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What's more, local girls actually competed to be that queen; Lauren herself talked about entering the competition in a few years. Whenever we griped about running her to piano lessons, she'd say, “When I'm Queen of the Cheese Festival, you'll be glad you did.”

“That will be our ticket to the good life,” Michelle would agree, tousling her hair. I thought I'd rather have her be town tramp than Cheese Queen, but there's no accounting for taste.

We ate in silence. The food was good, and the pear honey was smooth and sweet, although Mrs. Smallfeet just smiled sadly when I commented on how good it was. “The old ways are vanishing,” she said. “Young people don't learn to cook anymore. They all eat from those microwave ovens.”

“It's a shame,” I said.

“You have a microwave oven, Grandmother,” Phillip said, and Ellen Smallfeet held a finger to her lips.

“You're not supposed to tell people that,” she said. “It will spoil my—what do they call it?—mystique.”

“So I shouldn't say anything about your CD player either?”

She took a swipe at him, but I don't think it hurt much.

“I'm going to play basketball,” he told her. “Do you want to come watch me play?”

“It is good for you to get out of your trailer,” she said. “But why basketball? Why don't you go to the powwow, dance with your own people?” She speared a morsel of fish, put it in her mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. “No offense,” she said, turning to me.

“None taken,” I said.

“I was good at it once,” he said. “Basketball. Haven't been good at much else that wouldn't land me in jail. You ought to be excited.”

“Excited,” she said and sniffed. “I don't know. What is there to be excited about anymore?”

“Please come and see us play,” I said. “It would be an honor.”

“You were good once,” she said to Phillip, and to me as well, “when you were young men. Those days are gone.”

“We're not dead yet.” He smiled to himself before saying, “While there is life, there is hope.”

“Yes,” she said, gesturing at him with her fork and nodding as vigorously as her neck would permit. “That is a good Cheyenne saying. You have heard me say it many times.”

“I have,” he said, and he shrugged. “Maybe there's something to it after all.”

She sniffed, as if to say she didn't think it necessary to affirm that with words.

“I can drop your grandma back in town,” I told Phillip after lunch. I didn't think she could hear me, but she turned from the sink, where her rubber-gloved arms were elbow deep in hot sudsy dishwater. “Someone will come after me if I don't show up tonight,” she said. “But it might take awhile for them to get up their courage. They think Phillip will shoot them if they come here unannounced.”

Phillip did not chuckle to show that this was a ridiculous idea. “Let John run you home, Grandmother,” he said, then turned to me. “She'll walk it if I let her. She's a tough old bird.”

Ellen Smallfeet cackled.

When she had dried the dishes and gathered her things, we all walked out to the porch. “Why don't you come to homecoming?” I asked Phillip. “A lot of people you know will be in town.”

He shook his head. “More reason to stay here.” But he shook my hand and gave me a small smile and thanked me for coming by. “I owed you a dinner.”

“You didn't owe me anything. It was great to have you out to the house. You're welcome anytime.”

“Good-bye, Grandmother,” he said, turning to her. “You make sure John doesn't take you off to Mexico.” She kissed his cheek, and then she stepped to my truck, opened the passenger door, and clambered up inside, refusing all offers of help.

“See you Sunday,” I called as I got in the truck. Phillip inclined his head slightly—half of a nod—and pulled the trailer door shut behind him with a screech.

Mrs. Smallfeet didn't talk as we bounced across the rutted track taking us across the pasture or up to the road, nor did she talk until after I opened the gap, drove through, and closed it behind us. When I got back into the cab, she said, “Thank you for being a friend to Phillip. He has not always had good friends.”

“I know,” I said. “But I haven't been a good friend. How can I claim to be a good friend now, when I haven't been there when he really needed me?”

“Ah,” she said. “How do you know that now is not the time of his greatest need?”

I pursed my lips and mulled that over for a bit. “I guess I don't.” I turned onto the highway headed for town.

She furrowed her brow, tapped it once or twice, as if retrieving something from a mental vault: “‘We should never be afraid to do right now what we should have done right a long time ago.'”

“Sounds like something I've been thinking about lately,” I said. “Is that a Cheyenne saying?” I slowed down for the right turn onto 2nd Street, where Mrs. Smallfeet lived in a tiny composition-shingled house two blocks from Gloria, a house with a swing set and lots of outdoor toys for her many grandchildren.

“Martin Luther King,” she said. We pulled up in front of her house and she opened the door to get out. “Indians cannot take credit for all wisdom, you know.” She cackled again before she shut the door.

I thought about that all the way home: It's never too late to do the right thing, to make the right choice, to correct the mistakes of the past.

