End of the Tiger (10 page)

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.”

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.

“A stupid lie,” Harvey Branton said.

“Looie has never lied in her life,” Dad said softly.

Harvey gave him a mean look. “I’m not saying who is a liar, Baker. I’m just saying that I know my own boys and they wouldn’t do a thing like that and your wife is trying to shift the responsibility.”

Stoney Wotnack came out of the hallway. He came across the porch. His hands were out of his pockets, and I saw that the big knuckles were bruised and reddened. He stopped and looked up at Harvey Branton and said, “I seen it, mister. Them two creeps you got woulda burned her. Now take back what you said about Mrs. Baker.”

Harvey made a sound deep in his throat. He grabbed Stoney’s arm and said, “Son, it’s going to take me about ten minutes to teach you to stay the hell away from decent children.” He raised his big right hand, and his lips were drawn back from his teeth.

Dad said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear it, “Branton, if you hit that kid, I’m going to try my level best to kill you.”

I’d never heard Dad use that tone of voice. It made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.

Branton slowly lowered his hand. He let go of Stoney and stepped back away from the porch. He said, “I’m going to sue you, Baker.”

“Go ahead,” Dad said. “Maybe those two kids of yours will be put in an institution where they belong when the judge hears the case. Keep them off my property from now on.”

The car door chunked shut again, and the back wheels spun on gravel as big Harvey Branton backed out into the highway.

Dad said, “Somebody better help me. When I stop leaning on this pillar, my knees are going to bend the wrong way.”

Mother went to him and kissed him and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Just like Jack Dempsey. A real killer, aren’t you, darling?”

She turned and put her hand on Stoney’s head. He stood rigid and uncomfortable. Dad said, “Boy, this is your home away from home. We want you back here with us every chance you can get.”

“Knock it off!” Stoney said. He twisted away from Mother and went into the house. We heard his steps on the stairs.

We all talked about it at dinner. Stoney didn’t say anything. Near the end of the meal he said with a faint tone of wonder, “That big monkey was really going to fix my wagon.”

“How did you lick both of them?” Dad asked curiously.

“Both, three, six, who cares?” Stoney said. “They both lead with the right and swing from way back and shut their eyes when they swing. All you gotta do is stay inside the swing and bust ’em with straight rights and left hooks.”

Dad stayed home from the office the next day to see Stoney off. Mrs. Turner came and got him to drive him down to the station. Dad carried the black suitcase out to the car. Stoney had a little more weight on him and he looked heavier in the shoulders, but otherwise he was exactly the same.

Mrs. Turner said, “And what do you say, little man?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Stoney mumbled.

The car drove off. “Grateful little cuss, isn’t he?” Dad said.

“Maybe we’re the ones to be grateful,” mother said mildly.

We went back into the house. Dad was the one who, by accident, found out about the shoes. And I heard them talk and figure out together what had happened. The only way it could have happened was for Stoney Wotnack to get up in the middle of the night and put a high shine on every pair of shoes he could find. It must have taken him hours.

I saw Mother’s face. She had a shiny look in her eyes, and her voice was funny, the way it gets every fall with hay fever. That seemed to me to be a pretty funny reaction
to some newly shined shoes.

She shook Dad by the arm and said, “Don’t you see, Sam? Don’t you see? He didn’t know how to do anything else.”

Dad looked at me and smiled. It was that same funny-looking smile that he wears when he walks out of a sad movie.

None of it made any sense to me. All I knew was that I’d spend the rest of the summer with Looie walking one step behind me, sucking on her hand.