Neverland (25 page)

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Authors: Douglas Clegg

BOOK: Neverland
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“It’ll be all right,” I said, patting her shoulder.
“Maybe we’ll just go home soon.” She sighed, rocking Governor against her breast. “We’ve stayed too long, is all, too damn long.”
10
Nonie said to me, “When I grow up I’ll know how not to raise children by just watching
her
.” Daddy and my uncle came in at four with no fish and smelling like a brewery. As we walked off to Neverland in the early evening, Aunt Cricket called after her son, “Sunny? Don’t play too long in the woods. It’ll be too dark to play freeze-tag soon. You gonna play freeze-tag, Sunny? The croquet set is set up in the yard. You want to play croquet?”
Sumter said the password to Neverland over and over as we got farther and farther from his mother’s voice.
“Beau, present your sacrifice.”
I held up the cigar box.
“No, I mean get it
out
.”
I opened the lid carefully.
The mouse was adorable. It cowered, terrified, in its corner. “Gawd,” I said, my mild Southern accent becoming stronger as I realized the awfulness of hurting living things. The mouse had small nipples on its belly. It was a mother mouse, and somewhere its children were starving because I had trapped it.
“One less mouse,” Nonie said.
Sumter, with outstretched arms, “Hand it over.”
I shut the lid on the box. “I’m going to let it go.”
My cousin snarled. “When you gonna learn? When you ever gonna learn? Neverland
wants
the sacrifice, Lucy
wants
the sacrifice. The
All
wants the sacrifice. You have to prove your faith to our god. Get down on your knees, sinner, and
pray!
Pray to Lucy for forgiveness for your sin of
pride
, for your sin of pretending to know the mind of Lucy!” He was spitting as he railed at me, slapping his hand down on the top of the sacred crate.
Missy clasped her hands together in prayer, her eyes rolled up into their lids, and she began whispering to herself,
“Lucy, we pray you, forgive this our brother, he doesn’t know what he’s about.”
“Jeez, Beau, just give him the mouse, for God’s sakes,” Nonie huffed, her hands on her hips like a little mother. “All this racket over a
mouse
, jeez.”
Missy made a grab for the cigar box, and I wrenched it away from her, but as I did this I hit my elbow into the wall and the box flew out of my hands. I watched as it spun in midair, the lid snapping open and the mouse cannonballing out of it, squealing what I was sure would be its last squeal.
It landed on its feet, knocking over one of the burning candles. Its fur caught fire. The sound of its scream was not that much different from a human cry.
I got down on my knees and scrambled in the dirt, trying to put the flame out with soil. I cupped my hands around the mouse; it was biting at my palms. The fire was out. The mouse was still in my hands. I could still feel its heartbeat.
I opened my hands.
The thing in my hands had red eyes.
It had a ridge of thick gray teeth like a shark’s.
It was growling at me.
It was still a charred mouse, still smoldering, still breathing. But its red eyes, its gray teeth.
“Beauregard, bring me my glasses,” it said.
The way Grampa Lee always said.
Beauregard, bring me my glasses.
Its breath was sourmash and old coffee grounds.
But the creature in my hand was just a burned mouse.
Now dead.
“You did that,” I said to Sumter.
Lucy.
Sumter clapped his hands slowly. Nonie and Missy began clapping their hands.
“Your first sacrifice,” my cousin said cheerfully. “That wasn’t so hard, now was it? Don’t cry, cuz. You done good.”
“It’s just a mouse. You hate mice.”
“Shut up, Nonie,” Missy said. “I understand, Beau. But that’s why it’s a sacrifice. ’Cause it hurts to do it.” She put her arm around me and whispered, “It’s just make-believe, anyway, isn’t it?” I noticed her eyes: dull, half-lidded, drugged, the way all our eyes were when we were in the shack.
NINE
A Book of
Revelations
1
“Look what I stole,” Missy said after Sumter had plucked the burned mouse from my hand and popped it through the opening of the crate of our god, Lucy.
Missy bent over to retrieve something from a paper bag. What she brought out was one of Grammy’s black composition books. She handed it dutifully to Sumter, who shushed all of us.
He opened the notebook to its first page. Sumter read aloud.
To my mind there is no more lovely and terrible phrase in all the En - glish language than ‘summer afternoon.’ For it was on a summer afternoon that a horror began for us, when I was just sixty years of age. I have never forgiven myself for what I did to my daughter, and I relive that moment every day of my life.
“This is gonna be great reading. What a
steal
. Lucy is very, very, very happy.”
“Read more.”
But what she had done was a sin of the gravest variety. What else could be done? She had given herself over to that darkness waiting there on the bluffs. Old Lee believed her to be an idiot, ever since the surgery in New Orleans, but I knew that all the doctors had done for her was remove the very emotions that kept her sane, that kept her human. If anything, her operation had released something from her mind that was better kept in its cage. But after we had come here, to Gull Island, she had only one purpose left in life, and it was a dark one. She was like a mad child, speaking to birds and to the grass as if all of nature could reply to her. The operation had opened a door in the madness of her mind; it had made it possible for her to see another world, one that may be all around us, but that we can’t see. It was the Wandigaux inheritance; it was our curse.
 
