Neverland (20 page)

“Are you
Luc
ifer?”

“You want to grow up like
them?”
the Devil-thing asked.

Something was coming up behind me, something other than this woman-creature. I heard the buzzing of the yellow jackets and the clomping of hooves. I smelled its fish-oily skin, and I was turning to see it, to see
him,
not Lucy, who stood beside me, but something even greater than Lucy, the All, the Great Feeder who walked in shadows.

I sat up in bed. “Everything hurts.”

My door was open and Missy stood there. “Can you
believe
it?”

From down the hall we heard the sounds of fighting. Aunt Cricket was the loudest. “You just put that down right now! I will scream if I want to. . . . Oh, no, you don’t. . . . Well,
let
them hear—I don’t care!”

Uncle Ralph blasted, “He’s never gonna grow up to be a man! You can just look at him!”

“Well, maybe if he had a
man
to look up to!”

“He’s a goddamn mama’s boy—”

The crashing of objects, like bombs going off.

Missy whispered, “They were getting drunker and drunker downstairs, and then he almost
tripped
on the teddy bear going upstairs, and it all started, and
Gawd,
Beau, you just gonna lie in bed or you gonna come out in the hall and
listen
?”

The hallway was lit by a single bulb, with faces peering around the banister and from doorways. Nonie sat on the stairs, her hands over her ears, her head almost in her lap, although every few seconds she’d look up and down the hall to the noisy bedroom. Mama was in the doorway to her room and said, “Beauregard, you get right back into bed. I won’t have you getting sick for the rest of the vacation.”

I slunk back to stand just inside the door to my room. Missy, rather boldly, went and sat at the top of the staircase.

Grammy Weenie wheeled below us, shouting out, “I
wish
for once my children would
behave
themselves like decent
guests
and not just use my home as a saloon!”

From the bathroom came the sound of Sumter singing “Old Folks at Home” while he splashed in the tub. I could imagine him sitting there, pretending that none of this was going on. He had a tremendous capacity for blocking out reality.

“You best not be breaking any of my dolls!” Grammy said. “That’s all I have to say! You best not be breaking valuables!”

Nonie turned and looked at me. “Don’t you just get sick of all of them? I hate this. I
hate
this. I wish we’d all just get divorced.”

The door to the bedroom next to Uncle Ralph’s opened, and Daddy peered out. Behind him I saw Mama pacing the floor with Governor up over her shoulder. She was patting him on the back, her face set in a tight mask. Daddy barked, “You girls
get
in your room right now!” I hid behind
my door so he couldn’t see me. Missy and Nonie went running down the opposite end of the hall.

Aunt Cricket was crying hysterically while Uncle Ralph continued his tirade, throwing things around as punctuation. “You
hurt
me, you bastard!” Aunt Cricket shrieked. “You’re
hurting
me! Somebody! Help me!” Her voice was high and pathetic and it hurt just to hear her.

Daddy shut one bedroom door behind him and pushed open the other one.

From where I could see, Uncle Ralph was slapping at Aunt Cricket’s shoulders, back and forth,
whap, whap, whap.

“Get away from her,” Daddy said, and went over and shoved my uncle back.

“How dare you,” Uncle Ralph said.

Aunt Cricket cried and cried, “Oh, Lord, he
hurt
me, Dabney, he
hurt
me.”

I watched my father put his arms around my aunt.

“Go to your room
right now
,” Mama said. I looked up and she was standing in her doorway glaring at me. I had never seen her so angry except when she was ironing. “Go inside that room and shut that door, young man.”

I did as I was told.

Sumter’s voice was clear through the wall and almost sounded good. “All the world is sad and dreary,” he sang, and I sat up in bed listening to him until I fell asleep again.

The world of dreams seemed a safer place.

In the middle of the night I was again awakened, this time by Sumter.

“You feeling better?”

“Huh?”

“We’re going to Neverland. You coming?”

Once I could move my arms and legs, sore from the bites, scratches, and the outrageous fortune of bad circulation, I slipped from my pajama bottoms into my swimming trunks and followed my cousin out.

As scary as it could be, Neverland itself was our playground. It was, as Missy said to me that night on the walk out to it, “Fun scary, not
scary
scary.”

At least, before it got out of hand.

Everything in childhood gets out of hand.

In Neverland that night, Sumter entertained us.

“Step right up,” he said, waving his hand in the air. From the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt he produced a bouquet of stinky chrysanthemums. “For the lovely ladies,” he said, tossing them to Nonie, but as the flowers flew out of his hand, they became sparrows, twittering, and flying up against the roof. As we watched them, the birds dropped again, becoming bits of folded paper as they hit the ground.

“Oh wow,” Missy gasped, clapping her hands, “a
magic
show.”

We had come to accept the dream side of Neverland completely. I could not be surprised by anything that occurred within those walls.

Sumter held up his hand. “Ladies and germs, not a magic show, but a
tragic
show. Observe.”

He reached into the opening of the crate, making a face like he was sucking on a lemon, and then brought out something small and furry.

The bunny from Rabbit Lake.

“How’d you
do
that?” I asked.

“Watch,” he said. He sat down, clutching the bunny against his chest. “Presto-digito-boola-boola.” He kissed the bunny on the bridge of its nose.

He held it up by the scruff of its neck.

The bunny began speaking.

It sounded just like Uncle Ralph.

“That boy’s never gonna grow up, I tell you, he’s always gonna be a little mama’s boy,” the bunny barked.

Missy leaned toward me and whispered, “Can you see his lips move? I think his lips are moving.”

The bunny continued, “You got to stop playing with dolls, boy, you got to be more like your cousin Beau. You don’t see him playing with no damn teddy bear.” The bunny scrunched its nose up and tried to wriggle out of Sumter’s grasp, but he shook it almost furiously.

