Harris and me : a summer remembered by Gary Paulsen

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 I still rankled about that fear business so I 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 high-base 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

    bad enough but Glennis, she's going to take a hoe handle to me."
    I nodded. Glennis was something to be feared. I had seen her hit Harris so hard the snot flew when she just wanted to check her swing and wasn't even seriously mad. I shuddered to think what she could do if she was really upset.
    "Well, there's nothing for it . . ."
    I nodded again. He'd just have to face the music.
    ". . . you'll have to take the blame."
    "Mel"
    He nodded. "It's the only way out of this."
    "Glennis will kill me."
    "Naww. She don't hit nobody but me and a guy named Harold Peterson. He up and touched her on the chest at a church picnic and she brained him with a hot dish casserole. I think she's sweet on him though because she helped clean the casserole off while he was laying on the ground . . ."
    The injustice of it all rankled me. I had done plenty wrong on my own without