by SE Hinton
Sent from heaven? Had he gotten a good look at Dallas? “No, we’re greasers,” I said. I was too worried and scared to appreciate the fact that he was trying to be funny.
“You’re what?”
“Greasers. You know, like hoods, JD’s. Johnny is wanted for murder, and Dallas has a record with the fuzz a mile long.”
“Are you kidding me?” Jerry stared at me as if he thought I was still in shock or something.
“I am not. Take me to town and you’ll find out pretty quick.”
“We’re taking you to a hospital there anyway. The address card in your billfold said that was where you lived. Your name’s really Ponyboy?”
“Yeah. Even on my birth certificate. And don’t bug me about it. Are . . .”—I felt weak—“are the little kids okay?”
“Just fine. A little frightened maybe. There were some short explosions right after you all got out. Sounded just exactly like gunfire.”
Gunfire. There went our gun. And Gone with the Wind. Were we sent from heaven? I started to laugh weakly. I guess that guy knew how close to hysterics I really was, for he talked to me in a low soothing voice all the way to the hospital.
I was sitting in the waiting room, waiting to hear how Dally and Johnny were. I had been checked over, and except for a few burns and a big bruise across my back, I was all right. I had watched them bring Dally and Johnny in on stretchers. Dally’s eyes were closed, but when I spoke he had tried to grin and had told me that if I ever did a stupid thing like that again he’d beat the tar out of me. He was still swearing at me when they took him on in. Johnny was unconscious. I had been afraid to look at him, but I was relieved to see that his face wasn’t burned. He just looked very pale and still and sort of sick. I would have cried at the sight of him so still except I couldn’t in front of people.
Jerry Wood had stayed with me all the time. He kept thanking me for getting the kids out. He didn’t seem to mind our being hoods. I told him the whole story—starting when Dallas and Johnny and I had met at the corner of Pickett and Sutton. I left out the part about the gun and our hitching a ride in the freight car. He was real nice about it and said that being heroes would help get us out of trouble, especially since it was self-defense and all.
I was sitting there, smoking a cigarette, when Jerry came back in from making a phone call. He stared at me for a second. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”
I was startled. “How come?” I looked at my cigarette. It looked okay to me. I looked around for a “No Smoking” sign and couldn’t find one. “How come?”
“Why, uh,” Jerry stammered, “uh, you’re too young.”
“I am?” I had never thought about it. Everyone in our neighborhood, even the girls, smoked. Except for Darry, who was too proud of his athletic health to risk a cigarette, we had all started smoking at an early age. Johnny had been smoking since he was nine; Steve started at eleven. So no one thought it unusual when I started. I was the weed-fiend in my family—Soda smokes only to steady his nerves or when he wants to look tough.
Jerry simply sighed, then grinned. “There are some people here to see you. Claim to be your brothers or something.”
I leaped up and ran for the door, but it was already open and Soda had me in a bear hug and was swinging me around. I was so glad to see him I could have bawled. Finally he set me down and looked at me. He pushed my hair back. “Oh, Ponyboy, your hair . . . your tuff, tuff hair . . .”
Then I saw Darry. He was leaning in the doorway, wearing his olive jeans and black T-shirt. He was still tall, broad-shouldered Darry; but his fists were jammed in his pockets and his eyes were pleading. I simply looked at him. He swallowed and said in a husky voice, “Ponyboy . . .”
I let go of Soda and stood there for a minute. Darry didn’t like me . . . he had driven me away that night . . . he had hit me . . . Darry hollered at me all the time . . . he didn’t give a hang about me. . . . Suddenly I realized, horrified, that Darry was crying. He didn’t make a sound, but tears were running down his cheeks. I hadn’t seen him cry in years, not even when Mom and Dad had been killed. (I remembered the funeral. I had sobbed in spite of myself; Soda had broken down and bawled like a baby; but Darry had only stood there, his fists in his pockets and that look on his face, the same helpless, pleading look that he was wearing now.)
In that second what Soda and Dally and Two-Bit had been trying to tell me came through. Darry did care about me, maybe as much as he cared about Soda, and because he cared he was trying too hard to make something of me. When he yelled “Pony, where have you been all this time?” he meant “Pony, you’ve scared me to death. Please be careful, because I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”
Darry looked down and turned away silently. Suddenly I broke out of my daze.
