Neverland (15 page)

Slowly the door to Neverland opened. Sumter stood there in his swimming trunks. He looked at Zinnia and then over to me. “Don’t forget the lice, Beau.”

As if I’d just gotten a shock, I jumped back from Zinnia. I
had
forgotten the lice.

“If you got lice, it wasn’t from
me
.” Zinnia combed her fingers through her hair. “I am washed as
clean
as they come.”

“Go home or die,” Sumter said.

“Oh,
please, please
, let me see inside again. I won’t tell, honest I won’t, I’ll be so dang good you could cry, honest to goodness, please.”

Then something bad happened, and I knew it was bad just like I could smell it. It was like when rubber burned in Uncle Ralph’s old car—you didn’t know where it was burning, but you just sat there and smelled it and knew it was burning. Maybe it was Sumter’s woken-up look or the way he licked the edge of his lower lip—like smoking rubber. “Okay,” he said, still standing inside of Neverland, “only if you pass our test. Right, Beau? She’s got to pass our test.”

“Right,” I said, bewildered.

“Test? I could probably teach you both a thing or two, myself.” She sauntered on ahead of me, and I watched the twin spheres of her behind beneath the fabric of her dress twist and turn like she was clutching something between them with no chance of dropping it.

“Hey wait,” I said, stepping toward them. But Zinnia was in, through the door, and it slammed shut. I heard the inside lock click into place, and I heard Zinnia giggle and say, “I don’t get it.” I banged on the door with my fists. It gave a little, and I worked my fingers in through a crack, but Sumter, on the other side, pushed it down on my fingers until it hurt so bad I had to let go.

From the other side of the door Sumter said, “Sorry, cuz, this is only a test. For the next sixty seconds this place will be conducting a test of the Emergency Neverland System. This is only a test.”

I swore at the door and then ran around to the side window, but could not see in.

It was quiet for the longest time, and I was just beginning to wonder what was going on in there when I heard a shriek. It was so quick and sudden that I wasn’t sure if it came from inside Neverland or not. Then the shriek melted into a series of giggles, and Zinnia was saying, “No, hee-hee, please—don’t—hee-hee,” and even the giggles got quieter and quieter until they died in a sudden silence. Then I heard her making sounds like she was trying to sleep and couldn’t, and he was still tickling her, only she couldn’t laugh anymore.

The trees were whispering: It was only a breeze through their branches. The waves below the bluffs bashed against the shore. I became aware of the humming of locusts all around.

A few seconds later the front door swung open again.

Sumter’s face was pearly with sweat. “You saw her. She
made
me do that.”

I could not say a word.

I stepped past him and saw her lying there, still. Zinnia’s face was pressed into the dirt. Her arms crumpled under her chest. “She didn’t pass the test, Beau. Lucy judged her and found her wanting.”

My mouth opened and my jaw moved, but nothing came out.

“She’s just white trash.”

“You
killed
her? She’s . . . ”

“Another sacrifice. Like the dead bunny. To Lucy.”

“She was just being
silly
, you sure she’s . . . ” I moved closer to the body.

I reached down and touched her back.

She moved.

“She’s not dead, Sumter, she’s alive,” I said, relieved that we would not spend the rest of our lives doing hard time.

“Not dead? Not
dead?
”

“Gawd, that was some joke you two, Jesus,” I said, thinking it was, after all, a prank. I could’ve clobbered them both for scaring me like that.

“
Please
,” Zinnia murmured.

“Joke’s over,” I told her, “you can get up now.”

“
Make it stop
,” she whispered, and, shining the flashlight across her face, I saw where the blood had run down from her lips.

“
Hurts
.” The blood ran from her lips but was also pooled around her neck, and as I shined the flashlight down her body, I saw her dress had been pulled up, and carved into her stomach were the letters L and U and C.

“She’s still
alive?
” Sumter shouted, pushing me out of the way, and in the flashlight’s beam was that rusty trowel that he’d threatened her with before. He knocked the flashlight out of my hands so I didn’t see him bringing the trowel down for her heart, but I heard it rip into her flesh and slam against a bone and dig down into her.

