Down Sand Mountain (12 page)

“Once an idea gets around, people believe it just because somebody said it was a good idea,” she said. “It’s the same as gossip and the way people believe all of that. And I can’t stand gossip. Not one little bit.”

She looked at me hard, then she added, “The thing I like about you is you’re not a big fat gossip like some people.” Her face was all red when she finished, and I thought maybe it had something to do with what happened in the cemetery with the colored boy, which I still hadn’t ever asked her about.

I had to go — it was Friday afternoon and my dad was making me go with them to the varsity game that night — but before I did, Darla told me the trick to making yourself wake up at a certain time was to repeat that time over and over in your mind as you were falling asleep and then you’d automatically wake up when you wanted to. So when we got back home after the game and finally went to bed, I said, “Midnight, midnight, midnight, midnight,” until Wayne started snoring on the bottom bunk, and then I said, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” but he wouldn’t until finally I whacked him with my pillow.

At 12:30 somebody woke me up scratching at the window, or I dreamed about somebody scratching at the window. I sat up with my heart running so fast I thought it would explode, then I remembered.

“You were supposed to meet me at midnight,” Darla said once I got outside, which took about ten hours because the floor creaked every time I took a step, and I kept thinking I heard somebody else getting out of bed, and the window got stuck when I tried to open it, and the screen fell out when I pushed it.

I said I was sorry, it was Wayne’s fault, which was the only phony excuse I could come up with, and it wasn’t really an excuse, just blaming somebody else, but Darla didn’t catch me on it; she just said, “Who’s Wayne?”

I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not, but I guess she was. She was always surprising me like that, making a big issue out of not knowing things I just assumed she knew because it was stuff everybody just knew. “He’s my brother,” I said. “You know — Wayne Turner? My brother?
Wayne?
”

She said, “Oh, big deal, so you have a brother, I have a brother, everybody has a brother, so what about it?”

I said, “So nothing about it, but you asked was all.” It was turning into another one of
those
conversations with Darla, which never made sense to me, and made even less sense the more I tried to make it make sense, but it did help me get over being so nervous, I guess, and by the time I decided to give up on the whole dumb conversation, we were all the way down Orange to Second, and a little ways down Second toward downtown.

I stopped.

“What?” Darla said. “Why’d you do that?”

I said I was listening. I wanted to see if I heard anything. She said, “Good idea,” and we both froze, standing on the edge of David Tremblay’s yard under their oak tree where it bent low to the ground. I heard her breathing and I heard myself breathing. I smelled her, too. She had on perfume. And she was wearing jeans rolled up really high, which I had never seen before, like she was expecting a flood, and a black T-shirt that was big on her, and tennis shoes. You never knew with Darla what she would look like, except for her hair, which was always the same. I said, “Let’s go,” but she said to wait; she thought she heard something. I listened some more but didn’t hear anything, so we took off again.

A block later she grabbed my arm. “I heard it again,” she said. I asked her what and she said footsteps. I started to say something else but she squeezed my arm and said, “Be quiet,” and this time I heard something for real, too, and when I looked back where Darla was looking, I saw the shape of somebody in the shadows just off the street about half a block away.

“Run,” I whispered.

“No,” she said. “Let’s keep going and see if he follows us.”

“OK,” I said. So we walked a ways and stopped. He walked a ways and stopped. We walked some more. He walked some more. I could hardly breathe and neither could Darla, judging by her hiccups. It was dark as anything for most of the block, and even darker under the trees. There were clouds, so no stars or moon, so the only light just about anywhere was the streetlights at the end of the block. When we got to the next corner, we ran across it and into the shadows again and then waited to see who it was when he got in the light, but I was shaking so hard everything looked blurry to me. Darla was shaking, too. “I have to pee,” she said, which surprised me since I had never heard her talk like that before. For a second it almost made me forget somebody was following us.

Who, it turned out, was just Wayne.

