Chapter 12

            I remember seeing a lot of good movies during those years. John Wayne’s “The Cowboys” was about a man who hires a bunch of young boys for a cattle drive; the men of the community are off mining for gold. “The Godfather” made its debut in 1972; we had hardly considered there was such a thing as the mafia. Robert Redford was in “Jeremiah Johnson,” and all boys wanted to go hard-core camping, become mountain men.

            I drove Mara, Roger and Rose to Wichita to see “Deliverance,” a powerful movie, but what I remember most is when we went to dinner after the movie. Rose, in her cute Mexican accent, imitated the banjo going “De de de de de de de de de.” Until that moment, I could not imagine it with a Mexican accent and we all laughed for some time. It was fun.            Rose was pretty, with smooth, brown skin, jet-black hair and a figure that was other worldly. Both Rose and Mara were smart and both had a sense of humor, but sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of Rose and have to hold my breath she was so lovely.

            On the next Saturday night, I was again the last one to arrive at camp. I’d picked up a bag of ice and arrived about 7:30. Roger had the grill going and I was fairly starved. Wrestlers in season have to make weight and Coach Soleman’s advice to us about nutrition was straightforward. Eat regular food. If one was trying to lose weight, eat smaller portions. Skip the potato chips, soda pop, candy and cookies. Interestingly, nearly all my wrestling friends ate in a reasonable way.

            The pop and the chips were almost untouched, but we filled up on hamburgers and watermelon. David Western hardly said a word, he was so intimidated by Rose’s beauty. After dinner Mara walked me to the wrestling mat. We’d just finished cleaning up after dinner. Mara was slender with straight, blonde-brown hair, green eyes and a pretty smile. I was quite taken with her.

            She pushed me to the mat and I fell, good-natured, on my stomach. “So, you’re a tough district champion,” she said.

            “What do you want?” I said, smiling.

            She used her forearms to push me over on my back, and then she leaned on her forearms and pushed me to the mat. “Is this a wrestling hold?” she said.

            “Yes,” I said, “you’re a natural.” She was laughing now at my bold lie. “I don’t think you’re so tough. So Julie Hemerschmidt comes out here with dinner and you go ahead and eat with her?”

            “Hey,” I said, “she’s dating Sam. The food was here so I ate.”

            She bounced on my chest. I could see everyone watching us. I was laughing. “Just any old girl comes out here and fixes you dinner and you’ll be fine with that, you’ll just go ahead and eat.”

            I put my arms around Mara, rolled her over on her back and kissed her. “Just you, Mara. You’re my girl.”

            She kissed me and gave me a big hug. “That’s the right answer, Mr. Bowler, because you aren’t so tough and I could hurt you if I wanted.”

            “You’re already hurting me,” I said. “Now I want to make up and be friends.”  We kissed for a few minutes, then got up and joined our friends in some camp chairs. Wrestlers always talk about making out with a girl on a wrestling mat. It was nice, but obviously it would have been better if we’d had privacy.

            The owner of the Southern Kansas Bank was a big man by the name of Rowland Potter. He has silver grey hair, a little thin on the top, but he must have been 70, so it fit his look. He dressed up, but wasn’t stylish. I know he had a thread-bare blue suit, worn on the insides of the thighs of his suit pants. His shoes could’ve used a polish. Under his suit jacket, he wore short sleeves in the summer. He was overweight to the point of looking unhealthy, like he’d given up on having muscles with thin legs and a big belly.

            He’d lost his wife, but had three grown children working in other places, other banks in Kansas. I assumed they were being groomed to take over the Southern Kansas Bank.

            “I heard he has 49 sections of wheat ground,” Sam said.

            “I heard he has as much land as would make up the entire territory of Barber County,” Julie said.

            That didn’t make sense as there are more than 240 square miles in Barber County, 640 acres making up a square mile. “I think we would’ve heard if he had 150,000 acres of farm land,” Sam said.

            Julie shrugged. “That’s just what I heard.” We laughed.

            I knew a man in Barber County who farmed 7,000 acres, and another with 5,400 acres. These were large operations.  

            “Well, he’s rich,” Julie said.

            “That’s for sure,” Sam said. We couldn’t imagine the kind of wealth he had, and anyway after buying a car and a house what does one need? That was as far as our thinking took us.

