In Broad Daylight by Harry N. MacLean Read Free Book Online Page A

later.
    In junior high, Ken and John both wore their hair slicked back and their shirt sleeves rolled up, and the two of them sat together in school, until the teacher split them up for disrupting the class.
    The two boys were rebels with big chips on their shoulders. They played hooky a lot, and spent most of their time riding horses. Ken knew every inch of the land around there and they would ride for hours after school, checking traps and hunting. Once, as they were riding full speed alongside the timber, they came to a hidden embankment with a thirty-foot drop. Ken saw the danger first, nudged John, and turned his horse at the last second to keep him from plunging over the embankment.
    When the two friends weren't hunting, they were riding around to girls' houses. Most parents didn't like Ken and John, and forbade their daughters to have anything to do with them. Several girls were attracted to them, though, and managed to meet the boys secretly after school and on the weekends. One girl used to sneak out of her parents' farmhouse and meet Ken in the timber after dark.
    When John spent the night at Ken's house, people were stacked up like wood in the bedrooms and John slept in the same bed with him and Tim. There always seemed to be a lot of arguing and fighting going on. John felt sorry for Mabel because she worked hard all the time and barely seemed to stay even with things. She never had a new dress or anything for herself. The others seemed to just go on about their business. Ken stayed at John's house a few times and was always cleaned up, well-behaved, and polite to his parents.
    Toward the end of eighth grade, Short Linville, the school bus driver, stopped by the McElroy farm three or four days in a row and found no one waiting. Each time, somebody came to the door and waved him on. Finally, one of Ken's sisters came out and explained to him that he needn't stop at the house because neither Ken nor Tim would be going to school anymore. (Short didn't bring the bus around to the McElroy farm until years later when he stopped for Ken's children.)
    John started the ninth grade but didn't last long. He got into an argument with the principal, hit him in the mouth, and quit before he was kicked out.
    Stealing wasn't a new activity for Ken and John-they had always swiped stuff-but when Ken got a 1936 Ford, theft acquired more purpose because they needed gas and parts. They took out the back seat and lined the space with plywood. At night the two boys would drive to a farm and scoop grain from a bin until the car was full to the windows. The next morning they would drive to an elevator and unload the grain for cash, usually with no questions asked. Sometimes they would spot tractors or trucks sitting in the fields during the day and come back at night and siphon gas from the tanks. When the transmission on the Ford went out, Ken and John looked around until they found another 1936 Ford sitting in a farmyard. Waiting until the farmer was gone for the weekend, they slipped in and removed the transmission in little more than an hour. They took it back to the farm and had it installed in Ken's car by dinnertime.
    Ken never cared for work. He and John found jobs in a nursery in a small town in Iowa when they were about fifteen, but they were fired the first week when Ken was caught fooling around with a young girl who also worked there. The way John saw it, Ken never got over the fact that he was poor, and he resented people who had money and new cars and good clothes. He could never bring himself to do their shit work.
    If you didn't go to school, and you wouldn't work, there was really only one other way to get by.

PART TWO

    In 1952, when he was eighteen, Ken McElroy married Oleta, a sixteen-year-old girl from St. Joe. Soon afterward, they moved to Denver, where one of Ken's sisters lived. Her husband, a construction foreman, gave Ken a job. Ken and Oleta stayed in Denver for six months, then moved to the mountains, where