The Silver Spooner

Darcy O’Brien

The author wishes to thank the University of Tulsa, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Charles B. Clement, Jr., for generous assistance and encouragement in the writing of The Silver Spooner.

In view of a recent tendency to confuse fact and fiction, the author wishes to affirm that this is a work of fiction and that none of the characters, with the exceptions of Chief Red Bird, Ben Johnson, Mr. Wheeler and Oral Roberts, is intended to represent an actual person, living or dead.

TO GEORGE O’BRIEN,

BOB GREGORY AND

GAILARD SARTAIN

“How did I end up like this?”

—Seamus Heaney, at

Wheeler Dealer’s, Tulsa

ONE

In the Choctaw language, Oklahoma means red people. But this is a story about white people. They live in the eastern part of the state among the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles and Osages, but they do not see much of the Indians or of the black people, many of them the descendants of Indian slaves, who live there. In this part of the country people have their own distinct ways of life and death, or prefer to believe they do.

It must have been back in the summer of 1957, when A.G. Kruger and Ramsey Hogan were twelve years old, that they heard the story about the woman who drank Falstaff. Out near the Coyote pasture on the Sunrise Ranch on that summer day some twenty and more years ago, the heat rose up in waves off the ground and poured down from the sky, and the air was heavy with invisible moisture. This was not the flat, dry Oklahoma of the plains but a green land full of lakes, woods and fat cattle, the Oklahoma of which Will Rogers said that if it was not the Garden of Eden, it would have to do until something better turned up. The men sweated as they stacked the hay.

They had been stacking all day. It seemed to get hotter by the minute, and they had even stopped talking about all the beer they would drink that evening. The only sounds were the swish of the hay, flies, locusts and the occasional bird. A.G. and Ramsey worked along with the men, dreaming of ice cream, feeling ready to drop, but they would sooner have died than show it.

Everybody paused at the sound of a pickup drawing near. Over the top of a hill from the direction of the big house came old man Kruger, A.G.’s father Earl, bringing a load of watermelons to his men. They straightened up and cheered. Little A.G. threw his big white hat at the sun.

“It’s too goddamned hot to work,” Earl Kruger said, descending from his truck. “I heard on the radio it’s a hundred and eight in Tulsa. Here’s a couple knives, A.G. You and Ramsey slice up them melons. Jesus Christ, boys, I’m sweatin like a nigger on election day.”

That was the way it was, working for Earl Kruger on the Sunrise Ranch. You could break your ass for him, and his wages were low. You would get to hating him and cursing him, and then he would do something to make you grateful, and you would work twice as hard. A lot of people hated Earl Kruger, especially the small ranchers he had squeezed out, bullied out or burned out. “You know how that son of a bitch got all that land, don’t you,” people would say. “Grabbing, that’s how. Just grab and grab.” But everybody feared him, some respected him, and some even loved him. His cowboys stuck by him. He got them indoor plumbing and paid their doctor bills.

The men spread out under a tree as A.G. and Ramsey passed out the watermelon slices. Earl stood over them, big-faced, hog-gutted. Except for his silver belt buckle shaped in the form of the Sunrise brand, he was dressed like the cowboys in jeans and an old shirt and well-broken boots, but there was no mistaking the boss. He was six feet and two hundred pounds and he looked even bigger. He chatted about the heat, how the cattle were looking good, how he was going to do a deal for another five hundred acres. “I’m not talkin about some kinda pussyfootin bullshit. By God, I mean closure. When I want closure, I get it. That deal will be signed, sealed and delivered before the poor son of a bitch knows what hit him.” His red face pulsed with alert inscrutability. A.G. sat down off to the side to enjoy his melon and admire his father.

“Your daddy is the biggest man in the county,” Ramsey said.

“In the state,” A.G. said. “Nobody beats out my dad.”

“Mr. Kruger,” one of the cowboys said, “I’d say you was the meanest man I ever met.”

“Well thank you,” Earl said. “I’d like to think so. I never met a man as mean as me and I don’t expect I will. You know what they say. When Earl Kruger says it’s Easter, you better hide them eggs. Sam,” he said to a small, old cowboy, “give us a story.”

“One time there was this old gal,” Sam began, right off, as he always did, stories flowing out of him like whiskey from the bottle, “she must of been fifty or more, she come into this bar ever night and she would order a Falstaff. Just one Falstaff and then she lies her head down on the bar and passes out. She does this ever night and they have to wake her up when it’s time to close. Well, after a couple weeks, the bartender says to some of the boys, hell, let’s fuck her. So they did. They drug her into the back room and go after her one after the other, and she never does notice a thing. After a while, word does get around, and what do you know, there must of been fifty boys back there ever night a-fuckin away at her, and she never does notice, they just stick her back up on the bar stool afterwards and wake her up when it’s time to go.

