“In response to Le Grand Dérangement, their mass exile and exodus from L’Acadie by the British, the Acadians began to sing sad songs of upheaval and loss but also strange songs of frogs and other creatures. These songs confused Les Américains, and that was part of the point.”
—Beausoleil Canard,
Cajuns: Three Countries, Two Continents
& One Weird Trunk
“Saute, crapaud, ta queue va bruler;
Mais prends courage, elle va repousser!”
“Jump, frog, your tail will burn;
But take heart, it will return!”
—“Saute Crapaud”
Columbus “Boy” Frugé
At the end of the long hot day, the wires snapped overhead, the power dropped in the house, and the air conditioner died again. Through the open window, bayou fog wound around my neck like a cottonmouth snake, with its breath of wet smoke. Cradled against my mother’s side, my wild head of hair rained sweat down my arm to a pair of twitching hands. The sweat bonded my mother to me as I looked to her face for a sign of recognition. We lay in her bed with a hurricane lantern, my left side propped up by her arm as her steady finger moved across the page of a book, tracing the black lines, the marks she called words. Out loud, she read each sentence with added stress, her face a dramatic mask of sound.
They haunted me, my mother and that book. The Blown-Around Room starred a white-cheeked boy who, in just a few pages, turned red as a crawfish. He’d been ordered to straighten his bedroom, but the pictures revealed him sleeping instead of cleaning. Or else throwing a ball at an imaginary basket until it bounced to the side and overturned all the boxes in his closet. Suddenly, everything that should’ve been hidden, everything that belonged in drawers or on shelves was sitting like an angry squall in the middle of his room, out in the open for anyone to see. At the sound of the crash, his mother pried open the door and—before her vigilant eye—he turned into a little monster. Red in the face with a wild bush of hair on his head, he no longer resembled the cherub of the opening. There was only one word for what he’d become at that point, and my mother called it out loud: “Devil!”
When her wide eyes turned to me, I knew what to do: I repeated the word and looked for her recognition. She nodded, letting me know that I got it right, then pointed again to the stormy face of the boy and the disaster that surrounded him.
“See,” she said, “see what can happen.”
In her view, every story had to have a point. She wanted to know the outcome, so she sometimes read the last page first, letting its revelation ring throughout the whole tale.
“Of course, he had to turn into a devil,” she declared, “for it said so in the end.”
At that, she clicked her tongue with vindication. The blown-around boy was locked in the tale by my mother, who was now the author, and I was his shadow.
I would make a mess of things too. I would knock over boxes meant to be shut, stumble over a tangle of clothes on the floor, fall down with a red face and a flaming bush of hair. The whole book—every word—was a sign of what would happen, of the horror ahead.
Under the fluorescent glare of the kitchen, Mama sang a gospel tune and shelved groceries to an imaginary beat. Each can, bottle, and box faced forward, like votive offerings. Lined in straight rows, the pantry rack collected a religious order, only missing gold leaf and stained glass. Food was hallowed in Louisiana, its magic put to work in all manner of faiths. Not just herbs for hexes but roots, leaves, seeds, bones, and skins. Spells, cures, omens, all called for some piece of a plant or part of an animal that might also land on a dinner plate. If you wanted to quell the nerves, you stuffed a bag with the hairy flower of frog-foot. If you wanted to hinder the heart, you stewed the hooked fruit of devil’s claw. And if you wanted to predict the sex of a baby, you swung a meaty tailbone over the pregnant belly. A steady swing meant a boy, a gyrating swing meant a girl, and an in-between swing meant a third kind of baby, the kind no one wanted to name.
There I stood in Mama’s tall shadow, the no-name kind of baby. The light from the fridge radiated a halo around her dark cloud of hair. A carton of eggs glowed in her hand. Her long legs shifted back and forth, like a crane at dawn. Even though she tapped her heels to the song, I knew better than to tap along with her or, worse, to twirl across the linoleum flapping my hands in the air. By three, I’d learned penance for the jitters when Mama strapped down my restless hands with duct tape then ordered a doctor to fit braces on my twisting feet. By five, I’d learned sacrifice for the stutters when another doctor cut out a flap of flesh to correct my tangling speech. Mama showed me the horn-shaped piece to prove a point: the devil had me by the tongue. So I did my best to walk straight and talk steady.
Still, my feet pranced and my arms swung more than any boy Mama had known. At first glance, my body seemed drawn into the right shape, but my walk swished and swayed, and my hands flapped in the air or flitted at my side. A tremor in my chest pushed my ribs out when I grew anxious, as if I might burst. At times, I stared at a point between my eyes before boxing my ears with two fists or slapping my face with an open palm. Just what brewed inside me? Mama wondered. Just what made up my tailbone? Soon, she’d open that carton of eggs in her hand. Soon, she’d test that boy on the floor.
Cousins, blood relations, were the only boys Mama had known before marrying at sixteen. Short boys smelling of foul ditches, with loose tongues, rough hands, stiff lips, headed for the half-life of the oil patch. And the only man she knew, her towering father, had gone by the time she hit her teens, leaving her to tend two baby sisters and, as she put it, a baby mother. The girls made monstrous faces from the floor, crying for milk, syrup, toys, solace.
Her mother, my mamère, was an angry baby too, full grown, with three daughters and half a husband, but prone to pouting for days on end and pulling at her face until marks and stains rose on her skin. Jaundiced, with an odd yellow cast and a flame-red mark near her left eye, she frowned and winced and usually wore what the frosted-wig Cajun ladies called le grimace.
“That woman is marked,” they said, while rubbing their hands over a set of rosary beads. As soon as they heard she was from Sulphur, they knew the cause. That place looked, smelled, and tasted yellow. Water streamed with colored bits, soil crumbled into colored chunks, and air choked with colored clouds. Oil derricks clotted the town like metal birds boring for food. Tanker trucks rocked the roads leaving a tail of exhaust fumes and a crest of mineral traces. Who could look at all that and see anything but the devil?
Mama had heard the legends about her mother’s town and her father’s cove, where Sabine men dug into the swampy ground with their own homemade drills and bits to raise houses on piers. Or else they pushed off the land altogether to float in house boats on the Vermilion or the Teche, the phantom limbs of the Mississippi. Any oil drilled out of the ground, any minerals pumped into the air, didn’t belong to them. They owned no land, only boats, no farms, only fishing nets. And they did their best to outrun the changing tides and shifting coast of the gulf.
