Down Sand Mountain (9 page)

I HAD MY FIRST DANCE LESSON with Mrs. Turkel on Monday, after school. Darla had asked her for me because I was too nervous to ask her myself. Mrs. Turkel charged me twenty-five cents, which was my whole allowance for the week, but she didn’t mess around. Right away she laid cardboard feet down on the floor for me to step on so I could learn the fox-trot. I didn’t know why they called it that. It didn’t look anything to me like a fox trotting.

“Sweetie pie,” Mrs. Turkel said, “you’re going to have to pay more attention if you’re ever going to learn these steps. You’re shuffling your shoes and kicking these instruction steps all over the place. Now I want you to forget all about them. I’m going to tape them to the floor so they’ll just be here, but instead of looking down at them, I want you to try it this time with Darla —”

She crooked her finger at Darla, who had been sitting in a chair by the wall in their dining room, which was where we all were. The way Darla sat, with her feet flat on the floor, and her back straight, and with her hands folded in her lap, you would have thought she had been sitting there all that time at a fancy ball, like Cinderella waiting for a boy to come by and ask her to dance, instead of just watching me and her mom. Darla had on saddle shoes, bobby socks, a pleated skirt, and a button-up blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and except for her Shirley Temple ringlets, she almost looked like a regular girl.

Darla floated over and curtsied and lifted one hand so that when her mom pushed me toward her, my shoulder fit exactly under it. Darla stretched out her other arm and turned her hand palm down, just sort of hanging out there in space until her mom took my arm and pulled it out in the direction of Darla’s and laid Darla’s hand in mine, almost like it was a bird and I had caught it. She pulled on my other hand to stick it to Darla’s side. Then Mrs. Turkel went back to the old scratchy record player, which must have been the one in Darwin’s room, and put on a song she said was called “The Blue-Damn-You Waltz.” I stomped on Darla’s feet for a while, until I thought she was either going to cry or hit me, but then I sort of got it and said so to Darla, who said back, “Well, golly, I guess so, as hard as I’m having to back-lead,” and that’s when Mrs. Turkel said, “My goodness, look at the time. I do have to get back to work. You children keep practicing, but don’t wake up Papa. You know he needs his rest this afternoon; he had a hard night last night.”

Darwin, who had been leaning in the doorway watching, snickered and said, “
Hard
-ly.” Mrs. Turkel gave him a dirty look and left the room.

Wayne had told me their grandpa was a general in the Second World War and fought the Germans and all — it was another one of those things Wayne just seemed to know — but I didn’t believe a general would ever live in a town like ours, plus that didn’t explain why he never came downstairs.

“Where does your mom work?” I asked Darla.

She said Dr. Rexroat’s office. She was his receptionist. I said, “Oh yeah, I knew that already, I just forgot.” Darla said her mom had been there in the morning, but Dr. Rexroat always closed down for a while in the afternoons to take his naps.

Darwin snickered again from the door. “He has to take his naps to sleep off his lunches,” he said, and he made a drinking motion and said, “Glug, glug, glug. Like old granddad.”

Darla said, “Come on, Dewey. Help me pull these feet up off the floor.”

Darwin mimicked her with a fake high voice: “Come on, Dewey, come on, Dewey.” Then in his regular voice he said I had to come on with him to help clean his room. I thought about those yellow sheets and his dirty rug and the stuff lying all over, almost as bad as their back porch, and I really didn’t want to go with him. And I sure didn’t want to play that game again, either.

Darla said I had to help her, and we had to move all the furniture back, too, and anyway, Darwin should have to clean up his own room; she always cleaned up hers by herself. Darwin made scissors with his fingers and said how would she like it if he subtracted a few of those ringlets, Shirley Baby? He said it out of the side of his mouth like a gangster or something, and I couldn’t help laughing.

