The Jesus Cow

by Michael Perry

  “He taught me a few things. Got me my own wire-feed welder. Showed me how to run a plasma cutter. But then we split.”

  They were pulling back onto the road. Harley busied himself with steering.

  “Probably not the way to start a first date, talking about my old boyfriend,” said Mindy, after a quarter mile of silence.

  “Ach, we’re grown-ups,” said Harley, with an insouciance he did not feel.

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED at the sale barn the parking lot was packed with trucks and cattle trailers. Once again Harley held the door as they stepped inside the vestibule. “Good boy,” she said, winking, and he figured that was settled.

  A long hallway ran perpendicular to the entry; at the far end of the hallway to the left was a door marked REGISTRATION AND PAYOUT. To the right was a door marked CAFETERIA. Straight ahead was the door leading to the sale ring. In contrast to the chill outside, the inside air was cushiony and smelled of sawdust, fresh manure, and deep fryers. Harley opened the door to the ring and followed Mindy up the stairs. When she stepped into view the auctioneer stuttered a moment, and Harley’s ears burned as every cattle jockey in the joint swung around for a look. Mindy was a showstopper on her own merits, but against the greasy-capped backdrop of this crowd (there were no other women present), she was an illuminated angel. The auctioneer resumed, and the assembled heads swiveled back to the business at hand.

  The bidding well enclosed the sale ring on three sides. The serious bidders tended to cluster in several rows of vintage theater-style seats nailed to boards in the lower levels; Harley led Mindy to the top row of seats, which were simply varnished boards. Mindy pulled off her cap and shook out her hair. For a moment the warm scent of her conditioner displaced everything else.

  “Right now they’re selling heifers and cull cows,” said Harley.

  Mindy smiled at him, then leaned forward, elbows on her knees, chin on her hands, to study the ring below. The auctioneer sat in an elevated booth facing the bidders. His arms were folded on the counter before him and he leaned into a microphone, through which he flowed a steady rattle of numbers, filling any blank spaces with a purr of rolled r’s. As each animal entered, hurried along by a man hollering, “Yah-ha! Ha! Ha!” and snapping a noisemaker, its weight flashed on a scoreboard above the auctioneer’s booth.

  The bidders consulted small scratch pads and participated with nearly imperceptible signs: up-and-down twitch of the head to bid, broken eye contact and a single head shake to withdraw. When bidding lagged, the auctioneer threw out well-worn one-liners to liven things up: “I see Chet Franklin is here—I guess when the fish ain’t bitin’ there’s always the sale barn!”

  The regulars chuckled knowingly.

  Harley explained how some animals were sold by the batch, others singly. How the thin, ribby cull cows were destined for dog food, what phrases like “as it walks” meant, and that the cattle jockeys made their money on commission after having chased around from farm to farm in the predawn with their aluminum gooseneck trailers.

  A cow came halfway into the corral, dipped her haunches, and tried to turn back. While the handlers worked to get her through the gate, the auctioneer made an announcement.

  “Any calves still in the dock or in the alley, please bring ’em up!”

  “That means the heifers and culls are almost done,” said Harley, standing. “We got fifteen minutes. You wanna grab a bite to eat?”

  “Yes,” said Mindy. “Starved.”

  The cafeteria setup was straightforward: a few Formica tables, a cubbyhole kitchen run by two women in hairnets, and a Pepsi wall menu that—based on the dated logo and layered flyspecks—had hung there since the seventies. The sign’s moveable white plastic letters advertised HBGR, CHZBRGR, FRIES, CURDS, COFFEE, and POP. A dry-erase board propped on an easel beside a tub of plasticware advertised the day’s special: ALL YOU CAN EAT TACKO BAR.

  “Tackos!” said Mindy.

  Harley pointed to a card table in one corner of the room, whereupon a stainless steel food warmer held an excavated mound of hamburger; another contained a lump of refried beans, also well mined and drying and cracked around the perimeter. There was a tray of fractured taco shells, a tub of sour cream, two open tin cans of chopped black olives, and several jars of uncapped picante sauce. The rest of the table was sprinkled with bits of lettuce and grated cheese.

  “I’ll buy!” said Mindy, and handed the cook a ten, which—even after they both ordered sodas—returned to her a dollar and change, which she dumped in the plastic mayonnaise jar labeled TIPS.

