Neverland (29 page)

Uncle Ralph felt around my scalp. “He hit you on the head?” He picked the shovel up. “I’d be surprised if my boy could lift this thing, let alone swing it. If you got hit with this, and lemme tell
you
, you’d be black and blue and red all over.”

“Beau wouldn’t lie,” Mama said to him. “You okay, sweetie?”

I shrugged and nodded. “I guess.”

“I have to put Governor to bed. You go on up to my room and you talk to me about this, you understand me?” My mother was never one to come up and hug me as if she had almost lost her child. I knew this. Once when I had half drowned out in Virginia Beach and had to be dragged out by a teenager swimming nearby, my mother gave me no sympathy. “You’re not supposed to go out higher than your knees. Go back to the motel room
and dry off and sit there until we can talk about this.” So now, still achy from a blow to my head that might’ve all been part of my mind’s eyeball, I would get no sympathy from her. I would have to explain myself and go to bed. But I was happy to see Governor in her arms, and I knew that if I told her the truth, she would know I’d done right.

I stood uncertainly, meaning to follow her. She walked on past Aunt Cricket, who was lingering at the threshold, hugging her boy to her, as heavy as he must’ve been.

“You got him into this,” she said to me. Then she, too, turned and stepped out among the slender trees. I saw them in silhouette, her and Sumter. He was in her arms, his face pressed into her neck.

Within a few seconds the screaming started.

At first I thought it was the memory of a dream: a dream where trees screamed in the wind.

But it was Sumter, his mouth an endless chasm of pain.

Uncle Ralph ran out first, taking his flashlight with him, leaving me in complete darkness. I didn’t want to stay in that place, and I remembered my oath to Lucy: to deliver Sumter to Neverland. I knew I would never keep my oath, and I also knew I had better get beyond the boundaries of Neverland so that nothing bad would happen. If everything in Neverland was a hallucination, I wanted to see no more of it.

I stumbled up to my feet and, dodging trash and fallen candles, got out, slamming the door behind me.

Sumter was scratching at his own throat as Aunt Cricket shook him.

Her voice crested and fell like a wave; she wept and shuddered. “Sunny,
Sunny
, you stop that, hear?”

He was cursing her, cursing God, cursing himself, digging his fingers in around his neck, thick white spit flying from between his teeth. Uncle Ralph was trying to pry Sumter’s hands away from his throat, but every time he got one hand lifted, the other snapped back like a bear trap.

“He’s had a tremendous shock. My poor little baby.”

“Damn it, stop it, boy.” His father finally slapped him across his face.

Sumter began cussing like he was possessed—from the f word to the c word and all the a-to-z words in between. It was like he was speaking in tongues in some lost language of obscenities.

Like his mother, his father also began weeping, and as much as I disliked my uncle, it was a sad sight to see: him slapping Sumter back and forth as if on one of the slaps his boy would see the light, and his crinkled eyelids oozing tears.

I heard distant thunder and the crack of lightning and counted the seconds between them as we headed back to the Retreat.

“Where is his Mr. Bubble?” Aunt Cricket shouted from the upstairs bathroom. “My baby needs a hot bath to calm him, and where in
hell is
his Mr. Bubble?”

Rain was beginning to bat at the windows, and it was my job to run around and shut them so all the bugs in creation wouldn’t sneak beneath the screens and so the furniture wouldn’t get wet. She called out again, “Doesn’t anyone in this house know? It certainly didn’t get up and walk away. Where
is
his Mr. Bubble?”

Nonie and Missy were sitting on the stairs as I came in behind the others. Nonie whispered, “What was that all about?”

“Later.”

“Did he really bury you alive?”

“I said
later
.”

“Grammy Weenie’s on her knees and smiting herself on accounta she thinks God’s punishing her.” Missy kept her voice low, too. The Retreat was like church now, or like a library, and we all had to whisper.

“Who told, anyway?” I asked. “Who told where I was?”

“Not me.” Missy laid her chin gently into her hands.

Nonie didn’t even blink. “It was Sumter himself. Mama kept asking him where you got off to, and he kept making up different stories, that you
went down to steal a boat, that you were going down to look for shells, that you were already out on Rabbit Lake.”

