The Jesus Cow (8 page)

“But you're happy?”

Harley realized he didn't really have an answer for that. “I'm . . . I mean . . . I guess, yeah.”

Mindy looked at him with a friendly smirk.

“Well, aren't you a balla fire!”

“Nah. Just kinda happy with things the way they are. Could be better, could be worse.” The calf was getting to its feet.

“So you set the bar pretty high.”

Harley tried to grin, but he was preoccupied with putting himself between the calf and Mindy.

She jumped up and punched him in the shoulder. “Oh, I'm being too hard on ya! Let's see the haymow!” She pointed to the rafters over the pen. “By the way, you've got a lightbulb burnt out.”

“Yah, I was gonna . . . ,” said Harley, but she was already moving past him toward the haymow ladder.

There was a tricky moment of protocol when Harley didn't know who should go up the ladder first but Mindy resolved that by beating him to it. He tried to follow at a chaste distance without looking up but then did anyway, right in time to catch a chunk of alfalfa chaff across his cornea.

In the haymow he stood with one eye watering and explained how the bales got up there on the elevator and that Billy helped by unloading the wagons, and that he stacked the bales in the same pattern his father had out of habit, and then he noticed Mindy was gazing up at the roof and he trailed off, instead studying her throat in profile, the tip of the northernmost tattooed ivy leaf visible at the base of her neck. The haymow was quiet but for their breathing, all the sound muted within the banks of tightly packed hay.

“Lookit the frostcicles!” she said, in a near whisper.

Harley tipped his head back. High above them the shingle nails protruding through the roof boards were furred with frost, stark
and delicate against the rough-cut lumber. This was nothing new to Harley—he'd first seen them as a child when his dad sent him out here on winter days to throw down bales—but he had always loved to look at them, always had a fascination for how the outside cold traveled through the nail and how the nail pulled the moisture of cow's breath from the air and transformed it into white velveteen spikes. It was the kind of beauty that resonated in his heart like a tiny bell, the kind of minute observation he'd jot down for his creative-writing journal in college but not the kind of thing you rhapsodized on down at the fire hall.

Without warning, Mindy flopped onto her back, landing in a pile of loose hay left by a bale that had slipped its twine and broken apart coming off the elevator.

“Doesn't it fascinate you? Little beautiful things like that? Especially in this loud ridiculous world? And isn't it the cheapest sort of heaven to be able to climb into a place like this and lie around like the rest of the world has been put on hold until you're ready for it again?” Her eyes were sparkling like the frost.

Harley agreed, although he didn't know how to say so.

“C'mon, lie down and look up!”

“I . . . ah . . .”

Mindy bounced to her feet. “Aw, I made you nervous. Sometimes I go too fast.”

Harley desperately wanted to try something bold and uncalled for but he felt cast in caramel. He thought of flopping to his back but realized he had missed the moment and would look like a clown and might even knock the wind out of himself.

“You!” said Mindy, like a command. “You wanna get together again?”

She had one hand on the ladder, ready to descend.

“Yah?” said Harley, and as weakly as he said it he never meant anything more powerfully.

“Take me to the sale barn? Train me in on how to buy beefers?”

“Yah.”

“That qualify as a date?”

“Yah. I guess?”

K
lute Sorensen fished around with one arm over the side of his bed until he located his smartphone, raised it against the black of the ceiling, and pressed the Home button to check the time. The screen glowed up overbrightly, causing him to squint, which in turn caused his breathing mask to ride up the bridge of his nose. He cursed.

Three a.m.

He cursed again. Then sighed. The only thing more mentally defeating than tossing and turning until after midnight was falling asleep and waking to discover he'd slept just shy of three hours. His brain felt like damp flannel stitched with dry rawhide. He wanted so badly to sleep. Just sleep. Sleep deeply, and sleep long. But lately, no matter how many exhortative audiobooks he cycled through his system, no matter how aggressively he drove the Hummer, the tenuous nature of his financial existence was worming its way into
his mind-set. He found himself breaking out in cold sweats. Beset by tremors in his hands. A feeling of adrenalized worry hummed throughout his chest and the fringes of his liver. He'd catch himself clench jawed, drawing lung-bustingly deep breaths through flared nostrils and holding the air until the ribs of his upper back popped along their attachments like a rack of trick knuckles, then exhaling with such force his cheeks inflated like Satchmo blowing E-flat.

Yanking the breathing mask away and switching off the machine, Klute swiped and tapped at the face of his phone. An app bloomed, and Klute tapped again. After a brief pause as the livestream buffered, a woman's voice could be heard updating the vitals of several international stock exchange indices. Klute adjusted the sound down to a nearly inaudible two bars, placed the phone beneath his pillow, then lay down his head and closed his eyes.

