Bildungsroman

"Cowboys"

They all looked windblown and sunburned, but they had a manner that made me think they had seen a lot of life, and knew the way things were. When I think about how I will look in twenty years, I make faces of bitterness in the mirror, trying to picture how I will look when I am hardbitten like them. Of course, when I relax my face in the bathroom mornings and I see my face and eyes, I realize they are perhaps made of sterner stuff.

All the way up I had this tune running through my head. At first I thought it was "Greensleeves," but when I tried to hum the light, happy refrain, I couldn't.

On the trail, older people were all around us, wearing winged sunglasses and brightly colored sport shirts and blouses. The men didn't know how to ride, and sat in their saddles with their feet plunged heel deep in the stirrups, their hands clutching their saddle horns. The women smiled absurdly at each other, and waved frantically at each other all along the line of horses. I didn't like watching those people.

The men who were the leaders of the ride up were different from we others. If I turned away from the tourists and just watched those men, it was just like they did in the movies: a man sat casually in his saddle, with his feet out of the stirrups, smoking a cigarette. There was another man beside him in font, with his hat pulled low over his eyes, lurching in his saddle as if he were asleep, but he was awake, because he kept his toes pressed into the stirrups, keeping balance. Behind us all rode a few other men, wranglers and hands of various occupations, one of them a man with no teeth who rocked lackadaisically in his saddle, grinning while he listened to us, and sipping from a pint of whiskey.

"Did you see that lady?"

I shook my head no.

"Which?" called Eric, around me.

"Oh, the one with the flowers," Walt said.

I looked and up ahead there was a woman with huge flabby arms, a white blouse, and the most outrageously flowered pants I had ever seen. She was wearing a little bandanna around her head, and had those glasses on: pointed at the hinge.

Walter choked, nearly foundered with laughter. I started laughing, and the guy with the whiskey started cackling. We all turned around and looked at him, stunned, and then the four of us rode along hilariously, even when the laugh had sort of wore out.

* * *

That night we sat around the ashes of the fire and finished our dinner. My parents were operating perfectly together, me a little chalk line that wavered between the two of them, not alighting.

We met a wagon at the campsite that afternoon. It was stocked with beef, bread, beans, water, salad, and a small bar. It was tended by a round-faced red faced man with a hat fresh and crisply shaped. He had a helper, a Mexican named Sly, working there on a temporary basis. They served all the people who had come up to sleep overnight in the woods. He threatened Sly outrageously with getting deported if he didn't straighten up, and Sly laughed, and worked like a convict. Sly had a broken arm, in a cast, and he still took the slops bucket and emptied it out at the ravine. His cast was rotting and fraying, but he laughed and winked at me while the little fat man raved at him.

The little fat man's face blazed in a kind of glory below his perfect hat. They no sooner cleaned up after one meal then they began another. They were packing up breakfast and setting up lunch.

Walt and Eric had taken up with the man who had his hat over his eyes the ride up. He had a pistol, and they all took turns shooting at something laying down a little gully. They called me over, and I walked over to them, wiping my hands on my jeans. They all smiled at me. The guy had his hat off, and I noticed he hadn't a lot of hair left. What was there was stringy and whitish-blonde. He smiled, and his teeth flashed crooked and broken. This fellow's name was Stony Martin.

I liked the man's name, and he was a good shot. Oh, he waved the gun in the general direction of a rotted black log, and the pistol roared and gave off great clouds of blue smoke. When we fired it, it hung massy in our hands, which quivered with strain holding the big, blue steel barrel frame by the wooden handle. The weapon hardly registered the trip hammer quiver of my hand, like a small error of gravity may effect the turning of the earth, until the heavy trigger was swabbed home by a convulsion of my small, soft hand, and it leaped up, and clamored. The notched receiver sight always seemed a skewed highway away from the foresight, however still I willed my heart to be, and held my breath. He just waved the barrel in the general direction and milked off a shot, and the bullet arced down his line of sight like an engine down a rail, and the target rolled and shivered under his unconcerned firing.

"If you boys feel like having a beer or two with me and the other wranglers, you're welcome," he said. Then he walked off, his arms swinging widely. We all called thank-yous after him, awed. He waved back at us without turning.

* * *

There was talk of a storm. There was talk of departing. We were too far from the ranch for them to get down the mountain by night time.

