The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 Read online

  I didn’t mind him coming over to play, because both our favorite game was playing with the little plastic dinosaurs that I had and you couldn’t really have any fun playing by yourself. That was because someone had to be the American dinosaurs and someone had to be the Nazi ones. Rufus didn’t even mind being the Nazi dinosaurs most of the time and it was O.K. playing with him because he didn’t cheat and didn’t try to steal my plastic monsters.

  The only other guy I used to play with was LJ Jones, but I quit playing with him when a lot of my dinosaurs started disappearing. I’ve got about a million of them but before LJ started coming over I had two million. It’s kind of embarrassing how LJ got them from me. At first he’d steal them one or two at a time and I asked Byron what I should do to stop him.

  By said, “Don’t sweat it, punk. The way I figure it one or two of them stupid little monsters ain’t a real high price for you to pay to get someone to play with you.”

  But LJ wasn’t satisfied with doing one or two, I guess he wanted a raise, so one day he said to me, “You know, we should stop having these little fights all the time. We need to have one great big battle!”

  “Yeah, we could call it the World’s Greatest Dinosaur War Ever,” I said, “but I get to be the Americans.”

  I should have known something was fishy when LJ said, “O.K., but I get first shot.” Most of the time it always took a big fight to decide who had to be the Nazis.

  I started setting up my dinosaurs and LJ said, “This ain’t right. If this really is the World’s Greatest Dinosaur War Ever we need more monsters. You should go get the rest of ’em.”

  He was right. If this was going to be a famous battle we needed more fighters. “O.K., I’ll be right back,” I said.

  This wasn’t going to be easy. I wasn’t allowed to take all of my dinosaurs out at once because Momma was afraid I’d lose most of them. Especially because she didn’t trust LJ. Every time he’d come over she’d tell me, “You watch out for that boy, he’s a little too sneaky for my tastes.” I had a plan, though. I’d go upstairs and drop the pillowcase I kept my dinosaurs in out of the window. I wasn’t so stupid that I’d drop them down to LJ, I’d drop them out of the other side of the house and then run around to get them.

  My plan worked perfect! After I went and picked up the pillowcase I set up my dinosaurs and LJ set up the Nazis and we started the battle.

  He took first shot and killed about thirty of mine with an atomic bomb. My dinosaurs shot back and got twenty of his with a hand grenade. The battle was going great! Dinosaurs were falling right, left and center. We had a great big pile of dead dinosaurs off to the side and had to keep shaking more and more reinforcements out of the pillowcase. Then in the middle of one big fight LJ said, “Wait a minute, Kenny, there’s something we forgot about.”

  I was ready for a trick. I knew LJ was going to try to get me to go away for a minute so he could steal a bunch of my monsters. I said, “What?”

  “These dinosaurs been droppin’ atom bombs on each other. Think about how dangerous that is.”

  “How’s it dangerous?”

  LJ said, “Look.” He made one of his brontosauruses run by the pile of dead dinosaurs and when it got two steps past them it started shaking and twitching and fell over on its side, dead as a donut. LJ flipped him on the dead dinosaur pile.

  I said, “What happened to him?”

  “It was the radioactiveness. We gotta bury the dead ones before they infect the rest of the live ones.”

  Maybe it was because we had such a great war going on and I was kind of nervous about who’d win, but this stupid stuff made sense, so instead of digging each one of the couple hundred dead dinosaurs a grave we dug one giant hole and buried all the radioactive ones in it, then we put a big rock on top so no radioactivity could leak out.

  This really was the World’s Greatest Dinosaur War Ever. We fought and killed dinosaurs for such a long time that we had to make two more graves with two more big rocks on top of them. LJ finally pulled the trick I knew he was going to but he did it so cool that I didn’t even see it coming.

  “Kenny, you ever been over in Banky and Larry Dunn’s fort?”

  LJ knew I hadn’t. “Uh-uh.”

  “I found out where it is.”

  “Where?”