“Well one night, after about a month, she come in, sits down at the bar, and she orders a Coors. ‘A Coors?’ says that old bartender. ‘A Coors? Hell, I thought you always ordered a Falstaff.’ ‘Well, I know I did,’ she says. ‘But you know? I found out somethin. That Falstaff makes my pussy sore!’”

Everybody just about died laughing, so they asked for one more. Sam went on about the blacksmith who told his young wife that he was the only man in the world with two peckers, but that he had given one away to the postmaster. The wife came back from mailing a letter one day and told her husband that he had given away the better pecker. The men had heard the story before, but they laughed anyway and went back to work in a good mood, thinking that working for old man Kruger was a pretty good life. Some of the men had very little choice in the matter anyway, because Earl Kruger had made a deal with the sheriff to spring them from jail if they would work on the Sunrise at whatever wages Earl Kruger set.

Ramsey Hogan was staying with the Krugers for the summer, and that night he and A.G. lay in their beds in A.G.’s room on the second floor of the big house, listening to the comforting whirr of the attic fan, feeling tired, full and content from a big dinner.

“That Falstaff made my pussy sore!” Ramsey said, and he and A.G. shook their beds laughing.

“Sam’s got a million of ’em,” A.G. said. “What about that other one?”

“Imagine a feller havin two peckers.”

“That’s just a joke.”

“I know it,” Ramsey said. “It could happen though. I remember hearin about it happened over in India or some place like that.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“Sure it could be. There’s cows born with two heads, ain’t they?”

“That’s true,” A.G. said. “I wonder where it would be, though.”

“What?”

“The other pecker. On top or side by side?”

“Stickin out behind,” Ramsey said.

They laughed and drifted into private thoughts.

“I was wonderin,” A.G. said. “Couldn’t the blacksmith tell his wife was fuckin the postmaster? I mean, wouldn’t there be some way to tell?”

“You should ask Vicki Martin,” Ramsey Said.

“Vicki Martin! She does it for everyone.”

“That’s what they say. She’d know all about it. I’d like to ask her. Maybe she’d give me a demonstration.”

“Would you?”

“Sure I would. I’d like to ask her right now. My cock’s stiff as a board. It’s like a jungle flashlight.”

“Mine isn’t yet. I can’t think of anything. I think I’ll think about Vicki Martin. You ask her about it and then I’ll ask her.”

“Okay. Let’s both ask her.”

“Okay. She sure would know.”

“You know,” Ramsey said, “the first time I jerked off, I thought I was the only one doin it. I thought I invented it.”

“Maybe you did. You taught me.”

“You gonna do it now?”

“Yes.”

“So am I. You know what they say. It’s your soap—you can wash it as fast as you want.”

Ramsey and A.G. had been friends since the first grade. They had few secrets from each other, and they were together so much that the other boys sometimes called them Frick and Frack. Ramsey had always been bigger and stronger than A.G., but A.G. was smarter, or did better in school, and he carried about him the prestige and power of the Sunrise, so they made a good team.

Before meeting Ramsey, A.G. had been a lonely child. His mother and father had been in their forties when he had been born, their first and last, and they had doted on him like the unexpected gift he was. They had just about given up hope for an heir when he had arrived. There had never been a thought of adoption, for as Earl had said, the Sunrise was going to go to a Kruger or it was going to hell, and that meant a Kruger by blood. A.G.’s birth on V-J Day had been a big event in that part of the state in 1945. It had seemed to signal a continuation of the prosperity that the war had brought to the ranch, and it ended finally speculation about the future of the Sunrise. It also disappointed many who had hoped that with Earl’s death in twenty or thirty years, they would see an end to the Krugers. A few of the neighboring small ranchers hated the Krugers so much that they had hoped to be around to watch Earl’s widow be forced to sell off parcel after parcel of land, because no one believed that she would be willing or able to carry on so vast an operation herself. That would make the old man turn in his grave, they said. He held onto land like a tiger onto meat. But with A.G.’s birth there was no telling how long the Krugers would carry on, maybe forever.

Certainly A.G. was treated from the first as though through him a dynasty would be extended. One servant did nothing but care for him, and his mother, Margaret, fussed over him endlessly and made sure that he had every toy a boy could possibly want. His earliest years were spent in a world of adults. He hardly ever saw another child, except at Christmas, when the Krugers always threw a party for the cowboys and their families, and even then he was set apart, not out of snobbery or fear of contamination but simply because he was a Kruger. He spent his days with his mother and the servants, and in the evenings Earl would hold him in his lap, telling him stories and exciting him with descriptions of all the wonderful things father and son would do together when A.G. got a little older. Usually A.G. would crawl up on one of Earl’s big shoulders and examine his father’s bald spot, which fascinated him. “Daddy,” he would say, “you have a hole in your head.” Earl would always laugh and tell his son that he was the only man he knew who could get away with saying that.

