'hear me?” We nodded. Her face was a rock. She bolted the doors and blocked out the kitchen windows with cloth from under the sink. Then she picked up every letter except for one and dumped them all in a rice box. When she opened the last one, the place smelt really bad. She turned to Tony.

“Florida Water... candle... cupboard... top shelf.”

She wrapped her head with the reddest piece of cloth I ever seen, stuck a blue pencil up in it and poured the Florida Water onto her hand. She folded the letter seven times and put it in the middle of the kitchen table. Then she sent for her King James, dropped the book on top of the crumpled letter and pressed it down.

“Hold hands round the table.”

Goddamn it – now, this was serious. In my house Moms would do this stuff from time to time, so I didn't think anything of it. But we didn't hold hands to pray until some real trouble was brewin'.

For a few days that box of stinking letters sat there on the kitchen-area table with the King James Bible turned east on top of it. A brass padlock was in the middle of the book, holding down the pages to the Book of Psalms. Next to the Bible was the big Catholic candle, even though I thought we were Free Gospel or somethin'. It had a picture of a lady saint and it kept burnin' all night. It smelt like roses. On the last day, Moms tied her head with the red cloth again and lit some incense. I'm not quite sure what the incense was, cos she said we weren't supposed to even repeat the name of it in the house. Man, that stuff smelt worse than the dried-up blood. Then she took the blue pencil out of the head wrap and wrote a name on a piece of paper and burned it along with the letters in the mosquito fire while she was readin' the Psalm out loud – but backwards. Her eyes were closed and her face was all golden in the blaze. She said somebody was trying to conjure up some magic – trying to put a goat-blood spell on us – but they couldn't touch us now, so we shouldn't worry. And for the first time I wished my pops was there to protect us – until we figured out he was the one doin' the damn conjuring. Then I wished Frico would do something about that. But you know that bastard.

Well, I was in middle school and eleven by then, and by that time I had given up thinking that I had any sketching powers. I had done lost interest in Miss Lambert anyway, and furthermore she had turned on her heels and high-tailed it out of New O'lins after that stereo-fixing occurrence – and bless God she had taken ol' Suzy Wilson with her. It was a good thing I gave up tryin' to find out if I had powers too, cos that experiment had gotten me into no ends o' trouble. Hell, I still
got into trouble, but at least it was some brand-new nonsense – like that Sunday when I borrowed Belly's new bicycle.

See, Belly, he always got some cool stuff from his daddy over in Georgia. Now, at that time Belly was six foot one, though he was only thirteen years old. If it wasn't for his knocked knees that boy would prob'ly be six foot three. But still he was taller than my older brothers, and because of that, everything his daddy sent for him had to be super-sized. So this new bike was as big as a horse. We called it the “Beast”. I remember it was a classic, restored 1950s Bendix bike with the brake in the hub. Now, if you don't know what that last part means, that's OK, cos I didn't either. See, Belly and Doug and Tony were all helping me ride this bike. It had a real steel frame, fat black-and-white tyres, a dynamo and a bell... yes, a bell. So they all helped me get on the Beast and shoved me off, and I'm zigzagging down the dirt slope in the swamp and ringing the bell and comin' around the corner singin' and Pa Campbell's lettuce-patch fence is coming towards me, so I need to stop. But I notice there are no brake levers on the handlebars. But Belly is jumpin' up and down and shouting that “the brake is in the hub”. Well, that's a relief. Now all I have to do is find the “hub”. So I take my eyes off the marl road and I'm lookin' around the handlebars prob'ly expecting to see some labelling in big block letters that says “HUB”. But there's no such thing, and this doesn't make sense, and I'm ringin' the bell for Calvin and his kids to move outta the way.

“Well, Skid,” I tell myself, “whether it's in the bayou or on a bed of lettuce, you're goin' down.”

