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me a few times.
    â€œWhat if she won’t learn?” Ethan said at one point, looking up at me.
    â€œShe will,” I said. “As much as any of them do. Remember what June did to me the first year I showed her, Ethe?”
    Ethan looked at me and shook his head. He’d been pretty young then. June had been a full-grown cow for a couple of years and this happened when she was still a junior heifer calf, which is the youngest division there is.
    â€œI led her into the ring,” I told him, “and everything was going fine. Then just before the judge came over to look at her, she decided to lie down in the sawdust right where she was. She just lay there chewing her cud and looking around at all the people in the stands. No matter what I did she wouldn’t budge. Then the kid behind me tried to help by pushing on her. Then the judge himself got into the act. Don’t you rememberthat, Ethan? Pop got such a charge out of the whole thing. I could hear him roaring from the stands on the other side of the ring.”
    Ethan gave a quiet little smile, and I could see his face was brighter and the story’d had an effect on him. Ethan’s funny; he’ll worry about all kinds of things, but as soon as he finds out that something he’s been worried about has already happened to me or Pop or even Bo, then he’ll stop worrying about it. It’s as if he thinks, if it happened to us, it must be all right.
    He was still looking happy when we finished up and walked in from the barn. “Pop really got a charge out of it, huh?” he said, smiling up at me.
    â€œYeah,” I told him. “He really did.”
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    Not long after that Bo pulled up in The Tank. The Tank was actually a late-model, top-of-the-line Lexus, but it had earned that name because of Bo’s father’s history of using it to drive through things. Actually, this was the third in a series of Tanks. The original Tank had been dubbed by us about six years earlier when Mr. Michaelson had used it to put a new opening in the back of their two-car garage. It seems he got a story idea just as he was pulling into the driveway and was jotting it down after he parked in the garage. Unfortunately he never got around to taking the car out of drive, and it was creeping forward the whole time he was scribbling down the idea. When he heard the first telltale crunching sounds, he went for the brake but caught the gas instead and ended up on the back lawn. The thing that got me was he sat there for a few minutes getting the rest of the idea down before he climbed out to check damages. I still kind of admire him for that.
    â€œDo I see a new dent?” I said as Bo got out.
    â€œGood eye,” he said. “Dad had a run-in yesterday with one of those mail collection boxes on Main Street.”
    â€œWhose fault?” I said with a straight face.
    Bo had Ethan in a headlock and was pretending to whale on him. “Hard to say,” he said, deadpan. “They never found the guy driving the mailbox.”
    It’s not that Mr. M. wasn’t a good driver; he was actually pretty handy behind the wheel. It’s just that too many times his body was behind the wheel and his mind wasn’t. Bo explained it away by saying his father had no earth signs. He wrote books for a living, so spacing out was right up his alley. Anyway, every Christmas Mr. M. would send fruit baskets and signed books to anybody whose car he’d hit or whose property he’d damaged. The list grew a little larger each year. I was even on it. He’d backed over my bicycle when I was ten.
    We decided to head over to Bo’s house and review the footage we’d gotten the night before. First we dropped Ethan off at Pop’s office. At the end of each week Ethan liked to hang around there and help Pop organize everything, which, unlike me, he was amazingly good at. Pop said lots of times Ethan was