Late in the Standoff

The Standoff

On a swirling cold, late December morning in 1968, my grandfather Harry and I split light fog in a big, blue Oldsmobile Cutlass, twisting along Route 66 and various side roads, among small farms, bare-twigged meadows, and Civil War battlefields in the woods of eastern Oklahoma. Since the day before, we hadn’t spoken to each other except to get our plans straight.

The governor had sent him to a little town called Jay, well out of his congressional district, to settle some nasty business. Before our disagreement I’d asked if I could come along. It was too late to back out now.

The sky looked snowy but nothing fell. The gray light dulled the hills’ red soil. I stared, glumly, at the peeling Burma Shave signs by the side of the road. Harry switched on the radio. Static, quick as gunfire. Paul Harvey said John Steinbeck had died. We were quiet for several miles. Finally Harry, trying to be friendly again, asked, “Did you ever read The Grapes of Wrath?”

“They made us read it last year, in eighth-grade English.” A wheeze scratched the back of my throat.

“A lot of Sooners didn’t like the book when it first came out,” Harry said. “Thought it showed poor Okies in a bad light. Longing for the Pastures of Plenty and all. But I always felt it was a mighty fine novel. He knew the way it was.”

“My teacher said he’s a traitor,” I said quietly: a humble little smart-ass.

Harry frowned. “How’s that?”

“Early on, he was on the workers’ side, right? Anti-capitalist, anti-war. Then he got rich. He supported all the killing.”

“I see. We’re back to Vietnam, are we?”

I didn’t answer.

He lifted some weight off the gas pedal. “A wise fellow, a former governor, told me once, it takes a mature man to see the complexities of our culture, Pancho. To change his mind when he has to. I think Mr. Steinbeck must have been a very mature man.”

Paul Harvey finished his newscast. Harry and I stared at the road. The Beatles came on. Their music no longer seemed upbeat or innocent to me the way it once had, and I didn’t enjoy it much anymore. The Fab Four looked old now. They’d grown mustaches and beards and, posing for the camera, didn’t smile as much as they used to. John Lennon had said they were bigger than Jesus, and a radio station in my hometown had sponsored a “Beatles Record Burning.” One of the DJs showed up in a KKK outfit and waved a wooden cross. I didn’t destroy my “gear” 45s, but I didn’t play them, either. Instead, I watched the TV news. Mayhem in Chicago. War wounds. Oh boy. The world seemed a punctured balloon, with all the joy leaking out.

“… nah-nah-nah …”

I reached over and turned the music off.

We stopped at a Dairy Queen just off the highway and ate onion rings. Dead rose bushes twitched in the breeze, tapping the mustard-streaked window by our booth.

“So you’re disappointed in me, is that it?” Harry said, wiping his fingers with a napkin.

I didn’t know what to tell him. His anger, yesterday, was new to me. “I guess I don’t understand you. All the stories you’ve told me

… your resistance over the years …” I faltered.

“Like what?” he asked.

“Like opposing the draft,” I said.

“But I registered, didn’t I? Right after the Lusitania. You need to listen harder, Pancho. I followed the law. Everything I did — everything I’ve ever done — has been legal and proper. That’s the point of my stories.” He sipped his coffee. “You remind me of my dad, the Last of the Okie Reds. He wanted revolution and he wanted it now. Well, that’s not the way things work in this country, believe me. I’m mature enough to know that now. It’s not realistic.”

“All right,” I said. “But you don’t really support this war, do you?”

He lit a Chesterfield and coughed. Behind him, a woman in orange stretch pants ordered fries for her two fat kids. “I’m a Democrat,” he said softly. “Lyndon Johnson was a Democrat. It would be unseemly of me, as a representative of the people, to criticize my president.”

“But now that Tricky Dick’s in charge — ”

He picked up a cracked plastic spoon and batted away my remarks. “You’ve got to be realistic.” He looked to me vastly tired, a man who’d suffered for years, bearing lost causes all his life. A spent fighter who’d found it easier just to give in.

The woman herded her kids out the door. “Because I say so!” she snapped. The people have spoken! “Now get in the car!”

If I was a young ideologue, it was Harry’s own damn fault. As a child, I was as familiar with the Oklahoma House of Representatives as I was with swimming pools and merry-go-rounds. Along with Mother Goose I’d been spoon-fed Mother Jones. Before I could read I was spelling out “Come Hear Harry Shaughnessy, The Boy Orator,” copying into my coloring books fat letters from Harry’s old campaign posters. My first real drawings were sketches of his face, from pictures on old socialist fliers he’d shown me, brittle, yellowed, crumbling in my hands.

