Sketcher

by Roland Watson-Grant

  I remember the crickets chirpin’ slowly after we got back that night, like they were listenin’ how many quarters Doug was countin’ out into a can. He did it so slowly, prob’ly tryin’ to make sense of what happened or feelin’ guilty that he and Tony started the whole thing. Or maybe he just wanted to see how much money he had to help Moms pay back Ma Campbell for helpin’ out with the hospital. He was like that. He said money was the only magic he believed in. Cool. But you wish he’d just make noise and get the countin’ over and done with and stop the damn torture.

  Speakin’ of torture, I hope Calvin died in a hurry. Yes, Calvin died. Backhoe and his boys blasted our dog two times in the rampage. The second bullet, a full-metal-jacket, was to his head at close range against the foot of a tree where Calvin had curled up after taking one in the hindquarters. So, like Moms said, I made sure to recognize the tragedy of the human beings first.

  Now, let me just say that Calvin was like a regular guy as well. He didn’t give no trouble except for goin’ under people’s houses and likin’ the Benets’ girl dog. You could hang laundry on the line and that dog would walk away just out of respect, especially if it was white sheets. If he stayed near the sheets, it was just to guard them from those houseflies that make a hobby out of leaving nasty little specks on your best things. Calvin would watch a fly out of one sleepy eye and then – clop! – he’d take that speck-maker down and chew on him a bit before droppin’ him on the ground in a mangled mess. In the evenings, Calvin would jump and hug you with muddy feet just because you came home to the godforsaken swamp – and he still thought the world of you even when you failed a test or whatever. It’s horrible how the Benets died. And Calvin, he didn’t deserve to get shot and killed like that either. I’m just glad he made little replicas of himself before he left.

  But back to Broadway and Squash. I thought about them for days and days. I told myself that in another life away from this swamp with its muggy nights and jungle laws, we could have all been friends. Our parents would all be super-rich and we’d share our bologna lunches and those little Hostess cakes with the cream fillin’ in the middle that get advertised on the back of Archie comics. We’d go to one of those private schools where kids wore a blazer with a nice crest on it and everythin’. And they would’ve bathed regularly and combed their hair and known their grammar, and they wouldn’t have minded being called by their right names.

  Anyway, we didn’t go to the funeral, but Moms, she got a programme from the church service, and on the front of it, they called them Herbert and Orville. Maan, after that I wanted to talk to somebody about everythin’, but I had slim pickin’s this time. Moms had warned off Pa Campbell about the gossipin’. Tony was goin’ on and on with his nerd voice and explainin’ how “sinkholes are natural occurrences in the wetlands – or maybe all that experimental frackin’ that Backhoe started in the swamp a while back had caused the limestone to get weak”. Doug would just keep on countin’ his money, and Moms, well, I was beginnin’ to wonder what her hands in the air meant when she stood in front of those boys and their guns. Seems like she brought her hands and the bridge down at the same time, if I remember correctly. Or was it all Fricozoid’s doin’? Or maybe she hit down the bridge and he conjured up the hole under it. Damn. Now, if those two were really workin’ together, I was goin’ to have a hard time gettin’ anything done. Maybe Frico was takin’ instructions from her or the other way around. In any case, I was up a creek, so to speak, but I’d work it all out and keep goin’, even with all the confusion.

  Pa Campbell stood on his porch for four nights after the funeral, staring out towards the Gulf as if waiting for somethin’. It was September again, and the breezes were already shakin’ paprika onto the trees. So he complained that he was cold all the time and he put on that woven Native cloth I told you about and started walkin’ back and forth on the porch, shakin’ and hummin’. He’d lean against the railin’ for a long time, till I started thinkin’ he was sleeping upright. Ma Campbell always came to take him back inside. Truth is, that old bastard was waitin’ to talk to me, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t happen for a while.

