Neverland (6 page)

“Nope, it’s white trash. They’re yellow and running scared.”

I stood full up and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t see nobody.”

“That’s ’cause they
are
nobodies. Dang it if this island ain’t full of the trashiest sorts. If I was to catch one, I’d turn him into rump roast.”

We both heard the scraping at the same time, and Sumter returned his attention to the crate.

“Look here,” he said. “C’mon, Beau, look here.”

When I looked again into the shadowy interior of that crate, I thought I saw:

A creature with a human face, with legs like crab pincers, with a tail like a lizard, with the cold staring eyes of a bluefish, its mouth opened wide, gray shark’s teeth thrusting out of bleeding gums.

Sumter began giggling, and before I could stop him, he reached down into the crate and punched his fingers into the monster’s round fish eyes.

When he withdrew his fingers, the face of the thing changed, melted down like wax and reformed—it was the face of something I had never seen, and yet it was closer to being human than it had been a second before. The eyes still had the dull rounded stare of a bluefish, the mouth its jagged teeth, but there was a wisdom and a horror that brought to my mind an image of suffering. It was the ugliest, most hideous face I had ever been witness to—it was what they told us in Sunday school was
unclean
. I could not tell if the thing was male or female, child or grown-up; its skin was covered over with gray-green sores, and its lips were in shreds from where its own teeth dug into them.

And then, as if it were being stripped of its disguises, again the image changed, its skin dripping down around its eyes as if it were weeping,
and what I saw beneath the liquid flesh was just the turning earth, ripe with nightcrawlers, thick with roly-poly bugs and albino grubs, feeding, feeding, feeding on the pungent and rotting vegetation—and even
this
was a face.

Every cell in my body seemed to rebel against this image, and it was like hitting a sudden high fever or like a dream where I would fall from a great height down into the sea. I had no breath, I had no muscle, I had no
life
. All around me I smelled—not the sea, not the clean air—but the mustiness of rotting, damp leaves, of just-turned earth, of places beneath stones where creatures moved slowly on their dark paths.

As if in a distant world, I heard Sumter’s voice, “The face of god. You saw it, didn’t you? I know you saw, I
know
you did.”

I blinked and it was gone. That vision, that face from a nightmare no longer existed—only a lingering sense of dampness and rot, which even then faded like a half-remembered dream. As I turned to the sound of his voice, Sumter’s face was red and shiny, as if he’d undergone some great exertion, like rolling an enormous boulder up a hill.

I had goose bumps all up and down my arms—Mama always said that it meant someone was walking over my grave. I had had my waking dreams before, but I was sure this was no dream. I could’ve sworn that I
saw
what I
saw
. I gasped, “How’d you do that?”

He looked all innocent. I could never tell if he was lying or not, although I always strongly suspected he was. “Huh?”

“What I just saw. Jesus, Jesus.”

Like I said, Sumter always scared me the most when he was quiet, mainly on account of he wasn’t quiet a whole lot, and when he
was
, he looked like a different kid. He looked like he wasn’t my cousin at all, but somebody I never met and would never want to meet. Sometimes I couldn’t believe we’d come from the same blood. Here he was being the most quiet I’d ever known him to be, and I got the shivers. I could just about feel my face turning from deep red to white and back again.

“You saw the face of god,” he said in the tiniest voice, so I had to strain to hear him. “It’s a god that eats, and you got to feed god so’s it won’t eat you first.”

I could smell his bad breath, just like he’d been vomiting candy all morning: sweet and sticky and warm. I just couldn’t bring myself to look back at the dark opening of the crate. Sumter’s eyes rolled up a little, so I could only see their whites, and he gave out with a little gasp like someone had surprised him—he was making some motion with one hand over the other. He had used the metal edge of the soda-pop tab and sliced down on the flesh that ran between thumb and forefinger of his left hand. He used his other hand to milk the blood out of it—a few droplets of red hit the edge of the crate. Something smelled funny, and I noticed he had a growing wet stain down around his zipper.

More drippy blood spat from his hand to the opening in the crate.