When the Socialist Party died in Oklahoma, in the patriotic fervor of the First World War, he’d become a liberal Democrat (against his father’s still-militant wishes), running for local offices in Cotton County, just north of the Red River in the southwest part of the state. Finally, in the late fifties, he’d been elected to the House.

Whenever the legislature was in session, he stayed in the Huckins Hotel in downtown OK City. Sometimes my family drove up from Texas to see him. I’d sit in his room with a stack of hotel stationery, copying the latest Herblock cartoons. Harry saved them for me from the Daily Oklahoman. Herblock’s Nixon had caterpillar eyebrows and a slim, spiked schnoz. Pure Evil. I was delighted.

Or from one of Harry’s books I’d trace Bill Mauldin’s weary GIs, Willie and Joe; or Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us”). From the time I could form a reasonably straight line, I wanted to be a cartoonist.

For hours I entertained myself sketching. In ’62—’63, when I was seven, Harry brought me often to the House chamber. He knew I was fascinated by the surroundings, that I thrilled to his speeches. Normally, visitors weren’t allowed on the floor, especially during a vote, but I was just a kid, easy to overlook. It pleased Harry to have his little namesake there. I scribbled it all down.

One afternoon, I sat in the heat, in Harry’s leather chair, watching the edges of my drawing paper curl. Harry stood in the aisle jawing with a couple of other reps. They all wore light gray suits and — at least in my memory — ties the bright morning-blue of the Oklahoma flag. In the air, a faint smell of sweat and aftershave.

The chamber was a rectangle with a green carpet and cream-colored walls. Black, high-backed chairs bumped small wooden desks topped with silver mikes. Up front, a tote board, tallying votes, flashed green and red lights behind the House Speaker’s helm. From the walls, electric globes cast peach-colored circles across the room’s bottom half; the top, an open gallery for newspaper reporters, swam in a cool fluorescent bath.

Young aides in freshly pressed shirts rushed here and there ferrying telephones with long, twisted cords. They’d connect the phones to a desk; a legislator would holler instructions into the receiver, then the aides would collect the cords and sprint to another desk.

Harry leaned near me as I sketched all this. He jotted several names on a piece of notepaper and handed it to one of his partners. “We might have some influence with these knuckleheads,” he said. “I’ve already run our road bill by them, but it wouldn’t hurt if you paid them one more visit before the vote.” The man nodded. “No deals,” Harry warned him. “We’re not in the horse-trading business. Not on this one. Either we have their support or we don’t.”

In the warm chamber light his gray hair looked silky. He sat by me. With a nicotined finger he tapped my drawing pad. “That’s very good,” he said. “Did you just do that?”

“Yessir. What’s a horse-trading business?”

“You know that road north of Walters, that muddy mess out by Harlan Egbert’s farm?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m trying to get the state to pave it. That way, whenever I take you swimming out there, the car won’t get stuck. Won’t that be nice?”

Years later, searching through his papers, I learned that Standard Oil Company, which he’d cursed in rallies as a young socialist, had lobbied him to sponsor a road bill so it could get easier access to the natural gas deposits in Egbert’s fields.

Harry stood, shaking hands with men who passed in the aisle, waving at others across the room, mouthing, “Fight for me!”

Finally, the Speaker called the vote. Someone proposed an amendment to the bill. “Son of a bitch,” Harry muttered. “They’ll drain its juice.”

Even today, I can’t say for sure what happened next, but I know Harry crushed the motion without uttering a word. People turned to him. He danced like a featherweight. Winks, hand-gibes, nods. Later, when the tote board flashed and clattered and came up mostly green, I understood that Harry had finessed his way to victory.

“I want to know who managed that bill!” A rangy man with thick black eyebrows approached him. “I hear Harry Shaughnessy managed that bill.” He bent to me. “Are you Harry Shaughnessy?” he asked.

“Yessir,” I said. For I was.

“Well Harry, you’re one fine floor manager.”

“Thank you.”

“A pretty good artist, too, I see.”

Harry told me, “Harry, say hello to Governor Edmonson.” I could tell he felt pleased with himself, and I was pleased for him. He was an important man: the governor had sought him out. As his namesake, as a privileged visitor to the people’s chamber, I thought, I must be important too.

