A/N: Thanks for the reviews so far. This is the last of the pre-written chapters. Worth continuing?
Johnny Cade walked out to the edge of his front yard. He was wearing a white t shirt and jeans, scuffed sneakers. He ducked his head down and lit a cigarette, blew a line of smoke out and looked down the road.
For a moment I stared at him, thinking of the days he turned up in school with a black eye or fat lip, the days he never turned up at all.
I went back to the kitchen and grabbed a cigarette out of the pack my sister had left on the bench. I walked outside with it, stood by the front door and looked over at Johnny. He was leaning back against the hood of the rusted car.
He didn't notice until I'd crossed the road, then he looked up at me with the same blank expression I'd seen on him at school. If he recognized me he didn't show it.
"Hi, can I borrow your light?"
I didn't often smoke, but it sure was a handy ice breaker at times.
He held a pack of matches toward me without a word.
I lit up, taking a careful puff to avoid coughing, aware of his dark eyes gazing at me.
"Thanks," I said, handing him back the matches. "I'm babysitting my nephew so can't run down the shop, I was hoping I'd see someone having a smoke ..."
His blank expression and silence was unnerving and I found myself talking into it.
"Do you know my sister? Belinda? Her husbands coming back from Vietnam this Wednesday."
"Nah," he said. He flicked ash off the end of his cigarette. It was half finished, in a minute he was probably going to turn and go back inside the house, and this seemed about the best chance I'd have to talk to him alone.
"She used to go to our school. I'm Eva, I've seen you around school."
He was giving me the same impassive stare. As if he thought I was crazy. I half wanted to turn and run back inside, but I tried to recall again what my sister had said about him. Maybe underneath the tough act he was scared too.
"Johnny Cade," he said.
He didn't smile or shake my hand, but it felt like an offering.
"I'm actually doing an assignment for the school paper."
"Yeah, never read it," he said.
Maybe to a boy like him columns on football and fashion and advice on scholarships had about as much to do with his life as life on the moon.
"That's ok, I wouldn't either except I kind of have to."
His mouth turned up a little in one corner.
I felt encouraged and carried on, smoke from the forgotten cigarette curling around my fingers.
"Actually my assignment is writing about the rivalry between you boys from the North side of town and the soc's."
The half smile fell off his face so fast it might have never been expect for how I remembered the unexpected sweetness of it.
"Oh yeah," he said. He flicked his cigarette butt away. Eyes gone hard.
There was nothing to do but carry on.
"I was hoping you'd talk to me about it. I heard you had a run in with some of them."
His jaw clenched, he swung his head back around to look at me.
"It's between us, nothing to do with anyone else."
He jammed his hands in his pockets, his shoulders stiff. I could see the tight anger in him and felt strangely nervous. We were standing out on the street in the sunny afternoon. But the police didn't come out here.
"You know, I already spoke to Bob and Randy. You don't want to give your side too?"
He smiled again, but there was no sweetness in it this time. I felt like a child and him an old man, staring at me out of those still eyes. It made me wonder about what he'd seen, all those nights in the little house with his parents sounding like they were killing each other and no police coming.
The thought made me regret pushing him to talk, I wanted to take it all back, but before I could say anything he did.
"What does anyone care about our side?"
"I do," I said. He was slight still, narrow shoulders and thin wrists coming from the sleeves of his jacket. Looking at him and letting the image of the well fed soc's superimpose there, imagining them swinging their brawny fists at him, made me feel sick.
The fights between the soc's and greasers were something we laughed at, if we thought about it at all, me and my friends and all the people like us who didn't have to worry about being cornered and beaten.
"Must be lonely in your club of one," he said.
"It's why I want to write this, to try and get the other side. All people at school see is you and your friends hanging around together, acting like hoods, looking like you want to make trouble."
Johnny turned at the rumble of a car engine approaching. I followed his gaze and saw an old Ford rounding the street.
Then he turned to look back at me.
