Chapter seven

            We were getting ready to go to work on a Monday morning. “Julie’s going to come by this evening, bring us dinner,” Sam said.

            “Good work,” I said. “How’d you arrange that?”

            “She wanted to,” Sam said. “It was her idea.”

            We all nodded, pleased. We picked up the camp a little, and headed our separate directions. Sam and David Western headed south in Sam’s flat-bed Ford pickup. Roger and I drove off on our motorcycles. I went east to Freeport and Roger went west.

            I stopped after work and picked up a bag of ice for the ice chest and was the last one to camp. Julie and the rest were already there, organizing. Julie had laid out a blanket on top of the wrestling mat; the tent providing our main source of shade. There was fried chicken, potato salad, a green salad and a cheesecake.

            “This is really nice,” Roger said.

            “You can start,” Julie said. “It’s a picnic, no need to be formal.”

            We ate and talked, all of us dirty, though we had washed our hands. We had ice tea, a staple on a hot plains day. Julie looked nice in a pair of yellow shorts that showed her legs, and a short-sleeve cotton top. She had medium-length black hair, pulled back in a ponytail. It was hot out, but there was a small breeze that worked like a fan. “You boys are the talk of the town,” Julie said.

            At just that time, a couple of cars drove by. One old couple gawked. In the second car, little kids were making faces in the back seat. We laughed and waved. “Does that happen often?” Julie said. Sam nodded.

            “So, are you really working out, or is this just for show?” she said.

            “Bowler works out,” Sam said.

            “Yes, he’s a dedicated boy,” she said. “Sam told me there was a toilet, a throne in David’s camper. I’m glad to hear you’re dedicated to hygiene.”

            “I could show it to you,” Roger said.

            She laughed. “I can picture it.”

            David Western was quiet. He was good looking with black hair that looked good no matter what. Combed, it looked good, or blowing in the wind, it looked good. In a new social setting, he was quiet unless someone drew him out. He wasn’t a deep thinker, though, just shy. Inevitably, a woman would make a move on him as women are wont to do with a good-looking guy. To tell the truth, he seemed depressed.

            After dinner, and many compliments on the food, Sam helped Julie clean up and we told her how much we appreciated the meal. Roger had a tape deck, hooked to a spare battery in his pickup, and he put on the James Gang’s Funk #49 and we listened to the melodic guitar playing and singing of Joe Walsh. Julie stood next to Sam and they kind of swayed with the music, not dancing but talking and laughing. After a while, Sam left with her in the car, and returned in about an hour, just as it was getting dark. We were about to go to sleep when Julie let him out.

            Sam joined us, took off his boots and grabbed his pillow. “That was real nice,” Roger said. “A good evening.”

            “Yeah, it was a nice change. Funny how having a woman around makes everyone a little more energetic,” Sam said.

            “Yep,” Roger said, yawning.

            “I guess I’ve got a girlfriend,” Sam said.

            “Yeah, I suspected,” Roger said.

            “She said she’s been hanging out with Mara and Rose,” Sam said.

            “Yeah, I suspected,” Roger said. I could tell he was planning to go to sleep, but Sam was energetic.

            “I heard you climbed the hill north of Tony Lakes,” Sam said. I had been to the hill on my 305 Honda Scrambler, but it wasn’t a true dirt bike. Roger’s Honda SL350 was. Still, until this summer, the only person we knew who’d climbed the hill on a motorcycle was Jon Venter. Jon was a big guy who lifted weights. He worked on the family farm and went to school, but after that he nearly lived on a new Husqvarna 400 motorcycle. It was a beast. We used to joke he could climb a tree on that motorcycle.

            “Where’d you hear that,” Roger said. He sat up.

            “I saw Steve. I was in town getting a part for the tractor,” Sam said. Steve also has a Honda SL350, but so far he hasn’t been able to get to the top of the hill, although he’s a good rider. I bought my motorcycle after Roger and Steve purchased their motorcycles. For some reason, I like the Scrambler.

            “Did I tell you about the time Roger rode up the front steps to my house,” I said, “My father told me, ‘You tell Roger not to ride up the steps anymore.’ ”

            Sam laughed. Roger laughed too, although I had told him the story before.

            “I’m pretty good with my motorcycle,” I said. “I no longer use the handlebars; I just lean in the direction I want to turn and the motorcycle follows.” We all laughed at this. The laughter faded and so did our energy. Roger lay back down.