Now, six years later, a new governor, Dewey Bartlett, had called on him to resolve an “Indian problem.” Recently an article had appeared in Time magazine saying that Oklahoma’s blacks had no political clout and that the state’s Indians were disorganized and ignored. Since then, Governor Bartlett had moved quickly, whenever he could, to erase the racist image Time had painted of him. Though Bartlett was a Republican, Harry defended his efforts to assist minority employment. “He’s established the Full Employment Commission, whose primary purpose is to loan money to Mexicans, blacks, and Indians for job training,” Harry said in speeches statewide. “He’s created the Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission, and he’s appointed the state’s first black judge. What more can he do?”

The only thing I knew about Bartlett was that his campaign slogans were “Bring Back Our Okies!” and “Help an Okie!” and that his supporters all wore Okie pins on their shirts. He wanted to change the Okie image, from that of a poor dirt farmer like Tom Joad to that of a small industrialist, like a rubber tire manufacturer or a clothing supplier. He was probably glad Steinbeck had died.

After leaving the Dairy Queen, Harry and I passed through post oak and the twisted spikes of Arkansas yucca, heading north through Henryetta, Okmulgee, and Taft, a predominantly black town, on our way to Jay. There, a dispute had flared between local officials and a loose band of Cherokees, Kiowas, and Creeks, who were upset about the arrest and prosecution of a young Cherokee for hunting deer out of season. The young man had argued that the land belonged to his people. State laws didn’t apply to him; he followed the will of his tribe. The debate, Harry explained to me, had escalated into shouting matches on the streets and in the courts.

Finally, one of the Kiowa leaders requested Harry as a mediator. Harry didn’t know anyone in Delaware County so he didn’t understand why he was called, but the situation was urgent, said the governor’s staff.

Before my fight with him about Vietnam, I’d been eager to come along. As a boy, I’d accompanied him many times to Indian powwows in Sultan Park, north of Walters, his hometown. I remembered drums thundering beside the park’s little stream. Dogwood blossoms fell all around us. The dancers, in robes of white feathers and long blue beads, moved in solemn circles beneath quivering willows. I loved the dancers’ thick, straight hair, their long cheekbones. They looked much more down-to-earth than the actors I’d seen on TV shoot-’em-ups wearing moccasins and buckskin pants. They didn’t grunt or eat raw animals. They broiled deer meat over open fires in the park, cut it into strips, mixed it with vegetable oil and fresh berries. They laughed and sang. Their ceremonies were full of movement, lines, and grace. I sketched them so fast, so intently, I ran out of breath.

But now Harry and I were bristling at each other, and I wished I’d stayed in Walters at my grandma’s house.

The day before, my parents and I had driven up from Texas to spend Christmas with Harry and Zorah. She loved the holidays, and her tree was the finest of the season, decorated with strings of long thin lights filled with colored water. When you plugged them in they bubbled.

Zorah doted on me. When I was little, she’d leave dollar bills in pink plastic eggs for me at Easter or slip coins into my coat pockets. The morning Harry and I left for Jay, she caught me at the door. “In case you stop for a treat,” she said, slipping me a buck.

She also gave us two freshly baked gingerbread cookies. Harry had smuggled his into the Dairy Queen to eat with his coffee. I’d saved mine: a reward, later, for surviving this day with a man I no longer knew.

The trouble between us had started when my folks asked me to explain to him why I’d been suspended from school for a week, right before break. I’d drawn a poster of screaming Vietnamese children, from pictures I’d seen in Life magazine, and scrawled at the top in psychedelic lettering, “Stop the Bombing!” Late one afternoon, I’d mimeographed dozens of these and taped them to the classroom doors of my junior high.

Everyone knew who did it. Each month, I’d made posters for dances and other school events. My style was distinctive, the vice principal told me dryly as he pronounced my sentence.

Of all the members of my family, Harry would appreciate my convictions, I thought. After all, he was a former socialist, a man who’d opposed the draft as a kid, a man who called me Pancho because my infant face had recalled, for him, smudgy photos he’d seen in history books of the great revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

Instead, after I’d laid out my story, he told me, “If you don’t like your government’s policies, you work within the system to change them. This maverick stuff, Pancho, it’s useless and dangerous.”

“What maverick stuff?” I asked.

“The protests. The campus riots. The troubles in the cities. You’re what, fourteen, fifteen?”

