Sketcher (4 page)

So I was lookin' out from up in the conference-room tree, wonderin' what I could fine one of them for, and I saw Belly pedallin' towards L-Island along the train tracks. His plaid shirt was wet under the arms. I could fine him for that. Marlon was on the handlebars of the bicycle in one of those cool promotional T-shirts he got whenever he auditioned for a commercial. Belly was bobbin' his head and looked like he was talking to himself, while Marls had on those portable cassette-player headphones. As usual he was rewindin'
cassettes with a pencil and singin' Air Supply at the top of his voice. Truth is, that boy couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. So as soon as they rode up, I climbed down and told Marls to pay a fine. He grabbed the headphones off.

“Fine? For what?! The conference ain't even started yet.”

“For singin' in the swamps.”

“Since when?”

“Since Pa Campbell told me that in Peru you shouldn't sing in the jungle, cos spirits will sing along with ya.”

“Peru? Yo, look man, we live in America!”

“Peru
is
in America, moron.
South
America.”

Belly jumped in, clappin' his hands: “And we live in the South... of America, South
A-mer-ica
– you got that? So... pay the money, man, c'mon, time, time! Matter of fact Marls, why don't you just make it easy on yourself and go get us some
bánh mì
and some cheese at Ham Lee Lamb?”

“Lam Lee Hahn. And some cold drinks,” I said.

Marlon looked at us like he was being robbed. Which he was. He leant his head to one side.

“Wait just one minute, I wasn't the only one singin', man... Didn't you see Belly—”

“Naw man, I was
rappin'
. And that's different. Don't confuse the issue.”

Marlon was nine at the time. We prob'ly treated him like a little boy, cos he was so short. And he chose to hang out with Belly, who was only ten and over five feet tall – and that wasn't goin' to help. Anyway, he said we'd all soon stop laughin' at him when he became a child star like his uncle up in New York said he would. Of course we all gave him a hard time about that, 'cept Frico, who believed in the guy ever since he got a small part in a McCozie's Furniture commercial when he was seven. It was a TV commercial, but you only got to see ol' Marls for a smidgen of the thirty seconds. He sat in a sofa with his “TV family”, singin' one line in the jingle: “
Oooh... up to forty per cent off!
” That was funny as hell – cos
seriously: who sings about a damn discount anyway? Anyway, when some kids along Honey Drop Drive started singin' that Marlon was “forty-per-cent tall” or “forty-per-cent small”, Belly had to step in and rough these guys up, sayin' he was actually Marlon's half-brother and therefore the only one authorized to say nasty things to Marlon's face. Those kids bought it, even though Belly was touchin' the sky and Marlon was scrapin' the earth. Marls took all those blows like a champion, especially on his birthday. Every year, when his birthday rolled around, we'd say: “A child star needs to be a
child
, Marls, wha's happenin'?” And he'd say his uncle wanted to start right away, but his grandmother didn't understand the industry, cos she said he could only become a star when his grades improved.

Well, when he came back with the
bánh mì
and cheese, we climbed up in the conference room and I started breakin' open the middle of the bread and stuffin' the cheese in it. By the way,
bánh mì
is really French bread that thinks it's from Vietnam. Before long, Marls started back up with that child-star-dreamin'.

“I bet I can be a black child star like Gary Coleman.”

“African-American, that's the new term.”

“Yo Belly, look man. I'm not gettin' into all that South American, North American, African-American thing with you no mo', man. Whatever that new term is... I'm sure it's gonna be expensive. So I'm-a just be black, straight up!”

Well, it seems like things always came home to me in that tree, cos that was prob'ly the first time I was thinkin' about what Marlon was sayin'. Not the child-star part: it's what I would call the “who we are” part. You don't care too much about things like that when you're younger, but I was nearly nine.

