Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  He said, “You know I’m a friend of her family don’t you? A friend of her mother’s.”

  I said, “Yes, sir,” even though I knew Darla’s grandfather wouldn’t let Walter Wratchford in their house, and of course I also knew about him at the Skeleton Hotel with Darla’s mom, and the bottle, and the little shed up there.

  He said, “I want to ask you a question.”

  I said, “Yes, sir?”

  He said, “You haven’t been fooling around with her, have you?”

  That made me nervous. I said, “You mean like kissing?”

  He made a snorting sound like one of those horses. “Yeah. Like kissing.”

  I shook my head. “No, sir.”

  “You promise? Because I like to see she does OK and I hate to see somebody move in on her, take advantage or something.”

  I said, “No, sir, I wouldn’t ever move in on her,” even though I wasn’t too sure what he meant by that except it wasn’t just about kissing and it probably was something like what happened at the Skeleton Hotel, only me doing it instead of Darla.

  He said, “All right, then,” and he said, “She’s a good girl. People say things sometimes but she’s a good girl. You remember that, you got it?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He said, “People think they know things about people but usually they don’t, not really. They think they know all kinds of things about all kinds of things, but mostly they don’t know their head from their A-double-S, pardon my French.” He looked at me hard. “You know what I’m talking about?”

  I said I thought I did — like gossip and stuff, and how people make up stories about you like that you’re colored when you’re really not, or that you gave a guy at your school rat poison when it was somebody else, or that your dad loves colored people because of his election flyers.

  He nodded and I thought he was agreeing with me, but then he said, “Rat poison?”

  I made myself kind of laugh but probably it just made me sound guilty, and then I said, “Not really. I was just talking about stuff people might say about somebody that wasn’t true or something.” He kept looking at me hard the way he had been before and I got more nervous that he could see I was lying, even though I wasn’t lying but it still felt like I was. I said, “I think I have to go home. It’s probably dinnertime. We’re probably about to have dinner. I probably have to set the table or something.”

  Walter Wratchford grabbed my handlebars but not in a mean way. He said, “The reason I wanted to talk to you about all this is I just want you to be nice to Darla. I’m just saying she needs a friend and maybe you might be her friend; just don’t take advantage is all. That’s what I wanted to tell you. That’s all. Just be nice to her. You think you can do that?”

  I said, “Yes sir,” and he said didn’t he already tell me once that he wasn’t a sir and not to call him sir — that that was for his father, or for officers? I nodded, but I still wasn’t about to call him anything else because, even if he didn’t mind, I knew my mom and dad sure did.

  Dear General Westmoreland,

  My teacher Mr. Cheeley said for me to write this letter to explain to you Why I Should Be Fighting in Vietnam. The problem is I am not old enough to volunteer for the army since I am twelve, but I read in the newspaper about all the tunnels the Vietcong dug everywhere to hide in and live in and make sneak attacks on the American soldiers from. The Vietcong are a lot smaller than the Americans and so they need littler holes to crawl down and littler caves to live in. But what I could do is, since I am smaller, too, I could crawl down in those tunnels and since the Vietcong wouldn’t be expecting it, I could catch them by surprise. I have also dug some of my own caves and lived in them before, so I have a lot of experience, a lot more than you would expect from someone my age. I also have a lot of practice at the commando crawl and patrolling the perimeters. I know it’s not the same to just practice, and that war is real, not pretend. But my mom told me that Alexander the Great got started when he was my age and he conquered the whole world with his horse Bucephalus. I should also mention that I am a very good horseback rider in case you need that for the jungles, since tanks and armored cars can’t go a lot of places where the Vietcong are. Also I have a friend of mine who was a soldier in Vietnam and he told me everything about it. We talk about it all the time, so I can be prepared. In conclusion, this is Why I Should Be Fighting in Vietnam. Thank you. Your friend (I hope) and fellow American,