WAYNE WAS GRINNING LIKE SUZY, our dog. I had never seen him like that before. He wanted to know everything about everything: Who was this I was with, where were we going, was Darla that girl that sang and danced at the county fairs, didn’t she have a brother who did that, too, how come he never saw her around anywhere? I couldn’t believe all the big baloney. If Wayne knew about Darla being drunk with a colored boy, I figured he must have known all that other stuff already, too.

He kept pushing his hair off his forehead the whole time he talked, even though his hair wasn’t
on
his forehead. It took me a second but I finally figured out what was going on, which was that Wayne was
flirting.
Darla hardly looked at him, which I was happy about, but at the same time I noticed she didn’t seem to exactly mind answering his nosy questions. I asked him what was the deal with him following us, and he put his arm around my shoulders and said, “You made so much noise, I’m surprised the whole family didn’t follow you. I tell you, if you’re thinking about being a cat burglar, you better not quit your day job.”

Darla actually laughed when he said that. I couldn’t believe it. I pushed his arm off of me and decided I didn’t know who this guy was, but he sure as heck wasn’t Wayne. Wayne had never put his arm around my shoulders in his whole life.

“Just come on,” I said. “It’s way past midnight and we probably already missed it.”

“Missed what?” Wayne said — to Darla. She kicked at something in the street, which I couldn’t see — a microscopic pebble, I guess — and she said, “We just thought there might be a ghost at the Skeleton Hotel, that’s all.”

I couldn’t believe this either. “What are you talking about?” I said to Darla. “You heard it, remember?”

Wayne said it was a good thing he decided to come along, then.

So we all three went. For the next couple of blocks I let them know I was annoyed, and I gave them all sorts of directions —“Don’t walk so loud,” and “We’re almost there,” and “OK, this way.” Then I said, “Maybe we should practice jumping into a ditch in case somebody comes along,” and I heard Wayne whispering something to Darla that made her laugh again, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

After about eight blocks we got past most of the houses and then the row of churches that all faced on to First Street. We could see the backs of them from where we were on Second Street — the First Baptist, the First Methodist, and the First Presbyterian, each one of them taking up a block all on its own. Then there were a couple of houses again. We cut through a yard, then down a street, then through an alley and then we were there, at the corner of First Street and Bartow Highway. The Sinclair station was closed and dark, so we snuck up onto the concrete island with the three pumps, where we could see everything but nobody could see us unless they drove all the way in under the little roof and pointed their light directly at us. Sinclair was my favorite gasoline because of the dinosaur. They had a station over at Weeki Wachee Springs that my dad took me to one time that actually
was
a dinosaur — a giant concrete brontosaurus painted bright green, standing over the pumps.

To the right of us, on the other side of the highway, was City Hall with its one yellow light on at the top of the steps. Kitty-corner across the intersection was the new 7-Eleven, which was closed and dark like the Sinclair station. And directly across First Street, in the middle of a big dirt parking lot, was the Skeleton Hotel.

Looking up at it, I got kind of scared all of a sudden, I don’t know why, and I said, “God.”

Darla said that I shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain. I said, “I didn’t say God
damn it;
I just said
God.
” And she said, “Well, it’s still taking the Lord’s name in vain.” I said I was a Methodist and we didn’t believe that, even though I thought she might be right, but what I wanted to do was remind her that she was supposed to be my friend, and when did she all of a sudden get to be such a great pal of Wayne’s? I didn’t, though, and I sure didn’t tell her the other thing I had been thinking a lot about, which was kissing. Ever since she had asked me if I wanted her to on top of Sand Mountain when I was buried, I had been thinking about it, and I had sort of thought maybe tonight, except now here was Wayne butting in.

I realized I was hugging one of the gas pumps, so I quit and said, “I thought we were here to see about the Skeleton Hotel. What happened to that big plan?” Darla said the big plan was we should listen and see if we heard anything, so we all sat down on the island, her and Wayne squeezed between two of the pumps, and me between the others. None of us said anything else for a while and it got really really quiet and you could tell from how quiet it was how much noise we must have been making before.