            “I wonder what he does with all that money,” Rose said.

            “Buys more land,” Sam said. We knew there was a man at the bank who had no other job than to visit Mr. Potter’s farms and numerous tenant farmers.

            “What’s it like to sleep out here?” Rose said.

            “It’s nice,” Sam said. “That mat’s like a great big bed. It cools off at night, just a little with the breeze, and you relax every muscle and fall into a deep sleep. The sun wakes you up, about 4:30 to 5. It makes you feel like natural man to sleep outside.”

            “Natural man gets bit by a lot by bugs, yes?” said Rose.

            “Sometimes,” Sam said, smiling.

            “And snakes?”

            “No snakes so far,” Sam said.

            Roger turned on his stereo and we sat listening to music for a little while. Paul McCartney had released a song from the Ram album, “The Back Seat of My Car.” Oh oh we believe that we can’t be wrong.

            When it got dark we walked the girls to Rose’s red Volkswagen Bug. I stood with Mara on the passenger’s side. Roger was talking to Rose on the driver’s side. Sam and Julie were over by her car. Mara invited me to the coop’s annual summer picnic. I told her I’d go.

Chapter 13

            The Medicine Lodge Farmers Cooperative picnic was popular with farmers; the coop laid out a big spread of food. It was held in the air-conditioned gymnasium at Medicine Lodge High School on a Sunday afternoon.

            Mara Jantzen’s father was named Jerry, his wife Helene, her 13-year-old brother, John, but he went by Jack. At first, I was a little nervous about sitting with them at a dinner in front of the entire community. We had dated a year and she wanted me to come, so I tried to relax. It turned out I didn’t have to make small talk. Jerry Jantzen farmed more than 3,000 acres, and everyone knew him and wanted to talk to him. His wife was also popular. Jack ran off to sit with some of his friends.

            I saw Guy Smith, and took Mara over to meet him. Guy was with his son Robert, who had worked the wheat harvest with us, and his wife, Gabriella. Robert is the electrician nicknamed Buzz. I could tell Guy was pleased I’d introduce him to my girlfriend. We hadn’t even talked about the fact I had a girlfriend.

            “We wondered who you were spending your Saturday nights with,” Gabriella said in a friendly tone.

            I also told Mara we had to say hello to Edgar Patterson. He is a farmer who lets Sam, Roger and I hunt on his farmland. He’s always glad to see me, and although he’s probably 40 we are indeed friends. He has a small airplane and he’s friends with my father.

            He played on the 1951 state championship team, and when I ask about it he starts telling me stories about many of the men in our town when they were young and playing football. I can’t really do justice to it, but Edgar was an entertaining guy. We didn’t talk about football at the coop dinner, but usually that’s what we talked about. The 1951 Medicine Lodge team and the Kansas State Wildcats.

            To start the meeting, the president of the farmers group stood at a microphone. He was wearing faded overalls and a dress shirt, which is common dress in Kansas farm towns. He said the harvest had been good this year and the price of wheat is $5 a bushel so things are good for most farmers. Next, a representative of the U.S. Congress thanked the coop for the invite. He said the responsibility he has taken on in the House is to market Kansas wheat around the world. “The world’s changing and the hard, red wheat grown in Kansas is in demand. We need to continue to develop and maintain grain markets and continue to feed the world.”

            It sounds corny, I know, but Kansas farmers really do feel the mission is to be the breadbasket of not only the U.S. but the world. “We feed the world” is on signs in front of those skyscraper-like grain elevators that dot the landscape.

            We sat down to steaks, hamburgers, chicken breasts and a huge assortment of salads, vegetables and desserts. Vast amounts of coffee and iced tea were available. There were probably 300 people at the picnic.

            We sat down to eat and I had Jerry Jantzen on one side and Mara on the other. It was interesting Mara had the same easy gait and lean build of her father. Jerry and I talked about my farm job. He asked how my father was. He was easy to talk to. He was taller than me, wearing straight-leg Levi jeans, cowboy boots and a Western shirt. I wondered for a minute if he was a millionaire. In some places, one can easily pick out a rich person, but in Medicine Lodge any old cowboy in faded jeans and manure on his boots might be worth a lot of money.

            Those millionaire farmers didn’t need much, a farm house and a pickup, and most of them would never sell land to be a “paper” millionaire.