“Thirteen.”

“Old enough to have more sense.”

What had happened to the Boy Orator, I wondered, humiliated and confused. What had happened to the guy who’d scorned the nation’s “industrial giants and munitions makers”? I looked at his sagging cheeks. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not even in spirit. He was seventy now. But could a person change that much?

I carried a petition with me denouncing America’s bombing of North Vietnam. My Catholic “Youth for Peace” group was sponsoring a drive for signatures to mail to the president. Harry wouldn’t touch it. “These radical young priests in the church now, playing politics — they don’t know the first thing,” he said. “Ought to stick to pouring wine and chanting to themselves.”

“I can’t believe you,” I said. “You’re talking about the church!”

“Well, I expect you to straighten up.”

That night, helping Zorah trim the tree, I asked her if I’d done something to tick Harry off. It didn’t seem possible that my misadventures were enough to upset him so.

“Nope. He’s become cautious, that’s all.” She sprinkled tinsel on the tree.

“I’ve always seen him as a fighter,” I said. He had a promotional photo of Jack Dempsey, acquired somewhere on his travels. Besides the Pogo books, it was my favorite thing in his house. “Boxing’s not so different from running for office,” he’d told me once when he caught me admiring the picture. “The winner’s the one who can take the most blows.”

Zorah laughed. “He used to be a fighter. These days, it’s ’Agitation’s a luxury I sure as hell can’t afford.’” She reached to perch a little drummer boy on a limb.

“What’s he mean?”

“He’s an insider. A political veteran now, with a reputation to protect. He can’t be reckless.”

“Do you think my posters were reckless?”

“At your age, your granddaddy would have done the same thing.”

This didn’t comfort me. Did she mean I’d soften, too?

As I stretched to fit a snowy angel on the tree, I felt dizzy, short of breath: the pine needles had provoked an allergic reaction in my lungs. Colors swirled through my head. Reds, purples, pinks. Now, as I gazed at the tree, all the figures seemed to shift. The wise men, the Virgin.

Zorah plugged in the lights. I focused on the bubbles; their pulse steadied my chest.

“Anyhow, don’t worry about your granddad. He thinks the world of you. You know he docs. What is it — History Man? His name for you?”

“History’s Keeper.”

“Right.” She rubbed my head.

“Come on, it’s serious, Grandma. ‘History Man’ sounds like a comic book.”

“I thought you liked comics? All right, all right, I’m sorry. All I’m saying is, this tempest’ll pass. And it’s not like this is anything new, is it? He’s been in the House longer than old Methuselah. Don’t let the old goat get to you, okay?”

“You remember coming up here, couple of years ago?” Harry asked me now in the car. We were nearing Jay, climbing through red and yellow hills.

“The Civil War field?”

“Exactly,” he said. One of his pet projects was preserving historic sites, talking landowners into donating significant property back to the state. Sometimes he took me with him, as a prop. “We want our children, like this young man here, to have a clear sense of their heritage, don’t we?” he’d ask some farmer whose pastures had been the scene of a nearly forgotten bloody skirmish a century ago. Folks rarely refused him.

“You had your tape recorder then,” he reminded me. “History’s Keeper. Didn’t we come back through the city that time and stop at Adair’s?”

“I think so.”

“We wrap up this Jay business pronto, we might do that again. What do you say?”

I shrugged, feigning indifference. He knew I loved the place — Adair’s Tropical Cafeteria in downtown Oklahoma City. He used to take me there after House votes. It’s where he’d turned me into his personal storyteller.

He lit another Chesterfield. Coughed. The smoke irritated me. I remembered Adair’s the way it looked the first time I saw it. It was in a drab shopping center, but the neon palm tree just inside the door promised an exotic experience. To a seven-year-old, the bamboo partitions and jungle wallpaper were thrillingly strange. Usually, Harry was in a fine mood at these meals, having just won a floor fight. Over beets, baked halibut, macaroni and cheese, he’d tell me stories of his early days when he traveled the state as the Boy Orator, speaking for the poor. Eventually I knew these tales by heart.

All my life I’d seen his name — my name — on posters, match-book covers, emery boards: “Vote for Harry Shaughnessy — He Has Always Been Your Friend!” I believed it. We were one and the same, Harry and me.

One day at Adair’s, flipping through my sketchpad, he asked me if I liked to write as well as draw.

I hadn’t thought about it. “Sure,” I said.

