EZRA AND EVIL

EZRA AND EVIL

A Comic Novel

EZRA AND EVIL

Table of Contents

Chapter I........= ............................................................. Was Victory Mature

Chapter II.......= ............................................................ How Now Red Cow?

Chapter III......= ............................................................ A Little Learning

Chapter IV.......= ........................................................... Bullshit= o: The Code

Chapter V........= ........................................................... Rescue the Perishing

Chapter VI.......= ........................................................... Harangue and Holy Water

Chapter VII......= ........................................................... Amazing Grace

Chapter VIII.....= .......................................................... My Fair Lady

Chapter IX.......= ........................................................... Mr. Melville’s Boy, Billy

Chapter X........= ........................................................... A Short Frankfurt in Vienna

Chapter XI.......= ........................................................... Fish Kill

Chapter XII......= ........................................................... Sips that Passion the Night

CHAPTER I

WAS VICTOR MATURE?

&= nbsp; I didn't kill Fanny; you have to understand that. She was dead, or nearly so, when I barged in--before that even. = And other than possibly contributing a few gray hairs to that small, pretty hea= d of hers, I had absolutely nothing to do with what Roseabeth's father, Preacher Bascom, called Fanny's "untimely demise." He said the exact same thing about Roseabeth's mother. And he al= ways added that she, Roseabeth's mother, had been called away to do God's work elsewhere. <= /span>

&= nbsp; I reckon preachers are supposed to think like that, part of being a man of Go= d, but I can't see much sense in it. If you ask me--which few people do--seems like God ought to have all= the help He needs without the preacher's wife, unless of course, He doesn't have any better handle on things "up there" than He does down here in = what Huck called the "territories" and what has since become known as = Oklahoma.

&= nbsp; Seems to me too that somebody other than old Watakushi--that's Japanese for I, myself, or just plain old number one--ought to be held accountable for Fanny's demise and Roseabeth's ruin. But no, I'm responsible. Actually, it doesn't really much m= atter about Fanny. Besides being de= ad, she had no money or property to speak of, so every body has lost interest in her and is concentrating their sympathy on poor Roseabeth--because she's still alive. And to hear people talk, you'd think that what happened to Roseabeth= , or to put it more accurately, what I did with Roseabeth, is much worse than wh= at happened to Fanny. And from w= hat I understand, Fanny used to do it for a living! I find the entire reaction to the episode more than a little depressing.&nbs= p;

&= nbsp; If I did kill Fanny, which I didn't, it was an accident. Just like what I did with Roseabet= h; that was an accident too. Tha= t is to say, I didn't plan on doing anything to either of them. I= t was inevitable, I guess. That's w= hat Doc would have said.

&= nbsp; Consider this: If it hadn't have been = for the brakes failing on Si's pickup truck, that hill in front of Fanny's plac= e, some bad timing on her part, and a cab full of more nylon net and flame col= ored taffeta than you'd supposed existed in the world, the whole thing might have been avoided. But I doubt it.=

&= nbsp; I'd been on a libidinal roller coaster with Roseabeth for as long as I can recollect, even though I didn't recognize it for what it was until now. Even so, I never figured to pay the ultimate price for my infatuation, which is what I'm about to do. At least that’s the way I see it. What is happening to me shouldn't happen to anyone, especially not to a youth of my peculiar sensibilities and certainly not in 1956.&n= bsp; Yet, here, I am, locked up in the steeple of the Freewill Baptist Church (without much emphasis on the "Freewill" part) and on the verge of being married off to Roseabeth in a shotgun wedding.&nbs= p; If Preacher gets his way, I will be too--confined for life--and stil= l in the spring of my seventeenth year of existence, to use the term pretty loos= ely.

&= nbsp; Injustice is what I call it. Because it couldn't matter to Fanny what they do me; she's dead. And as for Roseabeth: She enjoyed it--up to a point, I mean. Not the aftermath, whic= h is quite understandable. Anyway,= I'm being punished for doing something with Roseabeth that she enjoyed. I don't get it. But maybe I did, and it is that fact which accounts for a major part of my present difficulty, which, aside from figuring a way out of it, is to get it set once and for all in my own mind just what did happen and why.

