“Oh my Laaawd! Tony. You’re so late!”
“What? Why? What happened?”
“Your mother and your siblin’s... oh my Laaawd.”
“Ma. Seriously... what!?”
“Well, don’t get testy with me young man, I ain’t the firstborn who ran off and caused this whole calamity! Come inside, quick!”
She looked this way and that way and pulled him inside with absolute terror in her eyes. This woman was a classic. I bet she was almost a Hollywood actress back in the day.
And when he came in and looked around and saw our furniture in the Campbell’s place and no sign of us and Pa just sittin’ there shakin’, he couldn’t even sit down.
Ma is lovin’ every minute of this, cos she always thought the boy was too uppity and know-it-all. So she poured herself some tea and sat down and made him sweat some more bullets before she began.
“Those Vietnamese, Tony. They’re good at everythin’. They got people who came to this country and made the best of things. Those Vietnamese fishermen over at Lam Lee Hahn, they went deep-sea-fishin’ in the Gulf and they invented a new net that went so deep it caught them a nasty old mermaid.”
“A what?”
“Listen, Tony, keep calm. You want some tea?”
“No, Ma. I need an explanation!”
“OK. Well, they went and caught themselves a nasty old mermaid – or a Melusine, or like what you’d call a Sirène or whatever. Those ones that sing and lure sailors to get all shipwrecked. Well, she told them she was seven hun’erd years old and used to be French royalty, but she got cursed. Anyway, she wanted to know if they knew a conjurer in these parts who could change her back. And those fishermen were afraid o’ her... so they brought her here.”
“Why?”
“You mother can do stuff, Tony. I know you caught up in all your learnin’ and whadeva, but you gotta make some room in theah for the natural runnin’s of this earth, y’hear?”
Pa Campbell chimed in from starin’ at nothin’. “Oh, yes.”
“Anyway, your poor momma changed her back right quick. Right in front of us she became a beautiful dame again. Then she demanded the first-born son for a husban’. Well, your poor mother, she tried to pass off Douglas as the firstborn. Now Doug, he liked how she came up from the water – wet, naked, hefty bosom and all – so he was ready to go back into the Gulf with her. But when you’re seven hun’erd years old, you cain’t be fooled easy! So she smelt Douglas up and down and all around. Then she just turned aside and asked for you by name.”
“By name?”
“Oh yeeesss,” said Pa.
Ma lapped up the support.
“Yessir! Anthony Beaumont! Heard it with my own ears! And then, when Valerie confessed to tryin’ to trick her, she just walked out the door headed for the lake, and when she got to the very edge she sang out loud, “Ruine! Ruine! Ruine!” – which is like “Doom! Doom! Doom!” in French. Then she looked straight into our eyes, folded her arms over her breasts, fell into the lake backwards and disappeared. She put a spell on this whole place. Me an’ Pa, we old crabs already, so we couldn’t be changed any further. But your sweet mother and brothers... they’re so innocent. And you’re so late!”
Well, I wish I could see his face, but by that time Frico and Moms and Doug, they’re fightin’ for the same peephole and pushed me aside, so I have to be dependin’ on descriptions. Doug, he said Tony is fixin’ to go crazy in about ten seconds, so we hurried back across to the crab crawl and sat on the porch right as Ma Campbell is tellin’ him to shout out “Sorry!” and “Amen!” and turn around three times to break the curse. Well, if he did, none of us can tell, cos by that time we were busy meetin’ his girlfriend on what used to be our porch, and she was lookin’ as bewildered as ever, but fine nonetheless.
You shoulda seen the look of relief on this boy’s face when he came back over there and saw us on that porch with just two legs each and no claws or beady eyes. Man, we just hung over the porch and had a good laugh at ol’ Mr Logical while he took off his coat and sat down and wiped his brow and put his head in his hands and asked for some camomile and ginger tea to calm his nerves. And right in the middle of all that fun that’s when the weather decided to go dark on us.
We were all inside watchin’ Pa, silently laughin’ at Tony and lookin’ at his girl, when we smelt the earth outside being cooled. Delicious rain rappin’ on the tin roof like someone arrivin’ late at a closed door.
