Down Sand Mountain (24 page)

Moe, who must have been six feet tall, said he guessed Wayne and him were about the same size, then, so he guessed Wayne would do. Then he looked at his bloody hand and then he looked at his buddy Head and said, “Don’t you guess he’ll do?” Head said, “Yeah, I guess he’ll do.” Moe said he guessed he’d see Wayne in the parking lot after school, then, and Head nodded along and said yeah, he guessed the two of them ought to be able to get things all taken care of in the parking lot after school. I looked around, wondering where the lunchroom ladies were. Usually they came out of the kitchen and caught you if you so much as leaned back in your chair, but today they were nowhere around, nor any teachers, either.

The rest of the day was terrible. I wanted to turn all the clocks back and hold them back to keep them from getting to the end of school. Every time a bell rang for the finish of one period and then five minutes later for the start of the next period, my face hurt like Moe was right there slapping me again. I saw Wayne in the hall a couple of times, but he wouldn’t look at me or say anything, and that made me feel even worse.

Moe didn’t even say anything when Wayne showed up in the parking lot, he just hit him in the face and kept hitting him. We were all standing there — me and David Tremblay and the others over on one side, Moe’s friends on the other side, plus a bunch of other people who just wanted to see a fight. But it wasn’t a fight. It was just Moe beating up Wayne, and me doing nothing but watch, until one of the coaches, Coach Lundy, the baseball coach, came running out of the gym and yelled at them to break it up.

Moe didn’t look at Coach Lundy and didn’t say anything. He just walked off with his friends, even when Coach Lundy said, “Hey, you. Come back here when I’m talking to you. I want to know who started this.” I couldn’t believe he didn’t know who Moe was. Everybody knew who Moe was.

Wayne hadn’t ever fallen down the whole time he was getting beat up, which was a miracle, but you could see how shaky his legs were. Me and David Tremblay went over to hold him up, and I wanted to cry because of all the blood. David Tremblay actually took his shirt off and used it to hold against Wayne’s bloody nose. I said I was sorry, but Wayne spit out some blood and I figured that meant he didn’t want to hear it. David said, “Way to go, Wayne. I saw you get him one time. I think you got him in the kidney.”

Coach Lundy stuck his big meaty face down to look at Wayne’s. The bill of his baseball cap nearly jabbed into Wayne’s forehead. “Think you’re going to make it, there?” Wayne grunted something but I couldn’t tell what. Coach Lundy looked at me and David Tremblay. “Y’all know where he lives?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

Wayne spit more blood.

David Tremblay said we could get Wayne home OK. Coach Lundy said, “That’s good. That’s good.” He straightened back up. “Now, I don’t want to see any more fighting around here, y’all understand?” I nodded but he wasn’t looking at me. “That goes for all of y’all,” he said to anybody who was still around, which wasn’t too many since most had run off when Coach Lundy first came out of the gym.

“All right, then,” he said. “Can you walk OK there?” Wayne nodded and the coach slapped him on the shoulder. I thought it was going to knock Wayne down, but he just swayed a little.

“All right, then,” the coach said again.

“Yes, sir,” David Tremblay said. “Come on, Wayne.” And he pulled Wayne over in the direction of our bikes. I took Wayne’s other arm, but he pulled away from me, so I said I would walk Wayne’s and my bikes home. David left his bike, so he could hold on to Wayne, and said he’d come back for it later.

“I’m sorry,” I said one more time to Wayne, but he didn’t even bother to spit.

The official story was Wayne’s helmet came off during JV football practice and he got mushed in a pileup. Mom was the first to see him and she made him lie down with an ice pack on his face so big I thought if it melted he might drown. She wanted him to quit the team, but Dad said the kind of thing he was always saying: if a horse throws you off, you have to climb back on right away and ride him again.

“I think it’s stupid,” Tink said. “They ought to put them all in the jail.”

“All who?” Dad said. We were sitting down to dinner, all except Wayne, who got to have his on a TV tray in the living room and watch television while he ate, which ordinarily I wouldn’t think was fair but I felt so lousy about getting him beat up that I even helped set up the TV tray, which wasn’t easy. Wayne’s lip was swollen and he said his teeth hurt, so Mom had made him soup.

“All the football players that did that to Wayne,” Tink said. “I think they did that on purpose.”

“Accidents happen,” Dad said. “It’s all part of the game.”

Mom said something under her breath that I think he might have heard because he said, “Now, Rennie,” which was my mom’s name.

He seemed so relaxed about everything that I started to worry maybe he knew what had really happened and was just playing along for some reason, to catch us in more stories and bigger lies. But I didn’t worry too much about that, either, because of the silent treatment Wayne was still giving me — not so much as a word or a look, even though I tried everything.

“Hey, Wayne, you want me to do your chores from the job jar?”

Nothing.

“Hey, Wayne, you want me to make you a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?”

Nothing.

I sat alone at lunch the next day, at a table in the corner of the cafeteria, but it didn’t matter. Moe still found me and took my roll, plus he took my carton of milk, too. I hardly noticed, though, because I was too busy watching Wayne and David Tremblay and Boopie Larent and all those guys talking and laughing and messing around, making fun of Connolly Voss, over where I used to sit with them. The worse I felt, the better the time they had, and it didn’t seem like anybody missed me, either. I kept waiting for them to look over my way, especially Wayne, and then I’d at least know that they knew I was gone and they cared
some,
but nobody did.

I guess I could have gone over and sat with Darla, or even Darwin. He was at another corner table, across the cafeteria from me, with one other boy from the tenth grade everybody called Hoot, who was supposed to be a math genius, although to be a genius in Sand Mountain didn’t take too much of an IQ, and anyway, he never looked anywhere but at his shoes when he was around people. They didn’t seem to talk hardly at all, and didn’t sit in any of the seats right next to each other.

