Down Sand Mountain (16 page)

He kept looking from me to his mop, then back to me. He didn’t take the hall pass. “I don’t think you have a hall pass to the auditorium to mess up my floor,” he said.

“No.” I looked down at my feet.

“Why you trying to dance like that, anyways?” he said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “For the minstrel show. To be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy.”

“Is that right.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tapped his foot. I still didn’t look at him. I hadn’t ever really talked to anyone who was colored before, and I remembered the time when Dad and Wayne and me saw Chollie after the minstrel show in August, and Mr. Hollis Wratchford asked Chollie how he thought the Rotary Club did that night and said Chollie was the expert, but I wasn’t sure what he might be the expert of except how colored people were supposed to dance.

Chollie said, “Practicing, huh?” and I nodded my head. Then he said, “Well, you better keep practicing. You better practice a lot.”

I nodded again and said I had to go, the bell was about to ring. As soon as I said it, the bell did ring and I knew I was going to get in trouble for not making it back to homeroom before first period.

I grabbed my shoes and ran off the stage, down the steps to the auditorium, up the aisle to the double doors in the back.

“Wait,” Chollie said, and I stopped just before the doors and turned around. He could have been an actor in a play, standing there all alone in the middle of the stage in the lights with his mop and his bucket. “One more thing, there,” he said. “Don’t you be doing your business outside on my grass anymore, either. I know your daddy, and I know you don’t want me to have to talk to him about a thing like that.”

That made me nervous even though Chollie still didn’t sound mad the way grown-ups usually do when they get on you about something. I wanted to explain it to him, that they wouldn’t let me into the
WHITES ONLY
, but I couldn’t say that to a real colored person — at least I guessed I couldn’t — especially since I didn’t look colored anymore myself. It was all too confusing. I didn’t even know where Chollie went to the bathroom, either, I realized, and he was still standing there, waiting, so I said, “No, sir,” about doing my business in his grass anymore, even though I had never said “sir” to anybody colored before, either.

“That’s a good man,” Chollie said, and I was happy to hear him say it, although later I didn’t know if he meant me, for minding what he was saying, or if he meant my dad.

ALL THAT STUFF WITH CHOLLIE happened on a Friday, so I had the weekend to think about where else I could pee from then on at school. I didn’t want him mad at me or telling on me to Dad, but I also didn’t want Head and Moe to get me for going to any of the whites only bathrooms inside the school, either. It was also the weekend for the Scouts camping trip that would be the first one for guys moving up from Cub Scouts. I might not have had a red belly yet, but I knew everybody was going to get the initiation into Boy Scouts.

Wayne had gone through it the year before, so that afternoon after school, I begged and begged and promised to do about a hundred weeks of chores from the job jar if he told me what was going to happen. David Tremblay was there at our house — he’d probably had all his Scout stuff packed since July because he was so desperate to get away from his own house and his sorry stepdad. He grabbed Wayne and got him in a full nelson and yelled, “Don’t tell him! Don’t tell him!” The way David saw it was if they made
him
suffer last year, then everybody else ought to have to suffer this year, too.

Wayne said, “OK, OK,” and David let him go, but I bribed it out of Wayne later on, anyway: all about the snipe hunt, and them blindfolding us and tying us to trees in the woods at midnight, plus other stuff that was even meaner.

We set up camp that night near Lake Kissimmee, on a dry hammock mostly surrounded by swamp. One of the Scoutmasters was Mr. Ferber, a chemical engineer Dad knew from the phosphate mine. He didn’t have any kids of his own, so I don’t know why he was there exactly. He had a metal plate in his head from where somebody accidentally threw a shot put into his skull when he was in high school, and sometimes he let us knock on it with our knuckles, which kind of hurt. Mr. Ferber told us where to raise our tents, and how to do our trenching and stuff, then he set off a couple of DDT bombs around the edges of our campsite to kill all the mosquitoes.

The other Scoutmaster — he was this kid Ronnie Dick’s dad — broke out a camp stove and a deep fryer and poured amber-colored goop in it, which was creosote that they used for treating the cut ends of fence posts and telephone poles to keep the wood from rotting. Once the creosote heated up in the fryer, Mr. Dick dropped whole potatoes in, and when they sort of bobbed their way back to the top after about a minute, they were done: creosote potatoes. You couldn’t eat the skins or you might die. That’s what Mr. Dick told us, anyway.

The snipe hunt started at dusk, when they stuck us new guys out in the woods with sacks and said to wait there and don’t move and don’t say anything, they were going to go bang on pots and stuff and drive the snipes our way so we could catch them. Somebody asked what snipes were and they said, “Oh, good grief, what are you guys — retarded or something?” So we waited and waited like they told us to until it was really, really dark. I brought my Scout knife and worked on my whittling, since I knew there wasn’t any such thing as a snipe and they were just tricking us to make us look stupid. I even told a couple of the other new guys that, but they didn’t believe me. One guy, Telmo Lewis, told me to be quiet because he had to concentrate.

Finally they came and got us and laughed at what morons we were, while the senior Scouts tied us up and blindfolded us and hauled us into the back of a truck, just like Wayne had told me they would. They drove somewhere that seemed like a long ways away but that Wayne had also told me wasn’t very far from camp, it was just that they were going in circles. Once they figured we were confused enough, they tied us to a tree and told us there was another one of those half man–half gators near there in Lake Kissimmee that was always crawling up onto land and eating kids.

The truck drove away and the black, black night got so still you could hear every mosquito and cricket and frog and owl, and then what sounded like a bear or a half man–half gator. Telmo Lewis started crying and saying he wanted to go home. I didn’t know it was allowed for anybody to act like such a baby, but decided I would be nice to him, anyway.

