Swear to Howdy (11 page)

“Nothin'!” Joey cried.

“He was tryin' to
kill
himself is what's goin' on!” I yelled. Then I snatched up the gun and hurled it out the window.

Joey's mama was in the room now, too. “What?” she cried. “What did you say?”

“Outta here, woman!” Joey's dad hollered at her, then came at us, muttering, “Looks like we got a coward for a son.”

His head was lollin' a bit, and his steps were staggerin'. Like his body was trying to sleep while the rest of him was hungry for blood.

Before he could lay a hand on either of us, I grabbed Joey by the wrist and yanked him with me over the bed, out the door, down the hall, and out of the house. And I kept on yankin' him, across his yard, then mine, as I hollered at the top of my lungs, “Daaaad! Dad, come quick! Daaaaad!”

Joey's dad was behind us, shouting, “Get back here, boy! Get back here now!”

Mama and Dad were already on the porch, looking paler than the Lost Ghost. “What's going on? Russell, what happened?”

Sissy was out on the porch now, too, wrapped in her robe, and Joey's mama was racing our way, crying, “Bobby! Bobby, stop!”

“Get home, woman!” he hollered back at her. “Get!”

My heart was thumpin' like a trapped rabbit's. My knees were wobbly as noodles. But I held on to Joey tight and called off the porch, “You ain't touchin' him, mister! You ain't layin' a hand on my friend!”

Mama whispered, “Russell, what is going
on
?”

“Joey was about to shoot himself with his twenty-two.”

“On
purpose
?” Mama asked.

“Shut up!” Joey hissed. “If you're my friend, you'll shut up right here and now.”

“I
am
your friend, and I
ain't
shuttin' up.” I looked at the faces all around us. Then I looked at Joey and knew we couldn't go on the way we'd been going on. So I took a deep breath and said, “Yes, on purpose.”

“
Why
?” Joey's mama asked through her tears.

“Don't!” Joey cried, trying to break free.

But I shoved him in a porch chair and held him down with all my might. “ 'Cause Joey and me's responsible for Amanda Jane's crash, that's why!”

Air sucked into mouths all around. There was a horrible moment of complete silence, then Sissy cried, “You?” and Mama gasped, “How?” and Joey's mama wailed, “What?” while my dad and Joey's dad took steps toward each other.

“Tell us what happened,” Dad said as soon as he was sure Joey's dad wasn't gonna storm the porch. “What did the two of you do?”

So I let it all out about the Lost Ghost and the prank
we'd pulled and how we didn't mean to hurt no one— how we were just out to have a little fun. Then I said, “Only things took a horrible turn and now Amanda Jane's dead and Joey and me's tortured over what we done, to the point where Joey's gonna do himself in 'cause he don't see no other way out.”

“Oh, Joey!” Mrs. Banks cried, running up the porch to hold him. “Oh, my Joey!”

Joey started to break down, but then his dad came stomping up the steps. “This boy killed our girl and you're gonna give him
sympathy
?” He pushed past Dad, but I stepped right in his way and hollered, “Don't you touch him! It ain't right the way you—”

He pushed me aside like a branch in his way, but Dad wedged between them and puffed himself up. “Bobby, you'd best take a deep breath and a step back from this.”

“Don't you tell me how to treat my kid, Cooper. He's
my
kid.”

“And this here's my porch, and there's not gonna be any fightin' on it, you got that?” Dad was looking steelier than I'd ever seen, holding his ground against one bear of a man.

Joey's dad stared my dad down for a whole minute before turning to Joey's mama and sayin', “Get him home, woman.”

“No!” she said, flinging tears aside. “Not until you calm yourself and swear to me you won't touch him.”

“He killed our little girl, you got that? You expect him to go unpunished?”

She stood up and screeched, “Don't you see? We almost lost
him
tonight, too! You never
listen
, Bobby! You just storm off or hit! We can't go on like this, you hear me? Things have gotta change!”

Mama reached out and gave her back a calming rub. Joey's eyes were big as flapjacks. Sissy was blinkin' like mad, and Dad was still holding his ground between Joey and his dad.

