On My Honor (6 page)

"All right," Joel consented. "Get them back."

Bobby climbed down the steps and then up again. He peered cautiously over the stack of papers he carried. "They're okay, Joel," he said, laying them down reverently, as though they were jewels.

Joel shook his head, trying to dispel the red fog that had taken possession of his brain. If he could get his hands on Tony now, he would ... But that was ridiculous. What would he do? What could anybody do? Beat Tony up?

At the thought he let out a choking guffaw, half laughter, half sob.

Bobby was watching him again, his face wary, his lower lip clenched between small, white teeth. "Are you okay, Joel?" he asked.

"Yeah," Joel said. "I'm okay." He went back to preparing the papers. "I'm alive, aren't I?"

The paper route seemed endless. Bobby rode behind Joel on the bicycle seat and chattered the whole way. Joel tried to listen, with half an ear anyway, but he couldn't. With each thunk of a paper on a porch, he heard, instead, Tony's voice, challenging, teasing. "I'll bet you can't get one in the middle of Mrs. McCullough's hanging geraniums. I'll bet you can't clip the Smiths' cat. Why don't you...?"

Joel wanted to yell at Tony, to tell him to shut up, but even Bobby would think he was crazy if he started yelling at a voice inside his own head.

Why did he feel so
responsible,
as though he had pushed Tony in? Why did he always have to feel responsible for
everything
that happened? If they had gone climbing on the bluffs and he, Joel, had fallen, Tony wouldn't have blamed himself. Would he?

Tony had said once that Joel was like an old grandmother, fretting all the time. Well, Tony ought to see him now. He would laugh.

At the thought of Tony laughing, Joel almost smiled. He and Tony always had so much fun together. Besides the tree house they were building this summer, they had a lot of other projects going. They always did.

For one thing, they had been pooling their allowances to buy a worm farm. Their plan was to get rich selling bait. Tony had even had the idea of using his mother's meat grinder to grind whatever worms were left at the end of the summer and sell them as goldfish food. (That was because Joel's father had pointed out that neither family would want worms multiplying in the basement over the winter.) For his part, Joel was skeptical about whether there were very many people anxious to buy worm mash for goldfish food, but he hadn't said that to Tony.

Last summer they had concocted a wonderful scheme for getting rich selling decorative pennies. They flattened fifty pennies by leaving them on the tracks to be run over by the 3:45 train, turning them into thin, coppery disks. Their plan hadn't been exactly what anybody could call successful, though. They sold only one penny, because every other kid in town knew how to flatten pennies, too. The one they sold (for a nickel) was to a prissy girl whose mother wouldn't allow her to go near the tracks. They had been left with forty-nine pennies they couldn't spend, not even in a gum-ball machine.

Joel tossed the last paper and turned his bike toward home. Bobby had finally fallen silent, and Joel was grateful for that. He could feel his brother's small, hot hands gripping his shirt and the puffs of breath on the back of his neck, so close, so alive.

A surge of protectiveness passed through Joel. He would have to teach Bobby how to swim. Bobby was afraid even to get his face in the water. Joel would start working with him right away. Every kid needed to know how to swim. Sometimes parents didn't seem to realize what a dangerous place the world is.

When Joel turned the corner by his house, he could see his mother and father in the front yard, talking to Mr. and Mrs. Zabrinsky. Seeing the four of them standing there, their faces solemn and intent, sent a chill through Joel's bones. What were they talking about? What did they know? By now, someone must have seen through his lie.

Or maybe the teenage boy had come back and turned Joel in.

Joel coasted up the driveway and stepped off his bike, pushing it into the garage before Bobby had a chance to climb down. Inside the garage, he scooped Bobby off the seat and set him on the floor.

"Thanks, buddy," he said. "I appreciate your help." He propped his bike along the wall, out of the way of the cars.

"I'll help you again tomorrow, Joel," Bobby said, his face glowing in the semidarkness of the garage.

"We'll see," Joel said, patting Bobby's shoulder. He began tinkering with his bicycle, shifting the gears back and forth uselessly, pretending to be engrossed.

