Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  He didn’t like colored people almost as much as he didn’t like the communists, and the worst thing you could be, to hear him tell it, was both.

  We didn’t have much to say in that class. We didn’t even take notes. There was a textbook, but what Mr. Cheeley put on the first test was just a single essay question: Did we agree (or disagree) that America should drop the atom bomb on North Vietnam to stop the spread of international communism? When I told my mom about all the stuff from class, she said, “Oh, good Lord.”

  Me and Darla were in three classes together at school, including Americanism vs. Communism, but she never looked at Mr. Cheeley’s photos. She always just kept her head down and, as soon as she got them, passed them right on to the next kid. I meant to ask her why, but we didn’t talk much at school except in the hall, where we would say hi, and I must have forgot about it whenever I hung out with her riding bikes and having dance lessons and stuff. I guess it wasn’t a good idea to talk to girls in front of everybody, because people might laugh or something. It was the same with Darwin, too, except I tried to avoid even running into him at school, especially when he told me that he had handcuffs and did I want to come up to his room and see them.

  At lunch all that week I sat with Wayne and the guys from the neighborhood — W.J. Weller, and David Tremblay, and Connolly Voss, and sometimes Boopie Larent, who I guess wasn’t too mad anymore about my wrecking his big attempt to set the world record for bouncing on the pogo stick. They didn’t exactly talk to me much, but they let me sit there.

  And every day either that guy Moe or the other one, Head, stopped at our table and took my roll from my lunch tray, which was usually the only good thing they ever gave you to eat at the cafeteria and was the thing that made you hungry all morning whenever you walked near the cafeteria between classes and smelled the bread baking and the margarine they melted on top of those big trays of bread. I don’t know why they did that, or still wouldn’t let me go to the WHITES ONLY bathroom, since the shoe polish had faded all the way away a while ago. I guess once they get it in their heads that you’re colored, there’s nothing you can do but try to stay out of their way.

  The neighborhood guys just looked down at their trays when Head or Moe did that, even Wayne, and I couldn’t eat afterward, so I usually went to my locker and kind of leaned inside of it with my head in there like I was looking for something. I got to where I wished those seniors would go ahead and give me my red belly and then maybe they might leave me alone to eat my rolls and go to the bathroom.

  We all went to Wayne’s first JV football game Thursday night — me and Mom and Dad and Tink. Fortunately almost nobody was there except some other parents, and I guess little brothers and sisters of the players. A dozen eighth-and ninth-grade girls were there, too, sitting all together in a big knot. I brought my homework but Dad said I had to pay attention to the game and support my brother, even though I pointed out that Wayne was sitting on the end of the bench just about the whole time. They let him in when they had a kickoff after the Mighty Miners scored a touchdown, but the return went the other way and Wayne was stuck on the wrong side of the field, blocking a guy who was stuck way out there in the middle of nowhere blocking him back. Neither one of them did it very hard, just sort of kept bumping each other like a couple of goats, or not even goats, but maybe sheep. I thought I saw Wayne right in the middle of things look over to see if the coach was watching. It was funny — once the kickoff was over, Wayne went back to his end of the bench on his side of the field, threw his helmet down and kicked it like he was really mad or really fired up or something, and the guy he was blocking went back to his end of the bench on his side of the field and threw his helmet down, too. The next time there was a kickoff, the two of them ran around on the wrong side of the field again until they found each other so they could do some more blocking.

  It reminded me of this story, or I guess it was an Aesop’s fable, where two rams got into a fight and started butting each other, but they were the same size so they kept butting each other and butting each other, neither one getting anywhere, no way either one could win, so they stayed at it all day, all night, the next day, the next night, and so on, wearing themselves down to just about nothing over the days and weeks until they were just the ends of a couple of tails, that was all that was left of them, and they still kept butting into each other until finally a gust of wind just came along and blew them away.

  At halftime I got a candy bar with my own money but Dad made me share it with Tink anyway, which wasn’t fair, and then he even made me give him a bite, which turned out to be the biggest bite in the history of our family.