Finally Joey's dad said, real quiet-like, “Get back to Rhonda.”

“No! Rhonda is fine.”

“I said get!”

“And I said no!” She turned to Mama, and they had some silent magical female conversation, which resulted in her looking back at her husband and saying, “I'm staying here. All of us are stayin' here 'til you cool off.”

Joey's dad stood there another minute or so, then turned around and stormed back to the house.

I started worrying about him returning with a gun, and Dad was thinking the same, 'cause he got his ready and carried it with him from room to room as we set things up for the night. I think Dad would've called the police, only Mama and Joey's mama were having trouble deciding what to do about everything. If the police found out what we'd done, would they file charges? Would we get sent to
juvenile hall? Would we have records? What were they gonna do about what we'd done?

So our mamas sat up talking, Dad sat by the door with the gun across his lap, and Sissy spent half her time crying and the other half shouting nasty things at us. And somewhere in the middle of all that, Joey fell asleep on his mama's lap, and I fell asleep on the floor.

And for the first time since Amanda Jane died, I slept clear through to morning.

Living next door to the Bankses was tough after that. Awkward. And I wound up playing that night back in my head, over and over and over. Maybe I should've done things different. Maybe Joey really
wasn't
gonna pull the trigger after all. Or maybe he
did
really believe he'd have been better off dead. He said both things inside an hour, so it's hard to know.

Either way, he told me, I'd broken a sacred pact, and we were through.

For a while, our parents had the same problem Joey and me had had. Should they tell the police? Or should they keep it within our families. “After all,” Joey's mama said, “everyone whose business it is already knows.”

But after a couple of days it became real clear that it wouldn't stay a secret for long. Sissy was madder'n a wet hen. At me, at Joey, at Mama and Dad for not bein' mad at me… There was no way that girl was gonna keep her mouth shut about what we'd done.

“Besides,” Mama said when she and Dad told me they and Joey's mama had decided to tell the police. “There's
nothing they can do to you that's worse than the sentence you've already got.”

Amen to that. Part of me
wanted
them to toss us in the slammer and throw away the key. Would beat feelin' the way I'd been feelin', that's for sure.

But after they heard the whole story, the police just let us go. Nobody was pressing charges, they said. Nobody outside our families had been hurt. They wound up shutting the case a lot quicker than we'd opened it.

At least
legally
that's what happened. School was a different story. Word got out, all right, and kids took to treating us like we were diseased. They didn't know what to say, so they avoided us altogether, which was harder to take than if they'd said mean things to us.

So instead of going to jail, Joey and me had the back-to-back tortures of staying in school and living right next door to each other.

School I could have handled if I'd had Joey at my side. But he'd have nothing to do with me, so I spent my days alone, wondering if things would ever get better or if Joey was right and this really was just a miserable earth.

My counselor said that eventually Joey would come around—maybe even thank me—but he never did. And it made me wonder what being a true friend actually meant. Had I messed everything up for good, breakin' the pact? But how could a true friend let things go on?

I tried asking Joey about it—tried telling him I did
what I thought a true friend ought to—but he just shook his head and kept his lips zipped.

Joey's
mama
, though, did plenty of talkin' to
my
mama, and before long Mama had convinced her to get their whole family into counseling. So Joey and his mama started going, but Joey's dad would have none of it. Said it was for sissies and women.

Well, come Christmastime, the sissies and women all packed up and left him. One afternoon after a particularly loud shoutin' match, Mrs. Banks put Joey and Rhonda in the car and just left.

They didn't come back that night, or the next, or the one after that. And since none of us had the nerve to ask Joey's dad where they'd gone, we just did a lot of speculatin' about it.

“She's probably to the Canadian border by now,” Sissy said. “I'd get as far away from him as I could, that's for sure.”

“Maybe she's got a relative she's staying with,” Dad said.

Mama nodded. “Her mama lives near Riverdale. I bet she's gone there.”

