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skull in my face, “must’ve just been in the dirt. Found this, too.” Again he reached into the crate, and brought out what at first seemed to be a thick twig with several prongs at the end. It was a small animal paw. “Like that story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ Only I don’t think it’s a monkey or anything. Maybe the missing link.” He dragged the edge of the paw along my arm and it tickled. The skin was dried right onto the bone. “Maybe it was some little dog’s. Like someone cut off this dog’s foot. Yeah, they cut it off and hung it up to dry. You see any three-legged dogs, you know we got its foot.”
    “I bet you dug those things up. I bet you stole them or something. I bet you weren’t supposed to.”
    Now he looked perturbed—he’d been found out. He tossed the skull down on the ground. He lifted three of his fingers up and said, “Peel the banana.” But he peeled it himself, bringing two fingers down around his middle finger, once again flipping the bird, his favorite form of greeting.
    “I bet you took those things from somebody and you’re gonna be in trouble for doing it.”
    Guilty as he was, he managed to make me feel guiltier for having seen right through his stories. “If you squeal . . . ” Sumter didn’t complete his threat. You may wonder how anyone could feel threatened by someone as apparently sissy as my cousin Sumter, but let me tell you, if you were a kid, you could smell what was wrong with him. His stink wasn’t like any other kid’s stink. Grammy Weenie always said you could tell the races just by their smells, and let me tell you, Sumter himself must’ve been from another planet, because he had a smell that was not like anybody else’s, and it came out when he made threats. It was like his juice was switched on electric, and if you touched him, you’d get a blinding shock. I guess I thought then that he was kind of psycho and weird, and I will tell you plainly that I did not like to cross him if I could help it. “If you squeal . . . ” His small fist was raised in the air.

    “I wouldn’t squeal .”
    A shower of pebbles hit the window.
    “What the—” Sumter motioned for me to duck down. He dropped to the ground and crawled over and around all the rubble. He popped up beneath the window like a jack-in-the-box. “Spies!” he shouted.
    “It’s probably just Nonie.”
    “Nope, it’s white trash. They’re yellow and running scared.”
    I stood full up and looked over his shoulder. “I don’t see nobody.”
    “That’s ’cause they are nobodies. Dang it if this island ain’t full of the trashiest sorts. If I was to catch one, I’d turn him into rump roast.”
    We both heard the scraping at the same time, and Sumter returned his attention to the crate.
    “Look here,” he said. “C’mon, Beau, look here.”
    When I looked again into the shadowy interior of that crate, I thought I saw:
    A creature with a human face, with legs like crab pincers, with a tail like a lizard, with the cold staring eyes of a bluefish, its mouth opened wide, gray shark’s teeth thrusting out of bleeding gums.
    Sumter began giggling, and before I could stop him, he reached down into the crate and punched his fingers into the monster’s round fish eyes.
    When he withdrew his fingers, the face of the thing changed, melted down like wax and reformed—it was the face of something I had never seen, and yet it was closer to being human than it had been a second before. The eyes still had the dull rounded stare of a bluefish, the mouth its jagged teeth, but there was a wisdom and a horror that brought to my mind an image of suffering. It was the ugliest, most hideous face I had ever been witness to—it was what they told us in Sunday school was unclean . I could not tell if the thing was male or female, child or grown-up; its skin was covered over with gray-green sores, and its lips were in shreds from where its own teeth dug into them.
    And then, as if it were being stripped of