Neverland (13 page)

“Oh,” she winked, “easy. I got this one tooth that’s sharper than a snake’s, and I just bite down on my gums and it starts to bleedin’.” She opened her mouth wide and pointed out the tooth. It looked like she’d chipped it on one edge. “Just was born with it.”

“It’s ’cause she’s part snake,” Wilbur said, scratching his scalp. These were the first words he’d uttered. His voice was low and deeper than most boys our age—for these kids weren’t more than a year or so older or younger than us.

Zinnia nodded. “Ma sometimes picks up cottonmouths to prove that Jesus is King. They never bit her but once or twice. You ever touch a snake? You ever
want
a?” She reached over with both hands and grabbed me and pressed her lips to mine. I recoiled from her touch, but not before I tasted the blood on her lips. She pulled her face back and reached up with her left hand and slapped me on the forehead. “That’s how my ma sends the Holy Ghost into you, with tongues of fire and a rap-tap on the head.”

We heard ringing from far off: Aunt Cricket clanging the dinner bell. Zinnia, who was smiling from her forced kiss, looked back toward the door to Neverland and said, “Who’s that for?”

“For you, white-trash girl, and don’t you dare try to put the Holy Ghost in me neither.” Sumter bent down and picked up a rusty rake and threatened her with it. Zinnia started caterwauling like some animal in heat, pushing Goober and Wilbur back out the door.

Sumter waggled the rake around, bashing it down into the ground. “It’s the Devil ringing his bell for you, white trash.” He held the rake up like it was a giant razor, shaving at the air in front of her face.

Zinnia ran out of Neverland faster than her two friends, racing out of there and into the scraggly woods, down to the edge of the bluff. The boys took off in opposite directions, one out to the main road, the other to the
eastern side of the Retreat, their arms flailing out as they ran, hooting and hollering.

I watched Zinnia go, the first girl who had ever kissed me. She stopped at the chalk-white path that would lead her down to the beach. She looked back at me as I stood there, having come around the side of the shack to watch her. Her hair floated in wisps around her head; the sun was red behind her and it looked like a halo on an angel. I could not see the expression on her face, but she waved, and I could not help but wave back.

Sumter came up from behind me. “Don’t encourage her.” He grabbed my waving hand and brought it down. Then he returned to shut the door to Neverland, checking the lock. “I got to get a combination lock for this place or all kinds of garbage will find its way in.”

As we walked back to the house, our feet getting sucked into the asphalt tar pit of the driveway, he curled his lips up as if he were sucking a lemon. “Yuck, I bet she tasted like a three-day-dead bluegill.” Sumter laughed, swatting me on the back.

Her lips had tasted to me like nothing, but my own lips felt funny. My whole face felt funny. “I think I got bit by some bug,” I said, scratching at the back of my neck. My whole scalp was itchy, but I figured it was mosquitoes. My mother had forgotten to hose me down with Off!, and we’d of course been eaten alive out on Rabbit Lake because of it. I generally preferred the mosquito bites to the smell of Off!, but it felt like all the blood-suckers had aimed for the top of my scalp and nowhere else.

 

BACK home, while Sumter and I were washing up, Missy sat on the edge of the big old claw-footed bathtub and filled us in on the shopping trip. “We ate at the counter at Ruley’s Five and Dime, and Mama kept talking about how Daddy was just a selfish so-and-so. All week she’s been like this. And Governor just bawling his eyes out. Too, too much.”

“I wish for just once in your life you’d get it right, Missy, just once.” Nonie stood in the doorway filing her nails with a dull emery board. Her face was already peeling from the sun, but it was all mushed over with some
of my mother’s calamine lotion. “It was Aunt Cricket who said the stuff about Daddy, and I swear Mama was gonna slap her if she kept talking him down. That Aunt Cricket gets
nasty
when she wants, blah-blah Sunny this and blah-blah Sunny that, as if he’s some little angel, and when
your
name comes up, let me tell you, she ain’t got a thing good to say but how
sorry
she is that you’re so
afflicted
with bad circulation and a melancholy temperament and
where
, she was wondering,
does all that come from?
Meaning
Daddy’s
at fault on account’a her little precious ain’t got nothing the matter with him. Aunt Cricket’s a regular b-i-t-c-h.”

“Can’t help what my mama says,” Sumter muttered.

