The past was closer to me then than the sweating glass in my hand and it seemed not long ago that I was a boy slumped against a sod house in the Indian Territory, watching Bitter Creek Newcomb wade through high yellow grass out to the buffalo wallow where he’d stare at a pane of water there with the white moon watered in it. I could hear pool water slap softly in the skimmer as some girl in satin underwear glided to the ladder near the diving board, but all I saw was my brother Grat as he slapped the Navaho blanket up and sagged a shoulder against the mud wall, a pottery jug of white alcohol hung from his middle finger. Horses would nicker at the pole fence and he’d look at the empty night and scratch himself. “Ain’t had this much fun since the circus.”

I walked back toward the house and saw that on the screened breakfast porch newspapermen were taking photographs of Julia hugged like a shy, baffled mother by four of her merry party guests: Andy Devine, Frank Albertson, Broderick Crawford, and Brian Donlevy; Hollywood’s latest version of Grat, Bill, Bob, and me. The stars clowned and made pistols of finger and thumb and Julia looked as amused as she could in her pearl necklace and navy blue party dress, a pretty hostess at sixty-four but less like the half-starved grand ladies here than a grocer’s wife or a good farm woman who each morning scatters feed to the chickens.

The newspapermen saw me and called me up onto the porch to pose with my wife and then to stand alone next to a movie-house poster framed under glass on the wall. I suppose they fancied that I’d grin for their cameras with a knife in my teeth and a pistol in every hand, that I’d fan a roaring gun at a coffee can to make it whang and hop across the patio, but I was forty-five years away from the boy who wanted to be famous; I didn’t want to be news anymore. The only picture they got for their rolls of black film was that of a tall, haggard man with a drink in his hand: Emmett Dalton in a charcoal suit, a rich executive with a needle of pain in his hip and a fourteen-year prison education, a man who golfs with bankers and stumps for good causes and talks to the governor on the phone.

I walked into the kitchen and put my glass in the sink and lit a cigarette. Julia came out of the dining room with a tray of lettuce and quivering gelatin dessert that she slid onto a shelf of the Frigidaire. She wiped her hands on a towel and asked, “Why are you frowning?”

“I ache.”

“I have some aspirin.”

“Maybe I’ll just suffer for a while.”

“Think how much they’re enjoying this,” she said.