Or is it? Did this apply equally to the way I treated my children, to the job I performed, to the woman I married?

Or was she just a senile old parrot who could squawk historic phrases?

The phone rang as we were sitting down for dinner. I would have been happy to let the machine pick it up, but Lauren made a dash for it.

B. W. rolled his eyes. “It's probably just a salesman,” he said.

“Hello,” she said, her voice vivacious. Then the smile left her face, she dropped the phone to her side, and she held it toward me.

“It's a man,” she said.

“Bill Cobb,” the voice said.

“Bill,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “John. Glad to find you at home.” There was a momentary pause, as though Bill was looking for his next words. “Just thought I might have a word with you.”

Then he sat silent again for a moment. “You can have several,” I said into the silence. “Words,” I explained helpfully when he made no reply.

“I have to go,” he said, and then he did, and I stood there holding the phone for a moment with what must have been a quizzical look on my face.

“What did he want?” Michelle asked.

“I don't rightly know,” I said. I replaced the receiver on its cradle.

“At least he wasn't selling something,” B. W. said.

“No,” I said. “He wasn't.” I sat back down at the table. “Lauren, will you say grace?”

That night I dreamed I was at some kind of gathering on the farm; it was unquestionably our place, only it looked like it did back before my father added the extra bedrooms, a strange trip back to when this place had a screened-in side porch where I used to sleep covered with sweat on sweltering summer nights, a world remembered in the black and white of old photographs. A big get-together was taking place, lots of family—aunts, uncles, cousins—and friends talking, eating, laughing inside, but I was standing outside the big picture window looking in at them from the flowerbed.

There were Gloria and Michael, sitting together in my father's big recliner. Gloria looked up, saw me, and waved, but when she nudged Michael, he just frowned and kept his eyes to the ground. Why should things be any different in dreams?

There was B. W., wearing rolled-up jeans, a flannel shirt, a watch cap, and carrying an ax.
Hi Dad
, he said silently, and he waved.

I couldn't see Lauren. Maybe she was out on a date.

Into the living room shuffled my grandfather, sober and somber, a tall man I'd always thought made John Wayne look like a sissy. I never heard of him smiling, and now he simply looked sourly at me and waved me away from the window with one hand like a quarterback waving a receiver back farther. Maybe I was standing on something he had planted.

I stepped up onto the front porch and looked through the screen door. Just inside, where Michael had been, I saw my brother, Trent, standing at ease in his Marine dress uniform, the one they buried him in, his hat in the crook of his left elbow. Next to him were Bill and Samantha Cobb, talking quietly about something.

“Hey, Johnny,” Trent said, turning to me with genuine surprise in his voice. “Long time no see.”

“Hey,” I said, and then something caught in my throat, and I could only raise a hand in acknowledgment. Even in my dream I realized that Trent was dead, as dead as my grandfather, but at that moment, I didn't care; I just wanted to open the door and throw my arms around him. Twenty-five years is a long time to miss your big brother.

Samantha looked up at me as I pulled at the door, rattling it, then she looked back to Bill and they continued their conversation, something about polls and early voting.

“It's locked, buddy,” Trent said. “Hang on and I'll let you in.”

The door swung wide, and for a crazy second it was like the world had swayed sideways—I had a sense of essential imbalance, of the earth teetering beneath me—and then I stepped inside and felt Trent's strong hand shaking mine, and I threw my left arm around his neck and felt the muscles bunched there beneath his collar and shoulder braid.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, and his voice was soft in my ear. “How many cattle you running?”

“I don't want to talk about cattle,” I said, taking him by his shoulders. “That's all you ever wrote about. Every letter home, you said everything was fine, you just wanted to know about things on the farm. Well, you weren't fine. You weren't!”

People turned to look in my direction, and hot tears burned at the corner of my eyes. “Hey, get a hold of yourself, Johnny,” he said, pushing me back a step and stiffening to attention. “You're the man of the house now. You're going to have to act that way.”

Then he saluted me, executed a crisp about-face, and disappeared into the dark interior of the house.

“Trent,” I called after him. “Trent! Hey, man. Come back. I'll be strong. I'll be a man.”

He was gone. My eyes were full of tears and my chest full of rocks, and I turned to Samantha and Bill, who were looking at me like I was an interesting species of insect. “I never got to say good-bye,” I said. “That's all. I loved him and he died and I never got to say good-bye.”

But they turned away from me and continued talking percentage points and constituencies; in fact, everyone in the room showed me their backs. The world became unstable beneath my feet again, and I reeled out of the house and out to the gloomy barn, banging into hay bales like a man on the deck of a boat in rough water. Finally I caught hold of a rope hanging from the rafters, and I climbed up it thinking,
Maybe I can see better from up here.

