Darla said, “Mom!” but Mrs. Turkel just said, “If you’re going to learn proper technique, you have to practice proper technique.” Then she turned to me and said she hoped I was taking note, and I said, “Yes, ma’am.”
I was happy it was just me and Darla again and Wayne was out of the picture, and I even sat by her at lunch the next day, which I was pretty nervous about. It surprised her, I could tell, and it surprised Darwin even more, because when he saw us at a table together as he came out of the lunch line, he stopped and stared for a minute.
“Do you want my roll?” I said, hoping Darla would say yes and take it before those guys Head and Moe came along, but they showed up before she could say anything and before we could have a conversation at all. Moe grabbed my roll and popped it in his mouth. Head looked hard at Darla, like he was trying to figure something out. His two eyebrows crawled together in the middle of his forehead, then he asked Moe, wasn’t this the girl they caught at the cemetery with the colored boy? He said it like Darla wasn’t sitting right there.
Moe was still chewing but didn’t mind talking with his mouth full. He said, “Back last summer?”
Head nodded his head. “You think maybe it was Little Sambo here she was with?” He was talking about me and I wished I could slide under the table and crawl right out of there, or I wished they would both die of a heart attack. But mostly I wished I hadn’t ever sat there by Darla in the lunchroom. Moe said, “Could be, could be,” then he said there was no way to know for sure; they all looked alike.
Eventually they wandered off toward the lunch line but I could still hear them, sounding like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello or funny guys like that.
Darla didn’t look up from her tray the whole time, and I stared down at my tray for a while, too, but I could tell people around us had heard everything. I guess I should have said something to make Darla feel better, but then she should have said something to make me feel better, too.
She mashed her peas with her fork, every single one of them, and then mashed them together, and then drew some patterns in the green muck, and then swirled in some powdered mashed potatoes we had that day, and then poured some of her milk in there to make a kind of a lake around everything. She acted like nothing had happened and started talking about Moon Pies — how come nobody ever ate Moon Pies anymore? Sometimes when she brought up a new subject all of a sudden, it gave me a headache and this was one of those times. It was like looking down to see if your shoe was tied and walking into something, or stepping on a rake and the handle coming up and hitting you in the head. My stomach growled from still being hungry.
The next day after school, I went over to Darla’s house because I told her I would, even though I kind of didn’t want to. She didn’t mention what happened with Moe and Head, and I didn’t mention it, either, so after a while I managed to feel better about being there. The only way anybody might know there was anything wrong was that we were a lot quieter between us than usual, which was what got me to finally tell her about seeing the lady that night of the Skeleton Hotel, since I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Also I was starting to doubt what I had seen with my own eyes, and I didn’t want that to happen. Telling it to somebody else would make it real again.
We were sitting under her dining-room table, hiding from Darwin, only without the blanket and pillows and dolls like that time with Tink. Darla wanted to know if I saw the Howler, too.
“No,” I said. “But I heard him after the lady disappeared.”
Darla wanted to know why I never told her, and I said I was kind of mad about her and Wayne not looking for me that night, plus I didn’t want her to be too scared. She said she wasn’t scared, and then she said we should go back to the Skeleton Hotel and we should do it Saturday night. It all happened so fast I didn’t even have a chance to argue with her about anything or make up any excuses why not.
“You meet me at the corner down from your house,” she said. “Saturday night. Midnight. And don’t bring Wayne.”
I had almost forgotten that nobody knew about me going over to the Turkels for dance lessons and to hang out with Darla, until I left that day and as soon as I got out in their yard along came Tink on her little bicycle.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“Nothing. I was just checking the air in my tires.” I had my bike there, too.
“Why are you doing that here?”
“Because I thought they might be low, but I guess they’re not.”
Tink blinked a couple of times. “How come you came out of their house?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I just thought I’d see if they had a pump, but they weren’t home. I don’t even know who lives here.”
“Why’d you need a pump if your tires weren’t low?” she said. “And how come they’re not here if their car is here?”
