The Jesus Cow (4 page)

I
n the little hut—originally the pump house, in fact—at the base of the water tower, Carolyn Sawchuck was pedaling her bicycle and reading
Soulful Declensions
, a book of essays she had written and published at the peak of her academic career, when things were really going her way. Despite her late night atop the tower, she had risen early today, awakened by the rumble of Meg's junk truck.
Bless my friend Meg
, she thought, and found herself taken aback by her unconscious use of the word
bless
, but even more so the word
friend
. She hadn't used either word in a long, long time.

The bicycle was clamped into a wind trainer, one of those roller mechanisms that converts a standard bicycle into an exercise bicycle. The trainer in turn had been modified to spin a small pump. A short hose connected a thirty-five-gallon plastic carboy to the pump's intake valve; the other end of the pump was attached to a
longer hose that snaked across the floor and out a small hole in the wall that was stuffed with insulation.

Carolyn pedaled steadily, her book propped on a rack mounted on the handlebars. Outside, a sign on the pump house door said
ACCEPTING NO VISITORS
. Carolyn had screwed the sign to the door the day she moved in. The first time Billy saw it, he chuckled, elbowed Harley, and said, “Who's offering?”

“Nice
,” said Harley. “Be
nice
.”

Billy grimaced. “That woman has halitosis of the soul.”

ABOVE ALL AND
through it all, Carolyn Sawchuck considered herself A Woman of the People. She had focused on becoming A Woman of the People as a second act after being A Woman of Arts and Letters failed to pan out after four underappreciated (and undersold) books, a pair of Guggenheister awards, a fat curriculum vitae's worth of grants and fellowships, two poetry chapbooks, and an endowed chair at the state university in Clearwater. Until the abrupt end it was a satisfying academic arc, although even at its apex Carolyn was not the sort of person for whom satisfaction was a natural state.

It was the vacation home in a Central American expatriate artists' community that put her on the path to a commoner's ruin, what with it being burned to the ground by the very same Marxist collective revolutionaries to whom she had given safe harbor and free copies of her recent treatise on “Indigenous Empowerment in a State of Transitory Postmodern Meta-Contextualism.” Wishing to demonstrate her commitment to the cause (and also unload a few boxes of poorly translated and even more poorly selling chapbooks), Carolyn had set up a fund-raiser based on a sparsely attended
poetry reading and free beer, after which (and it was never clear if this was the result of the free poetry or the free beer) the revolutionaries burned her retreat to the ground, and—essentially—the grant money that had served as a down payment. They also unloaded her iPad on eBay.

There followed a crash course in the intricacies of the Central American insurance industry, and when the ash and paperwork settled Carolyn was left with a scorched adobe shell and an underwater mortgage that had been of sketchy provenance in the first place.

It was possible she might have survived this personal setback had she not subsequently suffered a professional setback precipitated by a “think piece” she composed for the literary blog
Haute Ignorati
in which she impugned a female freelance writer for selling out the sisterhood by penning a style magazine article entitled “Six Sexy Steps to Steamroll Cellulite,” having failed to take into consideration that said female writer was a self-insured single mother who composed her cellulite article on a card table and pawnshop laptop in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking a Shopko loading dock as opposed to on a fresh MacBook in a writing den constructed from sustainable bamboo and tenure.

It developed that the cellulite scribe was a bit of a bootstraps feminist in her own right, and returned fire. In the ensuing online strafing session, Carolyn was shocked to find herself cast and cornered as a tone-deaf member of the privileged class and in violation of an obscure subsection of the university speech code, which Carolyn herself had helped compose. The professional conflagration that followed made the Central American incident seem a jolly marshmallow roast by comparison, and when the final faculty
review session concluded, Carolyn found herself endowed with a modest severance package but otherwise hopelessly outcast on all fronts.

THE PUMP GAVE
out a gurgle. Carolyn stopped pedaling, and dismounted. One corner of the small room was taken up by a number of five-gallon buckets. Carolyn selected one, fitted a funnel to the mouth of the carboy, emptied the contents of the bucket within, and returned to pedaling and reading her book.

CAROLYN DIDN'T ALWAYS
read her own books. In fact, she did so infrequently. But when she did read her own books, it was to reassure herself. To reassure herself that it was the outside world that failed to understand. That her poor book sales had no relation to the quality of the content. There was also the idea that the printed pages validated the work. So many
talked
of writing; she had done it. The fact that her words had languished in small print runs was secondary to the primary fact that she had put her ass in the chair, as she once heard some would-be rough-boy corduroy-blazered creative-writing workshopper say. Half the men in these workshops tended to project a combination of infantile sensitivity coupled with sublimated machismo. The sort of fellow who would be post-coitally teary but secretly hoping the woman would get out of bed and fix a nice snack. Carolyn often countered this image by conjuring up a mental picture of the guilty individual perched atop a pedal-powered monster truck.

