The Jesus Cow (10 page)

I
n the food pantry, Carolyn and Meg were mopping out the mop room. Any irony in this was obscured by the stench rising around them. The Swivel town sewer system had been sketchy for years, but lately it was getting worse. Several basements had been flooded with sewage, no treat at any time but especially poignant in winter. So far the pantry had avoided this fate, but now and then the mop room drain belched up foul gas and backwash.

When Klute Sorensen proposed Clover Blossom Estates, and further proposed that the town pick up the tab for new streets and sewers to service the development, there had been objections. But then Klute and the banker from Solid Savings had shown a PowerPoint presentation that laid out very clearly how an investment in Clover Blossom Estates (rather than the boring business of spending the money to fix the existing infrastructure) would actually accelerate the generation of tax revenues required to upgrade the old
part of town. “You wanna win, you gotta go all in!” said Klute. The soundtrack during his drive over had been
Too Bold to Fold: Poker Champs Up Your Ante
.

Of course the tax revenues never materialized, but the PowerPoint presentation had been very nicely put together, including animated graphics of dollar bills spouting out of a toilet. “Usually the government's flushing your money
down
the toilet,” interjected Klute knowingly, as the banker, the village board, and several citizens—only moments ago opposed to the whole idea—chuckled and nodded appreciatively. Vance Hansen beamed, thrilled to be in the presence of a man so assured and persuasive as Klute. This was before there had been so much yelling.

Although she was dying to, Carolyn had specifically avoided asking Meg about Klute Sorensen's presence at the salvage yard. Meg was swabbing the last of the residue from the tiles when she said, “So . . . Klute Sorensen asked me out on a
date
.”

Carolyn had a sardonic comment ready, but this revelation stopped her in her tracks.

“He
wha
?”

“Well, he never quite got to specifically asking, but it was pretty clear where we were headed.”

“Well.”

Meg smiled. It had been a while since she had seen Carolyn reduced to monosyllables. Their friendship had grown slowly, and they still spent very little time in each other's company outside the food pantry, but the hours had accumulated, and they had reached a certain ease.

“I haven't decided what to tell him,” said Meg. She meant it, but she was also having some fun with Carolyn.

She was immediately rewarded.

“You're
considering
it?!” Carolyn was looking at her aghast, her mop gripped in both hands like a parade rifle.

“Well . . . he seems very lonely.”

“He's a raging buffoon!”

“This does not exclude him from loneliness.”

“But, he . . . you . . .”

“I think we both understand loneliness, Carolyn.”

Carolyn had been here for ten years now and Meg had never known her to share strictly social time with another person (and reviewing Glen Jacobson's limericks didn't count).

“Well, I can't imagine comporting with that man on purpose,” said Carolyn. “That said, you might be exactly what he needs. You might be the one person who can talk some sense into him. Perhaps you could even soften him up and break his heart. That would be nice. Although this presupposes his possessing that organ.”

“Oh, I have no desire to hurt him,” said Meg, frowning and shaking her head as she dumped the dirty mop water down the sewer drain and then stepped back lest it regurgitate.

“I understand that,” said Carolyn. “You are irretrievably decent. But there is also another angle.”

“Yes?”

“You
might need
him
.”

Now it was Meg's turn to look shocked.

“Sure,” said Carolyn. “You've spent years avoiding relationships.”

“No, I—”

“Oh, of course you have, my dear. And for years I've said nothing, because it wasn't my place. But now that it's on the table, there
is the matter of you never having any relationship—in the time I've known you—outside of work and the church.”

“I'm honoring Dougie,” said Meg. “And—I don't mean this to sound dramatic, I simply mean it—and the Lord. And I like my work.”

“All worthy. But trade your hard hat for a wimple and you're a
nun
.”

“But, Carolyn, I'm content.”

“That I believe—to an extent. And contentment is no small thing. So few possess it. But—”

“Are
you
content, Carolyn?”

