Steering Toward Normal

by Rebecca Petruck

  The outburst was over in all of ten seconds. Then the steer hurried back to Diggy’s side, shuddering, head low and wanting reassurance.

  Diggy patted him. “It’s not you,” he said. Because it really wasn’t.

  The rest of the morning, Diggy stayed in the barn and rambled nonsense to Joker, brushing and brushing and brushing him to make up for getting him so upset earlier. The work—and being solo after so many weeks with Wayne’s quiet but still-there presence—helped to clear out his head.

  He liked all the things he had to do. Sometimes he felt like if he watched just a little bit harder, he would actually see Joker grow.

  At about six hundred and thirty pounds, the steer was exactly where he should be for October. A little more than a pound a day through winter, and Joker would hit eight hundred pounds by April 1, right on target. The food and growing schedule was the easy part, simple math. Hair growth, agility, and temperament were the true markers of a calf that would show well in front of a judge.

  Diggy tied Joker’s lead at nearly show height. The calf dropped his usual load of poop to make the point that he still was not a fan of this whole halter breaking thing, but he stood calmly, dealing with it.

  “Who’s a good boy?” Diggy teased with baby talk, laughing and thumping Joker’s rump. If cows could raise eyebrows, Joker would be best in class. What he thought of Diggy’s teasing was pretty clear. He had even saved a little poop, just in case. Diggy laughed again, shoveled the pile away, and gave Joker a quick once-over with the blower to free any dirt or dust from the hair. Then he let the hose run until the water was extra cold and rinsed the hair forward from the rear to the neck, doing about ten minutes a side. Like cold air, cold water stimulated the hair follicles.

  After he squeegeed the excess water off, Diggy used the rice root brush, again working from the rear forward, to train the hair up. He spent extra time around the legs, splitting the hair forward on the front half and backward on the back half.

  He worked the same pattern with the blower at a forty-five-degree angle. He made sure Joker was completely dry under his belly and the insides of his legs and brisket. At the legs, Diggy held the blower right at the bone so the leg hair would bloom straight up.

  The routine took about an hour, twice a day, and didn’t include the time Diggy spent simply brushing and talking with Joker. Soon, he’d introduce the show stick and start practicing setups. Before long, four- and five-hour days with the steer would be the norm.

  Mid-morning, Pop brought out a grilled cheese sandwich. He asked if Diggy wanted to talk and let it go when he shook his head. By the time July arrived, Diggy felt much calmer.

  Except that she didn’t walk to the barn.

  Wayne came out the kitchen door, and July went and hugged him.

  Not a sideways hug, but another of those full-on, wraparound hugs. “Hey there, Wayne,” she said in that voice Diggy had only ever heard her use when she talked to the youngest calves. “I heard about your dad again.”

  She held on to him, and Wayne not only let her, he hugged back. A long, long time.

  Diggy overheated. The sun was bright, like the weather had changed its mind about fall. He slung his vest onto a fence post.

  Sure, Graf’s latest episode was embarrassing—the man had a knack for making his business everybody’s business—but Wayne was taking advantage.

  When July finally leaned away from Wayne, she didn’t let go. “Are you all right?”

  Wayne wouldn’t look at her. Diggy wanted to smack him—for hugging her or ignoring her, it didn’t matter.

  She squeezed him again. “You’re in a good place.”

  Wayne nodded a little, and July finally let him go. “Mom sent food.”

  Diggy’s mood perked up at the prospect of Mrs. Johnston’s cooking but quickly sagged again. She had cooked for Wayne.

  “I’ll need all of you,” July said, leading the way to her truck. Three casserole dishes and a Tupperware container of what looked like poppy-seed bars lined the bench seat. July handed them over. “She was upset.”

  “Please thank her, and tell her not to worry,” Pop said. “We’re doing fine.”

  July snorted, looking pointedly at Pop. “Mom would worry even if you really were fine.”

