Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  Dad said another thing that ought to happen — and he’d make sure of it once he got elected — was annexation of the east side of the Peace River so they could shut down the one bar in the area, or at least the one white bar, that place called The Springs, which was built up on concrete blocks over a deepwater spring right next to the Peace River bridge. It was where David Tremblay’s stepdad went on the weekends, and of course Walter Wratchford with his carved wood fist with the finger, and where they said guys were all the time throwing their bottles in the water or falling in or drowning in or driving their cars in.

  Tink was too little to know any of that, though, and she asked what was The Springs. Wayne said, “It’s where you get your liquor.”

  Tink stood up on her chair, which she always did when she got mad. “I don’t drink liquor,” she said, loud. Wayne laughed at her and Mom told him to quit teasing his sister, and she told Tink to get down this instant, Young Lady. I still hadn’t said a word.

  The last thing that Dad said would be on his platform was a promise to pave some of the streets down in the Boogerbottom. “Those people are citizens,” he said, “and it’s not right they were left out of the comprehensive paving plan.”

  Mom had been spooning Tink another helping of macaroni even though Tink hadn’t eaten her spinach yet, which wasn’t fair. She asked Dad if that was his big plan to get the Negro vote and Dad said that yeah, he guessed it was, and that he had already been talking to Chollie, the janitor down at the high school, about helping him spread the word down in the Boogerbottom and to go talk to the colored churches around town.

  I had a bunch of questions, like how come Dad needed a Negro vote, and did people know about him talking to a colored man about the campaign, and were me and Wayne going to be the ones putting all those flyers on the doors of the houses in the Boogerbottom. But I didn’t want to give Dad any ideas, so I didn’t say anything.

  I could tell Mom wasn’t happy about any of this, either. She kept asking Dad if he was sure. About the tenth time she said it Dad kind of snapped at her and then dinner was over.

  Mom stood up from the table. “Take your plates into the kitchen,” she told us. “It’s Dewey’s turn to wash. Tink dries. Wayne puts away.” Dad picked up the newspaper and asked if there was any coffee. Mom asked was instant OK?

  Sometimes me and Wayne talked at night when we were in bed and neither one could sleep. That was about the only time we talked, really, especially since the start of school last year, when Wayne turned into a Lone Wolf. When we were little, I would get scared on the top bunk, and to get him to let me in the bottom bunk I would have to tell him stories. I made up all this crazy stuff about two boys who were mole rats, which I had read about somewhere in a library book. They were blind like all the mole rats, and rolled in their own poop so they could tell one another apart by smell like all the mole rats, but had super mole powers. They lived their whole lives underground with no light at all, and they fought a lot of snakes that tried to invade their tunnels, which in the stories were like the Vietcong tunnels that had rooms and places to store food and weapons and everything. Wayne didn’t like to sleep side by side because he said there wasn’t room for his elbows, so we always went head to feet, which sort of worked because there was room for all of our elbows, but sort of didn’t work because of the cover situation. I told him that was how the mole rats slept, too, only they had a whole bunch of them lined up like that, head to toe, head to toe, so they could fit more in a room.

  I didn’t know if he was awake that night, but I thought he was and maybe we could talk, though I doubted he would let me in bed with him or anything, and he probably didn’t care about the mole rat stories anymore, either.

  I hung partly over the edge of the top bunk. “Wayne?” I couldn’t see him in the dark.

  “Hmm.”

  “Wayne?”

  “What?”

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “OK, I’m not.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get to sleep.”

  “Can I come down there and sleep with you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. You’re too big.”

  “I’ll lay the opposite of you, head to feet.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have toe jam and your feet stink and you chew your toenails.”

  “Please?”

  “Why are you such a baby?”

  “I’m not. I just can’t get to sleep, either. I keep thinking.”

  “Well, I’m thinking, too, so leave me alone.”

  “About what?”

  “About stuff.”

  “About going down to the Boogerbottom to pass out the flyers for Dad?”

  “No.”

  “About school stuff?”

  “No.”

  “About a girl?”

  “No.”

  “About your peter?”

  “Shut up. No.”

  “About the JV team?”

  “Maybe.”

  “About what position you play?”

  “No.”

  “What position do you play? Are you the quarterback or is David Tremblay?”

  “David Tremblay. He’s always the quarterback.”

  “What are you?”

  “Guard.”

  “First string?”

  “Second.”

  “Is there a third string?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh’? I’d like to see you out there.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought you should be first string.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not good enough. Coach says I’m not focused.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means when he’s explaining the next play we’re supposed to learn, I’m standing over there thinking about some song on the radio in my head.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then they give me a hard time because my brother thinks he’s a Negro.”

  “Oh. What do you say back?”

  “Nothing. I tell them to shut up.”

  “Do you really tell them to shut up?”

  “Yes. Of course. What did you think I would say?”

  “I don’t know. Hey, Wayne.”

  “What? Jeezum Crow, what is this — a hundred questions?”

  “They didn’t give me my red belly yet.”

