Down Sand Mountain (18 page)

“How come I get to come over?”

“Well, I guess I know you so you’re not a stranger, obviously.”

“When was your mom a mermaid?”

“When she finished up high school. She ran away with her girlfriend named Luanne to Weeki Wachee Springs. They had jobs as dancers somewhere until somebody found out my mom could swim and hold her breath so long. Then they made her a mermaid. She could have been in show business but she decided to have her children instead. That’s why she came back to Sand Mountain.”

“You mean you and Darwin?”

“Well, we
are
her children.” She said that in a very sarcastic way, but I decided to ignore it the same way Walter Wratchford did.

I asked her where her dad was, and she said he was over in Weeki Wachee Springs, in fact he
owned
Weeki Wachee Springs, didn’t I know that? She said he was rich and sent them a big fat check for five hundred dollars every month that her grandpa put in his bank account. She said pretty soon they were going back to Weeki Wachee to live, but right now they had to stay in Sand Mountain to take care of her grandpa, which I guess they must have been doing ever since I could remember, because Darla and Darwin were always in the same grade as me at school even if we hadn’t ever been friends before now.

“What’s wrong with your grandpa?”

“He’s sick.”

“Is he going to die?”

“Of course not.”

“Is he going to get better?”

“No. I doubt it.”

“How come I never see him?”

“Because I already told you. He’s sick.”

“Is he a general?”

“A general what?”

“Of the army. Of World War II.”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “Well, yeah.”

I asked when was the last time she saw her dad — I guess I was being pretty nosy — and she said, “Oh, all the time,” but I didn’t really believe her. I didn’t believe they were ever going to go live in Weeki Wachee Springs, either, or that her grandpa was a general, or much of the rest of the story. Usually I believed whatever anybody told me, but you could just tell that Darla was making a lot of that stuff up.

“Are you scared of your grandpa?” I asked her.

She turned around on the horse and stared at me for a second like she might yell or something. “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She kicked Bojangles in the side, I guess to make him go fast, but he just twisted his neck real slow to look back at us with the stuff still leaking out of his eyes, and then he turned his head back just as slow and kept walking around the ring.

“Let’s go out on the road,” Darla said. “I’m bored of this.” I wasn’t sure if she meant riding around in circles, or the conversation about her family, or both, but I didn’t ask. She steered us over to the fence, where she leaned down like a real cowboy and unlatched the gate. The next thing I knew, she had Bojangles trotting again, this time down the stable driveway out to the Old Bartow Highway. Once we got there, she turned him north and we rode for a long time right there on the road, which was really more like the memory of a road, since big sections of the asphalt were missing or worn away or grown over with not grass exactly but what passed for grass in places like that around Sand Mountain. We didn’t talk for about ten minutes because I was worried about cars, anyway, and the ditch next to the road, and the train tracks on the other side of the ditch, but we only saw one car the whole time, and it slowed way down, and we never did see a train.

It didn’t take long before we were out of sight of Moon’s. At first there were some oak trees that marked the back side of the Pits for about a quarter of a mile, almost like a fence. After that there was nothing because they had mined everything out for miles in every direction back in the old days before reclamation, so everything along Old Bartow Highway looked like pictures of the surface of the moon. There were craters and dirt piles and rocks and old dams and slime pits. There were rusted truck beds and dead tractors nose-down in the sand like something praying for something. There was the wreck of an old dragline, a small one, fallen off of its track with the boom buckled in half and the bucket and cables missing, probably stuff somebody took for another machine years and years ago or for scrap metal. There was pipe everywhere, hundreds of feet of pipe along the road that looked like it was shedding metal flakes just while you looked at it, and then nothing but the shell of a booster pump that could have been a space satellite that crashed from outer space. And there was hardly a tree or a bush or a palmetto stand that wasn’t twisted and crippled and looking so desperate for water it made your mouth dry just to see them.

Whenever I was on top of Sand Mountain, I didn’t like to look in that direction because it was so sad and lonely and
desolate
— a word Mom taught me. You couldn’t ever say anything about it to my dad, though, because he would just tell you, “Don’t complain with your mouth full because that’s what’s putting food on this table, young man,” even though I think it bothered him, too, that the mines had left the land looking like that, and you could tell he was proud of the reclamation projects they had him in charge of, almost like he’d had the idea himself, even though it was the state law now.

But Darla didn’t seem to mind or notice, just the same way she didn’t seem to mind or notice what an old nag her poor horse was, or how phony her whole story about her dad owning Weeki Wachee Springs was, or anything like that. After riding awhile, and probably forgetting I was even squeezed in behind her, sweating like a little pig, Darla started singing, and once she got going, she didn’t stop — it was just song after song after song. I joined in on some of them and she didn’t seem to mind.

Eventually we turned around, I guess when Darla was half out of songs, because she sang all the way back, too, and only got quiet for about the last ten minutes, so I figured she had used them all up. I took the opportunity to ask her something that had been bothering me and that as usual I had been so slow figuring out that it worried me I might be retarded.

“Is Wayne your boyfriend?”

She turned partway around but didn’t quite look at me before she snapped her head back forward and said, “I wouldn’t have him for a boyfriend if you paid me a million dollars.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid now just for asking, and for ever thinking I’d figured this thing out that obviously I hadn’t.

“Your brother,” she said, not through yet. “Somebody ought to tell him he thinks he’s really something but he’s not anything but a I-don’t-know-what —”

“How about a maggot?” I wanted to help her if I could.

“Yes, a maggot. You brother is a big maggot.”

I liked this a lot and wanted to keep helping. “How about a tapeworm?”

