No Promises in the Wind Read Online Free PDF Page A

they’ll work. But not if we have to have a kid along.”
    â€œHe can sing,” Howie said as if to himself. “He’s got a good, clear voice, a little off-pitch now and then, but nice. Lots of people will pay to hear a little kid sing who wouldn’t notice older ones. Joey just might do all right for himself.”
    â€œI’ve told you, Howie, he can’t go. I won’t let him. And that’s final.”
    â€œMaybe you and me could go it alone, Joey. Let old Josh stay here and boss people around if that’s what he likes to do. You and me might get ourselves a lot of loose change if we practiced a little and got into the right spot.” He grinned at Joey, and my brother grinned back in triumph. For a minute I was furious with both of them, but even in that minute it struck me that if some artist could paint those two faces, both of them thin from too scanty meals during the past two years, but both of them bright with laughter—if some artist could have caught them at that minute, he could have made a picture that was really something.
    So it was settled, and late that night Joey and I crawled out of our room with an old cardboard suitcase full of clothing, the remnants of a tattered blanket, and all the matches I could find. Matches, I felt, were very important. I had read a story somewhere of an expedition that appeared to be all set, everything packed and ready. Then it smashed, all because one little item had been forgotten. No matches. I hunted around and collected every one I could find.
    I was too excited to think about how grave a step we were taking. If I thought of Mom and Dad at all, it was with anger which I sought to fan in order to keep up my courage. Nothing mattered except getting away.
    We joined Howie, who waited down in our alley with his banjo and a bundle of clothes tucked under his arm. The three of us slept in a park for a few hours that night. Then very early the next morning we found a Salvation Army kitchen open with no one else yet around. A big, tired-looking man shook his head at us, but he gave each of us a bowl of oatmeal. Then he told us not to come back. The food he handed out was for men who must wait in line to get to employment windows—it wasn’t for runaway kids.
    Our experience that first day showed how right Howie had been in making me allow Joey to come with us. We stopped down on Randolph and Wabash early in the afternoon and tried our luck for the first time at the art of panhandling. That is, Joey and Howie tried it. They were right for it, both of them being small, Joey’s blondness contrasting vividly with Howie’s great dark eyes and sallow face. I drifted off in the crowd and watched the other two perform.
    Joey sang, his small face bright under the blond hair that he had to brush out of his eyes from time to time. His voice was sweet and clear, a little thin, of course, and not always true to pitch, but with Howie covering up for him, he did all right. Howie, with his sense of showmanship, would run his fingers across the strings in a gay arpeggio and then grin up at Joey as if that flurry of notes was some pleasant secret between them. People stopped to watch them. Some smiled as they stood listening, and some sad faces looked sadder than ever. But a lot of people reached out to drop a nickel or a few pennies into Joey’s outstretched cap.
    They collected seventy-eight cents that afternoon. Then at twilight they joined me, and we moved on in triumph at our beginning. We bought hot dogs and a loaf of bread and still had money enough for some breakfast. We gloated as we ate. If Joey’s singing with Howie’s banjo could do that well for us, we were pretty sure that, given the luck to find an available piano, Howie and I could make music that some restaurant owner or dance hall proprietor would pay us to do. Once in a while I’d play popular numbers straight, I thought, and Joey could sing with us. I no