  As Mindy loaded up her paper plate with taco fixings and tore into the food, Harley marveled. After all his years serving at the Swivel Volunteer Fire Department food tent for Jamboree Days he knew some women who could wolf down half a chicken or a brace of bratwurst, but to see Mindy eating heartily without regard to the state of the facility spoke less to her appetite for food than her acceptance of the roughneck surroundings. Long ways removed from the damn art gallery, thought Harley.

  With any first-date nervousness diffused by the setting, Mindy and Harley ate in hungry silence. The tables around them were half full. Many of the diners approached the counter with a rocking gait born of bad hips and sprung backs. A group of men were playing cards at a corner table and cursing each other happily.

  A dusty speaker hung from a wire above the Pepsi menu crackled, and the auctioneer’s voice came over.

  “Calf buyers, we’re ready to go!”

  Returning to the bleachers, Harley and Mindy watched as calves were urged into the ring singly or in groups. “Depends on how the owners want them sold,” said Harley. Compared to the older animals, the calves were much more tentative, stopping to sniff the steel tubing of the corral and the sawdust beneath their hooves, their ears cocked in curiosity. If they moved too slowly the wrangler chucked them under the chin or smacked them on the haunches with a flat plastic bat, sometimes while whistling sharply or hissing, “Cht-cht-cht!”

  “Whoa, folks, take a look right there, we got a set of four bulls,” said the auctioneer. “These’ll be by the pound, boys—by the pound.”

  “That means when the auctioneer says, ‘Who’ll gimme ninety-five,’ he means ninety-five cents a pound,” said Harley to Mindy. “Not ninety-five bucks total. You have to watch that. They switch back and forth, depending. You could wind up owning some high-dollar hamburger.”

  Mindy nodded and smiled. Two men acting as spotters pointed out bidders, hollering “HUP!” every time somebody gave the sign. When the final bidder bailed, the auctioneer slapped his hand on the counter.

  “SOLD them calves!”

  Harley checked the scoreboard. The four bull calves brought $1.65 a pound. “That’s pretty good,” he said to Mindy. “I haven’t bought calves for a long while—I mostly get my own cows bred and raise those—but there was a stretch when bull calves weren’t worth half a tacko.”

  “So that calf in your barn? He’s worth a bundle!”

  Harley blanched, and his heart thumped with an adrenaline bump. His mind had been a million miles from that calf. It took him a moment to recall that Mindy wasn’t in on the secret, and simply meant what she said.

  “Ha! Yah!” said Harley, overeagerly, lifting his cap by the bill and running the heel of his hand across his suddenly humid brow.

  “What’d ya do, go a tad heavy on the hot sauce?” said Mindy, laughing.

  “I guess,” said Harley, trying to keep the frantic out of his chuckle.

  A lone calf galloped into the corral, then hit the brakes and went into a full-on four-point skid. Blessedly, this drew Mindy’s attention back to the sale ring.

  “A little crossie!” said the auctioneer. “You betcha!”

  “Crossie?” said Mindy.

  “Crossbred,” said Harley. “Half Holstein, half Angus. Tends toward a smaller calf, easier on the mother. Makes a decent beefer.”

  The auctioneer was rattling away.

  “I can’t even tell who’s bidding,
” said Mindy.

  “See that guy over there?” said Harley, pointing to a man in a T-shirt. The brim of his cap was tipped down over his face and his hands were laced across his large belly. He was sitting stock-still, with his feet up on the seat back before him. He could have been napping.

  “Watch his cap,” said Harley. Just then the man twitched, the brim of his cap descending and ascending less than a quarter inch.

  “That was a bid,” said Harley.

  The auctioneer kept rattling. Three seats down from Napper, a man in a cowboy hat touched his ear.

  “And that,” said Harley, nodding toward Cowboy Hat. “Also, some guys flick their tally sheet.”

  Napper nodded, and the auctioneer bumped the price again. Cowboy Hat tugged his earlobe. Once again the auctioneer raised. He looked long and hard at Napper, all the while rolling the numbers on his tongue. After a moment’s consideration, Napper shook his head tightly, as if trying to dislodge a gnat from the brim of his cap.

