Down Sand Mountain

EVERYTHING CHANGED TWO DAYS AFTER the fork stabbing. It was the first week of October and the first cool day we’d had, not quite cold enough for a jacket but not warm enough for just a T-shirt, either, so what I did was wear two T-shirts. Some leaves danced around in the street when I rode my bike to school, and I didn’t pay much attention to what I was doing because of watching them and so bumped into the side of a car that was parked on Second Street. I didn’t get hurt except that two girls saw me and laughed, but they were in elementary school so I didn’t care.

All that morning, I kept looking out the windows of my classes and watching the leaves falling and dancing. Always in the past I had just woken up in October and realized it was autumn and had been for a while, but that particular day was different — I was actually seeing it happen, actually seeing the end of the summer and the beginning of the fall. The problem was I kept getting called on in class, because even though I didn’t raise my hand, the teachers were so used to it that they called on me, anyway, only this time I not only didn’t know the answers, I didn’t know the questions, either. That Americanism vs. Communism teacher, Mr. Cheeley, got mad at me and told me I had to write a letter to General Westmoreland on “Why I Should Be Fighting in Vietnam.” I said, “You mean why America should be fighting?” but he shook his head and said, “No, I mean why you, Mr. Turner.”

I couldn’t wait until lunch, partly so I wouldn’t get called on anymore, and partly because I had to scoot outside and pee, which I went and did as soon as the bell rang. I had just come in and got my food tray — I hadn’t even sat down yet — when David Tremblay came up and said, “Hey, Dewey.” I was pretty happy at first that at least somebody wasn’t giving me the silent treatment anymore, and thought maybe he was even going to invite me to sit with him and Wayne and them. He had something in his hand that he was hiding, but at the same time trying to look like he wasn’t hiding, and he put it on my tray. It was his roll. “I’m switching,” he said. “But don’t eat it.” Then he grabbed mine and left before I could say anything.

About a minute later, after I sat down by myself, Moe and Head came in the cafeteria and swung by my table the way they usually did on their way to the lunch line. Moe said, “Snack time,” and snatched up the roll and my milk. He popped the roll in his big mouth and practically swallowed it whole and then opened the milk carton. Then he stopped. He had a funny look on his face and he said, “Bleah,” and stuck out his tongue the way you do when you eat something rotten or sour. He sniffed the milk and drank it straight down, swishing the last gulp around his mouth before swallowing. Head said, “Well?” and looked back at me like I might have done something.

David Tremblay and Wayne were watching the whole thing, their eyes as wide as mine the day I stabbed Moe and he slapped me. David’s mouth hung open even though he had food in it that he’d been chewing, and all I could think was, Oh no, what now? I put my head down on the table because it felt too heavy, but when I closed my eyes I saw Wayne again in the parking lot, and Moe hitting him, and the blood, and the way Wayne could barely stand up afterward and people thought that was a great thing because nobody had ever been able to stand up after a fight with Moe, even if Coach Lundy did break it up. Only this time it was me getting beat up in the picture I had in my mind, and there was no way I would still be standing afterward, or probably even live.

I didn’t see what happened next, but I heard about it between fifth and sixth periods. Somebody said Moe went to the bathroom with a hall pass and he felt something was wrong while he was peeing, and when he looked down he saw he was peeing blood. A teacher heard him hollering, and by the time the teacher got to the bathroom Moe had a nose bleed, too, and it was so bad it wouldn’t stop even when they put ice on it in the nurse’s station. Moe bled so much that they finally called Dr. Rexroat, even though it was during Dr. Rexroat’s lunch, which took up about three hours in the middle of the day, and everybody knew what that meant. He came after half an hour and didn’t look too steady when he got to the school. Everybody heard him yelling, “Call the ambulance. Get this boy to Bartow Hospital stat”— which I learned later meant right away.

