Down Sand Mountain (4 page)

So I put some down under me and he handed me the piece of rope and said for me to loop it over the door handle outside and then tie it inside wherever I could find a place. Before I hardly even got started, he put the car in gear and crawled back out on the road toward Sand Mountain. I had to reach all the way to the back door handle to find a place to tie off the rope, and when I did I saw this big carved wood hand he had from Vietnam, about two feet tall — actually a fist with the middle finger shooting the you-know-what. It was laying there on the backseat. Wayne told me that Walter Wratchford took it with him down to The Springs, where they sell the liquor on the county side of the Peace River bridge, and he sat by himself with that big finger in the middle of the table in front of him and got in fights if anybody said anything about it. Wayne heard that from David Tremblay, who heard it from his stepdad, Bud Teeter, who was always down at The Springs drinking, too.

I’d seen the finger myself one time before, at a Veterans Day Salute at the high-school auditorium, where Walter Wratchford was supposed to make a speech to represent the Vietnam veterans. When they introduced him, he pulled it out of a bag he was carrying and balanced it on the lectern. At first he didn’t say anything and you could hear people whispering what’s wrong with this crazy nut, and then he did say something. He said, “If Vietnam was a woman, I’d marry her in a second.” Then he picked up his carved hand with the finger and said, “Anytime any of you want to borrow this, you’re welcome to borrow it. It’s all right by me.” And that was all, except that he said “borry” instead of “borrow.” I thought that was pretty funny.

Walter Wratchford lit a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had been smoking, then wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his army jacket. The windshield was fogged up and he wiped that with his sleeve, too, but it didn’t much matter because the smoke from his cigarette filled up the car so fast you could hardly see through that, anyway. Every time we hit a bump, the passenger side door swung open a little bit and the rain came in, or maybe it was the water from the tires. I guess I hadn’t tied it tight enough. I kept getting wetter even though I was already soaking wet, and the inside of Walter Wratchford’s car kept getting wetter, too.

“You want me to take you down to the Boogerbottom?” Walter Wratchford said. His voice even sounded like cigarettes.

I shook my head and said no, just on up Orange Avenue.

“Colored don’t live on Orange Avenue,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make him mad or anything, but the last place I wanted to go was the Boogerbottom. “I just need to go home,” I said. I was about to cry.

He snorted. “I know you’re not colored. I was just kidding you.” He offered me a cigarette but I shook my head again. Then he asked me what was the story with my face and all and how come I looked that way. I just told him
shoe polish
and he nodded like he heard that sort of thing all the time, too.

“I been around a lot of colored guys,” he said like that’s what we’d been talking about all along. “They got a lot of them in the army now. I even had a friend in the army that was colored. That boy was one dumb son of a you-know-what.”

My teeth were chattering even though I wasn’t cold, just wet. Walter Wratchford wiped the windshield again and turned on the heater. He was grinning, but not in the way somebody grins if they think something’s funny. “You know what they got over there? Over in the war? They got these things — they call them Bouncing Betties — where when you hit the trip wire, they don’t just blow up and take your foot off or your leg off. Them bombs bounce up in the air so you can see them right in front of you for about a second. Not even a second, but a second of a second. And that’s the last second of a second you ever get. Then it blows your dang head off.”

He didn’t say hardly anything after that, and I didn’t know what to say back, either. I was too scared to ask him much even though there were about a million questions I wished I could have asked about Vietnam since I was pretty sure I would go over there to be in the war once I was old enough. I read about it all the time in the
Tampa Tribune.
In Vacation Bible School the summer before last when they had us write down who was the most important person in our lives not counting our moms and dads, I wrote General Westmoreland. That turned out to be the wrong answer, though. The Vacation Bible School lady said it was Jesus, and how come nobody wrote down Jesus, and she was very disappointed in us for not a single one of us saying Jesus. That got us in a big argument about whether Jesus was actually even a
person.
A lot of the kids thought he was more like Superman, with his super powers of turning wine into water and feeding the multitudes with the fishes and the loaves and bringing back Lazarus from the dead and walking on water. The Vacation Bible School lady said those were miracles, not super powers, and she rolled her eyes and said, “Land of Goshen,” the same way my dad said, “Good garden peas.”

It didn’t take long before we got to town. Walter Wratchford didn’t ask me anything about where to go; he just drove on across First Street and on down Orange Avenue toward my house. I hadn’t even told him where I lived, but Sand Mountain was such a little place, he must have just known somehow. Maybe he knew my dad. A lot of people knew my dad from the phosphate mine, or the Rotary Club, or the Methodist Church, where he was on the board of trustees, or him running for city council a bunch of times only never getting elected.

“I wish I could remember what that colored boy’s name was,” Walter Wratchford said. He shook his head pretty hard like he had water in his ear and was trying to get it out.

I thanked him when I got out of the car. He said, “Don’t even mention it.”

THE WAY I FELT WHEN I WALKED IN THE DOOR was like I’d been gone a week, but it turned out to only be about two o’clock. Mom wasn’t home. Nobody was. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet backward the way I used to when I was little. Back then I did it so I could play with my army men on the toilet tank while I was doing a Big Job — that’s what Mom called it — only this time I didn’t play anything, but just laid my cheek on the cool porcelain tank until I was done.

