Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  “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.

  THE SENIORS AT SAND MOUNTAIN HIGH SCHOOL had a list of all the seventh-grade boys according to height, and they were going for the tallest ones first with the red-belly attacks, then working their way down. That’s what I heard, anyway. That should have meant I was third to last, before Ronnie Lott and Richard Speight, although some people had the idea that they might spare Richard Speight because he was a dwarf. But that’s not how it worked out. Ronnie Lott and Richard Speight both got theirs on the second Monday of school.

  I saw Richard Speight after he got his in gym. There were big red handprints all over his belly that were already turning purple. Plus he didn’t have any shoes on. I asked where they were and he pointed over to the power line next to the outdoor basketball courts.

  “You’re never gonna get those down,” I said. I meant it to sound sympathetic, but Richard didn’t want sympathy; he just wanted somebody to be mad at.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But that’s nothing compared to what they’re gonna do to you.”

  “What?” I said, still thinking me and him were on the same side.

  He tucked in his shi
rt. “All I know is I’d move to a different town if I was you. You’re gonna wish you was dead. I just hope I get to see it.”

  I decided I hated Richard Speight. “Oh, just shut up, midget,” I said.

  I had forgotten that Richard Speight was pretty strong even if he was so short. He could also move pretty quick when he wanted to. He jumped up and grabbed me around the head and just about wrestled me to the floor, when one of the coaches came out of his office. Richard Speight scooted off but the coach grabbed my collar before I could get away, too.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, picking on a boy like that,” he said. “Do you want detention?”

  I said, “No, sir.” He shook me around and said that I better watch my step and mind my p’s and q’s, Buster Brown.

  Things got even worse after that. On Tuesday somebody put a WHITES ONLY sign on all the boys’ bathroom doors, and when I tried to go in, two seniors blocked the way. One of them was a guy they called Head because of his big head. He should have been a football player, but they didn’t have any helmet that fit him. The other one looked like Moe of the Three Stooges.

  “Hey, Little Black Sambo, can’t you read?” Moe said.

  Head snickered and pointed to the sign. “Whities only.”

  “Not ‘whities only,’” Moe corrected him. “Whites only.”

  “Yeah, whites only,” Head said.

  I didn’t start crying but I almost did. They laughed pretty hard when I went away. I heard them all the way down the hall. I guess they must have taken the other stairs, because when I tried to go in the bathroom on the second floor, Head and Moe were already there, too.

  I don’t know what they talked about in second-period English, because I had to pee so bad. I even asked Mr. Crow for a hall pass, but when he asked me what for and I told him, he said, “There’s a reason you have five minutes between classes, young man. You’re not in elementary school anymore. I suggest you budget your time more wisely.”

  So I didn’t go. Not then, not before the next period, not until lunchtime, when I ran outside and peed behind the building. It hurt so much I did cry then, only nobody saw me except Chollie the janitor, who was mowing, but I ran back inside before he could come over and get me in trouble. I didn’t drink anything at lunch or the rest of the day, and I made it home before I had to pee again, but just barely. I stayed in the bathroom a long time because when I finished peeing it felt like I had to go again right away, and I was afraid maybe I broke something holding it in so long. After a while I got so tired of standing to pee that I sat down backward again so I could put my head down on my arms because I had a giant headache, and I decided I was never going back to school ever and they couldn’t make me. In sixth grade it had been Deweyitis. Now it was Black Sambo and Whites Only, and maybe a red belly and maybe something worse. I also still sometimes forgot my locker combination, so I had to write it on my arm.

  The idea I came up with was military school. They had one over near Tampa. Of course, I would miss my family, but they could write me letters, and call, and send packages, and probably realize what a great guy I was once I wasn’t around, and feel bad about the way they had treated me, and try to make it up to me when I came home on leave or over breaks. I could wear my uniform around town, and if I saw Darla Turkel again at Green Street, I could explain my officer’s stripes and badges. I would be tough but fair. They’d call me sir, but when they talked about me when I wasn’t around they’d call me Dew-Man or something like that. Like, “The Dew-Man sure can handle his weapon. He had eight bull’s-eyes at target practice.” That sort of thing. Or maybe I wouldn’t use Dewey anymore once I got there. My middle name would be better — Markham. That was my mom’s last name before she married Dad. They could call me Markham because Markham sounded like Marksman, as in Expert Marksman. I planned to be very good with a rifle.

  Dad listened pretty nice while I told him my plan. We were out back in his work shed, where he was always making stuff and where he also kept his survey equipment. He used to go out there to smoke cigarettes, until John Wayne got lung cancer. John Wayne announced that he was planning to lick the Big C, which of course he did, but Dad probably figured he wouldn’t be so lucky. My dad smoked Chesterfield Kings, and he used to hide a pack in one of his nail jars. He did this thing where he nailed the lids of all his nail jars to a board that he then nailed to one of the beams over his workbench. When he needed a particular jar with a certain nail or screw or Chesterfield, he just reached up, unscrewed it, got what he wanted, then screwed the jar back in.

