by Gary Paulsen
I sat at a table, sipping pop and watching them dance, and within a few minutes they slowed the music to a waltz and it seemed absolutely impossible to keep my eyes open.
I lay my head down on the table and closed my eyes, just for a moment, and everything from the day caught up with me and went sliding together, and within moments I was sound asleep.
I’m not sure how long I slept. When I opened my eyes Knute was carrying me in one arm and Harris in the other. He put us gently in the back of the truck. I closed my eyes and awakened a moment later to see Knute carrying Louie out to put him in the truck as well. Louie was as stiff as a ramrod, his hands still holding the last bottle of beer he was drinking.
Then not even the noise of the truck could keep me from sleep.
8
In which we educate two horses,
and I learn that the one blamed
is not always the one guilty
“Now you be like you was the fat, dumb guy and I’ll be like I was Gene.”
“I don’t know—there’s a lot that can go wrong...”
“Come on—didn’t I sit last night and watch Gene do this very thing seven times?”
“Well...”
“When’s the last time I was wrong?”
I started to say something about hitting Buzzer in the rear with an arrow but it didn’t come out. The truth was I thought what Harris wanted to do would work.
Sometimes even the grown-ups could make mistakes. Usually it was us, but on several occasions that summer they took leave of their senses and left us completely alone.
This was the first time. All of them, including Glennis and Louie, had gone to the Halversons’ to help clean up from the fire and we had been left alone at the farm.
“You bring the cows in and set up the separator when it comes time to do chores and we’ll be back in time to milk.” Clair had paused with her hand on the truck door, seemed about to say something else—I thought to warn us not to burn the house down or start a war—and then changed her mind.
And they drove off down the driveway.
Harris stood watching the truck leave, innocence all over his face, until it was out of sight, and no sooner had it turned onto the road a quarter mile away than he was running to the barn.
“Come on.”
“What are you going to do?”
He hadn’t spoken but grabbed Bill’s halter out of the barn and went into the pasture toward the workhorses. This was when we still could approach them—later in the summer, for reasons that will become obvious, they wouldn’t let us come closer than thirty yards before moving off.
Bill gently lowered his head for Harris to put the oiled leather halter on and lead him to the barn.
To be totally honest I knew by this time that we were going to do something wrong. It was not that we always did something wrong—I hadn’t, for instance, shown Harris my “dourty peectures” yet—but this had wrong written all over it. I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be messing with the horses, and the combination of Harris and a two-thousand-pound workhorse simply had to be wrong.
“You’re always wanting to play cowboys,” he said. “Well, go get your little silver pistol and we’ll play cowboys.”
Bill came along peacefully and Harris, looking like an ant leading a rhino, led him through the barn and approximately ten feet out the front door.
Harris looked up. “That ought to about do it.”
“Do what?”
“Get him right for when we jump on him.”
“We’re going to jump on Bill?”
“Yeah. Like I said, you be the fat guy and I’ll be Gene and we’ll jump out of the loft door onto Bill and ride off after the rustlers.”
And as I mentioned, I thought we could do it. Oh, not at first. At first it looked a lot like jumping off the granary roof holding a rotten piece of rope or leaping on a three-hundred-pound commie jap sow.
But Harris pointed out that it wasn’t that far down to Bill and that he had a broad back made of largely soft flesh and that we rode him all the time when he was pulling the mower and that in any event there really wasn’t any choice because Gene did it in the picture show and we had to do it or we’d forever be lower than pig crap...
So I agreed.
The problem came about because of Harris’s lack of understanding of the nature of falling bodies.
We went ahead—Harris with enthusiasm, I with some residual dread—and set up the scene. Bill was put into position and an armload of hay placed in front of him to keep him there, head down, munching peacefully.
We then climbed into the loft and moved to the front door and looked down.
“See?” Harris said. “His back is like a big kitchen table down there...”
In truth Bill looked small, too small to hit, but Harris didn’t give me much time to think.
“The way we’ll do her is I’ll swing out a bit on the dump rope and you just jump on down. That way I’ll hit him up on the shoulders and you come in back of me and we’ll ride off and save the rustlers.”
“Get the rustlers,” I pointed out. “You don’t save the rustlers, you get them.”
He stopped. “What’s the difference? We still jump on the horse, don’t we?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, don’t be so quick to talk when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He grabbed the dump rope that hung down from the overhead rail and was used to pull hay up into the loft and backed off ready to run and swing out over Bill. “You ready?”
I nodded again but it was a lie.
“Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Heck, don’t you know nothing? You’re the fat guy. Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘Let’s go save the rustlers’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say it.”
“All right.”
“Say it now.”
“Let’s go save the rustlers.”
Harris nodded and ran out of the loft holding on to the dump rope.
Caught up in the enthusiasm I actually started to follow him.
Right here several things went wrong.
