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.
Around us, the day blazes to its hottest time. Sky’s grown darker in the west. Up in the cab, the Bob Dylan song has fizzled out. We’ve lost the station. Will twists the dial trying to find another, but all he gets is static.
The Ford follows the curve of the road, and Frankie’s suitcase slides over the bed. Rip-rip-rip.
I decide to try again to make conversation.
“We’re awful excited you’re here, Frankie. Ma’s made a blueberry cobbler for dessert tonight, and Dad said he’ll drive us into town to the movie theater, if we want.”
Us Elliot boys love the movies. First one I ever saw was Moby Dick at a Saturday matinee. Dad piled us into the Ford and drove us down to the State Theatre on Main Street. That white whale scared the life out of me, but Will insisted it was Captain Ahab who was the most frightening. That made no sense to me, though Will’s smarter than I’ll ever be so I figure he’s right.
The cornfields have dropped below and behind us, a swaying green ocean of their own now that Pete’s driven us into those blue Pennsylvania hills that looked so far away before. More often than not, you’ll find streams curling around their rocky toes, passing between gray sycamore trunks. There’s panfish in the shallows, sunlight glinting off their flat bodies, and in the deeper, greener holes, the trout sit fat and lazy.
Pennsylvania’s rocky ribs close in around us as we wind through miles and miles of narrow mountain passes, dark in the shade of sycamores, poplars, and pines, until all of a sudden we bust into a sweep of honey-colored meadow. The smell of honeysuckle comes to us on warm wind.
“Almost home now, Frankie.”
Frankie isn’t looking at me. Instead, he’s staring at the sparkling ribbon of water rolling deep and wide before us: Apple Creek. The road bends toward it, drawn as if by magic, and now we’re following the creek upstream.
Beside us the creek twists like a fat black snake in a patch of Bermuda grass, past Jungle Junction, where drifters sit by glowing campfires waiting to trade ghost stories for fresh-caught trout (the bigger your trout, the better your story); past Blood Root Mountain, where Crash Callahan and his riders race motorcycle bikes down impossible cliffs of black earth; right up to the Hopkins Bridge, a rusty pile of metal that shakes and rattles every time our truck dares across its brittle bones.
At the top of the next hill is Stairways.
At the top of the next hill is home.
My dog waits at the end of the dirt road.
You might remember I mentioned Butch already. I guess he really belongs to all of us—Dad and Ma, Pete, Will, and me—but since he and I spend the most time together, I think it’s all right to just say he’s mine.
Old Butch waits for Pete to park us beside the barn, then trots over, tail swishing back and forth. Frankie sees him, and his eyes grow wide.
“Don’t you worry about Butch,” I say. “He’s as gentle a soul as can be.”
Butch showed up on our porch one day, a lean, dusty-coated German shepherd. He was starving. Dad took him a piece of meat and smoked a cigar while he ate it. When Butch was done eating, he laid down and put his chin on the toe of Dad’s boot. He’s been our dog ever since. Ma says God puts people in your life at different times for different reasons. I know it’s true for dogs too. Butch has been my best friend long as I can remember.
I grab Frankie’s suitcase and lead him for the house. Butch comes with us, sniffing Frankie’s pant leg. Dragging Frankie’s suitcase up the porch steps, I tell him Butch ain’t ever hurt anybody, which is mostly true.
Our house is two hundred years old. Made from stone, it didn’t have electricity when Ma and Dad first moved in. Electrical company man was too afraid to run cables through the attic because of the snakes, so Ma took his ladder, hitched up her skirts, and did it herself.
People throughout the county call our house Stairways because of the steep spiral staircase that rises up from the parlor, up through three floors, all the way to the room where my brothers and I sleep under the attic. Other things sleep in the attic, above the rafters. Snakes shed their papery skins on hot summer nights (sometimes I can hear them if I lie still and hold my breath), and come wintertime, the screech owls keep me awake all night.
My brothers and me like the room just fine anyway. Our bedroom window lets us look down on our yard and the lane, and Apple Creek beyond that. The window is convenient for sneaking out late at night, too, by way of the gutter down to the porch roof.
“This is where we sleep,” I tell Frankie as we puff up the last of those steep steps. “Those bunk beds are Pete and Will’s. That bed right there is mine. You’ll sleep on the mattress by the window.”
He looks at the mattress, then at me.