Wayne was the first one home. I was at the kitchen table eating crackers and rat cheese — Dad said that; Mom just said “cheddar”— but he didn’t say much of anything, just went straight to the refrigerator and took a big swig of milk from the carton. Then he burped my name: “Hey, Dewey.” It was disgusting, but also maybe a little funny. I don’t think he even noticed that I hadn’t been in school. That made me kind of mad, but also made me think that if Wayne hadn’t noticed, then maybe nobody else did, either. He fixed two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and took off for JV football practice. I followed him to the front door. David Tremblay was waiting out front, sitting on his bicycle and holding Wayne’s. They traded: Wayne gave him one of the sandwiches and David handed over the bike. I could see Wayne already had a gob of jelly on the front of his shirt — that happened about every time he ate anything. David pointed at it and laughed. Wayne lifted up his shirt and licked it off, but it left a big grape stain. I would have been embarrassed about something like that, but you could just tell Wayne didn’t care.

Mom and Tink showed up right then. I watched them all through the front window but couldn’t hear anything. Mom probably asked if they had a good first day of school. Then she probably asked if they had time for a snack, and when would they be home — even though David didn’t live with us, of course — and would they please, please promise to drink plenty of water at their football practice?

Then she must have asked about me, because suddenly everybody turned to look at the house, even Tink, who had been leaning over, talking to the sidewalk, maybe to a line of ants or something. I should have waved at them — they must have seen me — but instead I ducked below the window and then crawled out of the living room and down the hall to my bedroom. I don’t know why exactly.

I was hiding under the bed — another dumb thing to do — when Tink found me.

“Here he is!” she yelled, even though Mom was standing right beside her. “He’s hiding under the bed!”

I tried to kick her. “No, I’m not.” I said. “I’m looking for something.”

Tink said, “What? Like a dust bunny?”

Mom told her to never-you-mind, then said that I needed to come out from under there right now because I had some serious explaining to do. So I crawled out.

She was holding the orange Ban-Lon shirt like it was a dead cat. I had stuck it in the dirty-clothes basket, under a towel, when I got home, hoping she would just wash it and not notice the mud and the holes I had burned with my magnifying glass. I don’t know how she found it so fast.

Mom shook it. “What is the meaning of this?”

The phone rang before I could tell her anything, or make something up.

It was the school.

When Dad came home, he asked if I had anything to say for myself before punishment. He had talked to Mom, so of course he knew everything by then already. He still had on his steel-toed work boots and his khaki pants, which had a mud stain on one of the knees, and a short-sleeved shirt but no tie. When he looked like that, it meant he had been out with the survey crew, and if he’d been out with the survey crew, it usually meant he was tired and hungry when he got off work, and not in too good of a mood if something was keeping us from sitting down to dinner right away.

I said, “No, sir. Just that they were making fun of me about being colored.”

He was already unbuckling his belt. “Who? Who was making fun?”

I told him Wayne and David. He said he’d speak to them later, but that that didn’t excuse what I did, and did I understand what Big Trouble I was in? I knew I was supposed to answer with “Yes, sir,” but I couldn’t say anything because my mouth was too dry. I hated even
looking
at Dad’s belt. He hadn’t used it on us in about a year, since a time me and Wayne socked each other on the arm during church. I didn’t think it was fair that time, because not only did Wayne hit me first, but also a lot harder. I didn’t think it was fair this time, either, because Dad also put me on restrictions, and with a lot of extra chores.

I could barely sit down to dinner afterward and asked if I could bring in a pillow. Mom always felt bad whenever Dad spanked us like that and so she said yes. We were having pork chops and potatoes au gratin. Tink thought it was called “potatoes
hog rotten,
” and everybody else thought that was pretty funny but I didn’t.

I still looked colored the next day, but at least I didn’t have to wear Ban-Lon. Nobody said anything when I walked into homeroom, but I guess that was only because it was me and I’m usually not somebody that kids notice all that much to begin with, plus I looked down at the floor the whole time so it was hard for anybody to see my face too well.

I headed for a desk in the back. I had math class in this same room first period, which was good because since I’d lost my notebooks at Bowlegs Creek all I had to write on was some of Dad’s graph paper from his work. I hoped we would get to use it, because I liked writing on graph paper and making charts and graphs and stuff. The teacher was Mr. Phinney, who was about a hundred years old and wore his pants up to his ribs and tucked in the end of his tie.

The PA buzzed and clicked. The principal read the announcements. Mighty Miners home game Friday. Key Club car wash Saturday. A scratchy record played “The Lord’s Prayer” and we all stood up for that. Then it was the Pledge of Allegiance, and then “God Bless America.”

The girl in the back row — her name was Mary Dunn and she was about a foot taller than me — she started staring at me halfway through the Pledge. It was the kind of way you look at somebody that has something really wrong with them, like a big neck goiter, or a glass eye that falls out, which Dad told me happened one time to a guy at the mine. Once the record was over and everybody else sat down, she went up to Mr. Phinney and said something, and when he looked back at me, the whole class did, too.

Everybody laughed pretty good for a while. I stared down at my graph paper and wrote my name over and over until they stopped, or until Mr. Phinney made them stop. Then Mary Dunn got all her stuff and moved to a different desk near the front, so I was the only one left in the back row after that. I tried really hard not to cry or anything, but I might have gotten kind of a runny nose, sitting there the rest of math class.

Mr. Phinney stopped me on the way out of class. He hiked his pants up a little bit higher, and tucked his tie in a little bit deeper, and I thought if he kept it up, the two things together might pull him over so far that he finally just folded himself in half.

One of his furry caterpillar eyebrows went up and the other went down, and he asked me if I was some kind of a joke boy and did I think I could get away with funny business in his class.

I told him, “No, sir. It’s no funny business. I just had an accident with shoe polish. That’s how come I missed the first day of school yesterday.”