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FTER GRADUATION, I LEFT town to work on my uncle’s Wyoming ranch where the wind never stops blowing. When I came back to Oklahoma, a year later, Pep O’Hara said Lillian Gish used to go to school with us, but I didn’t know who he meant. Pep and me were pals in high school, class of 1912. During our junior year, we did everything together. “Pep and John Mark,” they’d say, “two peas in a pod,” but in a sad sort of way, like nobody expected us to stick together, and I guess they were right. When Pep latched onto the topic of this girl, I wasn’t exactly surprised. He was always going crazy about one thing or other. That summer, the weather in Shawnee wasn’t all that different than in Wyoming, and it was funny how I’d gotten to think of that rugged mountainous state as my home, even though I grew up on the flatland. The sky was big in both places, but in Wyoming, it was polished clean like a looking glass crystal so blue it made you your eyes water to see it. Oklahoma always had a perimeter of dust kicking up at the horizon, and the whitewashed clapboard buildings downtown were a bearcat to keep clean
The summer after I got back from the ranch, I worked in the downtown, first at the haberdashery, steaming cowboy hats and denting the crowns just so, then at the constable’s office where I first got to wear a star on my flannel shirt. It was gawdawful dry that summer, which didn’t help the dirt problem, and hot enough to fry grasshoppers on the sidewalk—which isn’t even much of a fib. I seen it. To cool off, we’d go to this little drug store called Alderman’s where a few of us would buy ice cream or sodas after we got off work at night. Pep and me would walk across the railroad track from Main Street, and some of the boys would ride in from the farms on their horses. Sometimes they’d bring a girl or two, usually their sisters. There was a little nickelodeon next door with a hitching rack out front. Once in a while—maybe on a Friday night—we’d go see a show. One night I missed the show and met Pep afterwards at Alderman’s. He sat there with his ice-cream melting into a puddle, slender fingers drumming on the table, his watery blue eyes fixed on
