Copyright 2021/by Scott Newton

            There was a time when dinner conversations in our family were fun. My father would talk about flying, airplanes and Boeing, and my older brother would talk about auto shop, cars and anything mechanical. My brother was well read for a high school student. The contents of the conversations were far ranging. My brother introduced the mechanics at Dietrich’s to Popular Mechanics.

            I would listen with my younger brother, two sisters and my mother while my father and my older brother carried on a running commentary, complete with jokes.

            My brother was three years older than me, slender and eventually four inches taller. He had a great smile and would dodge haircuts for weeks at a time, giving him a head of unruly brown hair. He had a wide range of friends, and helped all of them with car repairs and with their attitudes. He was charming.

            As Mathew grew older, especially in his senior year in high school, the family conversations began to change. The politics surrounding the Vietnam War created a wedge between my father and Mathew.

            One night, the family went to a movie together, except for Mathew, who was going out with his friends. My father drove to the theater and while we were watching the movie Mathew, with a spare set of keys, borrowed the car and drove his friends around. He was 15. When he returned the car, the parking space for the car was taken, so he parked across the street.

            In hindsight Mathew and I thought this hilarious. Like dad wasn’t going to notice. It didn’t take long for my parents to piece it together. My father in general found my brother quite too free-wheeling. When we got home from the movie, my father decided to scare my brother straight. Those were the words he used. He called the police and asked them to send someone to threaten Mathew. Scare a little sense into him.

A policeman came. In those days, I don’t think the police in Medicine Lodge, Kansas had any education or training. My brother sensed an opportunity. “Sir,” he began, “you don’t have anything to charge me with. It’s the family car.” The policeman was at a bit of a loss. He wasn’t up to lecturing a 15-year-old he’d heard was precocious.

            In farm towns, in those days, lots of boys younger than 15 drove farm vehicles, or took the family pickup into town on errands. The policeman knew that Mathew already was helping older boys repair old cars, which were the only ones they could afford. Farm boys were known to drive tractors at the age of 11 or 12.

            My father came to the reticent policeman’s rescue. “Car theft, joy riding, driving without a license,” he said. Mathew responded; he was not having any of my father’s plan to scare him straight. He said to the policeman, “Come on. I know you’re not going to take me to jail.”

            I heard the conversation. I was listening, sight unseen, from the top of the stairs. The conversation was between my brother and my father. The policeman by now just listened. After a while, my father saw the policeman was being inconvenienced.

My father told the policeman he should go, and Mathew went to bed. It was interesting. I never thought of Mathew, ever, as feeling guilty for anything he did, but also I never knew him to be meanspirited.

            Mathew made friends with John Dietrich when he was 13, and at 14 he was working for him. Before that he built scooters and go-carts in father’s well-equipped shop in the garage. Dietrich – he went by his last name – was a German immigrant, 60 years old, who had a hint of an accent. First my father learned my brother had purchased a car without permission and kept it in the parking lot at Dietrich’s repair shop. Mathew had just turned 16. My father was upset but John Dietrich refused to get involved in the family dispute. My father dropped it and my brother had a car of his own. Later he acquired a motorcycle in the same way, but he didn’t have it long. I don’t know why.

            When Mathew was a senior, my father went by work one day at 5 and saw my brother sitting with the men in the break room drinking a beer. My father asked Mr. Dietrich not to let my brother drink beer.

            “I can’t afford to lose Mathew,” he said. “He makes my mechanics better. If he helps himself to a beer now and then, there’s nothing I can do. In Europe, it’s common.”

            My father believed in work. He was angry at Mr. Dietrich for not backing him up, but also he didn’t make my brother quit his job. My father was an aeronautical engineer and wanted my brother to be skilled with engines. Also, in my father’s defense, this was his oldest child, and if Mathew was so much trouble what would the rest of us be like. It turns out Mathew was his only eccentric child. I got in some trouble, but my younger brother and two younger sisters were model children. My father had no way to know it would turn out like that.

            My friends would talk about my brother’s close calls drag racing. He rolled a Volkswagen once, and dented up a friend’s car another time. It would be days or weeks before my father found out. There was local gossip and my father always found out, of course, the same way I did. People couldn’t wait to tell me the stories. The cars would already be repaired and my brother would wave off the trouble.

            “You know how school boys exaggerate,” Mathew would say about rolling the Volkswagen. Regarding the other car, he said, “It didn’t happen anything like what you heard. And anyway, I fixed Mr. Thompson’s car and he wasn’t upset with me.” Mr. Thompson was the father of a friend of my brother’s. Mr. Thompson thought Mathew was an exceptional boy, though he liked to drive too fast.

            Episodes of this sort came up at dinner, over and over, and my father was at a loss as to how to stop them or discipline my brother. My brother didn’t make things easy for him. “Relax pops,” he’d say, which would make the younger children at the kitchen table laugh while my father silently seethed. I don’t know what Mathew read that caused him to talk this way.

            Mathew, when very young, used to hang out with my father in airplane hangars and machine shops. He had access to tools and a curiosity about what people were doing. Adults liked him. I remember an airplane mechanic at Boeing who always asked about him; it’s easy for outsiders to laugh at the pranks of youngsters. The last go-cart Mathew built was so fast my father took it away from him.

            Mathew also rebuilt a pink scooter in our home garage when he was 13; it was the body of an old scooter found in a wrecking yard. The motor came from an earlier go-cart.

            It’s safe to say, in general, my father didn’t approve of two-wheeled vehicles with motors. He didn’t know about “Pink” until I took it out for a test drive and burned my calf on the muffler. I was 10 and that’s not an injury a boy can hide in the summer when we all wore shorts. I had a big, red welt on my calf that hurt like hell. Mathew got in trouble but wouldn’t take responsibility for being a bad influence.

            “I guess Bowler learned his lesson,” Mathew said, which cracked me up but I didn’t smile in front of dad. It was the truth. Damn that burn hurt.

            Unfortunately, the last year my brother was in high school the Vietnam War became a topic of conversation and this is when things began to heat up. Older friends of my brother were being drafted and went to war. My father was a highly trained pilot. In peace time. He had reservations about the war, but was retired from the military and felt it was unpatriotic to criticize.

            Mathew, handsome and clever, was witty in a way only a young person could be. Once one is older, skepticism, sarcasm, doubt and irony creep into a person’s mind. One becomes more cautious.

            Watching the war on television, and being well read, Mathew knew his own mind even at a young age. In the Vietnam War, soldiers didn’t fight for territory as was traditional. It was called a war of attrition and it was highly controversial. On the news they would say 300 U.S. soldiers died, but 1,000 Vietnamese were killed.

