Down Sand Mountain (5 page)

“Shoe-polish accident?”

“Yes, sir.”

The caterpillars were on the move again, the way they did when Mr. Phinney explained math problems on the board. “Try turpentine?”

I nodded. “But my mom didn’t want to get it too close to my eyes and mouth and nose.”

He said, “Well, all right then,” but that I had to stay sitting in the back row because he didn’t want me disturbing the class anymore. And if I wasn’t telling him the truth, he said, I better believe he’d find out about it, one way or another.

The second-period kids were crowding past us by that time, and I knew I was going to be late for my next class, which was what happened: I got a tardy for English, plus a whole other bunch of kids laughing once I came in after the late bell. Somebody said, “Hey, Sambo,” when I squeezed down the aisle between two rows of desks to the one empty one.

Nothing much else too bad happened, though, and by the end of the day, I thought maybe it would all fade away — the shoe polish and the getting laughed at and the having to sit in the back of the class. I hoped it would, anyway.

FRIDAY NIGHT CAME BUT I WASN’T allowed to go to the Mighty Miners game with Dad and Mom and them. I was feeling better about looking colored, I guess, but still didn’t mind not going. Mom had come into the bedroom the night before, when I couldn’t sleep, and rubbed my back until I finally did. Maybe she said something to Dad, because just before they left for the game, he let up on the restrictions some and said I could ride my bike, but only around the neighborhood. So that’s what I did — I rode about ten times around the perimeter.

I had read about perimeters in the Tampa paper, and if I ever talked to that Walter Wratchford again, I thought I might ask him about it. They said that that was the most dangerous job in the war — patrolling the perimeter. That and walking point, although one officer they interviewed said it wasn’t the guy walking point that got shot usually, it was the guy behind him, so I didn’t want to walk point or be the guy behind him, but I figured if the Vietcong opened up on me while I was patrolling the perimeter, I could either ride away fast or jump into a ditch. I practiced both for a while until I thought I had my technique down — up on the balls of my feet on the pedals so I could go directly into a sprint or jump off. It always worked better in my mind than it did when I actually tried it, though. Once when I jumped off I conked my head on a tree root and my bike rolled into a stop sign. Another time my foot slipped off the pedal and I landed face-first and got grass and dirt in my mouth.

Dusk is the most dangerous part of the day, and the time when you have to be the most vigilant on patrol because the changing light and the shadows can play tricks on you. It’s when the Vietcong can sneak up on your perimeter the easiest, and that’s what happened. This one was a girl: Darla Turkel. By the time I saw her, it was already too late.

I don’t know how I could have missed her. She was sitting on a pink bicycle on the other side of Green Street. The sun was low behind her, a red ball that made her blond Shirley Temple hair look pink, like the bike. I figured my only hope was to be friendly: Hi, bye, gotta fly.

“Hey, Darla,” I said.

She looked surprised. “Who are you?”

“Dewey Turner.” There were only about a thousand people in all of Sand Mountain, plus we were in a couple of the same classes at school. How could she not know who I was?

“Oh. I thought you were a colored boy. What’s the matter with your face?”

I had avoided the question all week, because after they all finished laughing, mostly people just stared at me and maybe whispered something to somebody else, and maybe called me Sambo, but that was about all.

“It’s just the makeup they use for the minstrel show,” I said to Darla, lying like crazy. “They picked me to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy next year. It doesn’t come off too good.”

Now there was a sour look on her face. “They just had the minstrel show.”

“Yeah, but it takes a lot of practice,” I said. “You practice for a whole year for that.”

She looked like if she hadn’t been a girl she would have spit right on the ground. “I saw that minstrel show, and I don’t think that boy they had this year practiced so much. He couldn’t even dance. They should have asked my brother, Darwin. My mom’s pretty mad. She’s really going to be mad now that you’re already it for next year.”

I felt bad for Darwin and her mom, and said I was sorry. Then I told her I was taking dance lessons.

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“I meant I’m
going
to take dance lessons,” I said.

She told me I ought to go to her mom because she was a great dance teacher, and I said that yeah, I would probably do that, I’d been thinking about it and all, I just hadn’t had time yet. We were both quiet for a minute. The sun was almost down and the streetlights made circles of light in little pools on every corner. You could hear the crowd all the way over by the Peace River at the football field.

Darla was staring, I guess at me. She said, “I know where this old lady lives that has a parrot that sings ‘When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder.’ You can see it through the kitchen window. You want to ride over there? It’s on Sixth Street.”

That kind of surprised me. I had thought she was mad or something before, and now she wanted me to go spying with her.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m on restrictions. This is as far as I can go right here.” Then — why, I don’t know — I said, “But you can come over here and we could ride around.”

“I can’t, either,” she said. “I’m on restrictions, too. This is as far as I’m allowed to go.”

“What are you on restrictions for?”

She blinked a couple of times. “I’m not allowed to tell.”

“You’re not allowed to
tell
?” I’d never heard of that before. I thought you
had
to tell, anytime anybody asked, so people would know how awful you were. It was part of the punishment.

“No,” she said. “I’m not. Besides, everybody already thinks they know, anyway, so I won’t dignify their gossip by defending myself.”