When he was old enough to wander around, he would sit for hours in a pasture dreaming, watching the wind touch blossoms or wondering what the cows were thinking. One of the cowboys carved little wooden boats for him, and he would take these to a creek and send them on imagined voyages, staring at them as they bobbed and swirled against rocks, imagining sailors on their decks, loading them with tufts of grass. He had his own horse by the time he was six and he would ride all over the ranch by himself, thinking that he was a real cowboy while city boys could only pretend. He was lonely, but he did not know that he was lonely. He knew only that after a couple of hours by himself he would always feel like going back to the house to see where his mother was and to hear her voice. Sometimes he would make up something to say to her, just to hear her respond to him.

Gradually he came to sense that he was somebody, and he began to like it. He came to know that the Sunrise was his and that it was more than any other boy had and that even the cowboys were, in a way, his. When he would ride into town he knew that he could buy anything, candy or an ice-cream cone or a pair of gloves, on credit, and he heard people saying, “That’s the Kruger boy,” or “That is Earl Kruger’s son.” He realized that he was different, maybe even better, though he was reluctant to be sure about that. Sometimes it occurred to him that he might be something like a prince, and he liked that, but there were times when he had the urge to put on a disguise and sneak into town to mingle with everyone else.

That was why he enjoyed Ramsey so much. Ramsey lived like every other boy, and being with him made A.G. feel natural, somehow, because he knew he was better off than Ramsey and yet, with Ramsey, he could do all the things every other boy did. He could be above Ramsey and yet the same as Ramsey all at once, and that was a good feeling. A.G. knew that his father wanted him to be able to rope and turn a herd and mend fences and shoot as well as the other boys, or better, and with Ramsey he could learn these things more easily than when his father, often so impatient, was trying to teach him. “Goddamnit, son, can’t you do anything right?” his father might shout if A.G. missed a target, and A.G. would miss again, but with Ramsey everything was so relaxed, so natural. He grew so attached to Ramsey that there were times when he thought it might be fun if they could exchange identities for a day or a week. Ramsey could see what it was like to be him and he could see what it was like to be Ramsey. The only real drawback to the plan, A.G. thought, was that Ramsey didn’t have a father.

It was with Ramsey, when the boys were about eleven, that A.G. really learned to shoot.

“Let’s go get us some turtles,” Ramsey said one morning.

A.G. had never shot a turtle up to that time. He had shot a few birds, crows mostly, and he knew that turtle shooting was a great pastime among the cowboys, but he had never had the urge to shoot the creatures on his own. He had always liked the turtles and for years had watched them along the creeks and by the sides of ponds, sunning themselves and plopping into the water. They made him think of noble dinosaurs grown small. He had a private theory that when the dinosaurs had been threatened by fiercer beasts, they had made themselves tiny and had grown shells to survive, and now they were called turtles. He knew that there was no way to prove the theory, so he kept it to himself, but he chose to believe in it, and when he saw a turtle disappear into a pond with small splashes and ripples, he imagined that it had once been gigantic enough to make a river spill its banks and flood a town.

So when Ramsey said they were going turtle shooting, A.G. had misgivings, but he knew that it was something that had to be done, because everybody did it. They rode out a mile or two from the big house and found a pond with two turtles resting on its muddy slopes. I wonder if they are husband and wife, A.G. thought.

The boys took their .22s from their saddles and loaded up.

“You go first,” A.G. said.

“Wait a minute,” Ramsey said. “You got to give ’em a sportin chance.” He explained how you didn’t shoot a turtle in cold blood. It would be like shooting a man in the back. You waited till you spotted one swimming. They swam with just their heads sticking out, or sometimes they would bob up for air and you would aim for the head in just the few seconds it surfaced. Hitting them in the shell or while they were taking the sun was chickenshit. Ramsey picked up a rock and threw it at the pair on the bank. They scrambled into the water.

“They got to come up for air,” Ramsey said. “Just wait.” He readied his rifle, his freckled face against the butt, his red hair bright in the sun. When one little green head bobbed up, he fired and hit it square.

A.G. was glad when he saw the turtle sink out of sight. It might surface later, but at least for now he didn’t have to look at it. He managed to stop thinking about whether it had been the husband or the wife Ramsey had killed and waited his turn. When a head showed, he shot and missed, his bullet skittering into the mud bank beyond.

“Try again,” Ramsey said. “We got all day.”

Now A.G. was all concentration. He knew he didn’t have to pretend he was as good a shot as Ramsey, yet, but he knew he had better hit one soon. He focused all of his body and mind on the pond and imagined an invisible line between him and the turtle’s head that he knew would soon appear, a line connecting the barrel of his gun with the target. It was just like throwing a football or a punch. You had to feel yourself connected to the target. When the next head appeared, A.G. pulled the trigger and didn’t even notice the slight kick from his .22 as the bullet hit home.