A girl in that place was her own dowry. With sable-black hair and a body that swayed like a cattail reed, Mama could’ve had any Sabine man. The center of her irises flashed a speckled green and her skin flushed with a copper flame. She was true Cajun on one side, la vraie chose, but Sabine on the other, an odd mix of French, African, and a dying Indian tribe. The wolf-faced boys opened their mouths in a howl when she passed. But she wanted no half-life, no half-husband, no near-man. She wanted no floating home. So she sang to herself and waited for a boy from another town and the exit sign.
And what had she learned before she left the cove, before she married? That the devil lurked everywhere, in drinking water, in mud under your shoe, in the wrath and cholera of family. That faith had to be conjured, cooked up with a powerful hand. That women snapped at each other like crawfish in a boiling pot while men ran like horses through wide open fields.
Her father had galloped in and out the front door for years, sometimes with another woman at his side. He reared back, dropped her on the couch, then hollered into the kitchen for a tall girl. He laughed at his own joke, calling his tall daughter to bring him a tall can of beer. Mama got the joke but didn’t laugh. She worried how he magically pulled a six-pack from a paper sack while she rationed lost bread for her sisters, spiked off milk with syrup, and shaved slices from the block of gray cheese. Yet if the bread, the milk, the cheese, and—yes—the beer rankled, her father’s women impressed Mama with their light hair and light eyes and elevated him above their lot.
He was elevated in other ways too. As part-time minister in the church of the Pentecost, and as full-time voodoo traiteur, my papère soared even before his crane of a daughter. In a tent revival, he stood head and shoulders above the penitents when he walked the aisles waving the Holy Bible. He leaned over weeping women and called foreign words out of their mouth. He shouted down stooping men and pulled ailments out of their body. Throughout, he smiled wide, his forehead glistened, and even the fillings in his teeth gleamed in testament to his word. Then at home, he raised his hand to the porch ceiling to hang black chickens, their guts dripping like yellow rain. From his seat on a wingback chair, he cured a baby’s deadly whooping cough with a rabbit’s belly and the milky sap of a tala tree. He ground up stinging nettle to make a gullet-scorching brew for a man who cheated him in cards. He burned onion skins for money and peanut shells for luck. He rubbed his hairy hand over a doll with a worried cross-stitched mouth while Mama’s cousins collected at his feet and called him Chief.
Her father could work magic both ways, the white voodoo and the black. The rumor was, given some moolah, a shot, and a pair of dice, he could solve any predicament. He’d throw the numbers on the ground, slam the shot down his throat, then strut around like a rooster with his tail on fire until he finally slapped his hands together and shouted, “Sweet Jesus!”
And, like that, he could tell you in exactly what part of the woods to find a thirty-point buck or how to exhume a dead skunk from under your house with nothing but a chain of beer tabs, a fish hook, and a free hand. He knew from whose backyard to steal the best sassafras root, which herbs needed rubbing together to cure a child’s croup, and how to boil chicken gizzards and bayou gum to induce an immobilizing pox or a severe case of the runs for whoever dared to cross you.
With shoulder-length hair, a hawk-like nose, and a chin so sharp it could work as a nutcracker, in her stories Mama’s father was the one man who could hold the entire world, steady and straight. Once, he spun an egg in his hand before her very eyes without it ever falling or hitting the ground. With a single tap, the whole shell fell away like brittle candy and there stood the perfect egg.
Yet she also saw her father crack. She watched him heat up a spoon with black tar before sticking a needle into his skin. Or else he rolled up tin foil and stuck a straw in a line of smoke. Soon she smelled it—the sulfur in the air—and with that whiff, she knew he’d become the other man. He might, with a single horse kick, put a hole through the bedroom door. He might run outside and send a fruit tree sailing through the front window. He might tear the whole house in two.
Just before she turned thirteen, Mama saw her father lifted in his wingback chair by a sheriff and two deputies. He refused to budge when they showed a summons, so they carried that chair off the porch and onto the lawn where they dumped him into a net. He let loose a howl as they slapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrist then laughed and shouted a streak of hot words in French. Her mother emerged from the bedroom, suddenly an old lemon-faced woman, crying that she had married a werewolf, while women in wigs stood at the edge of the ditch, clucking their tongues. The red lights flashed and the siren shrieked as they drove her father away.
Yet they couldn’t drive him out of her mind. Her eyes saw him everywhere: in passing cars, in big-armed trees, in a waking dream. He stood onstage under a tent wide as a sugar cane field. His feet floated above the ground and his hand reached out to heal a congregation of writhing people all at once. A young girl sang at his back, a raucous number that made the tent shake from side to side. He slapped his hand on the Bible then turned up a palm with an egg in the center, a brilliant white. Then the dream flickered and went dark on a single dancing flame.
Within weeks, she found a tent, filled with rolling bodies and a tall minister hoisting the Good Book overhead. A girl was pulled onstage to sing lead on a gospel song. When the words left her mouth, the tent billowed and the poles buckled. “He’s got the whole world in His hands,” she sang, as if each syllable were followed by an exclamation mark. People lifted their heads to the sky, shook their lips open until words tore out, and yanked their own hair until their scalps bled. Those with shoes tossed them onto the stage and joined those without. Together, they dug their feet into the muddy soil making a greasy floor. In the middle of all that grease, they danced faster and faster, more and more furiously, sawing their legs in and out to the beat of the gospel song. Some ripped at a sleeve or a collar, others were left standing in their underwear before the minister shouted a foreign word and promised to drop them in the water. When she caught his eye, though, she saw a ring of yellow and knew his magic was phony. His smile was too tight, his forehead too dry, and his hands too small. That minister had none of her father’s power, none of his fire or faith. No man did. Not any minister anywhere, not one of her cousins or uncles then, and not her husband now.
When she made her move out of the dark roux of the swamp, Mama headed for the light grain of the rice field. She traded the Pentecostal faith for the Catholic one. She donned a mantilla and gloves, gave up the week-long revivals, the robed choir, the stamping feet and overturned chairs, and even the language of tongues—all for a man with a job in another town and a car to drive her away. To her, away meant another world. It meant a new life. It meant the promise of anywhere but here.
Even so, she made a gumbo faith, a jambalaya religion. During Mass, she wondered at the mortification of the saints, the bloody Crucifixion of Christ, and the seven swords in the Mother of Sorrows. She endured the boredom of the liturgy and the drone of the homily. Yet at home, she turned on the AM radio to hear the storm of a gospel song break out in her ears, a chorus of voices rising in a ferocious wind, lifting her higher and higher, on a soaring bird, a galloping horse, carrying her further and further away.