Only fourteen, I had never had a beer all my own before. My grandpa always took the bottle away after I had a generous swig, and say I was still little. I drank a beer, and then drank a lot of beers, and quickly. The men talked easily, like I imagined brothers talked, cowboybrothers. I don't have a cowboy brother. I have a dead brother. He died when we were both babies. I lived, and he died. So I really don't have a brother. Didn't. Don't.

Four dusty boots near bunks between a window athwart the yellow ground and the silver sky, the sunlight blazing. The naked interlude behind the bathroom door alone, the quiet porcelain minute discovering the first hair, the first shave, the smell of grandfather's Old Spice. A big sprawling Kansan home, like the Clutters home, In Cold Blood. The first glance that says, we're brothers. We know we're OK. The confidence. The faith the future will not be lonely. Selfishness. A twangy voice like my mother's:

"Breakfast!"

They wanted to be called wranglers. They cursed and laughed, and spit into the fire. One played a harmonica, and some sang along. Stony sang and his voice was high and hard like a steel-stringed guitar. The man with the little harp, whose name was Billy, palmed the melody away from the others, and bent it to his own devices. Oh, he was a musician! And you could tell because when the notes took shape and pulled out at the ends, and they wailed out into the night like a train whistle, there was the Santa Fe in the station, the hiss of the engine, the smell of saddle leather, the road, the prairie; yet however it may have touched me, it sounded somehow foreign, and old. Conversation drifted away, and men talking in the woods laughed, and their voices cut it all down.

A man limped into the clearing, into the red light of the fire. He had a red Indian's face and hound's eyes, kind and mirthful when he laughed a loud braying laugh. I remember I was irritated.

Smacking the spit from his harmonica, the man named Billy said, "you rude bastard," and grinned. The laughing man, whose name was Gay, looked surprised, then turned away in mock disbelief.

"Well, you are a rude son-of-a-bitch," he said. Everybody quieted down, and I thought of those bitter moments in The Rifleman, when Lucas McCain was riled, and a fight was about to begin. But glancing around I saw their faces were suffused with affection. The crinkles their leather pans all tilted up. They loved him.

"You should listen up, because you just might learn something."

The other men grinned, as if this were old stuff.

"Once upon a time," Gay started, "there was this here cowboy." At this there was a chuckle.

"And he was a-riding through the desert. Well pretty soon he come upon a cactus.

"And behind the cactus was this big rattler.

"So the cowboy pulls his gun and commences to draw a bead on this here rattler, and darned if the rattler don't look up and say in a high, squeaky voice, 'Please, sir don't shoot me cause I am a magic rattler and I’ll give you three wishes.' The cowboy stops.

"'Three wishes,' he says. 'Yup,' says the rattler.

"So this old cowboy says, 'You're on. For my first wish,'" here Gay looked at the sky and rubbed his chin. “‘I wish I could have a million.' Well, the rattler shakes his tail and says, 'you got it.'"

"'For my second wish, I wish I had a pretty yellow-hair gal,' and the rattler shakes his tail and says, 'you got it.' 'And for my third wish,' the cowboy says, ‘I wish m'dong was just like that horse's over yonder.' Well, the rattler shakes his rattle and says, 'enter thou the bunkhouse, and therein shall thou get what is comin’ to thee.'"

Here Gay paused and finished his beer. He rolled a cigarette.

"When he gets home, nothing's changed. He sits downhearted. Suddenly! A knock at the door. Western Union. He's been handed down a million. Then there's another knock at the door, and his beautiful yella-hair she-cousin from Tulsa comes in and takes off her shoes.

"The cowboy's ecstatic. He laughs, he swears, he slaps his jeans. Dust puffs out his kneepans. He jumps under the shower. She's combin' her hair. He gets a leetle stiffenin' feeling, and he looks down at himself," here Gay reared his hat back on his head and looked at his groin, horrified, with the cigarette dangling between his lips, "he looks down at himself, jumps out of the shower, steps on his hat, and yells, 'I'm a sonofabitch, I was riding MAUDE instead of CLAUDE.'"

We all laughed and slapped our knees. Then a rough voice from off in the blackness, the Captain, demanded silence. The coals glowed. The fire in our cheeks. The wind blew cooly through the trees, making the coals blush and subside again.

Some men called from the woods, their voices oddly without any discernible direction. I was asleep, and a man near us got up. His boots red, then disappearing, then his hat looming in the bluebacked trees, the moon.

