Chinaberry Sidewalks Read Free Page B

nightly shortcut down the hall and out through the bathroom wall. Past midnight, five houses down, Ruby Gaines would yell, “Got-dammit, H.B., go home and get in the bed,” thus alerting the entire neighborhood that Horace Boudreaux Chenier, the crazy Cajun peeping Tom, was out making his rounds.
    How to make it safely through the wicked summer nights was a question that rarely came up among Jacinto City’s sweltering denizens, though how to stay cool was under constant investigation. In a cockeyed stroke of low-cost ingenuity, Frank Sharp’s suburban innovators hit on a brilliant plan to do just that: the attic fan. If there has ever been a more left-footed concept than this—a fan the size of a small, fat airplane propeller wedged into the hallway ceiling and working in reverse, sucking instead of blowing—I’ve yet to encounter it. A switch on the bathroom wall triggered the fan’s slow assimilation of speed until, at full-tilt, the house shook with the rattle and roar of a B-52 bomber.
    On paper this might’ve looked like a home run, but its practical application told a different story. Sixty-four straight days at ninety-six degrees and 92 percent humidity revealed the stupidity of inviting the outside indoors. With an attic fan sucking away, window screens had a life expectancy shorter than the Little League baseball season. In my parents’ new house, by mid-July of the second summer, the bedroom screens were a mesh of crumbling rust. As with the holes in the ceiling, my father had neither the money nor the inclination to meet the problem head-on; and once the screens were gone, so was our last line of defense. Without any screens at all, the attic fan brought us face-to-face with one of Mother Nature’s most bothersome creatures.
    The Gulf Coast of Texas in 1961 was a breeding ground for mosquitoes more deadly and opportunistic than any others in known existence. That summer, front-page news focused almost entirely on the encephalitis epidemic rampant from Beaumont to Brownsville, and the purveyors of this dreaded disease were feasting on human blood and spreading the sickness around like Confederate money. One bite from the wrong mosquito and the unlucky bastard infected would lapse into a deep coma from which some never awoke. Locally, the condition was known as “the sleepin’ sickness.”
    My father wasn’t buying it. “Sleepin’ sickness, my ass,” he’d scoff at the news report on the ever-rolling black-and-white television screen. “I wish one of ’em would put me to sleep. I sure as hell ain’t gettin’ no rest with them noisy sons-a-bitches buzzin’ around bitin’ me all night long.” Meanwhile, the attic fan served us up like hors d’oeuvres.
    But I was taking the epidemic seriously and had The Tingler and House on Haunted Hill , the Vincent Price double horror feature my cousin Larry and I sat through twice at the Capitan Theater, to thank for my diligence. I knew for a fact that only a fool would fail to keep a sharp eye out for things supernatural. Seeing a human spine rise from a bathtub full of blood, or a giant crab monster luring unsuspecting victims into its seaside cave by crying out for help using the voices of people whose heads it had recently bitten off, furthered my resolve to never let my guard down. To blame these deadly mosquitoes on an abnormally rainy summer was to ignore all the signs pointing to their planned takeover of the world. Any self-respecting Vincent Price fan knew this was the reason they were putting us all to sleep.
    I refused to be a hapless victim. Beneath a sheet, three blankets, and two of my grandmother’s handmade quilts, I braced myself for the long night with the belief that the deadliest insect could never penetrate my fortress of layered cotton. Sleep, when it came, usually from lack of oxygen, was fitful. The moment I nodded off, the covers hit the floor, and most mornings I awoke with bleeding ankles. From the sweat-soaked womb of my