Sketcher Read online

  Now from where I was, I could see Frico in the old dresser mirror, in his usual place on the floor beside the bed. That’s where he liked to sit and do his sketches – where we couldn’t see him. Moms told us to always look out for Frico. She said to make sure he had his glasses on when he was sketchin’, and then pay close attention to him, cos sometimes that boy would be concentratin’ so hard on what he was paintin’ or drawin’ – he’d forget to breathe. He’d just kind of fall asleep sittin’ straight up with his eyes wide open. Yep, he’d blank out and wouldn’t budge for hours. So we’d shake him – and if that didn’t work, we’d prob’ly have to slap him. They wouldn’t make me slap him, cos sometimes I didn’t know my own strength.

  Anyway, there he was: I’m watchin’ him in the mirror and – would you believe it? – all of a sudden he just jumped up with the sketch pad and walked out of the house into the pitch black of night. Now that may sound simple, but you don’t just walk out of Valerie Beaumont’s house in the pitch black of night without someone accompanying you or making sure there are no black bears or water moccasins or demons lurkin’ about the swamp. Furthermore, Frico was only nine years old. How dare you walk your nine-year-old self out of the house and let the screen door slam behind you like you can’t stand all that fightin’ in your ear? And especially without your glasses? But see, that’s the kind of crap that Frico Beaumont got away with.

  Now, I’m not sayin’ I’m innocent. I’m jus’ sayin’ I couldn’t catch a break, like with that CB incident – but Frico, everybody treated him like he was some kind of special, even though Skid Beaumont is the last Beaumont – the baby Beaumont. While me and Doug and Tony wash dishes and haul water and go borrow somethin’ from that crabby ol’ lady Ma Campbell across the fence, Frico gets to take Calvin, our yaller dog, on a lovely stroll to the shop or to go paint by the train tracks or deeper in the swamp. But even then, that’s during the day. So when he stormed out of the house that night, I was waitin’ to see if he was finally gonna get it. But Pops, he just stopped his Cajun-cussin’ and said: “Y’all go on and get your little brother.”

  Of course, even if Doug and Tony weren’t doin’ no homework, they weren’t gonna get up first, cos they were just tired of goin’ after Frico. So I jumped up like a good boy, made sure the screen door didn’t slam when I ran out, and waited to see if anybody was goin’ to come after li’le ol’ Skid and protect him from black bears, water moccasins and demons. But no, sir: ’twas just me, myself and a million crickets.

  Now, even though I don’t personally believe it, older folks say that strange things from hell walk under the old cypress trees after dark. So, if you ever go walkin’ in the swamps, here’s a few rules for ya, just like I heard ’em.

  If you see a shadow walkin’ out on the water, look away.

  If you hear someone whistlin’ or singin’, don’t join in.

  If a voice calls your name in the woods, walk in the opposite direction. Quickly.

  Watch out for a hairy man with his head in the trees: that’s the Loogaroo werewolf man.

  Look out for the little bald-headed girl walkin’ fast – and don’t follow her.

  And most of all, you need to look out for James “Couyon” Jackson and his gang, who’d dope up on crack before coming in a black van to cut out your kidneys and leave you in a tub full of party ice and rock salt. The way I heard it, you’d rather bump into the Loogaroo man after dark than run into those crack-pipe-hittin’ types in the broad daylight, I tell ya.

  So yeah, Pops told me all these stories and then he let me go out alone. Anyway, all that waitin’ in vain on the doorstep made me lose precious seconds, so by the time I chased after Frico he had disappeared, almost like the darkness was a stretch of water and he’d done gone under in it. Well, after walkin’ blind for a while, I realized I didn’t know where I was. See, in the pass, we lived on a little piece of land, shaped more or less like an “L” – a cul-de-sac, really. The top part of the L was connected to the mainland and led in from the train tracks that ran through the swamp. You went down a grassy slope from the tracks when you entered the L. Then, a little way in, there was a footbridge with a decent enough creek runnin’ under it. You crossed that bridge and went on for about two hundred metres on a dumped-up marl road before going round a bend into the bottom part of the L, which is where we lived along with Ma and Pa Campbell. Their house was right across the chicken-wire fence from us.

  Now, all around that L-island, as I call it, there was some murky swamp water filled with alligators and lots of drowning opportunities. So at night, without a light or a full moon, you could easily end up going off the corner of the L – and that would be the end of it. Furthermore, after the dry season, when rain broke a drought, big ol’ sinkholes could be anywhere. So I stayed put until I saw Tony and Doug way behind me with a flashlight and I got a sense of where I was.

