Sketcher (11 page)

“And by the way that is voodoo, not hoodoo, so don't be ignorant about that ever.”

And then she went back to clearing the table. I asked her if she knew that Pops went to the grave in St Louis Cemetery and made a wish to get her back. She smiled and said: “He can do whatever he wants, cos in my opinion, a woman who was born free ain't doing nothing to keep another woman in bondage.”

Her cheeks were all shiny again, and I was hoping that she was a little flattered that Pops could go to that extreme to get her back. But then all of a sudden the smilin' got weird and she was staring at me with no teeth showin', and she looked real creepy, like she could read my mind. But Tony always said: “Never watch a woman's smile: watch her eyes.” So Moms' eyes started lookin' disappointed.

“What?” I said.

And, would you believe it, the woman pulls out the same goddamn whiskey flask bottle I gave to Pops in the hospital and slams it on the kitchen table and calls out my full name in such a slow, quiet voice I felt cold.

“Now look, little boy – don't you go gettin' involved in things you don't know nothin' about, y'hear me?”

I swallowed hard. “Yes, ma'am.”

I shook my head and felt stupid. Dammit. I'm dead again. See, you really don't want to be on the receivin' end when Valerie Beaumont gets all bowed up and ready to strike. She leant into my face.

“You want to cast a spell, boy? Then go to school and grow up and get your ass out of these goddamn backwaters, y'hear? Cos at this rate, with all the idlin' you been doin', it will be a damn surprise, I'll tell you that! And that goes for all o' you!”

She swept the room with her index finger and her eyes, and everybody stopped breathing.

“Now y'all might miss your father, but you can't take magic and fix everything, y'hear? You got to work with what you got... you understand? Y'all need to remember that. Work things out in other ways, every single day. Even the good Lord walked this earth, but he wasn't into showing off with no miracles. God is good, but we got work to do too. So make somethin' of the little you already got. That's the
real
miracle.”

She took a hammer and broke the bottle in the sink and washed the hair and the spices down the drain. Then she said real soft: “Now go put my picture back where you found it. Matter of fact, I can't even trust you no more. I'll go do it my damn self.”

My brothers, they were gigglin', and I was frozen solid – couldn't move. I couldn't finish a sentence.

“How?...”

“How what? How did I get this?” She held up the neck of the broken bottle and then chucked it in the garbage before swingin' right back around to glare at me again. “Well, mister, maybe it's true that your momma can whistle and raise anything up from under the waters here and over in the Gulf. Or maybe Pa Campbell just took it right back here from the hospital and gave it to me. And let that be the end of it, y'hear?”

Eleven

Now, before the end of the year, I wanted to tackle Pa Campbell for takin' that whiskey bottle back to Moms and rattin' me out. I also made up my mind to tell him about Frico. If he believed me, I'd let him in on the whole Benet boys' killin'. So I made an occasion for it. I went to the fence and called him – and he hobbled out. I told him I wanted to learn all about the crawfishin' part of his business, cos I saw he might need some help. Well, he just half-grinned and winked and told me to go back inside and be ready at a moment's notice.

Soon there was a knock on the window and ol' gossip-monger Ma Campbell came callin' on Moms with a cup of hot water ready to mooch some herbal tea. By and by, after gripin' about the goats and the government, she got around to talkin' about her son. I was gettin' impatient, but I wanted to hear the latest on the legendary James “Couyon” Jackson. Turns outs he had gone and gotten a price on his head. A hundred thousand dollars. He was layin' low and workin' as a cowherd in Texas, but the farmer saw a news report that there was a reward for him. So the farmer nabbed ol' Couyon by lockin' him inside the cattle chute beside a dairy cow one night. Now, a cattle chute is a slender little steel cage for controllin' a big ol' fat cow. Throw one good-for-nothin' gangster in there and that's a tight fit. Anyway, the legend goes that Couyon Jackson milked the cow, shook that milk into butter, greased himself, slid through that steel cage and had gotten clear across the Sabine River border into Louisiana by the time that poor farmer came back from callin' the police. All the Texas cops got was some damn good butter, fresh from the farm. Well, whatever the story was, Couyon was
wanted and runnin' loose. Finally Ma Campbell got around to sayin' Pa wasn't doin' so well and needed a hand gatherin' all those crawfish traps and sortin' through them mudbugs, and she was wonderin' if Moms could send one of us young ones over for a few hours.

When Moms' hollered out and asked me if I done my weekend assignments, I shouted back “Hell, yes!” before I realized I damn near gave the whole plan away by being too enthusiastic.

So I'm in the pirogue – one of those small aluminum boats – with Pa Campbell and I deliberately called him “Lobo” to get his attention – but that wrinkled old man, he was lookin' at the next crawfish trap comin' up. See, to catch crawfish in a serious kind of way, you gotta set traps in a line all along the mangroves. You gotta put some dead fish or somethin' delicious in that wire trap and let those mudbugs crawl through the openin' to get it. Then when they realize they got a meal, they'll also discover they can't get out the way they came in, cos their claws and all their pointy parts and the thing they're holdin' on to gets in the way. So you get out there in your boat and as you pass along the line of traps, you haul them out the water one at a time and you dump those suckers into a plastic bucket or the front of your boat if it's a small pirogue-type boat or whatever, and you move on to the next trap and so on.

