“You’re always wanting to play cowboys,” he said. “Well, go get your little silver pistol and we’ll play cowboys.”
Bill came along peacefully and Harris, looking like an ant leading a rhino, led him through the barn and approximately ten feet out the front door.
Harris looked up. “That ought to about do it.”
“Do what?”
“Get him right for when we jump on him.”
“We’re going to jump on Bill?”
“Yeah. Like I said, you be the fat guy and I’ll be Gene and we’ll jump out of the loft door onto Bill and ride off after the rustlers.”
And as I mentioned, I thought we could do it. Oh, not at first. At first it looked a lot like jumping off the granary roof holding a rotten piece of rope or leaping on a three-hundred-pound commie jap sow.
But Harris pointed out that it wasn’t that far down to Bill and that he had a broad back made of largely soft flesh and that we rode him all the time when he was pulling the mower and that in any event there really wasn’t any choice because Gene did it in the picture show and we had to do it or we’d forever be lower than pig crap...
So I agreed.
The problem came about because of Harris’s lack of understanding of the nature of falling bodies.
We went ahead—Harris with enthusiasm, I with some residual dread—and set up the scene. Bill was put into position and an armload of hay placed in front of him to keep him there, head down, munching peacefully.
We then climbed into the loft and moved to the front door and looked down.
“See?” Harris said. “His back is like a big kitchen table down there...”
In truth Bill looked small, too small to hit, but Harris didn’t give me much time to think.
“The way we’ll do her is I’ll swing out a bit on the dump rope and you just jump on down. That way I’ll hit him up on the shoulders and you come in back of me and we’ll ride off and save the rustlers.”
“Get the rustlers,” I pointed out. “You don’t save the rustlers, you get them.”
He stopped. “What’s the difference? We still jump on the horse, don’t we?”
I nodded.
“Well, then, don’t be so quick to talk when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He grabbed the dump rope that hung down from the overhead rail and was used to pull hay up into the loft and backed off ready to run and swing out over Bill. “You ready?”
I nodded again but it was a lie.
“Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Heck, don’t you know nothing? You’re the fat guy. Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘Let’s go save the rustlers’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Say it.”
“All right.”
“Say it now.”
“Let’s go save the rustlers.”
Harris nodded and ran out of the loft holding on to the dump rope.
Caught up in the enthusiasm I actually started to follow him.
Right here several things went wrong.
First off, even if Bill had seen the movie he might not have tolerated two boys jumping out of a barn loft onto his back. But he hadn’t seen the movie and so the plot line was a complete surprise to him.
Then cowardice took over and at the last minute I tried to stop. I was already half out of the loft door and I wheeled in midair and grabbed back at the edge and barely caught myself to hang there like dirty laundry and watch the events unfold over my shoulder.
Harris was less fortunate.
He held on to the rope too long and released when he had already started swinging back toward the loft door.
He missed Bill’s front end and came down squarely on the horse’s enormous rump, which was, unfortunately, actually as wide as a kitchen table. Harris’s legs shot out sideways and his groin crunched with a sound I could hear from where I hung.
“Oooomph!”
He grabbed himself and started to slide off Bill’s back end.
Bill, in the meantime, did exactly as a horse should do when something out of nowhere jumps on his back. Horses have reacted to predators jumping on their backs for millions of years in one specific way. They buck hard and when the predator is dislodged they kick the bejesus out of it.
Bill obeyed the genetic codes in his system and bucked as Harris hit him, driving Harris back up almost even with the loft door opening where I still hung.
Harris, legs straight out to the side, holding his groin tightly, did an almost perfect backward swan dive and was coming down on his head directly in back of Bill where he would have crunched in the dirt and chicken mess.
But Bill obeyed the second code and just as Harris came into range kicked with one back hoof, a hoof as large as the top opening of a milk bucket, with a force just below nuclear.
It caught Harris directly in the middle of the stomach and drove him backward into the barn so hard that I heard him skip twice across the barn floor.
I hung from the door opening another second while Bill went back to eating quietly. Then I dropped and ran into the barn.
Harris was by the back door, having been propelled nearly the full length of the building. He was on his side, still holding his groin, looking past me at Bill, or trying to. His eyes had a distinctly unfocused look and he was still fighting for breath.
He whispered something so softly I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I leaned closer.
He mumbled again.
“You’ll have to talk louder...”
He got a breath down and hissed. “Did we save the rustlers?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. “Yes, Gene. We saved them.”
“Good.”
He mumbled something else.
“What?” I leaned closer.
“Don’t move me for a while.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.”
It was during the next week, after another Saturday night dance and the ensuing Gene Autry binge, that we tried the second cinematic event. It was also coincidentally the second time the grown-ups left us alone, this time to