            Mara was smart. I didn’t see her back on the farm. She was an A student and I had a feeling she would make her own way. In a way, dating Mara, I had outkicked the coverage. Mara was nice and funny and it was easy being with her family.

            I was told Jack was tearing up the junior high track world. I participated in track in high school, mostly to build up my speed and endurance for football. Coach Soleman loved it that I ran the 800, a grueling race because one must run the entire distance at almost top speed. Plus, I got a chance to work with the shot and discus throwers in the weight room. I wasn’t fast enough for sprints or long races, lousy at the hurdles, unremarkable in the high jump or the long jump. I’d tried almost every sport, baseball, basketball, golf, tennis, and I pretty much knew my place in the sports world. I played some football but if I was injured I wouldn’t be missed, and I was above-average in wrestling.

            Still, I felt I was maximizing my abilities. I could run five miles or bench press 150 pounds. Organized sports would probably last only one more year of my life then I’d have to figure out what I was really going to do.

            In the meantime, I was sitting with Mara Jantzen, a pretty girl in a simple summer dress with nice legs, so I figured I must be doing something right or else I was simply lucky.

            After the picnic, Mara said she wanted to get out of there. She said we could go swimming at the pond, and I was for it. I had swimming trunks in the trunk of my car. The swimming hole was a long way from the Jantzen house and barn, surrounded by hundreds of acres of wheat ground, now stubble, and pasture.

            “You don’t have to worry about snapping turtles,” Mara said. She changed into a two-piece in my car. We carried a blanket I kept in my car down to the pond’s edge, waded in a little water and talked. It was clear and sunny and hot outside, but it felt nice standing in the water. Jane went in, in a shallow dive, and I followed her.

            “You were quite sociable at the picnic,” Mara said. “I hardly got to talk to any of my friends.”

            “I wasn’t trying to avoid your friends,” I said.

            “No, it’s OK, it was cute. ‘Come on Mara, we have to say hello to Guy Smith. Come on Mara, we have to go over and talk to this guy. Hey Edgar, nice to see you.’ ”

            “Is that what I sound like?”

            She put her arms around me. “I’m teasing you. You did very well in front of my parents. They think you’re a nice boy,” she said, and then she laughed. “Bowler Jones is such a nice boy,” she said sarcastically.

            I smiled. “Tease me all you want. I am a nice boy.”

            The pond was nice, the water clear and cool. “It’s fed by a spring,” Mara said, “pretty nice, isn’t it?” I had been here before. I knew it was fed by a spring and there weren’t any snapping turtles.

            I nodded, and we began kissing. Holding Mara, cool, the wet skin against mine, I didn’t want the moment to pass. In a minute Mara took my hand. She walked me to the shore and we sat on the blanket and kissed some more, and before long her bikini bottom was off and we were making love.

            Women are so interesting. They know when things are going to happen, and men have to go along and wait until we’re pleasantly surprised. I knew it would be like this the rest of my life.

            “Oh my,” said Mara. It was a sigh. “I’ve been waiting for this all day.” I looked down at her. Her straight, blonde-brown hair hung down toward the ground. It was about shoulder length. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, but she was pretty either way. She was slender with nice, round breasts. She looked at me and had a slight, distant smile on her face. She was wearing a bikini top and that’s all. In my mind, I took a picture and promised myself I’d remember it forever.

Chapter 14

            Roger’s parents went camping and fishing at Wilson Reservoir, a large, clean-water lake in western Kansas. Roger didn’t say anything, but we knew we wouldn’t see much of him for the week. Rose came out after work on Monday to pick him up. She got out of her Volkswagen wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt, and no bra. Sam was beside me.

            “A woman couldn’t be any better made,” he said.

            “I know,” I said. “She’s beautiful.”

            Roger had been full of energy when he got in from work. He had his shirt off and was working the speed bag. He could make the bag dance. Now, anyone can get a good workout on a speed bag, but making it dance at a high speed took athleticism and strength, two things Roger had in spades. Rose, with a smile on her face, walked toward him and he stopped.

            “Hello,” Roger said. “How are you?”

            She smiled. “Pretty happy now.” Sam and I walked toward them to be sociable.