“I bet you hit that little son of a bitch right in the eye,” Ramsey said. “Nice goin.”

A.G. got caught up in the shooting after that. He hit six more turtles that day and a squirrel, and when he told his father about it, he reveled in the old man’s praise. A.G. and Ramsey went shooting all the time. Once in a while they would check into school, just to make the roll call, and then sneak off for a day of glorious shooting freedom. In the fall they accompanied Earl when he went after duck, goose, quail or the pheasants he bred on the Sunrise. And they went after poachers, too. A.G. had been thrilled when he was old enough to ride out for the first time with Ramsey and three or four armed cowboys to scare poachers and run them off. Word had come to the big house that a couple of poachers had been spotted, and Earl had chosen a search party and told the boys that they could go along. It was never absolutely certain whether hunters were deliberately poaching or not, because the Sunrise holdings were so vast that you could easily be trespassing without knowing it, but Earl felt that every poacher had to be made an example, no matter what his intentions, because otherwise things could get out of hand.

There was little trouble locating the poachers after a search of an hour or so. The sound of the guns gave them away. They were after quail in some bottomland four or five miles inside the Sunrise borders, and Earl’s men surrounded them before they knew what was happening. Two poachers against four cowboys and the two boys.

“Don’t you know this land is posted?” one of the cowboys said. “This is Earl Kruger’s land. You’re on the Sunrise Ranch.”

The poachers said nothing, looking as though they knew they were in for it. Their dogs, two fine English pointers, seemed to want to make friends. A.G. held his breath as the cowboy said that somebody was going to have to be taught a lesson. He told the boys to hold their guns on the poachers while he tied the dogs to a tree, disarmed the captives and started shoving them around. The other cowboys dismounted and took turns slapping the poachers and taunting them.

“Hunt your own land, whistle-dick, if you got any.”

“You think we should kill one of ’em? Which one?”

A cowboy held one of them while another cowboy punched hell out of the poacher’s gut. The dogs yapped and whined and tangled themselves with the ropes.

“You boys want a go at ’em?”

A.G. thought his role was probably to sit on his horse and watch, more or less supervising the action, and he found himself feeling a little sorry for the poachers and for their dogs, though he knew he should not have such feelings. He thought the lesson had probably been taught well enough already. But Ramsey dismounted and got in a few licks. His blows were feeble compared to the cowboys’, but to A.G. it looked like the poachers were pretty sore by that time and could have done without even a kid beating on them.

As he rode away, A.G. glanced back and saw that the poachers lay on the ground unmoving. He hoped that they would get up soon and untie their dogs.

“Those guys won’t be back,” A.G. told his father.

“They goddamned better not,” Earl said. “What do people think I am? Givin it away? I am not the government!”

One November, Earl, Ramsey and A.G. went after a trophy whitetail buck that had been spotted on the ranch over near the Arkansas line. Under his father’s guidance A.G. placed in his rucksack a short-bladed, round-edged knife, a whetstone and a compass, and from his belt he hung a light ax. His gun was a gift from Earl, a Weatherby 7mm Magnum that would shoot flat at two hundred yards. A.G. had been practicing with it for days and was almost confident with it. It was more accurate than Ramsey’s old Winchester and it narrowed the gap between their skills.

They took a pickup to the hilly, wooded country where the deer had been seen and set out, enjoying the wet freshness of a typical Oklahoma autumn morning, the sun rising on a clear, still day. By ten o’clock Earl had found the buck, stalked him into a meadow and downed him with two shots to the head at a hundred and eighty yards.

It was A.G.’s first deer hunt, and he was shocked to see the big buck, which had looked so proud and defiant, fall so quickly and so easily. He figured his father must be one of the best shots there was. He was secretly glad he had not been quick enough to shoot first: he might have missed, for one thing, and there was special satisfaction and a chilling thrill in seeing his father do the job right. That was the thing about his father. He would say he was going to do something and then he would do it, every time.

Earl, the boys trailing him, walked up to the buck and pressed his gun barrel into one big eye.

“Got to make sure he’s dead,” Earl said. “You can go for a pretty wild ride if you’re not careful. All right, A.G., get out that knife. I’ll show you boys the right way to dress out one of these sons of bitches.”

The buck lay on a small rise, and Earl grabbed the points, rolled the animal over on its back and pulled it around until the head was uphill. With one light stroke he slit the belly hide from the breastbone to the anus, just missing the penis and testicles to one side.

“Now look here,” Earl said. “That there is the stomach, and you see it ain’t punctured at all. You don’t want to slit the stomach, see. Spoils the meat. Now watch me get that liver.”

