We’d just learned about water balloons.

  I’m not sure how we got it into our heads to drop one on Mr. Gower. I guess it was because he was an easy target. By then we had spied on him a fair bit. We’d climb up that big old maple beside the once-upon-a-time driveway and he’d come by on his bike or on foot. He’d sing and cats would appear and march down the road like it was a parade and he was the not-so-grand marshal. By then, we’d made up a lot of stories about Mr. Gower.

  Anyway, it was summer and we had nothing to do and we biked over to his place and were up in his tree and we had these water balloons filled with Club House red food coloring. It just sort of happened. There he was, walking up the overgrown road and even though it was summer he had on an old black raincoat and a white toque and … well …

  Splash!

  Splash!

  He stopped. He was standing directly below us. One balloon missed but the other hit him on the top of his head — a direct hit. Splat! We clung to our branch, Danny and me, not breathing. Trying to look as small as we felt. We waited, too scared to move.

  What if Mr. Gower ate children? If he was wanted by the FBI, maybe it was because he was a serial killer. If he was in hiding from the mob, maybe he’d been their hit man. We waited and Mr. Gower just stood there, dripping. He never looked up. The dye soaked into his white hat, bright red, as if we had broken open his skull and blood was pouring out. And he never looked up. Maybe getting hit on the head by things falling from the sky was something that had happened to him before. Maybe he was used to it. Maybe it was something falling from the sky that had made him like he was.

  The cats skedaddled when the bombs dropped. And after about a hundred hours, Mr. Gower moved on, as well, and stared singing the song he’d been singing when the sky broke open above him and gave him a blood-red soaker.

  * * *

  It was back at Danny’s that we made the pledge. Danny’s anxiety was working overtime.

  “What were we thinking!?” he said.

  “We weren’t.”

  “It’s just an expression,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “But what were we thinking, Joe!?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at my friend and tried to imagine what was going on inside his head. I had to do something.

  “I’ve got it!” I said. Danny stared at me, his eyes like saucers, but with some hope spilling into the worry there. “We can’t take back what we did, right?”

  Danny shook his head.

  “But we can make a promise,” I said.

  “To who? To him?”

  “Uh, no. To each other.”

  “What good’s that going to do?”

  “We could, you know, help him.”

  “How? Pay for a dry cleaner?”

  “No. I mean if he needs help sometime.”

  “Are you kidding? He needs help all the time. He’s loony. He’s a crazy person. He lives in a fall-down house. He rides a bike with pink streamers on the handlebars. He —”

  “I know, I know,” I said, cutting him off before he went full tilt. “Take a deep breath,” I said.

  He did. In and then out. Then he shook his arms and ran on the spot and did a kind of shortened version of the Hokey Pokey. “Okay,” he said at last. “You said something about a promise?”

  I nodded. “A pledge,” I said. The word had come to me while I’d been watching him try to slow down his runaway nerves. Pledge sounded more serious. Like something worthy.

  “What we did was stupid. We can’t take it back but we can keep tabs on Mr. Gower and if he ever needs help, we can try to … I don’t know … do something. Do something right.”

  It didn’t sound very convincing, but somehow Danny got it. We agreed. We shook on it. It was a relief. We’d done a dumb thing and were going to pay for it. Just not now. Sometime. Some unspecified time.

  And then we forgot all about it.

  * * *

  We were nine back then. What did we know?

  Anyway, we hadn’t spied on the abandoned farmhouse for years. Now, we were twelve. And yet here he was again, Mr. Gower, back in our life. Mr. Gower, who clearly needed help.

  And here were Danny and I, who had made a pledge.

  It was getting dark. Mom was at the kitchen window again, looking out at us, wondering what we were up to. It’s okay, Mom. We’re just going to help out an old crazy person who is obviously in some kind of big trouble, because we have to, because we made a pledge.

  “Even if he has a gun?” said Danny.

  “We’ll be careful,” I said. “We’ll tackle him outside.”

  “Tackle him?”

  “I mean, you know, approach him … carefully.”

  I’m not sure if Danny heard me or not; he was thinking about that gun. I could see it in his eyes.

  * * *

  It wasn’t hard to get together a whole lot of groceries. Mom always filled the cupboard with lots of tinned stuff and boxes of mac and cheese, in case there was another ice storm or a zombie apocalypse or whatever. She wouldn’t miss what we took. The same was true for Danny’s mother. She was even more generous because Danny told her it was a food drive. It wasn’t so big a lie, really. If Mr. Gower was hungry enough to hold up a grocery store, then he was just as needy as anyone who used the food bank.

  This was our plan. We’d take him a whole bunch of food — two cardboard boxes full. And then we’d tell him about the food bank. We’d take him there, if he didn’t know where it was. I’d helped out there with my parents at Christmas, so I knew where it was and how nice the people were who worked there.

  “And then we’re done, right?” said Danny.

  “The pledge?”

  He nodded. “Does a couple of boxes of food make up for a water bomb on the head?”

  I gave it some serious thought. Then I nodded. “A box for each bomb,” I said.

