The Jesus Cow (12 page)

The bullhorn rose. “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I MUST ASK YOU TO DISPERSE.”

There was scant movement.

“IT'S A SIMPLE MATTER OF TRESPASS, FOLKS.”

Still nothing. Then the barn door swung open, and Billy stepped forward with his shotgun, bandoliers, and orange clogs. A murmur went through the near fringes of the crowd. They moved back three steps.

“OFF THE PROPERTY, FOLKS, OR I DEPUTIZE THAT MAN,” announced Constable Benson, and now the tide began to turn.

While the others retreated, a pale woman in an ankle-length denim skirt who had been standing off to the side and behind Reverend Gary stepped forward and addressed Harley. “We hope you will do good with this calf,” she said. From behind her skirt she produced a young girl with a runny nose and a stocking cap. Now there came a tremble in her tone. “My daughter,” she said, pulling away the child's stocking cap to reveal the child's hairless head, softly bald. “Please. Take her to the calf.”

“Whosoever shall receive one of such children in my name, recieveth me!
” called someone from the crowd.

“I . . . folks, I . . . you'll have to . . .”

“Glory to His name! Amen! Amen!” That was Reverend Gary.

The
amens
rippled up the driveway. Harley looked at the little
girl again. She was staring at him implacably. “Folks! I don't know what I'm going to do. I have to think it over. But you have to leave us alone now. We'll say more tomorrow.”

Constable Benson raised his bullhorn again.

“TIME TO GO, FOLKS.”

Billy moved forward. The people moved back.

“AT LEAST TO THE ROAD.”

The constable turned to Harley. “You know there's no way I can hold 'em, right?” Even now more people were arriving. A van from the Clearwater TV station had arrived and was raising its antenna. Cars were beginning to back up nearly to the overpass.

“I've radioed the county,” said the constable. “They'll send deputies. Likely call in the reserves. They'll be able to secure the barn and property overnight, but the county's not gonna pay to have them sit out here forever. You're going to have to come up with something.”

There was the sound of another siren approaching. Harley thought perhaps someone else had called the sheriff. Then Chief Knutson's Expedition careened around a corner, nearly wiping out a row of onlookers. At the end of the driveway the chief flipped his siren from wail to phaser, and the people parted to let him pass. Chief Knutson loved the phaser setting like Constable Benson loved his bullhorn.

The phaser burped to silence and Chief Knutson hit the ground running, his belly leading the way.

“Heard a commotion on the scanner! Whaddawe got?”

Harley explained the situation. The chief, a regular at St. Jude's, crossed himself, and then, looking at all the people and cars and the TV truck, said, “Well, Christ on a calf, this is a mess.”

“The county's comin',” said Constable Benson.

“Well, we're gonna need'em,” said Chief Knutson.

An idea occurred to Harley.

“We still short on funds for that thermal imager?”

“At this point we can afford the wrist strap and half a battery. What's yer point?”

“Every year the fire department runs the Jamboree Days beer tent and softball tournament,” said Harley.

“Yah . . . ,” said the chief, puzzled.

“Parking, crowd control, tickets, we do it all.”

“You sayin' . . . ?”

Harley sighed, and thought long and hard. He had sworn he wouldn't do this. But then he looked at the gathering crowd. They weren't going away without a look at that calf. And who knew how many more were coming.

“Yeah,” he said to the chief reluctantly. “No reason we couldn't use the same setup to run folks through here for a look at that calf.”

Now the chief looked at the crowd. “But why—”

“Sell tickets, donate the whole works to the thermal imager fund.”

The chief raised his eyebrows, a sign that he was interested.

“Plus, a raffle,” said Harley.

That got his attention. The chief loved a raffle. “Can't be any harder than runnin' the beer garden on a Saturday night,” he said.

“And lower odds of getting hit in the head with a stray softball,” said Harley.

“I'd have to get everybody rounded up,” said Chief Knutson.

“That's your specialty,” said Harley.

“Yes it is,” said the chief, swelling right up. In a trice, he was back in his Expedition, phaser blazing, headed for the fire hall.

W
ith county deputies patrolling the property lines, blocking the driveway and posted at both doors of the barn, Constable Benson took to the hood of his squad car with the megaphone and announced that the calf would be made available for viewing the following day, but in the meantime anyone who set foot on Harley's property or blocked the road would be arrested and taken to the county jail immediately. He then repeated this information in a brief interview with the television reporter. These announcements and the coming of darkness cut the crowd to manageable proportions, although by no means eradicated it.

In light of the day to follow, Harley sent Billy home to feed his cats and get a good night's sleep.