  Now, usually on Turkey Day every year Moms would say we had a lot to be thankful for. But that year – Nineteen Eighty-five, man – she was right. That year she also said we couldn’t have dinner and leave other members of our family unfed, even if they didn’t deserve to eat. She had gotten a big ol’ Butterball turkey from the owner of the restaurant where she worked and she carved off a piece and put some “real purdy gravy” with potatoes and some squash stuffed with shrimp in that gravy dish with the pink flowers on the side. She was experimenting with that tamarind sauce, but we didn’t like it. Then when she was wrappin’ the whole thing in foil to keep it warm, I heard Pa Campbell’s truck startin’ up, and he was honkin’ the horn and makin’ a hoopla. Momma told Tony and Frico and Doug and me to load up and go with Pa Campbell to visit Pops and bring him some Thanksgiving Dinner. That was a bit of a surprise – but the bigger shock was when Pa drove up to St Mary’s Hospital in Slidell. Seems that Pops had taken a bad beatin’ from God knows who, but I suspect Benet had somethin’ to do with it. Pa Campbell always said that man Benet had questionable connections in the city, and they’d do him a favour every now and then. One of Pops’ hands was fractured, and his whole body was all swollen up like a tree trunk. They had to be keeping him hooked up to a hospital bed for observation on Thanksgivin’ night.

  “Took a tumble over some appliances, boys.”

  “Yeah, some ninja stoves and radios, we copy dat.” Tony was hilarious, but that was not good timin’ for sarcasm or makin’ any kind of remark. Guess he was upset and wanted Pops to know that we knew he was in some kind of deal with Benet, but as usual Doug told him to shut it. Pops obviously didn’t even know that his wife and kids had been almost gunned down after he bolted out of the swamp that night. He only heard that the Benet boys died in an accident and he mentioned it to Pa Campbell. Pa had nothin’ to say about it, even though they did talk for a while and made up good after all those years. Twice Frico started sketchin’ Pops’s fractured arm – and twice he erased it. It’s like he knew better than to mess with a boomerang spell, especially if it was Valerie Beaumont’s work.

  We were way outside visiting hours, so a sweet nurse in a tight uniform, I remember, she came by, smiled and threw us all out so nicely. Pa and Pops, they shook with left hands as we got up to go. On the way out, I let everybody walk ahead of me. Then I turned back when they weren’t lookin’ and went back to Pops’ bed. He was surprised when I took a whiskey flask bottle from my back pocket with cinnamon, nutmeg, some paper with Moms’ name and some of her hair in it. He didn’t know I knew about this stuff.

  “I want my moms’ picture back,” I told him.

  And I was surprised when he pulled it out from a knapsack beside the bed and handed it to me. I rolled the photo and tucked it into the bottle and gave the whole thing back to him.

  “Now put your name in there and go toss it into the Gulf of Mexico for godssake... I want my pops back too.”

  You could see that he wanted to hug me and everything, but he had only one hand workin’. Plus, like I said before, that would just have been too weird.

  When we got back into the swamp it was late, cos Pa Campbell took a hell of a long time in the restroom at the hospital. I studied Moms’ face to see if she was in the mood to answer any questions, but you can’t read a woman that easily. I figured it might not be the best time to ask her about the archangel, so I decided on something intelligent-sounding like it could be for school or something. I asked her who Marie Laveau was, even though I knew already. She told me that Marie Laveau was a mixed-race voodoo priestess who was born free in Louisiana, and she’d been dead for over two hundred years.

  “And by the way that is voodoo, not hoodoo, so don’t be ignorant about that ever.”

  And then she went back to clearing the table. I asked her if she knew that Pops went to the grave in
St Louis Cemetery and made a wish to get her back. She smiled and said: “He can do whatever he wants, cos in my opinion, a woman who was born free ain’t doing nothing to keep another woman in bondage.”

  Her cheeks were all shiny again, and I was hoping that she was a little flattered that Pops could go to that extreme to get her back. But then all of a sudden the smilin’ got weird and she was staring at me with no teeth showin’, and she looked real creepy, like she could read my mind. But Tony always said: “Never watch a woman’s smile: watch her eyes.” So Moms’ eyes started lookin’ disappointed.

  “What?” I said.

  And, would you believe it, the woman pulls out the same goddamn whiskey flask bottle I gave to Pops in the hospital and slams it on the kitchen table and calls out my full name in such a slow, quiet voice I felt cold.

  “Now look, little boy – don’t you go gettin’ involved in things you don’t know nothin’ about, y’hear me?”

  I swallowed hard. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I shook my head and felt stupid. Dammit. I’m dead again. See, you really don’t want to be on the receivin’ end when Valerie Beaumont gets all bowed up and ready to strike. She leant into my face.

  “You want to cast a spell, boy? Then go to school and grow up and get your ass out of these goddamn backwaters, y’hear? Cos at this rate, with all the idlin’ you been doin’, it will be a damn surprise, I’ll tell you that! And that goes for all o’ you!”

  She swept the room with her index finger and her eyes, and everybody stopped breathing.

