Down Sand Mountain (27 page)

I stood up and yelled, “Hey!” really loud, but there wasn’t anything I could do, it happened so fast. There went Darla.

It took her the usual five seconds to get to the bottom, but it took me forever because I didn’t have my own cardboard and so had to jump my way little by little to the bottom and I kept falling down, and if I tried to run, I got going too fast and I fell down, and if I rolled, I couldn’t control where the heck I was going or how fast, either, and finally I just sat down and scooted on my rear end like a big inchworm or something.

By the time I finally got to the bottom, Darla was long gone on her bike and I had to ride home by myself in the dark. Mom was waiting for me at the house and drove me to Sunday night church late, still wearing my sandy clothes. “Your father is going to want to have a talk with you,” she said, and he did.

THEY CALLED ME DOWN to the principal’s office in the middle of fourth period on Monday.

They had the principal in there, of course — Mr. Straub. And Officer O. O. Odom, in his brown uniform, standing next to Mr. Straub’s desk. And Dr. Rexroat, who looked like he’d had a pretty rough weekend. His suit was wrinkled and his white hair stood up in the back like he slept on it that way. He had missed some spots shaving, but his face was about as wrinkled as his suit, so I figured it was hard for him to smooth out his skin enough to do a close shave no matter what.

They had me sit down in a big chair right in front of Mr. Straub’s desk. It was higher than the chairs we had in the classrooms and my feet didn’t reach the floor unless I sat right on the front edge, which I didn’t do. Instead I slid all the way to the back of the chair and wished I could keep sliding back until I disappeared.

“You know why you’re here, don’t you, young man?” Mr. Straub said.

I couldn’t open my mouth or nod or move or anything. I just stared at him. He wore glasses with black frames and thick lenses that made his eyes a lot bigger from where I was sitting. He looked like a bug.

Officer Odom leaned over and grabbed the back of my chair. He smelled like an onion. “You need to answer the question. Your job right now is to answer all the questions.”

I couldn’t say anything to him, either. I could hardly even see anymore because of all the tears I was trying not to let go of, partly because I was so scared and partly because of his bad breath.

“This is a very serious matter,” Mr. Straub said.

“That’s right,” Officer Odom said, still leaning over me. He was like a giant talking onion. “Very serious.”

“He could have died,” Mr. Straub said.

“Do you know what that means?” Officer Onion asked me.

I looked at my hands. They seemed too small and I wondered if I had always had hands that were too small, and if everybody else knew it already but me.

“We’re going to need some answers, Dewey,” Mr. Straub said.

Boy, my hands looked little.

“Have you heard of reform school, Dewey?” Officer Odom said.

I made my hands into fists so I wouldn’t have to keep seeing how tiny my fingers were, but then my fists looked too little and I didn’t want to see them, either.

Officer Odom shook my chair. “Are you paying attention here?” He turned to Mr. Straub. “Is there something wrong with him?”

Mr. Straub said no, he had my test scores right there on his desk.

“Then why won’t he talk?” Officer Odom said. I opened my fists and slid my hands underneath me.

Dr. Rexroat burped, like somebody in a cartoon, and everybody looked at him. “Can’t you see the little malefactor is scared?” he said. I didn’t know what a malefactor was, but the way he said it, I knew it couldn’t be good. Dr. Rexroat didn’t move from his chair, where he seemed to almost be lying down more than sitting, but Officer Odom moved back over next to Mr. Straub’s desk. Maybe him and Dr. Rexroat had a secret sign that told him to do that, I don’t know.

Dr. Rexroat rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and I looked, too. A pencil stuck out of one of the soft panels up there and I wondered if Mr. Straub threw it one time or if it was a kid sitting right where I was, waiting for the principal to come in and expel him or something.

“Poison,” Dr. Rexroat said, still not looking at anybody, “is a funny thing. Take penicillin. You wouldn’t eat moldy bread because it would make you sick, or at least you think it would, but you would take an injection of penicillin, which comes from the culture of that very same mold, and it would fight off infection and save your life. Unless, of course, it killed you instead, which has been known to happen in some extreme cases of allergic reaction.

