The other Scoutmaster — he was this kid Ronnie Dick’s dad — broke out a camp stove and a deep fryer and poured amber-colored goop in it, which was creosote that they used for treating the cut ends of fence posts and telephone poles to keep the wood from rotting. Once the creosote heated up in the fryer, Mr. Dick dropped whole potatoes in, and when they sort of bobbed their way back to the top after about a minute, they were done: creosote potatoes. You couldn’t eat the skins or you might die. That’s what Mr. Dick told us, anyway.
The snipe hunt started at dusk, when they stuck us new guys out in the woods with sacks and said to wait there and don’t move and don’t say anything, they were going to go bang on pots and stuff and drive the snipes our way so we could catch them. Somebody asked what snipes were and they said, “Oh, good grief, what are you guys — retarded or something?” So we waited and waited like they told us to until it was really, really dark. I brought my Scout knife and worked on my whittling, since I knew there wasn’t any such thing as a snipe and they were just tricking us to make us look stupid. I even told a couple of the other new guys that, but they didn’t believe me. One guy, Telmo Lewis, told me to be quiet because he had to concentrate.
Finally they came and got us and laughed at what morons we were, while the senior Scouts tied us up and blindfolded us and hauled us into the back of a truck, just like Wayne had told me they would. They drove somewhere that seemed like a long ways away but that Wayne had also told me wasn’t very far from camp, it was just that they were going in circles. Once they figured we were confused enough, they tied us to a tree and told us there was another one of those half man–half gators near there in Lake Kissimmee that was always crawling up onto land and eating kids.
The truck drove away and the black, black night got so still you could hear every mosquito and cricket and frog and owl, and then what sounded like a bear or a half man–half gator. Telmo Lewis started crying and saying he wanted to go home. I didn’t know it was allowed for anybody to act like such a baby, but decided I would be nice to him, anyway.
“It’s all fake, Telmo,” I whispered, since I didn’t want to get in trouble for already knowing that. “They’re just trying to scare us on purpose. It’s all fake.” He didn’t stop crying, though.
We kept hearing bears and footsteps, and hands kept grabbing at us and poking us, kind of like that Turn Out the Lights game with Darwin, and that kept happening for a long time, maybe about an hour. Telmo started screaming, and kept it up until the kid tied up on the other side of him must have jabbed him hard in the ribs, because he suddenly crunched up against me. I had to elbow Telmo back on his other side to make him get off.
Eventually the truck came back and they threw us in again with our feet still tied together and our hands tied behind our backs and our blindfolds still on tight. Telmo was sobbing by then, but nobody seemed to care much, except one voice said, “It will all be over soon.” For some reason that made Telmo cry even harder. I guess maybe he thought they were going to kill us. What they did instead was drive us a ways, drag us out onto the ground, and tie another rope to our feet. They explained what they were doing after that, since we couldn’t see: throwing the rope over a tree branch, tying the other end to the back of the truck, driving the truck a little ways, about ten or twenty feet, to hoist us off the ground until we were hanging upside down.
Meanwhile Telmo had turned hoarse, but he hadn’t wet his pants yet. That came a little later when they lifted our blindfolds one by one to show us the branding iron. I saw a fire a little ways off.
“This is the Scout brand,” one of the senior Scouts whispered, holding the iron close enough that I could feel the heat on my face. It glowed red and looked like blood or something. “We’re gonna brand you right between your shoulder blades, where nobody will see it while it heals up, because you have to swear to keep a shirt on at all times. But you’ll know it’s there, and we’ll know it’s there. Now, what’s the Scout motto?”
Hanging upside down was starting to make me feel sick, and my head felt too heavy for me to speak very well, but I somehow managed to get it out: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law —”
“No, you dummy. I said the Scout motto.”
“Oh.” My head was spinning. The blindfold was back down and tied tight. There was too much blood rushing to my brain. “Be prepared.”
“Right,” he said. “So are you prepared for this?”
“Yes, sir.”