  The casserole dish Diggy held warmed his hands, but July warmed his heart. He hated that she was out here because of Wayne, but she was one of those rare people who said what was what and faced what needed facing. Like asking Wayne if he was all right and really meaning it and not buying Pop’s assurance that they were fine. She made it seem easy, but Diggy knew from experience how tough it was to be straight with himself, let alone other people.

  They settled things on the kitchen counter, then July put her arm around Diggy’s shoulders, hugging him to her side the way she always did. She looked out the window toward the barn. “How’s Joker doing? I’ve been looking forward to seeing him.” She hugged him tighter and rested her cheek on top of his head. “You, too,” she whispered. “You doing okay?”

  She turned to look him in the eye. Diggy had to swallow a couple of times. He didn’t want her to worry, but it felt really good to know that she did.

  “You’re coming with us, right?” July added.

  Diggy nodded, not quite up for talking yet.

  July patted his shoulder and turned to Wayne. “You’ll want to change.”

  Wayne had dressed in normal day clothes, like for school. Both Diggy and July wore their steer-tending usuals—water-resistant pants and steel-toed boots. It was kind of stupid that Wayne’s having to change his clothes made Diggy feel better. Wayne might be able to join the club, but he wasn’t a real member yet.

  Normally, Diggy made a stink every time he was relegated to the middle seat because he was shorter than someone. Today was different. The middle seat was now prime real estate, right next to July.

  She spent the whole ride talking about steers. She mentioned how lucky Wayne was to follow in Diggy’s footsteps, because he was all set up with a proper fence, shed, water trough, feed boxes, hay racks, and the post for halter breaking.

  July encouraged Wayne to touch and talk to all the calves and to not be afraid. Animals were sensitive to human fear and wouldn’t bond if they felt it. She hoped Wayne would meet a calf that almost immediately slowed at his touch, a sign of trust that meant they’d have a good bond.

  Diggy knew how important the touch-and-talk method was, too—he could always tell in the show ring how much time a kid had or hadn’t spent talking to his steer. But July seemed to be putting more emphasis on Wayne’s bonding with the steer than on choosing a winner. That was fine by Diggy.

  She also talked about frame, size, muscling, structural correctness, style, disposition, balance, weight per day of age, hip height measurements, etc. Diggy was absolutely positive that it all was over Wayne’s head; he may have let Wayne trail him, but he hadn’t made a point of teaching him stuff. July had had her first steer when she was nine—she knew cattle the way some guys knew cars. But Wayne listened like he was truly interested.

  Most of the calves were already weaned and grazed in the pasture, but a few stood in individual chicken-wire enclosures. They watched the new arrivals with dark, shiny eyes, hopeful that their mamas with their body-warmed milk were coming back. All of them were uniformly black but unique in poky-boned, gangly ways. Legs were too long or too short, spines arced too high or too low or were invisible under hair that tufted like dandelion snowballs or was glued down with spit, mud, and sweat. Not one looked like he would grow into the stout, rounded barrel of cow that would enter the show ring. They were bumpy and clumsy, and Diggy loved them all at first sight.

  He let one suck his first two fingers. The tongue was rough, and the calf sucked hard enough to pop Diggy’s knuckles. He grinned. This calf might not be smart, but it was determined. Wayne watched like he was grossed out, even though he had spent weeks around Joker.

  “These are all crossbreds,” July told Wayne. “Crossb
reds are popular because they’re usually top winners at competitions. They’re a combination of the best traits of different breeds.”

  She pulled lightly at the hair and skin under a calf’s neck. “This one has a little extra leather here. You want a calf that looks cleaner through the throat and brisket.”

  She went to another and patted his rear. “This one is a bit round here. Calves with bunchy muscles generally grow short-rumped and show seams and creases in their rear quarters. Some people think the more muscle, the better, but too much too early doesn’t leave room for your calf to grow.”

  July pointed to a calf watching from the side of the pasture. “I like that one.”

  Diggy saw why. He had a long, straight top, sturdy legs, and looked full, not too skinny or too big. July might have seemed to put more of a priority on Wayne’s having a good bond with his steer, but she had picked him a winner, too.