“What they don’t say is they can’t find the Vietnamese bodies because they were vaporized by tons of ordinance dropped by B-52s over the previous three weeks,” Mathew said.

            It was common knowledge after a few years the numbers, given to us by the military, were skewed. At the very least, impossible to prove. Newspaper columnists regularly wrote about the bogus numbers and the way it was accepted. People knew there were record numbers of bombs dropped; they saw it with their own eyes on the network news programs. My father would listen to Mathew and fume. He was well connected, of course, and knew the arguments and part of him agreed with Mathew.

            Finally, of course, they got to communism. If they didn’t fight the war, communism would spread all over Asia, which had numerous incompetent rulers. Certainly true. The domino theory was that Vietnam was the place people had to fight to stop the spread of communism. The late President John Kennedy said Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines, Laos and Cambodia were in play. And today, one can still wonder, what if all those countries had turned red?

            “Communism, what a false argument,” Mathew said. “All of Asia could become communist and ol’ Joe Kennedy’d still make plenty of money.” Joe Kennedy was the president’s father. John Kennedy had been assassinated and Joseph Kennedy died in 1969, but Mathew never minded poking the bear, saying the outrageous to make a point.

             My father never knew how to respond to that argument, either, although he grew up in an era when everyone hated communism.

            He would argue communism sounds good but never works, people are always exploited. My father was a patriot, and believed in democracy and capitalism. Mathew didn’t believe in communism either and later in life would be financially successful.

            All of his senior year, the TV war dragged on and Mathew would pull out his war according to Mathew jokes and my father would get upset. Mathew would proclaim he could no longer live with the rest of us.

            I knew by now every dinner conversation would get heated, but I couldn’t help but laugh at Mathew’s statements. Once he said, well, the soldiers should just not go to the war. Another time my father said my brother would probably be a protester. “I’m not going to listen to a bunch of 25-year-old men tell me how to run the country when they can’t even hold a job.” He was talking about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. My father even laughed at that one, but most nights ended with my mother crying.

            My brother went away to college, but quit after a semester. He worked as a mechanic in Manhattan, Kansas, in the winter and spring, and in the summer he stopped by the house to introduce us to his girlfriend. Mathew had long hair now.

            Nancy had dark hair and eyes, a nice figure and a nice smile. She was friendly to me, and Mathew made a point of talking to me before dinner.

            “I like how you get along with people,” he said. “I hope you have a great time in high school, just like I did. I can’t live with Dad anymore. I’m away from home, making my own money, and he’s still trying to control me.” I was a sophomore in high school then.

            We had dinner, and then Mathew and Nancy announced they were off in their van to travel the country for a while. They got in a Ford van the next morning and headed west. I was broken-hearted. My younger brother and sisters cried. Mom tried to be stoic for the good of the family, and my father went into silent mode for a while.

            At age 19, my brother was eligible for the draft. He and Nancy had traveled all the way to California before going broke, then made it back to Manitou Springs, Colorado, where he got a job as a mechanic. Mathew was friends with a landlord, who owned several properties. For the price of a rent payment, he would allow Mathew and Nancy to move from apartment to apartment. When the local draft department tried to get ahold of Mathew, they kept getting notices my brother had moved. No forwarding address.  One was required to leave an address with the draft board, so technically Mathew was in default. Also, he didn’t have a phone.

            My father thought dropping off the grid was unpatriotic and they had a fight about it over the phone one night. Mathew always called from other people’s phones. He called mostly to tell my mother he was OK. So the terms of the phone communication were always on Mathew’s side, and he would go for weeks at a time without communicating. The draft board was made up of local men and my father was embarrassed at what his son was doing.

Then, the draft occurred. In the selective service procedure that year, there was a drawing. It was based on one’s birthday. Mathew’s number was 300. The Army announced it would take up to about number 166 that year. I called Mathew Lucky Number 300 once, and he thought it was funny.

            Once Mathew knew his number, he registered with the local draft board. They only ran the draft like that for a few years. Had Mathew been number 55, I don’t know if he’d have gone to the war or not. Even if he announced everyone should just stay home from the war, he knew that wasn’t realistic. Of course, he wasn’t a protester either. What he had done didn’t get him in trouble with the law; it just got everyone riled up.

            One can understand the tension with the draft by listening to Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” protest song.

For me, the war and the divisiveness just made me sad. Life had been fun with Mathew around, even my father thought so. I hated that he had to go. I will say one thing. Neither my father nor my brother was going to apologize.

Chapter two

            I was tired. I’d been on a tractor for 12 hours. It was hot in Kansas, the nights cooling down to the 90s at night, which is no advantage. It was 7:30 in the evening when I arrived at our camp. I stripped down and jumped into the horse tank, put on shorts and a t-shirt, and helped Roger make egg sandwiches.

            We were tired. We not only worked a long day, but were short of rest from working the two-week wheat harvest, surviving on four or five hours of sleep a night. The wheat harvest in Kansas is quite an ordeal.

            We were camped on the corner of a mile-square section of land in southern Kansas, the middle of wheat country. Hundreds of miles of wheat stubble spread out in every direction. We’d just finished turning luscious acres of golden wheat into ugly brown, hot-looking stubble.

            Our tent, so large I called it the big top, was set up over an old wrestling mat our high-school coach had purchased for $200 from the school district. We had wrestled on this mat roughly seven months ago. Next year, my senior season, we would wrestle on a new mat.

            Roger wiped down the mat before I got in from work. Using a mop and disinfectant, we vowed to wipe it down every two or three days to keep it clean, and to disinfect it. One must always disinfect wrestling mats; we had once seen the nasty impetigo infection. It was an ugly six-inch-square patch of red vesicles on the neck of a wrestler we knew from another school. It was nasty and inflamed. We wanted no part of it.

            We saw the wrestler at a high school basketball game. We decided if one knew the most beautiful woman in the world, and she had a dressing over her neck, but you knew it to be impetigo, you would walk away from her.

            The sides of the tent were rolled up and a breeze dried the sweat on us. The horse tank, made of metal, was round and filled by a windmill with perfectly clean water from a deep aquafer. We listened to it spin in the slight breeze. The wind is everything in Kansas. It dries sweat, turns the windmills, dries the wheat in the spring, turning it from green to gold. The Indian word Kansas means people of the south wind.

            We’d been working the wheat harvest late into the night for days on end, me for farmer Guy Smith, Roger Spellen for John Crown. We were on land owned by Stan Stanton, who employs our friend, Sam Louret. We didn’t know where Sam was.

