Down Sand Mountain (2 page)

So now whenever Boopie got on the pogo stick or rode his unicycle or did about anything, Dottie watched him just so she’d always know what was what.

I picked up my shoe-shine kit, which was just sitting there in the garage like nobody even cared whose it was, and said, “If you borrow something from somebody, you’re supposed to ask them first.”

Boopie kept bouncing, and said, “My dad got it from your dad.”

I said everybody knew it belonged to me, so he should have asked me.

He said, “Sorry, Your Highness.”

I wanted to ask him how he got to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy, and how he learned soft-shoe, and how he got his face painted black with the big white lips, and where he got the suit and the top hat and the gloves he wore in the minstrel show. But I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of thinking he had anything I wanted. Dottie was on three hundred and twenty-nine then, and I started counting with her: “Three hundred and thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, twenty-two, twenty-three, two hundred and eleven, twelve —”

She tried to count louder, but I just counted louder, too: “One hundred and one, one hundred and two, three thousand and nine,” until she finally yelled at me to shut up and go home and leave them alone, but when she did, Boopie yelled at her, “Don’t listen to him; don’t stop counting,” but it was too late, she had already lost the count, and I yelled back at both of them why didn’t they just start over since they didn’t know what number they were on, then I pushed Boopie off the pogo stick and ran home.

The next night, I asked Dad if I could be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy in next year’s minstrel show. Me and Wayne and our little sister, Tink, were lying on the floor in the living room after Sunday night church, watching the Disney show
Wonderful World of Color,
only it wasn’t color because we only had our black-and-white. Dad didn’t believe in color TV, plus he said we couldn’t afford it.

I said, “Can I, Dad?” but he wasn’t in the mood to talk about it, because he said what grown-ups always say when they’re not in the mood to talk about it: “We’ll see.” That meant I was supposed to be quiet, but he had only said it once, so I tried again. “When will you see, Dad?” I said. “Does that mean you have to ask somebody? Who do you have to ask? When can you ask them?”

He said, “I said we’ll see, and we’ll see. A year is a long time. You could be too big by then. They only want small boys.” A commercial came on and he went into the kitchen to eat his cold consommé out of a can.

What he said just about made me happy, though. I was the third smallest boy in my class and had been since second grade, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to grow anytime soon. There was Ronnie Lott, who was always spitting, and picking his underwear out of his butt. Then there was Richard Speight, who everybody said was a dwarf but I think there was just something wrong about his back. Then there was me. I had a twenty-five-dollar bet with Dad about whether I would still be shorter than Wayne when I turned eighteen. I know he only made the bet because he felt sorry for me. I probably shouldn’t have bet against myself, because it might jinx me from growing, but twenty-five dollars was a lot of money, especially when your allowance was only a quarter a week.

I gave up on the
Wonderful World of Color
and went into mine and Wayne’s bedroom and got out my shoe-shine kit and looked through it until I found the flat round can of Kiwi black. I twisted the top off and rubbed some on my arm to see how it looked. We had brown, too, which looked like it might be more the color of real colored people, but from what I’d seen at the minstrel show, I thought maybe I ought to go with the black.

It took me about half an hour to get my whole face painted with the shoe polish. The smell of it made me dizzy even though I didn’t do any right around the edge of my nostrils or right around my eyes, which left little pink rings there, like a pig snout, and like I-don’t-know-what eyes. My ears were a problem, too, because I didn’t want to get the polish up inside where it might be too near to my brain, so it was just black around the big part of the ear. Some got up in my hair where my crew cut stuck up in front, and when it dried, it was harder than Brylcreem. My lips looked stupid because they were pink but they were supposed to be white, only we didn’t have any white Kiwi since who wore white shoes except a nurse?

I thought I looked good enough, though, better than Boopie Larent, anyway, and I stood up and waved my arms around like Boopie did, like windmills, and I did my legs and my hips like Elvis. That stuff, that Kiwi, I don’t know what was in it but the next thing I knew I was singing pretty loud and it sounded good to me, too — also better than Boopie — and I must have got louder and louder the more I sang of those songs from the minstrel show.

My arms, I was cranking them faster and faster like I could just about take off at any minute, and I believe if Elvis had seen me, he would have been proud to call me son, and I could have danced and sang like that all night, probably, except I heard something at the door and it was Wayne, standing with his mouth open and full of a bite of one of his usual peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches. I could see the mash of it in his mouth all the way from where I was in the middle of the room and it was disgusting, also like usual. Next to him was Tink, looking scared about something, so I turned around to look behind me to see if there was something by the window, because you never know, there could have been.

I stopped singing by then, of course, and I also wasn’t dancing like the King anymore, or like anybody, but I was still dizzy and my head felt like it was still dancing, only I couldn’t breathe too well. Also I didn’t feel my legs too well, either, so I decided to sit down and so I dropped from standing up directly to my butt on the floor. I heard Wayne tell Tink, “Go get Mom,” but I don’t remember between that and Mom holding my face in her hands and saying, “Dewey? Dewey? Answer me.”

