“Should we walk?” Pinky asks, looking at the shoes.
“Hell, no,” Dora says. “I want a ride in that car.”
Ralph insists on making iced tea. He distributes the glasses with elaborate care, then excuses himself to “fetch something.” We wait in a miniature living room crammed with furniture, and Ralph comes back with a couple of dusty photo albums. “I had the camera bug in those days,” he says, leafing through one of the albums until he finds the page he’s looking for.
“Here,” he says, and we lean in, looking at a three-by-five snapshot. “That’s Claude,” Ralph says, pointing to a handsome man with long sideburns, seated on a park bench. “And that’s Marie.” He indicates the demure-looking woman next to Claude. Her head is turned, and with a fond smile, she gazes at the handsome, well-scrubbed little boy next to her. The part in the boy’s hair is as straight as a ruler.
“And that there is Byron,” Dora says. “This was before little Joe came along. Oh, how she doted on that boy, Marie did. Isn’t that right, Ralph?”
“Oh, my, yes. He couldn’t do no wrong far as his mama was concerned.”
“Wasn’t nothin’ that boy wants, she doesn’t get for him,” Dora says. “Every toy and game, every bicycle. Nintendo machine. Guitar. Trampoline. Go-Kart. Two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, if you can believe it. Clothes… nothing’s too good.”
“Claude, now,” Ralph adds, “he loved that boy, too, but tried to give his son some discipline, you know, what kids need. Marie – she wouldn’t let Claude touch the boy. Nor even speak harsh to him. And look what happened.”
“I don’t hold with blaming the parents,” Dora tells us. “Marie was sweet as pie. And Claude was a good man, too. I just think that boy was born twisted.”
“Maybe so,” Ralph allows. He finds another snapshot, taken a couple of years later. Byron is seven or so. Dressed in a suit, top hat, and what looks like a cape, he’s got a curly mustache penciled onto his upper lip. Behind him, affixed to the double-wide is a handmade banner: BYRON THE GREAT.
I remember what Karl Kavanaugh said about magicians starting as kids. The photograph gives me chills.
“Oh, the magic shows!” Dora says. “I plain forgot about that. Byron would sell tickets for a quarter, and everybody was more’n glad to pay because Marie would fix lemonade and sandwiches and potato salad, so in the end it was quite a bargain.”
“She made a mighty fine potato salad,” Ralph says. “Although not,” he adds diplomatically, “not as good as Dora’s.”
“Remember?” Dora asks. “We’d watch the show on folding chairs Byron set up outside the trailer.”
“He got pretty good at it, too,” Ralph says, “for such a little kid. I never did figure out how he did some of the shit he did, pardon my French. He had this one trick – he’d put a few feathers and scraps of grass in a pan, say some abracadabra stuff, and next time he opens the pan a bird flies out. I looked at the pan, too. No place to put a live bird in there.”
A dove pan, I think, remembering Kavanaugh’s description.
“Tell me about the father,” Pinky says.
“Worked offshore, same as me. Hardworking guy, Claude. Marie, she worked, too, took in ironing.”
But mostly, from what the two neighbors say, Claude was an absentee father. Working for Anadarko meant six-week stints on oil rigs in the Gulf, followed by three weeks at home. “When he was home, he wasn’t really home that much. He was out fishing or shrimping.” Ralph laughs. “Most of the time with me.”
“Did Byron go along?”
“Nah. He got bored. He’d rather stay home with his mama.”
“Did they go to church? I heard something about Byron being a boy preacher.”
“My goodness, yes,” Dora says. “They’s churchgoers all along, mind you, but after little Joe died, Byron really got religion.”
“A transformational experience,” Ralph says.
“A what?” Dora asks. “Where’d you get that?”
Ralph blushes. “Bible study. That’s what they call it – like Paul on the road to Damascus. When Joey drowned, the idea is, that must have set Byron to thinking about his mortal soul.”
“I don’t know about any transformation,” Dora says, “but that boy did catch the preaching bug. Byron – he’d be preaching to anyone who’d listen, standing on the bridge, even thumping a Bible down by the wharves when the shrimp boats come in. Marie was havin’ fits about it, the kind of men you got down there. Drunk and all, you know. But Byron – you couldn’t stop him.”
“He was even getting a reputation as a healer, right, Ralph?”
“Absolutely. Folks said he had a calling.” Ralph pauses, then resumes. “It was bullshit, of course. But he had a following, no question about that. He was quite the little showman.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What kind of ‘showman’?”
“Oh, for instance, he give a sermon one time ’bout shirking responsibility. He’s talking ’bout Pontius Pilate, and he’s got this big clear bowl of water on the altar, and he’s steamin’ on about how Pilate washes his hands of the matter… ‘Jesus Christ is just not any of his business.’ And little Byron, he lathers up with soap as he’s preachin’ and sticks his hands in that water and the water turns bloodred, and a big oooooooh goes up, you know – I mean damn! It’s right dramatic. Byron, he raises his hands and they’re dripping ‘blood’ and he’s thundering on about how Pilate cannot wash away the blood on his hands.”
“A trick.”
“Some kind of gizmo soap is what Claude told me, but it gets your attention, know what I’m saying? He had all kinds of stuff like that. Snap his fingers, big puff of smoke comes up. And then that thing with the puppy happened, and-” He turns to Dora. “Didn’t they bounce him out of the church?”
“What ‘thing with the puppy’?” Pinky asks.
“This was later,” Dora says, “when he was a teenager.”
But I’m not listening. I’m thinking of the boy preacher with his hands dripping “blood.” The boy preacher snapping his fingers to puffs of smoke. The boy preacher doing magic tricks.
The seven-year-old Byron the Great, honing his skills even then. Images of the Gabler twins come into my mind. In their costumes. The police photo of Clara Gabler’s lower half. I think about the Ramirez boys. One of them dismembered. The Sandling kids climbing ropes and doing “exercises.” Why? To what purpose?
A real showman.
When I think about what this psycho has in mind for my sons…
“You all right?” Pinky asks.
“More iced tea?” Ralph suggests.
I shake my head. “I’m all right.”
“What’s this about a puppy?” Pinky asks.
Dora frowns. “You mind if I smoke, Ralph?”
“It’s bad for you. But go on.”
“That puppy,” Dora says. “Oh, my Lord. That’s when we knew the boy was really crazy.”
“Put an end to his preachin’ days, too,” Ralph adds.
“What did he do?” Pinky asks. “Torture the poor critter?”
“Worse than that,” Ralph says.
“What could be worse than that?”
Ralph lets out a sigh, rocks back in his chair. “It’s Christmastime. And maybe this is hindsight, but what folks say now is that Byron was getting a little scary. No one can put their finger on it, but he put folk on edge. You just plain didn’t want to be around the boy. He’s still preaching a lot, but when he’s not preaching, he disappears entirely for hours and hours. He’s what?” He turns to Dora. “Fourteen?”
Dora nods.
“Marie – she’s worried,” Ralph continues, “says he’s got some kind of secret place, she don’t know where he goes or what he gets up to.”