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 fence.

“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.

The office door slammed open about then, which was easy to hear because it was a tin door hitting the tin wall of the barn. I had thought who walked out would be Mr. Moon, who owned the stable. I had seen him once, at Honey’s Drugstore, drinking a big vanilla Coke one Saturday, a bandy-legged old man with a chewing-tobacco stain down his chin. It wasn’t him, though. Instead the guy that walked out of the office was none other than Walter Wratchford. I nearly fell off Bojangles when I saw him. His hair was wild and matted to one side like he’d slept on it that way and forgot to comb it or take a shower, and he had on his army jacket even though it was a hot day and no shade outside where we were.

Darla waved and he sort of waved back with his cigarette. He fumbled in various pockets on his jacket and finally came up with a pair of sunglasses like pilots wear, which he jammed on his face, then he took a big drag off his cigarette and blew out the smoke through his teeth.

“Do you know him?” I asked Darla.

“Of course,” she said. “He manages the stable.”

“What about Mr. Moon?”

“What about him?”

“I thought it was his stable.”

“It is. He just hires somebody to manage it, that’s all. What did you think?”

“I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t think Walter Wratchford worked here, I guess.”

“Well, it’s not like he does hardly anything, I can tell you that. He sits in his office and listens to the radio and smokes cigarettes all day.”

Walter Wratchford came over to the ring and leaned on the fence. He smelled kind of like old beer, but he wasn’t drunk or anything. “I see you got you a little copilot,” he said to Darla. “You better be nice to him. He’s a big patriot of the U.S. of America.” He nodded toward me. “Isn’t that right?”

I said, “I guess so,” and he said, “You’re darn right I’m right.” Then he asked Darla what her mom was doing. Darla said she was at work at Dr. Rexroat’s, of course. Walter Wratchford said for Darla to tell her mom he said hi, and Darla said why should she? I couldn’t imagine ever talking that way to a grown-up but nothing happened except Walter Wratchford just winked.

“Did you know her mom was a mermaid one time?” he said to me.

I said, “Yes, sir.” Everybody in town already knew that about Darla’s mom.

He said, “Did you know her mom could hold her breath longer than anybody in Florida?”

I said, “Yes, sir,” again, since everybody in town also already knew that, too.

He said, “Do I look like an officer to you?”

I said, “No, sir,” because I thought that was the right answer on account of the way he asked the question, and he said, “Then you quit calling me ‘sir,’ then.” I said, “OK,” and he must have thought that was funny, because he laughed to himself the whole way back to the office.

Once he was gone, Darla asked me why Walter Wratchford said I was a big patriot and I told her about the funeral and “Taps” and Mr. Lauper and the five-dollar bill. Then I asked if Walter Wratchford was her mom’s boyfriend.

“He certainly is not,” Darla said. “Why did you ask me that?”

“Just because he said to say hi to your mom,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “My mom is nice to everybody, but that doesn’t mean they ought to get any big ideas. Also my grandpa won’t allow him.”

“Won’t allow him what?”

“Won’t allow him anything. My grandpa said if he ever came to the house again, he would have him arrested.”

“Have Walter Wratchford arrested?”

“Or anybody else.”

“Why?”

“Because my grandpa doesn’t want any strangers. He said my mom met enough strangers at Weeki Wachee Springs.”

“How come I get to come over?”

“Well, I guess I know you so you’re not a stranger, obviously.”

“When was your mom a mermaid?”

“When she finished up high school. She ran away with her girlfriend named Luanne to Weeki Wachee Springs. They had jobs as dancers somewhere until somebody found out my mom could swim and hold her breath so long. Then they made her a mermaid. She could have been in show business but she decided to have her children instead. That’s why she came back to Sand Mountain.”

“You mean you and Darwin?”

“Well, we are her children.” She said that in a very sarcastic way, but I decided to ignore it the same way Walter Wratchford did.

I asked her where her dad was, and she said he was over in Weeki Wachee Springs, in fact he owned Weeki Wachee Springs, didn’t I know that? She said he was rich and sent them a big fat check for five hundred dollars every month that her grandpa put in his bank account. She said pretty soon they were going back to Weeki Wachee to live, but right now they had to stay in Sand Mountain to take care of her grandpa, which I guess they must have been doing ever since I could remember, because Darla and Darwin were always in the same grade as me at school even if we hadn’t ever been friends before now.

“What’s wrong with your grandpa?”

“He’s sick.”

“Is he going to die?”

“Of course not.”

“Is he going to get better?”

“No. I doubt it.”

“How come I never see him?”

“Because I already told you. He’s sick.”

“Is he a general?”

“A general what?”

“Of the army. Of World War II.”

She thought about that for a minute, then said, “Well, yeah.”