Darla said, “Don’t laugh; you’ll only encourage him.” Darwin made more snipping motions, and said it, too: “Snip, snip, snip.” Then he started chasing her around their big dining-room table over by the wall. “Snip, snip, snip. Snip, snip, snip.” Darla screamed at him to cut it out and he said oh, he would cut it out all right, and he kept chasing her. I laughed until I had to sit down, and they kept it up until a door slammed somewhere upstairs really loud, and then they stopped like they had just gotten caught in a game of freeze tag. It was dead quiet in there, and I waited to hear footsteps above us, but there was just the echo of the door slamming, or maybe I just imagined there was an echo.

Finally I said I had to go and I would help with everything next time. They didn’t even look at me, just stayed frozen like that, waiting, I guess, for their grandfather to come downstairs or whatever, not that I think he ever did.

Everybody in seventh grade in the whole state of Florida took the class in Americanism vs. Communism, and nobody ever asked questions there, not even me. Our teacher was Mr. Cheeley, who had been in the South Pacific during World War II, which he kept reminding us, and who had these photos he let us look at — before and after pictures of a prisoner of war being executed: first the guy kneeling with his head on a hay bale and a Jap soldier standing next to him, with his sword raised up, then just the dead guy’s body on the floor on one side of the hay bale and his head on the floor on the other side of the hay bale. The quality wasn’t all that great, and you couldn’t see his face at all in the before picture, but if you looked close, you could see part of his face after they chopped his head off. Some guys said you could tell he had been begging for his life, because his eyes and mouth were wide open in the after picture. I hoped that was wrong and it only looked that way because of the shadows.

Mr. Cheeley got choked up when he showed us the photos, which he said he found left behind when they liberated Midway or Guatemala or Portugal or Iwo Jima from the Japs; I forget which island exactly. He told us the names of all the good men he knew personally who gave their lives for America. He said he could still see the faces of some of them right now if he closed his own eyes, boys not so much older than us at our desks without a care in the world because we were so lucky, and we didn’t have any idea or any appreciation for how good we had it, and we didn’t know the meaning of the word
sacrifice
—

“And do you think the communists know the meaning of the word
sacrifice
?” he asked us. “Do you think the communists would have crossed Valley Forge in the dead of winter with General Washington, their feet bound up with rags because their shoes were worn out from years of fighting, and their fingers turning black from frostbite, turning black and falling off, but that’s what they were willing to put up with for their independence from King George, who would have fit right in with the worst of them — Hirohito, Stalin, that whole murdering bunch?”

Mr. Cheeley said the Japs and the Germans and the Italians were fascists, but everybody else America had to fight was communists, and that included the North Koreans, the Red Chinese, the Vietcong, the Cubans, and of course the Russians, who were behind it all. He also said the trade unions were communist; and the National Association for Colored People, and Martin Luther King Jr.: all communist, all communist.

He didn’t like colored people almost as much as he didn’t like the communists, and the worst thing you could be, to hear him tell it, was both.

We didn’t have much to say in that class. We didn’t even take notes. There was a textbook, but what Mr. Cheeley put on the first test was just a single essay question: Did we agree (or disagree) that America should drop the atom bomb on North Vietnam to stop the spread of international communism? When I told my mom about all the stuff from class, she said, “Oh, good Lord.”

Me and Darla were in three classes together at school, including Americanism vs. Communism, but she never looked at Mr. Cheeley’s photos. She always just kept her head down and, as soon as she got them, passed them right on to the next kid. I meant to ask her why, but we didn’t talk much at school except in the hall, where we would say hi, and I must have forgot about it whenever I hung out with her riding bikes and having dance lessons and stuff. I guess it wasn’t a good idea to talk to girls in front of everybody, because people might laugh or something. It was the same with Darwin, too, except I tried to avoid even running into him at school, especially when he told me that he had handcuffs and did I want to come up to his room and see them.

At lunch all that week I sat with Wayne and the guys from the neighborhood — W.J. Weller, and David Tremblay, and Connolly Voss, and sometimes Boopie Larent, who I guess wasn’t too mad anymore about my wrecking his big attempt to set the world record for bouncing on the pogo stick. They didn’t exactly talk to me much, but they let me sit there.