“Darry!” I screamed, and the next thing I knew I had him around the waist and was squeezing the daylights out of him.
“Darry,” I said, “I’m sorry . . .”
He was stroking my hair and I could hear the sobs racking him as he fought to keep back the tears. “Oh, Pony, I thought we’d lost you . . . like we did Mom and Dad . . .”
That was his silent fear then—of losing another person he loved. I remembered how close he and Dad had been, and I wondered how I could ever have thought him hard and unfeeling. I listened to his heart pounding through his T-shirt and knew everything was going to be okay now. I had taken the long way around, but I was finally home. To stay.
Chapter 7
NOW THERE WERE three of us sitting in the waiting room waiting to hear how Dally and Johnny were. Then the reporters and the police came. They asked too many questions too fast, and got me mixed up. If you want to know the truth, I wasn’t feeling real good in the first place. Kind of sick, really. And I’m scared of policemen anyway. The reporters fired one question right after another at me and got me so confused I didn’t know what was coming off. Darry finally told them I wasn’t in any shape to be yelled at so much and they slowed down a little. Darry’s kinda big.
Sodapop kept them in stitches. He’d grab one guy’s press hat and another’s camera and walk around interviewing the nurses and mimicking TV reporters. He tried to lift a policeman’s gun and grinned so crazily when he was caught that the policeman had to grin too. Soda can make anyone grin. I managed to get hold of some hair grease and comb my hair back so that it looked a little better before they got any pictures. I’d die if I got my picture in the paper with my hair looking so lousy. Darry and Sodapop were in the pictures too; Jerry Wood told me that if Sodapop and Darry hadn’t been so good-looking, they wouldn’t have taken so many. That was public appeal, he said.
Soda was really getting a kick out of all this. I guess he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been so serious, but he couldn’t resist anything that caused that much excitement. I swear, sometimes he reminds me of a colt. A long-legged palomino colt that has to get his nose into everything. The reporters stared at him admiringly; I told you he looks like a movie star, and he kind of radiates.
Finally, even Sodapop got tired of the reporters—he gets bored with the same old thing after a time—and stretching out on the long bench, he put his head in Darry’s lap and went to sleep. I guess both of them were tired—it was late at night and I knew they hadn’t had much sleep during the week. Even while I was answering questions I remembered that it had been only a few hours since I was sleeping off a smoke in the corner of the church. Already it was an unreal dream and yet, at the time I couldn’t have imagined any other world. Finally, the reporters started to leave, along with the police. One of them turned and asked, “What would you do right now if you could do anything you wanted?”
I looked at him tiredly. “Take a bath.”
They thought that was pretty funny, but I meant it. I felt lousy. The hospital got real quiet after they left. The only noise was the nurse’s soft footsteps and Soda’s light breathing. Darry looked down at him and grinned half-heartedly. “He didn’t get much sleep this week,
” he said softly. “He hardly slept at all.”
“Hhhmmmm,” Soda said drowsily, “you didn’t either.”
The nurses wouldn’t tell us anything about Johnny and Dally, so Darry got hold of the doctor. The doctor told us that he would talk only to the family, but Darry finally got it through the guy’s head that we were about as much family as Dally and Johnny had.
Dally would be okay after two or three days in the hospital, he said. One arm was badly burned and would be scarred for the rest of his life, but he would have full use of it in a couple of weeks. Dally’ll be okay, I thought. Dallas is always okay. He could take anything. It was Johnny I was worried about.
He was in critical condition. His back had been broken when that piece of timber fell on him. He was in severe shock and suffering from third-degree burns. They were doing everything they could to ease the pain, although since his back was broken he couldn’t even feel the burns below his waist. He kept calling for Dallas and Ponyboy. If he lived . . . If? Please, no, I thought. Please not “if.” The blood was draining from my face and Darry put an arm across my shoulder and squeezed hard. . . . Even if he lived he’d be crippled for the rest of his life. “You wanted it straight and you got it straight,” the doctor said. “Now go home and get some rest.”
