Sketcher (15 page)

Fifteen

The sound of the gunshot came from out on bayou. We all forgot the thugs surroundin' us and looked in that direction. A bunch of birds lit out from where they were sleepin' in the swamp, and the crickets fell silent for a breath. Calvin's kids went and huddled behind the water tank.

“Dammit James! I told you not to come in heah no mo'!” Ma Campbell had wheeled Pa back out on his porch. He was shakin' and fuming like a gas leak.

The whisper went around the smouldering campfire: “Couyon”. The very tall, pale man in the baseball jacket had the kind of moustache I'd been tryin' to get for ages. He rode the boat up on the grasses, cranked the shotgun, pointed it down and squeezed the trigger. There was a pop. Like a full stop before he even said a word. The copper shell pinged on the aluminum boat. A jagged tail rose above the edge of the boat, relaxed and fell again.

“Yep, that be the motherload right there,” said James Jackson, pointing the rifle to the sky.

He stepped out of the boat loaded with six alligators that he had caught in the night with his gang. Monsters. All prob'ly over ten feet and just as ugly and menacin' as the guys standin' around us. He looked at us real scornful.

“Now, that... is how you hunt dinosaur elligadors with a point-two-seven-o rifle. And by the way, ol' man, don't talk to me like you's my Pa, cos you ain't. Oh, I borrowed your boat while you were just sittin' aroun' doin' nothin'. Knew you wouldn't mind.” Pa grunted.

“Ma, your baby's here!” shouted James. “What's for dinner?” His boys laughed.

And that's how we were introduced, or reintroduced, to James “Couyon” Jackson, legendary Mississippi Murderer and Ma Campbell's part-time son. We immediately knew we were in deep trouble. He sent around one of the fish buckets.

“My apologies for the foul smell of dat receptacle, but um, feel free to deposit all your valuables in it.”

“Now, ladies and gentlemen – and Pa Campbell... this heah meet'n' is hereby called to order. I'm James Jackson, and from my left to right are the members of my team. That right theah with the Smiff & Wess'n is Grizzly, my right hand, then that's Miercoles – cos I rescued him on a Wednesday when he was almost dead in a ditch – and up on the porch...” – he called out – “hey, Shotput, how's Mrs Beaumont treat'n' ya?”

Shotput, a large guy, just nodded. He had a shotgun pointed at Moms, who was now sittin' on a chair on the porch arguin' with him. We heard that Shotput was a star athlete who could have gone on to international games if he hadn't swung that iron ball and knocked his coach into a coma for tellin' him he was late for trainin'. Got two years for it before he joined up with Couyon's gang. Then there was another guy who just stood there with his gun holstered. I think he was instructed to do that cos, look, this was the first gangster I ever seen in bifocals, and prob'ly the last thing Couyon wanted was to get shot in a friendly fire accident.

“Pierre
!” – that was the bifocals guy's name – “Escort all these fine shindiggin' folks, except for the Campbells and the Beaumonts, onto that there Beaumont porch and hold 'em theah. Anybody tries to run – well, you and Boogers could use the target practice.” Boogers stepped up. He was the youngest in the gang, and I reckoned they called him that cos nobody ever got to see the end of his index finger.

Two of Doug's fans broke down and started hollerin' in fright. Couyon Jackson turned back to his audience and continued the one-man show-off. Pierre, blond as corn silk
and wiry and green as the stalk itself, he rounded up everybody and – can you believe it? – while he's walkin' them to the porch, he's tellin' the girls things like “Come this way please”, “Watch your step” and all that. That boy had no business bein' bad. Anyway, as I'm watchin' Mai and Marls and Belly and all the girls walkin' up to the porch, I'm gettin' concerned, cos those other thugs have different intentions towards the women. You could see the salivation and the swallowin', and their eyes lookin' around for the darkest corner. One guy pulled Frico up from the ground by the collar. Moms stood up. Then she looked like she decided to stay put on that porch to protect those girls that were walkin' up, and I bet if that gang tried to throw her off she could make herself as heavy as a mountain. Well, I'm trailin' behind the crowd headin' for the porch and I can hear Moms already up there threatenin' the gang with hellfire and sickness if they came near any of the kids. They laughed, but they'd heard she was a conjurer. So I was watchin' them back away, when Couyon, he comes and collects me and Frico. He grabs us by the arms and points to Ma Campbell's house with the gun barrel.

