Piper by John E. Keegan Page A

over next to the window, turned my head, and watched the vapor wafting out of the exhaust pipe on his refurbished Mercedes. Carlisle collected old cars and fixed them up to look like new. People from all over Puget Sound came to the Stampede Antique Car Festival and drove down Main Street in the annual parade. Mom told me he started it as a way to bridge the distance people put between themselves and the Carlisles, which I thought was a strange choice of activities since John Carlisle and Harry Hosey, the retired banker, were the only people in Stampede with antiques that still ran on their own power. Behind me, I could hear Marge greeting him with the same motherly enthusiasm she’d used with me. I didn’t care, as long as she kept him busy. I didn’t have a thing to say to that man for the rest of my life.
    There was a time when I thought our family had to be the luckiest in town because of how close we were to the Carlisles. The Carlisles were royalty. John Carlisle’s father, Stewart, had died in the Vietnam War and there was a natural gas torch permanently lit for him in Klah Hah Ya Park. Stewart Carlisle’s heroism in dragging his commanding officer to safety after a firefight in Dak To was better known in Stampede than John F. Kennedy’s adventures on the PT 109. In fact people talked like the Carlisles knew the Kennedys. John Carlisle attended school at the Sorbonne, where he studied fine arts, French, and dance, not exactly world-beating skills in a town like Stampede. Mom said he never actually received a degree because of some kind of trouble. “There were letters back and forth with French stamps on them,” is all she said. Instead of medals of honor, John shocked his mother by bringing home women friends like Monique who smoked cigarillos and spit on the sidewalk. The Sorbonne was part of the reason people said John Carlisle was spoiled. The bloodline had run thin. There was never a question about his returning to Stampede, however. Mom said his mother would have disinherited him if he hadn’t.
    I remembered the time one summer John Carlisle came by the house in a fire engine red jeep and honked in front of our house. He’d been cut by a dance company in New York, moved into the family mansion up on the hill with his invalid mother, and taken over the newspaper even though he was ten years younger than Dad and without a shred of journalism training. He had the window of the jeep rolled down and his green beret was set at a jaunty angle. Me being on the verge of seventh grade, he was what I imagined the playboy of the western world would be.
    â€œLet’s go up the Stillaguamish and have a picnic,” he said, revving the engine. “Kate can do some painting.”
    I remembered Dad massaging his whiskers and looking at the tires. “I gotta finish a story. Why don’t you guys go without me?” This always happened. Dad was the work boy of the western world.
    We headed north to Machias with the top down, Mom in the frontseat and me in back, leaning forward far enough to let the strands of her hair tickle my face. I measured the length of my hair against Mom’s by feeling how far in back of me it was blowing. When I looked up, there was a propeller plane leaving a tube of white smoke that thickened and rolled away like a snake shedding its skin. The rush of the air was so loud we had to put our heads together to say anything.
    At Granite Falls, we turned onto a two-lane road that pointed us toward the Cascades and I could see snow-marbled peaks off in the distance. Each time we passed through a shady section of the road, it cooled down like an air conditioner and the smell of pine rushed up my nostrils the way chlorinated water did when you jumped into the pool without plugging your nose. We stopped at Monte Cristo, a one-time mining town with remnants of old buildings, railway turntables, and mining machinery that Mom wanted to sketch. We made her