Neverland (7 page)

I was too scared to look her in the eyes, so I watched the silver brush in her hand and the small pink squiggly veins that ran around her knuckles and under the ruby ring she kept on her thumb. Her fingernails were chewed down to the soft white flesh; the cuticles were shiny half-moons.

“A prevaricator is a young man who lies. You love your grammy?”

I nodded.

She shook her head slowly, leaning back in her wheelchair, letting out a rasping laugh. “No you don’t, Beau, you will never be a liar, so don’t even try. You hate me, all children do, all children do because I know what children
think
, I know what you’re up to, all the time. So when I die, you just grab some sliced lemon from your iced tea and rub it around your eyelids and then you can pretend to cry and people will think you loved your grammy. What people think is all that matters in this world.”

“I don’t hate you, Grammy.”

“I don’t care if you do, young man. I’m your grandmother and you can hate me or like me, but I won’t have you lying to me. Now, come over here.”

I could’ve stepped backward and run away. The old woman was in a wheelchair, after all, and it wasn’t likely that she would jump out of it and chase after me into the woods or down to the shore. If I were my cousin, I would’ve done it. But I wasn’t Sumter, and I had never disobeyed the grown-ups except when they weren’t around to find out about it. My feet began tingling, and I knew that if I didn’t step toward her, I would not be able to move, I would take root right there, my toes would sink into the floorboards and tangle around beneath the house and then they’d have to cut me down. I padded over to Grammy Weenie, and she had me sit up on her lap, the silver brush still in her hand. Long strands of her white hair
hung down from its bristles like tentacles from a Portuguese man-of-war. She raised it above my head, and I was sure she was going to bang it against my shoulders, but instead it came down softly on my hair, and she gently brushed through my scalp. I looked straight ahead, out onto the road, the trees, the sky, and could not see Neverland, could not see Sumter. All I could smell was Grammy’s Isis of the Nile perfume and her sour breath.

“You’re a good boy, Beau, I know you are, I can see your soul, and it’s a good soul. But everything can become corrupt. It’s nature, and all nature must be fought. Nature is evil because it corrupts. Flesh is corrupt, child, and spirit is pure, and all of life is a struggle between spirit and flesh, and flesh must never be allowed to win.
Never
.”

The effect of her voice, a moment ago raspy and terrifying, transformed into this lullaby, this soft monotone, as she brushed gently, gently, in careful, even strokes along the ridges of my crewcut, was hypnotic. “Flesh and spirit, child, always at war, the demon and the angel fighting, but always the spirit will seek the higher ground, always we must seek the higher ground, flesh is our prison, but always we strive to break free.” I felt her silver brushing in the drawers of my mind, her words repeating themselves over and over, and I was no longer frightened, just sleepy, and soon I closed my eyes, her brush calming my blood.

Somewhere in my falling sleep I heard her ask, “
What did he show you there
,
child? What was it
?”

And in my dream in the dark of my head, I told her, and it didn’t hurt to squeal, it felt like a peaceful bed into which I was sinking.

A fragment of dream began tugging at me:
two figures, they were shadows, but one was a woman, and she was saying, “Go ahead and do it, see if I care, I don’t care,” and the other one, sounding like my father, was saying, “I don’t know why you make me do these things,” and then she was choking and he was crying like a baby
.

I awoke in the upstairs bedroom, thinking I had screamed. I sat up in bed. How the heck had I gotten there? Who had carried me up? I had not lost the feeling in my arms and legs completely the way I usually did,
although it was a few minutes before I felt steady enough to step down on the floor without falling. The clock on the shelf read 6:30, and I was so disoriented I thought it was early morning. I didn’t know what I had done between the day before and now. Had I slept the whole time? Sunlight lay like butter across the damp sheets—I’d been sweating. I got out of bed, fully clothed, and walked down the hallway to my parents’ room.

My mother lay on her back, diagonally across the bed, her right arm draped across her forehead, her left on her stomach. She wore a skirt; her blouse was unbuttoned to reveal her white bra. I tiptoed around the edge of the room, pausing as if every creaking board were painful, until I could look into the crib. Ever since I’d heard of crib death, I would check on my little brother every now and then to make sure he was still breathing. The baby was sleeping peacefully. It was the only time I adored him, when he was asleep, the only time I was happy to have a little brother for competition. He was definitely breathing: His small bean nostrils flared and flattened. He had a body like a fat little buddha, and his face was a ripe peach. I tickled his toes with my fingers, but he didn’t stir. Governor was off in a more peaceful dreamland than the one I had just visited.

