“Oh yeah,” Frank continued. He held up his two hands, listening. “By two touchdowns. This is going to be a party.”
A few minutes later the first four cars packed with kids circled into the meadow, easing over the grassy, uneven ground, all of them parking nose in toward the pile of lumber. Ross Hubbard, who was spirit leader, one of the boys who would go to Vietnam and never return or be found and would be Missing in Action, jumped out of his rusty Datsun and started waving the others away as kids piled out of every door. He walked along in front of gathering vehicles. “No, no!” he yelled. “Back up. Back, back! Do you understand? This is going to be a fire! Davis, you want to burn up your father’s car and have him kick your ass once more? Back it up! Move these or lose these!” he pounded on the hoods of the cars. “Back! Move it back!” He swept his arm. “Park back by the trees!” Immediately a kind of controlled chaos set in, boys and girls everywhere, some diving straight for the trees to relieve themselves, some throwing more wood on the pile, calling greetings, screaming out fiercely, joyously, for no apparent reason other than that they were young people out of town under the sky in this little random village in the woods. “Leeper!” Ross Hubbard yelled at one boy who was standing on the hood of a car. “Move this heap unless you want to burn it up!”
“My dad wouldn’t appreciate that!” Leeper said, dropping to the ground.
“I don’t think he’ll like those footprints either.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Leeper said from the driver’s seat. “We kicked Cody’s ass!” He laid on the horn, and two other horns jumped to join the noise.
The two boys, Doug Leeper and Ross Hubbard, started hauling and restacking the assemblage of lumber, making a cross-hatch chimney of four great logs and then filling the center with the hundreds of ruined four-by-fours they’d gathered last fall when the railroad dismantled the huge shed for the train roundhouse. Hubbard showed a group of boys how to interleaf the dozens of pallets they had so that they wouldn’t fall over. After half an hour the two leaders were standing atop the structure, which looked like a huge wooden soldier with a square head. Someone threw Ross Hubbard a rope, and with some effort he hauled up five gallons of kerosene and drizzled it down through all the vertical timbers while Doug Leeper walked the circle calling out, “No matches, no flames!” They hauled another five gallons, and Ross spilled it happily. Then there was the problem of getting him down. “It’s all right,” he called. “Burn me with it. It’s worth it, the way we beat Cody. Just a sacrifice, small but sincere.”
“Stop screwing around,” Janice Day said. “You’re not funny, big man. Somebody get him off there.”
“Move back,” Ross said, making as if to jump. Then he tied the rope to the top beam and shimmied down. Though they wrangled with the rope for ten minutes, the knot would not be jogged off the post. Doug Leeper cut it as high as he could.
“That,” Ross told him, “is my father’s anchor rope for the boat he loves more than his firstborn son.”
“Will he know it’s thirty feet short?”
“I’ll ask him as he drifts away,” Ross said. “It’s a sixty-dollar rope. Let’s get a donation.” And then there was a call for “Rope fund! Rope fund!” And Doug Leeper went in two big circles around the encampment with his football helmet out for cash, counting as he received each bill and coin, returning with forty-one dollars and fifty-five cents.
“Why do you have your helmet?”
“It goes everywhere with me,” Leeper said. “We’ve got a special arrangement.”
Two dozen cars lined the edge of the clearing when Craig Ralston arrived in his old blue Ford pickup. It was full dark. Kathleen Pullman and Matt Brand were with him in the cab, and in the bed of the vehicle were four bright kegs of beer. He orbited the bonfire pile slowly three times as kids jumped on and off the back of his truck. His hair was still wet from the showers.