Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  A block later she grabbed my arm. “I heard it again,” she said. I asked her what and she said footsteps. I started to say something else but she squeezed my arm and said, “Be quiet,” and this time I heard something for real, too, and when I looked back where Darla was looking, I saw the shape of somebody in the shadows just off the street about half a block away.

  “Run,” I whispered.

  “No,” she said. “Let’s keep going and see if he follows us.”

  “OK,” I said. So we walked a ways and stopped. He walked a ways and stopped. We walked some more. He walked some more. I could hardly breathe and neither could Darla, judging by her hiccups. It was dark as anything for most of the block, and even darker under the trees. There were clouds, so no stars or moon, so the only light just about anywhere was the streetlights at the end of the block. When we got to the next corner, we ran across it and into the shadows again and then waited to see who it was when he got in the light, but I was shaking so hard everything looked blurry to me. Darla was shaking, too. “I have to pee,” she said, which surprised me since I had never heard her talk like that before. For a second it almost made me forget somebody was following us.

  Who, it turned out, was just Wayne.

  WAYNE WAS GRINNING LIKE SUZY, our dog. I had never seen him like that before. He wanted to know everything about everything: Who was this I was with, where were we going, was Darla that girl that sang and danced at the county fairs, didn’t she have a brother who did that, too, how come he never saw her around anywhere? I couldn’t believe all the big baloney. If Wayne knew about Darla being drunk with a colored boy, I figured he must have known all that other stuff already, too.

  He kept pushing his hair off his forehead the whole time he talked, even though his hair wasn’t on his forehead. It took me a second but I finally figured out what was going on, which was that Wayne was flirting. Darla hardly looked at him, which I was happy about, but at the same time I noticed she didn’t seem to exactly mind answering his nosy questions. I asked him what was the deal with him following us, and he put his arm around my shoulders and said, “You made so much noise, I’m surprised the whole family didn’t follow you. I tell you, if you’re thinking about being a cat burglar, you better not quit your day job.”

  Darla actually laughed when he said that. I couldn’t believe it. I pushed his arm off of me and decided I didn’t know who this guy was, but he sure as heck wasn’t Wayne. Wayne had never put his arm around my shoulders in his whole life.

  “Just come on,” I said. “It’s way past midnight and we probably already missed it.”

  “Missed what?” Wayne said — to Darla. She kicked at something in the street, which I couldn’t see — a microscopic pebble, I guess — and she said, “We just thought there might be a ghost at the Skeleton Hotel, that’s all.”

  I couldn’t believe this either. “What are you talking about?” I said to Darla. “You heard it, remember?”

  Wayne said it was a good thing he decided to come along, then.

  So we all three went. For the next couple of blocks I let them know I was annoyed, and I gave them all sorts of directions —“Don’t walk so loud,” and “We’re almost there,” and “OK, this way.” Then I said, “Maybe we should practice jumping into a ditch in case somebody comes along,” and I heard Wayne whispering something to Darla that made her laugh again, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  After about eight blocks we got past most of the houses and then the row of churches that all faced on to First Street. We could see the backs of them from where we were on Second Street — the First Baptist, the First Methodist, and the First Presbyterian, each one of them taking up a block all on its own. Then there were a couple of houses again. We cut through a yard, then down a street, then through an alley and then we were there, at the corner of First Street and Bartow Highway. The Sinclair station was closed and dark, so we snuck up onto the concrete island with the three pumps, where we could see everything but nobody could see us unless they drove all the way in under the little roof and pointed their light directly at us. Sinclair was my favorite gasoline because of the dinosaur. They had a station over at Weeki Wachee Springs that my dad took me to one time that actually was a dinosaur — a giant concrete brontosaurus painted bright green, standing over the pumps.

  To the right of us, on the other side of the highway, was City Hall with its one yellow light on at the top of the steps. Kitty-corner across the intersection was the new 7-Eleven, which was closed and dark like the Sinclair station. And directly across First Street, in the middle of a big dirt parking lot, was the Skeleton Hotel.

