It's Number Nine

By Dwight Mills

In my life, I’ve learned there is an evil that exists in all of us. Every walk of life has corruption. There is not a race, creed, or nationality that is exempt from these truths. The only way I have learned to navigate this life and these truths is to never judge a person, good or bad, based upon surface-level facts. Simply put, if you haven’t walked in that person’s shoes, hold your judgment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648014888

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Family

Growing Up

Joining the Community and Other Changes

Growing Up

First Day of Junior High

About the Author

cover.jpg

It's Number Nine

Dwight Mills

Copyright © 2020 Dwight Mills

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64801-487-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88763-856-0 (Hardcopy)

ISBN 978-1-64801-488-8 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Family

My name is Dwight Mills. I would like to think that I grew up like most people. My family was Southern Baptist. My mother would wash our mouths out if she just thought you were lying. We were brought up to believe that anyone who worked for the government could not lie and had to tell the truth. If they did lie, they would surely lose their job!

I can give you two quick examples of how strict my mother was. On Saturdays, the movie theater, the Granada, in downtown Plainview, was our babysitter. Every Saturday, my mom would drop us off at the Granada with a big bag of popcorn. My older sister was in charge until we got picked up, which was a tough task since she had to watch both my older brother, Bill, and me.

This one Saturday, my mom didn't want to drop us off. Why? Because Mary Poppins was showing and she had heard that there was some witchcraft in the show. But they couldn't find anyone, so here we are, about to watch Mary Poppins. All day long we tried to say it: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. We made it a competition as to who could say it first.

That night at the supper table, it just came out, and I was so proud of myself! But before I could taste the taste of victory, I had to taste that bar of soap. I could hear Melinda telling my mom that it was a word from the movie. That just made it worse!

It wasn't long after that I was home sick from school. My mom had gone to pharmacy where she worked to get me some medicine. I was watching the parade in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot! I was home by myself. I watched the whole thing, and I remember being very stunned. They went to commercial when the limo went out of sight at the hospital.

They played several commercials, then I heard my mom pull into the garage. I went and opened the door. My mom had a sack full of groceries in her hands.

I said, Mom, they just shot the president!

She dropped the groceries, grabbed me by my arm, dragged me over to the sink, and shoved that bar of soap down my throat. She proceeded to give me a speech about making stories up, and especially about the president. About that time, they came back on live TV and said that this is the first time that they are going to rewind what we had just seen and they are going to see if they can show it again.

As it was playing, my mom stopped washing my mouth out and couldn't believe that the president was shot here in Texas. My mom never apologized! That was the only time she washed my mouth out and didn't whip me.

Growing Up

It wasn't long, and we moved from Plainview to Rockport, Texas. The state was looking for people who could weld and was willing to teach it. My dad applied and was accepted, but he had to go and apply at each different school. My dad had his own shop fixing farm equipment, but the idea of teaching and getting a regular paycheck was appealing. We were poor, so my dad built a camper; there was enough room for six. We were all told we were going on our first family vacation down to the coast.

All the schools were along the coast. First we went to Galveston, didn't stay there long. Next, we ended up on Port Aransas. During the day the five of us would stay on the beach while my dad was at job interviews. All the school districts in this area were looking for teachers. My parents had several places to choose from, but they settled at Rockport.

Joining the Community and Other Changes

The church had a fake pastor! No, the pastor's name was Brother Fake. This church was a lot smaller than we previously attended, but we were made to feel right at home. They accepted my dad's deaconship and made him part of the deacons right off the bat. He was even able to start singing in the choir. We all got involved.

At this time, I was eight, about to turn nine. We were living at the airport housing. The houses were owned by Rockport Yacht and supply. They were a lot of the reason my parents chose Rockport over the other towns. My dad was to work on Saturdays and all summer and on Christmas holidays. They were going to pay him too.

We were poor even though both my parents worked. Before we even started school, the only one that was not collecting a paycheck was my younger brother, Chris, and he was still in diapers. Melinda had gotten a job waiting tables. The first night she was at work, the busboy quit. So my sister told them that she could get her brother Bill to take that job, and by the end of the week, I was standing on a milk crate, washing dishes. My dad had to go to summer school for two years so he can get his teacher's certificate. He barely got out of high school.

When my dad got back in town from that college, the church had been planning this get-together. Someone volunteered their daughter to watch Bill and I. Melinda was at work. That night, after I took my bath, the babysitter assaulted me sexually. I knew what she had done was wrong, but I knew if I said something, my mom would think I was lying. So I just kept my mouth shut.

Growing Up

After a couple of years washing dishes, Captain Brownie came back in the kitchen where I was washing dishes and offered me a job as a deckhand. Bill had been a deckhand for him the summer before, but this year, Bill had gotten a job on a deep-sea boat. The Browns lived at the airport. There was Captain Brownie and his wife, their son, Joe, and their two daughters. They lived inside the circle right behind us to the south. I was eleven at this time, and Joe was just about to turn sixteen. Joe was the one who was going to train me. He taught me more than just how to fish.

