Down Sand Mountain (11 page)

Away from the river, over next to the Bartow Highway, was the Pits, four man-made lakes separated from one another by little dikes you could walk on, left over from one of the first phosphate mines there ever was in Florida. They said the Pits was so deep, nobody had ever touched bottom in the middle, and when somebody drowned, they couldn’t ever find the body. When you swam down under where the sun couldn’t reach, it was so cold your teeth shook even in the hottest part of summer. My mom, one time when we all climbed to the top of Sand Mountain, pointed to the Pits and said, “Look, Dewey, it’s the four chambers of the heart right there — left ventricle, left auricle, right ventricle, right auricle,” and I have never been able to look at the Pits since then without thinking about that.

Farther out was Moon’s Stable, where Darla kept her horse and where there were some pastures and barns and stuff. I hadn’t been out there with her yet, but she kept saying she was going to bring me to ride the horse someday. Mostly up that way it was just old mines that they had left, and it looked like the surface of the moon. West as far as you could see were the mines where they were still digging — miles and miles and miles of mines with their draglines and processing plants and float houses and water cannons and float crews and dams and chemical plants and pipelines and booster pumps and train tracks and open boxcars with the regular phosphate they carried over to the Port of Tampa to ship to where they made fertilizer and stuff, and the special cars for what they called Triple Super Phosphate, which Dad said was what they had when they mixed phosphate with sulfuric acid and which you couldn’t have be anywhere in the air or it would explode, so they shipped it in sealed tanks and Dad said it was funny that it was that dangerous, because if you ever saw it, it looked just like honey.

I don’t know what Darla was doing up there — probably dancing or something — but I was so tired when I finally made it to the top of Sand Mountain that I just waved to her and then fell right down on my cardboard and lay there looking up at the sky. The flat top of the mountain was about as big as my bedroom, so it was only a couple of seconds before Darla came over and I saw her face staring down at me.

“Are you following me?” she said. “Because if you are, I have a right to know why.”

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, she was still there. “Well?” she said. “Well?”

I didn’t know what to say. I thought she’d be happy to see me so I said that: “Aren’t you happy to see me?”

Darla crossed her arms. “That depends.”

I sat up. “Depends on what?”

“On whether you’ll let me bury you.”

I said how about if I let her share my cardboard to ride down on instead. Darla sniffed and said she already had her own and did I think she was stupid or something that she would climb all the way to the top of Sand Mountain without her own cardboard, for goodness sake?

“OK,” I said. “You can bury me, I guess. But I wasn’t following you.”

“Oh, sure you weren’t,” Darla said. Then she said I had to help her dig the hole to bury me in, which I did, and pretty soon I was standing in a four-foot hole and she was covering me up until I just had my head sticking out of the sand. It was hot and sweaty and itchy everywhere, even the deep parts. I held my breath as long as I could while she packed sand up around my neck. I didn’t want to get it up my nose and in my mouth. I hadn’t even got to stand up and look around yet, but that’s just how it was with Darla.

She said, “You know my mom can hold her breath longer than anybody in the world.”

I asked how come?

She said because her mom used to be a mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs, which I already knew, and all the mermaids had to do that, but her mom was the best. She said once her mom held her breath for five whole minutes. I said nobody could hold their breath for five minutes, not even the Great Houdini, who I had read a book about. Darla said did I want her to cover my whole head in sand, too? Then I better take back what I said. I said I wasn’t going to take it back and I tried to get my arms out, but she had piled too much sand and I couldn’t lift them, and she scooped more sand up to where it was right at the bottom of my lips and just about to go into my mouth.

“OK,” I said. “Maybe your mom did.”

“Maybe?”

I spit out some sand. “Definitely.”

Darla brushed away the sand from my mouth and stood up. “Now, what should I sing?”

I said, “How about ‘It’s Howdy Doody Time’?”

She gave me a look like I had just said the stupidest thing ever. “Maybe I should bury your head anyway.”

“You better not,” I said.

Darla said, “Oh, all right,” and then she sang the entire song of “Strangers in the Night,” while I blinked out grains of sand that kept blowing in my face. Mostly she stayed where I could see her, and she did a little dance while she sang. It was like the whole world was just her and me, or at least my head sticking out of the sand, and the top of Sand Mountain, and the big blue sky.

When Darla stopped singing, she came over and lay down next to me in the sand. “Dewey,” she said, “close your eyes.” I closed my eyes. She asked did I want her to kiss me? I opened my eyes and she was looking right at me and she was so close I could even smell her. She smelled like chocolate. “Well, do you?” she asked. I hadn’t ever kissed a girl before, and I thought about her with the colored boy in the cemetery and wondered if she kissed him, and I thought about Darwin and his Turn Out the Lights game and wondered why they were always tying people up and burying them in that family, and I got nervous, and she asked, “Do you?” one more time, and I just said, “Heck no.”

Darla stood straight up when I said that, which of course kicked a bunch of sand right in my face. Then she tore on out of there and didn’t say anything else: not good-bye, or more about kissing, or anything — just grabbed her sled and disappeared down the mountain.

It must have taken me a whole other half hour to finally dig myself loose, but at least she left me my cardboard so I could slide down, too. I should have known that was what would happen when I said the “Heck no,” I guess, but I hadn’t ever been around girls too much before, and never anybody like Darla.

IT TOOK ME A COUPLE OF DAYS to get Darla to talk to me again. On Monday when I saw her at school, she acted like Darwin did that one time and said stuff about me like I wasn’t even there. I really hated that. I said I was sorry I didn’t want her to kiss me up on Sand Mountain, and she just looked up at the sky and said, “Some boys are so conceited, they actually think some girls want to kiss them, when that’s just the biggest lie.” Then she walked away real fast like she was busy. It wasn’t fair that I was the one to apologize, of course, but saying sorry wasn’t too hard — I’d had so much practice that it sort of came natural.

