The Jesus Cow (9 page)

“Well, both our daddies were successful.”

Meg looked around at the mangled cars and ancient crane and yard full of dirty slush.

“After a manner of speaking, yes.”

“We both know what it is to strive for our own success.”

“Out of necessity, yes. Although your definition—”

“We're both on our . . . we don't . . . neither one of us . . . we're—”

“Single?”

Klute blushed brick red.

Now Meg became brisk. “Yes, Klute, I do see overlap in some respects. And there are times when it might be nice to share the company of someone over a meal. But you can't just go from ramming around demanding things in that Hummer to pussyfooting around with dinner invitations.”

Klute racked his brain. All those CDs packed with punchy phrases carefully crafted to close the sale, but he drew an echoing blank.

Meg let him gawp a minute, then was surprised to feel a twinge of pity. Harder men had softened, she thought. Who was she to stand in the way of repentance? Did not Christ forgive his persecuters? Perhaps, she thought, Klute was going all Saul of Tarsus.

Carolyn reappeared, the oil loaded. She rolled down the window, and ignoring Klute, said to Meg, “See you Tuesday at the pantry?”

“Yes,” said Meg. Both women looked expectantly at Klute. In the past, he had disparaged the food pantry. “Those people don't need free food, they need
jobs
,” he had said when they came to the village board meeting to obtain permits. “You keep feeding 'em, they'll never feed themselves.
Teach a man to fish. Et cetera
.”

But today Klute stood mute until Carolyn drove out the gate. Then he turned to Meg. “So you're not saying
no
. . .”

“I'm saying all things considered, over the course of time you've given me a hundred reasons to say no, and none to say yes. But sometimes, well,
comfort the afflicted, the Lord works in mysterious ways . . . et cetera
, well, sometimes we are called to those things we least expect.”

“So?” said Klute, hopeful enough that he managed not to take umbrage at the implicit skewering he had just absorbed.

“So I'm going to have to think about this.”

Klute's face was red again. But it wasn't an angry red.
I have to get some different audiobooks
, he was thinking.

“Thank you for stopping by, Klute.”

“Oh. Yes, yes. I'll . . . I'll stop back by.”

“I'm sure you will.”

In the Hummer, Klute repressed his desire to stomp the accelerator with both feet. Again it wasn't anger, but rather just a desire to flee. Unfortunately, he had failed to anticipate the logistics of retreat, and between the outsize Hummer and the cramped confines of the yard, he now found himself in the process of executing a laborious five-point turn in the shape of a child's crudely drawn star. While heaving around to look back over his shoulder, he bumped the volume knob on the custom stereo, and the confines of the scrap yard reverberated with the booming narrator of
Set Sale!

“YOU ARE THE CAPTAIN!!!
”

Meg shook her head, smiled, and turned for the crane. She had to get that car loaded up.

Right about the time Klute cleared the on-ramp it occurred to him that perhaps Meg and Carolyn were a couple.

T
he day after giving Mindy her tour, Harley screwed the loose lightbulb back in and cleaned Tina Turner's pen. As he forked manure into the spreader, the Jesus calf gamboled in and out of Harley's way. It was already bulking up, growing strong and sturdy on Tina Turner's milk. The shoe polish had faded more quickly than he expected. Jesus was looking gray in the face, but was once again clearly Jesus. He'd have to come up with something better than Kiwi black. Especially if Mindy was going to be around more. He held out hope that the calf would outgrow the image on its ribs, but so far it was expanding in proportion. Same visage as the day Harley first saw it, only larger now.

It was good meditation time, cleaning calf pens. Physical labor always helped Harley sort his mind. There was a rhythm to running the pitchfork, a state of physical autopilot that perfused the brain but allowed it to cogitate independently of the task at hand.
He was taking stock, thinking of Mindy, and how he had not felt such anticipation over a woman for a good long while. There was a roughness to her, a coarseness, and a good-humored independence that had him at once hopeful and on edge. Of course this conception was based on little more than initial impressions and his own desires, and was thus unsullied by reality.