And every day either that guy Moe or the other one, Head, stopped at our table and took my roll from my lunch tray, which was usually the only good thing they ever gave you to eat at the cafeteria and was the thing that made you hungry all morning whenever you walked near the cafeteria between classes and smelled the bread baking and the margarine they melted on top of those big trays of bread. I don’t know why they did that, or still wouldn’t let me go to the
WHITES ONLY
bathroom, since the shoe polish had faded all the way away a while ago. I guess once they get it in their heads that you’re colored, there’s nothing you can do but try to stay out of their way.

The neighborhood guys just looked down at their trays when Head or Moe did that, even Wayne, and I couldn’t eat afterward, so I usually went to my locker and kind of leaned inside of it with my head in there like I was looking for something. I got to where I wished those seniors would go ahead and give me my red belly and then maybe they might leave me alone to eat my rolls and go to the bathroom.

We all went to Wayne’s first JV football game Thursday night — me and Mom and Dad and Tink. Fortunately almost nobody was there except some other parents, and I guess little brothers and sisters of the players. A dozen eighth- and ninth-grade girls were there, too, sitting all together in a big knot. I brought my homework but Dad said I had to pay attention to the game and support my brother, even though I pointed out that Wayne was sitting on the end of the bench just about the whole time. They let him in when they had a kickoff after the Mighty Miners scored a touchdown, but the return went the other way and Wayne was stuck on the wrong side of the field, blocking a guy who was stuck way out there in the middle of nowhere blocking him back. Neither one of them did it very hard, just sort of kept bumping each other like a couple of goats, or not even goats, but maybe sheep. I thought I saw Wayne right in the middle of things look over to see if the coach was watching. It was funny — once the kickoff was over, Wayne went back to his end of the bench on his side of the field, threw his helmet down and kicked it like he was really mad or really fired up or something, and the guy he was blocking went back to
his
end of the bench on his side of the field and threw his helmet down, too. The next time there was a kickoff, the two of them ran around on the wrong side of the field again until they found each other so they could do some more blocking.

It reminded me of this story, or I guess it was an Aesop’s fable, where two rams got into a fight and started butting each other, but they were the same size so they kept butting each other and butting each other, neither one getting anywhere, no way either one could win, so they stayed at it all day, all night, the next day, the next night, and so on, wearing themselves down to just about nothing over the days and weeks until they were just the ends of a couple of tails, that was all that was left of them, and they still kept butting into each other until finally a gust of wind just came along and blew them away.

At halftime I got a candy bar with my own money but Dad made me share it with Tink anyway, which wasn’t fair, and then he even made me give
him
a bite, which turned out to be the biggest bite in the history of our family.

I was too bored to even pretend to watch the second half of the game. About the only excitement was to see if they put Wayne in any other time besides the kickoffs, which they didn’t. JV football didn’t seem like much fun to me, not like when we used to play in the empty lot next to our house. There would always be arguments and fights and stuff, but at least you got to play, even if you weren’t any good, like me.

Darwin Turkel even came over one time last year. I think his mom might have made him. He didn’t know how to play football, so everybody made fun of him, but he got picked for one of the teams anyway, because we needed one more guy. It turned out he was really fast. He caught up to W.J. Weller running for a touchdown, but instead of tackling him, Darwin grabbed W.J.’s arm and swung him in a circle and then pulled him to the ground. Darwin jumped up and down he was so excited, but W.J. had a broken arm, actually a broken shoulder.

At first a couple of guys defended Darwin and said it was just an accident, but W.J. got madder and madder until after a while we all agreed that Darwin had meant to do it. Nobody talked to him after that at school, and he never tried to get back in the football games. Guys made fun of Darwin for a while — called him Darla instead of Darwin, and Turtle instead of Turkel, and Peter Eater for no reason except we didn’t like him. He didn’t seem to notice, though. He just did like he always had: sat in the front of the class at school and answered all the questions right if the teacher called on him, but never raised his hand and looked like he was always bored but in a way that made you think he practiced it a lot in front of a mirror. He ate by himself or with one or two other prissy boys in the cafeteria, and never went to the real football games, and tap-danced with Darla when she sang “On the Good Ship Lollipop” at those talent shows at County Fair, and didn’t seem to notice how much fun people made of him for that, either.