Down Sand Mountain Read Free

the room and it was disgusting, also like usual. Next to him was Tink, looking scared about something, so I turned around to look behind me to see if there was something by the window, because you never know, there could have been.
    I stopped singing by then, of course, and I also wasn’t dancing like the King anymore, or like anybody, but I was still dizzy and my head felt like it was still dancing, only I couldn’t breathe too well. Also I didn’t feel my legs too well, either, so I decided to sit down and so I dropped from standing up directly to my butt on the floor. I heard Wayne tell Tink, “Go get Mom,” but I don’t remember between that and Mom holding my face in her hands and saying, “Dewey? Dewey? Answer me.”
    From a long ways away I said, “Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t know why I was so dizzy then, or why my tailbone hurt. I must have already forgotten about the shoe polish and sitting down from standing up. I heard her say, “Go get your father and tell him to bring some turpentine and a rag,” and Wayne said, “He’s not going to like this,” and Tink said, “He thinks he’s the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy but he’s not,” and Mom said, “Go watch TV,” and Tink said, “I don’t have to,” and Mom said, “Excuse me, Young Lady?” Tink ran back to the living room and I must have been laughing at something because Mom said, “I don’t see what’s so funny, Mister.” When she started calling us Young Lady and Mister, it meant we were in a lot of trouble but I couldn’t stop laughing and she said, “You better stop laughing, this is serious. Do you have any idea what you did to yourself?” only something didn’t sound the way it was supposed to and I realized it was because she was laughing, too, and I thought everything was going to be all right even though I still couldn’t feel my legs. I hadn’t heard my mom laugh in so long, probably since before President Kennedy died, that I’d forgotten how happy it made me, but that was just until my dad came in and he started cussing, which my mom always called Mine Talk, which he wasn’t supposed to do around us kids. Mom always told him if he was mad to just say “Good garden peas!” instead, and he said that now, too, which just made me laugh more, and I think made Mom laugh, too. I slapped my hands down on the floor over and over like a seal at a zoo until Dad grabbed me by the back of the neck and lit into my face with a rag soaked in turpentine that felt like a Brillo pad. Then I really couldn’t breathe and I wasn’t laughing and slapping the floor like a seal anymore, I was bawling like a calf like they had out at Mr. Juddy’s farm, who was a dragline operator from the mines. Dad scrubbed and scrubbed the skin off my face with that rag and I tried to tell him I couldn’t breathe but he wasn’t listening, and I don’t think Mom was laughing anymore by that time, either; she was saying, “You don’t have to do it so hard,” and he said, “If I don’t do it hard, it won’t come off. Look, look, it’s not coming off. There’s going to be a stain that won’t come off, and how in tarnation is he going to go to school like this? Oh, good garden peas.”

MY FACE WAS STILL STAINED KIWI BLACK when Mom pulled off the covers to make me get up the next morning, which was the first day of school. I checked right away in the mirror. I have this part of my brain that makes stuff up when somebody asks me a question but I don’t know the answer. It makes them think I’m smarter than I really am, which is OK, but it also makes
me
think I’m smarter than I really am, which can be a problem. Anyway, that part of my brain took over, and what it did was convince the rest of me that I looked tan. Maybe not regular tan, but tan the way those kids whose families have cottages out at Snake Lake are tan because they spend the whole summer with their boats and their rich families and their friends going water-skiing. A lot of people