Everybody was hanging out in the halls by then, not even going to class because the teachers were buzzing around talking to one another and going down to the office, and nobody could believe it, and there was a rumor that Moe was bleeding not only from his nose and in his pee but also out of his butt, and also a rumor that he had drunk a cleaning solution from the janitor’s closet. We all saw the ambulance finally pull up in front of the school, which was actually the hearse from the Kingdom Come Funeral Home since there wasn’t an ambulance in Sand Mountain, and that got the rumor started that Moe was dead. But when they wheeled him out of the nurse’s station on the stretcher, we could see he was alive, though he was still bleeding from his nose. His eyes looked worse than Wayne’s with all the bruising around them, and so that started the rumor that a gang of colored boys had snuck up to the school and attacked him — I don’t know why colored boys, except that any time there was any kind of rumor going around like that, people always blamed it on colored boys.

Head ran alongside the stretcher while they wheeled it down the hall to the front of the school to load it on the hearse and then, I guess, drive Moe up to Bartow, and Head was crying and yelling, “Hang on, buddy. Hang on, buddy. They’ll save you.”

At one point I saw Wayne and David Tremblay, but they wouldn’t look at me and I knew the reason was something to do with that roll from lunch, the one David had switched. When I tried to get through the crowd to find out what was going on, they had already snuck off somewhere and I couldn’t find them.

Wayne caught up to me that afternoon after school. We were riding our bikes down Second Street. He didn’t even say hi, or he was sorry for giving me the silent treatment, or anything. He just said, “You can’t tell anybody what happened.”

I told him I didn’t know what happened, and what did he care, anyway? Also I said maybe I was giving him the silent treatment now, so he should stop talking to me.

“If you’re giving me the silent treatment, you can’t tell me that you’re giving me the silent treatment, or else it’s not really the silent treatment,” he said.

I swerved my bike over at his and he had to jerk his handlebars to swerve out of the way so I wouldn’t hit him. Then he rode back next to me and grabbed my handlebars and made me stop, even though I punched him on the arm really hard.

I could tell by the look on his face that he wanted to punch me back, but he didn’t. “Just listen for a minute,” he said. “You can give me the silent treatment after that.”

“What?” I said. “What the heck happened? Did David Tremblay poison Moe? Is that what happened? He poisoned him?”

“What?” I couldn’t believe this. I expected him to deny it, to tell me it was all a big coincidence, a big joke, a big something, but not this.

“With d-Con. It was just supposed to make him sick. David must have put too much in.”

Wayne told me not to talk so loud. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk our bikes. Nobody can hear any of this.” So we walked our bikes, although the more he told me, the more I forgot to keep walking and he had to pull me along. D-Con was rat poison, and David Tremblay had brought some to school and hollowed out his roll with his finger and poured a bunch of the rat poison in to get back at Moe for what he did to Wayne.

“I told him not to,” Wayne said. “I kept telling him I wasn’t hurt, it was no big deal, but David said he was going to get him. He said he read the directions, and it was just supposed to make the guy sick.”

“If he was fine, they wouldn’t of taken him to the hospital. And now they’re going to think I did it. They’re going to blame it on me.”

“No, they’re not. Just don’t say anything. Just say you don’t know what happened. They’ll think it was something else that did it. Food poisoning.”

“They’re going to blame it on me. Why can’t David Tremblay tell them he did it?”

“He’s afraid they’ll send him away to reform school like they did Ricky. He says he has to protect his mom from his stepdad. You never got in trouble before, so they won’t do anything to you.”

“Well, if they did figure it out or something. Just tell them it was an accident.”

“Leave me alone.” I got back on my bike, and when Wayne grabbed my handlebars again, I socked his hand and he let go. I took off.

I yelled back. “Leave me alone!” I yelled some other stuff, too: that I hated him and David Tremblay, and I told him to go to hell.