“Indian ghost night," said a voice. Indian ghost night, said another, and laughed. Natural born fool if I ever seen it. Meet the bear, up there, white man, said a joker's voice. Horse is hobbled, Bill, said another. Stretch. We were up and following them in sleep, we didn't speak.

* * *

Stars shone, and the moon was high and white. We left the wooded trail and followed a narrower trail along the sloping side of the mountain. We passed a gnarled old tree that had only a few leaves left, that were no more than black dancing shadows, still darker than the night back-dropped sky.

We turned and the horses climbed from the trail to a grassy meadow. I watched behind me as the horse mounted the slope onto level ground, and below the trail all I could see was a black drop-off, falling blackness spiked with rocks, reeling down for thousands of feet.

Ahead was a wide expanse of long grass, which waved at me eerily in the moonlight. The noise of the wind through the grass was rushing, basso. Like long hair in water the field moved in slow motion. Far in the distance the rising waves of the Rockies surged, white-capped with snow. The moon lent them a blue hue, and gave them mobility, and they looked like clouds so far away.

"Hey buddy." Walt was speaking behind me.

"Yeah," I answered.

"Is this great or what?” he asked me.

"Sure," I said.

Gay was at the head of the line, and he hit his horse with his hat. We followed and I felt my horse, which I knew was a good one, an Appaloosa mare, gather herself under me. I felt so free, I yelled, "Hurrah, hurrah!”

Gay, the joker, wheeled at the other end of the field, and because I was at the end of the line, I called to him as he rode past to the other side.

He started to wave his hat, I glanced away, and when I turned toward him again, Gay was out of my field of view. I saw him then, and pulled up my horse, leaping to the ground and calling to the others.

The horse Gay was riding had stepped in a hole, or stumbled over an unseen log. Slowly the horse's rear legs rose behind him and kicked in the air, and he turned over on his back, one foot sticking stiffly into the ground. His big neck wrinkled and bent under, and the whites of his eyes rolled on and off. The leg broke free with a dangling, flailing motion, and the horse rolled over Gay, then shook himself to three of his feet, making Gay jerk up off the ground. I stared at him, and he was gagging and jerking around on the ground. Then he stopped jerking, and just lay there on the ground with his jaws agape. All twisted and broken, like a bag of broken sticks.

Looking at him, my mouth was open, and up ran the others. I backed away and I couldn't look at the dead man but saw death all around me, in each of the other's faces.

They were all in really big trouble, and I somehow felt I shared the blame. They put me down on Gay's horse's blanket after Stony shot the horse with his big forty-five. I saw the horse with his head down and his foot up, and Stony walked up to it, and tickled it under the chin, and loosened the saddle. The roar of the gun was everywhere, down the trail, up the mountain, in the sky. The horse dropped with a wheezy thud and his three delicate legs spidered around in the air for a minute, and then it was just Stony, his hat back on his head, an angular black branch of a man against the mountainous sky, hurtling past.

"I'm a junior member of the North Lake Polo Club," I kept saying, to anyone who would listen. Billy walked over from where Gay was laying, and smelled like some strange ammoniate sweat I had never smelled before. He stuck his rough face over me, and he looked like he was studying some small broken creature. I grabbed his shirt and I said it again, and there were little sparks in the corners of eyes, like shooting stars, planets, and the whole cold reeling universe above me, uncaring.

"I sit a good horse," I said, and my best friend Walt held my hand and said, relax, it will be daylight soon, daylight, remorseless with clarity. I would have to face my parents, so hideously alive, and myself, with daylight.

Soon it was. I avoided looking at the dead man, and when we started down, I felt sick seeing him spread in front of Billy on the saddle. He hung there with the blanket I laid up on, covering him, and Billy rode along ahead of us all. I saw him wipe his face. The campsite was very close, not near so far away as I had thought, and in no time the cheery red wagon appeared up the trail, and the hiss and smell of flapjacks. They threw Gay's saddle in the chuck-wagon, at an angle on the linoleum path in the center of the bed, between the cabinets. Around the breakfast fire, faces turned, my mother in her fawn-colored jodhpurs, my dad in his black straw Stetson and glasses.

