Neverland (32 page)

Each of us got a splinter of Neverland, and it dug down in our skins.

The thin branches of the tree I sat in whipped at my face; the wind and rain battered across the bluffs. The sky was dark and misty, and I let out a scream when the tiara bridge went. “Daddy! Daddy!” But no tears would come, I was all cried out. I had reached the furthest point of exhaustion.
And I felt reborn, as if I had truly died and was buried, and only now back from the dead. It was over, all that I had put up with in Neverland was out of me, out of my skin.

In my mind I heard Sumter’s voice.
Where I am is Neverland, now we are the All.

“Sumter,” I whispered, clinging to the branch, “bring him back,” I prayed. “Don’t hurt Governor. Keep him safe.”

Lucy says she will take him with her, that he will never have to turn into what
they
are. Look at the Weenie, Beau, look at her and her sad lying life, and your mama and daddy. Is that where you want to end up? In
their
world? Or in Neverland? You can come, too, if you want. Lucy wants all of us. Before it’s too late.
As his voice wormed its way through my mind, I smelled water and that vanilla way that Governor always smelled in the morning.

Another smell: rotting wood, strong and strangely aromatic.
It’s too late for you, Beau, I can see that. Lucy
told
me how you tried to
bribe
her. You’ll do anything to save your own skin.

Not mine,
his.
Don’t you hurt him.

It won’t hurt. He’s pure innocence. You can’t hurt that. He hasn’t learned how to
lie
yet. He’s living in bliss.

I heard Governor’s small
dit-do
sound.

Hear? He’s
happy.
He knows I’m taking him to a happy place.

You
do
sound like the Weenie.

Just as if I were hooked up to a radio, the frequency buzzed and crackled, and I didn’t hear his voice anymore. I screamed inside my head for him, but he didn’t respond. He controlled the telepathy between us, and he could shut it off if he willed.

I scrambled down from the tree and fell smack into the mud. It splashed up all around me, drenching me from head to toe. I let out a string of obscenities. The rain pelted me. I heard cries from the house, and from beyond the land the roar of surf and thunder and ear-splitting lightning crashes. It was like a booming orchestra with no conductor other than madness. I would’ve liked to lay down and die, to just let things go out of control, but the thought of my baby brother, over and above all else, was my fuel. This was nothing as easy as checking on him in his crib to make sure he was still breathing. This was going to take everything I had. I pushed despairing thoughts out of my head: of Daddy perhaps washed into the bay with the tiara bridge; the image of Sumter taking up a trowel and stabbing my brother through his chest in some demonic ritual.

I stumbled against the wind, to that sacred place, with branches scratching at my face, and came around the side of the smoldering tree beside the ruins of Neverland. The bark of the tree was blackened, and I caught a glimpse of movement. Above the wind, the sound of creaking wood, as if it were being bent. “Sumter?”

The tree, with its lightning streak split, was shaking in the wind. What were left of its branches swung down and back. But there, at the trunk, something inside of it, something moving. Fingers coming from inside the wood, tugging at the bark. Their nails long and curled, the skin of each finger ragged.

Scraping at wood.

Trying to emerge.

Grammy Weenie’s words in my mind,
that place beneath the skin of this one . . . it is madness . . . they know how gods mate with humans . . . the world is a skin . . . hack at the flesh of life to the beating heart.

The fingers bled as they scraped at the wood, shaking the tree.

“Lucy,” I said.

As the fingers scraped, the tree began screaming, but not the way the trees had screamed in my dreams, but the way a baby screams because he’s been awakened.

“Sumter!”
I yelled.
“Goddamn you, Sumter!”
I slogged through the mud and rubble of Neverland, stepping over bits of aluminum siding and wood, and grabbed the rake. I battered the tree with it, taking aim for the fingers. One of the tines from the rake drove into the knuckle of an index finger, and blood gummed up the rake like sap, holding it fast to the trunk.

I tried to wrestle the rake out of the tree, but another sound caught my attention and I let go.

From behind me I heard my mother calling, “Beau? Beau! Come back inside! Right now! You hear?”

I turned around and saw her running from the Retreat, still in her bathrobe and slippers. Her hair was matted against her scalp, and her face was colorless. All around us the howling storm separated us even as we came together. “Mama,” I said, feeling like a two-year-old.

Mama yanked at my hand, and we both almost slid into the muddy ground. She looked like a stone wall, no fear or anger or upset. At the most emotional times, the ones when she was truly backed into a corner, she put on a mask of emptiness. “Get in the house,” she said, and I felt the pinch of her fingers on my arm.

“He has Governor!” I screamed.

“I have enough trouble without . . . ” But her words trailed off. She was looking over my shoulder, her mouth half open.

I heard the crunch of twigs and mud and leaves, the earth splitting in two, the sound of something digging its way upward, scrabbling toward the air.
Always we must seek the higher ground.

