The Adventures of Jack and Billy Joe by A. Jeff Tisdale Page B

said as she came toward Jack with a clean kitchen towel. She put the towel over Jack’s head and blotted and wiped most of the water from him.
    Her efforts only tended to make Jack look more pitiful.
    “You come over here by the stove, boy, and dry off and warm up some before you get back out in that rain, and you keep that hood up, ya heah. You gonna catch your death of cold.”
    “Yes, ma’am, but I’m late now and people are expectin’ their papers,” Jack said in his best hero’s tone.
    “Well, I tell you what,” she said, “you’re gonna eat one of these sausages and a biscuit to warm your insides before you go back out there.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.” Jack gave in to her insistence.
    After he had eaten the delicious sausage and biscuit, he thanked the ladies again and returned to his route, which was just one more paper at the junior college’s president’s house.
    From the president’s house, home was just a block away. Jack rode his bike into the garage and parked it in the front so it wouldn’t block the car or the pickup truck.
    He went into the house through the breezeway from the garage so he could leave his wet slicker there to drip.
    He said hello to his mother as he passed through the kitchen and found his dad in the living room to give him the paper.
    Jack’s mother stuck her head out of the kitchen door and said, “Jack, you go to your room and change those wet pants and shoes. Bring the wet ones back to the breezeway so I can put them in the wash. Supper will be ready in about ten minutes. “You hungry?”
    “Not too much but I could eat, thank you.”

Chapter Five
    The River
    It was good that spring break started the next week. Billy Joe was about to come unglued. He and Jack could get their substitute newspaper carriers to run their paper routes for a week while they fished and camped in the woods if their mommas would let them go.
    Jack did foresee a problem getting their mommas to let them go for a week without adults.
    “I think we need to go out with the Methodists on their sleep-out at the Boy Scout camp. Your momma and mine would, for sure, let us go on that and the Methodists sure eat good.”
    “You mean you wanna go waste a week with those sissies in the woods?” Billy Joe asked. “Most of ’em ain’t never been out all night without their mommas.”
    “They ain’t sissies,” Jack said. “They’re just not used to being out in the woods. The only reason I wanna do it is, that’s the only way Momma will let me spend the night out there.”
    “Yeah,” Billy Joe agreed. “My momma thinks bears and alligators are gonna eat me or somethin’ but I don’t know if it’s worth it to go out with this Methodist Youth Fellowship bunch or not.”
    “You know the Methodists have the best parties and eats in town. The Baptists and the Presbyterians pray a lot but they don’t eat near as well. Besides, what you don’t like is the Easter egg hunts but it ain’t Easter. They won’t do none of that,” Jack argued.
    “What men are goin’?” Billy Joe asked.
    “Louis Jackson and Ted Ward, Jr. is what I’ve heard.”
    “Louis Jackson! When he was scout master, he used to make us march and he would kick us if we got out of step. I think he was a marine or somethin’ in the war,” Billy Joe protested.
    “Aw, he ain’t gonna make us march on a campout,” Jack said. “The worst he can do is make us bring in too much firewood.”
    “Where they havin’ this ‘campout’?” Billy Joe asked.
    “Out at the scout camp on Leaf River,” Jack answered.
    “Now that they built the shelter with the big fireplace and put in the generator wheel on the river, it ain’t like bein’ in the woods a’tall,” Billy Joe protested.
    “What we gonna do if we don’t go with them?” Jack asked.
    “We could borrow Mr. Ezell’s boat and run some trotlines further on up the river,” Billy Joe proposed. “The river’s just right, I hear.”
    “Now you know as well as