  Looking up at it, I got kind of scared all of a sudden, I don’t know why, and I said, “God.”

  Darla said that I shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. I said, “I didn’t say God damn it; I just said God.” And she said, “Well, it’s still taking the Lord’s name in vain.” I said I was a Methodist and we didn’t believe that, even though I thought she might be right, but what I wanted to do was remind her that she was supposed to be my friend, and when did she all of a sudden get to be such a great pal of Wayne’s? I didn’t, though, and I sure didn’t tell her the other thing I had been thinking a lot about, which was kissing. Ever since she had asked me if I wanted her to on top of Sand Mountain when I was buried, I had been thinking about it, and I had sort of thought maybe tonight, except now here was Wayne butting in.

  I realized I was hugging one of the gas pumps, so I quit and said, “I thought we were here to see about the Skeleton Hotel. What happened to that big plan?” Darla said the big plan was we should listen and see if we heard anything, so we all sat down on the island, her and Wayne squeezed between two of the pumps, and me between the others. None of us said anything else for a while and it got really really quiet and you could tell from how quiet it was how much noise we must have been making before.

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. One had a hole, so I poked a finger in and worked it around until pretty soon I could just about put my whole hand through. I scratched my leg and thought how strange it was to be so scared tonight when I must have gone by the Skeleton Hotel about a million times and hardly even noticed it. When we went with Mom to the farmers’ market, I usually forgot that I was even under a building or anything, it was just there up above, the red steel and wood scaffolding and a construction elevator and unfinished stairs that stopped before they even made it to the second floor.

  I looked over at Wayne and Darla and wished they were sitting with me, even if they were only a little ways away. I wanted to go ahead and hear the howling that Darla said she had heard that night with her family. If I heard that, and they heard it, too, that would be enough for one night. We didn’t actually have to go over there. We could come back another time to check it out up close. Plus it was getting so late. What if Dad came in our room to check on us and we weren’t there and he thought we’d been kidnapped? I bet Mom would be really upset, and I never liked for that to happen. If you got Dad upset, he would yell at you or pull out the belt, or do something like call the police right away if he thought you’d been kidnapped, but Mom was different, and I didn’t want to think about how disappointed she would be in me and Wayne once she found out we’d just snuck out of the house instead of being held for ransom.

  Something banged into something behind the Sinclair station and made me jump. I was feeling nervous, anyway, I guess, and maybe that was why I stood up, but it was a bad idea no matter why I did it, because of course there came the one lousy cop car in the whole town right then, cruising up First Street toward the light.

  Probably if I hadn’t moved again, just stood there by the pumps in the dark, in the shadows of the Sinclair station, the cop wouldn’t have seen me. I tried holding my breath but I was too scared, and I knew Wayne and Darla were scared, too, because they were even holding hands and when I saw that, I started to hyperventilate, and that sounded louder than anything, and then I thought I heard Wayne say something and that did
it. I yelled, “Run!” and took off around the back of the Sinclair station. I didn’t know my legs could go that fast — like the Flash in comic books — but they had to keep up with how fast my heart was beating, and once I got going at that speed I couldn’t slow down much because my heart wouldn’t have anywhere to send all that blood and something bad might happen, like maybe my arteries and veins would swell up and explode.

  A siren whooped behind me — maybe the cop was whipping through the Sinclair to chase us — so I cut down an alley, then a street, then through a backyard, then past the First Presbyterian church, then behind the First Methodist. That’s about where I realized that my legs and heart might be going as fast as the Flash, but the thing slowing me down was my lungs turning into sandpaper, which I bet never happened to the Flash, so I ducked behind the trash cans, and only then realized that Wayne and Darla hadn’t followed me and weren’t anywhere around.