Next thing I knew I was lyin' on my back, countin' clouds. The Beast was OK, but Pa Campbell's lettuce-patch fence and a coupla heads of salty lettuce were written off completely. Moms got really mad. You'd think it was
her
forehead that was gonna have chicken wire printed on it for weeks. She insisted that as punishment I should help Pa put his fence back together, especially since when the bicycle crashed, Pa's goats
got excited and went on a rampage and got into their house and ate twenty-two dollars from Pa's trouser pockets.

And that's how, while workin' off my mistake, I got to talkin' to Pa Campbell every evening for a week about some serious stuff. Round about Sunday evenin', when I thought I could trust him enough, I told him about the goat-blood letters, and that Moms thought Pops was conjurin' spirits, but I personally didn't really believe in such things. And when he turned slowly and looked at me with his filmy cataract eyes and shook his head up and down, all he needed was a flashlight under his chin and a campfire to make me piss the place up.

“Now hold on deah, Skid. Now look heah. Whatchoo mean you don't believe? Look heah. The worse things in this heah swamp don't walk on fo' or two legs, y'heah me? They ain't bears or big cats or even Bigfoot. They cain't be hunted. They ain't dead and they was nevah alive. Theah is things in this god-forsaken backdoor of Noo Orlins that can
not
be described, y'heah me? This place is a
crossroads
, y'heah? It means people come here to cast spells, and they leave stuff in the soil heah. And long ago theah was a town heah for fishermen and miners an' all dat, and folks say they got wiped out by a witch who sent bad weather back in Nineteen-Fifteen, y'heah me? And befo' dat theah was early Chawasa and Apalachee tribes and all, plus American forces fought the British in these parts, so many godforsaken soldiers went to hell right here where we standin'. So spirits be heah! So don't be disbelievin' in invisible forces! Cos if you sit real still and lissen close, you can hear theah voices... whispering... Shh. Lissen!” So I leant forward and he farted. And we laughed hard until Ma Campbell, she heard it from the house and shouted at him to come get some tea, cos he hadn't eaten a thing since lunch.

Pa got gassy and was always jokin', and that made it hard for anyone to take him seriously. But it would do you good if you did. He'd been around for a while. He knew stuff. He had
one of those white beards coloured by smoke and sweat. He was baldin' at the front, so he usually wrapped his head with a black bandana like a bike-gang leader and then pulled his long, white plait over one shoulder and let it hang down to his chest. You couldn't see any lips on this guy when his mouth was closed, on account of the forest on his face. His mug was all wrinkled, as if time was a liquid and he had his face soakin' in it for too long. The rest of his skin was cracked till you couldn't tell what those tattoos were supposed to have been. The back of his neck was always red and criss-crossed, like one of those fancy Christmas hams. He had on this silver ring with the bluest turquoise stone in it – like a little pinch of summer sky. He said it reminded him that there were “new horizons somewhere”. All I know is that ring bit so deep into his finger it couldn't pos'bly make its way back over his rusty knuckles.

“Don't take Pa too seriously son: he talks lots of bull when he misses his pills. And he believes in
everything
.” Ma Campbell threw the old man a nasty pair of eyes as if to say: “Shut the hell up”. But by nightfall Pa Campbell had told me so much I felt brand new, and I didn't even feel like he was SuzyWilsoning me, cos what he was saying was useful.

Right about the time Moms would be lighting the mosquito fires, me and Pa, we called it a day and went into his house. The old man rummaged through a wooden chest and fished out this American Indian-looking cloth. Wrapped in it was a big ol' photo album that used to be white.

“Now,” he said, “what was you sayin' to me earlier, Skid?” He flipped the album page after page, licking his finger each time, more out of habit than anything else. I knew he was talking about the goat-blood letters, but I wasn't gettin' back into it, especially at night. He stopped at a page and turned the photo album around so I could see.