He let out a long sigh just the way Grammy Weenie did in her sleep when I thought she was giving up the ghost, and then his eyes rolled down into their normal places.

I had goose bumps just about everywhere on my body I could admit to, and I heard the thing move in the crate as it came toward the few drops of blood he’d squeezed out.

Someone said, “
Good
,
good
.”

I looked at Sumter again. Had he just said that?

I didn’t want to look back in the crate and take the chance of seeing that gross face, but I did, and there was nothing like it within a mile: In the crate was what I thought I had seen at first.

A horseshoe crab.

Only now it was different.

Now, it was
alive
.

Its helmet-back dull and dusty, its dozen legs scraping and clacking against the splintery wood, its spiny tail rising and falling. The thing seemed bigger than life, larger than Sumter’s hands put together as he
hefted it up out of the crate, its tail whiffling through the air, its tiny claw legs slicing across one another.

“You feed it
blood
? Jesus, you feed it
blood
?” I took a step back and practically tripped on a clay pot. “Jesus, it’s alive, you . . . blood . . . feed . . . ”

“
Yeth
,” he lisped, inhaling deeply, and he did something then that seemed so horrifying to me—more than the blood on the edge of the crab’s shell, more than my growing sense that there was something else, something
almost human
in the shack with us. He brought the crab up to his face and pressed its underside to his lips. The spiny tail flicked straight up and down, and its legs clung to his cheeks, and a noise came out of my cousin like I’d never heard, a wheezing noise like Grampa Lee made on his deathbed, like Grammy Weenie when she was snoring away, but mostly like Sumter was feeling a kind of pleasure I had never seen another human being feel. Like an expiring sigh.

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” I screamed and leapt forward and grabbed the crab off his face; I heard a sound like a sheet ripping in two.

As I pulled the creature from his face, his skin came with it.

His face was just a mass of black dripping muscle and lumpy fat and bone, and in my hands—the other side of his skin, a perfect mask of Sumter.

“
Good
,
good
,” someone said, and it was Sumter’s skin stuck to the crab, flattened like a pancake, torn lips smacking.

My hands were shaking so much that the horseshoe crab rattled, but I could feel it trying to pull my hands, and it, toward my own face, and I felt a calm the way they say drowning people feel, and even I wanted to bring that crab with the flapping human skin to my face and feel the pleasure Sumter felt.

“
Good
,” the faceskin smacked.

As hard as I could, I smashed the crab down on the edge of the wheelbarrow, and when it hit the ground I stomped my bare foot hard on it, again and again and again.

When I was sure it had been completely destroyed, and my feet were cut and bleeding from where they’d cracked the shell, I felt his hand on
my shoulder and jumped at his touch as if I’d just been given an electric shock.

Sumter was whole; his face was intact. I couldn’t believe it; I kept half expecting the skin to be ripped away again, but it remained.

He was mad as hell.

“You fool,” he snarled, “it was a trick, it wasn’t real, goddamn you, that wasn’t even god, you moron, I was just testing you, and you failed, Beau, you failed big-time. Get out of my clubhouse and don’t you ever come back here, ever. You just think you’re so smart, but I just showed you, didn’t I? I just showed you! Don’t you ever dare come back here again!”

I wandered the bluffs for hours, confused by what I’d just seen. It hadn’t been like any dream I’d ever had: I really believed that I had seen his face ripped off. I had no desire to ever set foot back in that shack again. I heard the blood pumping through my body, and the sun felt good on my face and neck.
I am alive
,
nothing happened
.
Just scared
. The world seemed like it had been just polished; I noticed the bark on trees and the birds in them, chattering away. The sea air almost took my breath away, it was so strong and thick.
Just scared
. I decided then and there that I would not play with Sumter at all anymore, that he was too weird, and his Neverland was just an awful bad place. I would never go back inside there as long as I lived, and he could just go and sell his soul to the Devil for all I cared, but I was well out of it.