I had thought the first day of school, the day I skipped because I looked colored, was the worst day of my life. Then I thought the night me and Wayne and Darla snuck out to the Skeleton Hotel was the worst day of my life. Then I thought the day Dad made me and Wayne pass out the campaign flyers in the Boogerbottom and the colored kids chased us was the worst day of my life. The thing now was that even though this should have really been the worst day of my life, I was pretty sure that there were going to be still more worst days, maybe every day setting a new record for the worst, and it would go on like that for the rest of my life.

I turned my bike around when I was almost home and rode in the other direction, and didn’t even care if I ran into Wayne trying to catch up to me again. That didn’t happen, though. He must have turned around himself to go to JV practice, so I kept riding back up Second Street, over past the high school, past the Skeleton Hotel and the 7-Eleven and City Hall, past downtown and the railroad tracks, past the turnoff to Sand Mountain. I kept riding out to the Old Bartow Highway and Moon’s Stable, and by the time I got there, I was out of breath and stopped. Probably I hoped Darla would be there, but she wasn’t — at least not so I could tell from the road, since I didn’t want to go any closer. Nobody was there that I could see, except Walter Wratchford’s car and no sign of him. A couple of the horses in the field were playing between where I was and the barn. They were running around, chasing each other.

The sweat on me cooled off pretty quick. I didn’t even get off my bicycle; I just had my foot on the fence holding me up. I folded my arms and closed my eyes for a minute and felt like a cowboy or something, out in the West, all on my own, nobody in a hundred miles or a thousand miles in any direction. I thought about the Painted Desert, which was a place where I had always wanted to go since I saw a picture of it one time. I liked the sound of it, and thought it must be the prettiest place in the world, and there wouldn’t be anybody there. Just me.

When I opened my eyes again, there was somebody at Moon’s, though, and it was Walter Wratchford. I hadn’t seen him since that night at the Skeleton Hotel. He had come out of his shed, I guess to check on the horses and look around, maybe breathe some air that wasn’t all cigarette smoke. He had on his usual army jacket and had his usual hair over his collar. He walked over to an old horse standing under a tree next to the fence but didn’t notice me on the other side of the field next to the road, and then he did a strange thing, or strange for Walter Wratchford, anyway — he gave the horse something out of his pocket, probably a sugar cube, and when the horse leaned his head down to nibble it, Walter Wratchford leaned his own head against the horse’s like it was a pillow. The horse didn’t try to get away; he just let Walter Wratchford keep leaning against him for a long time. They both might have even fallen asleep standing up or something, because they stayed that way for about five minutes, and then all of a sudden they both started and jerked away from each other, like they didn’t know where they were and had woken up confused. Walter Wratchford punched the horse in the head, but not hard or anything, more like the way a guy might punch another guy sometime who was his friend.

Walter Wratchford stuck his hands in the pockets of his army jacket and hunched up his shoulders like he’d gotten cold standing there, and I realized I was getting kind of cold, too, even though I had on the two T-shirts. Next thing I knew, he was walking across the field in my direction because I guess he must have seen me sitting there on my bike. He yelled something at me and I thought about taking off but was kind of scared to because what if he got in his car and came after me or something? There was no telling what he would do. So I waited, and in a second he was there at the fence offering me a cigarette like he did that time he picked me up at Bowlegs Creek.

I said, “No, thank you, I’m not allowed.” He had shaken some up out of the pack, and then when I said no thank you, he tapped the pack on his hand and they went back down again. I thought about asking him if he knew about lung cancer and all, but decided not to. Anyway, he wasn’t my dad, so if he died from it, I guessed I wouldn’t miss him too much.

Walter Wratchford blinked through his cigarette smoke and blew out a big kitchen match he had lit up with his thumbnail. I could smell the sulfur.

He asked me was I looking for Darla and I said I kind of was. He said, “Well, she’s kind of not here.”

He squinted at me, and I realized the sun was behind me low in the sky so it was in his eyes. Usually he wore sunglasses but he didn’t have them today. There was a scar by his right eye that I’d never noticed before and I wondered if he got that from the war.

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.

“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?”

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.

“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:

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.