Harley let himself into the barn. The lightbulb above Tina Turner's stall was burning brightly. Mindy was seated in a corner of the pen, her revolver at her side. Harley unscrewed the bulb, then sat
beside Mindy and studied the Jesus calf in the half-light. It was lying beside its mother, legs folded, neck curled back, chin resting on its hocks.

Harley's cell phone rang. He didn't recognize the area code.

“Harley Jackson?” A man's voice. Businesslike.

“Who's this?” As far as he knew, his phone number wasn't listed anywhere.

“Sloan Knight,” he said. “International Talent Management.”

“Who—”

“This Jesus cow of yours. We want to represent it—and you.”

“But how did you—”

“Calf's viral. All over the Internet. We have people monitoring these things. We like to move fast.”

“You want to represent a
calf
?”

“Client, calf, we can work out the details later. Right now we just want to sign you to the agency so we can get started with the licensing and monetization. Sooner the better. I'm about to leave L.A. for Minneapolis now, and should be in Swivel by morning.”

Harley sat silent, and the agent continued. “If you can provide me with an e-mail address, I'll send a rough draft of the proposal and contract and we can work out the details in the morning.”

“Um, yah, no,” said Harley. “I don't want a big thing. We're gonna handle it here. Do a fund-raiser for the fire department over the next couple of weekends until the interest dies down.”

There was silence on the other end.

“So,” said Harley, as a way of wrapping things up.

“You have no idea what you've got there, do you?” said Sloan finally.

“Well, it's just—”

“We'll talk again,” said the man, and the line went dead.

Suddenly Harley was tired. Overwhelmingly tired. He stared at the calf's side long and hard, until Jesus went blurry.

But damn. It was sure enough Jesus.

He took Mindy by the hand then, and after checking that the deputies were in place, the two of them walked into his house and into bed where they slept, and only slept.

I
n the morning, Meg Jankowski set out for St. Jude's as usual and found her way blocked by a pair of sheriff's deputies directing cars and pedestrians. When she drew even with one of the deputies, Meg rolled down her window and asked what was up.

“Ask that guy,” said the deputy, pointing down the road, where Reverend Gary was standing atop a car, waving his Bible and bedazzled cross. When Meg reached him, she stopped the truck.

“Hello, Reverend.”

“Meg! Glorious news!” hollered the reverend. “The Lord has given us a sign!”

“Really,” said Meg.

“Christ himself, Meg!”

“Really,” said Meg again.

“Well . . . His likeness! On the side of Harley Jackson's bull calf!”

“Really,”
said Meg, putting the truck back in gear.

“Won't you stay? Won't you see Him?”

Meg smiled and drove away. Inside St. Jude's she lit Dougie's candle and prayed quietly.

Then she lit one more.

For Harley Jackson
, she thought.
It's likely he'll need it.

THE SWIVEL VOLUNTEER
Fire Department had arrived earlier that morning, fortified with doughnuts and coffee provided by the auxiliary. They set to work immediately, with Chief Knutson barking orders left and right. Several of the members brought their own snowblowers to clear the driveway and paths past the barn where the viewing area would be set up. The village allowed the use of its front-end loader and mounted snowblower, which was used to clear Harley's hay field to make room for parking. All footpaths, driving lanes, and parking areas were marked off using yellow-and-black
FIRE SCENE
tape strung from posts stuck in pails of sand (there was no driving the posts into the frozen ground). As Harley's driveway couldn't possibly handle all the traffic, the fence along the road was taken down and the ditch was filled in with a few loads of gravel to create two “in” lanes and two “out” lanes. The Jamboree Days ticket booths were pulled out of storage and set up along the “in” lanes. The booths looked garish against the snow, stapled as they were with last year's softball tournament beer posters.

Harley knew he couldn't just stand the calf outside in a pen, so he and Mindy framed up a sheet of Plexiglas that could be placed in the open side door of the barn. Then they built a small pen behind the Plexiglas, and illuminated it with a set of halogen shop lights.

WITH ALL THE
action happening elsewhere, Vance Hansen was anticipating a quiet cup of coffee alone in the village hall when Klute Sorensen came roaring through the door. Vance, hunched over the coffeemaker with his back to the entrance, startle-froze like a miniature African antelope at the roar of a lion and half his coffee hit the carpet.

“HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN!?” yelled Klute. Vance flinched again, an involuntary spasm causing him to crush the Styrofoam cup in his hand, which caused the rest of the coffee to spill over his fingers, which then led him to dance up and down in pain while sucking his knuckles.