            “Good one, Bowler,” Roger said.

            We were alone out there on the prairie on a warm summer’s night, a half moon peering over the horizon providing a sort of night light. I couldn’t believe Roger had climbed that steep hill. It gave me a thrill to think about it. The hill sloped gently up about 100 yards, and then the grade was a steep 45-degree slope. There was a flat area on top. It was small, but large enough to allow one to stop if the timing was perfect. To stop on the top of the steep hill. It took my breath away to think of it. I would never attempt it.

            Mathew was also a boy who needed a lot of adrenaline. I remember one Christmas we had a big snow. Mathew took me out in a Volkswagen he owned for a short time. He would drive fast, then pull on a hand brake – the emergency brake – located between the two front seats. The car would spin round and round before stopping on a snow bank. The car, with front wheel drive and an engine in back to provide some weight, could be driven out of the soft snow of a snow bank. Mathew and I laughed and laughed. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing. I went along with it but was scared.

Chapter eight

            There are as many ways to camp as there are people who camp. In Boy Scouts, we made an organized camp and had merit-badge classes to fill the long hours of the weekend. I’ve seen recreational vehicles that cost more than middle-class homes running generators so the owners could watch television at night. I’ve seen solitary hikers who had a minimum of light-weight equipment. There are old camp trailers being pulled on threadbare tires and stylish tents, fancy outdoor clothes and fishing gear and cook stoves.

            We thought our camp was quite simple. At first, we had a tent over a wrestling mat and a water tank filled by a windmill. We found that other people couldn’t stand for us to have a minimalist camp.

            They would bring chairs and tables. We had a round iron bowl for wood fires, and next started accumulating an ever-changing stack of wood, plus axes and shovels of varying sizes. One day when we were gone, someone dropped off a fine camp stove that used propane and left it on one of the tables. We tossed out the old one we had been using.

            I had brought out a round cooler that we used for drinking water, and later we had another for rinsing dishes and a big, old square cooler for storing food. Cups, glasses, bowls, silverware, skillets, wash basins and cooking utensils were the last to arrive. There was no end to the utensils, first a simple spatula then can openers, assorted knives, large forks, big spoons. Then someone left a cabinet.

            Many of the people in Medicine Lodge took ownership in the camp, people who didn’t live at the camp or even know us. A woman told me she had driven past, noticed we were low on firewood, and took some that she had stored out to the camp. Sometimes we were there when people dropped things off, but usually items showed up without explanation. We were gone 12 hours a day driving tractor, 13 when you consider drive time.

            Although some of the objects were nice, most were older things that were usable but not particularly valuable. In theory, we wanted a simple camp. It was easy for any of us to drop by home and have a shower or wash clothes. At first we worried people would steal things, but then we realized the only thing of value was the wrestling mat and it was the least likely thing anyone would steal. By the end of the summer, few of the things there belonged to anyone.

            It was after Julie cooked for us that Mara donated her father’s old charcoal grill. We didn’t know it at the time, but Mara and Rose were unaware of the fact Julie had brought us dinner. It started with gossip.

            My mother always said there was informational gossip and mean gossip, the later not being acceptable. My mother was good hearted and would not repeat a story about someone cheating on someone else or perhaps the details of a divorce. But if, for example, she had heard that Julie was taking dinner out to the boys she would have found that interesting. She must be making a play for Sam is what she would have said.

            Gossip is taking an unhealthy delight in sharing sensational news about someone else, so I didn’t buy into my mother’s definitions. Her interest in other people’s children, or what business was opening up in town, or who was buying a house, was news. I knew gossip in a small town, real, mean gossip, was rampant. People sometimes have menial jobs. Men tended to farm or work on the line at Boeing. Women, as a whole, were housewives or worked as bank tellers, waitresses or bookkeepers.

            Weather of course contributes to this. The afternoons are long and hot, and a person’s energy flags. It’s easier and more entertaining to tell stories over a cigarette or a glass of iced tea than to work.

            Mara worked at the Farmer’s Coop and Rose worked as a waitress at the Wheatland Cafe. Rose was serving some women when she heard someone at the next table talk about Julie Hemerschmidt liking Sam. She stopped and listened for a moment and realized Julie had taken dinner out to the boys. Julie had told Mara she had a date with Sam, but she hadn’t said anything about taking the four of them dinner.