Bobby watched him for a moment, then turned and headed outside with a one-legged skip. "Mommy, Daddy," he called before he was even beyond the front of the garage. "Joel's gonna let me help him with his paper route tomorrow, too."

Joel stood where he was, trying to control the way his hands trembled, the way the muscles in his face seemed to jerk. They were talking about
him
out there. He was certain of it. But there was no way past them without being seen, and if he stayed in the garage any longer, they would probably notice that, too. He shifted the gears one last time, slumped his shoulders, and pulled his head in, like a turtle retreating into its shell. Then he stepped out into the staring light of the driveway.

Chapter Ten

"J
OEL, WOULD YOU COME HERE FOR A MOMENT
, please?" Joel's father called.

Joel hesitated, wondering if he dared pretend he hadn't heard, but then he turned slowly and, keeping his head down, moved in the direction of his father's voice.

"The Zabrinskys want to know where you saw Tony last," his father said when he had arrived at his side.

Joel had a sudden image of Tony laughing, the river water streaming from his dark hair. "On the road," he said. "On the road to Starved Rock."

"But where on the road?" Mr. Zabrinsky asked. "How far had you boys gone before you turned back?" Mr. Zabrinsky was a big man, with huge, rather hairy hands. He sounded impatient.

"Oh," Joel said, scuffing the head off of a dandelion with the toe of his sneaker, "about as far as the bridge over the river, I guess."

"The bridge over the river!" Mrs. Zabrinsky repeated with a small gasp.

Mr. Zabrinsky leaned toward Joel. "But he was on his way to Starved Rock. Right?"

"Right," Joel mumbled, wishing, again, that he had remembered the first time to tell the story he had originally planned.

"Besides," Mrs. Zabrinsky said, "Tony can't swim. He'd know better than to go near the river." She seemed to be trying to reassure herself.

"He can't swim?" Joel asked, squinting up at her. "Really?"

She smiled, a crooked half smile that Joel had seen a million times. "You must know that, Joel. You've gone to the pool with him ... when he's willing to go."

Joel shrugged, tried to look away. "Well, he mostly played on the slide—or on the ropes, you know?—but he never told me he couldn't swim."

Mrs. Zabrinsky touched Joel's arm, and without thinking he jerked away. His skin felt clammy, and he was sure the stink of the river rose from him like a vapor.

"Maybe I shouldn't have told you," she said. "Maybe he wouldn't want you to know. He tried swimming lessons once, but he was always afraid of the water."

Tony? Afraid?
Joel pushed the thought away.

"Is that all?" he asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

"Yes," his father said. "I guess that's all." And as Joel walked away, trying to look casual, trying to remember how his feet used to move when he wasn't thinking about them, his father added to the Zabrinskys, "Let's call the park ranger. If he doesn't know anything, then we should probably drive out there, take a look for ourselves."

"I suppose I shouldn't worry," Mrs. Zabrinsky replied, "but you know what Tony's like. I guess I worry more about him than all the rest of the kids rolled up together."

Joel stepped through the front door into the cool darkness of the hall. Why hadn't Tony thought about his mother, about the way she worried, before he had decided to go for a swim?

Joel stood in the shower, the water streaming over his skin. He had soaped three times, his hair, everything, and rinsed and soaped again. The water was beginning to grow cool, so he would have to get out soon. His mother would be cross with him for using all the hot water.

He turned off the shower, toweled dry. As he rubbed his skin, the smell rose in his nostrils again, the dead-fish smell of the river.

He considered getting back into the shower, but he didn't. It wouldn't help. He knew that.

He pulled on his pajama bottoms and walked through the dark hall to his bedroom. Bobby was in bed, probably already asleep. Lights were on downstairs, and the murmur of his parents' voices floated up the stairwell. They were talking about Tony, of course. What else?

He didn't turn on a light in his room. He simply headed for the dark shape of his bed and lay down on top of the spread, arranging his arms and legs gingerly, as if they pained him.

After a while he heard light footsteps on the stairs, and then his mother came into his room. She sat down next to him on the bed, so close that he knew she had to be pretending not to be offended by the smell.

