Black Sheep Boy

by Martin Pousson

  Usually while Papa scrubbed-up, he closed the bathroom door and entered a limbo world. I’d wait beside the door, listening to every movement, until he stepped out with a gleaming set of arms and legs, a scrubbed-up walking mannequin of a husband. The arms were no longer for me, though, and his twisted grin passed over my head like a dying comet. It was my mother he wanted.

  But one day he left a crack in the door, just wide enough for a pair of spying eyes. His voice shouted at something in the room, then a buzzing and humming sound filled my head. Odd words shook my ears.

  “Bec mon fucking chou!”

  “Vas tu faire in your ass!”

  The words were a foul smear of French and English, but in Papa’s baritone voice, they sounded almost holy. He half-shouted, half-muttered with a rhythm that made him sound like a Catholic priest chanting the Hail Mary while chugging a bottle of the blood of Christ.

  Holding my breath, I pushed in closer until I could see Papa digging his nails into the soap and splashing water all over the embroidered towels. I knew how hard it was to get clean. Every night, Mama ran her finger in my ears, down my neck, and across the back of my knees, checking for a missed spot, a smudge of dirt, or a line of sweat. Any sign of grime sent her eyes spinning and her hands waving. She’d testify to the lamp, the couch, and the ceiling about her unclean son. How hard she worked to bring me closer to the Lord, how fast I fell back into the mud. Again, she sent me back to bathe, two, three, four times a night until her finger ran smooth against my skin and her tongue clicked in approval.

  In that bathroom, I figured Papa was working for her blessing too. I watched as he scrubbed his hands and arms with the bar of soap, then stripped off his shirt and rubbed his skin with a sponge. But when he dropped his pants, then his underwear, I moved back out of the light. The broad mass of his body cast a shadow, as if there were two men in the room, and the weight hanging between his legs hung like heavy figs. The sight of him startled me, and I didn’t want to look or move any closer.

  Until his voice rose again, and I pressed my face around the corner. That’s when I saw my father, legs spread apart, leaning over the toilet. He looked thoughtful, concentrating hard on the problem in his hands. And in the quiet of his concentration, a song broke out of his mouth. Not a church song, but something in French, something that got his toe tapping the floor, something that sounded light and dirty.

  “Allons danser Colinda, bou-doum, bou-doum,” he sang, “bou-doum, bou-doum, Colinda danser.”

  Suddenly, Papa was singing a Creole song and laughing to himself. His back relaxed and his body rocked back and forth. He had no microphone, no backing band, but he was making music anyway. Not on the radio, not for a hall full of dancers, not even for my mother. So I pretended it was for me.

  Soon, I started humming the song too, soft at first then louder and louder. “Bou-doum, ,” I repeated like a spell until a hand hushed my mouth. The words still echoed in my head, though, as my whole body lifted into the air. Above me, the ceiling sparkled like glitter and the brass globe spun like a wheel, its bright bulb throwing odd figures around the walls. The bathroom looked like a radiant sacristy, the sink a piscine, the drain a sacrarium. My hands flapped like a bird to touch the circle of shadows overhead. On my back I imagined a set of enormous wings. I floated and danced and sang in a whirling trance. Then I felt the grip of a pair of hands, and I looked down to see my father’s face beaming. His light filled the room and all the objects glowed and our mouths moved in unison, singing the same song, round and round, until his grip slipped, his knees buckled, and my head hit the floor.

  Right away, a welt rose on my crown, but I didn’t cry. Even so, Papa’s face turned ash-white, one eye twitched, and his hands drew back. He repeated a couple of words, over and over.

  “There, there,” he half-whispered, “now, now.”

  Then he stood and walked out the room with measured steps toward the calling voice of his wife. The sound of his steps echoed then died. For once, I didn’t follow. I waited. Nothing much had happened—my father had dropped me, I had fallen—and yet the whole world had changed. A long time had passed since he picked me up. A long time would pass again. How much more must I wait? How far until there, there, Papa, and how long until now, now?

  3.

  Masked Boy

  For a long time, I crept around the house like a small ghost. I faded into the patterns of wallpaper when sliding down the hall, slipped through the keyholes of doors when leaving a room, crawled into the pages of books when escaping danger. And when Mama called my name, I kept my voice low and lips tight, talking not from my mouth but from the cavern of my seven-year old chest.

