I WAS STILL ON RESTRICTIONS THE NEXT FRIDAY, but I didn’t want to go to the football game, anyway. I was barely colored anymore, but that didn’t stop kids from still teasing me about it at school. After Mom and Dad and Wayne and Tink left, I lay on the rug in the living room for a while burping — we had fried liver that night for dinner — but you can get tired of that after a while, so I eventually got up and rode my bike over to the corner of Second and Green Streets to see Darla Turkel again. I don’t know why I thought she would be there except that she had been the week before.
I waited about ten minutes for her to show up, then got back on my bike and rode around for a while, trying to do all the same things I had done the Friday before — the patrolling the perimeter, the jumping off into ditches, the sprinting to get away from the Vietcong — but afterward Darla still wasn’t there in that circle of streetlight on Green Street on her pink PF Flyer with her Shirley Temple hair, so I went back home and lay down on the rug again in the living room and did some more burping and watched some TV.
Darwin Turkel answered the door when I showed up at their house the next day after the job-jar chores and Dad lifted my restrictions.
“They’re not here,” he said, even though I hadn’t said anything, including who I was there to see. “They’re out and they’re not back yet.” He folded his arms and didn’t move over to invite me in, so I just stood on the front porch and looked at his lips, which were the reddest I ever saw on a boy, almost like he wore lipstick. I could tell he didn’t, though, because he had a habit of licking his bottom lip with his tongue back and forth very fast. Not all the time, but every once in a while: his tongue shot out of the hole like a rabbit or a gopher, turned both ways, then popped back down. He also wore a red Ban-Lon shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. I didn’t know how he could even breathe with that shirt on, or why he would wear it when he didn’t have to, like on a Saturday afternoon, which this was.
I tugged on the collar of my T-shirt to stretch it out some more.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“Well, are you going to come inside and wait?”
I said I guessed so and started to come in, only he stopped me.
“You have to go around to the back door,” he said. “That’s the servants’ entrance and where we take deliveries.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You don’t have servants. And what deliveries?”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, aren’t you supposed to be colored?”
I told him, “Heck no,” but he just smiled and closed the door. I heard his voice again, though. “See you around ba-ack.” He kind of sang it at me, and for some reason I went around the house to the servants’ entrance like he said, although I almost couldn’t find the door there was so much junk on the back porch, including an old washing machine that was green with algae or something, wet boxes full of magazines that you knew if you tried to pick them up the bottoms would fall out, bags of stuff, a couple of rolled-up carpets, toys and board games like Chutes and Ladders for kids a lot littler than Darla and Darwin, two big dolls without heads, some empty orange crates, a chair with three legs, the heads of the two dolls — a Raggedy Ann and a Raggedy Andy — stuck on the ends of two poles.
“Entrez vous,” Darwin said, holding open the screen door. It was French and meant “Come in, you.”
“I’m not colored,” I said again. He shrugged and said, “Well, all right, then,” and opened the door wider, and even though I sort of didn’t want to, I followed him inside.
The house was dark and Darwin told me I had to be very quiet because his grandfather was taking a nap. We went upstairs to Darwin’s bedroom. He shut the door behind us.
“So you’re the boy in the minstrel show,” he said.
I said, “Not this year,” but that next year maybe I would be.
He smoothed down the front of his Ban-Lon shirt, then stuck his hands in the pockets of his Bermuda shorts. I looked down at his shoes. He was wearing penny loafers without socks. “I was told you were already the one,” he said. “Can you dance? Let’s see you dance. I won’t even ask you to sing.”
I said I didn’t have to show him anything. Then I asked when were Darla and their mom coming back, anyway? Then I said I was leaving. He scooted over to block the door.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Never mind. Just kidding. You don’t have to dance. I don’t care, anyway. You can be in the minstrel show. Why should I care? We’re moving to Hollywood as soon as we get out of here and I’ll probably be in the movies.”
