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Death was a strange thing. Perhaps what made it feel so strange to Ponyboy was his familiarity with it, when only eight months ago death had been as far removed from him as the moon. A distant being, hovering somewhere far, far in the distance, something that he thought about every so often, but something that was far enough away that it didn’t feel real.
It still didn’t feel real, even though it had taken so much from him. His mom, his dad, Johnny. The unreality of it all made Ponyboy feel as if he were walking through a heavy fog. There is no up, there is no down, there is only forward into an unending blankness with no promise of releasing him from the fear that it would one day swallow him up too.
Johnny. Johnny.
The body back there on the hospital bed couldn’t have been Johnny. It was a lifeless thing, small and cold and broken, and Johnny was none of those things. Johnny was a warm little smile and a bump of his shoulders, Johnny was the surety that if Ponyboy got hit in a rumble there was a hand right there to help him back up, Johnny was someone who liked to listen to Ponyboy talk about the movies and books he watched and read, and who offered his own opinion in little thoughtful pieces, choosing each word with care. Johnny was his best friend, and the body back there on the hospital bed wasn’t him.
The toe of his shoe catches on the uneven ground and Ponyboy goes down hard on his hands and knees. The impact of the fall rattles through his bones. He sits back on his heels, and feels his knees flare up in pain. He lifts his hands to examine each palm; they’re skinned and bloody, and he sits there on his heels at the side of the road, meticulously picking out each little stone and piece of dirt from the wounds. Occasionally he hears a car pass by, a honk or two, the sound of voices. Eventually it all fades away. His palms are clean, or as clean as Ponyboy can get them, and he rises to his feet.
His knees immediately start to ache, and Ponyboy limps forward, onwards, headed to somewhere. Home, maybe. Or perhaps the empty lot. Johnny would probably be there, sleeping. Or maybe he could head back to the church in Windrixville, and he would find Johnny sitting there in the sunset, holding Gone With the Wind with a smile on his face.
A car speeds by, honking, and Ponyboy abruptly realizes he is standing in the middle of the road. He limps over to the sidewalk on feet that feel too heavy to work properly. And then, once he’s on the sidewalk, he squints at the bright light illuminating the portion of asphalt in front of him.
Ponyboy lifts his gaze, still squinting, to the brightly light store in front of him. It shines like a beacon in the dark night, standing as an unyielding force against the tidal wave of Ponyboy’s grief, and unbreakable monument of life and all of the mundanity that made it up - shelves lined with grocery items, cold milk in the fridge, beer bottles lined perfectly in boxes. Somehow it all seemed so absurd, a hilarious ode to life when Johnny Cade had just taken his final breath.
Movement within the store catches his gaze. A tall body is standing with his back to Ponyboy, gripping a magazine. Ponyboy thinks the figure looks like Dallas, reminds him of Dallas. And where had Dallas gone after Johnny had died? He’d taken off as if the thing that had taken the life from Johnny was after him too, as if he felt that impending death looming over him. And then Ponyboy does a double-take. The figure inside the store is Dallas.
He stumbles closer. His head hurts, his palms sting, his knees ache. He watches Dallas’s erratic movements, his grip on the magazine tightening and then loosening. Dallas looks one way, then the other. And then, suddenly, he lifts the magazine up in front of it and tears it down the middle.
The man at the front of the store says something Ponyboy can’t hear. Dallas moves away from the magazines and towards the clerk. Ponyboy recognizes the look on his face. He’s seen it only once before, when Dallas had learned about Ponyboy’s mom’s death, and it scared him just as much back then. Dallas had been locked up for three months after that night.
Ponyboy pushes the door to the store open. The bell jingles above his head. Dallas has his back to Ponyboy, and Ponyboy watches him reach around to grip onto something tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
“Dally.”
His voice croaks out in a weak tremble, breaking halfway through the word. Dallas stops short, as if suddenly hitting a wall.
The clerk moves his gaze from Dallas, who hasn’t turned around, to Ponyboy. “You know this young man?”
Ponyboy nods robotically. “Dally,” he says again.
Dallas turns. He’s a sickly kind of pale; his face is completely washed out of colour. His eyes are wide and wild, the whites too big and it reminds Ponyboy of a chained dog he’d once seen frothing at the mouth and half-rabid, as if it would lunge out and sink its teeth into flesh and not let go if Ponyboy got too close.
“Dally,” Ponyboy says a third time. “I was looking for you.”