“It’s all fake, Telmo,” I whispered, since I didn’t want to get in trouble for already knowing that. “They’re just trying to scare us on purpose. It’s all fake.” He didn’t stop crying, though.

We kept hearing bears and footsteps, and hands kept grabbing at us and poking us, kind of like that Turn Out the Lights game with Darwin, and that kept happening for a long time, maybe about an hour. Telmo started screaming, and kept it up until the kid tied up on the other side of him must have jabbed him hard in the ribs, because he suddenly crunched up against me. I had to elbow Telmo back on his other side to make him get off.

Eventually the truck came back and they threw us in again with our feet still tied together and our hands tied behind our backs and our blindfolds still on tight. Telmo was sobbing by then, but nobody seemed to care much, except one voice said, “It will all be over soon.” For some reason that made Telmo cry even harder. I guess maybe he thought they were going to kill us. What they did instead was drive us a ways, drag us out onto the ground, and tie another rope to our feet. They explained what they were doing after that, since we couldn’t see: throwing the rope over a tree branch, tying the other end to the back of the truck, driving the truck a little ways, about ten or twenty feet, to hoist us off the ground until we were hanging upside down.

Meanwhile Telmo had turned hoarse, but he hadn’t wet his pants yet. That came a little later when they lifted our blindfolds one by one to show us the branding iron. I saw a fire a little ways off.

“This is the Scout brand,” one of the senior Scouts whispered, holding the iron close enough that I could feel the heat on my face. It glowed red and looked like blood or something. “We’re gonna brand you right between your shoulder blades, where nobody will see it while it heals up, because you have to swear to keep a shirt on at all times. But you’ll know it’s there, and we’ll know it’s there. Now, what’s the Scout motto?”

Hanging upside down was starting to make me feel sick, and my head felt too heavy for me to speak very well, but I somehow managed to get it out: “On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law —”

“No, you dummy. I said the Scout
motto.
”

“Oh.” My head was spinning. The blindfold was back down and tied tight. There was too much blood rushing to my brain. “Be prepared.”

“Right,” he said. “So are you prepared for this?”

“Yes, sir.”

When they did it to me, I played along — grunted like it hurt a lot — and the shock of it did almost fool me. What they did was switch the branding iron with a chunk of ice at the last minute, and with freezing and burning, the idea is you can’t tell the difference. Everybody else screamed when they did it to them, and that was when Telmo must have peed his pants. Those older Scouts backed up the truck slow and laid all of us down on the ground like big fish. Most of us stayed there when they untied us, but Telmo took off running into the woods, barking, which I guess was the only noise left he could make.

I saw Wayne and David Tremblay about then. A couple of the senior Scouts sent David off to go catch Telmo, which he did, although it took him about half an hour. I think maybe part of that time he was just sitting with Telmo out in the woods and talking to him to calm him down and make him feel better.

When they finally came back, we all went to bed. I felt bad for Telmo, of course, but was also glad it was him and not me that fell apart. Wayne and David got in an argument once we were in our tent about whether Wayne had told me about the initiation. David said he knew Wayne did because I would have been just as pee-pants scared as Telmo otherwise. I didn’t say anything and I was so tired that I didn’t care, either. Even though I’d had to bribe him and all, Wayne had sort of looked out for me that night, and so I got to just be one of the guys and for once not who everybody was laughing at, which was OK by me.

There were more DDT bombs and creosote potatoes the next day — and dumb nature hikes, and merit-badge crafts and stuff — but no more initiations. That next night, they cooked a rattlesnake Mr. Ferber said he killed even though nobody saw him do it. Mr. Dick accused him of buying it off of a colored man they had seen fishing, but Mr. Ferber knocked on his metal plate and said, “Scout’s honor.” Everybody had to try some. It was fried, of course, but not in the creosote. I thought I’d be scared to eat my bite, but somebody said it tasted like chicken and they were right: it did.

Ronnie Dick, the son of Mr. Dick the Scoutmaster, said rattlesnake was colored-people food, and that started a conversation about what all else was colored-people food. Somebody said any kind of snake, and somebody else said raccoon and squirrel. The list went on for a while: rabbit, fried chicken, grits, watermelon, swamp cabbage, poke salad, collards.

The colored-people-food list got longer and longer — bugs and dirt and stuff like that. David Tremblay said dogs, he knew for a fact colored people ate dogs, and everybody laughed at that one. Finally I couldn’t help myself and I told a story about when Hurricane Donna knocked down a tree in our front yard and left a nest of possums on the ground. A colored man knocked on our door, who must have thought it was all right to come up out of the Boogerbottom because of all the damage left behind that somebody would have to clean up. He asked Dad if he could buy those possums off of us. Dad said, “You catch them, you can keep them.” The possums hissed, but the colored man was too quick for them to bite him. He grabbed their wiry tails and slung them into a croaker sack, even the babies. We asked Dad what he wanted them for and Dad said he figured the man and his family planned on eating them. I asked if Dad thought they would keep the babies for pets but Dad said he guessed not.

Nobody said anything when I finished. Wayne and David Tremblay looked kind of embarrassed and I guessed I hadn’t told it right. But that silence only lasted a minute, and then there was some more colored-people talk, the way it always was when guys didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t stay for it, but instead went and climbed in the tent and zipped myself up in my sleeping bag. I hadn’t spent the night away from home much before that weekend, and telling that story made me kind of homesick. I missed Mom and Dad and our dog, Suzy, and even Tink. Plus, it was funny: I missed Darla, too, and I wondered what she was doing right then, and realized I didn’t have any idea how she spent her nights at her house — if they watched TV like regular people, or if she and her mom danced or something, or if she hid away all alone in her room, which was kind of what I thought, and which made me sad if it was true.