First off, even if Bill had seen the movie he might not have tolerated two boys jumping out of a barn loft onto his back. But he hadn’t seen the movie and so the plot line was a complete surprise to him.
Then cowardice took over and at the last minute I tried to stop. I was already half out of the loft door and I wheeled in midair and grabbed back at the edge and barely caught myself to hang there like dirty laundry and watch the events unfold over my shoulder.
Harris was less fortunate.
He held on to the rope too long and released when he had already started swinging back toward the loft door.
He missed Bill’s front end and came down squarely on the horse’s enormous rump, which was, unfortunately, actually as wide as a kitchen table. Harris’s legs shot out sideways and his groin crunched with a sound I could hear from where I hung.
“Oooomph!”
He grabbed himself and started to slide off Bill’s back end.
Bill, in the meantime, did exactly as a horse should do when something out of nowhere jumps on his back. Horses have reacted to predators jumping on their backs for millions of years in one specific way. They buck hard and when the predator is dislodged they kick the bejesus out of it.
Bill obeyed the genetic codes in his system and bucked as Harris hit him, driving Harris back up almost even with the loft door opening where I still hung.
Harris, legs straight out to the side, holding his groin tightly, did an almost perfect backward swan dive and was coming down on his head directly in back of Bill where he would have crunched in the dirt and chicken mess.
But Bill obeyed the second code and just as Harris came into range kicked with one back hoof, a hoof as large as the top opening of a milk bucket, with a force just below nuclear.
It caught Harris directly in the middle of the stomach and drove him backwa
rd into the barn so hard that I heard him skip twice across the barn floor.
I hung from the door opening another second while Bill went back to eating quietly. Then I dropped and ran into the barn.
Harris was by the back door, having been propelled nearly the full length of the building. He was on his side, still holding his groin, looking past me at Bill, or trying to. His eyes had a distinctly unfocused look and he was still fighting for breath.
He whispered something so softly I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I leaned closer.
He mumbled again.
“You’ll have to talk louder...”
He got a breath down and hissed. “Did we save the rustlers?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. “Yes, Gene. We saved them.”
“Good.”
He mumbled something else.
“What?” I leaned closer.
“Don’t move me for a while.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
It was during the next week, after another Saturday night dance and the ensuing Gene Autry binge, that we tried the second cinematic event. It was also coincidentally the second time the grown-ups left us alone, this time to take a load of hay to the Halversons.
Again Harris watched them drive off, this time with the old John Deere tractor pulling a trailer of hay and everybody sitting on top holding pans of food.
As soon as they were out of sight he headed for the barn and took down Bob’s harness and moved into the pasture.
Bill would not let us get close but Bob hadn’t been indoctrinated—yet—and Harris walked up to him and haltered him and led him to the barn.
“I’m not jumping out of the barn loft on him,” I said as Harris led him through the barn and outside into the yard.
“Naww. We’ve already done that. What’s the other thing he does?”
“Who?”
“Gene, you dope.”
“Sings.”
“Naww. We ain’t gonna sing. It’s the other thing.”
“Well he rides, and jumps on horses, and sings, and...”
“Shoots,” Harris interrupted. “He rides and shoots, don’t he?”
“Well, yes...”
“He’s got that horse going wide open and he pulls out that six-shooter and blasts away, don’t he? Well don’t we do that we’re lower than pig puke, ain’t we?”
“That’s what you said last time. When we jumped out of the loft and you got kicked through the barn.”
“When I jumped,” Harris corrected me. “You hung and I jumped. Could be if you had jumped the right way instead of turning into a chicken it all would have worked out all right. You scared to do this?”
Of course that did it. I was scared—any time Harris started talking about shooting and horses it would be impossible not to be scared. Which of course meant I had to do it, whatever it was he wanted to do.
“Here’s how we’ll do her,” he said after he’d put a bridle with short reins on Bob. He was leading the horse across the farmyard and near the house. “You get that silver shooter and I’ll get a gun and we’ll climb up on Bob and get him moving at a good clip and then we’ll shoot.”
“A good clip?” I had seen Bob and Bill trot. Once. Other than that they never did more than a lumbering walk. “Can’t we just walk?”
He snorted. “Don’t you watch them movies at all? You ever see Gene walking his horse while he shoots? Now run get your gun...”
I ran in the house and upstairs where I had the cap gun. There were no caps but I was good at making gun sounds and I thought it was just as well. The sound of the caps going off might startle Bob and if we got him moving at all I didn’t want to startle him. Ever. Memories of Bill line-driving Harris through the barn were still fresh.
I found the cap gun and turned and trotted down the stairs and onto the porch and stopped dead.
Harris was already on Bob, sitting well up on his massive shoulders, and he was holding a gun easily as long as he was tall balanced across his lap.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That gun—that’s a real gun.”
“Oh, this? This is Pa’s old twelve gauge.” He shrugged airily and coughed and spit to the side. “He lets me use it all the time.”
