Cam and Kim went into their act. They hung onto each other and yelped. They gasped with laughter. They pounded on each other and jumped up and down and gasped about thirty-story windows. When they do that to me, I get so mad that tears run right out of my eyes. Stoney acted as if they weren’t there. After a while the twins got tired. Kim snatched Looie’s toad, and they went racing up through the orchard, yelling that they’d see me later. Looie was yelling about the loss of her ‘hopper.’
When they were seventy feet away, Kim threw the toad back to us. We heard it hit up in one of the trees, but it didn’t come down. Probably wedged up there.
Looie was screaming. Stoney said, “Pals of yours?”
“Well, they live in the next house.”
He gave me a contemptuous look and took Looie’s hand. “Come on, Sis, and we’ll get us another hopper.” She went snuffling off with him. I was about to complain because he had left me with the work, and then I noticed that he’d finished the last of his trees.
The next time I saw them, Stoney was leaning against the barn, his eyes half shut against the sun glare. Looie had a new hopper and she was hopping along behind it.
With the Branton kids back, the tempo of things stepped up. They galloped into the yard in the late afternoon. Stoney stood and watched them without expression. They separated to gallop on each side of him. Kim dropped onto his knees, and Cam gave Stoney a shove. Stoney went over hard. He got up and brushed himself off.
Cam and Kim circled and came back to stand panting in front of him. “Well?” Cam said.
“Well what?” Stoney said.
“What are you going to do about it?”
Stoney hunched his shoulders. He looked at the house and for a moment he seemed to be sniffing the air like a hound. Then the tension went out of him. “I’m not going to do anything, friend.”
“Yella!” Kim yelled.
Stoney looked wryly amused. “Could be, friend. Could be.”
I was disgusted with Stoney. I headed out of the yard and hollered back to the twins, “Come on, guys. Leave him with Looie.”
We went over to the Branton place. I was late getting back to supper. I came in with my shirt torn because they had ganged me. They hurt my arm, but I got over it before I went home. I didn’t want Stoney to see me crying.
The next morning the twins came over and used the punching bag for a tackling dummy. The rope broke and the bag split when it hit the floor. Stoney leaned against the wall and watched them moodily. I knew the way the twins operated. They were trying to get a rise out of Stoney. And once they did, it would be too bad for Stoney. The twins work as a unit. In school they cleaned up on Tom Clayden, who is fourteen and pretty big. Tom quit when Kim was holding him and Cam was hitting him.
After they had gone, I said to Stoney, “Shall we fix the bag?”
He shrugged. “I only got two more days here. Skip it.”
The following afternoon I was up in the room working on my stamps. A bunch of approval items had come in the mail, and I was budgeting my allowance to cover the ones I had to have.
It was getting late. I knew that Looie was trudging around after the restless Stoney Wotnack. The sound came from afar. A thin, high screaming. I knew right away that it was Looie’s built-in screech. She uses it for major catastrophies.
Dad wasn’t back from the office yet. I got out in back the same time Mother did, but Mother beat me to Looie. Looie was too gone from screeching to make any specific complaints. Mother went over her, bone by bone, and dug under her blonde hair looking for scalp wounds.
All we could find were some angry-looking rope burns on her ankles and wrists and a little lump on her forehead right at the hair line.
When the screeching began to fade into words, I told Mother that she was yelling about Indians. We got her into the house, and finally she calmed down so that Mother could understand her too.
Mother said, “Oh, it was just those silly Branton twins playing Indian.”
For my money, silly was a pretty lightweight word. The Brantons throw themselves into the spirit of any game they play. I got tangled in one of their Indian games the summer before, and Mr. Branton had to come over and apologize to dad about the arrow hole in my left leg in the back. The Brantons were kept in their own yard for a week, and when they got out, they twisted my arm for telling.
Just then Stoney Wotnack came sauntering down across the lot with his hands in his pockets. He was whistling. It was the first time I had ever heard him whistle.
Mother turned on him real quick and said, “Johnny, didn’t you know those big twins were picking on little Looie?”
“They quit after a while,” he said idly. I could see she wanted to ask him more, but he went on into the house.
Looie’s yelping had simmered down to dry sobs that were a minute apart. I could see by the expression on her face that she was thinking of something to ask for. She knew that she usually got a “Yes” answer right after she was hurt.
Mother said, “When your father comes home, I’m sending him over to the Brantons. This sort of thing has happened too often.”
Dad came home a half hour later. I saw a little gleam in his eyes as Mother told him about Looie. Dad gently rubbed his hands together and said, “A decent local government would put a bounty on those two. But I couldn’t go out after them. It would be too much like shooting horses, and I love horses.”
“This is nothing to kid about, Sam,” Mother snapped.
“Okay, okay. I’ll go have words with Harvey Branton. But if they carry me home on a shutter, you’ll know it went further than words. Remember, darling, he’s the guy who lifted the front end of our car out of the ditch last winter.”
“Just give him a piece of your mind.”
Dad turned to me. “Jimmy, would you care if you weren’t friends any more with the twins? I can tell Harvey to keep them off the property.”
“Have I been friends with them?”
Dad stood up. “Wish me luck,” he said.
Just then a car came roaring into our driveway and the car door slammed almost before the motor stopped running.
Harvey Branton came striding across the grass to our front porch. He walked with his big fists swinging and a set look around the mouth.
Twenty feet from the porch he yelled, “I want a word with you, Sam Baker!”
From the way he looked, if I were Dad, I would have headed for the storeroom in the attic. But Dad came out onto the porch and leaned against a pillar and held his lighter to his cigarette. “Just coming over to see you, Harvey.”
Harvey Branton pulled up to a stop, his face a foot from Dad’s. “You’re harboring a criminal in this house, Baker. This is a decent section. I won’t have you bringing city riffraff up here to pick on my children.”
“Pick on your children!” Dad said with surprise.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know anything about it, Baker. My two boys were worked over by an expert. I have the whole story from them. That gutter rat you’re boarding attacked them. Kim has two black eyes, and so does Cam. Their mother has driven them down to the doctor. Kim’s nose has to be set, and we think that he’ll have to take stitches on the inside of Cam’s lip. A man couldn’t have punished them worse.”
Dad said mildly, “Harvey, I was coming over to tell you that unless you could keep those two pony-sized kids of yours from picking on Looie, you could keep them off the property.”
“Harmless play,” Harvey rasped. “Don’t change the subject. I’m talking about brutal assault, and that riffraff is your guest, so you can damn well assume the responsibility.”
Mother came out onto the porch and said, “I just got the rest of the story from Looie. She wandered away from Johnny, and your two fiends jumped her and tied her to one of the saplings in the back pasture and piled brush around her legs. They had matches and they told Looie they were going to burn her alive. They were holding lighted matches by that dry brush. She said they had red paint on their faces.” Mother’s voice sounded funny and brittle, like icicles in the winter.