MY FACE WAS STILL STAINED KIWI BLACK when Mom pulled off the covers to make me get up the next morning, which was the first day of school. I checked right away in the mirror. I have this part of my brain that makes stuff up when somebody asks me a question but I don’t know the answer. It makes them think I’m smarter than I really am, which is OK, but it also makes me think I’m smarter than I really am, which can be a problem. Anyway, that part of my brain took over, and what it did was convince the rest of me that I looked tan. Maybe not regular tan, but tan the way those kids whose families have cottages out at Snake Lake are tan because they spend the whole summer with their boats and their rich families and their friends going water-skiing. A lot of people called them Colored-People Tans, except they used the other word for it.
Unfortunately, my tan idea didn’t last long. “He still looks like a colored boy,” Tink said when I finally came into the kitchen for breakfast.
Wayne said, “Mom, you can’t let the freak go to school like that. Not with me. He’ll embarrass me.”
I said, “You told me you were a Lone Wolf.”
Wayne did one of his giant sighs, then he said, “That was last year. This year is different. I’m going out for JV football and don’t need a freak brother, a freaktoid, to mess everything up.” The way he said all that, it wasn’t like he was talking to me. In fact, it wasn’t like I was even there.
Tink jumped up on her chair. “What’s a freaktoid? Does it mean colored?” I told her to shut up and she said, “You can’t make me.”
Mom had cooked grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and stewed prunes because it was a special morning, and Good Housekeeping said lunch for breakfast once in a while kept a family from falling in a rut. I poked my finger in the middle of Tink’s grilled cheese because I knew she hated anybody to touch her food.
Mom waved her spatula at me. “Dewey, that is unacceptable.” She grabbed my plate and set it down in front of Tink. “Here you go, Tink. You can eat your brother’s.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m not going to eat it, anyway.”
Wayne shoved the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and grabbed his new notebooks and pens and lunch money that Mom had lined up on the counter. He would have just left but Mom said, “Aren’t you forgetting something?” and he said could he please be excused, please, and thanks for the breakfast.
Mom said, “Wait for your brother,” then she wrapped another grilled cheese in a paper towel and handed it to me. She told me I could eat it on the way to school, and I wasn’t a freak, I looked fine, I was a very handsome boy. Then she stopped.
“Where is your new shirt?”
“What new shirt?” I said, though I knew exactly what she was talking about because it was still hanging on the back of a chair in my bedroom. It was something called Ban-Lon. Mom said it didn’t hold water, just sort of shed it, so instead of hanging it on the line to dry, all you had to do was wring it out. And it was wrinkleproof, too, so no ironing ever. I went back to the bedroom, knowing it was no use arguing, and looked at the shirt. It was orange. It had three buttons and a collar. It smelled like the chemical plant at the phosphate mine. In elementary school I only wore T-shirts, and they were always cotton, but my mom said, “This is high school and things are going to be different around here, Mister, so you better get used to it.”
I pulled on the Ban-Lon and right away my skin went crazy. I think the cells on the outside were trying to crawl behind the ones underneath, a worse torture than getting tied down in the desert on an ant bed with honey smeared all over your body. I tugged at the neck and sleeves, trying to stretch it every way I could, but nothing worked, plus I started to sweat right away. If Wayne ever pulled it over my head, he could suffocate me with it. I was so miserable, I thought about suffocating myself. Our dog, Suzy, a half beagle–half basset, had followed me to the bedroom, and I was pretty sure she was shaking her head.
When Tink saw me come out of the bedroom in the Ban-Lon, she blew tomato soup out of her nose and said, “Colored boy freaktoid.” I stuck my finger in her other grilled cheese, then ran out the door. I could hear Tink crying and Mom yelling until I was halfway down the block.