Carolyn was leaning the mop against the wall and froze for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Not really. It never came naturally. I'm the first to admit I am driven by dissatisfaction far more than satisfaction. I learned the language, but truth is, I've always been far less adept at inner peace than outer abrasiveness.”

“Maybe you're hiding behind discomfort as comfort.”

“Well, don't you learn quickly,” said Carolyn, smiling. “But Klute Sorensen?”

“Oh, I don't know. I was mostly kidding around.”

“Maybe you should focus on that ‘mostly' and see what comes of it,” said Carolyn.

Suddenly a quietness came over Meg. She stared out the food pantry window. “It's odd,” she said, “for all I loved Dougie—and I did—we had so little time that in retrospect I'm sure I didn't know who he was.” She sighed. “We were so young.”

“I say that all the time now,” said Carolyn, and Meg was shocked to see tears in her eyes.

MEG FELT SHE
should have followed up on Carolyn's unexpected teariness, but she hadn't been sure how to proceed, and then the
moment was gone, with Carolyn bustling off to unpack donation boxes. The rest of their conversation was incidental, and after they sorted the last of the cans, Carolyn checked her phone for the time and said she had to get to the post office before the window closed. They bid each other good-bye, and Meg drove away in her truck with a trio of smashed cars lashed to the bed like a stack of rusty latkes. She intended to grab a sandwich at home before delivering the cars to Clearwater, but as she crossed the overpass she spotted Klute's Hummer idling through Clover Blossom Estates. Downshifting, she hit the turn lane and dropped the hammer southbound.

TWO BOXES AWAITED
Carolyn in the post office. Back inside the pump house, she opened the lighter of the two boxes first and tucked the Zebra Cakes and ramen packets in their space behind the carboys. Then she opened the second box and brought out a cylindrical object all taped up in bubble wrap. Her oil pump had been making funny noises lately, and she had chased this one down on eBay.

Changing into exercise clothes, she filled the carboy, climbed aboard the bicycle, and began to pedal. The old pump growled, but it was still moving oil. Carolyn propped a book in the rack and took a sip of water. Then she looked at the tubs of oil surrounding her. It was going to be quite a workout.

A
fter Billy departed, Harley changed the oil in his Silverado and excavated the cab, clearing it of coffee cups, doughnut bags, baler twine, and the odd .30-06 cartridge. It's one thing to go on a first date in an old truck, quite another to create the impression one is a well-armed hoarder wired on discount carbs and convenience store caffeine. As a final touch, he vacuumed the seats. He got a little bit of everything, from cookie crumbs to lock nuts.

With the truck ready, Harley spent the rest of the day cleaning his house, because you never knew. Harley didn't live in squalor, but he did tend to let the dishes stack and the dusting lag. It was dark by the time he dragged the vacuum upstairs and started in on his bedroom, the floor of which was carpeted with discarded clothes. The process had the feel of an archaeological dig, and when he finally made it to the farthest corner and unearthed a pair of rumpled dress khakis and a teal polo shirt, he gave out a bemused
hmph!
of recognition.

Taking the khakis by the waistband, he held them up. As Billy had so kindly reminded him, he had worn them on his infamous last date, a trip to the opening reception of an art show at a Clearwater gallery owned by friends of his algorithmically selected date. The frontal pleats of the pants were marked with a dark maroon stain. Harley studied the stain and recalled its source, specifically a cheapish vintage of plonk which he slopped while choking on the inhaled fleck of a cocktail cracker upon which he had unsuccessfully attempted to balance a blot of dilled Brie. As he coughed the crumb and slopped his wine, the Brie bounced off his pastel polo shirt, clinging just long enough to impart a grease print, then fell to the blond hardwood of the art gallery floor. In a spastic attempt to catch the cheese while one-handing the wineglass, Harley fatally head-butted a mixed-media sculpture titled
Transitions
:
The Meadowlark Weeps
whilst backsplashing the remaining wine into the face of the woman who had dressed him in the polo and khakis and dragged him to the gallery in the first place.

