todd of tacoma

You can’t really fake having rolled wheel lines on time. When your boss is out of town on a long weekend, say, and has left the potatoes in your charge you can’t just leave lines irrigating where they sit and then roll them where they’re supposed to sit just as your boss gets home and pretend you’ve been a diligent little farm hand all weekend.

The ground talks.

I’m telling C this as I’m gearing up to pay our tab at the Robin.

And talks and talks. Are you going to be compensated for this? C says.

For this?

For doing extra work, she says.

I’m not doing extra work, I say.

I put out my cigarette and tip a beer can over. It’s one of the empties, but I jerk the table to catch it anyway.

C saves the table.

Shit, I say, thanks.

Her forearms are stronger than they look.

Sounds like you’re doing extra work, she says.

They look like pipe cleaners in a loofah thanks to her puffy blouse.

I’m doing what I normally do, I say. Just they’re not here to see it.

But the neighbors are.

She pats me on the leg like a basketball coach.

What do you mean the neighbors? I say.

You say they watch you.

Different watching. They watch me like trees in the forest, I say.

Are you not coming on Thursday, then? she says.

Where?

She doesn’t answer.

Filling Station, Zebra, Haufbrau, Rocking R, Robin, Main, some park. There’s always a show on Thursday and we always go to it, no matter where.

I don’t answer.

Yes or no?

I have to work, I owe them. I can’t be sloshed like always the whole time. They’re trying to look out for me, so I should, you know–

They think you’re a lost little puppy, she musses my hair. They don’t know the big grown adult man that I know. Pays his rent on time and has a phone.

I have a table at the Robin. And a pay phone in the lobby.

My big grown man.

When I stand up I have to start my mental tabulation of all we’ve had to drink, so I don’t have sticker shock in front of the bartender. PBR, PBR, gin and tonic, PBR, whiskey ginger, PBR, PBR, times two, PBR, PBR. I’m kind of mumbling these allowed and C sees.

It’s not Tuesday, remember.

I spill every drink, all of them in my mind at this realization. It’s not Tuesday, therefore not Dollar PBR Night. The bill has effectively tripled. I try to keep whatever composure I typically have.

I hate that they feel bad for me, I say.

Not bad enough to pay you enough to drink, C says, and she tosses a ten on the table, which doesn’t cover her part of the tab, it never does, but it gets me over enough that I don’t have to overdraft or smoke every cigarette twice for the rest of the weekend.

It’s our silent agreement.

I pick up the ten without a thank you.

Whatever it takes to pay this tab.

Don’t leave me out there alone on Thursday. The cows will be fine without you.

Cows? No, potatoes.

Shame, you’d make a good cow guy.

Cowboy?

I head to the bar.

You can drive me! she shouts to me. So I don’t have to get laid!

Why can’t we walk?

Friday

B and M are at the lake for their weekend. This one weekend a year that they call a long weekend. Thursday night to Sunday afternoon. The last three days in my free time I’ve been prepping their boats. Airing out, vacuuming, changing oil, polishing, restocking.

I save the windows for the end. That part I like. I spray the arc of little windshield panels with a strongly orange-scented industrial spray and wipe them invisible with newspaper.

Now you see ‘em, B’s oldest son jokes, eliding the second part.

No, you don’t, I indulge him.

Wanted. Malibu boat. No windows. It’s in the papers, he winks.

I throw a wad of paper at him and he throws it out of the boat. He’s snapping the travel cover closed behind me as I finish up. On the long weekend, he pulls the Malibu to the lake Friday at noon. The rest of the family’s been sitting there with just the pontoon for a night and a morning, just fishing and swimming, burning up in the sun and in reflections of the sun, and they’re aching for watersports.

That’s when the good son arrives with the Malibu, like he’s been withholding it till he knows they’ve been good sons and daughters, too.

The good son’s not an athlete but he’s good at sports. Makes sense the Malibu’s in his charge. He’s sort of mastered skiing barefoot. He can flip barefoot. Ski backward barefoot. Arch rooster tails that soak the whole boat when he slides parallel to it barefoot.

To ski barefoot, you start by bobbing out there behind your boat strapped into only one ski. You’ll drop this ski once you’re pulled up out of the water and the boat gets up to speed. A spotter will keep track of your ski after you lose it, so don’t sweat that. You’ll be concentrating on digging in your heels and keeping your toes up.

One step at a time.

Let’s start at the beginning.

When you’re situated in the water, give the boat the go signal and keep your back straight and push your hips forward. It should feel like you’re pulling the boat to you. Don’t pull too hard, though, think tug-of-war with a cat. Keep your ski pointed up, like a sun dial. It’ll drop like its shadow as you rise up from the water. You keep that ski up by pushing your heels down. You teeter on your arches. Once you’re comfortable on top of the water and the boat’s up to speed, has to be pretty fast, you drop your ski and dig in just a little harder and tilt your body back and away like a straw in an empty glass. You’re fighting the boat but you’re not. You’re a featherless swan. You glide with grace and ease.

And maybe none of that is how it is.

What I know for certain about skiing barefoot is that you can only drink lake water for twenty minutes.