  If I talked without a lisp, maybe she’d hear the boy she wanted, the one with a steady tongue. If I walked without a flap of my hands, maybe she’d see that solid boy, the one with steady feet and a steady future. Maybe she’d drop the whip then wrap her arms around me like pelican wings.

  The boy Mama wanted had skin whiter than mine, skin that never reddened, never darkened. He hit balls with one crack of his bat, caught balls with one snap of his glove. On the mantel, his trophies glinted and glowed. That boy didn’t hide in books; he leapt off the pages. He didn’t slip through keyholes; he burst through the door. He squared off against danger, defended his name, and lifted his mother right out of the boggy swampland of Louisiana into some other state. That boy climbed roofs and trees, sailed through the air on ropes and wires, conquered roads and ditches with his mighty motocross bike. He turned shaggy fields of rice into shining forests of gold. He appeared in my window at night, with the moon buzzing around his head, yet lived down the street, under someone else’s roof and someone else’s name. Soon he’d loom over me, older, taller, stronger, with eyes unmasked, mouth unhinged, and body uncloaked.

  When he entered the front door after work, my father stepped lightly, as if intruding upon another man’s house. He knocked first then turned the knob slowly, unsure what scene he might confront. His son kneeling on hard tiles in the kitchen, with his hands threaded and head bowed. His wife pacing the floor, with white knuckles and a white-hot whip. The air cracking like dry straw. He unbuttoned his collar, unloosed his tie, and unhooked his belt. At the rice mill, he’d moved from machine operator to paper pusher, but he had no power here. Even when the scene shifted, with his wife whipping up meringue for a pie and his son sitting with his nose in a book, he spoke as little as possible, said almost nothing. Any word might light a match, might start a fire he couldn’t extinguish.

  At dusk I went in search of Papa outside, the only place Mama let him drink beer or play tunes. Long ago, he’d surrendered dominion over the fridge and the stereo. He commanded only a plastic ice chest and a plastic transistor from the tailgate of his pickup truck. He couldn’t choke back a bottle of beer in his own living room, but he unloaded a six-shooter in the garage. He couldn’t drop the needle on Bois Sec or Boozoo on the record player, but he cranked up zydeco and Cajun, dancehall and swamp pop, fais do-do and la la on the radio outside. In his garage of solitude, Papa sawed his legs across the concrete floor or sawed his hand across an invisible fiddle. As I watched, he conducted a frenzied Cajun band, lifted a frantic wife to her feet, lifted a fragile son to his shoulders, all while humming to himself.

  When the song in his head stopped, he stared at his empty hands then lifted another half-frozen beer to his lips. No one knew the bullet in his chest, the vulnerability of his X-ray eyes to a weepy waltz about lost time. No one knew the storm in his ear, the supersonic echo of his wife’s every want, every unmet need. No one knew the supernova under his crown, the magnitude of his strength, as he raised a graveyard of memories before his peeping son. All the Cajun men who’d ridden horses, ridden tractors, who’d raised houses, raised hell floated out the garage, over the yard. All his haunted heroes made no sound and never touched ground, yet they danced in a haze of air. Some secrets held such power they had to remain
hidden, not in a closet or at the bottom of a chest, but out in the open, where no one would notice.

  Inside the house, Mama danced with no ghosts and entertained no gloom. She’d shelved the legends of her barefoot bayou childhood next to expired encyclopediae and outdated yearbooks. Instead, she read glossy magazines with manicured lawns and lives. Elsewhere, people breathed air without fumes, walked on land without ooze. Men made fortunes with ease, and women had maids and cooks and walk-in closets. Alone with her son, she romanced those men, conjured tales of another life, another husband, as she read each article aloud like a story. In a profile of quick fame or easy riches, she replaced another woman’s name with her own. She punctuated each tale with the hyphen of her mouth and the bracket of her shoulders, determined to write a new ending. Yet Papa disrupted the fairy tale, disappointed her every day, dropping not a shiny briefcase by the door but a pair of dusty boots, not a stack of century notes but a few sawbucks, not a blank check but an empty grunt. He disappointed himself too, it seemed, as he sighed with the news of other men’s triumphs. Over dinner, Mama spooned it out, night after night.