  Dewey Turner

  That was what I wrote that night while I was waiting for them to come and get me for poisoning Moe. I thought it was pretty good, although the part about being a “fellow American” was from LBJ, and of course I wasn’t exactly a very good horseback rider and I made up the whole thing about talking to Walter Wratchford about Vietnam all the time, but it wasn’t exactly a lie because of when he told me about the Bouncing Betties and when we went to the colored soldier’s funeral. As usual I got the idea in my head for a while, while I was writing, that I could actually convince General Westmoreland to let me come to Vietnam, and so I wouldn’t have to worry about anything after that, the same as when I had the idea of going to military school over in Tampa. But as soon as I finished and remembered that I wasn’t going to mail my letter but just hand it in to Mr. Cheeley, I started worrying all over again about what was going to happen.

  Wayne had left me alone when he got home from JV practice, and during dinner, and after dinner, until Mom said it was bedtime. The phone rang once and I got very nervous, but it was only David Tremblay calling to talk to Wayne. You never heard so much whispering like Wayne was doing during that conversation. The phone cord wasn’t very long, but he tried to stretch it all the way from the kitchen down the hall to the bathroom so nobody could hear him.

  When we were in bed, he started up again about me not saying anything. He had all these arguments he was making, trying to get me to feel sorry for David Tremblay and his mom, and what happened to Ricky Tremblay having to go to reform school, and it was all an accident, and Moe was going to be OK, and if Moe ever tried to do anything, they would protect me.

  “They who?” I asked him. It was the first and only thing I had said to Wayne since that afternoon.

  “Everybody in the neighborhood — me, David Tremblay, everybody.”

  “You didn’t say anybody else’s name.”

  “Well, that’s because they don’t know what happened. Nobody knows except you and me and David.”

  “And Moe.” I don’t know why I was giving Wayne a hard time. I felt so guilty about everything that I had already decided I wouldn’t tell on David Tremblay and would just let everybody believe I had been the one to poison Moe, even though I could just hear Dad now, how he was going to yell at me, and Mom, too, which was worse because she wouldn’t yell; she would just come in my room the way she had the day before, when she sang “Dewey Was an Admiral on Manila Bay,” only instead of making me feel better, she would make me feel worse than anything when she said what I knew she would say:

  “Dewey, your father and I are very disappointed in you.”

  I worried for a long time into the night, long after Wayne started snoring because of his hay fever, long after probably everybody else in town was asleep except the police and maybe Darla’s mom and Walter Wratchford with their secret meeting on top of the Skeleton Hotel. Thinking about them got me thinking that probably everybody had some kind of a secret, like Darla and the colored boy in the cemetery, and me and Darla also on top of the Skeleton Hotel, and Darwin and his Turn Out the Lights game. That made me feel a little bit better. Plus, I hadn’t told anybody about Darla’s mom, or ever asked Darla about her and the colored boy, or said a word about Darwin. And I wasn’t going to say a word, either, about David Tremblay and the rat poison.

  Keeping all those secrets, or just letting people’s secrets be — I figured that had to count for something.

  MOE DIDN’T DIE, but he didn’t come home from the hospital right away, either. Even though
nobody came to the house to arrest me, I still worried about it anyway, and that Friday night, I dreamed the whole town of Sand Mountain was lined up to give me a red belly. Somebody drove onto our front yard in real life and peeled a wheel that night, really late, and tore up some grass, but Dad said it must have just been teenagers, and he went by himself out to Panther Creek Sod Farm. On Saturday, after we did chores from the job jar, Dad made me and Wayne pass out more campaign flyers, even though we had already put one on every house and business in Sand Mountain before, but at least we didn’t have to go down to the Boogerbottom again.

