She Got Up Off the Couch (12 page)

“50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,”
by Paul Simon

“Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,”
ditto

“Beep Beep (The Little Nash Rambler),”
by the Playmates

“Someone Saved My Life Tonight,”
by Elton John, also
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,”
probably for good measure

All Simon & Garfunkel records

The Association’s Greatest Hits,
but it just went to my sister’s house because I’d stolen it from her earlier and she’d stolen it back

Ditto with all the Bee Gees records

“The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,”
by Vicki Lawrence, met a particularly ghastly fate in our trash barrel. I eventually found only the charred label.

I was left with Frankie Laine and Ed Ames, who were hidden in my closet. Life might have taken a vicious turn here, but my brother-in-law Rick gave me his old eight-track tape player, along with two John Denver tapes. John Denver became the only good-hearted naturalist my father ever threatened with a lynching.

I didn’t know why everyone was always going on so about shoes shoes shoes — what was the point when we had been given perfectly adequate feet for getting around on? Same with hairbrushes and toothbrushes and washcloths. Absolutely no use. But I reached the conclusion that I’d lost a fight and was going to keep on losing it, so I might as well decide on what kind of meanness was going to get put on my feet. I chose the dignified saddle oxford, white and black with the liver-colored sole. I don’t know the reason for this choice, particularly as the soles were slick as snot and I could often be found sailing down the highly waxed stairs of my elementary school, clinging to the handrail and hoping for something other than another head injury upon landing.

I have no memory of shopping for the saddle oxfords; they simply appeared year after year, and never new. They had come from some other person’s feet, the soles worn down to a glassy smoothness. My mom would hand them over and I’d utter minor addresses to the infant Jesus who as far as I could tell had done nothing so far but forsake me, and then I’d put the blasted things on.

They were supposed to be saved for school and generally I did that, because if I wasn’t in school and I wasn’t in church I had no need for footwear anyway, but on one great Saturday late in the summer Debbie Newman was leaving the Marathon station and she said grab some shoes and hop in and come on home with me and those were the shoes I grabbed. I also pulled a pair of white bobby socks out of the laundry pile in my parents’ bedroom, a pile in a shape I later recognized in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
If aliens had come to Mooreland they would have landed on that laundry mountain, and what a shock for them. The socks didn’t match and they weren’t the same shade of “white,” but they were generally shaped the same and who cared anyway.

The Newmans always had a nice car, a big boaty silver car with maroon interior, and even though their cars were nice and newer than anything we drove they still smelled flat like the barnyard and sometimes bits of straw waggled in the air vents. In fact, corn dust and fertilizer and manure covered the dashboard and the windows, and once in a while there’d be a trace of anhydrous that I found pleasing. Not as delicious as leaded gasoline, but close. I wasn’t singing on the ride out to the Newmans’, or even making any sound, as my talking drove Debbie to distraction and she would often have to tell me so in ways that were directly to the point. Julie was in the backseat beside me in her jeans and cowboy boots and a white T-shirt with a big red Viking head on it. That was the thing about Julie; she always looked exactly right for whatever she was doing, whereas I always looked like I’d walked through the wrong door into a story that had nothing to do with me. I believe I was wearing shorts with my unmatched bobby socks and used saddle oxfords, and some inappropriate upper-wear, like a discarded short-sleeved dress shirt belonging to my father.

“What are we gonna do today?” I asked Julie.

She shrugged. That could mean a lot of things. It could mean she had 62,000 chores and I was going to help with every one. It could mean we were going to ride horses or else take her new moped out around the countryside. It could mean her bedroom needed painting and if I didn’t work fast enough she’d give the raised middle-finger punch on the upper arm that left a bruise for days. Or her shrug could mean nothing. It could mean she didn’t know and since we were only going to the best place on the Earth, where every single minute of every day was different and filled with promise, what the heck difference did it make what we were gonna do.