Wayne was all the way over on Orange Avenue at David Tremblay’s house at the corner of Orange and Second Street by then. They’d been best friends since about first grade, so I guessed if Wayne was a Lone Wolf last year, then him and David must have been Lone Wolfs together. I walked toward them, trying to act like I wasn’t worried about anything, when the fact was that I was worried about everything: the Ban-Lon, the shoe polish, remembering my locker combination, the red bellies the seniors gave the new seventh-graders. When I got to the corner, Wayne and David Tremblay were already walking up Second Street. David Tremblay turned around with his Elvis hair and his eyes got big when he saw me and he laughed like a girl until Wayne punched him on the arm and he punched Wayne on his arm, and they ran on up Second toward the high school.
I decided I was mad at everybody, especially Wayne, who’d called me a freaktoid and wouldn’t wait for me even though he knew, because I had told him in secret, how scared I was about high school and the red bellies and remembering my locker combination and all. I wished I could be a Lone Wolf the way he was last year, only he had wanted to do that — chew on toothpicks and stand on one leg against the wall with his arms crossed and his other leg pulled up so his foot was braced against the wall behind him, which left a dirty shoe print, which was part of being a Lone Wolf. For me, though, I’d have been a Lone Wolf if it meant kids wouldn’t make fun of me anymore, but I’d rather everybody just liked me instead.
I slowed down walking and finally just stopped there in the middle of the street.
The Ban-Lon must have affected my brain, or maybe it was the chemicals from the shoe polish, but it finally got through my thick skull that there wasn’t any way anybody who didn’t like me before was going to start liking me now, on account of how colored I looked, and as bad as it was with Wayne and Tink at home, it was going to be a million times worse at high school. The seniors would probably give me a red belly so hard it would rupture my kidney or spleen or something, which was how the Great Houdini died. A guy showed up at Houdini’s dressing room and said he’d heard Houdini could tense his stomach muscles to take any blow no matter how hard and was that true and could he try it? Houdini was lying on a couch, talking to his admirers, and maybe grunted but didn’t really pay any attention, so he wasn’t ready when the guy hauled off and socked him in the gut. I was a big fan of the Great Houdini except for the part where he died the agonizing death. It was the one thing he couldn’t ever escape.
So I didn’t go to school. Where I went instead was the doghouse in W.J. Weller’s backyard so I could hide with W.J.’s old bassett hound, Lightning, until everybody was gone to school, then sneak down to Bowlegs Creek until I wasn’t colored anymore, or at least until three o’clock, when the bell rang at the end of school.
I didn’t stay in the doghouse too long, though, because Lightning wouldn’t move over and give me any room. Also, they must have been feeding him on a lot of beans.
It took me about an hour to get to Bowlegs because every time I heard a car I had to jump in the bushes, plus it was three miles south of the Sand Mountain city limits. Bowlegs Creek was where the Indian outlaw Billy Bowlegs hid in the old days, I think when they chased him out of the Everglades. My mom said the army caught all the Miccosukee Indians and put them on a train to somewhere, and Billy Bowlegs was the only one they couldn’t find.
Bowlegs Creek twists around the woods under cypress trees so thick you can’t see the sky, so it’s cool and dark all the time, and they say Billy Bowlegs’s ghost might be living under one of those cypresses, hidden behind the cypress knees or in a hollow place carved up under the bank like the alligator nests that aren’t supposed to be there, either.
One day back in July, we found five colored boys there. I don’t think anybody said anything for a couple of minutes, because we had
never seen colored boys anywhere we played and couldn’t believe they would come to Bowlegs Creek, which everybody knew was ours, not the colored people’s.