On Tuesday night I made Tink watch that old movie
Heidi
with me on TV that had Shirley Temple in it, so I could try to talk to Darla about it since I knew she was so crazy about Shirley Temple and all, but that didn’t work, either. When I saw her the next day, she just looked up at the sky that time, too, and said, “I think I see Superman.” It was the dumbest trick in the world but I fell for it, and when I looked up, she ran away and jumped on her bike.

My mom told me she read in the paper that Shirley Temple had gotten married and I tried to talk to Darla about that on Thursday, but she just said everybody already knew that old news, for goodness sake. I could tell I was making progress, though, because at least she said it
to
me and not just sort of
about
me.

Finally on Friday she decided we could be friends again, I guess, because she showed up at my house after school — or rather she sat on her bike across the street from our house until I finally happened to go outside and see her. She said why didn’t we go back to that old bridge at Bowlegs Creek, so we did and she showed me some of her tap steps, with our feet hanging over the edge so I could do it along with her without getting my feet twisted up and falling down and hurting myself. We were kind of in a rhythm — kick, tap, step, slide, kick, tap, step, slide, tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa — and since I wasn’t sure what else to talk about, I told her that my dad planned to knock down the Skeleton Hotel as part of his campaign promises.

Darla pointed her toes way out and rolled her feet down like they were bananas, which she had told me was what ballerinas did. She said, “You know it’s haunted, don’t you?”

I said sure I did. Everybody knew it was haunted from when they were building it and two guys up on the top got knocked off a girder. One fell straight down and broke all his bones but he lived. The other one — a colored guy — grabbed on to a rope and hung on there for a long time. At first he yelled for help, then he cried, then he got quiet, then his hands and him just slipped away. They said he didn’t make a sound the whole way down. Just fell and died.

Darla asked me if I’d ever heard him.

“Heard the ghost?” I said.

She sniffed. “Heard the
Howler.
”

I asked her what was the Howler and she kicked me. “It’s who howls on the top of the Skeleton Hotel. It’s what makes it haunted. What did you think it was — a dumb dog?”

I said no, I thought it was that colored guy, but I didn’t think he would howl or anything like that. I started to explain about him not making a sound at the end and when he fell, so it didn’t make sense for him to start howling now, ten years later.

Darla folded her arms and sniffed again.

“Well, I heard it, so I ought to know.”

I didn’t actually believe her for a second, but she said it was true, and then she told me this story about how one time her family was driving home from Tampa and got back to Sand Mountain at midnight and their car stalled at the one stoplight in town. Nobody was anywhere, but Darla’s mom figured the police had to drive by sometime, so they just waited in the road. It was dead quiet, not even a dog, not even another car, nothing. Just the Sinclair station on one corner, City Hall on another corner, the new 7-Eleven on the other, and the Skeleton Hotel on the other, with the tarps rolled down on the sides of the ground floor where they had the farmers’ market.

Darwin fell asleep. Their mom fell asleep. Their grandfather had already been asleep and never even woke up when the car died. After a while Darla got out. She thought it was funny to be there in the middle of the road, just stopped under the light. She practiced her tap dancing. When she got tired, she lay down in the road, right directly under the stoplight. The road was still warm even though the sun had gone down a long time before. Green-yellow-red, green-yellow-red. She tried to see if she could hold her breath through the whole of green-yellow-red. She did that for a while and so admitted to me that maybe she was dizzy from a lack of oxygen, but that was when she heard the howling from the top of the Skeleton Hotel. It scared her so bad she said she thought she was going to soil herself, which I didn’t know what that meant but pretended I did.

Anyway, when she heard that stuff, Darla jumped back in her car and screamed and woke everybody up. Her mom didn’t know what was going on and for some reason just turned the key in the ignition and the car started right up. Darla kept screaming and was too scared to talk when her mom asked her what was the matter, why was she screaming, so her mom slapped Darla in the face to make her stop, but that just made Darla keep screaming, so her mom put her hand over Darla’s mouth and kept it there and drove on home with one hand.

She finally calmed down and told her mom about what she heard at the Skeleton Hotel, and her mom told her to just hush and never mind what she heard, she was a girl with too much imagination and it was going to get her in trouble someday and she should quit making up stories, that it was probably a dog somewhere and she was confused and she was old enough that she shouldn’t get so hysterical about things.

“But I really heard it,” Darla told me. “Nobody believes me, but I really heard it.”

Her voice turned into a whisper. “So I think we should go back there before your dad tears it down.”

I said, “What do you mean?” even though I already knew, and she started talking about the Howler of the Skeleton Hotel like it was a Nancy Drew book, which she had obviously read a lot of, and since I had read all the Hardy Boys, I said “Sure,” like I did that sort of thing all the time. I thought about telling her I had a magnifying glass we could use, although I had no idea how that would help, but you never knew. But then I thought maybe that was something I ought to keep to myself.

I said maybe we could buy a special notebook and see if we could find some invisible ink to write everything down, and have a secret meeting back at Bowlegs Creek to plan out what we were going to do, and I could bring some sandwiches if Darla brought something for us to drink. She nodded a lot, like what I was saying made plenty of sense, but once I shut up, she just said, “We better go tonight.” I told her they didn’t have the election until November and this was still September, and my Dad wouldn’t win, anyway, because he never won, and probably nobody else wanted to tear down the Skeleton Hotel, but Darla said we couldn’t be sure.