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and sneak that I knew there wasn’t any god in there. The thing in the crate was in the light. For a second I knew what it was and said, “That ain’t god, that’s a horseshoe crab. How long you been keeping it in here?”
    “Three weeks so far.” He was grinning at me like I was about to get a good joke, only I didn’t know it.
    “Three weeks! It would be dead by now.”
    “Believe what you want, I don’t care.” This was the first time I’d ever heard him express this viewpoint. Normally he begged to be believed, threatened to be believed, threw tantrums until you believed his lies. “If something is , it don’t matter if you believe it or not, ’cause it is what it is anyway.”
    “Well, that ain’t what it ain’t . It’d be dead.”
    He brought the crab out of the crate and set it down in the dust. It didn’t move, and I figured it must really just be dead. It smelled like it was dead. I prodded it with my toe, and maybe it moved a little, but I figured it was just ’cause I’d touched it. I picked the crab up and shook it, and its innards rattled. Sumter grabbed it from me like I’d offended him and he set it gently back in the crate.
    He said, “I got something else, too.”
    He reached into the crate, and I was reminded of a magician reaching into a top hat. The creature had probably starved for days before it died, landlocked inside this dry shack. I began to realize how cruel all of us children were with our pets, how we were all cruel small gods, killing our animals, our guinea pigs, our hamsters, our chameleons, our frogs, our salamanders. I was getting physically sick. I remembered seeing a dog that
had been flung out of the back of a truck as it drove down a highway, and, upon hitting the road, the dog had been transformed from a living thing into a piece of butcher shop meat, one half of its fur skinned completely off, and my father saying to me, “Don’t look, Beau, nothing we can do for it.” Who thinks of crabs? I’d seen sea gulls carry them up over concrete and drop them down so the birds could feed more easily on them, but somehow this seemed different. This seemed unfair, that my cousin Sumter would trap this thing in a dark crate for his own entertainment.
    Sumter caught my attention, his hands a blur of movement as he leaned back into the crate. He had extracted something small and yellow and round from the crate.
    A very small human skull, one that seemed too tiny to be real. I thought he’d bought it at a magic or joke shop: It was too perfectly deformed, too finely crushed along where the left ear would’ve been.
    As if reading my thoughts, he said, “It is real.”
    “If it’s real, where’s the rest of it?”
    “I left it where I found it. This was all I needed. See, she got murdered. Right here.” He grasped the skull like it was a bowling ball, his thumb and forefinger thrust in the eye sockets. “And this is all that’s left of her.”
    “Her?”
    “Yeah, her name was Lucy and she was in love with this man, and she was going to run off with him, only he didn’t love her. So they met right here, at midnight, and when he kissed her, and she shut her eyes, he placed his fingers around her neck and strangled her. Her eyes popped open in terror and the killer says to her, ‘You will never leave this place. Ever.’”
    Sumter had a way with the spur-of-the-moment story, and I’ve got to admit I was taken in for about a minute as he spun this melodrama, but then I knew, like all of Sumter’s stories, this was something he just made up. He had a half-smile that was the tip-off: He enjoyed the company of gullible people.
    “If she got strangled, how come it’s smashed in?” I pointed to the left side of the skull, which had large chunks missing.

    He gave it up. “Okay, okay, wise-ass. My daddy says there’s this big old grave where these dead slaves were buried right around here, and I guess when they dug out this shack, this,” he practically shoved the