Harley might never have dated a woman were it not for a long-legged farmer's daughter named Wendy Willis who asked him to the Sadie Hawkins dance when he was sixteen. Up until that day, he couldn't imagine talking to a girl, but the Sadie Hawkins format flipped the roles. Harley stammered around but finally got to “yes,” and later, when Wendy kissed him beside her mailbox on Poleaxe Road, he figured there were joys here worthy of transcending all reticence. When Wendy turned her back to him in the high school library a week later and disappeared into the nonfiction stacks with Scooter Eckstrom, Harley felt he'd never love again, but three days later Kelly Motzer lingered near his locker applying Bubble Gum Lipsmacker and he found his sadness and reservations trumped. In short, he was hooked, and the following year (he and Kelly having fizzled) for homecoming he worked up the courage to ask Jenny Haskins out. That one lasted through basketball season and included several sessions of postgame kissy face in the darkened rear seats of the game bus, but by spring Jenny had lost interest. His senior year was fallow, and he arrived at the university in Clearwater with all of his virginity and most of his naiveté intact. This chaste state was due in part to lack of opportunity, bone-deep Scandinavian reserve, and the old shyness bugaboo, but it was also a product of his old-school Christian upbringing, in which sex was reserved for marriage and those who
engaged preemptively were bound to recline long-term upon the coals of doom.

Then, early in the first quarter of his college career, while struggling with his prerequisites, Harley left the library and wandered into the student center, where, in pursuit of beer (the backsliding had begun), he quite accidentally found himself in the middle of a straggily attended poetry reading supported with a cash bar. As he was not allowed to leave the premises with his bottle, he took a table. He had never been to a poetry reading before, and beyond a few childhood nursery rhymes knew nothing of the genre. His first impression of the proceedings was that most of the student poets acted as if they'd never before seen a microphone, and his second impression was that the proceedings would improve considerably were the microphone removed. Just as he was tipping the last of the beer down his throat and preparing to bolt, a woman stepped forward wearing calf-high motorcycle boots with a leather miniskirt and tights, a multitude of jangling wrist bangles, and a skunklike stripe of white through her otherwise jet-black hair. Standing squarely before the mic she read three poems in succession, delivering each in a level, nondemonstrative tone that at first listen seemed apathetic but upon closer attention seemed a fearless determination to let the poems speak for themselves. Contrasted against all the evening's preceding verse (much of it rehashing the disappointments of spring break and the Mysteries of Man as Observed from the Seventh Floor Dorm with a Buzz On), Harley's untrained ear found the skunk-hair woman's poems woven as tough and tight as Kevlar.

But the motorcycle boots clinched it.

Heart high in his throat, he lingered at the exit beside the Pepsi machine and as she walked—alone—to the door he said, “I liked your poems.”

“Oh!” she said. “Thank you.” She seemed sweetly embarrassed, which Harley was not expecting, what with the bangles and skunk hair and motorcycle boots and all.

“I mean, I don't really
get
poetry . . .”

“Neither do most the people in that place,” said the skunk-haired girl, nodding back toward the reading room. “At least you have the good sense to admit it. You want to go for a beer?”

“Well, I just had—,” started Harley, and then he thought,
What are you saying, idiot-face?
and then he gulped and said, “Um, yah.”

She took him to a creaky-floored joint hung with smoke, where they sat at a corner table beneath a large black-and-white photo of someone Harley assumed was a jazz musician due to the fact that he was smoking a cigarette and holding a saxophone.

Later that night she took him back to her apartment.

In the morning he prayed to be forgiven.

That night he went to her arms again.

HARLEY WAS LEANING
on the pitchfork, studying that calf and recalling the skunk-haired girl (
woman,
he corrected himself, recalling her instruction on that point). Over twenty years gone. They had a strong six months, then they ran out of common ground and even poetry and motorcycle boots could not save them. He figured maybe Skunk-haired Girl had broken his heart, but he had to believe she did his head a lot of good. Expanded it, he supposed she would say. To this day he liked a whiff of patchouli now and again, and it was thanks to her encouragement that he had filled one of his
humanities electives with a creative writing course on his way to almost getting his business degree. And on occasion he still attended poetry readings at the library in Clearwater.

