Neverland, p.1
Neverland, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
To the reader
Prologue
Blood Oath
ONE - Arrival
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
TWO - Where You Ain’t Supposed to Go
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
THREE - Rabbit Lake
1
2
3
FOUR - Island Lore
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
FIVE - Playmates
1
2
3
4
5
SIX - Opening the Window
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Come Out and Play
SEVEN - Hurt
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
EIGHT - Commandments
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
NINE - A Book of Revelations
1
2
3
4
5
TEN - Dread Night
1
2
3
ELEVEN - Lights Out
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
TWELVE - Where I Am Is Neverland
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Epilogue
Copyright Page
FOR R.S.
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Glenn Chadbourne, Matt Schwartz, M. J. Rose, Bentley Little, Francine LaSala, Amanda Ferber, Roger Cooper, Georgina Levitt, and everyone at Vanguard and the Perseus Group.
To the reader
Be sure to drop by Douglas Clegg’s website at DouglasClegg.com for bonus content.
Prologue
1
No Grown-ups.
Among other words we wrote across the walls—some in chalk, some with spray paint—these two words were what my cousin Sumter believed in most.
There were other words.
Some of them were written in blood.
2
No child alive has a choice as to where he or she will go in the summer, so for every August after Grampa Lee died, our parents would drag us back to that small, as yet undeveloped peninsula off the coast of Georgia, mistakenly called an island.
Gull Island.
We would arrive just as its few summer residents were leaving. No one in their right mind ever vacationed off that section of the Georgia coastline after August first, and Gull Island may have been the worst of any vacation spots along the ocean. Giant black flies would invade the shore, while jellyfish spread out across the dull brown beaches like a new coat of wax. It was not, as sarcastic Nonie would remark, “the armpit of the universe,” but often smelled like it.
The Jackson family could afford no better.
We were not rich, and we were not poor, but we were the kind of family that always stayed in Howard Johnson’s when we traveled together, and were the last on the block to have an air-conditioned car and a color television.
Daddy jumped from job to job, trying to succeed in sales while he also tried to overcome the bad stammer that had appeared when he’d attempted to sell his first piece of commercial property. We could not afford the more fashionable shores of the South, nor would my mother consent to go to the land of the carpetbaggers, as she called Virginia Beach. So we would go to what was called the “ancestral home” on Gull Island.
It was there—at the edge of my grandmother’s property—that we were first introduced to a clubhouse inside which my cousin, Sumter Monroe, ruled, and through which our greatest nightmare began.
The shack, really just a shed, was almost invisible were you to walk into the woods and look for it; it blended into the pines that edged the slight bluff rising out of the desolate beach.
There was a story that it had belonged to a dwarf who had been a ship’s mascot all his life and had built it there so he could watch the boats come in. Another story was that it had been built on the site of an old slave burial ground.
But my mother told me that it had just been the gardener’s shed and “don’t you kids make up stories to scare each other, I will not have my vacation ruined with nightmares and mindless chatter.”
Sumter was fascinated by the shack—and terrified, too.
The first three Augusts my family spent on the peninsula, my cousin Sumter would not go near that rundown old shack, nor would he allow any of us others to venture through its warped doorway.
He acted like it was his and his alone, and none of the rest of us cared enough about that moldy old place to cross him.
Aunt Cricket, wiping her Bisquick-powdered hands into her apron, would call after him from the front porch as we all trooped toward the woods, “Sunny, you be careful of snakes! You wearing your Off! spray? Don’t you give me that look young man, and don’t spoil your appetite for lunch. And Sunny, never, never let me catch you around that old shack! You hear me? Never!”
The fourth summer he entered the shed and he named it.
He called it Neverland.
Blood Oath
ONE
Arrival
1
All summer trips in the Jackson family began with one form of crisis or another.
The trip that last August to Gull Island was no exception. Our spirits had begun high enough: Nonie led us in singing “A Hundred Bottles of Ginger Beer on the Wall,” the Mom-approved version of the popular school-bus song, and Nonie herself drifted off to sleep by the time we’d crossed the North Carolina border. Governor, the baby, only screamed intermittently. I had brought along dog-eared copies of The Martian Chronicles and My Side of the Mountain, although my mother insisted I should be moving up in my reading to the classics. I had read both books a zillion times and could read them a zillion more times. We kept the windows down all the way, and when we stopped at a motel the first night, I think we all fell asleep without much fuss.
I had one of my dreams that night. I dreamed I was drowning in the sea with small fish nibbling at my skin. The next day in the car I said to Mama, “I had a dream.”
“Tell me it.”
“I was in the ocean. I couldn’t swim.”
She said, “Well, Beau, that must mean that you shouldn’t go in the water this summer. At least not past your knees.”
