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high school and had done well, though the poor ways of my family and our crackpot religion had made me something of a pariah possessing neither cowboy boots nor penny loafers. The story was always the same: someone would find a reason to be interested in me; then they would hit that little wall which consisted in their detecting my scrutiny of them. They weren’t wrong, but I couldn’t help myself. I perhaps made too much of my enthusiasm for animals, but they did provide me the feeling of being understood, something I badly craved. In my early years of medical practice and as a man about town, I would cultivate an entirely artificial hail-fellow-well-met personality fueled by alcohol, desperation, and my first taste of spending money.
    I’d been going out to the ranch almost as Gladys and Wiley’s only family by the time Dr. Olsson turned up asking if he could exercise his bird dog. He was new to the area, having bought himself a little cottage, but he hadn’t yet made any friends, though he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Far more interested in finding a place to run the dog, he was pretty deft at fishing out information about the local landowners, the location of creeks, who had a grain field, etc. He was certainly not fooling anyone, but Gladys and Wiley liked him and became, for a while, his only friends. Then he met my parents and they hit it off too, because really Dr. Olsson was the kind of solid fellow you couldn’t help but like. He had the look of a onetime football player, which he was, and despite plenty of sore joints he bounded around pretty well. Looking back, I think Dr. Olsson was no more than middle-aged. He first took a shine to me as a way of ingratiating himself with the grown-ups, I think, but maybe he actually liked me. He really seemed to give a damn about how I would turn out.
    Gladys and Wiley understood me too, even enjoying my awful timing and geekish silences. They believed I was smart and knew how to workand that I would eventually find myself if I got out of town and away from my parents. While personally fond of my mother and father, they thought they lacked common sense in raising me and considered my mother’s thermal relationship with Jesus to be beyond the pale. “Jesus is your friend,” Gladys once told me, “but let’s leave it at that.” I later had a spell of poetry reading and in the poems of Saint Theresa found a new version of the Savior, who appeared as a sort of demon lover with all the tools of electrifying conquest. Saint Theresa can make Christ sound like a nine-battery Chinese vibrator. After that came Abelard and Heloise with their thrilling menu of mixed messages. I like to think it was otherwise with my poor mother, but God only knows what they taught her in Arkansas. She was certainly fixated and said of her own father, a crooked door-to-door shoe salesman, that he had “gone to hell with a broken back.” I’m pretty well over all this, I say, but there was a day when the flames danced just beyond the next hill.
    So Wiley said, “I had several chances to try something else, but the land claimed me and I was grown old before I realized the land didn’t care about me.”
    “How about Gladys?”
    “Neither one of us. We’re like two ants crawling over it.”
    I suppose this made Wiley sound like a pessimist, which maybe he was, but his day-to-day demeanor was that of a cheerful, optimistic man. This seemed to be the case with people who knew the score, even if it was not encouraging, as though encouragement were just a matter of being pressed into the unknown.
    Gladys and Wiley assumed correctly that I was headed for college and that our encounters hereafter would be social calls only. Their new friend Dr. Olsson was nudging me in the direction of education too. Therefore, they would need new help, and indeed that had long been the case, though they had made do with tramps and jailbirds and schoolboys like me. As it was well known that ranch work was hard