"If they think that, what difference does it make? You think we want anyone to feel sorry for us?"
I shook my head, and anything I might have said would have been drowned out by the squeal of breaks as the car hauled up beside Johnny.
Steve Randle was driving, fair haired Dallas Winston was leaning out of the passenger window, arm hanging down along the door.
"Hey, Johnny," he said, but his eyes were on me instead of Johnny.
"You picked yourself up a date, Johnny?"
I felt even more uncomfortable under the hard stares of Dallas and Steve.
"Well jump in, there's plenty of room in the back seat," Dallas said to me.
"She just came over and started talking to me," I heard Johnny mumble as he got in.
Great, it appeared he really had thought I was crazy. If I tried to explain I was only trying to interview him it probably wouldn't help either.
"I just needed a light," I said, since Dallas was still eyeing me.
"Yeah, Johnny not man enough for you? You can get in the front with me then."
He winked, patted a slither of space beside him.
"I'm babysitting, and I wouldn't come even if I wasn't."
Dallas laughed.
"Think your too good for us? You're the one standing on the street on the North side, honey."
Spending a lifetime as a cops daughter let me know well enough not to get in a car with any group of boys I barely knew, but it didn't seem smart to say so. I knew there was no chance they'd talk to me if they knew who my father was, even though he worked in narcotics and had probably never laid eyes on any of them.
"I've got to get back in to my nephew now," I said.
"Another time," Dallas said, and he laughed again. A low chuckle which made me turn away fast. The laugh of someone who didn't really believe he wouldn't always get his way.
XXX
After dinner I went out to the porch where my father was sitting, having a whisky and cigar.
"Hey," I said. I stood beside him, looked over the dusky sky.
"Yes?" he said. My dad wasn't someone who made idle conversation. If you came to see him he expected you had a question he could answer, a problem he could find a solution for.
"That report for the paper I was telling you about, remember?"
"I remember."
"You know some people say police don't go to the North side. Is that true?"
"What do you think?"
He never for a second stopped being a cop.
"I got no reason not to believe it," I said. I couldn't tell him the person was my sister, his daughter.
Belinda had always been his favourite. Even when she got pregnant, he supported her while everyone else looked down on her.
He offered for him and my mom to adopt the baby, raise it like their own, but she and Tommy never even entertained the idea. They had already decided to get married when they broke the news of the baby over dinner one night. My dad just about choked on a piece of steak and mom cried into her salad.
"This going on your report?" he asked me.
"I won't name you," I said.
"No one have great powers of deduction at your school, do they?"
"Honestly, I doubt anyone will even read it," I sighed. "I think all anyone reads is the sport and gossip."
My dad puffed on his cigar, looking across the garden.
"You haven't denied it yet," I pointed out.
He smiled, but it was aimed at the overgrown roses not me.
"Let me guess - they were talking about a domestic?"
"Police don't go to domestics?"
"They do. But you know what happens? You turn up, she cries and screams when you arrest her man. Tells you he didn't do anything wrong. Tells you he never hit her while she's mopping up the blood from her mouth. Won't talk, won't press charges."
I stared at him, held by the image.
He shrugged.
"Violence is an ugly thing, Eva. Especially behind closed doors."
"So you don't do anything?"
"Can't do anything. You can haul him off to jail and she'll bail him first thing in the morning. Next Saturday night he gets home from the bar and there you go again."
"This happens a lot on the North side?"
My father sucked his cigar.
"Happens all over. Money never stopped anyone swinging a fist."
I thought of Dallas and Bob brawling together in the hallway. Arms locked together, scrabbling for the advantage, wanting blood. Yet in everyone's eyes Dallas was the delinquent one.
"But the police would come to the South side?"
"If they got the call, sure," he said. "But the wife of a doctor isn't going to report him for domestic assault."
I chewed my lip. I felt like my eyes had been opened to another world, one my father lived in when he left our house each day, one Johnny Cade and boys like him knew as the only world.
