Sketcher (25 page)

“Frico Beaumont! You're a goddamn genius! Ha! We did it! We did it!” And I can smell the last shovel of cement and the first coat of paint already. Cotton-ball clouds, they're on the move, and the summer sky is so blue and so close I can jump up and pinch myself a piece.

Meanwhile L-Island is too damn far away, and when I finally get there, I drop the bicycle on the train tracks and I don't care about the Gulf Coast train comin', cos I'm like a brand-new version of my pops, runnin' into the yard from the train tracks and screamin' out over the footbridge.

“Valerie Beaumont! Pops told ya! Ha! And
I
told you!”

And I just want to see Valerie's face when she's eatin' her words with her dinner, so I burst into Ma Campbell's house, and everybody's sittin' around, including Tony. This is it. I stand in the doorway sweatin' and almost unconscious. They
look up at me like I'm crazy. I point at Moms across the room, grinnin' between the tears.

“I told you!”

“What?”

“I told you!”

“You told me? Who told
you
?”

That's when I realize she's been cryin' too.

“You know about it?” I ask her.

“Yes. Your Aunt Bevlene told me today. Who told
you
?”

“Nobody told me. I was there. Saw it with my own eyes.”

“You saw it? How... Where?”

“Out at the crack...”

“Out where?”

“The crack – on the map.”

And now everybody's extra ugly, cos they're confused as well as in tears, and I can't imagine what my face looks like.

“The boy flipped,” says Pa Campbell.

And Moms is lookin' at me like that day in the backyard. She's feelin' sorry for me again. Her lips are tremblin' around a cigarette.

Doug wipes his eyes with his sleeve and gets a little impatient. He didn't even make it sound good.

“Sit down, Skid.” The grin is still on my face when he drops the bomb:

“Belly is dead.”

“What?...”

“Your cousin's dead, man.”

I think this must be a joke, like that crab-crawl-mermaid thing, but that would be cruel. Cruel like Ma Campbell's insensitive ol' clock that keeps on tickin' through all these tears.

Twenty-Seven

Some of the night had been left behind to stare down the day.

I'd have been empty of any expression as we drove back from the funeral in the rain if it weren't for Mrs Halloway's class and her magic words that “adequately described complex things”, includin' feelin's. I woulda been in love with her if she had a little more meat on her bones, that lady. Anyway, the day of the funeral I was numb.

NUMB

That word was like a “
NO TRESPASSIN
'” sign in my head. A warnin' to any kind of emotion that wanted to come around and loiter a bit. But soon all the emotions invaded and yelled and tore down the “
NUMB
” sign.

Tony was drivin'. And the whole way back from what was a twisted road trip, I'm going over my life in my head. I felt fragile when I thought about Belly just dying like that. Fell out of a tree, you believe that? Then, when I saw some of the trees in Decatur, Georgia, I understood. Tall as hell. Like Decatur is the city where all the tall trees come and stand together. Rows and rows of giants at the side of the road, competin' with the buildin's.

They made me feel small. And fragile. We were all growin'
fragile
. My whole crew. We were not invincible. I thought about how I used to wonder if Frico's sketchin' worked on gunshot wounds. Maybe not. That all seemed like so long ago, and I saw all the memories in black and white, like those new photos Frico was developin' in the dark room at school. New still-life photos of the most beautifully beat-up things:
dry driftwood from the Gulf, rusty train tracks. Abandoned conch shells. Pa's Campbell's wrinkled old face. A cracked ceramic cup and a broken bumper car out at Pontchartrain Beach amusement park. The place had been closed down by them, so that ride, it just sat there, right where the last kid left it. The paint was breakin' off in a pattern like varicose veins.

Now, Frico ain't no poet, but he wrote this in his portfolio: “Blessed is the one who seize the beauty in a broken thing”. He spelt “sees” wrong – and I thought it was sappy and wanted to barf, until I really thought about it. And I missed that girl Mai again, for about a second and a half, even though she smashed me into pieces. I finally told him about puttin' on his glasses and all the things I saw through it. He laughed and watched the drops on the window chasin' each other against a sad, grey background.

“What are you seein' outside now, Skid?”

“Rain. Dark clouds. Perfectly crappy day.”

“I'm seein' exactly what you're seein' right now, only twice as big.”

And he laughed again. The quickest, saddest laugh I ever heard from anyone in my life. And I wanted to hug him, but that would have been weird.

Then all the way in, with that squeakin' windshield wiper cuttin' a path through Alabama and Mississippi, I saw my cousin Ainsley Belle aka Belly in front of me. We left him lyin' in a muddy field of red dirt that was crowded with other horizontal people – cold, lovely, imperfect people.