I was trembling. A pain was growing in my throat and I wanted to cry, but greasers don’t cry in front of strangers. Some of us never cry at all. Like Dally and Two-Bit and Tim Shepard—they forgot how at an early age. Johnny crippled for life? I’m dreaming, I thought in panic, I’m dreaming. I’ll wake up at home or in the church and everything’ll be like it used to be. But I didn’t believe myself. Even if Johnny did live he’d be crippled and never play football or help us out in a rumble again. He’d have to stay in that house he hated, where he wasn’t wanted, and things could never be like they used to be. I didn’t trust myself to speak. If I said one word, the hard knot in my throat would swell and I’d be crying in spite of myself.
I took a deep breath and kept my mouth shut. Soda was awake by then, and although he looked stony-faced, as if he hadn’t heard a word the doctor had said, his eyes were bleak and stunned. Serious reality has a hard time coming through to Soda, but when it does, it hits him hard. He looked like I felt when I had seen that black-haired Soc lying doubled up and still in the moonlight.
Darry was rubbing the back of my head softly. “We’d better go home. We can’t do anything here.”
In our Ford I was suddenly overcome by sleepiness. I leaned back and closed my eyes and we were home before I knew it. Soda was shaking me gently. “Hey, Ponyboy, wake up. You still got to get to the house.”
“Hmmmmm,” I said sleepily, and lay down in the seat. I couldn’t have gotten up to save my life. I could hear Soda and Darry, but as if from a great distance.
“Oh, come on, Ponyboy,” Soda pleaded, shaking me a little harder, “we’re sleepy, too.”
I guess Darry was tired of fooling around, because he picked me up and carried me in.
“He’s getting mighty big to be carried,” Soda said. I wanted to tell him to shut up and let me sleep but I only yawned.
“He’s sure lost a lot of weight,” Darry said.
I thought sleepily that I should at least pull off my shoes, but I didn’t. I went to sleep the minute Darry tossed me on the bed. I’d forgotten how soft a bed really was.
I was the first one up the next morning. Soda must have pulled my shoes and shirt off for me; I was still wearing my jeans. He must have been too sleepy to undress himself, though; he lay stretched out beside me fully clothed. I wiggled out from under his arm and pulled the blanket up over him, then went to take a shower. Asleep, he looked a lot younger than going-on-seventeen, but I had noticed that Johnny looked younger when he was asleep, too, so I figured everyone did. Maybe people are younger when they are asleep.
After my shower, I put on some clean clothes and spent five minutes or so hunting for a hint of beard on my face and mourning over my hair. That bum haircut made my ears stick out.
Darry was still asleep when I went into the kitchen to fix breakfast. The first one up has to fix breakfast and the other two do the dishes. That’s the rule around our house, and usually it’s Darry who fixes breakfast and me and Soda who are left with the dishes. I hunted through the icebox and found some eggs. We all like our eggs done differently. I like them hard, Darry likes them in a bacon-and-tomato sandwich, and Sodapop eats his with grape jelly. All three of us like chocolate cake for breakfast. Mom had never allowed it with ham and eggs, but Darry let Soda and me talk him into it. We really didn’t have to twist his arm; Darry loves chocolate cake as much as we do. Sodapop always makes sure there’s some in the icebox every night and if there isn’t he cooks one up real quick. I like Darry’s cakes better; Sodapop always puts too much sugar in the icing. I don’t see how he stands jelly and eggs and chocolate cake all at once, but he seems to like it. Darry drinks black coffee, and Sodapop and I drink chocolate milk. We could have coffee if we wanted it, but we like chocolate milk. All three of us are crazy about chocolate stuff. Soda says if they ever make a chocolate cigarette I’ll have it made.