So Pa Campbell, he's rowin' and stoppin' at every trap and dumpin' crawfish in the front of the boat, and the crawfish is crawlin' and clatterin' against the aluminum boat – and I'm so fascinated with those bugs I forgot that I wanted to have the upper hand in the conversation. So Pa, he threw a giant crawfish in my lap, and while I'm struggling with the thing he just comes out with:

“Pay attention kid. The wind is changin' in this heah swamp. You came heah to talk, but you betta go on and lissen, cos I don't have much taam... and I don't mean today-taam – I mean taam, period.”

The old man was scarin' me again, but he was always too dramatic. He dumped the last trap in the boat and, as he was throwin' out the rotten bait, one of the mudbugs hung on to it and dangled over the water. He picked him off the dead fish tail and dropped him in the boat.

“All the questions you came into this boat wit' will be answered if you just tune into what I'm sayin'.”

“See kid? Life's hard, but it don't hafta be miserable, y'heah me? I travel the Industrial Canal and around the city and all the way across to Metairie, and I heah people talkin' about businesses closing and it's never been like this since the Great Depression and how God turned his or her back on us. Of course life is hard! But happy's in your heart. The people who don't know that happy's in your heart and not in what you have, they the ones who say God left this planet heah like a goddamn crawfish pot and went off and did somethin' else. Dunno, maybe she went to grab an ice-cream cone. And heah we are steppin' all over each other tryin' to survive. And in all this survivin', there's still a whole lot of plain old grabbin' and greed.”

I imagined a picture of God gettin' up off his throne cos he heard the ice-cream-vendor van comin'. I thought it was ridiculous to think of the Almighty just sittin' around on a great big armchair all day anyway, so I started laughin'.

“Don't be laughin'. And look at me – lemme get to the point. Forget all that talk about ice cream an' whadeva.”

Pa Campbell steadied the boat – which had started rockin', cos he was throwin' up his arms at me. Somethin' told me he wasn't so steady himself. He jumped right into another topic like we'd been talkin' about it long before.

“What those Benet boys got was comin' to 'em. Now, I'm not happy they died, but they were headin' theah before they was born. I mean, it was a curse.”

“Before...”

“Yes
before
they was born. It was a curse he put on his own flesh and blood by bein' too greedy.”

“He who?”

“Remember that man in the yellow glasses and beige bush jacket in those photographs from San Tainos?”

“Oh, the Jim Jones guy.”

He looked at me weird. “What? Anyway, that's Tracey Benet. Him, your mother, your pops, me and Pauline... that's Mrs Benet... we were friends for a long time. All of us were the toast of San Tainos. Those days we were damn near famous and all very good friends.”

Man, I couldn't connect the idea of that handsome fella being ol' hard-face Backhoe Benet. Worse, I couldn't imagine that the man who killed my dog used to be Pa Campbell's good friend. So I stared off over the lake and then back at him, and he looked away.

“I know, I know. Heah's what happened. Backhoe had money from natural gas that his fauder found in Pennsylvania dem days. That boy grew up rich and ambitious. They had property from here to the Yucatan, so we used to drive down to Mexico in a Studebaker – it's still ova dere in his junkyard – and we'd go to the Benet beachfront property in Merida and then sail to San Tainos right off the coast. We used to call him ‘Captain Benet' at the time, cos he even found time to serve in the Coast Guard right out of high school. So he's the one who used to drive the boat out to San Tainos. We called out there the ‘Tiny Antilles', or the ‘Mini Caribbean'. Ooowee. We were livin' the life, man. Up in the mountains learnin' from the tribes one minute, the next minute on the beach and thinkin' of never goin' back home. But then, greed got in da way. One day, when the girls were playin' beachball, Tracey said he knew a place jus' outside Noo Orlins that might have some oil. Now, maybe it was the damn mojitos or whatnot, but we spit in our hands and made a deal that we would all go camp out on the land for a few months and see if we thought it might have some deposits. He was convincin'. He said: ‘Look, this land is good for gas, and my daddy bought me some acres. And if we get
reason to believe that theah's really oil or gas under it, then we're in theah with pile drivers and drills, or whatever, and we'll split the earnin's. We'll be rich. Hell, yew bet your life... I'll drive the backhoe maself!' That's how he got the name. So we came here, to this swampy place you see around you, and we camped out. Well, by the taam I was way into my thirties we hadn't found nothin', even with several companies comin' in and tryin'. Many times unregulated by any authorities, to be honest. But Benet wasn't backin' down. He just kept on plungin' into the earth until it got illegal. Well, your pops went back into the city and got more interested in natural magic from San Tainos and even more interested in your mother. He couldn't wait to get down to San Tainos to see her, and that was a problem. See, we always went together. And more importantly, at that time Backhoe was your mother's boyfriend.”