&= nbsp; That's why I'm going to the considerable trouble, not to mention the humiliation, = of filling in the Big Chief table that Preacher gave me with the necessary background information to reconstruct the catastrophe. But even if I can't make any sense= out of it, maybe somebody else can, and if this information keeps just one poor= kid from making the same mistakes I did, I'll consider the world to be a better place to live. Not that I con= sider it a bad place now, considering the lack of viable alternatives, but it cou= ld use some improvement.

&= nbsp; About what happened I do know this much: It happened two ways, slowly, over a period of years, and then all o= f a sudden, in one huge burst of--of--I don't rightly know what to call it. Enthusiasm maybe. No, it was stronger stuff than that. Exuberance? Yeah, for sure, but more powerful still. Mr. Sigmund Freud, who= se work I stumbled on quite by accident, would have called it an "excess = of libidinal energy." Mr. W= alt Whitman referred to such excesses as "pent-up aching rivers." And it was that, along with what Doc undoubtedly would have referred to as, "unmitigated lust." There you have it; it was al= l those things. Along with the = night and stars and the way Roseabeth smelled and that strapless gown. Great God Almighty! What was I supposed to do in a situation like that? Quote her some baseball statistics= ? Maybe give her a brief synopsis of= The Great Chain of Being? Hot damn! Roseabeth didn't give a hang about baseball or metaphysics.

&= nbsp; I will say this in my defense and, I believe, to my credit: I didn't dance with Roseabeth. Even when she insisted I refused, = at first, holding steadfastly to my moral conviction that dancing is a sin, ev= en though it isn't mentioned in the top ten that Moses got from the burning bu= sh on the mountaintop. What happ= ened was: Roseabeth danced with me= ; I didn't dance with her. And no= body seemed to mind all that much. So I don't understand what all the fuss is about. What I do understand is that I have somehow offended the moral sensibilities of a great many good people--especially her father’s--eve= n if not those of Roseabeth and myself. Maybe that's the worst part of all.=

&= nbsp; Just how I figured out even that much of what happened will probably be somethin= g of a mystery to me for some time. Because, nobody, with the possible exception of Fanny, ever talked t= o me honestly and frankly about sex during the explosive years of my early adolescence. And sex almost r= uined me on at least two occasions, both of which occurred years before the catas= trophe that took place on Fanny's Hill.

&= nbsp; Naturally I have been unmercifully subjected to the locker room banter about girls--t= hose that do (what?) and those that don't--that largely makes up a kid's sex education these days. But not= an awful lot of that information seems to be entirely accurate, or even close = to being so. It is second hand, sometimes third, and in many cases pure or impure fabrication, depending up= on what it is that is being fabricated. Which is to say that it has made the task of growing up just that mu= ch harder.

&= nbsp; The trouble all started, as far as I can recall, the summer that I turned 13, n= ot a good year by anybody's assessment. That was the year that I began to . . . mature, in earnest. Personally, I didn't give a hang a= bout doing it; didn't even know how = to do it. But as I understood it at= the time, that was beside the point. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. I just had to let Nature take her course, which would have been okay, except for the fact that I was highly satisfied with the status quo. Besides, I recall thinking that everybody who I knew who was mature--adults, I mean--seemed to have all manner of worries: money, food, women, men, kids, everything. If that was what = came with maturity, I'd have just as soon stayed a kid who was pretty much certa= in of where his next meal was coming from, even if it was rice more than half = the time.

&= nbsp; Yessir! Things suited me just fine. I recall the river being full of catfish; Mickey Mantle was hitting .324 for the Yankees; Silas had hung me a new basketball goal, and, the sky that summer was about as blue as you'd ev= er hope to see it. The nights co= oled down nicely, and I felt as though Silas, Mariko, and Doc would have done ab= out anything for me. I mean I had= the feeling that they thought I was an okay kid. And I was, then. Everything changed rather suddenly, though, that morning when I woke up four years ago and had a revelation. Actually, it wasn't a revelation at all. What it was, was a hair,= a hair where I dead certain there hadn't been one the day before. Things started going down hill at = that very moment, as you shall see.

