My father let me drive the truck. It was orange and white and rusted, and the son of a bitch was big, which is how I felt behind the wheel half the time. The other half I felt small.

The cattle fields were rough and the thing bounced so hard across the hoof prints I thought my head was going to  pop through the roof.

When my dad wasn’t looking, I’d stop following directions and floor it through the turns. I wasn’t old enough to take it to the gravel or the blacktop, but there, in the cattle field, anything went. You could be a man; you could go for broke.

The cattle were afraid. I, on the other hand, was a stunt man or maybe even the star of the show, a thirteen year old Burt Reynolds on the verge of turning twenty or thirty or whatever age he was, and a hundred angry smokeys were perpetually in hot pursuit.