neighbors. Somehow, as she had known all along, I was not quite right. I was, and I was not, one of their own.
I gave her a smile—that ancient, self-serving primate signal of one’s own inoffensiveness—and lay back on the ground. I had accomplished my design. All it had required was weeks of effort, a bribe of inexpensive underwear, a drought, a foolhardy hunting expedition, and a posture of absolute helplessness in the face of an attack by giant hyenas.
Helen sidled near.
Into my hand she placed a collop of antelope meat. I accepted this and looked into her eyes, which were red-rimmed and haggard—but beautiful for all that. Then I cast a glance at my slaughtered prey, the antelope, and a reminiscent queasiness flooded through me. (Bambi.) Embarrassed, memory-choked, I averted my head and closed my eyes.
Chapter Eleven
Cheyenne, Wyoming
1969–70
HUGO WAS STATIONED AT FRANCIS E. WARREN Air Force Base, and Jeannette, who had refrained from seeking salaried employment while Anna and John-John were preschoolers, had recently taken a part-time position as a feature writer for a local newspaper, the Herald-Plainsman. Hugo did not approve of her working, but because the money she earned was genuinely useful, at times almost a godsend, she had no intention of sacrificing her job to his wounded machismo. Besides, she enjoyed writing for the paper, even if Hugo, ambiguously tongue-in-cheek, would sometimes acknowledge one of her columns by crooning, Caruso-fashion, “Hark, the Herald-Plainsman sings . . .”
The Griers, from whom the Monegals had been renting their remodeled basement apartment for nearly three years, were a saltily robust couple in late middle age. They lived directly overhead, but with a porch entrance set regally above the sunken, half-hidden door by which the Monegals must go in and out. The house itself was a mint-green stucco affair with dark-green shutters. Pete Grier did the heavy yard work, while his wife Lily took care of the decorative gardening about the porch. They were decidedly idiosyncratic people, but the Monegals had almost come to regard them as family.
Lily Grier, a woman of Slavic extraction, wore her iron-gray hair in bangs and her lower body in heavy, pleated trousers. Her face had the off-white color and the noncommittal expression of a frozen Swanson’s chicken pot pie—except when she smiled, for her teeth, all her own, were beautiful. She had been raised on a cattle ranch in Colorado, and her favorite interjections were “shit” and “goddamn.” Nevertheless, the presentation of an unexpected gift or a stray kitten’s mewlings would reduce her to tears. She was taller than Hugo, and weighed more, and had an abiding, paranoid faith that Pete took advantage of every trip to the drugstore or the post office to cheat on her. If that were so, Hugo told Jeannette, Pete undoubtedly packed the Fastest Gun in the West.
A whip-thin, red-haired man with forearms like Popeye’s and the beginnings of a paunch under his belt, Pete had made his living driving heavy machinery. He still owned a small yellow bulldozer, which he kept in a collapsing wooden shed in the tiny backyard. Two or three times a year, at some rancher’s request, he would dig a cattle pond or a drainage ditch, demanding his payment in cash to avoid having to mention the transaction on his income-tax forms. At the same time, however, he was an avid defender of his country’s greatness, a patriot. The American military was the world’s last best hope for the defeat and eradication of communism. Both he and Lily regarded the deployment around Cheyenne of intercontinental ballistic missiles in underground silos as tangible proof of their own and their neighbors’ faith.
Indeed, the Griers’ unflinching patriotism—at least in defense-related matters—had probably contributed to their readiness to rent to the Monegals. Hugo, after all, was a man with a dubious accent, and John-John’s complexion suggested the radical politics of Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and H. Rap Brown. Fortunately, he was only five when the Monegals moved from Van Luna, Kansas, to Cheyenne. Even at that age, though, the boy was beginning to realize that the Griers were the sort of people who sometimes, with sinister innocence, sprinkled their private conversations with racial epithets. But Hugo, house hunting in the autumn of 1967, had won them over with his Latin charm and military bearing, and they had taken pity on his need. The upstairs/downstairs arrangement proved workable from the start, and neither family regretted its association with the other.
* * *
At the end of July, at the height of