The Paper Cowboy

ALSO BY KRISTIN LEVINE

The Lions of Little Rock

The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had

KRISTIN LEVINE

G. P. Putnam's Sons
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia

New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

penguin.com

A Penguin Random House Company

 

Copyright © 2014 by Kristin Levine.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Levine, Kristin (Kristin Sims), 1974–

The paper cowboy / Kristin Levine.

pages cm

Summary: In a small town near Chicago in 1953, twelve-year-old Tommy faces escalating problems at home, among his Catholic school friends, and with the threat of a communist living nearby, but taking over his hospitalized sister's paper route introduces him to neighbors who he comes to rely on for help.

[1. Conduct of life—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Newspaper carriers—Fiction. 4. Neighborliness—Fiction. 5. Communism—Fiction. 6. Illinois—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.L57842Pap 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2014004421

 

ISBN 978-0-698-17174-9

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

to my father—thanks, Dad, for all the stories

THE PAPER

“Hands up!”

My best friend, Eddie Sullivan, had a newspaper rolled and pointed at me like a gun. He was only twelve, but over the summer he'd grown so much, he looked big enough to be in high school.

“No way!” I called out. I grabbed the newspaper and tried to wrench it from him. My dog, Boots, started to bark, excited. He was a small, scruffy black mutt, with paws as white as frost on the prairie.

“Surrender, you little commie,” Eddie said, “and I might let you live!”

“I'm not a communist!”

Eddie pretended to shoot me with the newspaper.

I fell down, laughing. “Stalin's dead!”

“But the Soviet Union is not giving up. I'm not going to let you take over the world!”

We were standing on a mountain of newspapers. To our right, a glass-bottle hill glowed brown and green in the sunlight. A bit farther on loomed a pile of tin cans, ten feet tall, with the labels burned off so that the metal sparkled like the silver on a sheriff's star.

Eddie grabbed one of my shoes and started to pull. I was laughing so hard, I could barely swat him away. “Help, Boots!”

My dog jumped into the fray, nipping at Eddie's ankles.

It was the day of our community paper drive, when everyone placed their old papers and magazines by the side of the road. Eddie and I had spent all morning following the collection truck, watching his father swing the piles onto the truck bed. After lunch, we followed the truck on our bikes to the scrap yard. The truck would be driven onto a big scale and the homeowners' association would receive a certain amount of money for every pound of paper that had been collected. While we were waiting for our turn on the scale, Eddie and I climbed onto our truck and started poking around.

“You dirty com—” Eddie's voice cracked, so high he sounded like my little sister. He cleared his throat. “You dirty commie,” he said, his voice now deep like his father's. Boots sank his teeth into Eddie's shirt and pulled him away. But Eddie didn't let go of my shoe, which came off, and I tumbled down the hill of papers.

We were both laughing so hard, it took me a moment to get my breath. Eddie was standing on top of the pile, holding the shoe over his head like a trophy. Boots was chasing him around in circles, barking. “Victory!” yelled Eddie.

I was about to scramble up the pile and join back in the fight when a headline caught my eye: THE WAR ENDS! Even though it was now September 13, 1953, finding an old newspaper wasn't so unusual. No, it was the masthead that intrigued me:
The Daily Worker.

“Eddie!” I called. “Come quick!”

Eddie slid down the hill, loose papers flying around him. “What is it, Tommy?”

I held the paper out to him. The
Daily Worker
was a communist newspaper. I knew that from the movies. And I'd found a copy, lying right beside my shoeless foot.

“A commie newspaper!” Eddie's eyes were wide, his cheeks smudged with newsprint.

“Do you know what this means?” I asked.

“What?”

“There's a communist in Downers Grove!” That was the little town where we lived, just a commuter-train ride from Chicago.

Eddie gave me a look.

“Just think about it,” I said. “These papers all came from our neighborhood. That means one of our neighbors”—I paused and lowered my voice—“must be a communist.”