  “Even though mine missed him?” said Danny.

  “It was mine that missed him,” I said.

  But we’d been through all this back when it happened. We had decided we were both guilty. It just felt better if we both thought we’d missed.

  So, on Saturday, we strapped the boxes onto the carriers of our bikes and headed out of town to the abandoned farm, where only we knew that Mr. Gower lived. I don’t think we’d ever known the county road was uphill until that day. It was hard work. The boxes weighed us down something awful. But we made it, and stopped, out of breath, at the end of the drive.

  There was a mailbox at the entranceway. The door was gone and there looked to be a nest inside.

  “We should make some noise,” I said as we approached the house.

  “No way!” said Danny. “That will give him time to load up.”

  “I meant nice noise. We could sing,” I said, “like he does.”

  “Yeah, and get attacked by all those cats!”

  Danny wagged his head so hard he almost lost his balance. It was hard enough riding through the undergrowth that had reclaimed the driveway. “We’ve got to take him by surprise,” he said. “Give him the groceries and get out of there. Done.”

  “Okay,” I said quietly, not wanting to rile him up any more than he was. We’d talked about all of this.

  “Leave the groceries by the gate, right? Get his attention, show him the boxes and then take off.”

  I wasn’t going to argue. The closer we got, the more nervous I got. Maybe I’d been hanging out with Danny too long.

  We stopped at the broken-down fence that surrounded the broken-down house. We leaned our bikes against the rusted gate post and hefted the boxes of food off the back of our bikes.

  “Carry it like this,” said Danny really quietly. He had the box right in front of him. “That way if he shoots, he’ll only hit a can of beans or something.”

  “Okay,” I said, and shivered at the thought of all that bean juice dripping on the ground like blood.

  I entered the gate. The pathway to the house must have been rolled up by the people who last lived there and taken with them to wherever it was they moved. There was just a trail through the high grass, the kind of trail deer make in the forest, only as wide as they are. His bike was on the porch. So were cats. Two or three anyway. Then I saw a couple in the yard. One on the fence. Another watching from the drooping porch roof.

  I was so busy cat-spotting I didn’t realize I was alone. I stopped and turned. Danny was still standing at the gateway. He hadn’t moved. I went back.

  “I thought we were just going to leave the boxes,” he whispered.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot. But, you know, it’s broad daylight. I don’t think he’d do anything, as long as we told him we were bringing him stuff.”

  “Don’t you think we should have just told the food bank people about him and let them do this?” he whispered.

  I looked at him. I didn’t want to admit I was on the verge of chickening out, too. I mean, we were nine when we made the pledge, right? We were just kids. Stupid kids. We didn’t write it down or anything. We didn’t sign our names in blood. Nobody would know what we did and nobody would know we backed out of it. Nobody but us.

  I didn’t say anything. I just locked eyes with Danny. If he couldn’t do it, with his anxiety thing and all, then what was I supposed to do? Stand by him, my best friend? Or stand by this promise we made each other? Then as I looked at him his eyes grew wide and I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore, he was looking past me.

  “Uh-oh,” he murmured.

  I slowly turned and there was Mr. Gower, standing on his porch looking straight at us. He was wearing a ragged check sports jacket over a mustard-yellow T-shirt and bib overalls. The good news was that he wasn’t pointing a gun at us. The bad news was that he was carrying an axe.

  “If them are kittens, you can just take them back where you come from,” he said.

  It wasn’t what I had expected him to say. “Pardon?” I said.

  “People keep leaving kittens. They don’t want them so they just leave ’em here. Boxes and boxes of ’em. I can’t barely keep up.”

  Oh.

  “They’re not kittens,” I said.

  “Are they puppies? I don’t like puppies.”

  I cleared my throat. “They’re not kittens,” I said more loudly. “Or dogs.”

  He nodded slowly as if he only half-believed me. “So, is it cat food, maybe?” he asked. “That would sure come in handy.”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “It’s people food,” said Danny.

  I looked at him. He’d come out of his stupor. He hoisted the box higher, so that it was covering his heart, just in case. He looked at me and bravely started walking up the path that wasn’t there. I wasn’t so sure if a cardboard box of canned foods would be a good defense against an axe, but I was impressed with Danny. I followed after him. It was only then that I wished we’d told anyone where we were going.

  “People food?” Mr. Gower said when we arrived at his stoop. He was only a step higher up than us, but he was pretty tall and gangly. He leaned his axe against a post that was already leaning all by itself — only just barely holding up the porch roof. He peeked in Danny’s box. He frowned. Then he peeked in mine, frowned some more. He reached in and took out a fat can of cabbage rolls and really frowned. Then he put it back.

  “Is this for me?” he said.

  We nodded. Then I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded again and then scratched his head. “Is this a school project?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be no school project,” he said.

  “It’s just from us,” said Danny.

  “Never much liked teachers,” he said.

  “We figured you might like some food,” I said.

  Mr. Gower looked truly perplexed. “It ain’t Christmas for three months,” he said.