But the way I saw it, we Beaumonts weren't “straight up” anythin'. My family couldn't call themselves Cajun just because Pops' greatest-granddaddies came from Canada and
settled in the Atchafalaya Basin. He abandoned that lifestyle a long time before, and he was so far away from the culture he couldn't tell us much about what Cajun meant except for some of the superstitions, some cookin' and some cuss words. And we kids, we weren't quite country, but we weren't city boys neither. We grew up in a place that was like the soggy meat between two slabs of city. Of course, livin' out in limbo didn't help us look “normal”. We'd turned up to school in clothes that showed we didn't live in the city, especially hip boots when it was rainin'. Meanwhile our friends would wonder what was up with our hair. Reddish-brown at the ends and black at the roots and off in every direction like nut grass. Plus, Moms made us all wear our hair in topknots – until we said we hated it. Frico never minded it, though, and soon the guy grew dreadlocks that he tied into three topknots that stuck out on top of his head. Made the guy look like a matchstick on fire – but he's an artist. Artists get away with anything. Anyway, I told our school friends that our moms is black and our pops is white, but I wasn't sure if it was all that simple to be called “Creole”, even though a dictionary might tell you that. By the way, I'm not sayin' we weren't good-lookin'. Hell, we all got our daddy's height and frame and our mother's face and her smile, which means we were tall and handsome, we Beaumonts. You could see my moms and pops in my face, but there was someone else there in the high cheekbones, like a kind of riddle.

Some kids liked callin' us “weird” or “red-boned” or even “
mestizo
”, even though we had no Spanish blood. But my creative-writin' teacher, Mrs Halloway, she would intervene and tell them that all those words didn't “adequately describe anybody's complexity”
.
I liked Mrs Halloway: she used words that sounded crispy, or crackled like a snack wrapper.

So after a few seconds of thinkin' about all that, I said to hell with it and just followed what my mother said when she was experimenting in the kitchen: “Mix it all up and see what
happens.” Well, thanks to Marlon aka Child Star, I felt like I had the mixed-up part down pat.

Now, between all that deep thinkin', the bread and cheese and my plans to cash in on Frico's talents, I forgot that I should have been watchin' out for those hyenas, the Benet boys. So – by the time I saw Squash Benet – he was at the foot of the tree with a damn chainsaw. He pulled the recoil. The saw buzzed. Then he looked up and tried to shout somethin' above the noise.

“I can't hear you. Turn it off!”

He turned it off, and then, every time I tried to say somethin' else to him, that bastard pulled the recoil and started the buzzin' back up again.

“Whauut? I cain't hear ya from all the way down here! Speak up Beaumont!”

Broadway, the bigger Benet, appeared at this side. I glared down at both of them, but I reckon that from their perspective they could see all the way up our noses, and that's not a very menacing look at all. Broadway motioned for Squash to turn the saw off. He squinted his eyes and scratched the fuzz on his face and spoke like there were three dots between his words.

“Um... Yew boys... fixin' ta... eat all that... baguette by yusselves?”

Belly acted real quick. He slid down two branches and leant over to talk to Broadway and Squash.

“Yow, look, Herbert, Orville, I know it's been hard—”

Pause
. Now, Belly knew these boys from Lanville Elementary over in Jefferson Parish. They prob'ly came in on the first day of school and started classes and then beat somebody up by second period and got expelled by recess. So I thought it made sense that he took a shot at talkin' to them. See, my cousin told us the whole story behind these Benet boys as he heard it from school – and it wasn't pretty. They weren't just mean: they had reasons to be miserable. For starters,
they both had asthma and had to walk around with animal skins on their chest and inhalers in their pockets all day. Their mother had gotten up in the middle of the night and ran off and left their old man and had taken up with some rich guy from Shreveport, and it damn near killed old man Benet. So they left the house exactly as she last cleaned it, waitin' for her to come back. Belly rode past a few times on the train tracks and inspected the livin' room through the window. He said dust was so high in that house you'd have to shovel your way across the floor, with a tractor. There were dirty dishes in the sink and two dead sunflowers in a vase of green water on the mantel, prob'ly from the last time Mrs Benet put up a fresh batch, and the whole place was still decorated with dusty sunflower drapes.

