Neverland (4 page)

I sat up in the lumpy bed, the feeling coming back into my toes. I had bad circulation according to the family doctor, and my mother said it came from Daddy’s side of the family, but I knew
that
because it was
bad
circulation and not
good
circulation. All bad things seemed to come from Daddy’s side of the family.

Aunt Cricket appeared in the doorway, arriving in miraculous silence. I was used to hearing her block-knocking footsteps as if she wore Dutch wooden
shoes, but this time she was at my door without prior warning, possibly because Uncle Ralph was sleeping through a hangover and she had learned to keep her clopping to a minimum. Her face was like a tapioca pudding, wiggly and
still
self-contained, her eyes two small raisins, and she whispered, “Get down to breakfast. Grammy’s got someone she wants you to meet.”

Grammy Weenie had hired a black girl as a nanny for us kids so that our parents could have most of their days free. Grammy Weenie sat at the breakfast table and introduced us to Julianne Sanders, who was sixteen and looked us over like we were stinkbugs that needed squashing. Sugar, the housekeeper we were used to dealing with, was pregnant, and as Grammy Weenie said, “At her age she’s got to take things slow because you never know . . . Emily Pinkham had an idiot when she was forty-two, and they say it’s got to be either that or a brain surgeon, and between us, I find it extremely doubtful that Sugar Odell is going to deliver a doctor on her living room rug.”

Julianne kept her eyes mostly on the twins while Grammy babbled on about monster babies born to women who did not have the good sense to lock their husbands out of the bedrooms at a decent age like she’d done with Grampa Lee—“and there was Holly Skinner, remember that woman from Macon? She had one of those children with the big heads like a piñata, what do you call them? Hydras?”—and Mama sat there with Governor, trying to make pleasant eye contact with our nanny. She quickly gave up the effort, seeing that Julianne was waiting for one of us to step out of line.

Sumter was conspicuously missing from the table. While Aunt Cricket and Mama talked family talk, and Uncle Ralph and Daddy tried to be pleasant to each other, Missy leaned over to me and whispered, “He tried to kill Grammy last night.” I swatted at her like she was a fly; her breath was all scrambled eggs.

“I know that.” I didn’t bother whispering.

Nonie, sitting on the other side of Missy, whispered to her, “He did not.” Grammy Weenie kept right on talking. It wasn’t so much that she believed children should be seen and not heard, but just that she didn’t hear what she didn’t want to.

Julianne clapped her hands. “Sharing secrets at the table ain’t polite, yes, I am talking to you young lady, and if you have something to share, you can just go ahead and tell all of us.”

Missy looked up at her, shocked by this intrusion. No one ever told Missy Jackson what to do, particularly not the hired help; she had a bit of the Bad Seed in her. But her astonishment was momentary. She whispered a bit louder, “He says he didn’t.
He
says his Slinky tripped her on purpose, but he was upstairs in his room.”

Again Julianne clapped her hands, but this time on the table so that everyone was rattled. Julianne was skinny and dark; she looked to me like one of the naked women in
National Geographic
even though she was wearing a V-neck T-shirt, beneath which I glimpsed the top of a bathing suit. Her eyes were deep brown and soul-piercing, and her voice sounded like she had a sore throat; it hurt to hear her, like she was scraping at the words with her teeth before letting them out of her mouth. “You just lost a day at the beach for that kind of insolence, little miss.”

“That’s
Missy
,” my sister said defiantly, but there was an edge of fear in her voice. A day at the beach was high on the list of bearable activities on the island.

“Once had a dog named Missy,” Julianne said as if it were meant as a passing comment, “put her to sleep when she got too proud.”

I heard Aunt Cricket whisper to Mama, “It’s all that Civil Rights stuff, it makes them think they’re better.”

“Enough, Crick,” Mama said, and turning to Missy, betrayed us all by adding, “and you obey Miss Sanders or you will not be enjoying this vacation at all.”

“Is the bitch gone?” Sumter asked.

I had never, until that moment, heard someone my own age use language that would be described by my parents as common. The B-word was
one of the many forbidden words—taboo to children, but regularly in use by the grown-ups.