“What a yawn-o-rama,” Nonie said. “Grammy’s always been a nut.” Sumter glared at her. “Lucy wants us to read it.”
“Yeah, sure.”
He continued.
 
And then there was the sad story of the drownings. I had thought, because her mind seemed so much like a child’s that playing with children was good for her. She was barely more than a child herself. I didn’t dare venture near the shed, for she would fly into rages each time I approached, but I thought a play area was good for her.
How was I to know what she did there? With those three children? How were any of us to know in what arts she tutored them?
In my mind’s eyeball, as Sumter would say, I saw Zinnia sitting where Missy had moments before been. Zinnia in her scraggly sack dress, her hair
sun-yellow, her teeth crooked as she smiled up to Babygirl, who had become a shadow in the back of Neverland. Zinnia’s brothers, Wilbur and Goober, were there, too, and were playing jacks. Wilbur took up one of the small metal jacks and cut himself across the wrist; he held it up to his sister, who lapped at the dripping blood.
Sumter’s voice was soft as he read.
Shall I commit to paper the atrocity of that golden summer afternoon when she swam with the children out to sea? I knew what she was about. I could’ve stopped her, I could’ve saved their lives. But I wanted to be rid of her: She was driving me to madness. I turned my back on them as they swam, and when I finally looked back, I did not see a single one of them . . .
“Hey,” Nonie said, “the Weenie’s been lying about Babygirl. She went and killed herself.”
“All grown-ups are liars. We
never
want to be grown-ups, do we?” Sumter closed the composition book. “You have done well, Missy, by stealing this in Lucy’s name. You are truly a child of your god.”
“They are liars,” Nonie nodded, dreamily. “They expect you to always tell the truth, and they lie through their teeth. They can all go to Hell.”
Even your daddy.
Sumter’s voice was in my brain.
He pointed to the snapshot I’d stolen from Aunt Cricket’s jewelry box: the man in the boxer shorts, pinned to the wall with the ΛΧΑ pin.
Even your daddy’s a liar, just like mine, just like all of them.
“It’s just your mama,” I protested. “She probably stole the pin and the picture from our mama. My daddy never loved your mama.”
They all lie, Beau. But there’s a way we don’t never have to be grown-ups. Lucy will take us there. Lucy wants us to never hurt.
“Can’t we fly again?” Missy pleaded. “I really loved that.”
“I wish we could just disappear,” Nonie sighed.
“Through Lucy,” Sumter grinned, reaching behind the crate, “everything is possible. And now we have one more sacrifice this afternoon, before the great sacrifice.”
Getting angrier the more I looked at the snapshot of my father on the wall, I said, “I think you’re making all this up as you go along. Why don’t you show us Lucy, huh? Why don’t we get to see?”
“I told you,” he said, “one more sacrifice today. Before the great one. And Lucy will be revealed.”
“What’s the ‘great’ one?”
“For me to know and you to find out.” He lifted a picnic basket—also stolen—from behind the crate. Reaching into one of the flaps, he withdrew a small black kitten. “And one of you must make this sacrifice,” he said.
The kitten mewed and pawed at the air, trying to bite him.
Growling noises came from the crate.
Lucy was hungry.
Sumter reached down and picked up a trowel.
He held it, handle out, toward me.
Bash its head in.
For Lucy.
“Not a kitty,” Missy huffed.
“Oh, it’s
okay
to kill mice and chameleons and junk, but not cats? Killing is
killing
.”
“I don’t care about mice. But not kittens, for God’s sakes, Sumter.” Nonie stood up, dusting herself off.
“Lucy wants us to do this.”
“I don’t care, I’m not gonna kill a kitten. It’s just plain mean and stupid, and if Lucy wants that, then I’m tired of playing this game.”
“This
game?