            It was 1972, and in the days before smart telephones much of your life was left to circumstance. Science had given us something much more useful than instant communication, birth control pills. It was up to us to meet girls, but after that there was no pregnancy. This was our first night at what we would call wrestling camp.

            Roger’s parents didn’t care if he camped out every night. Sam was staying at his brother’s, making his own way in the world really, though he was only 17. My parents were strict, but somehow the concept of wresting camp was so far out they didn’t object. I had been in trouble a few times, but it was never serious, and my parents knew if I was interested in one thing it was sports, football and especially wrestling. I loved football but was neither large nor fast, but my five-eight height and 150 pounds didn’t work against me in wrestling, a sport in which quickness is more important than speed. Quickness can be learned.

Before the advertising slogan “there is no off season,” there was wrestling camp.

            Roger was a 158-pounder. Wrestlers from other schools called him Minitank. He was a state champion and well known. Sam Louret was 185 pounds with huge arms. He was prized in football as a hard hitter. I was neither well known nor a hard hitter.

            When we found out coach Jim Soleman had purchased the school’s old wrestling mat, Roger grabbed the family’s extra-large, white camp tent and suggested we camp out for the summer. We had all been Boy Scouts and were veteran campers. Work all day, wrestle, run and lift weights in the evenings. It’d be fun, and when we got back to school in the fall we’d be in shape for football. Of course, we had never camped for an entire summer.

            I told my parents it would be a summer of working out. I promised I wouldn’t get in trouble. For me, it was about getting around the rules of my strict father. For Roger and Sam, this wasn’t an issue. All three of us liked the concept of camping out, living outside, and unlimited freedom. Of course, there is no such thing as unlimited freedom. We all had jobs driving a tractor, 12-hour days six days a week. One must eat and sleep, so it wasn’t exactly total freedom.

            When a person is young, he somehow finds time. Roger and I had girlfriends.

            The fried eggs were piled onto the bread; it was a thick, excellent egg sandwich.

            “The wheat harvest was a grind,” Roger said. It was the middle of June. Roger was sitting on the mat beside me, eating his sandwich. My name is Bowler Jones. Bowler was not a nickname, but my legal name.

            “I’m so tired,” I said. “You can’t believe how much I’ve been fantasizing about sleep. When I get caught up on sleep, I’m going on a date with Mara. Mara and Rose are going to freak out when they see this set up. We are going to have a good summer.”

            We had girlfriends, and we were hot to see them, but in Kansas the entire state gears up for the wheat harvest. I knew Mara was working, too.

            Roger and I were resting on the wrestling mat, but not asleep, when the deputy sheriff drove up. He was a 50-year-old man with bristly grey hair, a military cut. It would still be an hour before the sun set. Roger and I got up from the mat and out of the shade, and walked over to talk to him.

            He got out of the car, stretched out his back, and lit a cigarette. “This is a hell of a deal,” he said. “I know you boys aren’t 18.”

            “No sir,” I said.

            “We’re working, driving tractor, and we’re going to work on wrestling this summer. All summer long,” Roger said. He knew how to spin things to make it sound as if we couldn’t possibly find trouble.

            The deputy sheriff, known to me only as Mr. Lansing, knew Roger was a state champion wrestler. Still, I don’t suppose he’d ever seen a wrestling mat covered by a white-canvas tent in a wheat-stubble field before. Lots of people camped, but mostly it was at Tony Lakes, in regular-sized tents or camp vehicles. People slept on a lot of things, but not wrestling mats. Wrestling mats, by the way, are excellent for sleeping.

            Mr. Lansing looked at me. “Your dad know you’re out here?”

            “Yes,” I said. My father was an engineer at Boeing, but he was also on the Barber County Commission, so I knew Sheriff Deputy Lansing would know him.

            “It looks like fun. I know you boys are hard workers. Still, if I see a bunch of cars over here or a big bonfire, I’ll drive over to make sure you’re not having a beer bust. It that understood?” It was possible my father had asked the deputy to give us the word.

            Roger and I both nodded. “Coach Soleman give you the mat?”

            “He bought it from the school district for $200,” I said.

            “I’d never pay money to exercise,” Deputy Lansing said, laughing at his own joke. “Well, we’ve got wrestling under the revival tent,” Mr. Lansing said. He was the only one to call it a revival tent. “OK. It’s kind of a rough camp, but I suppose it’s got everything a couple of young men need. That a new horse tank?”

            “We wanted it to be clean,” Roger said. “We’ve got a round iron plate for a fire pit. The fire’s burned down now. We know not to leave a fire.”

            “Too hot for me out here,” Deputy Lansing said. “I need air conditioning to sleep.” He’d finished his cigarette. “You fellas take care. No beer parties,” he said. He got in the police car and drove off.

            At that time, the camp was simple. A wrestling mat with a tent over it, a horse tank full of water, my car and Roger’s pickup, and a fire ring. Simple and manageable, just like our lives. We fell asleep in no time, even before the sun set. I love those long June days.

Chapter three

            This would be the summer I learned to drink coffee.

            My wind-up alarm clock went off at 5. I got up, put on a pair of running shoes, no socks, and jogged down the road. It was already light out. After running a mile at a leisurely pace, I turned round at the mile intersection to run back. I put more energy into the second mile. When I arrived, Roger was making coffee.

            “Just in time,” he said. “I guess Sam stayed at home last night, or at his brother’s. Well, it was pretty nice. Sleeping outside is pretty nice. That wrestling mat is about the most comfortable bed you could have.”

            Wrestlers can build up quite a mystique about a wrestling mat. When Coach Soleman was recruiting wrestlers, he’d tell a class of students a wrestling mat was the most forgiving thing on earth. He’d toss an egg into the air, easily 10 feet over his head, and it would hit the mat and not break and everyone would go “Ahhh.” This is a true story.

            Roger poured me a cup of coffee. I’d never had coffee before, except to taste it. The coffee was bitter and strong, but also it gave me a little jolt of awakeness, which I needed. I poured some milk into the coffee. It wasn’t bad.

            The morning became lighter, started heating up. Already I liked living outside. I went to my car and put on jeans, a shirt and boots. Roger was similarly dressed. He doused the fire and we prepared to go to work, driving our vehicles off in different directions. I can tell you, driving a tractor in a field all day is no one’s idea of fun. I was driving a John Deere 4020. It had a nice, adjustable seat, a radio and air conditioning, so it wasn’t bad conditions. Just boring work. The tractor was pulling a rake, spring-toothing some people call it, over a 160-acre parcel, down one side, back the other, with little or no overlapping.