The man she married—my father—had a dry forehead, like that phony minister, she said. Small hands and a small quiet chest too. He’d taken her no more than half an hour from the bayou cove and gave her no more than half a house. A duplex apartment with plastic counters, plastic floors, and plastic lights overhead. It was brick, she had to admit, not cinder block. And the walls weren’t stuffed with bousillage. But still she wanted out.
Her mind rattled with maps and compasses and a spinning wheel of direction. Her ears echoed with the hum of old women and old stories. Her eyes burned with flaming creatures and the yellow sign of a dead-end. And now in the altar of the kitchen, she wanted to know: could I deliver? Could I direct her out of here?
Mama raised her hand to testify, playing minister, choir, and congregation all at once. She sang louder and higher than the radio, her voice rocking the air around us until it shook like a thunder cloud. Half the words drowned under the raining clap of her hands, while the other half tore out in a lightning flash.
“You and me, brother, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
“You and me, sister, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
At the end of each verse, she twirled around to stare at me on the floor, checking to see if I was still there or if I’d tipped over into a place she couldn’t reach. While she sang, her long finger pointed down at my head then made jabs in the air around her. I followed that finger and must’ve struggled to figure out the meaning of her dance. Each wave of her arm, each blink of her eye, each clap of her hands revealed another mystery, dark and cryptic. Soon something would crack. I’d move my mouth, my arms, or my legs in the wrong way. Soon, I’d end up in sitting in another doctor’s office or kneeling on the kitchen floor with hands taped to my chest.
Instead, Mama opened the carton of eggs, took one out and placed it in my hand. She looked straight into my eyes, as if she could see affirmation, a prayer or votive. Then she balanced the egg in the middle of my palm, upside down on its northern point and—for a long moment—it spun in a perfect orbit.
In the Golden Book stories Mama read at night, the cherubic altar boy would’ve carried that egg—proud and high, sure and steady—like an alabaster tooth from the mouth of God. But the devil boy would’ve bared his own yellow teeth, would’ve shaken the egg and sucked the yolk right out of the shell. What was I, Mama wanted to know, cherub or devil? What was I, a steady boy or another kind?
“Hold it,” she said, “hold it.”
Her eyes grew wide and glowed like green marbles. Here was her hope. Here was her way out of this cramped house, with its bell jar rooms and matchbox furniture. Here was her toddler listening to her command. She’d done right to read proper English to me, to forbid anyone to speak Cajun gibberish over my crib. She’d done right to show me how to genuflect, how to bow, how to button a shirt, how to clean under my nails, how to stay out of the sun, how to keep my face white, how to be a real man, not a wild little Sabine beast.
“Hold it,” she said, “hold it.”
It was a whole world, that egg. Now it spun in my hand. And as long as Mama gazed at me, it kept spinning. Before her magic-making eyes, I became the cherub and performed another wondrous miracle. Her baby who walked before his first birthday and talked before he walked, her boy who lined up all his toys in straight rows, her son who just the night before sat upright in his bed sleep-talking from Holy Scripture, this son of hers was now carrying the world she placed in his hands. He was now performing the same magic as her lost father, that minister and traiteur.
“Hold it,” she said, “Hold it as long as you can.”
Then before her eyes and mine, the egg began to spin out of control in a shaky orbit. It was a simple command, just a couple of words, but I couldn’t get it right, couldn’t keep it straight. I should’ve known how to hold it, like her folklore father, how to control the world she gave me. But the wobbly sphere in my hand turned round and round, and my eyes crossed as it spun faster and faster, more and more furiously until it looked like a storm in my palm, the tiny white eye of a hurricane.
Then my fingers twitched, my palm shook, a storm broke out, and the whole world went spinning. The egg flew from my hand to the floor, setting off a display of yolky lightning along the way. Mama’s newly mopped floor, the bleached tiles, the white cabinets, her gleaming patent leather shoes, and the trim of her skirt were all coated in yellow sticky ooze. Though I’d dropped only one egg, it looked as if a dozen brilliant suns had burst all around us. I stared at Mama, and she stared at me, until the nerves in my legs began to buckle. I slapped down my palm, trying to numb the pulsing sensation. But when Mama’s long finger pointed at me, a warm, yellow trickle ran down my leg and collected in a puddle at my bare feet. In a flash, I plunged my hands down my pants to squeeze off the problem.
And that’s when it all finally cracked. Mama took a good hard look at me and suddenly saw the devil before her. She’d somehow missed it all along, how she’d given birth not to a perfect Cajun son, not to a Catholic altar boy, but to bayou spawn, a pant-wetting, egg-dropping son of Satan.
“What in the Hell!” she kept screaming, her eyes wide and wild. “What in the sulfur-reeking, flame-licking, burning name of Hell are you doing with your hands in your pants?”
“Holding it,” I said.
“Holding it!” she screamed.
My answer and her echo sent Mama running for the fridge. When she turned back around, she glowed the way she would in a dream, and I could no longer say what was true and what was not. I had dropped an egg. That much was certain. I had broken my mother’s heart with a weak small hand. That was certain too. Yet was she singing that song? Was she clapping like mad?
When I looked up, Mama had turned into a red-eyed furious little girl staring down a jittery phantom. In one hand she held the carton of eggs, with the lid flipped open, and in the other she was cradling a phosphorescent white oval in her palm. She didn’t place this one in my hand, though. Instead, she flung it to the ground. Then she flung another egg at the cabinet. Suddenly eggs were flying everywhere—at the sink, the stove, the baseboard. At the walls, the floor, the countertop. Mostly, though, at me. Egg ran down my face and arms and into my mouth before the carton was empty, the kitchen was coated yellow, and she finally stopped.
Tears ran down Mama’s dream face in little rivers, then they ran down mine too. Along with the eggs, my mouth became a sea of grainy salt and slimy sulfur.
Yet the revival wasn’t over. Mama dragged me across the kitchen to the concrete floor of the pantry where she planted me on two skinny knees. Lord knows her son had made a mess. Lord knows how badly she wanted me to get it right, to be the good cherub. And everyone knows a revival’s not over until someone is stricken by the spirit, accused of some unholy crime, and made to confess. Eyes cross, tongues thicken, and whole bodies go rolling into the aisle. I kneeled and begged forgiveness, while a string of Blessed Be’s and Hallowed Names crossed my mother’s lips and she chased herself around the room, shouting as if her hair had been singed and her feet were on fire.
Finally, she dragged me to the closet in my bedroom and shut the door. Between the slats, I could see her tall slim figure pacing back and forth in front of my bed. And before her shadow slipped out of view, I heard one voice, then two, rising high and loud, singing the song from the kitchen and clapping to the beat of a pair of heels.
“You and me, brother, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
“You and me, sister, in His hands!”