But all I could see when I got to the top were the rafters and the underside of the tin roof. So I climbed back down. When I came outside, the sky had grown as dark as the interior of the barn, and big drops of rain were beginning to fall. Across the way, I saw the windmill, and the same dream logic that had impelled me to climb the rope sent me up the windmill, only the rain was making the metal wet and slippery, and lightning was flashing uncomfortably close by, and all of a sudden, somehow, I was naked. This dream was starting to feel ridiculous even to me, and I started to think maybe I should climb down from the windmill, and then people started coming out the side porch, the door closest to me, and the world was shaking again.

And then I woke up to Michelle sobbing quietly beside me.

“Michelle,” I said. “Hey, sweetie,” and she slid into my arms, and I felt her face, warm and flushed, and the wetness of her tears on my shoulder.

“It'll be okay,” I said. “Everything will be fine.” I didn't ask what she was crying about; although I should have, there were just so many possibilities. She was always emotional just before her period; in days past I'd known her to wail for half an hour about a speeding ticket, a student failing an exam, or a cross word from one of the kids.

There were plenty of serious things for her to cry about, too, regardless of her hormonal state: Michael, our grandchild, me.

“I know I wasn't your first choice,” she murmured. “But you do love me a little, don't you, J. J.?”

So I guess that would be me.

No, she hadn't been my first choice; I wasn't even conscious that I had had a choice. Because really, if I'd had my choice—

I flashed to Samantha, our last dance at the reunion. Our last rainy night together, the pattering on the windows, her skin iridescent in the glow from the dashboard.

I thought that only a few seconds had passed since she asked—not enough to make a difference, I hoped.

I smiled at her, although I didn't know if she could see it in the dark.

“More than a little,” I said. “You know I do, Shell.”

And I held her until she returned to a troubled sleep. I had no desire to join her. I lay there, her head on my shoulder, listening to the farm stir to life with first light.

Fools

Since Michelle had to get to the football field early Friday evening to work the concession stand for homecoming, I got to play the major role in the Lauren First Date story. It was my job to take her to fetch Martin, and then to chauffeur them around town, which wasn't so bad, really, even if it was a preview of plenty of late-night worrying to come, because Lauren did look beautiful, even without the excess makeup Michelle had ordered her to take off. “You look like a twenty-dollar hooker,” she said, chanting the time-honored refrain of parents of young women throughout the ages.

Maybe the reason we use the same tired accusations as our parents is because our kids make the same tired excuses. I knew “Everyone else is wearing their makeup like this,” would be Lauren's reply before it came out. I left the room to avoid being caught in the loop.

Lauren had mostly gotten over her sulk by the time I got her into the truck.

“Don't embarrass me,” she said as she checked her lips and hair in the dusty visor mirror.

“Do I ever?”

“Don't tell any jokes,” she said. “Talk about sports. Or school.”

“You look great,” I told her. “Martin is lucky to be seen with you tonight. I think maybe we should talk about how lucky he is.”

“God help me,” she muttered and put the visor up as we bounced to the end of our driveway.

“Let's see. What else could we talk about? Is Martin a vegetarian?”

“God help me,” she repeated. She rolled her eyes and looked across at me with tolerant affection.

“I'll be good,” I promised, and I was. I shook Martin's hand firmly but without bone-crunching malice when he got in, drove quietly from the Amos place at the corner of Seventh and Laing, across from the fairgrounds, to the football stadium. Lauren's jacket sleeve rustled against mine—she, of course, had scooted into the middle to make room for Martin. Beneath it she wore one of those satiny Mo Betta Western shirts with a wild geometric design and a pair of tight-fitting Lee jeans. I figured if her mother had let her leave the house in this outfit it wasn't my place to send her back, but I did indeed have that thought.

As we passed my hideous gymnasium—bluish and greenish metal siding with a brick front—we saw that the stadium to the north was already filling up with people decked out in red and black. I could see Bobby Ray up on top of the red press box with the video camera he used to film the games for the coaches—perks of school board membership—and if I'd been able to stop and look closely I could have located Michelle dishing out coffee and cokes in paper cups from the concession stand in the northwest corner of the stadium, just off the west end zone.

When we stopped and Martin opened his door, I quickly outlined the ground rules: “Fifteen minutes after the game ends, you will be at this truck. We'll take you to Pizza Hut. You may sit with your friends. After we've eaten, you've played video games, Michelle and I have had a last cup of coffee, we will head for our respective homes. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Martin said.