What happened was I kept turning my one ski and tipping it toward the deep to make it a diving rudder. I’d dive when the boat pulled me forward and rise when it slowed up. The water was heavy. And hot somehow. Like I had fat, sweaty children hanging onto my legs and giggling and yelling and telling me to walk. And when I’d try to walk I’d drown. And they’d slap me in the face.

Like one of those running nightmares. You know, where you can’t?

After fifteen long minutes I signaled that I was done and ready to crawl back into the boat and nurse my wounds, but apparently it looked like I was calling for another go thanks to my gasping and wiping my face and clawing at the air. They shrugged in the boat and turned and said okay and the fat kids started pulling me down again.

This time, though, thanks to an impossibly desperate attempt to get above the water and make my signal to stop clear, I made it up.

I was on the water!

It was exhilarating.

To lose the weight of the whole lake like that.

Cool freedom.

For five seconds.

I was about to that point where you gear up to let go of the one ski, but I wanted to adjust my trunks first, as you always have to do when you pop up out of the water. But I couldn’t find them. I kept feeling down my thighs and feeling down my thighs and I only felt skin. Wet, bare turkey skin. I let go of the rope, then, and I stepped out of the ski for some reason and turned sideways, to hide my nakedness, and I continued stepping away.

Laughter in the Malibu.

Shrieks.

I ran away three or four steps and kissed the lake open mouth.

My trunks had been dragged off somewhere. There was no spotter for that. My dick felt dirty in the lake water, dirtier naked than with trunks on, which didn’t really make sense to me. Was this what Adam and Eve felt in the Garden?

The boat took a few passes to look for my trunks but soon gave up and came back to me.

Still laughing.

Two of B’s sons stood on the stern and held a towel out to screen me from their women. I pulled myself up and twisted myself up in it.

No end to smiles that afternoon.

The kids and B and M have invited me back every year since.

But who would move the lines? I always say.

They say, the lines can sit for a couple days.

But I insist I stay back and they pretend I’m really helping them out by doing so.

***

Let’s move Bos’s, the good son says. I wanna hit the road soon.

He’s fueled up the boat and he reeks of gasoline from having overfilled two five gallon jugs for later. Cheap farm pumps don’t have automatic fill stoppers.

I got the lines, I say.

Way faster with two people. Don’t have to fly up and down to flush them, he says.

Fine, I say.

He puts the jugs in the back of his truck. He secures them with a rubber strap and rattles them to make sure they’re snug. Gasoline sloshes, but it stays in the containers.

He smells himself.

Am I gonna get it on the wetsuits?

You could burn it off, I say.

They’d melt all together.

Not if everybody wears one and you light them individually.

On the water! he says.

Yep.

That’d make a good show!

Have to wait till night, drive by the shore.

He pats me once on the shoulder.

He does this kind of thing.

I swear we have the strangest hired man in the valley.

He says this kind of thing. It’s not true.

He wants to say something else, too. He makes a noise and squints at the sun.

I ask, what?

He says, oh what, nothing, and he puts his waders on and kickstarts his bike and waits for me. You can tell he still wants to say something, but he’ll say it right before he leaves.

I push my bike’s electric start. My legs aren’t really working when I sit. Something I drank last night when the music was good.

I sidle up to the son. We nod at one another.

He goes ahead.

I go after.

My knees quake on the pegs.

Bos’s

The water feeding the lines by Bos’s comes from the muddy Hi-Line ditch, so there’s guaranteed a lot of sand and silt in our pipe after running eight-hour sets. When you roll sandy lines you really have to flush them first or you risk kinking pipe or tearing slits and causing a host of other problems that’d keep you in the field another hour or more just fixing what you’d done, all because you wanted to cut a corner and get home faster.

I’d take that risk if B’s son weren’t here.

He’s at the bottom of the field right now gearing up for lake sports while he waits for me to crank the water pressure down. He’s riding wheelies on the dirt track. Revving his dirt bike engine loud and kicking up whorls of dusty cyclones. He’s not like this very often, in fact ever. But it’s the long weekend.

I park my bike a dry distance from the lines’ opener valves. Our lines are only one set apart so it makes this whole affair a one-stop operation, thank God, a little two-for-one. I slosh in the mud to the valves and crank them down till about a quarter-turn is all that’s left and they scream like banshees.

The sprinklers slow to a tsssk tsssk tsssk like they can hear.

I see the son has taken his shirt off and has lain it on his handlebars. He believes he’ll get wet flushing the pipe, I suppose, and he’s not wrong.

Water fans out in great brown irises once the end plug valves are open. I’m remembering the eyes on the billboard in Gatsby. Those eyes come up in my thoughts a lot, actually, the eyes that make the greatest American novel great. I think they’re blue.

I can’t remember the doctor’s name.

When the eyes of the lines by Bos’s turn bone white with clear water I close the opener valves completely and pull the hoses off the wheel lines and drag the hoses and the openers to the next valve of the mainline for their next sets. Then I ride a dry row to the movers and wait near them for everything to drain. The spuds here by Bos’s are growing behind schedule compared to the rest of the farm’s spuds, so we can do that, ride the rows to save time.

The soil is rocky, that’s why they’re behind. We’re close to the river.

***

In the shop the decades of motor oil caked on the walls off-gasses a burnt dust, like an electric heater with hair in it. It’s not usually this bad. Or it is and I’m sensitive today.

