by Jim Lynch
16
HE WAS expecting little Roony, so it took a couple beats to adjust to the sight of this imposing figure on the half-lit porch of his milking parlor at four a.m.
“Good morning, Mr. Vanderkool.” The large kid stood too close, with the overly friendly eyes of someone about to try to sell him something he didn’t need.
“Says who?” Norm grunted, widening his stance.
“How’re we doin’ today?” he said, his size and confidence vaguely menacing.
Norm’s frown deepened. “Too early to know, isn’t it? What is it you want?”
“I’m here, sir, on behalf of a small group of businessmen interested in leasing a path of sorts through your property.”
Norm struggled to attach meaning to the words. He hadn’t been able to sleep for more than fifteen minutes straight since the monthly milk-tank tests arrived the prior afternoon. After a frenzy of disinfecting and cleaning—just in case salmonella was also in play—he’d left a message for Roony to show up early so he could at least share the news that the dairy might lose its Grade-A status. “You a realtor?” he asked.
“I’m Michael.” He stuck out a large right hand at an odd diagonal. Norm didn’t register that the kid was offering a shake before it was casually withdrawn. “And like I said, we’re simply interested in whether you’d be willing to consider a little side arrangement that compensated you for allowing us to pass discreetly through your property on occasion.”
“You want an easement,” Norm said, a tick before the offer had sunk in.
“Whatever you want to call it is fine with us.” The kid’s multi-dimpled grin—the highest indents just below his eyes—had clearly moved mountains before. “You’d receive a thousand dollars for every time we came through but at any rate no less than ten thousand a month—in cash. The crossings would be at night. And you’d never see anything or have anything to actually—”
“Who’s we?” Norm’s voice squeaked, the audacity of the offer snowballing inside him. It had been less than a month since the border lockup and Patera’s formal dairy warning—which, while greeted with eyerolls, had resulted in security upgrades on perhaps half the farms. And here came this kid strolling door-to-door before dawn, as if gathering signatures or selling vacuum cleaners. Norm wished like hell that Brandon would amble up behind this hustler and trump his size. “And who do you think—”
“Sir,” the kid interrupted, “it’s a business offer like any other, which you, of course, have the prerogative to reject. What I can assure you is that it will be discreet. You won’t see or hear anything. Simply check your mailbox on the twenty-third of each month, with the first payment beginning the month after which usage begins and proceeding every subsequent month that such an arrangement is utilized.”
Norm examined the kid closely so he could describe him to Patera. A solid six-four, slate eyes, Redford bangs, freckles near the temples. “Get off my p-p-porch,” he stammered, the offer clanging in his ears.
“I’ll swing back in a month to see if you’ve changed your mind,” the kid said with the confidence of a missionary. “Unless, of course, enough of your neighbors have already signed on.”
“Don’t even think …,” Norm said, trying so hard to picture what ten grand would look like in his mailbox that he couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I’ll see if they might be willing to increase the minimum.” There wasn’t a glint of shame or fear in the kid’s heel-dragging stroll from Norm’s bug-swirled porch.
Norm started to follow him but it was too dark, so he waited for the metallic clunk of a car door that never came. He stood in the gravel, straining to hear and wishing he had a flashlight. The kid must have hopped the ditch. He was definitely Canadian. But wouldn’t he have parked on Zero? Norm marched toward the house to report the outrageous encounter while his indignation was fresh. However, his pace slowed until he was rocking in place next to Aunt Mary’s mildewed Winnebago and his brother-in-law’s rusting jet boat, which hadn’t moved in six years. Farms, his father explained early on, are great places for everyone else to store the crap they never use. He took in the buttery tease of sunlight to the east, then trudged back to the milking parlor with the sensation that his dairy was on some war map. Norm snorted. It was hard to imagine an easier target. He’d traversed the same ribbon of grass and gravel at four a.m. and four p.m. for thirty-eight years. Still, he felt exposed, and it unsettled him that this kid knew his offer was a tiny blade that would spin inside Norm’s belly. Prerogative. A hustler who used words like prerogative and discreet? Was it a coincidence he’d shown up the morning after the milk stats came in? Norm had agreed to nothing but still felt like he’d already concealed something. He knew this information would thrill Patera, who was already giddy about some politicians supposedly flying out to tour his sector. Norm didn’t mind not telling the chief, or anyone else, every last detail, though he wasn’t sure he could shoulder one more regret.
