Sketcher (18 page)

Nineteen

Now, don't judge me for what I'm about to tell you. But I reckoned I shouldn't let all that progress go to waste. So let's just say I strongly encouraged my brother to do some sketchin' for his own good. I knew he was all bent out of shape with the Teesha Grey breakup, so me and Doug, we tried to cheer him up by playin' soccer with him on the porch.

See, we'd made this wooden ramp for Pa Campbell's wheelchair. Just a gentle slope from the porch down to the ground, with rails, so Ma Campbell could wheel the old man back home easily when he started gettin' too rowdy. So what we would do, we would run up the slope with the soccer ball, and as soon as we got to where the ramp met the porch, we'd drop that ball and kick it before it hit the floorboards. Well, when it was ol' Fricozoid's turn to kick, he backed off and jogged a little bit, then ran full tilt from way out in the yard and up the ramp and he dropped the ball and gave one hell of a kick – and kicked the edge of the porch instead of the ball and broke his big toe.
Freeze frame.

Now, to be honest I knew that Frico wasn't wearin' his glasses, and I really should have pointed that out to the guy and insisted that he go and get them like Moms said we should, but he was havin' so much fun... I just couldn't. As a matter of fact I went hid them under the kitchen sink so he'd definitely forget. I also knew that the porch was slightly higher since Pa Campbell last raised it, but I was thinking: what's a inch gonna do?

So when he was laid up in the house for days, nursin' his toe, I came home one evening from school and climbed into the bed beside him, and I said to him real smooth, like the
Devil to Jesus in the wilderness: “Why don't you sketch your big ol' toe all good and better, just to see what happens?”

And when he cleared his throat and started makin' excuses as usual, I pulled out a Snickers bar and five dollars and fetched pencil and paper before he did it, even though it was for his own good. Well, he said he didn't have any appetite, on account of losin' his girl, so he only took the money and the pencil and paper, and of course the next day we were playing ball again. Moms said he'd just been pretendin' to hurt himself that whole time so he could cut school. That evenin' Frico comes around to the old car seat under the shady spot at the corner of the house.

“Hey Skid, I been thinkin'. It's time your face cleared up.”

I didn't show it, but I wanted to do cartwheels. I was tired of talkin' to people with my face turned away, and the teasin' at school was gettin' unbearable. I looked like a reverse raccoon. The only clear skin were the circles around my eyes. Everything else was darker and scarred. Worse than all that, I had had enough of Moms' blood-purgin' bitter cerasee tea in my gut and aloe-vera slime on my face – not to mention that cleansin' bar that smelt like wood glue. So this was goin' to be double bonus. More sketchin' and a healin'. Hallelujah!

Then, when Fricozoid added the fine print, I started gettin' suspicious.

“You gotta help me out, though. I need you to go out into the yard and fetch one of those big fat branches we use for firewood and drag it back here. Then, when Moms ain't lookin', go into the bathroom and give the toothpaste sketch I just did on the mirror a good wallop, and that should do it.”

“Say what? Ain't that goin' break it?”

“Yes, and? See, you gotta break the image for this to work, Skid. Destroy what you are and start all over. Anyway, lemme know if you're interested.”

He sighed and started walkin' away, and even though I knew he was bein' dramatic like Harry T, I grabbed his arm.

“No. OK... I'll go do it. Where's Moms?”

“Cookin' catfish outside. Go, go, go.”

I ran with my head down and my fingers scrapin' ground like I was on a real mission again. Matter of fact, this was the first mission Frico and me were gonna undertake in a while.

He called out after me: “Make sure that branch's gotta big knot at the end of it.”

Well, I dragged that stick inside and lined up the mirror and put my back into it and swung like I was at the World Series and – wham. No sooner had I smashed a spider web into the middle of the mirror and that God-awful toothpaste sketch, I heard Fricozoid right outside the door, callin' out: “Momma, Skid's done gone crazy. He's messin' with the bathroom mirror again.”

I ditched the stick and came out with my palms open in the silent what-the-hell kind of way that I learnt from Mai.

Frico was leanin' against the door jamb, pretendin' to clean his fingernails with a pencil. Moms was wadin' through the chickens in the front yard, stormin' inside from the porch.

Frico used the few seconds before she got close.

“That's payback for the porch football, Skid. You know I needed my glasses. I found them under the frickin' kitchen sink. Didn't you think I'd know?”

Anyway, if I was superstitious, I'd say that my seven years of bad luck for breakin' the mirror started immediately. I look past Moms, and there was a policeman at the doorstep. A few others were out in the yard. Doug and Tony stood around watchin' them. Moms saw the bathroom mirror in pieces and didn't even blink. She went back outside. The cops wanted to look around. Well, I'd welcome the city police instead of gossip reporters any day, but they didn't have good news for us either. One of them, a detective, he looked up under our house with a flashlight. He took a scoop on a long stick and carefully picked out a few things, including another alligator egg. Then he pulled off his rubber gloves and looked Moms squarely in the face.