Harley had been compelled to purchase the fractured sculpture by the gallery staff, who comported themselves as if he had farted at a funeral. He was carrying nowhere near sufficient cash to match the price tastefully penciled in the lower-right corner of the display (he noted the absence of a dollar sign, a bit of cosmetic censorship meant to ease the sketchy transition from art to commerce), so although it felt like the least artistic sort of thing to do, he put the whole works on his Swivel County Credit Union debit card. There was a moment of discomfort when his available funds came up twenty bucks short, but after a hushed consultation between the cashier and the gallery owner that included worried glances at both Harley and the maimed art, it was agreed that everyone
could be happy with what the Swivel County Credit Union would provide, and Harley was rung up. On the way home, the remains of
Transitions
:
The Meadowlark Weeps
rode on the pickup truck seat between Harley and his date. Everyone in the cab felt the metaphor spoke for itself, and thus it was a silent passage.

There had been no more dates.

Impulsively, Harley gathered the polo shirt and khakis into his arms, walked downstairs and out the door, then around behind the garage and stuffed the shirt and pants into his burn barrel. Dressing the clothes with a drizzle of used motor oil, he lit and dropped a match, enjoying the soft
whuff
of ignition and the belly-dance waver of the flames taking hold. Sadly, after the motor oil was consumed, the fabric settled to a smolder, so Harley went into the garage, retrieved
Transitions
:
The Meadowlark Weeps
, and tossed it in. Constructed from renewably resourced balsa wood, indigenously masticated hemp fibers, and locally sourced llama yarn—all united with slatherings of volatile bonding agents purchased on sale at Home Depot—it took with an aggressive crackle, and shortly he had to move back three feet to alleviate the heat on his cheeks.

As the initial flare of flames settled into a steady burn, Harley took up an old hay fork and poked at the contents of the barrel. He felt oddly at peace, as if some invisible wall had been breached. The fork was missing one of its three tines and Harley kept it out here for this very purpose. The truth is that a burn barrel fire needs no tending, but Harley found it a soothing mental exercise even in untroubled times. Tonight as he poked and prodded, nudging bits of khaki and tempera-soaked lath toward the flames, he felt as he always did that relieving sense of finality when trash is
reduced to ash.
I got no more business wearing clothes like that
, Harley thought to himself as the pastel collar blackened,
than I do being with a woman like that
.

In fact, if pressed, Harley would admit that
clothes like that
and
women like that
had saved him from the triangular career path of many local men his age: trailer, toil, and tavern.
Yah
, Harley thought, as he forked a strip of scorched Dockers and dandled it through a veil of flames,
you didn't get it right with Wendy Willis, or Kelly Motzer, or Jenny Haskins, or anyone since, but you learned a little something from each one.
Indeed, it was likely Skunk-haired Girl's residual influence—her poetry, her nudging him into a semester of creative writing—that led to his presence at the ill-fated art show, but the trouble there was not the art, it was the clothes and the company. Harley made a mental note to continue to meet art, but to meet it—life, for that matter—on his own terms, which is to say probably in jeans and old boots and certainly not in the company of a woman who would dress him otherwise.

That night Harley was a long time finding sleep. When it came he lay with one arm extended to the empty side of the bed, daring to imagine it occupied.

C
ome morning, when the chores were complete (thinking ahead, he again unscrewed the lightbulb over the calf's pen), Harley showered, shaved, and dressed: old jeans, a worn T-shirt beneath a flannel shirt, logger boots, and a Carhartt jacket. Returning to the bathroom he paused for a moment, looked at himself in the mirror, then opened a drawer and studied the contents: a comb, a toothbrush, nail clippers, a deodorant stick. Reaching into the back of the drawer he pulled out a bottle of cologne. The cologne had been purchased for him by the art-show girlfriend.
She was really trying to tune me up
, he thought. He sniffed the bottle, then dumped it in the trash.