Clap, clap!
In the darkness, I bit my arm until I raised a red bump. I bit long and hard until I could no longer hear the sound of those two divided voices. The falling voice of a woman dropping something precious from her hand, and the rising voice of a girl watching in horror as it hit the ground. The low raging thunder of the words, and the high crying rain of the song.
“The itty bitty baby in His hands!”
“He’s got the whole world in His hands!”
Oh, but where are the soaring horses now, Mama? Where are all the men? Who will be there when the storm breaks, when the hand drops, when the Pentecost falls?
In the ray of light just outside the bathroom door, I waited for my father’s resurrection. When he got home from the battle of work, he looked dead as a blind buck in the road. The only signs of life were foreboding. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging veins snaked down his neck. One eye twitched and both hands trembled. With a jutting chin and twisted grin, Papa looked like a black and white poster for a wanted man, a legend everyone passes but no one sees.
At five, I’d already begun to mourn my father. His arms had held me once, his gruff beard rubbed against my face. His lips pressed against my belly, my nose, my eyes. He carried me on his back so that I towered over the house or he carried me on his side, so that—as he put it—his son could see everything his way. Cradled against him, I felt the warm and quickening beat inside his chest. Yet he no longer lifted me up, and his hands hardly ever laid on top of my head now. So I followed as he cut new tracks in the St. Augustine lawn, I raced as he headed for the garage, and I scouted souvenirs from his path: shiny beer bottle caps and glossy gum wrappers. Wherever he went, I lurked in his footsteps and shadowed his trail, in the hope of spying a glimmer of the father I wanted to know.
At seventeen, he was a local football star outrunning other boys on the field not with brute strength but with wily dodges and sneaky plays. At eighteen, he was a married man holding a son instead of a trophy, a ball, or a diploma. In name at least, he was head of a household. But where other men might’ve seen a new field to maneuver and dominate, Papa saw rising water and vanishing turf. He struggled to stay afloat with bills, taxes, and his wife’s teary tirades. His ears nearly drowned with her demands for more space, a bigger car, a faster way to a new home in a new neighborhood. New curtains, new carpet, new wallpaper. What he couldn’t afford, he charged. Still, she cried out that she was stuck or suffocated or stifled. If he touched her, she flinched. If he kissed her, she shivered. If he raised his voice or stamped his foot, she blanched and broke into tears.
Whatever man Mama wanted, he bore another face at home, wore another shirt at work. Rather than outrun that man, Papa camouflaged himself and stepped lightly over the threshold every day. He moved like a chastened animal or a man whose hands might get him into trouble. Arms at his side, eyes still and straight, and blond hair turned to early ash, he approached even his son with caution. Gingerly, he pushed pin into cloth, changing my diapers as if they were silk, as if I was a sleeping butterfly. Warily, he pushed a spoon into my mouth, feeding me from glass jars as if I too might shatter and break. He coddled me so much, so often, and so completely, that neighbors started to talk. Their chatter rose loud enough to reach even his drowned ears. What was happening in that flip-flop house? What did it mean when a man mothered, yes, mothered a child? If we’d been Greek, a chorus would’ve mounted the stage with urgent warnings and dire prophecies. Reversal means tragedy, and tragedy means someone will fall. And that someone, no doubt, would be me.
We weren’t Greek, of course, we were Cajun. Still, the drama persisted. And with Papa cast in the role of mother, Mama saw no choice but to wear another costume, to pull on boots and lay down rules. Before she lit the fifth candle on my cake, she issued her proclamation: no baby talk, no Cajun ya ya, no childish nursery rhymes, and no more holding, touching, or kissing. She would feed their son, she would bathe him, and she would tell him stories at night. Period. After all, his baby was meant to be her little man, her bright Cajun prince.
Yet she was too late. The light had long gone out on Cajun men in Louisiana, not because of any woman, but because they were—day by day—losing their religion. Not the religion of the Catholic church, which seemed filled with priests scheming for ways to run their fingers under the hem of an altar boy’s skirt. Not the religion of the Cajun language, which no one had even bothered to write down and which already had lost all currency. Not the religion of love, which left them nothing but confused. Not even the religion of the bottle, which never left their side. No, the biggest religion wasn’t practiced or preached, wasn’t spoken or sipped. It was played.
Cajun musicians were worshipped like demigods in Acadiana. Before he married any woman, a Cajun man served as a high priest in a chank-a-chank church. Along with a gang of cousins and fatras, he might’ve led a band. At the very least, he could clang a triangle or bang a cowbell. Besides having the Eucharist in his blood, every Cajun also had an accordion, a fiddle, a tit-fer, and a musical washboard. Until my grandfather’s time, every man could drain a six-pack in five-minutes flat and make a fiddle cry like a cat at a crawfish boil. After the American schools opened on the Cajun prairie, though, my grandfather became the first man in his family to master the English language and the last to hear his own father play the squeezebox.
By the time he was old enough to work, there was no money in Cajun music—or Cajun anything. So he let his father’s accordion lay silent and never picked up a bow or fiddle. With his English, he worked for a surveyor. With his wages, he bought a piece of land and stepped behind the wheel of a plow. If my grandfather couldn’t hold up the full moon of a Eucharist like a Catholic priest or saw a fiddle in half like his uncles, then there was only one thing left for his hands to do. He’d dig deep into the ground and pull up long stalks of Louisiana short grain. He’d rub the rice hull with his thumb until the brown turned gold. He’d stay out in the fields until darkness fell and the last church bell tolled.
While the men walked away from their chank-a-chank religion, the Cajun women walked the Stations of the Cross. At church, they rubbed rosary beads with holy fury. At home, they scrubbed wood floors with holy force. Who’d blame them for praying so fervently to hold the house together? Who’d blame them for scouring so frantically? Without the mantilla-headed women, their husbands and sons might’ve all grown long tails and disappeared into the swamp.
After all, women were the last keepers of the living faith. What was left of Acadiana was threaded on their looms, in their cross-stitching and in the fabric of their gossip. According to them, farming rice was the only honest work left for a Cajun man. With her own Good Book, my grandmother proclaimed sugar cane farmers “decadent,” shrimpers “low-lifes,” and oil men “nothing but the tobacco juice of the devil.” She had other sayings too, as many as there were numbers in Deuteronomy or names in Numbers.
“Hush my mouth,” to any piece of gossip she intended to pass on.
“Higher than a cat’s back,” to any price she refused to pay.
And “God don’t like ugly,” to any man, woman, or child who dared disagree with her.