Dallas trembles. His hand drops from where he’d been reaching around to grab whatever was in his waistband. He stares at Ponyboy as if seeing a ghost.
“Ponyboy.”
The sound of his own name moves through Ponyboy like a static shock, as if being struck by a bolt of lightning that rattles through his bones and almost stops his beating heart in his chest. Ponyboy has never in his life heard his name uttered the way Dallas says it in that moment, as if Ponyboy, the word itself, was a salvation that could save him from the depths of a hellish nightmare, as if the agonizing pain inside of him could only be relieved and excised from his body by uttering that exact word. Ponyboy.
“He needs to pay for what he ripped up,” the clerk snaps.
“Oh,” Ponyboy says dumbly. He moves into the store, fingers digging into the pockets of his jeans to fish out a few coins. “Here,” he says, dumping them out onto the counter.
The clerk looks unimpressed. He uses a finger to slide out the exact change, and Ponyboy gathers up the rest of the coins with fumbling hands.
“Get him out of here,” the clerk says, flickering a gaze towards Dallas. “Before I call the cops.”
Ponyboy turns around. Dallas is standing in the same spot, watching Ponyboy with dark eyes, and holding himself a little too still.
“Dally, c’mon,” Ponyboy says. When Dallas doesn’t move, Ponyboy grips onto his arm and pulls him along, leading him out of the store. Dallas follows where Ponyboy leads him, silent, docile, obedient. It scares Ponyboy to see Dallas like this, almost as much as it scared him to see the expression on Dallas’s face in the store before Ponyboy had gotten to him, when he’d been reaching behind himself.
Ponyboy stops short at the thought. Dallas walks into him, and Ponyboy stumbles over his feet. He turns to face Dallas. “Give it to me.”
Dallas stares at him. He blinks once, twice.
“I know what you were gonna do,” Ponyboy says. He nearly chokes on the words, thinking about Dallas pulling a gun on the clerk. “Give me the heater, Dally.”
Dallas still doesn’t say anything. He doesn't move either.
So Ponyboy moves instead, tries to reach around Dallas to get the gun from the waistband of his jeans. And this finally sparks Dallas into movement.
Dallas rears back as if Ponyboy has struck him, or like Ponyboy is the one holding a deadly weapon in his hands. Ponyboy stops and looks up at Dallas’s face. “Dal?”
Dallas doesn’t move for a moment. And then he reaches around back himself and pulls the pistol from his waistband. Ponyboy looks down at the weapon between them, and swallows harshly. “What the hell were you thinking, Dally?” He nearly chokes on the words. He thinks about Johnny, about the body lying back at the hospital, at the way Johnny had taken a breath and then it had all seemed to go out of him, the breath, the life, the soul.
Dallas still doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said anything since he uttered Ponyboy’s name in the store.
Ponyboy reaches out for the gun and takes it from Dallas’s limp hold. He’d always been the best marksman between his brothers, and he slides out the clip. It’s empty.
He looks back up at Dallas. He shakes his head, frowning. “Dally, this gun isn’t loaded.”
Dallas doesn’t reply. Ponyboy sticks the gun into the waistband of his own jeans. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s go home.”
When Ponyboy looks back on it later, he can’t actually remember the long walk home. He only remembers how quiet it was. Dallas was silent. Ponyboy didn’t know what to say. His knees ached fiercely. There was a dull, hot pain in his head. His skinned palms burned. Dried blood pulled tight at the skin of his face. Every so often he thought of Johnny and he wished that his body hurt even more.
The Curtis house is lit up in the dead of night. Ponyboy trudges up the front steps with Dallas on his heels. He pushes through the front door.
Inside, Darry is sitting in the recliner, patching up his wounds from the rumble. Soda, Steve, and Two-bit are spread across the couches.
“Hey, Ponyboy, Dally,” Darry says. “Where’ve you been?”
Ponyboy stands by the door. Dallas stands behind him, and Ponyboy doesn’t know what expression is on Dallas’s face but whatever it is makes Darry do a double-take.
“Pony?” Darry asks. He stands, flickering a gaze from Ponyboy to somewhere up and behind Ponyboy - Dallas. “Everything okay?”
“Johnny’s dead,” Ponyboy says. He’s amazed at how matter-of-fact it comes out. It almost feels like he isn’t talking about Johnny at all, or at least not Johnny Cade. Some other Johnny had died, someone whose body was laid out in that hospital bed.