There were those in Swivel who saw Carolyn as a bitter woman, and little she did dispelled this. Publicly she had always maintained that she came to Swivel to live “the simple life,” a pronouncement
that probably did more long-term damage than the burn barrel ruckus, implying as it did that the citizenry were by default de facto simple.

In truth she was more befuddled than bitter. She had done all the right things, sat on the proper literary panels, carefully doled out career-enhancing book reviews (always reserving the long knives for those outside the winner's circle and off the foundation board), and right there on the dust jackets and back covers were the testaments—the “blurbs” as they were called in the coarser trades—all these eminent pacesetters testifying to her wisdom and perspicacity and artistic essentiality, and yet, and yet . . . she wound up in a defunct water tower pump house riding a bicycle to nowhere.

In the wake of losing her position with the university, Carolyn had retreated to Swivel, where the cost of living—if not the tone of living—was more suited to her means, and rented a modest apartment above Reverend Gary's Church of the Roaring Lamb. It was her intent to simply lay low for a year, do some writing, then begin the reentry process. In the meantime, she took it upon herself to uplift and enhance the citizenry by offering memoir-writing workshops and selling dream catchers on consignment at the gas station.

The citizenry had proved stubborn in their unreconstructed lack of cultural acquisitivity. In that first year she sold but one dream catcher, and that to a drunken fisherman who mistook it for a musky lure. Glen Jacobson, a local handyman (known also for his skills as an unlicensed plumber and electrician), showed up for the memoir workshop, but he ignored Carolyn's instruction, insisting instead that she help him edit a sheaf of handwritten limericks stored in a manila folder that smelled of caulk. Carolyn adjudged
the limericks juvenile and told Glen his first assignment was to find a word that rhymed with
misogyny
. Punching it into an online rhyming dictionary, Glen found himself recommended to
androgyny
, which he in turn Googled, and what he saw next made him so nervous he wrote no more, and thus the workshop terminated. On another cultural front, Carolyn got into regular shouting matches with Reverend Gary. Some of the disagreements were theological, but mostly it was over all the speaking in tongues after ten p.m. on Bible Study night.

So it was, when Carolyn heard the old village water tower was slated for destruction, she had seen it as a cultural opportunity. More than that, a
responsibility
: if these people couldn't recognize the treasure of their own history, she'd recognize it for them. And after years of navigating the world of government grants and foundation funds, Carolyn happened to know the governor had recently expanded a state program making funds and tax credits available for the renovation of historic landmarks—exactly the sort of thing about which these shortsighted Swivel knuckleheads were oblivious. She went into high gear, submitting the petition for landmark status, storming the village board meetings, and convincing Harley Jackson to let her assume the lease.

Shortly thereafter, the governor reversed himself, announcing a series of budget cuts and putting the renovation program—and its funds—on hold, and Carolyn found herself stuck with a year-long lease on a rusty water tower full of nothing.

W
ith the chores complete, Harley found himself hungry. What he needed was eggs and bacon and good fresh-ground coffee, but what he craved was the instantaneous fix of a gas station pastry washed down with a Styrofoam cup of industrial drip, both available at the Kwik Pump. For that matter, maybe he'd go for a drive. It was one of his favorite things, driving nowhere particular in his pickup truck with old-school country music on the radio, slowly knee-steering along with the coffee in one hand and a pastry in the other. Nutritional napalm, and no way to navigate, but the sort of unobtrusive decadence that suited him. He closed the barn door, started his pickup truck, and made the short drive across County Road M to the Kwik Pump, where a neon sign in the window promised
BEER SALES TO MIDNIGHT
, and a banner hung with bungee cords advertised a dollar-off special on twenty-four-packs of Old Milwaukee. Right below that was an official government-issue
sign identifying the Kwik Pump as a deer carcass registration point. This was an accurate representation of the ratio of interests in the area, which ran about two to one beer to hunting.

Harley parked before the propane cylinder exchange cage and left the truck idling, the heater blowing. Inside the door of the station, Harley stopped as he always did to read the community bulletin board, filled with homemade posters advertising housecleaning services, babysitting, dock repair, cabin winterization, taxidermy, bowling tournaments, cancer benefits, used snowmobiles for sale, and Pampered Chef parties. Down in one corner a piece of paper stapled to the cork featured a cartoonish rendering of a gooey-looking black teardrop falling toward a sad-faced cartoon Earth. A red circle/slash had been superimposed over the black teardrop. The caption below Earth said:

TOP DOLLAR FOR YOUR USED MOTOR OIL

&

OTHER PETROLEUM-BASED WASTE

I PICK UP, I PAY (CASH)

(NONGOVERNMENT) (NO QUESTIONS ASKED)

Below the caption was a fringe made of the same phone number printed vertically, over and over, each separated by a scissors snip. Harley noticed that several of the strips had been torn away.