She might’ve also said “God don’t like dirty” for all the force she put into bleaching already-white walls and scrubbing already-clean floors. Like a good Catholic penitent, my grandmother fell on her hands and knees before God and before the evil menace of dirt. All that bleach and ammonia must’ve filled her head with fumes, as Papa put it, for soon she started wearing latex gloves at the dinner table and foam slippers in bed. She ordered her husband to drop his farm boots at the door but still chased his footsteps with a broom. Perhaps my grandmother had forgotten that rice was not only a seed, not only a grain, but also a germ. And a dusty one at that. Rice husk clung to my grandfather’s clothes and heels like a combustible line of ash. One short fuse and he might’ve blown up.
Instead, he broke down. With all his wife’s constant talk of dirt and the devil, with all her plastic-wrapped fingers and toes following him to bed, and with all the sad lost music in his head, my grandfather’s nerves finally snapped. He hollered at every object in the house: the rug that tripped, the clock that lied, the chair that chattered, the desk that bruised, and the broom that chased. He seemed to have lost all sense of place in the house, stopping to scrutinize a hallway or looking around a corner with a suspicious eye before taking a step forward. Soon, lead collected in his feet, then in both his hands. Maybe the rice in the field would rot, maybe snakes would take over the garden, maybe frogs would clot up the windows, and maybe birds would fall out of the sky and hit the roof, but he refused to budge until my grandmother called the rectory and two men in gowns dribbled oil on his forehead, muttered prayers, and rubbed beads. One led the rosary, the other read gospels from the Holy Bible. Both sipped from a bottle and ate plate after plate delivered from the kitchen. They left with a fat church envelope while my grandfather remained silent and still in bed. In the morning, though, there was a pool of oily vomit and a depression on the pillow where his head had rested. A low wheezing sound filled the air, like an accordion played with a deep reed and heavy bellows. The room smelled of camphor and dead leaves and my grandfather was not ever seen in any one of the twenty-two parishes of Acadiana again.
That’s when my father set out to find a woman who’d be the opposite of my grandmother. At first, Mama must’ve seemed as unlike a Catholic housewife as a girl in Louisiana could get. No frosted wig, no powdered face, no mantilla on her head. Instead, she had hair the color of motor oil and skin as dark and smooth as tawny leather. When she sat in his car, he wanted to drive like a madman through fields of sugar cane and rows of sweet potatoes, over gravel and shell and smack into the only stop sign in town.
Yet if my father thought a Pentecostal, revival-singing daughter of a voodoo man would be fond of dirt and rice chaff, if he thought she would sit idly by in the passenger seat, he was as wrong as a right hand turn in a cul-de-sac road. That turn might’ve landed him in the driveway of his own home, but the woman inside and the house itself were on fire with sanitizing fumes.
As soon as he got back from work, Papa followed Mama’s finger to the bathroom. He’d tried to plot a path away from his parents’ home, but he ended up right where he damn well started. He’d taken a step out of my grandfather’s rice fields, but he still worked with the seed as a threshing operator in a chaffing mill. He’d married a woman from deep down in the bayou, but he still spent an hour every night scrubbing the day’s work off his skin.
After my father walked out of the bathroom, I’d sneak in to flip over the soap he used in my hands, to find the place where the grime wore down the edges of the bar and his nails carved crooked lines, as if he was scratching at something deeper than dirt. There weren’t many traces of my father in our home. Whatever he touched, I wanted to touch. Whatever he held, I wanted to hold. If he couldn’t lift me up anymore, I’d lift up everything that passed under his hand. Maybe the bar of soap would turn into gold. Maybe it would transform me too, make me the boy Mama wanted: porcelain clean and chrome bright.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 host 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.
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.
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-shredding 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 cornmeal 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!”
In a furious cloud, they raced each other for their room, which exploded again. I imagined everything that I’d set into place flying into the air and landing in a tangle on the floor and figured I’d spend another night sleeping on the couch and another day cleaning up after the boys.
But then a voice down the hall hollered out, “Captain!” It was Coon’s voice calling. “Captain Fag!” And I found myself running to my name.
When I got to the room, the scene was worse than I’d imagined. Not only were the mattresses back off their frames, but the boys were out of their pants and in their underwear, as if they’d been in the middle of changing into pajamas and started wrestling instead. Coon wore a sheet around his neck like a cape. What’s more, he had Hog on the floor with that butcher knife at his throat, Duck had Coon in a half-nelson grip, and no one seemed able to budge.
“You gotta say it,” Coon stared at me.
“Say what?” I asked.
“Say ‘fag,’ say which one is the fag.”
All around me, the room started humming. Not a church tune but something lower, almost growling. That butcher knife shone in my eyes, and the fan buzzed in my ear, and I could hear the sounds of the TV, the minister and his weeping wife, and the sounds of the bayou water churning outside. In that moment, Coon’s dare sparked like foxfire in the air. Each of my cousins lined up across the room, and each took on his name with greater force. Hog’s chest swelled and nostrils flared, Duck’s feet shuffled and weight shifted, and Coon’s fingers stretched and eyes blazed. My own eyes filled with dust, as I stood on my toes, ready to take flight—but where? I started to speak but stopped. How could I answer the dare? How could I call any of them a fag? A tremor ran up my leg and into a coil just below my waist, and my forehead started to throb.
“Say it,” Coon repeated, “say who’s the fag.”
“Say it!” Hog and Duck chimed in, “Say it!”
Just then, a stream of warm piss ran down my leg and onto the floor.
“Jesus,” Coon said, as he dropped the knife. “Jesus.”
In the days after, the boys let me into their circle, but they looked at me strangely, as if at any moment I might break down and start crying. They tossed underhand balls to me and showed me how to catch. They snared a wild rabbit and showed me how to twist its neck and run a knife under its flesh. They taught me how to hold a rifle and hit a tin can off a fence. My cousins even went on calling each other fag, down the hall and out in the marsh, but they stopped saying the word in front of me. Soon, I started to miss the sound of it, the heat of their eyes when it left their tongue and the wild mess it always set into motion. So on the last night, I decided to say it out loud. When Coon grabbed the butcher knife, in the middle of one of their fights, I threw my own neck under his blade.
“Me,” I said.
“Me what?” he asked.
“I’m the fag.”
And, in a flash, he dropped his underwear before the boys.
“Touch it,” he dared me.
Right then, I went dizzy and cross-eyed with want. I lifted my hand into the air. But before I could touch anything, Coon brandished the knife and exploded in laughter, and the other boys laughed wildly too. They began running helter-skelter in a circle in the room, and I ran along with them. Round and round we went, the three beds spinning before me, the three boys spinning too. Everything spinning in circles before my eyes.