  Doug was callin’ out, “Skid, wait!” – so I walked in the opposite direction. Tony, who was the eldest at thirteen, began yellin’ something scary about some vampire guy that he used to watch when my family had a TV. I wasn’t goin’ to look like no baby, so I took my bearings from the light and just kept walkin’ until I saw the flashlight bobbin’ up and down, on the ground and up in the cypress trees, so I knew they’d started runnin’ after me. I took off at top speed and just kept lookin’ behind me from time to time.

  Now, I don’t know how soon it was, but I just felt the ground getting soggier and soggier, and then I heard a voice from heaven say: “Skid, stop.” Actually it was Frico’s voice – but that was good enough. He sounded like he was up above me in a tree somewhere – and that was weird, but that’s ol’ Fricozoid for ya. Then, when I stopped and peeled my eyes and looked dead ahead into the night, there – right in front of me – was a steep slope straight into the dark swamp water.

  “Don’t move.”

  Hell, like I needed him to tell me that. I started reversing slowly, and he said again from up in the tree: “I said don’t move – till I tell ya.”

  That’s when I saw the eyes. Just above the water surface, right in front of me. One massive bull alligator, about a twelve-footer, right behind the grass, just waitin’ for me to keep walkin’ forward. Even though I’d just finished runnin’, I felt colder than a dead eel and I started wondering where the hell was Doug and Tony when you need ’em? When they finally caught up, Tony was pantin’, cos he was kinda pudgy. In the dark I could still see that Doug had a “what the hell is wrong witchoo” look on his face. He had dragged on his soccer uniform back to front and he had only half-pulled out his cornrows when all the chasin’ started. He shone the light on the bank in front of me and said: “Look, fool.”

  I saw that I was standing in an alligator slide – that’s the long slide marks that an alligator’s belly makes in the mud when he’s gettin’ off the river banks to prob’ly get dinner. And that gator just sat there down in the water like a fleshand-blood submarine and gave everybody the evil eye. Then Calvin came up and started yapperin’ just to impress us, and the alligator raised his head and hissed just to let us know he wasn’t off-duty. So I walked backwards slowly and Doug started givin’ me a lecture, while Tony took the light and swept the area. He shone it into that monster’s mouth and saw those teeth and started with the vampire stuff again until Doug, who was a year younger than him, told him to grow up or shut up, whichever one came first. So just to annoy him, Tony put on his nerd voice and looked at the sky, pointin’ out that US satellites look different from stars and they can move them around from secret locations on earth – and Daddy knew, cos he helped build a rocket at the NASA Assembly Facility over in Michoud and blah blah blah.

  In the middle of all that science fiction and Doug lecturin’ and Calvin overdoin’ the barkin’ thing, here comes Frico’s voice again from up in the tree, real slow and soft in the darkness: “See, this is exactly why I got out here in the first place. Can’t catch a break from y’all. Jeez.”

  And Tony swung the flashli
ght into the trees and Frico shielded his eyes and nearly fell off a branch. The guy had climbed into a tree with some branches that hung out over the water. Moms said it was a tamarind tree. It was tall, but still smaller than those big old cypresses and beech and willow trees. It had low branches, so it was much easier to climb. We always went up into that tree durin’ the day, cos it was like our lookout point. From up there, we could see clear across the train tracks over to that scrap-metal junkyard where those mean Benet boys live, north of us. Beyond their dungeon was an old clogged-up canal that could give them access to the far-east end of Lake Pontchartrain. Lookin’ east, all you could see was train tracks. You couldn’t see the end of the tracks, but we knew that one train went to Slidell – which when you’re in the swamp is another city a whole world away. Turnin’ around to the south-east, we could see the stretch of bayou in front of our house that, like I said, was built on the bottom part of the L shape I told you about. Along the underside of the L, you’d see Pa’s sugar-cane strip, the mud levees we built, then some lonely crawfish traps bobbin’ up and down in between the mangroves of the open pass. Beyond that there was nothin’ but a lake and the eternal Gulf of Mexico way out south. Moms always said we came to live in the drainpipes of America. To the west was the best part, cos on a clear day you could see New O’lins with all those glass buildings lookin’ liquid behind the shimmer.

  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 m
ade 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.