Now a group of 70-year-old women were talking about it at a table in the cafe. After work, Rose went across the street to the coop elevators and told Mara.

            Rose acknowledged it was a good idea. They had had dates that summer, but hadn’t visited the camp. The wheat harvest occupied a large space on everyone’s schedule. Now Julie had been out hanging around with the boys, securing a place for herself.

            “Julie does like that boy,” Rose said.

            “I don’t suppose we have to wait for an invitation. What do you think, should we grill them some steaks?” Mara said.

            “Steaks? That’s too expensive,” Rose said, and they started laughing. “Hmm, how much do I like Roger?”

            “I know, right,” Mara said. “They’ll be just as happy with hamburgers.”

            “My dad has an old grill,” Mara continued. “We can take it out there, grill hamburgers, take chips and pop, and leave the grill if they want it.” Thus, the charcoal grill joined the fire bowl at wrestling camp and became part of the growing community asset.

Chapter nine

            I was always amazed at Sam’s ability to do anything he set his mind to. We admired him on the football field. He helped a farmer, Stan Stanton, set up a hog-raising operation, which made money. He took math and chemistry. One semester he took drafting and found he was quite good at it. And, in the spring before wrestling camp, he learned to weld. He took a class and then taught himself the fine points.

            He welded a squat rack, which allowed us to safely do squats without someone spotting us. He built a clever, solid frame to hold a punching bag, and later he built another to hold a speed bag. My routine became two miles and 30 squats each morning before going to work. Minitank was the one who could really make the speed bag dance. His quickness was another example of his athletic ability. We would all take turns stopping by the heavy bag in the evening and throwing jabs for five minutes or so.

            Sam began a new project. We began by taking the hood off David Western’s pickup. This is the pickup with the camper that provides an indoor toilet. We turned the hood upside down, and Sam welded a metal box, about 3 by 7 inches, and it had a swinging door and a place for a padlock. It was very secure. David put some money in it, and locked the padlock. We put the hood back on the pickup.

            “So David, why not just take the money to the bank like the rest of us,” Roger said.           “Well, it’s quite a bit, and I don’t like carrying it around, so Sam said he’d make me a secure place for it.”

            David certainly had a talent for not answering a question. “So, a bank’s not safe enough?” Roger said.

            David laughed. “Well, of course, it would be perfectly fine,” he said. Sam just shrugged his shoulders.

            “Was that all the money you made working the oil rigs?” Roger said.

            “Well, I never worked the oil rigs all that long,” he said. “That was miserable work. I’ll tell you, I thought my spine was going to break in half doing that work, so I didn’t stay long.”

            “Oh,” Roger said, “I thought that’s where you made all that money you were going to spend to go out to Colorado.”

            “Well, I made some money,” David said.

            I gave Roger kind of a questioning look; I thought David was being evasive again. But we liked him, so I let it go as David being David.

            “If I had a big bunch of money, I’d ask Sam to weld me one of those boxes, too,” Roger said. I laughed and Sam shook his head. The subject didn’t come up again, but there’s one thing I learned. Weld and hide an iron box, and put a bunch of money in it, and then knowing it’s there, even hidden under a pickup hood, it’s amazing how much you think about it. We wondered how much money was in there, and why it was there.

            It’s funny sleeping on a wrestling mat with other people. The mat was comfortable and a person could take up as much space as he needed. We had each kind of staked out a quarter of the wrestling mat, but slept close enough to center we could hear each other talking. We talked at night before going to sleep. Because the tent was open on the sides, we slept in our clothes. We did not wear shoes or boots on the wrestling mat.

            Roger had seen a copy of “The Milagro Beanfield War,” a novel by John Nichols, on the backseat of my car. Although Roger didn’t read much, he always wanted to know what I was reading. I told the four of them it was a quirky book, and I thought it was overall about a poor, working man who uses water to revive his beanfield. I said a rich resort owner and developer probably owns the water rights, but that is unclear. I said it was a pretty funny book.

            “How so?” Sam said.

            “There is a character, Onofre Martinez, who has only one arm. He said when he was young he fell asleep in the shade of a tree and a thousand butterflies flew off with his arm. In the Milagro community, unexplained mischief is blamed on Onofre Martinez’s missing arm.”

