Down Sand Mountain (8 page)

DAD SAID GRACE THAT NIGHT AT SUPPER the way he always did—
Dear Lord, bless this food You have set before us that it may nourish our bodies so we may better serve Thee, amen —
then announced he was running for the Sand Mountain city council. Again. It would be his third time. As soon as he said it, I lost my appetite even though we were having macaroni and cheese. Tink asked if he would be the mayor. Dad rubbed her head. “No, sweetie. But you never know in the future. Anything can happen.” Wayne seemed to always be hungry from the JV football practices and was shoveling in the macaroni. I stared down at my plate because I knew what was coming next.

“I’m going to need a lot of help with this campaign,” Dad said. “And I’m going to be relying on you boys. We’ll divide up the neighborhoods so you can get the flyers out. We’re going to have to be very organized about this.”

Wayne groaned but kept eating. Tink said she would pass out flyers at school, but Dad said since kids weren’t allowed to vote that might not be the best use of our campaign resources. He had a special job for Tink, though. He needed somebody reliable to answer the phone and take messages, and could she handle that? She ran from the table into her bedroom, then came back a second later with a little notebook with hearts on it. “Can this be the message book I use?” she said. Mom and Dad both smiled, and Dad rubbed her head again. It was all so cute I thought I was going to vomit.

I hated doing the flyers because I had to hand them out to people I didn’t know, which meant I had to talk to them, although I usually tried to sneak up to their door, knock so soft nobody could possibly hear me, then stuff the flyer somewhere and run back to my bike. And I hated for my dad to run for city council again because it was a big waste of time since he always lost.

Dad said it was still a few weeks before we’d be passing out the flyers because the election wasn’t until November, but he’d already been working on his platform, which he said was what they called your campaign promises and what you would do if you got elected. One of the first things Dad wanted to do was have them tear down the old Skeleton Hotel, which he said was an eyesore to the town.

I got nervous right away. The Skeleton Hotel scared me because everybody said it was haunted, but at the same time I couldn’t imagine downtown Sand Mountain without it being there. They started building it before I was even born — four stories high in a town that had only one two-story building and just a couple of two-story houses, including Darla’s. Only something happened when a colored man got killed at the work site, and they never finished it but just left the steel frame, with the floors and the old elevator to the roof, but no walls or windows or rooms or anything except a farmer’s market that Mr. Hollis Wratchford ran on the ground floor underneath — the same Mr. Wratchford that had started to build the Skeleton Hotel, so I guessed he still owned what was there.

Dad said another thing that ought to happen — and he’d make sure of it once he got elected — was annexation of the east side of the Peace River so they could shut down the one bar in the area, or at least the one white bar, that place called The Springs, which was built up on concrete blocks over a deepwater spring right next to the Peace River bridge. It was where David Tremblay’s stepdad went on the weekends, and of course Walter Wratchford with his carved wood fist with the finger, and where they said guys were all the time throwing their bottles in the water or falling in or drowning in or driving their cars in.

Tink was too little to know any of that, though, and she asked what was The Springs. Wayne said, “It’s where you get your liquor.”

Tink stood up on her chair, which she always did when she got mad. “I don’t drink liquor,” she said, loud. Wayne laughed at her and Mom told him to quit teasing his sister, and she told Tink to get down this instant, Young Lady. I still hadn’t said a word.

The last thing that Dad said would be on his platform was a promise to pave some of the streets down in the Boogerbottom. “Those people are citizens,” he said, “and it’s not right they were left out of the comprehensive paving plan.”

Mom had been spooning Tink another helping of macaroni even though Tink hadn’t eaten her spinach yet, which wasn’t fair. She asked Dad if that was his big plan to get the Negro vote and Dad said that yeah, he guessed it was, and that he had already been talking to Chollie, the janitor down at the high school, about helping him spread the word down in the Boogerbottom and to go talk to the colored churches around town.

I had a bunch of questions, like how come Dad needed a Negro vote, and did people know about him talking to a colored man about the campaign, and were me and Wayne going to be the ones putting all those flyers on the doors of the houses in the Boogerbottom. But I didn’t want to give Dad any ideas, so I didn’t say anything.

I could tell Mom wasn’t happy about any of this, either. She kept asking Dad if he was sure. About the tenth time she said it Dad kind of snapped at her and then dinner was over.

Mom stood up from the table. “Take your plates into the kitchen,” she told us. “It’s Dewey’s turn to wash. Tink dries. Wayne puts away.” Dad picked up the newspaper and asked if there was any coffee. Mom asked was instant OK?

Sometimes me and Wayne talked at night when we were in bed and neither one could sleep. That was about the only time we talked, really, especially since the start of school last year, when Wayne turned into a Lone Wolf. When we were little, I would get scared on the top bunk, and to get him to let me in the bottom bunk I would have to tell him stories. I made up all this crazy stuff about two boys who were mole rats, which I had read about somewhere in a library book. They were blind like all the mole rats, and rolled in their own poop so they could tell one another apart by smell like all the mole rats, but had super mole powers. They lived their whole lives underground with no light at all, and they fought a lot of snakes that tried to invade their tunnels, which in the stories were like the Vietcong tunnels that had rooms and places to store food and weapons and everything. Wayne didn’t like to sleep side by side because he said there wasn’t room for his elbows, so we always went head to feet, which sort of worked because there was room for all of our elbows, but sort of didn’t work because of the cover situation. I told him that was how the mole rats slept, too, only they had a whole bunch of them lined up like that, head to toe, head to toe, so they could fit more in a room.