A.G. held his breath as his father reached in and pulled down on the liver and severed the diaphragm from the ribcage. Then he got down on one knee, reached up into the chest cavity, grabbed hold of the windpipe and severed it and, in turn, the gullet and large blood vessels, bringing them out with bloody hands and hurling them into the woods. A.G. was too entranced by his father’s skill to give in to the nausea and horror that rose in him.

“Somethin’ll eat that,” Earl said. “Quite a buck. I bet he’s over two hundred pounds easy. Give me that whetstone, A.G. Be quick about it, would you?”

Earl sharpened the knife for a full minute and then plunged it in around the buck’s anus, making a deep circular incision. He tied off the rectal tube and cut the sex organs free, pulling them back into the body cavity. A.G. felt weak, and when Earl rolled the carcass over on its side and all the remaining organs and entrails spilled out onto the ground, A.G. thought he would throw up, but his pride kept him from it. He knew this was all part of hunting and life and being a man, and he would learn to love it no matter what. He could almost sense himself inside the body of his father, shooting like a champion, cutting like a surgeon, owning the world. It was very few boys had a father like that. Poor old Ramsey didn’t even have a father at all.

That night everyone ate fresh deer liver and onions and Earl said:

“They ain’t many white folks eatin like this tonight. And no niggers.”

“Don’t say that, Earl,” Mrs. Kruger said. “Edward might hear.” Just then Edward appeared with another bottle of wine and poured some into Earl’s glass.

“Well why shouldn’t I say it?” Earl said. “It’s true, ain’t it?”

When A.G. found himself enjoying the deer’s liver, he figured he had come a long way in a day, although he wondered whether he would ever be able to dress out a deer the way his father had, calm and skillful as an Indian. I think I will always take someone along to do that, A.G. thought. Ramsey could do it.

“I showed the boys the right way to dress out a buck, now didn’t I?” A.G. figured his father must have been reading his mind.

“You sure did, Daddy,” A.G. said.

“You got to learn to do it right. Down in Texas I know these ranchers, they got these wetbacks will take one on and have it in the freezer in twelve minutes. They might have three wetbacks for the one animal. I believe that takes the sport out of it, don’t you, boys?”

Ramsey and A.G. agreed.

Often when he found himself alone A.G. would head for an old abandoned water well that he was drawn to for some reason or other. He had asked his father about the well, and Earl said that he had no idea who had dug it but that it must be pretty old. The stone foundations of a house, or a shack, really, were visible in the grass nearby, and A.G. liked to imagine some pioneer family living in the house, maybe sleeping six to a bed and drawing their water from the well. He made up stories about the family to himself. The father was a terrific shot, but so were the sons, and many was the time they had saved their lives and those of the womenfolk by gunning down hordes of bloodthirsty Indians who would descend on them from the plains in search of scalps. A tornado had leveled the house one night and nothing was ever heard from the family again. They had huddled together in a corner, hugging each other and trembling at thunderclaps. Through the window they saw a tree struck by lightning—the explosion of thunder was deafening and the struck tree blazed up, incandescent with white and blue flames leaping from it, subsiding to a red glow. Then silence, and finally a distant roar, low at first but growing louder. In seconds the tornado tore through the house, carrying the family to where no one would ever find them.

The well was just deep enough to have a slight echo, and A.G. would call down to hear himself call back. The well would become overgrown in spring. A.G. would spend an hour clearing it, pulling out long roots and, when the light was right, kneeling to catch glimpses of himself in the shallow water, his face framed by a wreath of clouds, then tossing in a stone to blur his reflection in ripples. He loved going to the well. He thought it would be a fine place to be during a tornado. If only the family living in the shack had known that, they might never have been blown away.

TWO

Earl liked to make sure that A.G. toed the line. He figured that if he was going to give the boy everything a young man could wish for, A.G. had better be ready for it and had better learn responsibility sooner than later. When A.G. did not behave up to snuff, Earl had a wooden paddle with his son’s initials carved on it that could help make the boy understand what his place was and what his obligations were.

“You get that brush hoggin done, stud horse?”

“I forgot.”

“You what?”

“I just forgot it. I can get to it tomorrow.”

“What was you doin that you forgot?”

“Me and Ramsey, we—”

“Let me tell you somethin. You got certain things to do around here that is yours to do ’em. Now I don’t like to see this. Get me that paddle. You startin to bawl? You gonna bawl? I’ll give you somethin to bawl about. Get that goddamned paddle. I am gonna beat you like a redheaded stepchild. If I’d of done what was right I’d of pinched your damn head off when you was born.”

And A.G. would have to drop his pants right there and take six or eight good whacks. For the most part he accepted the punishment as his due, but as he grew older, he wondered how many years more it would go on. By the time he was ten he figured he was still too little to challenge Earl, not that he thought he would really want to, but he was sure he could outrun him, and so he decided that the next time Earl got out the paddle he would put his speed to the test.

