“I like towns better, and I already have enough trouble.”

“That’s okay,” Glen said. “When the geese lift up you’ll get to see them. That’s all I wanted. Les and me’ll go shoot them, won’t we, Les?”

“Yes,” I said, and I put my hand on my shotgun, which had been my father’s and was heavy as rocks.

“Then we should go on,” Glen said, “or we’ll waste our light.”

We got out of the car with our guns. Glen took off his canvas shoes and put on his pair of black irrigators out of the trunk. Then we crossed the barbed wire fence, and walked out into the high, tilled field toward nothing. I looked back at my mother when we were still not so far away, but I could only see the small, dark top of her head, low in the backseat of the Nash, staring out and thinking what I could not then begin to say.

On the walk toward the lake, Glen began talking to me. I had never been alone with him, and knew little about him except what my mother said—that he drank too much, or other times that he was the nicest man she had ever known in the world and that someday a woman would marry him, though she didn’t think it would be her. Glen told me as we walked that he wished he had finished college, but that it was too late now, that his mind was too old. He said he had liked the Far East very much, and that people there knew how to treat each other, and that he would go back some day but couldn’t go now. He said also that he would like to live in Russia for a while and mentioned the names of people who had gone there, names I didn’t know. He said it would be hard at first, because it was so different, but that pretty soon anyone would learn to like it and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, and that Russians treated Americans who came to live there like kings. There were Communists everywhere now, he said. You didn’t know them, but they were there. Montana had a large number, and he was in touch with all of them. He said that Communists were always in danger and that he had to protect himself all the time. And when he said that he pulled back his VFW jacket and showed me the butt of a pistol he had stuck under his shirt against his bare skin. “There are people who want to kill me right now,” he said, “and I would kill a man myself if I thought I had to.” And we kept walking. Though in a while he said, “I don’t think I know much about you, Les. But I’d like to. What do you like to do?”

“I like to box,” I said. “My father did it. It’s a good thing to know.”

“I suppose you have to protect yourself too,” Glen said.

“I know how to,” I said.

“Do you like to watch TV,” Glen asked, and smiled.

“Not much.”

“I love to,” Glen said. “I could watch it instead of eating if I had one.”

I looked out straight ahead over the green tops of sage that grew to the edge of the disked field, hoping to see the lake Glen said was there. There was an airishness and a sweet smell that I thought might be the place we were going, but I couldn’t see it. “How will we hunt these geese?” I said.

“It won’t be hard,” Glen said. “Most hunting isn’t even hunting. It’s only shooting. And that’s what this will be. In Illinois you would dig holes in the ground and hide and set out your decoys.