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“You answered the phone when he called,” I said hopefully.

She shook her head forcefully. “Nope. Not a chance.”

I sighed and tossed my lettuce around the plate so it would get coated with Thousand Island. “Okay. I'll call this evening. When he gets home from the office. If I can stay up that late.”

She patted my hand. “Good for you. I'll stand right behind you.”

I had a momentary flash of irritation. “I believe I can at least manage a conversation on the telephone.”

We sat in silence for a bit; I think she felt that she had pushed a little too far. Maybe she had. I might be a social misfit, but I was capable of dialing the telephone, even if I didn't want to.

I finally said, “How'd you get from ‘Dirty Laundry' to ‘New Hymn'? That's quite a stretch.”

She looked up and made a rueful smile to acknowledge the uncomfortable moment and its passage. “Well, we've been talking about how a lot of poetry deals with social issues. You know, men and women, the environment, politics, the media. We're starting to move into the section where I want them to see how literature addresses individual concerns.”

“Including finding out where you fit in with the man in charge?”

“Something like. If it is a man, which I have my doubts about.”

“Heretic,” I announced to the diner at large. “Grab some stones.” The only woman who looked up just rolled her eyes and returned to her food.

Our orders came then, and I launched into my chicken fried steak, not exactly tender, but certainly edible. “I do like that song,” I said. “‘New Hymn,' I mean. I'm not sure I've ever really listened to the words before. I feel that way sometimes, like I'm calling out and He doesn't hear me.”

She nodded vigorously, her mouth completely full of lettuce, and I couldn't help myself.

“You're beautiful,” I said, and she stopped chewing, the edges of her mouth curled up slightly, sadly, and she brandished her fork at me in mock threat. “I mean it,” I said. “You are. With your mouth crammed with lettuce and a spot of dressing on your chin.”

“Oh.” She took care of the dressing with her napkin. “Did B. W. speak this morning?” she asked, and watched me closely as I responded.

“Not to me,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. “He will. You'll see.”

But he didn't talk to me at practice, and he didn't talk to me at dinner that night. Which was just as well, because Lauren and I launched into a spirited but amicable discussion concerning the minimum age for dating. She maintained that perhaps cavewomen had waited until sixteen to car-date, but women at the end of the twentieth century were considerably more advanced. I contended that her mom was the only woman at the table, and that perhaps a dating novice could try her hand with an occasional parentally sponsored evening of entertainment.

“Dad,” she said, with a snort, “I would feel like a complete loser if you guys drove us around.” She paused. “No offense.”

“None taken,” I said, trying to live up to that sentiment.

“Do you even know any guys with cars?” Michelle asked.

“Not the point,” she said through a mouthful of greens.

I looked at B. W. “Any opinions?”

He shrugged and dropped the full piercing intensity of his gaze onto his steak, as though cutting a T-bone required his complete and undivided attention.

That was the most we got out of him. In fact, right after dinner he got up from the table, went back to his room, and would you believe that loud music began to issue forth. Bryan Adams, I think, “Summer of '69.”

Michelle and I exchanged a pursed-mouthed glance. “I'm going to call Bill after dinner,” I said, finally, shifting us from one pleasant topic to another. “We're going to try and put that game together.”

“Good,” Lauren said brightly. “I like seeing B. W. play. Now I'll get to see you both play at the same time.”

“Who said you're going to the game?” I said, and smirked at her when she looked up in dismay.

“You're a stinker,” she said, but then she smiled, and I could tell that she still loved me. Michelle and I smiled at each other; Lauren pretended not to see that, but she kissed both of us on the tops of our heads as she gathered dishes.

“You're the best,” she said.

“God help us,” I said.

Morning Time

Although B. W. remained tight-lipped, after a few days—unlike Michael—he at least returned to speaking to me, and I got the sense that although he was upset about something, whatever that something was, it wasn't primarily me. Maybe a truly good parent would have rooted out the cause of his melancholy like a terrier burrowing after a gopher. I have to admit I was willing to let things ride for a bit rather than take the risk of sending him back into silence.