  He was wrong about that. It wasn’t Christmas for seven months. But the box was getting heavy. We needed to move this thing along. “It isn’t a Christmas present,” I said. “We just thought you were, you know, really hungry.”

  “On account of robbing the grocery store,” said Danny.

  He just said it like that, out of the blue. I stared at him and then glanced at Mr. Gower to see if he was going to pick up his axe or reach into the pocket of his grotty old jacket for his gun.

  But he wasn’t. He was nodding his head. “Oh, that,” he said. “That was an accident.”

  Danny looked at me and I looked at him.

  “An accident?”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he scratched his head again and chuckled. “Woo-ee,” he said and then he stared across the overgrown lawn with a smile on his face.

  “Sir, could we put this stuff down?” I said.

  He looked down at us, squinting, as if in the moment he’d looked away, he’d totally forgotten we were there.

  “Oh, sure. Sure. Whyn’t you bring it in here.” He turned toward the door, opened it and stood aside, like a doorman, to let us pass.

  We were met by cats. There must have been another dozen of them in the kitchen. We had to sort of shove them out of the way with our feet in order to reach the table, where we put down the boxes and breathed a sigh of relief. Two sighs of relief, one each.

  “Now what’s all this about?” he asked.

  “We heard about what happened,” I said. “And we sort of knew it was you.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes, sir, on account of your hat,” I said. He reached up, feeling for a hat. “The one you were wearing that day. The white toque with the big red stain.”

  “We knew that hat,” said Danny, jumping in. I thought he’d say more but he clammed up.

  I think maybe we’d overloaded Mr. Gower’s motherboard. His frown deepened as if he was having to think long and hard to grasp what we were saying. And then, all of a sudden, his face cleared up and he just sort of stared at nothing — nothing we could see.

  “Well, thank you boys for the food,” he said. “I never turn down food.” He looked at us and then he got up and walked over to a big old kitchen cabinet and opened the doors. It was full of food.

  “But … But …”

  “It’s okay, Danny,” I said.

  “Yeah, but —”

  “We’ll be going now,” I said, grabbing Danny’s shoulder.

  “You robbed a grocery store,” said Danny.

  I groaned.

  Mr. Gower shrugged his shoulders. “Yep,” he said. “I did. But like I said it was an accident. I didn’t mean to.”

  “You … you pulled a gun,” said Danny.

  “Danny,” I whisper-shouted, dragging my hand across my throat.

  Mr. Gower laughed and then scratched his hair. Things fell out as he did. I didn’t look too closely.

  “Well, you see, I’d been to see Evening Primrose. You’ll know her,” he said. Danny was just about to say something like, We have no idea what you are talking about, but I elbowed him to shut up. “She’d been sickly and I dropped in to see if there was anything I could do. You know, run an errand for her. She gave me some money to go get her a few things. So I did.”

  He stopped as if he’d explained the whole thing. End of story. His smile faded a little bit and he looked off across the kitchen. It was pretty tidy, really, if you didn’t count all the cats. I sniffed. It didn’t even smell as bad as you’d think. Then Mr. Gower’s eyes found us again, saw us standing there and he startled, as if it was taking him a moment or two to remember who we were or why we were there.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “The gun.” Then he started poking around in his pocket. “I’ve got it here somewhere —”

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Oh, wait,” he said. “No, I don’t. I gave it back to Cyrus. Cyrus or Bob. Not sure which. One of Primrose’s boys. You know Cyrus and Bob?” he asked. We shook our heads. “No, I guess not. They’re just little ’uns, five or six … something like that.”

  Danny looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  Then Mr. Gower put his big old hands on his knees and leaned forward, chuckling away.

  “I remember it now. There I was in the checkout line with Primrose’s groceries and when I was feeling in my pocket for the money she’d gived me, instead, I find this thing in my pocket. I pull it out and it’s this old-fashioned six-shooter. Plastic. I guess one of her kids put it in my pocket — who knows why? Kids,” he said and shook his head as if he’d never be able to figure them out.

  “So I show the girl, you know — the one behind the counter. And I says to her, ‘Look at this, will ya. Guess you’ll have to give me these here groceries for free.’”

  He burst out laughing and smacked his knee with his hand. “Next thing I know, she’d gone. Didn’t see her leave or nothing. I looked behind me, saw there was a line-up, so I just … you know … left.” He smiled at us. Chuckled a bit. “Now, that’s not the place I usually shop, you see. It just happens to be right nearby Primrose’s place. But hey, if they’re givin’ away groceries, maybe I should go there more often.”

  * * *

  We said our goodbyes and Mr. Gower thanked us again for the food. And we were heading up the path that was just a bit wider than when we arrived on account of Danny and me walking side by side, when suddenly my best friend turned around and headed back toward the house. The door was still open, but he knocked on it anyway, and Mr. Gower turned to see who it was. He was standing at the counter opening a can of cat food with a herd of cats at his feet. He glowered at us. “I hope you didn’t bring me no more cats,” he said.