He fended off a swoon with a three-finger clod of Copenhagen, then reentered the vestibule to finish disinfecting the pipes and hoses leading to the bulk tank. He flipped on the vacuum pump and heard the cows stir. Propped against the wall, his eyes watering from the chlorine, he saw how hopeless his parlor would look to an outsider.
The last tourists he’d let in were Helen Schaffer’s third graders. He went the whole morning without chewing, as Jeanette had insisted, explaining as clearly as he could what he did and why, while they groaned and blanched as if they’d been forced to climb down manholes to learn where their piss and shit went. Brandon had scrubbed the place down beforehand, but it still was everywhere and eventually one of the tykes realized it wasn’t dirt. “How does number two get on the walls?” Before Norm could finesse a response, diarrhea flew out of a milking Holstein on cue, inspiring one of the ponytailed gigglers to puke and Miss Schaffer to glare at him as if the field trip had been his perverted idea.
And now Sophie kept threatening to turn up at dawn to see exactly what he did for a living. Terrific. She wanted a tour of the boat, too. The truth was he didn’t want to see his world through her eyes for fear he’d sleep through the next milking, torch the barns and drown himself in the Nooksack. At what point, he wondered, do you have to admit, at least to yourself, that you love somebody you shouldn’t?
If Chas Landers gave his jackpot to the sheriff’s office, then perhaps that’s who Norm should call. But he didn’t know anyone there anymore. No, he’d have to call Patera. Then there was the catch: If he drew attention to himself, he couldn’t change his mind. He sighed and spat. And what if he was the only holdout, with Moffat, Crawford and God knows who else already pocketing their ten grand on the twenty-third of every month? Another thought ambushed him: Is that how Sophie financed her remodel?
“All right, all right,” he said, approaching the gate where the big brown and white faces hovered patiently, with Pearl in front, of course, as if to reassure him they’d get through this together. He opened the gate, slid open the parlor door and watched six of his best producers lumber inside, lining up like large men at stadium urinals and sticking their heads into the trough. They ate noisily while Norm hooked up the hoses. Some got frisky during vaccinations or hoof trims, but it had been a while since one turned on him in the parlor; gentle cows were one upside to a closed herd, as was not having to mess with bulls. He reminded himself to visit Ray Lankhaar, who’d just had his ribs rearranged by his, though even the idea of conversing with the condescending dairyman was enough to exhaust him.
The downside of a closed herd, naturally, was the cows got sick in bunches, which meant that Norm had to be his own vet most of the time or else he couldn’t make it. Squatting beneath Pearl, his knees quieted with Motrin, he soaked each teat in a rubber cup full of iodine before attaching suction hoses and slinging a light harness over her back to keep the hoses off the concrete.
He moved to the next, sanitizing the nipples, fastening the hoses, and likewise with the other four, relieved that t
he first six udders looked so healthy. He watched velvety milk swirl through the glass ball where the hoses came together on the way to the tank. The leukocyte and somatic cell counts could be misleading, he assured himself while stepping out to check the vacuum level. He knew his cows better than any goddamn computer. He back-flushed the hoses, then stepped back, rinsed his stained hands and packed another chew while the cows munched and milked before he coaxed them out, one by one, most of them moving to the chirp of his voice, a few needing a nudge in their flanks. We can get through this, he thought, then said it aloud.
Two of the next six had pinkeye. Norm hooked up their hoses, dripped oxytetracycline in their puffy eyes and checked their ribs to see if they were losing weight. Most of his cows had already calved at least four times. The big boys would have fattened them with malt and slaughtered them years ago. But how do you give up on cows that haven’t given up on you?
