“Grant and Rufus met in kindergarten and had been best friends ever since, lovers of the outdoors, wild places, fast food, and girls.” A short story by Thomas McGuane.
Rufus’s dad may have been a Lloyd, too, but he was called Spook for his prominent eyes, and his large wife was called Jelly. The joke in town was that Jelly had matured early, having driven a getaway car when she was only fifteen. Spook had hair growing up the back of his neck and one incisor set edgewise. Sometimes he stopped to watch the men in town play horseshoes, or confronted tourists, demanding to know where they were from.
One evening, the summer before they started high school, Grant and Rufus set out at sundown in two inner tubes to float the big irrigation ditch all the way to town. Hidden by tall bankside grass, they drifted at a walking pace, so quietly that they were among the ducks at the moment they exploded into the air. They nearly missed a strand of barbed wire at eye level, dipping their heads as it passed over them in the dusk.
“This land will swallow us, just like it swallowed the Indians. If you never found an arrowhead, there’d be no reason to believe there’d ever been Indians at all.” A founding myth in Rufus’s family was that one of their forebears, a soldier in the Southern Army, had actually died of a dream. He was standing in front of his homestead, near the hamlet of Mexico, Missouri, gazing at two calves he thought would grow to be a herd once the war passed, when he fell over dead. His widow’s explanation—“He had a dream and it shot him”—was accepted as plausible, and may well have been why his descendants believed that dreams were messages, perilous to ignore.
Grant moved with his parents to Miles City, where his mother found a job at a credit union and his father attained enhanced journeyman status as a plumber licensed for boilers and heating systems. Grant had the mild romanticism of someone from a happy family but no great desire to start his life anew. Instead, he made friends, took a few classes at the community college, and fought off his father’s demands that he join the plumbing business.
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