There were people around here who used to talk about Joe Biggs, saying that he was sadistic and mean, and that he would come to no good. But these people didn’t know him like I did. He was a fun kind of guy, full of life and full of the devil. And you could bet your last dime that if there was a good time to be had, Joe would be there right in the middle of it.

Joe was big and strong, with reddish hair and ears that stuck out a little too far. I could always make him mad by reminding him about his ears. But I didn’t do that very often, I’ll tell you that. He almost killed me once when I did.

I was Joe’s best friend. We grew up together in the same neighborhood, and were only a month apart in age. He was older. And, boy, did he ever have a sense of humor! He was always playing jokes on people. Not little "buzzer in a handshake" stuff. Not Joe. He did it right, that’s for damn sure.

I remember the time Joe caught Bill Dexter’s dog. Bill was one of the kids who lived on the same street as Joe and me; a little wimp of a kid who cried a lot and looked scared whenever he saw Joe coming. Well, Joe got a hold of Scamp, the dog, and tied some cans to his tail. Then he poured a little kerosene in one of the cans and set fire to it. The dog took off, howling and wailing, with a flaming can flapping along behind him. The flame finally burned through the string and let loose. Bill went running after the dog, crying and yelling. Joe laughed as hard as I ever saw him laugh in his life. What a crazy guy.

Once in high school, Joe cornered Mary Jennifer in the gym. Mary Jennifer was the prettiest girl in the school, a tiny wisp of a girl, and real popular. Mary Jennifer was a cheerleader. She was coming back from practice, still wearing her cheerleading outfit and carrying her pompoms. Crazy Joe snuck up behind her, put his arm around here neck, and squeezed until she started to choke. She dropped the pompoms on the floor. Joe picked them up and started out of the gym with them. Mary Jennifer ran after him, sort of yelling and crying at the same time. She caught up to him by the door, reached for the pompoms, scratching him on the face as she did. Joe really got mad at that, so he hit her a good one, hard enough to knock her down. She went sprawling across the gym floor, scraping up her knees pretty good. She was bleeding a little from the mouth where he had hit her, and crying. Crazy Joe laughed and waved the pompoms in her face. I have to hand it to Mary Jennifer, though. She had spunk--more spunk than wimpy Bill. She grabbed for the pompoms again, but Joe held them high over his head.

Finally, she just sat down and buried her face in her hands and cried. "I hate you, Joe Biggs. I hate you!" she yelled.

That made Joe laugh even harder.

Joe hung those pompoms on the antenna of his car, and said he would never give them back to Mary Jennifer. And he probably wouldn’t have if Old Gherkins, the principal, hadn’t threatened to expel him from school. If you ask me, Joe was just having a little fun. That’s the kind of guy he was.

One Saturday at the homecoming game, he told me he was going to take Mary Jennifer home. I was real surprised, because I knew Mary Jennifer didn’t like him very much.

"Ah," he said. "That’s just a big act. She thinks I’m cool."

"Did she tell you that?"

Joe laughed. "She doesn’t have to. I know her type."

Well, right after the game, Joe took off after Mary Jennifer. I watched as she talked to him for a few minutes. Then she stalked off like she was mad about something. He went after her, grabbed her by the arm, and pushed her toward the woods in back of the bleachers. I decided to leave.

Monday morning, Mary Jennifer didn’t show up at school. Joe was there, happy-go-lucky as ever. When I asked him what happened with him and Mary Jennifer, he just winked and said nothing.

A whole week went by before Mary Jennifer came back to school. She looked terrible. She didn’t smile or talk to anyone except Meg, her closest friend. And she stayed as far away from Joe as she could. Mary Jennifer was never her old self after that. People talked about it, in whispers, and there were a lot of crazy things being said. There was even talk that maybe Joe would be arrested for doing things to Mary Jennifer that people didn’t even want to talk about. But Mary Jennifer’s parents pulled her out of school and enrolled her in St. Patricia’s in the next county. That set off more gossip. But things cooled down after that and eventually the whole thing was forgotten. Joe kept on being his old crazy self, laughing and playing his jokes on people.

Bill Dexter, the kid with the dog, was Joe’s favorite target. Once he made Bill climb the old apple tree across the street from the Post Office. Then he threw rocks at the hornet’s nest on the limb right above Bill’s head. Those hornets came streaming out of the nest and went after wimpy Bill. He scrambled down that tree, screaming at the top of his lungs while the hornets went after him like cats after a mouse. Joe nearly died laughing. He was sure a fun loving, crazy guy.

One day me and Joe were out cruising around when we came across wimpy Bill, riding his old beat up bike along Maple Street, just south of town, probably on his way to the lake. Joe came up behind him in his car, got the bumper right up against Bill’s rear wheel, then gunned the engine. Bill went sailing off into the bushes. The bike flew up in the air and landed on the road in front of Joe’s car. He ran over the back wheel of the bike. Bill had to walk home, bawling like a baby all the way. Bill’s dad was pretty mad at Joe over it, and got into a big argument with Joe’s old man about paying for the bike. But Joe’s dad stood up for him. He said that Joe was just having a little fun and couldn’t help it if the bike fell under the car. He said Bill was on the wrong side of the road anyway and was the cause of the whole mess. Joe’s old man was a neat guy, fun loving like Joe.

Now Joe’s gone. He was so full of life that I thought he would probably live forever. But he was shot dead. The police arrested Bill Dexter for the crime. Bill denied it, of course. Who wouldn’t? But they had the gun, and even had a witness.

That’s what I don’t understand about the whole thing. The DA just dropped the charges against Bill yesterday. I couldn’t believe it, but there he was on TV telling the reporters that there was "insufficient evidence".

"We don’t have enough of a case to present to the court," he said. "It would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money to try Dexter at this time."

"What about the witness?" a reporter asked.

"It was dark," the DA said, "and the witness can’t be certain now that it was Bill Dexter she saw."

That’s not what the paper said earlier. The witness was absolutely certain that she had seen Bill. She even picked him out of a lineup down at the police station.

I guess the DA knows what he’s doing. He seems like a pretty good DA to me. At least that’s what I hear. He came here well recommended by the folks he worked for in Dallas. But nobody really knows that much about him. He just moved here last year when he married Mary Jennifer.

Anyway, I hope they find the guy who killed Joe. It doesn’t seem right that a person could get away with murder just like that.