  I was too bored to even pretend to watch the second half of the game. About the only excitement was to see if they put Wayne in any other time besides the kickoffs, which they didn’t. JV football didn’t seem like much fun to me, not like when we used to play in the empty lot next to our house. There would always be arguments and fights and stuff, but at least you got to play, even if you weren’t any good, like me.

  Darwin Turkel even came over one time last year. I think his mom might have made him. He didn’t know how to play football, so everybody made fun of him, but he got picked for one of the teams anyway, because we needed one more guy. It turned out he was really fast. He caught up to W.J. Weller running for a touchdown, but instead of tackling him, Darwin grabbed W.J.’s arm and swung him in a circle and then pulled him to the ground. Darwin jumped up and down he was so excited, but W.J. had a broken arm, actually a broken shoulder.

  At first a couple of guys defended Darwin and said it was just an accident, but W.J. got madder and madder until after a while we all agreed that Darwin had meant to do it. Nobody talked to him after that at school, and he never tried to get back in the football games. Guys made fun of Darwin for a while — called him Darla instead of Darwin, and Turtle instead of Turkel, and Peter Eater for no reason except we didn’t like him. He didn’t seem to notice, though. He just did like he always had: sat in the front of the class at school and answered all the questions right if the teacher called on him, but never raised his hand and looked like he was always bored but in a way that made you think he practiced it a lot in front of a mirror. He ate by himself or with one or two other prissy boys in the cafeteria, and never went to the real football games, and tap-danced with Darla when she sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at those talent shows at County Fair, and didn’t seem to notice how much fun people made of him for that, either.

  I was actually glad he was around back then because it meant they were less likely to make fun of me — for being slow, or short, or uncoordinated, or always being the one waving my hand in class to answer the questions, even when I didn’t know the right answer. But there was just something inside me that needed to have the right answer, so I guessed at the question, hoping the teacher would give me that smile they always give you when you’re right, and nod their head in the way they always do, and cross their arms but with the chalk between two fingers away from their sleeve, and say, “Very good, Dewey, that’s correct. I can see someone did the assignment,” or did the reading, or did their homework, or came to class prepared, or spent some time thinking about the problem, then, “Now, who can tell me —?”

  And I would already have my arm up in the air wanting to answer that next question, too.

  The JV team won twenty-one to seven. Tink fell asleep in Mom’s lap. Dad ate a hot dog and got mustard on his shirt. I did all my homework, including a letter to General Westmoreland in Vietnam for Americanism vs. Communism, telling him to keep up the good work. I was kind of worried that Wayne would be sad, since he never did get in the game hardly at all, besides four kickoffs and some punts, but when Dad took us and David Tremblay out to the A&W afterward, it was kind of funny: David was in on about every play, of course, but the way Wayne and him talked and talked about the game, you’d have thought Wayne was, too.

  AFTER LUNCH ON SUNDAY, I fell asleep on the floor in front of the TV, and when I
woke up, everybody was gone except Dad. Wayne was probably somewhere with David Tremblay. Tink and Mom had left a note saying that they were visiting the shut-ins, including this old lady Mrs. Cronk and her parrot, Jehosaphat, the one Darla had wanted me to go spy on with her. Dad was asleep in his easy chair with the newspaper for a blanket and the TV on to a Baltimore Colts game.

  I went outside and stood in the sun for a couple of minutes with my eyes closed. Sometimes when you do that and then you open your eyes, everything looks different to you and strange, but not today. It was all still my house and my yard and my street. Still the same Sand Mountain. So I got out my bike and rode over to Darla’s.

  She wasn’t home but Darwin was.

  “What is he doing here?” he said in his usual prissy voice when he finally opened the door, like I wasn’t standing right there and he wasn’t really talking to me. I noticed he had combed his hair over to the side all neat like the Beach Boys. “Oh, wait,” he said. “I’ve got it. He’s looking for Darla. He loves Darla. He wants Darla to have a baby with him.”

