Last Summer Boys(2)
Frankie watches it go, and I know by the look on his face he wishes he was still on that train, heading back home to his city.
But I don’t know why he’d want to, with the whole place burning as it is.
Leaving the station, Pete decides to cut through the town of New Shiloh rather than go around. He drives us down Main Street past the redbrick storefronts with their stenciled letters, and old iron streetlamps and little metal benches that ain’t comfortable at all to sit on. I figure it’s mostly so he and Will can see if there are any kids around they know from school. Beside me in the truck bed, Frankie watches the town go by with a sad kind of look on his face, and I know he’s comparing it to his city.
“Old Sam Williamson says once upon a time this was a wagon trail,” I tell him.
Frankie looks at me, surprised at my sudden talk.
“Yes sir, this road carried pioneers in Conestoga wagons all the way from Philadelphia right on through to them mountains,” I go on. “Nowadays, people still come from Philadelphia, only they stay here, mostly in the new houses going up the far side of town.”
The new developments that Dad hates.
Frankie looks back to the streets and catches a faceful of sunlight blazing off the windows of the National Five and Ten.
Up in the cab, Will finds Bob Dylan on the radio. Dad never likes us listening to him, but Will does it anyway.
Pete sings as he drives with a voice that’s got more to it in the way of strength than tune but still sounds nice somehow. Pete’s seventeen. Sun-fired and glorious, with freckles on his nose and hair like straw. But it’s 1968. The Vietnam draft is going on and it’s a dangerous time for him to be so close to eighteen. He don’t care.
But I sure do.
Will drums his fingers on the dash, annoyed at Pete’s singing. I catch sight of my brothers’ faces in the rearview mirror and it’s like seeing double. Pete and Will look so alike most people think they’re twins: green-gray eyes, pointy noses, moppy blond hair. But Will is sixteen. Not so close to the draft as Pete. When we get to the stoplight in the middle of town and the corner with the crowd of kids, he stops his drumming and sits up.
I say crowd, but really it’s only a half dozen or so kids about Pete and Will’s age, maybe older. Black and white. Some have long hair, and there’s a red-haired girl in sunglasses wearing not enough clothes, so we can see more of her than we should through her knitted shirt. They’re waving hand-painted signs at the few cars moving slowly down Main Street:
END THE WAR BEFORE IT ENDS YOU
INJUSTICE ANYWHERE IS A THREAT TO JUSTICE EVERYWHERE
LBJ GO AWAY!
RESIST!
The light changes and Pete gives the Ford some gas. “Hippies,” he says, as we roll past.
At that, Will slides forward in his seat, and leaning himself far out the window, he lifts a fist in a kind of salute. The girl in the sunglasses sees him and gives a whoop. Will flops back into his seat and shoots a look at Pete.
“They’re fighting to keep your ignorant hide here and alive, not to send you off to Vietnam to kill and get killed like that idiot Johnson wants.”
“Better let me decide where my ignorant hide goes,” Pete replies, glancing a last time at the girl in the rearview mirror. “And if you’re worried about killing in Vietnam, you might talk to the communists who started the shooting.”
Will snorts. “Pete, I swear if you ever grow an idea of your own, it’ll die of loneliness. That’s Dad talking.”
Pete reminds him Dad’s the only one of us ever gone to war with communists, but Will tells him Korea ain’t Vietnam and anyhow civil rights here is more important, and they get to arguing from there. From my spot in the truck bed, I don’t pay them any more attention.
Other than the hippies, there ain’t any more kids out, and anyway we’ve come to the far side of town now. On our left, I spy the new development of square houses surrounded by the wood skeletons of still more houses being built. But Pete feeds the Ford more gas, and we’re rolling away from town now toward blue hills.
That Dylan song is still tumbling out the window as we go, the sound falling like rain on cornstalks that’ll grow twice as tall as me. Sometimes my dog, Butch, and I will crawl among those cornstalks. I pretend we’re in a swamp and that the stalks are really mangroves. After harvest in the fall, we walk these fields and look for arrowheads turned up in the earth among kernels of cracked feed corn.
Beside me in the truck bed, Frankie doesn’t see the corn. His eyes are shut tight against the wind, his fingers gripping the edge of the pickup bone white.
“Don’t worry, Frankie,” I say over the wind. “There’s all sorts of fun things we can do while you’re here. Hey, you know how to shoot?”
One eye opens. He shakes his head.
“We do, and I can teach you, if you like. We shoot all the time. Mostly old beer bottles.” Thinking for a minute, I add, “One time a man came into our house at night when we were all asleep, and Dad had to shoot him.”
Both his ink-black eyes open then.
“The man didn’t die,” I add quickly.
He seems about to say something when our Ford rumbles over a pothole in the road. The bed drops beneath us and Frankie and me are weightless for an instant, floating over the truck like boy-shaped clouds on a hot wind. I land on my tailbone with a thump. That ends my story, and it’s just as well.