“Get them pants down!” Earl said, after going through his customary admonitions, with digressions on the state of the nation, California dope addicts, lazy Indians, soldiers who refused to obey orders and cost the lives of good men. He swished the paddle about and rubbed its surface as if to warm it up. “Get them pants down and take it like a man.”

His legs were trembling but A.G. bolted, out the front door, down the driveway and along the dirt road that stretched five miles from the big house down to the highway. He had a vague plan. When he had put enough distance between himself and his father, he would crawl through a fence, head across a pasture and disappear into the woods to spend the night. His parents would be so worried about him that by the time he returned the next morning, the cards would be in his hand and he just might be able to see the paddle put away forever.

He ran on, not looking back, down the road in the twilight, until he began to feel short of breath, when he stopped and checked back to figure whether he had gone far enough. What he saw puzzled him at first and then made him light out again as fast as he could. About a hundred yards away, Earl was coming after him. Backwards. All A.G. could see was Earl’s back, his elbows and his heels pumping away at him, the big form running at him, gaining on him, backwards. There was something extra frightening in the sight. A.G. stumbled as he tried to start up again, losing more ground, and in less than half a minute Earl had caught up to him, grabbed him by the arms and lifted him into the air.

“You thought you could run away from your daddy?” Earl shouted at him, panting, his face red and enormous. “I’ll tell you somethin! Your daddy can catch you runnin backwards! You better believe it and you better not forget it! Now you get the hell back to the house and get those pants down real quick!”

That night as he lay in bed with Margaret, Earl said: “I got to admire the spunk in that boy.”

“Maybe you could let up on him some,” Margaret said. “He’s a good boy. Maybe you could let up on him. It does seem like he’s learned his lesson.”

“Maybe so,” Earl said.

Earl and Margaret had named their son August Grant after Earl’s father, who had staked the original land of the Sunrise, and Margaret’s father, Simon Grant, who had been forced to sell his land during the Depression and had shot himself to death. Earl had himself bought his father-in-law’s land at the rock-bottom price, and relations between the two had been icy right up to Simon’s suicide, although it had been Earl’s position that Simon Grant ought to have been grateful to get what he could during a time when a lot of piss-poor farmers were getting nothing but a foreclosure notice. Margaret had seen her father’s death coming, had seen that his spirit had been broken by his wife’s early death, by the rough times and by his sense that the dreams he had had for himself would never come true. She knew that the same thing had happened to many men in those days and thought that it was all summed up the first time she had heard Bing Crosby on the radio singing the song that went I built a railroad, made it run on time, brother can you spare a dime, and she never heard that song without crying. But she had Earl, and Earl was a different sort of man from her father. You felt that nothing would ever break Earl down and that if the world were coming to an end he would be there until the last, protecting her. Just by being there, Earl had made it easier for her to accept Simon’s death. You had to accept it and to go on. Some men survived and others did not. That was all there was to it.

Earl never ceased reminding Margaret, A.G. and himself that every head of cattle and every hog pen and every fence post was there for one reason only, and that was to give A.G. the best damned operation that it was possible to give him, so that he in turn could pass it on to his children and his children’s children, debt-free, all the struggle behind, a cattle kingdom growing more prosperous by the year. The future belonged to A.G.

With his father A.G. lived the life of the boy becoming a man, but with his mother he could sometimes indulge his boyish fantasies, and Margaret loved to encourage his speculations on what it might be like to be an airline pilot or President of the United States. She read him stories from the Bible, telling him that he could believe them or not, as he chose. And when he asked her whether she believed them, she said she did, but that his daddy did not, because that was the way it was: some people believed and others didn’t. Believing didn’t necessarily make you a better or a worse person.

“Why doesn’t Daddy believe them if you do?”

“Well, he wasn’t brought up that way.”

“Does Daddy believe there’s God?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

So he did, and Earl said:

“I look at it this way, son. What a man does, he does by himself, for himself. If there’s something up there, I’ll believe it when I see it. You’re holding the ace, show me. I’ll tell you one thing, all the goddamned Baptists ever did for this state was keep a man from havin a drink when he wants it, and all the goddamned Catholics did was root for Notre Dame.”

A.G. never did make up his mind about God, one way or the other.

She taught him to read, and as a little boy he had been known to spend days by himself in his room, reading away, emerging to tell the stories in his own words to his mother. They talked over the Arabian Nights together again and again and agreed on the advantages of living in a jeweled city with slaves and endless riches and beautiful women who obeyed commands.

“You can be anything you like and go anywhere you like,” Margaret would say to A.G. “All it takes is the will to do it. That’s what your daddy always said, and it was true. Look at the Sunrise.”

“Sometimes I don’t know what I want to be or do,” A.G. said. “I think I want to be like my daddy.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Margaret said. “But just remember, you can be anything you want.”