I got on my bike. “How come you ask so many nosy questions?”
Tink followed me up the street. “I’m not nosy,” she said.
“Yes, you are.”
“No, you are,” she said, then she started crying. I wanted to just get the heck out of there and away from Tink, but I couldn’t stand it when she cried, either — I couldn’t stand it when anybody cried — so I stopped and asked her what was the matter. Then, of course, she had to pout and tell me, “Nothing,” until I was nice to her for a while and said she could ride with me.
She wiped her eyes. “Where are we going?” Wayne and me never let her go anywhere with us, so I guess she thought it was a very big deal that day. I said how about we ride down to Bowlegs Creek, and she said, “OK,” but she wasn’t allowed to cross the highway. I said she was with me so it would be all right, though I wasn’t actually sure about that. Tink was very excited.
Once we got there, we just sat on the bridge the way I usually did with Darla when we went. Tink collected a bunch of sticks and threw them in two at a time so they could race under the bridge while we watched, and she made me bet which one would win. I tried to pick the one I was pretty sure would lose, so Tink’s would be the winner and she could say, “Ha!” Little kids like it when they get to win, no matter what they’re playing.
After a while Tink said she wanted to show me something. She had a bunch of stuff in her bike basket, including the notebook she used for taking messages when anybody called for Dad’s campaign, which from the looks of it wasn’t very often. She flipped through to the back where she had drawn a picture of a dog. Underneath it she had written, “Suzy Your Pet,” and underneath that she had written, “Do Not Run For The Election Or We Will Steal This Dog. Now You See What Happens.”
“What is this?” I asked Tink.
She threw two more sticks in Bowlegs Creek but didn’t make me pick one to win. She said she was going to put her picture with the note in our mailbox so Dad would quit the election and then nobody would be mad about anything anymore, and what did I think?
“I think you better not,” I said. “Dad’ll know you did it and he’ll get mad.”
Tink dumped all her sticks in the creek. “How will he know, if I don’t put my name on it?”
“He’ll know because it looks like a little kid wrote it and he knows what your writing looks like.” I thought Tink would argue with me, but she didn’t. “It’ll be OK,” I said. “Will you let me keep this? I like the picture of Suzy, and I can cut it out and put it on my wall.”
Tink studied the picture for a while and said no, I couldn’t have it. She liked it, too, and she wanted to keep it for herself.
We rode home slow, back up Orange Avenue. Tink wanted to know if they had those cards on the walls when you were in high school that showed you how to write all the letters of the alphabet in cursive, only she didn’t call it “cursive”; she called it “real writing.” She told me unless she looked at the cards they had on the wall in elementary school, she could never remember how to do the capital X and especially not the capital Q. I had to be honest with her and tell her that no, they didn�
��t have the cards in high school, but she shouldn’t worry about it because you hardly ever used the capital X and Q, anyway. Some people might have thought Tink asking me that was stupid, but I used to worry about the same thing when I was her age, so I understood. I hoped that was all she worried about, besides the election. I didn’t like to think that she also worried about everything else the way I did.
“It’s all going to be OK,” I told her again, and this time she smiled like she might even believe me.
When we got home, there was a car I had seen before, a blue Ford Fairlane with red doors, parked in front of our house. The passenger side looked like it had sideswiped a tree, only not too recently, and the door was tied shut with a rope, and when I saw that, I knew for sure whose car it was: Walter Wratchford’s.
WALTER WRATCHFORD WAS SITTING in the front room, on the couch, wearing his army uniform like the time I saw him at Mr. Rhodes’s funeral.
Mom stood up when we walked in, and Walter Wratchford did, too, after a second. Then Mom said, “Corporal Wratchford, I’d like to introduce my children. This is my son Dewey Turner. Dewey, you can shake Corporal Wratchford’s hand. And this is my daughter, Patricia.”