He moves past Darry. He’s home now, and he needs to wash up and brush his teeth and go to bed. Soda is staring at him as he passes. Two-bit’s eyes are wide. And something about that wide-eyed look shakes Ponyboy. He stops and turns to say something else, but before he can Dallas crashes into him again, the same way he had when Ponyboy had stopped them in the road and taken the gun from him. And Ponyboy realizes that Dallas is still following him.
“Dead?” Two-bit echoes. He looks pale.
Ponyboy looks away from Dallas and over to Two-bit. “Told him about beating the Socs. I don’t know, he just died.”
Dallas’s body jerks, as if hit by a sudden blow. Two-bit’s gaze jumps to him.
“Dally…”
“The kid’s hurt.” It’s the first words that Dallas has said since Ponyboy’s name. His voice is low, rough, scraping out of his chest. Ponyboy winces at how raw Dallas’s voice sounds. “He was limping the whole way back here.”
“Ponyboy?” Soda moves closer. “Are you hurt somewhere?”
Ponyboy shakes his head. “It’s nothing. Just tripped, that’s all.” He takes a few steps back, deeper into the darkened hallway and away from Soda. For some reason he feels unable to accept Soda’s comfort, which was very strange. Soda was always the person Ponyboy went to for safety. If Soda said that something was going to be okay, Ponyboy could believe it.
“I’m gonna wash up.”
He heads into the bathroom. He half expects, when he turns to close the door behind him, to once more find Dallas on his heels. But Dallas doesn’t follow him; perhaps breaking his silence had finally brought Dallas back to himself, or perhaps it was being in this house and back with his friends.
Ponyboy turns the faucet and leans over the sink, cupping his hands under the running water and splashing cold water over his face. And then, suddenly, he rears back and almost trips over his feet, coughing and sputtering. He rakes two hands down his face, rough and aggressive, trying to clear the water from his eyes and his nose and his mouth. His chest heaves with breath. He lifts his head, still panting, and stares at the reflection of himself in the mirror. His face is pale, his eyes are wide and dark. He looks back down at the running water and feels a shudder pass through his body. He reaches over and turns off the tap. And then he sinks down to the floor, pulls his knees to his chest and buries his face forward. His chest feels tight and his throat feels like there is something sharp and prickly tearing it to shreds from the inside. Ponyboy squeezes his eyes shut and presses his forehead to his knees. His mouth drops open; he exhales hot and wet. “Please,” he whispers into the dark. He remembers praying at the church like this after his parents had died. “Please, not Johnny too. Please.” He wraps his arms even more tightly around himself. “Let me go out there and see him. Please.”
He doesn’t know how much time he spends on the bathroom floor. Eventually he gets back up. He opens the door to find the house much dimmer and quieter. He takes a step out of the bathroom and then stops. Dallas is sitting on the floor beside the bathroom door. His head is tilted back against the wall. He’s smoking.
“Dally?”
Dallas cracks his eyes open. “That was the longest shit you’ve ever taken, kid.”
“Oh,” Ponyboy says dumbly. “Sorry. You can…” he motions to the bathroom.
Dallas pushes himself to stand. “Let me see your hands.”
Ponyboy frowns, but he lifts his hands up for Dallas to inspect. Dallas flips them over so that the palms are up. He clicks his tongue. “What the hell were you doing in there?” He takes Ponyboy by the wrist and drags him back into the bathroom. He turns on the tap and pulls Ponyboy’s hands under the running water. “Show me your knees next.”
Ponyboy does as Dallas tells him to. His head hurts too much to put up a fight, and he’s just glad that Dallas is back to talking and that the washed out, pale, sick look has mostly faded from Dallas’s face. Dallas taking care of him reminds him of the night at Buck’s when he’d gone with Johnny to see Dallas after Johnny had killed Bob, and Dallas had griped about Ponyboy’s shirt being wet and how he’d get pneumonia.
Dallas makes Ponyboy clean his scrapped knees, and then he wets a cloth and wipes the dried blood off of Ponyboy’s face with gentler hands than Ponyboy expects. “Thanks Dally,” he says quietly.
After Dallas deems him cleaned up enough, Ponyboy heads towards his bedroom. “You gonna stay the night?” he asks. “You can take the couch.”
Dallas’s gaze slides to the couch. “Yeah.”
Despite this, though, Dallas follows Ponyboy back to his room. Inside, Ponyboy sheds his sweater, and his hands find the gun that’s still tucked into the waistband of his pants. He grabs it and moves over to his dresser, tucking it into one of the drawers underneath a few clean shirts. When he turns back, he realizes Dallas is standing in the doorway. “Dally?”
