No Promises in the Wind Read Free

if she had money for a cup of hot cocoa after a morning of ironing. But I heard the door of her room close sharply, and I knew the meaning of that sound. I’d heard it often at times when I was younger and she was fed up with my childish demands for attention. It meant, “Keep your distance. I am not available for further conversation.”
    I didn’t think she was angry with me this time, but I had an idea she didn’t want to hear me say anything against Dad. Slowly I put the sandwich into the pocket of my jacket and started out for school.
    Penn High School had become a refuge for me. I was a good student, and that helped to make school attractive. I wasn’t one of the popular set, but that didn’t bother me because when classes were over, the piano up in Miss Crowne’s music room was mine, and Howie was with me.
    I played better than most kids of my age, I guess. That was partly because I loved music better than anything on earth. I played by the hour, improvising upon the snatches of melody that ran through my mind, fumbling sometimes, faking at others, but finally finding something that sounded beautiful and right to me. When that happened, I rearranged and polished and worked at it until the notes went slipping under my fingers like water.
    Howie shared my love of music, and he was one of those rare musicians. He seemed to have been born with an instinct for understanding music, for hearing it precisely and then reproducing it with a little something extra, all his own. Without being able to read a note, he could coax music out of a piano, a guitar, a mouth organ, a pocket comb. His favorite instrument, though, was the banjo. He had an old one which he once told me he had stolen, and that was very likely true. However he came by it, that banjo meant more to Howie than anything on earth. He knew how to make those strings sing, and we hadn’t practiced together very long until we were making music that sent splinters of delight all through me. With music like that I could forget the anxieties at home; I could forget Dad’s moods and the cheerless faces everywhere on Chicago’s grim west side. Day after day Howie and I closed the door of the music room and shut out the troubled times.
    Howie was a boy of many sorrows, but he was one that sorrow couldn’t quite pin down. He was only a few months younger than I was, but not much taller than Joey. He was a thin-faced, sallow boy with great dark eyes that could look mournful one minute and full of laughter the next as if they mocked mournfulness and refused to accept it. I guess he had never known his father; he’d had a line of stepfathers, none of whom cared much about him. His mother was drunk when she could find money to buy whiskey; when she wasn’t drunk, she was mean. Howie didn’t talk about her much. He liked to talk of things that made for laughter, and the most striking feature about him was his mouth, a mouth that seemed always eager to laugh. Maybe I noticed that especially because my own mouth was characteristically unsmiling, even a little sullen. He was a wonderful guy, that Howie, the only real friend I had in high school.
    That afternoon we were practicing something I had composed. It was a fluid, changing tone-story, a theme that I improvised upon according to my mood, an outpouring of feelings that were inside me and changed with the quality of sunlight or the lack of it, with the dreams that sometimes seemed to be possible, with the despair that was a part of the times. It was something Howie and I had worked on for months, and lately when we’d played it, Miss Crowne’s face glowed. We didn’t have to ask her if we were good. We knew we were when she asked us to play for the school assembly.
    The October afternoon outside the windows was as gentle and drowsy as if there weren’t a trouble in the world. For all old Nature knew or cared, every able-bodied man the length and width of the