Church of the Dog (21 page)

Rob and Paul change while I grab a six-pack. On our way out to the maternity ward, we stop at the Church of the Dog so I can introduce them to Mara and ask her to go meet Minda. Then the guys and I tip back a couple while I teach them the ins and outs of calving—literally.

I tell them to come get me if they need me and head in for some much-needed sleep, leaving Rob and Paul to figure out things as they go.

When I walk up the stairs that night, I stop to take all the dead people off the wall.

After work, Minda and I press garlic cloves and sun-dried tomatoes into the dough and take it out to the oven. I mop out the cinders and shove the dough in on a big paddle. She tells me about skiing the backcountry of Alaska while I imagine it. I imagine the clarity up there.

Then our attention turns to Winter. “She’s in heat,” I explain to Minda. Winter squeals at Solstice and Pal. She squirts and backs up into them. She gives up, kicks one of the metal fence panels, and squeals some more. “The boys are gelded. They can’t help her out. Sometimes I imagine that she’s calling them pansies and sissies. She gets so mad at them for being gelded.” Now and then Solstice raises his upper lip and holds his nose high in the air to tell her that he thinks she smells like Heaven, but he doesn’t satiate her womanly desires. “She gets more and more frustrated and angry every day she’s in heat,” I say.

“I totally know how she feels,” Minda says, looking over at the guys.

Paul starts the barbecue, Rob chops eggplant, zucchini, and portobello mushrooms, and Daniel sleeps on the porch swing. “Yeah, slim pickin’s,” I say.

“So you and Daniel aren’t—?” she asks.

“Brotherlike friend,” I say.

“Me, too,” she says. “Though there are moments when I wonder . . .”

“He’s a good guy. Knows how to dance. That’s huge.”

“Snores,” she says.

“Oh, rats. No woman wants to sleep next to that,” I say.

“Maybe for the right guy you just wear earplugs,” she says.

Rob finishes chopping and leaves the vegetables in the olive oil and balsamic vinegar marinade I made. “Minda! Is it time for our surprise?” he calls over.

“Oh, you’re going to love this!” she says to me. “Yes!” she squeals back to him.

“We discovered the farm and ranch supply store today!”

He runs to the backseat of the car and takes out five lengths of three-quarter-inch poly-propylene irrigation piping, each about twelve feet long, and five fittings. I don’t get it. He unrolls the windows of the car and turns on an old B-52’s CD. He gives each of us a piece of piping and a fitting. He can hardly contain his excitement.

The music wakes Daniel up, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

Rob says nothing but inserts both ends of the twelve feet of pipe into the fitting. He struggles to get it in all the way. He holds it up for us to admire. Then he puts it over his head and begins to hula-hoop.

Minda cheers. She drops her crutches, picks up her pipe, does the same, jumps away from the picnic table on one foot, and joins Rob. Paul and I follow.

“Paul, it’s a gentle motion! Use your legs!” Minda calls out over the music.

After several attempts he can keep the hula hoop up for a few minutes at a time.

And Daniel, you can guess, runs for his camera and takes our pictures.

In the distance, downdrafts from large, billowy spring storm clouds drop rain on faraway hills. In between our sun patch and that rain, a segment of rainbow forms. A rainbow—the beauty of the state of polarity between sorrow and light . . . life on Earth encapsulated.

We hula-hoop and watch the sky. And eventually we even talk Daniel into putting down his camera and joining us.

I ride out with Paul to check on the older cows and show him how to help the calves nurse when their old mothers have huge tits.

“I feel so dirty talking about tits like this,” he says.

I give him a look.

The strong wind blows dust in our eyes. When we mount our horses again, I spot two coyotes feeding on a calf in a little ravine. The calf, still alive, calls out for its mother, who can’t hear it on the wind. She stands on a ridge, looking around. The coyotes have eaten a back leg and have just broken into the stomach cavity. I pull out my gun and start shooting. I kill one coyote, but the other escapes. I ride over and shoot the calf.

Nearby I spot another coyote kill, a heifer who was having trouble delivering. The coyotes ate her butt right out.