"Joel," she said, "are you sure you've told us everything you know?"

"About what?" he demanded roughly, as if he didn't understand what she meant, wishing it were possible not to understand.

"About Tony, about what you boys did today."

For an instant he thought about telling her. It would have been such a relief to let the words spill out, to let the choking tears come. But then he thought about having to tell the Zabrinskys, too, and the police, and about the twisted disappointment in his father's face, and he couldn't. He simply couldn't. He flopped over onto his stomach, muffling his response with the pillow.

"I already told you.... I got tired and came home. I don't know what Tony did."

"Did you boys have a fight?" she asked gently.

Joel remembered being mad at Tony, but he couldn't remember, now, why he'd been mad. Especially he remembered saying, "You're the one who's scared."

"No," he said. "We didn't have a fight."

His mother continued to sit there, as though she expected him to say more, and after a while Joel began to hold his tongue tightly between his teeth. It was the only way he knew to hang on to the words that threatened to come tumbling out of his mouth.
I know where Tony is,
he wanted to say.
I can tell you exactly where to begin looking.

Finally his mother leaned over and kissed the back of his head, then got up to go. After she had left the room, Joel unlocked his jaws, relishing the burning pain in his tongue.

A few minutes later he heard his father's footsteps on the stairs, heard him stop just outside his room. He waited there for a long time, but Joel pretended to be asleep, lying perfectly still and concentrating on keeping his breathing steady and slow. Finally his father went away, too.

Joel buried his face in his pillow, pressing his nose and mouth into the suffocating darkness. It would have been better if he and Tony had tied themselves together and climbed the bluffs. At least he wouldn't have been left behind.

Chapter Eleven

J
OEL LAY WAITING
. H
E STARED INTO THE
darkness until his eyes ached, straining to see, to hear, though he didn't know what he was waiting for.

When he heard a sound at last, the soft swish of automobile tires on pavement, the hollow thud of doors closing, muted voices, he stood and moved quickly to his window.

A car had stopped in front of the Zabrinskys' house, and two men were walking up to their front door.

Joel gasped. Police! The men were police officers! The teenage boy must have reported him after all!

He tried to pull his jeans on over his pajamas, but his foot got tangled in the fabric. He kicked the jeans out of his way and hurtled down the stairs. He had to explain! If the police found out from Mr. and Mrs. Zabrinsky about the lie he had told...

The front door was locked, and he lost precious seconds fiddling with it, jerking the lock this way and that until the door finally sprang toward him and he pushed the screen door out of his way. But at the edge of the porch, he stopped, caught his balance on the top step.

Across the street, Mr. Zabrinsky stood silhouetted in his front doorway, talking to the officers. Behind him, Tony's mother moved through the lighted hall toward the front door and the cluster of men. Joel's stomach twisted. He was too late.

He turned to go back inside, but the door opened and his father stepped onto the porch, buttoning a short-sleeved shirt. Joel looked to see if his mother was coming, too, but she wasn't. She must already have gone to sleep.

"Come on, son," his father said. "Let's see if there's anything we can do."

No!
Joel wanted to whisper, to shout.
I'm not going over there.
Not a single sound came out of his mouth, though, and when his father put a hand on his shoulder, he seemed to lose all capacity to resist. He turned and walked with his father toward the Zabrinskys' house.

"Here's the boy who was with Tony," Mr. Zabrinsky was saying as Joel and his father joined the officers on the porch. Mr. Zabrinsky spoke without inflection. All the life seemed to have been squeezed out of his voice.

The two policemen pivoted simultaneously to face Joel, their eyes shadowed by the visors of their caps, their mouths set lines. One of them held a plastic bag from which he had drawn Tony's pale blue shirt. Joel stepped backward, but his father held an arm behind him. Joel couldn't tell if his father was protecting him or preventing him from running away.

"What have you found?" his father asked.

"The boy's clothes," the officer holding the shirt said. "By the river. His bike, too."

Joel stole a glimpse at Tony's mother. She was swaying, her hands pressed against her face. Did she know the truth? Did she know he had been there, that he had seen it all? He couldn't tell.