And parched. I fill up a beat-up copper cup with water from the shop’s water pump. It’s the one cup in the shop and it’s been around as long as the dust on the walls. Everyone who’s ever worked here has drunk from it and I was told it never needs washing. I wipe the rim every time I drink, though, in case anyone has recently applied too much chapstick.

I rinse my waders in the pump’s stream. The mud and leaves and grass from Bos’s goes down the drain, which empties ten feet from here, a couple feet from the shop, on top of the ground, and it flows to an apple tree that’s thick and flourishing between the shop and a machine shed.

Well, that wasn’t too bad, B’s son says.

I jump. I nearly grasp his shirt.

He apologizes.

No, it wasn’t too bad.

Would have been forever with one person.

Thank you for the help.

I sit on on the two egg crates and the 2×8 I’ve claimed as my seat in the shop. The son sits on a camping chair.

I suppose I better get going, he says, but he is stopped by something in him. Something small but worth saying.

Hey, he says.

I help him out, yeah?

I don’t want, we’re just gonna be gone, I don’t want, it’s just a couple a days and we’ll be back.

Yep.

I don’t want, can you just don’t do what you kind of sometimes do on weekends?

You mean what I usually do on weekends?

Usually?

Usually’s probably right. I’m not proud.

We don’t talk about what I do on weekends, except in euphemisms, and even then vaguely.

Could you not do what you did in June?

We don’t talk about what I did in June, especially.

It was May.

You’re a real pain in the butt, Todd, but you mean an awful lot to all of us.

I can tell he was asked to ask the first part, about the weekends. I can tell because he’s redder than a sunburn. But the part about June, about May, that was him alone, and impromptu, of a moment, a farmer’s son gone rogue, and he’s not sure if it’s okay to speak for the entire family about what I mean to them, but what do you do when the spirit moves you?

There’s a silence.

Overall, he appears happy with his performance. The red in his face is falling off. It can be good to say kind things, and heartfelt things that you mean, even if you’re just being nice and meaning the heartfelt things is just your good acting.

Is he a good actor?

I sit in the silence, for him and for me, I sit longer than I’m comfortable, to see how much I can handle. You have to know how you do in silence, don’t you?

I have no plans for the weekend, I say.

Act 2

There’s a chance I lose my apartment next paycheck. I have a couple weeks. I get paid once a month.

It’s a shit apartment anyway without power. I had to stop paying that two months ago, maybe three, and last week I finally lost that power.

I usually spend my paycheck the second I have it, because I have to cash it, having no bank account. Since it’s cash, I spend it gratuitously for two weeks, none of it on bills, then I spend almost nothing for the next two weeks or two and a half.

I shouldn’t say I’m completely without power. I run an extension cord to the apartment across the hall from me. It’s empty and a cinch to break into with a driver license. I can watch TV at night and read when I have energy thanks to its power.

Power and energy, C says.

I feel better when I read, I say.

Then for all our sakes, read.

But I can’t sleep when I read. Only when I watch TV.

Of course you can’t sleep reading.

I can’t sleep after finishing a movie, either, so I try not to.

It’s Friday and I’m still hungover from Thursday. So is C. But it’s still mid-month and I have some money, so we can fix the hangover.

It drives me nuts not to finish a movie. Don’t you want to know how it ends?

It’s worse when it ends. All the possibilities are gone.

You’re such a baby.

I need to know something’s still about to happen.

You want what you want to happen.

The possibility of it, yes.

Here’s what’s going to happen.

When C leads with this sentence, when she leads with it and she leans in toward me, she usually means to squeeze enough drinks out of me that she can black out upright and take me with her and wake up weird, somewhere weird, having done something weird or believing we had.

I think she got it from a movie. Here’s what’s going to happen and then making something happen.

We’re going to the Cannery for three pints of Miller Light and then to my place and you can watch TV.

I have to work early!

I’m offering you an easy night!

I’m the only one on the farm.

You say you need sleep.

We never sleep.

I have a TV.

I have one, too.

You have your neighbor’s TV.

My neighbor’s power.

You don’t have a neighbor.

I should watch TV at home.

Mine’s better, she says.

I drain my tall whiskey.

I have to work early, too, she says.

At what, nine?

I drain her tall whiskey, too.

She hits me.

I have to get up at five, I say.

I rub my leg.

To the Cannery, I say, but that’s it.

She hits me again. She should have been born my older brother.

And I’m sleeping at my place, I say.

You got this round, C says. You took my whiskey.

***

There’s a kind of drinking you do when you drink too much. The key feature of this kind drinking is you remember everything you do as you do it. You don’t think of it before. You don’t experience it during. You don’t remember it after. You think a thing and it’s done, go to do the thing but it’s happened, and you remember the thing as it happens, and wake up and go to work.

Sometimes you remember some things the next day.

But not much and not much you want to.

I’m usually too burnt out from all the remembering the night before to do too much remembering.

I’m not trying to remember anything on my egg crates and 2×8 in the shop at six a.m. I’m trying not to tip over backward putting my waders on. Once they are on I notice that I forgot my apartment key. It usually pokes me in the thigh when I attach the waders to my belt.