I flung away the crawfish and grabbed the sides of the boat. “What? No way!”

“Easy now son. That was...”

My head felt heavy.

“Backhoe?! What? You mean...”

“I said easy, Skid. That was a
long
time ago.”

“You... you mean I came that close to lookin' like
Broadway and Squash
? Oh God!”

He stopped rowin', and the boat – that was goin' in a straight line – started wobblin'. He just looked at me and frowned and leant his head like a dog who just heard a tea kettle.

“Is dat what you're gettin' from all dat I'm sayin' to you, son? Dat's your concern? Jeesus Saviour! Cos I ain't got the taam witchoo taday.”

The boat was really wobblin' now. I was wishin' he would stop lookin' at me like that. He sighed and narrowed his eyes and started rowin' again.

“So anyway, I told Alrick not to go to San Tainos by himself, but he did again and again, and by and by things changed.
Backhoe found out and wanted to hang him by the toenails. But your pops, he was in love. So when things got rough and he married Valerie and came to America, Backhoe went down to the island for Pauline. Now, that was just to make Valerie feel bad, cos that Pauline was like a young Miss San Tainos at the time – yeah – beauty-pageant winner and all. And by the way, I know you mighta heard stuff from his own mouth, but don't be thinkin' that man Tracey is prejudicialist. He's not.
Bitter
is what he is. And he's been so for a long time. He taught his sons to harass y'all, so y'all would just pack up and head on outta the swamp and make it easier for him, cos he still got feelin's for your... for Valerie. But... look what happened. It's all karma.”

All that time in my head, I'm still back in the Sixties with Moms and Backhoe. Imagine... Skid
Benet
. Daaamn.

Pa kept goin'. “Anyway, where was I? Yeah, late Sixties. After a while, Backhoe called up Alrick and reopened his offer, sayin' that the gas and oil was deeper down – and he wanted to get it like we all agreed. Of course, at the time, Alrick was just tryin' to settle in with his new wife, plus he knew under all that calmness Backhoe hated the fact that he took away the love of his life. But Backhoe said: ‘Look, business is business, no sweat, I'm happy. And I hear that you're the man for the job.' What he meant was that somebody over in Alabama told him they found oil underground by usin' divinations.”

He didn't wait for me to ask.

“Divinations is when people use magic to find out somethin' that science cain't. It's all over the Old Testament, kid. Ask your Harry T friend. Anyway, in this case, Backhoe knew about Valerie's conjurin' powers and wanted Alrick to get her to find out where the oil was under the land. See now, he had to be cautious, cos the place was in a mess and people were talkin' about it. So that's when Alrick came and told your momma that they should invest in a piece of swampland and the city would catch up later on.”

“So, he didn't have a vision?”

“Course he had a vision, cos when Valerie found out the trick and refused to help with the divinations, he prob'ly
wanted
to believe something good would happen evenchually. Like the city would actually come into the swamps. That was his Plan B if there was really no oil or gas. 'Twas on his mind day an' night. Plus, he had to get your mother here for a long enough time, in order for her to feel the energy of the place and conjure up where exactly the minerals were located. So he told her the vision. And she is a spirichual person, so she gave it a shot. And ol' Alrick, he was a sneaky one: he went ahead and got your momma pregnant, so that apartment idea she had wouldn't look so good any more. But when your mother came into the swamps, like I said, she found religion and refused to do any more spells 'cept for protection. And Alrick, he flipped a wig when she wouldn't do it, and he went and did some reckless magic himself, I tell ya. Started planting seals and conjurin' spells all over the place. Been doin' it for years. Now, with the subsidence year after year and all the gravel and marl we dump on this land from time to time, he can't find those seals anywhere. That land we live on is a magic minefield, you heah me? Don't you play with magic if you ain't ready for the constiquences! And that's why I say the wind's a-changin', son. Earth balances herself. At first I thought that as soon as Backhoe and Alrick realized there was nothin' in this swamp, then they'd just relax and I'd kick back with my old lady and enjoy the view right here. But greed is a ghost! I love this place, but this swamp is haunted by greed. And it's heavy with spells. Hundreds of powerful seals are buried in the earth right heah, and all that power is about to balance this place out. Those poor, misguided boys dyin' is just the beginnin' o' sorrows. Now, I never told you this when you came to me and said y'all think your pops was conjurin' against y'all, but he was prob'ly desperate and just tryin' his best to scare your mother off the land, cos he cain't imagine
what all those seals he planted are about to do. But of course, that goat-blood letter, it backfired and he hurt his own self.”

Now, after that bottle-spell incident I knew I shouldn't ask this, but I couldn't help myself, especially since I remembered Pops in the darkness diggin' at the dirt with his bare hands that night.

“Plantin' seals, Pa?”

“Have you been lissenin'? Now, don't you go trying nothin'. There are enough spells goin' on as it is. That's why I gave that whiskey bottle back to your mother. That's it.”