Dallas’s tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. He’s silent again. His hand grips the doorknob so tightly his knuckles are white. His hesitance is something Ponyboy has never seen from him before. Dallas opens his mouth. “I don’t want to be alone,” he grinds out, as if Ponyboy had turned the gun on him and had forced the words out of him.
“Oh,” Ponyboy says.
Dallas doesn’t move. He looks at Ponyboy, and Ponyboy looks back.
“Can I stay in here for a bit?”
“Oh,” Ponyboy says again. “Okay.”
Dallas finally moves, stepping into Ponyboy’s bedroom. He closes the door behind him. He walks over to the side of the bed that Soda usually takes and turns, sitting on the edge. Ponyboy watches his back, and the way his shoulders rise and fall with his breaths.
Ponyboy sheds his jeans and then crawls into bed. He lies on his back and stares up at the ceiling. The room is illuminated by his desk lamp, casting a yellow glow to the space. Long shadows creep along the walls. He feels wide awake.
“Dally.”
He hears an exhale. “What?”
“I can’t sleep.”
He hears movement, and the mattress dips as Dallas shifts his weight. “What the hell am I supposed to do about that?”
“I don’t now.” Ponyboy lifts an arm to cover his eyes. His throat has the tight feeling again, the one that makes it feel as if barbed wire is tightening around his neck and it makes it hard to breathe and hard to speak.
“Close your eyes and count to a hundred,” Dallas suggests.
Ponyboy takes in a quivering breath. “One…two…three…”
The mattress shifts again. “You’re really doing it?”
Ponyboy swallows around the lump in his throat. “I’ll do anything to sleep.”
It goes quiet. Ponyboy peeks out from beneath his arm and sees that Dallas has moved; he’s now beside Ponyboy, sitting up against the headrest, his legs stretched out on the bed.
“What were you really trying to do with the heater, Dal?”
“What?”
Ponyboy drops his arm to cover his eyes again. He finds it hard to look at Dallas. “I thought you wanted to get arrested again. I thought you were trying to leave, to get locked up. But you had a gun. What were you really trying to do?”
Dallas is silent. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Pony,” he says eventually.
“You were trying to get yourself killed,” Ponyboy whispers. It’s all he can manage with the sharpness of his throat. But he knows it’s the truth because Dallas doesn’t say anything. Ponyboy rolls and turns onto his side away from Dallas. He closes his eyes and starts to count in his head. One…two…three…four…five…
He doesn’t know what wakes him. His eyes snap open, suddenly, to a dark room. The lamp on his desk has been turned off. His blinds are still open, and the streetlights shine through in stripes on his bedroom floor.
Ponyboy blinks, and his eyes adjust to the darkness. He can see the book he’s halfway through re-reading - Great Expectations - on his desk. He thinks about Pip, who Ponyboy had always liked because Pip reminded him a little of himself, and he remembers suddenly the scene where Miss Havisham’s dress catches fire and Pip tries to save her but was unsuccessful and Miss Havisham had died. He turns onto his back and feels a tear roll down his temple.
It’s quiet in the house. Ponyboy closes his eyes. And then he opens them again when he realizes that there isn’t a body in the bed beside him. He lifts himself up onto his elbows, peering into the darkness at the empty space beside him. The covers are pulled up, as if another body had never been there to start with. Ponyboy turns his gaze to the dresser; the drawer that he’d placed the gun into earlier that night is pulled out.
Ponyboy nearly falls out of his bed, he moves so quickly. He shoved one leg then the other through the pantlegs of his jeans. He doesn’t bother with socks, and jams his feet into his shoes in his haste to push through the front door and clatter down the front steps. Not Dallas too, he begs. Not Johnny and Dallas both.
He’s almost at the front gate before he hears a noise behind him. Ponyboy stops and turns back. In the yellow glow of the front porch light he spots Dallas seated on the couch. Dallas is hunched forwards, his elbows resting on his thighs and his hands gripping the hair at each side of his head.
“Dally?”
Dallas lifts his face. It shines in the dim light, wet with tears. His features are twisted into an ugly expression of pain and grief. Ponyboy sees all this in the brief second Dallas raises his head; he drops his head back down just as quickly and his shoulders hike up to his ears.
Ponyboy closes the gate. He approaches Dallas slowly, like he would a wounded animal. He climbs the front steps and moves across the front porch. He stops when he gets to Dallas. In front of Dallas is the gun, lying out in plain view on the little table where Ponyboy’s mom had always liked to have her coffee in the morning. Ponyboy feels his body tremble in fear.