My mother’s expression of wonder had not changed, and were it not for her open mouth, the drool down the side of her chin quickly being washed away with rain, I would not have dreaded looking back over my shoulder. Her face was stripped of all emotion but one, and that emotion is unnamable: It begins with fear but becomes what a human being must experience when she sees through the skin of the world to the madness of its bones and sinews.

A voice behind me, one I recognized immediately, said, “Hey-ey, Beau, what are we gonna play, anyway?”

My blood froze as I turned, my mother squeezing my hand so tight at the wrist that it felt like she was sawing into me with a dull blade.

“Zinnia,” I said, recognizing the voice.

She had the rake in her fists, all her fingers bleeding. She swept aside mud and leaves with her hands as she scraped her way out of the grave from beneath the trunk of the burned tree. Even through the rain her smell was strong: the stench of barnacles and dead bluefish, the rotting timber of docks, of damp seaweed buzzing with flies. Mama smelled it, too; she finally let go of my wrist and put both her hands over her nose and mouth, gasping. “Help me out,” Zinnia said, pressing the palms of her hands down into the sinking mud as if it were quicksand pulling her under. Her round face turned up to mine, the brows crossed with exertion, her dirty blond hair caked with mud, her rotting skin gleaming with sweat.

When she opened her eyes, as if just waking from a long sleep, they oozed with a lumpy white fluid that dribbled down her tattered cheeks.

I could not move, I could not speak, I could not think.

Her brothers were also digging their ways up from where they’d been buried, shaking frantic grubs and ants from their fingers as they tore at the ground. Wilbur’s face was bloated, and when he opened his mouth, as he stretched upward, a large catfish struggled to emerge from where it had been stuffed down his throat. The fish’s mouth opened and closed, its eyes stared insensibly, its fins flexed and relaxed. The boy made choking sounds, and when his hands were freed, he clutched at his neck; the anchorlike tail of the fish was caught in his throat like a squirming Adam’s apple.

Goober had emerged, and he grinned like an idiot, his mouth a gash of gray meat. “Eat flesh, drink blood,” he giggled. He had on his swimming trunks, and the skin was ripped from his shoulders down to his navel, exposing charred bones alive and swarming with grubs. Like a baby who has just learned his first phrase, he repeated, “Eat flesh, drink blood, eat flesh, drink blood.”

Zinnia had the rusted rake in her hands. She clutched it so tightly that the bones of her fingers ripped through her flesh like she was shedding a glove. The teeth on the edge of the rake looked more like gray shark’s teeth than metal. “I
told
you.”

I could not answer.

“I
told
you. Some things just don’t get better.” Her dress was soaked through, so I could see her nipples like buds on cherry trees, her stomach low and egg-shaped. I didn’t look back up to those curdled and dribbling eyes.

“Eat flesh,” Goober said, “drink blood. Eat flesh, drink blood.”

“Lucy made us this way,” Zinnia said. She waved the rake in front of my face, swiping at the air. “She told us we wouldn’t hurt, but Beau,
everything
hurts. Sometimes,” she licked her lips, “we
like
to hurt.”

Wilbur still was struggling with the catfish in his throat, shaking his head from side to side, picking at the skin of his neck, making sounds like he was trying to throw up.

“We swam out for miles, it seemed like, and she told us we would reach Heaven, Beau. But you know where we are? You know where she
keeps
us?” She swung the rake down, and it almost hit my face. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t think I could move; my muscles would not work, my blood would not thaw.

“It sure ain’t Heaven,” Goober said, the gash of his mouth chewing on the words. He jabbed his fingers into his breastbone, coming back with a handful of grubs; he stuffed them greedily into his mouth.

“You know where she keeps us? Do ya?” Zinnia brought the rake down, and as it sliced through the sheets of rain, aimed directly for my face, she said, “She keeps us buried. She keeps us good and rotten!”

Both Mama and I had stood there paralyzed, and I had almost forgotten her, standing behind me, her mouth agape. But as the rake came down, I fell back against her and we both fell to the ground.

The rake grazed my shoulder, tearing my shirt, and I fell to the grass.

“Just teasin’ you, Beau, just teasin’,” Zinnia said, her eyes almost dribbled empty.

“In the house.” Mama sounded like she was in shock. “Now, Beau, in the house.” I leaned back against her for support.

“Y’all called us back to play,” Zinnia said. “Y’all made the sacrifices to Lucy. It’s not fair if you don’t want to play now. You
got
to play. We been waiting for
ever
to play.”

She stumbled forward with the rake.

She held it up like a banner.

A jagged spear of lightning shot from the dark sky right to the rake’s handle, illuminating Zinnia’s bones like an X ray, and she shook violently as she swung the rake around again.

I was blinded by the brilliant white.

Blinded by the lightning, or by the rake as Zinnia brought it down on my mother and me.

I felt like I’d been shot out of my body.

 

 

It
is
just a game. It seemed so real for a second.