Sketcher

by Roland Watson-Grant

  Five

  Well, I don’t think I have to tell you how deflated I was feelin’ after those two laughed at me up in that tree. However, just when I was really low, things got better. Round about that time we went to this Easter Break Baptist youth camp somewhere along the Gulf Coast. It was Harry T’s idea, cos he had joined the Cub Scouts by then and said he knew everythin’ about campin’ and knots and signal fires and morse code and all that stuff. Valerie Beaumont let us go, even though it was such short notice. We sat on a couple of broke TV sets in the back of Pops’ Ford Transit and he dropped us off with our makeshift campin’ gear. Nothin’ fancy. It was me, Frico, Marlon, Belly and Harry T, and we got there early to help set up for the rest of the camp kids.

  Now, when the bus came at sunset, this little city boy Peter Grant, who never got out of his house much, he was runnin’ beside that bus for about half a mile, and all the kids on the bus were cheering him on until he tripped over a rock in the dirt road and fell and busted his face wide open. Pow. And everybody said, “Oh my gosh” – and he was bleeding bad and the camp nurse wasn’t there yet. So they washed him off, and we went into our cabin and – guess what – Frico actually took out his sketchpad and fixed ol’ Peter Grant up real perfect. I held the flashlight so Frico could draw his face proper, and we didn’t even charge the guy a dime. You should’ve seen that midget Marlon and Belly eatin’ their words like cold soup. But to this day Harry T keeps sayin’ the nurse came and I slept through the whole thing. Yeah, right. All I knew was that even though Frico was still reluctant to sketch, him fixin’ those shorts and patchin’ up ol’ city boy Peter Grant’s face meant that soon we’d be in business.

  Of course I knew that when camp was over, Marlon and Belly would go back to pretendin’ that they didn’t see what happened at camp. So as soon as we got back to school, I hatched a plan. See, that statement about the impossibility of Skid getting a girlfriend really hit a nerve. So I said to myself: “I’m goin’ to do better than gettin’ a girl. I’m goin’ to go for the best one there is.”

  Now, I should tell you: I love older women. Loved them since I was, like, six or thereabouts. And why not? Older women are so fine. Anyone who knows me will tell ya, there’s somethin’ about a woman many years my senior that makes Skid Beaumont act up like he’s on catnip.

  That’s why when little Suzy Wilson first came to Long Lake Elementary in ’82, I wasn’t interested. Suzy Wilson was the most popular girl in school, even though she was skinny and too talkative and her chin was all pointy and whatever. She came from a sleepy corner of Canada, the French part, like my pops’ great-great-grandpopses, where it prob’ly snows all year and everybody stays inside. And I suppose there’s not a whole bunch of people to talk to on account of that. So when Suzy landed in Louisiana she had a hell of a lot of catching up to do. Man, that little girl would yap and my ears would just fall asleep.

  So, to be honest, the only thing I liked about Suzy Wilson was her aunt, Miss Fiola Lambert. Slow motion. Miss Lambert was this sweet-lookin’ teacher at Long Lake with a French accent and curls in her hair like a little girl. But man – there was no mistakin’ she was a woman. She was like warm toast soaked in syrup, or a cup of that camomile tea they serve in fancy restaurants – hot and dreamy. They said she had “European charm”. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded real delicate, like those heels that made her legs look so long. Even Pops, when he came to the school and couldn’t remember Miss Lambert’s name, he kept referring to her as “Miss Jacob’s Ladder”, cos he said her legs “went all the way up to heaven”. Of course Moms gave him hell for that. Anyway, when all the guys were salivatin’ over little Suzy and her lemonade stare, I closed one eye and took a look at her aunt, thirty-year-old Miss Lambert, just so I could imagine Suzy in the future. And I gotta tell ya, future Suzy Wilson was hot as hell.

