Down Sand Mountain (23 page)

We got there pretty fast and the elevator jerked again when it stopped, and this time I did fall down. Darla didn’t grab me, though, but just walked out on the roof, which was flat, and I crawled out behind her. There was nothing around the edge up there, just like the elevator, but Darla went right over to it and looked down at the intersection and the Sinclair station and the City Hall and the 7-Eleven while I stayed crouched in the middle at a little shed next to the elevator. I was shaking even though it wasn’t cold, and my teeth were chattering and everything, and all I could think about was what if Walter Wratchford came back and caught us. I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them to try to get warm and couldn’t believe I was where I was, and so scared I thought I might wet my pants.

I whispered, “Let’s go back down now,” but I don’t think Darla heard me. She was staring off in the direction of her house, even though you couldn’t see that far — not that I was about to stand up and go over there and check about that myself. She walked all the way around the edge of the roof like she was looking for something, and then she came back to the shed next to me and looked in. There was a bottle of something and she didn’t even wait or anything, she just unscrewed the cap and took a drink from it and handed it to me.

“What is it?” I said, still whispering.

She said, “Booze.”

I hadn’t ever held a bottle like that, except for that one time with Walter Wratchford, since we didn’t have it in our house and Mom and Dad didn’t drink or anything, and just holding it scared me, too, but Darla said, “Drink some.”

I said I didn’t want to; I just wanted to go home. Darla said I was a baby and grabbed the bottle back and took another drink and then stepped inside the shed to where I couldn’t see her, so I crawled over and looked inside, too. It was just an old tin shed with tin walls and a tin roof and an open front. There was a crate inside with a candle on it and Darla found some matches and tried to light it, but there was a breeze that kept blowing out her match. She said, “Cup your hands around this,” and I did, and that time she got it lit. She slid the crate over a little ways out of the wind so the candle would stay lit and then she sat down on a kind of a bed that was just a long wood pallet with a thin mattress and a couple of blankets on it. She took another drink from the booze bottle and I thought she was crying.

She said, “That wasn’t my mom,” and I said, “OK, it wasn’t,” I didn’t care, I just wanted to go, and couldn’t we go, please, now?

She said, “In a minute,” and she told me to sit by her, which I did, on that pallet, even though there was also an old stuffed chair up there without any legs, and a pile of cigarette butts in a pot next to it. Darla asked me why was I shaking like that and was I cold? I said I wasn’t cold, but my teeth were still chattering and I guess I was still shivering and she took one of those blankets and put it around me, and her, too. She had put the bottle down, but she picked it back up again and stuck it under my nose. “Drink it,” she said, and this time I took a tiny swig, which I thought was going to burn up my whole insides when I swallowed it. My eyes watered up so I couldn’t see for about a minute, and I dropped the bottle. Darla just left it lying there on the roof near our feet. There wasn’t enough in it to spill or anything.

Then Darla finally did kiss me — right on the lips. She did it so hard it hurt my teeth. That swig I took still burned in my throat and my stomach, and I kind of wanted to throw up but I couldn’t say anything because Darla kissed me softer after that and even licked me with her tongue on my lips, and that scared me, too, but not as much as what she did next with her hand on my pants, or rather in my pants. She pulled on me down there for a minute and I forgot all about wanting to throw up or anything else, just how it felt the way she was pulling, except I could tell she was crying, and she said, “That wasn’t my mom,” and she pulled and I couldn’t even move, I just sat there like I was a frozen zombie, and she said, “Say it,” but all I could say was nothing except I didn’t want her to stop pulling like that, and she didn’t until there was an earthquake and stuff came out, I could feel it, and when Darla stopped and wiped her hand on the blanket, I still couldn’t move, I just sat there leaning against her with my eyes closed because I didn’t want to see what the world looked like after something like that.

There wasn’t any moon that night, but the streetlights made shadows from us while we were walking home. Darla couldn’t stand up too well, I guess from the booze, so I put my arm around her shoulder so she could lean on me, and I helped her like that all the way to her house. On the one hand I liked holding her, but on the other hand I wished I was away from her already and back in my own house and in my own bed. I also wanted to change my pants, since it looked like I had had an accident in them, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with them so my mom wouldn’t see when she did the laundry and asked me about them, but I couldn’t exactly bury my jeans the way I did that Ban-Lon shirt. I only had two pair and I wore one or the other of them all the time.

Darla didn’t even thank me when I got her home and boosted her up to a window in their living room that she had left open to sneak out of and then sneak back in. She didn’t say anything and hadn’t since the last time she told me that wasn’t her mom we saw. I said, “Bye,” and then I ran the whole way back to Orange Avenue, to my yard and my house and my bedroom and my bunk bed. Everything looked different to me, even though it also looked exactly the same.

I GOT UP BEFORE EVERYBODY ELSE the next morning. I don’t know how, since I hadn’t hardly slept at all, but my mind was wide awake as soon as it was light outside. I leaned over the edge of the bunk bed and looked down on Wayne. His pajamas were all twisted around him like he’d been wrestling somebody and lost the fight. His blanket was on the floor, where he must have kicked it off, and his pillow was crammed up against the headboard. His head was barely on it. You’d have thought it was him out the night before, having the wild adventures instead of me. I wanted to wake him up and tell him about what happened with me and Darla, and the other stuff with Darla’s mom and Walter Wratchford. But as soon as I thought that, I thought I didn’t actually want to tell him or anybody. I wanted to keep it a secret to myself. Plus, what if I told him about the whole thing with Darla and he said, “Oh yeah, me, too”? So I decided I would keep the secret. Maybe I wouldn’t even say anything about it to Darla, in case she changed her mind and decided it didn’t really happen, which was just the sort of thing she might do.

