“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
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.