  David Tremblay came with us, of course — he showed up at breakfast and kept trying to do my chores, but I knew what he was up to and didn’t let him. He wasn’t going to get off the hook that easy. He didn’t say anything about the rat poison. Wayne and him kept being nice to me all day, anyway, like not making me have to talk to any of the people in the neighborhoods where we went. “You just carry the flyers in your basket,” Wayne said. “Me and David will run them up to people’s doors.” They also bought me a chocolate milk shake at Honey’s Drugstore downtown when we were done, and a Batman comic book, and when there was a big football game with everybody from the neighborhood that afternoon at the field by our house, they kept giving me the ball. It was enough to make you sick, and I thought about just leaving because I knew how phony they were being, but this dumb part of my brain still wanted to believe that everything had changed, just like that, and for no reason other than that Wayne and David Tremblay and maybe everybody else had just woken up that day and suddenly noticed what a great guy I was. I guess it was pretty sad. But at the same time, maybe you’re an idiot if you don’t take what they’re giving you, no matter why it is they’re doing it and no matter what they want in return.

  So I sat on the bike and was happy I didn’t have to talk to people about the flyers, and I sat in the booth at Honey’s and drank that milk shake until the straw collapsed from nothing left, and I lay on the cool concrete of our carport back home and read Batman, and I scored two touchdowns with my amazing speed and guys mysteriously falling down trying to tackle me, and when it was all over, I wished I could live the day again and this time go ahead and let David Tremblay do my chores from the job jar, too, what the heck.

  I didn’t actually forget about Moe in the hospital, and about waiting to get blamed for him being rat-poisoned, but it was like the atom-bomb drills we used to have in elementary school where they had you run home and get in the bathroom with your whole family unless you had a fallout shelter. I worried all the time about the atom bombs and radiation, but there was also a part of me that didn’t believe it could ever really happen.

  At church on Sunday, Reverend Dunn said a prayer for Moe even though Moe was a Baptist, but nobody knew who the prayer was about, at first, because Reverend Dunn kept calling him “Charles”: “And Lord we ask you to extend your mercies to one of our young high schoolers in the community, Charles Borgerding. We pray for the safe deliverance of Charles, and for the safety of all our young people in the congregation and the community.” Reverend Dunn could hardly even say the last name, Borgerding, and me and Boopie Larent, sitting in the vesper choir, both started laughing and had to hide behind our hymn books. It was Ronnie Dick, that Scoutmaster’s son, who was also in the vesper choir, who whispered to us that Reverend Dunn was talking about Moe.

  “I heard he got attacked by colored boys that snuck up to the school,” Ronnie Dick whispered.

  I whispered back that that was just a stupid rumor, and Moe probably just had food poisoning. I was pretty nervous lying like that, but figured it was good practice.

  Mr. Rupert, the choir director who was so mean, hissed at us and told us to zip it, which was actually what he said: “Zip it.” We almost started laughing at that, too, but you never knew if Mr. Rupert might throw something at you, or even give you the Horse Eats Corn right there during church, so we didn’t. Then the prayer was over and we had to sing, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty,” only Ronnie Dick, who was always messing around, sang, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord Godamighty,” and me and Boopie just about choked.

  Later on that day, I went to find Darla — not because I really wanted to but on account of what Walter Wratchford had said about being her friend and all, and not moving in on her, and not believing what you hear. Her mom came to the door when I knocked, and she said, “Hey, stranger,” in this funny way like in the movies, but I couldn’t look at her without thinking about the way she brushed her hair that night when we saw her coming out of the Skeleton Hotel. I don’t know why that was the thing I remembered the most — the way she brushed her hair like she was mad at it and all — but I did.