It used to be Klute only listened to the business news app in the mornings as he shaved and showered and made coffee. At that hour the voices emanating from studios somewhere in the heart of New York City were focused on the opening bell here in America, anticipating the day in terms of “break-even spreads,” “volatility issues,” “basis points,” and “convergent data.” Even if the market was down, hopes were up, and Klute always caught some of that energy, even here in fly-over Boomler. By listening, he felt like he was part of the grand capitalist team. Sometimes he tried to imagine what it was to be one of the on-air guests, joining the show by cell phone from the back of a long black car crossing the East River, or from the top floor of some glass tower flashing with fresh-risen get-to-work-early sun, capably dispatching questions served up by an obsequious soft-balling host. Even when it played indistinctly in the background—as Klute knotted his tie while looking
down on Boomler, or returned to the bathroom to dab at a razor nick—the continuous flow of all that beautiful business-world word jazz served as subliminal reassurance: the great machine of international commerce was rolling along, and Klute Sorensen had a ticket for the train.

Lately though, he had taken to monitoring the streaming business news whenever sleep would not come. Even now, at 3 a.m., the mesmerizing chant of numbers and jargon—
monetary aggregates . . . seven-for-one stock splits . . . the “Footsy” up ten . . . Hang Sen off three . . . analyst's average estimates . . . nominal growth paths
—soothed him like one of those white-noise generators used to calm infants. His mind stopped gnawing on his troubles, slowly succumbing instead to the soothing idea that the business of business was spinning the whole world 'round, and would continue to do so, come weather, war, or worse. Green or red, the numbers rose through his Tempur-Pedic pillow and soothed his mind. And then, with the soft sounds of unceasing commerce whispering in his ear, Klute Sorensen slipped into a state of disassociation, and—finally—sleep.

In the morning he popped the phone into the speaker jack, pipped the volume to its uppermost level, and began his day with the world's good business news echoing all throughout his gigantically empty house.

MEG JANKOWSKI BEGAN
her day by putting on her hard hat and crushing three cars. As a child, she stood in awe of the car crusher. She would watch with wide eyes as her father ran the hydraulics and the crushing plate pressed implacably down on the hapless vehicle as it shuddered and screeched and the windows popped until
it was nothing but creases and pancake. Nowadays she was more businesslike. Because other salvage yards down around Clearwater operated at much higher volume, and were thus far more competitive, Meg survived by searching the back roads and working the fringes. She went the literal extra mile to drag cars out of the deep weeds, pull old corn pickers from the far borders of overgrown farm fields, and snag the remains of abandoned projects, stripping every resalable part from each before converting it into an iron puck. This operating philosophy was also a hedge against the intersection of international market forces and local bootstrappers: A few years back, when China went on a steel buying spree, prices soared to the point that every knucklehead with a trailer dragged his “backup” car off its cement block perch and hauled it to the larger yards in Clearwater. The roads were filled with ramshackle rigs hauling rust-bucket car carcasses. Mostly, the one-off windfall came right back to town and was invested in the Buck Rub Bar.

To further protect herself from cyclical fluctuations, Meg had also maintained her father's tow truck service. There wasn't much to tow around these parts (much of the towing was performed by people using their own resources, which is to say it was not unusual to see one junker tailgating another at the distance of a logging chain), but the presence of the interstate provided a reliable supply of work in the form of tourists with failed transmissions, folks who couldn't locate their spare tire, or drivers ditched during snowstorms. She also had a standing contract with the fire department to help clear all accident scenes. Meg always crossed herself and murmured a prayer for the injured or deceased.

She was tired this morning, having been called out at three a.m. to tow a Winnebago that had blown a radiator hose at mile marker
72, but even when weary, she enjoyed her work, approaching it with the same dedication she exhibited toward her church, albeit as a different order of devotion.

She supposed it was the work that had kept her head occupied while her heart healed in the wake of Dougie's death. In fact, it didn't heal so much as learn to beat with a hole in it. Nonetheless, it was the work that provided her the momentum to persist. Each day there was something to be done, the work quite literally stacking up one car at a time, the towing calls coming at all hours without respect to day or holiday, but always there was the knowledge that the more she worked, the more she could give to the church and the food pantry. It had long been suspected by many around town that Meg was a secret millionaire, and as a longtime single person, she was a deep tither, but the truth was, once the insurance and taxes and upkeep and accountant and permits were paid, there was less remaining than many of Swivel's gossips believed.

Dougie had been Meg's first and only boyfriend. In the years immediately following his death, the thought of “seeing” someone else was frankly unthinkable, and she had thrown herself into the salvage business beside her father. When he had taken ill and she found herself running the business, her busyness had rendered a social life moot. By the time both of her parents were gone, she had settled into the rhythm of work and church and quiet time alone and found herself quite satisfied. In surprisingly short order, a decade had passed.

Lately though, she had been having doubts. What if she was conveniently deceiving herself? The doubts hadn't come on their own; she had been goaded out of her comfort zone by Carolyn Sawchuck.

AS MEG DROPPED
the crusher on a Ford Festiva, Carolyn Sawchuck was returning home from her oil-collection rounds. She was feeling the usual sense of relief that came with not having to drive up yet another driveway to face yet another skeptical farmer or leery shade-tree mechanic. Even though many of her stops were made at the request of someone who had torn off one of her phone number strips in the Kwik Pump, she still felt keenly her outsider status, conferred both by her relatively recent arrival (small towns count by generations: a decade was but a moment) and the fact that she was an overeducated oil-collecting earth mother in a Subaru with a dream catcher hung from the rearview mirror and a
COEXIST
sticker on the bumper.

