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Chapter 13
 
About Betsy Babineaux

“Let’s get back in the house,” Sadie’s mom said. Her face was flushed, which only made the green eyes stare out harder from the middle-aged sun-freckles on her cheeks and neck. Sadie felt her mom’s hands grab the wheelchair’s handholds, and the chair responded with the familiar lean-back tilt as her mom spun her away from the fence and pushed her rapidly through the back yard.

Her mom had once tumbled her during a footrace at church. All the other kids were running a three-legged race, two of them tied together skip-hopping to the finish line. Sadie was in her chair with her mom shoving her across the field behind the church. They had been winning when the front wheel caught on a hole or a rock or a stick or a stump. It caught something in the ground that wasn’t meant to be rolled over, and the back of Sadie’s chair launched skyward. Sadie flew out with her hands in front of her. Her chair landed on her, followed by her mother, and the three of them rolled to a stop. Everyone ran to Sadie as if she might be broken, even Preacher Dannison who had been in the dunking booth and was drying off behind a sunshade. Somehow, dropping a child in a wheelchair was far more catastrophic than dropping the other children, who had been tumbling to the ground and falling off the slides all afternoon.

Sadie had been all right after the fall. She and her mother had been scraped and one of her wheels had to be replaced, but afterward her mother never pushed her faster than what Sadie called a pansy push. It was a slow walk, a patient walk, a very safe walk.

Now her mom violated her own unspoken rule and hurtled Sadie through the back yard tilted on her two back wheels as if she might be running from some charging beast. Sadie gripped her sidearms and held tight to keep from bouncing out of her chair.

Beside the carport was a trenched waterline where the rainwater poured off the eaves. A walker might not notice the change in grade—they would step over it as easily and with as little thought as they stepped over an uneven floorboard—but Sadie knew about the trench because it was one of those parts of the yard that she had to lean back to cross. If she nosed her front wheels into the rain trench she would tilt forward and stick herself.

Her mom hit the trench at her panicked gallop and Sadie bounced and landed cockeyed in the seat. She managed to stay in the chair but something fell out and clanked into the packed pea gravel rocks beneath the carport. She felt a twinge of panic run up her spine when she realized what it was.

Sadie’s mom didn’t notice at first because she pushed her a few more feet and was almost around the minivan before she slowed and made an afterthought glance over her shoulder.

Her mom let go of the chair and left Sadie parked in front of the minivan, between it and her father’s old workbench and his old tools, all of it resting untouched since he died, all of it covered in a fine layer of rain-dust.

“What is that?” her mom asked.

Sadie didn’t answer. She was afraid to speak as her mom shuffled around the minivan and leaned over and picked up the broken-handled Bowie knife. It looked huge in her hand, almost like a sword, and if it hadn’t been clean when Marty found it, it sure was clean now. The blade was polished into a fine silver and bore scraggly spider-web scratches along the sides where either Marty or the prior owner had polished the blade.

“What is this?” Sadie didn’t answer, and her mom stared at her with her mean-mommy eyes. With her cheeks flushed and her chest heaving from the run through the yard, holding a knife big enough to pin Sadie to the wall like a dead butterfly, her mom looked intimidating and frightening. Sadie saw a woman capable of things she didn’t want to consider her mom capable of, and if her legs had worked, she would have turned and run.

“It’s Marty’s,” Sadie said. She almost whispered it.

Her mom screamed at her. It made her skin crawl and the air shifted. “I know it’s Marty’s, Sadie! What are you doing with a knife?”

“I don’t know,” Sadie said. The tears welled up fast into a sudden burst. Her heart had already been pounding, and now rather than blood it seemed to pump tears straight up through her neck, through the back of her throat, and out of her eyes and nose. “I don’t know, Mommy, it’s Marty’s, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s Marty’s.”

The words choked out and hung between them. Her mom didn’t move but waited until Sadie bled out a cup of tears and finally wiped her face against her sleeve. It took a couple of minutes, quite a few breaths, and a million heartbeats. Sadie’s sleeve came away wet and snotty.

When she looked up at her mom, Sadie couldn’t tell if the woman had moved or even breathed. She held the knife in front of her, turned it over in her hand, and shook her head. She spoke and it was far more quiet and self-controlled than before, as if she had reduced the roiling boil to a simmer.

“I told you, Sadie. I told you. I told you not to bring the devil into this house. What do you think this is? Will this lead you down a good path or a bad path?”