  “Now y’all might miss your father, but you can’t take magic and fix everything, y’hear? You got to work with what you got... you understand? Y’all need to remember that. Work things out in other ways, every single day. Even the good Lord walked this earth, but he wasn’t into showing off with no miracles. God is good, but we got work to do too. So make somethin’ of the little you already got. That’s the real miracle.”

  She took a hammer and broke the bottle in the sink and washed the hair and the spices down the drain. Then she said real soft: “Now go put my picture back where you found it. Matter of fact, I can’t even trust you no more. I’ll go do it my damn self.”

  My brothers, they were gigglin’, and I was frozen solid – couldn’t move. I couldn’t finish a sentence.

  “How?...”

  “How what? How did I get this?” She held up the neck of the broken bottle and then chucked it in the garbage before swingin’ right back around to glare at me again. “Well, mister, maybe it’s true that your momma can whistle and raise anything up from under the waters here and over in the Gulf. Or maybe Pa Campbell just took it right back here from the hospital and gave it to me. And let that be the end of it, y’hear?”

  Eleven

  Now, before the end of the year, I wanted to tackle Pa Campbell for takin’ that whiskey bottle back to Moms and rattin’ me out. I also made up my mind to tell him about Frico. If he believed me, I’d let him in on the whole Benet boys’ killin’. So I made an occasion for it. I went to the fence and called him – and he hobbled out. I told him I wanted to learn all about the crawfishin’ part of his business, cos I saw he might need some help. Well, he just half-grinned and winked and told me to go back inside and be ready at a moment’s notice.

  Soon there was a knock on the window and ol’ gossip-monger Ma Campbell came callin’ on Moms with a cup of hot water ready to mooch some herbal tea. By and by, after gripin’ about the goats and the government, she got around to talkin’ about her son. I was gettin’ impatient, but I wanted to hear the latest on the legendary James “Couyon” Jackson. Turns outs he had gone and gotten a price on his head. A hundred thousand dollars. He was layin’ low and workin’ as a cowherd in Texas, but the farmer saw a news report that there was a reward for him. So the farmer nabbed ol’ Couyon by lockin’ him inside the cattle chute beside a dairy cow one night. Now, a cattle chute is a slender little steel cage for controllin’ a big ol’ fat cow. Throw one good-for-nothin’ gangster in there and that’s a tight fit. Anyway, the legend goes that Couyon Jackson milked the cow, shook that milk into butter, greased himself, slid through that steel cage and had gotten clear across the Sabine River border into Louisiana by the time that poor farmer came back from callin’ the police. All the Texas cops got was some damn good butter, fresh from the farm. Well, whatever the story was, Couyon was wanted and runnin’ loose. Finally Ma Campbell got around to sayin’ Pa wasn’t doin’ so well and needed a hand gatherin’ all those crawfish traps and sortin’ through them mudbugs, and she was wonderin’ if Moms could send one of us young ones over for a few hours.

  When Moms’ hollered out and asked me if I done my weekend assignments, I shouted back “Hell, yes!” before I realized I damn near gave the whole plan away by being too enthusiastic.

  So I’m in the pirogue – one of those small aluminum boats – with Pa Campbell and I deliberately called him “Lobo” to get his attention – but that wrinkled old man, he was lookin’ at the next crawfish trap comin’ up. See, to catch crawfish in a serious kind of way, you gotta set traps in a line all along the mangroves. You gotta put some dead fish or somethin’ delicious in that wire trap and let those mudbugs crawl through the openin’ to get it. Then when they realize they got a meal, they’ll also discover they can’t get out the way they came in, cos their claws and all their pointy parts and the thing they’re holdin’ on to gets in the way. So you get out there in your boat and as you pass along the line of traps, you haul them out the water one at a time and you dump those suckers into a plastic bucket or the front of your boat if it’s a small pirogue-type boat or whatever, and you move on to the next trap and so on.

  So Pa Campbell, he’s rowin’ and stoppin’ at every trap and dumpin’ crawfish in the front of the boat, and the crawfish is crawlin’ and clatterin’ against the aluminum boat – and I’m so fascinated with those bugs I forgot that I wanted to have the upper hand in the conversation. So Pa, he threw a giant crawfish in my lap, and while I’m struggling with the thing he just comes out with:

  “Pay attention kid. The wind is changin’ in this heah swamp. You came heah to talk, but you betta go on and lissen, cos I don’t have much taam... and I don’t mean today-taam – I mean taam, period.”