“One of ’em was you went with Daddy to St. Badon.”

“Yeah, and you know Sumter’s a lousy liar sometimes. One story after another, until finally Grammy says to him to make up his mind and tell the almighty truth for once in his life, to just grow up here and now, and he says like he’s gotten shocked that you’re in the shack in the woods and that he put you underground. And then he says that you made him squeal, that you made him break his sacred word. He has gone certifiably mental. And that’s when he blasts off outside like a lit fart.”

I continued on up the stairs, stopping at the top when I heard my aunt’s unceasing wail.

I passed by the bathroom door. Steam came out at me. Aunt Cricket had taken her blouse off and was wearing her bra above her skirt. The skin on her stomach and beneath her neck was pale white. The steam made her hair stick around her forehead in slimy spirals. Sumter, having come down from his fit, sat on the toilet seat in his underwear. His eyes were glazed over. He was muttering to himself—an incantation. He was brilliant with exhaustion and steam.

“I think it’s under the sink,” I said.

Aunt Cricket looked at me sharply. “What is it
you
want?”

“The Mr. Bubble. It’s under there.” I pointed to the plastic curtain Grammy Weenie had fashioned around the sink bottom. “Here, let me.” I knelt down and reached under the small curtain and withdrew the box of bubble bath.

She grabbed it from me.

Sumter’s mutterings increased, became louder. “Fuck you,” he said, again and again.

Aunt Cricket uttered a small cry of shame, covering her gasping mouth with pudgy fingers as if he had just conjured the devil in a word.

She took the box of Mr. Bubble from my hands and shoved me away. Then she turned her back on me as she dumped the powder into the tub.

“That’s gonna be too hot,” I said.

She ignored me. I noticed she had moles all over her back.

“You’re gonna hurt him if you put him in there.” At this point, knowing what Sumter had intended to do with Governor, it wouldn’t have bothered me a bit to let him boil like a lobster, but I knew that my cousin was very sick and not himself at all. That was what Gull Island had done for him, and Neverland—and his god—had made him a sick little boy.

I stood there, watching him for several minutes. He didn’t seem to notice me at all. His small pink stomach a perfect grapefruit, the dimples between his ribs sunken, his face an upside-down triangle. He looked very sad and very small and reminded me of baby birds I had seen fall from trees and die just as they were being born.

Aunt Cricket did not acknowledge my existence. She had given herself over to the vapors rising from the tub, filled to the brim with white bubbles. “A hot bath. Sunny, my baby, my Sunny, a hot bath is what you need. Calms the nerves. You’re high-strung is all, my baby. You’re different from other boys. You’re more sensitive . . . a nice hot, hot, hot bath.”

I dreaded going into my parents’ bedroom and having to face my mother. She would get the whole story out of me, I knew. Somehow the magic of Neverland was gone, and along with that, the threat of Neverland, too. I would never set foot within its walls again. But how would I make sense of what we had done there? The sacrifices, the games, the imaginary ghosts of children from the island. It all seemed less substantial now than ever: just a children’s game that had gone too far.

I dragged my feet. Perhaps if I hid in my bedroom, Mama would fall asleep and then I could for at least one night avoid her anger and disapproval. She would say, “We thought you knew better”—and she would be right.

Uncle Ralph shouted up to me, “Beauregard! Get down here right now. I want you to help me with something.”

I didn’t want to obey, but I felt like I had to. I took the stairs two at a time, and when I hit the landing, he grabbed me by the collar and I figured I was a goner. His beer breath slapped me as hard as his hand did as he pushed me out the front door. “I don’t know every damn thing you kids been up to out there, but you and me’s gonna go out and take that place apart board by board so’s this kind of thing can’t go on no more. Now get in the car.”

 

HE DROVE, swerving off the main drive into the mud. Rain came down at a windblown angle against the windshield, and he didn’t bother to turn the wipers on. He drove the Chevrolet between the scrawny trees, scraping the sides on low-hanging branches. The trees really seemed to be screaming now, as they screeched against the metal of the car. I figured we’d crash, and to avoid going through the windshield, I held what little there was of a seat belt together with my hands and kept my head low.