When they did it to me, I played along — grunted like it hurt a lot — and the shock of it did almost fool me. What they did was switch the branding iron with a chunk of ice at the last minute, and with freezing and burning, the idea is you can’t tell the difference. Everybody else screamed when they did it to them, and that was when Telmo must have peed his pants. Those older Scouts backed up the truck slow and laid all of us down on the ground like big fish. Most of us stayed there when they untied us, but Telmo took off running into the woods, barking, which I guess was the only noise left he could make.
I saw Wayne and David Tremblay about then. A couple of the senior Scouts sent David off to go catch Telmo, which he did, although it took him about half an hour. I think maybe part of that time he was just sitting with Telmo out in the woods and talking to him to calm him down and make him feel better.
When they finally came back, we all went to bed. I felt bad for Telmo, of course, but was also glad it was him and not me that fell apart. Wayne and David got in an argument once we were in our tent about whether Wayne had told me about the initiation. David said he knew Wayne did because I would have been just as pee-pants scared as Telmo otherwise. I didn’t say anything and I was so tired that I didn’t care, either. Even though I’d had to bribe him and all, Wayne had sort of looked out for me that night, and so I got to just be one of the guys and for once not who everybody was laughing at, which was OK by me.
There were more DDT bombs and creosote potatoes the next day — and dumb nature hikes, and merit-badge crafts and stuff — but no more initiations. That next night, they cooked a rattlesnake Mr. Ferber said he killed even though nobody saw him do it. Mr. Dick accused him of buying it off of a colored man they had seen fishing, but Mr. Ferber knocked on his metal plate and said, “Scout’s honor.” Everybody had to try some. It was fried, of course, but not in the creosote. I thought I’d be scared to eat my bite, but somebody said it tasted like chicken and they were right: it did.
Ronnie Dick, the son of Mr. Dick the Scoutmaster, said rattlesnake was colored-people food, and that started a conversation about what all else was colored-people food. Somebody said any kind of snake, and somebody else said raccoon and squirrel. The list went on for a while: rabbit, fried chicken, grits, watermelon, swamp cabbage, poke salad, collards.
The colored-people-food list got longer and longer — bugs and dirt and stuff like that. David Tremblay said dogs, he knew for a fact colored people ate dogs, and everybody laughed at that one. Finally I couldn’t help myself and I told a story about when Hurricane Donna knocked down a tree in our front yard and left a nest of possums on the ground. A colored man knocked on our door, who must have thought it was all right to come up out of the Boogerbottom because of all the damage left behind that somebody would have to clean up. He asked Dad if he could buy those possums off of us. Dad said, “You catch them, you can keep them.” The possums hissed, but the colored man was too quick for them to bite him. He grabbed their wiry tails and slung them into a croaker sack, even the babies. We asked Dad what he wanted them for and Dad said he figured the man and his family planned on eating them. I asked if Dad thought they would keep the babies for pets but Dad said he guessed not.
Nobody said anything when I finished. Wayne and David Tremblay looked kind of embarrassed and I guessed I hadn’t told it right. But that silence only lasted a minute, and then there was some more colored-people talk, the way it always was when guys didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t stay f
or it, but instead went and climbed in the tent and zipped myself up in my sleeping bag. I hadn’t spent the night away from home much before that weekend, and telling that story made me kind of homesick. I missed Mom and Dad and our dog, Suzy, and even Tink. Plus, it was funny: I missed Darla, too, and I wondered what she was doing right then, and realized I didn’t have any idea how she spent her nights at her house — if they watched TV like regular people, or if she and her mom danced or something, or if she hid away all alone in her room, which was kind of what I thought, and which made me sad if it was true.
We packed up and went home the next day, which was Sunday. Telmo Lewis stuttered for the rest of the camping trip and mostly stayed in his tent, and he never did come back to Scouts once the camping trip was over. I didn’t particularly like Scouts after that, either, but Dad said me and Wayne needed to keep going because it helped build character. I don’t think he ever knew about the initiation. They made us swear not to tell.