This was such a blatant lie that it didn’t deserve acknowledgment.
“Come on—you going to wait all day?”
He maneuvered Bob close to the porch and after three jumps I managed to wiggle up and sit in back of Harris, my cap gun in one hand.
“You ready?”
I nodded, then realized Harris was facing forward and couldn’t see me. “Sure...”
He raised both feet straight out and slammed his heels into Bob’s sides so hard I heard wind whistle out of the horse’s nostrils.
Bob stepped forward, one, two steps, barely walking out of the yard as he moved up the driveway.
“We got to get him moving. Here, you kick when I kick...”
I wasn’t all that sure we wanted him to run, but 1 still rankled about that fear business so 1 started flailing away with my heels as Harris did with his and Bob moved first into a jarring trot and finally into a lolloping canter that had almost no real speed but must have triggered seismographs all over North America.
Dirt clods, rocks, bits of gravel flew up and Bob managed to move into something close to a full gallop. I had never been this fast on a horse and it was exhilarating. We seemed to be using up the driveway at a phenomenal rate and I took aim at a fence post off to the side and made gun sounds and shot, then over to a rock, back to another fence post.
Heck, I thought, this isn’t so hard. I relaxed my grip around Harris a bit and let myself get into the roll of Bob as he galloped—forgetting that it seemed twenty or so feet to the ground—and there I was, shooting Indians and rustlers and thinking maybe I really was a cowboy, when the whole world exploded.
Harris had swung the shotgun out over Bob’s head, directly between his ears, and let go a round of highbase goose load—what would now be called magnums—with number two shot.
I’m not sure who was the most surprised—Bob or me. I had no idea Harris had loaded the shotgun with a live round and I know the thought had never entered Bob’s cranium.
The recoil from the old goose gun was staggering. It drove Harris back, into me, then me back, and both of us off Bob just at the same moment Bob stopped dead—his ears no doubt whistling—then wheeled much faster than I would have thought possible for a creature of his size and tore back to the yard directly over the top of both of us.
We were scuffed some and I couldn’t for the life of me figure up from down for a moment or two, but worse, Bob had stepped on the shotgun and broken the rear stock in half.
“Shoot.” Harris stood, staring down at the shotgun. “Glennis is gonna kill me.”
“Glennis—what about Knute? It’s his shotgun.”
“He won’t say nothing. Just look at me. That’s bad enough but Glennis, she’s going to take a hoe handle to me.”
I nodded. Glennis was something to be feared. I had seen her hit Harris so hard the snot flew when she just wanted to check her swing and wasn’t even seriously mad. I shuddered to think what she could do if she was really upset.
“Well, there’s nothing for it...”
I nodded again. He’d just have to face the music.
“...you’ll have to take the blame.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “It’s the only way out of this.”
“Glennis will kill me.”
“Naww. She don’t hit nobody but me and a guy named Harold Peterson. He up and touched her on the chest at a church picnic and she brained him with a hot dish casserole. I think she’s sweet on him though because she helped clean the casserole off while he was laying on the ground...”
The injustice of it all rankled me. I had done plenty wrong on my own without seeking new blame. “I’m not taking the b
lame for the shotgun.”
“It ain’t like we got a choice, is it?”
“I’ve got a choice.”
“It’s this way.” Harris gave me a speculative look. “If you got a choice, I’ve got a choice, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you make a choice not to take the blame, I might make a choice to tell about them pictures you got in the box under the bed.”
“You snake! You’ve been in my stuff.”
He shrugged. “Not so’s you’d notice. I just looked at ’em once. Well, maybe more than once. It’s kind of fun to look at ’em. Makes my business feel funny and I start thinking about Shirley Everson...”
He had me. I understood that but I still fought a bit. “I ever catch you in that box again I’ll beat the tar out of you.” It was a hollow threat and he knew it but he had the decency to give it to me.
“I won’t. And don’t worry. Glennis ain’t going to hit you and even if she does, it won’t be like she’d hit me.”
The irony was that I lied the best I could, looked them all straight in the face, told them how I found the shotgun and took it out and found a shell in the cabinet (Harris coached me) and loaded it and felt just awful about it and Glennis patted me on the head and turned and hit Harris so hard he almost somersaulted out of the kitchen.
“What was that for?” Harris asked, staggering back into the room.
“For not stopping him,” Glennis said. “He could have killed himself with that old gun.”
“Well damn...”
Smack.
Harris was right about one thing though. Knute never said a word, just looked at me and then went out to glue and wire the stock together. But that look made me wish I’d never lied about anything in my whole life.
9
Where I learn of play,
and strength, and raw work
It sometimes seemed all we did was play that summer—and to be sure, most of what Harris and I accomplished centered on playing. Or trying to play.
But a goodly portion of our time was given over to work and it was during work that Knute broke his hand and I saw how Glennis really felt about Harris.
