The Jesus Cow (5 page)

Y
er not a LAWYER, yer a WATER BOY!”

Klute Sorensen's face was a plum shade of purple.

Vance Hansen's face was a Kleenex shade of white.

“But, Mr. Sorensen, these things take time . . . surely a man of your stature underst—”

“A man of my stature shouldn't have to be waiting on a mental midget like YOU!”

The cold coffee in Vance Hansen's Styrofoam cup was a trembling bull's-eye of ripples. Clutching it with both hands in an attempt to keep it from sloshing over, Vance sat hunched in a pilled Christmas sweater on a swivel chair that was set too low for the village hall conference table, an unfortunate circumstance that left him looking like an uncomfortable grade-schooler who'd arrived late for school picture day.

Klute Sorensen's recent sleeplessness wasn't solely attributable
to the fact that his CPAP roamed his face like a possessive octopus. In fact, even when the machine hadn't bothered him, he had been up a lot these past few months, trying to figure out how to stave off the failure of Clover Blossom Estates. The banker was getting nervous. Klute was certain that in time, when the economy and real estate markets recovered, Clover Blossom Estates would thrive again. History was on his side. To own property at the exit of an interstate was to own a gold mine. He had seen what had happened in Boomler. But he had also seen how it had come undone. How his father had anticipated how valuable the interchange property would become but had failed to anticipate just
how
valuable. And how by owning only one corner he was vulnerable to other developers. The ones who brought in the chain hotels and the franchise restaurants had understood: this was real-life Monopoly. Whoever controls the most spaces wins.

But how to survive in the moment? How to bank against the future when there was nothing in the bank? Swivel was a dinky little village. Klute knew that. But bigger times were coming. All you had to do was drive on the interstate to Clearwater. Sooner or later, even the most remote interchanges were becoming points of commerce. Rather than bail out of Clover Blossom Estates, Klute believed he had to react boldly. Rather than dump and run, he needed to increase his holdings. Double down. The Kwik Pump was already in place, so that corner was out of the equation. But if he could get the rest of Harley Jackson's farm, he would be up to half. That plan was already under way, although Vance Hansen had been a real slow-moving disappointment. He needed some jacking up.

And the third corner of the exchange—the one owned by
Margaret Magdalene Jankowski—would
really
close the deal. That corner had been costing Klute some sleep lately, too. He had offered to buy Meg out several times, but she had refused.

Klute stood across the table from Vance, leaning in, his jaw jutted to within spittle range, his meaty hands braced on either side of an array of papers splayed across the table. Topmost on the stack was a large plat printout of the interstate interchange. With a flick of his fingertips, Klute spun the plat, intending to rotate it so Vance could read it. Instead, he spun it with such violence the centrifugal effect sent the other papers on the table flying in all directions. Setting aside his coffee, Vance scurried over to a corner of the conference room to retrieve the helicoptering plat, then scurried back to return it to the table, smoothing it before Klute with trembling hands.

“THIS!” hollered Klute, jabbing a finger at a rectangle outlined in purple highlighter, “THIS SHOULD BE MINE!”

The purple border delineated Harley's fifteen-acre farmlet. Vance nodded vigorously. “Oh yes! Yes! I agree!”

“A
farm
! What kind of village has a
farm
in it?”

“Well, it's—”

“It's
backward
!”

“I certainly agr—”

“I'm a
forward
man!”

Now he adopted a more reasonable tone.

“You know I care about Swivel.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I'm an entrepreneur.”

“Yes. Yes you are.”

“I'm a go-getter.”

Vance nodded. Vigorously.

“But I don't just go-get for
me
.”

Vance looked mildly confused.

“I LIFT BOATS!”

Now Vance looked lonely. Klute sighed.

“I don't just make investments, I make
sacrifices
—for the good of the community.”

Vance went back to nodding, but the look on his face remained quizzical.

“We're here on Christmas morning, aren't we?”

“Yes,” said Vance, looking down and picking at his sweater. “Yes, we are.”

VANCE HANSEN JUST
wanted to go home. The kids would be impossible and his wife, Katy, would be angry that he had gone in to work on Christmas Day, but he also knew there was a paper plate stacked with green-and-red-frosted sugar cookies on the counter, and all he wanted to do was carry them to his recliner with a fresh cup of coffee and eat them one after the other until they were gone, and then, as the kids screeched around through drifts of gift wrap, he would cross his arms across his crumb-dusted sweater and sleep like a man trying to forget.

