While I gazed at the stacks and stacks of books, I heard a click. Then the room went purplish-black again. I waited for Flash to yank on the light and pop up behind me. But instead I heard clothes falling to the ground, first the thud of shoes then the snap of a belt and the hiss of a pair of pants. The room got darker and there was no sound at all. Until I heard a voice in my ear, gruff now and suddenly older.
“Boy,” Flash said, as he led my hand to his leg. “Put your mouth here.”
Then he clicked on the light. His eyes were hidden, blocked by an oversized pair of sunglasses. His shoulders were wrapped by a man’s blue velvet robe with a wide shawl and someone’s monogrammed initials over the heart. He looked like a comic book character, straw-gold hair, egg-white skin, and a shape that ran into a V. Yet he was naked under the robe, I knew, and I could feel the 3-D burn of his stare, could smell his scent too, the barely sweet musk and the slight char. My head filled with an odd vapor, and my skin seemed to peel away. What did he want to do now? When would it start? How long before he threw off the giant robe he wore like a cape?
“Here’s the deal,” he said, pulling on the sash. “Suck it and take your pick. Suck it and take any book you like.”
Right then, the floor turned to hot glue.
Flash kept those sunglasses over his eyes, but I could tell he was staring me down, waiting for my answer. Yet I couldn’t say a word any more than I could move a foot. I froze, dumbstruck by the figure of the neighbor’s son, looming larger and larger before me, as large as a full-grown man. His chest inflated with air, and his shoulders widened until his whole frame seemed to double in size. His legs towered over the comic books, and his hands stretched toward the walls on either side.
Next, the giant Flash dragged out a hurricane fan, a big whirling machine, and turned the blades on high. With the rushing air, his robe began to billow, and he looked like a superhero facing a menace or a wizard fighting back a monster. Before my eyes, he spread his arms like wings and pulled me close.
“Suck,” he said.
As my mouth opened, my tongue stiffened and I started to choke, but his hand clutched the back of my neck. Then, in a softer voice that brushed against my ear, I heard him say it, say the word that split me forever.
“Fuck,” he said.
Finally I opened my mouth to say, “Yes.”
In an instant, his hand turned into a muzzle, his face swelled into a balloon, and he pushed me back on the twin mattress, pulled my pants down to the floor. My shoes kept kicking against the pullout bed, but I kept my mind on the payoff. Soon he would stop and hand me another trading card, another pack of gum and a comic book too. But as his body kept rubbing against mine, instead of bubblegum or candy hearts, an awful smell rose around him, sharp as bleach, and my skin began to burn. His hands whipped my back and sides, so I closed my eyes. With a huff of breath, I tore in two. Half of me pushed my face deeper into the pillow and wanted him to do it again, to beat and break my skin, and half ached and ached and only wanted him to stop.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Flash warned me after. “Don’t say anything.”
Although he was thirteen and I was seven, I knew what he did was wrong, what I did was wrong. The burnt-match scent of danger filled the camper. His hair was wet with sweat, nearly black now. An alarm of words rang in my ear, and a flare of red shone in his eyes as he slapped a single comic book in my hand.
“Payoff,” he said.
One time. That was it. Once was enough, though, to take me away from Mama and Papa for good, to lift me too high and drop me too fast, to teach me too soon the lesson Mama had wanted me to learn: how to be a solid boy.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said again.
But I didn’t answer. Instead, I dug my arms into the open chest and lifted a towering stack of books. I hugged the books close and kept my lips shut. Even so, my body stretched inside its skin, and my face pushed against its mask. At home, I might still flinch when Mama raised the whip across my back. Yet I wouldn’t slip through a keyhole. I wouldn’t creep like a ghost. I’d square off against danger. I’d learn the power of my legs and learn to run faster than Flash, faster than lightning. I’d race out of the boggy swampland alone. I’d open my mouth to the sky, and sooner or later, I would tell.
For now, here I am, Mama, the boy you always wanted: your fabled son, rising with the moon in the window, with a new set of cards in hand and a disc of gold spinning overhead. Here I am, Papa, your little dark hero, running in a cape, running on winged feet, dancing in the lost air. See me run. See me spin. See me tear myself in two. Guess it now, guess my new name?
4.
