Now, over at Long Lake Free Gospel Church, one Sunday after the rumours caught on, we got an hour-and-a-half sermon dedicated to us and our witchcraft. Of course, even though they didn’t call any names, everybody kept lookin’ over at us, shakin’ their heads and fannin’.
Moms had more serious problems to think about uninformed sermons and gossip columns. She seemed more concerned that she wasn’t hearin’ from our pops even in all this excitement.
Pa Campbell reassured her that he was still gonna be lookin’ out for her, so she needn’t worry. As if. Then, changing subject, he started bragging from his wheelchair.
“Matter of fact, Valerie, as soon as Couyon got up out o’ my house dat night, I wriggled myself free and, in the middle of the hollerin’ and the helicopter and the barkin’, I took a shot in the dark. Ma got free and grabbed the barrel to save her son, but even in the noise, I know the sound of a bullet findin’ flesh, I tell ya dat.”
Ma Campbell wasn’t worried, cos she said most days Pa didn’t even remember who was in the mirror, much less what happened that night. And maybe she was right, cos apart from them catchin’ Boogers and Shotput, there was no report of any of them finding Couyon or any of his gang killed or injured.
Moms was looking for ways she could secure her family. What she wanted was money from Pops, and for a few months that wasn’t forthcomin’. We also needed him to come put some things back in place after Couyon cleaned us out. So Doug and Tony drove around and went lookin’ for him in New O’lins at all his usual hangouts, includin’ Copper Stills Bar on Bourbon Street, but no one said they saw him.
That pretty much meant we were on our own, so Tony, he took over and put some makeshift things in place. He sent me and Frico under the house to get some car batteries and a car alternator that he salvaged from Benet’s junkyard. Well, after Frico dragged out the first battery, he brushed off his hands and he was done. I had to crawl on my belly to pull out the other four, one by one. Then Tony, he sent me back for the car alternator, and at the time I had no idea what I was lookin’ for.
“It looks like a turbine!” Tony was shoutin’ from inside the house through the floorboards above my head.
“A whaaat?”
“A motor kind-of-a.”
“A what?”
I heard them all laughin’ through the floor. “Skid, just bring out anythin’ you’ve never seen before.”
So I brought out this metal cylinder with a grill around it, three huge eggs and a strange rectangular card the size of a driver’s licence. The card had been down in the dirt for a while, but it was covered with Scotch tape, so you could still see that it had weird markings on it, like those yellow envelopes somebody dashed into the yard. Moms was worried that an alligator had laid eggs under our house, cos it meant the bayou was risin’ again and under the house was gettin’ swampy. Frico and Doug were debatin’ whether I should have touched the eggs or not, as I told ’em there must be about forty more. They said mother gators can count, so she’d come lookin’. And since I smelt like her kids now, and my face was lookin’ as rough as her babies, she’d come hug me in my bed at night. Jerks.
Meanwhile, Tony was makin’ use of the car alternator. He hooked it up to the batteries and mumbled about “regulators” and “rpm” and “groundin’ wires” and blah, blah, blah, and said he’d give us at least some “low-voltage electricity” by nightfall. So that night, when we were lookin’ at the card with the weird markings in Tony’s fluorescent light, Moms went over to Pa Campbell and then came back and snatched up that card from in front of us and went back over to Pa – and when she finally returned, her face was dark again. I thought it had something to do with the old Cajun tale that an alligator under your house means someone’s goin’ to die – but it wasn’t that. She held up the taped-up card.
“This is a seal that your father planted. I’m not goin’ to go into what that means, but they’re all over the yard. Now, don’t none of you go searchin’ for them. But if you do see anything that looks like this, don’t take it in here. Just let me know where it is and I’ll come get it. Understand?”
We nodded. I felt a “Let’s Hold Hands and Pray” comin’ on. After the prayer, I looked down at the kitchen table disappointed. I thought the seal was some kind of disc that was all metally and shiny and carved like some of the golden-dragon decorations over at Lam Lee Hahn. I thought that when you found them, they would glow like in the cartoons – but no. Just plain ol’ paper. Pa Campbell said to shuddup about cartoons and never to underestimate the seals’ power. Then Moms bought a coupla chickens, and prayed over every one of them, and let them loose in the yard and threw buckets of water on the ground so the chickens would start diggin’ and scratchin’. And everyday you’d see her checkin’ around the house to see if any of the seals had come up.
