Neverland (27 page)

“You won’t come back.”

“You watch. I’ll never leave you, Beau. Ever.”

He honked the horn as he pulled back out of the drive, in reverse the whole way down to the main gravel road. Dust and big green flies and pebbles sprayed up from the wagon. He flashed his headlights at me and honked the horn. I glared at the dust and flies. I looked down at my feet: Pansies lay crushed there, purple and yellow petals between my toes.

I wanted to scream, too. I wanted to holler to raise the dead, but I couldn’t even find my voice.
What are we gonna do without Daddy? What’s Mama gonna do? How are we gonna get by? What’s gonna happen to Governor without his daddy?
The thoughts spun through me in my panic. I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and then that I had forgotten how to breathe at all, and I opened and closed my mouth like a fish on land. I watched the station wagon go until it disappeared into the sky.
What are we gonna do?

I turned. Behind me the Retreat was unchanged and without calm. I could still hear my mother throwing things around her bedroom, pulling drawers from the dresser, her curses at her own mother. Grammy Weenie, downstairs, shouting up biblical quotes, the squeak of her wheels as she rocked back and forth on the warped floors. Governor was wailing. The television in the den was turned up loud, blaring “Mighty Mouse” cartoons—my sisters’ attempt to tune out the world around them. Where was Sumter? Where had he gone? Was he in Neverland? This was all his fault, his Neverland, his god.

It had to stop.

All this playing.

No more.

The dark giggling, the blood, the sacrifices.

The voice in my head was not Sumter’s, but my own.

Wrong
, just like a baby bawling for the first time.
Stop Sumter. No more.

I ran back to Neverland on unsteady feet. The mud oozed up between my toes, making obscene sucking noises as I went. I stepped on prickers and kept running, not stopping to pluck them out. I knew my father was gone for good—he’d had enough, he was a coward, he was running, too, perhaps to his own Neverland.

The shack seemed smaller and thinner than it had ever been before. I was just about as tall as it was. Maybe I was too tall for it. Maybe I had grown this summer and hadn’t noticed it. But I almost felt like I was looking down at Neverland. I tried the door, but it was locked from the inside. “You let me in, Sumter, goddamn you, you let me in!”

There was no answer. I could hear the thin wind across the curling yellow grasses. I waited to the count of sixty, and then I still waited to hear him moving inside, but I heard nothing.

I ran around to the side window, pressing my face against the glass. Brown cardboard was taped up on the inside. I slapped my hand against the window, rattling it. “You open up! You hear?” The outer wall gave a little as I leaned against it, as if with a little more effort I could just tip the shack over.

“You show me what’s in that crate, damn you, you show me what you got!” I kicked at the splintered wood of the wall with the ball of my foot, and my toes went right through. My foot came out smarting with splinters, but I didn’t care. I kicked again. “You open up or I will kick this place to shreds, you hear?” The pain from my foot was shrieking, but I slammed it again into the wall. I kicked so hard that I fell down in the mud on my butt, barely missing a large rock. Using both hands, I lifted the rock and threw it at the window. The glass broke in a neat chunk where the rock
went through, and when I heard a small yelp, I actually thought it was the window that had screamed.

Then I heard him, knocking things over, tripping around all that junk that was piled around inside there.

“You let me in,” I whispered, “or I’ll tell them
everything
.”

The door creaked open. Sumter stood there, his dark-encircled eyes glaring at me. I hadn’t noticed, but he’d gotten thinner in the past week, almost like he was shrinking in on himself. He looked wizened; he looked like he was dying.

“All right,” he said.

I limped to the open door.

“Your daddy’s gone,” he said, without his usual tone of superiority. He stood back, away from the door. He held a trowel in his hands. It was caked with dirt. Spiraled around his left arm was some of Aunt Cricket’s laundry cord.

I remained in the doorway. “Did Lucy make him leave?”

Sumter looked surprised, like this hadn’t occurred to him. “I wouldn’t—Lucy wouldn’t do that. Lucy doesn’t care about grown-ups.”