“Good. I hope you’ll practice hard, Pancho. Pictures and words. A powerful combination. A right cross followed by a swift left hook.” He leaned forward, over his pumpkin pie. “Every family, like every culture, needs a chronicler,” he said. “History’s our teacher, right?”

“Right.” What was I going to say? He’d told me so, many times.

“You can be History’s Keeper.”

“I can?” I dribbled strawberry ice cream onto the table.

“You bet. I’ve been watching you, and I think you’ve got the skills.”

He winked at me, the kind of comradely signal he’d sent around the House floor. I felt the sway of his charm: my cheeks burned.

Instead of getting me started with stamps, a rare coin collection, or an ant farm, he made his life my project.

I think now he had a sense of himself as a unique individual in a particular place and time, in a way that few of us do, and he shrewdly thought ahead. If I didn’t pan out as his Boswell, at least I’d have the stories to pass along to someone else someday.

He bought a Norelco tape recorder, a heavy, square machine small enough to fit into a coat pocket, and saved his thoughts for me on mini-cassettes. On my visits, he’d slip the tapes into my suitcase. “History’s Keeper,” he’d say, smiling, patting my head.

The next Christmas he gave me my own recorder, “to go with your pencils and paper.” It seemed to me the kind of device I’d seen in James Bond movies. At home, whenever I played Harry’s tapes, I remembered our afternoons in the buzzing light of the neon tree, and my mouth watered with the faint taste of slightly scorched macaroni.

On the hardscrabble outskirts of Jay, pickups lined the highway: rusting, door-sprung jobs, some in need of paint, some painted three or four shades of the same basic color. Empty gunracks filled their back windows.

The guns were in the hands of the Cherokees, Kiowas, and Creeks who flanked the main street into town, in front of hot dog stands, neon beer signs on dark bar walls, gas pumps, signs saying JESUS IS COMING. Store windows were shattered. The Indians wore overalls or jeans, leather coats. They cradled rifles or fingered pistols tucked into the tops of their pants. Their hair was long. I didn’t see any women.

Not far from here, the Joads had scraped and stabbed their sun-cracked acres, but today, with most whites out of sight and Indians in charge of the streets, I’d never seen a less Okie-looking town.

Harry parked the Olds by a state trooper’s car. He’d gone pale. “If I’d known they were armed, I wouldn’t have brought you,” he said, scared or angry or both.

He tossed a cigarette out the window, and we sat there wheezing. Something else we shared, besides a name: neither of us could breathe worth a damn. Years of tobacco had taken a toll on him. I was a mass of allergic symptoms. My hands still prickled from touching Zorah’s tree.

A young white man with short hair and a gray suit waved to us from the side of the road.

When we left the car, Harry told me to stick close by.

The young man introduced himself as Michael Van Buren, one of Governor Bartlett’s aides. “We’re so relieved you could make it,” he said.

“When I spoke to him on the phone, your colleague in the city didn’t prepare me for this,” Harry said. “I was under the impression I’d be talking to two or three representatives of the tribes. This looks like war.”

“They started coming out of the hills last night. Staking out the streets. No one took them seriously at first. I mean, you know, the Indians here have always been pretty much ignored.”

“The problem, perhaps.”

“Right, right. Now we’ve got a scalping party on our hands.” He forced a laugh. Harry didn’t join him. In the young man’s stare I saw a confused quality I’d noticed in many adults. I’d begun to understand — from things Harry had told me — that America’s old rules of civility and order no longer applied to daily life. The Kennedys and Martin Luther King were dead. Cities were on fire. This may have been Jay, Oklahoma, but it hadn’t escaped the nation’s troubles.

“Why’d they ask for me?” Harry said.

“Don’t know. Won’t say. But you’re the man they want. Claim they’re through wasting time with the locals.”

Though the air was getting colder, Harry removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves, a flamboyant gesture of openness to everyone in the street: I’m hiding nothing. “Where am I going?” he asked.

Van Buren pointed to the courthouse. “The leader’s in there.”

“Stay put, Pancho. I’ll be back shortly.”

Despite my tiff with him, I wasn’t going to let him walk by himself through a hostile crowd. When Van Buren turned to confer with his aides, I followed Harry down the road. He was too intent, watching the men with guns, to notice me behind him. When he reached the fortlike courthouse, spun and saw me, he shook his head and whispered, “All right, sit down, Pancho. Don’t move.”