We stared at them on the one bank; they stared back at us on the other. We were barefoot; they were barefoot. We wore cutoffs; they wore cutoffs. We had inner tubes; they didn’t have anything but the mud, so of course somebody must have said something and next thing you know we were all pulling up our own mud and throwing it at them, getting hit by theirs, trying to dodge the big clods coming at our heads, and when it got in your eyes, you had to slide down the bank to the creek to get it out in the water, only you were closer there and you got hit even more. There were six of us, but one didn’t count and that was this kid named Connolly Voss, the biggest yellowbelly in Sand Mountain, who pretty soon ran off from the big fight. Wayne, who couldn’t stand Connolly Voss anyway, fired one that hit Connolly on the butt, which wasn’t easy since Connolly was about as wide as a stick, not to mention he had a pencil neck, and that even made the colored boys laugh. But they didn’t have time to laugh long, because we had been having a lot more mud wars there than them, plus we had David Tremblay, who could probably throw harder than anybody in the state. One of theirs, and then another one of theirs, went like Connolly Voss up the bank toward the bridge and out of range. We thought they were gone but one of them must have picked up a rock from the side of the road because the next thing you know I felt something hard on the back of my head and then felt back there with my hand and there was blood.
The colored boys all ran away, which was a good thing because when word got around about what happened, some of the dads — not ours, but some of the others — went looking for them. Wayne especially was worried about what might happen if the dads ever did catch up with the colored boys. I wasn’t worried so much about that, though. What I was worried about was that I only got one stitch in my head when Mom drove us to Dr. Rexroat’s, and I knew people would make fun of me if they knew that, because if you just got one stitch, you probably didn’t even need any and I wanted people to think I was really hurt so they would feel sorry for me and not say you’d get Deweyitis anymore if you touched me on accident.
When I finally made it to Bowlegs Creek, I went down the trail from the road to the deepest part of the woods to a beach at a bend in the creek everybody called Sand Head because it looked like a head with a big nose and was all sand, no trees. It should have been a great hiding place, and at first I thought I would stay there and draw pictures in my new notebooks, eat the grilled cheese sandwich before it got limp, and then make up my story about what happened the first day of school.
But after a while I got worried about Billy Bowlegs’s ghost, and the half man–half gator they were always talking about that also hung out around there. I started hearing stuff, too. Leaves crackling, twigs snapping, a breeze stirring things up, a bird, a splash in the water. Something growled, which might have been my stomach, but also might have been that half man–half gator, and that did it. I grabbed everything and ran back up the path out of the woods to the bridge, which was out in the sunshine and not as scary. By the time I got there, I was sweating like a fat monkey because of that Ban-Lon shirt. August in Florida is 99 degrees and 99 percent humidity, so I pulled the Ban-Lon off and got my magnifying glass I always carried in case I needed to look for clues about mysteries I might have to solve, although there hadn’t been too many of those yet but you never know. I aimed the lens at the Ban-Lon the way you do the sun to start a fire, and the shirt started smoking orange smoke, but instead of igniting and burning up, it just melted a hole. I couldn’t believe it. I melted a couple of more holes but it took too long, so finally I just dug a hole in the bank under the bridge and buried it.
The good thing about Bowlegs Creek was that you couldn’t see down there from the road unless you got right to the edge of the bridge and leaned way over, plus hardly any cars went down that far because there weren’t any citrus groves or cattle ranches out that way, just scrub brush and scraggly trees and palmettos and moss and sandy soil and ant beds and sandspurs and maybe gator lairs, and cattails, and turnarounds where people dumped old mattresses and clothes washers and leaky bags of trash, and old dogs or puppies that never lived very long so you were always finding their bones if you weren’t careful.
Since nobody could see me, anyway, and since I knew everybody who might come down to Bowlegs Creek was in school except me, I took all the rest of my clothes off, because I didn’t want them to get dirty or wet, except my underwear. Then I climbed down the bank to where we had the mud wars and started digging another hole, actually a cave like the ones the Vietcong lived in, with their miles of tunnels. They had a color picture in the Tampa paper one time of a cross section of the tunnels. It looked like this ant farm I used to have until Tink felt so sorry for them that she let them go.
I dug in the bank of Bowlegs Creek all the rest of the day. When my hands got too sore and my fingers numb, I found a stick, and when the stick broke, I found a hubcap, and when the hubcap got too big for the tight space in the back of the cave, I used my hands again until the cave was wide enough and deep enough for me to crawl inside. And even then I kept digging. I dug out a shelf to put stuff on, and then the start of a second hole off to the side in case I wanted to add another room. I thought I could even live there.
