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Chapter One: Beautiful Fool
East Egg, New York, 1922
When I was a child, my father would tousle my hair, hoist me in the air, and say, "Your three older brothers got all of the brains, didn't they? And the looks. But you're the tough one."
So, in an effort to help me develop what I had going for me, he ordered them to blindside me; as I walked home from school, they'd take turns springing from around corners, and tackling me. Until one day, Brett dropped down on me from a tree.
Fifty pounds heavier, he landed on my shoulders, crushed me to the ground, and pinned me. Except on the fourth time he tried this, I feinted right, he twisted midair, I bolted left, he flailed, I was intact, he collapsed on his ankle, I winced for him as his foot folded sideways beneath him, and his face grew a sickening pale.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
"Gahhh!" he screamed, and shrieked an Apache whoop before lurching at me.
All of my life, I've been able to sense when people are going to lose their tempers. And Brett was hobbling and grimacing. So, as he almost seized me, I dropped to all fours. He tripped over me, his face crashing into a gopher hole.
And he was silent.
"Brett?" Cringing, I approached his still body. His rump stuck up in the air. I pulled his face out of the ground and turned him over. He looked dazed. At least he isn't dead.
"Brett?" The blood on his face was speckled with dirt. I couldn't tell if his teeth were loose.
But when I touched his cheek, he seized my ankle.
And that's when the real beat down began.
#
Brett quietly ignored Father's instructors after that, and by the time I was ten years old, I was wiry, hard-muscled, and fast, and my other two brothers quit, too.
But let me back up to when I was six, in 1898. That was the year we moved out of the roughest neighborhood of New York—we grew up rich, but our block had declined—and instead went west to a farm near Deadwood, South Dakota. Even though I was only going in the second grade, I remember my dad saying, "I read that the frontier's closed. We're going to see if that's true, or if there's still time."
Meanwhile, the U.S. got into a war in Cuba. Like every other six-year-old boy, I wanted to go, but it was over before it started: we decimated the brutal Spaniards in Cuba in just a hundred days. Three years later, the hero of the war—a Dakota cowboy with ties to New York— was the President of the United States. We mourned his predecessor, a man my parents loved, and wished the rough rider well. "He's just like us!" my father's said.
