Down Sand Mountain (3 page)

I decided I was mad at everybody, especially Wayne, who’d called me a freaktoid and wouldn’t wait for me even though he knew, because I had told him in secret, how scared I was about high school and the red bellies and remembering my locker combination and all. I wished I could be a Lone Wolf the way he was last year, only he had
wanted
to do that — chew on toothpicks and stand on one leg against the wall with his arms crossed and his other leg pulled up so his foot was braced against the wall behind him, which left a dirty shoe print, which was part of being a Lone Wolf. For me, though, I’d have been a Lone Wolf if it meant kids wouldn’t make fun of me anymore, but I’d rather everybody just liked me instead.

I slowed down walking and finally just stopped there in the middle of the street.

The Ban-Lon must have affected my brain, or maybe it was the chemicals from the shoe polish, but it finally got through my thick skull that there wasn’t any way anybody who didn’t like me before was going to start liking me now, on account of how colored I looked, and as bad as it was with Wayne and Tink at home, it was going to be a million times worse at high school. The seniors would probably give me a red belly so hard it would rupture my kidney or spleen or something, which was how the Great Houdini died. A guy showed up at Houdini’s dressing room and said he’d heard Houdini could tense his stomach muscles to take any blow no matter how hard and was that true and could he try it? Houdini was lying on a couch, talking to his admirers, and maybe grunted but didn’t really pay any attention, so he wasn’t ready when the guy hauled off and socked him in the gut. I was a big fan of the Great Houdini except for the part where he died the agonizing death. It was the one thing he couldn’t ever escape.

So I didn’t go to school. Where I went instead was the doghouse in W.J. Weller’s backyard so I could hide with W.J.’s old bassett hound, Lightning, until everybody was gone to school, then sneak down to Bowlegs Creek until I wasn’t colored anymore, or at least until three o’clock, when the bell rang at the end of school.

I didn’t stay in the doghouse too long, though, because Lightning wouldn’t move over and give me any room. Also, they must have been feeding him on a lot of beans.

It took me about an hour to get to Bowlegs because every time I heard a car I had to jump in the bushes, plus it was three miles south of the Sand Mountain city limits. Bowlegs Creek was where the Indian outlaw Billy Bowlegs hid in the old days, I think when they chased him out of the Everglades. My mom said the army caught all the Miccosukee Indians and put them on a train to somewhere, and Billy Bowlegs was the only one they couldn’t find.

Bowlegs Creek twists around the woods under cypress trees so thick you can’t see the sky, so it’s cool and dark all the time, and they say Billy Bowlegs’s ghost might be living under one of those cypresses, hidden behind the cypress knees or in a hollow place carved up under the bank like the alligator nests that aren’t supposed to be there, either.

One day back in July, we found five colored boys there. I don’t think anybody said anything for a couple of minutes, because we had never seen colored boys anywhere we played and couldn’t believe they would come to Bowlegs Creek, which everybody knew was ours, not the colored people’s.

We stared at them on the one bank; they stared back at us on the other. We were barefoot; they were barefoot. We wore cutoffs; they wore cutoffs. We had inner tubes; they didn’t have anything but the mud, so of course somebody must have said something and next thing you know we were all pulling up our own mud and throwing it at them, getting hit by theirs, trying to dodge the big clods coming at our heads, and when it got in your eyes, you had to slide down the bank to the creek to get it out in the water, only you were closer there and you got hit even more. There were six of us, but one didn’t count and that was this kid named Connolly Voss, the biggest yellowbelly in Sand Mountain, who pretty soon ran off from the big fight. Wayne, who couldn’t stand Connolly Voss anyway, fired one that hit Connolly on the butt, which wasn’t easy since Connolly was about as wide as a stick, not to mention he had a pencil neck, and that even made the colored boys laugh. But they didn’t have time to laugh long, because we had been having a lot more mud wars there than them, plus we had David Tremblay, who could probably throw harder than anybody in the state. One of theirs, and then another one of theirs, went like Connolly Voss up the bank toward the bridge and out of range. We thought they were gone but one of them must have picked up a rock from the side of the road because the next thing you know I felt something hard on the back of my head and then felt back there with my hand and there was blood.

The colored boys all ran away, which was a good thing because when word got around about what happened, some of the dads — not ours, but some of the others — went looking for them. Wayne especially was worried about what might happen if the dads ever did catch up with the colored boys. I wasn’t worried so much about that, though. What I was worried about was that I only got one stitch in my head when Mom drove us to Dr. Rexroat’s, and I knew people would make fun of me if they knew that, because if you just got one stitch, you probably didn’t even need any and I wanted people to think I was really hurt so they would feel sorry for me and not say you’d get Deweyitis anymore if you touched me on accident.