Altar Boy
If there’d been no greased animal, the Courir would’ve been no more than an unholy run in the mud. In the bayou parishes, Mardi Gras called not for a run but a chase, with unmarried men fifteen and over snapping burlap whips in the air and onto the backs of other men in their path. Once flogged, the young men sank to their knees in ritual prayer while a ragged pelt was laid on their shoulders. Then they sprang back to their feet to chase a wet chicken, rope an oiled pig, or beg for pennies and pistolettes from the bystanders. The stingy were punished by revelers with willow branch whips on the rear and goat bladder bomps on the head. The revelers took turns riffling through the mean pockets, seizing dollar bills and loose change as loot while everyone else cheered the thievery as if the coins were raining from above, with beads and charms for all. At a manic high point, the unmarried men linked arms for a dance that had them moving almost can-can style with feet in the air, singing about a frog with a long tail and a fire underfoot. Finally the whole fête crashed with the butchering of a pig and the crowning of a queen, complete with a handmaiden dressed like a fairy.
Unlike the parades and floats in the city, the bayou krewes knew no king—and no law. The whippings might turn brutal, the theft might turn to rout, and the goat bladders might burst with beer. Their costume colors ran louder than any in the Vieux Carré, a riot of purple, green, and gold, along with stop-sign red or fireball orange, patched together with the rags of a pauper but in the fashion of a priest’s cassock or a judge’s robe. There was a capitaine, yes, but he was elected from among the drunkest. The honorary title went to the one who sucked at the beer bladder longest without pausing for breath. And when the run was done, they dunked him in a trough of ice water, stripped him of his capuchon, then dragged him to the steps of the church to await Our Lady of Prompt Succor and the mercy of the newly crowned queen, who offered him not the bounty of her lips but the bite of a cracklin’.
Of course, the next day everyone filed into that church with a fire in their belly and ash on their foreheads, as if all the revelry had only been conducted in the name of redemption. Yet at nine, I got the impression that it went the opposite way and that the day could last all year. Mardi Gras meant go in any direction, run anyway you wish. Between hunter or handmaiden, I already knew my direction. Between capitaine or queen, I already knew my wish. And by the end of Mardi Gras day, I meant to show my wings.
Those wings had sprouted early enough to bend my direction. After third grade, I was sent to a boy’s camp in Ascension Parish, on the far side of Acadiana. Sacred Heart Academy reformed boys who didn’t fit as scouts, as Cubs, Eagles, or Wolves. Boys who didn’t fit at school, who didn’t even fit their own skin.
“Bien dans sa peau,” Cajuns said about a man with a steady gait. They had other words for a boy uneasy on his feet. “Jenny Woman,” some said under their breath. And no one bet on a boy with that name.
At the camp, no bets were on me, as I spent more time in the counselor’s office than collecting badges in the field. Back at school, I’d been found “lurking” in the gym shower and “stashing” postcards of movie star hunks in my locker. The year before, I’d sent a carnation to another boy in class along with a cut-out heart. And long before kindergarten, I’d spoken with a girl’s tongue and walked
with a girl’s hips. Mama ordered a doctor to insert a corrective wedge in my shoes, and Papa ordered the gym coach to “knock the lily off my stem.” He punched me into every sport and every game only to see me land on my back every time, wood floor or grass turf. Just a month before the camp, a conversion specialist pronounced me cured after memorizing ball game scores and the long batting history of the only Cajun ever to pitch for the Yankees. But any kid at school knew there wasn’t a test I couldn’t ace or a game I couldn’t flub. And my own pitching arm still swung like a girl tossing a bouquet from the altar.
My bent direction caused enough trouble by day that Papa could hardly look at me at night. He could raise the roof with a line of curse words and the back of a car with one hand, but he couldn’t raise my hand to catch a ball aimed right at my nose or tackle a teammate half my size. He flinched at the sight of his son’s swishy walk and fluttering hands on the field, he cringed at the sound of his son’s stagey voice and show-tune lisp, so he disappeared at night to fix what he could in the workshop of his garage.