Sadie didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

“A bad path,” her mom said. “The devil strikes fast, Sadie-love.” Her mom stepped across the pea gravel and squatted on her heels, putting herself eye-level with Sadie. “I love you, honey. You know that, don’t you? I love you more than anything on this Earth. I didn’t mean to scream at you. I’m sorry but that’s what the devil does. He strikes fast.” Her mom held the knife up and twisted it to make sure Sadie saw it from all angles. “Then he drives a wedge between those you love. He works his evil one bite at a time, with little mouse-nibbles you won’t notice until there’s a big hole in your life. This is a choice, Sadie. This is your crossroads. There’s a point in our lives where we choose a path that leads us toward God or away from Him.”

Sadie’s mom stood and pointed the knife toward Marty’s house. “You’ve been obsessing over him for a year now, baby. I finally let you meet him and the first thing he gives you is a gift. Is this the sort of gift you want?”

“No, Momma,” Sadie said.

“And what do you think we should do with this little gift of his?”

“Give it back.”

“Give it back is right,” her mom said. “Stay here.”

Sadie’s mom walked into the driveway and looked right, toward the feeder road in front of the property and searched the yard and the house. She walked to the hurricane fence, put her free hand on it, and after a few more seconds of looking around she launched the knife over the fence into Marty’s yard.

When they got into the house Sadie’s mom pushed her into the front living room and said, “We’re going to have some sweet tea, you and I, and I am going to tell you about Betsy and Cooper Babineaux.”

Her mom ducked into the kitchen, and Sadie watched the cars on I-10 blow past the front bay window. Sometimes she counted the diesels that passed. She was up to twenty-three when her mom touched her shoulder and placed a glass of iced tea on the stand next to her chair.

Her mom sat on the couch, took a sip of her tea and set the glass on the coffee table. “That lady over there, Marty’s mom, she wasn’t always like she is now. We were kids once, like you and Marty. She was a lot like Mr. Cooper was, back then. You remember Mr. Cooper?”

Sadie nodded. He was the man at the fence who waved at her, even after she lost her legs.

“Back then this was Paw Paw’s house and over there next door was the Babineaux place. I had a schoolgirl crush on Mr. Cooper but I was too shy to talk to him, and he was about fifteen years older than me anyway. So I used to talk to Betsy sometimes and I’d ask about her brother Cooper. That’s all we ever talked about, Cooper this and Cooper that, back there at the fence eating our peaches. Daddy wouldn’t let me play with her, but he said so long as we stayed on our sides of the fence we could talk all we wanted. Sort of like I’m doing with you and Marty.” Her mom motioned with her hand between her and Sadie, as if connecting two points.

“I remember Cooper had lost his eye in a car wreck, at least that’s what I always heard. Betsy said it was a BB gun but I don’t think she knew either. He lost it when he was about your age, before Betsy or I was born, so who knows. His one good eye was a clear blue, clear as the sky, but the fake eye was a leafy green. He called it his Dead-Eye and said giving it a wink was good luck. He said it scared off the bad spirits, things he called
Boogerbears
.”

Sadie’s mom winked. She stopped for a few seconds, took a drink from her tea, and went on.

“Sometimes he would come to the fence and chat with us squirts, as he called us. We would give him a peach or whatever it was we were eating at the time and he would look at me with his Dead-Eye and it was like he saw clear through me. I could almost feel it. He would shake his head and sometimes haul off Betsy away from the fence as if he had seen a spider on his peach. Sometimes he would wink, and I have to admit it seemed magical. That eye never moved but it always seemed to be watching me, like those eyes in a painting that everyone says move with you across the room.

“Anyway, one day he came to the fence, Mr. Cooper did, and he said our fathers had finally gotten into it over some damned thing—that’s what he said, not me—and it was big-kid stuff that us little squirts wouldn’t understand. Mr. Cooper said Betsy wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore and that I should stop coming to the fence. He said it was better this way and he winked at me, and it sort of felt like I was being put out of my misery or rescued or somehow shown a mercy I didn’t understand. I don’t know how else to explain it but looking back, that was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

“See, Betsy and I were heading into high school and even though we didn’t associate much at school, she still might have pulled me into her crowd once it all started. I remember one of the first days of school seeing Betsy drive home with the Jameson boys, Ike and Ricky. They were dropouts from school, running the backwoods, and I don’t know how they met Betsy but they had her in that car of theirs. It was a black Camaro or Mustang or some seventies muscle car, and it was loud. You felt it coming even before you heard it.

“Within a year Betsy was pregnant with her oldest boy, Gerald. She dropped out of school our sophomore year, moved to Yellow Pine Bay with Ike Jameson, and until they moved back here a year ago that was the last I saw of her.

“The point is, baby, Mr. Cooper saved me from making a bad choice. I asked Paw Paw about her and Mr. Babineaux having a fight, and he said they hardly ever spoke other than a friendly hand-wave. Paw Paw didn’t want me over there but he didn’t have anything against them, not in particular. He was just being over-protective.”