Belly told us that their drinkin' water well had been contaminated real bad, cos their old man brought in illegal machinery and handymen and decided to dig for natural gas and oil by hisself. Now, the Benet part of the bayou looked like sludge: the fish couldn't swim in it, and that rotten egg smell wasn't just Broadway's armpits. It was stagnant water and animals decayin'. The whole natural-gas project failed, but that old man Benet was convinced that the gas was just deeper down in the limestone. He was determined to keep diggin'. They needed money bad, and Benet was desperate. Now, Belly knew all that. But the one thing my cousin didn't know about the Benets was that you should never,
ever
call the Benets by their real first names. Yup, that family was messed up. Their birth names sounded like insults in their ears. Even their old man called himself “Backhoe”. The guy's real name is Tracey
,
for godssakes... with an “e”.

So anyway, as soon as Belly said “Herbert” and “Orville”, Squash's face turned red and Broadway just got the look of a murderer. The chainsaw rattled back up again and started gnawin' at the trunk of our tree. What's funny is that they made sure to drop their dainty little protective goggles over
their eyes before they started splittin' wood. Anyway, when Marlon and Belly saw wood chips flyin' and felt the vibrations of the chainsaw, they started hollerin' for help – and I did what any sensible Beaumont would do: I dropped the baguette and cheese. Yep. I can't believe we gave up our refreshments like that, but look: these guys were choppin' down our conference room.

Now, it didn't matter to the Benets that the bread fell into two inches of mud on the bank. They turned off the saw, we breathed out, and Squash went and picked up the bread and brought it to his big brother. He looked up again and sneered at us.

“Tell yer pops... that we want... our groin-grabber back. Tell him to come around... to our house any time and bring it, cos... my poppa's been fixin' to have some words with him.”

I looked up at where the hook had landed that night, and it was still there, snug around the branch. But now that I knew what the purpose of the hook was, a grabber for groins, I wasn't goin' to just toss it down and let them try and jingle our bells with it. So I said, “Sure, OK, I'll tell him” – and they walked away chewing on our bread. I was hopin' they'd bite both ends, so they'd have bad luck. Squash called out with his mouth full. “Oh, and yah might want to encour'ge that mongrel o' yours to stay out of our oil fields. It's dangerous out there.”

It's real funny how your mind works, cos every time I remember watching those boys walk away over the tracks, eatin' our food, I can still hear the song that Marlon was makin' up about the whole thing. Imagine... we were mad and this guy was singin'. And that bastard knew we couldn't fine him again, cos he said he had no money left. What's worse, that song was catchy as hell.

As for the conference – well, after that bread-and-cheese robbery, I warn't in no mood to tell them about Frico's powers. But I still went ahead and told them anyway. And that
was a bad move, cos I don't think I sold it very well. Belly and Marlon, they just looked at me and burst out laughing until they nearly fell out of the tree. Then they started in on me about how the Benets' underground gas was gettin' into my head and lots of other mean stuff that went on for half an hour and got so bad I'll only tell you the endin'. They said they'd only believe in the sketchin' if it could do the absolutely impossible.

“Hey, Marls, let's see those powers turn you into a child star.”

“Fuh-geddit man! Let's make your daddy come back home without a hitch-hiker girl.”

“Wait, wait, or... or make Skid get a girlfriend.”

And they had to hang on to the tree while they were hawhawin' and chokin' and enjoyin' themselves – until they were drunk on laughing at ol' Skid. I was happy I could make them laugh after the Benets robbed us. Furthermore, if I was the only believer in the Frico Church or the only investor in the Frico Enterprise, then I'd be the only one to get the blessin' or the benefit. So whatever. Those two clowns climbed down and rode away and left me up in that tree with only those good-for-nothin' tamarinds to keep me company. Those things are so tangy they set your teeth on edge and make your stomach bubble.

