So. I told you I was in high school. Well, I finished high school. I graduated from Holt County High in 1946— hell, I even went to college. But during this period I’ve been talking about I was still in high school, still trying to play some kind of halfback while beside me there was this big fullback who was so good that he was going to make unanimous all-conference and second team all-state. That was Bud Sealy, of course, and he was all right then. He hadn’t begun to show any signs of becoming a sheriff or a son of a bitch yet. No, he was just a big tough kid with a fast car. Only, looking back on it now, I suppose it might have been then that he began to develop a habit for being hard in the middle of things, develop a knack for taking advantage of any opening, never mind whether that opening was on the football field or between the legs of some girl, or, like later, right on the front page of some damn big city newspaper. But I might be pushing things by saying that. That’s just hindsight. I might be trying to force square pegs into round holes, because if what I’ve just suggested is true, none of us saw it. I sure as hell didn’t see it. At the time I was a lot more interested in trying to get Doris Sweeter to allow me to see more of her, to let me hold something more of hers than just her sweaty hand.
Then, like Lyman, I left. I went to college at A&M in Fort Collins for a while. It was my mother’s idea as much as anything, though I wasn’t opposed. She wanted a son with a college diploma, and what I wanted was to get away from home. My dad agreed to it too; he thought I might be capable of learning something. Well, I don’t know that I learned a damn thing that matters, at least not of the sort he had in mind—though I can’t be sure of that now either. He probably knew all along.
Anyway, Fort Collins was a hell of nice little town then; it’s developed middle-age spread since—like the rest of us, it has some heart trouble. But in the four years I was there it was still the sort of town that even a green kid from Holt County could survive in. I mean it provided me with the kind of trouble that, once I got out of it, left me only a little bruised and scratched up but not a lot smarter than I was when I first got there. It wasn’t the kind of trouble or sidewalk show, say, that any seven-year-old kid from any slum sees every day and survives if he’s lucky but ends up changed forever afterwards even if he does. No, I just had some sore places to show for my trouble. It didn’t change the way I see things. It took Holt County to accomplish that.
But at least I got away from home. For a while I managed to get shut of Holt County. It didn’t mean anything, though; none of it did. It was just college. I didn’t even graduate. There was this little matter of chemistry: they required people studying animal husbandry to pass chemistry, and I never did. I tried it twice too. But somehow the theory of chemical formulas, even the logic of chemical elements, escaped me. How could anybody be so damn sure that if you added two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen it always came out water? The combination of things never seemed that certain to me; things weren’t that simple, not even with elements as basic as water. So I never passed chemistry, and after four years I still failed to do the one thing that might have satisfied at least my mother. Her son didn’t receive a college diploma.
You understand, though, that I was still about half willing to return for a fifth year and a third try at chemistry; I hadn’t quite finished playing the jackass in Fort Collins; and then while I was making my mind up to it the bottom fell out. Matters caught up with me in the summer of 1950. I began to learn those things that my years of college couldn’t teach me, hadn’t in fact even touched. I was home again.