I didn’t know if he was awake that night, but I thought he was and maybe we could talk, though I doubted he would let me in bed with him or anything, and he probably didn’t care about the mole rat stories anymore, either.

I hung partly over the edge of the top bunk. “Wayne?” I couldn’t see him in the dark.

“Hmm.”

“Wayne?”

“What?”

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes.”

“No, you’re not.”

“OK, I’m not.”

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to get to sleep.”

“Can I come down there and sleep with you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because. You’re too big.”

“I’ll lay the opposite of you, head to feet.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You have toe jam and your feet stink and you chew your toenails.”

“Please?”

“Why are you such a baby?”

“I’m not. I just can’t get to sleep, either. I keep thinking.”

“Well, I’m thinking, too, so leave me alone.”

“About what?”

“About stuff.”

“About going down to the Boogerbottom to pass out the flyers for Dad?”

“No.”

“About school stuff?”

“No.”

“About a girl?”

“No.”

“About your peter?”

“Shut up. No.”

“About the JV team?”

“Maybe.”

“About what position you play?”

“No.”

“What position
do
you play? Are you the quarterback or is David Tremblay?”

“David Tremblay. He’s always the quarterback.”

“What are you?”

“Guard.”

“First string?”

“Second.”

“Is there a third string?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh’? I’d like to see
you
out there.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I just thought you should be first string.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not good enough. Coach says I’m not focused.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means when he’s explaining the next play we’re supposed to learn, I’m standing over there thinking about some song on the radio in my head.”

“Oh.”

“And then they give me a hard time because my brother thinks he’s a Negro.”

“Oh. What do you say back?”

“Nothing. I tell them to shut up.”

“Do you really tell them to shut up?”

“Yes. Of course. What did you think I would say?”

“I don’t know. Hey, Wayne.”

“What? Jeezum Crow, what is this — a hundred questions?”

“They didn’t give me my red belly yet.”

“Don’t worry. Just when you least expect it, they’ll get you.”

“I don’t think so. They won’t let me go to the bathroom.”

“Well, that’s what you get for going to school looking like a Negro.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘Negro’? You sound like Mom.”

“It’s what you’re supposed to call them, that’s why.”

“Since when?”

“Since this year.”

“Says who?”

“Says LBJ.”

“Well, anyway, they won’t let me go to the bathroom.”

“So just go outside.”

“I do, but I might get caught.”

“Then do what Tink did.”

What he was talking about was when Tink was in first grade, two years ago, she was very nervous, and so for about a week she took a cigar box to school with her. Everybody thought she had her supplies in there, but instead what she was doing was using it to put her poop in if she had to go when she was at school so she could bring it home and flush it in our own toilet and say good-bye to it there and watch it go down the way little kids like to do. For some reason that made her less nervous.

All of a sudden I felt very tired — mostly tired of talking to Wayne. He used to be a lot nicer to me back when he was a Lone Wolf, before I started seventh grade and he went into the eighth and became a big hotshot second-string guard on the JV football team, even if he wasn’t focused. I thought about telling him that, but what was the use?

The funny thing was, when I decided to quit talking to Wayne, he started talking to me. Mostly it was about football stuff, like how he couldn’t do any of the blocking right, and he was always getting holding calls on him in drills, and they had this one drill where it was just a lineman and a running back, and the running back was supposed to run straight into a lineman and through him, and the lineman was supposed to not let him and was supposed to tackle him instead. Wayne said he always got run through. I guess he really meant run
over,
but that was the way they talked in football.

Another thing he told me was a lot of the guys chewed tobacco on the team, and you knew it because they spit their Red Man on the field and it got all over everybody’s practice jerseys and pants and helmets. One guy even swallowed his and they had to call his dad. So Wayne got Mom to buy raisins, which he would cram all in his cheek when nobody was looking so it looked like he was chewing tobacco, too. “It looks just like tobacco juice when you spit it between your teeth,” he said, “but it doesn’t hurt you if you accidentally swallow some.”

That made me laugh, but Wayne got quiet after that and pretty soon I was back to worrying. I thought about having to ride my bike around the whole town delivering campaign flyers to everybody, and maybe even in the Boogerbottom, and that game of Turn Out the Lights with Darwin Turkel that I still hadn’t told anybody about, and what they planned to do to me at school instead of a red belly, and people thinking I wanted to be colored, and me wanting to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy but not have people think that that just proved I wanted to be colored, and what Darla Turkel was doing in the cemetery with that colored boy, or if that was even true, and atomic bombs, and not being big enough for sports, and the Vietcong, and all of communism, and Dad tearing down the Skeleton Hotel, and the half man–half gators all over the place, apparently, and Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, what if they decided to make all the clothes in the world out of Ban-Lon?

“Wayne!” I knew I woke him up that time. He’d been snoring. “Please can I come down there?”

He grunted something and I decided that meant yes, so I crawled down to the bottom bunk and got in. It was very crowded, but I brought my own blanket and pillow.

“Do you ever worry about everything the way I do?” I asked him. His feet were next to my face and I said it at them like they were a microphone.

He was already snoring again, though, plus his feet smelled like tennis shoes, so I pulled the pillow over my face and pretended I was a mole rat and me and Wayne were in our nest underground. That kind of cheered me up after a while — I don’t know why — and I finally fell asleep.