Eddie looked around, as if he expected to see a Soviet spy parachuting down from the sky. If a Russian caught you, he'd torture you until you agreed to spy on the United States. Sure, it was bad that there was a communist in town, but it was a little bit exciting too. Like when you hear about a fire. You hope no one is hurt and you feel bad if they lost all their belongings. But there's something so thrilling about seeing that fire truck go by with all the bells ringing.

“Is this like the time you convinced everyone the old shack by the pond was haunted and it turned out there were just raccoons inside?” asked Eddie.

“No,” I protested. “This is proof!” I waved the newspaper.

Eddie's dad yelled at us to get off the truck then. Mr. Sullivan had come back from the war in Korea with a bad limp, but his arms were as thick as the strong man's at the circus. He always helped with the paper drive because no one could swing the stacks of paper onto the truck quite like him.

I rolled up the paper I'd found and stuffed it into my back pocket. Eddie handed me my shoe and I put it on.

“Hey, Tommy,” Mr. Sullivan said, “you want to come by and see the bomb shelter I built?”

“Love to,” I said. “But I got to get home to dinner.”

“It's his birthday,” Eddie volunteered. “He's finally twelve like me.”

“Well then, happy birthday. Tell your dad we should all go fishing again soon.”

“Will do,” I said as I jumped on my bike and pedaled off.

You'd think I'd be excited about my birthday. I mean, last week Dad had brought home a box that was just the right shape and size to hold a pair of genuine leather cowboy boots. Mom had promised to make pierogi and I loved the half-circle dumpling noodles filled with mashed potatoes and cheese. There'd probably be an angel food cake too, with a sweet fruit glaze on top.

But Busia, that's Polish for “grandma,” wouldn't be there. She'd died a few months before, right about the same time Susie was born. And that's when Mom really started to change. I mean, she'd always been moody, but now she was like a sky full of dark clouds. Sometimes, things would clear right up without a drop of rain, and other times, there'd be lightning and hail. Never quite knowing what the weather would be like at home made my palms sweat.

And as I turned into our driveway and walked my bike to the garage, from inside the house I could already hear screaming.

THE BIRTHDAY DINNER

I stood outside the front door for a moment, wiping my hands on my pants, trying to decide what to do. I wanted to go back to Eddie's house, see the shelter his dad had built in case the Soviets dropped an atomic bomb on us. But if I didn't show up for dinner on my birthday, my mother would call his mother, and that would just cause more problems. So I took a deep breath and opened the front door.

My dad was sitting on the couch reading the paper, as if he couldn't hear a thing. He was a foreman at Western Electric, and usually wore a suit and tie, with a shirt starched at the dry cleaner, even on the weekends. My dad was tall and thin and looked just a bit like Gary Cooper in
High Noon.
I'd seen that movie five times when it was at the Tivoli.

The screaming was coming from the kitchen. From what I could hear, it sounded like something Mom was cooking had not turned out the way she'd expected.

“Hello, Tommy,” Dad said without looking up. The dark frames of his reading glasses made his face look even thinner than normal.

“What's going on?” I asked.

“I'm not going in there to find out,” Dad said, turning a page of the paper.

This was usually the best approach when Mom was in a bad mood. We all tried to stay out of her way. I was just about to sneak off to my room when Mom called, “Is that you, Tommy?”

I groaned. Ignoring Mom when she asked you a direct question only made things worse. “Yeah, it's me,” I said.

Mom came to the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. She usually wore her long black hair pinned up in a neat bun. But lots of strands had escaped the bun today and the flowered apron she wore seemed too bright for her tense mood. She put her hands on her hips. “Where have you been?”

Dad rolled his eyes.

“Don't you roll your eyes at me!” Mom barked.

“It's his birthday,” Dad said. “You don't need to interrogate him. He came home because it's dinnertime.”