            “Let me try the speed bag,” she said. “My dad said he used to be a boxer. Show me how. I think I’ll be able to do it.”

            “Sure,” Roger said. He hit the bag slowly and in rhythm. “Just get it going a little and try to find an easy pace. When you’re comfortable with it, you can start to make it go faster. It won’t take but a minute or two and your arms will get tired.”

            Sam and I were beside them now. “Hi Sam, hey Bowler,” she said. We nodded hello. She held the bag still with her left hand.

            She raised her arms, stood in a boxer’s stance, which is the same basic stance in every sport. Feet squared, shoulder length apart, knees bent a little. She gave a punch and the bag came back and hit her fist. We laughed, but not out of meanness. Rose’s laugh was so cute a person could not but thrill to hear it. She held the bag still again.

            “OK, I’ve got it,” she said. She found a slow but steady rhythm and maintained a steady concentration. Without meaning to, without a bit of malice, I watched her breasts dance inside the t-shirt and was momentarily mesmerized. I looked at Sam and he gave me a smile; he had seen it, too. We all looked at the bag in an attempt to appear polite, but we were all thinking of what a fine pair she had and tried not to imagine seeing her naked.

            A bead of sweat ran down her nose and she stopped, breathing hard. “That’s a good workout,” she said, laughing at our embarrassment but not mentioning it. Women know what they’re doing.

            Roger put his arm around her. “We’re going to go into town for dinner. I suppose you boys will be able to manage without my cooking.”

            “We’ll manage,” Sam said. Roger grabbed his t-shirt, and a set of keys, and they walked to Rose’s red Volkswagen Bug.

            “I’ll see you guys later,” Rose said. “Thanks for the boxing lesson.” She drove off slowly so as to not raise a lot of dust. Common courtesy in Kansas.

            Sam asked if I wanted a hamburger, and I said yes plus I had a cantaloupe we could cut open and that would be our dinner.

            “I’ve been noticing the heat,” I said. It was only 7:30 but the sun still blazed in the sky. Many days it had been 100 degrees and somehow a person got used to it. “Do you think we live in the hottest place in the world?”
            “It’s funny how you get used to always being hot, always covered with a layer of sweat and dust, but never think of it as being out of the ordinary.”

            I nodded. “Where’s David?”

            Sam had some charcoal burning and was making hamburger patties. “He has longed for Cathy Snell of Coffeyville for a month, all I heard on our rides to and from work. He said, oh, maybe she was the one and I should have stayed. But, one weekend, Laura Kolzinski talked to him. There were a bunch of people at the drive in, standing around talking, and she went up and talked to him and now they’re a couple.”

            “I guess I’m behind on the news.”

            “This was about a week ago. I think he’s living in a room at their house now. Every minute they’re together, they’re holding hands. She’s been driving him to work in the mornings, and she picks him up at 7.”

            “Really?” I said. I thought about my parents. They would never have allowed me to move a girlfriend into the house. Even if they had a spare bedroom. They would have said something about the bad example it would set for my younger brother and sisters.

            “In the spring, just before school let out, I said hello to Laura in the hall and she gave me a nice smile,” I said. “She’s always been shy, and I think of her as a young girl, but when I saw her in the hall I thought, ‘Man she has grown up.’ ”

            “Yeah, I thought the same thing,” Sam said. “All the sudden, she is a pretty woman, well developed. We were all stupid for not noticing. Especially me. I was single at the time I noticed her.”

            “She’s shy. It seems out of character that she would go up and make a play for David Western.”

            “Nature abhors a vacuum,” Sam said.

            “I often wonder, there are the drama and music people, and the jocks and the debaters and the hippies, all these little groups within our school. I always wonder if people who aren’t in a group in high school feel left out.”

            “Probably they do sometimes,” Sam said. “But it’s not as simple as the way you put it. People in our high school have lots of little groups they hang out in. Take Mara. She could be a cheerleader, like Rose and Julie, but she works and obviously school is important to her. She could play sports, too, if she wanted. She’s got a hundred friends, but no one would associate her with a certain group. And some would say you’re a jock, but you’re friends with the science geeks, Brad, Beaver, Big Ed all-SKL.”

            “So, we might not be seeing David Western much?” I said. “Will he leave his camper out here?”

