So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger Page B

cloud came between us and the shining automobile, a large cloud tumbling in from the west comprising Heaven knows what magnitude of topsoil. When it had passed the auto was still there but shiny no longer and had also lost its tail of dust. Hood suggested it had broken down and the driver was underneath it, working, and that might have been the truth.
    On the third day the plains gave out to hills. They were green and dusty and creeks ran out of them, and the road curved up and round and felt natural again. I could have leapt from the Packard and kissed the earth. As for Hood, he had never before seen anything but plains. “Look up there,” he kept saying—he believed us to have reached the mountains, though they were only the Flint Hills he himself had told us to expect.
    We had gone some way into these pretty knobs when the Packard made a loud noise and quit. The noise was of something large knocking about loose inside the motor. At this time we were climbing a slight gradient and the Packard stopped and began to roll backward. Jumping out Hood threw a wedge of firewood behind a tire, then opened the lid and scouted the sighing motor.
    “All right, mechanic,” Glendon said.
    “I can fix it,” Hood replied. He didn’t look sure. He horsed his greasewood toolbox from the car and rattled through implements like a wizard through his totems.
    “Would you like some assistance?” I asked, as Hood wormed on his back under the Packard.
    “Don’t take it wrong but you ain’t going to be no help to me.”
    As it was evening we lit a fire and cut pieces off a loaf of bread and toasted them on sticks.
    “So these are the Flint Hills,” said Glendon.
    “I gather.”
    “I believe Mr. Crealock had people in the Flint Hills,” he remarked.
    “Who’s Crealock?” Hood asked.
    “Preacher I knew once. Not a regular preacher—he had no church, is what I’m saying. He’d had two or three but kept losing them. He’d drink too much, or forget himself and go to a dance, or play cards. I owe a lot to Crealock,” Glendon added.
    “Sounds messed up,” came Hood’s voice from under the car.
    “I suppose he was,” said Glendon. “He was kind to me, though, and taught me to read—that’s worth something, I think.”
    “Worth a pain in the backside,” Hood said, in a grouchy mood for the first time since he’d joined us. He was having a terrible go of it, to judge from his twisting legs.
    “What happened to Crealock, did you ever hear?” I asked, for Glendon’s face was pained at Hood’s disrespectful tone.
    “Yes, George Parrot shot him,” Glendon answered. “I wasn’t there when it happened, and I feel ill to this day when I think of it. George was big and powerful and in all ways a stupid person. I always felt someone must’ve put him up to it, although it may have been his idea. He was sufficiently mean all by himself.”
    At this we heard a sharp metallic lurch and Hood roared a string of impolite adjectives. He might even have cried a little. It wasn’t his fault. I’ve looked under a car or two myself, since then—it’s bedlam down there, no beginning no end, and a consequence for everything you touch.

15
    Poor Hood—the Packard, so dependable on the flats, went all balky confronted with rise and fall. We couldn’t go ten miles without some new problem putting us out of commission. The car would cough and stall, or bang like gunfire, or run down like a clock. We had so many stops it was no surprise when, in the evening shadows, the silver auto crested a rise and came down into the valley of our latest trial and pulled up behind us. The door sagged open and Charles Siringo hove out and stretched. Without shame I admit to a case of cold horrors, though Siringo did not look especially intimidating. He looked like any man does who has been driving too long. He rotated his neck and swung his arms back and forth and even touched his toes, the limber old screw.
    “Hello,” I said. Glendon was nowhere