  Meanwhile, Marlon, Frico, Harry T and this other dude Kevin, they all liked Suzy. Man, it was like a circus. Everybody came with somethin’ to try to impress that girl. But Marlon, he took the whole thing to another level. He got all cheesy and started writing songs for her. Well, actually he was just making up new words for Michael Jackson songs and singing them back to her, like she wouldn’t notice. Psssh. That hypocrite Suzy would just sit there on the steps during recess sipping the cold drink Marlon bought her day after day, pretendin’ to love those tunes. After a while Frico couldn’t bear to see him sufferin’. So he told Marlon: “Look. Lay off the lunchtime concerts, man. She’s laughin’ at you.” My boy prob’ly thought Frico just wanted to thin out the competition, so he kept up the karaoke. But my brother knew what he was talking about. That Suzy Wilson is damn lucky Frico didn’t use his sketching powers to make her ugly, cos I reckon he wouldn’t have had to sketch too much. Now, in spite of everything, Suzy didn’t really bother me apart from the yappin’ and takin’ my friends for a ride, but then somethin’ happened one day during recess.

  I was listenin’ to some music on Marlon’s cassette player. While I was tappin’ my fingers to the beats, Suzy Wilson comes and pulls off the headphones and asks how come I didn’t hang around her like Marlon and the others. I wanted to say, “Cos you’re a yapper.” But I thought that would be nasty, so I tried to be clever. I told her, “Naw kid, you’re too young for me. I’m really into your aunt though.” Soon as I said it, Suzy’s jaws dropped, her eyes bugged out and I knew I was dead.

  So there I was in Principal Phillips’ office watchin’ this half-willin’ ceilin’ fan havin’ a borin’ conversation with a typewriter that was clickety-clackin’ in the back room, when Moms walks in, demanding to know why her son was sent to the principal for saying he liked one of his teachers. Now Phillips, he’s the principalest-looking principal you’ll ever see: he pushed back his glasses with his finger, stroked his double chin as if he had a brand-new point of view, and as usual started with a quote from some long-ago guy:

  “Mrs Beaumont, have you ever heard the saying, ‘A child unbridled is a public report of domestic misdeed’?”

  “So my kid is a horse?”

  That was prob’ly the first time I saw Phillips stop dead in his tracks. He just sat there silent, and the smell of fresh exam papers came out of that room with the noise of the faraway typewriter, and it just made me feel sick all of a sudden.

  “You see, Mrs Beaumont,” says the principal in the end, “it’s not so much what your son said that got him into trouble: it’s what he was doing when he said those words... Terence, do you mind showing your mother?”

  Aw, dammit. Now, I honestly didn’t remember what I was doin’ at the time. And I meant no disrespect for Miss Lambert. I was just tryin’ to look cool in front of her niece. But now ol’ Screwdriver Phillips wanted me to demonstrate some dumb thrust-and-grind move for Moms in front of pointychin Suzy. Look, I can’t even dance, man. And lemme tell you, Moms hates anythin’ that looks like disrespect for other people. So yeah, that day I got punished twice because of damn Suzy Wilson. But I didn’t care about all that: that goddess Fiola Lambert and I were meant to be together, even if Suzy would be my niece-in-law or whatever you wanna call it.

  Now, even though I always put my hand up in her class (and that made the others call me mon petit chou, which is supposed to mean “teacher’s pet” or somethin’ like that), technically speakin’ Miss Lambert didn’t know how I felt. So I figured I had to get her attention. And it couldn’t be that whole corniness of a present or an apple on her desk. Hell, who does that? Plus I ain’t got no money for no presents. Of course, even though I had just turned nine, I had a brother who could sketch a picture of me and magically make me look all grown up and handsomer in real life, but he was being a jerk and not using his powers much at all. So – guess what – I decided to try some magic sketchin’ for myself. Yeah, you heard me. You can laugh, but see, I figured me and Frico, we shared the same womb and all, so maybe I had the same powers but I just didn’t know it yet.

