Down Sand Mountain

by Steve Watkins

  Then Dad started again. He said, “I wish you’d come to me about this before, Dewey. Will you promise me if anything like this happens again, you’ll talk to me about it and let me help?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  Dad said, “I know it’s not fair, but your mother and I are concerned about David Tremblay and his situation at home, and we think it’s best if nothing is said about this any further. But it’s going to mean some people will hold this against you when you’re not the one responsible.”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  Dad was quiet for a while, then he said, “Dewey?”

  I said, “Sir?”

  He said, “I owe you an apology, son. I let you down on this one.”

  I said, “No, you didn’t, Dad. You wouldn’t ever let me down.” Then I said I was sorry for making so much trouble for everybody.

  Dad had his hand on my shoulder while we talked and he moved it to my head and rubbed my head a little bit. He stood there with me like that for a long time, until I fell asleep. He might have even stayed there all night.

  DAD DIDN’T PUT ME ON RESTRICTIONS for what happened with Moe, but he did think there had to be some kind of punishment, even if I was taking the blame instead of David Tremblay. So on Saturday he ordered me and Wayne to pull up all the sandspurs in the backyard. It took forever. When Dad inspected, he found a few spots we had to do over again, but after that, he said he was proud of us both for a job well done. Only he wasn’t through with us yet. “Next I want you boys to paint the shed out back,” he said. “I’ve got some green paint already out there, and you know where the ladder is and the brushes, and be sure to use a drop cloth. And Dewey — no throwing paint on your brother.”

  We were at dinner when he told us that. Wayne asked if David Tremblay could help us, and Dad thought about it for a minute and then said yes, he thought that would be appropriate. It had just about killed David Tremblay that he wasn’t allowed to do any of the work on the sandspurs, and when we were out there, he climbed up in one of our trees and talked to us from a branch until Mom came out and told him he had to go home, that he wasn’t allowed over for a while because of what happened with Moe. I never saw anybody as sad as David Tremblay then, or as happy when Wayne told him he could come back in the yard on Sunday and help us paint the shed.

  I asked Dad why we weren’t delivering more flyers for the election — wouldn’t it be better for us to be doing that instead of all the chores? — but he said we’d done all the campaigning we were going to do, and it was time to sit back now and let the people decide. The way he said it sounded like he’d already lost, which made me sad, and one day, while I was still suspended from school, I got some of the leftover flyers and took them to houses up and down on our street, just me on my own.

  Mom helped me with the work the teachers sent home that I was missing while I was on suspension, and when they decided to let me back in school, Dad talked to Mr. Straub to make sure I could use the bathroom without anybody bothering me. I saw Head and Moe that first day back, in Mr. Straub’s office, and they left me alone in the lunchroom after that, too.

  David Tremblay had started a rumor that Moe had actually gotten sick from eating the school lunch and not from rat poison, and I guess that rumor got around pretty good, because one of the lunchroom ladies stopped me on Tuesday, pulled her hairnet down tight on her forehead, and said, “Don’t think we aren’t keeping an eye on you.”

  People started calling Moe “Ratterding” instead of his real last name, Borgerding, which was pretty funny. Nobody ever said it to his face, but I guess he knew anyway, because somebody scratched it on his locker, and he always seemed to be a little nervous anytime I saw him. The strange thing was that nobody made fun of me too much. Wayne and David Tremblay and all the other guys from the neighborhood let me sit with them in the lunchroom again and sometimes they laughed when I told jokes.

  The kids in my classes that didn’t pay much attention to me before didn’t pay much attention to me when I came back to school, either, so that was something that didn’t change. I still said plenty of dumb things and I was still too short. And after a couple of days of thinking I wouldn’t anymore, I started raising my hand again to answer all the questions in class. Mr. Cheeley in Americanism vs. Communism handed me back the letter I wrote to General Westmoreland one day, and in front of everybody, he said, “Perhaps you would like to add a postscript before you mail this off, and tell him about your skills as an assassin.” I couldn’t believe he said that and neither could anybody else, but that was about the worst thing that happened.