Every summer, a Catholic school from Victoria would come and stay at the Sea Gun Inn where the Whooping Crane was docked at. Several of these girls knew Joe from past summers, so when they got here, they would come down to the docks and wait for us to dock. The girls were coming down to visit this monastery just up the road.

Woodstock had just taken place. Joe thought wouldn't it be awesome to have all these girls go skinny-dipping! So he told these girls that he would supply the beer for a late-night swim. It was to take place after the moonlight cruise that we had on Wednesday and Saturday nights.

It was Saturday night. We had just docked. Several of the girls were there waiting. They told Joe to bring enough beer for all of them. Joe told them that when we got through cleaning the boat we would meet them at the pool. On Wednesday and Saturday nights, Captain would leave us and go home. He trusted us to do our job.

There were coolers under the wharf. That was where the beer that was sold on the Whooping Crane was kept. Joe had keys to the cooler, so he went and got four cases. We used a dolly to carry the cases to the pool.

When we got there, we saw there were at least a dozen girls there. They started drinking that beer down so fast that we had to go get more. Joe was very surprised that so far no tops had come off yet. We took another four cases. I didn't drink, and Joe was drinking very slowly. Several hours had passed, and we needed to get home. The girls all still had their clothes on, but we had to get home.

The next morning, we were right behind the captain, as we turned into the resort parking lot down by the docks. To my surprise and slight panic, there was two sheriff cars with their lights on. My dad just dropped me off and left. Captain Brownie was trying hardhead up to the docks, like every morning, when the sheriff and the resort manager came over and asked Captain where everyone was last night. Captain Brownie, without missing a beat, said that he had taken us all to the movies in Corpus after the cruise last night. The manager looked at the sheriff and said it must have been the other boys.

This was the first time I ever actually knew that an adult was lying.

Captain Brownie asked, Why, what happened?

The manager told him that a couple of late-night fishermen heard a commotion at the pool. It was two thirty in the morning. When they got to the pool, there was all these underage girls drunk and skinny-dipping. So they called the cops. When the cops got there, they were still swimming. So the cops went looking for the nuns that were supposed to be watching the girls. The nuns had picked up a couple of men at the resort bar and were having their own party. Needless to say, they never came and stayed at the resort again.

When Joe got to work, I asked him if he had told his dad about what we had done, and he said no. The captain wasn't only lying to cover our ass but more to cover his ass! When the girls were asked where the beer came from, the only answer they gave them was Two guys.

We never heard another word about it. When Captain Brownie lied about taking us to the movies, that was the first time I had ever heard an adult actually lie that I knew of.

I worked on the Whooping Crane for two years. I was getting tons of letters from different girls I had met out at the resort, so my mom made a new rule every summer: we had to change jobs. She told me since I wasn't going college I needed to discover what trade I would be good at. It wasn't long, and she had found my next job. A man in her Sunday school class was a cabinet maker, and he needed a helper.

This was the summer I was going to enter the sixth grade. I had been going to Fulton Elementary. My whole sixth-grade class consisted of fourteen kids. Well, all summer, Bill would keep teasing me about how horrible junior high was. I was going to be thrown into the seventh grade, where there was going to be about two hundred Mexican Americans. All the kids that I knew from Fulton would be all split up, and I would be lucky if I had a class with one student that I knew!

Bill would talk about fights; they would just come and pick on the smaller white kids and beat them up. He would tell me that they would form circles around you so no one could see that they were beating the hell out of you. I was scared to go to school.

First Day of Junior High

We had just moved from the airport, and my parents had bought a house just four blocks from school. I didn't have to ride the school bus anymore; I could walk to school. Breakfast was something that was usually only fixed on Sunday morning. But since we didn't have to wake up so early to catch the bus, my mom felt she had time to cook breakfast. She even made me drink a glass of orange juice. I really didn't care for orange juice.

Walking up to the school, seeing all those kids every step closer, I just wanted to turn and run home. But I knew if I did that my ass would be bleeding that evening. My parents were big on going to regular school, junior high and high school. They always told us a high school diploma was all you needed. My sister needed to go to college because she was a girl, and for her to get a good-paying job, she had to get a college diploma.

I looked up and found my name on the bulletin board, and found my first class; it was art class. By the time I got there, all the seats were full except this one back in the corner. This was a new school, but it had no air conditioners. We had crank-out windows on one side of the room. On the other they had slats at angles. These were about two feet wide, and they were placed in the middle of the wall at the top and the bottom. This was our teachers first day of teaching. To my surprise, there were about four kids in the class that were from Fulton.

After reading the roll call, she gave us a small art project to do to see what type of talent you had. Back in my corner, it was getting pretty hot. The teacher still had all the windows cranked shut. It was humid. My stomach was upset; it was talking to me. I don't normally get sick, but I was feeling bad.

It got so bad that I had to go ask the teacher if I could go see the nurse. She jumped up from her desk and said, I can't believe you, you can't make it through your first class of the first day. When I see your dad after school, I'm going to tell him you were trying to skip school. She told me to go and sit back down and finish my work.

I started back to my desk. I got