Last Summer Boys(37)

The thoughts swimming through my mind scatter like minnows when Frankie suddenly starts shouting into the phone. “Let me come home! Let me come home!”

Aunt Effie’s voice gurgles over the phone again, and I think I hear her crying now.

Frankie is trembling, but he goes on listening as his mother talks. He stares at the plaster on the kitchen wall, touches it with his fingers. I watch my cousin make his whole body slowly go calm, the water smooth once more. Then Frankie whispers to his mother, “I will.”

He hangs up.

Ma is at my side now, though I don’t remember hearing the screen door.

We wait.

Frankie’s still staring at the wall. Then, in a voice as dry as that plaster:

“My dad’s been shot.”

My breath catches in my throat, but before I can speak a word Frankie goes on in that same funny voice, slowly, as if he’s stamping it on his own mind. “He was at a traffic light. Someone walked up and started shooting. Most of the bullets went into the car. One hit him in the leg.” Frankie’s voice seems to be drifting away from him, like it’s leaving him, heading home. “He’s hurt, but alive . . . He’s in the hospital now.”

I draw a deep breath. “Come on, then. We’ve got to get you back to that train station.”

He shakes his head once, a quick jerk. “I have to stay.” His dark eyes move first to Ma, then to me as he repeats it. “He wants me staying here!”

My mouth drops. “But what on earth does your dad want that for?”

“Because he loves you.” Ma’s voice is full of command, of truth. To deny her words would be like telling someone the sun don’t come up in the morning or go down at night. She moves to Frankie, puts her arms around him. “Your father is a strong man, Frankie, and he will recover,” Ma tells him, her voice softer now. “And he will do it easier knowing you’re not in danger.”

Frankie bows his head, and now the tears are running down his cheeks. Ma holds him a minute longer, and I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes too.

When Frankie lets go, Ma sends him upstairs to lie down. I listen to him climb those spiral stairs and wait until I hear the door to my bedroom shut before asking her.

“Was it those men Uncle Leone was looking for? The ones who killed them boys in the car?”

“It was him being a policeman in a policeman’s car,” Ma says. “Nothing more than that.” She wipes the tears away with the hem of her apron. “Let him be a little while. Then keep close. Understand?”

I tell her I do, but as I push through the screen door, out into the furnace of a day, the truth blazes like a torch in my mind: I don’t understand any of it. Not why anybody would kill anybody for looking different. Or light fires. Or shoot a policeman. I make for the creek, looking to quench the fire burning in my mind. Next thing I know I’ve stripped down to swim.

Creek is low, and I bump my knees against the sandy bottom, but I keep right on swimming to the far bank. Push my feet into white clay, turn around. Back again.

I want it all to be over—the war; the shooting and the killing; the mobs, the riots, the fires. But I know it won’t be over. Not anytime soon. And most of all, I know there’s nothing—not a single blessed thing—I can do about any of it.

Day burns on above me, and when I lie down in my bed later that night, after a dinner where both Will’s and Frankie’s chairs sit empty, I feel the sun’s cold-fire kisses along the back of my neck and all down my arms and legs, burning me still.





I bust into tears when I wake up and see Will lying in his own bed. I run over and climb in and give him a big hug, bawling my eyes out the whole time. Will doesn’t shove me off right away. But he don’t hug me back.

He don’t have to hug me. He just has to be home.





Chapter 13


BONNIE AND CLYDE





Sadness drops like a curtain down around our stone house in the days after Kennedy’s funeral and the news of Uncle Leone. Frankie keeps to our room most of the first day, but he shows for breakfast the next, appearing his normal self though maybe his eyes are redder around the edges.

Will comes to breakfast, but he don’t eat. He barely sleeps, though he lies in bed most of the day. Sometimes he reads—a dusty book of Greek poetry. Or that Saturday Evening Post with Bobby Kennedy’s picture on the cover. Slowly I realize that Frankie is mending but Will ain’t. He may be back, but he ain’t better.

Afternoon of the third day, Will grabs that Post magazine and that blue-and-white Kennedy campaign pin off his bookshelf and carries them down to the barn. He clangs around inside until he finds a shovel, then he marches out into the meadow and buries both the magazine and the pin. Then it’s straight back up to the bedroom.

Pete and me watch from the porch. “What’d he do that for?” I ask.

“He’s saying goodbye,” Pete replies. “It’s something you do when people die. It helps with the sadness.”

“Oh,” I say. “How long you figure before Will’s done being sad?”

Pete shrugs. “A while.”

I don’t like that. I don’t want Will to be so sad. But there’s something else bothering me. Will won’t go anywhere or do anything. That includes looking for that fighter jet. Our expedition has to wait until Will feels better. That means Frankie’s story has to wait too.