  Wayne included me in stuff he did with David Tremblay for a while, so I couldn’t be mad at him about that night he snuck out the window with Darla. And I wasn’t mad at Darla, either. She kept inviting me to do stuff every afternoon that week — come over for a dance lesson again with her mom, or take our bikes to Bowlegs Creek, or ride Bojangles. Mostly I said sure, I’d like to do those things, and so we did do them, only we didn’t talk as much as we used to. I guess there were just too many things that had happened that neither one of us wanted to have come up. I wished we could go back to when we didn’t know so much. We always had plenty to talk about back then.

  But it was still nice with Darla, for all that. We even sat together once at lunch and she tried to give me her roll.

  On Thursday I went over to her house when nobody was around. Darla said her mom had to take her grandpa to the doctors up in Bartow. She asked if I wanted to see her room, and I realized I never had. In fact, I’d only been upstairs the one time back early in the fall, with Darwin. “You’re not going to tie me up, are you?” I asked her.

  Darla frowned at me hard and I said I was just kidding.

  Her room was probably the same size as Darwin’s but seemed a lot bigger because it wasn’t full of junk like his, and because of all the yellow light coming in her giant window. It was a flood of light, with dust motes looping and swirling and falling, and so warm you’d have almost thought it wasn’t autumn anymore.

  She had a fancy brass bed with a pink cover by one wall, and a little table with her schoolbooks on it, and a chair. And a little dresser by another wall, with combs and brushes on top. And that was it.

  “Where’s all your stuff, Darla?” I said. It felt funny to say her name. I guess in all the time I’d known her, I’d hardly ever said it out loud to anybody except Wayne.

  She’d been standing in the yellow light with her eyes closed, like she was in the shower or something, but stepped out when I asked her that. I followed her over to a closet door. She didn’t open it, though. “In here are my clothes,” she said. “And costumes. And my shoes, of course.”

  “But don’t you have any toys, or dolls, or girl stuff?”

  “We have Monopoly and Clue. They’re downstairs somewhere. I got rid of all my dolls.”

  “How come?” I remembered seeing the piles of old stuff out on their back porch the first time I ever came over — the moldy board games and the headless Raggedy Ann and Andy.

  “Oh, I don’t know. They were just a lot of bother. I got rid of a lot of things so I could have more room.”

  “More room for what?”

  Darla said she wasn’t sure yet, but she was thinking about a fish tank. I asked if she liked fish and she said no, not really. She did one of her dance steps back under the shower of that afternoon light, and I could see then why she liked to have her room the way it was. With the sun coming through her big window, and her standing there inside, it was like she was on a stage.

  “I have about a million pictures I drew of Bojangles, if you want to see them,” Darla said, about when I figured the conversation was over. “They’re in the bottom dresser drawer.” She said she had all her school photos, too, from every grade since first, but she didn’t let anybody ever see them and she wasn’t sure why she kept them, and in fact, since I brought it up and reminded her, she thought maybe after I left she would throw them all away. Or probably burn th
em.

  “You could give me one,” I said. “And I could give you one of mine.” Except for my mom and dad, I hadn’t ever given anybody any of my school pictures, or had anybody ask me for any, either.

  Darla thought about it for a minute, then said she guessed it was OK if I gave her one. But I couldn’t have one of hers. She said it was her policy to not give any away or let anybody see them.

  “Your ‘policy’?” I said. She nodded. Her Shirley Temple curls bounced.

  “My policy,” she said.

  I asked why she had a policy about something like that, and did she have other policies?

  “Oh, yeah,” Darla said. “I have a lot of policies. I have a policy about just about everything.”

  “Like what?” I said. “Or do you have a policy about not telling anybody the rest of your policies?”

  Darla smiled. I could tell she liked that. “Maybe I do,” she said. “And maybe I don’t.”

  It was about the dumbest conversation I’d ever had in my whole life. It made me pretty happy.