Four

Well, after that things just got worse between us and the Benets. Pops never went over there when he said he would. One Sunday, some decent church folk from Long Lake Free Gospel took the time to come baptize Tony in the creek, cos they said he was of age. Even though I was usually suspicious of city people who came into the swamp, it was a real nice occasion, cos they sang with harmonies and nothin' 'cept tambourines.
Freeze frame.
Church folks dressed in white, standin' waist-deep in the water. They all put their hands in the air and they're singin' and swayin' like trees. At their fingertips, cotton-ball clouds are polishin' the sky crystal-blue.

As soon as the service was over and the people went home, we were just relaxin' in the water, cos gators don't usually get into the creek, even in the deeper parts. Well, there came the Benet boys, who were watching the service from out on the bayou. Squash ran up and cannon-balled into the water and tried to pick a fight with born-again Tony. We ignored them at first, but we couldn't ignore the fact that all of a sudden the water got real warm and our legs started itchin'. That guy Squash came near to us and took a leak in the creek, and it was right in the spot where they had just had a
baptism
, for godssake
.

Now, that was wrong on so many levels. So we jumped out of the water to throw this guy in with his own pee, but his big brother pulled a shotgun from a wheelbarrow and said: “Stand down boys. No use... goin' to meet yer maker... so soon.” And even though we reckoned he didn't have no bullets in it, we weren't takin' no chances, cos I wasn't sure if Frico's powers could work on gunshot wounds. Then Broadway used the shotgun barrel to pick up all of our clothes that
were on the bank and throw them into the water, and we had to watch him do it.

The next day, I took the groin-grabber out to the train tracks and called out and threw it over to their side, thinkin' that's what they wanted. I told them to leave us Beaumonts alone after that, but they just laughed and came and grabbed me and held my head down on the tracks until the eastbound freight train was about ten seconds from my goddamn nose. I had nightmares and smelt diesel for weeks.

During those weeks, ol' Tony Beaumont invented a rocket from an empty chlorine-bleach bottle. I told him that thing would never reach the moon.

“It's doesn't have to, punk. It just needs to reach the Benet house.”

“Ohh, a
missile
.”

Then, when I saw him stuffing the bottle with some fireworks that Mai gave me, I didn't like that, and we had a tussle. Mid-fight he stood up like a war general and put one hand on his chest and used the other one to hold me off by my forehead. He made a speech while I was swingin' fists. He said givin' up those fireworks was part of my “destiny” and my role in the “Beaumont retaliation for family pride and glory”. That sounded so cool.

So we launched that missile at dusk. It glinted purple-blue up against the ground, then rattled and jumped off into the air, smoke and sparks trailin' behind it. We cheered, but it didn't reach the target. It fell plop onto the train tracks and made a colourful fireworks show. Then I remembered about Belly's natural-gas story, so I told Tony the bleach-bottle bomb was a stupid idea that could have gotten us all killed. But really I was just mad that all my sentimentally attached fireworks went up in smoke for nothin'.

Well, Broadway and Squash found out we tried to bomb them, and one day after school they blocked the footbridge when Tony and Belly were tryin' to cross over the creek.
Those Benet boys prob'ly learnt new words that day, so they told Tony that
gens de coleur
have to swim across the creek. Tony didn't mind, cos the bridge was getting rickety anyway, and Pops and Pa Campbell hadn't gotten around to fixin' it. So him and Belly took off their shoes on the bank, and while crossin' under the bridge Tony told them, “Y'all can't even spell
gens de coleur
.” That floored them, cos it was true.

So they leant over the bridge and dropped spitballs on Tony and Belly while tellin' them that all Beaumonts were tryin' to “
passe blanc
”
,
which was their way of sayin' we were tryin' to look white. Well, they didn't take too kindly to Belly sayin' that they were tryin' to “
passe
smart” and “
passe
handsome”, so they chased him and Tony with a big ol' huntin' knife.

