The money collected from the twenty-three families living back in the hollow of Foggy Mountain would be enough for a decent bunch of store-bought flowers from the shop in Erwin. One of the Haskell girls would write every family’s name on the card to be given to Junior’s parents. There would probably be bigger, fancier wreaths from Mr. Mullins’s fellow managers at the railroad, maybe even one from the president of the railroad himself, considering the circumstances, but the neighbors would want to send one anyway, to show that their thoughts and prayers were with the family in this time of sorrow.
Davy was still in mourning for his bicycle. Nobody was collecting flowers for it. Two dollars it had cost. Two dollars earned in solitary misery with sweat and briar-pricks, picking blackberries in the abandoned fields, and selling them door to door at ten cents a gallon. It takes a lot of blackberries to make a gallon. Getting two dollars’ worth of dimes had cost Davy two precious weeks of summer-two weeks of working most of the day dragging a gallon bucket through the briars, sidestepping snakes and poison oak, while everybody else went swimming or played ball at the old gravel pit. Two weeks without candy, soda pop, or Saturday matinees.
Saturday afternoons were the hardest. Davy would be alone in a field of brambles, so hot that the air was wavy when you looked into the distance, with the mountains shutting him in like the green walls of an open air prison. Somewhere on the other side of that ridge, his friends were having fun. Hour after hour he stooped over blackberry thickets, and to keep his mind off his sore back and his stuck fingers he’d try to imagine what was playing at the picture show. The cowboys, like Buck Jones or Tom Mix and his horse Tony, were his favorite, but he went every Saturday he could afford, no matter what was playing. When you’re eleven years old and home seems duller than ditch water, anything on the screen is better than real life. You had to want something real bad to miss the movies on account of it. Right now the movie house was showing Hills of Periclass="underline" Buck Jones helps a young woman save her gold mine from outlaws. The pictures were silent, but the dialogue was printed on cards that were projected onto the screen. Davy reckoned most of the boys in the county had learned more about reading at the picture show than they had in the schoolhouse. At Saturday matinees, with all those boys reading the lines out loud as they flashed on the screen, the theater hummed with a steady drone that sounded like the Johnsons’ beehives at swarm time.
Davy’d missed most of the Phantom serial. He’d had to make do with a summary of the story from Johnny Suttle, who forgot bits of the story and kept repeating the parts he liked. But Davy didn’t care. There’d be other movies, and his reward for missing this one was his very own bicycle. He had done it.
His hard-earned two dollars bought one bicycle frame with no accessories: no tires, no brakes, no pedals. He had made tires for the wheels himself, with a little help from Old Lady Turner’s yard. She had never missed that twelve feet of red rubber garden hose, and the tires he made from them were the perfect width and strength for the homemade bike. He’d caught hell, though, for cutting Mama’s clothesline and taking the galvanized wire to run through the four lengths of garden hose so that he could fasten them around the wheel rims. The beating he got for taking the clothesline had been worth it, though. Now he was riding.
Davy’s two-dollar bike had cast-off railroad spikes for pedals, and the Morris coaster brakes didn’t work, but that didn’t matter. He was riding. Dad had brought home an almost-empty can of blue paint from one of the railroad shops, and Davy had painted his bike so that from a distance it looked almost store-bought.
Up and down the gravel pit he wheeled and turned, dipping into the chug-holes and jumping out on the far side high enough to clear an upright Quaker Oats box set there as an obstacle. If he needed to stop the bike, he pressed his foot on the front wheel. That worked fairly well for solitary riding, but when he wanted to get into the bicycle polo games in Wells’s pasture, he needed something more reliable.
Bicycle polo was played with an old softball and croquet mallets that one of the boys had scrounged from somebody’s trash pile. They would divide up into teams and race up and down the pasture on their bikes, swatting at the softball. You needed brakes, though, to keep from crashing into your teammates, or so that you could change directions suddenly when the ball was intercepted by the other team and swatted off in the other direction. After a few hours of tinkering, he had repaired the Morris coaster brakes with a brake drum fashioned from a Coca-Cola bottle cap. After two or three hours of hard riding, the cap would grind up, leaving him brakeless again, but by then the polo game would be over, and he could go home and make repairs for the next match.
He had been able to hold his own just fine on his jerry-rigged bike-that is, until Junior Mullins showed up for the game, riding piggyback on Charlie Bestor’s motorcycle. Davy thought Junior and Charlie were two of a kind: big arrogant bully, little arrogant bully. Charlie was a high school senior who had been going to ROTC Camp at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, every summer. On the last trip he had brought home the motorcycle, and now he roared up and down the paved roads, promising his toadies rides on his motorcycle, and lording it over every other boy around.
Junior Mullins was the kind of big, loud kid that other boys hate but nobody stands up to. His father was a manager down at the railroad, working steady, so Junior had clothes that weren’t hand-me-downs, and meat sandwiches and an apple or an orange in his lunch box, while everybody else had corn bread and a cold potato. Junior Mullins had a store-bought bike, a shiny red one, brand-new, that his dad had bought in Johnson City for his birthday. Junior thought that he was better than the other boys in the neighborhood because his father was the boss of everybody else’s father, because the Mullins family lived in a brick house, and because Junior got a toy truck and a model airplane for Christmas, instead of just an orange, a stick of rock candy, and a new pair of shoes. Junior enforced his superiority with the ruthless cruelty of a ten-year-old tyrant. His weapons were scorn, derision, taunting, and, as a last resort, his fists. Davy tried to stay out of his way, and most of the time he succeeded, but nobody could escape Junior Mullins’s notice forever.
Davy’s turn came in Wells’s pasture, when Junior Mullins showed up just as the boys were starting a game of polo. Charlie Bestor stopped the motorcycle a few yards away from the group, and Junior climbed down, his red face curled into its usual sneer. He was wearing a pair of blue dungarees without a single patch on them and a leather jacket. “You babies still riding bikes?” he said. “We’ve got a real set of wheels.” He jerked his thumb toward the motorcycle.
Charlie Bestor patted his motorcycle and called out, “You fellows want to race?”
Johnny Suttle scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dirt. “We were just fixing to play polo,” he mumbled.
Junior Mullins hooted. “Hear that, Charlie? They were fixing to play polo! You sissies don’t know how to play polo,” he announced, swaggering over to the gaggle of bikers. “I reckon I’ll just have to teach you.”
“You can’t play without a bike,” Dewey Givens pointed out. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he hadn’t said them, because Junior’s face lit up with spiteful glee, and he stepped back to survey the taut faces of his victims. He was showing off for his big-shot friend now, which would make him more vicious than ever. He let the boys squirm in silence while he pretended to consider the matter.