Mama, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking at me, as if she stared hard enough she might see the horns she’d missed at birth. My Bible-quoting mother could open the sky with a line of Holy Scripture. She could turn floor tiles to hot coals until you confessed every sin in your head, even the ones you’d yet to commit. She could fire hallelujahs through a cypress door. She could see through the walls of every room in the house, but she couldn’t spank, slap, shake, or strike a satisfying answer out of me. Try all she might, Mama couldn’t right my direction.
Her inquest charged the air:
Why was I singing to a naked G.I. Joe doll in my room?
Why was I—Sweet Jesus—sitting naked in the tub at midnight?
Why was I flapping my hands in my sleep like a bird?
Why was I walking from room to room in the witching hour talking to the air like an old woman in the attic?
Why was I waltzing around the house with a broom in my hand after all decent God-fearing people were asleep? Holy Mother of God, did I think I was a maid in a fairy tale? Was that it? Was she raising a fairy of a son?
When my voice sunk to my feet, she answered her own questions with the hot fire of her gospel tongue and the heavy rain of her hand on my back. I couldn’t speak and couldn’t answer, but I could see what she saw. Under the clouds of the Old Testament, my halo had tilted. Under the dome of our little town, my robe had parted.
Walking through the carnival streets, I quickly learned that Mama wore her own wings and shone her own colors. Her green eyes, a deep moss at home, lightened to a near gold. The flecks shimmered in the kaleidoscope of sun and foil and neon and revolving faces. Her raven hair shone with ombre against the flashing signs for spun-sugar candy. And her face glimmered and glowed without the red moth that she fought to cover in the morning mirror. Rather than burn her cheeks, the rays from all directions calmed her skin into a cool tint, almost the color of her palms. The globes of caramel apples brightened when she passed, and the round eyes and broad faces of men brightened too. Their noses flared and chins lengthened, drawing their heads into her light. Her slim satin mask seemed to reveal more than it concealed, as a rush of excitement darkened her lips and parted them again and again in a soft little gasp. She was the center of the world, this woman, and I wanted the face she wore.
On good days, Mama allowed me to watch as she made up her face with a foundation of thick white cream. Under that cream, the dark surface of her skin disappeared. The chicory color of her face troubled her, she confessed before the bright lights of her salon mirror. The copper red of her bayou Indian father crashed with the olive yellow of her French Cajun mother to make a wild color that Mama found hard to tame. Flashes of red would break out under the surface of her cheeks, or traces of the brooding Sabine would linger around the corners of her eye. She pouted and pulled at her skin, slapping the trouble spots then running a cooler hand over them until her face finally blanched into the lighter shade of the women in the fashion magazines—and in the front rows of the Catholic church. When her face paled, she seemed at once horrified and pleased, as if staring into a package filled with her childhood wishes but addressed to some other person.
She plucked at wild hairs that ran between her eyes with the pliers of her nails and rubbed at the wider edges of her lips until they drew into a thinner, neater line. Along the way, she dropped warning flags, little white tissues marked with her lipstick and flesh-colored sponges, damp from the fountain of her eyes. Like an altar boy, I swooped down to scoop up each tissue and pressed my lips on the red marks. She tossed her head back and laughed.
“Look at mama’s boy,” she said. “Can’t get enough of my kisses.”
But her kisses weren’t the only ones I wanted.
On Mardi Gras day, all the men’s painted faces seemed as fantastic as my mother’s, twisted with all the gaudy colors of popsicles and all the greasy sheen of blood sausage. At first, those faces didn’t frighten me. They thrilled me into laughter, and I felt the urge to point. There was a wide-mouthed pelican, with a plastic beak and tatty feathers. There was a long-nosed alligator, with a row of felt triangles on his back. And over there was a sharp-toothed wolf with dungaree shorts and moss-covered arms. I wanted to touch each one, to sniff the gamey musk of monster after monster, but their hands passed over me to reach for my mother, as they sniffed the taboo rose of her scent.
In the mass of men, then, I could disappear, so I left my mother’s side for a tour of the booths and a concert of barkers. All around me, I heard the dying sounds of Cajun men, the horse-throated grunts and pony-high whines of their talking songs.