            Old Guy Smith, when he’d stop by, would look to see that I was making straight lines. Those farmers wanted straight lines; it was a thing with them.

            Guy farmed 1,360 acres. I was on land across from his house in Freeport, population maybe 10 but the old downtown was still there. Vacant, a ghost town, complete with an empty bank on one corner. The town cemetery was on the lot next to the parcel I was working. Guy had lost his wife between the first and second year I worked for him. She was buried in the cemetery. Guy’s wife had a little dog, and first thing in the morning, when it was still cool, that dog would go and lay down in the shade of his wife’s headstone.

            I spent hours thinking about that dog and one day I realized that Guy was feeling grief. He wasn’t crying or acting depressed. I could just tell he was lonely, out of his routine. He liked to make conversation with me, and I did the best I could. I liked him. I suppose technically he was my boss, but I never thought of it that way. He’d tell me the job and I’d do it. Simple.

            I knew his wife. Last summer, the first summer I’d worked for him, she would come out and greet us if we were at the shop next to the house. She made lunch for us. But she was thin, and no one talked about it but she was dying of cancer. I thought about it, but it didn’t exactly occur to me she was actually going to die. I was young with no experience in such things.

            The first year I worked driving a tractor, Sam would joke he was going to train a team of monkeys to perform the same job. He also said he was going to get computers to drive tractors, an idea that actually made sense but no one had heard of Global Positioning Satellites or programmable cars in those days.

            The monkey joke was to describe our place in the hierarchy of life as we knew it. We had the most boring, menial jobs in the state of Kansas, me and all my friends. We made $2.50 an hour. I simply thought of tractor driving as my place in the universe. Yet, the job came with a fair amount of responsibility. A tractor is an expensive piece of equipment and farmers expected a job to be done right.

            I suppose had I grown up near Bondi Beach, Australia, I would see my place in the world as surfing in the beautiful blue ocean surrounded by girls in bikinis, but I grew up in the bread basket of the world and my lot in life, until I could escape it, was to drive a tractor. Even in those days, I knew Kansas boys served as an inexpensive supply of labor. Cheap labor being one leg of the stool of some evil economic plan thought up by capitalists. I’m kidding. I was no communist.  

            The previous summer, I had driven an old Minneapolis Moline tractor with an umbrella over the top and no radio. I was the same color as the Kansas dirt each day that summer when I got off work. So, I was pleased to work driving a modern tractor with an air-conditioned cab.

            The mind drifts when one sits on a tractor all day. I had been reading H.V. Morton’s “In Search of London.”

            The Romans ruled London for 400 years. They had walled off a square mile, a wall that is still known and forms the official city of London. Greater London covers an area of more than 117 square miles.

            Well, any Kansas farm boy knows a square mile by heart, 640 acres, four 160-acre sections of land. Guy Smith had one full section that took days to work. The rest of his property was broken into half sections, quarter sections and an 80. They didn’t teach miles and acres in school; you knew it by heart if you lived here.

            I told Roger about the Romans and the London book, about Claudius coming to London from across Europe with legions of soldiers and a herd of elephants. Roger asked me to read it to him. I said OK, but I didn’t know if he’d find it interesting. But then Roger, he could surprise you.

            He was an athlete, a hunter, a fisherman and a mechanic, but I know he didn’t read many books. Still, if you told him some complicated story he’d think about it, working out the angles, not afraid to look at the big picture.

            We talked a lot about the war in Vietnam, and this made me think of my brother Mathew when he was living in Manitou Springs, Colorado changing his address over and over to create problems for the draft board.

            In my youth, as much as I could remember, the war was on television. I’m told General William Westmoreland could have cracked down on the media earlier in the war, but he never did so the war later on was on television every night. The three networks all had correspondents there. People from the press would hop on helicopters for transportation like it was their own taxi service.

            There were pictures of white “grunts” shooting Asian men. I don’t mean this as a racial comment. Record numbers of blacks fought. I just remember on TV seeing white people shooting at Asian people.

            It was the first helicopter war so pictures of large numbers of Hueys flying in formation over jungle hills was common. Bombs dropping out of B-52s were mesmerizing and shown all the time, and the fact we dropped napalm “burning gas” and herbicides to defoliate the jungle was well known. “Only the U.S. Army can prevent forests,” Mathew said. It was done to destroy the jungle cover for the Viet Cong.

            The television cameras showed booby-traps, from sharpened stakes sticking up on the trails to wire trips that threw up armed hand grenades at about the level of a man’s testicles.

            The television producers would show some good taste. A picture of a man who had triggered a trip wire would show his bloody shirt and facial expression, and perhaps one could tell he had no legs, but a medic might block the view of the offending wound.

            It was the first television war, and it could be the last. Showing an actual war on television made it hugely unpopular. I know 35,000 protested in October 1967. “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”

            My mind drifted to the wheat harvest. I stayed in a basement apartment at Guy Smith’s farm house. There was Guy and his son, Buzz, and his wife. Buzz’s wife cooked for us and kept us well supplied with iced tea and iced water during the day. It’s very hot in the dry fields, the sun blazing and the wind blowing.

            The basement apartment had a bedroom and a bathroom. We’d wake up at 4 or 5, eat breakfast, and go to work, often working till 10 or 11 p.m. Guy and Buzz drove combines. Guy owned two, and cut his own wheat plus contracting out with many of his neighbors. We cut thousands of acres of wheat over a two-week period. Guy had two old trucks and while one was on the way to town, the other was being filled in the field. I drove the trucks to the grain elevator in Freeport.

            When I returned from the elevator, the other truck would be just about ready to go. Mara had a job at the elevator in Medicine Lodge, so I didn’t see her much.

When one pulled in, the truck was weighed and they gave you a ticket to keep track of the wheat. On the way out, they would weigh the empty truck. A pretty, local girl had this job and I looked forward to her smile.

Mara had the same job and I suspect made a lot of young men happy with her smile. Mara wore jean shorts and a t-shirt, and her straight, brown-blonde hair bounced when she moved. She had a slim body and nice, tan legs.

            The wheat harvest starts the moment the heads of the wheat stalks are full and ripe. Farmers worry it will rain and slow things down. It’s important to get the wheat in when the heads are at their fullest. At a certain point, the wheat shrivels and weighs less, meaning less money. It’s the reason for the long days. We worked Saturdays and Sundays without respite. None of it was my wheat, but I took pride in participating in the community event. I knew even then this was my world.

