No Promises in the Wind (7 page)

She watched us thoughtfully while we ate. “Do you smoke?” she asked me after a while.

If there had been any laughter in me, I would have considered that a joke. “Ma'am, if I had the money to buy cigarettes, I'd have bought something for us to eat instead of asking you,” I said.

She nodded. “All right then. You boys can stay the night here. I had to ask about smoking because I'm fearful of fire. But you can stay.” She paused a minute. “I think you'll have to take a bath, though, and after you're in bed, I'll wash your clothes.”

A bath. I wondered if she knew what that meant to us. Joey and I washed with soap and hot water for the first time since we had left home. Our bodies were clean and refreshed and respectable in the suits of long underwear which the woman told us had once belonged to her husband. We lay in a soft bed that night under a feather comforter; we moaned a little before we slept, half in weariness, half in the wonder of being comfortable, and we refused to think of another day.

The lady let us sleep until almost noon the next day. Then she came in softly and laid our clothes, freshly washed and ironed, on the foot of the bed. She stood there looking down at us.

“Poor little fellows, you were dead tired, weren't you?” she said. She raised the shades at the windows and then walked to the door. “Better get up and into your clean clothes now. I've a good breakfast for you. Maybe the sleep and food will give you strength to get to wherever you're going.”

She had wonderful food for us—hot cereal and toast and cocoa. When I had eaten, I couldn't believe how well I felt, how strong a surge of confidence built up inside me.

The woman wanted to know any number of things about us. “Do you have any parents?” she asked me.

She was kind and good. I didn't want to be rude, but I began to feel wary and uneasy. I was silent for so long that she repeated her question. “I suppose so,” I answered. Then, ashamed, I said, “Yes—yes, we have.”

“Do they know where you are?”

“I don't think so, ma'am.”

“You ran away, didn't you?”

“No, ma'am. They knew we were leaving. At least, my mother knew that I was leaving. Joey decided to come with me at the last minute.”

“Were you in trouble?”

“Yes, ma'am. Too big an appetite.”

She shook her head and drew a deep breath.

“They must be suffering these days,” she said after a long pause.

I didn't answer. The woman sat looking at us, frowning a little.

After a while she went to a table, and from the drawer beneath it she took out paper and envelopes and stamps. Then she beckoned me to come to the table.

“Now, write something to Mama,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“I'm sorry, ma‘am; I can't,” I told her.

“You can write, can't you? You know how to read and write, don't you?”

Her question made me mad. I had been an honor student in high school. “Yes,” I answered, “I know how to read and write. But I can't. At least I—I just won't.”

“You have a hard nature, little man,” she said quietly.

“I suppose you're right. I hate to be mean after what you've done for us. I don't want to be mean. But I don't think you can understand. There's just nothing I can say to my folks. Nothing. If Joey wants to write, he can.”

She turned to my brother. “How about it, Joey?”

“Yes,” he said, “I'll write a note to them. But I can't say I'm coming home. Josh and I are going to stick together.”

“Well, then, that's the way it is. Anyway your mama is going to sleep better knowing that you're still alive.”

Joey showed me what he had written. He told our parents that we were in Nebraska, that we were well and getting along just fine. They were not to worry, and he would try to send them a line once in a while. That was all. His letter really told them nothing of what we were living through; still, as the old woman said, it at least let them know that we were still alive. She gave Joey some stamped envelopes and made him promise that he'd write whenever he could.

We left that little house regretfully in the early afternoon. We had found cleanliness and rest as well as nourishing food in amounts that satisfied our huge appetites. We wished that we could stay with her, but we knew the rules: one night, one meal. Two meals at the most. After that we must move on. It was understandable. There was no reason why any charity or any person should look after us. We were on our own, and for people on their own, it was a one-night stand unless, by some chance, they had some money in their pockets.

We seemed to be in a cycle of good luck, for we had gone no more than three or four miles down the highway when a truck passed us, its big tires humming along the concrete. The driver threw up his hand as he passed us, and we gave him the hitchhiker's gesture without really hoping that he might stop. Then we saw the speed slacken and the big truck edge over on the shoulder of the road. We ran toward it, hardly believing our good luck.

The driver was a thin, dark man with a tired look in his eyes. He smiled at us, a little wearily I thought, and he spoke in a kind of dry, toneless voice.

“Where to?” he asked.

“We're just moving along. We'll go anywhere.”

He didn't seem surprised. There were plenty of people just moving along these days. “You from around here?” he asked.

“No. Chicago. We've been on the road since the first of October.”

“No folks?”

“No, we're on our own.”

He seemed to be studying us. Finally he said, “I'm taking this load down to New Orleans. You want to go south?”

It was a bitterly cold day. I could have cheered at the thought of getting to a warm climate.

“Would you take us? I'll help in any way I can.”

“Do you have any money?”

“Not a cent.” I expected this would end the deal. No money for food and room, no money to pay for the ride. I braced myself for a “Nothing doing, kid,” but I was in for a surprise.

“Well, I've been broke quite a few times myself—I know how it feels. Give the youngster a hand and climb in.”

The truck cab was warm, and the comfort of riding was a joy to our tired legs. After he'd asked us our names, the man looked straight ahead of him as he drove, and for miles he didn't say a word. The drone of the wheels made Joey drowsy, and he dropped off to sleep, leaning against my shoulder. The man glanced at him once, and I noticed a kind of half-smile on his lips.

“Pretty young for a jaunt like this, isn't he?” he asked, turning to look at me for a second.

“Yes, he's only ten, but he was set on coming with me.”

He talked to me a little after that—asked where we had been and how we had managed to stay alive. He would acknowledge something I'd say with a nod occasionally, but I had the feeling that he was giving most of his attention to the road and his driving.