I stuck my hands in my pockets. One had a hole, so I poked a finger in and worked it around until pretty soon I could just about put my whole hand through. I scratched my leg and thought how strange it was to be so scared tonight when I must have gone by the Skeleton Hotel about a million times and hardly even noticed it. When we went with Mom to the farmers’ market, I usually forgot that I was even under a building or anything, it was just there up above, the red steel and wood scaffolding and a construction elevator and unfinished stairs that stopped before they even made it to the second floor.

I looked over at Wayne and Darla and wished they were sitting with me, even if they were only a little ways away. I wanted to go ahead and hear the howling that Darla said she had heard that night with her family. If I heard that, and they heard it, too, that would be enough for one night. We didn’t actually have to go over there. We could come back another time to check it out up close. Plus it was getting so late. What if Dad came in our room to check on us and we weren’t there and he thought we’d been kidnapped? I bet Mom would be really upset, and I never liked for that to happen. If you got Dad upset, he would yell at you or pull out the belt, or do something like call the police right away if he thought you’d been kidnapped, but Mom was different, and I didn’t want to think about how disappointed she would be in me and Wayne once she found out we’d just snuck out of the house instead of being held for ransom.

Something banged into something behind the Sinclair station and made me jump. I was feeling nervous, anyway, I guess, and maybe that was why I stood up, but it was a bad idea no matter why I did it, because of course there came the one lousy cop car in the whole town right then, cruising up First Street toward the light.

Probably if I hadn’t moved again, just stood there by the pumps in the dark, in the shadows of the Sinclair station, the cop wouldn’t have seen me. I tried holding my breath but I was too scared, and I knew Wayne and Darla were scared, too, because they were even holding hands and when I saw that, I started to hyperventilate, and that sounded louder than anything, and then I thought I heard Wayne say something and that did it. I yelled, “Run!” and took off around the back of the Sinclair station. I didn’t know my legs could go that fast — like the Flash in comic books — but they had to keep up with how fast my heart was beating, and once I got going at that speed I couldn’t slow down much because my heart wouldn’t have anywhere to send all that blood and something bad might happen, like maybe my arteries and veins would swell up and explode.

A siren whooped behind me — maybe the cop was whipping through the Sinclair to chase us — so I cut down an alley, then a street, then through a backyard, then past the First Presbyterian church, then behind the First Methodist. That’s about where I realized that my legs and heart might be going as fast as the Flash, but the thing slowing me down was my lungs turning into sandpaper, which I bet never happened to the Flash, so I ducked behind the trash cans, and only then realized that Wayne and Darla hadn’t followed me and weren’t anywhere around.

I was still hyperventilating, which I always did when I got too excited. My mom always brought out a paper bag when that happened and crumpled it together at the opening and told me to breathe in it, but I didn’t have my mom there. I didn’t have a paper bag; I didn’t have anything. I was about to cry, actually, because I was so scared and because I didn’t know what happened to Wayne and Darla.

Then it got worse: the cop car turned down Second Street, his blue light blipping round and round but his siren not on. He was crawling along about six inches every minute or so with his searchlight aimed at the backs of the houses two blocks up, but even going that slow he kept getting closer and closer. I couldn’t move. He inched past the block with the houses and moved on to the Presbyterian Church, one block up, where they had their trash cans out back just like the Methodists. He might have even stopped there and I thought about taking the opportunity to take off running again, but then I kicked something behind me and knew right away what it was because I’d snuck through it a million times before, playing hide-and-seek — a door into the ground for the church’s fallout shelter, which was never locked because if you locked it, then how would people ever get in if the Russians dropped the bomb in the middle of Sunday service, which as Mr. Cheeley had told us was exactly when communists
would
drop the bomb.