Down Sand Mountain (28 page)

Darla came another night and talked to Wayne again through the screen. She wanted to talk to me but I still wouldn’t get up. She didn’t leave, though, but just kept whispering to Wayne, and after a while he said he was going outside with her and don’t tell Mom and Dad. It made me a little mad, him hanging out with Darla again like that first night all of us went to the Skeleton Hotel, but then I thought about how I didn’t talk to her at school and what a sorry thing that was. Walter Wratchford had told me to be her friend but I knew I hadn’t been her friend. I had been a pretend friend — only when nobody else could see — and I bet most people didn’t even know I knew her or even knew her name.

Wayne came back after an hour and crawled in the window and crawled back in bed. He was pretty nice to me. “Hey, Dewey,” he said, “why don’t you come down and tell me one of your old stories. You can lie in bed with me.” I wanted to but I didn’t do it.

The psychiatrist up in Lakeland, Dr. Boughner, kept asking me how come I wanted to be colored. Somehow he knew about the shoe polish and the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy. I didn’t answer him, but he just kept talking about stuff.

He said that I must have an identity with the colored people and it was a sign of low self-esteem. He said a lot of times if you’re angry at other people, it’s because you’re angry at yourself, and a lot of times when a boy is angry at himself, it’s because he has desires and attachments to his mom and resentments of his dad, and did I think I had those? He said that he thought I had those and what did I think?

When I just lay there on the couch and couldn’t say what I thought, he waited a long time, about half an hour, before he said anything else. He said, well, the thing I should know is that those feelings are natural ones and I shouldn’t feel guilty about having them. It’s not right to do what those feelings want you to do, he said, but it’s OK to have them. He said what happens when a boy has those feelings and doesn’t think he should is that he gets mad at himself and catches low self-esteem, and then gets mad at somebody else. Like Moe.

He said a fork is a symbol, and what did I think it was a symbol of? I guess somebody must have told him about me stabbing Moe, because I sure didn’t. I wondered if the right answer was the devil’s pitchfork and it meant sin, but I didn’t tell Dr. Boughner that, and Dr. Boughner never told me the answer, either, but he did say the rat poison was a symbol, too, and it wasn’t Moe I wanted to poison but somebody else, and who did I think the rat really was? He said could it be myself as a vermin for having the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have, or could it be my dad keeping me away from what I wanted?

I got mad at him for saying that. Maybe I was the rat instead of Moe, but my dad wasn’t the rat, and he shouldn’t have said so. But I still didn’t say anything.

Mom was waiting for me in the waiting room when we finished, and she stopped at a restaurant in Bartow called John’s Restaurant, where they had hamburgers with hot cole slaw they put on them that I guess they were famous for. She must have thought I would want one, but I never did like hamburgers, and especially hamburgers with cole slaw. I would have eaten a hot dog but I couldn’t quite make myself ask if I could order one instead.

She saw that I was getting sick on the ride home after that and stopped the car on the side of Bartow Highway so I could vomit. I kept my head out the window the rest of the way, and the wind in my face kept me from being sick again. I went straight to bed, and Mom brought a cool washcloth in to put on my forehead. I fell asleep and when I woke up, it was still there so I must not have moved at all but knew I had been asleep for a long time, because the washcloth was dry and it was dark outside.

There were voices in the living room and somebody was crying, but I could tell from the sound of it that it wasn’t anybody in my family. The one crying in the living room was David Tremblay, and I knew just in hearing it that him and Wayne must have told.

After a while somebody went out the back door to the carport, and after a little while more, Mom and Dad started talking, just the two of them. Dad said, “Well, we have to call the police; it’s the only thing we can do at this point — try to get this thing straightened out.” Mom said, “Are you sure, Hank? They’ve all been through so much with this and it’s not all their fault. Why can’t we just let it go for now?” Dad said, “You can’t just let something like this go. Look what they did.” Mom said, “And look why they did it. Give them chores, put them on restrictions, don’t let them watch TV, make them read the Bible, I don’t care, but enough is enough.” Dad said, “What about Dewey?” Mom said, “You should go talk to him.”

I was still in the bunk bed, numb to everything the way I’d been all week, when he came in. He didn’t turn on the light but just stood next to my bed in the dark.

He said, “David Tremblay just came over here, Dewey, and he and Wayne told us what happened — that David was the one who poisoned the roll. They also told us about the incident with the fork and about what happened to Wayne and about the situation at school.” He stopped for a minute. I didn’t know what to say back, or if I even could say anything if I wanted to.

Then Dad started again. He said, “I wish you’d come to me about this before, Dewey. Will you promise me if anything like this happens again, you’ll talk to me about it and let me help?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

Dad said, “I know it’s not fair, but your mother and I are concerned about David Tremblay and his situation at home, and we think it’s best if nothing is said about this any further. But it’s going to mean some people will hold this against you when you’re not the one responsible.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

Dad was quiet for a while, then he said, “Dewey?”

I said, “Sir?”

He said, “I owe you an apology, son. I let you down on this one.”

I said, “No, you didn’t, Dad. You wouldn’t ever let me down.” Then I said I was sorry for making so much trouble for everybody.

Dad had his hand on my shoulder while we talked and he moved it to my head and rubbed my head a little bit. He stood there with me like that for a long time, until I fell asleep. He might have even stayed there all night.

DAD DIDN’T PUT ME ON RESTRICTIONS for what happened with Moe, but he did think there had to be some kind of punishment, even if I was taking the blame instead of David Tremblay. So on Saturday he ordered me and Wayne to pull up all the sandspurs in the backyard. It took forever. When Dad inspected, he found a few spots we had to do over again, but after that, he said he was proud of us both for a job well done. Only he wasn’t through with us yet. “Next I want you boys to paint the shed out back,” he said. “I’ve got some green paint already out there, and you know where the ladder is and the brushes, and be sure to use a drop cloth. And Dewey — no throwing paint on your brother.”