“Aw shit,” said Tony in his fancy white shoes.
Moms stepped in with pots and pans and a look on her face that was more relief than excitement.
“Action, stations!”
We knew that meant we needed to hurry and set the containers to catch rain water. I grabbed a bucket and told Moms I would stick it under the run-off from the roof of the crab crawl. She told me to hurry and get back before it was a real downpour, but I had other plans. See, I thought I’d do somethin’ romantic and run across to Mai in the rain, and she’d have a towel for me to dry my hair that would be all curly once the water soaked it, and we’d eat prawns and laugh. So I lit out and set the bucket at the crab crawl and took off my shoes. I was about to run out in the rain when I saw that ol’ Fricozoid had left his glasses on the porch ledge. I hesitated, cos I remembered last time he put a spell on me over these specs, so I wanted to run back and give them to him, but then I’d be caught by Moms and my romantic mission would be off.
So I’m there contemplatin’ while the rain was comin’ down. I put on Frico’s glasses to mock the guy, and I had to grab on to the porch to steady myself. Not because they’re bifocals, but because it was as if my eyes, my eyes were opened and I could see everything that the Sketcher saw. The dying swamp was a different world. A wonderful world. Nut grass wasn’t nut grass any more. Cypress and oaks were giant trees in their prime. No Spanish moss. Just over the porch the bayou was perfect and clear and ripplin’ and full of water hyacinths again. I turned around and the shacks were new and the raindrops on the roofs had turned into petals – thousands of petals floatin’ down instead of fallin’ hard. The broken creek was complete again – our tamarind tree was in bloom. Mai was walkin’ across the footbridge in her Vietnamese ao dai dress, coloured petals slidin’ off her red bamboo umbrella. I couldn’t wait to see what she looked like up close, so I ran out in the floral rain, and the grass was misty and as soft as ever.
I met her just as she stepped off the bridge, and she was perfect. She twirls her umbrella, and that pretty Vietnamese song with no translation is playin’ from the sky.
I swear that wearin’ Frico’s glasses is the best wagonin’ I ever did. When we get to the crab-crawl porch, I run through the streams pourin’ off the roof and try to help her up the steps. But she stops out in the rain and she’s not movin’. So I whip the glasses off and put them back on the porch ledge. When I look up, she’s standin’ there lookin’ sad, in a white top and blue Levi’s. The red umbrella is cold steel, and the Vietnamese song drowns in the water whippin’ the metal roof.
“What’s the problem? Come on up.”
She caught herself, but she stayed out in the rain. She tried to smile.
“Did you like the lan-yap? The men brought enough for a lot of weeks.”
“Uhm, yes, we have a huge crab crawl now.”
“Uh-huh. I heard. Did they tell you how to feed them?”
“They told us everything. So... with all that lan-yap, does that mean I’m a real customer now and not your petit chou any more?”
“Uh-huh. I have to go,” she says.
“OK, I’ll come with you.”
“No you can’t. I mean, my mother says we’re leaving. Leaving the swamp.”
I stepped down towards her. She took one step back, farther into the rain.
“Well, we’re all leavin’. Even Ma and Pa are leavin’ tomorrow, but we’ll stay in touch, right? What about the shop – where are you movin’ to... the city?”
“Closer to it. But you don’t u
nderstand, Skid. I want to help...”
I tried to interrupt to tell her the dream, but she counter-interrupted me.
“Listen, Skid. The whole swamp is turning upside down. The earthquakes are increasing. We have sinkholes in our shrimp ponds now. We don’t want to wait until one opens under the house.”
“I know what’s causin’ the earthquakes, Mai.”
“I don’t really care, Skid. I’m trying to tell you something!”
She never got so annoyed with me before, so I shut it.
“This swamp, this business, I want more than that. Or maybe less. I want to help people in different way. I need to be where people are dedicated to something big. So I’ve decided to become a postulant.”
“A what?”
“It’s the first step to becoming a nun.”
“A nun?... You’re sixteen!”
“It’s not for another two years, but I want to start preparing myself now. So...”
“So we can’t be friends?”
“Yes, friends. But only that.”
“Oh.”