            “He said he would,” Sam said. “He didn’t say it, but he loves having Laura drive him around. He thinks he’s living the life. And, by the way, I saw Big Ed all-SKL with Roseanne Dyal.”

            “Young Eddie Morton has his first girlfriend. Living out here in the country driving a tractor all day, I never hear anything. Well, isn’t life interesting?”

            “Big Ed and Roseanne, it makes sense,” Sam said.

            Since Roger wasn’t around, we didn’t play his stereo. We ate and cleaned up the camp, probably more than usual. I cleaned the wrestling mat with disinfectant. When someone did this during the season, someone would inevitably say, “There’s a fungus among-us.” Rhyming fungus and among us. Impetigo is actually caused by bacteria.

Sam and I both liked a little order in our lives, but it never took long to pick up camp. When the sun went down, I peeled off my cowboy boots and lay down on the wrestling mat. A few minutes later, Sam had his pillow out and was doing the same. The only sound I heard was the wind turning the windmill.

            “During basketball season, I remember one night looking at Rose in her cheerleading uniform,” Sam said. “I remember thinking she must be about the sexiest woman in the whole world. As pretty as any woman you see on TV.”

            I laughed. “I agree,” I said, sure that we both went to sleep thinking about her.

            I was surprised to realize I was thinking of madness as I lay there that night on the wrestling mat. James and Clem played with a well-established country and western band that performed everywhere within a hundred-mile radius of Medicine Lodge. We could’ve followed them from little town to little town, meeting the wild girls of Southern Kansas. We could’ve danced with them at the Opera House in Caldwell and the VFW in Kingman and the municipal hall at Pratt. A girl in every town, drinking beer like crazy every Saturday night, driving home on dirt roads to avoid the police. Getting our kicks, maybe having to fight a little, establishing bad reputations.

            Only Friday nights on the football fields kept us sane, provided enough excitement for us. If a person lived in a little place like Medicine Lodge, the most exciting thing in life was a Friday night game. It kept us with our girlfriends, at our jobs, in high school. It was almost over, but it was the only life we knew. Rose was as unattainable as the wild life. I would be leaving town in a year. I knew that.

Chapter 15

            I enjoyed the time I spent with Sam; he was a smart guy and good at many things. In the morning, I did my jogging and three sets of 10 squats. Sam did three sets as well, and punched the heavy bag for a while. I was always jealous of his enormous arms. I could punch forever and not have arms like that. We went to work, and returned, and kept the routine about the same all week. Each evening, Roger would show up, then Rose, and off he would go to town and we wouldn’t see him again until the next evening. He was staying at his parents’ house in Medicine Lodge while they were away camping. Roger was an interesting guy. He never made a big deal about dating Rose, never bragged on their love, but we knew it was good.

            I asked Sam if he remembered the Andover football game. Sam had a concussion and after the game had run the wrong way off the field. We all saw Sam running away from the gymnasium, away from the showers, but we just watched. It was Roger who sensed something wrong. He ran after Sam, turned him around.

            “I remember,” Sam said. It was the second concussion he’d had that season. “I remember the first time I had a concussion. Man, I had this fog in my brain and I knew what it was, but I just kept playing.”

            We wouldn’t know until years later how dangerous concussions could be. It was a little bit of a point of pride. If you got “dinged” you didn’t ask to be taken out, one just played through it.

            “I saw Brad the other night at the drive-in. He was hired by the school district to clean buses. Then they put him on weeding duty. He would go out to the practice field and pick stickers out of the field all day. Talk about a hot, miserable job.”

            Brad was a member of the “science club.”

            “I asked Brad if he had considered playing football,” Bowler said. “I knew he was considering a career in the military. He had asked my father what he needed to do to get into pilot’s training. He knew there would be physical training, but he looked at me like I was crazy. ‘I’m not going to go out there and bang my head against other people all day,’ he said.”

            Sam laughed. “Well, Brad is smarter than me. I had a chemistry lab with him once. He could joke around, but he always knew what he was supposed to be doing.”

            “Yeah, my dad loves him,” I said. “He’s always saying I should be friends with Brad instead of hanging around the jocks.”

            Sam nodded. “You mean instead of hanging around Roger and me.”