  “Don’t worry. Just when you least expect it, they’ll get you.”

  “I don’t think so. They won’t let me go to the bathroom.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for going to school looking like a Negro.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘Negro’? You sound like Mom.”

  “It’s what you’re supposed to call them, that’s why.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since this year.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says LBJ.”

  “Well, anyway, they won’t let me go to the bathroom.”

  “So just go outside.”

  “I do, but I might get caught.”

  “Then do what Tink did.”

  What he was talking about was when Tink was in first grade, two years ago, she was very nervous, and so for about a week she took a cigar box to school with her. Everybody thought she had her supplies in there, but instead what she was doing was using it to put her poop in if she had to go when she was at school so she could bring it home and flush it in our own toilet and say good-bye to it there and watch it go down the way little kids like to do. For some reason that made her less nervous.

  All of a sudden I felt very tired — mostly tired of talking to Wayne. He used to be a lot nicer to me back when he was a Lone Wolf, before I started seventh grade and he went into the eighth and became a big hotshot second-string guard on th
e JV football team, even if he wasn’t focused. I thought about telling him that, but what was the use?

  The funny thing was, when I decided to quit talking to Wayne, he started talking to me. Mostly it was about football stuff, like how he couldn’t do any of the blocking right, and he was always getting holding calls on him in drills, and they had this one drill where it was just a lineman and a running back, and the running back was supposed to run straight into a lineman and through him, and the lineman was supposed to not let him and was supposed to tackle him instead. Wayne said he always got run through. I guess he really meant run over, but that was the way they talked in football.

  Another thing he told me was a lot of the guys chewed tobacco on the team, and you knew it because they spit their Red Man on the field and it got all over everybody’s practice jerseys and pants and helmets. One guy even swallowed his and they had to call his dad. So Wayne got Mom to buy raisins, which he would cram all in his cheek when nobody was looking so it looked like he was chewing tobacco, too. “It looks just like tobacco juice when you spit it between your teeth,” he said, “but it doesn’t hurt you if you accidentally swallow some.”

  That made me laugh, but Wayne got quiet after that and pretty soon I was back to worrying. I thought about having to ride my bike around the whole town delivering campaign flyers to everybody, and maybe even in the Boogerbottom, and that game of Turn Out the Lights with Darwin Turkel that I still hadn’t told anybody about, and what they planned to do to me at school instead of a red belly, and people thinking I wanted to be colored, and me wanting to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy but not have people think that that just proved I wanted to be colored, and what Darla Turkel was doing in the cemetery with that colored boy, or if that was even true, and atomic bombs, and not being big enough for sports, and the Vietcong, and all of communism, and Dad tearing down the Skeleton Hotel, and the half man–half gators all over the place, apparently, and Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, what if they decided to make all the clothes in the world out of Ban-Lon?

  “Wayne!” I knew I woke him up that time. He’d been snoring. “Please can I come down there?”

  He grunted something and I decided that meant yes, so I crawled down to the bottom bunk and got in. It was very crowded, but I brought my own blanket and pillow.

  “Do you ever worry about everything the way I do?” I asked him. His feet were next to my face and I said it at them like they were a microphone.

  He was already snoring again, though, plus his feet smelled like tennis shoes, so I pulled the pillow over my face and pretended I was a mole rat and me and Wayne were in our nest underground. That kind of cheered me up after a while — I don’t know why — and I finally fell asleep.

  I HAD MY FIRST DANCE LESSON with Mrs. Turkel on Monday, after school. Darla had asked her for me because I was too nervous to ask her myself. Mrs. Turkel charged me twenty-five cents, which was my whole allowance for the week, but she didn’t mess around. Right away she laid cardboard feet down on the floor for me to step on so I could learn the fox-trot. I didn’t know why they called it that. It didn’t look anything to me like a fox trotting.

  “Sweetie pie,” Mrs. Turkel said, “you’re going to have to pay more attention if you’re ever going to learn these steps. You’re shuffling your shoes and kicking these instruction steps all over the place. Now I want you to forget all about them. I’m going to tape them to the floor so they’ll just be here, but instead of looking down at them, I want you to try it this time with Darla —”

  She crooked her finger at Darla, who had been sitting in a chair by the wall in their dining room, which was where we all were. The way Darla sat, with her feet flat on the floor, and her back straight, and with her hands folded in her lap, you would have thought she had been sitting there all that time at a fancy ball, like Cinderella waiting for a boy to come by and ask her to dance, instead of just watching me and her mom. Darla had on saddle shoes, bobby socks, a pleated skirt, and a button-up blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and except for her Shirley Temple ringlets, she almost looked like a regular girl.

