Ned was the earnest, open type, with a strong jaw and a shock of thick brown hair and striking blue eyes. He’d tried wrestling, too, but sports couldn’t much hold his attention. He wasn’t built that way. On top of all the rest, no matter how Shot tried to cure him of it, Ned was thoughtful, introspective. He considered things before he spoke and he didn’t waste words, and you could already see in him, as a teenager, the man he would’ve become. Because he was that man even at fourteen. I wondered sometimes if my mother had had an affair.

To watch the girls in town look at him as he walked by … this was something I’d never have from the boys, and yet I didn’t begrudge Ned. For one thing, he didn’t even know he was beautiful. No, the only thing I begrudged Ned was a kind of secretiveness that came with the introspection, built in. He kept things to himself.

But even then, in the last years, as the divide increased between us, because of our age, because I wasn’t a boy, our expeditions kept us close. That and surviving Shot. Or “Shit,” as we also called him.

Ned’s fascination with things under rocks as a child only intensified and sharpened as a teen. He could have a kind of lazy aspect because he didn’t act right away, but things under rocks brought out a laser-like attention. It coalesced around more than just salamanders. But I noticed the salamanders more because he had to work for them harder and harder. They became a rare treasure around the farm as creeks dried up, or maybe it was the herbicides and pesticides to protect the crops. Or maybe the new development by rich folks up in the heights, and the runoff from that. But in the little hidden ravines where creeks ran at the bottom … we still would find them.

This could be Sundays with the forest beyond the farm as our church. Or we’d finished our chores after school and Shot was off at a bar getting drunk. We had to do things we liked while Shot was getting drunk, to store up kindliness, laughter, nice memories, as a kind of barricade.

Ned had learned of the megafauna of the Trinity Alps of California, and even though that was far distant from the farm, he hoped for some local sighting.

“Those places we can’t get to—the gorge, maybe.”

The gorge bordered an abandoned quarry, so I didn’t think so. But I never said that.