After squeezing 212 gallons of four-percent from the healthiest half of the herd, he scraped manure out of the parlor with a snow shovel and found himself ruminating over Dale Mesick’s “green-power project” to turn cow shit into electricity. What a genius! Three hundred kilowatts—enough power to meet the needs of two hundred homes! Even got grants for it, including a check from Paul Allen’s philanthropy! Norm knew part of his resentment was that this never would have occurred to him. You make it to sixty-two and your limitations are posted on the wall. Yet he felt like he’d put his own hoax in play by shoving Brandon into the BP. The ongoing mystery of the bomber’s identity—had he woken up yet?—only added to the circus, with everyone filling the blanks with speculation and Patera whispering in his ear, “Brandon has it. You don’t see it often, but he’s got it.”
Microsoft millionaires. Shit-to-power. Brandon the supercop.
Norm knew it was just a matter of time before it turned to embarrassment, tragedy or both. Another ticking alarm. But it all bounced off his son like none of it had anything to do with him, as if his days were divided by dikes.
Jeanette, too, seemed increasingly disconnected to yesterday. A week ago, he’d seen her glance up at Brandon with an unspoken question on her hesitant lips: What are you doing in that uniform? She was barely holding it together, and it was like watching someone spackle over rust. “Norm, we need to talk,” she’d told him one afternoon, after flapping her blouse and blowing into her cleavage to cool another flash. But when he sat down she’d already teared up, because she no longer remembered what she’d wanted to discuss.
He rested his knee before loading the Super Slicer with alfalfa bales, doubting he’d be able to nap that afternoon with the easement offer and all the grim cow care circling overhead. Was his dairy so forlorn that any Canadian glancing across the ditch could tell he needed cash? Or did someone like the professor tip them off? The list of people Norm trusted kept shrinking. He didn’t discuss money with anyone anymore, including Jeanette. And it weighed on him that she didn’t know they’d already sunk $38,750 into a partially completed sailboat he doubted he could sell for half that. She used to write the checks and cushion him from the daily panic, until the numbers started getting lost inside her. He half-envied her detachment. That’s all he figured he’d have at the end, the drip-drip-drip of numbers. Fifty-year-old phone numbers of cute girls he’d never called. Seasonal schedules for ferries he’d never ridden. Dimensions of the sloop he’d never finished. The birth and death dates of his sister, parents, uncles and aunts. The Cialis flyer in yesterday’s mail, which his mind instantly distilled to $1.49 per erection.
He spread more Clorox around the main barn. He’d noticed only a few cases of diarrhea, fewer than normal, but nothing was normal now. And where the hell was Roony? He felt dizzy and stepped outside for a smoke, the valley brightening with false hope. The rumble of the incoming feed truck—another two grand down the tubes—interrupted his second Winston and brought him back to business. He couldn’t bring himself to check on the sick barn yet so he shuffled out to bottle-feed the calves, which he’d usually left to Brandon. This was the easiest way to get too close to your cows. The big boys didn’t have that problem. They didn’t bother raising calves and waiting two years for them to freshen. They just bought more heifers and sold the calves for meat. There were many reasons Norm never ate veal. For starters, Jersey calves were cuter than puppies, so curious and friendly he had to force himself not to play with them. Secondly, a cow’s uterus is pretty much the same as a human’s, something he liked pointing out to people; and if that wasn’t enough he’d mention that their ovulation and gestation cycles were also about the same and that calves pop out with umbilical cords just like yours.
Unless they abort. Norm’s herd had suffered more abortions in the past six months than in the prior three years combined, which reminded him of that article in Hoard’s about dairies hit with forty or fifty in a row. They even had a ghoulish name for it: abortion storms.
Once he got to the sick barn, there was more bad news. After cutting off four teats he’d rubber-banded off the day before, he found six more that were newly engorged. Some of these cows were chronics he’d dried out before, which meant it was probably culling time whether he wanted to admit it or not. It had been two weeks since he’d caught Brandon inspecting the herd. After he finished haranguing him, Norm had agreed to call Doc Stremler so long as Brandon stayed off the dairy and focused on his job like he’d promised. But he hadn’t gotten around to it, and the longer he waited, the harder the call was to make. He wanted to go over the latest milk stats with an optimist like Roony before the doomsday doc lowered his glasses and started lecturing: At a good dairy, cows like to be milked. It was Stremler who’d warned him that if he didn’t replace his son with a quality dairyman, he’d be in dire trouble within six months. At first Norm thought he was joking, but he was as humorless as ever. Brandon was at the academy for two months before Norm saw what the vet meant.