Why don’t I have my apartment key with my car key? I like my friends to have access to stuff. What stuff? Stuff they don’t care to have access to. I lent a book to someone once, who never returned it, and that gave me the impression I was the kind of person whose residence was a communal hub of activity, not a second-story cave.

The usual blackout vignettes come to me when I’m on my bike on my way to Bos’s. A bartender I don’t know refusing to serve me, an alley dumpster I recline against, a sidewalk to my apartment I crawl on, my urine on a small elephant statue that I call cultural appropriation, my extension cord that I can’t seem to unravel.

I’m not hungover, but that’s not a miracle. I’m not sober yet.

So much of my life was not supposed to happen, I suspect. Some of it takes great pains to be recalled. I hope all I’ve said about memory is clear to you. It’s not particularly clear to me.

***

At the Cannery we ran into J. We hadn’t seen J since graduation. There were rumors he was everywhere. He’d gone to Tibet. He’d gone to London. Gone to Paris, Texas. He’d made it under a different name in Hollywood. He’d died by a sicario’s knife in Baja. Drowned by a spurned ex in Kalispell.

He was a legend.

I’m with this drywall unit in Big Sky, he said.

Don’t tell anyone that, C said.

Who wouldn’t want to hear it? It’s insane money.

We wanted to hear how you finally came out of hiding in Flathead Lake with the help of a plastic surgery you paid off in stolen cash.

H wasn’t like that. I didn’t need to run from her.

She wasn’t obsessed with you?

Was that really something people said?

How well did you really know her? C said. Think about it.

J was thinking like he was thinking about something else, or wanted to be.

You look great, C said.

I have a good job, J said. I work three days a week. Three twelves. The rest of my time I get to do what I want.

That’s awesome.

What do you do that you want to do?

I drink. I might climb. I mostly drink.

Nobody’s seen you in two years.

How did I pull that off?

Disguise? Tinted windows?

A vast network of tunnels?

People have seen me, he said.

Nobody we know, C said.

Who do you know!

Okay, who’s seen you? Or, who have you seen? Have you seen H?

He slinked as far as he could slink on a barstool.

Whatever happened to her?

How am I supposed to know?

I knew it! We’re talking to a man who doesn’t exist!

J stood up.

What’s it like? C said. The void. Why did you come back?

C does coke now, I said. Sorry about the rapid-fire.

She hit me.

You guys want anything? J said. I’m buying.

C stood up.

Inches

The upper line isn’t so full of soot I can’t roll it unflushed, but the southernmost is.

Still, I make do.

I’m insistent when I cut corners, deliberate and patient. I roll the southernmost line in quarter-turn spurts, a quarter forward, an eighth back, overshooting and rocking, overshooting and rocking, rippling the line in place over and over over potato rows until I’ve counted four rolls to where I need to be.

I could have just done this right in the first place and flushed the line, I think, but I only have this notion once I’m two rolls in and I can’t roll back.

I’m really kind of more than halfway finished, I tell myself, given all I’ve had to do to get here.

I’m sweating into my eyes and there’s a deerfly dive-bombing my ear. This field isn’t a great place for deer- and horseflies, almost never any cattle in the pasture by the river marsh, so I don’t know what the hell this guy is doing here.

Persisting.

Not even a twenty-mile-an-hour dash on my bike gets rid of him.

The hose on the southernmost line is long and heavy and I don’t like to coil it up and carry it. I get too much mud on myself. I’d rather drag it unfurled like I’m dragging a body, or like Samson dragging chains. I hoist the crank over my shoulder and lean forward against the dead weight and trudge and slip along in the muck.

After one good slip, though, I drop the hose and valve opener. I curse God and his girlfriend and I pick up everything and I’m dripping mud all over, a lot of it in my boots, all the way to my wet socks. Squish, squish. I’m paying for it, I’m thinking, paying for all my shortcuts.

I turn the mainline valve an eighth turn only. I’ve opened this line a full five turns before and blown four sprinkler heads off and the end plug when the pressure hit.

You have to be cautious.

This field is gravity fed from a ditch a couple miles away and I don’t know how many feet up. That far away you have to drop just quarters of an inch at a time when you lay your underground pipe or you’ll have pressure that cuts cement by the time water gets to your field. Your line will pack with sediment, too, that never gets pushed out, the fast water just carves grooves in the soot and the soot builds up and plugs the pipe useless over time, wrecking your sprinkler heads and your pipes all the while.

I get on my bike and watch the pressure build. I am beat to hell and ready to go home and take a nap. This world is no place for me.

Pressure hits the last pipe and it snaps.

The line lurches as usual. The sprinklers turn powerfully.

The flush valve is spraying.

But the flush valve isn’t open.

Two trucks

After a couple pitchers of Miller Light and some shots, J had sort of changed his tune about work. The thirty-six hours a week he was slamming sheetrock on the walls of Big Sky’s ultra-wealthy was beginning to sound more like ninety.

It’s not the work, he said.

It sounds like the work, C said.

It’s the job.

He was making a distinction.

I know I may seem like I have it all together.

Just like us, C said.

Working in the mountains. I have loads of tools. I have a second truck, J said. Two trucks!

I’ll take one.

But all that money, being around all that money. I don’t even know what they do for it. Or with it.

They spend it on great sheetrock.

Their homes are nothing. Do you know what slamming sheetrock means?