  So I tried sketchin’ myself a few times, but t
hen I got scared, cos only the kinky, red-hair part of that left-handed drawing looked like me, and I didn’t want to get stuck as a stick man for the rest of my life. Well, I stepped it up. A few days after that, I got this eyebrow pencil and locked myself in the bathroom and reckoned I could just sketch a moustache and beard on my reflection in the mirror to see if I could grow them real fast. I figured my powers would be weaker than Frico’s, so I doubled up. I did the moustache-and-beard sketchin’ every single day until Moms, she started asking who the hell kept smudging up the bathroom mirror. So one morning I was using some vaseline to clean that smudge off the glass when Moms, late for work, barged into the bathroom and caught me with one hand holding an eyebrow pencil and the other hand in her jar of vaseline. She took the Lord’s name in vain, and Doug and Tony came running.

  Of course, after that the mirror-sketchin’ had to stop. I figured I was prob’ly going about it all wrong anyhow. Maybe Frico sketched with only magic pencils or somethin’, or maybe he said some secret words before he did the drawing. But man, I was as confused as the very first bug to hit the very first light bulb they ever invented. I didn’t know where I was going with this sketchin’ thing, and the longer my powers took to kick in, the more my bigger plans were gettin’ delayed.

  Well, after Prize-Giving that year, the guidance counsellor at school wrote to Moms and asked her to take me over to see this lady doctor in New O’lins proper, right by the Lake. Apparently, this lady would see me for free. I wasn’t quite sure why we had to go to this doctor lady, cos I felt OK. But I figured on the way there that it might have something to do with that eyebrow pencil I’d borrowed from Miss Lambert’s handbag. Or the whole vaseline incident, or me taking all of Frico’s pencils and then lyin’ about it. Well, whatever the crime, I didn’t mind doing the time, cos man, this lady doctor looked like she was in her thirties and she was fine.

  “Hi there, I’m Dr Barton. You can call me Lisa.” She had a dusty, baby-powder voice and the cutest, slightest gap between her two front teeth. Wow.

  “Hi Lisa. I’m Skid. I’m nine... almost ten.”

  Moms told Dr Barton I wasn’t gettin’ along with the girls at school. Hell, it was just one girl. The doctor asked me to talk about that. She sat forward and smiled and looked at me with her eyes all soft and bright, like two full moons over Lake Ponchartrain. Aww man.

  Now, I decided I wasn’t going to start off with some immature story about Suzy with this fine lady, so I said: “Well, my mother’s right. I don’t like girls. I like women.”

  Lady doctor nearly died laughing. After that, things got less funny. She kept asking me how I felt about my mother and Pops and a bunch of other serious stuff I can’t recall or can’t see why they were important.

  Then she asked me what made me afraid. To be honest, even with all that junk about the Loogaroo and Couyon and whatever else, the only thing I was really afraid of was not havin’ any cash at all in my pocket. But before I could tell her that, she gave me this big ol’ sheet of black paper and some neon-coloured chalk and asked me to use my left hand to draw “whatever it was that protected me from what I was afraid of”, or some such thing. Of course, I could only think of drawing my big brother Doug, cos look, the poor guy would give me all of his lunch money every single day if I told him I lost mine. So that was easy. Then the doctor asked me to draw a picture of myself. Aw, hell no. My sketching powers could kick in any time now, and like you prob’ly figured out, I couldn’t draw to save my life, so I didn’t want to start doing that again and risk screwing up my looks. Especially since the left-hand drawing I did of Doug just looked like crap. Plus, that Dr Barton would get to keep my sketches, and I wouldn’t be able to destroy the damn things if everything went to hell in a hurry. So nope. There was no way I was gonna draw an image of myself ever again.

  Now, I like volcanoes for some reason. So instead, I drew a massive volcano, rising up through the clouds, with jagged edges at the top. It was roarin’ to life with a red, boilin’ crater at the top and smoke and ashes above the cone, and there was a long, lonely road leadin’ up to it. My drawin’ was cool – even though if artsy-fartsy Frico saw it, he wouldn’t be too impressed with it.

  Well, the doc, she looked at my drawing and said: “OK, so where exactly are you in this drawing?”

  I told her me and my older brother Frico, we were right up there on the road closer to the volcano, too far along for anybody to see us. We were goin’ to go fix the cracks in the crater. Then she smiled and looked so sad in her full-moon eyes that I wanted to ask her if I could draw somethin’ else. But then she asked Moms to let her speak to me alone.

