Neverland (2 page)

“You know where Missus Pogo’s gone on to?” Daddy asked Missy.

Missy shook her head. “Didn’t go nowhere. She’s just dead.”

“She’s gone on to God, sweetie. It’s where we’re all headed.” It was the one sliver of religion shining through his weary eyes.

But no one in the family was buying it, least of all Missy—and I knew that no hamster who ate her own children was likely to make it to the pearly gates. My father was as defeated as a man could be when it came to his wife and children; he could not fight us, for he would never win.

My mother clucked her tongue, “Jesus, Dab, she’ll be crying the whole trip now. Missy,” she reached over and grabbed my sister’s hand, “Missus Pogo’s just died, perfectly natural. Hamsters don’t live all that long. It hurts when something you love dies, but you have to remember that they don’t hurt anymore.”

“Not if she went to Hell,” I whispered, “then she’s gonna burn eternally for eating her babies.”

“Beauregard,” Mama snapped, “is this the way you’re going to behave the whole vacation? Well, I won’t have it. You just be your good self and keep that bad part put away for at least this trip. Beau?”

I sighed, “Yes’m.”

 

A DEAD hamster probably doesn’t exude any kind of smell, at least not for several days, but we began to imagine that it did, until finally Daddy agreed to pull over and bury Missus Pogo on the edge of the highway. He did a piss-poor job of it, using the plastic ice scraper as a shovel and only digging down in the gravel deep enough for the small body.

Missy opened the box again to get one last look at the hamster. “Lookit,” she said, poking around with her fingers, “she’s all squishy, her eyes are open and sunk.”

Nonie and I peered at the furry corpse, and each of us got to touch it. Nonie said, “I bet in a week ants’ll’ve eaten all the skin off so’s it’s all bones. Probably already’s got worms in her innards eating away. Worms’ll eat just about anything.”

“Naw,” I said, feeling the hamster’s soft, still fur—it was creepy and beautiful and mysterious because it felt so different from when the animal had been alive. “Some stray cat’s gonna dig it up and eat it—just like it ate its babies, something’s gonna eat it.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Mama’s hand came out and whapped me on the behind.

“Speaking of food, I’m
starving
again.” Nonie licked her lips over the hamster as a joke.

“You children are being revolting,” Mama said, and turned to get back in the car.

My sisters and I giggled, knowing what all children know: Sometimes it’s
fun
to be bad and gross.

I heard Missy mutter as we got into the car again: “Now I wish we coulda kept Missus Pogo to see how fast the worms would come out.”

Mama said to Missy, “See how many different license plates you can count, honey.” We were back on the interstate and had not yet seen the ocean, and Governor kept screaming whenever Daddy hit a bump on the road. Missy had drawn a line with her finger down the backseat and told me that if I crossed it with my knee, she was going to scream like Governor.

“Scream your head off,” I told her, sliding my knee over to her side. My leg had, as usual, fallen asleep, so I barely felt it when she scratched me on the thigh with her cat-claw fingernails.

Nonie, whose mood had also turned sour, pretended we were not related to her. When other cars passed near us, she smiled at the strangers as if to indicate that she would like them to adopt her. Nonie was, after all, a born flirt, and I knew that the real reason she was eager to get to Gull Island was so she could wear her two-piece and lie on a rock and thrust her chest out.

She and Missy were twins, but miles apart in most departments: Nonie was a tease and walked in such a way that men of whatever age watched her; Missy was withdrawn, sulky, and didn’t seem to like boys at all—on the beach she wore a long T-shirt over her bathing suit, and unlike Nonie, she did not stuff wads of Kleenex into her training bra. Friends used to ask me which of the two was the evil twin—because there is always good and evil—and I would tell them that they were both evil twins, each in her own special evil way.

“Lord, how much longer?” Mama asked, and Daddy just thrummed his fingers on the dashboard when we pulled over at an Esso station for gas. I went into the station to get a Yoo-hoo chocolate soda and some Mallomars for the road. They were the last things I needed; we’d stopped at every Stuckey’s from Richmond on down, and I felt green from eating chocolate-caramel turtles and pecan logs.

There was a map machine, and I had a couple of dollars in quarters, so I dropped some in and got a map of Southern California. The man behind the counter said, “Your daddy probably wants South
Carolina
.”

He thought I was retarded, I guess, so I started playing retarded and stared blankly back at him and began drooling.