It had been far worse in the early days, when she made cold calls and was greeted with frank suspicion, scowls, and once, a shotgun. By now she had been at it long enough that while her customers still thought her a tree-hugging oddball, word had spread that her checks never bounced, and in fact, several of her regular customers had taken to scrounging on her behalf. As a result, Carolyn Sawchuck's collection rates were climbing.

Unbeknownst to Carolyn, some of her customers were enhancing the volume of their contributions by mixing in everything from paint thinner to stale gasoline. There were times she arrived home light-headed, unaware she was hauling liquid dynamite.

All she knew was she was wearing out that bicycle.

MEG HAD COMMENCED
the terminal crimping of a Chevy Malibu when Klute Sorensen's Hummer nosed through the open gate. The approach was unusual, because usually whenever Klute visited he came barging in, driving with his usual confidence and disregard,
bailing out of the four-wheeler while it was still coming to a rest in order to aggressively renew his long-standing offer to purchase her land.

But today he paused behind the wheel for a moment, as if collecting himself. And when he did step out, he smoothed the lapels on his suit coat and instead of the usual bluster his expression and posture were that of a grade-schooler about to recite a poem.

Meg let him stand there while she finished flattening the car. This mild shunning was the furthest Meg would depart from her gentle Christian center. Klute had tried to buffalo her from the beginning, thinking that he could push her off the property by proxy, and if not push her off, bribe her off. He had also spoken ill of Harley, whom Meg knew to be a harmless—if adrift—fellow, and whose father had always been a square dealer with her father.

But now here was a different Klute, obviously nervous. Had he a hat, Meg thought, he would have been holding it at waist level and rotating the brim through his hands. As the sound of ripping tin, snapping plastic, and powdering glass reverberated around them, Meg nodded at Klute. He responded with a ghastly ingratiating grin, which, coming from a man accustomed to neither ingratiation nor grinning, unfurled like a matched set of slow-motion cheek cramps.

When the pop-off valves tripped and the car crusher jaws relaxed, Meg shut down the machine and turned to Klute with a smile.

“Not selling, Klute.”

“Oh! I, heh-heh, I, I'm not here to, I, I . . .”

“Perhaps you've come to hand-deliver one of Vance Hansen's ‘smart growth' letters?”

Klute flushed and ducked his head. With a shock, Meg realized he truly was nervous.

“Klute, I've never seen you so . . .
schoolboy
.”

Klute stubbed his foot at the frozen ground. “Meg, I've treated you poorly.” He was looking right at her now, and it seemed that once he'd started talking he didn't dare stop. “I've tried to push you around like I try to push everyone and everything else around. I listen to these damned—
darned
—CDs all the time, and sometimes I think they get me all ginned up to the point where I think I can just twelve-step right over the top of everybody and everything.”

“Well, you are
forceful
.”

“I know,” said Klute. “And I've been thinking that has to change.” He paused. “A little.”

“You still can't have the place.”

“Right now I don't want to talk about that.”

“What
do
you want to talk about?”

Klute had begun to ease in the face, but now he looked stricken again, as if he had just inhaled—and was now trying to swallow—a chilled slug.

“Well, I thought you . . . I . . .
we
might work better as a team.”

“Klute, I've run this business alone ever since Dad died, and I don't see any reason to do it any differently.”

“No . . . well . . . not the
business
. . . well, I mean, maybe the
business
, but I was thinking more maybe we could go somewhere and talk about how . . . what . . . the . . .”

And it was right then, as he trailed off, that Meg realized Klute Sorensen was asking her out on a date.

And then Carolyn Sawchuck arrived.

When Carolyn saw Klute, she frowned. Since she and Meg had become friends, they had often discussed Klute's visits, and his bullheaded attempts to get Meg to sell out. Carolyn had taken her lumps in feminist circles, but that had done nothing to impede her bristling when a man tried to shove a woman around.

“Well, hello there, bulldozer breath,” said Carolyn as she stepped out of the car. Meg hid a smile, but Carolyn was surprised when Klute said nothing in return. She had expected him to hurl an insult, or storm off, but instead he just stood there, like he wasn't sure what to say.

“Hello, Carolyn,” said Meg, unwilling to embarrass Klute, no matter that he might have deserved it. “Can you please allow Klute and me a moment?”

What's
this
all about?
wondered Carolyn as she returned to the Subaru and backed over to the elevated container in which Meg stored her oil. As she drained the oil into a series of five-gallon buckets, she could see—but not hear—Klute and Meg in conversation.

“WELL, THE THING
is,” said Klute, swallowing and looking as if he wasn't sure what to say next, “the thing is, we have a lot in common.”

“Okay?” said Meg in the form of a question. She didn't agree, and she wasn't sure she wanted to hear, but she was curious.