Again Harris watched them drive off, this time with the old John Deere tractor pulling a trailer of hay and everybody sitting on top holding pans of food.
As soon as they were out of sight he headed for the barn and took down Bob’s harness and moved into the pasture.
Bill would not let us get close but Bob hadn’t been indoctrinated—yet—and Harris walked up to him and haltered him and led him to the barn.
“I’m not jumping out of the barn loft on him,” I said as Harris led him through the barn and outside into the yard.
“Naww. We’ve already done that. What’s the other thing he does?”
“Who?”
“Gene, you dope.”
“Sings.”
“Naww. We ain’t gonna sing. It’s the other thing.”
“Well he rides, and jumps on horses, and sings, and...”
“Shoots,” Harris interrupted. “He rides and shoots, don’t he?”
“Well, yes...”
“He’s got that horse going wide open and he pulls out that six-shooter and blasts away, don’t he? Well don’t we do that we’re lower than pig puke, ain’t we?”
“That’s what you said last time. When we jumped out of the loft and you got kicked through the barn.”
“When I jumped,” Harris corrected me. “You hung and I jumped. Could be if you had jumped the right way instead of turning into a chicken it all would have worked out all right. You scared to do this?”
Of course that did it. I was scared—any time Harris started talking about shooting and horses it would be impossible not to be scared. Which of course meant I had to do it, whatever it was he wanted to do.
“Here’s how we’ll do her,” he said after he’d put a bridle with short reins on Bob. He was leading the horse across the farmyard and near the house. “You get that silver shooter and I’ll get a gun and we’ll climb up on Bob and get him moving at a good clip and then we’ll shoot.”
“A good clip?” I had seen Bob and Bill trot. Once. Other than that they never did more than a lumbering walk. “Can’t we just walk?”
He snorted. “Don’t you watch them movies at all? You ever see Gene walking his horse while he shoots? Now run get your gun...”
I ran in the house and upstairs where I had the cap gun. There were no caps but I was good at making gun sounds and I thought it was just as well. The sound of the caps going off might startle Bob and if we got him moving at all I didn’t want to startle him. Ever. Memories of Bill line-driving Harris through the barn were still fresh.
I found the cap gun and turned and trotted down the stairs and onto the porch and stopped dead.
Harris was already on Bob, sitting well up on his massive shoulders, and he was holding a gun easily as long as he was tall balanced across his lap.
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“That gun—that’s a real gun.”
“Oh, this? This is Pa’s old twelve gauge.” He shrugged airily and coughed and spit to the side. “He lets me use it all the time.”
This was such a blatant lie that it didn’t deserve acknowledgment.
“Come on—you going to wait all day?”
He maneuvered Bob close to the porch and after three jumps I managed to wiggle up and sit in back of Harris, my cap gun in one hand.
“You ready?”
I nodded, then realized Harris was facing forward and couldn’t see me. “Sure...”
He raised both feet straight out and slammed his heels into Bob’s sides so hard I heard wind whistle out of the horse’s nostrils.
Bob stepped forward, one, two steps, barely walking out of the yard as he moved up the driveway.
“We got to get him moving. Here, you kick when I kick...”
I wasn’t all that sure we wanted him to run, but 1 still rankled about that fear business so 1 started flailing away with my heels as Harris did with his and Bob moved first into a jarring trot and finally into a lolloping canter that had almost no real speed but must have triggered seismographs all over North America.
Dirt clods, rocks, bits of gravel flew up and Bob managed to move into something close to a full gallop. I had never been this fast on a horse and it was exhilarating. We seemed to be using up the driveway at a phenomenal rate and I took aim at a fence post off to the side and made gun sounds and shot, then over to a rock, back to another fence post.
Heck, I thought, this isn’t so hard. I relaxed my grip around Harris a bit and let myself get into the roll of Bob as he galloped—forgetting that it seemed twenty or so feet to the ground—and there I was, shooting Indians and rustlers and thinking maybe I really was a cowboy, when the whole world exploded.
Harris had swung the shotgun out over Bob’s head, directly between his ears, and let go a round of highbase goose load—what would now be called magnums—with number two shot.
I’m not sure who was the most surprised—Bob or me. I had no idea Harris had loaded the shotgun with a live round and I know the thought had never entered Bob’s cranium.
The recoil from the old goose gun was staggering. It drove Harris back, into me, then me back, and both of us off Bob just at the same moment Bob stopped dead—his ears no doubt whistling—then wheeled much faster than I would have thought possible for a creature of his size and tore back to the yard directly over the top of both of us.
We were scuffed some and I couldn’t for the life of me figure up from down for a moment or two, but worse, Bob had stepped on the shotgun and broken the rear stock in half.
“Shoot.” Harris stood, staring down at the shotgun. “Glennis is gonna kill me.”
“Glennis—what about Knute? It’s his shotgun.”
“He won’t say nothing. Just look at me. That’s