“Let what hap—”

“You don't KNOW?” Klute had just finished fighting his way through the crowds. He had done this with much less equanimity than Meg, blowing the twin air horns of his Hummer and yelling out the window at stragglers. Thus he had arrived at the village hall highly revved and ready to rant.

“It's all over the news! That knucklehead Harley Jackson is running amok! Turning this beautiful village into a tourist trap for Jesus freaks!”

“Well, they're just trying to raise funds for the fire department . . .”

“You
believe
that?”

“Well—”

“You see all those loonballs out there? You see them trampling the snowbanks, clogging the roads, parking every which way?”

“Well—”

“I just came from Clover Blossom Estates—you can't even navigate! It looks like a used car lot after a hurricane! You understand
what this will do to property values? They're already in the tank, now they're headed for the
TOILET
!”

“But I don't see any way—”

“You call yourself a
lawyer
?!”

“Well, I prefer village
counsel
. . .”

“Well, lemme
counsel
you,
Counsel
. Anybody come in and get permits for that cluster out there? Are winter parking rules suspended? Community beautification ordinances? Is anyone enforcing
anything
?”

“Well, they just—”

“They just push you around,
Counselor
.”

“I—”

“Actually, this is the miracle I've been waiting for,” said Klute, his voice suddenly softening. He picked up a fresh Styrofoam cup, filled it with coffee, and handed it to Vance, who accepted it with bewildered caution. Klute took a seat at the conference table and motioned for Vance to take the chair beside him.

“Harley Jackson has been undermining me—this
community
—for some time now,” said Klute, shaking his head regretfully. “I grieve to think how Swivel might have thrived had Clover Blossom Estates not been sunk by Harley's stinky beefers and stubbornness.”

Vance nodded tentatively, still unnerved by Klute's brief run of gentleness.

“At every turn we have tried to convince him to do the right thing, and at every turn he has ignored us. In short, he has been a bad neighbor.

“Well, now he has given us the opening we require.”

And then Klute Sorensen outlined his plan. When he left, Vance
Hansen was on the phone with Klute's attorney in Clearwater. And when Klute found himself reduced to a five-mile-an-hour crawl through Swivel's newfound congestion, he simply smiled and cued up
Sawing Through Setbacks: Lessons from the Lumber Barons of Yore
.

That one always made him feel nostalgic.

BY TEN A.M.
things were set to go. Chief Knutson was parked on a small rise beside the ticket booths where he had a clear view of the whole operation. He was wearing a brand-new lime-green reflective vest labeled
INCIDENT COMMANDER
, and although he had just discovered he couldn't get the Velcro tabs to meet across his belly, he couldn't have been happier about the situation in general. In addition to the vest, he was debuting his new Wheel Commander Incident Command System, a magnetic dry-erase whiteboard that clipped to the steering wheel of his Expedition, allowing him to coordinate operations by radio from the quiet of the cab (at least that's how the chief had pitched it to the fire board; there was also the advantage of having a heater and two cup holders: one for his Kona Luna, and the other for a bouquet of Original Slim Jims).

Surveying his whiteboard one last time, the chief delicately centered the magnetized tab engraved
CHIEF
in the preprinted rectangle captioned
ICS COMMANDER
, jotted the time in the column labeled
INCIDENT LOG
, punched the fully integrated scene-time stopwatch, gave a happy little shiver, and keyed his radio mic.

“Incident Command to Operations.”

“Yah,” replied Boober Johnson. “Operations.”

“Commence operations.”

“Okeydoke.” The chief was hoping for something more professional, and made a mental note to review radio protocol at the next meeting. Just then Boober's voice came across the radio again.

“Ahm . . . which particular operations?”

The chief sighed and keyed his mic. “Let in the cars and people.”

“Copy-copy,” replied Boober.

The chief peeled a Slim Jim.

BOOBER OPENED THE
barn door and relayed the chief's command, then jogged off to alert the crew at the gates. Harley and Billy (armed and back in his bandoliers) moved the calf into position behind the Plexiglas, and Mindy switched on the halogens. Tina mooed worriedly, and the Jesus calf mooed back, so Harley allowed her inside the pen as well. The Swivel Volunteer Fire Department kicked right into Jamboree Days mode, the only difference being that instead of sleeveless T's and bad shorts they were bundled up in bunker pants and blaze orange deer hunting jackets and their breath was visible in the frozen air.

There was trouble immediately. Rather than file past, the first four people to stand before the calf dropped to their knees in prayer. Harley tapped on the Plexiglas and waved them on. They stayed right where they were. The people behind them began pushing forward, and then there were nearly a dozen people trying to peer through the Plexiglas at once. Spotting the backlog, Constable Benson came over with his bullhorn. “KEEP 'ER MOVIN', FOLKS!” he blared from a distance of three feet.