Pause. The red wooden fence behind her is covered in bougainvillea. It’s the time of year for it, and durin’ a drought they come out in a rash. The bushes have more flowers than leaves, and all together they look like a white wave. I look around, and the swamp is once again a bowl of poison gumbo garnished with those bougainvillea white lies on the Lam Lee Hahn fence. The streams of rain running off the roof have become bars between Mai and me. They might as well have been a solid steel cage set in concrete. My breath is stuck in my throat again. It’s hard to talk between these goddamn bars.
“What about you and me goin’ to the San Tainos volcano and to Vietnam when we’re eighteen? What about you showin’ me the Great Mekong River that runs from the top of the world?”
She sighed. I had never seen her sigh.
“Those were promises that I will not be able to keep, and I’m sorry, but this is what I want to do with my life.”
“I thought you wanted to be a businesswoman, like your mother.”
“I do what my mother tells me. If I’m good at it, it’s because she taught me to watch and listen well. She also told me not to fool myself. That’s why I am doing this. I hope you understand.”
“No... I don’t.”
“Look, it’s kind of your fault, Skid.”
“My fault... what?”
“Do you know when I made this decision?”
“When I turned my back, obviously.”
“I decided this after you told me something you said no one else believes. When you told me about your brother, I saw it in your eyes how much you believe in what he can do. You believe that he can fix broken things in a much bigger way than your pops, who just repaired radios and TVs. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true. What is important to me is how deeply you believe it. Everybody else wish they were a star or maybe take trips to some place or had a lot of money. But I wish I had what I saw in your eyes and heard in your voice. Somethin’ to believe in as desperately as you believe in your brother. I have to go and look for it, so I want you to let me go find it. And please believe in me too.”
Yes, I did tell Mai about Frico and the whole sketchin’ thing. But I didn’t even know she was listenin’ between tendin’ to the shop and studyin’. But now there she was tellin’ me she wanted to believe like that. That was the closest anybody came to givin’ it a chance to be true.
So that was the beautiful breakup. She wouldn’t let me hug her. She wouldn’t know what to do with her hands.
She gave me a pen and said she had no paper, but I should write down her new address. I wrote it into the porch rail between two flower pots. 113 Meadow Vale, off Gregorian. Then she gave me her phone number.
“You gotta call first.”
And I just laughed and wondered when I would ever have a phone.
“And ask for Francine. That’s my American name.”
“Francine” looked at me for a long time, and I knew she was in love, but she turned and left me anyway. Her T-shirt was shorter, the skin of her back glowin’ and smooth as a river stone, with two dimples I used to call “hug handles”. But you shouldn’t think of a nun that way. Funny, she wasn’t even my type when I met her. Now, walkin’ over the footbridge as if on wheels and hikin’ up the slope, Mai was almost perfect, like the English she now spoke, and I knew I would never see her again. I decided this. That address was the inscription on a gravestone.
Master Sam was waitin’ for her at the train tracks with another red umbrella. He had on a red robe with neck embroidery, but the rain made the lower part of his dress look darker, like someone dipped him in blood. He looked in my direction, took her by the shoulder, and then those umbrellas just disappeared behind the mangroves.
When I got back, I was soaked. I made sure to walk slow through the showers, cos rain and tears, they look alike. Well, Moms, she was mad and told me I didn’t listen when she spoke, and one day I’d get into big trouble for it. She said all this in front of Tony’s girl, who was about twenty. Didn’t matter, I’d taken a break from older women. And Vietnamese ones too.
Anyway, poor Tony couldn’t even get to the car out at the tracks. I remember his girlfriend wanted to get back to her college dorm, and she needed to make a call to her dad. That expensive hand-held phone in her bag was as big as a damn buildin’, but she couldn’t get no signal out there behind God’s back. Ma Campbell said she once heard they don’t work well in the rainy weather, but on account of that lovely mermaid story, I think they should have that old woman hooked up to a lie detector all day long.