Setting it down real hard! C said.

Zipping it in real fast! I said.

Soundproofing. Bathrooms, bedrooms, dens. I do almost every room in their homes. All the things they do is in secret! he said, a drink to his lips.

Slamming is soundproofing, C noted. 

Was H happy? J drank the drink at his lips.

I didn’t know H. Did you? C said.

She was asking me.

Sort of, I said.

Was she happy? J turned to me.

Of course she was, I said.

In the bedroom, I mean.

I think she must have been.

With me in the bedroom?

Lotta provisos, C said.

I don’t think I can comment on that.

Just tell me you know!

I don’t!

Honey, tell him you know, C said.

She never said anything, I said.

Just lie for him!

I can’t!

Not because I was taking a stand for truth, or thought a lie would hurt him. I was too drunk to come up with one. Not one that seemed real. You’re a monster in the sack! She broke up with you because she couldn’t handle your beautiful cock!

He’d believe whatever I served him. The bar was low.

But I couldn’t open my mouth.

Do you ever hear a song about a movie? J said.

All the time, said C. Apparently as drunk as I was.

About a man who’s a parody of a joke?

So funny, said C.

Tragic! J said.

So tragic.

And then you think, that’s me! I’m the parody of a joke of a movie of myself.

What are you talking about? C touched his arm. You’re a stud sheetrocker in Big Sky, Montana.

I saw a porno yesterday. It was my seventh porno, I think. On the internet. The recommended ones on the bottom are pretty good. I like to click on them. Sometimes I don’t even watch what I’m watching. I play them all all the way through, but while I’m playing the all I choose which porno to click on next. They always get me.

He drank a gulp of Miller Light from our pitcher, then poured from our pitcher into his gin & tonic glass. Its dead ice gave the stale beer a head.

Last week, I heard her voice, J said. H’s. She was saying, like that, like that, deep, I never had it deep like this. And I scrolled up. And there she was. Her back was to me, to the camera.

Oh shit! this wasn’t a dream? C said.

I know it was her. I recognized her nape.

Did you see her face? I said.

I saw her nape.

You know her neck that well?

Two bible verses.

On her neck?

I never saw the bible on her neck.

On her tramp.

Tramp stamps from the bible?

Wait, nape is neck.

It can mean back!

Can it?

What bible verses?

Long ones.

He was going to cry. The heat of late summer and the gin, and the room temperature pitchers of beer and the white hot embarrassment of opening up newly vulnerable to strangers that you know.

His upper lip was wet with beer foam.

I looked at C.

Do you think you could find it again? C said.

Don’t make him do that!

It might do him good to reopen the wound to let it heal proper.

The porno? he said.

The porno, C said, and touched his arm.

Don’t call it a porno, I said.

Then what?

Just porn! Call it porn.

Can you remember where you started? Which porno did you watch first? C said.

What will that do?

If we start at the beginning.

We? he said.

I want to help you.

C, I said.

We follow the clicks.

Come on.

It might do him good. It might do you good.

Barmuda Triangle

J and C had made it all the way to the Cannery front door, then C turned around. She put both hands on J’s shoulders to indicate wait right here.

She went to the bar and stood at the bar and got the bartender’s attention and he came to her.

She said something.

The bartender looked at me, then C. He poured C two shots of what looked like Jameson and she brought them to me and set them down beneath me. They smelled like a woodland on fire, the fairy king and fairy queen’s charred bodies, and all their attendants.

You have enough to pay for this? she said.

I hope so.

Then pay up. You’re coming with.

I don’t want to sit there while you two watch porn.

We’re all watching porn.

I’ll just end up leaving there. I’d rather leave here.

You think I’m trying to get laid? Is that what this is?

He’s still pretty attractive. Obviously stays fit. Good income.

Drink up.

Shouldn’t he pay the tab? I said.

Drink!

***

On the way to J’s house we stopped by the Barmuda Triangle, three bars where most of Bozeman’s DUIs are incubated. We had a drink and some peanuts at the quietest one, the Scoop. I wanted to say, just tell J to check History and Recent Tabs and we can go home, but I knew what C would say.

We need to recreate the event!

I need to see him click!

I need to know exactly his state of mind to know if H is who he’s seeing, or why H is who he’s seeing.

***

It’s fixed now. I thought it was going to be an ordeal, but it’s fixed now.

There was a split in the pipe from rolling it with mud. Water was spraying fan-like from the split into the ground, carving up vines and scalping baby spuds and floating them down the field in a sandy river.

But I fixed it.

My way.

I detached the broken pipe and rolled it and carried it out of the field and left it by the fence dividing Bos’s from the old river marsh pasture.

To pick up later. Not dealing with this shit now.

I moved the end plug up a section and the last sprinkler of the line is missing a lot of the edge of the field now.

Sure.

But it’s fine.

If I play dumb I won’t be in too much trouble.

North side

His apartment was on the north side. I’ve always wanted to live on Bozeman’s north side. It’s not where all the rich people live, and it’s not where all the college kids live. It’s where the serious people live. The people who get home from work and drink a single glass of wine on their porch in the summertime and read The New Yorker and sometimes have a single glass of wine more. They spend a lot of time at libraries and you can hear crickets at night.

