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.