IT WAS AN HOUR LATER AND STILL RAINING and I was hiding at the edge of the bridge only in just my underwear and the Ban-Lon shirt with the holes. The rain had already raised the level of Bowlegs Creek up over where my cave used to be, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do except wait until it got dark and then sneak back home. I wished my mom would come looking for me and I said a couple of prayers for that, but nothing happened except finally this guy Walter Wratchford showed up in his car.

Everybody knew Walter Wratchford, because his dad was Mr. Hollis Wratchford that ran the farmer’s market under the Skeleton Hotel, and that gave Chollie the janitor a dollar after the minstrel show. Walter Wratchford had been in the Vietnam War but was back now. I guess he did a lot of just driving around sometimes.

I saw him from a long ways off, coming real slow from the direction of the old Turkey Creek Mine that was about ten miles south of town and nobody ever went there anymore. The car was an old blue Ford Fairlane with red doors, and it got slower and slower until it finally kind of glided to a stop there next to me like maybe it had run out of gas. There was a rope holding the passenger door shut, and I guess Walter Wratchford untied it from inside because in about a minute the door swung open and there he was, sitting inside smoking a cigarette. His hair was long and stringy, which you didn’t see much around Sand Mountain, and he had on his old army jacket. I ducked down some more but then figured he must have already seen me or why else would he have stopped, so I lifted my head up.

He just looked at me like he saw stuff like that all the time, and he said, “Well, are you getting in or not?” I nodded and pulled my Ban-Lon shirt as far down as I could, almost to my knees, so he wouldn’t see that I didn’t have any pants on. Once I slid in the seat, he grabbed some old yellow newspaper, which I started to lay over me.

“No, no, put it under you first,” he said. “I don’t want my car all wet.” Then he said, “Dang.”

So I put some down under me and he handed me the piece of rope and said for me to loop it over the door handle outside and then tie it inside wherever I could find a place. Before I hardly even got started, he put the car in gear and crawled back out on the road toward Sand Mountain. I had to reach all the way to the back door handle to find a place to tie off the rope, and when I did I saw this big carved wood hand he had from Vietnam, about two feet tall — actually a fist with the middle finger shooting the you-know-what. It was laying there on the backseat. Wayne told me that Walter Wratchford took it with him down to The Springs, where they sell the liquor on the county side of the Peace River bridge, and he sat by himself with that big finger in the middle of the table in front of him and got in fights if anybody said anything about it. Wayne heard that from David Tremblay, who heard it from his stepdad, Bud Teeter, who was always down at The Springs drinking, too.

I’d seen the finger myself one time before, at a Veterans Day Salute at the high-school auditorium, where Walter Wratchford was supposed to make a speech to represent the Vietnam veterans. When they introduced him, he pulled it out of a bag he was carrying and balanced it on the lectern. At first he didn’t say anything and you could hear people whispering what’s wrong with this crazy nut, and then he did say something. He said, “If Vietnam was a woman, I’d marry her in a second.” Then he picked up his carved hand with the finger and said, “Anytime any of you want to borrow this, you’re welcome to borrow it. It’s all right by me.” And that was all, except that he said “borry” instead of “borrow.” I thought that was pretty funny.

Walter Wratchford lit a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had been smoking, then wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his army jacket. The windshield was fogged up and he wiped that with his sleeve, too, but it didn’t much matter because the smoke from his cigarette filled up the car so fast you could hardly see through that, anyway. Every time we hit a bump, the passenger side door swung open a little bit and the rain came in, or maybe it was the water from the tires. I guess I hadn’t tied it tight enough. I kept getting wetter even though I was already soaking wet, and the inside of Walter Wratchford’s car kept getting wetter, too.

“You want me to take you down to the Boogerbottom?” Walter Wratchford said. His voice even sounded like cigarettes.

I shook my head and said no, just on up Orange Avenue.

“Colored don’t live on Orange Avenue,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make him mad or anything, but the last place I wanted to go was the Boogerbottom. “I just need to go home,” I said. I was about to cry.

He snorted. “I know you’re not colored. I was just kidding you.” He offered me a cigarette but I shook my head again. Then he asked me what was the story with my face and all and how come I looked that way. I just told him shoe polish and he nodded like he heard that sort of thing all the time, too.

“I been around a lot of colored guys,” he said like that’s what we’d been talking about all along. “They got a lot of them in the army now. I even had a friend in the army that was colored. That boy was one dumb son of a you-know-what.”

My teeth were chattering even though I wasn’t cold, just wet. Walter Wratchford wiped the windshield again and turned on the heater. He was grinning, but not in the way somebody grins if they think something’s funny. “You know what they got over there? Over in the war? They got these things — they call them Bouncing Betties — where when you hit the trip wire, they don’t just blow up and take your foot off or your leg off. Them bombs bounce up in the air so you can see them right in front of you for about a second. Not even a second, but a second of a second. And that’s the last second of a second you ever get. Then it blows your dang head off.”

He didn’t say hardly anything after that, and I didn’t know what to say back, either. I was too scared to ask him much even though there were about a million questions I wished I could have asked about Vietnam since I was pretty sure I would go over there to be in the war once I was old enough. I read about it all the time in the Tampa Tribune. In Vacation Bible School the summer before last when they had us write down who was the most important person in our lives not counting our moms and dads, I wrote General Westmoreland. That turned out to be the wrong answer, though. The Vacation Bible School lady said it was Jesus, and how come nobody wrote down Jesus, and she was very disappointed in us for not a single one of us saying Jesus. That got us in a big argument about whether Jesus was actually even a person. A lot of the kids thought he was more like Superman, with his super powers of turning wine into water and feeding the multitudes with the fishes and the loaves and bringing back Lazarus from the dead and walking on water. The Vacation Bible School lady said those were miracles, not super powers, and she rolled her eyes and said, “Land of Goshen,” the same way my dad said, “Good garden peas.”

It didn’t take long before we got to town. Walter Wratchford didn’t ask me anything about where to go; he just drove on across First Street and on down Orange Avenue toward my house. I hadn’t even told him where I lived, but Sand Mountain was such a little place, he must have just known somehow. Maybe he knew my dad. A lot of people knew my dad from the phosphate mine, or the Rotary Club, or the Methodist Church, where he was on the board of trustees, or him running for city council a bunch of times only never getting elected.

“I wish I could remember what that colored boy’s name was,” Walter Wratchford said. He shook his head pretty hard like he had water in his ear and was trying to get it out.

I thanked him when I got out of the car. He said, “Don’t even mention it.”