"Sorry boys," whispers the twin's oldest brother in the growing dusk behind their father's former bus garage. "We've got to take what we can and get out of western Pennsylvania."
"Some things might have to stay," Frank replies with eyebrows raised in a glance towards his uncharacteristically quiet twin.
"Be that as it may," assures George with that kind smile of his. "Now that you can drive, one of you gets the Duesenberg and the other gets the Indian."
The Beatty boys were divvying up their father's possessions because he was on the lam from the Pennsylvania State Police. Ostensibly it was for insurance fraud for the burning of a bus company car now owned by the bank, but they also had him for tax evasion, bootlegging, and incestuous child abuse.
The large family had survived the transition from horse-drawn to gas vehicles, a world war, an influenza pandemic, the roaring twenties, the stock market crash, and the beginning of the great depression. By 1936 the older girls had left home for their own families and their mother was staying put with the two youngest. The twins were at loose ends, about to turn seventeen and tired of grueling work at the filthy oil wells.
"That bike is mine!" Francis asserts, finding his usual self-assurance with the claiming of the motorcycle. "Frank's better at keeping an old car running."
"Where'll we go?" wonders Frank, already resigned to leaving the only home the twins have known.
"I'm bringing the cash to Jersey and Speed's taking the tools to Kentucky," George patiently explains. "You boys should split up and explore the country."
"What about my little girl in Fairchance?" shouts Francis into the suddenly chilly night as he and Frank simultaneously shake their heads back and forth.
"Some things have got to be left behind to help the old man."
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