“That won’t stop it, Valerie, it’s too late! They’re too many buried over theah,” Pa called out one evenin’ from his porch.
Moms didn’t answer until Ma Campbell stuck her head through a wooden window and asked: “Too many berries over where?” and “What won’t stop what?”
Moms answered without lookin’ around.
“Tryin’ to get these yard fowls to stop diggin’ up the yard, Ma!”
“So why’d you buy them in the first place, chile? Lawd, Val, that’s what free-range chickens do, they dig! For the life of me... you young people! Tell her, Pa.”
“I told her, Ma. I told her.”
“Well, tell her again!”
And Pa, he cleared his throat and glanced back at Ma Campbell, who was over his shoulder, and then hollered out:
“That won’t stop Valerie! There’re too many chickens over there. And lots of chickens means lots of diggin’, gurl!”
And Ma was satisfied and closed the window again, mumblin’ that she taught us all the common sense in the world until she was sick of it – and what the hell were we gonna do when she was dead and gone.
Seventeen
Well, for the rest of that year we got so isolated and paranoid I swore trees were people. Even when there were no reporters or curious campers comin’ to look at the scene of the “most intense hostage situation in the State’s history”, I was seein’ shadows. Then again, it was weird how L-Island was suddenly empty. Everybody stopped comin’ ’cept for that girl Teesha Grey, who still had “wildlife research” to do. She even tried gettin’ an interview with Télépathie to “get the word out” about protectin’ the environment and buildin’ a refuge for endangered species and all that. Man, those gossip reporters just backed away from her real slow, like some kids at school who thought we were evil. Now, I thought she was really just hangin’ around spying on Frico, and I wanted to catch her in a lie. So I asked her how much more research she was gonna need to do.
“Well now, let’s see, we have about ten thousand species of birds in all... and about another hundred or so that are extinct. So... I’m, like, on number one of my ten thousand – one hundred birds. How does that grab ya?”
She was a feisty one, that girl. And I liked that a lot. But I couldn’t let her get in the way. That Frico needed leadership, and she had his talent headed in the wrong direction with all her damn birds and what not. She didn’t have a clue about half of what this boy could do. If she did, she wouldn’t be wastin’ his time when there were dreams to fulfil and money to be made.
Speakin’ of which... Apart from the bad publicity that stupid gang gave us, they also cost me some dough. See, I was plannin’ to ask all the shindig supporters for a modest contribution of a quarter each, ’round about the same time James rode up shootin’ gators – gators he left behind to stink to high heaven in the next-day sun.
So, anyway, I lost that money, and Samadh only needed so much tamarind polish and no more. So I was runnin’ out of the usual options. I reckon I could always hunt down the Couyon Gang in hopes of getting the hundred-thousand-dollar reward, but that would take me until I was thirty, especially with no Frico-sketchin’ support.
And Lord knows I tried to get him to help me go after ol’ James Jackson, but there was no convincin’ Frico after he said no. But I know for a fact that he was doing some sketching behind my back, the bastard. That Teesha Grey girl he was talkin’ to, just kept getting cuter and cuter all the time. That’s how I knew. And what pissed me off was the fact that she thought he sketched her because she was pretty. But I knew she was pretty because he sketched her. Soon she had a cute little nose, fuller breasts and a butt with a mind of its own. You shoulda seen that thing. Freeze frame.
Now look, it wasn’t like I was jealous or nothing – but hell, I’d made an investment a few years back, so I thought that I needed to get my Snickers’ worth at least.
So I see her braggin’ one day by the school, and I just rolled up on the bicycle that Belly left with me, and I told her she owed me money. Well, she started actin’ up in front of her friends, so I just pulled her aside and told her the whole damn story about the sketchin’, and then I demanded some money again. Of course she didn’t believe me, and she told Frico that his little brother’s crazy like ol’ Mississippi murderer James Jackson.