“So Mr. Bunny,” Sumter said, “you think boys shouldn’t play?”

“More important things in life.”

“Like what?”

“Like drinking good bourbon and chasing whores.”

“You think your boy should be like you?” Sumter asked the rabbit. He shifted his fingers from its neck to its ears. It began writhing in his grasp, trying to escape.

Uncle Ralph bunny hissed, “You worthless whelp, you put me down. You put me down or I’ll have your hide, you hear me? I’ll have your hide!”

“No.” Sumter grinned, and this worried me. Whenever he grinned like this, broadly, his eyes catching the glint of candlelight, I worried.

“Sumter,” I said, “don’t do—”

“Shhh,”
Missy hushed me, “just watch the
show
.”

“I’m gonna tan your hide, boy.” Uncle Ralph bunny flailed its back legs; with its forepaws it fought the air.

Sumter held it firmly by the ears. “No you’re not, you
dumb
bunny, not if I tan yours first.”

And with that Sumter reached up with his free hand to the nape of the animal’s neck. With one quick and sure move, he ripped the bunny’s fur right off its back.

I yelped and jumped up and tackled Sumter to the ground. “Don’t you hurt that—”

Sumter was laughing. “Get off me you moron, lookit!
Lookit
.”

The bunny had fallen to the ground beside us, and it was, after all, just a stinky old dead bunny with its guts hanging out and some flies buzzing around its innards.

“It was already
dead;
you saw it before. It’s been dead for at least a week. You know that.”

Nonie peered beyond us to the rotting rabbit. “Disgusto.”

“How’d you do that, Sumter? Huh? Show me how you did that. I only saw your lips move
once
,” Missy said.

I looked around at the others, my sisters. Their eyes seemed to be glazed over as if they were walking in their sleep. I sniffed at the air; it was sweet and rotten.

“Why’n’t you bury that thing?” I asked. “What’re you keeping it for?”

“Don’t you want to see what happens when you die?” he asked me, incredulous that I wouldn’t want to watch a body decompose. “Don’t you want to see how it all goes?
Lookit
,” he poked his fingers into the open belly, jabbing them around, “ain’t it something?
Nothing
hurts it.
Nothing
.”

We all slept late after the emotional storms of the previous night. Even with the tragic show Sumter put on for us in Neverland, I was well rested. I felt better that morning than I had felt for a long time, and the scratches on my arms were all healed. My circulation wasn’t even all that bad; I practically leapt out of bed. Uncle Ralph was moaning from his room and spent most of the day nursing a hangover. Julianne had already swept up the broken lamp and the two vases my uncle had thrown, and except for a sour memory, you’d’ve thought we were all back to normal.

“Julianne’s taking us down to the West Island for the carnival,” Missy said over a breakfast—which we didn’t sit down to until nearly eleven.

“I didn’t even know there
was
a carnival,” Nonie said sullenly, forking through her grits like she was looking for a prize.

“The Sea Horse Park,” Julianne said as she brought in a pitcher of juice. “I want to get y’all out from underfoot here, and they say some of the rides’ll be open. Always some ride going down there, and I have a few things to do there, m’self.”

“Mama, don’t you want to come?” Sumter asked Aunt Cricket, who just shook her head. We all noticed and later commented on the fact that she was wearing an inordinate amount of makeup around the eyes this morning, and if you squinted, you could make out the barest smudge of a yellow-purple bruise.

Daddy dropped us off at the park just after noontime. The sun was up and hot like a big old egg yolk sizzling on the griddle sky. Julianne had a little white plastic purse that was almost too dainty for her lumbering form. “Your daddies’ve given three dollars’ spending money for each of y’all, so you decide what you want, if you want cotton candy or a ride or a trip through the sideshow. Then you come to me for your money and I’ll give it to you. But decide first, so’s you don’t just throw it away.”

The Sea Horse Amusement Park was a shambles, and it’s doubtful that it met any safety standards whatsoever. You didn’t so much enter it as step in it. Dwarfing it was a gray-white wooden roller coaster that, as far as I knew, had never run, but had always just been this curvy skeleton taller than even the trees, or so it seemed. But it looked like you could blow it over by just coughing. The park was decomposing just like the dead bunny in the Neverland crate. Even the sidewalks between the bubbling asphalt were cracked and crumbling, with wild yellow stalks of grass fighting for space, and corkscrew roots of dying trees just waiting to trip you up as you headed toward the ticket booth. There was a Muzak version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” coming through the crackly loudspeakers, and there couldn’t have been more than a dozen other people in the entire park—and most of them looked like sleepy drug addicts. Floating as if in a trance
were skinny men with goatees and red pirate bandannas around their scalps, wearing black tank tops and bell-bottoms, limp cigarettes lolling from their tight mouths. An older girl with long straight hair all the way down to her fanny strode up and down the walkway, a halter top barely holding her bowling-ball breasts in, a three-year-old curly-haired girl clutching her hand tightly.

The man selling tickets was fat and had no shirt on, and his nipples were huge and hung across his chest like two great puffy flapjacks; tattoos of dragons and naked women ran together in green and red all around his flabby arms, and he had a Viking painted on his overhanging belly, with its cavernous navel making the Viking’s mouth. He smelled the way phone booths sometimes do when bums pee in them. The rides were between fifty and seventy-five cents, depending on their severity.

The bumper cars were disabled, but we went around to them anyway and sat in the cars and pretended they were going. Julianne leaned against the low wall outside and pulled her skirt together when a crazy-looking man walked by and leered at her.

“I bet you don’t know how to drive a car,” Sumter said.

“I do, too.” I spun the wheel of the bumper car and made
vroom
noises. “Daddy lets me drive it up and down the driveway.”

“Well, we ain’t going nowhere in these things,” he said, climbing out of them.