Then the whole world turned upside-down as Coon brandished the knife again and, with a bright grin, slid the blunt edge into my skin and I fell back onto the floor. He stood over me and ran the butcher knife into the slit on my hand a second time and a third until a tear opened and blood ran out.
“Faggot,” he said, laughter still shining in his eyes, that word burning before us.
The name flashed in yellow letters before me, and I studied it for a long time. While the boys watched, my shoulders spread wide, and my stance widened too. My chest filled with air. There were no tears on my face, not one, but there was a fine mist everywhere as I opened my mouth, stretched out my arms, and unbent my knees.
“Right,” I said, with a straight-edged tongue, “Faggot.”
This time, no one laughed.
Even the TV went silent. No one called out a number. No one spoke of a battle to win or a direction to follow. Now I’d never be a real boy. Never. Under the sharp edge of a blade, at the tip of a knife, in a line of blood and dirt, the whole story just ended.
Hulking over the desk, his elbow jerked back and forth with the thick inky lines of his pen marks. My lines jittered on the page, thin and curvy. My letters fell against each other like a row of hastily dropped gowns. Yet from the seat behind, I watched his letters rise up in sharp edges. Each word he wrote belted its trousers and squared its shoulders with the hard stance you’d expect of a boy at Holy Cross.
Even so, Blaze looked like no one else in junior high. In the morning, all tight corners and abrupt angles. By noon, taller, broader, threatening to burst from his clothes. He had heavy brows, dark unflinching eyes, and—rumor had it—saw through doors and chests and right into the heart of any subject. He never raised a hand in class yet barked out the answer to any question. He never knocked on a door yet nosed his way into any room. Already, stubble shadowed his chin and neck, which stretched half a length over any other boy. With the nuns out of view and the sun a halo overhead, his feet left the ground and he rose straight into the air with his arms out in the shape of a cross. Then his feet met the ground again, and he swung a tail like a whip. The other boys tightened their lips and glowered, but my mouth opened in wonder.
Before Blaze walked onto campus, anyone odd sat in the back with a shut mouth, sat solo in the quad, sat in the bleachers with a pair of stone feet. At least that’s where I sat, the class sissy, the school puss. Even the yellow-eyed priest called me by that name when I lisped during Catechism.
“For the love of God,” he said, “shut your puss, Puss.”
On cue, all the boys jeered and made loud cat noises. From history, whether on campus or in textbooks, I’d learned what happened to puss boys: we ended up with knuckles in our face, a knee in our groin. Or worse: in gutters, gallows, and garrotes. Maybe the story was old, but it felt new every time I swallowed blood, and by eighth grade, I badly wanted a new ending.
Now the odd new boy sat wherever he wanted and spoke whenever he wished. Before us, Blaze walked right out of his skin into shape after shape. If the nuns returned and spied his tail, he snorted at their habits and pulled his brow into an arch or turned his uniform blazer inside out and ran barefoot across the church altar. Once, he unzipped his pants in the school quad and sprayed a perfect circle of flame-yellow piss around the flagpole. The fragrance rose in vapors, and the grass singed to a sooty black. Yet Blaze soon was the star athlete, the A student, the polymath, and he argued his way out of every corner with his blade of a tongue. I had no such weapon, so I hid behind his biggest-in-the-class back and prayed for cover. When he moved his arm or his head, I moved in turn. When he coughed, I coughed in echo. Before me, his hair shone like ink, and his shoulders spread like wings.
Even on the bench next to the principal’s office, his head was unbowed, his shoulders unhunched. A nun had nabbed him for an inked image on the back of his hand: the reproductive cycle of the paramecium. He called it a study guide; she called it a cheat sheet. There was no exam scheduled that day, and it wasn’t the first time Blaze had drawn on his skin. Sometimes in class, he coated an entire side of his hand with correction fluid. Then he wrote words in Latin or drew glyphs over the white field. I studied his hand drawings, like blue tattoos, while the nun jabbed a stick of chalk at the board, underlining lessons in our science class. A cloud of dust surrounded her head when she reviewed outlaw sexual phenomena, what she called “nature’s deviants.” Mostly, these were creatures that ate their sexual partners or changed their sex at will or mounted their own sex. Dragonflies, gypsy moths, clown fish, black widow spiders. As the nun—and the biology section—droned on week after week, Blaze’s drawings grew larger, more elaborate. The nun warned of skin poisoning, accused him of distracting the class and disturbing her, yet that only made him square his shoulders and widen his grin.
On the Friday when she eyed the paramecium on his hand, drawn in the “deviant” act of self-fertilization, her chest rose nearly to her chin in anger. Her eyes narrowed and her wimple shook. Days earlier, she’d denounced the paramecium, along with the earthworm and the slug as “lowly hermaphrodites.” She’d marked an X in the air with chalk, as if to censor an illicit image. Yet Blaze’s drawing featured a paramecium splitting itself in two. With a hairy footprint shape, it hardly looked pornographic. From a crooked angle, though, the nucleus might’ve passed for a nipple on a weirdly shaped breast. The nun stared at the sketch a long while, her chest rising and falling, then she announced a closed-book quiz: on the reproductive cycle of the paramecium. When I raised my hand to object—we hadn’t even finished the lesson yet—she called me an accessory to the crime and accused me of plotting with Blaze to cheat. Then with two X marks overhead, she ordered us both to the principal’s office.
The story made no more sense to the layman principal than it did to us, yet he asked Blaze to repeat parts over and over again as if he were memorizing the lines. Each time, Blaze added an extra twist, his hands scissoring the air into new shapes, while I sat on my own hands and screwed my mouth shut. A hellish fate awaited us, I was sure, already falling into the role of doomed criminal and damned sinner. Extreme punishments flashed before me: tongue tearer, knee splitter, thumbscrew. No doubt, if my clothes were pulled away, I’d be revealed as a quivering hairless animal. Yet the principal hardly even looked in my direction, and Blaze faced the desk while a pair of antlers seemed to crown his forehead. He bucked against every charge made by the nun, not just the cheat sheet but accusations of disorderly conduct, destruction of school property, and defiance of the dress code. Blaze turned each charge into a joke, delivering the punch line with a jab of his hand. After examining the paramecium tattoo, the principal coughed, stood up and hitched his pants. From a drawer, he pulled out a long paddle that all the boys called the Ugly Sister. Passing in the hall, you could hear a boy let loose a muffled shout when that rough cypress hit his rear end. Most of the time, the principal executed the law of the church and the rules of the school with more force than any priest. Yet when Blaze stared across the desk and locked eyes with him, tapping the floor twice with a heavy foot, the principal brought the paddle down on the chair instead, air whistling through the holes. After several loud hard smacks, he laid it down and hitched his pants a second time. Sweat glistened on top his lips. His hands shook a bit and his eyes creased with near-laughter. Then he looked long and hard at Blaze.