I glanced around the shack. It was cold and smelled like the meat drawer in our refrigerator back home. The candles were lit, and in their center, the crate. Next to the crate was a ditch. A shovel was thrust in the dirt.

“I’ve been burying something,” he said quickly, but I could tell he was partially lying. He had that look.

“Another sacrifice?”

I thought he smiled, but his face was pained. It was a grimace. “No.”

“What’s in the crate?”

“Lucy.”

“No, I mean, what’s really in the crate?”

“You have to see through the crate to Lucy. And to our father. I know you seen him. I
know
it. He is the devourer. He is the Feeder Who Walks
in Shadows. And he
loves
us like we were his own. And there’s this . . . ” From the dirt he withdrew the small animal leg that he’d shown me before—a dog’s leg. “This was my brother’s.”

“You ain’t got a brother.”

“I had one just like
you
have one. Only mine was a year older than me. She kept him here. She nursed him here.”

“Who?”

But he ignored me. “We come from her body and we must return through her body. My daddy’s waiting.”

“Your daddy’s drunk, if you ask me.”

“My daddy’s waiting. God is a feeder, don’t you know that? Everything eats everything. Let me show you what I seen, Beau, what I
seen
with my mind’s eyeball,” and he reached over with that paw and scratched across the back of my hand, and it hurt really bad, and I wanted to scream, but it was like a strong electric shock and I was thrown across the room, against the wall. When I looked up, the color of the light had changed in the shed, and it smelled new; it smelled fresh.

From outside, the sunlight entered, a violet sunlight like it was early morning, and Sumter was no longer there with me. The strange dwarf woman with the white hair was in his place.
Lucy.
Her frog eyes rolling up into themselves. She had stitches across her forehead, just above her eyes, and she was tearing at them with her fingernails, and they were popping out. Into the chasm of her open skin she poked around with her fingers and moaned as if someone were tickling her, and then she giggled, pressing down harder with her fingers into her open forehead, her eyes twitching, her legs rubbing against each other like she had to go to the bathroom, and I heard some noise in the corner, from the shadows, and there were eyes staring out at her, and there was the paw, reaching from the dark to the light.

And the creature that the paw belonged to.

Moving clumsily, like the baby it was, into the light.

Its lips slippery with saliva.

It was small and ugly as it moved, with its one paw, its hand on the other arm clutching at the air, searching for nourishment.

The woman giggled as her fingers dug more deeply into her scalp.

The child that crawled toward the woman had no eyes, and I would not have screamed because of its one paw, for Grammy had often told stories about monster children who were the cross-bred sons to farm boys, or old women who had daughters with enormous heads filled with water. But the scream came up through my stomach and into my throat and out into the air because of the baby’s tail, which was like a fish’s, swimming upstream in the air as it moved forward.

And the resemblance.

Not to the giggling mother.

But to the brother.

To my cousin.

My real mama, Beau,
his voice pricked into my mind.
She had found a way into another world, where my father lived. Where nothing hurt. Nothing. They all lie, the grown-ups. All lie, and all feed. And my daddy is the All that Must Feed. I look like my mama, but I am my daddy’s son, and this is my daddy’s house. I was born to devour. I was born to feed. Where I am is Neverland. I am Neverland.

“Sumter,” I gasped. The light in Neverland extinguished, and I lost control of my body—my shorts were moist where I had suddenly urinated.

Then I opened my eyes: They had been closed all along, I had been dreaming standing up.

Sumter stood close to me, his breath tickling my face.

“Who is Lucy?”

“You know. Or are you stupid?”

“Who is she?” I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him hard.
“You tell me!”

He snarled, “Who do you think she is?”

“I
don’t
know.”

“She’s my mother. My
real
mother.
The Weenie killed her. The Weenie is evil. The Weenie stopped Lucy from taking me to Neverland, so now I have to bring Neverland here. Out. We won’t never have to grow up and be like
them.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, too, with strength I didn’t know he had.