            I nodded, but it was no secret some people thought of Roger as a bad influence and Sam was already living on his own. Roger wasn’t a great student, and he rode a motorcycle and was known to go to beer busts, but then I had gone to a few myself, which made my father quite upset.

            “My father blames him because a few times when I went home drunk, I was with Roger.”

            “Your father wants you to hang out with college material. I get it. He probably thinks you should be an engineer and go to flight school yourself.”

            “I like flying,” I said. It was no secret I’d spent time with my father at the air field in nearby Wichita. My father owns a small plane, a Beechcraft Travelair. Sometimes he flew it to Boeing to work. “But I’m not obsessed with it. I like the medical field. I do pretty well at biology and micro-biology, but I’m not interested in the advanced math I would have to take for engineering. My brother Mathew was good at that, though, and he took auto mechanics at the same time. He was the engineer.”

            “Have you heard from your brother?” Sam said. He knew the story of how my brother had dodged the draft board for a while by continually changing addresses in Colorado.

            “No, we don’t hear from him much. You know there’s a rift between Mathew and my father about the Vietnam war. Last I heard, he was living in Manitou Springs. With a woman. My father doesn’t think much of that.”

            Sam laughed. “Young Mathew is more interested in women than going into the Army. Makes sense to me. I hope I can avoid that Vietnam thing.”

            I nodded. It was the first acknowledgement that Sam understood what was going on in my family, and he didn’t hold it against me. It was good to think about my brother in the way that Sam had. Thinking of him with a woman in a hippie van instead of going into the Army made sense when you put it like that. Mathew never kept a vehicle long, so the van was probably gone already.

            Later in the week, Mara came out. Sam and Mara talked about college. Mara said she was going to be pre-med, Sam was thinking of computer engineering or accounting. As they talked on, I started thinking about my senior year. There was a chance I’d be a starter in football, at defensive back, and of course in wrestling I wanted to put together my best season.

            Mara said, “If Bowler took calculus and chem 2 he could be pre-med, too. The best thing for him to do would be retire from sports and work on scholastics.”

            “Really?” I said, “That’s what you think?”

            She nodded, but didn’t give it much.

            I’m a good student, have friends, work, but I wasn’t ready to start thinking about college. I remembered a time when I was in second grade. I’d spent all summer at the municipal pool and was darkly tanned. It was September, the weather was sunny and hot, and as I looked out the window I couldn’t believe I had to be in school. I should be at the pool, I was thinking, but the pool was closed.

            Having that same closed-in feeling, it was recurring, I got up. I left Sam and Mara, and began hitting the big bag. All the swimming, running and hitting wouldn’t put off the future for a minute, I knew that, but it felt good to have my arms up and hit the bag. Anyway, I knew I could be an A student if I put my mind to it; I just hadn’t put my mind to it.

            Mara walked up. “Everything all right?”

            “Yes,” I said.

            “OK,” she said, “you don’t have to tell me.”

            “I’ve been driving a tractor all day. I guess I’ve just got some energy to burn.”

            “I know our paths will diverge someday, but you’re my boyfriend. You’ll be going away to school, too.”

            “I know.”

            “We could take a motorcycle ride, maybe look at the stars a while. I’ll bet I could help you burn some energy.”

            “Yeah, if you want to.” I didn’t show much enthusiasm.

            “I want to.” She knew she had pissed me off with the remark about retiring from high school sports. People always had to remind me I wasn’t the best athlete. Maybe it was because I chose to hang out with the two best athletes at our school.

            I took a blanket, rolled it tight, set it in front of me on my Honda 305 motorcycle. Mara got on back. We drove slowly a few miles down the road, lay down the blanket on the grassy entrance to a field. We sat on the blanket and began to make out. We took our time and it was nice.

            There was a breeze, so there weren’t any bugs, and the stars were bright. After we made love, I lay back, feeling content, and wondered about the millions of young men throughout the history of the world who had had just the same sort of experience. Felt so content and so satisfied, and yet they knew the future was coming straight at them. Maybe they had to go off to war. Throughout history there had to have been a billion men who had to go off to war after making love to a woman.

            Maybe Mara would be gone before I knew it; I was already feeling the distance. I wanted in the worst way to start as a defensive back on the football team in my senior year. I couldn’t believe Mara didn’t know this.