The Indians hadn’t shifted as we’d passed them in the street. Silent sentries. A man with football-colored skin told us to wait, then slipped inside the courthouse.

“Got your pencil and paper?” Harry asked me.

He knew I did. I nodded.

“May be a good story in this.”

At that, a faint macaroni taste filled the back of my mouth. My lungs hurt.

A tall man in black denims and a blue cotton shirt came out of the courthouse. “Representative Shaughnessy. Thank you for coming,” he said.

Harry shook his hand. We all shivered in the cold. “Why me?” Harry asked. “I’m not from this district.”

“You have the reputation, statewide, of being a fair and honest man.”

This didn’t satisfy Harry — I could tell from the curl of his mouth — but he let it go for now. “All right,” he said. “Fill me in.”

“My name is John Tasuda, from the Kiowa tribe. As you may know, the Kiowas, Cherokees, and Creeks live and work harmoniously here.”

Harry nodded.

“I’ve been elected to be their spokesman.”

“In this deer hunting matter?”

“In the illegal arrest by the Department of Wildlife of my Cherokee cousin, Louis Chewie.”

I wheezed. My ribs felt like straps.

“The hunting laws are clear. Posted well in advance,” Harry argued.

“Louis Chewie is a good family man. A farm laborer.” John Tasuda scratched his ear through a tassel of long black hair. “You grew up on a farm, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Have you forgotten, in your nice, air-conditioned office in the capitol building, how arduous farm life can be?”

“I haven’t forgotten.”

“Most of us work in the strawberry fields when we can, but much of the year we’re out of work. We do what we can to feed our families.”

The straps were tightening.

“Still — ”

“The buck in question was killed on the Kenwood Reserve, in the thickest part of the woods. Do you know the place?” John Tasuda asked.

“Yes. I did a little homework before coming here,” Harry said. “The government holds it in trust for the Cherokee tribe.”

“That’s right. So the land belongs to Chewie’s people.”

“Even so, under federal mandates — ”

“What? Is he to be licensed like a dog, just so he can feed his children?”

Tightening, squeezing all the air. Harry rubbed his face. “As one elected official to another, I can tell you, you’ll get nowhere with this. I know it doesn’t seem fair — ,” Harry said.

“It’s not a question of fairness.” Tasuda crossed his blocky arms. “It’s a matter of survival. Last September, Chewie’s aunt starved to death in her cabin.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry said.

“I heard a long time ago, Mr. Shaughnessy, that you believed in equality for Native folks. That’s why I’ve turned to you.”

At that moment I completely lost my breath. My worst asthma attack in months. Probably it had been building for a while, prompted by Harry’s cigarette smoke in the car, Zorah’s tree, the stress of our situation on the courthouse steps, but it seemed at the time a rebuke to Harry — I felt it, he felt it — a cynical response to John Tasuda’s faith in him.

It was as though I’d shouted, “I’ve always been proud to bear your name. But you’re wrong about Vietnam. You’re wrong here. I don’t want to keep your history anymore.” I saw the shock on his face — and it was shock, more than concern — as I stood there gasping.

A hawk called in the sky.

“Do you have an inhaler?” Harry asked.

“Left it … in the car. I’ll be okay. Just let me sit.”

It took me a while, but I like to believe, now, that I was mature enough to compose myself in a crucial moment.

I closed my eyes and pictured Zorah’s bubbles.

“We’ve got to go,” Harry said, worried for me now, even as I was starting to get better.

“I’d hoped we could work things out,” said John Tasuda.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Really.”

“Mr. Shaughnessy, I’ve followed your career for many years.”

Harry looked at him. “Why?”

“My grandmother used to talk about you. She heard you speak once, somewhere. You wouldn’t have known her. Just a face in a crowd. But she was a great admirer of yours.”

Harry looked chilled, a slightly bewildered old man — as if trying to recall what he used to say, how he used to feel.

“I want you to understand, I don’t trust politicians,” Tasuda said. “Never have. I know, to you, we’re all just faces in a crowd — ”

“No no, everyone’s important,” Harry said automatically. “Of course you are.”

“But I asked to speak to you because I know what’ll happen if shooting breaks out. We may win the day, but eventually we’ll lose the war. We always do. I figured if I could reason with any white man, it might be you. Grandmother always believed you were principled and fair.”

“He is,” I said, still wheezing. My lungs felt hard and small. Harry watched me closely, probably to see if I was being a smart-ass again. “She was right, wasn’t she?” I asked Harry.