“Let go.” I tugged myself free of his grasp and stepped into the circle of candles.

“Beau, what they did to her—was
bad
. They’re
bad
people. We don’t never got to be like them. We can change the whole world. We can make everything Neverland. Just one more sacrifice.
One more
.” He pointed to a place near the crate. Next to the crate was the ditch, only it was more than a ditch. It was a long hole.

“You burying more animals?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” he said.

This got my curiosity up. I leaned over the hole and looked down. Because of the rain, some of the hole had filled with muddy water.

His voice was sly: “I’m just digging.”

“You’re trying to dig up those dead slaves.”

“No. I’m trying to bury . . . ”

I glanced back at him, peripherally, because there was a flutter of movement. First, I saw the laundry cord, dangling along his arm like a giant white worm.

But the movement was the shovel, in his hands.

The shovel was coming for my head just as he was saying, “ . . . you.”

I dreamed of the dead slaves, manacled together, floating above me. Their limbs moving as if with some will, but it was the tide pulling them forward and pushing them back, forward and back. Seaweed wrapped between them. They were heading for the peninsula; it was drawing them to it. I was beneath them, somehow able to breathe in the seawater like it was
the cleanest air. I held onto a rotted length of timber from some ancient wreck. The faces of the slaves were indistinct, and as I squinted through the green waves, I saw who they were. One was my mother, her hair all but torn from the side of her head, her eyes bug-wide; and then there were Nonie and Missy, barnacles attached to their necks, small fish pecking at their earlobes, at their toes; Aunt Cricket and Uncle Ralph, too, the farthest. All floating toward Gull Island, all heading there, dead but being pulled. Pulled, and eaten by the things that feed. Grammy Weenie had once told me that even trees move, perhaps even stones, all creation moves. And even the dead. Tugged at by the sea, but who was to say that even in life we did not move because of forces outside ourselves? Human will could not be separated from the will of the universe. Grammy Weenie’s voice again, “The flesh and the spirit eternally at war, never resting. Always we must seek the higher ground.”

In the dream, I began swimming upward, into the horror of my drowned family, up into that mass of flesh. Because beneath them, I was trapped by them. But if I swam into them, if I rose above the waves, I would reach higher ground. I would be safe. I became tangled in their arms: They formed a circle around me, and as my head came up above the surface of the water, I could no longer breathe, and the bodies of the dead dragged me back into their loving, devouring arms.

I awoke gasping.

I was lying on my back in cool mud, water coming up around my neck and back, but my face was well above it. My hands were tied together, as were my feet, but it wouldn’t matter—I tried moving my arms and legs, and there was nothing doing. I tried wiggling my fingers to get the blood going, but my wrists were bound tight with laundry cord. I was packed in by wet earth, with just my nose and mouth coming up to some opening for air. I tried opening my eyes, but the dirt pressed against them.

When I spoke, all that came out was a moan. But I knew I was awake, I knew I was conscious.

“Beau?” It was Sumter above me. “You can breathe, Beau?”

I let out a moan.

“It’s the last sacrifice, Beau, a human one. To Lucy.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It’s not you, Beau, I’d
never
do that. You’re my cousin.” Sumter was crying, or just about to cry. His voice was weary; he sounded like he longed for sleep. “And it won’t be your sisters. I wouldn’t . . . and it doesn’t matter, because a sacrifice, once you make it, well, it ain’t really a sacrifice ’t’all. It’s for Lucy. It’s what Lucy
wants
. Lucy and my
natural
daddy.”

I concentrated on breathing.

“And anyway, it won’t be painful. I don’t think he can really feel pain. Not like we feel pain. And it’s the law of the universe, right? Eat and be eaten. It’s a cycle. It’s where we have to go, and he won’t mind. And this way he’ll never have to go bad. Everybody, you know, everybody in this whole damn world goes bad one day, if you live long enough. Even the Weenie knows it. Corruption. He won’t never have to know corruption. So it’s not even a bad sacrifice.”

And I knew.

I knew who the sacrifice would be.