CHAPTER 10

By the time puddles had iced over and snow coated Tulsa's streets, Johnny had stopped sleeping at his parents house and taken up residence at Dally's. He'd moved all his stuff out little by little, sneaking in when he knew that his parents would be at work or passed out too drunk to wake up at a little noise.

Dally went with him a few times, basically sitting on the bed watching as Johnny sorted through his stuff, but Johnny always seemed embarrassed when the older greaser was standing in the tiny room, so he'd quit coming. He didn't know what caused the kid's embarrassment; the room wasn't any worse than the one Johnny was sharing with Dally now—a little smaller, but it was cleaner at least, maybe because no one lived there, but still. The walls were closer to white, and it even smelled better, a little musty but not sour.

But even so, he stayed home and opened the door whenever Johnny clambered up the stairs with another backpack full. It took him six trips, total, over the course of a month to get everything out. Dally found him a couple of old boxes in the alley behind The Dingo to put the stuff in. They smelled like cardboard and musty potatoes, but Johnny still put everything in them and stacked them in the corner, one on top of the other, a makeshift dresser.

It was mostly junk, the stuff that Johnny brought back. Personal. Old letters, a lot of them not addressed to him but instead to his mother, 16 years ago, when she had been young and happy. Letters asking about her new son. It was clear that she had been proud of him, the letters had obviously been in response to bragging words about the new baby. The ink was aging faint, the letters in pencil smudged so badly that they were barely legible.

There was a picture frame, and protected underneath the scratched layer of glass was a couple that Johnny said were his grandparents. Their black and white faces were serious,eyes gazing out over an imagined horizon. Dally imagined them looking at prairie, at fields full of wheat, even though there was a small white house in the background looked like it was in town. It seemed right that they lived somewhere other than dusty old Tulsa, somewhere where there weren't any gangs or guns and you could see for miles.

Johnny wrote a note when he was finished. It was in not real neat pencil on a sheet of paper torn out of his school notebook. Dally saw it when Johnny was in school, the morning after he wrote it and the morning before he pinned it on the door of the empty room that used to be his. It said, bluntly, that he'd found someplace else to stay, someplace better. He'd signed it 'Jonathan' and Dally realized, with an odd amount of surprise, that that must be his real name. It seemed strange that Johnny would be named anything else.

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Dally stopped seeing the bruises. With each week they faded, until the only marks were the occasional one from being tackled in football, the bruises that come from bone on bone with only a thin layer of flesh between. They were good bruises. Happy ones.

They were playing football, a week after Johnny had left the note and five weeks after he'd moved into Dally's place, when Johnny's father showed up. The whole gang, except for Ponyboy, who was indside, were collapsed in the dry brown grass after a game of football. Their jackets and sweatshirts were discarded in a pile, but their breath was still making smoky clouds of ice in the January air, and their noses and ears were red and tingling.

Dally was wheezing a little in the cold air, trying to catch his breath. He smoked too much, Johnny was always telling him, but hell, Johnny smoked twice as much as he did. He was always coming home to find out the kid had run out of smokes of his own and had finished off Dally's pack. He was staring at a patch of grass, holding in air and letting it slowly back out as evenly as he could, listening to Johnny's laugh. He looked up, startled, when the laugh ended abruptly with a sharp breath in that even Dally could hear, four feet away with the sound of his own breath wheezing in his ears like distant screams.

It took Dally a few seconds to recognize the man, but when he did, the resemblance shocked him. The man looked like Johnny, in a way. He had the same dark skin and wiry build, the same dark hair and eyes. He looked like Johnny might look in 25 years, but Dally couldn't imagine those bitter eyes taking the place of Johnny's, or the rage that contorted the man's face being at home on Johnny's face.

It was obvious that he was drunk even before he started yelling, spewing out slurred words. "So you've found somewhere better to go, eh, boy?"

One second, they were lying around on the grass and the next, the gang were all on their feet, and formed a circle around Johnny. With some surprise, Dally found himself on his feet and at the front of it, directly in front of the drunk. "Get the fuck out of here," he growled.

Mr. Cade looked surprised for a second. He swayed a little on the spot, putting out a hand to the telephone pole to steady himself. "You ain't got no right to tell me where to go."

The circle had gotten tighter. Dally had Johnny's chest pressed against his back, he could feel the younger boy shaking. A month of peace, and he had let down his guard, and now Dally could hear his sharp intakes of breath, fast and uneven, could feel his fear in the way the boy was leaning against him for support and shelter.

"Goddamn hood. That's my son, you ain't got no right to keep me from talking to him."

"You ain't got no right to treat your son the way you do."

The man took two wobbly steps toward Dally. "Don't you tell me how to treat my son. Johnny, get your ass out here."

Dally took a step forward, about to say something, when Johnny stalked out from behind him and up to his father. Dally's gut reaction was to pull on Johnny's sleeve, pull him back into the safety of the group, but he knew that he couldn't do that, not now that Johnny'd stepped out on his own. No greaser would stand for something like that.

"There you are, you little shit." His father took a step toward him, fists curled, but Johnny, instead of cowering back, stepped forward as well. Mr. Cade halted in confusion.

"Get away from me." Johnny's voice was a low hiss, more threatening than Dally had ever heard him sound. His eyes were narrowed, and his eyes weren't focused on the ground but instead on his father's face.

Mr. Cade gaped at him. "Why you little…" Dally saw the arm being drawn back, starting forward, but when the punch landed squarely on Johnny's cheekbone, the kid didn't utter a sound, he just went down limp as a rag doll.

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You know on Monty Python, where there's that woman who keeps yelling in an English accent "I'm not dead yet!"? That's this story. It keeps yelling at me.

And don't be mad, I hated to do that to Johnny, too. Poor kid, he stands up for himself and look what happens.

Next chapter out over Xmas break, maybe.