  I was still hyperventilating, which I always did when I got too excited. My mom always brought out a paper bag when that happened and crumpled it together at the opening and told me to breathe in it, but I didn’t have my mom there. I didn’t have a paper bag; I didn’t have anything. I was about to cry, actually, because I was so scared and because I didn’t know what happened to Wayne and Darla.

  Then it got worse: the cop car turned down Second Street, his blue light blipping round and round but his siren not on. He was crawling along about six inches every minute or so with his searchlight aimed at the backs of the houses two blocks up, but even going that slow he kept getting closer and closer. I couldn’t move. He inched past the block with the houses and moved on to the Presbyterian Church, one block up, where they had their trash cans out back just like the Methodists. He might have even stopped there and I thought about taking the opportunity to take off running again, but then I kicked something behind me and knew right away what it was because I’d snuck through it a million times before, playing hide-and-seek — a door into the ground for the church’s fallout shelter, which was never locked because if you locked it, then how would people ever get in if the Russians dropped the bomb in the middle of Sunday service, which as Mr. Cheeley had told us was exactly when communists would drop the bomb.

  I didn’t even think about it. I just pulled hard and the door scraped open and I climbed down inside and shut the door behind me. Just in time.

  You can think about a lot of things when you’re sitting in a bomb shelter in the middle of the night and it’s so black you can’t see your hand, and you’re scared of the dark and you’re claustrophobic and the cops are after you so you can’t do anything about any of those things except try not to hyperventilate again. I sat there on a step like a blind man to wait until the cop was gone and I could finally go home, only how was I going to know the coast was clear without going back outside where the cop might be waiting? I listened as hard as I could but the only thing I heard was my own sandpaper breathing, which got quieter after a while but still echoed. I tried holding my breath to see if I could hear any better but got nothing with that, either. And I was shaking about a hundred times worse than I ever did in my life, and my mind was racing around a track like a greyhound dog. Where were Wayne and Darla? What happened to them? What if they got caught? What if it was my fault?

  I decided I’d better pray awhile, so I started in on the Lord’s Prayer but that sounded too lonely, so I sang it the way we did in school when they played it over the PA system after the Pledge of Allegiance and before the announcements:

  Our Fa-ther

  Who art in hea-ven

  Hallow-ed be thy name.

  For some reason, even as scared as I was, that got me thinking about how everybody said I had a pretty voice when they made us sing in the vesper choir at church — actually me and Boopie Larent — they said we were better sopranos than the girls, only I didn’t want to sing like girls, and I also hated Mr. Rupert, the choir director, who was always grabbing your leg when you messed up and squeezing your thigh real hard and saying, “Boy, you want to see how the horse eats corn?” I guess his hand was supposed to be the horse’s mouth, and your leg was the corn.

  I don’t know how long I sat there thinking about dumb stuff like that, but I finally had to come out. My claustrophobia got so bad I thought there were things in there touching me that I couldn’t see, plus I couldn’t breathe, either, and I got panicked that I might be running out of air. What I wanted to do was run home, but after I peeked out for a while and didn’t see the cop, and then climbed out and just stood there for a couple of minutes until I could stop shaking so bad, I made myself go back downtown to look for Wayne and Darla.

  As far as I went was the dark side of the Sinclair station. At first I just looked around, but when I didn’t see any sign of them or of the police car, I tried whispering their names as loud as I could, which when you’re whispering isn’t very loud, of course. Nobody said anything back, even though I listened so hard it made my ears hurt.

  And then I heard something else: not the cop again, but the little elevator on the Skeleton Hotel that nobody even knew could work — the freight elevator, which was just a pallet and cables. I couldn’t actually see anything, but it must have been at the top of the Skeleton Hotel and then brought somebody to the ground floor, which was just the farmers’ market, because a minute later somebody came out of there and walked across the road right toward the Sinclair station, then right on by, not even noticing me in the shadows because I didn’t move and didn’t breathe and didn’t make a single solitary sound.