I just sat quiet. I couldn't imagine Joey living anywhere but here.

“Do you suppose they'll come back?” Sissy asked. “I don't like the thought of livin' next door to just
him
.”

“I don't know what's going to happen,” Mama said with a sigh. “A man's got to be willing to face himself, and I'm afraid that one's not.”

It was strange living next door to only Mr. Banks. He got
a big snarling dog with fangs the size of tusks that he kept chained outside. It barked at all hours and lunged at anybody who walked by

It was also strange because even though Joey and me hadn't talked in some time, him being gone made me feel extra lonesome. Like any hope of being friends again was gone.

By February I'd pretty much given up on ever seeing Joey again. But then one day after school, Mama greeted me at the door waving a paper in her hand. “I got a letter from them!”

“From Joey's mama?”

“Yes!”

My heart jumped clear to my throat. “Where are they? Are they comin' back? Is Joey all right?”

Mama hugged me and laughed. “They're fine! Least, fine as they can be. They're stayin' with her mama, just like I thought.”

That night, Mama wrote her back, and I wrote Joey. And for the rest of the school year, I wrote Joey every couple of weeks. I hate writin', too, but it was something I did anyway. I never heard a word back from him, but Mama did hear regularly from Joey's mama, and I learned through her that Joey was still going to counseling and seemed to be doing better.

Then when the school year ended,
we
moved. Mama and Dad thought that it'd be good for me and my “quiet brooding,” and good for Sissy, too. We were both having
trouble finding new best friends, and they thought it'd be good to start us fresh somewhere else.

Besides, none of us were going to miss Joey's dad, especially me. He'd taken to hunting along the riverbank, which was scary enough right there. But on top of the fear of coming face to face with him, I kept having nightmares that his dog would dig up Smoky's bones.

I was all for moving, boy! All for it.

I liked the town where we moved, too. Met a kid at school who invited me over and taught me how to drive a tractor. Talk about fun! There's nothing like being in the seat of a John Deere!

'Cept maybe sliding through mud in a frog-stranglin' rain.

Anyhow, with all my new distractions, I almost quit writing Joey. But one afternoon I got an itch to do it, so I sat down and told him all about the boy next door, and how crazy he is, climbing on the roof and cock-a-doodle-dooin' every morning like a maniac rooster. I swear to howdy he's gonna try and fly someday, and when he does, I don't want to be the one to go and catch him. He's only ten, but that boy weighs two hundred pounds. Maybe three.

Then just last week Mama came in with a letter. And I could tell right off it was from Joey 'cause of the stupid stuff he'd doodled all over it. A dog liftin' its leg, a 'gator eating a barn,
flies
buzzing around all over… That right
there busted me up, but what really made me smile was what he wrote on the front.

Rusty-boy Cooper.

I tore it open quick, and inside he wrote, “Hey-ya, Rusty-boy,” and I could practically see his loopy grin again. Then he said, “So you think you're hot, having Rooster-boy next door, huh?” and went on to tell the tale of the biggest, meanest snapping turtle known to man that lives in a swamp near their house and comes out snappin' and whippin' its tail, chasin' little kids for miles.

“A turtle?” I wrote him back. “
Chasin
folks?” Then I scribbled him the longest letter ever, tellin' him all about my new school and how I've got a teacher who stinks up the place with noisy gassers and runs a goose alongside his bike on his way to school.

Mama asked to read Joey's letter, so I let her. But when she was done, she had tears in her eyes. “What's wrong, Mama?” I asked her. “I thought it was funnier than anything!”

“It is,” she told me. “I'm just so glad to see that Joey's found himself back.” Then she gave me the kind of sweet look that only your mama can give you. “And I'm mighty glad for the P.S.”

I was, too. It was the shortest line of the entire letter, but it meant everything to me.

“P.S. Thanks.”

Mama stood up and gave me a kiss on the head. “I have
a feeling the two of you will always be bound, no matter where you go.”

There's a scar on my finger that tells me that's so, and a few more inside, besides. Together they remind me what a true friend is.

And what it ain't.