Down Sand Mountain (13 page)

I didn’t even think about it. I just pulled hard and the door scraped open and I climbed down inside and shut the door behind me. Just in time.

You can think about a lot of things when you’re sitting in a bomb shelter in the middle of the night and it’s so black you can’t see your hand, and you’re scared of the dark and you’re claustrophobic and the cops are after you so you can’t do anything about any of those things except try not to hyperventilate again. I sat there on a step like a blind man to wait until the cop was gone and I could finally go home, only how was I going to know the coast was clear without going back outside where the cop might be waiting? I listened as hard as I could but the only thing I heard was my own sandpaper breathing, which got quieter after a while but still echoed. I tried holding my breath to see if I could hear any better but got nothing with that, either. And I was shaking about a hundred times worse than I ever did in my life, and my mind was racing around a track like a greyhound dog. Where were Wayne and Darla? What happened to them? What if they got caught? What if it was my fault?

I decided I’d better pray awhile, so I started in on the Lord’s Prayer but that sounded too lonely, so I sang it the way we did in school when they played it over the PA system after the Pledge of Allegiance and before the announcements:

For some reason, even as scared as I was, that got me thinking about how everybody said I had a pretty voice when they made us sing in the vesper choir at church — actually me and Boopie Larent — they said we were better sopranos than the girls, only I didn’t want to sing like girls, and I also hated Mr. Rupert, the choir director, who was always grabbing your leg when you messed up and squeezing your thigh real hard and saying, “Boy, you want to see how the horse eats corn?” I guess his hand was supposed to be the horse’s mouth, and your leg was the corn.

I don’t know how long I sat there thinking about dumb stuff like that, but I finally had to come out. My claustrophobia got so bad I thought there were things in there touching me that I couldn’t see, plus I couldn’t breathe, either, and I got panicked that I might be running out of air. What I wanted to do was run home, but after I peeked out for a while and didn’t see the cop, and then climbed out and just stood there for a couple of minutes until I could stop shaking so bad, I made myself go back downtown to look for Wayne and Darla.

As far as I went was the dark side of the Sinclair station. At first I just looked around, but when I didn’t see any sign of them or of the police car, I tried whispering their names as loud as I could, which when you’re whispering isn’t very loud, of course. Nobody said anything back, even though I listened so hard it made my ears hurt.

And then I heard something else: not the cop again, but the little elevator on the Skeleton Hotel that nobody even knew could work — the freight elevator, which was just a pallet and cables. I couldn’t actually see anything, but it must have been at the top of the Skeleton Hotel and then brought somebody to the ground floor, which was just the farmers’ market, because a minute later somebody came out of there and walked across the road right toward the Sinclair station, then right on by, not even noticing me in the shadows because I didn’t move and didn’t breathe and didn’t make a single solitary sound.

It was a lady with a long coat and a hood, or else the ghost of a lady — I couldn’t tell because she went by so fast, plus I was so scared I squeezed my eyes shut until she was gone.

That right there would have been enough of a shock to me, but I never got to think about it too much because a minute later, after the lady got out of sight, I heard something howling from the top of the Skeleton Hotel and that was it for me. I got out of there as fast as I could and didn’t stop running until I got all the way home, and crawled in the window, and saw that Wayne wasn’t home, and threw my clothes in the dirty-clothes pile, and crawled up in the bunk bed. When my heart stopped galloping, I said my prayers, which I hadn’t done earlier when I went to bed the first time, before sneaking out. I prayed that nothing had followed me, and prayed about where the heck was Wayne, anyway, and what happened to Darla, too, and I kept praying like that until don’t ask me how but I fell asleep.

“RISE AND SHINE, BOYS. Fence won’t paint itself and breakfast is waiting.”

That’s what Dad said when he came banging into our bedroom the next morning. He yanked open the blinds and turned on the overhead light and said it was eight o’clock already, and Saturday morning, and time to get cracking. I felt like crying but sat up because I knew it wasn’t any use. Saturday was chore day and we always had to get up early, but nobody had said anything about us having to paint the fence. Wayne just kept snoring on the bottom bunk until Dad pulled down the covers and dumped him on the floor in his underwear.