“Or say if we have a man with arterial blockage and thus a man who could stroke at any time. We can give that man medication to thin out his blood so it will trickle around arterial obstructions, even those obstructions that might otherwise cause him to stroke. But if we prescribe that same medication in excessive dosage, or in the same dosage to a smaller organism — for example, a rat — then the rat’s blood will thin to the point that the walls of his arteries and capillaries cannot hold it all in, will actually collapse, and so he will bleed internally. Of course all that blood has to go somewhere, and so it does — out of his mouth, out of his eye sockets, out of his ears, out of his anus. His organs will become liquefied, and that will be that. In one situation, in one dosage, and with one organism, it can save a life, but in another situation, in another dosage, and with another organism, it can take a life. Or, to put it another way, one man’s blood thinner is another man’s rat poison.”

Dr. Rexroat had crossed his legs and was tapping his knee with a little rubber hammer, making his top leg bounce. “Young man,” he said, still not looking at anything but that pencil stuck in the ceiling. “Is it possible that we owe you a debt of gratitude? That you somehow detected the symptoms of potential stroke in this Mr. Borgerding, and through swift action — blood thinner, or should I say rat poison, in his lunch biscuit — saved his life? If that is the case, you are surely to be forgiven if your dosage was excessive, causing Mr. Borgerding to react as he did, with the bleeding and the bruising.”

Boink.
His leg jumped.
Boink.
His leg jumped again. “You see, despite what Officer Odom and Mr. Straub here told you, the situation for Mr. Borgerding was not life-threatening. But neither was it entirely comfortable for him, or his family, or apparently the entire school, or Poison Control, or the fine and dedicated doctors and nurses at Bartow Hospital.

“So, on to my question, then. Should we be thanking you, Mr. Turner? Or — and God forbid this should be the case — might there have been malice in your prescription for Mr. Borgerding?”

My hands had gotten so numb wedged under my legs that I couldn’t feel them anymore. My feet had gone to sleep, too, I guess, because the front edge of the chair cut off the circulation. I wasn’t sure what exactly it was he had said.
Malefactor
and
arterial blockage
and
organisms
and
anus.

But I did understand what they were all getting at, of course, which was why did I poison Moe, which by now I had almost started to think I really had, and not David Tremblay. I wanted to tell them it was David. Or else I wanted to explain about what Moe and Head had been doing all that time, stealing my rolls and milk, and not letting me go to the bathroom because of their
WHITES ONLY
.

But I didn’t say anything. What could I say? And I was too scared, anyway, just like Dr. Rexroat said. I was a scared malefactor. Whatever it meant, I knew I must be one.

Officer Odom pulled out his handcuffs and said did they think he should put them on me. Mr. Straub said he doubted they were small enough, which got me thinking again about how little my hands were, but Dr. Rexroat said, “Don’t be a damn ass, Odom,” which probably hurt Officer Odom’s feelings a lot worse than the way my dad talked to him that night he came to our house.

“I’m just trying to do my job here,” Officer Odom said in kind of a whiny voice.

“You got no call to talk to him that way,” Mr. Straub said to Dr. Rexroat.

Dr. Rexroat tapped his knee one last time real hard, which looked like it caused his whole body to sit up all at once. Standing was harder for him, though, and I bet he wished there was some place he could tap himself again to help with that, too. He was wheezing when he finally made it, and he just grunted at Officer Odom and Mr. Straub and walked out without saying another word. I was sorry to see him go. He was the only one there that I sort of liked, even if I didn’t know what he was talking about.

After he left, Officer Odom and Mr. Straub mumbled between themselves for a while, and I just sat there with my numb hands and my numb feet that eventually went from being numb to aching, but I still didn’t move. I heard a train whistle from very far away, off one of the phosphate trains. Those trains went so slow, I don’t know why they bothered. Anybody who wasn’t blind could always see them coming at a railroad crossing, except a drunk guy I heard about one time who fell asleep on the tracks that ran through Mr. Juddy’s property and probably no whistle loud enough in the world could have saved him, anyway.