J’s landlord is an electrician. He’s valuable to J professionally. Gets him work–and vice versa.

J’s in his garage until he has time to find a decent place.

I thought you made a lot of money, C said.

There was a tent on some cardboard, with camping foam inside, an electrical cord strung from the garage’s hall to the tent. It was attached to J’s laptop charger.

It doesn’t hold a charge very long, he said, and he lit up a glass pipe he’d been packing since we walked in and inhaled and held the smoke in his lungs for too long.

This is nice, C said. Looks like you just moved in?

There were boxes everywhere, and totes, and buckets and buckets of tools.

I’ve been here awhile, he exhaled. He was near coughing, you could hear it, but he held back and just wheezed a great fog that descended over everything. The weed was so skunky you could see seeds in the air.

How long is a while? I said.

I got a receipt.

I notice that I can’t hear the crickets.

A receipt for the rent? C said.

I’ve been here as long as the tent has. The receipt’s somewhere.

That’s okay, I said, and stood next to C to nudge her to leave, but she dropped to her knees and entered the tent.

She opened the laptop.

What’s your password? she said.

Here, he said and dropped on all fours and entered the tent and crawled past C and turned the laptop to him. It has a lot of numbers in it, he said.

C signaled for me to get in.

J typed with just one middle finger.

I grabbed a pipe wrench from one of J’s tool buckets and entered the tent.

Interrupt

The site where we began had a confetti background, like an office party invitation, and the three videos above the fold looked like just that, office parties. Gone obscene. It was, according to a subhead, orgy season.

Two secretaries were accidentally given anal.

Not getting a lot of work done, are they? C said before she scrolled down.

J smiled desperately at C. He would avoid my eyes for the rest of the night.

C’s scrolling was suddenly halted by a pop-up interrupt.

Meet mature women who want to fuck in your area.

Fuck, she said. What area is that?

She x-ed the interrupt closed.

On cue, the automatic garage light vanished. I squeezed the pipe wrench behind my back.

It’s okay, J said. And he lit a small lantern that was hanging in the center of the tent.

Are we gonna burn? I said.

We’re off-gassing ourselves, C said. Like miners.

It’s safe, J said. And he was pointing at a suggested video at the bottom of the webpage. That’s where I started.

He scooted closer to C and reached an arm back pretending he was signaling to me to get closer to the screen.

I’m all right, I said.

I am, too, C said.

Before J could lob a plausible denial, C clicked on the video. I couldn’t read its full title from where I sat, but I caught the words drinking fountain and guzzling. At the fountain’s page C scrolled immediately to the suggested videos.

Above the fold there was talk of an office function someone had to dress up for and could they get some help picking something out. Since J’s laptop volume wasn’t high and his speakers were bad, and because we couldn’t see the video, it felt like we were listening around a corner like children, to some very naughty parents.

See anything here? C said.

J’s breathing was absurd and too apparent.

What are we doing here? I said.

They all look familiar, J said. Try this one.

We’re helping, C said.

She clicked where J was pointing.

I remember this! he said.

Once again, we scrolled to the bottom right away. Three videos in. Four to go.

We’re skipping ahead a lot. I thought we were trying to recreate the scene in its entirety.

You want me to recreate it? C said.

Isn’t that what you want? I said.

J, what were you doing?

I was, I had…

Did you have your pants on?

No, yes.

What shirt were you wearing? Were you wearing one?

No, yes.

Which is it?

Yes. Then I took it off. The BYU one!

Were you going to clean up with it?

Not with BYU–I don’t like this.

Don’t worry, honey, I’ll stop.

She reached over and pinched my thigh and left her hand there.

Be nice, she said.

You’re the asshole, I said.

J put his hand between his legs.

Watch him, C said.

You’re an asshole, I reiterated quickly. She found my hand and squeezed it and let it go.

Anything here? C said. J! she snapped her fingers. Eyes and hands up here. Anything?

That one.

Good boy. Good remembering.

I have a good memory.

I do, too. I black out every single night of my life to train my brain?

J was flexing his forearms to keep his hands on his knees.

Good boy, don’t move. How about this one?

His lips were quivering.

There, yes.

His neck shaking but not his head. Sheetrocker muscles, I thought.

Now?

That!

Yes?

Yes! The one with the robot!

We’re almost there, C said.

I’m nervous.

One more.

He grunted.

Can’t be. It’s not right.

A small grunt, a punctuation mark between relief and disappointment, so close, like a however.

Can’t be, he said again.

You don’t see H in here?

We were looking at our options. There was a step-dad helping his step-daughter and the babysitter with dishes. A student afraid they’ll fail the big test and never go to college. And an office costume party.

Orgy season.

I must have watched one more. I don’t remember any of these.

The suggested ones aren’t the same every time, I suggested.

They’re the same on this site! That’s why I like it.

He raised a finger like Death.

Hold on, he said. Actually, try this one.

We went to the costume party.

I remember the cowboy.

This time C did not scroll down. We scooted closer. To better see a hypersexualized green M&M.

Put your hands back on your knees. Your hands are cement, okay?

Click.

M&M

How is she so hot? C said. There aren’t any curves.

There’s one curve.

A circle.

The legs, I said.

I like the arms, C said.