            Roger laughed; something about the story struck him. “I guess that’s funny,” Sam said. David didn’t comment.

            There was something physical about Roger’s presence. Part of it was his lean, strong build. Also, he could wiggle his ears or imitate one’s walk. After I told the story about Onofre Martinez, there were times when I saw him put on a t-shirt, pull his left arm out of the sleeve and behind his back. With the empty sleeve, he did indeed look one armed. Whenever I saw him do this, I couldn’t help but laugh.

Chapter 10

            It was a warm summer night. Fireflies glowed round our tent. There was a gentle breeze and it was not as hot as it had been just before the harvest, or maybe we were just used to it. Roger asked me to read from Morton’s “In Search of London.”

            I read about the blitz of London during WWII. “In Cheapside, I saw most of the streets to the north railed off by police, offering a ghastly vista of roofless broken buildings and glassless windows, with piles of rubble lying in the road in pools of water. Approaching Guildhall, I saw the Union Jack flying above the porch, which is now merely a screen. Firemen were rushing about; the fire engines stood in odd corners. I wondered how badly the Library had been injured, and went round the corner into Basinghall Street to find out. As I was about to enter the half-open door, a dusty man in overalls, whose face was as black as a chimney-sweep’s, barred the way and asked irritably who I was.

            “I told him I was a friend of the Librarian and was only anxious to know if much damage had been done. ‘I am the Librarian,’ he said; and then I recognized beneath the grime and dust my old friend, J.L. Douthwaite, who at the same time recognized me, and his distracted features relaxed into a smile that was a weary grin.

            “ ‘Come inside, Morton, and have a look,’ he said, drawing me into the building. He took me up to the Library, where I have so often seen royal and stately gatherings. The three bays at the end have vanished, together with the books in them. It was a beastly sight, and my heart sank. Only a few yards away from this ghastly mess Douthwaite’s room was absolutely untouched, his Christmas cards were still standing in rows on the mantelpiece.

            “He took me down to the ruins of the Bridge, where we stood on a pile of books lying in a gigantic heap on the floor and still gently smoking and smoldering. Lovely little pages curled up wetly from the pile; Eighteenth Century calf bindings protruded here and there.

            “ ‘Part of a life’s work,’ said Douthwaite. ‘Mostly collected by one. This was a student’s library, and one can never replace what is gone.’ ”

            Those of us in the Baby Boom generation in the U.S. grew up in the shadow of WWII. We knew half a dozen people in Medicine Lodge who had served, but we rarely heard the stories because the veterans didn’t talk much about it. I had the experience of trying to draw a few of them out. Perhaps they told the stories to our fathers. Still, we knew who they were and we could name them.

            My friends and I didn’t talk much after reading of the bombings of London. I know I’d seen pictures of the London fire, and of the country-side of Normandy and pictures of Paris. But I couldn’t imagine what Europe was like. I only knew about this little part of Kansas where I’d grown up. I had two friends who had never been outside the states of Kansas and Oklahoma.

            Still, I remember reading about Ho Bo Woods, where thousands of acres of forest and farmland were destroyed by fire and chemicals. The forest was destroyed to deny cover to the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong owned the ground, the United States owned the air.  I thought of all the bombs dropped out of B-52s shown on the news. Vietnam was seen differently than WWII. Still, fire is fire.

            On Sunday, I got up early and went home to my parents’ house to get a shower and prepare for church. The first thing I did when I got in the house was pour a cup of coffee.

            “You drink coffee now?” my father said. My mother was also in the kitchen.

            “I was reading about London during the blitz,” I said. “You were stationed in London for a while. What was it like?”

            “I was training with the British, flying jets off an aircraft carrier, and taking a class in aeronautical engineering.” He smiled, and was thoughtful for a moment, as if remembering something.

            “It was the best as a pilot as I’ve ever been,” he said. “All my young life, all I’d wanted was to be a pilot. It was the culmination of everything I wanted to do. Yet, it was peace time. It was the late 1950s, and I knew I was going to be an engineer. Make planes instead of fly them.

            “I had great fun, and worked hard, and made friends and drank too much beer in pubs,” he said, as if now I was old enough to hear the story.