He wished he could forget the day Klute Sorensen had first pulled up to the village hall in his star-spangled Hummer. How Klute had flung the door open and strode to the front of the room as if he were six men. How his chest was broad and his suit was tailored. How heavily the gold chain hung around his neck, how solid his wristwatch looked, how his thick black hair gleamed beneath the fluorescents.

The position of Swivel village attorney was a very part-time gig; Vance did wills and probate and small-claims work on the side, but it was slim pickings, and lately Katy had been picking up shifts at the Kwik Pump. In Klute, Vance had seen everything he had ever wanted to be. And if he couldn't be that (he'd need a hair transplant and elevator shoes, for starters), he wanted to be
around
that.
Part
of that.

If I make myself valuable to that man
, Vance had mused,
we—I—will go places
.

That seemed a long time ago, he thought, jerked back to the present by Klute, roaring again.

“You promised me this would be done by now! You said you had everything all lined up!”

“Y-yes,” said Vance. “Well, we're well on our—”

“YOU DON'T SNEAK UP ON SUCCESS IN FLUFFY SLIPPERS!”

Vance recognized that one. Disc three, track five,
Stomp Your Way to Success
.

Klute slammed his hand down flat on the plat, his palm covering the entirety of Harley Jackson's property. Vance jumped, dumping his coffee across the table. Klute drew his fingers inward, scrunching the purple-highlighted section over and over, working his fingers until the entire map was balled within his fist. Then he flung the wad of paper in Vance Hansen's face.

“GET ON IT!”

As Klute's Hummer roared out of the parking lot, Vance dabbed at the coffee with a wad of paper napkins.

Oh, how he wanted a cookie.

R
ight about the time Klute crumpled Vance Hansen's map, Carolyn Sawchuck climbed off her bicycle. Enough of that for the day, she thought, as she showered in the mini-stall originally designed for a motor home. After dressing, she brewed a mug of EarthHug tea, and curled up to read in her papasan chair. It was a cozy little setup: A thrumming space heater, a small writing desk stocked with hempen paper and her favorite fountain pens in a fair trade coffee can, a teapot and a hot plate, and over there behind the miniature refrigerator, a stash of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes. She procured the Zebra Cakes via an online vendor known mainly for selling books, and most importantly, that shipped everything in plain brown boxes. Carolyn felt she couldn't be seen buying the Zebra Cakes in public, as their preservative-laced sugar-bomb goodness was inconsistent with her public image as a cultural thought leader. Better that people think she was adding to her library.

When St. Jude's electronic bells rang, Carolyn looked up from her book. She hoped this day would be all her dear friend Meg prayed for, but as for herself, Christmas was rooted in a patriarchal mythology from which she had emancipated herself somewhere around her second year of grad school and she would be having none of it.

It seemed improbable that the two women would have become close, and yet when Meg posted a homemade sign on the Kwik Pump bulletin board asking for volunteers to help her establish a local food pantry, the only person to show up at the planning meeting had been Carolyn Sawchuck. Together they cleaned up the abandoned pool hall kitty-corner from the Buck Rub Bar, together they completed and submitted the paperwork to establish tax-exempt charitable status, together they solicited donations, and together they met every other Tuesday to sort and stack the donated canned and boxed goods. Every other Saturday they sacked up the food and handed it out to anyone who showed up, no questions asked.

They didn't have a lot to talk about at first. Early on, Carolyn had tried to jazz things up a bit, suggesting that they offer poetry workshops and yoga for the “underprivileged.” Meg paused, a can of tuna in each hand, looked Carolyn square in the eye, and said, “We are here to feed the hungry.”

“But man cannot live on bread alone—”

“—and thus the Lord gave us mac and cheese,” said Meg, and turned back to the shelves. Carolyn spent the next twenty minutes stacking cans and trying to figure out if she had been the object of a threat or the butt of a joke.

From that moment forward the two women worked in a mostly
wordless tandem, meeting for the sorting and distribution, and responding to emergency requests when needed, like when a house fire put someone out and the chief called.