In the end they didn’t put handcuffs on me and they didn’t take me to jail; instead they said I couldn’t go to school for two weeks and they said I had to go to a psychiatrist all the way up past Bartow in Lakeland. It must have been my mom’s idea.

When Dad got home that afternoon, he took off his belt, but Mom wouldn’t let him use it on me. She said, “Dewey needs our help right now, Hank. I don’t think we should handle it this way.”

Dad said he at least wanted to know what I had to say for myself, and he held my arms and kind of shook me until Mom made him not do that, either, and anyway, it didn’t matter because I couldn’t seem to say anything back, and finally he just sent me to my room.

Reverend Dunn came and tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t talk to him, either. I wanted to, but when I tried, nothing came out. It was like I had run out of words. Even when Mom came in once and put her arms around me and said, “Please, Dewey.”

Reverend Dunn told me God had a plan for everybody and my job was to figure out how everything that happened fit into God’s plan for me. The way to figure that out, he said, was to give myself up to God in prayer. I tried, but the only prayer that came into my head, besides the Lord’s Prayer, was the one from when I was little, which always scared me:
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

God didn’t say a word back, but Wayne did. He said he was sorry he got me into all this, and he bought me Batman comic books just about every day from Honey’s Drugstore, until he ran out of money, even though I didn’t read them but just kept sticking them under my pillow on the top bunk, where I spent most of my time for about a week.

They made me go to the hospital to apologize to Moe. I went but didn’t say anything; I just looked at my shoes. So Mom said it for me: “Dewey wants to apologize for what he did. He showed very poor judgment but wants you to let him know if there is anything he can do to help out.”

Moe didn’t look sick or anything. In fact, he looked like he was having a pretty good time in the hospital, with all the flowers and candy and TV and food and attention. I wished it had been me in the hospital. His mom was there, and that surprised me. I guess I hadn’t thought a guy like Moe would have a mom. When she thanked my mom, she didn’t sound like she meant it, more like she just wanted us to leave. She pointed at me and said, “Ain’t he going to say anything?” Mom looked at me and said, “Dewey?” but I couldn’t think of a single word.

David Tremblay tried to give me all his Elvis and Beatles records the next day. He brought them in the bedroom and said, “Here,” and left them on the desk, but I didn’t touch them the same as with the Batman comic books, and after a couple of days, he took them back. He wouldn’t look at me, either. I guess he felt pretty bad, too.

Tink drew me a picture of Suzy like the other one she had drawn that time.

Mom cooked macaroni and cheese one night. She cooked fried chicken another night. She even had doughnuts for breakfast one morning, which wasn’t even a Saturday.

Darla Turkel came over one night and tapped on the window. I wouldn’t get out of bed to talk to her, so Wayne did. She stood outside and they whispered through the screen for kind of a long time. I didn’t even try to listen to what they were saying.

Mom said, “Dewey, do you think you’re punishing everybody else? Well, you’re not. You’re only punishing yourself by behaving this way. This is not the way you show that you’re sorry and that you take responsibility for what you’ve done.”

Tink said, “Why won’t you talk to me, Dewey? Are you mad at me?”

Wayne said, “You know, at school I heard some kids say they wished they were the ones to poison Moe. Everybody said nice things about him when he was in the hospital, but then they made fun of him ever since he came back.”

Dad didn’t say anything to me directly after that first day. He didn’t say anything to me at the dinner table, or on the way to church — not anywhere. But I knew what he was thinking, that he was disappointed in me. I worried that I had probably messed up the election for him, too, which was in just three more weeks. I bet he worried about that, too. One night I saw out the window that there was a blue light coming from his shed and looked like it was moving. I got worried at first but then figured it was that Niagara Falls lamp he fixed that time I asked him about military school and tried to talk to him about what was going on with the red bellies and the bathroom and all.