Now, no matter how good a funeral might be, you can't ever say it was “a success”, or people will hit you over the head. It was a good experience, though. Everybody was there. Harry T had no hairstyle. Peter played the piano in the church in flip-flops, cos his foot was all swollen for some reason. Marlon “McCozy” came all the way from Rochester with back-up singers taller than himself, and sang a song he wrote as a tribute called ‘Love Does All the Heavy Lifting' – and it wasn't half
bad, y'know. Sounded like Elton John and Air Supply – no, really. He just came over to us and said “Hey, you play, right?” as if he didn't know before or was too much of a star to remember stuff. Well, he gave Peter Grant the melody, and they practised it twice in the pastor's vestry – and that was it.

I'm so glad

that love does all the heavy liftin'

heavy liftin'

love does all the siftin'

through the hurt –

it turns it into somethin' good

somethin' good.

Apart from Peter puttin' too many jazz chords in it, it was a hit, if you can say that about a song you sing at a funeral. We Beaumonts all wore topknots, as a sign of respect for Belly, but I'm sure some people thought we were in a gang or somethin'. That's people for ya. Ignorant as hell. Then, when we were in the graveyard, Doug, he took a bottle out of his coat pocket. He said it was dirt from the swamp, cos before Belly died, he wished he could get to “touch the swamp dirt again”.

So Doug, Frico, Harry T, Marlon, Tony, Peter and me, we all stood above the burial vault and we poured swamp dirt from our hands into the grave. We weren't in New O'lins, so there was no chance of second-lining and brass bands, but Tall Horse with his red eyes, he hit his wristwatch and hollered out “Time, time!” to his work buddies. So they lined up a whole bunch of tractor trailers inside the cemetery on both sides of a driveway. Then, when that black Cadillac was comin' through with the casket, those guys, they revved the engines and rattled the trucks and honked the horns and gave ol' Belly a twenty-one-truck salute that was so cool and touching I just bawled like a baby. Aunt Bevlene never liked that too much, though. She was way down in her soul. And
I don't think she went for that “swamp dirt poured into the grave” thing neither. Prob'ly she thought it was too Taino, and she was one hardcore Baptist. It wasn't a Taino ritual, to tell you the truth. If we were really goin' to do an ancient Taino interment, the law wouldn't allow it. Cos that would mean we'd have to curl ol' Ainsley Belle up in a cave with all his worldly possessions and prob'ly a few pineapples for his trip into Coay Bay. He was only eighteen, so he didn't have much in his name. Matter of fact, he had a lot less than he started with, considerin' I made the goddamn cargo train annihilate his bicycle.

I remember the preacher – soft-spoken ol' guy. Frico took a picture of him, partly cos he looked so broken down. But that preacher, he said somethin' that stuck with me. Almost made me say “Amen!” He said this whole earth is a “dark place still filled with all kinds of flowers”, like Gethsemane... or Eden after “the Fall”. Wow, that guy had a way with depressin' words. I mean, it wasn't the most encouragin' thing to say, but it put a beautiful image in my head anyhow. I know Fricozoid thought so too, cos he didn't take the preacher's picture until he said that.

Anyway, I couldn't wait to get back to the swamp, even though those big-boned Mississippi Valley girls at the funeral made me want to hang around for a coupla days. I could bathe in their muddy drawl and listen to their bracelets rattle all day, no lie. And they smelt so good. It was a little annoyin' how they kept sayin' “Who dat? Where yat?” like they thought all people from Louisiana speak that way. I wished my San Taino patois was up to par so I could confuse them. They grilled some serious sirloin, and fed us and asked about our topknots and the dirt-pourin' and what not, and wanted to stay “in touch”. But look, you really shouldn't encourage the women you meet at family gatherin's. And if I have to explain why, then maybe you shouldn't be invited to family functions in the first place.

More importantly, it had been eight or nine days since I ran into L-Island like a madman. All that time the machines were out there at the crack on the map, workin'. I was anxious to see what was happenin' and, out of habit, I got the urge to call a conference about it. Then I realized that the life of conferences and callin' up the crew was a long time and one funeral ago.

The changes happened fast. We moved out of L-Island early durin' those eight or nine days. I turned sixteen the same week. It was September Nineteen Eighty-nine. Tall Horse had an apartment on – of all places – Hayne Boulevard, and he said he'd rent it to us. Oh man. You shoulda seen Moms just shakin' her head and lookin' around and smilin' real sad when she walked into that place, twenty-one years late. We left Ma and Pa Campbell in the swamp, but they had arranged for their people from Arizona to get there around the time we came back from the funeral.