I said, “Maybe Hollywood, Florida,” which was down near Miami.
He started to say something and I could tell it was going to be prissy, but he stopped himself and asked me if I wanted to play a game. “They’ll be back in a little while. Darla went to ride her stupid pony. We can just play until they get back. You have to play.”
I wasn’t used to somebody wanting me to be around like this, even if it was somebody so weird like Darwin Turkel. “OK,” I said. “What?”
“It’s a game I made up called Turn Off the Lights.”
“That’s a dumb name.”
“Well,” he said, “if you win, you can make up a new name that I’m sure will be better.”
The game was that we closed the blinds and turned off the lights, and one of us tied up the other one and blindfolded him. The one that was tied up had to sit on the floor, and no matter what happened he wasn’t allowed to say anything for five minutes. If he did, he lost. If he didn’t, he won. It sounded pretty stupid to me.
By the time he finished tying me up, I couldn’t see anything, even when I opened my eyes under the blindfold. I heard a scratching sound, which was a record player, then the Beatles’ “She Loves You.” I heard Darwin’s voice singing the “yeah, yeah, yeah” part, and his feet every now and then creaking a loose floorboard. I was sitting in the middle of a big rug and figured once he was on it, I wouldn’t be able to hear him, which turned out to be true, because when he poked me in the ribs the first time, I just about jumped up off the floor.
Now it was just the Beatles singing.
He poked me again, this time in the stomach, and then he grabbed both of my sides and tickled me. I squirmed to get away from him, but clamped my jaw tight to keep from making any noise. I wanted to win so I could rename the game “This Is Stupid.”
I felt something on the back of my neck, I think a feather. Then something in my ear, which must have been the feather again. That didn’t tickle so much. I couldn’t believe how black it was under the blindfold, and I got that kind of panicky feeling of being claustrophobic. I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to know when five minutes were up, but figured that was probably a trick of his to get me to say that so he would win.
He grabbed one of my shoes and pulled it off, and I almost said, “Give it back,” but didn’t. He grabbed the other shoe, too, and then I felt the feather again, this time across my face. At first I twisted away but it actually felt kind of good, so after a while I quit trying to move away. He did the feather for a long time after that, across my forehead, down the side of my face, over my ear, across my mouth. He did it around my neck, too, really slow. Then my mouth again, which felt funny the more he did it. Then down my arm, then my other arm, to my hands, which were sitting in my lap. Across my knuckles, up my arm, around my neck, across my mouth, over my ears, down my arms again. The song had stopped and the needle was just going round and round on the last groove on the record. He needed to stop it but maybe he didn’t notice, and I didn’t say anything because of the game. The feather ran over my legs some, my arms, everything. And then disappeared. I hardly noticed when it did, except that I felt his hands on my arms instead, not squeezing, just holding my arms for a minute moving up and down, then one of his hands was on my shirt kind of rubbing on my belly. I held my breath when he did that, just for a second, or maybe longer than a second, I’m not sure. It sure was dark.
Then
I finally said something. I said, “Five minutes is over; now untie me,” and I rolled away from where I thought he was and didn’t feel his hand anymore.
“Untie me,” I said again. “I won. It’s five minutes. Untie me.” I began to get panicky under the blindfold and with my hands tied, and didn’t know how I had made it that long because of the claustrophobia. “Untie me!” I yelled. “You better untie me!” I could hear Darwin breathing a little ways away.
I started yanking really hard on the ropes and got one of my hands free and right away pulled off the blindfold. Darwin helped me get the other knots out.
Then it was his turn.
I knew some knots from Scouts and used every one I could think of when I tied him up: the sheepshank, the half hitch, the square knot, plus a few I probably made up. I kept tying until I ran out of rope. Then the blindfold — I pulled that tight until he said “Ow,” then I pulled it even tighter. He said it was about to make his eyeballs pop, and I said he wasn’t allowed to talk for five minutes, remember?