Missy nodded, admitting her mistake. “That’s right. Aunt Cricket said the bad stuff, but I think Mama is just fed up. And shoot, Beau, she must’ve bought up the entire store at Four Gals. She bought a dress that cost over a hundred dollars and then some.”

“She wears such ugly things, it’s about time,” Sumter said, drying his hands off. “My mama says Aunt Evvie’s got the worst taste in the world.”

“Oh, huh, Sumter, yeah, huh,” Nonie said sarcastically. “You believe everything your mama tells you, do you, huh?”

Sumter whapped her with the hand towel. “I believe things because I know ’em. Like today, we saw a girl take off all her clothes. She kissed Beau.”

“He’s a liar. She didn’t take her clothes off.”

“She started to. She kissed him.”

“You got kissed.” Nonie nodded her head up and down, amazed.

Missy began repeating “Wow” over and over to herself.

“She kissed him like this.” Sumter poked his face against Nonie’s and slathered his tongue across her lips. She slapped him and pushed him away, spitting his kiss into the sink.

“And he
liked
it. Beau got a boner.”

“Did not. Just shut up,” I said.

“Beau got a boner,” he repeated, “and she was only white trash. Now we know what
he
likes. Now we know what
he
likes.”

From the hallway Mama called out, “You children come to supper, now, or there won’t be any left for you.”

Uncle Ralph had only caught one catfish that day, and Daddy said it was hardly larger than the bait he’d used. “I felt bad for it.” He grinned, sipping his beer. He patted the place next to him, between him and my mother, for me to sit at. “I was thinking maybe we ought to let it go. I think it was a newborn.”

“It was big enough before it got cleaned,” Uncle Ralph grumbled.

“You still smell like that lake.” My mother wrinkled her nose at me as I sat down to the table. “Didn’t you wash up like I asked?”

Grammy Weenie was distracted. Her eyes were like blue beads off of Nonie’s costume jewelry necklace. She wore her thick reading glasses, and she had her little red Bible laid out in front other. I saw her from the side and noticed fine white hairs along her chin.

We had the tiniest catfish tidbits for dinner, and Sumter refused to eat anything except his corn. He nibbled at it the way cartoon characters did, like it was a typewriter and every time he came to the end of each side he’d make a noise like a tinkling bell: “Ding!” He wanted to sit his teddy bear at the table with him, but Uncle Ralph made him keep Bernard in the living room.

“But, Ralph, Sunny looks so sad without him,” Aunt Cricket cooed. Her face was flushed and shiny, the way it always got whenever she spent the day shopping; it may have been the makeup she wore, or it may have been the thrill of the hunt. She’d pulled her hair back into a small Danish pastry on the side of her head, and this seemed to tighten the skin around her ears so that they looked pointy. “It’s only a bear,” she reminded my uncle, her pointy ears bobbing as she spoke.

Uncle Ralph looked at his son like he couldn’t believe a boy like that could exist for very long under scrutiny. “I don’t give a damn. I should’ve left that thing in a Dumpster back in Marietta when we had the chance. He’s gonna be some kind of sissy if we don’t get rid of that thing.” Turning his attention to my father, he said, “I don’t know what I did to deserve
this. If he’d only take an interest in something, I tell you, something like bowling or even Matchbox cars, like a regular boy. I don’t see your kid playing with dolls, Dab.”

My father looked like he was about to say something, but held himself back. He winked at me. “Beau, you want to play with a Chatty Cathy, you go right ahead.”

Grammy Weenie looked up from her Bible. She removed her glasses, holding them in midair. “Babygirl had an actual bear for a pet when she was a young girl. She’d found it as a cub and trained it, but in the end Old Lee had to shoot it. Babygirl was good with animals; she had sympathy for them. Not much interested in people, mind you, but bears and such . . . ”

“Oh, Mama, really,” my mother said, “why in God’s name would there be a
bear
on Gull Island?”

“There was a
carnival
, dear, a
circus
, and there were
cubs
. You were only four, so how can you be expected to remember? Cricket was barely two. Babygirl was nine by then.” Grammy sighed, seeing that my mother was ignoring her. “There was a
storm
and the
bears
got
loose
. It happens in the world, Evelyn Jane. Not everything is the way you remember it.”

Mama looked at Aunt Cricket and then back down to her plate.