I asked when was the last time she saw her dad — I guess I was being pretty nosy — and she said, “Oh, all the time,” but I didn’t really believe her. I didn’t believe they were ever going to go live in Weeki Wachee Springs, either, or that her grandpa was a general, or much of the rest of the story. Usually I believed whatever anybody told me, but you could just tell that Darla was making a lot of that stuff up.

“Are you scared of your grandpa?” I asked her.

She turned around on the horse and stared at me for a second like she might yell or something. “Of course not,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous.” She kicked Bojangles in the side, I guess to make him go fast, but he just twisted his neck real slow to look back at us with the stuff still leaking out of his eyes, and then he turned his head back just as slow and kept walking around the ring.

“Let’s go out on the road,” Darla said. “I’m bored of this.” I wasn’t sure if she meant riding around in circles, or the conversation about her family, or both, but I didn’t ask. She steered us over to the fence, where she leaned down like a real cowboy and unlatched the gate. The next thing I knew, she had Bojangles trotting again, this time down the stable driveway out to the Old Bartow Highway. Once we got there, she turned him north and we rode for a long time right there on the road, which was really more like the memory of a road, since big sections of the asphalt were missing or worn away or grown over with not grass exactly but what passed for grass in places like that around Sand Mountain. We didn’t talk for about ten minutes because I was worried about cars, anyway, and the ditch next to the road, and the train tracks on the other side of the ditch, but we only saw one car the whole time, and it slowed way down, and we never did see a train.

It didn’t take long before we were out of sight of Moon’s. At first there were some oak trees that marked the back side of the Pits for about a quarter of a mile, almost like a fence. After that there was nothing because they had mined everything out for miles in every direction back in the old days before reclamation, so everything along Old Bartow Highway looked like pictures of the surface of the moon. There were craters and dirt piles and rocks and old dams and slime pits. There were rusted truck beds and dead tractors nose-down in the sand like something praying for something. There was the wreck of an old dragline, a small one, fallen off of its track with the boom buckled in half and the bucket and cables missing, probably stuff somebody took for another machine years and years ago or for scrap metal. There was pipe everywhere, hundreds of feet of pipe along the road that looked like it was shedding metal flakes just while you looked at it, and then nothing but the shell of a booster pump that could have been a space satellite that crashed from outer space. And there was hardly a tree or a bush or a palmetto stand that wasn’t twisted and crippled and looking so desperate for water it made your mouth dry just to see them.

Whenever I was on top of Sand Mountain, I didn’t like to look in that direction because it was so sad and lonely and desolate — a word Mom taught me. You couldn’t ever say anything about it to my dad, though, because he would just tell you, “Don’t complain with your mouth full because that’s what’s putting food on this table, young man,” even though I think it bothered him, too, that the mines had left the land looking like that, and you could tell he was proud of the reclamation projects they had him in charge of, almost like he’d had the idea himself, even though it was the state law now.

But Darla didn’t seem to mind or notice, just the same way she didn’t seem to mind or notice what an old nag her poor horse was, or how phony her whole story about her dad owning Weeki Wachee Springs was, or anything like that. After riding awhile, and probably forgetting I was even squeezed in behind her, sweating like a little pig, Darla started singing, and once she got going, she didn’t stop — it was just song after song after song. I joined in on some of them and she didn’t seem to mind.

Eventually we turned around, I guess when Darla was half out of songs, because she sang all the way back, too, and only got quiet for about the last ten minutes, so I figured she had used them all up. I took the opportunity to ask her something that had been bothering me and that as usual I had been so slow figuring out that it worried me I might be retarded.

“Is Wayne your boyfriend?”

She turned partway around but didn’t quite look at me before she snapped her head back forward and said, “I wouldn’t have him for a boyfriend if you paid me a million dollars.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid now just for asking, and for ever thinking I’d figured this thing out that obviously I hadn’t.

“Your brother,” she said, not through yet. “Somebody ought to tell him he thinks he’s really something but he’s not anything but a I-don’t-know-what —”

“How about a maggot?” I wanted to help her if I could.

“Yes, a maggot. You brother is a big maggot.”

I liked this a lot and wanted to keep helping. “How about a tapeworm?”

Darla nodded. “I don’t know why I even bothered to be nice to him, anyway.” Her shoulders shook and I knew it wasn’t because of the horse because of how slow we were going, so I figured she was laughing. I laughed with her for about a second, really more of a chuckle, until I realized she wasn’t laughing after all, so I stopped and said I was sorry. I meant I was sorry for laughing when she wasn’t, but I had the idea that she might have thought I was sorry for something else. Either way, I guess it was the right thing because she said, “That’s OK,” and wiped her eyes, and by that time we were all the way back at Moon’s.