Me n Poot Make It Four

I was asleep on the couch when Poot come over and Mom told me to get up. Remember I had asked her not to let me go? She MADE me go.

I know, this is getting pretty predictable. Poot come into school Friday morning and asked me for 79 cents. I initially protested, but by the end of first period gave him the money so he could buy lighter fluid and a lighter and we could burn down another house.

Wrong.

This time I put up a heck of a fight. I moved to another desk. I refused to read his notes. I walked away from him during recess as he followed me around the schoolyard trying to tell me his “plan.” It got where now that just the words, “I got a plan” sent me to the bathroom in a trot.

“We ain’t running today,” Mizz Hodge, Poot told Momma after she woke me up that afternoon. “We just going down to the river to throw some rocks.”

“Well, I think that’s wonderful. Zane, you get up and go with Robert. No boy ever got in trouble throwing rocks into a river.”

So that’s how Poot played my momma like a piano. Again.

School had been terrible that day. The stress of burning houses was really working on me. I made a zero on a history test when I just sat there and didn’t even write my name on it. I was thinking what was going to happen to us when we got caught. I still remembered the shame when me n Poot got throwed out of our Boy Scout Troop when I burned Rudolph Johnson’s eyebrows off.

We was at Camp Tallaha and late one night I poured half a pint of whiskey on the fire cause I didn’t want it, and nobody else would drink it either. I never did like whiskey. It was hot, tasted bad, burned my stomach, and always made me sick. When I poured the whiskey on the fire, it flamed up and got Timmy’s eyebrows, some of his hair, and turned his nose a bright red. That’s how come we took to calling him Rudolph.

Rudolph started yelling like a banshee and that led to all the scout masters getting up which led to an investigation which led to me n Poot having our bags searched which led to them finding cigarettes, beer, chewing tobacco, snuff, and magazines that had pictures of nekkid women in them. Our Scoutmaster— I can’t remember his name, but we called him “Killer” and I once saw him cry when we was roughhousing and kicked out a door at the church where our troop met— drove us home the next day.

Momma got sick and had to go to bed. Dad interrogated me about where I got all “the stuff.” I had found the whiskey and magazines behind Naman’s Motel. I found a lot of booze and mags there, and that’s how I knowed I didn’t like whiskey and vodka. I just took it on the camping trip to show out. I lied about the other stuff and said I had given five bucks to an older boy who had a car and asked him to get me all the good stuff five dollars would buy. Dad wanted to know who the boy was, and I said I never seen him before or since. He didn’t believe me, of course, but he couldn’t shake me off my story.

I got grounded for two weeks which meant me n Poot couldn’t have no fun and I had to pretend to be miserable. Momma was the one who was always telling me about the Penitentiary. She was devastated that I had gotten Robert into so much trouble, and I think one reason she always let me go with Poot was she was flattered Poot’s parents still let him hang out with me. Poot’s dad was a big man at one of the banks and his momma was always in the Commonwealth doing something for some charity. Poot had short hair and always spoke real nice to Mom, so he could do no wrong.

When Robert Fitzgerald Buckley, “Poot,” got arrested in 1975 on fourteen (FOURTEEN!) counts, Momma had to go to bed again, this time for three days. And Dad, who was always pretty laid back about us doing bad stuff, was stunned out of his mind. He come into the den at lunch and wanted to talk about Poot, and he didn’t even refer to him as Robert.

“Did you know he was that wild?” he asked me.

“Oh heck no, Dad. Poot wouldn’t never do nuttin wrong. I don’t know how this could have ever happened.”

He knowed I was telling one, but all I was doing was following the same line of thinking and talking they had expressed for the last ten years. He walked out of the room that day and never mentioned Poot again for the rest of his life. Not to me.

I was conflicted, confused. For once, I wasn’t with him and for once they couldn’t blame it all on me. I felt happy and sorry all at the same time. But all that is a whole ’nother story. Maybe I’ll tell it one day, and maybe I won’t.

That Friday at Bankston was one of my worst days ever. The pressure of me n Poot having had so much fun had built up like a mountain of dirt on my chest. All day I was sort of sleep walking. Every teacher I had asked me what was wrong. Several kids asked me what was wrong. Even Bailey seen me walking zombie-like in the hall and asked if I was OK.

I give Poot the money right before fifth period.

We rode our mopeds up Medallion to Riverside Drive, but instead of stopping where we usually did we went down the levee to get away from anybody who might show up at the swing. Poot’s plan was to burn the house in mid-afternoon. No one would expect that. When I asked him what if somebody showed up at the swing and seen us on the other side of the river, he said we just wouldn’t burn the house. Ain’t nothing odd about us swimming across the river, he said. When I asked how we could possibly set it on fire without being seen, he said we walk to and from IN the ditch instead of BESIDE it, and we crawl the ditch on the side of the road and cross over into the cotton field which would give us cover. We crawl between two rows of cotton and come around behind the house.

