Summer of '69 by Todd Strasser

Author:Todd Strasser [Strasser, Todd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536206579
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

“Zach’ll be here in a couple of hours,” Barry says early the next morning, stepping out of a phone booth beside a Rexall drugstore in Kemptville. Tinsley and I are sitting at a picnic table, our knapsacks, Barry’s duffel bag and camping stove, the butterfly kite, and some of his art supplies on the ground beside us. Last night Barry returned in the dark to say he’d found the town but everything was closed. Half an hour ago, I bade farewell to Odysseus and wished it safe journey to that hallowed junkyard in the sky. Then, carrying what we could, we walked here. The sun is barely above the thick green tree line to the east. The gathering heat is gradually drying the dew that accumulated during the night. A harsh chorus of cicadas has started to rise. Feels like it’s going to be hot today.

The I Ching coins clatter softly on the road map of southern Ontario that I’ve spread on the table. Tinsley scribbles in her notebook. Barry sits down beside her and lights a Camel.

“I’m gonna head back.” I hate saying it. I want so badly to forge ahead to my ladylove, but Lake Juliette is at least eighty miles to the north and west, out many narrow roads (not all of them paved, according to the map) in the wilderness. I could try to hitch there, but I doubt I’d make it by five, the time Robin has already warned me that my visit with her will end. And even if I were to miraculously make it to the camp by dark, I’d have nowhere to crash tonight.

Meanwhile, now that my personal-moral-code conscientious objector application has no chance of succeeding, I need to get back to Long Island in time to meet with Charles on Monday and figure out what the alternatives are.

The rising chorus of cicadas fills the air. A man in overalls driving a red tractor slowly passes, pulling a wagon stacked high with bales of pale-green hay. Tinsley closes her notebook and gathers her coins. “I’m going back, too.” Her eyes slide toward me. “That okay with you?”

A pair of blackbirds lands on an overhead electric line. A boxy 1950s Chevy sedan rolls past. The two gray-haired ladies inside stare at us. It can be a long, slow trip for a guy hitching alone. Most people won’t pick you up. But hitching with a petite, sexy-looking blond chick? Like going from a Ford Model T to Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America.

But why isn’t Tinsley going to the farm? Why not wait with Barry in Kemptville for Zach? Why risk the unknowns that come with trying to hitch all the way home? But then I think back to last night on the mattress, and to something I’ve felt ever so slightly simmering since she strolled out of Barry’s house yesterday and asked if I’d mind if she came with us to Canada: a gradually growing inclination that — sometime last night or this morning — became a decision.

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