So I’m up in the house doing dishes and, of course, here comes Frico chargin’ in through the screen door shoutin’ about what I told Teesha Grey. So I told him we’re business partners and he was givin’ away the sketchin’ services for free. But he denied it and said she was pretty from before.
And I said: “Yeah, pretty dumb.”
And maan, it was on. He punched me in the face. Now I don’t believe you should punch your brother square in the face. That’s the family face you’re messin’ with. So I recovered and hit him hard with my elbow, but he was stronger than me. So he grabbed a hold of me, but I had my head in his belly, so I pushed him into that glass display case with all of Moms’ fine china in it. There was a horrible crash, and splinters and broken crockery was everywhere, and the fightin’ suddenly stopped, cos now we had to make up a damn good excuse to tell Valerie Beaumont why her display case was broken and her crockery all smashed up. Then I remembered that this guy could fix anything by sketchin’. So I hit him again, with a gravy dish this time. So after he knocked me out cold for hittin’ him with the gravy dish, he woke me up and told me to hold still so he could sketch my face back good and proper, and then I had to hold the mirror so he could sketch himself. Then he sketched the display case real quick. But when Moms came home and we were sittin’ there smilin’ like Cheshire cats, she took one look into the glass display case and said:
“OK, where’s my gravy dish? That’s not my gravy dish. The pink flowers are supposed to be on the side, not around the rim – so where is it?” And Frico just sat there cool as a creek and told her that I broke it and then I went and borrowed one from Ma Campbell, cos I was so sure she wouldn’t notice.
“And I told him to tell you he broke it, but this little boy of yours is stubborn and pretty dumb.”
That’s how I realized the guy deliberately sketched that gravy dish different just to set me up. But I couldn’t say nothing about the sketchin’, of course, cos that would just sound like nonsense – and furthermore, his story was the bomb.
Well, after that, him and ol’ Teesha Grey broke up, but I don’t think it was my fault. She probably got too caught up with the environment and all those birds instead of him. So, soon after, she wasn’t so pretty no more. Things wasn’t pretty between me and Frico after that neither. I think that was the beginning of us growin’ apart. It wasn’t just because of a fight about some girl: I think it was just that he prob’ly felt like he really couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut any more. And you can’t sketch a relationship back the way it was: you gotta work on it in other ways, you know.
Of course, I didn’t see Harry much any more neither. I figured him and Frico started hangin’ out. Me and Harry were still cool, but it wasn’t the same – especially after that evenin’ he zoomed into the swamp with an Air Force recruitment book and said he was goin’ to be in the Armed Forces when he left school. To me, he just sounded like that wannabe teen idol Marlon Rodgers. So I wasn’t even thinkin’ straight before I opened my mouth. Or maybe I was just envious. Everybody seemed to know what they wanted to do. But me, I’d spent so long on this swamp dream that all I’d done with my life was write a stupid ten-dollar poem.
“You don’t even know who you are, Harry. And you want to go lose that identity you’re still workin’ on... in the military?”
Man, I remember he had a cold drink in his hand and one foot on the bicycle pedal. And he just wasn’t thirsty any more and emptied the can on the ground and sat there balancin’ on the bicycle and holdin’ the recruitment book under his arm. Then, when he was crushin’ the can, he started out loud:
“Well, look, we didn’t all get the opportunity to know our father, Skid Beaumont. So consider yourself frickin’ lucky. And you know what? Maybe I don’t know who I am, but you don’t know neither. You’re supposed to be my friend, man. I stand up for you when people talk about your cheese-grater face behind your back. I went with you to Gentilly, and I even went along with that dumb sketchin’ plan you talked about that summer when we were kids. You’re a real jerk, man.”
Well, I repeated everything he said word for word just to mock him. But I left out the “cheese-grater face” part, cos that kicked me in the bells a little bit. And he just sucked his teeth and pushed off and rode away over the footbridge just as the sun was rollin’ out a tattered gold carpet across the bayou. I called out:
“Man, that boy Harry Tobias is so dramatic! Say something sad and then ride off into the sunset, won’t ya? Too much TV, I tell you!”
