Down Sand Mountain (20 page)

ON SUNDAY THE TIRE TOWER CAUGHT FIRE, down in the Boogerbottom. The whole sky over Sand Mountain turned black and stayed that way. You couldn’t go outside without choking on the smoke, and it stunk worse than a skunk or a polecat or a pulp mill. A black film got all over everything and everybody, and if you stayed outside too long, you started to look like you were colored. People said they put the owner of the Tire Tower in jail for letting it happen, and not having a permit, either. Me and Wayne had seen him when we were on our bikes running from the colored kids. He didn’t seem like somebody who belonged in jail, but I guess you never know what makes a criminal.

There was a story going around that somebody set the Tire Tower on fire on purpose, but nobody seemed to know why they might have done it. I also heard that all those tires in the Tire Tower were worth a million dollars and that the Firestone Company would pay that much so they could melt them back down into rubber and make new tires, but I doubted that was true or else why was it just the one colored man collecting them all those years?

There was nothing the Sand Mountain volunteer fire department could do about a tire fire except make sure it didn’t spread onto trees or houses or anything, and it wasn’t until a couple of days later when the fire finally burned itself down to where it just smoldered that we learned what was really going on. That’s when Dad got a note saying, “Now you see what happens.” It was written on the back of one of Dad’s campaign flyers that somebody mailed back to us. There was also a picture somebody drew of two people kissing — one white, one colored — and they wrote underneath it that Dad must love colored people, only they didn’t say it quite that way. I saw it on Dad’s dresser and showed it to Wayne.

“Oh, man,” Wayne said. “They must mean the tire fire.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” Except that I didn’t really know. Why would they burn down the Tire Tower? Dad just said he was going to get the streets paved in the Boogerbottom, not anything else, and he didn’t have anything to do with the Tire Tower, anyway.

A police officer came to our house and his name was O. O. Odom. I wondered if he was the same one from the night me and Wayne and Darla went down to the Skeleton Hotel and he chased me from the Sinclair station. Officer Odom looked over the flyer pretty carefully. Him and Dad were in the front room but we could see them from the family room, where we were pretending to watch TV, only we turned it down really low so we could hear what they were saying, too.

“Now, what makes you think this here is connected to the tire fire?” Officer Odom said. He pronounced it “tar far.”

“What else would it be referring to?” Dad said.

Officer Odom scratched his head. “Well, I guess it could just mean they expect people are going to be mailing you back your papers like this fella did. ‘So now you see what happens.’ They don’t want it, so they send it back to you.” He paused. “Maybe they think you’re being too keen on the colored people.”

Dad stabbed his finger in the middle of the flyer. “Exactly,” he said. “Which was why they set fire to the Tire Tower and wrote ‘Now you see what happens.’”

Officer Odom shook his head. “But it doesn’t
say
anything here about the tar far.”

Dad threw up his hands and said, “Fine, fine. Maybe you’re right. Thank you so much for coming by and looking in to all this. We’ll rest easier knowing you’re on the job.”

Officer Odom looked like Dad hurt his feelings, and I had to admit Dad did sound kind of sarcastic. “You don’t have to be that way,” Officer Odom said, and picked up his hat from the coffee table.

Mom came out of the kitchen and went past us into the front room. She must have heard what Dad said and how he said it, because she was really nice to Officer Odom. She shook his hand and thanked him for coming over, in a way that sounded like she meant it. After he left, she gave Dad a look and then he left, too. Mom said he was going to the shed to work on something, but I snuck out later and peeked in the door and saw he was in there smoking a cigarette even though he was supposed to have quit a long time before.

On Wednesday I went over to Darla’s for a dance lesson. Her mom said it was time I learned the tango, which was fine with me because I was sick of worrying about the election and the threats and the tire fire and was happy to think about something else for a while. At first Darla’s mom did it with me, but my head only came up to her boobs and they kept knocking me around, which was very embarrassing. You have to be really close for the tango, and any time I leaned my head away from getting hit, she pulled me back in. I couldn’t say anything about the boob-knocking, of course, but Mrs. Turkel must have finally noticed because she said for Darla to come over and practice with me instead.