“You're missin' the best part, Beaumonts. Let's all go back into my office.”

Now I'm thinking: “OK, soon as we get into the house, Pa Campbell's gonna grab a rifle and tell James, ‘Stand down soldier', and James and his boys, they'll take off and leave us alone.” See, Pa told me once that you need to understand a disturbed guy like ol' James. He's the delusional type that says things happened to him that never did, or the details didn't quite go the way he described it. And if you talked down to him without respectin' his delusion, then you're plumb out of luck. So let's say he's got a gun pointed at you and he says he was in WWI, then he
was
in WWI. Don't tell him he's too young to have been there. That's gonna get you shot. Twice, in the head. You gotta know that he really feels like he went to WWI, and you got to let him cry and then tell him the War is over and hug
him a little bit so you can get the goddamn pistol out of his grip. But as we all got shoved into Ma's house, I realize we were behind the eight-ball. Ma and Pa were both being tied down to their bed, and there was a big can of gasoline on the floor.

“Now,” said James, “it's gonna get hot as hell in here if I don't get some cooperation. First order of business is roll call. Please answer to your names when they're called. Let's go... Paw Campbell?”

Pa groaned. “Jesus.”

“Nope, that name ain't on the register, Paw. And I'm the one doing the name-callin', not you. So let's go again. Paw Campbell?”

“Oh Lawd.”

James trailed his finger down a make-believe register. “Nope, neither.”

“For godssakes Pa, just play along!” hollered Ma Campbell beside him. Ma was annoyed enough already that she was still horizontal and starin' at the ceiling at the end of the day, when there was work to be completed. Well, soon ol' Couyon, he ditches the register that never existed and declares that he was done with watchin' Pa's “elligador and crawfish bidniss go to pieces, and therefore he was there to conduct a takeover to move the bidniss forward”. Said he wanted to be on the cover of Fortune 500, and the old man had no vision.

Meanwhile, Pa Campbell's eyes kept drifting off to the space behind the door. Couyon saw it before I did. He reached around and snatched up Pa's rifle and said, “Ah, nothin' like a little more staff motivation.”

“Aw, shit,” said Pa, gettin' worried.

“Nope. No bathroom breaks yet, Paw. Now that we're all heah, let's begin again.”

And James went through the purpose for the meetin' and marked the register again, only this time addin' the year, Nineteen Eighty-six. Now, as I looked around the room and saw
Ma and Pa and my brothers, I honestly started blamin' myself for this whole mess, until I realized that all was going to be all right. See, everything was going according to some divine plan. I didn't care about whatever CEO obsession Couyon Jackson was havin', even though he was talkin' about money. But I was thinking this situation is ideal. Soon Moms, being held out on that porch, is gonna say to hell with it and start conjurin' or – better yet, since she and Frico were prob'ly workin' together – they'll definitely see this as a crisis and sketch us the hell out of all this mess. So I was excited like it was Christmas and I got presents and I was going on a campin' trip all at the same time. This was show time. And Couyon Jackson didn't know the kind of Beaumont Retribution that was comin' to him.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen – Paw included – I, James Altamont Jackson, today in my capacity as the Human Resource Director and CEO of the New Campbells' Catcheries, will be conducting interviews to determine my Vice President of Operations.”

Everybody groaned in a chorus, but me, I was almost impressed with James' speeches for a guy who walked out of the third grade. That was until I realized I had heard some of them before. He'd actually ripped off most of the dialogue from a few of those soap operas on Channel Twelve, where people are always taking over oil companies or wineries and vineyards and celebrating every single nothing with a glass of champagne.

With one hand still on the rifle, James reached into the toilet and yanked at the toilet-paper roll. He reeled the whole thing out into the livin' area and handed the end of it to me and said I should take the minutes. Tony told him he didn't need minutes in an interview. He said, “Shaddup, your interview is first. And you ain't off to a good start.”