But as I passed the shack on the way home in the afternoon, I picked up its scent, like just-turned earth in a garden, and I told myself that it had been my imagination or a trick, like Sumter had said. How had he done that?
I don’t care
,
he’s just perverse
,
and I’m not gonna be part of it
. Maybe he’d used a Halloween mask. It must’ve been a pretty neat one, too. It looked real, but maybe if I hadn’t been so scared (
you’re a fool
), I would’ve seen the seams or the wires or where it didn’t fit over his face right. They
always advertised masks like that in the back of comic books; maybe he’d sent away for it.
I don’t care
.
He’s just perverse, and I’m never gonna go in there ever again as long as I live
.
Never
.
Cross my heart and hope to die
.

When I got home, Daddy was snoozing on the grass while Mama and Uncle Ralph were setting up Aunt Cricket’s croquet set on the side lawn, trying to be careful to avoid stepping on the flower beds that Aunt Cricket guarded over while she stayed at the Retreat. They were being mindful of stepping over the wickets, too, and not tripping on the balls and mallets, because Uncle Ralph and Aunt Cricket and my parents had been having early cocktails—it wasn’t yet four—and they all smelled like gin-and-tonics.

“I got to talk to you,” I told my mother.

She was smiling, but a kind of tense smile the way she sometimes did around my aunt and uncle. “Honey?”

“It’s about Sumter,” I tried whispering, but Aunt Cricket heard me and clomped over to get in on it.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” Aunt Cricket asked suspiciously.

“Oh, Cricket, let him say what he wants,” Mama said. She swung her croquet mallet back and forth idly.

“He’s doing strange things,” I said, ashamed that I was so close to squealing. I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I tried, but it came out all wrong. “I saw like this monster and it ripped his face off and it had shark’s teeth. He has this skull, and he feeds it blood. But it may be a mask or something. Like those things on
Creature Feature
with the skull sticking out, sorta.”

Mama sighed, and ignored me then, the way she did whenever I told her a particularly strange dream. I knew she must wonder if I was a little crazy. “No more horror movies late at night,” she said. “I don’t care if it is summer, no more horror movies. Beau, you’re too impressionable. You’ll be wetting the bed all over again.”

I felt my face go red with embarrassment.

Aunt Cricket sipped her drink. “Seems to me you’re the one doing the strange things,” she said. “He told us all about it. Frankly, I don’t care about one of them ugly old crabs, but it wasn’t too nice of you to smash up his pet, now, was it? He caught it and he was taking care of it, and what kind of little boy goes around stomping on horseshoe crabs, I wonder.”

Lying is a trait common to children, but we are never good at it. Sumter had gotten home first and had lied to save his skin.

I wiped my feet on the bristly welcome mat on the porch when Grammy Weenie’s harsh voice called out, “You been up to no good, Beau? You been with that cousin of yours?” She punctuated each word with a phlegm-laden cough. The wheels of her chair scratched noisily against the warped floor of the front hall as she slid to the open doorway. Aunt Cricket’s black-and-yellow crocheted throw lay across her lap, and Grammy picked at the flower pattern with her bony fingers. There, amidst the flowers, rising between her knees, was the dreaded silver-backed, all-natural bristle brush.

The brush put the fear of God in me, but I didn’t want to go through the humiliation I’d just endured at the hands of the other grown-ups. Grown-ups never wanted the truth, anyway; they only wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. I lied, “Ain’t seen Sumter since this morning.”

“‘I haven’t seen Sumter since this morning,’ you mean.”

“I haven’t seen Sumter since this morning. Yes’m.”

“You got to practice, Beau, you’re not very good.”

“Ma’am?”

“Prevaricating.”

“Ma’am?”

She squinted her eyes and leaned forward, clutching the brush by its handle, lifting it up and slapping it down lightly on the top of her leg. “
Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me
,
young man
.”

I never knew how to respond to Grammy Weenie. She could be sweet and smooth as molasses sometimes, and then she could be sharp and mean and cruel. My reaction was always to play dumb in these cases. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Close your mouth, boy, you look feeble-minded like that. Planning on eating flies for lunch?”