He hadn’t said much after he let me go, and I hadn’t said much, either. I pushed him down to a sitting position on the rug, turned off the light, turned it back on again so I could find my shoes, which he had tossed under his disgusting bed, which hadn’t been made up and which had sheets that were yellow, not that that was their real color. I would have thought a guy that wore Ban-Lon on a Saturday would have a much neater room, but I guess not.
I still felt pretty funny about the game but didn’t know what to say about any of it, so once I found my shoes, I licked my finger really good and stuck it in Darwin’s ear. “The new name of this game is Wet Willie,” I said, then I tiptoed over to the door, turned off the light, threw a book against the wall to distract him, and made my getaway.
I didn’t get too far, though, because Darla and her mom walked in the front door about the time I got to the bottom of the stairs. They were both wearing big riding boots and matching pink pants and T-shirts. Darla’s hair was still perfect, like Shirley Temple. Her mom’s hair was red and piled up on top of her head like Jackie Kennedy, only her face was harder.
“Call the police, sugar,” Mrs. Turkel said. “It’s a midget burglar.” She laughed at her own joke and winked at me. “You must be one of Darwin’s little friends. What’s your name? And where is he, anyway? And where’s my papa? He’s not still asleep, is he? That man would spend his entire life in bed if you let him, I swear. Well, it’s time to get him up. Darla, sugar, I’m going to get Papa up. You hold on to this boy and go count the silverware. Check his pockets. Ha-ha. You are the cutest little thing, I swear.”
She went on like that with the “Where’s Papa?” and the “I swear” and the “Darwin’s little friend,” even when she stomped away down the hall in her riding boots, leaving a trail of mud prints that nobody seemed to notice but me. If it had been at my house, my mom would have handed somebody the broom and dustpan and stood there pointing at the mess or just looking at it until it got cleaned up.
Darla’s pony was named Bojangles after Bill Bojangles Robinson, a colored man Shirley Temple danced with in some movies. We were riding our bikes when she told me this, because I had said I had a sore leg and couldn’t stay at her house for a dance lesson, but really I was nervous about Darwin tied up upstairs and wanted to get out of there before he started yelling or something. Darla said she would go with me, and just followed outside and hopped on her pink bike, even though I hadn’t asked her. We were a ways down Orange Avenue when she told me about the pony. I wondered why if she could afford a pony they couldn’t clean off their back porch, too, but I didn’t ask.
“Why’d you name him Bojangles, besides that?” I said.
“Well, why do you think?” she said.
I said I guessed because he was a colored horse.
She pedaled up next to me. “Not colored. He’s a black horse. And anyway, he’s a pony. His mane is black, his tail is black, his coat is black, his eyes are black.”
I said colored people weren’t black, they were brown. She said she wasn’t talking about colored people, she was talking about her pony. I said I thought she was talking about why she named him after Bill Bojangles Robinson, and she said, “I was.” She studied me pretty hard for a minute, still pedaling, and said, “You’re not slow, are you?”
I said, “You mean like retarded?”
“I mean like slow,” she said.
I shook my head. “I make all A’s usually.”
“Well, good, then,” she shouted. “That’s very, very, very good.”
We kept riding all the way to Bowlegs Creek, and I decided I didn’t understand much about talking to girls. But then again Darla didn’t seem like any regular girl, just like her mom didn’t seem like a regular mom, and her brother sure didn’t seem like a regular boy. Which reminded me —
“Can I tell you something? And don’t get mad at me,” I said.
Her cheeks were red from riding, and her blond hair back off her face from the wind and the perspiration. “What?”
“Your brother, he’s all tied up in the bedroom with a lot of knots in a rope, and the lights are off, and he’s also blindfolded.”
Darla blinked at me. We had gotten to Bowlegs by then and were putting down our kickstands. She said, “So?” like she thought I was accusing her of doing it.
“So I might of been the one that tied the knots and all.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “He can just stay there all day. He probably likes it.”