  It was a lady with a long coat and a hood, or else the ghost of a lady — I couldn’t tell because she went by so fast, plus I was so scared I squeezed my eyes shut until she was gone.

  That right there would have been enough of a shock to me, but I never got to think about it too much because a minute later, after the lady got out of sight, I heard something howling from the top of the Skeleton Hotel and that was it for me. I got out of there as fast as I could and didn’t stop running until I got all the way home, and crawled in the window, and saw that Wayne wasn’t home, and threw my clothes in the dirty-clothes pile, and crawled up in the bunk bed. When my heart stopped galloping, I said my prayers, which I hadn’t done earlier when I went to bed the first time, before sneaking out. I prayed that nothing had followed me, and prayed about where the heck was Wayne, anyway, and what happened to Darla, too, and I kept praying like that until don’t ask me how but I fell asleep.

  “RISE AND SHINE, BOYS. Fence won’t paint itself and breakfast is waiting.”

  That’s what Dad said when he came banging into our bedroom the next morning. He yanked open the blinds and turned on the overhead light and said it was eight o’clock already, and Saturday morning, and time to get cracking. I felt like crying but sat up because I knew it wasn’t any use. Saturday was chore day and we always had to get up early, but nobody had said anything about us having to paint the fence. Wayne just kept snoring on the bottom bunk until Dad pulled down the covers and dumped him on the floor in his underwear.

  “Let’s go,” Dad said. I couldn’t believe how happy he was when me and Wayne were so tired and miserable, but he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if he knew we had snuck out and all, and maybe that’s why he was going to make us paint the fence, but if so he didn’t say anything about it, but just finally left. “Breakfast is on the table,” he yelled back at us, and I knew what that meant. I crawled off the top bunk.

  Wayne was trying to cover himself on the floor with the rug. “Where were you last night?” I said, but he didn’t answer.

  “Well?” I said, but got nothing except he groaned under the rug. I accidentally kicked him on my way out of the bedroom and forgot to say I was sorry.

  The kitchen table was loaded with everything you might need to get ready for chores: scrambled eggs, cheese grits, orange juice, halves of grapefruits with sugar, pancakes and syrup, even a box of Krispy Kremes. Tink had a glazed doughnut in each hand and looked as happy as Dad.
First she took a bite from one, then a bite from the other. She parked them on her index fingers like giant rings and did some nibbling.

  “I told Tink she could go on ahead since the boys were taking so long,” Mom said from the stove, where she was cooking about twenty pounds of bacon. She looked around when she heard me fall onto the old church pew that we used for a bench at the kitchen table and said, “Dewey, you look like you haven’t even slept. Tink, pour him a glass of orange juice right now and see if that won’t revive him. And where is your brother?” Mom was happy that morning, too, and I wondered if her and Dad were up to something, only I couldn’t figure out what that might be. Mom yelled for Wayne and it gave me a headache: “Wayne Turner, you have until I count to three to get in here. One. Two. Two and a half —”

  Tink took over: “Two and three quarters, two and four quarters, two and five quarters. THREE.”

  Wayne dragged himself in and plopped down next to me. Dad folded up his newspaper, clapped his hands together, and said why didn’t we sing “Johnny Appleseed” this morning instead of saying grace, which was something he never did, because he couldn’t hold a tune. Wayne put his head down in his hands. I just stared at my plate. The pattern around the edge, I think it was green vines, looked like it was swimming.

  Tink dropped her doughnuts and said, “Everybody hold hands,” so Wayne had to lift his head and I had to touch his pinkie with my pinkie, then Tink started singing the grace. Mom and Dad sang too, all the way through to the end.

  Wayne’s eyes were closing back up and my mouth barely could form the words, but Tink wasn’t through yet: “Amen, brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen. Hen died, rooster cried, poor old Ben committed suicide.”

  Mom popped Tink on top of the head with a serving spoon and said, “That will be all, Young Lady.” But she smiled. “Now everybody dig in. There’s plenty.”