  My dad kept everything neat like that, and as I explained about going to military school over in Tampa, I made sure to tell him how neat and orderly they did things, and how it would teach me to be neat and orderly, too. Plus probably lead to a career in the military. Plus I was already the best around at shining shoes, which they made you do a lot of, for parades and stuff.

  When I finished, he looked up at the nail jars like maybe he wished there was still a pack of Chesterfields tucked up there in one of them. There was a light on over the workbench, a naked bulb, and the sun came in through the one little window, and through the double doors, which he always left open. But mostly it was dark. He said, “So what brought all this on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go back to school here anymore.”

  Dad said, “Did something happen at school you should tell me about?”

  I shook my head. There were the WHITES ONLY signs, and not getting to go to the bathroom, and Little Black Sambo. And there was the Deweyitis, though that was last year. But how could I talk about any of that? Besides, he was probably still mad at me for the shoe polish and skipping school and losing my clothes at Bowlegs Creek. Which left just the one thing.

  “Did they have red bellies when you were my age, Dad?”

  He nodded. “I believe they probably did, sport. Is that was this is about? What the seniors do to the new boys?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, although I left out the part about everybody already getting theirs except me. I knew my dad liked that kind of problem, anyway, because he always had a story he could tell me about when he was a kid, and he always knew what to do, and he always had good advice that made a lot of sense, the same way scouting stuff made so much sense when you read about it in Boys Life, even though it never worked too well when you tried it yourself. But it sounded good. Usually I guess it didn’t work for me because the problem Dad thought we were talking about wasn’t really the problem because I had to leave too much stuff out.

  One time I asked Dad what I should do if a guy wanted to fight me, because if I was in a fight, I always got in trouble not only with the principal, but with Dad, too. That was back in elementary school. What Dad said was I should pray for help in those situations, and ask God for the strength to resist, and turn the other cheek. I said, But the other guy could hit me when my eyes were closed and Dad said it was OK to pray with your eyes open; just pray in your mind. He said you didn’t have to get down on your knees or bow your head or fold your hands or close your eyes.

  “Or get in a closet?” I said. We had a Sunday school teacher that year who told us the Bible said you were supposed to go into a closet when you wanted to pray. Dad said, “That’s right — or get in a closet,” but he also had this exasperated look he got when he tried to explain something to me but I kept missing the point.

  That business about praying — I guess it was good advice, and I did try it one time, but the problem was I usually did something myself to get in the fight in the first place so what I should have been doing was maybe praying to not be so stupid all the time.

  Dad had been working on an old lamp while we talked — one of those lamps where the shade spins slowly around so it looks like water crashing over Niagara Falls. It hadn’t worked in about a million years, and I didn’t know why he was trying to fix it now, since Mom didn’t like it and he would just have to sell it or give it away. But that n
ever mattered to Dad. He just figured if something was broke, you fixed it and that was the end of that. I watched him with the rewiring and the splicing, and I handed him a new bulb that he screwed in, and then he remounted the shade and plugged the lamp into his extension cord. It hummed and the shade turned and the light swam around the walls.

  “The best thing is probably to tough it out on this red-belly business,” Dad said. “Sometimes bigger boys just need to prove how big they think they are, and they pick on smaller boys like the seventh-graders. If it gets out of hand, you let me know and I’ll speak to the principal. But what they want you to do is be scared, and if you show them you’re scared, that’s how they win. Just act like you don’t care what they’re up to. They might not leave you alone, but you’ll have your dignity, and that’s the most important thing in all of this. Your dignity. Nobody can take that away from you unless you let them.”

  He stopped then and looked at me, and I wondered if he remembered who he was talking to — a boy who stained his face black with Kiwi shoe polish, and burned holes in his Ban-Lon shirt with a magnifying glass, and had to sneak home in the burnt shirt and his underwear.

  “I understand, Dad,” I said, and I did — about the dignity, and about the toughing it out, and about the bigger boys and the smaller boys.

  “Great, son,” he said.

  “But Dad —”

  “Yeah, sport. What is it?”

  “Well, I was still wondering — you didn’t say yet about the military school, about can I go.”

  He looked back up at those nail jars and I know he wished he still had some Chesterfields then. He didn’t answer. Or maybe he had already answered and I just hadn’t heard right. I don’t know. The lamp was still on and the shade was still turning and the river was still running like it was carrying me and him and the shed and everything closer to the falls. All he said was didn’t I have some homework I needed to do for school tomorrow, and shouldn’t I head on back to the house to do it? I wanted to say, “Wait, Dad, there’s more, a hundred things more, a hundred reasons for me to go off to military school that I haven’t told you yet, and never go back to Sand Mountain High School or stay in Sand Mountain,” but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, so I just said, “Yes, sir.”