I guess I could have gone over and sat with Dottie Larent, too. She didn’t have regular friends, and one day I saw her at the end of a table by herself with a couple of chairs between her and anybody else. People said she had a BO problem and didn’t take a bath or a shower except once every now and then like colored people, but I didn’t believe it. I’d been around Dottie some and never smelled her once.

But I guess I still thought it was better to be miserable and alone than embarrassed for people to see me hanging out with somebody that was supposed to be smelly like Dottie Larent, or worse than a girl like Darwin Turkel, or a retarded genius like Hoot, or even Darla, who dressed so funny and had the Shirley Temple hair and set off firecrackers with a colored boy in the cemetery, and you never knew when she might suddenly start singing or dancing, and you also never knew when she might take you up to the top of the Skeleton Hotel and do things that you didn’t know what to think about later so you tried not to think about them at all and you tried to not have to look at her anymore or talk to her or anything, even though that was probably mean —

So I sat alone.

Mom finally noticed something was wrong with me, I guess, because after school I went in my bedroom and shut the door and crawled up on the top bunk and stayed there until dinnertime. I might have fallen asleep, because she was just there next to the bunk bed with her hand on my head. When she saw I was awake, she said, “Do you not feel well, Dewey? You’re all hot and sweaty.”

I said I was OK. She said she thought she would get the thermometer and I said I wasn’t a baby. She said, “Well, you’re my baby.”

I said, “Oh, Mom.”

She laid her hand on my forehead and it felt cool, and for some reason I just about started crying. She asked if Wayne and I weren’t getting along, and I said, “Sort of.” She said it would get better. I said what if it didn’t? What if it got worse and worse? That could happen, too.

She seemed surprised by what I said. “Your brother loves you very much. That doesn’t mean you always have to get along. But he does love you, and he has always watched out for you.”

I said I doubted he would anymore, and she asked me why I said that. I said I didn’t know. Mom didn’t say anything for a little while. Her back was to the window and the blinds were closed and it was dark in the room, so I couldn’t see her face very well. There was an orange light coming through the blinds that made a kind of outline around her. She had taken her hand away from my forehead when I said that about Wayne maybe not watching out for me and stuff, but she put it back. She asked me if I remembered the song she used to sing to me when I was little.

“You mean ‘Mack the Knife’?” I said.

“No, the other one, when you were a very little boy.” I said no but I really did. It was “Dewey Was an Admiral on Manila Bay.”

She started to sing and I said, “Oh, Mom,” again like it was embarrassing, but she kept singing, really soft, her cool hand still on my head.

EVERYTHING CHANGED TWO DAYS AFTER the fork stabbing. It was the first week of October and the first cool day we’d had, not quite cold enough for a jacket but not warm enough for just a T-shirt, either, so what I did was wear two T-shirts. Some leaves danced around in the street when I rode my bike to school, and I didn’t pay much attention to what I was doing because of watching them and so bumped into the side of a car that was parked on Second Street. I didn’t get hurt except that two girls saw me and laughed, but they were in elementary school so I didn’t care.

All that morning, I kept looking out the windows of my classes and watching the leaves falling and dancing. Always in the past I had just woken up in October and realized it was autumn and had been for a while, but that particular day was different — I was actually seeing it happen, actually seeing the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall. The problem was I kept getting called on in class, because even though I didn’t raise my hand, the teachers were so used to it that they called on me, anyway, only this time I not only didn’t know the answers, I didn’t know the questions, either. That Americanism vs. Communism teacher, Mr. Cheeley, got mad at me and told me I had to write a letter to General Westmoreland on “Why I Should Be Fighting in Vietnam.” I said, “You mean why
America
should be fighting?” but he shook his head and said, “No, I mean why
you,
Mr. Turner.”

I couldn’t wait until lunch, partly so I wouldn’t get called on anymore, and partly because I had to scoot outside and pee, which I went and did as soon as the bell rang. I had just come in and got my food tray — I hadn’t even sat down yet — when David Tremblay came up and said, “Hey, Dewey.” I was pretty happy at first that at least somebody wasn’t giving me the silent treatment anymore, and thought maybe he was even going to invite me to sit with him and Wayne and them. He had something in his hand that he was hiding, but at the same time trying to look like he wasn’t hiding, and he put it on my tray. It was his roll. “I’m switching,” he said. “But don’t eat it.” Then he grabbed mine and left before I could say anything.

About a minute later, after I sat down by myself, Moe and Head came in the cafeteria and swung by my table the way they usually did on their way to the lunch line. Moe said, “Snack time,” and snatched up the roll and my milk. He popped the roll in his big mouth and practically swallowed it whole and then opened the milk carton. Then he stopped. He had a funny look on his face and he said, “Bleah,” and stuck out his tongue the way you do when you eat something rotten or sour. He sniffed the milk and drank it straight down, swishing the last gulp around his mouth before swallowing. Head said, “Well?” and looked back at me like I might have done something.

Moe said, “Bad roll.”

David Tremblay and Wayne were watching the whole thing, their eyes as wide as mine the day I stabbed Moe and he slapped me. David’s mouth hung open even though he had food in it that he’d been chewing, and all I could think was,
Oh no, what now?
I put my head down on the table because it felt too heavy, but when I closed my eyes I saw Wayne again in the parking lot, and Moe hitting him, and the blood, and the way Wayne could barely stand up afterward and people thought that was a great thing because nobody had ever been able to stand up after a fight with Moe, even if Coach Lundy did break it up. Only this time it was me getting beat up in the picture I had in my mind, and there was no way I would still be standing afterward, or probably even live.