So of course my eldest brother is sittin' there lookin' at James Jackson and not cooperatin', and the CEO slash Human Resource Director slash Rigolets River Murderer now
has two rifles and is not amused. But Tony isn't budgin'. And I see this waltz was turning into a wrestlin' match real quick, so I started blurting out loud.

“Mr Jackson, Tony is real good at electronics like his pops. He's almost out of high school and has a lot of ideas about the future of technology.” Doug and Frico and Tony are lookin' at me like, “What the hell, fool?” But this is for their own good. I want them to cooperate while he's still in character and give Frico time to make his move. The last thing you want to do is give Crazy James Jackson reason to add more damn titles to his name and then let so many of his personalities get pissed off in a group. Then we would all be eaten by catfish over in the Rigolets. So I keep talkin' and I ask Couyon if he knew that they were inventing helicopters with tractor beams like the aliens use, and once the light hits you, you're frozen.

“Rubbish.” He spat black liquid from his chewin' tobacco on Ma Campbell's floor. I didn't blame him, cos I didn't believe that one when Tony told me neither.

“Wait, there's some more!” I told him. And I blabbered on about how Tony predicted that in the future everybody in the world would travel thousands of miles in less than a second, just by walkin' through a door, and read two hundred books in an hour.

“Bullshit,” said Jim. “Learnin' takes your whole life.”

“Then we'll be able to learn much more in a lifetime,” said Tony, soundin' real cool and controlled, even though he was biting the nails on his flat fingers. “Computers will make everything pos'ble. We'll even have photo maps of the whole Milky Way. So we can look down from satellites and see everywhere in our Galaxy, including the swamps and the L-shaped island and the house with the man holding people hostage.”

So I see my big brother was trying to psych out ol' Couyon Jackson. And that wasn't part of the plan – at least not in my
head. So James, he starts lookin' up and around. He's gettin' jumpy, so I hand the toilet paper off to Frico and I tell him to get to sketchin'. He looks at me wide-eyed as usual, and then says it doesn't even make sense, cos the paper is not ideal and he doesn't even have his pencils.

Now James, he sees I'm fidgety and talking to Frico, so he points the rifle at me and tells me I'm his secretary and I should go make him a cup of coffee. And – would you believe it? – in the middle of this crisis ol' Ma Campbell, tied up as she was, she starts doting on her boy James.

“Skid, maybe you should make Jim a coupla hush puppies too – poor boy must be hungry – that's why he's actin' up. You hungry Jim?”

“Damn right I am, Ma.”

And that old lady is tied to the bed, but she's craning her neck to look into the kitchen so she can give me instructions on how to deep-fry hush-puppy biscuits for ol' James Couyon Jackson.

“Not too much buttermilk, now Skid”, or “Mix them ingredients real good, or it'll upset his bowels. Yes, that's right – keep stirring, Skid, keep stirring.”

Damn. I used to like Ma Campbell – up to that point.

So I'm deep-fryin' them hush puppies in a big ol' cast-iron skillet that must be older than Pa and Ma put together, while James is conducting his interviews, and I realize somethin's goin' on. For starters, Tony is not sayin' another word. Every time I dropped a hush puppy in the hot grease and it crackled up a bit I could hear Tony just hittin' the key on that HF-1200 walkie-talkie beside Pa Campbell's bed.
Dit. Dit. Dit. Dah Dah Dah
.
Dit. Dit. Dit.

He did it about three times sittin' on the floor with his hands behind him. Then he dah-ditted some more – but hell if I could make out them words.

So I went ahead and brought the hush puppies to Couyon, and he's lookin' at me suspicious. He had good reason too,
cos I'd heard a rumour that because he walked out of the third grade, James couldn't read too well – and that's why he ripped off speeches from movies. Hell, they said it was so bad that you could write his name on a slice of bread and he'd gobble it down like there was nothing different about it. So I had gone ahead and written “JAMES” on the dough of a hush puppy with a fork, and he guzzled it down like a hungry blind dog. After that, outside was completely dark, and I was wonderin' what's next and where was Moms in all of this and why the hell Frico wasn't sketchin'. Then Pa Campbell, on account of missin' his chill pills, he just started hollerin' at Jim.

“Now look, I really need to go. Are you done keepin' us all hostage, you S–O–B? Sorry, Ma.”