It’s dawn again, and here we are in an average barnyard after a raucous party outside a small western town by a river. The air is chilled, dewy, smoky, crystalline, lots of words like that. A tree stands on the hill in the nearer distance cluttered by large debris, bulky, alien, geometric. We won’t ask. It’s no matter. That’s the past and we’re the future comin’. The sky’s dry between ridges of two distant ranges, east and west. The western range seems smaller but this is just a trick of backdrop to indicate “farther.” The eastern range looms, however, so big behind the hill that it seems an actor in the show, and the sky, so flat and uniform this time of day, it is surely blue paint brushed on. The birds, both wild and domestic, dart, fly, and call for seed, gathering at feeders in town and at the barn door where they know it’s hidden. The hawks wheel in blue as expected, their small heads clicking tiny readjustments.

The Kid stands in the dusty ranch yard, his fists at the navy piping of dirty pants. He wears no shirt. He lost it in the confusion before our commercial break. His face is filthy, his chest and arms likewise. He’s been sleeping in the barn. Found his hat dangling from his thumb. He lifts the hat and looks it over. His eyes are blue as the sky, as sapphire shining in the sun, too rare a color to play an Indian. His day as the Indian is done. He is young. He is both thrilled and disappointed. He walks to the well, bows to it. There is soap in a tin cup. He sets his arm to work at pumping and he cleans himself of Indian.

He drips when he stands. No towel. He spins to take things in: the tree and the three stone steps to the porch. The propane tank. The clothesline fallen on the berry bushes out back, a pair of socks, old graying pegs. We zoom in and out on cottonwoods that sprang from the seeds of the trees who hid the Indian Spy, the Original. They fill the space between dirt and sky.

The boy yawns. He’s been a child, a puppet. The strings are broke now. His privates still tingle. His eyes are full.

If the boy could do both, stand in the barnyard at the wellhead and also watch himself standing in the barnyard at the wellhead, sit in the loft and in the yard also, for example, watching himself thinking of the Indian Spy spying in the cottonwood, he would divide himself in just this way. This is the world no one speaks about. He’s been waiting for it a long time, felt it coming when he was younger, now it’s arrived in a wave. He shakes with affirmation.