I was starting to feel really lonely, which I guess is what secrets do to you, but then remembered I had to get up and do something I had never done before.

Laundry.

I had hid my jeans from the night before under the bottom bunk, so now I had to get on my belly and reach way in to fish them out of there along with my underwear. I scoured the room and got all the rest of the clothes I could find that were dirty: more underwear, and socks and T-shirts, plus Wayne’s football gear, and I carried it all out of the bedroom, through the living room and the kitchen, out to the back porch. The jalousie windows were open and it was cool back there but not too dark, so I didn’t have to turn on the light to see the washing machine. I dragged out a kitchen chair to stand on, then threw the stuff in and turned on the washer, which I had thought would be hard but wasn’t once I figured out that you didn’t just twist the knob around to “Normal,” but you also had to pull it out toward you, until you heard a click, to make the water rush in. Since I didn’t know how much soap to use, I went with three scoops, which seemed like a good number. After that was when I realized Mom was standing behind me, in the doorway to the kitchen.

She had on bedroom slippers and a light blue bathrobe, and hadn’t brushed her hair. Her face was kind of puffy, I guess from sleep, which was a way I had never seen her before. She still looked like Mom, only not the usual Mom. She said, “Don’t forget to close the lid or it won’t rinse and spin after the wash cycle.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am,” nervous about what she would say next, or what lie I could tell her about why I was doing what I was doing.

She asked if that was my sheets in there, and I realized she thought I must have peed the bed, which would have been a great lie if only I’d thought of it. Unfortunately my sheets were still on the bed, so I had to tell her no, I just thought I would help with the laundry today, that’s all.

Mom lifted some hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, sort of brushed at it, then let it drop down in the same place. She crossed her arms. “You decided to get up early on a Saturday morning and help with the laundry?”

I said, “Yes, ma’am,” again, and then asked could I help fix breakfast with her — would she like for me to do that, or set the table or something? When she didn’t say anything back, I said also I was all ready for the job jar, wasn’t it time for the job jar, shouldn’t we get going on the Saturday chores?

Mom said she didn’t know what on earth was going on with me today, but she guessed if it had me eager to do work, she wasn’t going to worry about it. Then she changed her mind and got out the thermometer and checked my temperature. “It’s a little high, but you don’t have a fever,” she said. She felt my face with her hand, then hugged me, then let me go and said I could help with breakfast if I wanted — I could get out the orange juice and everything to go on the table — and if I wanted to go ahead and pick first out of the job jar, I could do that, too.

I was hoping I’d get lucky, but instead picked out the worst jobs there were:
CLEAN THE BATHROOM
and
TAKE OUT THE TRASH
.

On Monday at school I stabbed Moe in the hand with my fork. I’m not sure why. He took my roll the way him or his big fat twin, Head, always did off my lunch tray, but that had been going on since school started — so long that I was almost used to it. Maybe part of the reason was Connolly Voss, who had been bothering me more than usual for letting Moe or Head take my rolls: How come I never did anything about it? What was I, a man or mouse? He had started calling me Darwin Turkel, which was worse than being called a girl, as everybody knew, and the other guys at the table actually thought that was funny and laughed when he said it. Once he was doing that and I was telling him to shut up or else, and the real Darwin walked by. I don’t know if he heard or not, but he gave me a look like he was sad but at the same time used to that sort of thing, and I felt bad.

Probably all of those things were good enough reasons for what I did, but I guess the other one was that I was very hungry that day because I was almost late for school so missed breakfast, and all they had for lunch was canned peas and carrots, canned meat with canned gravy, canned banana pudding, and those homemade rolls they baked in giant trays that were fluffy and warm and brown on top from where they painted the margarine with big paint brushes and you could smell them cooking all over the school for about an hour before lunchtime. It was clear that the only good thing I would have to eat all day until I got home from school was my one single solitary roll.

But Moe showed up at the exact minute I got out of the lunch line and put down my tray. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to think about it. He was reaching for the roll and saying, “Thanks, Sambo,” and I stabbed his hand with my fork.

Moe said, “What the heck.” He had the roll in his fist. The fork hung there for a second and then fell on the floor. He said, “What the heck,” again, but that was all for the first minute. There was hardly any blood, just a few drops was all. Moe shifted the roll to his other hand — I guess so he could examine the place where I stabbed him better — and the longer he stood there, the more you could see it was bleeding. I don’t think anybody else at the table breathed. They didn’t say anything, and my eyes got so big watching Moe and waiting for what would happen next that I thought I might go blind.

What he did was slap me so hard that tears squirted out of my eyes. I think they might have even landed on his shirt. My ear felt like it must have gotten knocked off, and there was a screaming noise inside my head that made me dizzy. Then, I guess because I really was the biggest idiot on the planet and also because I was in so much pain I didn’t know what I was doing, I slapped him back, although it barely grazed his cheek because he was a lot taller than me. He reached back to smack me again but Wayne pushed his chair away from the table and pulled me out of the way and said why didn’t Moe pick on somebody his own size?

Moe started after Wayne but that other guy Head appeared from out of nowhere and grabbed Moe’s arm. My face stung like anything and my ear was still ringing, but I touched it and it was still there, at least. Moe’s face looked like a big cloud of thunder about to break open and cause a flood of forty days and forty nights, but after Head whispered in his ear for a minute, he calmed down and got one of those evil grins on his face that you’re always reading about.

“How tall are you?” he asked Wayne. Wayne said he was five foot six inches. David Tremblay stood sort of next to Wayne and sort of behind him, I guess so Wayne wouldn’t feel all alone.