Free Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins Page A

it got all over everybody’s practice jerseys and pants and helmets. One guy even swallowed his and they had to call his dad. So Wayne got Mom to buy raisins, which he would cram all in his cheek when nobody was looking so it looked like he was chewing tobacco, too. “It looks just like tobacco juice when you spit it between your teeth,” he said, “but it doesn’t hurt you if you accidentally swallow some.”
    That made me laugh, but Wayne got quiet after that and pretty soon I was back to worrying. I thought about having to ride my bike around the whole town delivering campaign flyers to everybody, and maybe even in the Boogerbottom, and that game of Turn Out the Lights with Darwin Turkel that I still hadn’t told anybody about, and what they planned to do to me at school instead of a red belly, and people thinking I wanted to be colored, and me wanting to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy but not have people think that that just proved I wanted to be colored, and what Darla Turkel was doing in the cemetery with that colored boy, or if that was even true, and atomic bombs, and not being big enough for sports, and the Vietcong, and all of communism, and Dad tearing down the Skeleton Hotel, and the half man–half gators all over the place, apparently, and Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, Ban-Lon, what if they decided to make all the clothes in the world out of Ban-Lon?
    “Wayne!” I knew I woke him up that time. He’d been snoring. “Please can I come down there?”
    He grunted something and I decided that meant yes, so I crawled down to the bottom bunk and got in. It was very crowded, but I brought my own blanket and pillow.
    “Do you ever worry about everything the way I do?” I asked him. His feet were next to my face and I said it at them like they were a microphone.
    He was already snoring again, though, plus his feet smelled like tennis shoes, so I pulled the pillow over my face and pretended I was a mole rat and me and Wayne were in our nest underground. That kind of cheered me up after a while — I don’t know why — and I finally fell asleep.

I HAD MY FIRST DANCE LESSON with Mrs. Turkel on Monday, after school. Darla had asked her for me because I was too nervous to ask her myself. Mrs. Turkel charged me twenty-five cents, which was my whole allowance for the week, but she didn’t mess around. Right away she laid cardboard feet down on the floor for me to step on so I could learn the fox-trot. I didn’t know why they called it that. It didn’t look anything to me like a fox trotting.
    “Sweetie pie,” Mrs. Turkel said, “you’re going to have to pay more attention if you’re ever going to learn these steps. You’re shuffling your shoes and kicking these instruction steps all over the place. Now I want you to forget all about them. I’m going to tape them to the floor so they’ll just be here, but instead of looking down at them, I want you to try it this time with Darla —”
    She crooked her finger at Darla, who had been sitting in a chair by the wall in their dining room, which was where we all were. The way Darla sat, with her feet flat on the floor, and her back straight, and with her hands folded in her lap, you would have thought she had been sitting there all that time at a fancy ball, like Cinderella waiting for a boy to come by and ask her to dance, instead of just watching me and her mom. Darla had on saddle shoes, bobby socks, a pleated skirt, and a button-up blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and except for her Shirley Temple ringlets, she almost looked like a regular girl.
    Darla floated over and curtsied and lifted one hand so that when her mom pushed me toward her, my shoulder fit exactly under it. Darla stretched out her other arm and turned her hand palm down, just sort of hanging out there in space until her mom took my arm and pulled it out in the direction of Darla’s and laid Darla’s hand in mine, almost like it was a bird and I had caught it. She pulled on my other hand to