Looie Follows Me

I remember that it promised to be a terrible summer. I had squeaked through the fifth grade and I was going to be eleven in July and I had hoped that on my eleventh birthday my parents would come to visit me at Camp Wahmbahmoo, bearing gifts.

It was our third year in the big house twelve miles from town. Dad called it “a nice commuting distance” in summer and “too rugged for a dog team” in winter.

One of the main reasons for my wanting to go to Wahmbahmoo was on account of the Branton twins, Kim and Cam, who lived a couple of hundred yards down the road. I knew that if they went for two months and I didn’t go at all, they’d make my life miserable all winter yapping about the good old days at the camp. They were twelve years old, and Dad said he could never look at them without wondering when they’d be the right size for a harness and bit. The second reason was that if I stayed home all summer, Looie, the five-year-old kid sister, would tag around after me all day with her hand in her mouth. Her real name is Louella — but Looie suited her better when she was five.

The big discussion came in May. I was called into the living room and told to sit down. While Dad took off his glasses and stowed them in his coat pocket, I made a quick review of recent misdemeanors and couldn’t decide which one to think up a defense for.

“Jimmy, your mother and I have been discussing the question of camp for you this summer,” Dad announced.

I dropped defensive plans and went on the offensive. “I can hardly wait to go,” I said.

Dad coughed and looked appealingly at Mother. “The fact of the matter is, Jimmy, we feel you’re a little young. We think you should wait one more year.”

Then they told me that I would have fun during the two weeks at the shore and I made a low-voiced comment about a hotel full of old ladies — and besides the Branton twins were going and I played with them and how did that make me too young?

And so after I lost the discussion, I had nothing to look forward to but mooching around our childless neighborhood all summer with the clop-clop of Looie’s feet behind me. The folks had been pretty mysterious about something nice that was going to happen during the summer, but I had a heavy suspicion about anything they called “nice.” They even called sending me to Syracuse to visit Aunt Kate “nice.” And I was prepared to resist going to Aunt Kate’s to my dying breath.

The mysterious “nice” thing arrived on the fifth of July. Its name was Johnny Wotnack and it came from New York City. It climbed out of Mrs. Turner’s blue sedan and it stood in our driveway and stared suspiciously around at the big yard, the oaks, and the orchard on the hill behind the house.

Dad had stayed home from the office that day. He started out and so did I, but just as I got to the door, Mother grabbed my arm and hauled me back and said, “Now wait a minute, Jimmy. That little boy is going to stay with us for a few weeks. You are going to share everything with him. One of the social agencies tries to place city children in the country for the summer. And we agreed to take this boy in here for a while and make him feel at home. So you be nice to him. Understand?”

“Why did he come here?”

“For fresh air and sunshine and good food so he can be healthy.”

“He looks plenty rugged to me.”

Johnny Wotnack had a small black shiny suitcase. Dad spoke to Mrs. Turner and she waved to Mother and drove off. Dad picked up the suitcase and said, “Glad you could come, Johnny. This is my son, Jimmy. And his mother. And the little girl is Looie.”

“Please to meet you,” Johnny said politely enough. He was sort of thin, but his face had a seamed, grayish look like a midget I saw once at the side show. His hands were huge, with big blocky knuckles on them.

Johnny gave me one cool glance. “Hi, kid,” he said.

“Hi,” I said.

His hair was cropped short, and he wore blue jeans and a white sweat shirt. Dad took him upstairs right to my room, went inside and pointed to the extra twin bed and said, “You’ll bunk in here with Jimmy, Johnny.”

For the first time I thought the pictures that I had cut out and taped to my walls looked sort of childish. I wished I had known about him so I could have taken them down. Johnny slowly surveyed the room. “This’ll do okay,” he said.

Mother went over to him and gently pulled his ear forward as though she was lifting a rock under which she expected to find a bug. Johnny snatched his head away. “What’s the gag?” he demanded.

Mother gave her telephone laugh. “Why, I just wondered how dirty you got on the trip. Those trains are a fright. I’ll start hot water running in the tub.”

She hurried out of the room. Johnny said weakly, “Wait a minute, lady.” But she was already gone. In a few seconds we could hear the heavy roar of water filling the tub.

The three of us stood there, sort of embarrassed. Dad said, “Well, Johnny, make yourself at home.” He went on downstairs, leaving me there with this Johnny. Looie was with Mother.

Johnny sat on the edge of his bed. He kicked at the suitcase with his sneaker. I looked at him with fascination. There were two deep scars on the back of his right hand and one finger was crooked. He was the toughest-looking kid I’d ever seen. It seemed somehow to be an insult that Mother should shove him into a bathtub the first minute.

I said, “It happens to me too. The baths, I mean. Until they’d drive you nuts.”

He looked at me without interest. “Yeah?”

“I’m going to be eleven in July. July fourteenth,” I said. “How old are you?”

“About twelve, I guess.”

I was horrified. “Don’t you know for certain?”

“No.”

Now I knew that this was really a tough kid. I had never met anyone before who didn’t know his own birthday. I decided right then and there to forget my own.

When he came downstairs for lunch, his hair was damp. But his face still had that grayish, underground look. He sat silent at the table while Mother and Dad made a lot of gay conversation about how nice it was in the country. He pushed his glass of milk aside. Mother said, “Don’t you like milk?”

“Never could get used to the taste of the stuff.”

“In this family,” Mother said in her don’t-cross-me voice, “the children eat what is placed before them — without question. We hope you’ll do the same, Johnny.”

