Free Neverland by Douglas Clegg

she snapped from behind her Bible.
    “I wasn’t doing nothing,” Sumter said, and his voice was light and sweet. He dumped the worms and dirt back into the crate.
    “You never do nothing, way I figure, but what you ain’t supposed to do.” She may have been the only one on the island besides me and Grammy Weenie who could see through my cousin’s games, and I wasn’t always sure I could see through them. Turning to me she said, “Good to see you back, Beauregard, but I see you left your smile hanging up in your closet.”
    “It’s early.”
    “You boys should be like the lilies of the field. They don’t toil, they don’t sweat, they just grow in God’s sunshine.”
    “I’d trample ’em,” Sumter said, “and then I’d pick them apart, petal by petal.”
    “They’d just grow up again.”
    “And I’d dig them up.”
    “You have a mouth on you, boy.”
    “That I do. The Mouth of the South.” Then he began singing off-key, “Whoa, Big Mama, why’n’t you turn your damper down?”
    I was almost happy to see Sumter’s nasty side start to come out after his earlier syrupiness.
    “I said, whoa-oh, Big Mama, why don’t you just turn your old damper down? ’Cause when you flap those big lips, just makes me wanta frown.” He stomped his bare feet down on the boards, causing half the shop to rattle. Minnows scattered in spotty schools along the edges of their tanks, cutting through the water at right angles.
    “The fire’s eternal, Sumter, it don’t just go out,” Diane muttered, but returned to her scripture.
    Sumter finished his song and dance, moving back around to the fish and creepy-crawlies. He pressed his face against one of the tanks and made fish lips. “Don’t you feel sorry for these poor suckers?” he asked me, and now I knew he had at least momentarily forgiven me for whatever it was I was supposed to have done. “They wait here for someone to put a hook
through their middles and while they’re dying they get pecked at by snappers and catfish. But, on the other hand, if they were just swimming down at the lake now , they’d probably have been eaten by now.” He shrugged.
    The minnows looked to me like slivers of silver skin, moving together in perfect strokes as if they had not fifty fish minds between them, but one will.
    “Daddy!” Sumter yelped. “I want a sea horse! Can I have one?”
    Uncle Ralph snorted, and Sumter made a face at his father’s back. My dad was looking at a set of fancy lures, and I heard Uncle Ralph say, “Dab, those are for pussies.” My father looked back to see if I’d heard, and I looked back at the tanks and played dumb.
    “You’d know,” Dad told him.
    “They got Caymans this year.” Sumter grabbed my hand and yanked me over to one corner of the store.
    There was a screen stapled down to the top of a wood-frame aquarium, scratched plexiglass all along the lower edges. Sumter and I leaned over it, and a stink came up like Don’s Johns at campgrounds during sticky summers. “Take a whiff.” Sumter gargled the air into the back of his throat and coughed it out. A thin layer of brown water coated the tank bottom; clumps of hairy moss floated lazily like unanchored gardens. A chunk of sepia-tinted hamburger was pushed up against a corner. There were two Cayman lizards: They were like baby alligators, but somehow more exotic because they were called Caymans.
    “I want one of them,” he said.
    “They’re neat.”
    “I bet they eat virgins for breakfast.”
    My only knowledge of virgins at that age was the Virgin Mary. Our neighbors in Richmond, the Antonellis, had a blue Virgin Mary in their garden, and I imagined her surrounded by hungry Caymans.
    “I bet they eat fingers,” he said, grabbing my wrist and slapping my hand against the top of the screen. I pulled my hand away from him. The lizards swished their tails, splattering the sides of the tank as they moved
swiftly, practically burrowing under the floating moss. When they rested,