At that point Moms did what Pops shoulda done. She marched all of us over to talk to Backhoe Benet. She never called his name or nothin'. She just stepped up on his porch and said good evenin'. But he wouldn't come out to us and talked to her through a window behind the dirty sunflower curtains as if he didn't care. So she stood there and made a statement:

“My kids came runnin' into the house today, chased by your boys. And it got me thinking that whether we all came here last year, thirteen years ago or hundreds of years ago, we're all running from something. We're all refugees here. And... this refuge is the worst of 'em. It's... it's not even a ghetto. It's a swamp. And it's not even a decent swamp. Nothin's even s'posed to live out in these parts 'cept for the critters. And they're not making much of a fuss other than they s'posed to. So if my chil'ren can't catch a break here, then where the hell are we supposed to go?”

When the figure behind the curtain just laughed softly, she realized it was no use.

“Well, we can all go to hell if that's what y'all want. So let me know.”

Somehow, Pops never got involved in all that. He was always walkin' on a slant, so to speak, until one night he came home sober and the Ford Transit lights showed him somethin' that popped his head gasket. See, Pops had this aluminum sign that he was real proud of. He painted it himself and put it right at the entrance of our little L of land. It was about two by three foot and it said:

REPAIR 'EM LIKE BRAND NEW!
KeroGas Stoves, Televisions
CB Radios and Appliances
CALL INSIDE NOW

Well, the Benets took the sign for target practice. They shot holes through all the letters that had a space to shoot through. Pops stayed up all night paintin' a new sign and cussin'. He put it up the next day on a piece of ballistic steel that he borrowed when he used to work at that Michoud facility.

When they couldn't shoot through that, the Benet boys just went ahead and tore the whole sign down and lay it flat on the ground and threw paint all over it. So Pops said “Hell no” and went across the tracks to talk to them. He told us to wait by the tracks while he walked across with the sign in his hand and the pole draggin' behind him. The sunflower drapes moved. It was Backhoe Benet. We saw the rifle nozzle pointin' at Pops. We saw the flash, heard the shot, and saw our Pops jerk backwards when the bullet hit the sign in his hand. Pops was still standing. Backhoe laughed out loud and said, “Jus' checkin', Beaumont!” He motioned with the barrel for Pops to leave the bulletproof material out in the yard. “What's in my yard is mine, includin' you!”

The door opened. We saw the dead sunflowers on the mantel, then Pops disappeared and the door shut. Well, we weren't movin' until we saw our pops again – and in about three quarters of an hour he came out with the glummest
look on his face. He was carrying a cardboard box with six puppies in it. They were cute little critters. All brown mutts with black mouths. One had a white mark on his right front foot like a sock. We walked alongside Pops. He was walking fast and talkin' real quiet. We had to jog to keep up.

“Mr Benet says these six kids belong to Calvin. Said he doesn't want mongrels in his yard, and we should keep our dog off his property, or else. You boys'll have to chain him for a while, y'hear?”

So it seems Calvin went and got himself entangled with the worst people in the swamp. Calvin, why? Why not at Gladys', that sweet ol' widow from further down the tracks? She had girl dogs and she'd keep the pups too. Why not Evin Levine, that hunter guy in the busted-up boathouse who could prob'ly use a couple more mutts in his huntin'? But no, Calvin had to go cavortin' with Ol' Medusa Benet, the worst dog possible, even though dogs can behave much better than people sometimes. All in all, that didn't matter too much. What was real puzzlin' for me was that I knew my daddy didn't go face to face with the Benets just to talk to them for forty-five minutes about a shot-up sign or about Calvin knockin' up their dog. So when everybody was oohing and aahing over the pups, and Frico was sketchin' them bitin' his toes, and Calvin was nappin' on the porch like he had nothin' to do with all this, I sat down on the floor beside the bed and I wondered: “Everybody sees the puppies Pops brought over... but can't nobody see the monkey on his back?”