Down Sand Mountain by Steve Watkins

Chesterfields then. He didn’t answer. Or maybe he had already answered and I just hadn’t heard right. I don’t know. The lamp was still on and the shade was still turning and the river was still running like it was carrying me and him and the shed and everything closer to the falls. All he said was didn’t I have some homework I needed to do for school tomorrow, and shouldn’t I head on back to the house to do it? I wanted to say, “Wait, Dad, there’s more, a hundred things more, a hundred reasons for me to go off to military school that I haven’t told you yet, and never go back to Sand Mountain High School or stay in Sand Mountain,” but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, so I just said, “Yes, sir.”

I WAS STILL ON RESTRICTIONS THE NEXT FRIDAY, but I didn’t want to go to the football game, anyway. I was barely colored anymore, but that didn’t stop kids from still teasing me about it at school. After Mom and Dad and Wayne and Tink left, I lay on the rug in the living room for a while burping — we had fried liver that night for dinner — but you can get tired of that after a while, so I eventually got up and rode my bike over to the corner of Second and Green Streets to see Darla Turkel again. I don’t know why I thought she would be there except that she had been the week before.
    I waited about ten minutes for her to show up, then got back on my bike and rode around for a while, trying to do all the same things I had done the Friday before — the patrolling the perimeter, the jumping off into ditches, the sprinting to get away from the Vietcong — but afterward Darla still wasn’t there in that circle of streetlight on Green Street on her pink PF Flyer with her Shirley Temple hair, so I went back home and lay down on the rug again in the living room and did some more burping and watched some TV.
    Darwin Turkel answered the door when I showed up at their house the next day after the job-jar chores and Dad lifted my restrictions.
    “They’re not here,” he said, even though I hadn’t said anything, including who I was there to see. “They’re out and they’re not back yet.” He folded his arms and didn’t move over to invite me in, so I just stood on the front porch and looked at his lips, which were the reddest I ever saw on a boy, almost like he wore lipstick. I could tell he didn’t, though, because he had a habit of licking his bottom lip with his tongue back and forth very fast. Not all the time, but every once in a while: his tongue shot out of the hole like a rabbit or a gopher, turned both ways, then popped back down. He also wore a red Ban-Lon shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. I didn’t know how he could even breathe with that shirt on, or why he would wear it when he didn’t have to, like on a Saturday afternoon, which this was.
    I tugged on the collar of my T-shirt to stretch it out some more.
    “Well?” he said.
    “Well what?”
    “Well, are you going to come inside and wait?”
    I said I guessed so and started to come in, only he stopped me.
    “You have to go around to the back door,” he said. “That’s the servants’ entrance and where we take deliveries.”
    “What are you talking about?” I said. “You don’t have servants. And what deliveries?”
    He rolled his eyes. “Well, aren’t you supposed to be colored?”
    I told him, “Heck no,” but he just smiled and closed the door. I heard his voice again, though. “See you around ba-ack.” He kind of sang it at me, and for some reason I went around the house to the servants’ entrance like he said, although I almost couldn’t find the door there was so much junk on the back porch, including an old washing machine that was green with algae or something, wet boxes full of magazines that you knew if you tried to pick them up the bottoms would fall out, bags of stuff, a couple of rolled-up carpets, toys and board games like Chutes and Ladders for kids a lot littler than Darla and Darwin,