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Show 20 "secretary" on his trips to Escalante and that my mother would not let her come to our house. The secretaries were usually middle-aged, plump ladies of uncertain style, and my parents were prudes, she said. Ah, Ann Marie! My aunt said she suspected that Granddad never got divorced from his third wife so that he would be safe from marriage with any of the secretaries who followed her, the old bastard. She laughed, my aunt did, enjoying the scandal, and said that half the old ladies in Shavano remembered him with a very special fondness. Wild Bill! When he died of a heart attack in his bedroom in San Diego, my middle-aged father cried like a kid. I wept and mourned him but I was looking forward in those days, not back. Because it was obviously up to me to re-establish the Brocken cattle empire, even bigger than before. And I was going to keep the damnedest string of broncos you ever saw. I was one of five kids. My twin sisters were named Faustina and Felicia, and called Tina and Fanny. I had a big brother Henry and a little brother Davy. My mother called me Chester, did until she died, and only gradually did I learn to hate that name. My father called me Chet, most people called me Chet, and that was OK. Once I told Ross Jaeger my middle name, Erasmus, and he laughed and called me Rastus. I hated him. When Davy started talking, his pronunciation of Chet changed it to Chess, the twins picked it up, then Henry, and it stuck. Growing up in town, in play, I was sometimes Buck Rogers, who was really Buster Crabbe, and sometimes Ken Maynard, who happened to be real but to me was only the role he played in the picture show. The future meant being old enough to go to high school and play football; more than anything it meant growing a little so I wouldn't be smaller than my friends. But I didn't |