  “You wanna come see it?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “They ain’t there, this is Thursday night, they’re up at the community center playin’ ball.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, if you too scared …”

  I knew this was a worm with a hook in it but I bit anyway. “I’m not scared if you aren’t.”

  “Let’s go!”

  I figured the trick would come in right here so I kept a real good eye on LJ while we put my monsters back in the pillowcase. When we were done I sneaked a look at his back pockets, ’cause I knew when he stole dinosaurs he put them back there or in his socks. From the way his pockets were sticking out it looked like he had one Tyrannosaurus rex and one triceratops. I couldn’t tell how many he had in his socks. I figured that wasn’t too bad a price for as much fun as we’d had.

  LJ was talking a mile a minute. “They even got some books with nekkid ladies! You ever seen a nekkid lady?”

  “Yeah, lots of times!” I had too. Byron had borrowed lots of nasty magazines from Buphead’s library. I knew LJ didn’t believe me, though. For some reason if you were famous for being smart no one thought you’d ever looked at a dirty book.

  LJ said, “You gotta be in the house by seven, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “O.K., we better hurry before it gets too late.”

  After I’d sneaked the dinosaurs back into the house we ran off toward Banky and Larry Dunn’s secret fort.

  It wasn’t until nine o’clock at night when I was in bed that a bell went off in my head. I’d forgotten all about the radioactive dinosaurs!

  I put on my tennis shoes, got my night-reading flashlight, climbed out the back window and went down the tree into the backyard. I got to the battleground and saw the three radioactive graves, but when I moved the rock on the first one and dug a little bit down I didn’t hit one dinosaur, not one! The second grave was empty too. I didn’t even move the rock from the third one, I just sat there and felt real stupid.

  I couldn’t help thinking about Sunday school again. I remembered the story about how a bunch of angels came down and rolled away the rock that was in front of Jesus’s grave to let him go to heaven. I think it took them three days to push the rock far enough so he could squeeze out. My dinosaurs weren’t even in their graves for three hours before someone rolled their rocks away. Maybe it was a lot easier for a bunch of angels to get a million dinosaurs to heaven than it was to get the saver of the whole world there, but I wished they’d given me a couple more hours.

  But I was just making excuses to myself for being so stupid. I know if a detective had looked at these rocks he wouldn’t have found a clue of a single angel being there, but I’d bet a million bucks that he’d have seen that those rocks were covered with a ton of LJ Jones fingerprints.

  I never played with LJ again after that. So playing with Rufus got to be O.K. It was a lot better not to have to worry about getting stuff stolen when you were with your friends, and it was a lot better not spending half the time arguing about who’s going to be the Nazi dinosaurs.

  I was wrong when I said that me and Rufus being near each other all the time would make people tease both of us twice as much. People started leaving me alone and going right after Rufus. It was easy for them to do ’cause he was kind of like me, he had two things wrong with him too.

  The first thing wrong with Rufus was the way he talked. After he said that “Hiya, y’all” stuff on the bus he got to be famous for it and no matter how much he tried to talk in a different way people wouldn’t let him forget what he’d said.

  The other thing wrong with him was his clothes. It didn’t take people too long before t
hey counted how many pairs of pants and shirts Rufus and Cody had. That was easy to do because Rufus only had two shirts and two pairs of pants and Cody only had three shirts and two pairs of pants. They also had one pair of blue jeans that they switched off on; some days Rufus wore them and some days Cody rolled the legs up and put them on. It’s really funny how something as stupid as a pair of blue jeans can make you feel real, real bad but that’s what happened to me.

  We had been sort of secret friends for a couple of weeks before people really started getting on them about not having a bunch of clothes. Me and Rufus and Cody were on the bus right behind the driver one day when Larry Dunn walked up to our seat and said, “Country Corn Flake, I noticed how you and the Little Flake switch off on them pants, and I know Fridays is your day to wear ’em, but I was wonderin’ if the same person who gets to wear the pants ’gets to wear the drawers that day too?”