Mom's face turned red, a vein popping out on her forehead. “Dinner will be ready in a minute,” she shouted. “The first set of pierogi didn't turn out right!”

Dad didn't respond, just turned another page of the newspaper.

“I'm sure they're fine,” I said, trying to smooth things over. But as soon as Mom turned to look at me, I knew it was the wrong thing to say.

“You don't appreciate my effort?!” Mom snapped. Her normally hazel eyes blazed emerald green. “I was trying to make them perfect for you!”

“I . . .” There was nothing I could say.

Mom stomped into the kitchen and then came back carrying a pan of pierogi. “You think they're fine? Take them!” She threw a pierogi at me.

It hit me on the stomach. I stared in surprise. Mom yelled all the time, but she'd never thrown anything before.

My dad finally put the paper down. “Catherine!” A noodle hit him on the shoulder.

Mom kept throwing. Soon there were noodles all over the floor, blending in with the beige carpet.

“Stop it!” cried Dad.

I giggled uncomfortably.

“Oh, you think it's funny, do you?” Mom asked.

“No,” I said.

But she was already storming back to the kitchen. She returned with the cake in her hands. “Then you might as well have the cake too!” She threw it. The delicate angel food cake crumbled against the living room wall.

“That's enough!” said Dad.

It wasn't even a little funny anymore. She was scaring me.

Mom disappeared once more and returned carrying a large shoe box. “And here's your present!”

She tossed the box onto the coffee table. It slid across the table and fell to the floor. The lid popped off and I could see the genuine leather cowboy boots I'd wanted inside.

But getting the boots didn't feel as good as I'd expected. It didn't feel good at all.

In the back room, I could hear my baby sister start to cry.

At the sound of the crying, Mom seemed to collapse, as if she were a puppet and the string holding her up had suddenly been snipped. “I have a headache,” she said. “I'm going to sleep.” She stomped off and slammed her bedroom door.

I looked over at Dad, but his expression was as blank as a cowboy playing poker.

“What's wrong with Mom?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice calm.

Dad shook his head. “She's just tired. She wanted to make your birthday special.”

It was a lame excuse and I think he knew it, because he wouldn't meet my eye.

The baby kept crying, but Dad just knelt down and started picking up the pierogi. So I went into the kitchen and mixed up a bottle and walked into the nursery.

If you asked me, my littlest sister, Susie, who was three months old, still looked like a wrinkled raisin, but everyone else said she was cute. Her face was bright red, her tiny fists flailing as she fought off the covers.

“Hey, Susie,” I said as I picked her up. She quieted a little, and I held her to my chest. She smelled nice, like baby powder. But then she shoved a fist into her mouth, sucked it twice, and began wailing again. I gave her the bottle, and she gurgled happily. It made me feel a little better.

I carried Susie into the hall and stood still for a moment. My heart was pounding. So I hadn't gotten my birthday dinner. So what? A cowboy wouldn't be upset. Heck, I bet a cowboy didn't even celebrate his birthday. But I was disappointed, and even worse, I was mad at myself for feeling that way.

What I really wanted was to talk to Mary Lou. She always made me feel better. I could hear water running and realized my older sister was probably hiding out in the bathroom, giving Pinky her bath. I knocked on the bathroom door. “It's me.”

“Come in,” called Mary Lou.

I did, and closed the door behind me, giving a little sigh as I leaned against it.

Mary Lou was sitting on a low stool next to the tub. She was thirteen, a year ahead of me in school, with brown hair she usually wore in braids. I guess she was pretty, but I could only tell because Eddie could never put two sentences together when she was around. I knew boys were supposed to think their sisters were dull and stupid, but I liked mine.

Mary Lou smiled when she saw me, a big, happy, genuine grin, but I must have looked pale or something because she asked, “You okay?”

“Fine,” I lied. “But Mom started throwing things!”

“Shh!” Mary Lou whispered. “Tell me later. Not in front of Pinky.”