            I remember being 15, New Year’s Day, and seeing a picture in the newspaper with boys and girls maybe 16 or 17 surfing at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, it being summer in that part of the world. The girls were wearing bikinis and both the boys and the girls looked fit and tan. I knew that much of the world.

            Vietnam, I knew by the coverage of the war. I knew London from Morton’s book, which is copyrighted 1951. I found it at the school library. It starts in 1913 in Edwardian London, before the first great war.

            I knew small town, rural America. To me it seemed limiting and unsophisticated, although in my mind the wheat harvest created a great prosperity. I would later learn to respect this place, but when I was young I was burning to go and see the world. Leave the small-town gossip. I knew Mathew felt that way. He was already gone from my life.

Chapter four

            I was the last one back to the campground and smiled when I saw there was activity. Sam was there with David Western. They were wrestling. Roger was refereeing and a half dozen people were sitting on the edge of the mat in a semicircle, watching. David, a year older than the three of us, was no match for Sam, but they were a couple of 190 pounders throwing each other around and it was exciting.

            After watching for a few minutes, I saw that Sam was working on his takedowns and that he would let David make some moves. If a person didn’t know any better, he’d think it was a good match. In reality, Sam would easily win a match against David.

            In the crowd were two of our friends and four girls, who enjoyed the attention. One of the guys was Killer, a tall, skinny boy who played basketball. Killer was not unlike us. Even in the heat of summer, he’d spend hours on his driveway working on his jump shot.

            Killer was not really a good basketball player, but he wanted to be and he was determined. He told his teammates once he wanted to be nicknamed Killer for his deadly jump shot; one must carefully choose his own nickname. The members of the basketball team cracked up and teased him unmercifully. However, when the wrestlers heard it, we liked it and we all called him Killer. Then it became popular, and everyone at school called him Killer. It earned the members of the wrestling team his good will; he was always at our matches. We knew the nickname was politically incorrect. That’s why we liked it.

            At our school, the basketball teams in those years weren’t that good. I don’t say it to brag, but the wrestling team always won so we were sort-of popular.

            Wrestling was our religion. The lama was Coach Soleman. Our dharma, the guiding principle, was lean and strong with good wind. Discipline was required. The goal was not knowledge or inner peace, but number of wins. Fifteen in a season was OK, 20 was good, 25 to 30 indicated a wrestler had gone to the later rounds in tournaments and won there.

            Sam and David knocked off not long after I arrived, and the spectators said goodbye and headed off to Medicine Lodge to eat. Killer was driving the entire group in a 1967 Pontiac Bonneville, a four-door hardtop that could have easily held eight. Hell, 10. They made some huge-ass cars in those days when gas was cheap.

             Roger started the fire; he planned to make hamburgers. David had been on the wrestling team. Because of his size he had become friends with Sam, but all of us knew him. Even at a young age, he looked mature and had to shave, so he could buy alcohol in Danville. He graduated a year ago and last we heard, was living in Coffeyville, Kansas making big money working on oil derricks.

            “Are you back in Medicine Lodge?” I said.

            “I got a job yesterday working with Sam,” he said. “I’ve got a good bit of cash saved up, and I’m planning to move to Colorado, but when I heard about wrestling camp I decided to stay here and spend the summer.”

            David said he had a good-paying job in Coffeyville, but wanted to spread his wings a little. David was usually quiet, and I sometimes had doubts about what he said, but nonetheless I went along. Why move here to make $2.50 an hour if he had a good job somewhere else making $20?

            “We now have an indoor toilet,” Sam said. “Come take a look.” David had a 1964 Ford pickup, and he said his brother also had a camper on his pickup. They would park at a camp site side by side. They made David’s camper into a luxury bathroom. There was a 500-gallon water tank in the bed of the camper, and a toilet on an elevated platform, which we would later call the throne. It was a full-sized flush toilet.

            Also inside was an industrial-sized sink where a person could clean game or fish, or simply wash his hands. Under the camper was a drainage pipe, which had already been set up to drain into a ditch by the road.

            Now, we had camped in rough woods and used the woods for our bathroom. Behind our camp site was a 640-acre field of wheat stubble, so bathroom facilities weren’t a big issue to us at first. But, the camper toilet was a huge step up and it would have become an immediate need if David hadn’t come along. David would ride to work with Sam and share his pickup, leaving the pickup camper set up for use as a toilet.

It was interesting to me how the camp site was growing. First there was a tent and a horse tank, now a pickup truck with a camper, and three vehicles for driving instead of two. We’d entertained our first visitors.

            We were all tired and as we spread out to sleep, the conversation turned to girls. I was dating Mara and Roger was dating Rose, a Latina girl with a fine body, what we would call busting out with womanhood. Sam had recently had a first date with a girl named Julie.  David asked what we were doing for birth control. We told him Mara and Rose were taking birth control pills. Sam said he hadn’t slept with Julie, but he used condoms.

            “I can’t stand that,” David said. “It takes away from the pleasure.”

            “Well, do you want a baby or not?” Sam said.

            “That’s a problem, for sure,” David said. As I said, David could say things that left us wondering the meaning. Was he in trouble or did he mean at some future time it would be a problem to have to wear a condom?

            After a few minutes, Roger asked me to read about London being taken by the Romans. “Are you sure?” I said. Everybody said yes, so I got out H.V. Morton’s “In Search of London.” I edited what I read to make it concise.

            “The reason for the Romans to take Britain is obvious. Without this island the Gaullist rebels could strike the continent and then retreat to the island. Claudius selected three Rhenish legions for the expeditionary force, the II Legion, Augusta, from Strasburg, the XIV Legion, Gemina, from Mainz, and XX Legion, Valeria Victrix, from Cologne.         “From the Danubian province of Pannonia, he withdrew the IX Legion, Hispana. The whole force probably numbered about 40,000 men.

            “Now, this occurred about 43 A.D., and the Crucifixion occurred around 33 A.D., so some of the same men who pegged out the boundaries of London might have served with the XLL Legion in Jerusalem, and may have been stationed round the Cross.

            “What this means is the founding of the city of London occurred near the same point in history as the life of Jesus,” I said, in case they missed the point.

            I continued reading: “The Emperor’s parting instructions to his general were that he was to bring the Britons to bay, but not to fight a conclusive battle. Claudius wanted to be present in person, and take the credit for the military triumph in Rome. Claudius took with him the Praetorian Guard and a phalanx of war elephants with Indian mahouts.

            “All kinds of outlandish soldiery must have visited. There were Batavians and Tungrians and Gauls, mounted Scythian archers, Spaniards, Thracians, Dalmatians and Asturians, Hamian archers, Balearic slingers, all in their distinctive dress, as well as barbaric-looking cavalrymen and artillerymen, which drew along the northern roads with great catapults that hurled rocks and stone for hundreds of yards.”