Coyotes were here first. I know that. And mostly they eat rodents. I know that, too. I know there is supposed to be some kind of balance in nature, but you can’t see this kind of carnage and not grow to hate them.

I turn around and look at Paul. His eyes are large. “Fuck,” he says.

I reach into my saddlebag and hand him a beer.

That night the sound of Daniel shooting at a coyote woke me out of a dead sleep. The shot echoed twenty-one times in my head as I remembered standing in the ironic sunshine, my father’s casket in front of me, covered with the American flag. I searched the expressionless faces of the men who fired their guns for some answer, some sense. I wanted to ask them, Was it worth it? Was a tiny country rich with oil really worth it? Why? Ultimately, though, no one can answer that for anyone else.

When I look at red, white, and blue, I think independence. Red, white, and blue are liars to me. There’s no such thing as independence. I needed my dad.

“Come on, Daniel. Paul’s got it covered. Two games, that’s all we’re asking,” Minda says. It’s hard to say no to her.

“I don’t know, guys. I’m not very good at bowling,” I say.

“Guys? He just called us ‘guys,’ Marge,” Rob said to Minda. They’re both wearing their thrift store bowling shirts. “You know when we don the shirts, you have to call us by our bowling names!” They point to the names embroidered on their shirts. “And it totally doesn’t matter if you bowl well or not because I’ve got Hot Tamales! They make you bowl well!” Rob says, pulling out a box of cinnamon-flavored candy.

“Come on, Daniel. He’s got Hot Tamales,” Minda says. “We even have a surprise for you.” She pulls a large green and black bowling shirt out of a plastic sack. She holds it up by the shoulders.

Rob points to the name. “We invite you to be Phil.”

“Okay, Darrel. Okay, Marge. I’ll be Phil,” I say. I put the bowling shirt on over my white T-shirt.

“Sexy,” Minda says and growls like a cat.

I put my arm around her and kiss the top of her head as we walk out the door.

In my dream, Gram and I float above Garden Valley High School, where two students shot ten others today. “Isn’t it interesting what they’ve chosen to teach us?” she marvels.

“I don’t know, Gram. This one hits a little close to home for me. That could’ve been me. I used to dream about hurting people like that.”

“Oh, that never could have been you. You had too much compassion. I made sure of that.” She dismisses my thoughts.

“Yes, I remember that night you took me to all the bullies’ homes so I could see what they lived with. I was so mad at you for that because it completely disarmed me. All I had left to protect myself after that was my red aura.” She taught me that as long as I pictured myself on fire, no one would touch me. She claimed I could walk down the streets of Harlem at night with a red aura, and no one would touch me. I’ve never felt the need to test that one.

“Well, did anyone actually touch you?” she challenges.

“No,” I admit.

“Let’s go join the others,” she proposes. We float down to where there are spirit travelers like us, holding hands in circles like skydivers, only not falling. There are circles inside of circles of people like us, covering the whole town, here to clear the area with our love, here to send down healing energy, and here so that all those frightened people know on some level that they are being watched over.

The next day is a hard one for me. Children of all ages in all my classes speculate about what cupboards they could hide in if something like that happened in our school. The fears cloud the schools just like thick fog. At the elementary school I find out a troubled fifth grader brought a toy gun to school to scare all the kids in the cafeteria at breakfast, and later, at the high school, there’s a bomb threat.

After school there’s a staff meeting where this situation is discussed for five minutes before we are broken up into groups to brainstorm how to raise the test scores that already improved two hundred percent this year. I suggest better nutrition before I walk out.

I excuse myself as if I were going to the bathroom, but really I make a run for it—out of the school, across the parking lot, through the barbed wire fence, and up the hill to the place where the purple wildflowers grow. There, I try to clear the schools of all that fear and ask that it be recycled into something positive. I think about my participation in this institution that contributes more and more to breeding terrorists. I pray for clarity and direction.

I watch a hawk circle above me. Oka, an Onandoga friend of mine, believes hawks are messengers from Great Spirit, different from the way eagles are messengers but significant nonetheless. I watch the hawk and wonder what my message is.