There had been other women. An emergency room nurse from Boomler—that one ended when the hospital closed and she joined a traveling service. A second go-round with Jenny Haskins after her divorce—that one lasted two weeks longer than the original. He had met the most recent online, thanks to an algorithm that matched them up based on age, a professed interest in the arts, and your basic thirty-mile radius. That one ended in dramatic ignominy at the art gallery, but of all these and the others none had hit him quite like the skunk-haired girl.

But Mindy: this was close. There was a force of impact here he hadn't felt for years. What would it be like, he wondered, to swing by her repurposed granary now and then, for maybe a meal and whatever else followed? To rise in the morning and return to his own quiet house? Or, vice versa, to smile at her from his own pillow as she left his bedroom to begin her own day back at her place? What would it be like, he wondered, to sustain that life right into the future? To never go any more domestic than sleepovers? There were couples who managed it, he knew. And not just for the first two weeks or months, after which things went either solid or sour but rather to live apart happily for years.
Then again
, he thought,
what would it be like to live together in all legal and domicile senses?
To finish dinner and the dishes together, share in the evening chores, take to bed with an eye toward the day and the years ahead?

And what would it be like to share
that
secret?
he thought, staring at the Jesus calf. Rather than this shoe polish silliness, rather
than a stupid secret, to have her at his side, fully in the know, helping him decide what to do about that calf? A normal person would have called the local TV station. A creative person would have maybe tried to sell the cow to the bank in lieu of all monies owed.
A wise person would have taken that calf out back, and shot it, and buried it deep
, said a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Billy.

But Harley Jackson?
thought Harley.
Harley Jackson does what he does best
:
dither. Dither in love, dither in faith, dither in life itself. Dither over Klute's lawsuit, dither over the Jesus calf. You can't keep covering everything over with Kiwi black. Spring'll be here soon, and that'll force your hand. You can't put a wall around the entire pasture like Meg does her junkyard.

He shook his head. “I'm gonna have to do
something
.”

The barn door opened, and Billy filled it.

“Staff meeting?” said Harley.

“Yahp,” said Billy.

Harley jabbed his pitchfork into a straw bale and they walked to the house.

Clear into the new year, and still the letter from the village attorney sat on the kitchen table. Billy flicked it so it spun, stopping with the address right side up before Harley.

“You know this ain't goin' away, right?”

“Yah,” said Harley.

“Klute Sorensen is the spiritual equivalent of an orally flatulent bulldog, but a bulldog nonetheless. Masks his effluvial essence with the scent of money—although you'll notice he never actually ponies up—and the locals are willing to overlook a lot of stink for that.”

Harley just sat there. There were vast subsections of reality in which he could muster no interest, and this was one of them. And yet he knew he had to do something about it.

“He's got his teeth in. He won't let go. You aren't careful, he'll own this whole works, right down to this table and all it sits on,” said Billy.

“I know,” said Harley, resignation in his voice.

“I'm telling you, that calf—that calf's yer ticket. You're keeping your million-dollar light under a two-dollar bushel.”

Harley stood. “I gotta go clean out my truck.”

“Yes?” Billy's question was implied.

“I'm taking a woman to the sale barn tomorrow.”

“Is that even legal?”

Harley rolled his eyes.

“Anyone I know?”

“Mindy Johnson.”

“Not familiar.”

“Red F-250. Headache rack.”

“Oh,
her
.” Billy nodded appreciatively. “The newcomer. So you figure this one will pan out? Yer kinda oh-fer in that department. Oh-fer
life
.”

“At least I'm in there swinging.”

“First of all, I'd hardly call one date in six months
swinging
,” said Billy. “And didn't your last relationship implode over a wine and cheese party in an art gallery?”

“Well, it certainly crashed.”

“You were wearing
khakis
, fer cripes' sake.”

Harley couldn't deny that. At the time he had seen it as a form of self-improvement. Although it hadn't been his idea.

“What about you?” said Harley, mounting a counteroffensive. “I've never
once
seen you with a woman.”

“I'm saving myself.”

Harley snorted. “For what?”

“Not for, from.”

“From?”

“Women.”

“Why?”

“Because women been my trouble since I found out they weren't men.”

“Waylon,” said Harley. “Again.”

Billy grinned, drained his beer, and departed for his trailer.