&= nbsp; "Ezra,&qu= ot; Mariko called, "get up. = Doc's already gone fishing."

&= nbsp; "I'm gittin'," I said, but I wasn't. I was just lying there, square in the middle of my bed, staring down= at it. It wasn't much of a hair really; one skimpy dark hair sprouting out of what otherwise looked like a barren stretch of desert. Aft= er a moment I climbed off the bed and walked to the window where the morning sun poured in like a stream of warm honey.&nbs= p; There I could have a look at this development in a different light.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Once there I only confirmed what I thought I'd seen only moments before. It was a hair all right. Immediately I started worrying.&nbs= p;

&= nbsp; Where'd it come from? How many more w= as I going to get? When? And where else? Preacher Bascom had hair sprouting= out his nose and ears, and that was no sight for sore eyes. And what about money? If you were mature you had to have= money to buy cigarettes because smoking cigarettes helped you not to worry, and smoking cigarettes was a sure sign of maturity. And that worried me too. I didn't want= to smoke cigarettes even if it did make you mature.

&= nbsp; Why, I just wanted to play ball, go fishing, and listen, up to a point, to all D= oc had to tell me about the world and life.&n= bsp; As far as I knew Doc was about the wisest man that ever lived, and t= hat includes Solomon and Aristotle and Mr. Albert Einstein, because Doc knew everything about them, but they didn't know the first thing about him. Doc told me all about Plato and Ch= arles Darwin and Ernest Hemingway and George Elliot and Madam Curie and Herman Melville and Mark Twain and the Great Chain of Being and . . . <= /span>

&= nbsp; "Ezra! Come on down now. Your breakfast is almost ready.&qu= ot;

&= nbsp; "Okay,&qu= ot; I said, "I'm comin'."

&= nbsp; Forcing this maturity thing from my mind temporarily by thinking about how pretty Roseabeth Bascom was getting, I washed up, pulled on some faded Levis and a pair of PF Flyers, then hurried downstairs. Mariko was waiting in the kitchen = with a typical breakfast--rice cakes, green tea, a bowl of cold rice with a raw egg broken on top so all the gooshey stuff ran into the crevices of the rice so= you couldn't get it out no matter what.

&= nbsp; Mariko was Japanese, Nisei, and my mom. This breakfast was just one example of many ways that I was learning that Japanese culture had a lot more to offer us than Pearl Harbor, which seemed to be the only thing most people remembered about the Japanese. Mariko was a pre-war bride. My father, who the Navy had statio= ned in San Francisco, married her before we entered the war.&nbs= p; That had kept Mariko from being sent to the "relocation center" where her parents died of dysentery early in 1942. My father's marriage didn't, howev= er, keep him from falling victim to the madness in the N= orth Atlantic where the Navy had sent him after his union with my mother. From what I could understand, I wasn't supposed to feel as bad since my father was killed by = the Germans instead of the Japanese. To tell you the truth, I'd probably have felt a lot better if he hadn't been killed at all.

&= nbsp; Anyway, Doc naturally took us in after that, and that's how we finally ended up attached to Silas here in the territories with me having rice for breakfast= and learning about Japanese culture. Well, I wasn't crazy about this culture business, but I'd learned by this time that kids had to put up with a certain amount of this kind of thi= ng from their parents, and besides, there were lots of worse things in the wor= ld than having rice for breakfast.

&= nbsp; "Look at you," I heard Mariko say. She was standing across the kitchen from me; her arms were folded in front of her, and she was smiling at me and shaking her head. I took a quick look down and didn'= t find anything out of the ordinary. So I glanced up and shrugged. She crossed to me, and I let her hug me. She was real big on that, and since it seemed to mean something to h= er I went along with it. She also happened to be about the prettiest mom a kid could ever hope for--thin, dazzling dark eyes and hair, white straight teeth, and skin as soft as silk. She held me back at arm= 's length and pushed the hair back from my eyes. She smiled and said, "Ezra, y= ou need a haircut."