“Beau?” Mama asked, and I glanced over to her. She lifted her arm away from her eyes, brushing her hair back. She was already pulling her blouse together with her left hand. “It’s so hot in here. I wish she’d put in air-conditioning. You okay, sweetie?”

There were times when I didn’t think my mother recognized me, and this was one of those. The word “sweetie” was the tip-off: She only said that after a stiff drink. Not the gin-and-tonic of the cocktail hour, but bourbon, straight up. And she only had a stiff drink after an argument with my father, and she only argued with my father if he was drinking, too. An entire situation presented itself to me: My parents were guzzling bourbon at six in the morning. But it was too hot to be dawn, and I smelled supper downstairs, so they’d had their bourbons, and a row, and now Mama was recuperating while Daddy was out back somewhere, walking off steam.

“I had a nightmare,” I said to my mother, who smiled sympathetically.

But her mind was on other things, and her words seemed perfunctory. “Did you. Well, it’s only a dream, sweetie. You like scary movies too much, don’t you. Oh, well. Want to tell me it?”

“Nothing special. It was just scary.”

She stood up, buttoning her blouse—in the humidity and heat of Gull Island it was normal to always be half-dressed, to see bits of slips, of undershirts, a white lace hem, a sweat-mottled edge of boxer shorts. She began a series of sighs, and I sniffed for the whiskey, but there was none. “Aunt Cricket’s loaf must be done. Go wash up and call your sisters, will you, Beau? And tell Miss Sanders that your daddy won’t be joining us tonight at the table.”

“How could you nap through it?” Missy asked, grabbing me and pulling me into the twins’ room as I went by. She shut the door, and Nonie, who was in a corner checking the tan line around her shoulder straps said, “Try being a little blasé.”

“Blasé?”

“You don’t have to get excited every time it happens, just because they don’t love each other. They’ve never loved each other, they’ve only been staying together for the children. That’s why people get married at all. Nothing to go hysterical over.”

“
God
, Nonie, they were at each other’s throats.”

“Exaggeration.”

“Didn’t you hear it?”

I shook my head.

“Daddy said he didn’t know why we came on this trip, and Mama started crying, and then she threw the lamp at him.
Gawd
, Beau, how could you not hear it? Governor was bawling, and the lamp broke in a million pieces and I think they’re getting divorced.”

“Such a little actress,” Nonie sneered. “They were only being foolish and drunk. Mama had her julep. It was an ugly lamp, anyway.”

“Mama says we should go downstairs now.”

Missy waved her hands in the air the way I’d seen charismatics call down the holy spirit into their scalps. “How can we
eat
after what just went on?”

“I’m so hungry, I’m
ravished
,” Nonie said, adjusting the red-and-yellow beach towel more tightly around her waist. Her bathing-suit top was almost flat against her chest, but when she wore it she sucked in her tummy and pulled her shoulders back so it looked like she had breasts.

“You’re wearing that down to supper?”

“So what?”

“Hey-ey.” Someone banged on the windowframe from the outside, which was quite a feat as the room was on the second story. It was Sumter. “You look like Lady Godiva,” Sumter said. He shocked us all: He was leaning over the window ledge from the outside, his arms hanging in, his face pink with sun and effort.

“You climb all the way up here?”

“No, you dumb bunny, I
flew
. ’Course, I shimmied up on the drainpipe, and
you
,” he pointed directly at me and I felt my face going red, “I know what you did, squealer, and I told you I’d kill you and that’s just what I’m gonna do.” He raised something up from the outside ledge. It was yellow and oblong, a balloon. “Bombs away!” He lobbed it at me. I ducked down. The balloon sailed right smack into Missy’s sunburned face. Both the balloon and her forehead seemed to burst open at the same time, and she screamed as water drenched her hair and dribbled down across her chin. Nonie laughed, wiggling her fanny as she walked around us and out the door. Sumter had already disappeared from sight. I turned to Missy to help wipe her face off, and she said, “Thanks a lot!” as if I were to blame for her being hit just because I had dodged the water balloon.