We conversed at the breakfast table again, at least when Michael didn't join us, which anyway was about every morning. We talked about practice. B. W. shrugged when I asked how he thought it was going.

“Okay, I guess. You're the coach.”

While Michelle bustled around getting ready to leave, we talked about colleges, and he got a gleam in his eye when we talked about forestry. He had spent part of the last few summers after we'd finished harvest with other FFA kids at the Cimarron camp in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, and he hoped to work as a ranger this next summer, taking groups out into the wilderness for two-week backpacking trips. While it looked like he would probably go to Oklahoma State, which had a good reputation for forestry, he really had his heart set on the high-powered program at the University of Montana in Missoula, and he said so again this morning.

“Well,” I said, “let's hope you have another good season.” There had been some interest from college scouts the previous year. “Maybe you'll get a basketball scholarship or get some help if you keep your grades up.”

“Maybe.” He sighed, and I sensed a danger spot, an open pit looming ahead, and eased cautiously around the edges of it. Instead, I asked him about Jennifer, his current girl, and he smiled big before catching himself. “Oh, she's good, she's fine,” he said, filling his smile with a spoonful of cereal.

“Which one? They're not interchangeable, are they?” asked Michelle, dashing back into the kitchen to scoop her keys off the counter with an exasperated I'm-running-late groan.

“Yup,” he said, and took another bite so he wouldn't have to say anything else.

“Okay,” Michelle said, “I'm off to save Western culture. Any encouragement?”

“All memorable events transpire in morning time,” I called after her, and was answered by a laugh and a slamming door. Henry David Thoreau said something of the sort, I believe, in
Walden
, and since Michelle annually taught him to her seniors and implored them to listen to his advice on life, I had sought out a few pungent quotations to employ on appropriate occasions—which is to say, when they worked to my benefit, which is the only reason anyone ever quotes anything.

B. W. and I were the only members of the family who happily followed Thoreau's admonitions to rise early and greet the dawn, unless you count Michael, who sometimes greeted it coming home, which I don't think was exactly what the bard of Walden Pond had in mind.

“Got to go, Dad,” B. W. said, rising from the table with his bowl and juice glass.

“I'll see you at practice,” I said, patting his shoulder as he went past.

He grunted, put his dishes in the sink, and departed, leaving me to bask in the auroral glow of morning by myself. Actually, I'd already been outside and it was brisk out there, wind out of the north, mid-forties according to the thermometer outside the kitchen window, which was probably about right for a low temperature in October. I was content to remain inside for awhile, and was thinking about going into the den and pulling Henry David off the bookshelf instead of driving into town for coffee when the phone rang.

I figured it was probably one of my coffee buddies wondering where I was, so I picked it off the cradle and said, “Yeah.”

“Since when do the only two men in my life conspire behind my back?” Samantha Mathis Cobb purred in my ear. I knew that voice in the same way I knew the contours of the face I shaved every morning, but knowing that voice and being prepared to hear it were entirely separate matters. My breath left me like a covey of quail exploding out of a stand of tall grass, and my insides, whether straining to follow or exposed to the partial vacuum thereby created, knotted.

“S-Sam?” I stammered.

“The very same,” she said. “Surprised?”

“Uhmn,” I said, not yet trusting words. At least I was breathing again.

“What is this thing that you've talked Bill into doing at Christmas? A basketball game? What kind of middle-aged macho nonsense is that?”

“It's not
my
middle-aged macho nonsense.” I felt I should point that out.

“Well,” she said. “I thought not. So do you, uhm, like the idea?”

“No,” I said.

“I don't either,” she said. “So. What are we going to do about it?” We were planning the future again. Her voice was still soft, conspiratorial, and it sent a thrill shivering up my spine; it made me want to promise that we would stop the game somehow, that I would chain myself to the doors of the gymnasium, that at the homecoming dance the night before the game I would spike the punch and disable the team with food poisoning.