&= nbsp; "Huh,&quo= t; I said nervously and glanced down at my groin area. I hoped she wasn’t talking a= bout that hair.

&= nbsp; "You need a haircut," she repeated.

&= nbsp; "Oh, a haircut," I said relieved. "I know."= I stepped back, stumbled over my l= eft foot and more or less fell into my chair.&= nbsp;

&= nbsp; "Goodness, Ezra, I think you're growing too fast for your own good."

&= nbsp; "I am," I agreed, having no reason to doubt her.

&= nbsp; "It won't be long before you'll be a man."

&= nbsp; "How long?" I blurted out, startling her.

&= nbsp; "Well, just relax, Son. It takes a l= ittle while." She eyed me kind= of funny--like maybe she suspected something.= Then she said, "Eat up."

&= nbsp; I started on the rice, then took a sip of the tea from a small pottery cup th= at had been in Mariko's family a lot longer than I had. She sat down opposite me and began= to study her cup. After a moment= I ventured, "Mariko?" Sometimes I called her that. Over the top of her cup she let her eyes settle on mine. "Are--are--Japanese men--ah--hairy?"

&= nbsp; She blinked, then sort of intensified her gaze, cocking her head a little. "Hairy?" she said.<= /o:p>

&= nbsp; I avoided her eyes and started to shift around some in my chair. "Yeah, you know--hairy."

&= nbsp; "In what way?" she asked, creasing her brow.

&= nbsp; "In--jist the regular way," I said, sorry that I'd brought it up. "Some here, some there."=

&= nbsp; She shook her head and said, "I don't understand."<= /p>

&= nbsp; "I don't either," I told her. "That's why I asked."

&= nbsp; "Ezra, what is it--that you don't understand?"

&= nbsp; I shrugged and said, "If I knew what it was that I didn't understand I wouldn't of asked you to explain it to me." I tried to choke down some more rice.

&= nbsp; She set her cup aside and glanced out the window, probably genuinely puzzled, thinking nonetheless. When she turned back to me she asked, "Well, what does hair have to do with it?"

&= nbsp; "Everythi= ng, I think," I said passionately.

&= nbsp; She nodded, smiled slightly and found my eyes with hers, but not for long. "Ezra, do you have some new hair? Is that what this is all about?"

&= nbsp; "Me? Why no. No," I said impulsively. Boy she had a way of getting right= to the root of things. "I--= I was jist wondering if--if Japanese men were as hairy as American men. That's all. And if--if they had to git haircut= s as often. You're the one that br= ought up hair." I gulped down = the last of my tea and started for the door.

&= nbsp; "That's all?" she asked. "You're sure?"

&= nbsp; "Mom! It's . . . somethin' you wouldn't understand."

&= nbsp; "Because I'm a woman?"

&= nbsp; "No, no," I insisted, backing out of the kitchen. It's ‘cause--’cause I'= m a boy."

&= nbsp; "Who's becoming a man?"

&= nbsp; "No," I said, "I'm jist a kid who's tryin' to stay a kid. Now I've got to go.

Doc's probably at the river catchin' up all the fish."

&= nbsp; "Okay,&qu= ot; she said. "But why don't= you ask Doc about it? Or Silas?&q= uot;

&= nbsp; "About what?"

&= nbsp; She looked a little disappointed. "About . . . staying a kid."

&= nbsp; "Okay, I'll do that," I promised. In a flash I'd made it through the back door and leaped off the porch. I filled my lungs with the potent morning air, trying to get hold of myself.= I'd never been in such a sweat.&nbs= p; And all because of one hair. Lord, I hated to thing = about what was going to happen by and by. As I lit out for the river I heard Mariko call, "Good luck." Which would have = been okay if I'd known just how she meant it.&n= bsp;