“Anybody home?” a familiar voice called through the front screen, and Two-Bit and Steve came in. We always just stick our heads into each other’s houses and holler “Hey” and walk in. Our front door is always unlocked in case one of the boys is hacked off at his parents and needs a place to lay over and cool off. We never could tell who we’d find stretched out on the sofa in the morning. It was usually Steve, whose father told him about once a week to get out and never come back. It kind of bugs Steve, even if his old man does give him five or six bucks the next day to make up for it. Or it might be Dally, who lived anywhere he could. Once we even found Tim Shepard, leader of the Shepard gang and far from his own turf, reading the morning paper in the armchair. He merely looked up, said “Hi,” and strolled out without staying for breakfast. Two-Bit’s mother warned us about burglars, but Darry, flexing his muscles so that they bulged like oversized baseballs, drawled that he wasn’t afraid of any burglars, and that we didn’t really have anything worth taking. He’d risk a robbery, he said, if it meant keeping one of the boys from blowing up and robbing a gas station or something. So the door was never locked.
“In here!” I yelled, forgetting that Darry and Sodapop were still asleep. “Don’t slam the door.”
They slammed the door, of course, and Two-Bit came running into the kitchen. He caught me by the upper arms and swung me around, ignoring the fact that I had two uncooked eggs in my hand.
“Hey, Ponyboy,” he cried gleefully, “long time no see.”
You would have thought it had been five years instead of five days since I’d seen him last, but I didn’t mind. I like ol’ Two-Bit; he’s a good buddy to have. He spun me into Steve, who gave me a playful slap on my bruised back and shoved me across the room. One of the eggs went flying. It landed on the clock and I tightened my grip on the other one, so that it crushed and ran all over my hand.
“Now look what you did,” I griped. “There went our breakfast. Can’t you two wait till I set the eggs down before you go shovin’ me all over the country?” I really was a little mad, because I had just realized how long it had been since I’d eaten anything. The last thing I’d eaten was a hot-fudge sundae at the Dairy Queen in Windrixville, and I was hungry.
Two-Bit was walking in a slow circle around me, and I sighed because I knew what was coming.
“Man, dig baldy here!” He was staring at my head as he circled me. “I wouldn’t have believed it. I thought all the wild Indians in Oklahoma had been tamed. What little squaw’s got that tuff-lookin’ mop of yours, Ponyboy?”
“Aw, lay off,” I said. I wasn’t feeling too good in the first place, kind of like I was coming down with something. Two-Bit winked at Steve, and Steve said, “Why, he had to get a haircut to get his picture in the paper. They’d never believe a greasy-lookin’ mug could be a hero. How do you like bein’ a hero
, big shot?”
“How do I like what?”
“Being a hero. You know”—he shoved the morning paper at me impatiently—“like a big shot, even.”
I stared at the newspaper. On the front page of the second section was the headline: JUVENILE DELINQUENTS TURN HEROES.
“What I like is the ‘turn’ bit,” Two-Bit said, cleaning the egg up off the floor. “Y’all were heroes from the beginning. You just didn’t ‘turn’ all of a sudden.”
I hardly heard him. I was reading the paper. That whole page was covered with stories about us—the fight, the murder, the church burning, the Socs being drunk, everything. My picture was there, with Darry and Sodapop. The article told how Johnny and I had risked our lives saving those little kids, and there was a comment from one of the parents, who said that they would all have burned to death if it hadn’t been for us. It told the whole story of our fight with the Socs—only they didn’t say “Socs,” because most grownups don’t know about the battles that go on between us. They had interviewed Cherry Valance, and she said Bob had been drunk and that the boys had been looking for a fight when they took her home. Bob had told her he’d fix us for picking up his girl. His buddy Randy Adderson, who had helped jump us, also said it was their fault and that we’d only fought back in self-defense. But they were charging Johnny with manslaughter. Then I discovered that I was supposed to appear at juvenile court for running away, and Johnny was too, if he recovered. (Not if, I thought again. Why do they keep saying if?) For once, there weren’t any charges against Dally, and I knew he’d be mad because the paper made him out a hero for saving Johnny and didn’t say much about his police record, which he was kind of proud of. He’d kill those reporters if he got hold of them. There was another column about just Darry and Soda and me: how Darry worked on two jobs at once and made good at both of them, and about his outstanding record at school; it mentioned Sodapop dropping out of school so we could stay together, and that I made the honor roll at school all the time and might be a future track star. (Oh, yeah, I forgot—I’m on the A-squad track team, the youngest one. I’m a good runner.) Then it said we shouldn’t be separated after we had worked so hard to stay together.