I didn’t realize at the time that kids outside of our neighborhood already knew the story of Hansel and Gretel. Like I said, we didn’t have a lot of books. Ours were in gang-occupied libraries, for crying out loud. It’s a shame, because I’d heard plenty of our neighbors spout some great stories. This one time, I saw the police handcuff our neighbor Ace Williams to the apartment stairwell for trying to club his brother-in-law with a worn-out slugger. Ace had been drafted by the minor leagues back when he was young. Then his sister was stabbed to death near Grant Park and he just couldn’t hit like he used to. Could barely run. And I heard him tell the cop, “That wasn’t me, man. The real me left a long time ago. I’m just a vessel now, man. It ain’t filled with me. These arms ain’t filled with me no more.” It was kind of poetic, in a way.
Before I had finished the chapter, the rumble of an engine encroached from the freeway and slowed to a stop in front of the apartment. I pushed the book down flat and its forest disappeared into our neighborhood of time-rubbed pawn shops and barred windows, littered gutters, and spray-painted stop signs people rarely obeyed. But this car, a dirty white pickup with a cluttered bed, had approached slowly, delicately. Our grandparents had arrived.
Papa Roy sprung from the driver’s side, a willow-branch man so unlike Ma’s rooted limbs that they barely seemed the same species. A plain white t-shirt hung from his shoulders in a scarecrow’s drape, his back slightly bowed as if all his stuffing leaned away from the center rod wherever the breeze blew it. He cantered toward us around the bumper, saluting beneath a line of dark, mossy hair and the brim of a torn Navy cap, though he had left the service before Ma was born.
“Well, now,” said Papa Roy, bending down to our size. Not a word of “I’m sorry we have to meet again this way” or “Do you remember me?” Instead, he looked straight down at the book in my lap, as if he had driven all this way to continue an old conversation about it. “A Fairytale Comp—,” he began, looking at the cover. “Comp—.” He paused, tried again. Sounded the word out beneath his breath with some difficulty. Then—
“Com-pan-i-on. Companion.” He cheered at this, sucking in a deep breath as if to swallow away what had just transpired. “And where,” he continued, “did y’all get such a fine-looking book as this?”
I pretended I hadn’t noticed him struggling to read, and told him that I had forgotten to return it to the library.
“Good thing,” said Papa Roy, smiling, “because it looks to me like this has my name written all over it.”
The pinched horn of someone blowing her nose interrupted us from just behind Papa. That was Mama Ilene, joining us from inside the truck where she had most definitely been crying. She smiled at us, quivering at the lips, and gestured as if she intended to shake our hands. She looked to me, to Eli, and back to me again, like a stitch pulling two seams closer and closer, until finally she closed her eyes and reached out her hands to touch the inherited curves of our cheeks.
Eli and I had two garbage bags of clothing between us, our only accompaniments for our journey away from home.
I closed my book, crushing Hansel, Gretel, and the trail of crumbs they wouldn’t find. They will turn around, I thought, in the darkness of the woods, where wolves eat little girls and perfectly nice princes get cursed into frogs, and see that all the lights of the world had been turned off.
We drove south in Papa Roy’s pickup for several hours and listened to him tell tales about Bonne Chance, where he and Mama Ilene had lived all their lives. Papa chartered fishing boats for a living, in the rivers and swamps, or sometimes in the Gulf, and for ten minutes he stretched a true story about a New Orleans surgeon and his two young nephews and their vicious fight with a hooked stingray.
“I thought I was gonna have to do everything for him, this boy so tidy and neat,” he said about the doctor. “But I ain’t never seen nobody pull out a hook with so little blood. He say he pulled out worse things before.”
Mama Ilene asked what we liked to eat, if we liked étouffée with shrimp or crawfish better. Eli had no idea what she was talking about, just said he liked SpaghettiOs. I was almost embarrassed, but Mama Ilene just said, “Maybe you’d be more of a crawfish boy, then,” and asked what kind of desserts we had a taste for. This time Eli said, “Turkish delight,” and I rolled my eyes. He had never actually eaten it before and learned it from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I explained to Mama and Papa what the book was: a fantasy, I said, about a secret world and talking animals and humans who become kings and queens by the end. I could see, in the rear-view mirror, Papa Roy’s eyes staring at something far ahead beyond the road.
Eventually we crossed a bridge over the Mississippi and continued downward until the last skyscraper faded away and I could, for the first time in memory, see where the sky touched the earth from side to side.
It was a hideous earth. For long stretches we straddled nothing but brown waters and the crooked trees that soaked there, hollowed and stripped by hurricanes and tornadoes. The clouds swayed low and the buzz of cicadas rattled through the open windows, which had been rolled down to substitute Papa Roy’s broken air conditioning. Everything passed so stiffly, so expertly trained to stand on soggy ground, that I forgot about what really went on underneath it all, that just beneath the waters and the swampy coverlet lay the crush of the mantle, a million years of change and pressure turning fossils to black riches. In the distance as we drove, red creaking rigs like great, stabbing storks sucked it from the earth, where one loose match would set every leak on fire, destroying everything. That’s the problem with trying to mine the past.