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Johnny Cade is in Windrixville, and he is hand in hand with Dallas Winston in front of the old church. He is a little confused, because he is sure that he’d made the pilgrimage from Tulsa with Ponyboy Curtis. They had been in a hurry, running from something, hiding from something…but that is irrelevant, now, because it is he and Dallas here, holding hands and watching the sun go down.
The sun is going down, yet Johnny feels warm all over.
The teens stand in companionable silence for some time as reds and yellows fade and blend into orange and purple lights before them. Dally searches for a smoke in his pocket with his free hand. Johnny tears his eyes away from the sunset to watch him fish a cigarette out of his pocket, slip it in his mouth, and light up, all one-handed. As Dally smokes, looking out at the sun once more, Johnny decides to be a little adventurous; he threads his fingers through Dally’s. He quickly turns to look at the sky again. Surprisingly, though, Dally makes no move to rearrange their hands, or to separate them altogether. He tightens his grip on Johnny’s hand, and Johnny is kind of in awe.
“Y’know, Johnny boy,” Dally says, breaking the silence, “you were right. Sunsets are tuff.”
“I told you,” Johnny replies. It’s a conversation that Johnny is almost certain he’d never had with Dallas; never felt quite confident enough to confide that particular little musing with his older friend. Always afraid of what Dallas’ answer might be. But here they are. Johnny is not going to push his luck.
“Yeah, well…” he takes a drag, then lets it out as he speaks again. “People will always say stuff. But me?” He glances at Jonny out of the corner of his eye. “I like to do stuff myself before I take someone’s word about it. Have my own experience.” Another long drag, then smoke rings let off into the sky while Johnny watches in his peripheral vision.
“Sometimes, words don’t mean nothin’, Johnny boy,” Dally murmurs. He shuffles his feet and turns his whole body to face Johnny’s as the sun is on its last legs and the land around them is darkening. Johnny mirrors him and looks up at him.
They are still holding hands.
It is almost completely dark. All Dally can see of Johnny is the faint outline of his face and the whites of his eyes. While Johnny can still see most of Dally’s face fairly clearly, what his eyes focus on is the lighted tip of his friend’s cigarette as it is tossed onto the ground and crushed out. And then, they focus on Dally’s hand as it makes it way to the side of Johnny’s face to cradle it gently.
Dally leans down and catches Johnny’s bottom lip between his own lips. His eyes slip shut, and so do Johnny’s, and they kiss, warm and soft and sweet like the movies Cherry and Pony love so much.
The sun is down now, yet Johnny feels incredibly warm all over.
Unbelievably warm.
Almost unbearably warm.
His throat is bone-dry, and the air is stale.
The air is stuffy.
The air is almost nonexistent in the sudden, unbearable heat.
His nose and lungs are trying to take in oxygen that isn’t there and are instead filled with this incredibly cottony sensation that feels disgusting in the way that it’s traveling and settling in his core.
Johnny panics, because he is roasting from the inside out.
He suspects that his eyes must be on fire, too, because they’re burning and Dallas is fading into nothingness and instead of outside darkness, all Johnny can see are those peach-pinkish-reddish tones that are on the inside of one’s eyelids, and out of all of the things he’s lost, now he’s gonna lose his eyes, too, and he starts trying to move his hands, move his feet, move himself to find some damn water because he’s burning alive and it looks like he’s on his own yet again and he’s always gotta have all the rough breaks, and he would be bawling his eyes out right now if they weren’t, you know, on fire –
“onny – ade –” He’s hearing things.
“Johnnycake –” He must be losing it. There ain’t nobody even here -
“Johnny?”
Then suddenly, Johnny’s eyes are slowly opening, and there are softer, lighter tones in his vision – cream and mint green and gray and golden yellow – and then things fall into focus, and he sees Dally and Pony again.
So he hadn’t been burning just then. (And Dally hadn’t been with him, sharing confidences, being everything to him that Johnny had always wanted - )
But he’d been burning before, back at the church.
That’s why he’s here, in this hospital bed with cracked-up skin and a busted-up back, and sheets that are itching something terrible against his arms (because he can no longer feel anything on his back or below his waist), and what’s more, he still feels so goddamn warm –
Oh, shit, thinks Johnny.
He gets it, now.
It’s like when the engine of one of Dally’s ‘borrowed’ cars overheated.
Johnny’s body, his insides, they’re on the same track, except…there wasn’t any repairs, wasn’t any fixing that could be done once they got too hot.
Always gotta have all the rough breaks, he thinks. It’s a mantra, now.
It takes him a moment to make his vocal chords and mouth do what his brain wants them to.
“Hey,” he manages softly, taking in the flushed faces of his friends. His eyes eagerly take in everything about them, their features, the way they’re panting lightly (probably sprinted all the way here), the way they look like they care. And even though it’s silly to think that they wouldn’t, because the two of them are more family to him than his blood family has ever been, it still gets to him.
Dallas is the first to really speak. He tells Johnny something about beating the Socs, and it makes anger and frustration and nausea bubble up in Johnny, and he tells Dally, the one whom he’d nearly never told off, he uses precious energy to croak at him just how useless he thinks all that fighting is, because it is. What does it matter? The Socs are down; he was still here.
He just don’t get it, thinks Johnny.
Except Dally does.
Dally speaks again, a bit too fast, a bit too nervously for Johnny to catch all of it, but he hears the last part, “We’re all proud of you, buddy,” – loud and clear.
“We’re all proud of you.” It replays in Johnny’s head.
There’s a sharp pain in Johnny’s chest, and a prickling at his eyes, but they’re good feelings, for once.
It’s the closest he’s ever gotten to getting exactly what he’s wanted.
It’s true acceptance. It’s pride.
It’s plain love, love from Dally Winston.
Not quite on the level Johnny had always secretly wanted (if he’s honest with himself, he knows it was never meant to be that way, it never was), but it’s something. Something honest and real, and Johnny is tucking it away within himself, storing it to cherish wherever he ended up next.
The Dally from his dream had said that sometimes, words don’t mean nothing.
But sometimes, words mean everything.
There’s another kind of warm feeling that’s coming over Johnny as his time is running out, but this one isn’t quite so unbearable.