Harley knew that number. He dialed it whenever he needed to speak with Carolyn Sawchuck.

MAKING HIS WAY
through the ranks of foil-wrapped snacks, gallon jugs of window washer fluid, and artfully stacked rock salt, Harley approached the bakery case and chose a creme-filled, maple-frosted
long john, then moved to the coffee stand, where he drew a twenty-ounce Kona Luna from the vacuum thermos. Then he turned around, bumped directly into a woman, and slopped fresh hot Kona Luna across her boots.

“Oh, shoot, I—,” said Harley, before the woman cut in with a laugh.

“Nothin'!” she said, pronouncing it
NAH-thin!
and waving her hand dismissively.

Harley stood red faced and mute.

“Look at 'er bead up!” said the woman, pointing proudly to her boot toes, where coffee trembled atop the leather in glossy orblets.

Harley liked few things better in this world than a good pair of boots. But among those things was a
woman
in a good pair of boots. Not spiky pumps or furry winter clompers or thigh-high “bondage waders” (Billy's term), but rather sturdy wafflestompers with some scuff on them. Harley kept his eyes locked on the coffee beads, waiting for the face flush to disperse. It only deepened as the nape sweat sprung.

“Oiled 'em last night,” he heard her say. “With the beeswax and whatnot. Set 'em by the woodstove all night long. Melts it in good.” Harley stared resolutely at the boots. She stomped first one foot, then the other, and the coffee beads dispersed.

“Christmas breakfast in the Kwik Pump?”

Harley had no choice now but to raise his gaze and the woman was looking him square in the eye. His gut flushed as if he had misstepped on the top rung of the haymow ladder. Trying to focus, he didn't so much see her face as take inventory. Long straight hair. Frank hazel eyes. Blaze orange bomber cap trimmed in rabbit fur, flaps down. A face that seemed wide open. And a grin. Not
a smile, a grin. A grin like she knew exactly what he looked like in his skivvies. A buddy-style grin the full opposite of coquettish, crinkling into the very first hints of crow's-feet, the kind of lines a man learned to look for after he wearied of petulance and chirping. And: creeping to the crest of one clavicle and just visible at the flare of her flannel collar, an ivy-vine tattoo.

“Oh. Hey. Yah, I . . .” Harley's ears felt molten as he stood there with a dripping coffee cup in one hand and a creme-filled maple-frosted long john in the other. The pastry was a true embarrassment. “Cow calved last night, and I—” He had this fleeting thought that talk of calving would render him in a sturdier light.

“Don't worry about it, big shot,” interrupted the woman, hoisting a plastic bakery bag so he could see her own creme-filled, maple-frosted long john within.

Harley grinned in relief.

“Mindy,” said the woman, pulling off one leather chopper mitt and extending the undressed hand. “Mindy Johnson.” Harley shuffle-juggled his coffee and pastry to the crook of one arm and met her grip, which was strong and naturally electric, with a coarseness that bore the implications of physical labor. The nape sweat formed a drop and slid down his neck. “Harley,” he said.

“Off to see family?” said Mindy.

“Nah,” said Harley. “No family.”

“Oh.”

“No big thing, just no family.”

“But on Christmas?”

“Not real big on Christmas. Nothin' against it, but . . .”

“You and me both,” said Mindy. “Rather have a quiet night in. Or a
warm
night in.”

Harley felt himself seizing up.

“Hey!” Mindy was holding up a wire-tied plastic bag packed with day-old blueberry doughnuts. “Four for a buck!”

She lobbed them at his chest. “Y'know y'want 'em,” she said, laughing as he basket-caught the bag with his elbows and another slosh of coffee hit the floor,
splat
.

“Well, merry solo Christmas!” she said, laughing again.

“Yah,” said Harley. “You too.” He fled for the counter, paid the clerk, and hustled for the warmth of his truck. Backing away from the propane cage he clutched into first and steered a smooth arc around the lot to the exit, but then lingered, hoping to catch a glimpse of Mindy in the rearview. Soon enough she emerged and climbed into a well-worn Ford F-250. Red, with plow mounts. A beefy four-wheel drive but fitted with narrow tires—smart for the snow. A set of tire chains hung from the headache rack.

The cab was warm and the coffee smelled better than it was. He was in the mood to drive. Rather than cross to his driveway, Harley flipped the blinker, turned right on County Road M, and headed for the overpass. And he didn't even mind when he turned on the radio hoping for Loretta Lynn and got Christmas carols instead.