In fact, they grew into an effective team: Meg in the service of the Lord, Carolyn in the service of humanism, both in service to their neighbors. But still, they didn't talk much, until the day Carolyn revealed that she had lost her longtime partner to cancer fifteen years previously.

“I'm so sorry,” said Meg, and tears leaped to her eyes. Then Meg told Carolyn about Dougie, and after that, they had more to talk about.

RISING FROM THE
papasan, Carolyn set her teapot to boil again and crackled open a packet of ramen noodles. When she received her severance package, an acquaintance who ran a small mutual funds shop in Clearwater had helped invest it in a real estate trust. Early returns had been robust, allowing her to accumulate savings even while withdrawing a modest monthly stipend. Then, after taking umbrage at the rank typos peppering the
Weekly Dealio
, she fired off a grammatically airtight and punctilious e-mail to the editor and was to her surprise hired as a freelance copyeditor. Thanks to these twin sources of income and her modest lifestyle, Carolyn was able to afford both her apartment rent and the water tower lease.

But then she had gotten into the oil-recycling business.

The way things were going, it was bound to break her.

The whole idea had sprung from the burn barrel incident, after which Carolyn discovered that the burning of used motor oil was perhaps the least environmentally offensive means of disposal.
It was also being poured down drains, into the grass out behind shops, or down the ravines where many of the locals tipped the rest of their junk. Although used oil collection services already existed, they were targeted mainly toward auto shops and not individuals. And then there was the fact that most of the area around Swivel was rural. Far easier to burn the used oil, or dump it on a roller chain, or use it to keep the dust down on the driveway than it was to lug it to a collection center. Furthermore, because the services operated under the auspices of government-driven environmental protection programs, the populace was generally leery and unwilling to participate. For her part, Carolyn figured if she couldn't hector the locals into environmental consciousness, perhaps she could bribe them.

And so she overcame the skeptics with an old-fashioned tool: cash. Carolyn paid by the gallon, at a rate matching the established services, plus a modest sign-up bonus. She also picked up the oil on site, free of charge. At launch, she financed the program out of her own pocket, dipping into her severance package reserves—at that time still in an appreciated state. And as with her hopes for the water tower, Carolyn was confident that in the long term she would be able to fund the program through outside sources.

Frankly, it took off better than she could have expected. Once word got out that the weird lady in the Subaru was paying good money for bad oil, the phone rang steadily. What she had envisioned as a few pints per month quickly multiplied. Soon her apartment above Reverend Gary's Church of the Roaring Lamb was stacked with containers and plastic jugs of all shapes and sizes.

Meg, who had tried to talk Carolyn out of the project from the get-go, offered to take the oil off her hands. “Just dump it in with
mine,” said Meg. “Every time I crush a car, I have to drain the fluids, and all the oil goes in a container out back. Eventually I haul it to the collection center in Clearwater.”

But Carolyn had refused. In fact, she insisted on collecting Meg's waste oil as well, explaining that it would be easier to get funding support if she could document increased collections. Soon the apartment living room was full, and Carolyn was stacking overflow in the bedroom. The joists were beginning to creak. At one point she considered taking the oil to the Clearwater collection site, but then while researching environmental remediation grants she wound up on a Department of Natural Resources website and discovered that she was in violation of at least sixteen different hazardous waste statutes pertaining to collection, storage, and transportation of toxic chemicals. Prison time was not out of the question, and she became badly spooked at the idea of someone from the collection center making inquiries.

And in a crowning setback, the real estate roller coaster was currently on a downslope, further accelerating the shrinkage of her financial reserves.

It was in this troubled state of mind that she was returning from her rounds with yet another batch of full buckets in the back of her Subaru the day she drove past Harley Jackson's place, looked up at the old water tower, and had an epiphany.

DESPITE THE REVOCATION
of state restoration funds, and the waning state of her severance package, Carolyn had maintained her lease with Harley, holding out hope that the governor might reverse his decision, or that she might locate a sympathetic benefactor. This was also a matter of frank stubbornness: after all the public declarations
she'd made, there was no way she'd give those goobers the satisfaction of seeing her sacrifice the tower for scrap. Just as she had refused Meg's offer to relieve her of the excess oil, Carolyn couldn't stand the idea of bailing on the lease. Carolyn's biggest obstacle wasn't dwindling funds or lack of storage space. It was pride. She'd be damned if she'd fail the preservation of history, she'd be damned if she'd fail the earth, and above all, she'd be damned if she'd fail in front of these damned locals. From the poetry to the professorship, there had been enough failure. Swivel was her fresh start, dammit.