&= nbsp; Doc wasn't a doctor at all; at least not the kind that makes people well when they're sick. Fact is, he dea= lt me a nearly fatal dose of metaphysics before I had a real clear understanding = of The Hardy Boys. Doc was what's called a Doctor of Philosophy, a Ph.D., and his particular field of specialization was literat= ure, American and otherwise, which he'd taught for some thirty-odd years at the = university in Norman before retiring, five, maybe six years ago. I had been his only student since = his retirement, and the job of removing "ain't" from my vocabulary had become what Doc termed an "arduous task" for both of us. Bad grammar, you see, was one of t= he two things that Doc couldn't hardly tolerate.&= nbsp; Injustice was the other. And I was forever trying not to unconsciously split my infinitives for Doc, but= I couldn't see much future in it. He was the only one who noticed, and when I did find words like "aren't&q= uot; creeping into my working vocabulary when "ain't" would have worked just as well, my cronies came down on me real hard like. So I had to try to keep everything= that Doc taught me under wraps. Fr= om what I could tell, there was nothing tougher on a kid than trying to be grammatical in a largely ungrammatical world. Of course it was no picnic being evenhanded either; I had both cheeks busted more than once for trying to see that “justice prevailed." Another one of Doc's notions. But I hung in there because it was important to Doc for me to become= a decent and grammatical human being. But at 13 it was clear that I had a ways to go on both counts. I could express myself decently wh= en I put my mind to it, but it was a powerful lot of trouble.

&= nbsp; Doc also, aside from Mariko and Silas, was the only religious liberal in Mansfi= eld, and, I suspect, maybe the only practicing freelance minister of that description in the territories, a factor which bore directly, if not favora= bly, upon my upbringing, my religious education in this case. According to Doc, I, too, was a religious liberal but also an occasional Freewill Baptist. From the Baptists I learned what a= sin it was to dance, and from Doc and all his books came my introduction to Plato = and the roots of Western ethical thought, the foundation, according to Doc, of = my becoming a decent and grammatical human being.

&= nbsp; Of course I never let on to anyone else that I was fully aware of the fact that Doc was unopposed to dancing. That would have ruined his good na= me; it was enough that he was a religious liberal. Few in Mansfield knew just what th= at entailed, and nobody bothered to find out by attending the services that Doc held religiously every Sunday, even though Silas, Mariko, me, a handful of Kiowa Indians and occasionally Fanny Boltwood were his only takers.

&= nbsp; I split my time between Doc's lectures and the Baptist meetings because Doc wanted me to hear both side of the story.&= nbsp; Seemed to me, however, that rather than hearing different sides of t= he same story, I was hearing two stories that weren't even remotely related. Preacher Bascom went on and on abo= ut God and his boy, Jesus, while Doc kept harping on the ancient Greeks to begin w= ith and later a bunch of other foreigners like Hegel, Kant, Galileo, Descartes, Sartre, Hannah Arendt and only God knows who else. But people in Mansfield had never heard of any of them, and, in my opinion, m= ay have been better off for it. = Now Doc was real high on Jesus too; said Jesus was the most decentest man who e= ver lived and I ought to try and . . . "emulate" him I think it was.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Doc might not have thought that Je= sus was everything the Baptists had him cracked up to be, but he thought Jesus = was a far sight better than the rest of us.&nb= sp;

&= nbsp; So, I naturally thought Doc most surely was about the wisest man since Solomon,= and that's why I was sure he could help me get this maturity business straight. I just hoped that he could do it without bring Aristotle or Plato into the conversation. Doc, with all his knowledge, I hav= e to admit, had a way of making a simple thing seem downright impossible.

&= nbsp; Why, those stories about Jesus the Baptists told were so simple that even a kid = my age could understand them; you hardly had to think about them at all before= the point would leap right out of the story and knock you smack out of the pew. But the stories Doc told= were altogether different; you had to get you old mind working overtime to make = any sense of them at all. For Doc= , and consequently, for me, nothing could be simple. It was as simple as that.

&= nbsp; Doc didn't look complicated though, not dozing under a big cottonwood tree set alongside the left bank of the Washita, = not much of a river by Mr. Twain's standards, but a moving body of water nonetheless. And a river of, "uncommon historical import," according to Doc. I'll tell you why it was an import= ant river when it comes to me.