  Darla and me hardly talked when we got on our bikes, and I don’t know how we ended up going back out to Sand Mountain, since neither one of us said anything about it. It must have been like the force of gravity that pulled us there, and just like the time before, we were the only ones. On the climb up, when she wasn’t breathing too hard, Darla told me about this book she had just finished reading, called Ethan Frome, about a guy who must have been about the most miserable guy in the world. He was in love with a girl named Mattie Silver, and he hated his wife, old Mrs. Frome, who kept having her organs taken out because she didn’t like them, and Ethan and Mattie at the end of the book rode on a sled in the snow down a giant hill and crashed into a giant elm tree on purpose. I think that was the part Darla liked so much — them doing that because they were in love but couldn’t get married or anything, like Romeo and Juliet. But what happened instead was they didn’t die; they just got hurt real bad and turned into cripples, and old Mrs. Frome ended up having to take care of them, even though she probably didn’t have any organs left, and they were trapped with her all in the same house, forever.

  Once we got to the top, Darla wanted to pretend we were Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver, which I thought was kind of a dumb thing, but that’s how it was with Darla. We couldn’t just ride down Sand Mountain on a piece of cardboard; we had to pretend we were trying to kill ourselves crashing into a tree. Only there weren’t any trees anywhere near Sand Mountain, but I suppose if there had been, Darla would have wanted to crash into them just so we’d be able to do things right, the way they did them in the book. I asked Darla if there was any kissing in the story and she said I had a dirty mind, which made me mad, especially after what happened at the Skeleton Hotel. But I was too embarrassed to say anything about that, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  Darla started singing, “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me,” which was playing a lot on the radio, and which surprised me because usually she just sang old songs that I didn’t know or that I had heard because my mom sang them around our house.

  I knew I should interrupt her, make her hop on the cardboard so we could ride back down and get the whole Ethan Frome business over with and so I wouldn’t be too late getting home, but there was something about being up there on the top of Sand Mountain with Darla right then that kept me from saying anything — the way it was just her and me, and her singing like there was nothing else in the world, nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Even though the song was about being blue and missing someone, it didn’t seem like that; it was just pretty.

  When she finished, I still lay there on the cardboard and looked at her. She didn’t look at anything, just curtsied at her pretend audience and then closed her eyes and breathed. The sun was starting to go down, a big red ball turning orange through all the phosphate dust where the mines and the processing plants had messed up everything west of Sand Mountain. The wind picked up and it turned cool. Darla seemed to be waiting for something, but I didn’t know what.

  “I did something really bad,” I said all of a sudden.

  Darla turned around and stared at me for a minute like she’d forgotten I was there and it surprised her to hear my voice, or anybody’s voice. I wanted to tell her about the rat poison and I figured she would ask what I had done, but when she finall
y spoke, she just said, “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did,” I said. “I did something bad. I mean it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I want to tell you about it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  I couldn’t believe this conversation. “Well, why don’t I?”

  “Because you didn’t do anything.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh’ is right,” Darla said, not that I knew what that was supposed to mean. But I didn’t have time to think about it too much because she said we needed to get back down from the mountain. She said she was probably going to get in trouble with her mom, and it was mean of me to keep her up there so long when I knew she had to be home already.

  I said I was sorry, even though I could have pointed out that it was her idea to stay longer while I was the one who had wanted to go home already, but with Darla, what was the use of arguing? In her mind there was nothing to argue about, just like in her mind I must not have done anything bad because she didn’t want to hear about anything bad and that was all there was to it.

  She dragged the cardboard out from under me and over to the edge. “Sorry won’t get us down the mountain,” she said, and she took off before I could climb on behind her.

  I stood up and yelled, “Hey!” really loud, but there wasn’t anything I could do, it happened so fast. There went Darla.

  It took her the usual five seconds to get to the bottom, but it took me forever because I didn’t have my own cardboard and so had to jump my way little by little to the bottom and I kept falling down, and if I tried to run, I got going too fast and I fell down, and if I rolled, I couldn’t control where the heck I was going or how fast, either, and finally I just sat down and scooted on my rear end like a big inchworm or something.

  By the time I finally got to the bottom, Darla was long gone on her bike and I had to ride home by myself in the dark. Mom was waiting for me at the house and drove me to Sunday night church late, still wearing my sandy clothes. “Your father is going to want to have a talk with you,” she said, and he did.