It seemed like the closer it got to Christmas, the more Johnny Paul kept showing up at our door. He’d want me to come out and play football up the street with him and Bubba and Jeremiah or was wondering if I could come down to his house and work on drawing maps for geography, and once he wanted to know if we had some rope that he and his buddies could use to rig up a trolley from the top of a pine tree across the street in the woods. Everything he came peddling sounded like something worth buying, so I’d grab my carcoat and take off with him nearly every time.
It occurred to me that I’d get a glad feeling that he wanted me to go, and that caught me by surprise, since I had argued so with Mother about him not being my boyfriend and all that day she was working on the clowns. It also occurred to me that he had quit me last year right after Christmas for no good reason except what Mother interpreted as the loss of some sort of “mystery.”
This “mystery” was in a realm I clearly knew nothing about. It all seemed pretty ignorant to me. The whole point in every Nancy Drew book I had ever read and every Alfred Hitchcock movie I had ever seen was to get the mystery solved, not to hope it would go on and on making everybody wonder. But according to Mother, Johnny Paul liked mysteries better when he couldn’t solve them. So now I was in a hard spot: I was liking being pursued by a boy who would only keep liking me as long as he couldn’t catch up with me. Mother said the trick was to play “hard to get.” When you’re used to not having to think about what other people are thinking about you from one minute to the next, like when we were playing football or climbing trees and building trolleys, it’s hard to remember to think about pretending to like somebody less than you really do. It didn’t seem natural, and I thought I would probably make the mistake again of turning loose of any mystery I might have had because to tell you the truth, I didn’t really have any secrets I was keeping from Johnny Paul or anybody else. The biggest mystery to me about this whole thing was what on earth Johnny Paul thought was such a mystery about me anyway. It wasn’t like I was in the CIA or something. Of course I couldn’t tell him that or he wouldn’t have even been interested in popping firecrackers with me at Christmas anymore. This whole thing just gave me the thumps.
But he must have thought I had gotten ahold of some new secrets since last January because sure enough, just like last year, when Christmas Eve came around, there he was on my front porch again looking like Steve McQueen with his blue eyes and black eyelashes and a sack of Black Cats. When the sack was nearly empty, we had a contest to see who could hold onto a firecracker the longest before throwing it. One went off in my hand, so I guess I won. Johnny Paul led me crying into the house where Mother slathered butter all over it.
I knew Johnny Paul had a present for me in the bottom of the Black Cat sack because I had seen it, so even though my hand still throbbed and I would have liked to just go get under the covers, rock my hand, and bawl, I went on back outside and sat on the porch in the dark with Johnny Paul. There, with Johnny Paul’s comforting arm around me keeping me warm and the Christmas tree lights blinking joy through the window behind me, I lost the will to play the game my mother advised me to keep playing, and let myself be caught and kissed. I hoped that kiss wouldn’t cause all the mystery to leak out because I had bought Johnny Paul a silver identification bracelet for Christmas with my name on the back which I figured would become obsolete way too fast for the $7.95 Mother paid for it if things went south like they did last Christmas.
Lately at night after I’d finished my ritual of reading several pages in the dictionary, I would think about Mother’s mystery theory and work on coming up with ways to latch onto some kind of emergency mystery just in case Johnny Paul started acting like he had about figured me out again. I thought one good idea would be to gaze at him with serious eyes and solemnly pronounce “Yo escribo con lapiz.”
Daddy and I had begun a project of learning Spanish, and “I write with a pencil” was as far as either of us had gotten. I thought if worse came to worse this would suffice as a good mystery for him to chew on for a few days and might buy me a little time. But tonight there was no need; it was the magical season of Christmas, and I felt Johnny Paul securely resting in the palm of my hand.
I could tell by the size of the box in the Black Cat sack that he hadn’t bought me another comb and brush set this year, and I was right: in the tiny black velvet box wrapped in shiny green foil paper was a silver necklace with a disk engraved with my name on one side and his on the other. It was just the thing I needed to convince me once and for all that I could quit worrying about my mother’s ridiculous notions about mysteries.
Among other things under our tree the next morning, like sweaters and gloves and records and pajamas, was one of the things I had wanted most for two whole years: a b-b gun complete with a whole arsenal of b-b’s. And out in the back yard was the other: a blue 24” ten-speed English racer bicycle. On that happy Christmas morning with Johnny Paul’s disk hanging around my neck and my brand new bike and b-b gun waiting for me to take for a spin, Travis Wayne Harvey could have sat down at our dinner table and called me “Sunshine”— or for that matter, “Possum Breath”—for three hours straight without ever stopping to take a breath, and I would have just smiled and offered him more turnip greens. I thought there might be something to what Mr. Pete kept talking about; it looked like Jesus had finally found His way to Herald Street.
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