Aunt Cricket pretended she was interested. “I remember Babygirl talking about her bear. She had other pets, too, didn’t she? She always went for long walks in the woods.”

Under his breath Uncle Ralph muttered, “She was just an idiot, as far as I could tell. Making up stories like a gooney bird.”

“Bernard would claw you up before you had your gun out and aimed,” Sumter said. He reached up and parted the hair along his scalp. I assumed he had also been ravaged by mosquitoes that afternoon. He scratched furiously at the rim of his ears.

“How’re your memoirs coming, Rowena?” Daddy asked.

Grammy Weenie made a sucking noise with her mouth; Sumter kicked me under the table; Aunt Cricket raised her eyebrows and I knew what she was thinking:
senility
.

“I am writing what I think happened,” Grammy said. “Although one can never be sure if one is seeing things as an adult sees them or as they were seen as a child. And there is a difference. Big Daddy himself I barely remember, physically, and the Giantess from Biloxi is only a shadow and a voice. I remember not a shred of kindness nor mercy from either of them.” She offered up a bittersweet smile, her eyes shining a bit in the light as if they held back tears. “My childhood seems terribly empty when I think on it. It was after I had children of my own that my recollections become better.”

Then, brightening a bit, she laughed lightly. “Until I married Old Lee, I had no friends at all. But young ladies lived like that in those times. Then, my girls came along. Oh! How they were like flowers in a perfect garden! I love all my daughters equally, whether they choose to believe that or not, but because of Babygirl’s sensitive temperament and the fact of her being firstborn, I suppose she and I were able to be the closest. She was always a child, even up until she died, always like a little girl, even in her twenties.”

Then, that etching of sadness overcame her, the deep plunge that I often felt around my grandmother as if life were a precipice and, at any moment, she might fall from it. “Sometimes . . . I feel her. Tugging at my hands, brushing my hair. Those we lose are never really gone, are they? They are there, at least insofar as we remember them, and they have not really left us at all. Why, Dabney, it’s just like she will walk back in that door and sit with us at the table. Perhaps if she had been home with us when she died, I might not remember her so clearly, but she left, you know, and went away, and there she died and there she is laid to rest. But it’s as if she had never really done anything but walk out the back door one day. Perhaps, on another, she might walk right in through the front.”

Grammy dabbed at her eyes with her grease-stained napkin.

Nonie, across the table from me, rolled her eyes. She hated Grammy’s stories, particularly about Babygirl, our late aunt. None of us had ever met her, and we often doubted her existence, considering how many stories were spawned by her short life of thirty years. Grammy had been in her
late thirties when she’d had her children, unusual for her day, and even stranger given the fact that Grammy often spoke on the subject of why women in their twenties should be the only bearers of children. “Anything can happen when you’re older,” Grammy would warn my sisters, “your babies can have all kinds of complications.” Aunt Cricket would often remark that Babygirl was from Mongolia and that neither she nor Mama were much allowed to play with her. Grammy would say, “It was a tragedy, but sometimes I think she was lucky to have her life end so young—the indignities of age and a graceless family were never visited upon her.” Grammy was most animated when telling death stories.

Mama clicked her fork on her plate. “I remember her, Mama, and the way she loved the dolls. I liked playing dress-up with her.”

Governor made his
dit-do
noise.

“Dit-do,” I said back to him, cocking my head to the side.

My baby brother looked at me like I was crazy.

Grammy Weenie continued her rambling. “About that bear, the bear had fur the same red color as her hair.”

Aunt Cricket interrupted, “It was blond.”

Grammy shook her head. “You only saw her in the summers when she’d been in the sun. I am her mother. Do you think I don’t know my own daughter?”

“
Sometimes
. . . ” Mama said under her breath, and then stopped herself.

Grammy continued, “Although y’all are just too young to remember. Her hair was like fire and ashes. Mine was always light, like Sumter’s. Nobody’s got that kind of hair, but it was beautiful, I can tell you. She wore it long, and once, as the story goes, she was brushing it at an upstairs window in the Biloxi house, she was only fifteen, and someone called the fire department because they saw the red of her hair reflected in the window glass and thought it was fire. As God is my witness, that’s a true story. The whole town came out that day to see her hair. Of course, she was terrified of them, and never went to the window again.
People
she was never fond of. She loved children—but then, she was a child herself.”