I thought he’d turn back, but he just stopped and let go of one handlebar and flipped me the bird without lookin’ back. And you shouldn’t say anything more to a person after they flip you the bird. Besides, one fight for the month was enough.
Well, it seemed like I ticked everybody off that year ’cept Doug, but by the following year Doug had his own crew, and even though I’d be fourteen right before the fall, bigger boys don’t like new teens comin’ around. So that’s when I started hangin’ out with Peter. Yeah, the same music-playin’ Peter Grant that busted his face open at camp.
Eighteen
Well, Peter Grant, he didn’t live near the swamp. He lived close to Armstrong Park. We could only hang out a bit on weekends when I didn’t have work to do. Now, he’s Irish-American, but he always liked tellin’ people: “Yeah, me, Skid and Frico, we’re all brothers.” That guy had a deep respect for Frico’s artistic skills even before the camp accident, and after Frico fixed his face, Peter had a new kinda reverence for the guy. So no matter how mad I got about anything my brother did, he was always on Frico’s side. He would answer everything I said with: “Yeah, I hear you, but he got serious talent, man.”
Peter Grant was a genius too. He started playing jazz by ear from when he was eight, he said. Now, we started hangin’ out cos his father picked him up from school in a big eighteen-wheeler truck nearly every day. He said it used to be fun in elementary school, but it was gettin’ cheesy in middle school. Well, hell I didn’t mind climbin’ up in a truck from school – I didn’t care if kids laughed and said we climbed up so high we got a nosebleed or whatever. So we made it cool again, especially after Mr Grant slapped some fire decals on that custom rig and flung two exhaust pipes up in the air and sprayed the whole thing metallic purple.
He had two eighteen-wheelers, but he called this one the “family car”. Ol’ Mr G was cool enough to make me hitch a ride into the swamp from school most days. Peter would ride with us, even though after the shindig Mr G was a bit cagey about lettin’ Peter come into L-Island by himself. Well, Peter’s mom, she was a sweet lady, but kind of a worrywart, so Peter made every excuse to avoid his house. So that left us lookin’ like two bums who lived on the street. To make it worse, Peter got a little keyboard that used batteries and we used to go into Armstrong Park or head over to Jackson Square and sit around pla
yin’ mostly Oscar Peterson stuff. Well, actually, he played, I just sat around and gave girls the eye. And if somebody ever came up and dropped a coin in the Casio keyboard box, that boy Peter would get mad and ask them if it looked like he was street-performin’ for tips. Hell, I told him to just play music and let me worry about all that annoyin’ money. One time an older, big-belly guy playin’ a trombone, he saw us makin’ money and told us we’d better play along with him, like we were his band, or he’d have to chase us out. So he had to chase us out. That was the first time we went over to Jackson Square – and I saw this artist guy sketchin’ lovers. Now, they were payin’ him to make them look ugly. So I went home and told Frico I had a brand-new business idea.
I sat down near to him on the floor beside the bed, and I said: “Frico, I saw a guy today gettin’ paid to make people look bad on paper. So just imagine. We could sketch some of those not-so-pretty tourist people over at Mardi Gras, reduce some spare-tyre gut and love handles and stuff, make them look all handsome, and they pay us a coupla bucks. We can do the advertisin’ ourselves. I could be the pitchman at fairs and exhibitions across the country, and Peter can play music and sing like one of them real ol’-time attractions.”
Well, he just sighed and looked at me with his eyes all tired. And all I could hear was crickets and frogs far away in the damn swamp. And since I knew that he was always lookin’ at Art and Photography schools, I kept goin’: “Frico, you could sketch and get to save money... for school.”
“I can get money or a scholarship for school, fool... That ain’t the problem.”
The problem, I was thinkin’, was that he was scared. Yep, Frico was scared. I thought he wasn’t scared of nothin’ – especially with these powers he got from God, or God knows where – but God bless a damn duck, he was scared as hell.
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