The M&M was being accosted by a cowboy with a dick longer than his lasso and a modestly endowed man in a banana costume half peeled, an everyman. The M&M began working them both with her hands and would use only her hands because her human mouth was not available. Not that it mattered to the men, as they slapped her fuzzy cartoon mouth and eyes and lowercase m until their dicks annoyed her enough she had to ask her friend the dairy cow to get them udderly ready for her.

She said that. Udderly.

The cow obliged.

Meanwhile, the green M&M turned around with her taint to the camera and rubbed her white gloves between her legs and you could just glimpse her big fingers barely able to touch her thighs and unable even to pretend to penetrate where a pretend opening in her green crotch would be.

She signaled to her cow friend.

The cow rose and pushed the cowboy and the banana onto the couch and made them lick one another while she went to the M&M’s rear end and unhooked a button that was holding shut a hatch and she opened the hatch and beneath it were red, sweaty buttocks with a black string of underwear between them. The cow pulled these down to the floor with her hoof and thrust a forehoof between the unveiled buttocks and she mooed, which kind of took me out of it, and she nuzzled the bare ass and signaled to the cowboy and banana that the M&M was ready to be eaten.

They went to her.

They took turns eating, watching, admiring, and stroking until no part of the M&M had been ignored. Then the cow kissed the banana and peeled him away so the cowboy could finally enter the thin candy shell. He ceremoniously pretended to pull up his big leather boots and he rattled his spurs. He grabbed his mostly hard dick with one hand and snarled like a sheriff and raised his other hand to smack the buttocks even redder.

Stop! J yelled.

Smack!

C jumped backward into me.

Oh, my God! the M&M shouted.

Stop it! said J, still somehow honoring his cement hands.

That’s! So! Fucking! Good! Oh, my God!

C was squirming against me. Her arms were reaching for the keyboard, but it was too far away from her and she would have had to move away from me to hit the spacebar. There are some things you can only witness holding someone or being held by someone anyway.

Fuck! Fuck! Me! Oh!

I looked over to J. He seemed to be holding his breath. His face was green. His cement hands cracking.

So fucking hot, the cow said.

I pushed C forward and reached over her to hit the spacebar.

C touched the screen.

How do you zoom in closer? she said.

Hold these two, I said. She did.

And I pressed +.

J began to make a sound like a pressure cooker.

There it is! he said.

And there it was.

Is that the verse?

…faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Amen, C said.

Are you sure it’s H? I said. It’s a popular verse.

Her mom’s favorite.

Her mom must be dead? C said.

Really dead, he said. Cancer.

The other verse was in a shadow.

How do you un-zoom? C said.

Act 3

I have my apartment key. Someone found it. I don’t know who. It wasn’t me. After the porn and whatever I did after that I seem to have broken in with my driver license. It’s getting kind of mangled from all the wedging in the jam I’ve had to do over the last year or six months or so. I should get a Safeway card or a library card and use it instead.

My midday sleeps are a fast and relentless descent thanks to this TV show called The Five Garments. It’s on Saturdays midday on channel 45. The whole tone is perfect. Subdued voices, tender, loving old people, no shaking the rafters or summoning God on High for three wishes. It’s just Jesus’s everlasting forgiveness and a 1-800 number. When I sleep to Five I dream perfect, boring dreams. Usually of them. Today they were passing around M&M’s.

When I woke up, my key was taped to the inside of my door. Not the outside. Someone had cracked open the door and reached an arm around and in and pressed the key near the eyehole and vanished. How anyone knew it was my key I don’t know. It’s a copy of a copy of however many copies and it looks like it belongs to a file cabinet.

They took the time to get tape.

***

We’re technically not supposed to use farm gas for anything but farming. It’s not driving around gas or errand gas or for road trips. It’s for back and forth between fields and working the fields and that’s it. No boats, no Honda Civics. It’s taxed differently, that’s why.

But it’s honor system if it’s regular gas.

The dye in diesel will turn your fuel tank pink. Even if you use it just once, a decade ago, Highway Patrol can see. Your tank’s pink forever. You were born bad. By original sin. This is the kind of person you are, a fuel abuser.

You’re trusted, though, if it’s regular.

I don’t trust that people can trust me. That’s my original sin.

Maybe a gallon into gassing up my car, I hear what sounds like a cage rattling. Then gravel crunching. Before I even see who it is I practice begging them forgiveness.

Just for the farm? I had no idea!

So, not in the car? What do I owe!

I’m so sorry, I must have misunderstood!

It doesn’t matter.

It’s P the welder.

P goes from farm to farm and field to field and pasture to pasture taking care of little odd jobs for farmers for what my boss thinks is way too much money. But I don’t think his dislike of P has much to do with the money. The man sort of looks like Tom Waits and is just as aloof in conversation, so you wonder when you’re talking with him if anything you say lands and you end up repeating yourself and feeling like a jackass until he leaves, usually abruptly. He smells a bit like a burning barrel, too, one that’s been smoldering for a day, with motor oil and warm Christmas spices, as he’s always chewing on a clove he put out an hour ago. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smoke.

You will never see–or hear–P’s truck without his welding rig. Even at church it’s attached. It’s a converted horse trailer with four locks on the back doors and the locks and doors rattle at every jostle and turn and shimmy. Sermons have paused while he finds parking.

