like Steve’s. A better one, maybe.”
Dad nodded. “Not a bad idea.” No matter how harsh the man could be, I guess he liked it that I never just asked for things. He saw that I wanted to earn them.
I did.
I wanted nothing for free.
Nothing came for free at our place anyway.
Rube spoke.
He asked, “Why would you want a stereo for, boy? So you can dance up in our room as pitifully as that?”
Dad only stopped, looked back at him, and clipped him on the ear.
He said, “At least the boy wants to work, which is more than I can say for you.” He turned away again and said, “Now come for the dinner.”
We followed our father back up and I had to get Sarah out of her room for dinner. She was in there with the boyfriend getting it off with him against the wardrobe.
It’s a movie scene in which I have a noose around my neck, waiting to be hanged. I’m sitting on a horse. The rope is attached to a heavy tree branch. My father is on a horse in the distance, waiting with a gun.
I know that there has been a price on my head for quite some time, and my father and I have a plan going where he turns me in, collects the reward, then shoots the rope as I’m about to be hanged. Somehow I will then get away and we will continue the process in towns all over the countryside.
I’m sitting there with that rope around my neck in a whole lot of outrageous cowboy gear. The sheriff or lawman or whoever he is is reading me the death sentence and all these tobacco-chewing country folk are cheering because they know I’m about to die.
“Any last words?” they ask me, but at first, I only laugh.
Then I say, still laughing, “Good luck,” and with sarcasm, “God bless.”
The shot should come any moment now. It doesn’t. I get nervous. I twitch.
I look around, and see him.
The horse is slapped, to make it take off, and next thing, I’m hanging there, choking to death.
My hands are tied in front of me and I reach them up to keep the rope off my neck. It isn’t working. I , horribly, saying, “Come on! Come on.”
Finally.
The shot comes. Nothing.
“I’m still choking!” I hiss, but now my father is riding toward the mob. He fires again, and this time the rope is broken and I fall.
I hit the ground.
I suck.
Air.
Lovely.
Bullets fly all around me.
I reach for my father’s hand and he lifts me onto his horse on the run.
Wide shot (camera shot). New scene.
All is now calm and Dad holds about a dozen hundred-dollar notes in his hand. He gives me one. “One!”
“That’s right.”
“You know,” I reason, “I really think I should get more than just this — after all, it’s my neck hangin’ up there.”
Dad smiles and throws away a cigar, chewed. He speaks.
“Yeah, but it’s me who shoots you down.”
With desert all around me, I realize how sore my back is from falling down.
Dad is gone, and alone, I kiss the note and say, “Damn you, my friend.” I begin walking somewhere, waiting for next time, hoping that I will live that long.
CHAPTER 3
I’d forgotten they were there.
I’d forgotten they were there until the next day when I was lying in bed with an incredible pain in my back from the trenches I’d dug the day before. I don’t know why I remembered. I just did. The pictures. The pictures.
They were hiding under my bed.
“The pictures,” I said to myself, and without even thinking, I got out of bed in the dark but slowly lightening room and got out the pictures. They were pictures of all these women I’d found in a swimwear magazine catalog thing that came through the mail last Christmas. I’d kept it.
Back in bed I looked at the pictures of all the women with their arched backs and their smiles and their hair and lips and hips and legs and everything.
I saw the dental nurse in it — not really, of course. I just imagined her there. She would have fitted.
“God almighty,” I said when I sone of the women. I stared, and I felt really ashamed in my bed because … I don’t know. It just seemed like a low thing to be doing — gawking at women first thing in the morning while everyone else in the house was still asleep. In a Christmas catalog no less. Christmas was just