“Got it,” Lauren said, sliding toward Martin and freedom. They disappeared toward the stadium at a dead run before I could say something like, “Synchronize your watches,” as Lauren knew I probably would.

After I bought my ticket, I sauntered over to the concession stand, stopped almost every step of the way by people asking after the basketball team. Maybe with the football team a miserable failure, people would turn to basketball. Maybe basketball would become everyone's sport of choice. Maybe God would plant in the heavens a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide these record crowds toward the gymnasium.

In any case, I tried to sound hopeful about my kids, and when people asked enthusiastically about the benefit game at Christmas, I smiled and said we'd work hard to put on a good show. That seemed to satisfy them.

After tossing such mendacity about like chicken feed, it was pleasant to spend a short truthful moment with Michelle as she poured coffee into the big insulated mug I'd brought.

“Kids okay?”

“They were polite,” I said, pulling out my wallet to replant the change she gave me. “To expect more would be pointless.”

“True enough,” she said. “Come back later?”

“Of course.” I raised my mug after securing the lid. “I'll be back when it's time for a refill.”

The size of the crowd surprised me, as homecoming crowds always do. It's like Easter Sunday services—people you haven't seen all year apparently decide it's a good thing to show up and demonstrate where their loyalties lie. I pushed up toward the spot in the home bleachers where Oz and Michael Graywolf and a few others normally sit and couldn't even see them. The stands were full of strange people—strange in a familiar way, admittedly—but still people who normally weren't sitting in my seat.

I climbed up to the press box, thinking I might presume on school connections for a seat up there. Reporters from the
Watonga Republican
and the Geary paper shared the booth proper with the PA announcer, George Hoberecht. George looked up and waggled his triple chins at me. “Try the roof,” he said. “Bobby Ray'd likely welcome the company.”

I went up the ladder, one hand holding my coffee, rapped on the trapdoor to announce myself, pushed it open, and pulled myself up onto the roof. “You got room for an old friend?” I asked, aware that we had not acted much like old friends the last time we'd seen each other.

“If you don't mind sharing the roof with an idiot,” he said, and gave me a rueful smile. Then he extended a hand and pulled me to my feet.

The roof of the press box was about twelve by fifteen, and there was a railing around it. Up here, you could feel the wind blowing in from Kansas. On the flagpole above us flapped the flags of the United States of America, the state of Oklahoma, and the Watonga Eagles.

The video camera pointed to the fifty-yard line from its tripod, and Bobby Ray was sitting on a folding chair sipping his own cup of coffee. “Good idea,” he said as I took the lid off my mug, both of us sending mist into the air. “I always spill half of mine on the way up.”

“I have my moments,” I said, sipping and feeling the warm welcome bitterness spread out from my stomach.

“That you do,” he said. There was a moment when he studied his shoe, then he inhaled deeply and looked up at me. “We still have practice this weekend?”

I exhaled fog. “How's Sunday afternoon for you?”

“Sunday afternoon is good for me. Any chance we'll get Bill up here for a practice?”

“Probably, now that the Texas elections are over,” I said. “I should have asked him—” I stopped. I really hadn't had a chance to ask anything the last time he called.

Bobby Ray broke off mid-sip and leaned forward confidentially. “Bill better have supported good folks this time,” he said. “'Cos I'd guess his chances of getting himself elected dogcatcher now are about as good as my chances of getting a big loan from First Watonga. Not that I care, mind you.”

“Why do you say that?”

He eyed me curiously. “I've never cared for Bill. You know that.”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Not why don't you care. Why couldn't he get elected dogcatcher?”

Bobby Ray looked through the viewfinder and adjusted the focus. “He's lost the wholesome family man thing now. Grave political liability.”

I set my mug down on the ground and straightened up to look Bobby Ray in the eyes. “Lost what?”

“When Samantha left him,” Bobby Ray said, as though he were explaining something to an infant. The band was coming out onto the field, and I could hear the smart slap of their feet as they marched past on the asphalt track.

“What are you talking about?” I said. “Who left who?” I remembered Samantha's breathy “We need to talk,” Bill's bizarre phone manners, and suddenly I felt a sledgehammer blow to the solar plexus.

“Whoa, partner,” he said. He reached a tentative hand out as if to steady me, and I must have needed it, because I found myself leaning heavily against the railing. “I thought you knew. Marcie told me she ran into Michelle in the frozen food aisle at Homeland and told her all about it.” Marcie was Bobby Ray's third and most recent wife, a more recent former head cheerleader, former secretary for Bobby Ray. He hadn't found another secretary as good, and he was still mad at her for quitting when he married her.

