thought about jumping off and walking. He was having too much fun.
“The Blackfoot! Here comes the Blackfoot!”
Afterward, when the Griers, the Rivenbarks, and the Monegals had all reunited with both Anna and John-John, Hugo took the boy aside and asked him if he had minded the shouts of the people along the route.
“No.”
“Good. It didn’ mean anythin’, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’re a very wise fellow, Juanito. Sometimes I think you’re six goin’ on sixty.” And he led the boy back to the Griers and the other members of the family.
* * *
One afternoon when John-John was seven, he found Pete Grier and his adoptive father in the backyard making plans for a hunting trip. His sister Anna, then twelve, was languidly pumping herself back and forth in the swing that Pete had hung in the maple near a neighbor’s fence. Ignoring her, John-John climbed into the bed of Pete’s pickup truck, a battered red GM with a gun rack across the rear window, to watch Pete struggling with a screwdriver to mount a spotlight on the vehicle’s cab. The enthusiasm of the men’s talk seemed premature, for it was nearly four months until either deer or elk season. Gesturing with the screwdriver, Pete described a stretch of hilly territory not too far from Cheyenne where it would be easy to sight, hypnotize, and drop a pretty little whitetail deer. A hatrack, he emphasized; not a doe. One helluva hatrack.
“Hypnotize?” Hugo wondered aloud.
Pete patted the spotlight, glanced over his shoulder, and winked at John-John. “You like deer meat, don’t you, Johnny? Missed not havin’ any over the winter, I’ll bet.”
The previous autumn Pete and Hugo had gone on a three-day hunting expedition in the vicinity of Eight Mile Lakes, a trip that Lily had permitted only because straight-arrow Hugo had ridden along as a watchdog. The men had come home bruised, flatulent, and empty-handed, and Pete’s disappointment over their failure still ran deep. An entire winter without venison.
“I want to go too!” shouted Anna from across the yard. She jumped from the swing and came trotting across the dappled grass to the pickup’s tailgate. In jeans, sneakers, and a green University of Wyoming sweatshirt she looked like a fragile ballerina kidnapped from her dance troupe and disguised by her abductors in urban-cowgirl garb. “I want to go too,” she repeated, more sedately.
“Go where?” Hugo demanded.
“Poaching. With you and Pete and John-John.”
* * *
Hugo made up some sort of story for Jeannette, and at seven o’clock that evening Pete drove him and the kids out State Highway 211 toward Federal on the way to Horse Creek. Anna and John-John rode in the back, huddled against each other under a musty patchwork quilt. Beneath them was an army blanket that Anna had folded double and anchored in place with a fishing-tackle box and a Styrofoam cooler laden with Pepsi-Cola cans, a jar of mayonnaise, a loaf of bread, and a package of bologna. The sky over this desert of tufted flatness was so big that it seemed to tent the world. Twilight edged over into dusk, and the air slipstreaming around the cab of the truck grew chillier and chillier. When stars began to wink palely in the dusk, pinpoints of sequin dazzle in the Wyoming Big Top, Anna fetched a package of Fritos from under the quilt and shoved it under John-John’s nose.
“Here, have some!” she cried.
John-John stuffed himself. Corn chips bulged his cheeks, poked brittle ends against his tongue and palate. Their saltiness summoned his saliva, and he ground the baked corn meal to a gritty paste on the crowns of his hindmost teeth. Anna, laughing, thrust the package at him again, urged him to take more. They fed each other. Finally, the truck whirring west-by-north under a milkweed scatter of stars, they began lifting corn chips out of the sack and flinging them into the roar of the back-blasting wind.
Corn chips flew kamikaze missions into the night. They struck the tailgate and scuttled back and forth across the corrugated loadbed like tiny autumn leaves. They sailplaned and loop-de-looped.
Wearying of this game, Anna began brushing Frito crumbs onto her lips, leaning over her brother, and depositing them on his mouth with her tongue. This was so funny that they sputtered in each other’s faces, unable to get serious again. Mock-kiss followed mock-kiss, corn-chip debris granulating on their mouths, sticking to their forgers, transferring like sticky pollen to their clothes. Their hilarity increased, and they rocked from side to side in each other’s