I saw Billy wipe his face, and I knew that he was trying to stop crying, and I felt bad for having cried, for after all I had hardly known Gay at all.
_____________________________

"The Last Day of School"

(This story was first published in the Chicago Reader, 12 June 1981.)

It was late and the sky was black around the town and the grounds, except when you walked through the woods. In the woods you could see the sky in a shade of blue; and suspended in the dark, between the reaching, circlemaking branches, there were sudden flashes of light, when a janitor switched on the flourescents in a high classroom window.

The clock on the administration building chimed eight, nine, ten. Sitting on a bench across the narrow street from the building, in the dark, I drank the rest of a pint of milk. I held the cup and the waxed paper the Danish had come in, and had a' faint longing to go back to the commons and get another, but the Union was 300 yard's away, and I was tired from my night at the lab, and tired of the hot weather, and sick with art school. I was in sculpture; I wanted to be a sculptor, and I was so bored by all of it, with the exception of my last degree project.

At the lab I had a lover, Gig. She was putting in credit hours and I was a part-time technician for the rats and guinea pigs. They were in tiny cages with grated floors and a drawer that slid out. I would rather have been with the monkeys, like Gig was. The primates were more interesting, their poses, and their posture in movement. Gig's name was Galatia Hernandez, her father had fled Cuba sometime back in the 50s, and now lived in Michigan some where. She was studying primate reproduction in outer space. She had a small, brown, bakery smelling body, and we spent most of the night on the sterile floor of the technician's locker room, on her aluminum-colored space blanket. Her hair was soft and dark and curly, with tiny little curls. We showered in the acid-rinse for a long time. Afterward, we lay and listened to the animals scurrying around in their cedar chips. We laughed at the thought of Dr. Sabat, in his Indian moodiness, finding us mating on a space blanket.

We smoked and had some coffee, and Gig talked about Margarita, a naturalist friend of hers who, in defiance of the airlines, had flown 3,500 miles with a rare South American fruit bat slung around her neck, anaesthetized, beneath her shirt and between her breasts. We went to the roof cages to see him. He had red eyes and stared out at me from his cage. Many of the animals were kept caged on the roof in the summer. Sometimes they escaped and we got to go catch them. That was fun. It was starry above the lights, and there were cool breezes.

"Nice night," I said.

"I wish I was back in Florida," she said. "I saw Peter Stefanik the other day. I hadn't seen him since he was doing that little stock thing down there a few years ago. He said, 'My God, what did you with your boobs?' That asshole. I feel better smaller."

"I like you," I said.

"I like you." She kissed me.

"And you wouldn’t look good with a bat between your boobs. "

"You're an asshole, too," she said, and we went back down the stairs, through the blackpainted hallway, and then into the third-floor halls. The gray circle of a street lamp cut into the high windows at the end of the hall at the stairwell. The light shone coldly on the floor. It was a shiny stone floor, and had gold metal cutting it into squares. The light caught the metal, and we were like moving variables on graph paper.

"Larry and I are going to try and pour it again tomorrow," I said.

We were pouring sand-cast bronze. It was the last day our piece was eligible for a show, a degree requirement. Degrees! The sand casting technique was essential for a few effects we wanted, surface effects. Our piece needed softness, a smooth, rough, hot texture. Sand casting is a hard way to do it. It is hot and dangerous, and we had already tried twice and failed. If we did it, Larry and I had vowed to stick it out and finish school. If we failed again, we cut out. Larry had 10,000 pounds of granite waiting for him somewhere in Tennessee, and I had a job back in Chicago designing sets-- a play called Terminus Rex, a futuristic improv about worshiping a locomotive. It made me feel funny doing something like that.

Our joint design for the piece fitted together like a curvy jigsaw, into a whole, complementary. It was a shame if we screwed it up again. But if we did we had both soberly decided that was that.

"Are you high, Larry?" I'd asked as we last sat planning. Part of our private ritual.

"Never been high, Chuck." Then we laughed a little.

"Me neither," I said. Larry and I sat in front of the fire in the $50-a-month cold-water shared-bath front room I lived in. He lived above me, second floor. Larry flexed his biceps. He lifted weight and was heavily built. His shirt said Macon County Jail on the front. He had brown hair in a ponytail, and a beard. He was about six-foot-three, and weighed 200. He wore heavy glasses. He exhaled a cloud of smoke.

"Like to get high on that piece Thursday. That'd make me high," he said.