            “But when I came home, I knew I was done training as a soldier pilot. I got out of the Air Force, finished up my engineering degree, and got a job. I was only gone to London, and the south coast, five months, but I was glad to get home with my wife and family. I didn’t ever want to go away again.”

            “I’d already had Mathew,” my mother said. “I knew he was happy to see me. We had four more children after that.”

            My father smiled, I suppose thinking about being a young man with a young wife.

            I had heard my father’s stories about learning to take off and land on an aircraft carrier in the ocean. It had been an intense experience, but he didn’t go into all that again.

            “Our family came from England,” my father said. “It was too long ago so I’m not connected to anyone in England now, but I know I had a great-grandfather named Bowler.” I knew the story about my namesake, but didn’t interrupt him. By the way, the story’s not that interesting. We think there was a relative named Bowler Jones but that’s all we ever found out. It was in a church registry and maybe it wasn’t even our Jones.

            “London was under construction when I was there,” he continued, “but they were slow with it and I saw a lot of the damaged areas. What’s amazing is what wasn’t destroyed. Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum. I must have gone to the British Museum a dozen times when I was there. There are artifacts from around the world. I circled the globe visiting in that big building. Best museum in the world.”
            He refreshed his cup of coffee and sat down next to me. “You know, the English are fascinated by Henry VIII. He liked to hunt, was involved in many wars, spent extravagantly and had six wives and numerous mistresses. Well, I suppose you know about all that, the beheadings of some of his wives and cabinet members.

            “I know if I really think about it, it’s a violent world, that’s what I think about,” my father said. “Then you realize it’s a really violent world, and it still is.” He sat quietly for a moment.

I knew this, of course. In the end, 58,000 servicemen died in Vietnam. President John Kennedy believed communist-led insurgencies could overthrow weak governments in Asia. This was the domino theory. Kennedy was young, handsome and popular and he jumped into a war that eventually killed 2 million Vietnam soldiers and citizens. He didn’t want to lose a war. President Kennedy had President Dien killed. Dien was a Catholic who harassed the Buddhists and divided the South. Still, Dien was democratically elected.

Lyndon Johnson became president and he didn’t want to lose a war, either. Richard Nixon took over, and we had the feeling, eventually, the war was winding down, but not before he did some bombing in order to try and influence a bargain in our favor. It didn’t work.

            There was universal support for WWII. Vietnam was different. There are arguments over when the war started, was it 1959 or 1964? Maybe even when the French colonized Vietnam and forced slave labor to produce rubber.

In World War II, we had an easy villain in Hitler. The politics of Vietnam are complicated. It was debated whether it was it a worthy war, with strong opinions on both sides. Some young protesters moved to Canada and Sweden, rather than serving, making it divisive to many families.

            I got up to shower, and then we went to church, and then we had a big breakfast. I stayed around the house for a while, and in the heat of the afternoon, went to the municipal pool to cool off and see who was around.

            I thought about Mathew. My father always told him he had so much potential. He did well in school, especially mathematics, but also he took auto shop, welding and drafting. All the classes an engineer would need. My father was a patriot. The Air Force gave him exactly what he wanted, training and a bunch of high-performance jets to practice in.

            My father didn’t necessarily want Matthew to go to Vietnam. He just thought it was his son’s duty to participate in the draft. Mathew’s actions were a repudiation of everything my father was.

            My father had the good luck to join the military after Korea and before our involvement escalated in Vietnam. He could have gone back into the military to train pilots, but he was involved in designing jets and didn’t want to change focus.

            It had been two years since Mathew took off, and we didn’t see him much. He’d write a card to Mom sometimes, but not often.

            So there was my brother and two sisters and me, and my mom and dad at home, and Mathew was separate and not seen. It seemed lonely if I thought about it.

Chapter 11

            Sam told me he needed a break from David Western. We went to the drive-in theater on a Friday night. This would mean a late night and a lack of sleep on Saturday, but we needed a break from the routine. Sam said sometimes David wore him out. He had money and was going to Colorado to seek his fortune, but he didn’t have any education or a plan of any kind. He constantly talked about his former girlfriend in Coffeyville, Kansas. “If Cathy Snell was so great, why didn’t he marry her?” Sam said.

            I agreed. Sometimes David would start a story, but it didn’t take you anywhere. “His stories trail off down a rabbit hole,” Sam said.