  “That new couple at the end of the block just booked a cruise. On a ship.”

  “The insurance broker and his wife toured New York City and saw show after show. On Broadway.”

  “The psychiatrist next door took his wife to brunch. Jazz brunch. At a hotel.”

  His own paycheck barely covered the mortgage and Mama’s endless renovations. While Papa conducted an orchestra of memory in the garage, Mama directed a theater of fantasy in the house. She raised fairy tales on the walls with elaborate murals and flocked velvet featuring European villas or abstract bursts of arabesque. She suspended fables from the ceiling with octopus-armed chandeliers, set to glow with dancing flames. She arranged and rearranged a royal court of furniture with French Provincial, Spanish Colonial, then Hollywood Regency. She grouped chairs into Conversation Corners, grouped figurines into Curiosity Cabinets, and grouped landscapes into Gallery Clusters. The plush carpet whispered of richer times ahead. The glass sliding door gazed back at her in wonder, along with her creeping son.

  Long ago, her own mother was confined to a cinder-block house in the projects, and her grandmother dwelled under a tin roof with mud and moss stuffed into cracks for insulation. She missed not one iota of the past, not one half of her half-breed legacy. There were no graveyards in her view, only future fields to travel. She missed not one minute of lost time. Her watch only wound forward, and her calendar only marked the next day. Tomorrow rose up in spires and stairways, in white peaks and gold palaces. Even if no one visited, she dusted, scrubbed, bleached, polished, and shone every dark surface of the house. Then she covered every dark inch of her face with pale cream and frosted powder, and she crowned her dark hair with a sparkling cloud of spray. She was no one’s ash-girl, no one’s swamp woman, and she refused to stand still on sinking land.

  Of all the men she secretly romanced, one stood taller, blonder and broader than the rest, with a wingspan that reached over half the block. The man who lived next door: the psychiatrist. He had diplomas—plural—on his office wall. He had The New York Times and Wall Street Journal delivered to his front door. He had two cars in the garage, one for his diamond-faced wife. He had broker statements and stock reports in his mailbox. Yes, she looked. And a son so grown up that he slept on his own, in a camper in the driveway. Thirteen, he collected ribbons, medals, and trophies not in art or drama or reading rallies but in real races and real games played at night under the stars and a bank of stadium lights. In high school, she’d watched a boy just like him bat his way into the minor leagues before she dropped out to marry my father, all because he had a car and a job in another town.

  “I could’ve been the wife of a Yankees pitcher,” she announced in an exaggerated whisper. “Or a heart surgeon. I could’ve had a car of my own and a credit card and a house decorator and a whole living room of ladies over for tea. Who knows? I could’ve married a psychiatrist.”

  Her voice trailed off as she stared me down.

  “You,” she said. “You can go over there, meet the boy. Make friends. Who knows? Anything can happen.”

  Mama looked over my head—and past my age and height—to see me catching balls in the backyard for the neighbor’s son, the psychiatrist’s son. Maybe he’d teach me how to stop prancing on tiptoes and flapping hands in the air. Maybe he’d teach me how to catch a ball, hit a ball, score a point. How to be the boy she wanted.

  Out of a haze one sweltering day, the neighbor’s golden boy passed right by me, inches away, jack-hammering his bike. His legs pumped straight up and down but his body piked forward at an odd angle, as if he was going to leap from the handlebars into an imaginary pool of water. He’d passed me on that bike nearly every afternoon but never looked twice. He never looked long at anyone though. Down the block, everyone called him Flash, with his blond hair and legs like lightning. At high school, he ran track and ran from diamond to diamond on the baseball field and from post to post in the football stadium. There was no sport, no game he couldn’t win. Before me now, he pedaled right into a gray cloud shooting from the tail pipe of a truck crawling along our street. Once a week, that truck sprayed a fog of insecticide over the lawns and ditches and sidewalks and over the houses like a sprawling but invisible mosquito net. At the first sign of the truck, all the mothers shut doors and windows. Yet the boys mounted bikes, crashing in gray clouds and falling onto hot asphalt, dizzy with fumes and speed. With a chance to disappear too, I hopped on my bike and followed Flash as close as I could while he pedaled circles and circles around the truck until our tires collided, and we both fell into a ditch. When I stood up, half as tall and half as old, he eyed me suspiciously, as if unsure who I might be, then grinned and nodded toward his camper.