When I woke up, the rain had stopped and the car was crunchin' gravel. Only Doug and Tony stayed awake the whole way. A song was stuck in my head from listenin' to Tony's music the whole way. You know when you wake up and it's only one line that keeps goin' and goin' and you can't stop it? Well, the way to stop that is, you've got to conjure up that cassette player in your head and see yourself pushing that imaginary stop button. Or just imagine yourself smashin' the damn thing. That's how I stop it. Anyways, I rubbed my eyes and realized we were not on Hayne Boulevard. Instead, we were headin' into the swamp.

“Momma left somethin' back there,” Tony said, lookin' all around.

I tried to see where we were, and I couldn't tell if we had passed where that overpass used to be or not. I looked for any sign of the machines. They were gone. All they left us was empty pink sky and New O'lins in the haze behind us, but I
couldn't tell the distance with no overpass to mark it with. Nothing remained: no excavator, dump truck, nothin': just a great, big, gapin' hole – a wide canal that stretched in every direction and never ended until we got into the L-Island. And in that wide-open, empty wilderness there was nothing but water grasses and marsh and new water wellin' up like blood in a fresh bruise. Oh, and birds
.
Waves and waves of egrets and blackbirds and waterfowls – by the hundreds – not flyin' home, but pickin' up after the machines, feedin' and settlin' into trees I hadn't noticed before. I was confused. Maybe at that very moment the machines were headin' back. You just don't leave a wide trench open for miles. I looked across at Frico: he was asleep and snorin'.

Then way ahead, we saw the smoke. L-Island was burnin'. Not blazin', really, but smoulderin' in the sunset. We could smell it. Smoke hung in the trees – and you could see the glow of fire without bein' able to tell where it was started from.

Moms woke everybody up and told Tony to be careful as we ended the ribbon of road that now had more marsh on both sides. Ma and Pa Campbell – we all thought of them at the same time. Or maybe it was because Pa's old truck was abandoned at the side of the road and his wheelchair was turned over on its side, in a ditch. Moms started chanting. The truck keys were still in the ignition, but those two old people were nowhere to be seen. A wind came through from behind us and just up ahead, the smoke rolled away and we saw it – a drillin' rig: fluorescent lights all over the tower like a multi-eyed monster. The rig was on the exact same spot where the Benet house used to be. All around it, there were more contraptions inside the chain-link fence.

Well, that whole thing just looked like an overnight growth of steel forest standin' tall and strange in the smoke and mist – or the deck of some invadin' ship that brought the fire into the swamp. One light blinked on top of the tower, as if the rig was waitin' for orders. Bushes had been cleared away, so a
reflective sign glowed in the Honda headlights. At the top of the sign was that little green logo from the TV infomercial.

Tony spoke up, so soft it scared you.

“That's a natural-gas drillin' rig. But there's no one anywhere.”

“Don't get out.”

We didn't need Valerie Beaumont to tell us that.

We turned at the train tracks into L-Island. Tony cut the engine. As soon as the car had rolled down the slope, he flicked on the high beams, and those car lights showed you a place that would make you gasp for more reasons than the smoke in your lungs. “Desolate” is the word. No sound 'cept for the tyres in the dry riverbed, one weakened cricket and the broken creek pourin' into the earth. Smoke everywhere. In the distance, the Campbells' house had no lights in it, and the crab crawl – the shack we used to live in – leant forward into the dead pond that was now really a big puddle. Dead alligators were on their backs in the mud. They were swollen and looked like cylinders you could roll around. I was halfway through lookin' for my father's bones out there in the pond before I realized that I had been doing that for weeks. As the water level fell, I'd climb into the tamarind tree, lookin' into the pond for bones or clothes, relieved to see nothin' but the rusty tin roof toasted by time. In the smoke now, on the surface of the dark water, orange and blue flames appeared and vanished like mischievous spirits. This was hell.

Jerusalem. Jerusalem.

“More like
methane
, Momma. That gas has been comin' up from underground this whole time. Let's go.”

“Hell, no. Not until we know where those old people are. Doug, you stay with Skid and Frico. Roll those windows up. Tony, come with me.”

They walked in the beams from the headlights until they disappeared at the turn of the L. So, I'm there thinkin' we needed a knife or a rifle or a sketch pad and a pencil for protection. But Doug and Frico, they're fascinated. They were sittin' there, reminiscin' about a tyre swing we used to have on the tamarind tree that swung you out over the water and back in – and you should try not to fall in with the gators.

That's when I turned to see, by those ghost lights on the rig, that our tamarind tree was uprooted, chopped up and hauled away, maybe for firewood. Only the tangled roots of it lay exposed above the dirt, half on the bank, half in the pond, the wood white and the last of the fruits cracked and scattered here and there. There were more trees flung down, or stampeded through, like somethin' large had come in and forced itself on the place. All that was not broken was beaten down or limp and still flappin' in the wind. And the piano started in my head again. It swelled up into a big ol' church organ that was holdin' a high note at the end of a stanza, but there was no chorus comin'.