Sketcher (3 page)

Frico went “Shhh!” when Tony started climbing the tamarind tree and shakin' it. He made us stop halfway and promise we'd shut the hell up while he was drawing. It took effort, especially at night, but I climbed all the way up to the top where Frico was and told Tony to pass the flashlight, even though Frico had a cigarette lighter up there and everything. Frico had his back against the main part of the tree, and his legs were wrapped around a branch beneath him. Clutchin' a No. 6 pencil in his right hand, he stuck it into his shaggy hair. His left hand gripped a small sketch pad that was also restin' on his knee. I shone the light off to the side of the sketch pad, so that only the outer circle of the beam caught the drawin'. Frico was lookin' across the stretch of water towards our house. He was tryin' to sketch the swamp night scene, though he could barely make it out, cos he left his glasses plus the half-moon was just draggin' herself in over the Gulf. Then, when I turned around and looked west, my breath got stuck in my neck, cos for the first time, from up in that tree, I saw the city from the swamp at night. Downtown New O'lins was blazing and throbbin' – and when you moved your head, you could see all kinds of colours twinklin' through the trees. The
high-rises, with all those fluorescent lights inside their windows, reached up like a crown covered in diamonds. Then again, around the base of the buildings, the gold glow of the street lights over in tourist town made the whole city look as if it was hoverin' on jet boosters – like something that just came down from above. But man, if there was someone out there in the city lookin' back at us from a window in one of those fancy buildings, all they'd see is pitch black.

Frico had finished the outline of our swamp shack peeking out from the cypresses, so he started filling in the night sky. The soft scratch-scratch of pencil on paper and a sudden light breeze from the east lifted the heat from the swamp floor and made me sleepy in no time. I sat in the fork of two branches, rested my head back, closed my eyes and thought of Pops' vision. I saw the buildings of New O'lins comin' closer and closer. I could hear them: a soft rush at first, like faraway rain. Then the rush became a rustle that broke into a rattle of glass against steel and steel against stone. Faster and faster, buildings popped up from the swamp floor until they all came crashin' through the trees in front of us. Fragile blue cranes and woodpeckers flew away, and suddenly we were so close that we could lean across and touch the cool walls that swooped into the sky. We could peep inside offices and leave oily forehead prints on the windows.

Then the light breeze stopped, and a mosquito started blowin' a jazz horn in my ears. It was off key, so I opened my eyes and killed it and wiped my palms on the tree. And my dream-city dried up and went away as well.

“Shhh!”

Frico didn't appreciate the noise, but something had distracted him before I did.

Lower down on the branches, Tony and Doug were pointin' to a light out on the bayou. Someone was prob'ly night-fishin' for bluegill near to our house. Pa Campbell wouldn't like that, cos whoever it was, they weren't from our little L of
land. The boat with the light came across the water until it was right next to the bank and up under our tree. Then, all of a sudden, a big ol' rock came flyin' through the leaves of the tamarind tree. We hollered out and hung on for our lives. There was laughter from the darkness below and then a metallic sound came clangin' up through the branches. I swung the flashlight to see a grapplin' hook barely miss Frico's face. I ducked down, and the hook wrapped clockwise around a thick branch right behind my head. Someone started pulling on the rope and whoopin' and yellin', tryin' to shake us out the damn tree.

“Let catch ourselves some Beaumonts, Squash!”

It was the Benet boys, who called themselves “Broadway” and “Squash”, our regular bayou teenage terrorists. They weren't much older than Tony, but they were tall and stout like footballers. Each one looked like half a house, and I heard they even had beards before they were eleven.
Freeze frame.

Now see, these Benet boys were vicious. They'd do just about anything to make life in the swamp a little more miserable for everybody. They'd been expelled from too many schools to count. They hunted in and out of season, killin' things just because they could. Their father owned a junkyard, and they just set down all day and welded together new devices to do the worst damage possible. One torture tool was called the “eye-catcher”. That was a catapult made from tin and tyre tubes. It shot nuts and bolts and could take an eye out. And don't bother tellin' their old man, cos he was worse than them.

Now it seemed the Benets were testing out a new weapon and they wanted us to be the guinea pigs, but we knew the drill when these demons came around. Holler and run. Doug was racing down the branches and Calvin was raisin' hell, when my pops came out of nowhere and stood under the tree.