            “There’s something else, Sam said. “I’ve been thinking about it, not bringing it up around you and Roger because I felt like it would betray a confidence. I think I’d like to tell you about it, though,” he said.

            “Yeah,” I said, “what’s up?”

            “I pulled up next to David on the tractor two days ago,” Sam said, “and David should have noticed I’d caught up with him, but he didn’t. I looked over and there were tears running down his face. I stopped, got out of the tractor, and he was wiping his eyes with his shirt. I think he was embarrassed. He got off his tractor. I asked if he was OK and he said yes.

            “I said, well, I don’t mean to be nosey but you were crying. It’s not my business, but if you want to talk about it, I’m here. He was quiet a minute. We were standing out in the hot field, the engines of the tractors were making that low rumble, and finally he said he’d been thinking of something that happened in Coffeyville. He said he had worked it out, it just made him sad sometimes. He said he knew he could be kind of gloomy sometimes, but really it was OK. Anyway, we went back to work.”

            I nodded. “Working the fields driving a tractor can give a guy a lot of time to think,” I said. “You know, I think that’s sometimes why good farmers are kind of solid people. If you bark at your wife for something that’s not important, you’re going to have all day to think about it on a tractor. If your finances aren’t OK, you’ve got a lot of time to worry.”

            “Yeah, a guy has to be OK with himself to spend those long hours thinking,” Sam said.

            “Well, maybe,” I said and laughed. It wasn’t a good idea to generalize too much.

            We found a place to park at the drive-in, put a speaker on Sam’s window. The sun was just going down and I had a large glass of iced tea I’d brought with me. I sipped it trying to stay cool. I drink my tea without sugar. I told Sam about a girl I knew who dumped sugar into her tea. “I tease her about it, calling it cavity in a glass.”

            “I know her,” Sam said. I was referring to Roseanne Dyal. “She has a pretty face.”

            I nodded and slumped on the bench seat in the pickup, then not being comfortable, sat up straight again. We watched the movie a while, then I went to the building with the projector, which had a snack bar and restrooms in the back. I washed my hands in the restroom and walked out still drying my hands on a paper towel. I was behind the building.

            “Hello, Bowler.” I tossed the paper towel in a large trash can outside, looked up and saw Rebecca.

            “Hello yourself.” She gave me a smile and it gave me a nice feeling. I walked up to her. “How’s your summer going,” I said. “Having any fun?”

            “It’s going OK. I’m working for my dad as a receptionist.” Her father was a tax accountant and kept books for several local businesses. He was a consultant for the Southern Kansas Bank. “How’s farm work?”

            “It’s OK, I don’t mind it. You know what the job is.”

            “Yes, I’ve heard but I’ve never been out there on a tractor. What’s it like?”

            “Bumpy,” I said, and she laughed and put her hand on my shoulder.

            “No, really it is. That tractor goes up and down on those fields all day long, jostling you about in that chair. The land looks flat, but somehow that doesn’t translate into a smooth ride.”

            She smiled.

            “I’ve been thinking about you,” I added. “You looked really great the other day when you were at camp. A pair of shorts and a sleeveless cotton shirt suits you.” She was dressed the same way this night, but in different clothes.

            “Well, nice of you to say,” she said. “I’m here with Beaver. Who are you with?”

            “Sam,” I said. I pointed toward his pickup.

            “I could ask Beaver to go sit with Sam, and you and I could talk in his car.”

            “I was thinking it would be nice to sit and talk with you,” I said. “I see you around, and I like you, we could sit and get to know each other a little.”

            “Great,” she said. “Let’s go.”

            I walked with her to the car. We got in and Beaver said hello. Beaver pushed his thick glasses up on his nose and asked me how it was going. We talked for a few minutes. Thom Beevor was working for an old guy, Max Heckman, in a TV repair shop. Beaver could fix anything, and Max loved having him around. He said Beaver could fix electronics better than he could, and he’d been at it a while.

Beaver was the one who had set up the spare battery in Roger’s pickup. Roger could run his pickup on one battery, and play music on the other. When one ran down, he’d flip a switch and the spare battery would take the charge while he drove the pickup. It was a clever set-up.

            “Sam’s on the other side of the concession stand, if you want to go over and see him,” Rebecca said.

