Last Summer Boys(57)

“I can hardly believe it,” I say. “Will Elliot writing love letters.”

Pete leans against the railing, watching him go. “I guess sometimes things work out.”

“Think we’ll ever see him again?” Frankie asks.

“He needs a stamp if he’s going to mail that thing,” Pete says. “He’ll be back.”





Next afternoon, it’s just me on the porch, sipping my lemonade and watching our valley gleam golden and beautiful under the sun.

Things are duller than ever now that Will’s in love. He disappeared early, walking toward town. Pete decided he needed some money and went to pick up a few hours at the gas station. Dad’s at the game preserve. Ma is in town. I figure I’ll ask Frankie to play another game of Battleship, but he just shakes his head and takes off across the flagstones for the barn.

“Sorry, Jack. I’ve got writing to do,” he tells me.

I got no idea why he’s even bothering anymore, but I let him go anyway. No use making Frankie miserable about our failed expedition.

Alone on the porch, I start to get mad about it all. I know I shouldn’t, but a good part of me just wants to blame it all on Caleb Madliner. If we hadn’t run into him in the creek that day, well, maybe we’d have had time enough to find that fighter after all. I’m chewing that over in my head when I hear another car coming up the lane.

It’s a police car. State trooper. But he ain’t got his lights flashing or his siren sounding. It pulls up in front of our barn, and I see there are two people in the front seat. Only one of them gets out of the car, though.

It’s Kemper.

He glances about the yard. Then when he’s certain Butch ain’t coming for him, he begins to study our house and yard with his black ferret eyes. He stands there a long time, blinking in the sun. The way he looks at our land makes the skin go tight across the back of my head.

Then he sees me. He scowls.

“Your parents here?” he calls from the drive. The voice is squeaky.

“No, they are not,” I tell him. “Whatever you’ve got to say, you can to me.”

Behind him, the police officer rises from the car and looks about. He rests his hands on his belt and there’s a sound like a little metal jingle.

Kemper crosses the drive for the porch.

“You the one threw those stones, aren’t you?” He licks his lips as he comes and looks around him again, like he’s checking to see if anybody else is here.

When he gets close, he puts one polished black shoe on the porch step. Then he looks me over. I feel his eyes on my faded shirt, the one that used to be Will’s. Those eyes jump to the patch on my pants, the one Ma sewed on after I cut up the knee running.

“You see that policeman behind me?” Kemper jerks a thumb over his shoulder so that he’s pointing to the barn, not to the police officer in the drive, but I don’t bother telling him that.

“He’s here to protect me while I deliver this to your daddy.” He draws a white envelope out of his suit and waves it at me. “It’s a notice of a public hearing to consider a proposal to create a reservoir on this land. Do you know what that means, boy?”

Cold fire ignites in my veins. I keep silent.

“It means your daddy should have sold to me when he had the chance. Now it’s over for him and your family. Or it will be, soon as the council votes.”

Kemper tugs at his suit jacket, then leans over from the waist. He looks directly into my eyes.

“How would you like living in a trailer? A little box on cinder blocks down by the tracks? That’d be quite a change from all this space, wouldn’t it?” He looks to the yard, to Apple Creek and the meadow beyond. “Because that’s about all your daddy will be able to afford if he holds out any longer on selling.”

I feel the tears welling up at the corners of my eyes.

“Maybe you ought to tell your old man to stop thinking only about himself,” Kemper says. A bead of sweat streaks down the side of his head, glistening in the sun. He dabs at it with a perfectly clean white handkerchief.

I swallow. Then, in a voice that’s hardly more than a whisper, I tell him, “You’re a small man, Mr. Kemper. You’ve got no guts. You leave that letter here if you want, and I’ll give it to my father. But you won’t get one inch of our land.”

Amazement flashes across his face. Then anger. The monstrously huge Adam’s apple does a dance along his pencil-thin neck, and he draws up and snorts. Then he tosses the envelope on the porch boards and turns back for the police car without saying anything. The officer lowers himself back in, and soon their wheels are making dust down our lane.

I sit a long time in my chair, Grandma Elliot’s quilt wrapped around me and that white envelope lying on the floorboards just a foot away from me. I don’t touch it. I won’t touch it.

It seems like I’m fighting too many battles, and not one I can win. Fevers, floods, and failed fighter jet expeditions; now a nasty man from the county hell-bent on taking our home.

Most of all, it seems like I’m fighting time. Pete turns eighteen next week. I know there’ll be another letter in the mail soon after that, one from Uncle Sam addressed to “Mr. Peter Elliot.” That letter will change his life—and all our lives—forever.

And there’s nothing I can do about that neither.