Darla had obviously done the tango before, because she grabbed my one hand and pulled our arms out straight in front of us, and she pressed her cheek against my cheek, and she held my other hand down by our sides. Mrs. Turkel put on the record and away we went, following our arms to one end of the room, then dipping, then changing arms and cheeks and following our other arms back to where we started. The only problem was our knees bumping into one another when we did our turns, which must have been my fault because Darla told me it was.

“Watch out, dummy. That hurt,” she said, but I didn’t have to say anything back because her mom told her if she was going to speak to a partner on the dance floor, she should always make sure she was a lady about it. After that when our knees bumped, Darla smiled really big and said, “Pardon me, sir, but I think you might have injured me and could you please not?” It was very phony, but I guess better than being called Dummy.

Anyway, I liked the tango a lot and thought I was getting pretty good at it until Mrs. Turkel said OK, now Darla was going to demonstrate with Darwin, who I hadn’t even noticed was hanging around at the door. Darla said she didn’t want to dance with Darwin, he always squeezed her too tight. Darwin told her not to be a baby — it was beginning to sound like me and Wayne — but once they got started, I could see that it was true. Darwin squeezed so close to Darla that you would have thought he was her boyfriend instead of her brother.

Darla said, “Mom!” but Mrs. Turkel just said, “If you’re going to learn proper technique, you have to practice proper technique.” Then she turned to me and said she hoped I was taking note, and I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

I was happy it was just me and Darla again and Wayne was out of the picture, and I even sat by her at lunch the next day, which I was pretty nervous about. It surprised her, I could tell, and it surprised Darwin even more, because when he saw us at a table together as he came out of the lunch line, he stopped and stared for a minute.

“Do you want my roll?” I said, hoping Darla would say yes and take it before those guys Head and Moe came along, but they showed up before she could say anything and before we could have a conversation at all. Moe grabbed my roll and popped it in his mouth. Head looked hard at Darla, like he was trying to figure something out. His two eyebrows crawled together in the middle of his forehead, then he asked Moe, wasn’t this the girl they caught at the cemetery with the colored boy? He said it like Darla wasn’t sitting right there.

Moe was still chewing but didn’t mind talking with his mouth full. He said, “Back last summer?”

Head nodded his head. “You think maybe it was Little Sambo here she was with?” He was talking about me and I wished I could slide under the table and crawl right out of there, or I wished they would both die of a heart attack. But mostly I wished I hadn’t ever sat there by Darla in the lunchroom. Moe said, “Could be, could be,” then he said there was no way to know for sure; they all looked alike.

Eventually they wandered off toward the lunch line but I could still hear them, sounding like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello or funny guys like that.

Darla didn’t look up from her tray the whole time, and I stared down at my tray for a while, too, but I could tell people around us had heard everything. I guess I should have said something to make Darla feel better, but then she should have said something to make me feel better, too.

She mashed her peas with her fork, every single one of them, and then mashed them together, and then drew some patterns in the green muck, and then swirled in some powdered mashed potatoes we had that day, and then poured some of her milk in there to make a kind of a lake around everything. She acted like nothing had happened and started talking about Moon Pies — how come nobody ever ate Moon Pies anymore? Sometimes when she brought up a new subject all of a sudden, it gave me a headache and this was one of those times. It was like looking down to see if your shoe was tied and walking into something, or stepping on a rake and the handle coming up and hitting you in the head. My stomach growled from still being hungry.

The next day after school, I went over to Darla’s house because I told her I would, even though I kind of didn’t want to. She didn’t mention what happened with Moe and Head, and I didn’t mention it, either, so after a while I managed to feel better about being there. The only way anybody might know there was anything wrong was that we were a lot quieter between us than usual, which was what got me to finally tell her about seeing the lady that night of the Skeleton Hotel, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Also I was starting to doubt what I had seen with my own eyes, and I didn’t want that to happen. Telling it to somebody else would make it real again.

We were sitting under her dining-room table, hiding from Darwin, only without the blanket and pillows and dolls like that time with Tink. Darla wanted to know if I saw the Howler, too.

