Free King of the Mild Frontier by Chris Crutcher

I.Q. was once measured at 180, though he was quick to say that was an inaccurate measurement because he had read so much moreimagination raced me toward the sun. “You’d melt,” he said. “You know, there are some conversations we should probably keep at home. What do you think?”
    â€œHow do I know which ones?”
    â€œWell, if you’re even close to getting a bloody nose, that’s one of the conversations.” Not long after receiving that note, my father took to introducing me as Lever. Nature’s simplest tool. My sister was quite taken with that moniker. She calls me that to this day.
    The school principal wanted my dad to stop giving me lessons my mind wasn’t old enough to wrap around, but that was never to be. He just looked for simpler situations. In early December of that same year, he and Taylor Bowlden loaded my brother and me into the back of our jeep to hunt down a Christmas tree. In those days no red-blooded Idaho male would be caught dead buying a Christmas tree from a pile in front of a store, or even cutting one from a Christmas-tree farm, which, if it was invented yet, certainly hadn’t worked its way to our part of the country. If you were under the age of eighty-five and had a fake tree, you could legally be cut up for Christmas decorations. The jeep was an army model with a canvas top over the cab and an open back. Neither my father nor Taylor Bowlden subscribed to the notion that children should be coddled, kept warm andsafe. They subscribed to the notion that adults get the goodies because they’ve been alive longer. So my brother and I sat in the freezing open back of the jeep while they sat in the covered cab with a heater and a small flask of whiskey.
    We lived in the Rocky Mountains. There were trees two blocks from my house that could have stood in nicely as Christmas trees in a pinch, but hunting for the perfect tree was like hunting for the perfect five-point buck elk, only you didn’t have to shoot it. The farther you drove to get it, the more of a fer-real Christmas dude you were, and we spent from eleven Sunday morning until four thirty Sunday afternoon tracking the elusive perfect tree. By the time we arrived back home, my colon was frozen and my hands were numb as bricks. I was shaking so hard my voice sounded like I’d swallowed a vibrator. Taylor Bowlden watched us from the toasty cab as we jumped out of the back of the jeep and stumbled into the house on numb feet and said, “That’ll toughen those youngsters up.” Taylor Bowlden would have been the recipient of the same one-finger salute Bob Gardner got back on that fateful Fourth of July, but I’d have had to break the rest of my fingers off to deliver it.
    I ran into the bathroom and began running hot water into the sink. Crutch passed in the outside hall and saw the steam rising, stepped in, and stopped me a split secondbefore I could plunge my icy fingers in. He drained the sink and ran cold water. My eyes widened like a window thrown open on a sunny day, and up popped bawlbaby. I had seen my father as insensitive but never as a brutal torturer. “They’re already cold!” I screamed at him.
    My sister saw what he was about to do and went screaming for our mother.
    â€œRemember when I told you about the sun and the furnace?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWell, this is that same lesson.”
    â€œI got a bloody nose.”
    â€œNot from me you didn’t. I will guarantee you, young man, that if you stick your hands into hot water when they’re that cold, you’re going to be crying a lot harder than you’re crying right now.”
    I had long ago sharpened my radar for the term “young man.” More often than not it prefaced or followed a warning, but under every circumstance it signified truth.
    He eased my hands into the cold water. I swear to God I thought he was a magician. I had watched him refill that sink with