            “Yeah, I like hanging out with Sam,” Beaver said. He had been in Boy Scouts with us. “Maybe I’ll go watch the movie with him.” He got out. “You know where to find me,” Beaver said, and walked away.

            Rebecca leaned against my shoulder and I put my arm around her. “That’s nice,” I said.

            “Yeah it is,” she said.

            We watched the movie a few minutes, then she turned toward me. I kissed her. A quick one at first, and then a long kiss. We were holding each other tight. We kissed for quite a while, and I rubbed my hands along her long, smooth legs. She put her hands on my shoulders and ribs.

            “I’ve always admired your body,” she said. “It’s better touching you than I even imagined it would be.”

            She felt the muscle in my arm and I laughed. “I always went to the wrestling matches, you know. I hang out with the geeks, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like good bodies.” We kissed some more.

            “Are you going to tell Mara we made out,” she said. She was smiling as she said it.

            “I don’t think so,” I said.

            “I won’t get you in trouble,” Rebecca said. “But if you ever break up with her, you might remember that we have fun together.”

            “I couldn’t forget,” I said.

            She kissed me again and sat up straight. We had cooled a little. “What are you going to do after you graduate?”

            “I’ll go to college. It’s expected of me. I don’t know what I’ll study yet. I like biology, history, literature. I’m sure I’ll think of something. How about you?”

            “Of course, I’ve got a while to think about it,” she said. “I always think I’ll have a good life, but it seems like a long time till I’ll be on my own. I’m trying to figure out a way to have fun in high school. I don’t think I’m as popular as some girls, so I hang out with the nerds. They’re fun, and safe. They don’t hit on me. For them, it’s good enough just to have a girl hanging around. Or maybe they’re just polite. I’m fairly serious about my school work, I guess, so hanging with them makes sense.”

            “Yeah, I figured you were smart. What do you like to do?”

            “Make out with you,” she said, and we laughed. “Every year in the summer, my family takes a trip to New York. We go sight-seeing, and we all like Broadway shows. They’re really good.”

            “That’s something I never thought of doing,” I said. “Tell me about what you’ve seen.”

            “My father likes Shakespeare, and he read some plays to us and then we see the shows, ‘Othello’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ We have fun, my father likes it. He likes the stories and he likes to explain the language. He has a dictionary of middle English. He said Shakespeare addresses all the famous themes, love, greed, revenge.

            “My favorite show last summer was ‘Follies,’ about ex-showgirls, you know based on Ziegfeld Follies. It’s a musical by Stephen Sondheim; they all meet at this old theater and talk about the good old days, and the good and bad about how life has worked out. That’s why I say I know I’m going to enjoy being an adult, it’s just getting through high school I’m worried about. Anyway, I loved it; it was a great show. The place where lovers are always young and beautiful, and everyone lives only for love,” she quoted.

            I laughed. “Wow, I like that.”

            “It’s fun. We’ll go to Central Park or the Empire State Building, and then dinner, then to the hotel to get dressed up. The crowd is always so interesting. There’s my mother and father, and I have a younger sister.”

            “Yeah, I’ve seen her.” We were quiet.

            We kissed again, and I unbuttoned her blouse and unsnapped her bra and felt her firm, small breasts. I touched her and she touched me and we were both excited again for a little while, kissing hard and pulling on each other’s hips. Finally we rested and it felt nice to hold her. We were lying down across the bench seat.

            “I’m not going to have sex with you tonight,” she said.

            “I know,” I said. “We’re just getting to know each other.”

            “Still, you better watch out for me this summer. I’m getting a lot of crazy ideas.”

            I laughed.

            The mood had passed a little bit, and I kind of sat up and she leaned against me. We were watching the movie. “Do you know what’s going on?” I said.

            “I’m barely thinking about the movie,” she said.

            On the drive to camp, after the movie, Sam and I talked about the Oklahoma State University wrestler John Smith, who would become a two-time Olympic champion, although we didn’t know that then. All wrestlers talked about John Smith because he had been quoted as saying he didn’t like to pin his opponent. If one pins an opponent, the guy says he fell into something. Beat him 23-4 and he admits he was defeated. John Smith was famous for running up the score.

            “Do you think Roger’s good enough to go to Oklahoma State?” I said. You could throw a rock from Medicine Lodge and hit Oklahoma.

            “He’s good,” Sam said. “I’ve been wondering about it, myself.”