“Let’s go,” Dad said. I couldn’t believe how happy he was when me and Wayne were so tired and miserable, but he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if he knew we had snuck out and all, and maybe that’s why he was going to make us paint the fence, but if so he didn’t say anything about it, but just finally left. “Breakfast is on the table,” he yelled back at us, and I knew what that meant. I crawled off the top bunk.

Wayne was trying to cover himself on the floor with the rug. “Where
were
you last night?” I said, but he didn’t answer.

“Well?” I said, but got nothing except he groaned under the rug. I accidentally kicked him on my way out of the bedroom and forgot to say I was sorry.

The kitchen table was loaded with everything you might need to get ready for chores: scrambled eggs, cheese grits, orange juice, halves of grapefruits with sugar, pancakes and syrup, even a box of Krispy Kremes. Tink had a glazed doughnut in each hand and looked as happy as Dad. First she took a bite from one, then a bite from the other. She parked them on her index fingers like giant rings and did some nibbling.

“I told Tink she could go on ahead since the boys were taking so long,” Mom said from the stove, where she was cooking about twenty pounds of bacon. She looked around when she heard me fall onto the old church pew that we used for a bench at the kitchen table and said, “Dewey, you look like you haven’t even slept. Tink, pour him a glass of orange juice right now and see if that won’t revive him. And where is your brother?” Mom was happy that morning, too, and I wondered if her and Dad were up to something, only I couldn’t figure out what that might be. Mom yelled for Wayne and it gave me a headache: “Wayne Turner, you have until I count to three to get in here. One. Two. Two and a half —”

Tink took over: “Two and three quarters, two and four quarters, two and five quarters. THREE.”

Wayne dragged himself in and plopped down next to me. Dad folded up his newspaper, clapped his hands together, and said why didn’t we sing “Johnny Appleseed” this morning instead of saying grace, which was something he never did, because he couldn’t hold a tune. Wayne put his head down in his hands. I just stared at my plate. The pattern around the edge, I think it was green vines, looked like it was swimming.

Tink dropped her doughnuts and said, “Everybody hold hands,” so Wayne had to lift his head and I had to touch his pinkie with my pinkie, then Tink started singing the grace. Mom and Dad sang too, all the way through to the end.

Wayne’s eyes were closing back up and my mouth barely could form the words, but Tink wasn’t through yet: “Amen, brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen. Hen died, rooster cried, poor old Ben committed suicide.”

Mom popped Tink on top of the head with a serving spoon and said, “That will be all, Young Lady.” But she smiled. “Now everybody dig in. There’s plenty.”

Half an hour later me and Wayne were standing outside at the end of the driveway at the start of the two-rail fence that ran the length of our yard and separated it from Turners Field. Dad handed us each a giant paintbrush and a bucket of white fence paint. “Let me know if you run out,” he said, still happy. “And nothing sloppy. I don’t want to see any paint on my grass.”

“OK, Dad,” I said, looking at all that fence, which went so far back in the yard that I couldn’t even see the end of it, although actually I couldn’t see the end not because the yard was so long — it was just half an acre — but because, halfway down, there was a stand of bamboo that grew through the fence. The bamboo section was the hardest to get at because whichever one of us was on the field side had to hold the bamboo away while the other one painted, and then had to make sure the bamboo didn’t swing back over and mess up the wet paint.

“This is going to take all day,” Wayne croaked. Then he started bossing me around. “I’ll take this side,” he said, waving his brush toward the yard. “You go over there.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I want the yard side. You got the yard side last time.”

“No, I didn’t,” Wayne said.