"If we choke, we quit, right?" He took a long, silent breath of the joint. Then he passed it to me.

"Yeah," he said. He exhaled. "Let's buy a bottle of Forester. You want to drink?"

"Sure," I said. We got systematically drunk. We went to Larry's house and I added some pastel touches to the charcoaled Rabelaisian women he had all over his walls, eight feet high.

The next night was when I went to meet Gig at the lab. We were going our separate ways soon, so we got together. Afterward, after space blanket and and fruit bat and golden-gridded floor, I wasn't sleepy, and Gig had work to do. She gave me a handful of her cigarettes.

"Thanks," I said. "Loan me a buck," and she did.

I threw the waxed paper and cup in the trash. Larry was out with another art student, Jim, in the flatbed, to get some railroad ties for some big geometric thing Jim was building. I started walking to my home, on the west side of town, away from university territory. When I struggled to the surface of undergraduate school, I had escaped campus living as quickly as I could.

I passed some frat, and all the windows were open, the lights all blazing. All the boys were cruising around in little underslung convertibles. They were making out with girls on the lawn.

I passed the library, a big windowless block of concrete, and left the buildings behind. Then there was the viaduct, and I went under the train tracks. I climbed the hill where the University Foundation memorial carillon was. The lines to the bells whipped around and whistled inside, on the gray stone walls. Then I jumped across the creek, and saw the gravel road where the house was.

Sitting under the streetlight were two other men who lived in our house, Charlie and Tom. They were from the south, and altogether uneducated scholastically. They tolerated us and our insane preoccupation with the university, because we came home dirty from our work, and worked late. They knew Larry and I were smart enough because we helped Charlie change a piston ring in his sister-in-law's Plymouth.

They were smoking cigarettes, and it was quiet. I had been walking along the curb, one foot in front of the other so I wouldn't crunch. Then I started to walk on the temporarily graveled road. It was white gravel, and I made noise walking on it.

"Hey."

"Hey," Tom said.

"Hey Charlie," Charlie said. It pleased him we had the same name.

"Hey, Charlie," I said. We grinned at each other.

Charlie offered me a cigarette. I shook my head and took one of Gig's and lit it. I gave one to Tom. He always had a vacant look. He said he was a motocross racer. He'd had a lot of accidents, he said, but when his therapy-- doctorin' he called it-- was over he was going racing again. His leg was twisted at the knee, and he had shown me at long, blue scar at least a half-inch wide. He and Charlie had tattoos. Tom was very calm all the time.

"Thanks," he said, and lit the cigarette with a steel lighter.

Beyond the streetlight there were big earthmoving machines. The city was refacing the street. Everything was wild and opened up. They had been taking a lot out of the ground, and I wondered if when they got their hands into their work they brought up live or dead things. The mounds of dirt stood around like statues.

"Yeah, so we 'bout got killed, tonight," Charlie said. He took smoke into his mouth, and into his chest with a quick little breath, and exhaled. "Yeahboy," he said. "Weeeooo!" He laughed and Tom smiled faintly.

They waited for me to ask.

"Yeah?" I said.

"We was comin' back from Columbus, and you know that cement bridge? Well, we torpedoed 'er." He laughed. Tom laughed: "Huh!" he said, laughing just that way, once. He picked a dandelion, and rubbed it between his palms, and threw it up with both hands.

"Whose car?" I said.

"Toni's," said Charlie. It was his sister-in-law.

"Man, you should have seen us. We were flyin' We were really movin!"

"We musta gone twelve feet in th' air," said Tom, smiling calmly.

"God damn it, we were really sailin'. Poom!" said Charlie. He slapped one palm forward into the other and off into space. "Son of a gun! Damn! Weeeoo!"

"So have you told her?"

"Whoaaaa!" They both roared.

Charlie turned toward me, squinting through a breath of smoke. He flicked his cigarette.

"Buddy," he said, "she's gonna beat my ass, man." He stood up, and laughed.

"Oh, she's gonna just kill you, Charlie," said Tom.

"Yeah, but fuck 'er," said Charlie. He was walking around like a bantam. He took another puff and flipped his cigarette away. Around the streetlight he walked, making a half-moon and then coming back to the grass when the circle of cast light reached into the road or into the lot, placing his feet carefully. "'Cause man," he said, walking. "We are, I are-- am-- alive." He turned and retraced his steps back to us. He did a roll and landed sitting. "I'm alive. And Chuck, we were so wasted. Hit 'er doing 80. We didn't know where we were. They fished us out."