I stood there, in the darkness, shivering, my skin feeling like ice.

“Sacrifice, Beau, it’s a sacrifice, and it’s good. It’s change, it’s turning, it’s
feeding
,” Sumter muttered, and I could hear him lapping at something, and I knew it was her blood without having to see anything. “Everything eats
everything
. That’s sacred, Beau, you get it? All don’t come from nothing. All comes from
all
.”

I could hear my heartbeat like it was thunder, and I counted the seconds between each crash.

“Sumter,” I whispered, “you killed her.”

“She doesn’t matter,” he said, “you know she doesn’t matter.”

“And you helped.”

“You.”

From near the door I heard a low growl.

“Bernard,” Sumter whispered, “stay down, boy.”

I dropped to the ground and tried to throw up but found I could not. My hand touched the edge of the flashlight. I picked it up again. I directed my beam over to where I’d heard the growling, but all that was sitting over there was his dumb old teddy bear. Then I brought the light back over to Zinnia, and as the beam hit her, I just about peed my pants, because it wasn’t her at all, but one of Grammy’s Victorian dolls. Its blue silk dress ripped off and the trowel sitting straight up in its chest.

Its eyes were open and staring and dumb.

I heard Sumter laughing at me in the dark as the flashlight battery died and the light shut off.

“It’s just a
game,
Beau, don’tcha get it?”

From a corner of the darkness I heard a girl giggling stupidly, giggling within those walls of darkness, and her giggling was like a contagious disease—because I started giggling, too, and then Sumter, and we giggled madly in the dark, and I felt her hand,
her hand
, reach over and press down on my stomach, and her fingers like furry spider legs, tickling me into more giggles, and I knew,
knew
, it was bad, what we were doing, but I could not tell her to stop.

“It’s fun,” Sumter said, his breath on my neck, “to play in the dark, ain’t it?”

I walked back home alone that night feeling ashamed of everything that had gone on in Neverland. Entering the normal world of my parents and lying awake in my twin bed, I thought of the endless tickles and whispers in the dark of the shed with both revulsion and delight. I could not bring myself to think on it directly, but instead thought of it as something that happened the way things happened in my dreams: kind of true, but not part of the daylight world in which I did pretty much what I was told and was a good boy for the most part. I was thrilled to have this secret life in a secret place, to have given a blood oath, to be somehow part of a world alien to the master-slave relationship of parent and child. Thrilled, yes, and ashamed, too—gleefully ashamed.

I dreamed that night of other worlds, like in
The Martian Chronicles
, where the planet was blood-red and even grown-ups were not in control.

It was inevitable that one of those days Missy and Nonie would follow Sumter and me out to Neverland. We could only keep it secret so long.

It happened soon after I called Nonie the B word. The word had finally gotten around to my mother, who told me to apologize formally at the dinner table, which I did while Sumter kicked me from beneath. Mama would normally have disciplined me further, but she had her hands full with Governor, who was crying a lot more than usual, and with my father. They were well into their summer clothes of arguing and stormy silences. Dad never provoked the arguments, but he was always on hand to see them through. My mother would say that he never wanted a family, and he would deny it and tell her it was her imagination, to which she would reply that there was nothing she could imagine that didn’t already exist.

Grammy Weenie slapped the table that evening and said, “Thank God your father is dead, Evelyn. If he’d known you’d grown up into such an unfeeling, self-centered creature, he wouldn’t want to live. You’ve become a very hard woman.”
Hard
was the meanest adjective Grammy Weenie ever used, and it was worse than more explicit terminology. From
hard
there was no return, and it ranked just above
brazen hussy
on the scale of insults to women.

“Why’n’t you kids go out and play before it gets too dark,” Dad said, nodding to me. He was wearing a checkered short-sleeved shirt, and for every checkerboard there was a food stain.

“Yes,” Nonie muttered sarcastically, “we can play like good children.”