 

SUPPER was Aunt Cricket’s Famous Meatloaf, which floated in greasy tomato sauce puddles, potatoes, and boiled kale. I wasn’t all that hungry,
which was unusual for me, but I felt vaguely guilty for having perhaps squealed on Sumter and his shack. Although I couldn’t remember exactly what it was I’d told anybody—I was still so confused by what I thought I saw in Neverland. And I was mad at him for lying to them about the crab, but more guilty for the worst crime: squealing. I had fallen asleep in Grammy Weenie’s arms and then awakened upstairs, but anything in between was fuzzy, like the floor underneath my bed.

The drone of the ceiling fan made all conversation sound as if it were underwater, and Mama sat next to her sister and kept rubbing water spots off the flatware with her paper serviette. Governor was sitting up in his high chair with baby slop running down his chin. Uncle Ralph was telling jokes, but I could barely hear him, and Aunt Cricket kept interrupting him with, “I don’t mean to be such a wife, honey, but couldn’t you please not put your elbows so far over on the table?” Or, “I don’t mean to be such a nag, Ralph, but you could pass the potatoes to Grammy, if you had a mind.” Missy was kicking me under the table, and Grammy Weenie sat near me at one end and did not look up from her plate while she ate. Nonie ate her food in a lady-like manner, chewing each bit a thousand times; she ignored the rest of us.

Sumter dug into his food with relish. “Mama this is the absolute-lee best meatloaf you ever did cook.”

“You ready for seconds, Sunny?”

Sumter nodded greedily. “Am I ever.”

“Big appetite,” Uncle Ralph nudged his wife, “for a big mouth.”

“I’m just hungry, is all,” Sumter’s voice was smaller, thinner.

“He’s a growing boy, Ralph.”

My mother stood up so quickly, pushing her chair back, that even Grammy Weenie looked up from her plate. “I don’t know why you men are so inconsiderate to the people around you. It’s not like anyone
needs
you for anything.”

Missy stopped kicking me under the table. Nonie began scratching her neck; she always did that when she was nervous. She rolled her eyes and whispered, “Here we go.”

Grammy Weenie waved her fork around in the air. “All I ever ask for is peace and quiet at the table, and this is what I get. Well, thank you very much for this scene, Evelyn, and may you burn this quotation into that mind of yours: ‘Behave like a nut and you will soon become one.’”

Mother squinted her eyes and leaned forward, her palms slapping down on the table. “And I have one for you, too, Mama, and it goes, ‘The
nut
doesn’t fall far from the tree.’”

Grammy smiled and took my hand up in hers. “Your mother, dear, was always a high-strung child. I thought I was raising daughters, but I have since discovered I was raising demons.” The ring on her thumb scratched against the back of my hand.

After we’d finished eating, I found my father smoking a cigarette out on the front porch.

“I wasn’t hungry,” he said when he saw me.

“It wasn’t very good. Mystery loaf.”

“Want to sit?” He made room on the porch swing next to him.

I shook my head. “I just didn’t know where you went.”

“I was here. I’m your daddy, Snug. I’ll always be here, don’t you worry about that.”

“I wasn’t. And I’m too old for Snug. And I wasn’t worried.”

“If you ever think you might be, you’ll see. I’ll be somewhere nearby.”

Mosquitoes pecked at my neck and ears, and the sky was murky with oncoming night. The sound of the ocean was like trucks out on the highway near where we lived in Richmond. I could see no stars, not because there weren’t any, but because I had closed my eyes and was wishing that we were back there in our small house with our dog Buster. And if I opened my eyes after I counted to ten, I would be there, in my room, and the stars and the dark would be different than what hung over Gull Island, because this night was a wall that I would not be able to see over.

I AWOKE in the middle of the night with someone standing over my bed.

“Beau? You awake?” It was Sumter, although I could not see his face because of the dark.

“I am now.”

“I can’t sleep. Everybody’s snoring except you.”

“You can’t sleep here. Not enough room. And I’m mad at you. You lied about the crab.”