Twenty-Six
Now, don’t you let that clock fool you. It drags your days through the mud, but races off your years when you’re not lookin’. So don’t be surprised when there’s a wrinkle at the corner of your smile and a strip of grey where a milk moustache used to be. My pops said that time should stop when you step into your house, so we never had a clock. But, hell, we weren’t livin’ at our house no more, so we needed to get used to that big monstrosity of a grandfather clock over at Ma and Pa Campbell’s. Now, there’s one miserable machine to measure your life with. Forget the chimes – the tickin’ drove you crazy long before you got there. And those hands, those three hands didn’t help you do anything. They were only there to point out your limits, man.
It also didn’t help that the thing was so “classic” that it looked like Dracula’s vertical casket, no lie – but Ma Campbell, she was proud of that piece of funeral-home furniture. Said it was a “gen’wine Victorian Mellard” – which sounded quite uppity for a woman who would eat the fried skin off anything.
“When you git-a yourself a gen’wine Mellard, you hold it for as long as you can, even if it’s brok’n.”
That thing didn’t even know it was broken. It still ran, but it never showed the right time. Well, for me, it didn’t need to. I already knew that on one hand I was runnin’ out of it, and felt like it was goin’ too slow on the other. Ma and Pa Campbell were packed and waitin’ for family to come all the way from Arizona. They hoped the police would come back and say all was fine with the ballistic report, cos they didn’t want to look like they was runnin’. Moms had sold off nearly all of Pa’s goats, and they split the money. We handed off most of the mud crabs to Al Dubois for some more dough, even though they were a gift from Lam Lee Hahn. But there was no way we could eat all that crab in a coupla days. Evin Levine had taken three of Calvin’s kids, and we told Pa and Ma to take one and we’d keep the other. The chickens were all dead, ’cept for one dethroned rooster that walked around, tail feathers droopin’, wonderin’ where his women went. We killed him and sprinkled the blood around the house, cos Ma said demons were advancin’ on the place. Pa mumbled that the demons dropped down out of the big ol’ day bat when it flew over the swamp. Never mind the fact that it was all over the news what the creature really was.
B2 BOMBER. FIRST-TIME FLIGHT. BRAND-NEW STEALTH PLANE. LATEST WEAPON IN THE WORLD. MISSION
TRAINING EXERCISE.
Well, we could ignore Pa and his stories, but nobody was arguing with Ma about her beliefs any more. And if you came home and found a big ol’ turkey vulture pacin’ back and forth across your dinner table, like a preacher – with his nasty ol’ wings spread above his half-rotten head – you wouldn’t argue neither. You’d just ask her where she wanted that blood sprinkled. The moon was deep orange for four nights in a row after we chased that vulture out. Strange.
But the strangest thing of all was that everybody started experiencin’ things. Suzy Wilson felt like she was underwater drownin’ and gaspin’ for air, and that’s why she had to leave that day. Tony said the place felt stuffy, like there was a plastic bag over your life. Moms began to see things... like her husband’s shadow slidin’ up the stairs onto the porch. But she’d look up and that shadow wouldn’t be attached to a man.
Well, like I said, Ma Campbell, she had the remedy for all that: blood sacrifice. She wanted to kill a goat, but the last goat kid, he escaped with the chain around his neck, and at night we could hear him runnin’ through the goddamn bush, that chain rattlin’ like a Rollin’ Calf. Now, that’s supposed to be a ghost slash bull with fiery eyes and smokin’ nostrils – mostly bull, if you ask me. So instead of helpin’ the situation, this stupid billy-goat was runnin’ around the swamp at night, makin’ people wet themselves.
Ma Campbell drained out all the rooster blood around the house, dipped the rooster in hot water, sloughed off the thick feathers and singed away the finer ones over a fire, before turnin’ him into dinner. She put the candle of the Blessed Virgin against the mirror “to double the light in the room”. We burned frankincense and put a large brass crucifix in the doorway. The shadow fell across the porch. The last of the blessed lake water was sprinkled to keep spirits out. But we also had to keep an eye on the gators that wandered across the front yard at night, preferrin’ the brackishness in the lake over the gas bubbles in the dead pond. Mai’s mother had said some people somewhere in Africa saw bubbles in a lake and thought it was nothin’ until the entire lake rose up one night, swallowed up the village and burned everybody to the bones. I thought of Frico sketchin’ a levee around the house, but to me, the real repairs had already been done. Now it was just a matter of time.
Sketcher Page 22
