“Yeah. Funny how these things go, ain’t it?” He shifted his weight in the chair, and then reshifted, trying to find what was obviously an impossible position of comfort. “But there’s all sorts of cowards, and the best ones never let you know it.
“I grew up in the oil fields of Oklahoma. The kids were pretty tough there. I was always big for my age, and I got teased about it. When I was five, a seven year-old bully picked on me in the playground. I knocked him down and he hit his head on the side of the swings, gashed open a big cut. I heard he needed eleven stitches. I never told anyone about it, and I guess he never told anyone who did it, either—maybe he was embarrassed to be beat up by a kid two years younger than him. But I remembered what he looked like lying there with his head cut