&= nbsp; Up through the branches of the cottonwood I could see the sun flickering like = some huge gem in that scorching yellow-blue sky. Here in the shade with a slight br= eeze being funneled between the high banks of the river the heat wasn't too bad. The river was rolling by= ever so lazy and peaceful like, and our bobbers were dancing just slightly in the current. I was sitting there = next to Doc trying not to think about not thinking.

&= nbsp; Part of my Japanese cultural education had to do with, God forbid, Zen Buddhism. And the idea, Marik= o told me, was to reach a state of nothingness.&n= bsp; I wasn't all that keen on the idea to tell you the truth, but I'd pr= omised Mariko that I'd give it a go, and I was hesitant to wake up Doc to find out about the maturity thing just yet. Squeezing my eyes shut real hard I tried to clear my mind of all thought, something I'd been accused of doing more than a few times at schoo= l. But this time it didn't work. I found that by trying not to think about not thinking about nothing, I couldn't help but try to think of what,= if anything, nothing was. I mean, everything was something; even the black hole of space without a molecule of anything in it was a black hole in space, which was something.

&= nbsp; I guess it was like Mariko said: You couldn't do it consciously. Y= ou had to let it sneak up on you, and then as soon as you were aware that you had = it, you lost it. As far as I coul= d tell, there was just no way of being dead certain of whether you had it or not. Such a line of thought was getting= me nowhere so I gave up on it. I= still had this maturity business to get settled, and I'd done some thinking on it since I'd left Mariko. I thou= ght that maybe I was on to something, and if Doc wouldn't turn a simple question into a lecture on metaphysics, I could probably benefit from his expertise. And maybe even fro= m my own experience of getting mature. I sure hoped so.

&= nbsp; Doc was beginning to stir some; his eyes were twitching, and he was making funny little sounds in his sleep and sort of smacking his lips. It was kind of disgusting, but the= sort of thing you overlook in people you love.&= nbsp; I mean, if you didn't or couldn't, I don't see how anybody could or would ever love anybody else. I didn't want to wake him yet, so I reeled in my line to check my bait, a jui= cy night crawler that looked none to happy with the lot that Fate had dealt hi= m. I didn't blame the poor thing; see= med unjust to me, but Doc said that with worms justice didn't carry a whole lot= of weight. So I threw him back i= n the river, way over to the far side where some roots hung down covering the undercut bank. Catfish got up= there in the shade on these hot days and dozed just like Doc was doing.

&= nbsp; Glancing down at my grandfather I couldn't help but smile and at the same time cock = my head and look at him with some kind of vague notion of something that went = well beyond admiration. His rod was resting in those huge hands, hands that had seen a good deal of wear from m= ore than just flipping pages of all those books he'd studied. They were all gnarled and puffy, a= nd the little finger on his left hand was missing, bit off, he'd told me, by a cat= fish years before. He just told me= that, I think, to tease me because I'd been having such a tough time with Moby Dick; for years I'd been stru= ggling with Moby Dick. But all Doc would say is that I wo= uld understand and appreciate it fully when I was more mature. It was an okay story, a little hea= vy here and there for a ten-year-old, which is when Doc started me in on it, b= ut it was real exciting and adventurous. That wasn't enough though. Doc told me I had to, "get something," out of it. He wouldn't tell me what; said I h= ad to get it for my ownself, and when I did I'd know it. Sounded a little like Zen to me.

&= nbsp; Anyway, that's the reason I decided not to fight this maturity business, to go ahead and get mature. It would be terrific, I thought, to finally get something out of Moby Dick, even if it did seem like a powerful lot of trouble to put a kid through just so he'd understand a book.

&= nbsp; Doc's chuckling broke into my already unsettled peace of mind. When I looked I found him staring = at me, smiling, and laughing to himself like--like maybe he knew what I was thinking. I suppose he may have. Still he asked: "What's going = on in that head of yours, Ezra? You= look mighty bewildered." I sh= rugged and squinted at him as a shaft of sunlight slanted through the swaying limb= s of the cottonwood. "You considering nailing Old Blue?"