I don’t know which surprised me more — Walter Wratchford being there in the first place, or Mom introducing him as Corporal. I shook Walter Wratchford’s hand like she told me, and Tink did, too. He said, “Pleased to meet you,” to Tink and just kind of smiled at me. He settled back on the couch after Mom sat down, but his eyes jumped around like he had to check out everything all at once — the front door, the windows, Tink, me, Mom, the pictures of Mom and Dad getting married, the pictures of me and Tink and Wayne when we were babies, the Readers Digest Condensed Books that came every month lined up on the bookshelf built into the wall.
Mom turned to me. “Dewey, Corporal Wratchford has come by to ask a favor of you.”
“For what?” I said.
“For you to play your bugle this afternoon.”
They talk about in stories how somebody’s heart sinks when they find out something lousy happens, like their star pitcher is missing and it’s the day of the championship game and it looks like he’s not going to show up. That’s what it felt like to me when Mom said that, like my heart sank down about to my stomach, and then when Walter Wratchford said, “It’s for a colored soldier shot and killed in Vietnam. I believe he’s the first from here we’ve given up to that particular war,” it sank about all the way to my shoes.
Mom told me to go run and put my Scout uniform on, but Walter Wratchford said to wait; he only wanted me to do it if I wanted to. “It’s at a colored church, too,” he said. His voice sounded froggy. Then he said, “There’s just going to be colored people there.”
I looked at him pretty good right before I answered. His eyes were red, I guess from smoking his cigarettes and maybe not sleeping much. If he’d been drinking liquor, Mom would have smelled it on him and she wouldn’t have even let him come in the house.
I didn’t really have to think about it, anyway. I just said the only thing I figured you were ever allowed to say to a grown-up: “Yes, sir.” That wasn’t quite good enough for him, because he said, “Yes, sir, you don’t mind if it’s at a colored church?” and I just said, “Yes, sir,” again, with my heart so low now it was about six feet underground with the dead bodies they buried in the cemeteries, white or colored.
Actually Walter Wratchford was drinking liquor. He had a bottle in his car that said VODKA on the label, but you couldn’t smell it. He handed it to me along with a little half-empty carton of milk once I’d changed into my Scout uniform and we were driving, and he said, “Pour some of that into there, would you?” I started to pour the milk into the top of the liquor bottle, but he grabbed my hand and almost made me spill some and said no, he meant the other way around, so I poured as much of the liquor into the milk as would go. He took the carton back and told me to put the bottle under the seat, which I also did. From the way it looked, if somebody like a police officer or sheriff saw Walter Wratchford driving along, they’d just think he was having some milk.
The whole thing still made me nervous, as if I wasn’t already nervous enough going to a colored church to play “Taps,” but at least he didn’t try to get me to drink any of it, too. I asked him if he knew the colored soldier whose funeral we were going to, if they were in Vietnam together. Walter Wratchford shook his head. “Nah. I never met him. I saw one of his buddies that told me.” He said the colored guy used to play football at the colored high school out in the county and used to be pretty good, too, and must have played at a colored college but he got drafted for the war. I didn’t know what to say back. I hadn’t even known there was a colored high school out in the county.
Walter Wratchford didn’t say anything after that, but just drove us out of town, across the Peace River bridge, and past The Springs, where I had heard he went on the weekends and brought his big carved bird finger he got in the war. There was a dirt road off to the right that I must have seen a million times but never went down, but we went down it that day and bounced along in Walter Wratchford’s old Ford Fairlane at the edge of a field on our left and some woods to the right. Occasionally you could look through and see the Peace River even though it was narrow there and the bank was steep. Everywhere around us there were black cypress knees and cattails, and it smelled like mud and rotting leaves and alligator breath.
It took me a while, but finally I got up enough nerve to ask him about being in the war and what was it like in Vietnam and was he ever in any of the Vietcong tunnels. That made him laugh a little bit, and he said, “Heck, no, I wasn’t inside any of those tunnels — are you crazy? They got all kinds of booby traps down there. They take a snake, one of those poison vipers, and tie him to a piece of string hanging from the ceiling of a cave, and if you come crawling along not knowing where you’re going, you bump right into him and he bites you in the face.”
