This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

out of the truck and into the pen. Which was pretty much forever. A full day, anyway, that’s how long it took old Mr. Knutsen, and the six Knutsen boys, and the tractor trailer man, to get those buffalo where they were going. They just didn’t want to get out of the truck. And then, of course, once they were out and into the pen, they didn’t want to stay there. The morning Daniel turned eleven they bust up the fence the Knutsen boys had spent all spring fixing, and that was pretty much the end of the buffalo.
    A month before, when the buffalo first arrived, Daniel’s father had said, “Those Knutsens, you got to hand it to them—they got an eye to the future.” But when the buffalo got out and all hell broke loose, he said, “I could have seen it a mile away.” Daniel didn’t say anything. His father seemed so confident that he had known from the beginning how things would go now that they had actually happened that Daniel thought his saying that before aboutthe “eye to the future” had only been a kind of a joke. Daniel was just beginning to realize that adults did that sometimes—said things they didn’t mean. And it wasn’t because they couldn’t think of the right way to say what they meant—they probably could. It was just what they did. Sometimes they even said the very opposite of what they meant, and liked it that way. They thought it was funny, and that whatever it was they said wasn’t meant to be taken seriously anyhow. Hardly anything that grown-up people said, Daniel was beginning to realize, was meant to be serious.
    Any way you looked at it, though, the Knutsens were forward thinking—everyone admitted that. This was unusual—especially in those days—in their postage-stamp-sized corner of the world. It had been a surprise to Daniel the first time he looked at the state of South Dakota on a map and saw the way that it could be made to look so small—the exact size and shape of a postage stamp. Whenever he got outside, and wandered around, like his mother was always bugging him to do, everything always seemed so big. Even his own tiny corner of that other tiny corner of … but when he started thinking about it, it made his head hurt, and he had to stop before he ever got anywhere near to thinking about the entire state of South Dakota. It seemed that everything just went on and on forever, because even if he ever got to be able to think about South Dakota, that would be only the beginning of thinking about everything else.
    Once, he told his mother about trying to think about that. He said: “I start off real small, and then I try to think up, bigger and bigger, as slowly as I can, but then my mind gets fuzzy and I can’t think anymore. How come?” His mother had laughed—but in a nice way that wasn’t really directed at him, and which Daniel always found vaguely comforting. “You just can’t think about those things, honey,” she told him. “You’ll find out there’s a lot of things like that.”
    It wasn’t the answer he’d been looking for, and maybe it was because he could always get a yes from his dad when he couldn’t from his mother, and the other way around, that he believed that, in this case, too, if he wanted a different answer he’d just have to keep looking.
    DANIEL EASES THE GEARSHIFT into Drive. His hand is overtop of Anna’s and, once the stick has clicked in at D , he says, “Now just step on the gas, just a little, just a little.” Anna doesn’t step on the gas. His hand is still on hers, and underneath that is the gearshift. “Which one’s the gas?” she says. Daniel tells her which one, and they lurch forward, going too fast, and then a second later they stop entirely, with a bounce. “Okay, okay,” Daniel says. Anna looks like she might cry. One of her eyebrows is all knit up and she’s got a hold