“Sometimes I think I’d like to be like Captain Nemo. Live under the ocean and travel around where nobody else goes.”

“Well, you could do that, too.”

“Or shoot tigers in India.”

“Yes.”

“Or discover the pyramids.”

“Discover something else. The pyramids have already been noticed, sweetheart.”

“Well then I’ll discover a city hidden away in the jungle, like Tarzan did. Only my city will have skyscrapers like New York and instead of being green like Oz it’ll be bright red.”

“My God, A.G. You have the imagination of an elephant!”

As he grew older and went more and more about his manly pursuits, A.G. read less, and this was as it should be, Margaret supposed, although she missed their crazy talks. She knew that her boy would always be a dreamer in some way or another, and she was glad of that.

Sometimes A.G. would dream of soaring across the plains and living like an eagle in Colorado. He would dance on the tops of mountains while crowds looked up at him with terror and amazement on their leaden faces. A.G. sometimes believed he actually could fly. Sometimes he knew he could. He imagined that one night he would leap from the window of his room and fly out over the Sunrise. All he would have to do was move his arms slightly, that would be enough; his legs would follow, floating along like a kite’s tail. He would fly away from the big house and look back at it with its lights burning, and then he would head out over the barns and corrals, their dark angles indistinct in the moonlight, and go visit the cattle and the horses. They would take no notice of him. Perhaps they always knew he could fly. When the dawn broke he would ascend to a great altitude and survey the thousands and thousands of acres of the Sunrise, going from black to green in the spreading light.

His conviction that he could fly grew so strong that sometimes he would wake from these dreams and believe that they had been revelations, that some power was trying to tell him that he had already flown and could fly again. He decided, vaguely, that one day he would put his secret skill to the test.

He began by skipping steps as he ran out of the house down to the barns. His legs felt like springs and gave him hope. Out riding, alone or with Ramsey, he would surreptitiously move his arms slightly, just to see whether his power was great enough to lift the horse, too. One day he and Ramsey were chasing each other around the bunkhouse, and A.G. climbed to the roof with Ramsey in pursuit. He let Ramsey get close to him at the edge and then jumped.

It was only a one-story building, but he hit the ground hard. One knee shot up and popped him in the eye and gave him a good shiner.

His mother wondered why he would do such a thing. Earl said that every man has to jump off a roof once to find out what a ladder’s for. A.G. had a lot of time to think about his failure as he lay in bed recovering. He could not quite bring himself to believe that his power had deserted him completely. It may have been that he was not supposed to fly in front of other people. His mother stayed close to him, bringing him ice packs and trying to tell him that there was a difference between being brave and being foolish, and Ramsey told him he was crazy.

I am not crazy, he said to himself, I am A.G. Kruger. He contemplated himself. He was not as big or as strong as Ramsey, but then he was not as fully developed as Ramsey either, in any way, but that would change, no doubt. He could ride as well as Ramsey and shoot almost as well, and he knew he had to be smarter than Ramsey. Ramsey could hardly read, and his handwriting nobody could read. A.G. could cut a herd with anybody, and he was better with a rope than Ramsey. It could happen that there would come a day when suddenly he would be taller and stronger than Ramsey and could take him out with a quick combination to the head, not that he would ever want to. He would end up as big as his daddy, and nobody tangled with Earl Kruger.

When A.G. was over his fall or his jump, Ramsey reminded him that it was only six weeks or so before school started again and suggested they go on an adventure together.

“We could set out and just ride. Stay off the highways. Just ride and ride. Take our stuff with us and camp out. We’d probably have some adventures. Hunt our dinner. You know, stay out a while.”

A.G. thought that was one hell of a swell idea, and he went to his father to ask permission.

“What about those fences?” Earl said. “Who you think’s gonna fix ’em? I suppose you’d send your mother. Well, she’s got better things to do.”

But A.G. begged and pleaded and promised he’d work twice as hard when he got back. They’d only be gone a few days. Earl gave in and offered the boys plenty of advice about how to follow streams so they’d always have water and what equipment they would need. Old Sam liked to go out by himself and had a tent the boys could probably use.

“Don’t get into trouble like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,” Margaret said.

“We won’t,” A.G. said.

Margaret’s remark gave A.G. the idea that he and Ramsey should call themselves Tom and Huck while they were on the trip, although A.G. couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be Huck or Tom, and Ramsey had not read the books anyway, so A.G. dropped the idea. They set out at dawn and by evening figured they must have been thirty miles or more south of the Sunrise. A.G. had decided that if they headed due south one way and due north on the way back, they were bound to end up where they started.

“I wonder where we are,” A.G. said. They had camped beside a stream and were waiting for the sun to go down before starting their fire.