  Of course the whole bus started laughing and hollering. Larry Dunn went back to his seat real quick before the driver had a chance to tell anybody the secret he knew about Larry’s momma. I looked over at Cody. He had the blue jeans on today and was pulling the waist out to check out his underpants.

  Maybe it was because everybody else was laughing, maybe it was because Cody had such a strange look on his face while he peeked at his underpants, maybe it was because I was glad that Larry hadn’t jumped on me, but whatever the reason was I cracked up too.

  Rufus shot a look at me. His face never changed but I knew right away I’d done something wrong. I tried to squeeze the rest of my laugh down.

  Things got real strange. Instead of Rufus jabbering away at me a mile a minute in school he scooted around in his seat so all I could see was his back. He didn’t follow me out on the playground either, and he acted like he didn’t want my sandwiches anymore. Ever since Momma had met Rufus and I told her about sharing my sandwiches with him she had been giving me four sandwiches and three apples for lunch. When I saw him and Cody weren’t going to come under the swing at lunchtime I set the bag with their sandwiches and apples in it on the swing set. The bag was still there when the bell rang.

  They quit sitting next to me on the bus too, and Rufus didn’t show up that night to play. After this junk went on for three or four days I sneaked the pillowcase full of dinosaurs out and headed over to where Rufus lived. I knocked on the door and Cody answered. I thought things might be back to being O.K. because Cody gave me a great big smile and said, “Hiya, Kenny, you wanna talk to Rufus?”

  “Hi, Cody.”

  “Just a minute.”

  Cody closed the door and ran back inside. A minute later Rufus came to the door.

  “Hey, Rufus, I thought you might want to play dinosaurs. It’s your turn to be the Americans.”

  Rufus looked at the pillowcase, then back at me. “I ain’t playin’ with you no more, Kenny.”

  “How come?” I knew, though.

  “I thought you was my friend. I didn’t think you was like all them other people,” he said. “I thought you was different.” He didn’t say this stuff like he was mad, he just sounded real, real sad. He pulled Cody out of the doorway and shut it.

  Rufus might as well have tied me to a tree and said, “Ready, aim, fire!” I felt like someone had pulled all my teeth out with a pair of rusty pliers. I wanted to knock on his door and tell him, “I am different,” but I was too embarrassed so I walked the dinosaurs back home.

  I couldn’t believe how sad I got. It’s funny how things could change so much and you wouldn’t notice. All of a sudden I started remembering how much I hated riding the bus, all of a sudden I started remembering how lunchtime under the swing set alone wasn’t very much fun, all of a sudden I started remembering that before Rufus came to Flint my only friend was the world’s biggest dinosaur thief, LJ Jones, all of a sudden I remembered that Rufus and Cody were the only two kids in the whole school (other than Byron and Joey) that I didn’t automatically look at sideways.

  A couple of days later Momma asked me to sit in the kitchen with her for a while.

  “How’s school?”

  “O.K.” I knew she was fishing to find what was wrong and hoped it wouldn’t take her too long. I wanted to tell her what I’d done.

  “Where’s Rufus been? I haven’t seen him lately.”

  It was real embarrassing but tears just exploded out of my face and even though I knew she was going to be disappointed in me I told Momma how I’d hurt Rufus’s feelings.

  “Did you apologize?”

  “Sort of, but he wouldn’t let me talk to him.”

  “Well, give him some time, then try again.”

  “Yes, Momma.”

  The next day after school when the bus pulled up at Rufus’s stop Momma was standing there. When Rufus and Cody got off they said, “Hi, Mrs. Watson,” and gave her their big smiles. The three of them walked toward Rufus’s house. Momma put her hand on Rufus’s head while they walked.

  Momma didn’t say anything when she got home and I didn’t ask her but I kept my eye on the clock. At exactly five-thirty there was a knock and I knew who it was and I knew what I had to do.

  Momma and Joey were in the living room and when they heard the knock everything there got real quiet. Rufus and Cody were standing on the porch smiling a mile a minute. I said, “Rufus, I’m sorry.”

  He said, “That’s O.K.”

  I wasn’t through, though. I really wanted him to know. “I am different.”