Mindy had suggested they take her truck since it was newer and more roadworthy, but residual male pride compelled Harley to insist on his Silverado. He also saw this as a chance to beta test his new resolve to meet life on his own terms. If Mindy was the sort
of woman to balk at the idea of a first date in a rusty farm truck, well, it would save him—both of them—a lot of trouble on the front end.

He recalled the way the coffee beaded on her boots and figured she'd be fine with it.

SHE STEPPED OUT
of the granary as he pulled up, and his breath caught. She was wearing a canvas jacket, the bomber cap, and camo cargo pants.

And those boots.

His heart gave a little
whoopty
.

As he opened the door for her (there was the momentary emancipated male internal debate about whether this was gallant or chauvinistic, then Harley's internal voice said
Tough nuts
and he grabbed the handle;
Meeting life on my own terms
, he thought, although his internal voice quavered a tad) he was struck again by the directness of her gaze, her hazel green eyes jovial and piercing all at once.

“Well,
thank
you,” she said, in a tone that somehow simultaneously acknowledged, excused, and encouraged his outdated courtliness.

“How's life in the granary?” asked Harley, not knowing where else to begin.

“Goin' good!” said Mindy. “Wired in the two-twenty today.”

“Oh,” said Harley. “So now you can get a stove.” Mindy had told him she was cooking on a hot plate.

“Um,” said Mindy. “The two-twenty is for my welder.”

The marvels accumulate
, thought Harley.

“You weld?”

“I used to date a welder. The man kind, not the machine kind.”

Harley's gut tightened.

“Well, I didn't just
date
him. We lived together for three years. He worked for a bridge-building company, welding up beams. Then he started making sculptures from scrap. ‘Sculptwelding,' he called it. Fish with fins made of Volkswagen hoods, cows with oil funnel teats.

“He taught me a few things. Got me my own wire-feed welder. Showed me how to run a plasma cutter. But then we split.”

They were pulling back onto the road. Harley busied himself with steering.

“Probably not the way to start a first date, talking about my old boyfriend,” said Mindy, after a quarter mile of silence.

“Ach, we're grown-ups,” said Harley, with an insouciance he did not feel.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED
at the sale barn the parking lot was packed with trucks and cattle trailers. Once again Harley held the door as they stepped inside the vestibule. “Good boy,” she said, winking, and he figured that was settled.

A long hallway ran perpendicular to the entry; at the far end of the hallway to the left was a door marked
REGISTRATION AND PAYOUT
. To the right was a door marked
CAFETERIA
. Straight ahead was the door leading to the sale ring. In contrast to the chill outside, the inside air was cushiony and smelled of sawdust, fresh manure, and deep fryers. Harley opened the door to the ring and followed Mindy up the stairs. When she stepped into view the auctioneer stuttered a moment, and Harley's ears burned as every cattle jockey in the joint swung around for a look. Mindy was a
showstopper on her own merits, but against the greasy-capped backdrop of this crowd (there were no other women present), she was an illuminated angel. The auctioneer resumed, and the assembled heads swiveled back to the business at hand.

The bidding well enclosed the sale ring on three sides. The serious bidders tended to cluster in several rows of vintage theater-style seats nailed to boards in the lower levels; Harley led Mindy to the top row of seats, which were simply varnished boards. Mindy pulled off her cap and shook out her hair. For a moment the warm scent of her conditioner displaced everything else.

“Right now they're selling heifers and cull cows,” said Harley.

Mindy smiled at him, then leaned forward, elbows on her knees, chin on her hands, to study the ring below. The auctioneer sat in an elevated booth facing the bidders. His arms were folded on the counter before him and he leaned into a microphone, through which he flowed a steady rattle of numbers, filling any blank spaces with a purr of rolled
r
's. As each animal entered, hurried along by a man hollering, “Yah-ha! Ha! Ha!” and snapping a noisemaker, its weight flashed on a scoreboard above the auctioneer's booth.

