Last Summer Boys
Bill Rivers
The bravest are the tenderest,—
The loving are the daring.
—Bayard Taylor, “Song of the Camp”
Chapter 1
CITY BOY
Cousin Francis said come nighttime he could smell the fires in his city.
Not like that sweet woodsmoke scent me and my brothers love so much, but an awful, eye-watering sting in the air of burning brick and rubber and roofing tar. Wind blew that terrible smell all the way to his bedroom window from the West Lake housing projects where the fires burned and had been burning since sundown the day Reverend King was killed. Seven straight days the riots lasted, and on the morning of the seventh day the soldiers came, came and stayed. It went on like that for weeks, until the day Francis’s father came up to his room to tell him he’d be coming to stay with us for that summer of 1968.
Francis did not like that one bit.
No boy wants to leave his father to face the world alone, police officer or not. Francis put up a fuss, but Uncle Leone was never one to fool with. Slim and dark and quiet, he had a fire all his own. Most times it burned low, like coals glowing on a hearth late at night, but it could blaze to life if the right breeze was blowing. And it was.
Truth be told, Uncle Leone didn’t want Francis to leave their city either: he was only doing it because his wife—Ma’s sister, our Aunt Effie—asked him in a way he couldn’t tell her no. She believed boys don’t belong in places where they can get killed. Uncle Leone thought leaving was running away and it was better to change the city so no boys, black or white, had to worry about getting killed.
Aunt Effie allowed that would be best, but Aunt Effie also had no hope of it happening this side of heaven.
So soon as school let out, Cousin Francis, all of thirteen years old and alone, slim and tanned like his father, took a train out to stay with us: my two older brothers, Pete and Will, and me; Dad and Ma; and our big dog, Butch, together in the stone house that sat alongside Apple Creek at the beginning of that awful summer.
“There he is, Pete,” I tell my brother, over the hiss of the train.
At the platform’s far end stands a boy who looks to be made of sticks: flannel shirt hangs off him like a flag on a pole. Beside him is a mud-colored suitcase that stands half as high as him.
My brothers and me have never met our cousin before, but I recognize him from a newspaper photograph Ma taped to our fridge. He’d won a contest for story writing and got his picture taken. Aunt Effie sent us the clipping, and Ma put it up, hoping that’d make my brothers and me want to work harder at school. It didn’t.
Crowd’s thinning out on the platform and the train’s still hissing like an angry copperhead, but Francis ain’t seen us yet. He stays blinking in the late-May sun, and that gives us time to size him up some. He’s my age but even shorter than me, with hair black as boot polish and chestnut-tan skin. Hard to tell the color of his eyes because he wears glasses.
“What’d I tell you, Pete?” my other brother, Will, says. “A city boy. Useless.” He spits.
Much as I hate to admit it, Will’s right: Frankie looks like a stiff breeze would send him right off the platform.
Pete just grins around the stalk of onion grass in his teeth. Then, as Will’s spit fries up on the tracks below, he walks over to Francis and sticks out a hand.
“Hiya, Frankie.”
Frankie. Just like that, Pete changes his name. Our cousin is Frankie now. Frankie forever.
“I’m your cousin, Pete. This here’s Will. And that’s Jack.” My brother tilts his shaggy head my way. “Stick close by Jack. He’ll look after you.”
“I sure will,” I say, trying to sound more excited about it than I am.
Will snorts. He don’t like it one bit Frankie’s come to stay with us, what with school only being out a few precious months. My brothers been planning an expedition to find a wrecked fighter jet that crashed years ago the next county over. We ain’t supposed to go, on account of the Air Force men never being truthful enough for Ma’s liking as to whether they found all the bombs and missiles that were on it.
The wreck is far and it’s rough country to get there, even for us. Will worries babysitting a city boy will ruin it.
That’s how my brothers want to spend the summer. But I got a secret summertime plan of my own. And if, or how, our city-boy cousin can help, I can’t say.
We simmer a bit on the platform, while above us white sky bruises slowly toward blue. Away to the west, storm clouds stack themselves one atop the other. Frankie still ain’t spoken. Behind his glasses I spy a pair of soft, dark eyes that move from Pete to Will to me.
“Let’s not stand here like a pack of fools!” Will seizes Frankie’s suitcase as the train lets loose a final hiss, then a whistle as the whole metal monster groans to life and goes rolling away along tracks that gleam like spilled quicksilver through the fields of butterfly weed.
Pete leads us off the platform, down to the gravel drive where our pickup bakes in afternoon sun. He and Will climb into the cab while I heave Frankie’s suitcase into the bed and hop up with him for the ride back to Stairways.
The train is far out in the fields by the time Pete brings the Ford’s engine to life. With its tracks hidden in the high grass, the train looks like it’s floating over Pennsylvania farmland. A ghost train.
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