Uncle Ralph sniffed, “Only don’t you girls get Sumter out playing dolls or dress-up. Y’all play a game of War or something.”

“We
don’t
play
dolls
.” Nonie, again.

“Yeah,” Sumter grinned, “a little W. W. Two action and we set off the bomb in our own backyard. Lights out for the Rising Sun?” He rose from the table so fast his chair skidded right back into the yellow wall. He and
his shadow seemed to move in different directions, as if they were not joined at all.

“That boy . . . ” Mama sighed, and Aunt Cricket shot her a cold glance.

Nonie gave me a nod. “Let’s get out,” she whispered. Missy excused herself politely, and I stubbed my toes trying to get away from that table before a full-fledged fight broke out.

“Jesus,” Nonie gasped as if for air, “I wish they’d just divorce each other and not stay together for our sakes.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Missy worried. She kept flattening her blouse down, trying to define whatever breasts were dully sprouting there. “If you say it, it can happen.”

“Big deal.” Nonie pointed at Sumter. “
You.
”

“Yeah, huh?”

“Just that. I know about you.”

“Yeah, what do you know?”

“I just do.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

Nonie kept smiling secretly to herself. “There are more things in Heaven and Hell than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”

Sumter turned to me. “You have a spooky family.” He had his teddy bear on his lap. We sat on the front porch. The light was dimming, and fireflies were blinking on and off in the woods out by Neverland. The heat did not let up, even at twilight. It would just become dark and humid, and the slurping sound of the ocean would be silenced by the maracas of locusts in the trees. Sweat and mosquitoes bit at the backs of our necks.

“Well, let’s play something. Like Red Light, Green Light,” Missy said.

“That’s a baby’s game,” Sumter muttered.

I said, “We could play kickball.”

Sumter held Bernard’s ears back and made growling noises.

“I wish there was something to do here,” Nonie said. “There’s nothing to do here. I am so tired of the hired help telling me what to do, too. Don’t you hate that Julianne?”

“With all my heart and soul,” Sumter replied, “but she’s got hairy legs and so it can’t be helped. She ain’t all there.”

Nonie slapped aimlessly at the mosquitoes. Her face was spongy with sweat. “I don’t need a
baby
sitter. I’m old enough. I am so tired of that dumb old beach. I am so bored. Aren’t y’all bored? Well,
I
am. Not even a good book. At least the head lice provided some mild diversion. This is worse than summer camp. God, I wish there was a way to destroy all mosquitoes and to make it not get so sweaty.”

“What a mouth you got on you,” Sumter said, “and you’re only bored ’cause you got nothing inside you. You’re like one of those seventeen-year locusts you break open, only there’s no innards.”

Nonie fanned herself with the flat other hand.

“I think it’s pretty here.” Missy sighed, her voice dreamy. She swayed back and forth on the front-porch swing. “I could look at the sea forever.”

Her twin snorted derisively. “Natural beauty only does so much for me. If only there were boys.”

“You horny?” Sumter asked. “Beau and me know some white-trash kids that might find someone like you interesting.”

I felt my face flush red all over, thinking that my sisters could read all about the tickling and giggling and shadows of the night before.

Nonie wasn’t even looking at me. “You are so gross. And I mean nice decent boys like those high school boys we saw at the shopping center.”

“They were okay,” Missy said.

“
Okay?
They were major hunks. Really mature-looking, too. One guy had a
moustache
.”

“You are so boy crazy,” I told her.

“A slut at twelve, in trouble by fourteen, that’s what Mama says,” Sumter said. He had maneuvered his teddy bear around on its paws to
make it look like it was crawling like a real bear. Every now and then he’d growl and pretend it had come from Bernard.

“Well, I only have one more year to work on it. Almost thirteen, and don’t you forget it, twit.”

“
I
know,” Sumter brightened, “
I
know what we can do. We can play in Neverland.”

I screwed my face up, trying to figure him out. He wasn’t supposed to tell them.
I
wasn’t supposed to tell them.