Arilla Sun Down

by Virginia Hamilton

  Sound roars over me like I’d just learned to hear it. I go to the window, looking out. Slide the window up. By craning my head around, I can see lights from way over there. It’s funny how land dips and turns when it looks all flat with trees. If I were to walk straight out from here, it would take me hours going east through the state park to get there. But if I go out the front and through a little bit of the town, it doesn’t take long at all.

  Seeing the lights, I get hungry for it. I hurry and close the window. No more than a minute passes and Mom comes in like I knew she would with some clean clothes.

  “Whew, that’s an odor, I tell you. Get yourself into the shower,” she says. “Supper’s almost on. Five minutes.”

  “I can’t make it in five minutes.” I let my face give her a hint I’m hurting. Too busy with getting supper to notice.

  “Ten minutes, then. But come on now. How was it today? Fun?”

  “It was fun,” I lie.

  “Bet you’re tired out.”

  “Yes. Mom, I hurt.”

  “Well. Maybe tomorrow I’ll come out and take a look at you all riding. I’m so glad you and Sun … I’ll come watch you, would you like that?”

  “Sure.”

  She been saying that for weeks. How’s she going to get there with all her classes and with Dad at work?

  She leaves me alone, all at once, like she can’t keep her spirits up or focused on any one thing too long. Never even noticed it before, but Mom is as strange and different as everybody else in this house. Or maybe I’m just strange and different. She didn’t notice that I hurt, even when I told her. But then she’s a dancer and she says dancers always hurt. Every minute of every hour. Maybe if I’d done The Dance, I wouldn’t hurt so much now.

  Taking up my clean clothes and head for the bathroom across the hall.

  Jack Sun, I think. And take a split second to look. Still standing there! He hasn’t moved a hair, waiting to hear me moan in pain. I walk on out with strength. Give him a backhand wave and close the door behind me.

  Inside, I get out of my stinking clothes. On into the shower as hot as I can stand it. I stretch out full length in the tub. Let the shower water beat out the pain. I can’t hear the rink roar with the door closed, with water beating, and steam like it will fill up my eyeballs.

  No thinking in the tub. Just letting my mind go fallow like a field. Fields don’t know pain. So I go blank, hoping muscles will stop jumping. Blanking out horses, jumpy and making me so sore.

  It seeps in, how other people can live every day without having a phenomenon like Sun Run around. Mom says a phenomenon is a happening you can’t put a name to. And I said to her, Yes, you can put a name to it — a phenomenon! But she didn’t appreciate my sense of humor. That’s because I never show much of one, I guess. Sun has one; and that’s how I know a sense of humor is his way of showing he is better than anybody and that he couldn’t care less about anybody’s feelings. I know my life has been some trouble with him, but it would be just forever dull having an ordinary boy for a brother. Even when he and I never have been like the kind of stuff you see going on at the basketball games and the soccer games.

  Girls will never mind to bring along their little brothers as what they call the chaperone. Meaning to keep what the girls call going with a boy a secret (where do they go with the boys? — I never see them go, other than Angel). Girls will button up their little brothers’ coats and buy them popcorn and wipe their noses, even slap some little faces when a kid may need dis-i-pline. And the whole time keeping the little ones close, so they won’t get lost or trampled in the excitement of winning and losing. I never will figure out how girls can concentrate on older boys, chewing gum, varsity cheers, crossing their legs and swinging them — always their right legs swing back and forth, back and forth, in time. And never once forget to take care of their little brothers. Their little sisters always seem to sit still between their moms and dads, which is a cramped way to watch some game.

  I wish some older sister could of taken care of me once. Whenever I see those girls with their little brothers, I wish it. Not something I think about and to bother me. Just that I wasn’t a little boy and Jack Sun wasn’t ever a girl. Naturally, I never had the chance to show him off by taking care of him. Even if I had been oldest, I bet he wouldn’t be the type of kid who’d let somebody treat him like a baby Ken for a grown-up Barbie. But in true life Sun Run never took care of me the way older brothers stand in front of their sisters to take up for them. Thinking back, Run all of the time seemed to be fooling with me. Or Mom was there in the middle taking up for me so Jack never could; or telling him how to do something so I would do the same. Maybe that’s why we never got the crinkles worked out between us, I don’t know.