  When Moms went outside, the doctor asked me if there was anything else I had to tell her, and I told myself I wasn’t going to say anything about Frico to this lovely lady. But she prob’ly hypnotized it out of me. You know how sweet these ladies can be. So I just found myself babblin’ on and on and tellin’ the doctor about the sketchin’ and how I was working on my own powers and stuff.

  I was talkin’ like I was tumblin’ down some stairs. You know, like when you want to stop yourself but you just can’t? And the whole time, that sweet lady, she’s looking at me and smilin’ sad, but she was so beautiful that I just went on and on about Frico and the cat and the plum tree and the shorts and Peter Grant’s face and how my brother wasn’t sketchin’ enough and I wish he would... cos everything in life was broken and needed fixin’, especially New O’lins and all. You gotta say stuff like that to a woman. Women like it when you’re sincere and poetic. At least that’s what Doug told me.

  Then it was Moms’ turn. The doctor took me to a room with some other kids so she could talk to Moms alone, but I snuck back and lay flat on my belly and listened under the door. I couldn’t hear what the doc was sayin’, but whatever it was, it was making Moms fall to pieces. I could hear her talkin’ between tears.

  “Yes, Dr Barton” – sniffle – “it’s not goin’ so well between their father and me. He used to be a wonderful man” – sniffle – “sweet ’n’ kind when we just got married and I came over with him. But he’s not himself any more, and it’s ruining everything... my poor chil’ren.”

  Well, hell, I didn’t know what that was all about. After all, I was the reason we went into all that trouble to get dressed up and bother old man Pa Campbell to drive us into town to see the doctor – so why was Moms cryin’ about Pops and tellin’ all her stuff to this sweet lady?

  I listened some more, but then this security guard that looked like Colonel Sanders, he came and lifted me up by the belt and set me on my feet and said: “Go on now” – and that made me miss the best parts.

  Anyway, Moms’ eyes were all red and she kept rubbing my shaggy head the whole way home. I took the opportunity and got her to buy a Po’ Boy for dinner. That’s a big ol’ Louisiana sandwich and a once-in-a-blue-moon meal in my family.

  Well, we never went back to that sweet baby-powder lady doctor Lisa. And for a while I wondered if I went too far with the Frico story.

  Anyway, that day I couldn’t wait to get home to see if Doug was still in one piece, cos like I said, I drew him all screwed up. So I ran into the house and there he was, sittin’ in that big ol’ tangerine armchair behind the door. I stopped and stared at him.

  “What you lookin’ at, Skid?” he hollered at me after about ten seconds of me starin’.

  “You doin’ OK? You feeling all right Doug?” I went closer to inspect him.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, fool, what’s the matter with this one, Momma?”

  “Don’t call your brother those names, Doug.”

  She stepped towards us, her eyes all angry.

  “I don’t care what nobody says, y’all are just fine. And y’all gonna be fine!”

  And she just broke down again and started bawling in the middle of the room. And Doug, he said he was sorry and came over and hugged her – and I was hugging her too, but meanwhile I was looking Doug over from head to foot, and it looked to me like he was in one piec
e. So when I was sure that he was feeling all guilty about making Moms cry, I just told him: “I lost my lunch money today again, Doug.”

  Six

  “Alrick Beaumont is a brilliant man.

  He can fix anything, and he can

  shock dead radios back to life,

  resurrect old stoves gone cold...

  He makes sleeping TV sets open their eyes

  and assembles rockets that go

  high up on the blue shelf of heaven,

  blazing bright above our level.”

  September 9, 1983

  OK, I know it sounds all artsy-fartsy and real pretentious, but that year my pops was payin’ me ten dollars to write that crap about him. And since ol’ Skid didn’t get much for his birthday, I needed the money. See, on your birthday you got a good breakfast, lunch money and dinner just like other days. If it was on a weekend, Moms would bake cornbread. But generally, she gave you a kiss and prayed for you, Pops slapped you on the back and told your brothers to grab you by the arms and legs and bounce your butt on a rock ten times for good luck and then toss your ass in the bayou – and that was it. “Happy Birthday till next year, y’hear!”