  “Just shut up, Darwin,” I said.

  Darwin looked all around on the porch, everywhere but at me, like he was talking to a crowd of people. “He’s upset. You can tell because his cheeks are red. He misses his Darla.”

  “What are you being so mean for?” I said. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Oh, no!” Darwin panted. “His feelings are hurt. He’s going to cry now. Take your seats, everybody. He’s going to cry. Here it comes. The dam’s about to break. It’s going to be a flood. Grab your life preservers. Man the lifeboats. Women and children first.”

  I called him a turd-knocker and jumped off the porch, not even bothering with the steps, and picked up my bike.

  That changed his sorry tune pretty quick. “I was just kidding,” he said. “Don’t go. They’re probably just out riding Darla’s old nag. Come on.”

  I turned around. “Why are you always so mean?”

  He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re the silliest boy I ever met. Come inside and I’ll get you a Coke from the Frigidaire.” We never had sodas in our house, so it was hard to turn down a free one at somebody else’s. I put down my bike and followed Darwin inside, where it was cool and dark, and down a long hall next to the stairs. At the end of the hall was the kitchen, and it was enough to make you never want to eat again in your entire life. They had dirty dishes and pots and pans and glasses and silverware piled everywhere on the counter, and a trash can without a lid on it and garbage that spilled over on the floor and would have to be cleaned up, but probably not by anybody in the Turkel family except Darla, who had already told me that she was the only neat one in the whole house.

  “Where’s the Coke?” I said. He opened the Frigidaire, which probably used to be white but was now yellow, like Darwin’s sheets. He pulled out a bottle that somebody had already drunk out of and handed it to me. It didn’t even have the cap on.

  “Last one, and it’s all yours,” he said, as if I couldn’t see what was going on.

  “Somebody already drank most of it,” I said.

  Darwin shrugged. “They must have poured a glass. Probably Darla. She’s always doing that. But nobody put their mouth on the bottle, I swear.”

  I was pretty thirsty, so I took a swig. It was the flattest Coke in the history of the world and I spit it out in their sink, on top of the pile of dishes. The whole thing was disgusting. I thought I saw a palmetto bug in there crawling around on the dirty plates.

  “I’m leaving,” I said, and I did, even though he offered to fix me a ham sandwich with mustard, then he offered to teach me a boy dance instead of those girl dances of Darla’s, then he offered to take me up to his room and show me some new stuff he had gotten recently from his grandfather that he couldn’t tell me about, he could only show me and I had to come upstairs if I wanted to see it. He was so desperate I started to feel sorry for him, but that just made me want to get out of there faster.

  I heard somebody call for him from somewhere upstairs — it must have been his grandfather — and Darwin looked like he would rather be anywhere in the world than where he was. I don’t know why Darwin couldn’t just leave and go somewhere — go anywhere — but he didn’t, and I sure wasn’t about to invite him to come with me.

  My next stop was Boopie Larent’s house. He wasn’t home, either, though, just Dottie, and she said her mom didn’t want me at their house.

  “You’re lying,” I said to Dottie.

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “Stick around and I just might have to call the police.”

  “How about if I spit in your yard?” I said, which was pretty dumb but all I could think of.

  She put her hands on her hips like she was her mom and said, “I might have to call the police for that, too.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Trespassing,” she said. “And public nuisance. And loitering.”

  “What’s loitering?”

  “It’s a very serious charge.”

  “What does it mean? I bet you don’t even know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Then I don’t have to leave.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  I had to admit I was having fun arguing with Dottie, and I would have been happy to keep doing it for a while. She was in Wayne’s grade but it was obvious to anybody that I was a lot smarter than her. But then things got out of hand the way they always do just when you think they’re going just fine. She called me Little Black Sambo, which nobody had called me for a couple of weeks and I didn’t like, and I called her Fat-stuff, which she really didn’t like, and she didn’t bother with calling the police, she just chased me out of their yard with a rake.