“I heard a highway this afternoon,” Ramsey said. “I didn’t want to mention it.”

“I feel like Daniel Boone.”

For dinner the boys ate a couple of cans of Dinty Moore stew, which they heated over the fire, and they thought it tasted great out there in the woods, surrounded by blackjack oaks and pines.

“Tomorrow we’ll stop early and shoot something,” Ramsey said.

The boys fell asleep easily and awoke with the July sun.

But it was in the middle of the next afternoon that they happened on something that was to change their plans. They had ridden steadily, stopping only occasionally to rest and snack, and A.G. had begun to think he could go on like this for days and days. It was so peaceful being borne along in his horse’s rhythm, hearing nothing but birds and the creak of saddle leather, thinking about Daniel Boone and Hopalong Cassidy and the story he had heard about Tom Mix being arrested for horse stealing once up in Osage County. There was nothing like this riding out in the woods to let your mind wander, and it was good to get away from the ranch chores.

“Hold it,” Ramsey said suddenly. He was in the lead and he held his hand up and stood up in his stirrups, and A.G. thought of John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. "There’s a bunch of cars up ahead.”

“What do you mean, cars?” A.G. was disappointed. They had managed to avoid civilization this far.

“Cars parked,” Ramsey said. “Come up here and look.”

Among the trees maybe a hundred yards ahead they could see the glint of cars and pickups, and they heard voices.

“Let’s go and see what it is,” A.G. said.

“Tell you what,” Ramsey said. “We’ll leave the horses here and sneak up. You never know what we might find.”

They hid behind trees as they went, until they were close enough to see that some kind of a meeting was going on, way out there in the woods. There were sixty or seventy cars and trucks parked at all angles but more or less in a circle surrounding what looked like a cleared campground. Seven little wooden huts formed an inner circle, with a big fire burning in the middle.

“Indians!” A.G. said.

“Yeah,” Ramsey said. “Keep down and keep quiet.”

Indians, two or three hundred of them, men, women, and children, sat around the fire, some of them in the huts, which were roofed but open on the sides, and the rest casually in folding chairs and on the ground. Near the fire an Indian wearing boots, jeans, a fancy western shirt and a straw cowboy hat with a feather stuck in it was delivering an oration. Next to him on a battered card table lay seven brightly colored wampum belts. The Indian paced back and forth, speaking and gesturing, but A.G. and Ramsey could not hear or understand what he was saying.

“Let’s move in a little closer,” A.G. said.

They crept within hearing distance and realized that the Indian was speaking in his own language, in long syllables and grunts that sounded, A.G. thought, the way Indian language was supposed to sound. After a while, the Indian began picking up the wampum belts, walking slowly around the circle to display them to the crowd, talking and pointing at their colors, patterns and figures.

“What the hell is this?” Ramsey said. “Listen to that mumbo jumbo.”

“I wish we hadn’t of left our guns on the horses,” A.G. whispered.

The boys watched quietly as the Indian continued his talk. His audience was attentive but relaxed, some of the men smoking or chewing tobacco, young children wandering around from time to time but keeping quiet. One by one the speaker picked up the wampum belts, and when he finished with the seventh and last, he walked over to one of the huts, which had several framed photographs and one oil painting tacked up on it. The Indian pointed to each of the pictures in turn and talked about them. Suddenly his talk was finished, and as he sat down, the crowd let out a subdued shout.

“That must mean ‘Amen,’” Ramsey said.

“Here comes another one.”

A second man, also with a feather, but a smaller one, in his hat, now came forward and began addressing the fire, which had been built atop a carefully packed pile of ashes some three feet high, suggesting many fires before this one. This speaker spoke only to the fire, pointing at it and touching one by one four logs, one each pointing east, west, north and south, which had been placed around it. His speech was short. The shout went up again at its finish, and this time everyone got up and began milling around and talking and laughing freely.

“Well that’s over,” A.G. said. “What do we do now? Let’s see what else they do.”

“What if they find us?” Ramsey said.

“We’re goners.”

A.G. didn’t know whether he really believed this, but it seemed the right thing to say at the time. After all, he knew from his Oklahoma history at school that the Indian wars had been over for some time. Still, there was something so strange about coming on this ceremony or whatever it was in front of him, with that big fire burning in the heat of the day in the middle of July and the strange language. At least the Indians were wearing regular clothes and not skins and war paint.

The crowd moved over to a long, long table piled with food. The man with the big feather in his hat stood at the eastern end, with the women lining the south side and the men the north. He said a few words over the food, pointing to the sky and to the earth, and then they all heaped their plates and dispersed among the trees to eat and talk. It was beginning to look like an ordinary picnic. A.G. was not close enough to see what they were eating and he was wondering whether it was some secret Indian mixture of nuts and wild plants when he felt a hand gripping his shoulder. It was not Ramsey’s.