When a cup of gumbo hit a man’s mouth, he whinnied with gratification, as if an invisible hand had just run down the slope of his neck. When he picked up a hot link of boudin, he whistled in anticipation as if to say this would be the one, the link that would take him back to the days of the Acadian cabin, rising high on cypress piers with bousillage in the walls and a fraternity of boys in the attic. When he picked up a ruby slice of watermelon, he wet his lips like a wolf as if to say no amount of drink could quench his thirst, not even the bloody flesh of a melon. Still, he wouldn’t stop trying. He’d chug back cup after cup of beer, bourbon, and any backwater hooch for a souvenir taste of the man he used to be.
Every Cajun man was, in some real way, smaller than the man before him. From across the parade path, I could see my own father shrink behind my mother as the carnival men danced in the street and the tent barkers ate and drank with fiery eyes. For a while, I watched him watch her until her face was eclipsed by one of the young revelers. My father sank into his judge’s robe when it looked as if the teenager was kissing Mama. What could he fix? He turned toward home. Then I turned my face back to the parade.
Tall Capuchin monks and medieval friars passed by on rickety hand-made floats, with twisting tassels and sequined robes in tatters. Short comic book nuns stood behind them in beaded wimples and garter belts, with balloon breasts and flaming red wigs. They passed the steeple of the Catholic church, the arch of the cattle feed store, and the altar of the recording studio where Cajun bands sawed out the uneasy beat of a waltz. They passed the bronze statue of the crooked governor whose eyes seemed to follow you no matter what direction you moved, as empty as a pair of pennies.
Like that governor, the eyes of every man wandered blankly. Like him, everyone wore a mask. Everyone flashed the nervous smile of a freed suspect. On this one day, in this one festival, everyone was someone else. The monks were camouflaged farmers, and the nuns, it turned out, were just boys in costume. Everyone could laugh at what they were not. Everyone could gawk at the made-up faces. But no one, not one Mardi Gras reveler in the whole town, looked straight ahead at the fact that they were dancing on a mass grave, marching a parade right over the dead ground of a phantom people.
In the Catholic church, death calls for last rites and a ho
st of ministrations, but at Mardi Gras even the altar boy was drunk and the priest was absent without leave. So everyone kept dancing and the fiddles kept sawing the air, muffling the laughter of the two teenagers as they hog-tied my arms and slid lard over my body. One of them kept chugging back a bladder of beer while another dragged his foot into the dirt, like a pony gaming for a race. They’d spotted me in a booth trying on a plastic tiara.
“Little queen,” they shouted in unison. “Little fairy.”
Both were from Ascension, from Sacred Heart. Two of the older boys at the camp—young men, the priests called them—they’d been expelled from the same high school and had formed their own scouts: the Wild Boars. For Mardi Gras, they wore the choir dress of altar boys, each with a black cassock and a red sash, but at Redeemer they wore football jerseys and lace-up pants even off the field. They grunted in the halls, and chased sissy boys like me into corners and stalls. When they tugged at their laced crotch, I should’ve turned my head, but my eyes roamed again and again and my wishes rose up like flames. I wished for the touch of another boy, it’s true, even at nine and even at camp. And the Wild Boars delivered that wish every time they cornered me. Once that summer, they chased me into a watery bog then yanked my wet trousers down to my ankles while I turned crawfish red.
On Mardi Gras day, though, they skipped the baptism and went straight for another sacrament. While my eyes flipped into my head, they delivered hard punches to my chest, hard jabs at my face, and stinging gobs of spit. The lard they smeared on me ran down my limbs in streaks, like greasy ribbons, as they started calling animal names in my ear. My legs began to buckle, and my lungs emptied out. Then the sky opened up and a black cloud of rain fell over us. I went tearing out of their carnival tent toward the streets of town. The grease seemed to speed me through the air as I pulled further and further away from the Wild Boars, but their grunts were echoed by others who spotted that tiara still on my head and a tassel of feathers trailing my feet. The grunts rose to shouts and roars and fiery words. Papa stood on the sidewalk behind Mama, his hands covering his face, while she lifted up her eyes and spirit fingers in prayer. Any other boy might’ve run in their direction, might’ve repented in a white-hot flash. But my legs wouldn’t move that way, and my arms were still bound behind my back, so I ran past my parents, past the crowd of revelers in the street and right to the top of the marble steps of the church where I waited for my wings, waited for my capitaine, waited for the whole of carnival to end in ash.
Black Sheep Boy Page 4