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by Richard Brautigan
They crouched with their rifles in the pineapple field, watching a man teach his son how to ride a horse. It was the summer of 1902 in Hawaii.
They hadn't said anything for a long time. They just crouched there watching the man and the boy and the horse. What they saw did not make them happy.
"I can't do it," Greer said.
"It's a bastard all right," Cameron said.
"I can't shoot a man when he's teaching his kid how to ride a horse," Greer said. "I'm not made that way."
Greer and Cameron were not at home in the pineapple field. They looked out of place in Hawaii. They were both dressed in cowboy clothes, clothes that belonged to Eastern Oregon.
Greer had his favorite gun: a 30:40 Krag, and Cameron had a 25:35 Winchester, Greer liked to kid Cameron about his gun. Greer always used to say, "Why do you keep that rabbit rifle around when you can get a real gun like this Krag here?"
They stared intently at the riding lesson.
"Well, there goes 1,000 dollars apiece," Cameron said. "And that God-damn trip on that God-damn boat was for nothing. I thought I was going to puke forever and now I'm going to have to do it all over again with only the change in my pockets."
Greer nodded.
The voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii had been the most terrifying experience Greer and Cameron had ever gone through, even more terrible than the time they shot a deputy sheriff in Idaho ten times and he wouldn't die and Greer finally had to say to the deputy sheriff, "Please die because we don't want to shoot you again." And the deputy sheriff had said, "OK, I'll die, but don't shoot me again."
"We won't shoot you again," Cameron had said.
"OK, I'm dead," and he was.
The man and the boy and the horse were in the front yard of a big white house shaded by coconut trees. It was like a shining island in the pineapple fields. There was piano music coming from the house. It drifted lazily across the warm afternoon.
Then a woman came out onto the front porch. She carried herself like a wife and a mother. She was wearing a long white dress with a high starched collar. "Dinner's ready!" she yelled. "Come and get it, you cowboys!"
"God-damn!" Cameron said. "It's sure as hell gone now. 1,000 dollars. By all rights, he should be dead and halfway through being laid out in the front parlor, but there he goes into the house to have some lunch."
"Let's get off this God-damn Hawaii," Greer said.
Richard Brautigan
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