Last Summer Boys(14)
Sam sighs and leans against Myrtle’s red, white, and blue mailbox. He looks at us.
“So you boys are looking for a typewriter? Myrtle mighta had one. Let’s see.”
Sam’s trailer is a jungle of junk inside. On a leaning pinewood table, I spy a pair of old fishing reels and spools of thread, cans of turpentine, empty boxes of Cracker Jack, and a roll of duct tape. Towers of dusty LIFE magazines from 1957 teeter in a corner; a machete balances at the edge of a dresser just above them. There’s no place to stand—the floor is covered with empty milk bottles standing row after row to the trailer’s far side. Milk bottles fill moldy cardboard boxes in the hall. Milk bottles stand like nutcrackers on the windowsill. Milk bottles cluster on a sagging bookshelf. And winking dimly at us from under the dusty fabric of a sunken coach: more milk bottles.
Over all of it, glowing softly white in the dim light, are chicken feathers, and that reminds me of how Hank Wistar said Sam stashed his chickens inside when Crash tore the door off his coop.
“Best if you boys wait here,” Sam husks as he disappears into the back. Soon, we hear sounds of him rummaging about, and the clinking of more bottles. Milk, I suppose, but maybe not.
When Sam returns he carries a squat, grayish hunk of metal in his arms. A pair of knobs stick out of both sides. A single sheet of yellow paper floats out the top.
“Oh, it’s perfect!” I say.
“Don’t say that ’til you know if it works,” he grunts. “I expect it does.”
He drops the typewriter into my outstretched arms, and it’s so heavy Frankie has to shoot over to help me hold it, knocking over a dozen milk bottles as he does.
“I best be giving you a ride back,” Sam says. “Don’t expect you’ll make it otherwise.”
Frankie and me carry the typewriter into the yard and somehow manage to lift it into Sam’s battered truck, where we wedge it safely between us in the front seat. Sam waits until Butch is settled in the bed, then coaxes the engine to life.
As we roll out of Sam’s place, past his red, white, and blue mailbox and its new barbed-wire fence, I look at Frankie and can hardly believe our luck.
Later that night, while my family watches Walter Cronkite on the evening news, Frankie and me slip away to the barn to try out our typewriter.
I’ve pinched a candle from the kitchen and it only takes me two matches to get it lit. It’s a fine, cheery little flame that takes to the wick, and in its yellow light, Frankie rolls a piece of paper into the machine and starts to type. The keys seem loud as gunshots in the big dark barn.
Frankie’s fingers flow quick over the keys, and I’m impressed he don’t have to stop and look for the right letters. When he’s done, I lean in and see what he’s written:
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY.
I whistle soft and low.
“Well, we’ve got our typewriter,” Frankie replies, smiling. “So when do we find this fighter jet?”
I bite my lip.
“What?”
“I ain’t exactly asked Pete and Will about you coming along with us just yet, Frankie. And truth be told . . . they won’t like it.”
In the candle’s flickering light, Frankie’s face changes: the smile leaves and his dark eyes seem to grow glints in them, like sharp rocks deep beneath the surface of still water.
“Because I’m a city boy. And city boys aren’t tough at all, are they?”
I don’t answer him, but he’s right. That’s exactly why.
Frankie frowns. “Jack, that is honest to goodness bullshit.”
I’m surprised to hear Frankie cussing, but before I can speak a word he goes on.
“All right, so I don’t like spiders, or snakes, or being in the middle of nowhere without so much as a streetlight or a car horn to let you know there’s other people living on the planet too. Lots of people don’t live like that, but that doesn’t make them soft. You know what it’s like where my family lives? I’ll tell you. A week into the riots, four boys from the West Lake housing projects drove into my neighborhood and stopped at the corner store at the end of my block. It’s a place to buy sandwiches and cigarettes, and maybe that’s what they were there to do. Or maybe they were there to burn the place down. Nobody knows because some men on the rooftop shot them all. Ever wake up to gunshots? It sounds like a car backfiring except it doesn’t stop. One of the West Lake boys died that night, and it didn’t look good for the other three when the ambulance took them away. Now, my old man is a cop, and he’s looking for those men. Alone. Without me. Because he and my mom think I’m safer if I’m here with you. But I want my father safe, Jack. I don’t want him getting shot too. And there’s nothing I can do to help him here. So I’ll go on your adventures. I’ll write your stories. But I won’t have you think for one second I’m not tough as you.”
When Frankie finishes there’s tears in those dark eyes, and I’m so shocked and ashamed of myself, it’s a while before I can even think to say anything. Here I am sick half to death worrying about my brother, who’s alive and safe and still right here at home with me. Meanwhile, Frankie’s worrying about his father chasing murderers in a place that’s on fire.