“You sound like my mom,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. Then she did a strange thing. She said, “Watch this,” then got off her bike and pushed it out of the circle of light, and when she stepped back into the light she started singing like Shirley Temple. “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon, all I want is lovin’ you and music, music, music, music.” As she sang, she also danced like Shirley Temple, which involved a lot of skipping and bouncing her hair and throwing her arms open like she was trying to hug everything in the world. I had never seen anybody open their mouth so wide, except to eat something really big. This went on for quite a while. She sang a couple more songs. She did “Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats and Little Lambs Eat Ivy.” She also did “High Hopes,” about an ant that ate a rubber-tree plant.

I guess I was hypnotized or something, watching her and listening, because I hardly noticed when she finally stopped. She was panting. A drop of perspiration rolled along the side of her face and down her cheek.

“You can close your mouth now,” Darla said. “You’re attracting flies.”

Green Street, at that minute, looked wider than the Peace River. The crowd roared from far away. “Somebody must of scored a touchdown,” I said.

Darla said, “Yeah, I guess.”

On weekends at our house, everybody had to pull two pieces of paper out of the job jar and then do the chores they picked: clean the bathroom, vacuum the house, beat the rugs, wash the garbage cans, sweep the carport, edge the sidewalk. One slip of paper said “
FREE
,” and another said “25¢,” and if you ever got both of those, you jumped on your bike and tore out of there because if you stayed around the house doing nothing — even though you had a right to — you ended up doing chores, anyway.

I got Wayne to tell me the Darla story later that Friday night, but it cost me two weeks’ worth of his chores from the job jar. He was lying in bed, on the bottom bunk, with his hands behind his head. I was leaning over the edge of the top bunk barely able to see him in the dark. “If I get the
FREE
or the money, that doesn’t count,” he said. “Maybe you better put that in writing.”

“I will tomorrow,” I said. “Just tell me about Darla.”

The more I wanted to know, the more he was going to make me wait. “What do you care, anyway?” he said.

“I just do. Now tell me.”

“First you have to say you want to marry her.”

“OK. You want to marry her.”

“Not me. You.”

“OK,” I said again. “You want to marry her.”

Wayne snorted. “I guess you don’t really want to hear this, then.”

“I already said I would do your chores,” I said. “We have a deal. You have to tell me.” I swung my pillow down at him but he grabbed it and pulled it out of my hands.

“Violence will get you nowhere, Mister Sambo.”

“Shut up,
Wiener,
” I said back. That was the nickname he had that he hated.

“Sambo.”

“Wiener.”

He jumped out of bed and started whacking me with my own pillow, and I didn’t have anything to defend myself with except the wood bar that kept you from rolling off the bunk bed. I nearly hit him in the head with it and then the light came on. It was Dad. We froze. He glared at Wayne, standing in his underwear holding my pillow, then at me on my knees up on the top bunk holding the bar.

“Do we need to have a conversation?” he said.

“No, sir.” Wayne handed me back the pillow.

“No, sir.” I put the bar in its place.

The room was darker than before when he left and shut the door, partly because he turned off the hall light and partly because it always takes your eyes time to adjust. Things were quiet for a while. Then Wayne started talking.

“The police caught her setting off firecrackers in the cemetery, is what I heard. Somebody that lives by there called the cops and when they came, she tried to run away across Riverside Road into the woods. They chased her down a path and finally caught her. She was lying on the ground with her feet stuck up in the air, laughing like a Laughing Hyena.”

“She was laughing? How come? And how come her feet were in the air?”

“Because she was
drunk.
” I could tell Wayne had been saving that part.

I said “No, she wasn’t,” and he laughed at me and said, “Yes, she was. And that isn’t all.”

“What else?” I don’t even know why I asked him, because I didn’t believe any of it.

Now came the part he had
really
been saving. “She was with a colored boy.”

I was already lying on my back, but it felt like all the air went out of my body. “A colored boy?”

“Yep,” he said. “A colored boy.”

When I started breathing again, I asked Wayne what happened to the colored boy and Wayne said he got away but they were still looking for him, and still trying to make Darla tell them his name and what all really happened after he gave her the liquor and where he got the firecrackers.

“What do you think they’ll do to him?” I said.

Wayne said you couldn’t be too sure. Put him in jail maybe. Or cut his you-know-whats off. If they put him in jail first, they might not do the other one; but if they did the other one first, they would still put him in jail.

“What about Darla?” I said.

His bed springs creaked. “Nothing, I guess. Nobody’s going to talk to her is all.”

“
I’ll
talk to her,” I said, which surprised me on account of I about always tried to do what everybody else was doing, because I wanted to fit in and have people like me — something that was getting harder ever since I turned colored, of course.

I thought Wayne would make fun of me for saying that — go on some more about how I loved her, or say I was Little Black Sambo.

But he didn’t. He didn’t say anything else, and I didn’t ask him anything else. It took a long time for my mind to be quiet, thinking about Darla and the colored boy and the cemetery and everything else. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed about that half man–half gator down at Bowlegs Creek, and that wasn’t any better, either.