Down Sand Mountain Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’re welcome to borrow it. It’s all right by me.” And that was all, except that he said “borry” instead of “borrow.” I thought that was pretty funny.
    Walter Wratchford lit a new cigarette from the butt of the one he had been smoking, then wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his army jacket. The windshield was fogged up and he wiped that with his sleeve, too, but it didn’t much matter because the smoke from his cigarette filled up the car so fast you could hardly see through that, anyway. Every time we hit a bump, the passenger side door swung open a little bit and the rain came in, or maybe it was the water from the tires. I guess I hadn’t tied it tight enough. I kept getting wetter even though I was already soaking wet, and the inside of Walter Wratchford’s car kept getting wetter, too.
    “You want me to take you down to the Boogerbottom?” Walter Wratchford said. His voice even sounded like cigarettes.
    I shook my head and said no, just on up Orange Avenue.
    “Colored don’t live on Orange Avenue,” he said.
    I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make him mad or anything, but the last place I wanted to go was the Boogerbottom. “I just need to go home,” I said. I was about to cry.
    He snorted. “I know you’re not colored. I was just kidding you.” He offered me a cigarette but I shook my head again. Then he asked me what was the story with my face and all and how come I looked that way. I just told him
shoe polish
and he nodded like he heard that sort of thing all the time, too.
    “I been around a lot of colored guys,” he said like that’s what we’d been talking about all along. “They got a lot of them in the army now. I even had a friend in the army that was colored. That boy was one dumb son of a you-know-what.”
    My teeth were chattering even though I wasn’t cold, just wet. Walter Wratchford wiped the windshield again and turned on the heater. He was grinning, but not in the way somebody grins if they think something’s funny. “You know what they got over there? Over in the war? They got these things — they call them Bouncing Betties — where when you hit the trip wire, they don’t just blow up and take your foot off or your leg off. Them bombs bounce up in the air so you can see them right in front of you for about a second. Not even a second, but a second of a second. And that’s the last second of a second you ever get. Then it blows your dang head off.”
    He didn’t say hardly anything after that, and I didn’t know what to say back, either. I was too scared to ask him much even though there were about a million questions I wished I could have asked about Vietnam since I was pretty sure I would go over there to be in the war once I was old enough. I read about it all the time in the
Tampa Tribune.
In Vacation Bible School the summer before last when they had us write down who was the most important person in our lives not counting our moms and dads, I wrote General Westmoreland. That turned out to be the wrong answer, though. The Vacation Bible School lady said it was Jesus, and how come nobody wrote down Jesus, and she was very disappointed in us for not a single one of us saying Jesus. That got us in a big argument about whether Jesus was actually even a
person.
A lot of the kids thought he was more like Superman, with his super powers of turning wine into water and feeding the multitudes with the fishes and the loaves and bringing back Lazarus from the dead and walking on water. The Vacation Bible School lady said those were miracles, not super powers, and she rolled her eyes and said, “Land of Goshen,” the same way my dad said, “Good garden peas.”
    It didn’t take long before we got to town. Walter Wratchford didn’t ask me anything about where to go; he just drove on across First Street and on down Orange Avenue toward my house. I hadn’t even told him where I lived, but Sand Mountain was such a little place, he must have just known