He raised one eyebrow, grinned at her almost as though he was humoring her. He drank the milk down and wiped his mouth on the back of the scarred hand. “I still don’t like it,” he said.

Dad quickly changed the subject. After lunch he said, “Now you kids run out and play.”

Johnny headed for the garage. Once upon a time it was a barn. He went around behind it, dug a cigarette butt out of his pocket along with a kitchen match. He lit it carefully after striking the match with his thumbnail. He took one long deep drag, puffed out the smoke, butted the cigarette and put it back in his pocket just as Looie came around the corner of the barn, her face screwed up ready to cry if we were out of sight. She came toward us with a wide happy smile.

“ ’Fraid she’d snitch,” Johnny said.

“She would,” I agreed.

“I’m going to get sick of this Johnny, Johnny business,” he said. “The name’s Stoney. Stoney Wotnack.”

“Ha! Stoney!” Looie said. “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.”

“That’s right, sis,” he said.

I couldn’t think of what to say to him. He said, “What’s to do around this dump, Jim?”

I said eagerly, “Well, we can climb the apple trees, find there’s a crick the other side of the hill to fish in, and I’m making a cave in the crick bank and...” My voice trailed off. There wasn’t the tiniest gleam of interest in his eyes. “What do you like to do?” I asked weakly.

Stoney shrugged. “Depends. I get a charge out of playing snatch at the five-and-dime. You can sell the stuff for enough to take in the movies. You can smoke in the balcony. Or you tell a guy you watch his car he’ll give you two bits. And let him know that maybe you don’t get the two bits first, he gets a hole in a tire. Or at night you can go hunting in the alleys for drunks. Roll ’em for everything but their clothes.”

I couldn’t follow him very clearly. And I didn’t want to show my ignorance by asking questions. But he had opened up exciting possibilities I never knew existed. I saw myself sitting casually in a movie balcony, puffing on a cigar.

He sighed. “But you can’t do that stuff here. This place is — empty. No noises except bugs and birds. My old man was on a prison farm once. He didn’t like it.”

I said, “Want to look around?”

He shrugged. All the things that had looked pretty good to me turned out to be as childish as the pictures on the walls of my room. I had been pretty proud of our six acres, the same as Dad, but under Stoney’s cold stare everything dwindled away to a horrible, insipid emptiness.

At one place he came to life. The Branton twins and I had got hold of a feed sack, stuffed it with sawdust and hung it by a long rope from one of the rafters in the barn. When Stoney saw it, his shoulders went back and he strutted up to it. He went into a crouch, jabbed at it lightly and expertly with a flicking left, and jumped his right fist deep into it. He bounced around on his toes, jabbing, hooking, snuffing hard through his nose. The thump of his fist into the sawdust gave me a horridly vivid picture of how that would feel in my stomach.

He finished and said, “Little workout’s a good thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, consciously imitating his cold tone.

“Another couple years and I try the geegees.”

“The what?” I said.

“Golden Gloves, kid. Golden Gloves. That’s a life. Win in your division and turn pro and play it smart and you’re all set. Better than lugging a shine box around in fronta the Forty-second Street library, kid. I watch ’em work out at the gym. Look, we got to get a bigger bag and fasten it more solid. It swings too much.”

“Yeah,” I said coldly.

“Got any funny books?” he asked. “I feel like reading. The crime kind.” “They’ll only let me have cowboy ones,” I said apologetically.

“Them big sissies in the pink shirts give me a laugh.”

“I like Roy Rogers,” I said defensively.

He stared at me and chuckled coldly. “Roy Rogers! Ha!”

I went moodily back to the house alone. Looie was trudging around on the pointless walk, following Stoney. I didn’t like her following me usually, but this sudden shift of allegiance annoyed me. I sat in a chair on the porch.

Dad came out and said, “Where’s Johnny?”

“Walking,” I said.

“Can’t you think up a game or something?”

“He doesn’t like games.”

Mother came out and heard that last part. She said to Dad, “It’s quite an adjustment for the boy. I think we ought to leave him alone for a little while. Polite, isn’t he?”

Stoney did not come out of his mood of chill disdain. Within three days he had settled into a pattern. He fixed the sawdust bag and spent two hours every morning working out. Dad lined up some chores for him, and after his workout, he did his chores quickly and expertly. He was silent at the table, speaking only when spoken to. In the afternoon he wandered around and around, tagged by Looie. She talked to him constantly and I never heard him say anything to her that was longer than one word.

On the eleventh day of Stoney’s visit Dad had set us to work grubbing the tall grass out from around the bases of the apple trees. The dogged way Stoney worked made it necessary for me to work just as hard. Looie had found a hoptoad 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 were the biggest kids of their age in our school. They had 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. But I’d never heard anyone 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 Wahmbahmoo 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 drawn 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, 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 of 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 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?” Cam asked.

Stoney hunched his shoulders. He looked at the house and for a moment he seemed to be sniffling 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 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.

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 Stoney Wotnack. The sound came from afar — a thin, high screaming. I knew right away that it was Looie’s built-in screech. She used it for major catastrophes.

Dad wasn’t back from the office yet. I got out in back the same time Mother did, but Mother beat me to Looie. Mother went over her, bone by bone, and dug under her hair looking for scalp wounds.

All we could find was some angry-looking rope bums on her ankles and wrists, and a little lump on her forehead right at the hairline. 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. I had got tangled in one of the Brantons’ 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?” I asked.

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 with 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 was 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.

“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 see it, mister. Them two creeps you got would ’a’ 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 beat the hell out of 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.”

“Break 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 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.