“No,” I said. “But I heard him after the lady disappeared.”

Darla wanted to know why I never told her, and I said I was kind of mad about her and Wayne not looking for me that night, plus I didn’t want her to be too scared. She said she wasn’t scared, and then she said we should go back to the Skeleton Hotel and we should do it Saturday night. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to argue with her about anything or make up any excuses why not.

“You meet me at the corner down from your house,” she said. “Saturday night. Midnight. And don’t bring Wayne.”

I had almost forgotten that nobody knew about me going over to the Turkels for dance lessons and to hang out with Darla, until I left that day and as soon as I got out in their yard along came Tink on her little bicycle.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Nothing. I was just checking the air in my tires.” I had my bike there, too.

“Why are you doing that here?”

“Because I thought they might be low, but I guess they’re not.”

Tink blinked a couple of times. “How come you came out of their house?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I just thought I’d see if they had a pump, but they weren’t home. I don’t even know who lives here.”

“Why’d you need a pump if your tires weren’t low?” she said. “And how come they’re not here if their car is here?”

I got on my bike. “How come you ask so many nosy questions?”

Tink followed me up the street. “I’m not nosy,” she said.

“Yes, you are.”

“No,
you
are,” she said, then she started crying. I wanted to just get the heck out of there and away from Tink, but I couldn’t stand it when she cried, either — I couldn’t stand it when
anybody
cried — so I stopped and asked her what was the matter. Then, of course, she had to pout and tell me,
“Nothing,”
until I was nice to her for a while and said she could ride with me.

She wiped her eyes. “Where are we going?” Wayne and me never let her go anywhere with us, so I guess she thought it was a very big deal that day. I said how about we ride down to Bowlegs Creek, and she said, “OK,” but she wasn’t allowed to cross the highway. I said she was with me so it would be all right, though I wasn’t actually sure about that. Tink was very excited.

Once we got there, we just sat on the bridge the way I usually did with Darla when we went. Tink collected a bunch of sticks and threw them in two at a time so they could race under the bridge while we watched, and she made me bet which one would win. I tried to pick the one I was pretty sure would lose, so Tink’s would be the winner and she could say, “Ha!” Little kids like it when they get to win, no matter what they’re playing.

After a while Tink said she wanted to show me something. She had a bunch of stuff in her bike basket, including the notebook she used for taking messages when anybody called for Dad’s campaign, which from the looks of it wasn’t very often. She flipped through to the back where she had drawn a picture of a dog. Underneath it she had written, “Suzy Your Pet,” and underneath that she had written, “Do Not Run For The Election Or We Will Steal This Dog. Now You See What Happens.”

“What is this?” I asked Tink.

She threw two more sticks in Bowlegs Creek but didn’t make me pick one to win. She said she was going to put her picture with the note in our mailbox so Dad would quit the election and then nobody would be mad about anything anymore, and what did I think?

“I think you better not,” I said. “Dad’ll know you did it and
he’ll
get mad.”

Tink dumped all her sticks in the creek. “How will he know, if I don’t put my name on it?”

“He’ll know because it looks like a little kid wrote it and he knows what your writing looks like.” I thought Tink would argue with me, but she didn’t. “It’ll be OK,” I said. “Will you let me keep this? I like the picture of Suzy, and I can cut it out and put it on my wall.”

Tink studied the picture for a while and said no, I couldn’t have it. She liked it, too, and she wanted to keep it for herself.

We rode home slow, back up Orange Avenue. Tink wanted to know if they had those cards on the walls when you were in high school that showed you how to write all the letters of the alphabet in cursive, only she didn’t call it “cursive”; she called it “real writing.” She told me unless she looked at the cards they had on the wall in elementary school, she could never remember how to do the capital X and especially not the capital Q. I had to be honest with her and tell her that no, they didn’t have the cards in high school, but she shouldn’t worry about it because you hardly ever used the capital X and Q, anyway. Some people might have thought Tink asking me that was stupid, but I used to worry about the same thing when I was her age, so I understood. I hoped that was all she worried about, besides the election. I didn’t like to think that she also worried about everything else the way I did.