“You okay, little boy?”

I hadn’t had anyone call me little boy since I was four, and I wanted at that moment to cuss a blue streak, but I was sure Daddy would come in at any minute. “Jes fahn,” I drawled, sucking up drool back into my mouth. At that moment Mama came in, carrying Governor under her arm like he was a pig going to market.

“Pardon me, sir,” she said, glancing over at me as if she and I did not belong together, “which way to the ladies’?” The farther south Mama got, the thicker her accent; I could barely understand her.

“Just t’other side of the water fountain, and you don’t need no key, but knock first, if you please.”

She rubbed my head as she went by, and Governor stared at me wide-eyed the way he did when he watched TV; I was afraid that the way my mother carried him, he would fall on the soft spot of his head, and I didn’t want to be around to see that. It had been rumored that my cousin Sumter had been dropped repeatedly on his soft spot when he had been a baby, and I knew what that had done to Sumter. I unfolded the map of California and then refolded it.

“Listen,” the man behind the counter said, “your daddy’s gonna be mad because you got the wrong one, so I’ll just give you one for South Carolina and it’ll be our little secret.” There was something in his smile that reminded me of what Mama had always said—
Don
’
t talk to strangers
,
and don
’
t take things from them
—something spooky and leering, like he wanted something from me, only I didn’t know what. “It’ll be our little secret, huh, little boy, just you and me,” he said, and I grabbed the map and got out of there as fast as I could because grown-ups scared me more than anything else when they were like that.

“You had to be a smart aleck,” Mama said when we were on the road again, and she reached back and pinched my knee hard. I held my breath and pretended it didn’t hurt—at ten I was getting too old for the traditional modes of punishment: knee-pinchings, butt-slappings, my grandmother’s natural bristle brush on the back of my bare leg. “You couldn’t’ve gotten a map of Georgia, now could you?”

I began unfolding the map of Southern California across my lap, and handed Missy the one of South Carolina.

Missy said, “There’s a little bit of Georgia on mine.”

“Georgia on my mind,” Daddy began singing, but because he never could remember the words to a song, he hummed the next line and then let the tune die in his throat.

“Why don’t we ever go to Disneyland?” I asked.

“If I ever get your Daddy to take me to California, I can guarantee Disneyland will not be one of our stops. Don’t you like the island?” Mama asked. “Maybe Sea Horse Park’ll be open this year.”

But the amusement park on Gull Island was a collection of dinosaur bones: a run-down roller coaster, a lopsided carousel, several kiddie rides, a dried-up tunnel-of-love ride, and a swampy flume. From the time I’d set eyes on Sea Horse Park, my first visit to the peninsula until this ride out to Grammy Weenie’s, the place had never been open, and from the decrepit looks of it, it would never pass any kind of inspection. There was about as much chance of that place being open when we arrived as there was of pigs flying, and I would’ve been less surprised by the pigs. I looked out the window of our Ford station wagon. It seemed then like we’d had that station wagon forever. It was a pale green and had what the car salesman had called “beaver sidings,” which made my sister Nonie laugh out loud whenever someone said it. “We never even go to South of the Border.”

“Hey, Mommy,” Missy yelped.

“Hay is for horses,” Mama said. She always said this, and we always groaned when she did.

“I just thought of something.”

Daddy winked at me from the rearview mirror.

“What’s that?” Mama asked.

Missy said, “At the gas station, you left your purse up on the roof.”

As always, we arrived at the peninsula by night.

My father would be playing the radio softly, a Muzak-type station, and my mother would sleep in the middle seat, curled impossibly around the baby’s carrier while Governor gave us a few hours of silence. The twins would be asleep in the very back of the wagon, having made beds for themselves out of the sleeping bag Daddy kept back there.

I sat up front, the naviguesser for the evening, poring over the map of the Georgia coastline.

“Snug,” he’d say, and that was my nickname from earliest memory, although only my father and mother would use it; Missy and Nonie dared not say it, because their nicknames, Mutt and Jeff, seemed a hundred times worse to them. I was too old for that nickname—I had been too old for it for a good while—my name is Beau. But sometimes when I felt the coldness of the world, I didn’t mind it. “Snug,” his voice weary and kind, “see the lights down there? That’s the bridge.”