Darla nodded. “I don’t know why I even bothered to be nice to him, anyway.” Her shoulders shook and I knew it wasn’t because of the horse because of how slow we were going, so I figured she was laughing. I laughed with her for about a second, really more of a chuckle, until I realized she wasn’t laughing after all, so I stopped and said I was sorry. I meant I was sorry for laughing when she wasn’t, but I had the idea that she might have thought I was sorry for something else. Either way, I guess it was the right thing because she said, “That’s OK,” and wiped her eyes, and by that time we were all the way back at Moon’s.

DAD DIDN’T FORGET ABOUT THE BOOGERBOTTOM, not at all, so me and Wayne went on Friday, even though David Tremblay tried to talk us out of it. He brought up that business from the Scout trip again about colored people eating their dogs.

“I ain’t kidding, either,” he said. “I knew a guy one time his dog ran away down to the Boogerbottom and the guy went looking for him and finally found him in a bag down by the Peace River, or what was left of him, just his bones picked clean.”

I asked how the guy knew it was his dog, and David nodded like he was waiting for the question. “Collar,” he said. “Found that, too.”

Wayne said it was all baloney and for me to just come on and let’s get this thing over with. David kicked at Suzy, our little dog, and said we should bring her with us, see what would happen. Tink, who had been listening to us talk but not saying anything, screamed and picked up Suzy, or tried to, though Suzy was too long and heavy for her, but Tink somehow managed to stagger like that to the house still screaming the whole time.

“Way to go,” Wayne said.

David just pulled out his comb. “There’s other stuff goes on down there you don’t even want to know about. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The worst thing was Mom caught us before we left and said we ought to look presentable and for Wayne to put on a button shirt and for me to put on a new orange Ban-Lon shirt she had bought to take the place of the other one I burned up with the magnifying glass that day at Bowlegs Creek.

One of the things you notice first off about the Boogerbottom is there isn’t any grass. They have weeds there, but no grass. Just dirt. Dirt yards, dirt streets. Dirt. And where there isn’t dirt there’s sand, which was why we ended up pushing our bikes whenever we tried to ride down the middle of the streets, because the tires sunk down too low and we couldn’t pedal. It wasn’t as soft on the sides, but there was about a foot or two-foot ridge at the edge of the road, where it was sunk down from I guess years of people driving on it but no pavement, and there were no sidewalks, either — just the road, the ridge, and the start of people’s yards. Wayne said he bet when it rained here they couldn’t hardly even drive cars because of all the mud they must have in the streets, and I said I bet that wasn’t a problem because I didn’t see too many cars, anyway.

The first person we met was an old lady with a rag on her head raking her yard in long careful lines, and she was the first we gave a flyer to. She blinked at us like she’d never seen white boys down there before, then she blinked at the flyer. Then she said, “Is this for the insurance? Are you with that Mr. Cowans?”

Wayne said, “We don’t know a Mr. Cowans. This is for the city council election, for Mr. Turner, who’s running for the city council, and he would appreciate your vote. He wants to pave your streets here.” Wayne nodded toward the street. “That’s his campaign promise. It’s all written right here.”

She blinked at Wayne, blinked again at the flyer, blinked at Wayne again. “Not for the insurance?”

“Nuh-uh,” Wayne said. “For the election.”

“All right, then,” she said. She folded the flyer without reading it. Folded it some more, the way Darla had done those notes to Wayne only without all the Scotch tape, then tucked it down the front of her dress somewhere and went back to raking.

The next couple of houses were easier. Nobody was home, so we tucked the flyers in the screen-door handles. I was careful not to scrape my hand, because they were so rusty.

We kept going deeper into the Boogerbottom and it didn’t take long before a gang of little kids was following us — staring and whispering and every now and then yelling something like, “Hey, hey you!” and then laughing when we turned to look at them. “Hey, hey you! Hey, hey you!” They stayed a couple of people’s yards behind but inched closer when we left our bikes and went up to one house together, so after that one of us stayed with the bikes. We didn’t want them to get stolen. Hardly anybody was home at any of the houses, and if they were, it was usually an old woman like that first old woman, raking the yard, or hanging clothes out on a clothesline, or sitting in a chair under a shade tree, fanning herself, or holding a dirty baby, or swatting at flies and gnats.

The kids started chanting after a while: “Hey, hey you! Hey, hey you!” There had been just a couple at first, then more, finally a dozen, all about six or seven years old except for a littler one, who they made come closer to us, who didn’t have pants on, like the boy we saw that Sunday in front of Miss Deas’s. His eyes got wider and wider, but whenever he turned around to go back, the other kids shouted at him, “Go on. Go on or I’ll hurt you, boy.”

So he kept coming. He got to about ten feet away from us and I smiled at him. I wished I had some candy or some bubble gum to give him, he looked so scared, and I wished they wouldn’t keep doing that to him, making him come closer even though he didn’t want to. His eyes were so wide I thought his head might explode if they got any bigger, and I was just about to tell him it was all right, we wouldn’t hurt him, when he lifted his arm up and threw a rock at us that hit Wayne on his ear.

He ran back to the other kids, and when Wayne picked up the rock and took a step toward them, they scattered like a leaf pile in a hurricane.

“Let’s just go home,” I said. “They don’t want us here.”

Wayne ran his fingers over the rock and stuck it in his pocket. His ear was red, but that could have just been from the sun. “No, we have to finish up. Dad told us to.”

“We can tell him we did. We can just say it. We can leave the flyers right here and let people pick them up.”

Wayne said he wasn’t going to lie to Dad and I said it wasn’t lying, we already passed out a bunch of them, and we couldn’t help it if they didn’t want us down here, and I bet colored people didn’t even vote, anyway. Wayne said of course they don’t vote.