Deep Down Popular Read online

  “You’ll have to wear a hat, Jessie Lou,” says Melinda, making her eyes look slit-like, like a cat thinking things over.

  “That’s a good idea,” says Mama. “You know those nice big picture hats they’re making now. They say you’re supposed to wear one all the time to protect your eyes from direct sunlight. ’Course they say all kinds of things.”

  We pull up into the parking lot at the Shenandoah Valley Shopping Mall. I always forget how many cars there are in the world. Must be millions. Once when Granddaddy was taking me to this shopping mall to get colored pencils and an art pad, we came out to the parking lot and there were so many cars we couldn’t find Granddaddy’s big old Chrysler Imperial. We had to get a policeman to help us.

  “I’ll just get something black,” I say, “so I won’t show up much.”

  “You can’t wear something black in the spring,” says Melinda, pulling away toward her window, making a face, and then shaking her head back and forth as if to shake that awful idea right out of her mind.

  In a way I am kind of looking forward to the state fair ’cause there’s a guy that does hypnotism there. He gets people to come up onstage and quack like ducks and cry like babies. Granddaddy says it’s a fake. He thinks the worst of everything, but I’d still crawl on my knees all the way to Newport News if my granddaddy asked me to.

  Finally we get out of the van and walk across the desert of asphalt. Heat and parking lot wind comes up around us. Mama puts her arm over each of us, one on either side. Melinda looks down at my jeans and my old sneakers and I know what she’s thinking, so I just look away ’cause I don’t care. I don’t care at all.

  At school our teacher writes the word DISCOVERY on the chalkboard and then she draws an arrow that points to the words SELF-DISCOVERY. “A different kind of exploration,” she says, swallowing and looking happy at the same time, “an exploration into the wilderness of yourself.” She whispers those last three words so they almost seem to tremble with importance.

  Out the window a big truck drives by with the words CAMDEN, VIRGINIA, HOME OF THE VICIOUS VIPER VIRGINIA SAUSAGE. My mouth just about waters thinking about those tender sausages. Everybody in the class follows the truck with their eyes.

  Mrs. Duster writes out the word SELF-PORTRAIT and then underlines it with another swirling Z. “What can you discover about yourself?” she says, turning around quickly from the chalkboard and looking at us real hard. We all look back at her with big wide-open eyes.

  To make our self-portraits you have to lie down on a big piece of paper and somebody takes a crayon or a pencil and draws a nice outline around your whole body. Then it’s up to you to draw in the details. If you feel like it, around the outside you can write words that describe who you are — like talkative or funny or class clown. That’s what Quentin Duster writes on his margins — TALKATIVE. FUNNY. CLASS CLOWN. I don’t see him that way. I think I would have written on his, PIP-SQUEAKY, BOSSY, TOO BIG FOR HIS BRITCHES. But the portraits are supposed to be what you think of yourself, not what others think of you.

  After the outline around my body is finished, I pretty much hate to start putting in the details on my self-portrait. Stupid skinny-looking thing with a hedgehog hairdo. I start coloring in my worn-out blue jeans and my broken-down high-top Converse sneakers. I can never imagine myself wearing party shoes or a pretty dress like my big sister, Melinda, wears. Around the outside in the margins I write STUPID. UGLY. SKINNY. I do that partly because Ryan Ferguson is laughing and I start hamming it up for him, forgetting for a minute that these self-portraits are going to be hanging in the halls for our big sixth-grade graduation dance and celebration coming up at the end of the year.

  Elizabeth Parnell and Louise L., my not-right-now-maybe-later friends, walk by and give my self-portrait a little sneer, which means they hate it and me today, which doesn’t bother me at all ’cause I know tomorrow they’ll be just the opposite.

  My pencil breaks and I have to go over to the pencil sharpener, which is near Conrad’s table. I know it seems funny but I can barely look at him, never mind talk to him. I halfway turn my eyes toward him and then I look down at Conrad’s self-portrait lying on the floor. He’s working away with a smooth, even look on his face. I notice he hasn’t even drawn in his leg brace. He simply left it out and around the outside he has written POPULAR. SMART. HANDSOME.