THAT NEXT WEEK WAS STILL SEPTEMBER, but Dad decided it was time to start his campaign, so Wayne and me and David Tremblay went to work delivering flyers all over town. I should have felt pretty good about things since at school that day I figured out a new place to pee: a kind of blind corner behind the gym, where there was a hedge but no grass that I might kill, just dirt and ants. On the way home from school I started feeling low, though, and as soon as we started with the flyers, I felt even lower. First we went out to the houses in our neighborhood, then down Orange Avenue, south toward Bowlegs Creek, to some crummier streets where people had houses that looked like the ones the colored people lived in down at the Boogerbottom. We decided to save the Boogerbottom for last, and hoped if we put it off long enough, Dad would forget he wanted us to go there.
As usual I picked the houses where nobody looked like they were home, so I could ring the doorbell, stuff the flyer in the mailbox, and run back to my bike. Wayne and David Tremblay made fun of me, but at least I hardly had to talk to anybody that way, and the only thing I had to worry about was dogs.
Most people who were home just took the flyer and thanked us. Usually they were ladies and said they would give it to their husbands. Wayne and David got some things to eat at a couple of houses where the people were friendly or knew my dad and I guess liked his platform — a piece of chocolate cake one time, which made me jealous since I didn’t get one because I was busy hiding behind a tree while they went in. Twice, though, the men were home and took one look at the flyer and crumpled it up with a sour look on their faces. One of them didn’t have a shirt on and he said some things to Wayne that I couldn’t hear from where I was hiding but I could tell from the man’s face that he was mad. Wayne looked nervous when he came back after the guy shut the door — actually slammed it.
“What’d he say?” I asked Wayne. He looked like he was about to cry but I knew he wouldn’t.
“Nothing,” Wayne said. “I think I woke him up.”
I didn’t believe him and neither did David Tremblay. “He was mad because you woke him up?” David asked him. “What else?”
Wayne grabbed his bike. “He said Negroes ought to pave their own dang streets.”
David and me hopped on our bikes, too. “He said ‘Negroes’?” I said.
Even pedaling behind him I knew Wayne was rolling his eyes. “No. But he did say he thought Dad was a great leader for the twentieth century and we ought to be proud of him for standing up for his communist beliefs.”
“Really?” I said.
“No.”
“Let’s dump the rest of these flyers,” David Tremblay said, already tired of the whole business. “We have football practice. Give them to Dewey.” Next thing I knew, all the flyers were piled in the basket on my bike and Wayne and David were out of there. I rode back to the house and told Mom I had a lot of homework and couldn’t pass out any more flyers. We were back at it the next day, though.
David Tremblay’s mom, who we hardly ever saw, took a flyer that next afternoon and read it in their living room, though I didn’t know how she could even see since it was so dark in there. We had only stopped by for David to get his greasy comb to Elvis up his hair in case he saw any girls. His mom said, “Well, isn’t that something”— about the flyers, not about the comb — then she asked me and Wayne to please tell Mom she would love for her to come over for a visit sometime again; it had been so long since the last visit; she would make sweet iced tea. The one lamp she had on was cracked at the base, and the two pictures on the walls both looked crooked. We got out of there as fast as we could, and nobody faster than David.
The next day at school David said his stepdad had got hold of the flyer we’d given his mom and he’d torn it into little pieces and said Hank Turner was a great damn disgrace to the white population of Sand Mountain.
It didn’t seem like too many people liked Dad’s platform. Walter Wratchford drove by us and stopped in the middle of the road and asked for a bunch of them flyers. I handed over about a dozen and he didn’t even look at them, just shoved them in his glove box and said, “All my parking tickets was getting lonely in there.” Then he asked didn’t our daddy know that you could annex the whole dang world to make it dry and there’d still be somebody opening a new bar somewheres else, like on the moon?
David was with us and said he wished there was a bar on the dang moon — they could just send his stepdad up there from now on. Walter Wratchford just sort of nodded at David and said, “Maybe not a bad idea.”
