Last Summer Boys(30)

Then comes a single, ear-splitting shriek. It comes from up the road. It comes from Crash Callahan.

He is still on his bike, still rolling down the road. Astonishment blazes across his red face at the sight of his horde lying wrecked and dazed and humiliated before him.

Crash jams on his brakes and slows, weaving in and out of the logs and busted motorbikes, leaning over the road at impossible angles. He rides through a sea of his gang’s wreckage, licking his lips, howling in defiant rage.

He roars right up to us.

“Nice work, old man! We’ll be back. Tonight! And tomorrow night! And every night for the rest of your life!” He spits again.

Before any of us can say anything, the rifle is gleaming in Sam’s hands again. There’s a crack like lightning and Crash’s front tire pops.

“Come back anytime!” Sam hollers. The rifle cracks again. Crash’s back tire pops. “Anytime!”

With a face like paper, Crash guns what’s left of his bike and takes off down the road, his tires flopping like rags.





But the shooting is too much for Butch. At the sound of those rifle blasts, my dog bolts. He bounds off the porch, right into the sea of defeated motorcycles and angry men. There’s just one problem: he takes Frankie with him.

Dad dives for him, fingers snapping shut on empty air. “Let go!” he shouts.

But Frankie can’t let go. His arm is looped through Butch’s collar. Facedown, he’s dragged alongside my German shepherd—right into the road.

Dad charges after him.

“Sam, cover us!” Pete shouts as he charges too.

Sam’s rifle cracks like corn in a hot skillet. He pops tires. He clips branches. He rains leaves down on the men in the road and at the edge of the field. He makes the dust spit at their feet.

Between that and my dog, the riders decide enough is enough. Those that can, right their bikes and pour back up the road in a last thunder-roll of choking diesel and dust. The rest take off running through Knee-Deep Meadow.

And now I’m running too: jumping steaming piles of motorcycle wreckage, chasing after my dog and my cousin. At first I don’t see them in the swirling dust of the road. Then I see Butch, without his collar, chasing the last of the riders into the high grass.

Ahead of me, Dad and Pete jump over the motorcycles that lie panting like dying animals in the dust, running for the shape of a boy lying facedown in the dirt.

Frankie! A lump rises in my throat. But when I get close, I see he’s sitting up. He holds Butch’s busted collar in his hand, looks as if he’s wondering what it is. He’s a mess. He’s got grass in his hair and stones down his shirt. One shoe is missing. Somehow he’s still wearing his glasses.

“You all right, son?” asks Dad.

Frankie runs his hands over his chest, his arms, his legs.

“I think so,” he coughs. He looks around. “Where’d they all go?”

Except for the logs and the wreckage of the motorbikes, the road is empty. Butch’s barking comes now from halfway across the meadow. There ain’t a single rider in sight.

“We chased them off!”

Will and Sam come up, shattered glass crunching under them. Old Sam is red-faced and smiling ear to ear. He slaps his knees several times, laughing as he looks about him.

“Ooh-wee,” he wheezes to himself. “Look at all this, Myrtle. We fixed ’em good, didn’t we? Ooh-wee.”

He drops to one knee and lays a hand on one of the motorcycles. It’s hot to the touch, and he snaps his fingers back real quick.

“How much you figure Hank Wistar will give me for these parts?” Sam grins again and slaps his hands against the singeing metal.

I help Frankie to his feet and brush him off as Pete and Will lift one of the bikes upright. Pete swings a leg over it and sits with his hands on the bars. “How do I look?”

Dad stands with his hands on his hips. His blue eyes sweep over the road, the logs, the steaming motorcycles. He smiles.

He looks down and kicks at a piece of glass.

“Well,” he says, long and slow. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up.”





There is a kind of tired a boy can be when even breathing seems too much work. I feel that way as I lean against Stairways’ cool stone and let a heaviness like lead settle into my arms and legs.

A slow fire burns in my muscles, a deep, dull ache that is somehow so satisfying and so good. I borrow a breath from the summer night and let it out, long and slow.

We lifted those old oak logs in and out of our truck in three different places—at Madliner House, at Sam’s, and finally at Stairways. From the porch, I can see the logs stacked beside the barn, tall and dark, there to wait, there to dry in preparation for winter.

They will burn well.

My stomach tightens as I remember Mr. Madliner’s words. There was something uncomfortably gleeful in the way he said it, like he looked forward to a time of burning for the great old tree.

I push that man out of my mind and focus instead on the good pain in my shoulders and neck, the pain that comes from working with people I love and who love me.

I doze for a time, there against the solid stones of the house where I was born. Fireflies are glowing in the yard when I wake. I sniff and smell something that wasn’t there before: cigar smoke.

Dad is in the yard under the tree, watching night come to the valley he loves so much.