Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight.
What’s my wish? To keep Pete from dying in Vietnam.
Below, the screen door wheezes open, slaps against the frame. I hear footsteps pound the porch boards, crunch gravel: Will. Leaving, walking off again, furious from his fight with Dad about Bobby Kennedy and the Democrats, Richard Nixon and the Republicans. And the war.
One of these days, he’ll go for good.
No, don’t say that. Not Will too.
Frankie appears, smelling like soap with his dark hair sticking every which way, and it’s my turn to wash in the white tub. As I pour warm water over my head, my mind goes back to the barbershop, to Mr. Hudspeth’s voice playing like a tape recorder over and over and over again:
Now, if you’re famous, you don’t have to go to war.
Chapter 5
THE PLAN
I wake to find my idea bobbing on the line in the shallow end of my brain, like an embarrassed trout that ought to know better.
I lie still, barely breathing and almost crying with relief because I know now how to save my brother—and it all depends on my cousin.
“Frankie!” I whisper. “Come on and get dressed! Come on now!”
I give him a shake and reach for a shoe. My fingers are trembling so badly from the excitement, I can barely get the knot tied.
Frankie comes up from his mattress blinking, one hand feeling for his glasses.
“They’re on the windowsill,” I tell him.
“What time is it?”
“Shh!” I jerk my head toward the bunk, to Pete’s and Will’s sleeping shapes. They can’t know. Can’t have any part of it. Not Ma or Dad neither. Nobody can know—until the right time, and then everyone will know.
“About seven o’clock. Now hurry up.”
“Where we going?”
“Apple Creek.”
“What for?”
The truth: because I can’t have Pete and Will hearing what I have to tell you.
“Just because,” I say instead.
“At seven o’clock in the morning?”
“Best time of day—as good as any other. Now get dressed while I grab us some breakfast.”
I leave him on the mattress and take the spiral stairs two at a time to the kitchen, where I spread some butter on a pair of yesterday’s biscuits and stuff both in my overalls before screwing the lid onto a jar of orange juice. Frankie is at the bottom of the stairs by the time I finish. His shirttail hangs out of his pants. His hair dives off his head at odd angles.
“You’re slower than molasses in January,” I tell him as we push through the screen door so hard it slaps the back of the porch and wheezes back, nearly catching Frankie’s elbow. Heavy perfume of summer washes over us: lilac and honeysuckle. Grass is still wet from the last of the dew, and the hems of our pants are damp by the time we pass the barn.
Butch finds us then, lumbering over to say good morning and sniff at the biscuits in my pocket. I watch Frankie make the decision to drop a hand on my dog’s head and give him a quick scratch behind the ear. Butch plops down at once on his behind and points his nose at the sky, which is his way of telling Frankie to keep on with the ear scratching.
Any other day, I’d stop and accommodate Butch, but this morning I’m impatient.
“I think he likes me,” Frankie says, yawning. “Does he live in the barn?”
“He only sleeps there,” I tell him. “Come on, I’ll show you. But real quick.”
Cooler inside the barn. Dark. Motes swirl in a pair of light beams that slant through cobwebby windows and splash on Dad’s gray Ferguson tractor, still asleep under its blue tarp. Enormous wheels make creases like mountain ridges beneath waterproofed plastic. The trailer hangs out the back of the tarp, filled with the tools Dad uses on old Mr. Halleck’s estate: axes, shovels, chainsaws, hedge clippers, work gloves, a posthole digger, a jug of gasoline, and a paint-splattered pail.
Frankie spots our toboggan, tucked across the rafters.
“That’s the best place for hide-and-seek,” I tell him. “One time I stretched out on it to hide, and it was so comfy I fell asleep. I was up there hours and Pete and Will couldn’t find me, and Ma was fixing to call the sheriff when I finally woke up. Good thing I never rolled nowhere. Only bad thing about it was the spiders.”
I lead him back outside, where Butch is nipping at gnats in the yard, and down the worn flagstones to the lane. When he sees we mean business about leaving the yard, Butch gets up and trots along after us.
Above us, the sun is a soft ball of yellow egg yolk. Not one cloud in sight, which means it will be hot, and I’m glad when we cross the road and slip beneath the gray sycamores and pass into Pennsylvania’s endless forests. Will told me once that you can walk from one end of Pennsylvania to the other and never once come out from under trees, if you don’t want to. I believe him. There’s a musty smell on the air of rotting leaves and fresh mud. Roots, like old fingers, reach across the deer trail we’re following, which begins to dip down.