            I also talked about the square mile of London, the area marked off with a stone wall by the Romans and which still remains the boundary of the city of London, while there is also London County and the greater London area. The Romans left after 400 years, with the decline of the Empire, and some say England fell into anarchy. I understand it’s a point of debate, when and for how long there was anarchy.

            “I would like to see how they fought on elephants, or was it just for show,” Sam said.

            “I suppose we could find out the history of all those people,” Roger said. “I’ve never heard of the Thracians or the Hamian archers and about half the others. Civilization sure gets mixed up.”

            It was quiet. In the Midwest on a summer’s night crickets chirp and when one is lucky, lightning bugs glow. We lay there on the wrestling mat, the four of us, imagining the world outside this small place we knew.

            My father had been to London. I would have to ask him about it the next time I had a chance. It occurred to me there were a lot of ways to kill people during a war.

Chapter five

            When I arrived at camp, after a day at work, there was a small crowd. Jeff Bonn, Carl Hansberger and a half a dozen others I thought of as freshmen, but of course they would be sophomores during the coming school year. They’d come in two cars. The talk died down the moment I got out of my car, making me think they’d been talking about me.

            People nodded hello, but Jeff was looking down at his feet. “Jeff heard about our wrestling mat, and came out thinking maybe he could wrestle a challenge match against you,” Roger said. “Sam and I said of course he could.”

            I smiled. That’s what the silence was about, Jeff telling people he’d beat me out for a position on the varsity the coming year. Jeff Bonn had been the quarterback on the freshman team. He was a strong, lean fellow and a good athlete. He had brown hair, and like the rest of us in the 1970s, he hadn’t had a haircut for a while. This passed for long hair because our parents wouldn’t let us grow it long.

            At first I felt a knot in my stomach; I was always nervous before a game or a match. I figured Jeff had been talking trash, or maybe it had been his handsome, beefy friend, Carl, whom I also knew to be a good football player. Both had been on the wrestling team as freshmen. Carl had a lot to learn about wrestling, but Jeff had done well on the junior varsity. He was a quick learner. I had wrestled with him before. I wasn’t intimidated, but I was pissed off, imagining what had probably been said about me before my arrival.

            I was upset about being challenged. Maybe during the season I wouldn’t mind, but nobody was coming forward to challenge Minitank or Sam. I knew it was because I was considered vulnerable. I held a silent grudge against Jeff. In practice, when we traded off partners, if I was wrestling Jeff I gave it more.

            It’s permissible to turn a wrestler’s head with one’s forearm. I would use mine as a club and place the hard bone of my wrist against his temple, trying to hurt him. If I had to lift a leg, I pulled hard to try to pull the muscles in the upper thighs or buttocks.

            Two boys fighting have a hard time hurting each other if the rules of wrestling are observed. Punching or eye gouging isn’t allowed. Two competitive wrestlers usually walked off the mat tired but not hurt. Indeed, it is my own experience that football results in more injuries than wrestling.          

            Still, I tried to make him pay for wrestling with me. In fact, what I was doing was making him a better wrestler.

            I never talked to Jeff beyond hello, but I didn’t actually hate him. I just didn’t want him to mature on my watch and become a better wrestler. I would be angry later about being challenged so soon; I knew it. If one is competitive, a challenge will arise. It would be months till wrestling season. Nothing would be resolved at this time. It was stupid.

            Jeff Bonn, like Roger and I, had attending summer wrestling clinics before high school with Coach Soleman. At first, when we wrestled, I made sure to beat him up pretty good whenever we practiced together. I did this to discourage him from challenging me in the 150-pound weight division. At first, I was pinning him all the time.  He developed as the season went on last year, and was harder to beat later in the season.

            As a senior I had no intention of missing matches. If I had an injury, he would wrestle in my place and then I’d have to challenge to get my spot back. I didn’t plan for him to get any wins that were by rights mine. I had lettered in wrestling as a sophomore and a junior, and I planned on having a good senior season. Yet I knew Jeff was a good athlete, and he would get in shape as the season wore on. I was in shape, had good wind, but I considered he could catch up.

            I looked Jeff in the eye. “Yeah, let’s go. Let me put on my shoes and get warmed up.”

            He nodded.

            “Anything you want to say now?” Roger said. “Anything you want to say in front of Bowler now that he’s here in person?”

            Roger was facing Jeff but the question was aimed at Carl; he didn’t say anything.

            “You don’t mind if I referee, do you Carl?” Roger said.

            Carl shook his head. Like someone was going to tell the state champion he couldn’t referee a match.

            I put on a pair of shorts, some white socks and my wrestling shoes. I wear my running shoes without socks, but wrestling is different. I have reverence for my wrestling shoes. I rolled around the mat a little to warm up, and Jeff was doing the same.

            “Hey, freshman, no street shoes on the wrestling mat,” Roger shouted at a boy wearing boots. The boy took off his boots and said under his breath, “I’m not a freshman. I’m a sophomore.” It was interesting to me Roger and Sam weren’t being any too polite to our visitors.

            Roger brought us to the center of the mat. Coach Soleman didn’t like for wrestlers to hang onto each other, and then wrestle hard the last 30 seconds, and I was his disciple.

             “Three, two-minute periods. Sam’s keeping time. I’ll call out any points awarded.” He blew his whistle.

            I stepped forward with my left leg, my back straight but the knees bent, and swept round Jeff and grabbed his heel. He was too quick and strong and I couldn’t hold onto it. For some reason, my reach is longer with my left hand. My left-side takedown is strong enough, but I can’t seem to sweep as far with my right hand. I knew my strategy.

            I went left-side, step and sweep, step and sweep, step and sweep. Then, my real attempt: Right leg, step and sweep. Jeff jumped back. I repeated the sequence. The match was seconds old and I had already attempted four takedowns.

            I went right again, and again got his heel, but my grip wasn’t strong enough to hold and he kicked back. I went from the right side again and again. There was a chance he’d stumble or rest a second and I’d get in, but he was alert and kept jumping back.

            Jeff reached out to put his hand on my neck, to lock me up, and as soon as he reached, I dragged his arm across my body and tried to drop in under him in order to get behind him. Our arms were tied up and we swung wildly round and round before breaking apart, neither of us with an advantage.

            I recovered from an awkward few steps, and went to face him. Before he could turn square to me I’d started another series. Step and sweep, step and sweep. He jumped back. I shot again and again from the right side, then again and again from the left. He’d begun almost, but not quite, to run from me. That meant he was tired.