  I can’t quite make the way it was more exact because thinking back hard always makes me feel ready to have a fit of some kind. But girls I know feel free to talk about when they were little and stuff. They will just go on remembering about anything, man! I never even want to think about when I was little.

  “GIRL! You get your own private country club, you can stay in it for an hour.” Sun is always hungry. Banging on the door, trying to make out I’m holding up the supper.

  “Okay, ugly, I’m out!” Off with the shower and I’m out, drying with the towel. Did I wash with soap? Sure, but I was so busy being a blank and when I was little …

  Maybe we were so poor we were partway hungry when I was little. Nobody talks about it, like my dad will never talk about when he was in Korea.

  I don’t recall being poor or knowing what poor was, or years, or anything like that. Because I haven’t lived so long, I guess. I can’t remember whole times from one year to the next. Mostly, I bring back something from when I was little all in a flash. The way the flash works is like heat lightning around the skating rink, outside but way off dead in the darkness. Do all kids lose whole times and most of years like I do, and then see a little bit of them all in a flash? Like heat lightning flashing and quivering way over in the earth’s curve.

  Your eyes keep coming back to the flash, so big in the dark you get blinded by it. Until all at once you know you are seeing many flashes rolled into one. You take one of the many and it grows into one great big flash. You watch it repeat itself, echo itself and give off more than one image of itself in the dark. But watch out, you have to work fast. Heat lightning only flashes a second. Work fast and you can hold on while it gets deeper and deeper, just the way I turn a flash of memory over and over. I let the flash echo in my brain again and again until I have grabbed every piece and particle that is in it.

  I get this flash of wood planks laid out on cement blocks in a long, crooked row. The sound of water rushing around the cement blocks about six inches below them. And all these real little girls and me having to walk the crooked row because the school basement has got flooded. The sound of that rushing water makes us have to go to the bathroom more than ever. I mean, a flash of boards just inches wide and we are walking them class by class because they wouldn’t let us go in the basement one at a time. Like, you raise your hand and ask, “Teacher, may I be excused?” and the teacher will say Yes or No, not now, all up to her if she thinks you really have to go. Most times she’d guess right, with what I recall to this day my mom said to her when she brought my lunch was an uncanny accuracy. I remember Mom saying that just as clear — I thought it meant a taste of something that wasn’t home-grown and put in a can. And if the teacher had an uncanny accuracy, then I wanted some of it, too.

  It was true, too, because most of the time the teacher guessed right about a kid having to go to the bathroom. But once in a while some little boy or girl would have an accident right in their seats. A bad accident. So that the teacher would have to clear the whole room. And some little kid would be stinking and bawling, and some embarrassed mom would have to come and get the kid.

  I mean, a flash of the whole thing in detail, almost, just as clear. The water wasn’t as high in the girls’ bathroom be
cause there were drains in there. I can see the water rushing down the drains. Hear it. There weren’t any planks up high, but boards laid out on the floor so we wouldn’t have to step in the wetness. We stood in line and I watched water rush down the drains. I was happy there with all of the girls in one place. The only time I can remember being together with a bunch of girls, feeling close to them. All in dresses, like it was special being a girl and I was special, too. With these women teachers standing taking each little girl by the arm oh so carefully, like one might break if they didn’t. And when it came to my turn, they did the same to me oh so carefully, and leading me into the cubicle with the swinging door; and then guarding the door on the outside while I was in there. Even to think about it makes me feel like I was something special.

  Water gurgles down the drain of this bathtub right now just in the same sound as when I was little in that flood basement of a school. And I remember watching water gurgle swiftly down a large drain. The chance to see some easy working of indoor plumbing forever opened my brain, like a trapdoor sliding back. Even sweeter than being close with a bunch of little girls all alike, and it was awful nice being all alike.