After we'd traveled about three hours, we drew over onto the shoulder again. “Have to rest a little,” the man said. “Long straight slab gets you hypnotized after a while.” When he got out of the cab, I followed him and let Joey go on sleeping. The man leaned against a front wheel and rolled a cigarette quickly and carelessly as if he'd done it for a long time. “What was the trouble about?” he asked curtly as if he were sure I knew what he was talking about.

I supposed he meant the trouble at home, but I just looked dumb and didn't answer.

“You know what I mean. Why did you run away?”

I hesitated. The things that had happened at home shamed me. I had grown up believing that only ne'er-do-wells lacked food, that only people in homes of low standards shouted insults at one another, begrudged the food that others swallowed. Now Joey and I were from such a home. The music and laughter and love that had once been part of our lives had been hopelessly shattered. I looked up at the man standing before me.

“I hate to talk about it,” I said in a low voice.

“You don't have to, I suppose, but before we get too far, I'd like to know something more about the boys I'm hauling south. I don't want the police on my neck for helping two runaways. Now why'd you tell me you had no folks—that isn't the case, is it?”

I stared at the ground for a minute. Then I opened up and told him everything that had happened between Dad and me, how things had been going from bad to worse, how Mom had even agreed that it would be better for me to clear out.

He had a way of sighing deeply as if there were some heaviness in his chest. He ground out his cigarette as he sighed and made no comment on what I had told him. I got the impression that he wanted to change the subject.

“How old are you, Josh?” he asked abruptly.

“Fifteen.”

He nodded. “I thought so. What month were you born?”

It struck me as being strange that on a cold day in winter when half of the world was starving, this man would care about my birthday. It was none of my business, though, so I answered as if it were a perfectly natural question. “June—June twelfth.”

He took off his hat and pushed a lock of black hair back from his forehead. “That's pretty close,” he said. “My kid was born in April of that year. His name was David.”

“He died?” I asked, and then wished that I hadn't.

“Yes. He died. Five years ago. He was about as tall as Joey—heavier, though, and brown as a little Indian. Looking at you makes me realize how big he would have been. Well”—he turned and opened the door of the cab—“we'd better get on down the road. We've got a lot of miles ahead of us.”

The three of us were very quiet during the long afternoon. Joey slept quite a lot, but even when he woke, he sat with his hands clasped over the old banjo and said nothing. The man seemed to have something on his mind, and I, feeling rested and relaxed, gave myself up to a daydream of warm southern skies, of a job, of a place where life would be a little kinder.

It began to snow hard in late afternoon. At dusk we drew up in front of a small cafe beside the road. The light from the windows barely showed through the swirling snowflakes outside.

“We'd better have something to eat,” the driver said as we stopped. He jumped down and held up his arms to help Joey down from the cab. He laughed a little as he tousled Joey's hair, and there was a friendliness in his manner that made me feel I could trust him.

I was worried, though, about the matter of eating. “A lady gave Joey and me a good breakfast this morning,” I told him. “We can get along on one meal a day.”

“No, come on in,” he said, starting up the path toward the door.

“I don't have a cent.” I thought maybe he had forgotten.

“You told me that. We're not going to have steak. Just soup and hamburgers. Come on.”

They knew him at the cafe. The waitress called him Lonnie, and the man who was frying hamburgers in the kitchen stuck his head around the corner and talked to him.

“See you got friends with you,” he said.

“Yes. Couple guys from the Windy City. Going down to Louisiana with me.”

As we sat at the counter waiting for our food, he talked and joked, sometimes with us, sometimes with the cook and the waitress. When Joey addressed him as Mister, he told us to call him Lonnie. “That's what my niece calls me,” he said. “I tell her she might show me a little respect and put ‘Uncle' in front of my name, but she's nearly fourteen and pretty set in her ways.”

Then he asked Joey about the banjo, if he could play it and so on. Little by little we told him about Howie, about our plans to find a place where I could play piano and where maybe Joey could accompany me with the banjo when he learned to play better.

Lonnie seemed interested. He kept looking at me while we talked as if he were thinking of something. When the waitress came to wipe off the counter in front of us, he said, “Bessie, is that old piano still in the next room?” He jerked his head toward an adjoining room that looked like a makeshift dining room.

“Sure,” the woman said. “You buyin' up junk on this trip?”

“This kid says he can play. I want to hear him. All right if we go in while the hamburgers are cooking?”

“Come on.” She motioned for me to follow her, and led the way into the next room. “This ain't no Steinway, but you're welcome to try it,” she said.

The empty little dining room was cold, and the piano was pretty close to being the junk the waitress had called it. Some two months had passed since I had even seen a piano, and this one, junk though it might be, looked good to me. My fingers felt stiff at first, and it took me a little while to get going. It wasn't long, though, until I began to feel at home again, almost as if Howie were beside me and Miss Crowne were listening from her office. My confidence began to return, and I played for Lonnie and the waitress, the cook and two or three customers with all the skill I could rediscover, with all the spirit left in me.

As music it wasn't very much, but they liked it. They had all crowded inside the door and had stood there in the cold, listening while I played. They clapped when I was through, and they said that surely there must be a job someplace for a kid who could play like that. Joey was beaming. I could see that he felt our troubles were almost over.

While we were eating, the waitress came over and gave Lonnie a slip of paper with a name and address written on it. “Lonnie, this man, Pete Harris, is a cousin of mine,” she explained. “He grew up here in Nebraska; we went to school together. He's been down South for fifteen, maybe twenty years now, but he always keeps in touch. Reason I'm tellin' you this is that Pete has a carnival down near Baton Rouge—not much of a carnival, I guess. He's operatin' on a shoestring, he told us, but I know he hires piano players sometimes. He might, he just might, have a place for this boy. Will you be anywhere near Baton Rouge on your way down?”