“Oh, just shut up.” I was too tired to get worked up about how unfair everything was, the way I could usually, so I went around to the field side but made sure I splattered paint on Wayne the first chance I got. He splattered me back, but at least I got him first. Dad came back after not too long to point out all the spots we had missed and to ask if we happened to know how come the screen was out of our bedroom window. Wayne said, “No, sir.” He guessed it must have just fallen out or something, but he was asleep and had no idea, and did Dad want us to get the ladder and hang it back up?

Dad said no, that was all right, he already put it back up himself, just thought he’d ask was all, and wasn’t it a great day to be painting? He said he figured if we really worked hard, we’d be done by that afternoon.

After he left, I was just about to tell Wayne what happened the night before — about the bomb shelter and the lady and the Howler — and also ask him again what the heck happened to him and Darla. I didn’t get the chance, though, because right about then we heard a squeaky bicycle and somebody singing an Elvis song coming up Orange Avenue and it was David Tremblay.

David hated his own house — or hated his stepdad, so he hated being there — so he came over to our house a lot of Saturday mornings, especially after they shipped his older brother, Ricky, off to reform school. When Mom saw him hanging out, she always told him the same thing: “David, there’s no standing around. If you’re going to be over here when the boys are working, you’re going to have to pitch in, too.” David smiled when she said that, and said, “Yes, ma’am.” And then he worked about twice as hard as me or Wayne. He always stayed for lunch, and probably would have moved in with us if he could.

Today he was riding with no hands like he owned the whole road and like if any cars came along they could just drive through people’s yards for all he cared. He had his hair done up like Elvis with a gallon of Brylcreem, about half of which you could see had already dripped down the back of his T-shirt.

He didn’t bother with the kickstand, but just dropped his bike in the grass by the fence.

“Whatchyall doing?”

He always asked that, no matter what. Then he pulled his giant comb out of his jeans pocket to touch things up a little bit with the hair.

“Digging a hole,” Wayne said, wagging his brush like he might flick paint on David Tremblay.

“Doesn’t look very deep to me,” David said, wiping his comb on his pants leg and leaving a big oil smear.

“It would if you climbed down in and looked up,” Wayne said.

“After you.” David did a sort of a bow and stuck his comb back in his pocket.

“No, no,” Wayne said. “Ladies first.”

David looked around slow, like there was a big crowd of people he had to examine, then back at Wayne. “I don’t see no ladies here. Maybe you were talking about yourself.”

“Not me. I thought maybe you just came back from the beauty parlor, and because of how bad that hairdo looks, I thought you might want to crawl in this hole for a while and hide.”

The way they kept talking about a hole this and a hole that, I finally glanced around to see if maybe there really was a hole that somebody dug when I wasn’t there or something. But there wasn’t. Just the fence.

After that Wayne and David moved a little ways off in the yard and leaned their heads together. Wayne’s brush dripped on the grass. He had his back to me but I could still tell he was whispering stuff to David. I leaned over the fence and yelled at them that I wasn’t going to paint all by myself and Wayne better come back or I was going to tell Dad. They kept whispering, though, and laughed a couple of times, and I heard David say, “Holy moly!” That’s when I knew they must be talking about last night. I yelled at them again. “Hey! We are supposed to be painting the fence or did you forget? You better get back over here or I mean it — I’m telling.”

Wayne looked over his shoulder and told me to shut up, then he turned back to David for more whispering. I yelled at
him
to shut up, but he ignored me and they laughed some more and so I got madder and madder. I figured what they were talking about was probably Darla, too, which I didn’t even want to think about, really, but I couldn’t help it: what if Wayne and her had been out somewhere kissing like Darla wanted to do with me that day up on Sand Mountain? That got me even madder, and so I kept yelling at Wayne, and at David, too, but they kept ignoring me until I went crazy the way I sometimes do. I cussed at them, and grabbed up the bucket of fence paint, and said I was going to dump it on them if they didn’t shut up. David laughed at that and so did Wayne. Wayne said he dared me to, and David said, “Yeah, we both dare you,” and they laughed some more until I ran over with paint sloshing all over the place and threw it on them.