  Darla floated over and curtsied and lifted one hand so that when her mom pushed me toward her, my shoulder fit exactly under it. Darla stretched out her other arm and turned her hand palm down, just sort of hanging out there in space until her mom took my arm and pulled it out in the direction of Darla’s and laid Darla’s hand in mine, almost like it was a bird and I had caught it. She pulled on my other hand to stick it to Darla’s side. Then Mrs. Turkel went back to the old scratchy record player, which must have been the one in Darwin’s room, and put on a song she said was called “The Blue-Damn-You Waltz.” I stomped on Darla’s feet for a while, until I thought she was either going to cry or hit me, but then I sort of got it and said so to Darla, who said back, “Well, golly, I guess so, as hard as I’m having to back-lead,” and that’s when Mrs. Turkel said, “My goodness, look at the time. I do have to get back to work. You children keep practicing, but don’t wake up Papa. You know he needs his rest this afternoon; he had a hard night last night.”

  Darwin, who had been leaning in the doorway watching, snickered and said, “Hard-ly.” Mrs. Turkel gave him a dirty look and left the room.

  Wayne had told me their grandpa was a general in the Second World War and fought the Germans and all — it was another one of those things Wayne just seemed to know — but I didn’t believe a general would ever live in a town like ours, plus that didn’t explain why he never came downstairs.

  “Where does your mom work?” I asked Darla.

  She said Dr. Rexroat’s office. She was his receptionist. I said, “Oh yeah, I knew that already, I just forgot.” Darla said her mom had been there in the morning, but Dr. Rexroat always closed down for a while in the afternoons to take his naps.

  Darwin snickered again from the door. “He has to take his naps to sleep off his lunches,” he said, and he made a drinking motion and said, “Glug, glug, glug. Like old granddad.”

  Darla said, “Come on, Dewey. Help me pull these feet up off the floor.”

  Darwin mimicked her with a fake high voice: “Come on, Dewey, come on, Dewey.” Then in his regular voice he said I had to come on with him to help clean his room. I thought about those yellow sheets and his dirty rug and the stuff lying all over, almost as bad as their back porch, and I really didn’t want to go with him. And I sure didn’t want to play that game again, either.

  Darla said I had to help her, and we had to move all the furniture back, too, and anyway, Darwin should have to clean up his own room; she always cleaned up hers by herself. Darwin made scissors with his fingers and said how would she like it if he subtracted a few of those ringlets, Shirley Baby? He said it out of the side of his mouth like a gangster or something, and I couldn’t help laughing.

  Darla said, “Don’t laugh; you’ll only encourage him.” Darwin made more snipping motions, and said it, too: “Snip, snip, snip.” Then he started chasing her around their big dining-room table over by the wall. “Snip, snip, snip. Snip, snip, snip.” Darla screamed at him to cut it out and he said oh, he would cut it out all right, and he kept chasing her. I laughed until I had to sit down, and they kept it up until a door slammed somewhere upstairs really loud, and then they stopped like they had just gotten caught in a game of freeze tag. It was dead quiet in there, and I waited to hear footsteps above us, but there was just the echo of the door slamming, or maybe I just imagined there was an echo.

  Finally I said I had to go and I would help with everything next time. They didn’t even look at me, just stayed frozen like that, waiting, I guess, for their grandfather to come downstairs or whatever, not that I think he ever did.

  Everybody in seventh grade in the whole state of Florida took the class in Americanism vs. Communism, and nobody ever asked questions there, not even me. Our teacher was Mr. Cheeley, who had been in the South Pacific during World War II, which he kept reminding us, and who had these photos he let us look at — before and after pictures
of a prisoner of war being executed: first the guy kneeling with his head on a hay bale and a Jap soldier standing next to him, with his sword raised up, then just the dead guy’s body on the floor on one side of the hay bale and his head on the floor on the other side of the hay bale. The quality wasn’t all that great, and you couldn’t see his face at all in the before picture, but if you looked close, you could see part of his face after they chopped his head off. Some guys said you could tell he had been begging for his life, because his eyes and mouth were wide open in the after picture. I hoped that was wrong and it only looked that way because of the shadows.

  Mr. Cheeley got choked up when he showed us the photos, which he said he found left behind when they liberated Midway or Guatemala or Portugal or Iwo Jima from the Japs; I forget which island exactly. He told us the names of all the good men he knew personally who gave their lives for America. He said he could still see the faces of some of them right now if he closed his own eyes, boys not so much older than us at our desks without a care in the world because we were so lucky, and we didn’t have any idea or any appreciation for how good we had it, and we didn’t know the meaning of the word sacrifice —

  “And do you think the communists know the meaning of the word sacrifice?” he asked us. “Do you think the communists would have crossed Valley Forge in the dead of winter with General Washington, their feet bound up with rags because their shoes were worn out from years of fighting, and their fingers turning black from frostbite, turning black and falling off, but that’s what they were willing to put up with for their independence from King George, who would have fit right in with the worst of them — Hirohito, Stalin, that whole murdering bunch?”

  Mr. Cheeley said the Japs and the Germans and the Italians were fascists, but everybody else America had to fight was communists, and that included the North Koreans, the Red Chinese, the Vietcong, the Cubans, and of course the Russians, who were behind it all. He also said the trade unions were communist; and the National Association for Colored People, and Martin Luther King Jr.: all communist, all communist.