We looked at some kittens that got born in the pole barn. They were way little and their eyes were still glued shut. The mama cat hovered around hissing at us — she was feral and would never tame. We shot a little pool on the bumper pool table in the dining room and Julie beat me so hard so many times I put my stick down and told her she was cheating. She ignored this. Julie never cheated. We went out to ride the good horse, Angel, but she had a cut on her foreleg and Big Dave said no. We thought about sneaking off on Mingo, the horse in league with the Devil, but decided against it. Pretty soon we were climbing over the barbed-wire fence and out into the rolling land across the road that wasn’t farmable, wasn’t quite grazable except up by the road. It wasn’t worth much but beauty. There was a steep walk down to a stream, and on horseback the horses would have to walk with small, careful steps as we leaned completely back, almost lying down to accommodate the angle. There was maybe thirty acres over there — the grazing land for some cows, the valley and stream, and the rise up to a stretch of woods where a few times we’d seen a great horned owl.

We rode that land all summer, me behind Julie on Angel’s wide back. We rode without speaking. I often got thwacked by branches that missed Julie altogether. Julie could set Angel up to a canter that seemed to work fine for Julie but shook all my internal organs loose until I was googly-eyed and begging for mercy, but not very loudly as my lungs had collapsed. Only a month before our current stroll we’d taken Angel around on a slow walk, leading her to the old pump at the edge of the field. We meant to pump water for her, but instead we found a dead cat there. She was a black and gray tabby cat, as pretty as could be, lying on her side with her one green eye staring at the sky. Angel stopped. Julie and I froze. I said, “Is this one of our cats?” Julie said, “Nope. But she could have been.” And Angel wouldn’t drink from the pump so we rode on.

Today we were just on our own feet and it was hot outside. We passed the cows, stopped to look at some calves, then headed down toward the creek. We knelt at the edge, looking for crawdaddies or snakes or anything really, but it was hot enough outside that all living creatures had departed for shadier places. We crossed the creek on rocks, a leap to the left, the left, the right, the opposite bank, and climbed the hill up toward the stretch of forest. We weren’t saying much, weren’t heading anywhere directly, when both of us heard the same noise and froze.

“What was that?” I said, looking around.

“Shhhh.”

The sound came again and it turned out to be two sounds — a small, lowing cry from one direction, and a deep, bass-note exhalation through what sounded like bovine nostrils. On one side of us, Julie figured out, was a calf, maybe only a day or two old, and on the other was the mama. Sure enough, here came the mama cow pawing at the ground and moving with a swift assurance that cows are typically not permitted.

“Get up that tree!” Julie said, not quite yelling as that wasn’t her way.

I ran behind her to a gnarled old something, I never bothered finding out the names of trees as what difference did it make, and watched her take the trunk in a single gesture. I don’t know how she did such things; it wasn’t as if she had tentacles or suction cups, she was just a red-haired human girl but nothing had any
force
over her. She was up the tree and out on a fat horizontal branch while I was still holding on to two little branches, my butt out in the air where the cow could eat it, my saddle oxfords sliding down the trunk like they’d been dipped in baby oil.

“Ummm,” I said, pulling myself up, slipping down.

“Good Lord,” Julie said, laying herself flat down on the branch and reaching for my hands. She somehow managed to pull me up beside her just as the cow, which I could now see was the size of a mobile home, hit the tree trunk with her flank — she was that mad. Plus her eyes were rolling around in the way that gave rise to the term “Wild-eyed Cow,” a look my dad sometimes got.

“That is a
bull,
” I said.

“Psshh.”

“I’m telling you that is no cow, Julie Newman.” Whatever it was continued to stare at us and snort out great blasts of fury through its nose, while the baby continued bleating away somewhere beyond the tree line.

“You saw the bull behind the fence with your own eyes, Dumb.” Julie scanned the area behind us, looking for the baby.

“A fine thing, letting a bull just run around loose like this, fixing to kill some children.”

“Hush up.”

Hours passed. Oh, hours and hours. The bull stared at us and chuffed and pawed at the ground and made a terrible sad sound about his baby, but wouldn’t move. Then the baby would cry out and the whole thing was nearly tragic.

“My butt is about broke, and I’ve got bark all up in my shorts,” I said, throwing a piece of twig down onto the bull’s back.

“Hush up, I said.”

The baby crashed around in the woods and the cow stopped giving us the murderous hairy eyeball for just a minute.

“Do you see it?” I whispered.

“I might see it if you ever stopped talking.”