Pinky was our other little sister, and she was four. Her real name was Roberta, but the nurse who had delivered her had remarked, “She's so pink!” and the name had stuck.

“Happy birthday!” Pinky exclaimed, splashing in the tub.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Mom made a cake!” Pinky added. “She said I could have a piece.”

I didn't know how to tell her that my birthday cake now lay smashed to bits on the living room floor. So instead, I changed the subject.

“Look what I found,” I said brightly. I balanced Susie in the crook of one arm and pulled the newspaper out of my back pocket. “A commie newspaper!”

“Oooh!” said Pinky. She didn't know what that meant, of course, but she'd caught my excitement. And she forgot about the cake, which, of course, was what I had intended.

“Let me see that,” Mary Lou said.

“Careful!” I said. “Your hands are wet.”

Mary Lou wiped them on a towel and I handed the paper over. She scanned it quickly.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

“Found it on the paper drive.”

“Tommy, you have to get rid of this!”

“Get rid of it!” I exclaimed, surprised. “But I wanted to show the boys at school.”

“Why?” she asked. “Do you want them to think we're communists?”

I laughed. “No one would think that.”

“You should burn it,” she said, handing it back to me.

“Well, thanks for your advice,” I said sarcastically. I was kind of disappointed. I'd thought she'd be excited too. Finding the paper was the best thing that had happened today.

“I mean it! You're going to get in trouble.”

“Nah.”

“Tommy! Remember last month when you found the BB gun in the woods and—”

“Fine,” I sighed. “I'll burn the paper.” But I was going to show it to the other boys at school first.

After Pinky and Susie had been put to bed, Dad and Mary Lou and I shared a tense and silent dinner of pierogi sprinkled with carpet fibers. Mom had been right. They weren't very good. The filling had turned out mealy, not at all like Busia used to make them.

“Did you like the cowboy boots?” Dad asked gruffly, when we were nearly done.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

He nodded. I waited for him to say something about Mom throwing all the food, but he didn't. Dad took off his glasses and I could see the fine lines around his eyes. He looked tired.

After dinner, Mary Lou and I did the dishes and listened to
The Lone Ranger
on the radio. I loved how it always started the same way: “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear!” and the music and the “Hi-Yo, Silver! Away!” I loved how the Lone Ranger's best friend, Tonto, always called him ke-mo sah-bee, which means “trusted friend.” I loved how in thirty minutes the bad guys were caught and all the problems solved.

When the program was over, Mary Lou shut it off. She smiled and the freckles on her nose and cheeks popped out. Sometimes, in the right light, her hair had just a tinge of red. “Hey, Tommy,” she said. “I've got something for you.” She pulled a small, newspaper-wrapped package out of her pocket.

I smiled. Mom might be unpredictable, but I could always count on Mary Lou.

“Take it, stupid,” she said, pressing it into my hands.

I unwrapped it slowly.

It was a silver star-shaped pin, just like the ones the sheriffs wore in the movies.

“We might argue sometimes,” said Mary Lou. “But you're still my favorite brother.”

“I'm your only brother.”

“Well, that too.”

I gave her a hug. “Thanks, ke-mo sah-bee.”

“Sorry you didn't get a cake,” she said.

I shrugged. “It doesn't matter.” But it did. Who doesn't want a cake on his birthday?

“You know Mom,” she said, her voice just a little strained. “She'll probably get up in the middle of the night to make you a new one.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe so.”

Mary Lou yawned. “I better go to sleep,” she said. “Got to get up early to deliver those papers.”

I nodded. “See you in the morning.”

Boots padded over to me then and rubbed his head against my leg. I stroked his fur absently, then went to get ready for bed myself. I was just about to climb under the covers when I heard someone moving around in the kitchen. Mary Lou was right. Mom had gotten up to bake me another cake. The smell of angel food batter and sweet orange icing lulled me to sleep.