“What kind of lizard?” he asked again.
“Whiptail,” Blaze said. “The all-lady lizard.”
“And what did the Sister call it?”
“Parthenogenesis.”
“Right,” the principal said, with a hand to his shaking mouth. “Virgin birth.”
Whether Blaze had mesmerized the principal into releasing us, I couldn’t be sure. Yet free of the paddle and free of school for the weekend, he turned his eyes and looked straight at me for the first time.
“Come over,” he said. It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer.
Instead, as if surrounded by a narcotic cloud, I followed the skinwalker home, lights bursting in my head and sounds echoing in my ears. You could be odd and not get flogged—not even in the principal’s office? You could speak up and not get strangled? You could stand up and not get kneecapped?
Shifting from cloven hooves to spotted paws to the long whirling feet of a sprinter, Blaze dashed through his house, throwing off the school uniform and picking up a bottle of cola and a bag of Roman taffy. In his backyard, he jumped onto a trampoline and shouted after me to join him. As soon as I climbed up, he leapt from his haunches, the canvas bounced me into the air, and he exploded in laughter. My ears, oversized and nearly pointed, flashed with heat and I could feel them turning red. My arms prickled with every little hair standing needle-sharp on end, like a set of quills, and my nose filled with the smell of grilled meat and ripe fruit and wet grass and damp earth. All around, the world rose up and down in a shaking blur while blood rushed from my hands to my feet and back again. Under it all, I smelled a strong musk that flared my nostrils and dizzied my head. I wanted to remain weightless, high from the trampoline, from the heat, from thoughts of Blaze, but one leg overshot the frame and I landed with a splat on the ground.
Through my shirt, you could see my spastic rib, the one that pulsed with a strange twitch anytime my chest filled with too much air. Blaze crouched over me and pulled up the tails of my shirt. His eyes widened at the sight. That rib looked blue now, and it quivered out of sync with my breathing, making my whole chest throb like an animal under a spear. Then he looked closer and found my birthmark, a crimson-colored arrow on one side of a nipple.
“Deviant,” he said then repeated it louder. “Lowly deviant!”
He howled between laughs and spat a mouthful of cola on the ground. His eyes glared, daring me to disagree. He’d invited me over for just this reason, I guessed, so he could pin me with an exclamation mark.
For a moment, I stood still as the breath rushed in and out of my chest. Then I jumped back on the trampoline and jumped into the air with that word ringing in my ear. Deviant. The nun had said it in class, of course, too many times, but never in the way Blaze said it, like a grunt of recognition. The word rang inside my head in echo after echo. All the perfume of the world rose up again, along with Blaze’s face, his unblinking eyes and jutting chin and his mouth open wide in easy laughter. Soon, I overshot the trampoline once more and landed on my back, breathless, wordless.
The skinwalker stood over me, no longer grinning. His face the face of a sphinx. He stopped breathing too, it seemed, and his eyes shut for a long moment. Would he open those eyes soon and see a coward, a puss? Would he see a suspect boy? Would he jeer and catcall me like all the others?
When his eyes opened again, Blaze shook his head, tugged his lips on the cola bottle, then spat a caramel waterfall over my face. The ground fell away, and my whole body rose up. Blaze locked eyes with mine. Weightless, I opened my mouth in the shape of an O, letting the cola and spit rain into my throat while his grin returned and widened. Under his steady eye, I grew out of my shoes and floated over the backyard. I floated out of my clothes too, driven into a daze with his mouth on my neck and his hand on my waist. Master of letters, master of shapes, he cast that kind of spell.
In his bedroom that night, I kept my face to the pillow. When I was sure that he’d fallen asleep, I opened my eyes and turned toward him. Blaze slept with his shirt and pants off, and the sight of him thrilled me. My ears burned and my throat was dry and I knew every why. Why the priest mocked me at Holy Cross. Why the boys taunted me. Why my letters were odd curlicues, feathers and fans, ribbons of silk. Next to the skinwalker, I wasn’t a standup boy or even a daredevil. I was only an accessory to the plot, a stock character, an end page waiting to be filled.
Yet now, in his bed, I didn’t care that I couldn’t match Blaze, that my own letters failed or that I was the sissy, the puss. As I lay alongside him with the rustle of sheets, his heart beat in my ear. I bent my hand, slid it under his arm, and musk rose around me. Heat rose too, followed by a grunt deeper and longer than all words. I drew my fingers back and pressed them against my face. Then the bed filled with steam. Grinning wide, with his long teeth, the skinwalker rose over me and clawed into my skin, the blood glistening before running off in tears. A set of initials branded me, three letters in ink, a fresh tattoo on my arm. My brow pulled into an arch. Maybe I’d never turn into a boy like Blaze, maybe I’d never square my shoulders or sharpen my tongue, maybe I’d never walk out of my skin or master anything at all, but he was my author now, and I was his sentence.
Late at night, with a perfumed wrist and a sudden click of her tongue, Mama put the magazine in her lap aside to tell me cautionary tales—odd, twisting stories about her outlaw father, about how he punched his way from parish to parish in lower Louisiana in pursuit of a ring and a championship belt. After quitting the ministry, he sought fortune as a boxer then left the Bayou State for work as a croupier, a bookie, and finally a bounty hunter, but a rash broke out on his hands each time some Texas boss in pointed boots called him a coonass. Did those cowboys think he was an animal? A trash-eating animal in a mask? Other times they called him Otterfoot. Did they think he was a web-toed weasel? He’d show them; he’d shift his shape again. Now he was a snaggle-toothed wolverine, a claw-footed bobcat. Now he was a fox-eared traiteur, a swan-necked revelator. And now, now he was the hot tongue of breath over their head and the hairy finger that tapped on the window at midnight before the panes exploded and the house burst into flame. He was a rebel-yelling prophet, a vein-hunting warrior, a junk-shooting preacher. And if he was an animal, he was a champion loup-garou, a teeth-gnashing, bone-crunching werewolf.
Until the day they finally wrestled him onto a gurney and into a hospital and shot voltage through the electrodes on his head. Once, when I was eleven, Mama brought me to meet him. He was living in a cinder-block government home with a woman who had the same odd name as him and two boys who took turns sitting on one knee. The other knee was gone, the fabric of the pant leg dangling like a lady’s handkerchief. His hair ran onto his back in a tight double ponytail, making his nose look sharp and long. His teeth were sharp and long too, all yellow and twisted. Syringes lined his dresser like firearms. You could smell the riot of perfume. Soon, he’d be dead, not of old age, though, or disease or even an overdose. No, he couldn’t live in one shape, and he couldn’t bear that he’d been robbed of wild thought by strangers wearing surgical masks.