” Sumter was incredulous. “You think this is a game? Lookit.” He pointed all around the walls of Neverland: It was painted over with dirty words and sayings, some in chalk, some in spray paint, some in blood. We had written all of it. “You think this is a
game
we been playing?
You think
flying
was a game? You think that sacrifice is a game? We’re calling Lucy into us, don’tcha get it? Lucy’s our only salvation from them. Lucy’s the way out.”
And in one quick motion, before any of us could stop him, he jabbed the point of the trowel into the kitten’s neck.
2
The bunny screams because it is alive, the woman was saying, and when you’re alive, everything hurts.
“Did you see?” he asked me afterward, after my sisters had run shrieking from Neverland, after he had lain the dead kitten down in the crate. “Did you see?” His hands were covered in blood, and he didn’t look like a monster, and he didn’t look like the high priest of a god.
He looked like a stupid little boy who had just torn through the wrapping paper on his Christmas present. His eyes were wide and sparkling, his face flushed with excitement. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d begun foaming at the mouth and gibbering. He looked like a wild animal who had just caught its prey. I could imagine him holding the dead kitten between his teeth and shaking it in victory.
I knew then that he liked to kill.
“Did you see? You musta seen, cuz. I know Lucy speaks to you, so you musta
seen
.”
I fled from that place like it was the entrance to Hell itself. I heard his maniacal voice behind me. “You
saw
, but you’re too much like them! You’re a liar! Well, I banish you from Neverland! You hear me? You are
banished!
”
3
My sisters were inside by the time I reached the house. I was prepared to tell all, I was prepared to spill the beans regardless of my blood oath. Nonie said, “You really think he killed it?”
Missy shook her head. “Uh-uh, remember the rabbit? I think it was a trick. Beau—didn’t you say the bunny was already dead? Well, maybe the kitty was, too.”
“You don’t know that,” I said stonily.
“I’m gonna watch TV,” Nonie said, pouring herself some milk.
I wanted to scream at them:
He killed a cat!
Why were they so undisturbed by that sacrifice? Was it all a dream? If a child can feel the tidal pull of sanity within his small skull, I felt it then. The world was coming apart, and I didn’t know anymore what was real and what was imagined. My sisters acted as if nothing much had happened. Nonie went on a bit about how she was getting tired of Sumter’s games and all the make-believe. Then she very calmly went into the den and switched on the black-and-white TV. Missy followed after her with a plate of graham crackers with peanut butter spread over them.
I kept seeing in my mind’s eyeball that kitten unharmed, its small green eyes wide with curiosity as Sumter held it in midair. The mouse burning. What was in that crate, what thick fog covered our eyes in that shed that warped the way things really were? I was beginning to doubt that any of what had gone on in Neverland had truly occurred. Would we need surgery, too, and would we both one day egg each other on and swim out to the horizon until our limbs grew heavy and we longed for endless sleep?
I felt disembodied.
I saw the little boy who was standing in the kitchen doorway, leaning against the jamb. It was as if all my bad circulation had finally just stopped, the machine of my body had shut down.
Spirit and flesh constantly at war
, Grammy had said,
and always we must seek the higher ground
. I saw my flesh and spirit separate then. I saw them as two distinct entities, and I was ready to leave my flesh behind. Even my body parts seemed to tear loose from their tenuous connections, my hands floating away from their wrists, my head cut neatly at the neck, my torso twisting itself out of the sockets of my thighs.

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