From a long ways away I said, “Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t know why I was so dizzy then, or why my tailbone hurt. I must have already forgotten about the shoe polish and sitting down from standing up. I heard her say, “Go get your father and tell him to bring some turpentine and a rag,” and Wayne said, “He’s not going to like this,” and Tink said, “He thinks he’s the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy but he’s not,” and Mom said, “Go watch TV,” and Tink said, “I don’t have to,” and Mom said, “Excuse me, Young Lady?” Tink ran back to the living room and I must have been laughing at something because Mom said, “I don’t see what’s so funny, Mister.” When she started calling us Young Lady and Mister, it meant we were in a lot of trouble but I couldn’t stop laughing and she said, “You better stop laughing, this is serious. Do you have any idea what you did to yourself?” only something didn’t sound the way it was supposed to and I realized it was because she was laughing, too, and I thought everything was going to be all right even though I still couldn’t feel my legs. I hadn’t heard my mom laugh in so long, probably since before President Kennedy died, that I’d forgotten how happy it made me, but that was just until my dad came in and he started cussing, which my mom always called Mine Talk, which he wasn’t supposed to do around us kids. Mom always told him if he was mad to just say “Good garden peas!” instead, and he said that now, too, which just made me laugh more, and I think made Mom laugh, too. I slapped my hands down on the floor over and over like a seal at a zoo until Dad grabbed me by the back of the neck and lit into my face with a rag soaked in turpentine that felt like a Brillo pad. Then I really couldn’t breathe and I wasn’t laughing and slapping the floor like a seal anymore, I was bawling like a calf like they had out at Mr. Juddy’s farm, who was a dragline operator from the mines. Dad scrubbed and scrubbed the skin off my face with that rag and I tried to tell him I couldn’t breathe but he wasn’t listening, and I don’t think Mom was laughing anymore by that time, either; she was saying, “You don’t have to do it so hard,” and he said, “If I don’t do it hard, it won’t come off. Look, look, it’s not coming off. There’s going to be a stain that won’t come off, and how in tarnation is he going to go to school like this? Oh, good garden peas.”

MY FACE WAS STILL STAINED KIWI BLACK when Mom pulled off the covers to make me get up the next morning, which was the first day of school. I checked right away in the mirror. I have this part of my brain that makes stuff up when somebody asks me a question but I don’t know the answer. It makes them think I’m smarter than I really am, which is OK, but it also makes
me
think I’m smarter than I really am, which can be a problem. Anyway, that part of my brain took over, and what it did was convince the rest of me that I looked tan. Maybe not regular tan, but tan the way those kids whose families have cottages out at Snake Lake are tan because they spend the whole summer with their boats and their rich families and their friends going water-skiing. A lot of people called them Colored-People Tans, except they used the other word for it.

Unfortunately, my tan idea didn’t last long. “He still looks like a colored boy,” Tink said when I finally came into the kitchen for breakfast.

Wayne said, “Mom, you can’t let the freak go to school like that. Not with me. He’ll embarrass me.”

I said, “You told me you were a Lone Wolf.”

Wayne did one of his giant sighs, then he said, “That was last year. This year is different. I’m going out for JV football and don’t need a freak brother, a
freaktoid,
to mess everything up.” The way he said all that, it wasn’t like he was talking to me. In fact, it wasn’t like I was even there.

Tink jumped up on her chair. “What’s a freaktoid? Does it mean colored?” I told her to shut up and she said, “You can’t make me.”

Mom had cooked grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and stewed prunes because it was a special morning, and
Good Housekeeping
said lunch for breakfast once in a while kept a family from falling in a rut. I poked my finger in the middle of Tink’s grilled cheese because I knew she hated anybody to touch her food.

Mom waved her spatula at me. “Dewey, that is unacceptable.” She grabbed my plate and set it down in front of Tink. “Here you go, Tink. You can eat your brother’s.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m not going to eat it, anyway.”

Wayne shoved the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and grabbed his new notebooks and pens and lunch money that Mom had lined up on the counter. He would have just left but Mom said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” and he said could he please be excused, please, and thanks for the breakfast.

Mom said, “Wait for your brother,” then she wrapped another grilled cheese in a paper towel and handed it to me. She told me I could eat it on the way to school, and I wasn’t a freak, I looked fine, I was a very handsome boy. Then she stopped.

“Where is your new shirt?”

“What new shirt?” I said, though I knew exactly what she was talking about because it was still hanging on the back of a chair in my bedroom. It was something called Ban-Lon. Mom said it didn’t hold water, just sort of shed it, so instead of hanging it on the line to dry, all you had to do was wring it out. And it was wrinkleproof, too, so no ironing ever. I went back to the bedroom, knowing it was no use arguing, and looked at the shirt. It was orange. It had three buttons and a collar. It smelled like the chemical plant at the phosphate mine. In elementary school I only wore T-shirts, and they were always cotton, but my mom said, “This is high school and things are going to be different around here, Mister, so you better get used to it.”

I pulled on the Ban-Lon and right away my skin went crazy. I think the cells on the outside were trying to crawl behind the ones underneath, a worse torture than getting tied down in the desert on an ant bed with honey smeared all over your body. I tugged at the neck and sleeves, trying to stretch it every way I could, but nothing worked, plus I started to sweat right away. If Wayne ever pulled it over my head, he could suffocate me with it. I was so miserable, I thought about suffocating myself. Our dog, Suzy, a half beagle–half basset, had followed me to the bedroom, and I was pretty sure she was shaking her head.

When Tink saw me come out of the bedroom in the Ban-Lon, she blew tomato soup out of her nose and said, “Colored boy freaktoid.” I stuck my finger in her other grilled cheese, then ran out the door. I could hear Tink crying and Mom yelling until I was halfway down the block.

Wayne was all the way over on Orange Avenue at David Tremblay’s house at the corner of Orange and Second Street by then. They’d been best friends since about first grade, so I guessed if Wayne was a Lone Wolf last year, then him and David must have been Lone Wolfs together. I walked toward them, trying to act like I wasn’t worried about anything, when the fact was that I was worried about everything: the Ban-Lon, the shoe polish, remembering my locker combination, the red bellies the seniors gave the new seventh-graders. When I got to the corner, Wayne and David Tremblay were already walking up Second Street. David Tremblay turned around with his Elvis hair and his eyes got big when he saw me and he laughed like a girl until Wayne punched him on the arm and he punched Wayne on
his
arm, and they ran on up Second toward the high school.