"You hit the water?"

"Did we hit the water?" said Tom. "We bounced off the water, man."

"We got fished out by the state police," said Charlie.

We discussed the car. It was a wreck.

"Why'd you go wild?" I asked him.

"Hell, it slipped m' mind to tell you," said Charlie. "I'm gonna have me a baby. Chrissy's pregnant."

Then we all went and had a beer.

* * *

The following afternoon I was packed and ready to go. Gig was in Indianapolis visiting someone, and we had said a businesslike goodbye. The grey Toyota was piled high with stuff: whatever stereo equipment I couldn't pawn, two worn suitcases with my Grandma's initials on them, my tools, and a shotgun. It was a muggy, grey-bright day.

After the morning we'd had at the shop I just came home, wanting to be done with leaving as quickly as possible. I was ready to go before I knew it. Nervous energy, I guess. I wanted so to be away from the place. It had the shades of some truly dead and buried friends, and an army of specterlike faces, remnants of the restive intimacies of vacation love, the college affair. Dead friends and lovers. None of it anymore was fun or exciting or toughening or any of the virtues with which we apologize for the locales of our miseries.

One of my neighbors was an old man named Henry, who had retired to the cheap side of town, and he sat that day and smoked his pipe, watching me. He smoked Granger tobacco, which he had mailed into him from South Carolina. He started early in the morning, when he was sitting with the sun full in the face. He didn't move all day. He hadn't today. We were backed up against woods and farmland, and at dusk all the little wild cats and squirrels and sometimes a 'coon would amble up to Henry for a nut or some dried crusts. He smoked silently, and calmly, faintly smiling, he watched the sun rise and fall.

Larry and I had gone into the shop at four in the morning and destroyed our last-chance casting. I said good-bye to Larry at the infirmary. He had splatterburns from his shin to his waist. A vent we built into the casting to release the gasses of the molten metal had plugged. It's a common problem. A ten-inch hole had blasted out of the side of the mold, Larry screamed bloody murder, the sprinklers came on, and that was that.

He was planning a week recoup, and then to Tennessee and his stone to rape, and the mountains. And I had my job. We had a cigarette, and a laugh. Larry had been an emergency-room orderly at this same infirmary for four years. Now he had a chance to take advantage of his hospitalization guarantee. We shook hands.

It took about four hours to pack up my life as it was.

Charlie came up to me from next door, his hand behind his back. He was smiling. He had his shirt off, and I noticed for the first time he had a long scar across his chest.

"Want a cat?" he said.

"No, I don't need no cat," I said quietly. I was trying just to be quiet.

"Here," he said. "Some warm pussy for them long winter nights." He held out his hand. It held a little orange cat with blue eyes.

"Make him into a pair of gloves," I said.

Charlie lit a cigarette, expertly shifting the cat from one hand to the other. "Take it," he said, puffing. "Little varmint took me damn near an hour to chase down." He handed me the cat.

We went upstairs to the bathroom with a tub in it and smoked one, and the cat was crawling with lice so I scrubbed it with a brush, and he yelled bloody murder and Charlie laughed. I said I'd take it.

Henry and his old woman, and Charlie and Chris and Tom all told me good-bye together on the blacktop. The steel machines were there and quiet because it was the end of the day. The clouds were parting a little. Last night, on the porch upstairs just outside Larry's door, from my height on the second floor, I had wanted to draw the machinery. Under the streetlight, they had been hulking, fascinating shapes, heavily animate. I felt an electric feeling, and my eyes had flashed around when I looked away, and had shot up negatives of the bright street lit scene all across the dark walls. Now I guessed I had lost the chance. Now the light was different.

I divided up the stuff from the kitchen, and some books that my ex-wife and I had collected back in undergrad. I gave a type heavy, annotated edition of Moby-Dick to Tom, who immediately started paging it, his eyes close to the pages. Henry coughed and spit and lent me a few Bugler papers. I gave him my drip coffeepot.

Charlie and Tom paced around my overloaded grey dreadnought, straight-faced and worrying me about taking such chances with my life. The little cat was in the back seat, crouched. Then we drove away, and in the rearview I saw Charlie walk through the grass, kicking easy and rhythmic at the dandelions.