But I didn’t tell her the worst part of the dream.
In the dream, one of the nibbling fish was all scaly and silvery, but his eyes were large and round and human and belonged to my cousin Sumter.
RIDING in the station wagon all day, it was easy for us kids to alternate pouting. First Nonie, then me, then Nonie, then Missy—but Missy took the prize. She quickly became the malcontent of the trip, and it was over her hamster, which she had smuggled into the car. It was supposed to be left at home to be cared for by our usual babysitter, Lettie, who was going to water the plants and feed and walk our dog, Buster. But Missy, not wanting to part with her dear Missus Pogo, put it in an airhole-punched shoe box and thought it would survive the first day’s ride alongside the spare tire beneath the backseat of the station wagon.
Missy, two years older than me, had a rare lack of foresight for someone her age as well as an unlimited capacity for suffering. She said she didn’t think the spare-tire area would be any hotter than the rest of the station wagon, and she had jabbed holes in the shoe box with a ballpoint pen and left some lettuce and sunflower seeds in there for the hamster.
But Missus Pogo was dead on her back, her tiny ratlike feet curled into balls, dead as I’d ever seen any animal be dead before. Missy cried her eyes out, then pouted, then kicked her feet against the back of the seat, then wouldn’t talk to anyone. Daddy had wanted to bury Missus Pogo right there on the North Carolina border, but Missy screamed some and made ugly faces, so Daddy put the dead hamster and its Buster Brown coffin back in the car. I swore you could smell it every time we hit a bump. “Never liked that hamster,” I said, “not since she ate her babies.”
“Just shut up, Beau,” Missy muttered, “she didn’t eat them on purpose. Missus Pogo would’ve been a good mother.”
“Something sick about a mother who eats her babies, is all. I don’t exactly call that a good mother. Mama, you ever want to eat your babies?”
Mama shot me a look that meant she was about to turn and slap my knee if I said another word about the whole business, so I just clammed up for a while.
“You know where Missus Pogo’s gone on to?” Daddy asked Missy.
Missy shook her head. “Didn’t go nowhere. She’s j ust dead.”
“She’s gone on to God, sweetie. It’s where we’re all headed.” It was the one sliver of religion shining through his weary eyes.
But no one in the family was buying it, least of all Missy—and I knew that no hamster who ate her own children was likely to make it to the pearly gates. My father was as defeated as a man could be when it came to his wife and children; he could not fight us, for he would never win.
My mother clucked her tongue, “Jesus, Dab, she’ll be crying the whole trip now. Missy,” she reached over and grabbed my sister’s hand, “Missus Pogo’s just died, perfectly natural. Hamsters don’t live all that long. It hurts when something you love dies, but you have to remember that they don’t hurt anymore.”
“Not if she went to Hell,” I whispered, “then she’s gonna burn eternally for eating her babies.”
“Beauregard,” Mama snapped, “is this the way you’re going to behave the whole vacation? Well, I won’t have it. You just be your good self and keep that bad part put away for at least this trip. Beau?”
I sighed, “Yes’m.”
A DEAD hamster probably doesn’t exude any kind of smell, at least not for several days, but we began to imagine that it did, until finally Daddy agreed to pull over and bury Missus Pogo on the edge of the highway. He did a piss-poor job of it, using the plastic ice scraper as a shovel and only digging down in the gravel deep enough for the small body.
Missy opened the box again to get one last look at the hamster. “Lookit,” she said, poking around with her fingers, “she’s all squishy, her eyes are open and sunk.”
Nonie and I peered at the furry corpse, and each of us got to touch it. Nonie said, “I bet in a week ants’ll’ve eaten all the skin off so’s it’s all bones. Probably already’s got worms in her innards eating away. Worms’ll eat just about anything.”
“Naw,” I said, feeling the hamster’s soft, still fur—it was creepy and beautiful and mysterious because it felt so different from when the animal had been alive. “Some stray cat’s gonna dig it up and eat it—just like it ate its babies, something’s gonna eat it.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, Mama’s hand came out and whapped me on the behind.
“Speaking of food, I’m starving again.” Nonie licked her lips over the hamster as a joke.
“You children are being revolting,” Mama said, and turned to get back in the car.
My sisters and I giggled, knowing what all children know: Sometimes it’s fun to be bad and gross.
I heard Missy mutter as we got into the car again: “Now I wish we coulda kept Missus Pogo to see how fast the worms would come out.”
2
Mama said to Missy, “See how many different license plates you can count, honey.” We were back on the interstate and had not yet seen the ocean, and Governor kept screaming whenever Daddy hit a bump on the road. Missy had drawn a line with her finger down the backseat and told me that if I crossed it with my knee, she was going to scream like Governor.
