Chapter 5: Grease Monkeys

      "That girl...," utters Frank glancing over his shoulder as they leap the back steps onto the Fairchance bus.

"I saw her first!" Francis exclaims, kneeling onto the back seat to watch the young woman crouching in the evening light slanting down on their grandmother's front vegetable garden.

     The twins had gone to work for Pennsylvania Rock Oil after dropping out of high school when their seventh grade classroom switch backfired. The now fifteen-year-olds were assigned to smear crude oil onto drills and truck axles at the company's wildcat drilling sites around Fayette County. Their job was called being a grease monkey in 1935 when that term was actually descriptive of the work. 

     Francis was older by nine minutes and had always led the way on their many misadventures with an easy smile and outgoing nature. Dating would apparently be no different for the twins.

     "Who'd want a couple of grease monkeys, anyway?" Frank shrugs plopping down beside his brother in the spring breeze generated by the accelerating bus.

"She would," beams Francis waving back to the dark-haired girl staring after two filthy but handsome working boys.

Chapter 4: Commencement

     "That electric shop test tomorrow is going to be a tough one," Franks declares sensing his twin's worry as they ride the Connellsville bus home near the end of their first year at South Union High School. 

"Yeah, and Mr. Salitrik is out so the sub'll be clueless," Francis mopes, a breeze from the open window cooling his dripping forehead. "Hey, he won't know if you do eighth period for me!"

"I don't know Mo," counters Frank using his private name for his brother. "Mom doesn't need more problems at home."

"Hi-de-ho Bro," chuckles the more assertive twin to conclude the discourse. "As Pop would say, our only trouble would be getting caught."

     Twins can be alike in appearance and very different in personality and interests. In their case Frank was fascinated with taking things apart and putting them back together to figure out how they worked. Francis loved inventing new games for those same things so they still had a grand time first playing and now working together.

     Frank and Francis had always been assigned to the same class at Lafayette Elementary. High school brought their first chance at academic differentiation, and Frank had excelled in seventh grade mathematics and industrial arts, Francis in the creative arts. His stick work on the snare drum had landed him first chair percussion.

     "Why Francis, what brings you to eighth period band with your brother's trumpet?" entreats the music director with a firm hand on the thirteen-year-old's bony shoulder.

"Um...Frank couldn't make it," Francis whispers, his squirm giving away the lie.

"Well then mister, I'll see you both in the Principal's office right after school."

Chapter 3: Neologisms

     "Who's on my goddamn radio?" shouts Orville as the kitchen door slams shut, cutting off the heat of a June afternoon in the Laurel foothills. "I got the Cardinals plus one-point-five!"

"Who else, Daddy?" sighs Alice, nodding over her shoulder toward the living room from her dinner preparations on the kitchen counter.

A quick glance upward from Francis sends he and Frank scrambling up the stairs before their father can catch sight of them.

     Unique communication is common between twins, be it in expressions, signals, body language, or words. When non-verbal, such interactions can be mistaken as telepathy by those outside the immediate family. 

     In the spring of 1930 the boys were obsessed with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Their team had finished second in the National League the previous year, sparking hopes for a pennant run in the first year of the new decade. Each morning they'd wait in bed until they heard their father leave for the bus garage. Then they'd race down the stairs to read the sports section of the Post Gazette, Francis scanning the game scores and standings, Frank the player statistics.

     Games were played in the late afternoon at Forbes Field before lights were installed in 1940, affording a chance for the 10-year-olds to hear the play-by-play on KDKA, the first station to broadcast professional baseball games live. As exciting as it was to listen, the threat of their father's verbal wrath drove the twins to run for cover into the stifling heat of their bedroom.

     "It's the top of the ninth with the bases loaded," whispers Francis dripping with sweat as he crawls out from under the bunk beds. 

"Up to the plate steps Pie Traynor," calls an equally drenched Frank rolling out from the other side of the bottom bed that they still share on most nights. "Cookie Cutter's on first base, Cake Plate on second, Croissant Toussaint on third."