  I can tell another sausage truck just went through. I can tell by the way the kids near the window stand up and start staring. I guess West Taluka Falls, Virginia, wouldn’t be West Taluka Falls, Virginia, without the sausage festival. You end up seeing most everybody in town there. Me, I just think it’s nice to do the same thing every year and to see the same people every year doing the same thing.

  Grown-ups dress up as German or Swiss yodelers with sausages to sell. All the people working there wear these special green hats. It’s fun to see people from our town in a different setting, like the pale skinny man who works at the post office. He’s always at the festival wearing his green felt German hat and handing out mugs of root beer. At the post office he’s the guy behind the stamp window. Mama always says, “That skinny little man at the post office, Ed Collar, flirts with every single person in a skirt that comes through the door at the post office. And I pity that poor woman who works next window over from him. She has to listen to it all day. I pity her. No, I really do.”

  My old kindergarten teacher is always up at the festival too, handing out ice cream. (She isn’t a kindergarten teacher anymore. Now she’s a poodle trainer up in Roanoke.) And I always see Mrs. Duster, our teacher, dancing her feet off in the square dance area.

  Last year I went up there with Elizabeth Parnell. We were having a pretty good time kind of rambling around like we do when she happened to spot Sarah Jane Peabody on the other side of the field. All of a sudden she said she wanted to get a Super Deluxe Vicious Viper Virginia Sandwich, which is one of the hottest sausages at the festival, and she went into the Vicious Viper Sausage hut. I sat out on a bench waiting for her but she never came back out of that sausage hut. I think I waited close to an hour. When I went to look for her she had totally vanished, I mean, completely disappeared.

  “There are discoveries to be made within and without,” says our teacher, drawing a circle in chalk on the board. She points to the inside of the circle and then she points to the outside. Today I notice our teacher is wearing a dress with tall pine trees and lakes printed all over the fabric. I guess she’s wearing that so if a little fourth grader goes up to give her a hug, that kid will be hugging the forests and rivers of Lewis and Clark.

  Another sausage truck goes by out the window and everybody in the room lifts up off their seats about five inches.

  “All right, yes, I know it’s Friday and the Cabanash County Sausage Festival is going on this afternoon and I want you all to go there and have a good time. But I want you to go up there as explorers and discoverers like Lewis and Clark. Okay?” says our teacher.

  Things start to break down. Everybody is talking at once. Teachers in the hall are shouting. Bells are ringing. Parents are peeking in from doorways. Principal is running around waving his arms. Backpacks are flying this way and that. School is over for the day.

  “Jessie Lou,” our teacher calls out loud and clear. I swear her quiet-loud voice could carry across canyons and valleys. “You are still responsible for helping Conrad Smith. Okay? And about that bicycle. Did it get home the way it was supposed to?”

  “What?” I say.

  “Did you get Conrad’s bicycle home all right?”

  Conrad looks over at me and I look back at Conrad and for a split-second our eyes lock tight. Tight. Then there’s a moment that seems like forever, a moment of deep space when the room spins and voices chatter and I can feel Conrad’s eyes on me, waiting. Waiting.

  The room then seems to go silent. I look back up at Mrs. Duster and I say, “Yes, ma’am. That bike got home safe and sound.”

  Outside where the buses are loading, Quentin
Duster is knocking around talking to this kid and talking to that kid, trying to get a laugh wherever he can. He sees Conrad moving across the schoolyard and he looks over at me too, coming along not exactly next to Conrad, but let’s say not far off. Then Quentin Duster does what he does best. He makes a beeline right over here, kind of buzzes up alongside of Conrad, and says, “Hey, Conrad, where y’all going? Up to the sausage festival?”

  “Maybe,” says Conrad.

  Quentin doesn’t let that drop. He keeps zigzagging around me and Conrad and the more he zigzags around us, the more I realize we’re moving away from the buses. Conrad isn’t planning to get on that bus at all. He’s planning to walk. Maybe he wants to check on his bicycle to see if it has sunk like an old refrigerator to the bottom of the river by now.

  Oh, but I wish we were boarding that big yellow zoo on wheels. I know I’d feel better with those kids screaming and yelling and jumping up and down all around me. I wouldn’t even care if somebody hit me on the head with a purple-striped Frisbee from the back of the bus like what happened last Friday. Anything would be better than this. I just hate walking along carrying somebody’s books feeling like a stupid robot that was never programmed for speech.