  When we went back downstairs Darla put on a record and said it was for slow dancing. She leaned her cheek on my shoulder and I felt her breath on my neck. Something like that would have been ticklish once, but it wasn’t now. It wasn’t kissing — we hadn’t ever done that again, or the other thing, either — but it was kind of like kissing. I could feel her heart beating, too, and I tried to count the beats until the end of the song, but dancing so close like that, I kept getting mixed up on which ones were hers and which ones were mine.

  There was a canoe trip with our Scout troop down the Peace River that weekend, which was the last weekend in October. I didn’t want to go on account of all the torture and stuff that went on at the last Scout trip, but Dad said I had to. It had turned real cold by the time we started out Saturday morning, so our hands and fingers got numb right away from holding on to our paddles and getting them wet and getting our clothes wet from splashing. The whole day was pretty miserable, but Mr. Ferber and Mr. Dick wouldn’t let us stop and build a fire or anything, except when we pulled the canoes over to eat lunch and have a couple of snack breaks.

  About the only time I got warm all day was when we took one of those breaks, next to a cow pasture, and a bunch of us climbed the fence. I don’t know where Wayne was, but I was walking next to David Tremblay and I said, “I bet you can’t catch one of those cows,” so of course he said, “I bet I can,” and he took off running. We all ran after him and chased the cows around for a while, yelling at them and waving our arms and stuff. It was a lot of fun.

  Mr. Ferber saw us and got mad, but we pretended we couldn’t hear him yelling from across the field, and when he came to make us stop, he stepped in two cow patties, one with each boot. Somebody told him that me and David Tremblay started it, so he made us take his boots down to the river and wash them off, which got my hands even more freezing. I kind of liked it, though, that for once — even doing something disgusting like that — it was me and David together and not just him and Wayne.

  The cold got even worse at night. Nobody brought enough clothes, and we slept wrapped up in our ponchos on the ground. At least we did until about midnight, when Mr. Ferber and Mr. Dick got everybody up yelling “Pee call! Pee call!” because they didn’t want anybody peeing in their sleeping bags. We woke up shivering the next morning, expecting we’d have a fire, but nobody had covered the wood, so it was all wet from the dew. Mr. Dick hadn’t even brought any gasoline. We ate beans out of cans and then got in the canoes.

  A bunch of us just sat there, at first, and said we wanted to quit and go home, but Mr. Dick and Mr. Ferber said the only way out was to paddle, so we paddled and paddled all day Sunday, and didn’t even care when we passed a meadow with about twenty alligators sunning on the bank. The sun was silver and just about as cold as the night, and probably colder because of the wind that blew where there weren’t any trees. We would stop paddling and breathe on our hands every now and then until we felt our fingers, but that almost made it worse once they got wet again and cold again and numb again. Mr. Ferber started this song, which he made us sing over and over, that he said was what the Canadians or the Eskimos always sang when they paddled their canoes way up north. We were supposed to sing it and paddle at the same time, and it was supposed to help us, so we sang it for about ten hours:

  Dip, dip, and swing them back,

  Flashing like silver,

  Swift as the wild goose flight,

  Dip, dip, and swing.

  Everybody hated it.

  When it was over and we got to the place and dragged the canoes out and loaded them on the cars, everybody just sat there frozen until they yelled at us and poked us and threatened to not stop at the 7-Eleven on the way home. Then we dragged ourselves into the cars and sat there frozen instead — nobody talking, nobody moving, nobody doing anything but sitting, even the guys that fell asleep. They just slept sitting up, was all.

  They dropped David Tremblay off at his house, and me and Wayne at our house. All I wanted to do was get in the hot shower. Mom was waiting for us in the kitchen, where she was cooking dinner, and Dad was in there, too, drinking a cup of coffee, and Tink had a coloring book, even though she was too old for coloring books and even though she was good at drawing her own pictures, too, like that picture of Suzy.

  I’m not sure how, but I could tell something was wrong as soon as we walked in. I wondered if there’d been another letter, like the tire-fire one, about the election or something. I said, “What’s the matter?” Mom put down her wooden spoon on the counter and twisted her hands in her apron. Her face was red and puffy. Tink started to cry.

