Neverland by Douglas Clegg

us.

    RABBIT Lake was so named because of the bunnies who occupied the small island we stood upon. These rabbits were here, not because they were natives of Gull Island, but because, over the years, when people vacationed on the peninsula around about Easter-time, the grown-ups would dump their children’s pets out on that mound in hopes that either the animal would drown trying to get back to shore or live out its natural days there.
It must’ve satisfied a sense of what heaven was, for parents could row out with their kiddies and Mr. Flop-ears, let the bunny go, tell the kiddies how happy the bunny would be—much happier than in some crate down in the rec room eating kibble and being bored—and then row leisurely back. The myth would develop of Mr. Flop-ears, who would never die in their imaginations, but live on at the island on Rabbit Lake. The truth was that the bunnies did live on there, multiplying like, well, bunnies, but the small island in the lake became a stockade for the locals, the poor population of the island, the Gullah descendants, too, to whom the soft bunny meat was something of a delicacy. Sumter told me that he thought bunny meat tasted like chicken, “because every weird thing you eat is supposed to taste like chicken.”
    He poked me in the ribs as I came up beside him, tiptoeing even in the mud and grass. “They’re made up of pure innocence,” he whispered. The bunny was small and its soft, white fur was matted with burs and dried mud. Its nose twitched, and it rose up on its hind legs to inspect us before darting back into the high grass. “Pure innocence, the way babies are. Nobody’s told them the way it is yet. Nobody’s told that bunny that it’s gonna be somebody’s supper. It’s living in bliss, Beau, pure bliss ’cause it don’t know what’s coming.”
    Because it seemed an intensely private moment—and therefore embarrassing—I didn’t glance directly at my cousin, though I could feel his breath near my ear. But I knew he was crying, maybe not much, maybe just a few tears rolling from his eyes, but I knew he was crying. I pretended not to notice. I saw peripherally that his face was crumpling like rotten fruit. I thought he whispered something, but maybe he didn’t, but it was something that passed between the two of us like a whisper, what was on his mind. “My Daddy wishes I wasn’t ever born.”
    We spotted other bunnies in the next two hours, and we even tossed pebbles at some of them. Sumter did not come back to his usual obnoxious self; he was distracted. Finally, as if answering a question in his own head, he turned to me and said, “Give me that hook.”

    “Huh?”
    He pointed to my arm: the hook he’d cut himself with. I plucked it from my sleeve reluctantly and handed it to him.
    He stuck it against his thumb.
    I winced, watching.
    “Give me your left hand.”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “We’re gonna take a blood oath.”
    “What for?”
    “Because of Neverland. You and me, Beau, we’re gonna be joined with blood so you never tell a living soul what you’re gonna find there.”
    “I thought you weren’t gonna let me in again.”
    “I changed my mind. And you can’t tell nobody ever again about what’s there.”
    “Not much there.”
    “If I told you something.”
    “Like what?”
    “Like the Slinky attacking the Weenie. Neverland made it attack her. Neverland wanted to kill her. Like the horseshoe crab—it was a trick, but lotsa tricks happen in there. Like the skull of Lucy, my one true god, which speaks of what will come. And the Gullahs know about Neverland, Beau, they know, and they keep out, because of the god I found, and I am the priest of that god. Those dead slaves, they didn’t just die, they consecrated that ground. But it’s a god that don’t just sit on its ass, cousin. It’s a god of action, of retribution, it’s a god of living bliss and destruction. It’s the god of eternal hunger.” His face was perfectly calm as he said this,