He was rethinking the cheaper semen he’d been buying when the image of that kid on his porch swung back at him. If they knew Norm’s habits and needs, they also knew who his son was, right? He tried calming himself by whispering to the sick cows, then returned to the healthy barn to see if any of the heifers he’d AI’d were pregnant yet.
“Norm!”
After wondering if he’d imagined the shout, he realized Roony must have finally arrived. “Back here!” he yelled, deciding right then that he wouldn’t share the numbers with him just yet, given how misleading his relentless cheerfulness could be. Norm needed to feel this pain.
The second “Norm!” sounded shrill, possibly feminine. Jeanette, he assumed. But he was in the middle of a PT, feeling for that solid lump of new life. “Give me a minute,” he shouted, “or come on back!”
The barn door swung, and a shaft of daylight pulled Sophie Winslow in with it. She was puffing hard, adjusting to the gloom, bangs dangling between her alarmed eyes.
Norm saw himself through them. Rubber boots caked in manure, his bib so stained you couldn’t tell it used to be yellow, sweat and dirt and iodine smeared across his face beneath a ball cap so dingy Jeanette had begged him to trash it a decade ago. He watched the confusion cross her face. Where’s his right arm? When it became obscenely clear where it was, she paled and turned away. He pulled out of the heifer’s rectum faster than he should have, the suction sounds appalling even to him.
He was peeling off the glove when she turned back around, looking pasty as a clown. “Know how you said to let you know if I saw a cow down out back?” she panted. “Yeah, well …”
Norm galloped outside toward the medicine shed before she finished. He had four swollen cows in the field, and badly needed a healthy calf and a productive mother. They were good producers out there, too, all of them. Great producers, actually. And if the mother had already calved, the calf needed her right now.
He grabbed a bag of CMPK, then ambled—knee grinding, groin tightening—to his battered pickup. Sophie jogged alongside, babbling about how she’d been eating cereal wh
en she noticed a cow struggling on the ground. He climbed inside and she did too, rearranging old Copenhagen lids with her clogs on the rusted-out flooring. Even now he was distracted by her smells, her wet hair, her peach-colored pants that fell just above the raised goose bumps on her tapered calves. His truck rounded her house with a mild squeal, then whined out Northwood to the entrance to his back ten. After a quick scan, Norm groaned.
“What?”
“It’s the Holstein.” He grimaced. “She’s a great producer. A great, great producer. And …” The image of both 83 and her calf already dead or dying shut him up.
It didn’t occur to her to open the gate, so he lunged around the hood, unwrapped the chain from the post and pushed the gate inward, then scrambled back behind the wheel without glancing at her. He stepped on it, the four cylinders squealing until he shifted out of neutral and lurched forward, rattling across the cattle guard. When he tired of high-centering on the rutted road, he braked abruptly. Sophie’s pretty wet head swung toward the dash. He grabbed a coil of rope from the back and hobbled ahead.
He was relieved to see a wet calf the size of a Great Dane wobbling near the fallen Holstein, waiting for its critical first feeding. But the mother was spread on her side as if staked to the earth, moaning, head lolling, belly bloated well beyond any pregnancy bulge. Norm looked into her crazed eyes and felt behind her ears for a fever. “What’s wrong, girl?”
He slipped a harness over her head, dug his rubber boots into the mud and grass and yanked her thick neck back toward her hind legs in hopes of coaxing the twelve-hundred-pound beast to her feet. She snorted miserably. He tried again and then gave up, gasping.
“She have twins?”
He’d almost forgotten Sophie—barefoot now, at a safe distance, clogs in hand, her face cadaverous, a camcorder hanging at her side, the red light on, filming.
“You see another one?” Norm glanced wildly about.