“I shoulda known you boys wasn’t up to no good.” His speech slurred, and I did not know how that man could see what was ahead of us with all the rain blurring the windshield. “I shoulda known when you marched like a buncha little Nazis out to the woods. Didja touch each other? Didja? Is that what you boys been doin’? You pull your things out and piss on each other? I swear, boy, if I find out you been playin’ little faggoty games with each other, or with the girls—God Almighty, I will give you both a talkin’ to neither or both’a you’s bound to forget.”

I was shocked to the core. Uncle Ralph didn’t even have a clue. I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “It ain’t nothing
sexual
. Gawd, you are so stupid. Uncle Ralph, you’re as dumb as they come.”

Before I knew it, he whacked me hard across the face and I hit the back of my head against the window. “And you’re so all-fired insolent. Okay, smart mouth, if it weren’t sex, what were those words on the walls?”

I was so mad I could barely talk. “Just words.”

“You know what they mean? You answer me, boy, or I will give you a good talkin’ to,
you hear me?
”

I nodded, terrified that he’d hit me again.

“You know what that kind of language means?”

“It’s just a word, that’s all,” I muttered.

Finally he turned on the windshield wipers. The Chevy’s headlights were shining straight ahead through a grove of trees.

On Neverland.

Uncle Ralph reached over and opened the dashboard. “See if you can find my cigars in there.”

I brought out a long rectangular tin and handed it to him.

He took out a cigar and lit it.

The wipers slashed at the rain.
Kashit-kashit-kashit
.

He seemed calm.

I thought he was going to kill me right then. I almost relaxed. Uncle Ralph with a cigar thrust between his lips looked fatherly for once in his life.

“It’s all gonna have to change,” he said. “It’s all gonna have to start over. I told his mama a hundred times: You can’t let a willful boy loose, but you got to
discipline
him; you got to teach him what most boys know by nature. When you got somebody else’s child—an idiot’s child, for Christ sakes—you can’t slack off none, but you got to come down hard on him every time. You boys’ve been livin’ like filthy dogs crappin’ in their own house. But it’s gonna have to change, and I’m the daddy, and I’m gonna have to take matters into my own hands.”

He gunned the engine.

He jammed his foot into the accelerator like he wanted it to go through the floor.

The Chevrolet flew head-on to Neverland, and I thought we were going to die.

He spun the wheel at the last second, and the car skidded in the mud, barely missing a tree whose branches scratched across my side window. The tail end of the car smashed against the shack. I said, “Gawd, Gawd, Gawd.”

Uncle Ralph put the Chevy in reverse and we rammed against the walls, scraping and crunching, and I turned back to watch Neverland lean farther and farther back, until it was just about collapsed into the ground. He
turned off the engine. “Beau, you do what I say, you hear me? You do what I say.”

We got out of the car, but I was scared of him.

Uncle Ralph said, “I’m gonna tear this place apart with my bare hands, and I want you to help.” He went through the rubble and grabbed the rake, tossing it aside. When he found a hand axe, he began chopping into the wood, through the walls, against the roof, smashing all the windows. “Beau! Get in here and help clear out this crap!”

I was afraid of him, but on some primal level I was more afraid of what might or might not be in that fallen shack.

Lucy
.

Her words:
help me come out and play.

I was even afraid
for
my uncle because he was destroying the holy of holies, and just supposing there
was
a Lucy, this spelled doom for him, too.

I followed my instinct.

I ran for home.

Uncle Ralph’s voice was behind me like a bear’s growling, shouting bloody murder at me, but I didn’t care. I would go back to the Retreat and hide and hope this was all a bad dream.

 

IT WAS like I had left one world and entered another.

The house seemed almost back to normal. I stepped in out of the rain and stood in the front hall light. It was quiet and the lights were warm and yellow. I heard the television on in the den. I looked above at the ceiling, to the cracks that ran down them. Mama was probably exhausted, resting, with Governor. I shook rain from my hair and wiped my muddy hands across my face. I was shivering. For the first time ever, I was freezing in August on Gull Island. I smelled what had been supper: lamb chops, their grease probably still spitting on the frying pan. Someone had forgotten to turn off the stove. How many times had Grammy or Aunt Cricket done just that, or whenever Nonie tried her hand at cooking? I wandered into the kitchen and flicked on the light.