“Stay where y'all are!” he shouted.

Then he took out his knife and, while the hook was still attached to the tamarind tree, he reached up, leant over the water and grabbed the rope stretchin' out towards the boat. He cut the rope and let it fall back into the bayou. Two voices cursed out of the dark, then everything was still again. Pops called up:

“Come on down boys, and let's go – seems like those Benet boys need a good whoopin'. I'll go across the tracks and talk to their ol' man in the mornin'. Right now I need to go get the rest of
my
whoopin' from your mother.”

Say what you want about my pops, but nobody was goin' to mess with us and get away with it, even though that time he let those Benet boys off easy.

So we're walking back to our house and the Benet boys are behind us on the bank, wet like swamp rats and swearin' about what they were going to do us next – but they kept their distance. Then Pops – I watched him, that man – he took Frico and put him in front of himself as if to shield him from any other Benet missile. Then it got worse. Pops took off his jacket and wrapped Frico up and took all his pencils and stuff and carried them for him.

Now, when I looked at Doug and Tony, they didn't see nothing strange about all that mollycoddlin' and that special treatment. I mean, I know Frico's kinda feeble and he was born premature and all, but he's the one who jumped out into the night air. Now, in Pops' fancy suede jacket, Frico was a warm, fuzzy bear and I was feelin' like the slimy serpent.

When we got back to the house, Pops told us to go on inside, and he'd be right in. I thought he was goin' to visit old man Pa Campbell (even though they weren't on good speakin' terms ever), to tell him about the Benet boys hurling hooks and stones from their boat at us. But when I peeped outside through a crack between the boards that made up our swamp cabin, I saw him take something from his pocket. He looked this way and that way and stooped in the dark and dug at
the dirt with his bare hands. Not like I didn't see him do this before, but he always told me, “Skid you ain't see nuthin' now, y'hear?” So I asked Moms what he was doin' there in the dirt this time of night.

“Planting his dreams, son. Just remind him to leave his work shoes on the porch.”

And she used the sarcastic voice only cos she just had a fight with him. I mean, you could see she loved the guy. She just hated the swamp life, and that fight with Pops was like the beginnin' of sorrows. And that's when it hit me – like a hickory nut in a hurricane: the one stone I could use to kill two birds. I got to thinkin' that the way to get things back in shape in my family and make them have some respect for people other than Frico Beaumont was for me to get the city that had been sleeping for years to start movin' into the swamps again.

So how was I plannin' to get that done? I wasn't sure yet, but right round that time when things were looking pretty bad, I just kept thinking how everybody in my family was proud of Frico's skills on paper. Moms thought his paintings and drawings were somethin' special, and Pops said Frico's gifts were going to “put the Beaumonts on the map once and for all”. Frico had won school competitions since kindergarten, and they even put a painting of his on greetin' cards for sick kids over at Charity Hospital in the city one Christmas. Doug and Tony liked takin' him places to impress girls. So if anything was really goin' to help us out, it may very well be this boy's talent.

But lemme tell ya – for me, it was much more than just talent. I knew things that the rest of my family had no idea about. See, when I was really young I used to follow Frico everywhere, cos that's what little toddler brothers do. And when I thought about it hard enough, I could remember that when I was about three years old, out by the train tracks, I saw Frico sketch on paper with his left hand... and he made some strange things happen. It had been a while, but deep down I
knew
what I saw. That boy was more than artistic. He had somethin' in his left hand... a strange power to
fix
things with a pencil. But just like the lazy machines on the New O'lins development, he had quit that kind of sketchin' and he wasn't budgin'. So my job was to figure out how to get him to do this thing again, in time.

Three

Rewind a li'le bit.
So like I was sayin', when Frico was four, he sketched a picture of a cat that had a broken leg. And the cat got better and walked away. Man, that cat was so excited about havin' a brand-new back leg he just got up and hit the train tracks and walked and walked for miles and never came back – I swear. In kindergarten Frico drew himself pissing under a plum tree in the schoolyard, and the tree withered and
died
. Look, I'm not making this stuff up. I can't even stand the guy sometimes, but I was there. And that's what happened.

