He always said – and when he did, he sounded real artsy -fartsy – he wasn’t so good at drawin’ the human form. See, Frico liked to draw landscapes and animals and Teesha Grey’s birds and nice buildin’s. Those he drew real good. But he hated drawing people. Even though in reality he was good at it. So before he could even answer, I flipped it and said: “Fine, you’re afraid you’ll draw somebody all screwed up. But supposin’ they need to be drawn all screwed up?” I could think of a coupla people who deserved it, damn it – or at least one guy: that same ol’ James Jackson. One year after the shindig that Couyon guy was back to snatchin’ clothes off people’s clothes lines like he forgot he was the CEO of some place in his head. So I told Frico that maybe we could tell reporters some big lie to bait ol’ James Jackson – and when he comes back into the swamp, Frico could draw him without arms or legs or somethin’. Then, when he’s rollin’ around on the ground, we nab him quick and collect the reward money.
“Where do you come up with this bull? And by the way, didn’t I tell you to stop talkin’ to people about all this stuff?”
And that was the end of the conversation right there. If he was goin’ to be as dismissive as that, then I wouldn’t ask him anything any more. Except to stop the pimples. For one whole year I rushed into the bathroom every mornin’ to try and stop him from sketchin’ me on the mirror, but I’d always be too late. It was like the guy slept in there.
But, seriously, I couldn’t see why tellin’ Peter Grant was a problem. I thought Peter would be the first to say he believed in Frico’s powers, but the first time I stopped by his house, he suddenly didn’t seem to have a clue. Now, first of all this boy lived in a mansion – at least compared to our one-room shack in the swamp. Peter’s house wasn’t like one of those historic houses that all look alike. Naw, the Grants’ house was a mansion fixer-upper. White Lions on black-marble columns greeted you at the front. Then there was a veranda with black-and-white tiles. It had three bedrooms, a guest room and helpers’ quarters. Kitchen counters went on for ever, and there was a huge gas range and a fridge with ice comin’ out the side, clink-clink into your glass. Man. Two carved bannisters led upstairs, but one staircase was blocked off. That was to accommodate a Hammond B3 church organ. Yes, a real, live church organ that when Peter held down the keys and stepped on the pedals his whole family jumped up and praised the Lord or cursed the Devil.
Anyway, like I was sayin’, about the first time I went to the house, I saw the Frico face sketch in Peter’s room. It was done such a long time ago it was faded, and the blood that got onto it was deep brown. I asked him about that night. He said he didn’t remember much, cos he lost consciousness, but the nurse woke him up with smellin’ salts and then Frico gave him the drawin’ he had done.
“Do you remember me holdin’ up a flashlight to your face?”
“No, not really man. Why?”
“How long ago was this camp accident?”
“Two, three years?”
“Five.”
“OK, and?”
“And do you remember how you got hurt?”
“One second I was running beside the stupid bus, and then next thing I tripped and hit my face on a rock in the road.”
“Maybe you were lookin’ at Donna Milleaux in the bus. She was cute.”
“Donna Milleaux was not cute.”
“Cute enough to make you fall hard and bust your face up.”
“Back to the point, Skid.”
“Yes. Now, don’t you think it’s strange that there’s not even one scar on your face from that accident? Think about it.”
“Good genes, I guess.”
“Good genes, bad memory. A miracle happened that night, man.”
“I dunno. Like I said, I can’t remember.”
“Well, you got to.”
“Yeah – as soon as you tell me what you’re getting at, I’ll try.”
“Just look at your face in the mirror, remember the accident and try to find a scar, then we’ll talk.”
The whole way into the swamp, Peter was checkin’ his face in the rear-view mirror, until his old man told him to stop makin’ him nervous.
“Dad, remember that camp injury?”
“Can’t forget. You chased some girl called Dora Miller until she hit you in the face with a rock. I must’ve paid for the stitches. Waidamminit... did you get any stitches?”
“No.”
He fixed his cap on his head and looked sideways at Peter while drivin’, just like Pa Campbell did all the time.
“Come to think of it, you came home properly patched up, really. We sent the nurse a thank-you note and everything.”
“Good genes and a good nurse, I guess.”
I looked straight ahead, smilin’. “Man, I got some things to tell you, Peter Grant.”
That same evenin’, Moms was cookin’ up a storm with so much skill she made it look like kung fu or like she had more limbs than the rest of us.
I watched her from the bed. In our swamp shack, you see everything just by turning your head – and that made me think of the Grant Mansion and the fact that you could actually be inside that big house the whole darn day and no one would know. I was feelin’ so triumphant that day I wasn’t even afraid of ol’ Frico and his nonsense. So I rolled over to the edge of the bed and looked down on him. “Why don’t you just sketch us all a bigger house right here in the swamp and we can all live in it?”
And as soon as I said it, I knew it was the dumbest suggestion he ever heard. But he just said: “It don’t work that way, Skid. I told you this before and so did Momma. You can only work on what you already got.”
And that was the first time Frico Beaumont didn’t flat out deny that he could do magic. So I knew we were makin’ progress.
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 spo
t 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, lik
e 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.
Sketcher Page 17