  The old man was scarin’ me again, but he was always too dramatic. He dumped the last trap in the boat and, as he was throwin’ out the rotten bait, one of the mudbugs hung on to it and dangled over the water. He picked him off the dead fish tail and dropped him in the boat.

  “All the questions you came into this boat wit’ will be answered if you just tune into what I’m sayin’.”

  “See kid? Life’s hard, but it don’t hafta be miserable, y’heah me? I travel the Industrial Canal and around the city and all the way across to Metairie, and I heah people talkin’ about businesses closing and it’s never been like this since the Great Depression and how God turned his or her back on us. Of course life is hard! But happy’s in your heart. The people who don’t know that happy’s in your heart and not in what you have, they the ones who say God left this planet heah like a goddamn crawfish pot and went off and did somethin’ else. Dunno, maybe she went to grab an ice-cream cone. And heah we are steppin’ all over each other tryin’ to survive. And in all this survivin’, there’s still a whole lot of plain old grabbin’ and greed.”

  I imagined a picture of God gettin’ up off his throne cos he heard the ice-cream-vendor van comin’. I thought it was ridiculous to think of the Almighty just sittin’ around on a great big armchair all day anyway, so I started laughin’.

  “Don’t be laughin’. And look at me – lemme get to the point. Forget all that talk about ice cream an’ whadeva.”

  Pa Campbell steadied the boat – which had started rockin’, cos he was throwin’ up his arms at me. Somethin’ told me he wasn’t so steady himself. He jumped right into another topic like we’d been talkin’ about it long before.

  “What those Benet boys got was comin’ to ’
em. Now, I’m not happy they died, but they were headin’ theah before they was born. I mean, it was a curse.”

  “Before...”

  “Yes before they was born. It was a curse he put on his own flesh and blood by bein’ too greedy.”

  “He who?”

  “Remember that man in the yellow glasses and beige bush jacket in those photographs from San Tainos?”

  “Oh, the Jim Jones guy.”

  He looked at me weird. “What? Anyway, that’s Tracey Benet. Him, your mother, your pops, me and Pauline... that’s Mrs Benet... we were friends for a long time. All of us were the toast of San Tainos. Those days we were damn near famous and all very good friends.”

  Man, I couldn’t connect the idea of that handsome fella being ol’ hard-face Backhoe Benet. Worse, I couldn’t imagine that the man who killed my dog used to be Pa Campbell’s good friend. So I stared off over the lake and then back at him, and he looked away.

  “I know, I know. Heah’s what happened. Backhoe had money from natural gas that his fauder found in Pennsylvania dem days. That boy grew up rich and ambitious. They had property from here to the Yucatan, so we used to drive down to Mexico in a Studebaker – it’s still ova dere in his junkyard – and we’d go to the Benet beachfront property in Merida and then sail to San Tainos right off the coast. We used to call him ‘Captain Benet’ at the time, cos he even found time to serve in the Coast Guard right out of high school. So he’s the one who used to drive the boat out to San Tainos. We called out there the ‘Tiny Antilles’, or the ‘Mini Caribbean’. Ooowee. We were livin’ the life, man. Up in the mountains learnin’ from the tribes one minute, the next minute on the beach and thinkin’ of never goin’ back home. But then, greed got in da way. One day, when the girls were playin’ beachball, Tracey said he knew a place jus’ outside Noo Orlins that might have some oil. Now, maybe it was the damn mojitos or whatnot, but we spit in our hands and made a deal that we would all go camp out on the land for a few months and see if we thought it might have some deposits. He was convincin’. He said: ‘Look, this land is good for gas, and my daddy bought me some acres. And if we get reason to believe that theah’s really oil or gas under it, then we’re in theah with pile drivers and drills, or whatever, and we’ll split the earnin’s. We’ll be rich. Hell, yew bet your life... I’ll drive the backhoe maself!’ That’s how he got the name. So we came here, to this swampy place you see around you, and we camped out. Well, by the taam I was way into my thirties we hadn’t found nothin’, even with several companies comin’ in and tryin’. Many times unregulated by any authorities, to be honest. But Benet wasn’t backin’ down. He just kept on plungin’ into the earth until it got illegal. Well, your pops went back into the city and got more interested in natural magic from San Tainos and even more interested in your mother. He couldn’t wait to get down to San Tainos to see her, and that was a problem. See, we always went together. And more importantly, at that time Backhoe was your mother’s boyfriend.”