Now, I know I'm not talkin' hogwash, cos the rest of my family also told me about some li'le things that happened before I was born. Take for example, there's this story in my family about Frico Beaumont wakin' up as a baby and seein' a big ball of blue light over his crib and him reachin' out and touchin' it with his left hand. Doug was awake and saw the whole thing and told Moms and Pops. But they couldn't get around to agreeing on what it meant. Moms was saying the blue light was an angel, but Pops said, “Yes, angel from
hell
!” He said that any ball of blue light in the swamps wasn't nothin' but a damn
fifolet.
That's a spirit that was left to guard French treasure, centuries ago, he said. Meanwhile Frico thought all that blue-light stuff prob'ly never even happened. Doug just wanted an excuse to call him “
folet
”, cos that's the closest you can get to callin' your brother “fool” without gettin' a lecture from Valerie Beaumont. Well, after that, that name is the only thing that stuck for a while. The real details of the story all went foggy, like “L-Island” before the rain moves in.

If you think that story doesn't mean anything, lemme tell you a little bit about the VW panel van Pops used to drive. Now, I heard that Pops was proud of that van and he always waxed it and parked it right on a slope where the sun came through the trees, so that the windshield could catch a ray of light and shoot it across the yard and straight into Pa Campbell's house. That would make the old man wonder “what the hell” and come to his window and see the van glistenin' and get jealous or just plain pissed off. Doug said Moms said she didn't know why Pops was showin' off, cos that panel van was NASA property and he shouldn't even be drivin' it home from the “facility” in the first place. Pops was a genius, but he wasn't no bigwig at work. He was one supervisor out of a hundred on an assembly line that helped put together rockets and other space vessels. Pretty cool.

Anyway, the VW van was there, all waxed and parked on a slope, glistenin'. Doug said he was sittin' in the back with Frico when Tony, who was about six at the time, went into the driver's seat and released the handbrake. I wasn't walkin' yet, thank God, so I wasn't caught up outside in the whole mess. Well, that VW panel van came rumblin' down the slope and Tony, he couldn't reach the brakes or anything, so the vehicle damn near missed a tree, but it scraped along Pa's chickenwire and wood fence, until Pa Campbell ran out of his house, barefooted with cigarette in mouth, and jumped into the shotgun seat and pulled up the handbrake.

Well, everybody got shook up, and the van had a long scratch on the side. Now you can imagine, our pops is comin' out of the house yellin' at Pa for God knows why, Moms is taking her kids out of the van and shoutin', I'm inside screamin' for my grits and Pops and Pa Campbell start ballin' fists and knockin' the snot out of each other for no reason. Moms puts Frico down to stop the fight, and by the time they're finished tusslin' –
poof –
that scratch on the van was no more. Then everybody saw little Frico sittin' on the ground, drawin'
a detailed version of the van in the dirt with his left hand. And they all stopped arguin' and said “aww” and gathered around Frico and told him he was amazin' – and I'm still inside screamin' for my damn grits
.

Anyway, ask Tony Beaumont right now for his version of that story and he'll prob'ly tell you that it wasn't the first time he was “driving” Pops' van, so he had everything “under control” until Pa Campbell jumped into the shotgun seat and “threw him off so bad he had to scrape the fence”. He'll also tell you that Pops' VW van had doors that slid all the way back, so when Moms retrieved her kids from inside it, she slid the door open and kept it there to hide the scratch on the side until the ol' T-Rex cooled down. Well, look here, you'll learn not to listen to Tony Beaumont's stories too much. Cos, first of all, if there was still damage on that panel van when Pops went to work, it would have gotten him fired. And the way I hear it, when Pops
did
eventually lose his job, it was cos he went to the NASA facility and tested out some biofuel that he invented from swamp duckweed and sugar-cane juice, and they caught him and said he was selling moonshine on government property. That scratch disappeared long before all that.