The baby came a little closer, making a sound that was so like “ma ma” it made a person wonder about how nature was really organized. The cow pawed at the ground and ran toward an old stretch of fence, only about six feet long and mostly lying flat. Calves aren’t very bright, as it turns out, because this one had thought itself trapped behind the broken fence the entire eighteen hours Julie and I had been stuck in the tree.

Mother/father and baby were reunited with great licks of their gigantic tongues. “I’m gonna jump,” Julie whispered, “and you follow me. Then we’re gonna have to run, Jarvis, you hear me?”

“We can’t jump! We’re like a hundred feet in the air! Our ankles would turn to sausage!”

“Hush up,” Julie said, leaping to the ground, her red hair fanning out behind her like a cape. And just like that, the bull decided the Girl Threat was still imminent, and came charging, so Julie just reversed course and was back up beside me before I’d ever seen her land.

“Oh! Oh, this is rich!” I said, waving at the beautiful weather, the stream fifty yards away, the clouds of mosquitoes all around us. “When do you reckon they’ll find us up here, huh? When it’s time to
slaughter
that calf? After it’s made the rounds at the 4-H Fair?”

Julie gave me the look, so I turned my back to her.

“Plus I am starved out of my mind.”

“You’re out of your mind, all right.”

“AND I have wasted a whole day I could have been doing something else.”

Julie said nothing.

“I could have been, I don’t even know what.”

Silence.

“Your mom made me put on
shoes
for this and I am covered, I am outright covered I tell you with mosquito bites and I don’t know what-all. This horsefly has landed on me twenty times now and horseflies have
teeth,
Julie Ann.”

The big cow and the little cow were now happily resting under our tree, the baby nursing, the mama grazing and periodically looking off across the pasture as if in appreciation of its beauty, just before she looked back at us as if she had rabies.

“And what happens when…”

Julie punched me in the arm. “You stop talking.”

Now I knew I was doomed. Julie had no ideas and the sun was going down. I’d gotten the knuckle-punch and my thighs were rubbed near bloody from the rough bark of whatever tree it was we were in. We could have yelled and yelled and no one would have heard us; there was too much land and too many animals between us and the Newmans’ house. There wasn’t just the cow lot near the road, there were pigs, and two secrets about pigs is that they never stop wagging their tails and they never, ever shut up. There’s some noise coming out of those things around the clock. I was trying to imagine one, even one single option when Julie said, “There’s David Lee.”

Now if this whole event had happened at my house and my sister had eventually come looking for me, it would have gone like this: she would have stopped about fifty yards away and yelled, “What are you doing up there, big stupid?” And I’d have had to yell back, “I’m trapped up here in this tree by a bull down below! A bull and its baby! It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen and mean as hell!” And Melinda would have said, “I’m telling Mom you said ‘hell.’” Then maybe she would have saved my life or maybe she’d have let me stew for a little while longer. But at the Newmans’, this was the course of action: David Lee came up the hill from the stream. He saw the cow and the calf. He saw Julie’s white shirt and red hair up in the big branch. He took off his seed cap and his own white T-shirt and waved it in the air, yelling, “Whoo! Whooee Mama!” which caused the bull to turn and look at him for about a split second before deciding David Lee needed killing. The instant the bull ran, Julie not only jumped, she pulled me down with her and I landed in such a way that both my ankles felt like someone had rammed lit sparklers in my shoes.

David Lee ran, zigging and zagging down the hill, yelling, and the bull followed him. Julie and I ran straight down, right through the creek, up the hill. Twice the cow decided it hated us more than David Lee and changed direction, and then David would have to wave his shirt even harder and yell even louder. We ran past the old pump, and rather than toward the cow lot, we went toward the pigs, which were surrounded by a wood fence, no barbed wire.

“Jump that fence,” Julie said, not even winded.

“Oh Lord,” I said, my lungs aflame. But I jumped it, and landed in two feet of mucky goo, Indiana’s quicksand. Julie pulled her cowboy boots up and out with a squelching sound I wouldn’t soon forget, and kept going. There was no way she was going to leave her brother out in the hinterlands with Babe the Ox chasing him. She climbed the fence at the road’s edge and I did the same. We landed in the grass and something felt funny. I looked down and I had neither shoe nor sock on either foot.