&= nbsp; "Naw,&quo= t; I said. "Old Blue's for = you to catch. He didn't eat my finger. Actually, I was--was thinkin' 'bout--'bout gittin' mature."

&= nbsp; Doc reflected momentarily, taking a few turn on his reel to get the slack out of his line. "Maturity, huh= ? What about it?"

&= nbsp; "I'm not sure," I said. "That's why I'm thinkin' 'bout it."

&= nbsp; He nodded, digesting that, then rubbed the back of his leathery neck with a br= ight red bandanna. Doc made it a h= abit to think before he spoke, and he encouraged me to do the same. But I'm afraid my mouth worked a l= ot faster than my brain, as was the case with the vast majority of folks. "Maturity, huh?" he said again.

&= nbsp; "Yessir, why don't you tell me 'bout it?"

&= nbsp; "Maturity= ?"

&= nbsp; "That's what we're talkin' 'bout," I said.&nb= sp; Then added: "It w= ould save me a powerful lot of thinkin'."

&= nbsp; "Now don't you get down on thinking, Son. There's nothing in the world wrong with thinking, except that too li= ttle of it goes on. Now where would Plato be if he hadn't been such a thinker?"

&= nbsp; "Exact same place he is anyway," I said, "a hole in the ground."

&= nbsp; "Well, you've got yourself a point there, Ezra, but we never would have heard of h= im if he hadn't been such a thinker. That's the difference."<= /o:p>

&= nbsp; "I didn't mean to git down on thinkin'," I said, thinking we seemed to be getting off the subject of maturity. So I persisted: "= I've been thinkin', but I can't seem to= make much sense out of it--maturity."

&= nbsp; Doc reeled in his line and inspected his now empty hook with the careful eye of= a surgeon. "Hand me the worms," he said and reached for the can with a wiry arm. I opened the can and handed them t= o him. "Fine specimens here, Ezra,&q= uot; he said, holding one to the hook. Doc was slim, his skin the color of leather, and his hair a ghostly white like the bushy eyebrows over his dark, sad eyes. "Fine specimens. Where'd you say you got them?"= ;

&= nbsp; "I didn't."

&= nbsp; "Who did?"

&= nbsp; "Who did what?"

&= nbsp; "Who got the worms?"

&= nbsp; "I did!"

&= nbsp; "You just said that you didn't."

&= nbsp; "What I meant was that I didn't say w= here I got them, not that I didn't git them. I did."

&= nbsp; "Well say what you mean, Son."

&= nbsp; "I thought I did."

&= nbsp; "Where did you get them?"

&= nbsp; "Behind the feed lot," I explained, wondering what the devil was going on, "where the troughs drain into the ditch."

&= nbsp; "Ah, yes. Prime area," Doc sa= id, “prime area." He b= aited up and cast toward the middle of the river.

&= nbsp; "What's hair got to do with it?" I asked before he could get settled.

&= nbsp; He scratched the back of his head and said, "What's hair got to do with w= hat?"

&= nbsp; "Gittin' mature," I said as patiently as I could.

&= nbsp; "Oh, you're still on that, huh?"

&= nbsp; "Yessir.&= quot;

&= nbsp; Rubbing the white stubble on his chin he narrowed his eyes at me. "Tell me, Ezra, how do you fe= el about . . . females these days?= "

&= nbsp; "Girls, you mean?" He nodded. I just knew he'd do this. "What's that got to do with it?"&= nbsp; Come on, Doc," I protested, "I asked you a simple question, and

you have to go and drag girls into it."

&= nbsp; "It's not a simple question; there are very few simple questions," Doc said.= "And females--girls as you ca= ll them--have a great deal to do with it.&nbs= p; Now how do you feel about them?"

&= nbsp; I started to wiggle around some and noticed the heat was getting pretty inten= se, even under the shade of that cottonwood.&n= bsp; The fact is I had just recently begun to look at girls in a different light, not that I ever had anything against them. But aside from somebody to play ba= ll with or chase around the schoolyard, I'd noticed lately that girls were--we= ll, kind of--pretty, different even. Especially Roseabeth, Preacher Bascom's daughter and Fonda Peters, daughter of the minister over at the Methodist Church.