Sadie’s mom stopped there and laughed. It was more of a chuckle but it went on for a few seconds. She looked at her feet and then up at Sadie. “You wouldn’t know anything about an over-protective parent, would you, baby?”

Her mom took a deep breath and stood. She stepped next to Sadie and leaned down and hugged her. Her mom felt hot as if the pent-up heat inside her had been released through the pores of her skin.

“That’s all I’m trying to do for you, baby,” her mom said. “I’m trying to protect you, that’s all. I suppose if I had a green eye like Mr. Cooper, I could wink at you, for luck, to scare off them Boogerbears.”

Chapter 14
  Gerald

The smell inside the house overwhelmed him. It smelled worse than the dump, worse than the pile of dead snakes. It smelled so bad Marty wanted to sleep outside, under the stars even if the mosquitoes hauled him into the swamps.

“Momma,” Marty said.

His mom didn’t answer, and Marty went to the couch where she was lying on her side and shook her. She didn’t respond any more now than she had this morning. It was strange sometimes how his mother could resurrect herself into a fit of wild action, and within an hour collapse into her Gerald-ish coma on the floor in the kitchen, in the bathroom, or this time on the couch. Two hours ago she had been screaming at him for speaking with Sadie at the fence and now she was back in a catatonic state. She could do that, come alive and fall asleep with the flicking of some internal switch. The cigar box his father left was open on the floor beside her.

“Momma,” Marty said again. He knew it wouldn’t do any good but he said it anyway, the way someone falling from a rooftop yelled all the way down, as if a simple word might slow their descent.

Marty went into her bedroom and hauled off a pillow and a throw blanket from her bed. He placed the pillow under his mother’s head, covered her with the blanket, and arranged her arms and legs.

Marty turned off the television and the house fell silent but for the chuff of Gerald’s breathing machine and the traffic outside the house. He looked at the attic but heard the same silence as he had this morning.

He walked into Gerald’s room and hung over his brother. The smell in here was physical. It was as big as the room. It thumped its fists against the windowpane and slunk into the hallway to mix and mingle with its buried buddies, Mr. Mold and Ms. Dead Rat under his mother’s pile of junk. Marty opened the bedroom window and pulled back the sheet on his brother.

Moving the sheet had the effect of releasing a second wave of stench. He had never changed one of Gerald’s diapers, but it sure smelled full. Marty had seen his mother do it a few times and it was not something he wanted to try, but he needed to do something about the reek inside the woodshop.

Gerald’s chest rose and fell with the breathing machine. He was bones and stretched skin, with a bulging in his stomach as if someone had shoved a volleyball inside his gut. It had been empty yesterday, and Marty guessed his mother must have fed Gerald sometime this afternoon. It didn’t make sense to him, since his mother had been sleeping, but the fact remained that Gerald’s stomach was extended where it had been empty the day before.

Marty positioned himself alongside Gerald and tugged the diaper down his legs. When his fingers touched Gerald’s skin along his stomach, his skin felt cold and thin. Marty stepped back, caught his breath, and decided to first reposition Gerald’s legs. He couldn’t get the diaper off with Gerald lying flat anyway.

Gerald’s knee wouldn’t bend any more than would a plank of pine, and as Marty pulled on his ankles, Gerald let forth a magnificent single note of putrid flatulence from beneath his diaper. It lasted several seconds and Marty watched in juvenile amazement as his brother’s stomach deflated and sunk into his ribcage.

If the smell had been intense before, now it was unbearable even with the window open. Marty let go of his brother’s legs and stepped away from him. The sheet fell to the floor, and Gerald lay on the top of his hospital bed like a slab of meat waiting for the butcher or the rats, whoever showed up first. The breathing machine pushed his chest up and down in a sick imitation of life.

He sensed someone behind him and turned. Marty’s heart skipped up into his neck, and he took two steps back when he saw his mother standing in the hallway with her arms slack at her sides. She was somewhere in between asleep and awake. Her eyes were half-open and she slurred when she spoke.

“Are you satisfied?” she asked. She burped up something but swallowed it down, and that’s when Marty noticed she held in her right hand the long carving knife she had chased him with the night he shot Gerald. “Get out,” she said. “If I ever see you again I’ll cut out your eyes.”

She waved the knife at him, and Marty slunk past her and climbed over the wall of trash blocking his bedroom.

“I’ll kill you, Sugar,” his mother said, making sure her threat had been heard and understood and duly noted by all parties present. She said it with such calm that it was impossible to disbelieve. She laughed and gargled the sludge in the back of her throat. “I’ll cut out your eyes and I’ll slit your throat. Then you can go say hi to your precious Uncle Cooper.”

When he reached his bedroom, Marty shouldered the dresser against the door and left it there. Then he began clearing out a path to the attic access in his closet.