            Roger blew the whistle. He took a coin out of his pocket. “You call it Jeff.” He tossed it and Jeff said heads. “Top or bottom?” “Bottom.”

            “Second period. No score,” Roger said.

            Jeff got on all fours, and I got in the upper position, my right arm around his stomach and my left hand on his left elbow. Roger held his hand out, then raised it and said go.

            I had spent three years practicing with a state champion wrestler, so I was used to working at a fast pace. Jeff would sit out and I’d follow. He’d switch, but I’d re-switch. He’d stand but I’d push him back down. He started out moving pretty well but in a minute he slowed down. Once he tried a move and I caught him halfway. He was on his back and I began to work his arms so I could put him in a pinning hold. I did a good job of it and held him on his back for several seconds.

            Finally, showing his strength, he rolled over.

            “Two points,” said Roger.

            “Yeah, maybe three,” Sam said. Carl and his friends were quiet now. They could see I was in better shape.

            Roger blew his whistle.

            Jeff and I were both wet with sweat, but I was pleased that I was OK, not too tired. The sweat was rolling off Jeff.

            I got in the down position, and Roger raised his hand. “Third period, two to nothing Bowler.” He raised his hand and I began a familiar routine. Sit out, sit out, sit out, switch, standup. I had gone on like that many times in live, regulation matches. There are other moves to throw in there, but these are the basic ones. I sat out and turned to face him.

            “Escape,” Roger said. “One point.”

            Jeff had given up by this point, but now that the match was in hand, I wanted to rub it in. I got close to Jeff and began shooting takedowns, step and sweep, over and over. Finally I went left, grabbed his heel, lifted it, knocked the other foot out from under him.

            “Takedown, two points,” Roger said.

            Once I was awarded the points, I let go of him and got in my stance.

            “One point, escape,” Roger said.

            He stood up slowly but he knew what I was up to, that I was trying to run up the score. The match was easily over.

            “Forty seconds,” Sam yelled. I had seen wrestlers get a takedown, give an escape and get another takedown in 40 seconds.

            I shot and shot, step and sweep. My legs were burning. I got inside and held onto him, so close, but he was able to back out. I shot and shot and shot and the whistle blew. He was running now.

            Jeff and I shook hands, and Roger raised my arm in the tradition way. We walked off, both of us sweating. Sam came up and put his arms round me. “That was a good match,” he said. “If coach were here, he’d tell you you wrestled a good match. Don’t worry though, I’ll tell coach about it.” He laughed and patted me on the shoulder.

            I found myself standing next to Jeff. I pointed to the horse tank. “I’m going to cool off. No one here will mind if you swim in our tank.”

            “Thanks,” Jeff said.

            Both of us swam in the tank, it being brutally hot and dusty on a Kansas summer evening. We all talked a while as Roger made a meatloaf and began cooking it in a camp oven. We talked about the freshman football team, and the varsity, and the new sophomores talked about some of the girls they were trying to date.

When the meatloaf was ready, Roger didn’t invite them to stay. Sam, David, Roger and I began to serve up food and the freshmen drove away in the two cars, going slow so as to not kick up dust.

            We each ate three pieces of meatloaf and nothing else. We drank some water and lay on the mat to rest. Roger put on some music, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.”

            “Carl and his buddies were saying Jeff Bonn was going to kick your ass,” Roger said. “But Jeff wasn’t talking like that. I thought you might want to know.”

            “I suspect that guy will be challenging me my entire senior year.”

            “You beat him soundly,” Roger said.

            “Thanks,” I said, but the reassurance was meaningless. I was thinking he would be a pretty good wrestler by the end of his sophomore season. It would be a nice accomplishment for him to get on the varsity as a sophomore. It was a thought that pissed me off, but when I fell asleep I was out cold. I wasn’t in shape to wrestle a six-minute match and I was tired.

Chapter six

            In the blistering hot Midwest, a sense of lethargy can overcome people during long summer days and nothing kills time in the middle of the day like idle talk. Somehow the story of the challenge match, and of the wrestling camp, began circulating through Medicine Lodge.

            My father heard it at the drug store when he went with my mom to get coffee one afternoon. They were talking about a match I’d wrestled against Jeff Bonn. My father had to stop the man who was talking to get him to tell the full story. As if he knew it.

            The wrestling program in Medicine Lodge started about five years earlier when a tough guy named Carl Bell moved to town. He was a guy who liked to smoke, drink beer, fight and ride his motorcycle. He told Coach Soleman about wrestling at another school, and to help him out Coach Soleman started a wrestling team. Carl’s friend Johnny Wat was also on the team and the only other wrestler who developed right away.

            It was about this time Coach Soleman started going round to the grade schools and junior highs, recruiting wrestlers and tossing his egg. He read a book on coaching wrestling, and began to attend clinics. Within five years, he had a state champion, Minitank, Roger Spellen.

            Carl, a tough guy, is still around, working as a mechanic. He worked with my brother a while. Aso in those days there was a wrestler named Johnny Wat, a 126-pounder with the cutest girlfriend you’ve ever seen. When I was young, the saying was that only hoods wrestled. Funny, the word hoods was still used then. But, as my class came of age, people realized Medicine Lodge had a good wrestling program. It would remain that way for the next 40 years, but of course we had no way of knowing that.

            In Medicine Lodge, the basketball teams during those years were awful, the football teams decent. The wrestling team had a state champion and always seemed to win. Now we had a camp set up and were going to work out all summer. Of course, this wasn’t true. There were only three wrestlers there and it’s not like we worked out all the time.

            That’s what people talked about. I knew it. If they had driven by and we were out there drinking beer, the talk would have been different. Now people began to drive by. In the evenings, after they finished work, having heard of the challenge match, they’d drive out on the country road and, with the windows up and the air conditioning on, take a look at our camp.

            It began with one or two cars a night, usually not stopping, usually with a bunch of little kids looking out the windows at us, a couple and their children out for a ride.

            They saw the camp change. First there was a tent, a horse tank, and a pickup with a camper. Then Sam welded a square frame that held a barbell, and we would get inside and do squats. Then Sam welded up a frame holding a punching bag, again on a solid iron frame. Then Roger and I began riding our motorcycles out, so there would be cars and motorcycles and Sam’s farm truck, a flat-bed Ford.

            Every morning I ran two miles and did 30 squats. Maybe I was the only one who planned to work out all summer. I had coffee, and cereal for breakfast. I left my car there, locked up, and drove my motorcycle to work, a 305 Honda Scrambler.