In my dream, Gram brings Dad. I haven’t seen him in at least a year, though from time to time I have the feeling he’s checking in on me. He looks the same, so I would recognize him: hair the color of mine, piercing brown eyes, olive green flannel shirt, and Levi’s. I give him a big hug.

“You know, I’m doubting this teaching business. I can’t figure out if I’m part of the solution or part of the problem,” I announce.

Dad nods silently for a minute. “Yes, you’ve done some damage,” he confirms, and a few faces flash through my mind: Andy, Ashley, Brooke, Connor. And with each comes the instant knowing of what I did that hurt their feelings or embarrassed them. I feel mortified.

Then Dad projects us into the future. First, I see me building one-person churches for people. I seem pretty happy creating stained-glass windows on-site—not teaching. We flash to Kelli passed out in an alley. We flash to Kevin in the Navy, exposed to radiation. We flash to Brent, standing on a ledge. We flash to Cara dancing at a strip club. We see Nate get cut from minor league baseball and then go speeding down the freeway, weaving in and out of cars. We flash to Emily being held up at a mini-mart. We flash to Ty, unhappy in a cubicle in corporate America. Then we project into an alternate reality. Here, I am teaching. When I come home, a child comes running to greet me. We flash to Kelli, who is reading a story to a child on her lap. We flash to Kevin, doing massage therapy. We flash to Brent watching movies and cuddling with a loving partner on a couch. We see Nate and Cara opening their own art gallery together. We flash to Emily designing clothes in a hip loft in a city somewhere. We flash to Ty filming a movie in Hollywood.

All at once the slide show is over, and I am left by myself to make sense of it.

Grandma used to predict how much the steers would bleed by what she read in
The Old Farmer’s Almanac
, and as much as Grandpa and I made fun of her for it, we could not deny she was right. She said when the moon was in any sign that ruled the heart to the head, there would be more bleeding, and when the moon was in a sign that ruled the knees on down, that was the best time for castration. For the steers, it’s hit or miss. You can’t wait for the right time in the cycle. For her horses, however, she would wait. I don’t know what the moon is in today, but there is a lot of bleeding.

Tim and I rope and tie calves, Minda and Whitey brand, Hank and Paul castrate, and Mara and Rob vaccinate. After two days of this we’ve gotten into a good rhythm. I think we just may finish before Minda, Paul, and Rob leave tomorrow.

“Get up around Opal Lake yet?” Tim asks me. It used to be our favorite fishing spot. Big trout. Huge.

“Nah,” I say.

“Well, if you find some really nice brown saddlebags out there, they’re mine. And if you find them in the morning, there’s a cold beer in them waiting for you. I lost most of my tack on one embarrassing incident I’d rather not tell about. I recovered everything but the saddlebags,” he explains.

“Maybe the shepherds already found them,” I say.

“I never considered the shepherds. That could be. I always figured it was the porcupines. I heard somewhere that they’ll chew through your boots if you let them,” he says as he moves a few more calves into the chute.

“Really?” I close a gate.

“Oh, yeah. They love leather,” he says.

At the end of the day Hank and Whitey cook steaks over the branding iron fire. Paul and Rob sit near them.

“Smells good,” Rob says.

“I can’t smell anything over Medusa’s hair,” Hank says.

Whitey turns to Paul. “You gotta cut that hair, Medusa.”

“No woman is ever going to get near you with hair that smells like that,” Hank says.

Paul takes it like a good sport.

“This is an intervention, Paul. Those dreads are a lifetime sentence of celibacy!” says Rob.

Mara prepares something in a skillet with one of those big mushrooms and tofu. It looks disgusting to me. Tim sits between her and Minda.

I take the salad and bread out of the back of the pickup and make a buffet on the tailgate. Everyone is starved.

“They’re ready,” Whitey says. “Get your plates.

Tim tries to hit on both Mara and Minda. “I don’t care whether a woman is fat or thin. I’ve had a lot of fat girlfriends. I believe you have to appreciate whatever a woman has,” he says like he simply loves women. “Until that bitch gets mouthy,” he says as he gets up to get another beer. Minda and Mara blink with shock and exchange horrified glances.

“It’s a wonder he’s been divorced twice, isn’t it?” Whitey says.