Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  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 fo
r 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.”

  “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.