One Good Punch by Rich Wallace Page B

floor. The clerk sees it and yells at him to stop, which he does, but I’m already out the door, and I run like hell up to the park and hide out. The clerk gets Joey’s name and calls his parents, but he won’t give up my name, so I get off free. The next day, I see Joey and he’s got welts on his arms and under his eye. But he says just to forget it.”
    “Is
that
why you’re protecting him?” she asks, as if there’s no parallel at all.
    “Not exactly,” I say. “But we were always doing things like that—throwing rocks through factory windows at night or stealing bottles of soda—and I always seemed to get away with it. He usually did, too, but he got caught a few times and never ratted on me.”
    She gives me a very surprised look, like she can’t believe I’d really do anything criminal.
    “We grew
up,
” I say. “I was twelve!”
    “God,” she says, shaking her head.
    “Anyway,” I say, “I still don’t know if I
am
going to protect him. I have until tomorrow afternoon to decide.”
    “You can’t compare stealing Hershey bars with selling drugs, Mike.”
    “There’s more to it than that,” I say. “This isn’t even about protecting him, you know. I don’t want him getting arrested, but that’s only part of it. Everybody keeps telling me to tell the truth, but they’re all full of shit. They have this preconceived notion of what they think the truth is. But they’re wrong.”
    “So make it right.”
    “This is about honesty, Shelly.”
    “Honesty means telling the truth, Mike. Doesn’t it?”
    I stare at the sidewalk, then start nodding my head slowly. “That’s exactly what it’s about,” I say.

Decisive Match Is a No-brainer
    I T’S STILL EARLY when I walk Shelly home. She leans into me at the doorway and kisses my forehead lightly. “I know you’ll make the right decision,” she says, sounding like my mom.
    I just shrug. I don’t know what I’m doing. I need a run. But first I need to go see Joey. I don’t know if I’m going there to talk things out or to beat him up, but I’m going. Somehow that will help me decide.
    “See ya,” I say. Shelly watches me from the step until I’m out of sight; I keep looking back, and she keeps standing there.
    So I walk up the hill and through the downtown and over to Joey’s. They live in one of those big old Victorians on Myrtle; I think it was passed down to them from Joey’s father’s family.
    I used to come over here once in a while after school. One time me and Joey went up to the attic and crawled out on the roof, which is steep and fairly high. We could see way over to the valley and, much closer, into people’s yards and windows.
    We were about thirteen, and one of the neighbors started yelling at us to get the heck down from there before we fell and broke our necks or worse. Joey just laughed. “I fall off here all the time,” he called back, which was totally untrue, of course. We
would
have broken our necks or worse if we fell.
    The neighbor called the cops, and a car came by. The officer got out and looked up at us with his hands on his hips and said, “You boys all right?”
    “No problem,” Joey said.
    “You better get down. You’re making people nervous.”
    Joey looked at me with a smile. “That’s good,” he said, loud enough for the cop to hear.
    We crawled back into the attic and went to the kitchen and ate peanut butter sandwiches.
             
    Mr. Onager opens the door and greets me enthusiastically. He’s wearing old gray pants; a white T-shirt is stretched over his huge stomach. His hair, which is receding and thin, is sticking up as if he’s been lying on the couch.
    “Come in, Mike. Come in,” he says, smiling and sweeping his arm toward the living room. So I follow him in. You never know what he’ll be like: sometimes he’s funny and engaging; sometimes he’s practically brain-dead and nasty.
    “Let me make you some room,” he says, picking up a pile of seven or eight old