John Tasuda spread his arms. “We need your help, Mr. Shaughnessy. You see for yourself, we’ll force change if we have to. We can’t go on like this.”

A man sneezed in the street. Shifting rifles. Shuffling feet.

Harry rubbed the back of his neck. “About all I can do is push for the case to be taken to federal court, so you’re not dealing with locals. It’s likely the judges there would be more impartial, more mindful of public opinion, especially in a civil rights case. Your friend Chewie might have a better chance at a fair trial.”

“But the local authorities have been adamant — ,” Tasuda began.

“I’ll handle the local authorities.”

“I’m not sure if that’s — ”

“Look, all you want’s a fair trial for the man, right?” Harry asked.

Tasuda nodded slowly.

“Can you convince your people?” Harry said.

“Maybe. They’re getting cold and tired …”

“Well then, you’d better get them the hell off the streets. You said it yourself. They’re not helping your cause.”

They talked a while longer, trading timetables and possible arrangements. I took deeper and deeper breaths, watching guns in the gray light, studying angles and lines and the subtle shadings of clothes. The images swirled together, turning all the men into bright, brittle ornaments.

Harry offered Tasuda a Chesterfield. They held the cigarettes away from me, so the smoke wouldn’t blow in my face.

Harry coughed. “Where’d your grandmother hear me? Do you know?”

“I think it was after a Golden Gloves tournament once, somewhere in the city.”

“I remember that. Sure. Long time ago.”

“My older brothers, they both boxed.”

“Any good?”

“Naw. But they were too big and dumb to fall down, so they usually won their fights.”

Harry laughed. “I could use men like that on the House floor.”

“So you’ll see Chewie through?”

Harry promised, “I’ll do what I can.”

Years, it’s taken me years to see how a good sketch leads a viewer’s eye from one figure to the next so the picture appears seamless. I mean, I’ve always understood this, but occasionally I’ve failed to see it. Some lessons, I guess, we need to keep learning. Sometimes we lose what we know.

In 1921, on the eve of the Carpentier-Dempsey fight, Harry, just a kid then, clipped a cartoon from the Daily Oklahoman by an artist named Winsor McCay (I found it in Harry’s papers after he died). This was long before the great Herblock. Its caption read, “The Kind of Fighting That Pays,” and it featured three First World War vets, one missing a leg, another blind, and a third without his arms.

The hobbled fellow spreads a paper on his lap. He says, “Listen to this! The fight is limited to twelve rounds. It may last only one minute or less. Carpentier is to get $200,000 and Dempsey $300,000. No matter who wins, or how long the fight lasts, they get theirs!”

The blind man responds, “WOW! What do we get for our fighting? Ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho! And a couple of he-he-hes!”

The third adds, “We got ours! Yes, we did! We got ours, ha-ha! Thanks to an appreciative public!”

A pair of crutches guides the viewer’s eye down the first man’s body to his stump. The head of the blind vet’s cane points to the third friend’s empty sleeves. Simple, smart. A perfectly orchestrated drawing.

I often think that a man who tells stories and makes sketches for a living must still be a kid at heart, an idealist insisting on symmetry and balance, even when they’re hard to find.

That is to say, I wanted Harry’s life to be one straight line.

So did John Tasuda, that day in Jay.

So did Harry, maybe, as he tried to negotiate the complexities of our culture.

“I could use a soda,” he told me when we’d returned to the Olds. “How ‘bout you? Back to Dairy Queen?”

“Sure.”

“Got your breath again?”

“I think so.” For good measure, I took a couple hits off my inhaler.

Harry had exchanged a few words with the governor’s aide, who still looked confused. John Tasuda was addressing his people. They didn’t seem happy. They stayed in the street with their guns, but didn’t try to stop us when we pulled away.

We were alone now on Route 66. The road, lined with pumpjacks, had long been bypassed by the interstate.

“That was good,” I said after a while, pinching off a bite of Zorah’s cookie.

“Proud of the old man now? One last time?”

“That was good,” I said again. A hawk-shadow blackened the fields.

Harry reached for the radio. “—bless America, and our fine new president,” someone said. “And a very Merry Christmas to you all.”

Oh boy.

“We’ll grab some dinner at Adair’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let’s go home.”

“Yeah, let’s go home.”

Out the window, I waved at the ghosts of the Joads.