"The Buccaneers are ahead by three as Sweaty Swetonic takes the stretch," Francis exclaims, jumping into position and acting out the pitch.  "It's a mighty curve that drops a mile into the strike zone." 

"Pie slices a surprise bunt," Frank gasps, doing the same with his air bat. "It's the suicide squeeze!"

"Rocky Rossmenko leaps from behind the plate before the ball hits the dirt," screams a diving Francis.

"He whips it to Paul Waner at first who tosses to Lloyd Waner at second who throws to Winnie Waner at third," Frank giggles at the impossible play.

"And the Waner triplets pull off the first quadruple play in baseball history for the Pirates win!"

Chapter 2: Ohiopyle

      "How cute in their matching cowboy shirts!" exclaims a bobbed-haired, short skirted woman strolling past the family sprawled on two waterside blankets in the warmth of the midday sun.

"Thank you kindly," nods Ellen over the roar of the falls, smiling at the recognition of her western-wear handiwork and hoping that's the end of the conversation disrupting her rare Sunday siesta.

"Fraternal or identical?" smirks the disheveled man stumbling along the grassy swale beside the young woman and splashing something from a bag as he turns to look down.

    That's the infuriating question fielded by parents of twins with any public appearance. Barring two separate water breakages, most don't know the answer since monozygotic twins don't always look exactly alike and dizygotic ones sometimes do. 

     It's the height of both Prohibition and flapper culture in the spring of 1922, but the two-year-old twins are more concerned about the interaction with their lifelong companion. They'd napped on sisters laps the whole ride up Mount Summit in their father's new International Harvester bus. Awakened on the jarring dirt track down to the river, the boys were raring to go when their family disembarked beside the falls.

      

     "I'm not rightly sure, but that happy one came first," Ellen concedes, lunging as Francis toddles toward the swift current with his brother Frank right behind.

Teen sisters Ethel and Alice, their awe at the flapper broken by the boys, scramble after them.

"Surely you gotta know," the red-faced man sniggers as he takes another slug.

"Listen here mister," Orville hisses, jumping to his feet and spraying into the drunken man's face. "They look alike so they might be identical. They're brothers so they're definitely fraternal."

"That's a good one, Ace," the drunk slurs, passing Orville the bag.

      The offering is just enough to appease Orville's temper as he takes a sip of the moonshine.

"Not bad! Where'd you get this stuff?"

"Between you and me, there's nothing from Pittsburgh to Cumberland so this one came from her papaw's."

Chapter 1: Estranged

      "Well Daddy, is there anything you'd like to say before it's over?" queries Frank's eldest daughter in an effort to get him to air any regrets from the disheveled full-sized bed he used to share with her mother.

"Don't know what to tell you, sweetie," he sighs, his bone-thin frame breaking into a shiver before cryptically whispering out into the cramped second-floor bedroom: 

"Wish I could have seen Francis's little girl in West Virginia."

     Francis was his estranged twin. Formerly inseparable since their post-influenza birth in 1919, they'd seen each other only twice in the fifty years since running away from the turmoil of home in western Pennsylvania soon after their seventeenth birthday. 

     The upheaval started when Frank and Francis were ten and the Third National Bank of Pittsburgh closed doors on their father Orville's operating cash. His buses had limped along on declining fares, soon to be supplemented by expansion of a side gig leftover from Prohibition. 

     Whiskey may have temporarily saved the bus company, but it also destroyed their lives with increasingly drunken binges. Orville's last straw at domesticity came when the twins big sister and primary caretaker turned up pregnant without a suitor.

     It didn't take long for his wife Ellen to put two-and-two together, booting the old man and reporting him to the Pennsylvania State Police. She took on sewing and cleaning to keep the formerly prosperous home going even as her older children plotted their escapes. Now thirteen-year-olds, Frank and Francis left school after seventh grade to work in the nearby oil fields, eventually fleeing as soon as they could drive. 

     And drive they did in opposite directions and away from their twin for the first time in their lives.

     "What little girl in West Virginia?" the daughter blurts, attempting to hide her alarm from him and her mom who's been fretting about up and down the stairs in and out of earshot.

"Just leave it be," Frank begs, wincing to roll away onto his side.