  Dad said, “Just put your gear over there by the door, then I want you boys to come sit down.”

  Wayne said, “What is it, Dad?”

  We sat next to each other on the old church pew we used for a bench at the kitchen table.

  Dad squatted in front of us. “There’s a girl in Dewey’s grade, Darla Turkel.” He said it like a question and I said, “Yes, sir,” and Wayne nodded.

  Dad looked over at Mom, then back. “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but there was an accident while you were gone.”

  All the air went out of me and I barely could hear Dad when he said the rest about Darla — that she died.

  I HADN’T EVER BEEN TO A FUNERAL where I didn’t wear my Scout uniform and bring my bugle, so it felt funny putting on my Sunday suit. Wayne already had his on and he sat on the bottom bunk, not watching me exactly, but just sort of there. He hardly knew Darla the way I did, but you could tell he was upset, acting real quiet, like the way I was when they wouldn’t let me go to school and they thought I was the one that poisoned Moe.

  I had trouble tying my tie even though I’d done it a million times, and Wayne finally got up to help me even though I didn’t ask. “You got it all wrong,” he said. He untied it and tied it back, and it wasn’t much better, but I left it that way, or I would have except Mom saw it when we came out of the bedroom, and she made us redo it until finally it was about right.

  Mom wore a black dress, which was what you were supposed to wear to a funeral, but it had gotten warm again and Tink had on her Easter dress, which was pink, with a pink hat and little white gloves. Mom tried to get her to change but Tink was stubborn, so Mom gave up and said, “You children hurry out to the car; we’re going to be late.” I’m not sure why Mom wanted us all to go. I guess she must have known Darla’s mom from Dr. Rexroat’s office, the way everybody in Sand Mountain knew everybody at least a little unless they were colored, but me and Wayne hadn’t told her anything about either of us and Darla except that we knew her. Probably it was like visiting the shut-ins — Mom just thought it was the right thing to do.

  Dad was out in his shed. Mom called him, once we got to the car, to come on, we were all ready. He smelled like a cigarette when he got in behind the wheel.

  “Daddy smoked,” Tink said.

  I told Tink to shut up, no he didn�
�t, and Mom said, “That’s enough out of both of you. You should be thinking about others today, not yourselves, and you shouldn’t be ugly to each other.” That made me feel bad, that I wasn’t acting right even when we were going to Darla’s funeral, but that’s just the way it had been for me since we heard.

  Even the day before, when I made Wayne and David Tremblay go with me to where it happened, to the Old Bartow Highway out past Moon’s, I didn’t understand how I could be so curious instead of just sad. When Darla had died was Sunday, that second cold day of the canoe trip with the Scouts. She went riding on Bojangles by herself, and they said the last person to talk to her was Walter Wratchford. She rode the same direction we did that day I went with her, out the Old Bartow Highway, with the railroad tracks on one side and the old mines on the other that they never did reclamation on. The guy in the car that hit them said he saw Darla up ahead of him, on the side of the road, riding her horse. The train conductor of the phosphate train said he saw Darla, too, riding Bojangles, and he saw her pump her arm up and down the way you do to get a truck driver or a train engineer to blow their horn. He said at first he wasn’t going to do it because he wasn’t supposed to, but he didn’t see the car, he just saw Darla riding old Bojangles and thought, What the heck, not having any idea that it would spook Bojangles and he would run out in the highway and suddenly the car would be there, too.

  Me and Wayne and David Tremblay saw the skid mark. Where it stopped must have been where the car hit Bojangles, only it didn’t kill Bojangles; it broke his legs, and Officer O. O. Odom, who was the one that came out after they got the report back at the police station, had to shoot him to put him out of his misery. Actually, the way they said it was that Officer Odom had to “put him down.”

  There was still the dried blood on the road, too, when we went out there. It was black instead of red, so it didn’t look like blood. Somebody said they got a tractor and had to drag Bojangles’s body back up to Moon’s, where they buried him in one of the fields.