And now there stood that water tower. Empty. With space for thousands of gallons, she figured. And at its base, the neat little pump house. Having recently viewed a PBS special on the tiny house movement, Carolyn now recognized its potential as a snug, environmentally conscious dwelling that would not only reduce her carbon footprint but would allow her to save the rent money she'd been spending on the apartment above Reverend Gary and his vociferous flock.

Rushing home, Carolyn did some quick online research on water tower construction, fluid dynamics, and the website of a humanitarian organization (run by an acquaintance from her ill-fated stint in Central America) that built bicycle-powered machines for farmers in Guatemala. Then she called Glen Jacobson. If you help me renovate the pump house, she said, I'll help you with your limericks.

Harley Jackson had no inkling of any of this until the day he looked out his kitchen window and saw Glen Jacobson's panel van parked inside the chain-link fence that surrounded the pump house and base of the tower. While he was puzzling on this, there
was a knock at the door. He opened it to find Carolyn Sawchuck standing on the mat.

“I put a new padlock on the gate up there,” she said, pointing toward the water tower.

“Oh?” said Harley.

“The old one was rusted.” She opened her hand to reveal two shiny keys. “Here's your copy,” she said, and handed one to Harley.

“My copy?” said Harley.

“I'll be keeping the other one,” said Carolyn. “I'm moving in.”

“Moving in?”

“Moving in. I represent the tiny house movement. Shrinking our carbon footprint, leading by example.”

Harley stared a moment, then nodded. If he lacked the will to fight Klute Sorensen, he certainly didn't want to tangle with Carolyn Sawchuck.

Also: The lease. He could keep chipping away at those student loans.

After Glen completed the renovation, there was much to do. Carolyn spent long hours in the pump house (always behind the locked gate and her
“ACCEPTING NO VISITORS”
sign) assembling her bicycle-powered pump (so as not to arouse suspicion, she ordered the pump and other parts from the same place she got her Zebra Cakes). (She bought the bike at a pawn shop in Clearwater and snuck it in under cover of darkness.) When it was ready, she made her first Christmas Eve climb, inserting the hose with the PVC “T” (which kept it from slipping down the overflow tube) at one end and plumbing it to the pump at the other.

By New Year's, she was astride her bicycle daily, pumping waste oil into the tank high above Swivel. At first she would stagger to her
papasan after only a few minutes, but soon she grew stronger and could pedal for two or three hours straight. She became lean and fit, Zebra Cakes notwithstanding.

She hung on to her apartment for a few months, giving her time to sneak the pent-up oil out a few buckets at a time until it had all been bicycle-pumped into the sky. As for what she would do with all that oil? And her accumulating Department of Natural Resources violations? Carolyn put these things out of her mind. There was a lot of room in that water tower. She had bought herself plenty of time—years, in fact—to figure it all out. Meanwhile, she was living tiny, getting fit, and keeping all of that evil oil out of the soil and air.

The ramen helped Carolyn stretch her budget, but over time she had also come to construe it as a form of character-enhancing asceticism. Harder for her to admit was the fact that she actually craved the salty broth; even now she sniffed the steam rising with its trace aroma of chicken and upended saltshakers. It reminded her of the academy, as so many freshman backpacks smelled of it.

Rubbing the steamed window clear as she waited for the noodles to soften, Carolyn sighted down County Road M to where it intersected with the railroad tracks and became Main Street. She could see Meg's truck parked at St. Jude's and for a moment she wondered what it would be to take comfort from such a place. Carolyn remembered going to church when she was a little girl, but she had spent so much time unlearning church that she didn't think she could sit through a service now without drowning herself in dissenting footnotes. It was tough enough to get these local yokels to stop burning their oil-soaked trash in the backyard and tearing
down vintage water towers.

NOODLES IN HAND
, Carolyn returned to the papasan, resting her bowl of ramen in her lap and her book on her knees. She sighed (
contentedly
, she realized) with some surprise, and settled in to read.

From St. Jude's the prerecorded bells pealed again.