  July stood close to Wayne, helping him get used to touching the calves still being weaned. When he seemed fairly comfortable with them, she led him to the calf she liked. Watching the three of them together made Diggy’s heart hurt. They were like a matched set. Perfect and shiny and meant to win at the State Fair.

  While he stood to the side, hands sticky with cow spit and boots wet with poop.

  THE CALVES GOT ALONG GREAT. JOKER ACTED LIKE HE’D BEEN WAITING FOR Wayne’s calf all along, and Wayne’s calf, after the long drive home alone, seemed glad that he wasn’t solo after all.

  More and more, Diggy holed up in his room. He had commandeered a table from the hallway and set up his rockets and supplies in a corner of his bedroom. A series of model diagrams covered his 4-H certificates and blue ribbons for showing his steers and showmanship—they reminded him too much of what he wanted and how far from it he still was.

  The room was crowded, and pretty soon his desk was useless for doing homework, covered instead with catalogs, rocket-body tubes of different sizes, balsa and plywood fin stock, plastic nose-cone sets, adapters, engine mounting tubes, parachutes and streamers, shock cord, recovery wadding, launch lugs, decals to decorate rocket bodies, steel rods of different lengths and thicknesses, and launch pads of varying durability. He had cleared out a desk drawer to more carefully store the launch controllers, wicking, and igniters. Most precious were the model-rocket motors. Diggy had found a little box for the cylinders with their black-powder ejection charges so they wouldn’t get lost in the jumble, crushed, or accidentally ignited. Pop would not be happy if a motor ignited. He was pretty strict about things like fires inside the house.

  Not that Diggy cared much about what Pop thought these days.

  He had cleared the top of his bookshelf to line up the rockets he and Pop had built. A few were from kits—a Sprint, a Screamin’ Demon, and an Egglofter—but most were scratch-built. Pop didn’t like paying for something he could figure out how to build himself. He and Diggy used to spend a ton of hours tinkering with different designs, but that felt like eons ago.

  Diggy was all about altitude. His level-one rockets had all flown more than eighteen hundred feet. Although level-two rockets usually didn’t go as high, he had several, because Pop wouldn’t let Diggy near a level three until he had mastered the twos. When Diggy had had to move all his rocket stuff to make room for Wayne, he decided he had mastered level twos and began researching the Navaho rocket to build as a level-three, two-stage design. He didn’t need Pop’s approval.

  But the November slush that spattered the windows dulled Diggy’s creative power too much to sketch plans for the level three. Instead, he was painting the second color coat of his level-two scale model of the Saturn V rocket when Pop came in.

  Pop studied the white body tubes. “How are the thicknesses? You stack them all together yet?”

  Diggy shrugged. Paint thickness was one of the criteria judged in model-rocket contests, because a rocket was more aerodynamic if the paint was mostly uniform when the pieces of the body tubes were put together. But he didn’t care about it much for this model. The Saturn V was cool, but they’d built it for a C motor. Diggy’s plans for the two-stage were for D- and E-class motors. Only eighteen-and-olders were allowed to buy them, and Pop hadn’t caved yet, despite much begging and bargaining. Diggy would figure out how to get it on his own.

  “You’ve been in here a lot lately,” Pop said.

  Where else did he have left to be? Wayne was in Diggy’s old rocket room, or in the living room doing homework in front of the TV, or in the kitchen eating stuff, and Pop’s latest project had taken over the dining room. Most of his engineering work was on a computer, but sometimes when he did work for international nonprofits, he had to figure out what could be done with existing equipment—usually many years old and half-broken—and cheap alternatives, so he’d collect what he could, take it all apart, and spread it out to see what he could make from the pieces.

  “We haven’t talked much lately,” Pop added.

  Because Pop was so busy talking with Wayne. The kid had lived with them for almost two months, had his own steer, and called Pop “Pop.” He was supposed to have moved back to his own house by now, but instead he hung around Pop like a noose. Diggy suspected that if he timed it, Wayne would have more hours in with Pop than with his own calf, and that was not fair to the calf.

