“Elaine Peterson.”
Still I sat silent. Shyness, always a problem with me, now became a terminal illness. I thought I would burst, that in some way the shyness would stop my heart. I could hear it beating, whumping, and the beat seemed irregular and it seemed entirely possible that I would just sit there, like a turd, and die. I took a breath, held it, controlled my voice as much as possible, and blurted my name.
She smiled. “We live near Greener Lake—about four miles from the Larsons.”
I asked her why I hadn’t seen her at the movie—or thought I did. It came out: “Haven’tseenmovieyou?” Or something near it.
“I’ve been staying with my grandmother in North Dakota. It’s over west of here a hundred and fifty miles.”
She said it like it was another country and I thought I might tell her that I had lived in the Philippines for almost three years and in Texas and had seen California and pretty much everything in between but nothing, absolutely nothing came out.
I don’t know how long we could have gone on like that, her talking, me with my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth, wishing I could disappear, but time kicked in and took over. It was late and the band started on its last dance, a slow waltz, and the movie was done and the rest of the kids came out of the back room.
Harris spied me instantly and took in the situation in a glance. He came up to the table—the ubiquitous bottle of orange pop in his hand—and plunked down in a chair.
I made eye motions at him to leave but he ignored them and spoke to Elaine.
“How do you like my cousin?”
She smiled. “He seems nice.”
Harris shook his head. “That’s what I thought but he ain’t right.”
I pushed at his shoulder.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“In the head. He ain’t right. It was something to do with when he was borned. They cut the cord too fast or something and his brain didn’t get into the light. It happens all the time. Brains got to get into the light or they don’t work right. You remember that Severson kid? How he kept leaning left and ate his snot all the time?” Harris pointed at me with his chin. “It’s the same with him.”
“Not true...,” I said, or attempted to—it really came out as more of a blapp. The shyness had gotten worse and I was now in the position of having to convince Elaine that I was indeed “right in the head “ and did not eat my snot, without being able to speak but it was too late. Elaine was studying me with a new look, one of pity, and she smiled—not unkindly—and nodded and left me sitting there with Harris, fuming.
“I’ll get you for this,” I told him.
“Ahh you didn’t want to mess around with Elaine anyway. Pretty soon you’d just want to go down there all the time and then I’d have nobody to play with and there you’d be, hanging around their mailbox hoping to see her...”
“I’ll get you for this,” I repeated. “I really will.”
And as luck would have it I got my chance the very next day.
“I ain’t gonna do it.”
Harris stood by the side of the barn, looking at the wire that came from an insulator near the door and led out into the pasture.
Knute had turned the pigs out into a part of the cow pasture to root and dig for a while. Rather than put up hog fence he bought a battery-operated electric fencer and some insulators and wire.
Inside the barn he put a dry-cell, six-volt battery and the fencer to keep them out of the weather, then brought the wire out through a hole.
We had half a good day watching the sows figure the wire out. They learned fast and one of them, old Gertie, learned on the first day to cake mud on her head, let it dry, and then push at the wire with the dry mud insulator to get out of the pasture and into the cornfield.
The chickens hit it a few times, squawking and jumping with feathers flying, and even Buzzer accidentally brushed the wire. When it popped him he took it as an attack and went after it, which of course made it worse and made him more angry so that he attacked harder, biting and clawing at the wire until finally he admitted defeat and walked away from the fence. Every hair on his body was straight out and I believe if anybody had crossed him right then he would have killed.
It was while Buzzer was fighting the wire that the idea came. We had tried touching it with the backs of our fingers and pieces of grass but the results were inconclusive. I had always been of a scientific nature, believed in the worth of experiments, and I wondered what would happen—watching Buzzer and the fence at war—if somebody actually peed on the wire.
Specifically I wondered what would happen if Harris peed on the wire.
I knew it would not be an easy experiment to conduct and set about doing it carefully. The subject would be reluctant—downright negative, as it turned out—and there would have to be some form of inducement so attractive that it would overcome the reluctance.
As it happened I had the “dourty peectures.”
The power of these pictures to control and induce were beyond question. I believe if given enough of them Harris would have walked into a bonfire—indeed, I would have done the same thing. The quality of the pictures wasn’t great. They were black-and-white and small and grainy. But they worked. It was impossible to look at them and still breathe correctly. My dilemma was mostly one of quantity. I knew I could