Before I reached high school, Mama told me other tales about her father and his people, the Sabines, impossibly poor half-breed shrimpers and swamp-dwellers who—legend had it—were swindled by a pack of strangers bearing gifts. Men with smooth suits and smooth hair walked onto their land but with a rough speech that confounded the Sabines. The strangers spoke with no tone, even when their words ran into knots. At their feet, the Sabines saw overfilled baskets of rich meats and rare fruits they couldn’t grow or buy on their own. They knew the taboo of foreign food, knew the sin of greed. Their tables already were laden with thick gumbo, giant shrimp, and blood sausage. Yet with hungry eyes, they quickly took the baskets and signed a stack of contracts without ever looking straight at the faces of the strangers. After feasting off the food, they grinned with satisfaction and rubbed their stomachs. Then their grins widened, and their eyes widened too. Soon, a fever broke out. Whole groups of men dove into greasy pig pits, ran manic cochons de lait, and donned bird beaks and corn silk wigs. Women leapt over boiling pots of crawfish and crowned their heads with glistening king cakes. At first, the mêlée seemed no more alarming than Mardi Gras. Everyone was someone else; everyone was a figment. Before long, though, the carnival upended. Beaks turned into snouts, cakes turned into sow’s ears, and hair fell out like fur. Finally, the feasters became meat, as the delirious Sabines spun on their own spits roasted by the strangers, who shed their gentleman’s masks, and they looked too late at the saw-tooth faces of the real tatailles, the oil tycoons who now laid claim to their swampland and to the glistening black pools under their feet.
Late one night, after I turned thirteen, marks appeared on my skin like a sudden rash. By then, there was talk in Louisiana about the damage of the oil derricks, all the sulfur and minerals drilled out of the ground and into the air. Industrial silos rose up all around us, issuing smoky gray clouds like uneasy brain lobes that hung in the sky longer than any thunderstorm. The bayou water took on a sick look, too, with a bilious green that oozed like a running sore. Water needs to breathe, everyone said through tight lips. All the talk was of an evil poison. Over a stretch of Cajun country, in a crescent-shaped alley, cancer blossomed like kudzu in lungs, in stomachs and colons, in glands and tissues with names no one could pronounce. Tumors, seizures, fits that got chalked up to the nerves, and odd skin rashes.
Yet mine wasn’t a rash. Instead, like my outlaw grandfather, I was a vein-hunting warrior, only I wanted to let the juice out not in, let it burn not cool. In a fever dream, a thick line of twisting blossoms crept over my arms as if the nerves beneath were flowering. One tiny bud opened in my hand, in the crook where a pen would go. Others burst open in radiating zigzag lines. A little cluster of roses, each a shade darker than the next. The petals grew blurry at the edges with an anxious halo. To no good end, I burned each mark into the skin with the cherry glow of a cigarette. The ash raised the hairs then turned them black before the ember raised a scarlet ring and a plume of sulfur reached my nose.
As smoke rose around me, hot words filled my head, hot names too. A pack of boys in roper boots had gotten my scent that year. I smelled of flowery cologne and fruity hairspray. I smelled of sweet mouthwash and pretty soap. Growing deaf to Mama, I flipped up my collar and feathered my hair. I scrunched up my sleeves and flashed a wristband. I double-looped a knot in my belt. First year in high school, I pushed against my uniform. The pack of boys delivered warnings with their eyes. In the gym, they curled lips, flared nostrils, stamped heels. At recess, they swaggered and swore. In fluorescent hallways, they thrust out their tongues like a wedge of swans to imitate my speech. Then, in unlit bathroom stalls, they shoved their hands in my pants, shoved their fingers in my face. After school, they fed their knuckles to my mouth. I swallowed it all, the oily saliva, the fleshy blood, the feverish words and hot hot names.
Yet I badly wanted to shift shape. I wanted to flick a magic finger in the air like my papère, to make buildings explode, to gnash teeth, crunch bones. I wanted to stretch my neck and soar through the clouds. So I leapt from the roof of Divine Redeemer, with birds singing in my ear and lights flashing in my eyes, until I crashed and crunched my own bone—a fractured femur. Just a dizzy ballerina, the boys said, a flightless fairy.
Still, the pain shook me into relief. After that, I burnt my arms again and again with a cigarette, burnt my chest too. I started slapping my head with my hands, snapping my wrist with a rubber band. Then I drew a finger across the edge of a steak knife. Something in me wanted out, so I punctured a vein. No matter how hard I tried, I never shifted shape. I never became a champion of any kind. I never fought that pack of boys, never even tried to outrun them. Instead, when cornered and faced with another meaty fist, I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, ready for the tongue of fire, the revelation of names. Ready to eat words, swallow blood. Ready for the lesson, the chokehold of redemption.
Late in his life, when I met my papère, he’d lost all speech. All words had left him. He grunted, and his wife brought him a can of pop rouge with a bent straw. He groaned, and his sons smacked his remaining leg while the phantom one seemed to shiver. He wore dark sunglasses, even inside, like a mask over his eyes. If he could’ve spoken, what would the outlaw have said to his grandson? Would he have greeted him as a fellow rebel, a renegade fairy? If he had both legs, would he have raised the sissy-boy onto his shoulders and paraded him through town, shouting his pride in French? Or would he have slipped off his belt to deliver a carnal blessing?
Late, very late at night, in my own version of the Sabine story, my werewolf papère stands at the mouth of the den, fending off all predators. We may be hungry, our tongues may be sickly white, but when a basket of food appears, my grandfather lifts a leg over it, sprays, and kicks it away. He stands his ground and keeps constant watch for any change in the air, any sudden noise or movement. His eyes are black as bayous. From rocks, he draws water, clean and clear. From dirt, he pulls cakes, sweet and moist. From his neck, an endless chain of zigzag teeth swings like a second jaw. He moves without caution and knows no taboo. He’d frighten any tataille into the woods, chase any pack of animals into the dark. He’d terrify the words out of any boy’s mouth, chew the mask off any villain’s face. Yet his breath is perfume. At midnight, with his long tongue, he licks the wounds on my skin until they seal and form gray scabs. In the morning, he clicks them each with his champion toe and the scabs fall off. A shock goes through me, and my face breaks into a troubled smile. All around, the smell of roses.