The line began to move again.

For a while then, things moved smoothly, if slowly. Many of the viewers genuflected, or crossed themselves, or simply bowed their
heads. Some spun around with their backs to the calf and snapped selfies. One man was holding a poster advertising a homeless shelter fund-raiser. He hollered through the Plexiglas at Harley, “We want to sell raffle tickets for a chance to sit with the calf!” He pointed to a phone number on the poster. “Call me!”

“MOVE IT ALONG!” blared Constable Benson, and the man shuffled on, but kept casting his eyes back at Harley, who felt a jab of guilt.

By now Tina Turner had settled into placidly chewing her cud, apparently undisturbed by the people passing by outside the Plexiglas. The Jesus calf was resting beside her, positioned in such a way that the Christ image was easily visible. Leaving Billy and Mindy to babysit, Harley went outside to see how things were going.

He was unprepared. Cars were backed clear up and out of sight beyond the overpass, snaking around and waiting for their chance to pass through the ticket gates. Clots of people were standing in the Kwik Pump parking lot and walking down the shoulder of the road. The parking area in the hay field was nearly full and someone was working with the village loader and snowblower to clear even more space. Here and there pilgrims were clambering over snowbanks to circumvent the ticket booths. There were people at his house looking in the windows.

Chief Knutson spotted him and—phaser deployed—came tooling over in the Expedition. “Word's gettin' out,” said the chief. Carlene Hestekin was in the passenger seat beside him, flicking at her smartphone, and the chief nodded toward her. “My communications officer here has been monitoring social media, and all them people going through the line are posting photos and messages and it's only bringing more and more people. We're makin' a killing at
the ticket booths. Coupla days a'this and we'll be able to buy
two
thermal imagers. Or maybe,
maybe
, an Argo!” The chief had long dreamed of purchasing an Argo—an eight-wheeled amphibious firefighting and rescue vehicle—but so far had failed to sell the fire board on the idea.

“Hey!” hollered the chief, punching his phaser and four-wheeling off to intercept someone trying to sneak through the snow around the ticket booths. Harley could see other people doing the same thing—there was really no way to seal the entire perimeter of the place using only the volunteer fire department. Furthermore, each person left a trail in the snow for the next, so sneaking in was becoming easier and easier.

Harley looked toward the house again. Those people staring into his windows: That had to stop. He walked over and asked them to leave. They looked at him silently and did as they were asked.
There are advantages
, Harley thought,
to dealing with people who are gentle in their obsessions.
He stepped through the front door and found the silence of the kitchen oddly foreign. The house of his entire childhood and most of his adult life suddenly felt like an island afloat in a sea of unfamiliarity. Nothing in here but the sound of the refrigerator, and everything so still, and yet he felt the vibration of all the oddness swirling around him.

A face appeared at the window. A woman, tapping the glass with one knuckle.

Harley recognized the woman who had produced the sickly child from behind her skirt. Her eyes were bagged and dark. Her expression was flat and weary. She stared at Harley.

Harley turned his back and opened the refrigerator, looking for something to eat. He hadn't eaten anything but fire department
doughnuts and he was of a mind to scramble some sausage and eggs for Billy and Mindy. He pulled out the eggs, but as he faced the stove he could feel the woman's gaze upon him. He placed the pan on the burner and lit the gas, but still couldn't shake the idea of the woman at the window. He snapped the gas off and looked again. She was still there, unmoving, her gaze steady.

He stepped outside.

“My daughter,” said the lady, once again producing the child from within the folds of her skirt. The child looked cold beneath her stocking cap. A clear rivulet of snot ran from one nostril. Harley found this more moving than tears.

“Please,” said the woman. “Just let her touch Him.”

“I . . .”

“Please.”

“I don't think that will . . .”

“I am trusting in
my
faith,” said the woman, her voice suddenly firm. “Not yours.”

Harley looked at the child. She was nearly translucent in her afflictions, but beautiful. So beautiful.

“Okay,” said Harley.

He led the mother and child up the path beneath the yard light and out to the barn. Nodding at the firefighter guarding the door, he led them inside. Mindy looked up from where she was sitting on a camp chair but seeing the mother and child said nothing.
One more reason I like her
, thought Harley.
She simply accepts things. Goes with them.

Without words, Billy drew open the gate to the viewing pen and ushered the woman and child within. Tina Turner laid her ears back and sidled off a quarter turn.

“Move slowly,” said Harley. “We don't want to spook 'em.”