            I was surprised to find I was thinking about Killer, the way his floppy, straight blond hair would bounce as he shot a basketball. He was an average athlete and only started because the basketball team wasn’t very good. He had averaged eight or nine points a game last year, but I’ll bet he has a goal of 30 points a game as a senior. Perhaps he’d not told anyone this goal, but you knew he had a fantasy of pulling it all together. He matures and finds he has a good shot. That’s why they call him Killer.

            I couldn’t understand why Mara didn’t see that I wanted to put it all together for my senior year. She knew I ran daily and lifted weights and took it all seriously.

            I thought in the winter I might go to a few more basketball games. If I saw Killer had a good game, I might mention to him I’d noticed.

Chapter 16

            In the morning, on my run, I usually go west, but on this morning I went north. About a half a mile away from our camp is a creek and at this dry time of the year, there are pools of water in the creek bottom. A wood bridge goes over the creek. The land on the south is wheat stubble, like what is on our camp site, but on the north it’s a pasture. The land lining both sides of the creek is comprised of rocks, sand and scrub trees.

            The light was coming up and streaming through the pasture. In knee-high grass, there were three coyotes. They were young with shiny fur. They weren’t really running, but bouncing through the grass and it brought a smile to my face. I thought of them as three brothers out exploring.

            At camp, the talk was about football. We would do lots of running, lots of sprints, and even though I was in shape the work would be hard. Two-a-day practices, first in the early morning and then in the heat of the day. After a couple of weeks, we’d put on pads and begin hitting. No matter how much one works out, there is being in shape and there is being in football shape. It seems weird, but your body has to get used to contact, to getting hit and hitting people.

            Sam and I drank coffee, and I had some cereal for breakfast, and we went to work. It was a nice time for us. The next Monday night, Roger and David Western were back in camp. We ate dinner and joked a bit. A car drove by, an older couple looking at our camp. We waved.

            We were well into summer. Our camp had grown a little over-large and slightly out of control. Roger had enjoyed staying back in town and having the run of a house when his parents were out of town. David Western was pleased to stay at the Kolzinski’s sometimes.

            “Mrs. Kolzinski cooks a big meal every night, and I take a shower every day. And Laura drives me to work,” David said. “It’s a nice situation, so I’m just going to go with it.”

            We were all getting paid, but didn’t have any time to spend our money so it somehow felt as if we were better off. Roger commented how it was nice to have money again. “Not big money like David, but it’s nice,” he said.

            Roger, Sam and I didn’t know how much money David had in his welded box under the hood of his pickup, but now we were thinking about it again.

            David laughed. “Hey, it’s not that much,” he said. “It gives me the freedom to go west, but you know, it’s working out OK right now at Laura’s so I don’t know the plan.”            “That’s nothing new,” Sam said. “We never really know what you’re up to anyway.”

            “Yeah, that’s true,” David said, and laughed in a good-natured way. “I know I was kind of moody when I first moved out here.”

            “Mooning after Cathy Snell is more like it,” Sam said.

            David laughed. “OK, you can tease me. I was pretty gloomy for a while.”

            We saw a car we thought we recognized and it turned out to be Jim Soleman, our wrestling coach, with his wife Fiona. Coach is 30-something, and he is in good shape, and his wife is pretty. “Nice looking for a mature quail,” Roger said once.

            “Hey, Coach, nice to see you finally made it out to see our set-up,” Roger said.

            Coach laughed. “It’s all we’ve heard about all summer. I told Jim we’d better get out here before you break it down for football season,” Fiona said.

            It was mid-July; we had a month before football.

            “Are you guys working out or is this just an excuse to get out of the house?” Coach said.

            “A little of both,” Roger said. “Bowler runs every day, but Sam and I just hit the speed bag. It’s been nice, though. You get used to sleeping outside in the summer. It’s restful.”

            “Some wrestlers came over from Derby, Hightower. And we’ve had other guys from the wrestling team out here,” I said.

            “I saw Cowboy in town the other day,” Coach said.

            Cowboy was a slender boy, but muscular enough. He has an odd style, tying people up with his long legs in a ride called the grapevine. His legs are so long one would have thought they were drawn by a cartoonist. Cowboy didn’t like to wrestle with Sam, although Sam only weighed nine pounds more. Sam used to say, “Come wrestle me; I’ll get out of that grapevine.” Which was the truth. Sam liked to give Cowboy a beating just on general principles, and Coach knew this. Like Big Ed all-SKL and a smaller guy named Ted Cone, Cowboy won a lot of matches. I probably fall into that mid-level group.