  “Let me see it,” he said, soon as I stepped inside.

  When I looked down, I saw a trail of blood on my leg and a tear in my shorts. Flash dropped to his knees to examine the wound but soon started rubbing spit on his hand and rubbing his hand on my thigh until it turned red. His mouth broke into a radiant smile, and a shadow-line shone over his lip. His breath stopped, his eyes widened, and I half expected him to burst out of his shirt with a chest of armor and a clap of thunder. Instead, his look softened before darkening with a click of the bulb swinging overhead. I couldn’t make out his face or the outline of his body. The room blurred into a purplish black, and my ears echoed with the sound of shuffling feet.

  “Boo!” Flash shouted behind me then exploded in laughter as light shone from the ceiling again. “You like games?” he asked.

  I nodded, not sure what he meant, as he pressed a pack of chewing gum in my palm and a bandage on my knee.

  In the following weeks, Flash picked up not a single bat with me in the backyard and tossed not one ball my way, yet he ordered me out of clothes and into a bed sheet for a Greek council in his father’s office. A knot held the sheet on one of my shoulders, like a toga, while he stood with a paper crown on his head and issued accusations and declamations with a wave of the hand. Back in the camper, he dressed me in one of his old Halloween costumes, a magic elf, while we played a game he called a “campaign” with lots of monsters and wizards. The rules confused me, yet I knew it was all make-believe. I’d watched Papa perform a dance with ghosts in the garage and Mama practice serving tea to invisible ladies in the living room. So when Flash threw a hood over his head or spoke through a cone, I did what he said and did my best to pretend. He’d hang a tarp in the window with holes punctured to make pinpoints of light, like twinkling stars. He’d flip the card table over so that it was a power station with interplanetary antennas, or he’d throw a blanket across the top for a Batcave. On the walls, blacklight posters glowed with a confusion of swirling galaxies, safari animals, and smiling aliens. In one, Spiderman shot a lethal web at some unseen villain, while his red mask shimmered and his arms bulged.

&nb
sp; Sometimes, Flash acted out scenes from the posters. He talked and talked and made up stories and new games, and I took it all in, waiting for my part. At the end of each game, he made a big show of giving me what he called my “payoff.” Chewing gum in cartoon wrappers with glow-in-the-dark colors. Trading cards with grotesque villains, some just boys, caught up in an endless series of doom: rising from a city sewer with a red face and a nuclear fist, standing before a busted window and a moon bubbling like tar, or sitting butt-naked on a crack in the earth with a mushroom cloud overhead. Bloody knives, spaghetti limbs, crossed paths, and twisted necks. These were bad guys, I knew, but the cards smelled like bubble gum and candy hearts. I liked their red faces, their atomic hair, and I liked that the golden boy liked them, too.

  “A pack of weirdos,” he called them but spread the cards on the table and told a different story for each in a near whisper, as if we were best friends talking in the back of class or sharing a secret in the middle of the playground. He pulled me closer and closer to him in the camper and even promised to open the chest he kept locked near the bed. Yet he never talked about school and never showed me his track medals or anything that didn’t come from a game box. And he never once challenged me to a bike race or called me over when other boys filled his backyard.

  One day, though, with the shades drawn and the door latched, he unlocked and opened that chest. Inside rose a tall stack of fairy tales and an even taller stack of comic books, with the names of superheroes and supervillains emblazoned on the covers. He already was magic to me, Flash, and he seemed to live in more than one realm. A star pupil at school, a popular jock on the block, a game master in the camper. And since he started calling me over, Mama’s hand whipped meringue and sweet batter more often than she whipped me. The counter filled with ribbon-laced pies and medallion-shaped pralines. I ate them in silence, not wanting to break the spell. I was not her golden boy, not yet, but I was getting close. Whatever magic Flash had stored inside his chest, I wanted.