I notice I’d stopped pumping gas, so I start the pump again.

P stops in front of me.

Morning, I say.

He leans his head into the shadow of his gunrack to get a good look at me. He says nothing.

Yeah, B and M told me to take advantage of the pump this weekend, I say, with all the driving back and forth I’m doing.

They up at the lake? he says.

Up there, yep.

Been meaning to go fish Hyalite all summer. Never got around to it.

They’re up at Kalispell.

S’pose they got their boats all gussied up.

They did. I helped.

Gold star, buddy. I’ll getcha a sticker.

He lets the wind sough through his cab. A couple carbon paper receipts blow against his chest and to his glove box and back again. My instinct is to reach out and help grab them, but he just lets them whirl like leaves, so I make my hands cement and let be.

Wepp, I’m gonna get started, he says. Better watch your pump.

Oh crap!

I stop the pump. I’m almost full.

By the way, one of Craig’s calves looks to be loose in that eighty by Bos’s. Somebody might wanna head up there.

Bos’s? Nobody uses that pasture.

Craig does.

I stop fueling.

Craig does?

You broke, kid?

Craig’s calf

It’s that part of the day where the air is no longer cooler in the shade than in the sun, just different, maybe itchier, like you’re walking in tall weeds.

I see the calf at the fence across from what I presume is her mother. She is working her tail like a boxer working a jab. Whacking her legs and slapping her rump and she is working at a section of barbed wire with her head. It will be torn down if I don’t get the calf back in soon.

There’s a gate at the far southeast corner of the field, next to Leaps’ alfalfa, and that’s where I determine is the best place to drive the calf in, better than where where she exited.

I walk coolly to the section. Somehow no other cow or calf had noticed it. The pipe must have blown there in a wind, but was there a hard wind? Doesn’t take much. I turn my pipe parallel to the fence and roll it in tight and press it firm against the posts and hook what barbed wire isn’t broken over the pipe so it all becomes one ugly section of taut fence and then I back away till I enter what I presume is the calf’s field of vision.

You never know what they’re looking at.

I’m just walking you in, girl, is what I say, loud enough that only I can hear.

I approach her like a widow at a funeral.

He was so loved.

I can’t imagine your loss.

Only eighty-seven.

So young!

I barely lift my legs off the ground but I don’t drag my feet. No sound. I’m just a friend and we should take a walk together. Clear our heads.

She starts.

Splays her front legs and downward dogs me and gives her head a one-quarter twist of her muzzle. It glints in the sun with a snot that promises fight. She’s not spooked, she’s pissed off.

I counter.

I hunker and glide one half step, with my arms thrown outward, hugging the huge air. My mouth, too, is open wide like this, mimicking my arms, can’t be helped. I’m trying in some language to tell the calf that while I’m not a friend I’m perfectly benign. I’m just here. Not an aggressor, not a captor, not an executioner or shitty hunter.

I’d just like to take you somewhere.

Right over here, in fact.

But like a bull she takes her cues from God-knows-what-devil and she charges. Charges not at me, really, but at the potato rows nearest her and here’s where I get nervous. Potato fields are a great place for a cow to break an ankle. If this girl starts gamboling through the rows and snaps a leg I’ll have to get P the welder out here with his gun to take care of her eternally, and I’ll have to pay Craig for his loss.

A lot of livelihood is looking at me now. I think she’s looking at me.

I back up and set forth southwest describing an arc of a great wide circle to massage her gradually into her gate. I’m doomed to ever larger circles before I can possibly wear her out and I must forgive her in advance to do this thing the right way. She can’t help but show fight and run at the dead air. It’s all she’s been taught.

Her hide glistens.

She runs. South toward Leaps’ field. She’s going to go past the gate and I haven’t even had a chance to open it yet.

She stops. She breathes dust.

She runs. I go with her.

She stops.

Runs. Stops. Goes. Stops.

You try to find a path around her to re-set her direction of travel, but you can never get your angle right.

She flings a rope of mucus in the air.

I lose sight of her though she’s right in front of me. There’s a glare coming off the potato leaves and I don’t have sunglasses.

I see her when she goes again.

She stops. I squint.

She’s at the gate! Right by the gate. I just have to get west of her.

I’m panting.

In the New Testament, in one of the Gospels, Jesus drives a horde of demons from a lunatic man into a herd of pigs and the newly possessed pigs drown themselves right away in a river or pond or some kind of water. The townspeople ask Jesus to leave. Matthew and Luke attribute this to the people’s unwillingness to believe, and I took their angle as gospel growing up. The Five would take that angle, too.

I’m sparring with myself as much as with the calf.

But the town had just lost a lot of pigs, to a man who called himself Savior and a maniac who called himself Legion.

The girl bucks.

I’m beyond the gate and I only have to drive her north and east, unlock the gate and swing it wide, and back away.

She turns her head.

I slide two steps and scarecrow my arms and mouth baaaack.

She turns again and kicks.

She’s a whole lot of money.

Don’t go, girl.

She shakes and kicks.

Easy.

I run a button hook and kick dust in her direction. She whips her head and licks her nose, stares into some gray distance and we listen to the squealing chie chie chick of the wheel lines on Leaps’ alfalfa.