Well,
fast forward
again to Nineteen Eighty-one: after that night in the tamarind tree, we were still broke as hell and livin' in swamp and all, and I started off my plan by suggesting to Frico one day that we try to make some money with those powers of his. When I told him what I had in mind, he cleared his throat and scratched his red head and took off his tiny glasses and rubbed his freckled nose, and said that it was such a long time ago and we had prob'ly made up the whole story just to fool people, so it was all a lie about the cat walkin' and the tree dyin' anyway. Well, Frico's a real hard-headed bastard who would beat you up if you bothered him too much, so I took it easy. See, all he did at home all day was draw and paint. And like I said, the boy was good. So, nobody didn't
want to disturb him when he was doin' a masterpiece. He got away from me annoyin' him the same way he got out of going to make groceries at Lam Lee Hahn. He simply took out his brushes one at a time, chose watercolours and headed out to the train tracks. So many times I wished I could be that boy. He was talented – and he had it all figured out. Me? My talent was to make money, even though I had nothin' to show for it.

So, anyway, Frico was just play-actin' about the sketchin' bein' fake, cos before long
he did it again
. Now, this wasn't part of the plan, it just happened.

See, I borrowed this newspaper-boy tweed cap from my big brother Doug, though it was bigger than my head and fell down over my eyes most times. Doug said it made me look like the sax player in a New York jazz club. Tony said it made me look like an idiot, but he's the eldest: he didn't know much about what was cool any more. Well, it just so happened that Frico had a pair of tweed shorts with the same patterns as my newspaper-boy cap. Now, it's a tradition in my family to wear the other guy's clothes when he's not lookin'. We call it “bandwagonin'”. See, you could ask to borrow somethin' from a guy, but that's no fun. So, with bandwagonin', the idea is not to get caught. If you happen to wagon a guy's shirt or shorts and you're lucky to see him comin', then you got to hide up in a tree and pray that the guy doesn't need his clothes right away. Oh, and if your feet are big and flat like Tony Beaumont's, you can't possibly be serious about wagonin' somebody's shoes, cos seriously – that's the end of them. Tony would wear Doug's church shoes, then come back in, clean the mud off and park them under the bed like nothing happened. That's what caused that big ol' Sunday-mornin' Mother's Day fight.

Everybody was all gussied up and ready to go to church. Doug was dapper in a coat and tie. But when he pulled out his brand-new church shoes from under the bed, they looked like a duck had been wearin' 'em for days and days. Man, you
shoulda seen him and Tony rollin' and splashin' in the mud in front of our house and Ma Campbell callin' out to them from across the fence in the name of Jesus and Holy Mother Mary – and them standin' there tired and muddy as hell in their church suits and Moms just shakin' her head in disbelief. Poor Moms... but it was funny though.

Anyway, like I was sayin', one day I wagoned Frico's shorts to go with my cap. I couldn't bother to ask if I could borrow it, cos I was only goin' to go make groceries for Moms at Lam Lee Hahn. It was a good day, until that young Vietnamese girl at Lam Lee Hahn, the tomboy, she saw me come into the shop.

“You come heah yestuhday an' you come again today, good good.”

“No.”

“You no come yestuhday?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Then, you have twin brodda, yes?”

“We're not twins.”

“Hmm. Well, your brodda look like you. You have same clothes too!”

Sometimes the best answer you can give is “OK”, so that's what I said. I was a little annoyed, cos I used to get that a lot. But I don't look like Frico. We got the same frizzy reddish hair, but he's skinnier than me. He has Pops' brown eyes and he wears specs. I got my moms' dark eyes. But I guess wearing Fricozoid's shorts didn't help matters neither. Then, as I was walkin' around in the store picking up groceries, the girl was followin' me around and tellin' me it was the Year of the Monkey and about all the things they do for the Vietnamese New Year. So I said, “That's nice, do you give discounts?” – cos I really wanted to keep some of Moms' change to drop into my savin' can or get some candy. Well, the girl, who was prob'ly ten or eleven at the time, she just smiled and kept smiling until her eyes disappeared, and she was so cute when
she gave me a proper cussin' in bad English about how it's bad luck when the first customer for the day comes into the shop and starts bargainin' for discounts so early.

She said: “Leetle boy, you want to spoil da whole day?”