I would peer over my map, crinkling it up and tossing it on the floor. In the dark, the peninsula was beautiful, and it was like driving around and seeing Christmas lights: Yellow and dim-blue lights studded the bridge over the bay, which my grammy Weenie called the “tiara.”

It dipped into a flat end of Gull Island, but low hills rose up beyond, specked with more flickering, wavering lights, as if the place were held hostage by lightning bugs.

“Nighttime’s a wonderful thing,” Daddy would say as we drove down the hill to the tiara bridge, “it makes things prettier than they are.”

And, waking perhaps even the dead, I would turn around and shout, “Hey-ey!” to my mother, my sisters, and now my baby brother, too. “We’re almost here!”

Gull Island was as small as my thumb from the bridge, and only two hundred people ever occupied the peninsula at any one time. It was too marshy
for much in the way of development, and it would be too expensive to fix up. (At that time its reputation was at an all-time low, no one to speak of ever went there for vacations, and even the people who lived there year-round tended to head for other beaches down the coast by August.)

Arrival to Gull Island meant crossing through the West Island—the
bad
part of the peninsula. Stories abounded about pirate treasures sunken in the marshes, which glowed with firefly light and will-o’-the-wisp and smelled like rotten peaches and baby vomit; the Gullahs had a graveyard they kept decorated with colorful flowers, and Nonie had started a tradition in my family that, when we passed the graves, we had to hold our breath or a ghost would get us.

“Leonora Burton Jackson, you stop that right this instant or your face’ll freeze that way,” Mama said.

I looked from the front seat to the back to see Nonie turning blue.

She let out what could only have been a honk when she finally could no longer hold her breath. She glared at me. “A plague on
both
your houses,” she hissed. In seventh grade she’d fallen in love with Shakespeare and was fond of quoting and misquoting her favorite lines.

Missy, the less avid reader of the two, chimed in, “Bloody bones on the first step.”

“Stop that,” Daddy interrupted, “right now.”

“We can’t have him wetting the bed again.” Missy couldn’t resist this stab at my machismo.

Okay, I confess. I was the kid who wet the bed, and although the damp sheets had ended when I was eight, my sisters still used it as leverage, particularly when it came to blackmail, and would probably continue to do so until I turned ninety. The root of the bed-wetting, according to a friend of my mother’s who was up on such things, was my hatred of my mother, which I can tell you did not go over well in the Jackson household. But the true reason was simpler: My sisters would take great pleasure in telling me horror stories, and lying in bed at night, I would be too scared with
nightmares to set foot on the floor of my dark bedroom. So the natural thing to do was to just relieve myself in my jammies and then sleep
around
the spot—a habit from which I broke myself by simply moving my bed closer to the door and the light switch.

But in the station wagon, on the way to the Retreat, such petty assaults as bed-wetting reminders were common. Most brothers and sisters say they love each other even if they fight, but when I turned back around to face forward again, I remember thinking that I hated the twins more than I hated school and more than I hated farts.

When the Retreat came into view, its jutting geometry pushing at the luminescent drifting clouds behind it, I reached over and pressed my hand into the horn and Dad swore, and I heard Mama whisper tensely, “Starting in already.” I didn’t take offense when my mother began scolding us—there was some magnetic field around Gull Island, at its strongest at the Retreat, with its epicenter dwelling in Grammy Weenie herself. The closer Mama got to
her
mother, the more wound up she became.

Rowena Wandigaux Lee, no relation to Robert E. or Harper, although she claimed to be kin of anyone of note, had inherited the house and the land from her parents. After a few decades of renting the property out, the place was completely unrentable, and now Grammy Weenie lived there most of each year. She was a dethroned princess, riddled through like a Swiss cheese with the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. “My daddy invented a most curious elixir,” she’d say, her powder-white, liver-spotted fingers picking lint off our Sunday-school clothes, “and we would be doing quite well now, if that
pharmacist
hadn’t stolen it.” And we all knew she was referring to Coca-Cola, a drink that would never touch her lips; or, “Your great-great granddaddy was a wealthy man before the war”—and needless to say, the war she meant had ended in the
1860s. When Grammy Weenie kissed us, we smelled a mixture of bourbon, Isis of the Nile perfume, and something sour and yeasty; all of us children agreed that it was like having to kiss a toad, and my cousin Sumter tried to prove us wrong by kissing an actual toad, but our opinion could not be swayed.