Wyoming’s arid, short-lived summer, no one could escape the aura of blossoming spectacle attendant upon the coming of Cheyenne Frontier Days, a Wild West festival of parades, honky-tonking, and butt-busting rodeo events, all seemingly sanctified by the fragrance of fresh manure. It would be a long winter, and no one wanted to greet it without having celebrated as fiercely as possible the rollicking High Noon of July.
This year Jeannette’s parents, Bill and Peggy, flew in from Wichita to experience a portion of the flapdoodle with the Monegals. Besides, it had been nearly two years since they had seen their grandchildren. Pete and Lily put the Rivenbarks in a tiny guest bedroom upstairs, and Jeannette was startled by how well the two couples got along. Peggy, after all, hated bad language and shrank from those who used it; she had fallen away from churchgoing of late, but she still prayed silently several times a day and demanded a heartfelt grace before every meal. Without much diluting the cattle-ranch flavor of her speech, however, Lily endeared herself to Jeannette’s mother by her exuberance and her unstinting hospitality. Bill and Pete, meanwhile, hit it off like old World War II buddies. In fact, they had both been Navy men, Bill a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga and Pete a Seabee in the South Pacific. Within only two or three days the couples had cemented a gratifyingly cozy relationship. Privately, Peggy told Jeannette that once she and Bill returned to Van Luna, she would rest easier knowing that her children and grandchildren were under the wing of people as big-hearted and caring as the Griers.
No one could deny that Pete, as well as Lily, was going out of his way to insure that both their downstairs tenants and their upstairs guests enjoyed Frontier Days to the fullest. He gave the Rivenbarks free rodeo tickets and made arrangements with a friend in a local men’s civic club for Anna and John-John to be in the parade that traditionally opened the festivities. The parade’s hallmark was the passing in procession of nearly every sort of transportation that the early pioneers had used in traversing or settling the Great Plains: horses, covered wagons, traps and buggies, steam-driven locomotives, old-timey automobiles, and so on. Pete himself had not attended a parade in four or five years, but he would certainly go to see how the young Monegals fared if they chose to accept his friend’s invitation.
“What do we have to do?” Anna asked.
“Just ride,” Pete told her. “Just ride, honey.”
* * *
On the morning of the parade Anna was assigned to the front seat of a remodeled Stanley Steamer, a replica of the 1906 automobile whose top speed was nearly thirty miles per hour. Dressed in her frilly Sunday-school best, Anna waved to the crowd as her goggled and dust-coated driver eased the old vehicle along the tree-lined avenues not far from the city hall.
John-John rode on a Plains Indian travois behind a spotted pony surmounted by a dark-haired man in buckskins who said he was Richard Standing Elk, a Cheyenne now living in Portland, Oregon. According to Pete, he managed a small Ford dealership there. Richard Standing Elk’s impatient pony had to clop-clop along at the pace of the parade.
Immediately in front of Richard and John-John, the flame-red caboose of a train on rubber tires wobbled from side to side. Behind the travois, meanwhile, marched a phalanx of American Indians in magnificent headdresses and beaded moccasins. Most of these men strode the street with an aloof dignity, but a few pounded tomtoms, shook lances, and danced—colorful eddies of activity in the otherwise placid stream.
“Look at the Indian!” someone shouted. “Look at the Indian on the rawhide sled!”
“What Indian? I don’t see no Indian!”
“He’s takin’ a magic-carpet ride!”
“That’s no Indian I’ve ever seen before!”
“He’s a Blackfoot, a genuine Blackfoot!”
“Here comes the Blackfoot!” went the shout up the line of spectators. “Get ready for the Blackfoot!”
John-John waved, unperturbed, and a good number of people waved back, grinning as if he were a fine joke on them as well as on himself. The hi-ya, ho-ya of the tomtomming, dancing Indians behind the travois seemed to him a kind of good-natured complimentary laughter. John-John kept waving. Periodically he would crane his head around to watch the twitchy hindquarters of Richard Standing Elk’s pony, to study the design on the buffalo-skin shield tied high up on its butt. The ride aboard the sledge was a herky-jerky, stop-and-go business, but he never once