But what I said was, “It's a done deal. They changed our reunion to December because of the game. You should have already gotten something in the mail. Oz and Michelle sent things out a week or two back.”

“Yes, I got something about that,” she said. She paused for a moment, emitted a sound like a low hum, and finally said, “Well, a dance. I suppose something good could come out of this.” She hummed again. “Save a dance for me, Johnny? I loved our dance at the last reunion. Do you remember?”

Oh, dear God. She would have to bring that up.

Did I remember?

Of course I did.

It had been one of the last dances at our tenth anniversary get-together. The Cars' “Drive” was playing, and as they sang, “Who's gonna drive you home tonight?” and I held her close, the years melted away, and it might almost have been that younger me, that younger her. While my hands stayed respectfully above the curve of her hips, my fingertips remembered and rememorized the small of her back, and I discovered that the smell of her hair still made me stupid, still made my heart catch in its steady progress toward middle age.

“Right. I remember it.” I paused, spoke when my voice seemed steady. “I think I can set aside one dance, seeing as how we've been friends forever.”

“Forever,” she said with a sigh. “Has it been that long? Sometimes it seems like just yesterday. But I look at the girls, and they're fifteen and thirteen, and I've seen them grow, so it's not like the record skipped somewhere, jumped ahead. Oh, John, how did we get so old?”

“Two ways,” I said, cribbing from Hemingway. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“No, it was all gradual. It's just the recognition that's been sudden,” Sam murmured.

It was my turn to sigh. Before I could say anything else, she leapt in again, and the tone of her voice had gone from sharing secrets to making plans. “Johnny, one of these days we really need to talk about some things.”

“We're talking right now,” I said, although the hollowness in my chest told me she was speaking of something different, something considerably more involved than what we were presently doing.

“In person,” she said firmly. “I think some things can only be said face-to-face.”

The severity or importance of such talks is almost always directly proportional to the pause between “We need to talk” and the eventual conversation. So is the level of anxiety of the person so warned. Want to make someone sweat? Say, “We really need to talk. See you in a few months.”

But I couldn't let myself think about any of that. “I've got to go, Sam,” I said, and I seized on the first excuse I could conjure. “I've got to haul a dead calf off to the canyon.”

“Well, that's a fine way to end a conversation,” she said, but she was laughing, and the sound of Samantha Mathis Cobb's laughter was still as beautiful as the sound of my waterfall dropping musically into the pond. “We'll talk soon. Take care of yourself, Johnny.”

“You, too,” I said. “So long.” I hung up the phone, stood up, then dropped my hands back onto the top of the cabinet to steady myself and shook my head so hard I thought I could hear something rattle. A nocturnal presence—Michael—passed on the way to pour himself a glass of orange juice and disappear again into his inner sanctum.

He glanced in my general direction and then back at the ground as he passed me on the way out. “Who died?” he muttered, although he didn't stop for any answer.

If even Michael saw how shaken I was, it must be pretty bad. “Come on, man,” I whispered. “Shake it off.”

Or, maybe, more properly, “Walk it off,” which was what my coach Von Parker used to say, his remedy for any disaster that might conceivably befall a human being.

Twisted ankle coming down with a rebound?

Walk it off.

Your heart broken?

Walk it off.

Mysterious phone call from your old flame?

Walk it off.

So I walked. Out to the barn, where I pulled on a pair of battered gloves. Into a pen at the back of the barn, where the ex-calf, dead from pneumonia, lay on its side in its own sickly yellow manure. Out to my pickup, dragging the calf, which weighed at least what I did, by his legs, my own legs straining, boot heels slipping as I backed to the tailgate where I half lifted, half wrestled it into the truck bed, my old dog, Frank, snuffling delightedly around behind me. Out to the canyon, where my father and his father before him used to dump trash—there is no curbside pickup for farmers, let me assure you—where I backed the truck to the rim, climbed into the back, and pushed the body out unceremoniously. The deceased calf hit once, rolled partway over, and caught on some debris halfway down the canyon wall.