When I finally made it to Bowlegs Creek, I went down the trail from the road to the deepest part of the woods to a beach at a bend in the creek everybody called Sand Head because it looked like a head with a big nose and was all sand, no trees. It should have been a great hiding place, and at first I thought I would stay there and draw pictures in my new notebooks, eat the grilled cheese sandwich before it got limp, and then make up my story about what happened the first day of school.

But after a while I got worried about Billy Bowlegs’s ghost, and the half man–half gator they were always talking about that also hung out around there. I started hearing stuff, too. Leaves crackling, twigs snapping, a breeze stirring things up, a bird, a splash in the water. Something growled, which might have been my stomach, but also might have been that half man–half gator, and that did it. I grabbed everything and ran back up the path out of the woods to the bridge, which was out in the sunshine and not as scary. By the time I got there, I was sweating like a fat monkey because of that Ban-Lon shirt. August in Florida is 99 degrees and 99 percent humidity, so I pulled the Ban-Lon off and got my magnifying glass I always carried in case I needed to look for clues about mysteries I might have to solve, although there hadn’t been too many of those yet but you never know. I aimed the lens at the Ban-Lon the way you do the sun to start a fire, and the shirt started smoking orange smoke, but instead of igniting and burning up, it just melted a hole. I couldn’t believe it. I melted a couple of more holes but it took too long, so finally I just dug a hole in the bank under the bridge and buried it.

The good thing about Bowlegs Creek was that you couldn’t see down there from the road unless you got right to the edge of the bridge and leaned way over, plus hardly any cars went down that far because there weren’t any citrus groves or cattle ranches out that way, just scrub brush and scraggly trees and palmettos and moss and sandy soil and ant beds and sandspurs and maybe gator lairs, and cattails, and turnarounds where people dumped old mattresses and clothes washers and leaky bags of trash, and old dogs or puppies that never lived very long so you were always finding their bones if you weren’t careful.

Since nobody could see me, anyway, and since I knew everybody who might come down to Bowlegs Creek was in school except me, I took all the rest of my clothes off, because I didn’t want them to get dirty or wet, except my underwear. Then I climbed down the bank to where we had the mud wars and started digging another hole, actually a cave like the ones the Vietcong lived in, with their miles of tunnels. They had a color picture in the Tampa paper one time of a cross section of the tunnels. It looked like this ant farm I used to have until Tink felt so sorry for them that she let them go.

I dug in the bank of Bowlegs Creek all the rest of the day. When my hands got too sore and my fingers numb, I found a stick, and when the stick broke, I found a hubcap, and when the hubcap got too big for the tight space in the back of the cave, I used my hands again until the cave was wide enough and deep enough for me to crawl inside. And even then I kept digging. I dug out a shelf to put stuff on, and then the start of a second hole off to the side in case I wanted to add another room. I thought I could even live there.

When the afternoon rain came, I brought my clothes and notebooks inside and put them on the shelf and sat there for a long time, still in my underwear, watching it pour down outside. The rain smelled like mold at first, then like dirt, then just like the clean water they had in the North Carolina mountains where we went camping at Deep Creek. That was nice — that smell, and thinking about Deep Creek, where we met our cousins and saw bears. I thought about that for a while and the rain kept coming down, buckets of rain, and I also thought about being in my own bed some nights with clean sheets still crunchy from drying on the clothesline, stretching my legs and yawning and hearing Wayne snore on the bottom bunk and Mom and Dad watching something on TV in the living room, the blue light from the TV coming in the edge of the bedroom door. They might laugh, or say something I couldn’t understand, just their voices coming through the door, too, like the blue light, and then the night summer rain starting, tapping, then drumming, then roaring on our tin roof while I was deep under the sheets pulled up to my mouth and the pillow over my eyes so just my nose stuck out so I could breathe. That was like a cave, too, actually better than a cave because it occurred to me that the one I was in right then at Bowlegs Creek had turned cold, and my underwear was wet, and the rain had shifted and was blowing in on me. The water from the road and the trees ran down the bank and into the cave so that pretty soon I was sitting in a puddle, and the rain was still pouring down outside, and the edge of the cave washed away, then more of it, then more —

Everything happened so fast, I hardly remember anything except that I jumped out just in time before it collapsed, and slid down the bank into the creek. Then I was under the water and it was rushing hard over my head and there was nothing to grab on to and I swallowed and coughed and felt the bottom and kicked back up so I could breathe, and the current dragged me halfway under the bridge before I could even think about swimming to the side. Once I did, I just shivered there for a while so I could catch my breath, then I crawled back over through the mudslide, but too late: my notebooks and pants and shoes, even the grilled cheese sandwich from breakfast that I never ate, were all buried and I was too tired and scared and wet and cold to dig them out. I just sat there, my feet sinking in the mud, until I had to do something, so I crawled back under the bridge and dug up the Ban-Lon. It was probably going to rain forever, and I didn’t have anything else to wear.

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.”