  “It’s been an adjustment, but we’re still a team. And we’re doing something really good by helping out Wayne.”

  “He’s supposedly your son, not a charity case.”

  “Ann was a good woman. She deserved to live a lot more life than she got. We honor her memory by taking care of Wayne until Harold gets it together. He’s finally going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so that’s a start.”

  Diggy didn’t want to hear all this. He knew it already, and, sure, life pretty much sucked for Wayne, but he was in Diggy’s house—life pretty much sucked for Diggy, too.

  When Diggy mumbled, “What about my mom? Was she a good woman?” Diggy was as caught off guard as Pop.

  Diggy remembered when he was younger, during that summer when he messed around with that red fireproof safe that held the few things his mom had left behind, that he had asked about his mom then, too. Pop had answered as many questions as he could, but the truth was that he hadn’t known Diggy’s mom all that well, and Diggy got to feeling weird about asking, like it meant he didn’t love Pop. Now, though, he could see how his little-kid logic didn’t make any sense.

  Pop blinked away his surprise. “She was smart, and so funny.” He laughed a little. “She remembered all sorts of odd facts and paired them up with whatever we were doing or talking about in ways that didn’t seem to make sense at first but would hit you all of a sudden. She had the greatest laugh.”

  “And she left me on a doorstep.”

  Pop sighed. “She was sad. I didn’t see it at first because she laughed so much, and when I did … Well, it seemed like women were making a habit of leaving me.”

  Diggy stared at Pop. This was new information. She had left him? And, “She was sad?”

  “She didn’t have a good relationship with her family.” Pop winced, but he needn’t have. Diggy had guessed that truth a long time ago by her parents’ complete lack of interest in him. “I think after graduation everyone had expected her to move away, including her.”

  But she hadn’t, not at first. Not until she had met Pop. Not until she had had Diggy.

  Diggy couldn’t help but notice that though Pop had said a lot, he hadn’t said she was a good woman.

  Even though he knew the answer, he asked, “How much longer is Wayne staying?”

  “We can talk more about your mom, Diggy. I understand why you’d be thinking about her now.” Diggy just looked at him until Pop sighed again. “As long as he needs to.” Pop patted Diggy’s shoulder, then just before he left added, “This could be an opportunity for you, if you let it. You boys have the steers in common now. I’m sure you could find other things. You might become friends if you tried a little.”

  A
fter he left, Diggy wondered if Pop had had a similar conversation with Wayne. Had Pop told Wayne this could be an opportunity to help out Diggy because he didn’t have a mom, either? That they could become friends?

  The idea ticked him off so much, his determination to build a level-three rocket, no matter what Pop thought about it, was reignited. Diggy shoved aside his Saturn V stuff, not caring about wet paint, and started looking for parts. He pretended his urgency wasn’t at all because his mom hadn’t been cured of her sadness when she had him.

  When Pop called up that he was heading to Ole Jib’s Hardware, and did he want to come, Diggy declined. He had had enough of Pop for one day, partly because he wasn’t sure what to think about Pop realizing Diggy’s mom was sad but letting her leave anyway. But the offer did get him to notice that the sleet had stopped and it was full dark.

  He ducked into the barn and let Joker loose to putter in the field. Cold and dark were essential elements of good hair growth.

  The sky was like a half-erased chalkboard, black smeared with white. The cold was so sharp, it was like everything had been stopped in its place—even sound. No birds, no insects, no tractors in the distance. No wind, not even a creaking in the tree. Joker’s presence barely made a dent in the quiet.

  Until Wayne came out to let his own calf loose. Diggy jumped like a spooked cow. He had been sure Wayne had gone with Pop to the hardware store.

  “Hey,” Wayne said.

  “Hey,” Diggy replied. Conversation over, he headed back to the house. As much as he hated it, he had a crapload of homework to do.

  Since Wayne had his stuff spread out in the living room, Diggy took his backpack into the kitchen. He was looking for an excuse to stop conjugating Spanish verbs when the phone rang, but Wayne beat him to it.

  Wayne was answering the phone at Diggy’s house.