We were at dinner when he told us that. Wayne asked if David Tremblay could help us, and Dad thought about it for a minute and then said yes, he thought that would be appropriate. It had just about killed David Tremblay that he wasn’t allowed to do any of the work on the sandspurs, and when we were out there, he climbed up in one of our trees and talked to us from a branch until Mom came out and told him he had to go home, that he wasn’t allowed over for a while because of what happened with Moe. I never saw anybody as sad as David Tremblay then, or as happy when Wayne told him he could come back in the yard on Sunday and help us paint the shed.

I asked Dad why we weren’t delivering more flyers for the election — wouldn’t it be better for us to be doing that instead of all the chores? — but he said we’d done all the campaigning we were going to do, and it was time to sit back now and let the people decide. The way he said it sounded like he’d already lost, which made me sad, and one day, while I was still suspended from school, I got some of the leftover flyers and took them to houses up and down on our street, just me on my own.

Mom helped me with the work the teachers sent home that I was missing while I was on suspension, and when they decided to let me back in school, Dad talked to Mr. Straub to make sure I could use the bathroom without anybody bothering me. I saw Head and Moe that first day back, in Mr. Straub’s office, and they left me alone in the lunchroom after that, too.

David Tremblay had started a rumor that Moe had actually gotten sick from eating the school lunch and not from rat poison, and I guess that rumor got around pretty good, because one of the lunchroom ladies stopped me on Tuesday, pulled her hairnet down tight on her forehead, and said, “Don’t think we aren’t keeping an eye on you.”

People started calling Moe “Ratterding” instead of his real last name, Borgerding, which was pretty funny. Nobody ever said it to his face, but I guess he knew anyway, because somebody scratched it on his locker, and he always seemed to be a little nervous anytime I saw him. The strange thing was that nobody made fun of me too much. Wayne and David Tremblay and all the other guys from the neighborhood let me sit with them in the lunchroom again and sometimes they laughed when I told jokes.

The kids in my classes that didn’t pay much attention to me before didn’t pay much attention to me when I came back to school, either, so that was something that didn’t change. I still said plenty of dumb things and I was still too short. And after a couple of days of thinking I wouldn’t anymore, I started raising my hand again to answer all the questions in class. Mr. Cheeley in Americanism vs. Communism handed me back the letter I wrote to General Westmoreland one day, and in front of everybody, he said, “Perhaps you would like to add a postscript before you mail this off, and tell him about your skills as an assassin.” I couldn’t believe he said that and neither could anybody else, but that was about the worst thing that happened.

Wayne included me in stuff he did with David Tremblay for a while, so I couldn’t be mad at him about that night he snuck out the window with Darla. And I wasn’t mad at Darla, either. She kept inviting me to do stuff every afternoon that week — come over for a dance lesson again with her mom, or take our bikes to Bowlegs Creek, or ride Bojangles. Mostly I said sure, I’d like to do those things, and so we did do them, only we didn’t talk as much as we used to. I guess there were just too many things that had happened that neither one of us wanted to have come up. I wished we could go back to when we didn’t know so much. We always had plenty to talk about back then.

But it was still nice with Darla, for all that. We even sat together once at lunch and she tried to give me her roll.

On Thursday I went over to her house when nobody was around. Darla said her mom had to take her grandpa to the doctors up in Bartow. She asked if I wanted to see her room, and I realized I never had. In fact, I’d only been upstairs the one time back early in the fall, with Darwin. “You’re not going to tie me up, are you?” I asked her.

Darla frowned at me hard and I said I was just kidding.

Her room was probably the same size as Darwin’s but seemed a lot bigger because it wasn’t full of junk like his, and because of all the yellow light coming in her giant window. It was a flood of light, with dust motes looping and swirling and falling, and so warm you’d have almost thought it wasn’t autumn anymore.

She had a fancy brass bed with a pink cover by one wall, and a little table with her schoolbooks on it, and a chair. And a little dresser by another wall, with combs and brushes on top. And that was it.

“Where’s all your stuff, Darla?” I said. It felt funny to say her name. I guess in all the time I’d known her, I’d hardly ever said it out loud to anybody except Wayne.

She’d been standing in the yellow light with her eyes closed, like she was in the shower or something, but stepped out when I asked her that. I followed her over to a closet door. She didn’t open it, though. “In here are my clothes,” she said. “And costumes. And my shoes, of course.”

“But don’t you have any toys, or dolls, or girl stuff?”

“We have Monopoly and Clue. They’re downstairs somewhere. I got rid of all my dolls.”

“How come?” I remembered seeing the piles of old stuff out on their back porch the first time I ever came over — the moldy board games and the headless Raggedy Ann and Andy.

“Oh, I don’t know. They were just a lot of bother. I got rid of a lot of things so I could have more room.”

“More room for what?”

Darla said she wasn’t sure yet, but she was thinking about a fish tank. I asked if she liked fish and she said no, not really. She did one of her dance steps back under the shower of that afternoon light, and I could see then why she liked to have her room the way it was. With the sun coming through her big window, and her standing there inside, it was like she was on a stage.

“I have about a million pictures I drew of Bojangles, if you want to see them,” Darla said, about when I figured the conversation was over. “They’re in the bottom dresser drawer.” She said she had all her school photos, too, from every grade since first, but she didn’t let anybody ever see them and she wasn’t sure why she kept them, and in fact, since I brought it up and reminded her, she thought maybe after I left she would throw them all away. Or probably burn them.