Thrown-away Child

mud from whence it had come.
    “Head-sucking fool!” she hollered. “You want to swallow that mess of crawfish brains, you going to wind up being soft in your own damn head!”
    “Well, there she is—my little sister,” Ruby whispered to me, polishing off a bit of crawfish meat and poking my ribs with an elbow. She called out to Janice, “Hi there, Janny dearest.”
    Janice glowered at Ruby through dark glasses. She moved along to the opposite end of the table and busied herself by kissing everybody hello, leaving Ruby and me for last and Cousin Teddy for never.
    Not only had she interrupted my monkey reverie, but Janice had also interrupted Teddy the Torch. He had been regaling the table with the retelling of a legend. Of course it was my first time hearing the story, one more of the family gems that Ruby had withheld from me. Everybody else had no doubt heard the story a hundred times, though it did not seem to diminish their enjoyment now.
    Teddy was cousin to Ruby and Janice on the Flagg side. His head was an oil field of pomade, and he had a spongy face the color of peanut butter. I imagined if I was to touch his face it might actually feel like peanut butter, too. I have noticed that faces get that way when they are finally tired out from vices: too many cigarettes maybe, certainly too many days of liquor or drugs.
    A lot of people must have observed the same about Teddy, so many that he had developed the habit of being the first one to comment on his appearance. Such as right after we were introduced, when Teddy said, “I got the kind of face where people who don’t even know me come up and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ ”
    Teddy worked with some kind of computer at the dog pound. He told me what kind, but I understand nothing about machines that are smarter than I am. Anyway, the dog pound gig was a day job. His show business vocation had earned him the sobriquet Teddy the Torch.
    “Don’t do too much singing and dancing anymore, though,” Teddy explained. “Just a little now and then. Still do choreography, and my good deeds. Like for instance, I’m trying to talk cousin Perry into taking the test for a job at the pound. Also I direct the choir at Zeb Tilton’s church. Yeah, I had to cut way back on actual artistic performances—after the accident.”
    The “accident” was ten years ago on the Fourth of July. Teddy was the center man in a near-nude, five-man dance line at a Bourbon Street club called Boys! Boys! Boys!—Three-Bs for short—and that year he came up with the idea of ending the regular floor show with a patriotic pièce de résistance in commemoration of Independence Day.
    “Go on, tell Ruby husband what you did, fool!” Teddy’s orders came from Mama’s neighbor, old Miss Minnie Sue. (“Practically another sister to me,” Mama said when I shook the old lady’s spidery brown hand after being introduced. “Shoo—I’m old enough to be Vi mama!” Miss Minnie said. She had twin black warts on her chin, one of them sprouting a clump of gray hair. “I’m so damn old I count my teeth every time I got to bite the bullet.”)
    Quite the innovative showman, Teddy explained that part of his scanty costume included a dozen sparklers stuffed into his nether cheeks, which would be set ablaze by one of the other dancers when the attention of the audience was drawn to the slam-bang crest of the orchestra’s drum solo. Then, as the drummer came down from his heights by tapping on the snare rims, the blue light would fall dramatically on Teddy. Teddy was to twirl around, bend over, and pull away a rear flap of silver lamé, surprising the audience with a festive burst of multicolored sparks.
    “Didn’t quite work out the way I planned it in my head,” Teddy said. With a straight face he said this. People who wind up with what’s-wrong faces tend to develop unusual logic systems. They do not laugh at the right places, for instance.
    “Gawd a’mighty, I’ll say it didn’t work out!” Miss Minnie whooped, clapping her thin hands together, nodding yes to Uncle Bud when he held up the offer of a long-necked bottle of Dixie beer. “The Negro’s asshole caught fire from them sparklers! That’s why we all calling him Teddy the Torch!”
    The table rolled with laughter, Teddy laughing as hard as anyone. I turned to Ruby during all this merriment and asked, “How come you never told me any of this stuff?” But she was laughing so much herself she could not make out the