She gazed at a red explosion dangling pink. “I don’t know.”

“A spider,” he said. “What about this one?”

This time she just looked at his upturned profile and his glazed eyes.

And he said, “An elephant. See, there’s its trunk.”

She frowned. “Where are you getting all of this?”

He continued staring at some bursts of Roman candles. He said, “You just missed an orange tulip.”

She said, “I don’t think I understand you.”

I spent more time in Pawhuska that autumn so I could be close to Julia, and Bob mixed more often with our older brother Grat at the eastern border, where they made do on pretty skimpy paychecks by selling liquor to the Indians and engaging in graft against the pioneers. My brothers would stop ox-pulled Studebaker wagons and lean on their saddle horns shouting questions at the driver: “Where you from?” “Haven’t I seen you somewheres before?” “You ever been arrested for introducing?”

The canvas tops would be jagged with bureaus and desks and tapestried sofas that always seemed to get dumped in a sutler’s ravine before the boomers got west of the Cimarron, and a woman would sit next to her husband with a blanket so much around her she hardly had a face.

Grat would plant unlabeled whiskey bottles in the flour sacks and accuse a farmer of bootlegging, or they’d demand an axle toll for a bad clay road that Bob insisted was a turnpike, and they’d trot away from the schooners with coins jangling in their pockets. One woman said, “We are three weeks out of St. Louis. We are used to hooligans by now.” Squatters were sport in those days.

Bob mailed my mother twenty dollars a month, and to Minnie he sent boxes of frilled blouses, silk scarves, and long white gloves that buttoned past her elbows. And I’d receive letters recounting Grat’s wild schemes for pocket money.