  Quentin keeps zigzagging and zigzagging till we’re halfway down the road watching those loaded buses go by with kids making all kinds of faces at us out the back window.

  “Hey, Conrad, I heard they got one of the hottest sausages the world has ever seen up at the festival this year,” says Quentin. “I heard a kid fainted earlier today and had to be taken to the emergency room ’cause that sausage was so hot.”

  “Is that so,” says Conrad, leaning down and picking up a rock off the road and throwing it fastball pitching style at a telephone pole in the distance. It looks like it’s gonna hit the pole but just at the last minute it veers off and falls in the grass.

  “Oh, come on, Conrad. Anybody can throw better than that,” says Quentin Duster, picking up a rock and leaning back and throwing it toward the telephone pole. But it doesn’t go anywhere near that pole and it doesn’t land anywhere near anything at all. It’s just a rock that got thrown away into the emptiness of nowhere.

  “You qualify for the semifinals with that one, Quentin,” says Conrad.

  No matter what the situation, I can never resist throwing a rock. I’ve thrown going on a thousand rocks in my lifetime. Sometimes it helps me think or helps me write a poem or helps me breathe when I’m steaming up with anger. I just can’t resist. Suddenly I reach down and pick up a stone and I aim at the telephone pole and I throw that rock clean and high and wide, and bingo. Bull’s-eye. You can hear that rock as it smacks the telephone pole dead center. The sound ricochets through the woods.

  Conrad and Quentin look at each other. Their eyes go all wide and disbelieving.

  “Wow!” says Quentin Duster.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I say.

  “Just means wow,” says Quentin Duster. “You don’t need Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary to figure that out. Wow just means wow.” Then he looks at me kind of close like he’s seeing a speck of dust on my forehead and says, “What’d you go and cut off all your hair like that for?”

  And I say, “Quentin Duster, go back to fourth grade and wake me up when you’re gone.”

  “Yeah, Quentin,” says Conrad, “now that you mention it, I think it was you I saw out on the playground yesterday chasing a little old third-grade girl with yellow curls. You had that sweet pea running around in circles.”

  “I didn’t chase any third grader,” says Quentin, putting his hands on his hips. “I don’t talk to third graders.”

  Conrad smiles at me and I smile back.

  “It’s true, Quentin, I saw you too,” I say.

  “Well, I’m so glad y’all were focused on me yesterday,” says Quentin. “And here I had no idea I was the center of your thoughts. Had I known I would have pulled up a chair and asked y’all to sit down.”

  “Now that would have been real polite,” says Conrad, throwing another rock. It sails up high and then drops into the green murky slow lazy river with a plunk.

  “Wait just a minute,” says Quentin Duster, standing up on the bank of the river. “What the heck am I seeing out there, Conrad?”

  Conrad looks at me and I look back and I say, “It’s a bicycle, Quentin.”

  “Yeah,” says Conrad, “don’t you know that word or haven’t you covered that material yet in fourth grade? A is for apple. B is for bicycle.”

  “No,” says Quentin, “back in first grade, it was A is for apple, B is for bullroar. What’s that bike doing out there in the water?”

  Nobody exactly answers him. So Quentin keeps at it. “Come on, Conrad, never seen anything like it.” He starts running and jumping up on rocks along the bank and then leaping down to the shore, all the time never letting up about the bicycle. “Is that the one the teacher was talking about, Conrad? What happened? Did you make a wrong turn or something?” He leaps off the rocks trying to do some sort of made-up karate maneuver and then falls into the grass along the shore. His backpack drops down ahead of him and pops open. All kinds of junk falls out. Drawings of dinosaurs. Dinosaur cards. A pair of brand-new white Nike crosstrainers.

  “Hey, where did you get the fancy shoes?” says Conrad. “Last time I saw a pair of those, they were on TV in the Division One Playoffs.”

  “My daddy got ’em for me up at the mall in Roanoke. Cost one hundred dollars. First time I ever had a pair of good shoes. Took me three weeks of carrying on like crazy to get ’em,” says Quentin.