“Michelle didn't tell you that Samantha and Bill split up?”

“Must have slipped her mind,” I said. At the edge of my hearing, I heard the crowd roar its approval at the conclusion of the national anthem. It sounded like the ocean in a big conch shell my dad brought home from Guam after the war.

“Why?” I finally said, and it must have been some time later, because Watonga had already kicked off and Bobby Ray was bent over the viewfinder of his camera.

“Get the wind at the end of each half, I guess.”

“No.” This was why I never liked talking to Bobby Ray. “Not why didn't we elect to receive, if that's what you're telling me. What happened to Bill and Sam?”

“I hear she had an affair.” He shrugged without looking up. “I hear he had an affair. Who knows? Their parents aren't talking about it, and they aren't talking to each other, either.”

The sledgehammer was gone, and in its place my stomach now felt as empty as if I were coming off a five-day fast. I took a gulp of coffee to try and counteract it, but this was one of the few things coffee couldn't make better. “So what's going on? Are they getting divorced? Where are the kids? Is she coming back here?”

Bobby Ray lifted his eye from the camera to look across at me. “You better hope not, old son.”

And dimwitted as he could sometimes be, about this Bobby Ray was right. It was a strange feeling to hear that my first love had left her husband, and stranger still to think about running into her in the flesh.

“I hear Samantha's moved to Fort Worth with the kids,” Bobby Ray said a few plays later, after Canton had punted and Watonga took over on their own thirty. “She's still selling real estate. Making good money, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.” Through the crowd milling in front of the stands I saw Michael Graywolf, and next to him, someone else I knew. “Look. There's Phillip.”

“Really?” Bobby Ray couldn't take his eyes off a pass play, but the surprise was evident in his voice.

“Down below and to the right,” I said, and he took a look as the referees conferred about what to do on the play they'd just whistled dead.

“That was interference, plain and simple,” Bobby Ray said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “They're looking up this way.”

“Well, I guess you better wave,” Bobby Ray said. “Wouldn't want 'em to think we're unfriendly.”

“No, we wouldn't,” I said. I waved. Michael waved back and nudged Phillip, who looked up hesitantly. He nodded. Beside me, Bobby Ray nodded back.

“He's had a tough old row to hoe,” Bobby Ray said, as close to an apology as he was ever going to get.

“That he has,” I said, and took another sip. “I think I'll pop down and tell him howdy.”

“You're welcome to come back up here if you like,” Bobby Ray said, followed closely by a curse as a Canton Tiger blocked our punt and chased it toward our goal line. “We are just god-awful.”

I understood his frustration. It's hard to be a fan for a team that loses, unless they do so in lovable fashion—like the Chicago Cubs. Our Watonga boys that year didn't make endearingly horrendous mistakes like running the wrong way for touchdowns. They just got beat by better teams week after week, and there's not much fun in that.

After climbing down and through the press box, I made my way into the bleachers to Michael and Phillip, and managed to get a few words in to both before we were swept apart by the tide of fans. I took a step in the direction of Michelle, then remembered that what I most wanted to talk to her about was not suitable for a public conversation. So I went back up on the roof after answering another round of questions about the varsity team, about the basketball fund-raiser, about my hopes for the season.

“God save us,” I said when I got back up on the roof of the press box. “The worse the score gets, the more people want to know about basketball.”

“You may have to sneak out the back before it's all over,” Bobby Ray said. We had gone down two touchdowns in the short time I had been gone.

“What happened?”

“Converted on the blocked punt, then ran in an interception. Our guys would be better off just falling on the ball for the next three quarters.”

And he was right. It might have made the score more respectable. After the final gun went off and we had lost by thirty-eight, I patted Bobby Ray on the back, told him I'd see him Sunday, and started out toward the truck.

Carla caught me on the sleeve as I passed the gate. “Run for your life,” she told me. “These people are desperate for a winner.”

“They've probably been asking my kids about our chances,” I said. “I hope they lied.”

“You hang in there,” she said. “Looks like some more folks are waiting on you.” She smiled and took off toward her Jeep, and I turned, ready to put on a false smile and give a big Chamber of Commerce handshake.

“Hurry up, Dad,” Lauren called, for indeed it was my lovely daughter and her beau leaning against the truck. “Pizza Hut will be full.”

Which it was. Had there been chandeliers, kids would have been swinging from them. Every booth was full to overflowing, angular adolescent knees were jutting out into public space, and the waiting line seemed to contain as many folks as were already stuffed into booths. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “McBee's? Hi-De-Ho?”

Lauren rolled her eyes.
As if.
“We'll stay here, Dad. You're welcome to go if you want.”