  “SOLD them calves!” hollered the auctioneer as another batch passed out of the corral. “Put ’em on six fifty-three!”

  “Six fifty-three?” asked Mindy.

  “Cowboy Hat’s bidding number,” said Harley. Cowboy Hat was now scribbling in a notebook so tiny it looked like a postage stamp in his paw. “‘Put ’em on six fifty-three’ means he won the bid, and the secretary—that woman sitting at the computer beside the auctioneer—is generating a sales slip.”

  “So whaddo I gotta do if I want to buy my own beefers?” asked Mindy.

  “Stop down at the buyer’s office,” said Harley. “Get a bidding number. Then you’re good to go.”

  “I’d like that,” said Mindy. “Next spring, maybe. Get some fencing up, try raising a couple.”

  “Yah,” said Harley. “You could do that.”

  “Maybe find myself some lonely bachelor who owns a hay baler . . .”

  Harley blushed.

  “Would you come down and help me bid?”

  “Well—you bet,” said Harley. He hoped his heartbeat wasn’t visible through his shirt.

  “C’mon!” said Mindy, standing. “Those were some top-notch low-rent tacos, but that coffee tasted like it was poured through a furnace filter. Let’s go get some good stuff!”

  “Well, there’s not much around he—”

  “That truck of yours make it to Clearwater and back?”

  “Oh, sure. Might have to put your foot over the hole in the floor so the heater can keep up.”

  “Let’s go!”

  AT THE COFFEE shop in Clearwater he craved a dry cappuccino but wasn’t sure that would give the right impression, plus there was the danger of a foam mustache, so he played it safe with the house blend. Mindy ordered a chai.

  “You a straight-coffee guy?” she asked.

  Harley decided to play it honest. “Mostly, yah, but a guy does like a triple-shot dry cappuccino now and then.” He was embarrassed that he knew what a triple-shot dry cappuccino was, but he figured after the lies about the calf and the lightbulb he should recover the up-and-up.

  “Well, whatever,” said Mindy, “long’s you don’t dump it on my boots.”

  They both chuckled, and Harley realized with a happy shock that they already had shared history. Conversation came easily then.

  “So,” said Harley. “You’re living in a granary.”

  “Yep,” said Mindy. “It’s comin’ along. I’m gonna convert one of the oats bins into a metalworking studio. Get back to making and selling.”

  “Selling art? In Swivel?” asked Harley. “Unless it’ll double as a beer bottle opener . . .”

  “I still have a lot of contacts in the art gallery world,” she said. “And I helped the sculptwelder set up his online store, so . . .”

  Harley flinched more at the term art gallery than he did at another mention of the boyfriend, but he covered with a question. “What do you make?”

  “Smaller pieces, mainly. Statuettes. Wind spinners. Decorative wall hangings.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to get something for the bachelor pad,” said Harley.

  “I accept credit cards or hay bales,” said Mindy.

  They laughed, and then Harley told her about his history with this coffee shop, how he first came here with the skunk-haired girl, and how she had introduced him to the world of poetry and how he still came down now and then for a reading.

  “I’d heard someone joking about you going to art shows,” said Mindy. Before he could demur, she said, “I found that attractive.”

  “Well . . . ,” said Harley, thinking in particular of The Meadowlark Weeps, “I don’t really always get it. The art.”

  “And you’re good enough to say so,” said Mindy.

  “And I get teased, sure, but no one is mean to me. They pretty much leave me be. Helps, I suppose, that I’m on the fire department. That’ll buy a guy some slack.”

  “Well, it sure did with me!” said Mindy, smiling wickedly.

  Harley blushed again. “But it’s prolly no coincidence that my best friend is Billy, the odd duck from out of town.”

  “Could be a metaphor for your whole situation,” said Mindy.

  “And that could be a metaphor for overthinking things,” said Harley, relieved when she smiled at his first tentative attempt at a joke.

  “So you and the sculptwelder,” said Harley. “Three years?”

  “Yeah,” said Mindy. Harley thought her eyes glistened.

  “That’s a while.”

  “It was good,” said Mindy, quietly. “First time we ever met, I just knew. Just by the scent of him.”

  Harley nearly snorkled his coffee. “The scent of him?”