“Scream your head off,” I told her, sliding my knee over to her side. My leg had, as usual, fallen asleep, so I barely felt it when she scratched me on the thigh with her cat-claw fingernails.
Nonie, whose mood had also turned sour, pretended we were not related to her. When other cars passed near us, she smiled at the strangers as if to indicate that she would like them to adopt her. Nonie was, after all, a born flirt, and I knew that the real reason she was eager to get to Gull Island was so she could wear her two-piece and lie on a rock and thrust her chest out.
She and Missy were twins, but miles apart in most departments: Nonie was a tease and walked in such a way that men of whatever age watched her; Missy was withdrawn, sulky, and didn’t seem to like boys at all—on the beach she wore a long T-shirt over her bathing suit, and unlike Nonie, she did not stuff wads of Kleenex into her training bra. Friends used to ask me which of the two was the evil twin—because there is always good and evil—and I would tell them that they were both evil twins, each in her own special evil way.
“Lord, how much longer?” Mama asked, and Daddy just thrummed his fingers on the dashboard when we pulled over at an Esso station for gas. I went into the station to get a Yoo-hoo chocolate soda and some Mallomars for the road. They were the last things I needed; we’d stopped at every Stuckey’s from Richmond on down, and I felt green from eating chocolate-caramel turtles and pecan logs.
There was a map machine, and I had a couple of dollars in quarters, so I dropped some in and got a map of Southern California. The man behind the counter said, “Your daddy probably wants South Carolina.”
He thought I was retarded, I guess, so I started playing retarded and stared blankly back at him and began drooling.
“You okay, little boy?”
I hadn’t had anyone call me little boy since I was four, and I wanted at that moment to cuss a blue streak, but I was sure Daddy would come in at any minute. “Jes fahn,” I drawled, sucking up drool back into my mouth. At that moment Mama came in, carrying Governor under her arm like he was a pig going to market.
“Pardon me, sir,” she said, glancing over at me as if she and I did not belong together, “which way to the ladies’?” The farther south Mama got, the thicker her accent; I could barely understand her.
“Just t’other side of the water fountain, and you don’t need no key, but knock first, if you please.”
She rubbed my head as she went by, and Governor stared at me wide-eyed the way he did when he watched TV; I was afraid that the way my mother carried him, he would fall on the soft spot of his head, and I didn’t want to be around to see that. It had been rumored that my cousin Sumter had been dropped repeatedly on his soft spot when he had been a baby, and I knew what that had done to Sumter. I unfolded the map of California and then refolded it.
“Listen,” the man behind the counter said, “your daddy’s gonna be mad because you got the wrong one, so I’ll just give you one for South Carolina and it’ll be our little secret.” There was something in his smile that reminded me of what Mama had always said—Don’t talk to strangers, and don’t take things from them—something spooky and leering, like he wanted something from me, only I didn’t know what. “It’ll be our little secret, huh, little boy, just you and me,” he said, and I grabbed the map and got out of there as fast as I could because grown-ups scared me more than anything else when they were like that.
3
“You had to be a smart aleck,” Mama said when we were on the road again, and she reached back and pinched my knee hard. I held my breath and pretended it didn’t hurt—at ten I was getting too old for the traditional modes of punishment: knee-pinchings, butt-slappings, my grandmother’s natural bristle brush on the back of my bare leg. “You couldn’t’ve gotten a map of Georgia, now could you?”
I began unfolding the map of Southern California across my lap, and handed Missy the one of South Carolina.
Missy said, “There’s a little bit of Georgia on mine.”
“Georgia on my mind,” Daddy began singing, but because he never could remember the words to a song, he hummed the next line and then let the tune die in his throat.
“Why don’t we ever go to Disneyland?” I asked.
“If I ever get your Daddy to take me to California, I can guarantee Disneyland will not be one of our stops. Don’t you like the island?” Mama asked. “Maybe Sea Horse Park’ll be open this year.”
But the amusement park on Gull Island was a collection of dinosaur bones: a run-down roller coaster, a lopsided carousel, several kiddie rides, a dried-up tunnel-of-love ride, and a swampy flume. From the time I’d set eyes on Sea Horse Park, my first visit to the peninsula until this ride out to Grammy Weenie’s, the place had never been open, and from the decrepit looks of it, it would never pass any kind of inspection. There was about as much chance of that place being open when we arrived as there was of pigs flying, and I would’ve been less surprised by the pigs. I looked out the window of our Ford station wagon. It seemed then like we’d had that station wagon forever. It was a pale green and had what the car salesman had called “beaver sidings,” which made my sister Nonie laugh out loud whenever someone said it. “We never even go to South of the Border.”
“Hey, Mommy,” Missy yelped.
“Hay is for horses,” Mama said. She always said this, and we always groaned when she did.
