“Never could get used to the taste of the stuff.”
“In this family,” Mother said in her don’t-cross-me voice, “the children eat what is placed before them. Without question. We hope you’ll do the same, Johnny.”
He raised one eyebrow and grinned at her almost as though humoring her. He drank the milk down and wiped his mouth on the back of the scarred hand. “I still don’t like it,” he said.
Dad quickly changed the subject. After lunch he said, “Now you kids run out and play.”
Johnny headed for the garage. Once upon a time it was a barn. He went around it, then dug a cigarette butt out of his pocket along with a kitchen match. He lit it carefully after striking the match with his thumbnail. He took one long deep drag, huffed out the smoke, butted the cigarette, and put it back in his pocket just as Looie came around the corner of the barn, her face screwed up ready to cry if we were out of sight. She came toward us with a wide happy smile.
“ ’Fraid she’d snitch,” Johnny said.
“She would,” I agreed.
“I’m going to get sick of this Johnny, Johnny business,” he said. “The name’s Stoney. Stoney Wotnack.”
“Ha! Stoney!” Looie said. “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.”
“That’s right, doll,” he said.
I couldn’t think of what to say to him. It was almost like trying to talk to Auntie Kate. He said. “What’s to do around this dump, Jim?”
I said eagerly, “Well, we can climb the apple trees, and there’s a crick the other side of the hill to fish in, and I’m making a cave in the crick bank and...” My voice trailed off. He hadn’t changed expression. There hadn’t been the tiniest gleam of interest in his eyes. “What do you like to do?” I asked weakly.
Stoney shrugged. “Depends. I get a charge out of heisting candy from the five and dime. You can sell the stuff for enough to go to the movies. You can smoke in the balcony. Or you tell a guy you watch his car he’ll give you two bits. And let him know that maybe you don’t get the two bits first, he gets a hole in a tire. Or at night you can go hunting in the alleys for drunks. Roll ’em for everything but their clothes.”
I couldn’t follow him very clearly. And I didn’t want to display my ignorance by asking questions. But he had opened up new and exciting vistas of experience. I saw myself sitting debonairly in a movie balcony puffing on a cigar.
He sighed. “But you can’t do that stuff here. This place is... empty. No noises except bugs and birds. My old man was on a prison farm once. He didn’t like it.”
I said, “Want to look around?”
He shrugged. All the things that had looked pretty good to me turned out to be as childish as the pictures on the walls of my room. I had been proud of our six acres, the same as Dad, but under Stoney’s cold stare everything dwindled away to a horrible, insipid emptiness.
At one place he came to life. The Branton twins and I had gotten hold of a feed sack, stuffed it with sawdust, and hung it by a long rope from one of the rafters in the barn. When Stoney saw it, his shoulders went back and he strutted up to it. He went into a crouch, jabbed at it lightly and expertly with a flicking left, and thumped his right fist deep into it. He bounced around on his toes, jabbing, hooking, snuffing hard through his nose. The thump of his fist into the sawdust gave me a horridly vivid picture of how that fist would feel in my stomach.
He finished and said, “Little workout’s a good thing.”
“Yeah,” I said, consciously imitating his cold tone.
“Another couple years and I try the geegees.”
“The what?” I said.
“Golden Gloves, kid. Golden Gloves. That’s a life. Win in your division and turn pro and play it smart and you’re all set. Better than lugging a shine box around in front a the Forty-Second Street Library, kid. I watch ’em work out at the gym. Look, we got to get a bigger bag and fasten it more solid. It swings too much.”
“Yeah,” I said coldly.
“Got any funny books?” he asked. “I feel like reading. The crime kind.”
“They’ll only let me have cowboy ones,” I said apologetically.
“Them big fairies in the pink shirts give me the itch.”
“I like Roy Rogers,” I said defensively.
He stared at me and chuckled coldly. “Roy Rogers! Ha!”
We walked aimlessly around for a time. I suggested weakly, “We could pretend something.”
He didn’t even bother to answer that one. I went moodily back to the house alone. Looie was trudging around on the pointless walk, following Stoney. I didn’t like her following me usually, but this sudden shift of allegiance annoyed me. I sat in a chair on the porch. Dad came out and said, “Where’s Johnny?”
“Walking,” I said.
“Can’t you think up a game or something?”
“He doesn’t like games.”
Mother came out and heard that last part. She said to Dad, “It’s quite an adjustment for the boy. I think we ought to leave him alone for a little while. Polite, isn’t he?”
Stoney did not come out of his mood of chill disdain. Within three days he had settled into a pattern. He fixed the sawdust bag and spent two hours every morning ‘working out.’ Dad lined up some chores for him, and after his workout he did his chores quickly and expertly. He was silent at the table, speaking when spoken to. In the afternoon he wandered around and around, tagged by Looie. She talked to him constantly, and I never heard him say anything to her that was longer than one word.
Mother and Dad began to really work on bringing him out of what they called his ‘shell.’ As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t in any shell. There just wasn’t much around to interest him. Mother and Dad asked him a lot of questions to get him talking. But it didn’t work. Then they took us on rides, and we went to the movies and went swimming. But nothing did any good. Stoney was obedient, clean, and reserved. And I never saw him smile.
On the eleventh day of his visit Dad had set us to work grubbing the tall grass out from around the base of the apple trees. The dogged way Stoney worked made it necessary for me to work just as hard. Looie had found a hop toad and she was urging him along by poking him with a twig.
Suddenly there was a loud neighing sound, and the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, came galloping down the hill. They are the biggest kids of their age in our school. They have long faces and bright blue eyes and not very much sense.
Stoney straightened up and looked at them and I heard him say one short word under his breath. I saw that word once, chalked on a fence. I had wondered how to say it.
They ran around us three times and pulled up, panting and snorting. They both talked at once, much too loud, and I finally got the idea that there was some kind of sickness at Camp Wah-Na-Hoo and everybody had been sent home.
Stoney stood and stared at them. Kim said, “Hey, you’re from the Fund, Mom said.”
“You want it drawed for you in a picture?” Stoney asked.
“Yipes, he can draw,” Cam yelled. Kim jumped up and grabbed an apple tree branch. He swung his feet up and got them over the branch, let go with his hands, and hung by his knees. Then he started a gentle swinging. At the right part in the swing, he straightened his legs and dropped, half twisting in the air so his feet hit first. He had to touch his hands to the ground for balance.
Cam stared at Stoney. “Okay, let’s see you do that.” Both the twins seem to be made of nothing but hard, rubbery muscle and pink skin.
Stoney gave a snort of disgust and started to work again. “Scared to try, even,” Cam shouted.
Stoney straightened up. “What does it get me, pal, falling out of a tree? Once I see a guy fall out a thirty-story window. When he hit, he splashed. There you got something.”