  He said, “Shoot, Kenny, you think I don’t know? Why you think I came back? But remember, you said it’s my turn to be the Americans.”

  People started moving around in the living room again. I guess I should have told Momma that I really appreciated her helping me get my friend back but I didn’t have to. I was pretty sure she already knew.

  4. Froze-Up Southern Folks

  Because she’d been born in Alabama, Momma didn’t really know anything about the cold. Even though she’d lived in Flint for fifteen years she still thought cold weather could kill you in a flash. That’s why me and Joey were the warmest kids at Clark Elementary School. Momma wouldn’t let us go out on a cold winter day unless we were wearing a couple of T-shirts, a couple of sweaters, a couple of jackets and a couple of coats, plus gigantic snow pants that hung on your shoulders by suspenders, plus socks and big, black, shiny rubber boots that closed with five metal buckles.

  We wore so many clothes that when we pulled our final coat on we could barely bend our arms. We wore so many clothes that when Byron wasn’t around, the other kids said stuff like “Here come some of them Weird Watsons doing their Mummy imitations.” But the worst part of this was having to take all this stuff off once we got to school.

  It was my job to make sure Joey got out of her coats and things O.K., so after I took all of my junk off I went down to the kindergarten and started working on hers.

  Joey usually looked like a little zombie while I peeled the coats and jackets off of her. She got so hot inside all this stuff that when I finally got down to the last layer she’d be soaking wet and kind of drowsy-looking.

  I took her hood off and unwrapped the last scarf that was around her head. When that last scarf came off there was always a real nice smell, like Joey was a little oven and inside all these clothes she’d baked up her own special perfume, with the smell of shampoo and soap and the pomade Momma put in her hair. That was the only part I didn’t mind. I loved sticking my nose right on top of Joey’s head and smelling all those nice things baked together.

  Momma always kept a little towel in Joey’s last jacket’s pocket so I could make sure her face and hair were dry.

  “Kenny,” she said one time while I wiped the sweat from her forehead and hair, “can’t you do something to stop Mommy from making us get so hot?”

  “I tried, Joey. Momma thinks she’s protecting us from the cold.” I started trying to get Joey’s shoes out of her boots. Whoever invented these boots should be shot because once the boots got ahold of your shoes they wouldn
’t let them go for anything. I pulled everything off Joey’s foot and gave her the boot while I reached my hand inside to tug on the shoe. We pulled and pulled but it seemed like the harder we pulled, the harder the boot sucked the shoe back in.

  “Maybe Byron’ll help make Mommy stop if we let him know how hot we get.”

  Joey was too young to understand that Byron didn’t care about anything but himself. He was kind of nice to her, though, and didn’t treat her like he treated me and other kids.

  We tugged and tugged and the shoe started coming out an inch at a time. Finally it made that funny sound like water going down the drain and slid out of the boot.

  “Whew!” I tied Joey’s shoes back on her feet and used her towel to wipe my own forehead. I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to not listen to what Momma told me.

  The next morning Momma was burying Joey in all her clothes again. Joey was doing the usual whining and complaining. “Mommy, can’t I wear just one jacket, I get too hot! And besides, when I wear all this junk I’m the laughing sock of the morning kindergarten.”

  Momma’s hand came up to cover her mouth but she got serious when she said, “Joey, I don’t want you to be the laughing ‘sock,’ but I don’t want you catching a cold. You’ve got to keep bundled up out there, it’s colder than you think. This cold is very dangerous, people die in it all the time.”

  Joey pouted and said, “Well, if they die in it all the time how come we don’t see any frozen people when we go to school?”

  Momma gave Joey a funny look and pulled her hood over her head. “Sweetheart, do what Mommy says, it’s better to be too warm than too cold.”

  Joey whined a little more while Momma put her boots on her. Me and Byron went outside and waited on the porch. He was trying to look cool but I said to him anyway, “Man, I hate taking all that stuff off Joey when we get to school, she whines and cries the whole time.” I stood next to him and looked at him sideways.