  “Whatever,” says Conrad. “They’re done for now, Quentin, all covered with mud.”

  Quentin rolls over and gets to his feet. He looks down at the muddy shoes lying next to the river. Suddenly his face breaks up like a pie somebody just dropped on the floor. There’s a fine line between a fourth grader and a baby and Quentin Duster just crossed that line. Looks like he’s all prepared to throw a pre-kindergarten fit.

  “Oh, gimme those things,” I say, grabbing the shoes, going into my backpack, and getting out my plaid flannel shirt. I go over to the river’s edge and I crouch down and let that shirt loose in the water. It swirls around waving its arms in the current and then I pull it up and wring it out nice and tight. I take that wet shirt and I scrub Quentin Duster’s big white $100 shoes and soon enough the fresh mud lifts off them and those shoes look pretty new again. All the while Conrad stands there watching me looking like he needs an eye exam or something.

  “There, Quentin,” I say, handing him his shoes. “Quit jumping around now like a Ping-Pong ball, will you?” Quentin looks up at me for a frozen second. He takes the shoes and then he starts bolting around again like nothing happened.

  Conrad doesn’t say anything, picks up a rock, and skips it across the river. It hits the water seven times. Then he says, “By the way, Quentin, I heard that sausage was so hot that kid had to be airlifted by chopper all the way to Alaska, where he was put on ice for twenty-four hours.”

  “I heard it was Los Angeles and he had to be put in a tank of subzero water and there were sharks left in there by mistake. That’s what I heard,” says Quentin, smiling all over the place.

  “Could be,” says Conrad, looking at me and Quentin. “So are we going up there to see if we can take the heat or not?”

  “You bet,” says Quentin, making a running leap from one rock to another.

  I feel a little like I swallowed a mouth full of blueberries too quick. Am I going with them to the sausage festival? Is that what I’m doing? If I were a being flying above us in the clouds and I looked down and saw me standing along the river with Conrad Parker Smith talking about going to the sausage festival, I’m sure that I would fall out of the sky in disbelief. I would say to myself “No way. No way. It just can’t be.” And then I would have to explain to myself that the only reason I’m here at all is because of that blessed beautiful metal leg brace.

  Before I get back up on the road, I
kind of drop my muddy wet shirt in the weeds. My mama has close to a nervous breakdown every time she finds a muddy old wet piece of clothing in my backpack, so I always think it’s simpler to just throw the thing away.

  Then we just start walking like we don’t even know where we’re going, even though we do. Somebody starts kicking a rock along the road. Somebody else makes a dumb joke, and I look up at the sky and notice suddenly what a deep blue it is.

  “Come on, hurry up, you two. Mosquitoes are having a sit-down dinner on my back,” Quentin shouts. He’s pulled ahead of us on the road, rushing past the turnoff to his double-wide ’cause there’s no way he wants anyone thinking he’s going home. His road is called Bull’s Lane, which you have to pity Quentin for, since a name like that can only lead to thousands of jokes at his expense.

  “What’s your hurry, Quentin? Got a flight to Washington to catch?” calls Conrad.

  Quentin stops on the path, scrunches up his nose, and says, “Hey, Conrad, I heard your mama went up to the PTA meeting and showed everybody how to make those clothespin angels.”

  “It was just a five-minute talk to get people to come out for the meeting,” says Conrad.

  “Yeah, but if she gives away all her secrets, people can make their own angels and then, Conrad, you’re gonna starve,” says Quentin Duster.

  “Not gonna starve,” says Conrad.

  “I guess I wouldn’t even buy a stupid clothespin angel,” says Quentin Duster, putting his hands on his hips, looking right up at Conrad. “What would I need such a stupid thing like that for?”

  “People like ’em,” says Conrad.

  Soon enough we get to those fields of long blowing grass, and there sitting in its overgrown yard is that old lost-in-a-dream weather-beaten house. From a certain distance I almost feel it pulling me. I just can’t look at that house but a wistful feeling blows through me. Wistful is my granddaddy’s word. He always says to me, “Are you feeling wistful, sweetheart? Wanna talk to me? You know your granddaddy has great big ears that stick out for a reason.”