The big deal was getting out of there once the fire was set. If we crawled back it would take too long, and somebody would prolly see us. So Poot said we needed to run as soon as the fire was started, so he went to Gibson’s and bought us ski masks to wear so if somebody seen us run across the road, they couldn’t identify us.

Besides all that, we had to do it now, Poot said, cause the river was low and easy to swim. As soon as it rained, the river would rise and the banks would get muddy showing out footprints. And the leaves were just starting to fall. Soon we would lose the cover of the trees.

When I asked Poot how come he had to borrow money from me to buy lighter fluid every time we burned a house down but he had money to buy ski masks, he wouldn’t answer. That’s how come I think Poot just wanted to make me do stuff. Everything was a game with him. We had to outdo Tooter and his bunch. He had to make me do stuff I didn’t want to do. We had to get in the paper somehow. 

Did I mention that? After the first Star of the West Plantation fire, there had been a couple of lines in the paper about the Greenwood Fire Department responding to a fire in an abandoned house. Wade Road is out of the city limits, but the Greenwood Fire Department always responded to fires in the county if they was close by. After the second fire, there was a short article mentioning that the two houses had been purposely set ablaze. We didn’t know it yet when we left the house for the fourth one because the Friday paper hadn’t come out, but after the third house, the sheriff was warning people in that area to be on the lookout because there was “an arsonist on the loose.”

So we swum the river wearing only our ski masks and walked inside the tree line to our stashed shorts and shoes. Then we went up the ditch to Wade Road just like we planned and stopped there to take a long look. The ski masks were hot, but they gave me a real comfort that no one would know who we were even if they seen us.

Everything was quiet except for a crop duster in the distance defoliating the delta’s ubiquitous sea of cotton, and a jay bird that sounded like he was scolding something, a squirrel maybe, in the woods behind us and to our left. Since Poot always done the lighting and since it was daytime, he told me to stay put and be the watch out. If something went wrong, I was to yell out and then run. He said I wasn’t to worry about him or nothin’ cause he could hide in the cotton and eventually get across the river alone. Just get gone.

So Poot left the ditch we were hiding in and crawled on his belly in the road ditch till he got across from where the cotton rows ran right down to the road on the other side. He looked back at me and I waved him over. In nothing flat Poot was in the cotton field invisible to everyone except God.

I seen the cotton plants swaying as Poot made his way farther into the field to work his way around behind the house. Then the plants stopped moving way too soon and Poots ski mask covered head come sticking out of the field. He was beside the window and I knowed he had changed his mind about going all the way around to the back. No need cause the cotton was only about thirty feet from the window and nobody could see him unless they drove down the road.

I knowed he was waiting on me to give him the signal, so I give him a thumbs up and motioned him towards the house. In a flash he was at the window with one arm draped over the window sill. He was pouring the lighter fluid on the floor. I saw when he dropped the lighter and he looked at me. Everything was still quiet, so I motioned for him to come on. 

Me n Poot started walking, this time very slowly, down the ditch towards the river. We didn’t go far before we looked back and already we could see yellow flames.

Then a siren sounded. Close. Blue lights. A sheriff’s car flew in, slammed on brakes, and came to a screeching to a halt. Two uniformed men jumped out.

“Run!” Poot yelled.

And we did. We sped down the ditch, branches of trees slicing our skin. When we made it to the river, we didn’t stop to hide our shoes like we usually done but run on upstream and then waded in. Once in the water, we sunk our shorts, shoes, and ski masks and then swam over as fast as we could. We didn’t waste no time redressing and speeding off on our mopeds.

Was we caught?

Did they see us?

How did they get there so fast?

After we swam back across, redressed, and got on our mopeds, we had to ride around till we dried off before we could go home. After we dried, we stopped at Little Red School House to talk.

“Deny. If they come talk to us, just deny ever thang,” Poot lectured.

“We’re going to prison,” I kept saying while trying not to cry.

“Deny,” Poot said again. “Except we DID swim the river. We swim the river almost every day. If they find tracks in the ditch, there’re shoed tracks. We ain’t got no shoes over there any more for them to find. If they come talk to us, we swum across but we didn’t do nuthin we didn’t see nuthin. Got it?”

“Got it,” I answered as I restarted my moped, headed for Harding Street, and wondered if Mom would ever forgive me for getting Poot sent to prison.