&= nbsp; "Well?&qu= ot; Doc said.

&= nbsp; "I like girls all right," I told him and was suddenly struck by the thoug= ht that girls had more hair than b= oys, a lot more. That's what they had to do with it! I could hardly contain my enthusiasm. "Are girls m= ore mature than boys, Doc, ‘cause--’cause they got more hair? Is that it?" I sat back smiling then and waited= for his response because he was always so proud when I figured out something fo= r my ownself.

&= nbsp; But this time he just stared at me with a kind of funny expression, a troubled = one I'd say. "Ezra," he finally said, "hair has got very little, if anything, to do with it. Girls--females of many species--do mature earlier than their male counterparts, but not because they have more hair. It's . . . biological."<= /o:p>

&= nbsp; "Oh," I said quietly, trying to hide my disappointment and because I wasn't dead certain of what he was driving at. I was sure hair had some= thing to do with it. "But I'm gittin' more hair; doesn't that mean that I'm gittin' more mature?"

&= nbsp; Doc nodded. "Yes, that's tru= e . . . physically, but--"

&= nbsp; "I see!" I said. "It's like--like Samson! He had all this hair, and he was t= he strongest and the most maturest man who ever lived. And--and he killed a lion and a ja= ckass and all them Philistines--"

&= nbsp; "Those Philistines."

&= nbsp; "Yeah, them too," I said and hurried on.&nbs= p; "And then--then Jane cut off all his hair, and he got all weak and--and immature because he di= dn't have all that hair anymore." =

&= nbsp; "That was Tarzan," Doc said.

&= nbsp; "Tarzan!<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> He got weak too?"<= /span>

&= nbsp; "No!" Doc said. "Jane didn't c= ut off his hair; Delilah did."

&= nbsp; "Delilah didn't even know Tarzan."

&= nbsp; "Ezra, I know that, but you said that = Jane cut off Samson's hair. But she didn't. Delilah did!"

&= nbsp; "Oh," I said and scratched the back of my head.&= nbsp; "Well, what did Jane cut off?"

&= nbsp; Doc suddenly ripped the bandanna from his neck and began mopping his brow. "I don't know that Jane cut o= ff anything! We were talking abo= ut Samson!"

&= nbsp; "Then why'd you bring up Tarzan?"

&= nbsp; "Because you brought up Jane."

&= nbsp; "But I meant Delilah. She's the one who cut off Samson's= long hair."

&= nbsp; Doc just nodded and began gnawing on his lower lip; he was ordinarily about the patientest man in the world, but even he was sometimes unnerved by what I t= old him. "Now what were we discussing before Tarzan got involved?"

&= nbsp; "Maturity= ," I reminded him, "'bout how Samson got all weak and immature because Delilah cut off his hair." I was real careful to get it right= this time, but I don't see what difference it would have made. From what I understood he'd of got= ten just as immature if Jane had been the one.=

&= nbsp; "Okay,&qu= ot; Doc said, "I'm with you, I think, go on."

&= nbsp; "Okay, so that means that when you lose your hair, regardless of who cuts it off, you're not mature anymore, that you git all weak and can't whip the Philist= ines anymore. Right?"

&= nbsp; "Ezra, there are any number of things that can make a man lose his hair, not any o= ne of which necessarily means that a man is becoming less mature. When= you lose your hair as a natural consequence of the aging process it isn't so mu= ch a matter of becoming immature as it is one of becoming . . . overripe. You understand that?"

&= nbsp; "No sir."

&= nbsp; "All right then, take an apple."

&= nbsp; "I ain't got one."

&= nbsp; "I don't have one."

&= nbsp; "I don't either."

&= nbsp; "I was making an analogy."

&= nbsp; "I'd sooner have an apple," I told him and smiled.

&= nbsp; "Consider the apple," Doc said, raising his voice just enough to let me know his patience was wearing a lit= tle thin. "Now if you let an= apple stay on the tree without picking it, what happens?"<= /p>

&= nbsp;