When Tink stepped on a nail later in the week, Mom took all of us to Dr. Rexroat’s for tetanus shots even though me and Wayne didn’t think that was fair. Darla’s mom was at her receptionist desk and said, “Hey there, sweetie pie,” to me, which made me nervous, but pretty quick she started goo-gooing over poor Tink’s bloody foot. Wayne handed her a campaign flyer. He gave one to Dr. Rexroat, too, when we went in the examination room for the shots. Dr. Rexroat must have already read it because he only just laughed and said, “Ah yes, the crusading Turner family.” Mom smiled but you could tell she didn’t mean it.
Darla’s mom must have read her flyer while we were in with Dr. Rexroat, because she wasn’t so nice when we came out. She seemed kind of upset and asked Mom about a hundred questions about Dad wanting to tear down the Skeleton Hotel. She wanted to know why he wanted to do such a thing as that, and wasn’t it a matter of private property, and didn’t Dad ever consider that it was a famous landmark for Sand Mountain, or maybe not famous, but a landmark, anyway? Mom just said it was an idea that would be good for the town council to discuss, even if they didn’t end up doing anything about it. That got Darla’s mom calmed down, and she said, “Well, of course,” and that she guessed that made sense, and also it was nice that Dad wanted to help the colored people, and maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to annex the city limits over on the other side of the Peace River and shut down The Springs.
Nobody else said anything mean about Dad and his campaign, but I guess that was mostly because nobody much was home. It took us forever, almost a whole week, to get the flyers delivered to everybody — except for the Boogerbottom.
One afternoon after Wayne and David Tremblay took off for JV practice, I went back over to Darla’s and she invited me to ride bikes with her out to Moon’s Stable, where she kept Bojangles. I don’t know what made her change to want to do stuff with me again, but I was glad about it. You get tired after a while of just hanging around hoping somebody notices you’re there.
Bojangles wasn’t anything like I expected, which was a beautiful pony like My Friend Flicka. Instead he was old and had a sway back, but I guess Darla didn’t see him that way because she hugged his head the minute she saw him and gave him a carrot and a sugar cube and brushed him for about an hour like a maniac, then braided his tail and his mane, even though he seemed to be missing clumps of his hair. His eyes leaked some kind of stuff that Darla kept wiping off and not mentioning anything about, and when it was time to ride him, she got on bareback from the top of a fenc
e.
“Come get on behind me,” she said.
I wasn’t so sure. “Don’t you have a saddle?” I said. It didn’t look safe to me, plus I wasn’t sure how I could sit behind her without us being squashed together at the lowest point of Bojangles’s swayed back.
“Sometimes I do,” she said. “But today I don’t.” I asked her what that was supposed to mean, and she said she didn’t exactly own a saddle but had to rent one from the stable, which usually she couldn’t afford on top of the boarding fee. When I asked her how much was the boarding fee, she said they paid in kind, and when I asked her what “paid in kind” meant, she said her mom took care of that and I should stop asking so many dumb questions.
We hadn’t seen anybody since we’d been there, just some other horses that looked a lot nicer and happier than Bojangles, running around in a pasture they had, and a few more in their stalls in the big barn. The barn had a new paint job of green with a red roof, but you could tell it was kind of run down, since there were boards missing or half-hanging, and weeds — a lot of weeds. Somebody was in the office, or what Darla called the office, which was just a shed off the side of the barn. I smelled cigarette smoke. “Come on and get on,” Darla said again, so I finally climbed on Bojangles and immediately slid right down his back until I was pressed up against her, which made me nervous, but which I liked, too. Darla took us for a walk around the ring, which was all mud and horse poop, then she kicked and let out the reins some, which got Bojangles to trot even though I thought he might die from the effort and I might die from how bad it hurt my butt. It was all I could do to keep from getting bounced off, so I held on to Darla, since there was nowhere to grab the horse.
After we’d been trotting for a couple of circles, she tried to make Bojangles gallop, even though he was obviously too old and too tired to gallop. He refused and I guess as punishment for Darla even having such an idea, he slowed back down to a walk.
Down Sand Mountain Page 12