Maybe Lauren was onto something when she talked about bailing out of the beef conspiracy. I had just provided a meal for a coyote, a worthy project, maybe, but still the sight of the calf's stiff limbs sticking out into cold, empty air was enough to complete the job of ruining my morning.

And I'd had such high hopes for it, too, because I knew the afternoon was going to be ridiculously hard. Oz and I—Bobby Ray completely washed his hands of it—had agreed to meet at McBee's for lunch and then drive out to Phillip's place before practice to talk with him about playing in December.

“Think he'll shoot us?” Oz wondered when we decided to do this, and although he had called me from home, I had a vision of him hunkered down behind the pharmacist's counter at the drug store while bullets flew.

“He wouldn't shoot us,” I said, with a confidence I did not feel. “We're old friends.”

“No, we're not,” Oz said. “Never were. Certainly aren't now.”

He was right. I had been closer to Phillip than any of the other guys, been out drinking and driving with him, even tried to help him, but I didn't know what demons drove him, didn't know what had sparked him down the trail that eventually led to armed robbery and the penitentiary.

And yet we were going out to talk to him, to trespass on his turf, and as much as my body told me it wanted to put things off—or at least wanted more time to recuperate from my morning shock—the clock on the dash of my Chevy said 11:00, and we were supposed to meet in town at noon.

I went back and changed clothes, threw the ones I'd been wearing into the washer. I didn't want Phillip to think I was putting on any airs, so I wore another faded pair of Wranglers, another pair of work boots, and an old blue T-shirt under my jacket. Oz must have had a similar idea, because underneath his pharmacist's smock, which he untied before he climbed into my truck and then wadded between us on the seat, he was wearing an old pair of Converse high-tops, Levis, and an ancient gray sweatshirt, arms tugged up to the elbow, with “Watonga Eagles” across the chest.

“Couldn't hurt,” he said when he saw me glance at his shirt and smile.

“Might help,” I replied.

After lunch, we drove in silence out of town, past the entrance to Roman Nose State Park, and then down the dusty section roads toward Phillip's place. I had directions that my closest neighbor, Michael Graywolf, had given me. When I'd asked him if he wanted to guide us personally into his cousin's house, he said, “No way am I setting foot on his property.”

“Why not?” I had asked him.

He pulled off his black Stevie Ray Vaughan hat and rubbed his forehead. “Man, that Indian's in a world of hurt. I think our Grandma Ellen is the only person he hasn't shot at.”

“Thanks for that encouragement,” I said.

“Good luck, John,” he said. “But you may be all right. He's not as good a shot if he's been drinking. Of course, he's more likely to want to shoot you then.” He stopped and looked at me in what I hoped was mock seriousness. “You did tell Michelle to rent me your pasture if anything ever happened to you, right?”

“Thanks,” I said again. “Let's hope it doesn't come to that.”

It hadn't rained in town for what seemed like weeks, although I knew it couldn't have been that long. The dust billowed out from behind and under the truck, and once, when we passed another pickup, we drove in his dust for a quarter of a mile, the fine white powder coating hood and windshield and settling finally to earth again in the fullness of time.

Up ahead and to the left was the barbed-wire gap, and once we crossed it, we would be in Phillip's territory. I stopped in front of the gap. Oz looked at me, took a deep breath, let it out, and got out of the truck to let us in. He pulled the gate post out of its upper and lower barbed-wire loops, carried it back and in, and when I'd pulled the truck far enough inside, walked back to the loops, dragging the gap across the dry grass behind him and raising a miniature cloud of dust. Then he seated the post back in its lower wire loop, and with a slight nudge from his shoulder, eased the gap tight until the upper loop would fit back over the post.