“We've been investigating since you came in and asked us to look into his disappearance. Your husband is now officially missing, Mrs Beaumont. And I gotta tell ya, we're fearing the worst.”

The cop smelt like rubber and asphalt and concrete, if you can smell all that at once. And he wasn't usin' any fancy cop phrases.

A lady officer came around the corner of the house with a pair of Caterpillar work boots in her hand. They were waterlogged and swollen, and the leather looked rotten enough. Duckweed and water bugs were all over them. Three of Calvin's teenage kids sniffed them and then slinked away, uninterested.

“We found these in the water. Did they belong to your husband, Mrs Beaumont?”

Deep breath
. “Yes, they
do.
”

“Are you sure?”

Moms reached into her apron with one hand. The other hand started pointin'.

“Look here, officer. See those scuff marks on the toes? Those are from my two last kids learning to stand and walk on the front of their daddy's shoes when he came home from work. See those heels all slantin' and broken down – with pebbles up in the grooves? That's from him runnin' in here half-drunk every night to tell me some wild dreams o' his. See those tracks on the bottom? I can trace those footprints from here all the way to Gentilly when he goes stomping down some young gal's front yard, so yeah, uh-huh, I'm sure. I threw those boots out the goddamn house every day, twice a day, so of course I'm sure! And inside those boots is where he hid his damn cigarettes every time he fell off the wagon... like I'm fixin' to do... right now.”

She pulled out a box of cigarettes and some restaurant souvenir matches from the apron, and in a flash she was a smoker again. I'd heard about it, but I'd never seen her do it.
Funny how the first part of a fresh-lit cigarette almost smells like some delicious thing roastin'. Then, when you get to the middle, it's stiflin'. The smoke floated up and gave away the sunlight splinterin' through the treetops. The lady cop put the boots on the nut grass.

“Mrs Beaumont, we found body parts inside the boots. We'll have to analyse it carefully, but—”

Moms dragged the cig harder to numb the sharpness of that statement.

“Not in front of my kids, please. Tony, everybody inside.”

He dropped his voice. “I'm sorry. We just don't think that with the gators—”

“Detective. Please be kind enough to desist from telling me all the gory details until my children are out of earshot, thank you.”

When my moms was tryin' to hold herself together, she spoke proper English. Broken English is only for laughter or anger.

By the time the cops left with the boots in a bag, Ma Campbell was leanin' halfway out of her window, strainin' her neck to get the drama.

“Valerie! Valerie! What the poh-lice want now?”

“Nothin' Ma. Same Shindig questioning.”

“Heh? Ain't they done with all that? You know, I reckon those cops got a big crush on ya, and they usin' all kinds of excuses to come round heah.”

“Uh-huh. Yeah, Ma, maybe.” She sucked her teeth.

“Good thing you got that spider of yours to chase ol' Mr Officer Muffet away!”

Moms pretended she didn't hear that last part. That Mr Muffet joke was somethin' Pops started sayin' to Moms after I was born, I heard. He'd joke with her before he left early for work.

“Now, Val, don't you open the door for no strangers today. And if any Mr Muffet comes by trying to sit on my
tuffet, well... now you got eight legs and eight eyes to scare him away.”

I liked thinkin' of me and my brothers as one big blackwidow spider that scared things away, but I don't believe Moms saw it that way or found raisin' four kids in a swamp funny at all.

None of us breathed easily for the five minutes or so that Moms was speakin' to the police and Ma Campbell. I just remember being in a daze sittin' on the bed lookin' at my cheekbones, cos they were the only thing I could recognize from my mangled image in the dresser mirror. Mangled: that's how I felt. A crazy mosaic. Shattered, all over the place. And those pieces wouldn't even fall out so I could start again. Maan, I couldn't even destroy somethin' properly. Moms walked into the house, fire first, smoke trailin'. She sat down at the kitchen table and took a last drag, squintin'. The corners of her eyes showed brand-new crow's feet that she prob'ly got five minutes before. She crushed out the cigarette in a shallow tomato-paste can, waved away the last of the reluctant smoke and set the can at her feet.

“Y'all get in here.”

We stepped into the kitchen area. She looked at all of us, one at a time, for the longest time. Then she told us to get closer, like what she had to tell us was a secret.

Now, between what she said and the details that Tony filled in later on, here's what happened – and it ain't pretty.

The police believed that somebody had been under our house the night of the shindig. Somebody had been diggin' for somethin' and dug up dozens of alligator eggs instead. Soon mother alligator, she came by to check on her kids, and was so alarmed by the hollerin' and the helicopter, she dashed under the house, and her mouth just fell wide open when she came face to face with a certain Alrick Beaumont, who made a run – or, more specifically – a crawl for it. But Pops was no match for the speed of the gator, especially with the bayou
shoreline almost up under our house and all that extra mud. He prob'ly tried to get vertical, and he made it to the water eventually, but long and short, they found one of my pops' legs from the knee down floatin' under a patch of marsh grass out in the bayou. The rest of him was nowhere to be found, and they thought there was a slim chance he might still be alive.

