Black Sheep Boy

by Martin Pousson

  Near midnight, I awoke on the steps with a tapping sound in my ear. It was a frog, a man-sized frog waving and tapping at me. When I looked again, I saw it was my father. He’d shed his robe for another costume, but the tail had been cut and one ear folded over, making him look more like a green bulldog than a frog. He said nothing to me, but I felt something move in my shoulders as he loosened the rope and set my wrists free. He said nothing, but he sang a Cajun song called “Saute Crapaud” which had just two lines.

  “Jump, frog, your tail will burn;

  But take heart, it will return!”

  All the next day, the words echoed in my head until I found myself singing them too, not high and bright like a show tune but fast and furious like a Cajun two-step. My feet moved to the jig with a hobble on one leg and a lift on the other. Round and round and round and round until my head spun and the roof opened and a coin of light shone in the attic room like a small crown. I put a finger to the light then to my forehead. With the sound of my father’s knock, it was time for the walk back to Prompt Succor, time for the Imposition of Ash.

  5.

  Flounder

  The place was so upside-down, so higgledy-piggledy that direction made no sense at all. When the crooked bayou shifted course and snaked back on itself, when upstream ran down and east bank sat west, then all compass lost meaning. Not even the three boys racing around the marsh could tell you which way they were headed. Their foxfire movements lit one side of the bayou then another, sending lines crashing into circles, shifting shapes in the air. Even so, they knew one direction for sure: the way to be a real boy. For nearly a week, I watched my cousins race each other for that end until I went dizzy and cross-eyed with want, until I finally turned upside down too.

  By the time I reached eleven, Mama had tried everything to make me a real boy: the school counselor, summer camp, the silent treatment, speech therapy, a G.I. Joe doll, a NFL football, a military crew cut, a long belt across my back, and an endless streak of Holy Scripture. None of it, not one thing, had worked. In the classroom, I may have become the star pupil, but on the playground and the football field—where it really mattered—I remained twinkle toes, a Tinker Bell with light feet and butter fingers.

  So on my birthday, Mama announced a new plan. She’d bring me to the bayou cove where she’d grown up, where she’d seen men and even teenage boys rise out of the water with forty-pound nets of shrimp, where she’d seen her own father wring the head off a chicken and tear the skin off a buck like he was removing wrapper from a candy.

  “If any place can fix you,” she said, “it’s the bayou.”

  She didn’t step out of the car or even stop the engine. Instead, she lowered the window, fingered a wad of bills from her purse, and pressed them into her sister’s hand with a click of her tongue.

  “Make him be,” she said.

  Then she declared, “You can’t be a real boy, not until you learn how to handle a knife and run the sharp end over fresh kill.”

  The way she described it, learning to be a real boy was nothing more than learning a sport. But I knew there had to be some magic in it since none of the signs were clear. The more I tried to play along, the more I got the game wrong. The more I tried to stand straight, the more I looked bent.

  If I expected a set of directions from my Pentecostal aunt, though, I was let down. She outlined no rules, issued no manual. After Mama left, she just folded the bills without a word then fished a yellow pill from her jean skirt and slipped it onto her tongue. As she swallowed, her throat moved like a lizard’s calling out to another across the yard, but she didn’t speak. The towering bun on her head quivered as she shrugged her shoulders and headed back to the paper-thin house.

  They must’ve smelled the wincing garlic of the beans and the sweet butter of the yellow cornbread. Something brought the three boys out of the bayou and out of the woods. Running hard and fast, my cousins were spinning dirt devils, driving clouds of black dust into the air. They ran and ran, whooping like a pack of pretend Indians, and I suddenly wanted to slip into costume, to play a role of my own.

  But the boys hardly noticed me as they pushed past each other to race for the supper table. They called out positions, first, second, third chair. I tried to imagine how they came by that order and by the stains on their shirts. Maybe Hog stole an egg from the neighbor’s roost and swallowed it whole, eggshell, yolk, and all. Maybe Duck wrestled with an alligator, stuffing his mouth with marshmallows and pinning down his webbed feet with arrowheads. Maybe Coon sank his teeth into a chicken’s neck, and that’s why blood ran down his collar. I’d seen those things at carnivals, men chasing frantic chickens and greased pigs, seen blood spilled in the name of Mardi Gras and manhood, and heard stories about my own voodoo-practicing strongman papère, but I’d never seen boys up close after handling animals for sport. It put air in their chest and a sense of self in their face.

  The biggest and oldest at thirteen, Hog, plunked down in the only chair with arms then hoisted himself up so that he ruled over the rest of the table.

  “I got the captain’s chair,” he hollered, “I get the ham bone tonight!”

  The other two boys groaned then fought over a pack of crackers and a liter of soda. Each one, it seemed, had to claim a prize before he could eat, and eating itself became a sport as the boys raced against time and each other for a cast-iron pot of red beans and rice.