            People would drive by, and report to their friends over coffee in town there was more and more activity at the camp. They would report a clothes line was up. Or they went by and there was a challenge match going on; in truth, the only challenge match wrestled that summer was the one between Jeff and I. But wrestlers from other schools found our camp a few times. It was located four miles north, two miles east, of Medicine Lodge. No one born in Kansas could not find it.

            When two wrestlers showed up from Derby, a Wichita suburb, it probably looked like a challenge match. They had a 158 pounder who wanted to be the next Roger Spellen. He was black and had a pumped-up upper body, but weight lifting isn’t wrestling. He wasn’t as strong or as good an athlete as Roger. His name was Curtis Hightower. He would be a sophomore. By the time Roger was a sophomore, he was already a legend.

            Hightower – we called him by his last name – was a good guy and we liked him for coming to see us. He was with a friend, also black, Freddie Stack. First, Roger and Curtis wrestled a match, but it wasn’t serious. Roger kept a lead, but could’ve pinned Hightower.

            Then, I worked out with Freddie. The Derby coach apparently didn’t teach them to break an arm bar, and when I realized this, I asked him about it.

            “So, when we stand up, and I grab your far arm by the wrist, you don’t work a move to break my hand off?”

            Freddie, first standing there, then turned and leaned against me. I grabbed his far arm. “OK, we’re like this,” Freddie said. “What would you do?”

            I smiled, to show I wasn’t hostile. “You haven’t been taught to break an arm bar? OK, I’m going to teach you an illegal move, but it’s used all the time. It’s common. You will turn away from the referee, then pull a finger or two back, and I’ll let go. If I don’t, the second time you do it, break some fingers.”

            Freddie laughed. “Your coach taught you this?”

            “Freddie, everyone does it. But you must turn away from the referee. It’s illegal.”

            Freddie and I changed positions. He tried it, easy at first, pulling fingers back on the hand that was holding his wrist. Then he figured out just how hard to jam my fingers to get me to let go.

            “What if I use this in a match against you during the season?” he said.

            “Well, it’s a competition,” I said.

            “All right,” he said. “Man, our coach maybe isn’t as good as yours.”

            I said I thought we had a good coach. In later years, if I mentioned the illegal move, people would look at me in disbelief. A good coach – ethical – wouldn’t teach an illegal move? A good teacher, coaching, wouldn’t teach an illegal move? But when we broke an arm bar, we turned away from the referee. That was part of the lesson.

            We all cooled off in the horse tank. Hightower and Freddie said they’d come back every week, but we wouldn’t see them again until football season.

            That night I thought about the illegal move we used, breaking the arm bar. In life maybe one doesn’t always follow the rules. Maybe that’s what Mathew was doing, telling the draft board to bug off. I also thought, well, if I was good at a major sport, football of basketball, there wouldn’t be any secret rules. I liked an obscure sport; I was obscure as well. No one in my life would ever ask about high school wrestling. Roger was the only shining star in our universe. We were in awe of his talent.

            Another night we had a visit from James and Clem, friends of ours who played in a rock band. They came out one night and played guitar for probably two hours. Three girls were with them, and it was fun. It was the 1970s and those guys, any guys in a good band, were popular.

            Another night, members of the science club visited. I use the term “science club” loosely; now you’d call them nerds. Beaver, whom we called the boy genius, long-legged Rebecca, who was a pretty, soon-to-be sophomore, Brad, and Big Ed all-SKL. Also known as Eddie Morton.

            Beaver was really Thom Beevor, of Italian origin, with thick glasses. He wouldn’t play sports. If you tossed a ball to him, with his poor vision, he’d not see it till the last minute, and then the ball would be right in front of his face and scare him. One tryout in little league baseball and he was done with sports forever.

            Brad was a good-looking guy with a good sense of humor. I know the nerds always made home movies, at some point throwing a dummy covered with ketchup in front of the camera. They always had a dead body with fake blood in their movies, and constantly worked on the recipe for something red that looked like blood. Rebecca, fresh out of her freshman year, would always play the lone woman in the movie, the lead, and the other boys would fall all over themselves trying to impress her. It was funny. She was six feet tall with long, slender legs like a filly. She had blonde hair and a nice smile. She was friends with the nerds but she had made it clear, Beaver told me once, she wasn’t dating any of them.

            Eddie Morton was a friend. He was on the football team and liked to hang out with the jocks. He would’ve stayed at wrestling camp with us in a heartbeat, but although we liked him, there was no way we were going to spend the summer with him. He was, in a word, fat.

            Now, Big Ed played football. He did all the hard workouts, all the running, and he went through the same grueling workouts as the rest of the wrestling team. There weren’t any fat wrestlers, I can tell you. But still, our heavyweight Big Ed all-SKL was fat.

            All along, Ed had played football. He was a decent offensive tackle and made the honorable mention Southern Kansas League team. Not first team, not second team, but honorable mention. Roger called him Big Ed all-SKL. We could tell immediately Ed liked it. It was a bit of a promotion.

            At first, when Roger would say it, Ed would smile and everyone else, whoever was around, would say, “What?”

            “Big Ed, all-Southern Kansas League football team,” Roger would say. Like it was important and everyone would go, “Oh, right. Congratulations.” Pretty soon, the entire school was saying it. “Hey, Big Ed all-SKL.” Like it was one word.

            The geeks at our school weren’t bullied. I was in classes with most of them, but I was a B student and a jock, while they were A students. Sam was actually just as good a student, but he didn’t hang out with the science club for some reason.

            But I found them to be funny, always a running gag going on with them. They made funny films. I know they studied harder than me, and at times I felt guilty about that. I knew I could’ve done better. As we were sitting around talking, Beaver told me it was Rebecca’s idea to stop by. We figured it was Ed, who was hinting at an invitation to stay.

            When Beaver told me it was Rebecca’s idea to stop by, I asked him what he thought of that. “What do you think?” Beaver said. “She likes you.”

            “You think so? She must know I’m dating Mara.”

            Beaver shrugged. Ed was telling Sam how great it was out here; the camp site looked great and he could see we’d been working out.

            We had fun, talking about our Boy Scout days. Beaver and Ed had been in the Boy Scouts with us. They got up to go and Roger stood up, looked Rebecca right in the eye and said, “You can come back any time.” She was wearing shorts and a little cotton top with no sleeves. She put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Thank you. I think I will.” She turned, looked at me and gave me a big smile. Obvious.

            Beaver, Brad and Ed kind of looked down. I smiled at her and Sam laughed. I watched those long legs walk away.