I don't know if they were puttin' us on to make us feel better, but they said he might have used his other steel-toe Caterpillar boot to clobber the gator quite a bit, so the lizard took off and left the leg alone. Great, but when they pulled that decomposing leg from the water, it had a bullet hole through the trousers and didn't make us very confident. My pops had been shot through that leg before the gator took it off. The police would have to do the whole ballistics testin' of the bullet and all that to see if it was a cop bullet or gang bullet that got him.

Now, if my pops was alive, he'd have a hell of a lot of questions to answer about his possible involvement with the Couyon Gang. Why was he on the scene? Was he their lookout guy? Was he trying to break into the house from underneath it? Well, we could answer all those questions for 'em right away. First of all, my pops had too much pride to be led by James Jackson, even though his ambitions were crazier than Couyon himself. Secondly, we could bet that Alrick Beaumont had snuck into L-Island from God knows where and was obviously diggin' for seals that night – and prob'ly just chose the wrongest time to do it. I mean, the guy is the master of bad timing and poor judgement, and I hoped I didn't get those genes. He wasn't involved in anything but a bad deal with Backhoe Benet – and it ruined his whole life.

Twenty

Speak of the Devil, not more than two days after the police came, Benet appeared in the swamp all gussied up in a white felt hat and smellin' just like that city cop.

I saw him comin', but I wasn't goin' to tell Moms. I was goin' to crawl up under the bed and lissen. Tony and Doug were off in the pirogue, settin' a big ol' trot line to catch more catfish, and Frico was with them. Benet strode up to the door and knocked loudly. Moms moves the curtain, sees him, makes the sign of the cross, takes a deep breath and opens the door. She steps out onto the porch and closes it behind her. I go to the window where I can see her, but not him.

“How can I help you, Cap'n?”

“Hello, Val. Let me... get to the point. I came to tell yew... two things. The first is... I'm sorry for yer loss.”

“Well, that seems quite previous of you, Cap'n. The police don't think—”

He laughed softly, and when she stopped he dropped his voice even lower.

“And yew think the police know anythin', Val? Who do you think told them about the body parts? How do you think the Coast Guard swarmed in here when yew was all shindiggin' over my sons' cold bodies? Look, I know what goes on in this swamp. I been here for ever. And from the looks of it, ain't nowhere for an injured man to hide... from the sixteen gators in this section of the bayou – not countin' their gator friends who come by to visit. See, the cops like ta say things... all fancy, so yew feel better, Val. But I'm-a tell you like it is, in plain black and white. Alrick was a good man. He tried his best. Sorry for yer loss.”

Pause
. Cigarette smoke floatin' up and collidin' in slow motion with the underside of the porch's tin roof. Weird how Backhoe sounded like Broadway. Or was it the other way around? I was happy I spoke more like Moms. In English, I mean. My pops, he is brilliant, but he talks country.

Anyway, she had her other arm folded over the one that held the cig. She puffed again and sent a choo-choo-train blast to the ceilin'.

“I think that brings you to your second point, Cap'n.”

Backhoe sighed heavily. I imagined him adjustin' his hat, like in the movies.

“Val, we go way back, so... we should be able to help each odder out. I knew when yer boys were born... every single one of 'em. So, look, I found a place for you in the city. You and yer boys can go there... whenever you want. Just pack up and go. If it makes you feel better, yer welcome to pay me rent... but yew need to get your sons and get out of this swamp, Valerie. It's time.”

“Well, thanks for your concern and your offer, Mr Benet, but me and my boys'll be around here just a while longer. We waited so many years now, so a few more won't hurt nothin'.”

I heard him step towards her on the porch, and the angry blood in my ears drowned everythin' else out. But by the time I busted open to the front door to take the guy on myself, I saw that Tony, Doug and Frico were already standin' side by side in the yard starin' down ol' Backhoe. The Beaumont Black Widow
,
all eight legs and eight eyes, was in full effect, and we got this guy surrounded. It looked like Doug and Tony were gettin' ready to send that five-foot alligator gar they caught flyin' any second, so I was happy when Moms spoke up, cos that was our dinner.

“I think our front porch is a little too crowded, Mr Benet. Now I know this is your land... heard about that only recently – but it's still my house, so thanks for stoppin' by.”

Well, ol' Backhoe, he just smiled and stepped heavily down the three steps and walked with his hand in his pocket in the direction of his Lincoln Town Car that was parked far up near the tracks. He looked into the trees and the sky that was darkenin' a little, and a little breeze tugged at the hem of his white trousers when he stopped a little ways off. He spun around.

“Two things Valerie. One... it looks like it's gonna rain soon. Yew might wanna think about catchin' your drinkin' water from the heav'ns... instead of pullin' it up from hell. And two... what makes you think this is still my place?”