  Because seeing and hearing that drain, I would never again fear sitting in the cold in the dead of winter. In the world, there was a way of draining water — and I know I remember thinking that. Someday I wouldn’t have to freeze in the outhouse.

  My head is like that. A flash of something clear, but the rest darkness. Nothing. Kind of scary. I get a scent of trees sometimes, and a flash of cool pale bark of a tree. I appear to be floating past it, back and forth. I get kind of weak, either with the floating back and forth or with the scent of the tree. I wonder if somewhere, sometime, I have lived another life.

  Downstairs, thinking so hard I’m in the kitchen hearing the skating rink like it is the sound of home-fried corn with bacon I see sizzling on the stove. My head gets mixed up like that when I’m real tired. I have to blink a few times to make everything clear again. Mom’s at the stove putting supper in bowls and Sun is sitting on his side of the table like he is saying, This side is mine, I own it.

  I sit down on my side. I notice that Jack Sun’s hair is still damp from his shower he took before I got home. He is forever letting his hair drip dry and never catches a cold.

  “Thanks for coming home with me,” I tell him. Right away I’m sorry I let on I didn’t like coming home alone.

  “You never said you wanted me to wait for you,” Sun says, as polite cold as he can be. He’s sneaking a fork of coleslaw in a white bowl.

  Without a headband, Sun’s hair just flows shiny and black. Prince Valiant in some old comic you see in the shops around here. He is dressed clean in a white, long-sleeved T-shirt with a feather decal, and faded jeans.

  “Get your fingers out!” I yell real fast. But he keeps on sneaking the slaw. “Who do you have a date with?” And, naturally, he doesn’t answer.

  My voice doesn’t sound like me at all. Me so tired my head feels light. Either I am sick or half asleep, something.

  Mom puts a bowl on the table — heat rising from fried corn in a yellow bowl, color-coordinated.

  I know. I’m jealous of Jack Sun, I can’t help it. And why don’t I look like that, with that way of living now and long ago? Who am I? Why do I have to be the ugly one? Why does this table seem like the worst place to be this evening?

  Everything is on the table, a platter of lamb chops, which I haven’t seen on our table for the whole summer. End of October, when the lamb chops fall off the lamb, and I look like Leslie Rainy.

  Leslie Rainy is the singer they blast from the loudspeaker outside the rock shop on weekends. The rock shop doesn’t mean rock-and-roll shop, but a place where you can buy leathers for weaving or braiding, and beads and all kinds of polished stones to string on wire. They blast Leslie Rainy, who can do some strange skating up and down octaves with her voice — hard on one edge of it and sweet on the other. Oh, I love that Leslie Rainy, but I don’t like looking like her.

  Mom says Leslie Rainy looks just like the Taylors in this town and says I look just like Leslie Rainy and the Taylors in this town. All of them are plump with this complexion that Sun says is from-the-moon fair. And I hate fair because it is yellowish or it looks unhealthy. Taylors and me with lumpy hair that is not quite kinky. No Red Indian anywhere. I must of said the “Red Indian” out loud because Jack Sun suddenly says, “The Red Indian is a misnomer, Little Moon.”

  Mom clucks her tongue and puts full glasses of Kool-Aid, no, it’s pink lemonade, next to our plates. “Jack, don’t start up,” she says.

  “What’s a missed number?” I ask him and he has to laugh.

  “Dummy!”

  “Jack, you start up and you leave the table,” Mom tells him.

  “Yay, whoopee. Leave the table so’s I don’t have to look at you,” is what I say.

  “Oh, my lord,” Mom says. “The two of you can just make me sick.”

  “I said ‘misnomer,’” Jack says. “Not missed number — oh, forget it.”

  “No, now you go on and explain it to her,” Mom tells him.

  “Story of my life,” Sun says.

  “A misnomer?” I ask him, getting it right this time.

  “No. You. Explaining to you.”

  “You don’t have to say nothing to me for the rest of your career, too,” I tell him, “get smart with me.”

  But he’s patient. Proud he’s so smart.