Sumter, whose Southern accent tugged at vowel sounds as if for dear life, clipped this one word the way my uncle Ralph snipped his cigars. I had just gotten my swimming trunks on and grabbed a towel out of Grammy’s linen closet. I closed the closet doors, and there was Sumter. He had changed. I knew that. Not just that he’d grown slightly taller, although I swear I thought he was going to be a dwarf most of his natural-born days. He had
changed
. Oh, he was his usual pale, wormy self, and his snow-white hair was ragged from one of Aunt Cricket’s bad cutting jobs (at their home in Savannah they had three dogs, and Aunt Cricket used the dog-clipping shears on the pets and on her child—the results were usually choppy). He looked the same on the outside, but in the
eyes
—that one place in all living creatures that lets you look right down into their most secret places—
his eyes were different
. The only thing I could think was maybe he’d stayed up all night brooding over things.

He squinted them so they turned into slits. One thing about Sumter, however: He was always an immaculate dresser, which I never could comprehend because he was such a walking disaster area in every other respect. He wore a clean-pressed white oxford cloth button-down shirt and khaki shorts, a pair of white socks beneath his sandals.

“You hear me, Beau? She gone?” He began twiddling his fingers across the stains on Grammy Weenie’s faded wallpaper—the stains had been made by us kids over various summers, and although Grammy always had help to do the cleaning, no one ever thought to scrub the walls.

“Hey, Sumter.”

He brought his thumb back from the yellow paper, licking it. “Peach preserves.” He held his fingers up; they were covered with a dark amber goo. “ ’Member that time you stole ’em from Grammy’s cupboard? You ran along here and threw one of the jars at the wall. Still tastes like what Gummi bears would do in the woods.” He had a laugh that went “Haw Haw Haw,” just like he was faking it.

Sumter himself had broken the jar by throwing it. I know because I was there and the jar narrowly missed my head—three inches, if at all—and running barefoot across the landing, I cut my feet on the glass. I reminded Sumter of his participation in stealing the preserves; he was always making up stories to suit his version of things.

He smirked, flicking the last of the preserves in my direction. “You’re getting more and more like the old Weenie, but my mama says that you’re all doomed because of the alcoholism that runs on your daddy’s side.”

I was not witty or clever enough to say what I should’ve, which was, “Seems to me your own folks knock back their fair share of booze.” Even this wouldn’t have gone over with Sumter, because there was a popular mythology among the Lee side of the family that other people couldn’t hold their liquor, but the Lees had no problem. How many times had I heard Aunt Cricket say, “Lord, I hope I never become an alcoholic, ’cause then I couldn’t drink anymore.”

What I did say was, “I hear you tried to kill Grammy.”

“It wasn’t me. It was my Slinky going down the stairs that got her. If you don’t believe me, the old witch knows the truth. Ask her.”

“How can a Slinky attack somebody?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.”

“You coming to the beach?”

He grinned—Sumter didn’t have an open, friendly grin. He always looked a little sour, even at his best. “I got more important things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m not gonna tell you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“If I told you, you’d be a blabbermouth, you’d tell Missy and she’d tell Nonie and she’d tell Aunt Evvie and she’d tell the Weenie.”

“You don’t have anything to do. You’re a big fat liar.”

“I’m holding something ransom.”

“Kidnapping?”

“You tell anyone and you’re dead.”

“Tell me.”

Sumter shrugged. Julianne started yelling for me to come down because it was time to go to the beach and if I wasn’t down by the count of five I may as well not come down at all. Already I could hear the big horseflies buzzing and whapping into the screens on the windows.

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “Don’t go.”

“I
want
to go.”

“Don’t go and I’ll show you. What I got.”

“Where is it?” I asked while Julianne counted to five and then ten and then fifteen on the floor below.

“I keep it someplace. Someplace where you ain’t supposed to go.”