“Oh,” I said, thinking no conversation I’d ever had with Darla so far ended up the way I thought it would.
We sat on the stone wall of the bridge for a while, flicking sticks in the water and watching them disappear under us with the current, and I told her about the time I dug a giant cave in the bank and lived in it for a while until it collapsed on me and I had to claw my way out. It was kind of a miracle I survived. I would have been fine probably except for a storm that came up — I thought it might have been a hurricane — that was what washed the cave away. She asked what I lived on and had I run away from home and did my family give me up for dead — practical questions that I appreciated, and nothing that went in the direction of Ban-Lon and underwear.
I spit down in the creek and she said she hated it when people spit, and I said I usually never did that but a gnat must have flown in my mouth, I was sorry. She said she thought you should always be a gentleman, no matter how old a boy you were. That seemed pretty hard to me, to not be able to spit, or burp even if you ate liver and cabbage, or cut one, but I would try around her. I suddenly had about a million questions I wanted to ask her — about the cemetery and what happened there, and how long her mom could actually hold her breath underwater when she was a mermaid, and what about Darwin — and a million things I wanted to say to her, too, but I was also afraid of talking too much, of saying something too stupid, so I kept my mouth shut after that and we just sat there in the afternoon. She sang a couple of songs just because she wanted, I guess. Bowlegs gurgled along under us, and two cars passed a half hour apart, but it was quiet mostly, and that was nice, too.
DAD SAID GRACE THAT NIGHT AT SUPPER the way he always did—Dear Lord, bless this food You have set before us that it may nourish our bodies so we may better serve Thee, amen — then announced he was running for the Sand Mountain city council. Again. It would be his third time. As soon as he said it, I lost my appetite even though we were having macaroni and cheese. Tink asked if he would be the mayor. Dad rubbed her head. “No, sweetie. But you never know in the future. Anything can happen.” Wayne seemed to always be hungry from the JV football practices and was shoveling in the macaroni. I stared down at my plate because I knew what was coming next.
“I’m going to need a lot of help with this campaign,” Dad said. “And I’m going to be relying on you boys. We’ll divide up the neighborhoods so you can get the flyers out. We’re going to have to be very organized about this.”
Wayne groaned bu
t kept eating. Tink said she would pass out flyers at school, but Dad said since kids weren’t allowed to vote that might not be the best use of our campaign resources. He had a special job for Tink, though. He needed somebody reliable to answer the phone and take messages, and could she handle that? She ran from the table into her bedroom, then came back a second later with a little notebook with hearts on it. “Can this be the message book I use?” she said. Mom and Dad both smiled, and Dad rubbed her head again. It was all so cute I thought I was going to vomit.
I hated doing the flyers because I had to hand them out to people I didn’t know, which meant I had to talk to them, although I usually tried to sneak up to their door, knock so soft nobody could possibly hear me, then stuff the flyer somewhere and run back to my bike. And I hated for my dad to run for city council again because it was a big waste of time since he always lost.
Dad said it was still a few weeks before we’d be passing out the flyers because the election wasn’t until November, but he’d already been working on his platform, which he said was what they called your campaign promises and what you would do if you got elected. One of the first things Dad wanted to do was have them tear down the old Skeleton Hotel, which he said was an eyesore to the town.
I got nervous right away. The Skeleton Hotel scared me because everybody said it was haunted, but at the same time I couldn’t imagine downtown Sand Mountain without it being there. They started building it before I was even born — four stories high in a town that had only one two-story building and just a couple of two-story houses, including Darla’s. Only something happened when a colored man got killed at the work site, and they never finished it but just left the steel frame, with the floors and the old elevator to the roof, but no walls or windows or rooms or anything except a farmer’s market that Mr. Hollis Wratchford ran on the ground floor underneath — the same Mr. Wratchford that had started to build the Skeleton Hotel, so I guessed he still owned what was there.
Down Sand Mountain Page 5