The bidders consulted small scratch pads and participated with nearly imperceptible signs: up-and-down twitch of the head to bid, broken eye contact and a single head shake to withdraw. When bidding lagged, the auctioneer threw out well-worn one-liners to liven things up: “I see Chet Franklin is here—I guess when the fish ain't bitin' there's always the sale barn!”

The regulars chuckled knowingly.

Harley explained how some animals were sold by the batch, others singly. How the thin, ribby cull cows were destined for dog food,
what phrases like “as it walks” meant, and that the cattle jockeys made their money on commission after having chased around from farm to farm in the predawn with their aluminum gooseneck trailers.

A cow came halfway into the corral, dipped her haunches, and tried to turn back. While the handlers worked to get her through the gate, the auctioneer made an announcement.

“Any calves still in the dock or in the alley, please bring 'em up!”

“That means the heifers and culls are almost done,” said Harley, standing. “We got fifteen minutes. You wanna grab a bite to eat?”

“Yes,” said Mindy. “Starved.”

The cafeteria setup was straightforward: a few Formica tables, a cubbyhole kitchen run by two women in hairnets, and a Pepsi wall menu that—based on the dated logo and layered flyspecks—had hung there since the seventies. The sign's moveable white plastic letters advertised
HBGR, CHZBRGR, FRIES, CURDS, COFFEE
, and
POP
. A dry-erase board propped on an easel beside a tub of plasticware advertised the day's special:
ALL YOU CAN EAT TACKO BAR
.

“
Tack
os!” said Mindy.

Harley pointed to a card table in one corner of the room, whereupon a stainless steel food warmer held an excavated mound of hamburger; another contained a lump of refried beans, also well mined and drying and cracked around the perimeter. There was a tray of fractured taco shells, a tub of sour cream, two open tin cans of chopped black olives, and several jars of uncapped picante sauce. The rest of the table was sprinkled with bits of lettuce and grated cheese.

“I'll buy!” said Mindy, and handed the cook a ten, which—even after they both ordered sodas—returned to her a dollar and change, which she dumped in the plastic mayonnaise jar labeled
TIPS
.

As Mindy loaded up her paper plate with taco fixings and tore into the food, Harley marveled. After all his years serving at the Swivel Volunteer Fire Department food tent for Jamboree Days he knew some women who could wolf down half a chicken or a brace of bratwurst, but to see Mindy eating heartily without regard to the state of the facility spoke less to her appetite for food than her acceptance of the roughneck surroundings.
Long ways removed from the damn art gallery,
thought Harley.

With any first-date nervousness diffused by the setting, Mindy and Harley ate in hungry silence. The tables around them were half full. Many of the diners approached the counter with a rocking gait born of bad hips and sprung backs. A group of men were playing cards at a corner table and cursing each other happily.

A dusty speaker hung from a wire above the Pepsi menu crackled, and the auctioneer's voice came over.

“Calf buyers, we're ready to go!”

Returning to the bleachers, Harley and Mindy watched as calves were urged into the ring singly or in groups. “Depends on how the owners want them sold,” said Harley. Compared to the older animals, the calves were much more tentative, stopping to sniff the steel tubing of the corral and the sawdust beneath their hooves, their ears cocked in curiosity. If they moved too slowly the wrangler chucked them under the chin or smacked them on the haunches with a flat plastic bat, sometimes while whistling sharply or hissing, “
Cht-cht-cht!”

“Whoa, folks, take a look right there, we got a set of four bulls,” said the auctioneer. “These'll be by the pound, boys—by the pound.”

“That means when the auctioneer says, ‘Who'll gimme ninety-five,' he means ninety-five cents a pound,” said Harley to Mindy.
“Not ninety-five bucks total. You have to watch that. They switch back and forth, depending. You could wind up owning some high-dollar hamburger.”

Mindy nodded and smiled. Two men acting as spotters pointed out bidders, hollering “HUP!” every time somebody gave the sign. When the final bidder bailed, the auctioneer slapped his hand on the counter.

“SOLD them calves!”