I said, “Right in the face?”
He grunted. “Right smack-dab in the face. I saw a guy one time, his face was the size of a watermelon it swole up so big.”
“From a viper?” I said.
“You’re dang right from a viper,” he said, and then he said again, “You couldn’t pay me to go down those tunnels. And I don’t want to hear about you going down there, neither. OK?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He took a drink from his milk carton. “I know I told you not to call me sir, since I’m not an officer.”
I said but I thought he was a corporal and he said he was a corporal, but a corporal wasn’t an officer, it was a noncom. I nodded like I knew what that was supposed to mean, and I didn’t call him sir anymore. Not that I had much of a chance to, anyway, because Walter Wratchford finally stopped his car at the place where the road ended. It was a clearing of a couple of acres, and other cars were everywhere, mostly old cars that looked like they should have been in a junkyard, but a couple of shiny almost-new ones, too, including a big black Cadillac with fins that looked like the Batmobile from a certain angle. There were five or six gray-board shacks with porches and raked dirt yards like they had down in the Boogerbottom, and across the clearing was the church, which was wood painted white and a steeple also wood painted white with a cross on top painted gold. Most of the colored people must have already been inside the church, because we could hear singing and clapping and somebody banging on a piano a lot louder than they ever did in our church, where they played the organ for hymns instead. But there were still a few colored people, some men, standing outside next to a low black hearse at the side of the church. They all wore suits, black suits, with the coats buttoned up, and they all smoked cigarettes.
Walter Wratchford lit a cigarette, too, and when he wasn’t taking a puff, he was flicking it, tapping it, fidgeting it around, sort of worrying it until it looked so wrung out and limp that it was hard to believe he could still be smoking. I felt stupid in my Scout uniform, when he got out of the Fairlane and motioned fo
r me to get out, and seeing the colored men in their suits, I was embarrassed by how Walter Wratchford looked, too, with his uniform and long greasy hair. I was afraid he was going to make me go inside the church, but he didn’t. He walked over to the colored men by the hearse, with me a little ways behind him, and he told them we were there to pay respects to the fallen soldier. That’s what he called the colored man who died — the fallen soldier. The men just nodded, but I could tell they thought Walter Wratchford was strange, and when they looked at me, I could tell they thought I was strange, too, and they didn’t want us there any more than those colored kids had wanted me and Wayne delivering flyers down to the Boogerbottom. I wished we could just get the heck out of there before people came out of the church.
About that time, somebody did leave the church. It was a boy about my age. The door banged open and he stumbled outside, crying really hard and yelling. He fell down on the concrete-block steps and started hitting his face with his fists, and then hit his head on the steps one time before the colored men next to the hearse could get to him to grab him and make him stop. Some colored women came out of the church and rushed over to him, too, but he pulled away from everybody and ran away, yelling and crying, and saying, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
I wondered if the boy was related to the colored soldier that got killed — maybe his little brother — and that made me wonder how I would be if Wayne ever died or got killed in the war. I doubted I would hit my own head or run off like that boy did, but I knew I’d be sadder than just about anything. Just thinking about it made me want to go home and crawl in my bed.
Walter Wratchford dragged me back a ways while the colored men chased after the boy and caught him, which wasn’t hard, because he seemed like he was blind, running into cars, throwing himself on the ground even though he had his Sunday suit on, then getting back up and running again. They took hold of his arms and had to hold him up, because once they got to him, his legs crumpled and he couldn’t stand anymore. Other people came out of the church, and one must have been his mom, because they brought him over to her and she took him in her arms and sat on the steps and just held him. She called him “baby-baby” and said that over and over like it was one word or one name. I felt like crying from seeing all this, but the service inside never stopped the whole time, except they weren’t singing now. But the preacher was shouting instead. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, partly because of the way he talked, or shouted, and partly because the people in the congregation said things back, not like the readings from the back of the hymnal we had at the Methodist Church, where the minister read one sentence and all of us down in the pews read the next sentence together.
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