No Promises in the Wind by Irene Hunt Page A

and my eyes were almost swollen shut. When we got into town, a policeman bawled me out for fighting. He didn’t make us get out of town, though. He even let us sleep in the jail that night.

4
    I noticed after a few weeks that I was thinking of nothing but food. Even the hopes of finding a job dwindled to the point of being extinguished altogether. But the question of the next meal was always with me, pressing and immediate.
    There had been many other interests in previous years; even in the midst of very difficult months at home there had been time for other interests. There had always been the dream of playing in an orchestra, dreams of the recitals which I would one day give, of the praise and acclaim my art would inspire. With Howie I had sometimes planned to run away, to roam the world (always with money in our pockets), to see sights and have adventures and come back heroes. There had been sports and school and teachers, good and bad; there had been books and an occasional movie where we always watched each feature twice at least. There had been girls, which was a secret interest, but a very real one. I often wondered about girls, at their soft prettiness, their grace, their capricious little ways. Sometimes I had stared at the mass of bright curls belonging to the girl who sat at the desk in front of me, and new music had come into my mind, gentle, whispering music that a boy with the solemn name of Josh Grondowski might sometime play for the girl he loved.
    Not anymore. There were no dreams now, no hopes, no interests except in finding food enough to keep Joey and me alive. Sometimes we’d get a bowl of dishwatery broth at a soup kitchen and we’d be told, “Just one meal. One meal is all we have for tramp-kids. We’ve got our own to feed.” And then we’d hide out in a doorway or a railroad depot or a city park, and the little sleep I’d get would be troubled with the problem of where to find a bite of breakfast, how to go about the business of searching or begging or stealing.
    We almost starved before I went to the garbage cans. I’d read in the papers back home of people doing that; I didn’t believe I could ever bring myself to it. But I did. I made Joey stay inside a warm doorway, and I went around to an alley back of a restaurant. There were two men and a woman pawing through the cans. There were rats too. The rats were brazen enough, but we four humans tried to ignore the presence of one another. I found some frozen bread and two steak bones with a little meat still on them. I washed the bones in the lavatory of a public rest room; then Joey and I found a sheltered place in a vacant lot where we built a fire and warmed the food. Joey ate it gratefully, but each bite sickened me as I remembered the garbage cans and the rats and the shamed people who couldn’t look at one another. I swore I’d never go back for that kind of food again, but I did, many times. I had to do it. One thing I was proud of, though: I never allowed Joey to go with me. Never.
    But I had reason to feel ashamed on another score. I turned coward when it became necessary for us to beg. The humiliation of begging was as hard for me to bear as hunger, and it left deeper scars. And though I spared Joey the indignity of the garbage cans, I did let him take over the hateful business of going from door to door.
    Joey never complained; he assumed that begging was his role rather than mine. “It’s better for me to do the asking, Josh. I’m younger and they’ll give to little kids where they won’t give a scrap to big guys.”
    He was right, of course. People would look at his thin face with the big shadowy eyes, and they’d share whatever they had with him. He was often casual about the reaction of people to him.
    â€œThe lady cried—I guess she was real sorry for me,” he told me indifferently one night as he spread out his gift of bread and an apple. Once he was