And I felt bad, 'specially since I was only buyin' bitter melons for Moms to put into her diabetic stew. So I said sorry and she made me promise to come back and spend more money and help her learn more English. I knew she outsmarted me, so I liked her style, and we stood there talkin' the whole time, while Moms' pot was waitin' on the bitter melons. Mai, her name was. Her family had moved to America seven years before. They were farmers, so they were fixin' to set up a farm out in the swamps behind the grocery shop to grow greens and raise chickens and catch fish out in the Gulf. She said you can't do all that in the city. Plus the swamps reminded the older folks of the country village where they used to live in Vietnam before the war – a pretty place at the end of the “Great Mekong River that runs from the top of the world to feed the Delta,” she said like a teacher, but in broken English. Then, when she was describin' it some more, an old Vietnamese man, her grandfather I thought it was, he came out and spoke to her real hard and loud in Vietnamese, so I assumed I was distracting her from her shopkeepin' duties and I got out of there real quick.

But when I was goin' back home, the Lam Lee Hahn family dog, he got all excited by the old man's shoutin', and he barked and growled and dug under the fence and chased me and bit me on my right ass cheek. And that dog stood up on his back legs and held on with his teeth and rocked his head side to side and tore out the whole damn seat of Frico's goddamn borrowed pants. Man, that bastard Frico was so pissed at me he only sketched a picture of his tweed shorts all properly sewn up and left my backside with those tooth marks in it. Well, I wasn't gonna let him sketch my ass anyways, so whatever.

I told Moms it was the Benets' dog that did it, cos I didn't want to get my new friend Mai into any trouble. When Frico said he was goin' to tell Moms the truth, I had to give him the Snickers bar I bought plus two dollars' hush money. Anyway, I didn't mind. I was glad that at least I got that bastard to sketch something back to perfection, so those were the best bites of my life and money well spent.

Well, after that demonstration of his powers, I felt it was about time I called a meetin' about Frico's sketchin'. I needed to reveal Frico's powers to more people and create a plan to manage it going forward. Of course, before that I didn't brag to nobody else about Frico's powers, cos people always want too damn much. You know, they would want to tell him what to do and bring all their bullshit to get fixed without my permission or without payin'. Hey look, I was Frico's manager: I invested a Snickers bar and two dollars into that whole business. Shiit.

So that tamarind tree I told you about was our official conference room. Hell, we had to book it and everything. Not with an actual book, but you can't be having a serious conference and then ol' freckle-face Frico decides he wants to climb up and paint some bluebirds and tell us to shush. That boy loves critters. Got it from his mother. So anyway, you had to just tell the rest of the Beaumont boys, “Look, I'm in the conference room,” and then pray they didn't come spyin'.

So I called up the crew. At the time it was Marlon the wannabe child star and our cousin Belly, who was really like a brother, but lived out at Honey Drop Drive close to Marlon's house. Honey Drop Drive was in an area they call De La Roulette, a little roundabout community north-west of us that's not built-up city, but it's definitely not swamp. It was supposed to have been a little gamblin' town, but that never happened.

Anyway, like I told you, us Beaumonts, we didn't have no phone, so roundin' up the crew for a meetin' could be one
elaborate affair. I had to get on the CB and turn to that same Channel 19 that got me in trouble – cos it was the truckers' channel – and holler: “Breaker, breaker Tall Horse, Tall Horse you on the frequency, break?” “Tall Horse” was Belly's dad's CB nickname – or “handle”, if you want to use a technical term. That name “Tall Horse” was also an automatic cuss word that my moms couldn't stand to hear me say in the house, so the longer Tall Horse took to answer the breakerbreaker, the more likely it was that Valerie Beaumont was gonna shut down the whole call. So, I'd shout out to Belly's daddy (who drove a sweet eighteen-wheeler over in Atlanta) and hope he was in his big rig. When he got to a rest stop, he'd shout up ol' Belly's house on Honey Drop Drive from a payphone and suffer through a lecture from my Aunt Bevlene about how Belly had too much free time on his hands and no fatherly guidance and needed a good talkin' to, plus some more maintenance money, cos he was only ten and eatin' everything in sight. And if some hitch-hiker girl giggled in the background, he would get another earful. So he just hurried up and told her, “It's long distance, Bevlene. Times a-wastin', time, time!” And Belly would come on and take the message that there was a meetin' in the swamp. Belly's daddy was cool like that. Then Belly would take another half an hour to lace his tennis shoes and primp himself and ride a quarter-mile to Marlon's house on his BMX bike and wait fifteen more minutes while Marlon practised bein' a child star in his garage.