When the afternoon rain came, I brought my clothes and notebooks inside and put them on the shelf and sat there for a long time, still in my underwear, watching it pour down outside. The rain smelled like mold at first, then like dirt, then just like the clean water they had in the North Carolina mountains where we went camping at Deep Creek. That was nice — that smell, and thinking about Deep Creek, where we met our cousins and saw bears. I thought about that for a while and the rain kept coming down, buckets of rain, and I also thought about being in my own bed some nights with clean sheets still crunchy from drying on the clothesline, stretching my legs and yawning and hearing Wayne snore on the bottom bunk and Mom and Dad watching something on TV in the living room, the blue light from the TV coming in the edge of the bedroom door. They might laugh, or say something I couldn’t understand, just their voices coming through the door, too, like the blue light, and then the night summer rain starting, tapping, then drumming, then roaring on our tin roof while I was deep under the sheets pulled up to my mouth and the pillow over my eyes so just my nose stuck out so I could breathe. That was like a cave, too, actually better than a cave because it occurred to me that the one I was in right then at Bowlegs Creek had turned cold, and my underwear was wet, and the rain had shifted and was blowing in on me. The water from the road and the trees ran down the bank and into the cave so that pretty soon I was sitting in a puddle, and the rain was still pouring down outside, and the edge of the cave washed away, then more of it, then more —
Everything happened so fast, I hardly remember anything except that I jumped out just in time before it collapsed, and slid down the bank into the creek. Then I was under the water and it was rushing hard over my head and there was nothing to grab on to and I swallowed and coughed and felt the bottom and kicked back up so I could breathe, and the current dragged me halfway under the bridge before I could even think about swimming to the side. Once I did, I just shivered there for a while so I could catch my breath, then I crawled back over through the mudslide, but too late: my notebooks and pants and shoes, even the grilled cheese sandwich from breakfast that I never ate, were all buried and I was too tired and scared and wet and cold to dig them out. I just sat there, my feet sinking in the mud, until I had to do something, so I crawled back under the bridge and dug up the Ban-Lon. It was probably going to rain forever, and I didn’t have anything else to wear.
IT WAS AN HOUR LATER AND STILL RAINING and I was hiding at the edge of the bridge only in just my underwear and the Ban-Lon shirt with the holes. The rain had already raised the level of Bowlegs Creek up over where my cave used to be, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do except wait until it g
ot dark and then sneak back home. I wished my mom would come looking for me and I said a couple of prayers for that, but nothing happened except finally this guy Walter Wratchford showed up in his car.
Everybody knew Walter Wratchford, because his dad was Mr. Hollis Wratchford that ran the farmer’s market under the Skeleton Hotel, and that gave Chollie the janitor a dollar after the minstrel show. Walter Wratchford had been in the Vietnam War but was back now. I guess he did a lot of just driving around sometimes.
I saw him from a long ways off, coming real slow from the direction of the old Turkey Creek Mine that was about ten miles south of town and nobody ever went there anymore. The car was an old blue Ford Fairlane with red doors, and it got slower and slower until it finally kind of glided to a stop there next to me like maybe it had run out of gas. There was a rope holding the passenger door shut, and I guess Walter Wratchford untied it from inside because in about a minute the door swung open and there he was, sitting inside smoking a cigarette. His hair was long and stringy, which you didn’t see much around Sand Mountain, and he had on his old army jacket. I ducked down some more but then figured he must have already seen me or why else would he have stopped, so I lifted my head up.
He just looked at me like he saw stuff like that all the time, and he said, “Well, are you getting in or not?” I nodded and pulled my Ban-Lon shirt as far down as I could, almost to my knees, so he wouldn’t see that I didn’t have any pants on. Once I slid in the seat, he grabbed some old yellow newspaper, which I started to lay over me.
“No, no, put it under you first,” he said. “I don’t want my car all wet.” Then he said, “Dang.”
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.
Down Sand Mountain Page 2