            “You live out here, and drive a tractor all day, you don’t see many people,” I said. “I’m not complaining, we’ve had fun.”

            “Can I look at the mat?” Coach said. We said sure and he walked over, looked around. Despite the slight mess of the camp, the only thing under the tent was the mat, which we kept clear of junk and kept clean, for purposes already stated.

            “It still looks good, even with all the hard use,” Coach said with a smile. He turned to David Western. “I heard you were out here with these roughnecks. What are you doing these days?”

            “Hello Coach,” David said. “I’m working with Sam for Stan Stanton.”

            “Last I heard you were in eastern Kansas earning big money in the oil fields.”

            “I was. I thought I’d head west, like Colorado, for a while. But I ran into Sam and he said he was camping out for the summer. We wrestled a few times, but he’s too much for me now.”

            “Yeah, Sam Louret has turned into a pretty good grappler.”

            Fiona put her arms around Jim. “Buying this wrestling mat was a pretty good investment,” she said.

            “Well, the summer’s not over. We’ll see what shape it’s in in a month.”

            Coach could work a person pretty hard, but when he talked to you it was in a pretty lighthearted way. I don’t think he expected the mat to come to any harm.

            “The tent gives it a different dimension,” Coach said. “Kind like being under the big top or something.”

            Fiona laughed. “I think of it that way myself,” I said.

            “Well, Ed is the person I see most around town. I’m surprised half the boys you know haven’t moved out here.”

            “Well, Ed’s kind of a rough guy so we’re afraid to have him around,” Roger said. Coach Soleman laughed. “Yeah, he’s too rough a guy to hang out with you boys,” he said.

            Coach and his wife started for the car. “Don’t be bringing any girls out here now,” he said, giving us a smile.

            “They’re afraid of that big wrestling mat,” Roger said. He was the first to proclaim innocence at any mention of trouble.

            “They probably can’t outrun you on a wrestling mat,” Coach said. His wife gave him a little jab in the ribs, and he turned around to smile at us again.

            After Coach left, Thom Beevor pulled up with Brad, Jessica and Big-Ed all-SKL. Ed was disappointed he’d missed Coach Soleman.

            Roger put on his stereo and we sat around in camp chairs as the sun was going down. “Coach said he saw Cowboy this summer,” Roger said. “I don’t know how he happened to see him unless Cowboy was at the coop or something.” It was common knowledge Cowboy lived on a big ranch 20 miles outside of town, barely inside the school district boundary. Cowboy was an odd duck, but to his credit he came from a family that worked hard. They had a lot of pasture, for cattle, and a lot of farm land.

            I was looking at Rebecca. She smiled at me.

            Ed said, “Remember how Cowboy was going around with that petition to get John Lennon’s ‘Power to the People’ off the air?” Beaver, Brad and Rebecca nodded.

            “Said it was a communist anthem,” Sam said. “He couldn’t get anybody to sign his petition. He wanted to take it to the radio station in Wichita. He kept saying, ‘Listen to the words. It’s a communist anthem.’ ”

            “One night we were wrestling Chaney,” Ed said. “They were supposed to have this hot-shot team, but we beat them pretty good. Everybody was feeling great. In the bus, on the way home, the entire team, except for Cowboy, sang ‘Power to the People.’

            “After that, any time we were on a bus trip, and we won, we’d sing it. By the end of the season, even Cowboy’d sing it with us.

            “The first time we did it, I thought it was mean,” Ed said. Ed could say things in a sincere manner. “But, I did it along with everybody else. Then it became our victory song.”

            Everyone was laughing for a minute. Cowboy had the right to petition to have a song banned, but that was a good reason to tease him and we weren’t about to pass it up. The song had been an odd thing. It wasn’t a catchy tune and it could have meant anything. Everyone knew the song. “Power to the people, power to the people right on.”

            Rebecca said, “Who started it, after the Chaney match.”

            “Bowler,” said Roger.

            “I don’t know about that,” I said.

            “I’m not surprised,” Rebecca said, “he’s a trouble-maker.” She gave me the smile again.