  Coon, the youngest, had crescent moons around his mouth and the barely handsome features of a midnight bandit. His fingers, though, were long and thin, as if they might be more comfortable on a piano than around a knife. He had a way of turning his seat into a rocking chair. Always in motion, always tilting back and forth. His eyes revealed flecks of green in the light. Of the three, his grin glowed the brightest, as if all that rocking was the product of an unseen electric current running right down his spine. That spine gave him a bearing his older brothers lacked and made him seem sharper. Already, I felt myself bend, felt my hands twitching under the table and my feet lifting off the floor. Already, I wanted to touch his skin, to feel his shock.

  Before I could even touch my fork, a sudden commotion at the table broke out when Hog announced that he single-handedly hauled in—for a moment—a thirty-pound flounder then lost it to an evil undertow.

  “You ain’t never even seen a thirty-pound fish much less reeled one in,” Coon snorted to set the record straight.

  “I swear to God and piss on a cracker,” Hog shot back, “I oughta know what the fish weighed. It was my hand on the rod.”

  “Your hand weren’t nowhere but on your own damn rod,” Coon said, and Duck let rip a laugh.

  My aunt’s bun nodded from side to side. I looked for a flash of anger or a sermon on dirty talk, but she just steered another spoonful of beans into her mouth while the boys erupted into a full-scale fight. Soon, Hog was on the floor pinned by his smallest brother, crying every filthy name until he hit the magic one: fag. Once he choked out that word, every utensil, every dish became a weapon, and the boys tore down the hall to their room where it sounded as if a hurricane were chewing up furniture and shredding the sheetrock.

  At that point, my aunt walked over to the glow of the TV, switched on a program called Hour of Power, and seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open. With that magic word still ringing hard in my head, I stared at the glow from the couch. There was a lot of talk about Sodom and a battle to end all battles and the need to raise money. I fell asleep to a phone number and a set of directions flashing in yellow on the screen.

  In the morning, the TV was still on and my aunt was still sitting up, with a minister’s blonde wife shedding tears, but the boys were nowhere in sight. If the screen door hadn’t been hanging open, I might’ve believed they jumped out the window or punched their way through the wall.

  At first, I was relieved they were gone. I didn’t want to find myself in the middle of a dish-flinging wall-s
hredding storm. And I didn’t want to find myself at the end of that word: fag. But then I thought of Coon, his bright grin and the way he rocked back and forth in his chair, and I set out to find the boys. All around the house, I heard their whooping sounds rise and fall like battle cries, but they never came into view. Instead, their voices flew in animal bursts. Then the air quieted down to an eerie stillness, so still that I could hear the toads warning of rain. Overhead, the sky blackened a bit, and I felt sure that I’d never catch up with them, that I’d never be a real boy.

  So I headed back into the house to see what I could find in my cousins’ room. When I opened the door, I saw three single beds all in a row, but two of the mattresses hung off their frame, as if the boys had used them for slides or trampolines, and the rest of the room was a wreck. Pillow stuffing scattered across the floor, sheets rolled into lumpy balls, clothes spilled from drawers, and the entire closet coughed out its contents. Mismatched shoes, chewed-up belts, a deflated inner tube, and stacks of yellowing comics ran from the closet door into the room, as if someone had been digging for a treasure or a hidden way out. Rusted pots and pans, crusted over with a sulfurous powder, hairy ribbons of moss, and what looked like chicken’s feet.

  Then I spied it: a blunt-edged butcher knife in the back corner. What were my cousins doing with that knife in their closet? I imagined them playing butcher in the bedroom, holding the knife over the body of a deer, or lifting it overhead like a comic book hero about to plunge a blade into the heart of the enemy. I imagined them wielding the knife like a bayonet or a javelin, holding the sharp end to the neck of an opponent.

  Next I caught sight of a broom and hit on a plan. I’d clean it all up, the whole mess. Then the boys would have to notice me. Maybe they’d even take me into the woods on their next run.

  Quickly, I went to work cleaning the room and setting everything in place while the wobbly fan nodded from side to side. With twinkling feet and twitching fingers, I sorted shoes, hung pants, rolled-up belts. Like a bird twittering over an untidy nest, I stacked boxes, folded T-shirts, and shook out sheets. I swept every inch of the floor as if I wore wings, dipping the broom up and down. I tugged each mattress onto its frame and tried lying on top. None of them felt right, but I finally fell asleep on the bed nearest the door.

  Then, with a great burst, the door flew open and all three boys fell into the room, already holding their sides from laughter.

  “Look at the new maid,” Hog said soon as he saw what I’d done.

  “What are you doing?” Duck asked, “Playing house?”

  Then Coon shut everyone up by shouting, “Fag.”

  For a moment, hearing that word didn’t bring the roof down, didn’t send plates flying, didn’t even burn my own ears. Instead, the whole room came into focus: the first time I ran a finger over the chest of G.I. Joe, the first time I showered in the boys’ locker room, the first time I ran my hands over a football jersey then ran out the door with the smell of boys in a cloud around my head. All right, I thought for a moment, all right. But then I remembered Mama, remembered that my cousins were still in the room. I thought I’d been invisible in their home. Now, I worried they could see straight through me. Now, the word they spoke out loud burned my ears, and it sounded as if Coon was calling out my secret middle name. He stared at me with a pair of shimmering eyes, daring me to disagree.