On Gull Island we went barefoot. It didn’t matter that Aunt Cricket would be there warning us that hookworms were no laughing matter and that broken glass grew like kudzu along the shoreline; it didn’t matter that the summer before, Nonie had sliced a neat wedge from her heel when she came down on a fancy fishing lure that had fallen out of my Daddy’s tackle box; nor did it make any difference whatsoever that we would all, on occasion, slip into a fresh pile of dog doo and have to not only hose the flats of our feet down, but put up with endless ribbing and the uncertain feeling that somehow the stuff was never completely washed away.

As Sumter and I stepped down off the front porch into the fat slab of mid-morning sunlight, I noticed that my cousin was still wearing his sandals and socks. “Hey,” I said, pointing to his feet.

“She’ll go into conniptions,” he whispered. I didn’t know why he was whispering when no one else was outside with us, nobody was on the porch, and, as far as I knew, our mothers were upstairs with the baby and both our fathers were down at the Footlong Nightcrawlers-Live Bait store over to the West Island; Grammy Weenie couldn’t hear much, and Julianne and
my sisters were already halfway down the steep path that ran down the bluff to the shore.

But Sumter kept his finger pressed against his lips to shush me until we were farther into the scraggly woods.

“The Weenie lets her mind roam,” he said. “She knows what I’m gonna do before I do it. My mama bought me a new croquet set, and the Weenie yelled at me through one whole game because she knew I was up for cheating.”

“You mean like a mind reader, like Kreskin?”

“I mean like a witch. In olden days they would’ve
burned
her. Oh, how I wish these were the olden days!” He plopped himself down on a stump and began removing his sandals. “Something about the Weenie—if I’m anywhere within a mile of her, she knows
everything
.”

I could hear Julianne crying out to my sisters to stay away from the rocks. The air smelled of dead sea creatures and leftover bacon brought by a breeze from the house. The cluster of trees we called the woods was that deep rich odor like when my father used to unroll his tobacco pouch when it was new and I’d lean into it and breathe it in until bits of dark tobacco flew up my nostrils. But even so, at Sumter’s suggestion I could almost
smell
Grammy Weenie’s Isis of the Nile perfume. “We’re not even a mile away,” I said, looking back at the Retreat through the spiky line of trees.

“You know the shack,” he said after he’d wadded his socks up and stuffed them with his sandals into the rotted hollow part of the tree stump.

I nodded.

“That’s where I keep it.”

“What is it?”

He looked to his left and then to his right; he looked up in the branches of the tree; he looked down at his wiggling toes; he looked at my face for signs of betrayal. He whispered, “It’s
god
. And it’s in
there
.”

He pointed to a place I had always seen and never noticed, as if it had been a blank spot, a hole in the world. Even though I knew the place had
existed there every summer we’d come up to the Retreat, I had no curiosity about it, I had no thought for it.

“In Neverland,” Sumter said.

The shack was falling apart. When I was younger I thought that it was some kind of old outhouse given that it stood within a quarter mile of the Retreat, hidden back among the trees, and it looked and smelled pretty bad. I had never been inside it before. The windows were caked with dust, and when you tried to look in, it was full of nothing but old tools and cans of paint.

Grammy Weenie had hired a caretaker years before I was born, back when she didn’t spend most of the year on Gull Island, but the man had gotten some local girls in trouble and had to be let go. The shed had been his, and when he’d left the peninsula, no one bothered to take it down. This was when the surrounding trees still were seedlings, my mother told me, when the view from the Retreat to the sea was clear, when she and Aunt Cricket and my other aunt, the one they called Babygirl, would take Grammy’s Victorian doll collection out to the bluff and play tea party and watch pelicans glide like winged horses over the shoreline.

I had never known Gull Island to be a beautiful place. As far as I could tell it was a sweaty, sandy stretch of family arguments.

And the shack: I had tried to look through the dusty windows before but never dared to go inside it. Just as Sumter had said, it was “where you ain’t supposed to go.”

And I never went places where you ain’t supposed to go. Before this particular summer I had always stayed to the paths, I had always been under the shadows of grown-ups, and I had always been a good boy. I was tired of it. As we headed toward the door, I began to see nothing but Neverland and the piney bluff it rested on, the sea below.