“Recognize that fella?” His grubby fingernail was tapping at a Polaroid that had gone almost fully yellow. It was a photo of three white men standin' up among some darker-skinned
people dressed in white with drums and pineapples in their hands. They had really white teeth and were excited about the camera. You could tell. The same way I could tell that most of them had been pulled into the photo late and everybody had to make space to accommodate them. From the looks of it, they were all down inside this huge hole. Someone had taken the picture lyin' down on the ground and lookin' up at the people and the sky. It was a really nice shot. You could see the edges of the hole above them. I recognized one of the white guys as my pops, lookin' younger. He was standin' beside another man, handsome guy, in a beige bush jacket with a crispy starched collar, a fake ship captain's cap and one of those see-through sunshades that doesn't block any sun at all but only makes the whole world look all yellow.

I had seen another picture at my house with him and that same guy in that beige suit and glasses goofin' off. But Moms always said she hated that picture, cos it made Pops' friend look like that preacher guy Jones, who they say was a wonderful man till he killed all those church people in some place called Guyana not long after I was born. That was a crazy story if I ever heard one.

Anyway, the third guy in the photo was obviously Pa Campbell, who looked pretty much the same, but his hair was out like a hippie, his teeth were whiter and his beard wasn't. Then I remember thinkin' that this was the first time I had ever seen Pa Campbell and my pops standin' close together. It was almost like he read my mind.

“Me an' Alrick, your pops, we go way back.”

“Really? And where's that place y'all at?”

He breathed in and let it all out slowly.

“That place... is out in the sun, kid. That place is San Tainos,” he said, like it was a declaration of some sort. “It's a little island aways from here. Paradise really. If the whole world was on one island, that island would be San Tainos. Ooowee. Your pops and me, we used to get off the grid and
go hang out in San Tainos for a bit in the late Sixties. It was girls, beaches, rum. Then—” He paused.

“Then what?

He laughed. “Your father forgot how to be free. He fell in love. Look heah.” Pa flipped the page and tapped another photo. It was on a beach with the prettiest ocean water you ever seen.

On the horizon the sunshine looked so warm it must have popped those fresh popcorn clouds hangin' out over the sea. Now, I was fixin' to fall in love with that sweet, dark-skinned lady in the picture he was pointing at when he said, “That's your momma right theah about fourteen-fifteen year ago.” And I just hated myself for a little bit. But Moms was as pretty as ever, though. Her skin looked like she polished it, and her red-lipstick smile was bright and comic-book perfect. She had on a smooth orange stone danglin' from a chain round her neck and one of those colourful cloth bands holdin' back her hair from her forehead. You could see her hair was long, even though it was styled in a topknot on her head. A red Coca-Cola tank top and a tie-dye skirt to match the head-band made her look like a doll from Pops' VW dashboard. There was light in her eyes to match her smile and the glint off her hula-hoop earrings. She looked like Pam Grier. Not the bad-ass Pam Grier: the sweet, smiling Pam Grier.

In another picture, they were in the water. She was laughin' because Pops had her in his arms and that yellow-glasses fella (he didn't take them off) looked like he was about to splash both of them. It was weird, like those two in the picture were not my parents but some other happy couple who were still down on that island lovin' each other.

“Now, I'm not sure I should be tellin' you this, but your mother's from San Tainos, son. She was born there.”

“I think I heard that.”

“Whatchoo mean ‘you think you heard'? That mean they never told you. If you ever heard about San Tainos, you'd
know
you heard about San Tainos. Your momma was born in one of the prettiest places on earth. The gods made that place special. She came heah with your pops when things turned ugly in the late Sixties.”

“Ugly?”

“The Sixties was part of a nervous time with e'rybody threatening to drop a big bomb on e'rybody else, till the whole world got so goddamn scared nobody dropped a bomb on nobody at all. But then even if nobody dropped jack, you still needed to know which one-a da bomb-droppin' sides you was on. So the long and short is, San Tainos started makin' friends with the wrong side, so the ol' US of A wasn't their friends no more. And when things got tougher in paradise, your Moms, she married Alrick and came to Florida first and then eventually headed heah to Noo Orlins.”