  “The Red Indian is a misnomer. I ain’t going to give you a half-hour course, which is what it would take,” smart-mouth Jack says. “But, quickly, it means a mistake in naming something. People think Amerinds are red-colored. What it was, the first Amerinds ever seen by a white land thief probably had red paint on them. They liked the bright colors. And they got to be called ‘Pull up the wagons, here come the Red Men.’”

  “That’s very dull,” I tell Jack. “That’s the most dullest, uninteresting, made-up story I have ever been forced to listen to.”

  But Jack is looking satisfied with himself. And I’m amazed at how easy it is for him to turn any conversation to himself and Indians.

  “Who you going out with?” I say real fast, hoping to catch him.

  “Never you mind,” he says at last.

  Mom sits down at the head of the table between us. “Sun? You must have homework to do.”

  “Too early in the year for homework,” he says to her. Words slide out of him like moss agate strung on silk.

  I fill up my plate. “Bet I know who,” I tell him. “Bet it’s Angel Diavolad. Because she is darkest. Sun don’t like nothing that has any light on it.”

  Mom fixes Jack’s plate like he is a baby. “A sixteen-year-old promise is going to trip and fall in a seventeen-year-old dead-end if he’s not careful, too.”

  Jack Sun gives Mom a glinting look she missed but I caught. Before he can be smart, I butt in: “And no dark angel is going to catch a falling star — hoo!” That was pretty good for someone as tired as me.

  I can see I’m getting under his skin. Smile is tight. He orders his plate like always, but in quick, jerky motions. He moves the corn so it is not touching the coleslaw, and shoves over the coleslaw so it won’t touch the lamb chop.

  “Never you wonder about it, Moon Child,” he says to me. “An angel will know how to wing it.”

  “The two of you,” Mom says. She is eating, watching her plate. “Your father ought to hear this brother and sister.”

  She’s only irritated. She don’t yet know she is surrounded by TNT.

  “I like Angel,” Jack says. “It takes class to run the eight-eighty at two minutes. I think I’ll walk her through the dark to the roller rink.”

  Watch it, Sun!

  He did that deliberately to get Mom started.

  “She is a thirteen-year-old child and she has no business over there at that skating rink. You know that, Sun. Her father finds out she is over there and running with you —”

  “She was fourte
en about ten days ago,” Sun says. “She running the four-forty and me running the eight-eighty. I’ll wait for her at her finish line. Have to. I like the angel. Better than a moon maid.” He gives me the eye, like an arrow flashing past.

  “That’s enough,” Mom tells him. “Eat. I haven’t said you are going any place. Eat.”

  Sun eats one food at a time. Corn, then coleslaw and finally the lamb chop. How can he eat like that? One food hot, the next lukewarm and the last cold. I can’t stand to watch him.

  Quiet and the muffled roar of the rink is on my mind. Skating is dangerous to talk about, and I hope Sun will leave it go.

  His glinting eyes on me. Oh, no. Sun, leave it alone. I take it all back. I’ll clean your room, I swear, for a week.

  Down at his plate, eating so carefully, like he is wearing his headdress. He says, “We’ll just skate some waltzes to the loudspeaker and listen to some rock records during intermission.”

  “He just wants to walk in the dark with Angel,” I say to get Mom’s mind off the rink.

  “You ever learn to skate, Moon Child?” One smooth stone at a time.

  “Now that’s enough!” Mom says. “I’m telling you, you’re not going over to that skate place. Arilla can’t go and you can’t go. Now that’s it.”

  Be careful, Sun.

  “How you going to stop me?” Sun says, just as nice as he can be.

  “You just don’t defy me,” Mom says. She’s getting angry.

  “I think I’m too old for you to tell me what and when, Moon Mother.” Still so pleasant, but his face seems to close.

  “As long as you are under my roof,” she says.

  “You all stop fighting,” I say.

  “As long as you live here,” she says. “And I’ll tell you something else, Jack. You’re too old to be playing the brave warrior. It was all right when you were twelve or so. But you aren’t a boy any longer, so stop pretending.”

  “Who’s pretending?” Jack Sun says. “Aren’t I my father’s Sun?”

  “You all stop it,” I tell them.