Harley checked the scoreboard. The four bull calves brought $1.65 a pound. “That's pretty good,” he said to Mindy. “I haven't bought calves for a long while—I mostly get my own cows bred and raise those—but there was a stretch when bull calves weren't worth half a
tacko
.”

“So that calf in your barn? He's worth a bundle!”

Harley blanched, and his heart thumped with an adrenaline bump. His mind had been a million miles from that calf. It took him a moment to recall that Mindy wasn't in on the secret, and simply meant what she said.

“Ha! Yah!” said Harley, overeagerly, lifting his cap by the bill and running the heel of his hand across his suddenly humid brow.

“What'd ya do, go a tad heavy on the hot sauce?” said Mindy, laughing.

“I guess,” said Harley, trying to keep the frantic out of his chuckle.

A lone calf galloped into the corral, then hit the brakes and went into a full-on four-point skid. Blessedly, this drew Mindy's attention back to the sale ring.

“A little crossie!” said the auctioneer. “You betcha!”

“Crossie?” said Mindy.

“Crossbred,” said Harley. “Half Holstein, half Angus. Tends toward a smaller calf, easier on the mother. Makes a decent beefer.”

The auctioneer was rattling away.

“I can't even tell who's bidding,” said Mindy.

“See that guy over there?” said Harley, pointing to a man in a T-shirt. The brim of his cap was tipped down over his face and his hands were laced across his large belly. He was sitting stock-still, with his feet up on the seat back before him. He could have been napping.

“Watch his cap,” said Harley. Just then the man twitched, the brim of his cap descending and ascending less than a quarter inch.

“That was a bid,” said Harley.

The auctioneer kept rattling. Three seats down from Napper, a man in a cowboy hat touched his ear.

“And that,” said Harley, nodding toward Cowboy Hat. “Also, some guys flick their tally sheet.”

Napper nodded, and the auctioneer bumped the price again. Cowboy Hat tugged his earlobe. Once again the auctioneer raised. He looked long and hard at Napper, all the while rolling the numbers on his tongue. After a moment's consideration, Napper shook his head tightly, as if trying to dislodge a gnat from the brim of his cap.

“SOLD them calves!” hollered the auctioneer as another batch passed out of the corral. “Put 'em on six fifty-three!”

“Six fifty-three?” asked Mindy.

“Cowboy Hat's bidding number,” said Harley. Cowboy Hat was now scribbling in a notebook so tiny it looked like a postage stamp in his paw. “‘Put 'em on six fifty-three' means he won the bid, and the secretary—that woman sitting at the computer beside the auctioneer—is generating a sales slip.”

“So whaddo I gotta do if I want to buy my own beefers?” asked Mindy.

“Stop down at the buyer's office,” said Harley. “Get a bidding number. Then you're good to go.”

“I'd like that,” said Mindy. “Next spring, maybe. Get some fencing up, try raising a couple.”

“Yah,” said Harley. “You could do that.”

“Maybe find myself some lonely bachelor who owns a hay baler . . .”

Harley blushed.

“Would you come down and help me bid?”

“Well—you bet,” said Harley. He hoped his heartbeat wasn't visible through his shirt.

“C'mon!” said Mindy, standing. “Those were some top-notch low-rent tacos, but that coffee tasted like it was poured through a furnace filter. Let's go get some good stuff!”

“Well, there's not much around he—”

“That truck of yours make it to Clearwater and back?”

“Oh, sure. Might have to put your foot over the hole in the floor so the heater can keep up.”

“Let's go!”

AT THE COFFEE
shop in Clearwater he craved a dry cappuccino but wasn't sure that would give the right impression, plus there was the danger of a foam mustache, so he played it safe with the house blend. Mindy ordered a chai.

“You a straight-coffee guy?” she asked.

Harley decided to play it honest. “Mostly, yah, but a guy does like a triple-shot dry cappuccino now and then.” He was embarrassed
that he knew what a triple-shot dry cappuccino was, but he figured after the lies about the calf and the lightbulb he should recover the up-and-up.