  “All men have a scent, silly,” said Mindy, recovering her humor. “I used to sniff his shirts.”

  Well, that’s kinda weird, thought Harley, although he did recall reading something along those lines in Cosmopolitan magazine the last time he was at the dentist’s office, the only place you ever saw magazines anymore. The article had been about pheremone dating. You slept in your T-shirt then put it in a Ziploc bag so prospective daters could sniff it.

  “I can be a little too frank,” said Mindy, chuckling at the look in Harley’s eyes.

  “Yah, well . . .”

  “He was good to me,” said Mindy. “I was having some troubles then. He helped me through. I figured we’d be together forever.”

  “And?”

  “And one day I was helping him move some scrap iron, and we bent down to pick up an old car door in the weeds, and I smelled his sweat, and it smelled sour. And that was it. I knew it was over.”

  “Because his smell changed?”

  “Or his chemistry. Or mine. Who knows? More research is needed.”

  That last seemed an attempt at a joke, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  Harley focused on his coffee.

  “It was okay. I like being alone.”

  THE CHATTER REVIVED as they drove home, the conversation flowing the way it does when a first date goes well. There was also the warmth of the heater and the glow of the dash and the ease of the road. When Harley pulled into the driveway of Mindy’s place, he executed a Y-turn to position the passenger door near the granary. As his headlights swept the yard, they illuminated a Kokopelli made of sickle-mower bars and parts of an antique dump rake.

  “Whoa,” said Harley. “You weld that?”

  “The sculptwelder,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Harley, for lack of anything better to say.

  “Don’t gotta love the artist to love the art,” said Mindy, and Harley figured that was fair. Now the headlights shone on the tarped bundle he’d noticed the day he drove past after spilling the coffee on her boots.

  “Another sculpture?”

  “Nope,” said Mindy. “Motorcyle.”

  “I thought so,” said Harley.

  “Sixty-seven Norton.”

  Harley whistled. “That his too?”

  “All mine, boy.”

  �
�Really!”

  Now the truck was idling before the granary door, and Harley—even after all these years—wondered what to do, but Mindy took care of it in the instant, opening the door and jumping out of the cab.

  Holding the door open, illuminated by the overhead light, she smiled at Harley and said, “That was fun! Let’s do it again.”

  Then she slammed the door and disappeared into the granary.

  It didn’t even occur to Harley to be disappointed that the evening was over. Instead, as he drove home, Mindy’s words spun around and around in his brain: Let’s do it again.

  Yeah, thought Harley. Yeah.

  CHAPTER 19

  Harley rose early for his shift at the filter factory. During his first break he found a voice message waiting on his cell phone. It was Mindy.

  “Let’s keep it simple. Date number two—we are dating, right?—I’ll come by your place. I’ll bring supper. Lentil soup and bread. Homemade. Tonight okay?”

  Harley called back and got Mindy’s voice mail. “Yah,” he said, deploying the universal Scandihoovian preface, “I’m working a twelve today—a twelve-hour shift. So I won’t be back until late. But yah. Supper. That’d be nice.”

  And then he gave her a time, purposely an hour later than he planned to be home so as to allow himself time to spruce up the house and—just for safety’s sake—to dose the Jesus calf with shoe polish.

  Man, he thought, I gotta come up with something better than shoe polish.

  WHILE SCRUBBING THE calf with Kiwi black, Harley wondered about that lentil soup. He may have been considered Swivel’s cosmopolitan fellow, and he didn’t mind a little dilled Brie when he didn’t have to peel it off some art gallery floor, but at base his appetites were still those of a farm boy, and there was the concern that lentil soup might run a bit light, verging as it did toward the hippie vegan side of things.

  He needn’t have worried. When Mindy climbed out of her truck, she handed him a Crock-Pot, and when he popped the lid he found the lentils keeping company with hearty chunks of pork sausage and diced red tomatoes, and the aroma had him instantly hungry. Mindy was also carrying a fresh-baked linen-wrapped loaf of thick-crusted bread. It was still warm at the center when Harley sliced it, and Mindy didn’t skimp when she slathered on the butter. It was nearly ten p.m. when they finished eating, and Harley had yet to feed the beefers, a violation of a rule his father taught him, which was that you didn’t sit down to eat until your animals had been fed.