  Now I was completely out of anybody to do anything with. No Wayne, no David Tremblay, no Mom or Dad or Tink, no Darla, no Boopie, and not Darwin Turkel and not Dottie Larent, and I don’t think I had any other friends that I knew about. I didn’t want to go home yet. I didn’t have any money to go to the drugstore to buy a comic book or a milk shake. I guess I could have gone over to Connolly Voss’s house, which was just a couple of blocks away from Boopie’s, but he was less of anybody’s friend than me, just one of those guys who lived in the neighborhood so was always a part of things because of that.

  It was late in the afternoon and the streets were so empty you’d have thought they’d had an atom bomb that killed everybody except me. That made me feel pretty lonely, not seeing anybody and not having anybody to see, so I did what I hadn’t done in a long time — rode my bike out of the city limits and down Brewster Road a little ways to the turnoff to the W. R. Grace mine, and then down that road, which was a one-lane blacktop with potholes you had to dodge all the time, so it looked like you were drunk, weaving all over, but that was what you had to do to get from Sand Mountain the town to Sand Mountain the mountain, which some people said was the tallest place in Florida and I thought was about the best place in the world.

  You couldn’t see the mountain when you were in town because of all the trees, unless maybe you were on top of the Skeleton Hotel, where of course nobody ever went since it was haunted. Once you got to Brewster Road you could see just fine, though, because all that land had been mined out and was flat as anything, plus Sand Mountain stood in the middle of a big swamp of nothing and was thirty stories high — that’s what Dad told me — and so white that you couldn’t hardly look at it in the middle of the day, the sun reflected off of it so bright. The sand got too hot for anybody to play on it then, too, but you could later in the afternoons.

  It was the W. R. Grace Company, the company my dad worked for, that made Sand Mountain. They pumped their leftover sand to that one spot in the middle of a swamp from the processing plant after they shook out all the phosphate rock. Most of the mi
ning companies just spread their leftover sand around the old mines — they called it the tailings — but one of the problems with that was sinkholes, and one time W. R. Grace had a sinkhole right in the middle of a mine road and a bulldozer fell in so deep they never got it out.

  After ten years they couldn’t pump their sand any higher, so they quit making Sand Mountain, and then after they tested to make sure it wasn’t going to have avalanches that might kill everybody, they let people climb on it. At first everybody tried to run down from the top, and some still did, or they rolled like crazy maniacs and got sand everywhere in their clothes and their hair and their mouths and their ears. Then one day somebody dragged the first cardboard box to the top and tore it apart and sat on it and lifted up the front end so it wouldn’t snag under the sand and rode it all the way down to the bottom going a hundred miles an hour.

  It was about five o’clock when I got to Sand Mountain, and I figured I would be able to climb up, which took about a half an hour, and slide back down, which took about thirty seconds, and still make it home for dinner. At first I thought I was the only one there, since I didn’t see any cars or trucks or anything. I tried to lean my bike up on the kickstand where everybody parked, but the sand was too soft so I just laid it down, even though I could hear my dad telling me a hundred times never to do that because it would get sand in the chain and the sprocket.

  Then I saw a flash of something over in the bushes, some color that wasn’t part of the bush, and when I went to investigate, I knew what it was right away, and whose it was, too: red, white, and blue streamers in the handles, playing cards in the spokes, pink banana seat, pink bike.

  That made me pretty happy, and I hurried up and grabbed a big piece of cardboard that somebody had left, and started the long climb to the top, which was slow because my feet sunk in with every step since it wasn’t packed sand like at the beach, and because it was so steep, about a forty-five-degree angle. Looking up, I had to squint. You could see for about five whole miles from the top, which meant even though you couldn’t see Sand Mountain from the town of Sand Mountain, you could see all of the town of Sand Mountain from Sand Mountain. I am afraid of heights really bad — almost as bad as my claustrophobia — but at the same time, one of the things I like best is being really high up and seeing everything there is to see.