He takes a seat next to Dallas. The couch is old and the cushions sink towards the center, and so Ponyboy ends up sandwiched beside Dallas, their bodies touching from ankle to knee to hip to shoulder. Everytime Dallas’s body trembles, everytime a sob hitches in his throat, Ponyboy feels it in his own body as if it were happening to him.
“Why did you stop me?”
Ponyboy thinks he mishears. “Huh?”
But Dallas doesn’t repeat it. He doesn’t move, his hands still gripping his head and his face is hidden from Ponyboy’s gaze. Ponyboy feels ice slide into his stomach and his shivers.
He wonders why he ever thought Dallas was incapable of love. Now he understands the depth of Dallas’s heart, and Dallas quite possibly has the deepest heart of anyone Ponyboy has ever met. No wonder Dallas preferred to seem so uncaring, so cold, almost heartless; love would have made Dallas do a terrible, awful thing.
“I’d stop you every time,” Ponyboy says. His eyes feel hot with tears. He wipes at them impatiently. “You can’t…I’m not gonna let you do something like that.”
Dallas scoffs. “You’re not gonna let me?”
“No.”
Dallas goes quiet. And then he finally moves his hands away from his head and lifts his body up. He sinks back against the couch. Ponyboy turns to look at him; Dallas’s face is wet with tears, but he isn’t crying anymore.
“You got a lot to learn, Pone.”
Ponyboy frowns. “Like what?”
“This is what you get for helping people. A whole lot of bullshit.”
Ponyboy’s mouth feels dry. He swallows roughly. “Do you think it’s my fault?”
Dallas frowns. He tilts his head to the side, sliding a glance at Ponyboy. “What?”
“I ran into the church to help those kids,” Ponyboy says. “It’s my fault that Johnny’s…” he can’t say it.
“Jesus Christ,” Dallas swears. “Pony, none of this is on you. I don’t ever wanna hear you say shit like that, got it?”
Ponyboy nods slowly. He doesn’t exactly believe Dallas, but he doesn’t say this. Instead he turns his head to look at Dallas. Something about the tilt of Dallas’s mouth, the furrow of his brows, gives Ponyboy pause.
“It’s not your fault either, Dally.”
Dallas’s gaze slides back to Ponyboy’s face. It’s an electrifyingly intense look; Ponyboy feels pinned to the spot. He’s never been this close to Dallas before, never had a chance or a reason or a need. Ponyboy preferred to do his watching from afar.
“You’re a good kid, Pony.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Ponyboy insists.
“Maybe you believe it.” Dallas shrugs. “Good luck convincing everybody else.” He hooks a thumb towards Ponyboy’s house.
“They won’t think that.”
“Yeah?” A self-deprecating grin pulls at Dallas’s mouth. “Sometimes I really wonder what the hell you see when you look at me, kid.”
Ponyboy doesn’t know how to answer that, so he says nothing. Dallas exhales and sinks further back into the couch. Ponyboy turns his gaze back out to the road. It’s lighter now than it was when he first hurried outside. There’s a blue glow to the sky in the distance. Ponyboy liked sunsets, like the streaks of pinks and oranges and purples across the sky, but he liked them so much because he usually wasn’t up early enough to see a sunrise.
He sits with Dallas on the couch watching the sun come up. He doesn’t speak, and neither does Dallas. He watches the horizon warm to a lighter and lighter blue. The birds start to chirp and sing. He realizes that the gold he loved so much in the sunsets could also be found in a sunrise. He thinks about the sunset he’d watched with Johnny at the church in Windrixville. He wishes Johnny was here now to watch the sunrise too.
“I shouldn’t have said that, before.”
“Said what?” Ponyboy asks.
“When I asked why you stopped me.” They are still pressed together shoulder to shoulder. “Thanks.”
Ponyboy thinks about how he’d been wandering around the streets, how out of it he had been. It had been pure luck that he’d happened to be on the same road as Dallas, that he’d come across Dallas at the exact moment Dallas had been about to do something he could never come back from. He wonders if Johnny had lingered, if Johnny had led Ponyboy down that exact street to where he needed to be. He liked to think that.
“I’m glad you’re here, Dally.”
Dallas nods. He doesn’t say anything more. They watch the sunrise come up together, silent in the morning light, pressed together from ankle to shoulder, gold streaking through the sky above them.