  “Fag,” the other boys chimed in, and I saw myself pulled into a battle I couldn’t win, until my aunt hollered down the hall to announce lunch. “Manges! Manges!” she said, and the boys raced again for the captain’s chair. This time, Coon landed first. He and the other boys rushed through the pot of mushy red beans and rice, then Coon turned his attention to me.

  “What kind of ball you play?” he asked, as he ran his hands over the arms of the chair and rocked it back and forth. Even at eleven, he already sported a dark line of hair over his lip.

  “Ball?” I asked. In class, I sprang up with the right answer every time, defining difficult words, pointing to the capitol of any state on the map, any country on the globe. But there, before my cousin, I was not sure of anything, not even a small word like ball.

  “Yeah, ball,” he repeated, louder. “As in play. Do-you-play?” But I understood the question was really an accusation. Since there was no kind of ball I could play, I told my cousin that I wrote for the school paper, an “op-ed,” I called it, and soda gushed out of his nose, while the other two boys joined him, howling with laughter.

  “So you don’t play but you do write,” he repeated. He didn’t have many words, but he knew how to use them, bearing down hard on one, easing up on another. I had a trunk full of words but couldn’t lift even one with the same force.

  “Write,” he said again, only now he made it understood as “Right!”

  Hog and Duck answered in unison, “Right!” They began to sing it back and forth as they spilled out the front door and went cutting a path—without me—to the woods. Coon looked over his shoulder and, for a moment, I thought I saw a grin.

  In the city, my straight A’s might’ve given me some leverage, but out in the country, they did me as much good as a feather pillow in a boxing match. If I was going to run with my cousins, if was going to get close enough to touch Coon, then I’d have to do something the other boys might do. Inside the paper-thin house, the Hour of Power still called for help, and my aunt’s face now looked like the minister’s wife, with tears falling harum-scarum down her face. Sodom was still rising, and money was still needed for the battle, and the minister still called out a number and a set of directions. Yet instead of taking a seat next to my aunt, I walked to the bank of the bayou.

  Before me, the oily bayou gurgled. My aunt’s house was downstream from a refinery, and—from time to time—the residue floated up in a dark sheen. The air bore a sheen too, a kind of rainbow glow, but it was dulled by a tint of yellow. And everywhere, the smell of sulfur rose up, a rotten egg smell undercut by the briny scent of the dead fish that sometimes floated in the bayou. With cataracts on their eyes and fungus on their scales, those dead fish looked like a sign from Exodus.

  But there were live fish in the bayou too, and there was a rod near the bank. With no better plan, I dropped the line in the water and waited out the afternoon.

  Just before dusk, the rod started twitching and—just then—the boys turned the corner from the woods.

  “Shit-damn” Coon said, “you caught a fish.”

  Then he hot-footed toward the bank as I struggled with the rod.

  “It’s a twenty-pounder, at least,” Hog said.

  But Coon disagreed. “Naw, idiot, that fish ain’t no more than two pounds.”

  Then he rolled his eyes and snorted. Duck took up the middle and judged it a five-pounder, but none of them had even seen it yet. The only way to settle the dispute was to yank the fish out of the water and lay eyes on it, and—since my hand was on the rod—I was expected to do it. I grew shaky and started stammering but managed to shout out, “I got it!”

  But I didn’t have it. I faltered and froze with the rod barely in my clutch. I stood there shaking, when Coon stepped beside me and hollered, “Arc it!” He threw his hands out in a pantomime next to me and suddenly I could smell the hard tone of his musk. His arm brushed against mine and I could feel his rough skin and the heat of his breath. My hands still shook but I tugged higher and higher and in another instant had the fish out of the water and onto the ground. It trembled and flopped around for a bit, both eyes quivering on one side of its head.

  “It’s a flounder,” Coon declared then repeated in case no one had heard. “It’s a flounder, all right.”

  Hog rolled his eyes but remained silent. What could he say? You could argue about the weight of a fish or the color of its scales. But the name of a thing had a certain authority to it.

  That night, my aunt fried up the flounder in an iron skillet with mustard and cornm
eal batter and hot oil until it was crisp and golden brown at the edges. For once, she hummed while she cooked, as if having more than beans put music in her mouth.

  The boys let me sit in the captain’s chair while they took turns telling the story of how the fish looked as it flopped around on the ground. Duck insisted that it was blue-black and that its eyes were blinking. Coon threw his fork down on the table and said, “That fish weren’t no more blue than my teeth. It was gray and, anyway, fish don’t blink.”

  Hog jumped up from his chair and fell to the ground in imitation of the fish gasping for air, while batting his eyes like a would-be starlet. Coon’s hand slid over Hog’s face like a hook, then Coon dragged him under the table and gave him a good hard kick. “That’s it!” Hog said, as he pulled Duck down to the ground with them, and all three boys wrestled with each other for control of the words in the air.

  I sat still in the captain’s chair while my aunt walked over to the kitchen sink. She fiddled with a bottle and filled a glass with water. She popped a pill in her mouth and let her head fall forward before throwing it back, while her bun slipped from its clip. Then Hog rolled out from under the table and stood over Coon. “Fag,” he said, pointing down to his brother, “You fag!”