[extreme environments]

Easton Smith

Aquifers

            Cows, cows, oil pump, cows, prison, cows, cops, billboard, cows, gas station, cows, cows, cops, cows.

            “I can’t believe you grew up out here,” Eden said. But she’d been here before, passing these same cows, when we came to the funeral.

            “Get used to it,” I said. “This is home.” Now was the time for her to abandon whatever quaint mirage of the Western frontier had replaced this dry, shitty place in her mind. Now was the time of monsters and Family Dollar.

            Eden eyed me sourly under black bangs, annoyed by my words and my presence and the many choices she’d made that connected her to me. She scratched her arm and dry, shitty bits of skin wafted up into the potent beams of sunlight that cut through the windshield.

            We stopped. The heat rose from the hood of the car and from the asphalt and from the back of my neck as I stepped out of the Toyota Camry. We would need a bigger car for our new life. Two more cylinders, at least. But first, gas.

            You can buy hard liquor at the gas stations here. Fireworks and firearms and slot machines and Kool-Aid flavored vape pens but God forbid you want a fucking vegetable. Being home is liberating and oppressive at once, like having a body. I picked up a flask-sized plastic bottle of rum and a twenty ounce Diet Coke and brought them to the counter as the gas streamed into our vehicle from a tube that was connected to what? Some gigantic metal tank beneath our feet? Are we all just living our lives atop aquifers of gasoline? I realize that I don’t really know how the world works.

            “And a pack of Marb Reds. And a lighter,” I said to the attendant. She watched my finger as I pulled a credit card out of my wallet. I have a tattoo of a straight black line going along the outside of my left index finger that people often mistake for a bug or a scar or an errant penmark. Whatever it was, she didn’t like it. But she was old and that was her right.

            How can we, as a society, make our elders work at gas stations? I wondered. There is nothing sadder than veiny hands fumbling with a touchscreen cash register, saggy skin under a corporate polo uniform. She had a golden cross necklace around her neck and was older than my mother, who was now dead.

            “Have a blessed day, hun,” said the attendant.

            “You too,” I said, regretfully, as I ambled out the door. I was in no state to be handing out blessings. Maybe a curse. They thought it was an accident, with my mother, but they hadn’t ruled out suicide, the detective told me.

            I could feel the boogers drying up in my nose, growing sharp, as I sat back down in the passenger seat.

            “It’s not so different from where you’re from,” I said to Eden once we were driving again. “You know, farms, schools, strip malls.”

            “Yeah but there’s green in New England, Harper. My parents grow broccoli and beets and raise goats. Your parents grow alfalfa to send to China and have a hundred miserable cattle roasting in the sun.” It was true. She’d grown up learning to harvest crops and a quaint, unshakable sense of meaning from the land. I’d grown up wearing fake nails in high school that never touched dirt. My dad, who died long before my mother, liked to joke that our family business wasn’t farming but shipping and receiving.

            “Grew alfalfa,” I corrected her, my voice spiteful, playing the snappy orphan. Eden smiled at me as if I were one of those stupid chihuahuas that barks at bicycles and stray flip flops. She hated me but also she loved hating me which is a kind of love.

            “I mean, the alfalfa is still growing,” she said. “The cattle are still standing there in a field. Just because your parents are dead that doesn’t make the crops fall out by the roots. We’re going to have a lot of work to do.”

            This was the plan: we'd quit our shit jobs, leave our rent-destabilized apartment in the city, and move back to the house I’d inherited. Live off my humble cash inheritance as we fixed it up, sold the cattle, turned the cash crops into some kind of queer-owned organic CSA for the newly ruralized, work-from-home, Patagonia fleece families. Then we’d sell it all.

            It wasn’t a good plan, but a good plan is always a Ponzi scheme or a cryptocurrency.

            “How about a podcast,” I said to Eden, who was gripping the wheel with both hands like a woman on the edge. It was increasingly important to let these other voices into our relationship to offset the tension and the silence. We still had forty-five minutes to go. I tapped play. I took the lighter from my pocket and flipped it around anxiously. Eden tolerated my smoking habit, in these difficult times, but not in the car. I flicked the metal wheel and the flame shot up. My own private aquifer of gasoline.

            The host’s voice streamed through the speakers, squeaky and self-assured and truly unforgivable. Air conditioning bombarded my bare arms. We passed my old high school and I felt nothing but dread as I watched white children kick a ball on a field. Somewhere nearby my mother’s corpse staved off rot with chemicals. So many empty liquor bottles lined the highway. Cows, etcetera.

***

            When I woke up the next morning I discovered that someone had torn down my childhood home and made an exact replica in its place. The bed sagged in all the right places, but it didn’t support me like I remembered. The yellow dawn light came through the window, casting the silhouette of the back yard sycamore on the wall. But the shadow had grown unfamiliar.

            Eden was already awake. Downstairs, in the uncanny kitchen, she held a cup of coffee and wore her hearty leather boots laced up. I looked down at my own white slip-on sneakers and they looked like children’s shoes. I poured water from the kettle into a mug. It was no longer hot. The chasm between us could be measured in footwear and by the length of time it takes boiling water to cool.

            “You’re up,” Eden said. She loved to emphasize the obvious. She was a woman of emphasis. I was vague. I shook instant coffee grains from the plastic container into the mug and swirled it around badly, splashing nearly half the liquid onto the counter.

            “This doesn’t feel like my house,” I said, groggily, as I opened the fridge. The milk and cabbage and leftover pasta looked sickly under the harsh fridge light. No one had been by to clean it out after the funeral. Was that my job?

            “Well get used to it,” she quipped, using my own words against me. All the times I’d been snarky to her and I had only made her more powerful.

            “I thought I would feel more nostalgia with my parents dead. But I feel nothing. It’s just a bunch of stuff.”

            “A bunch of weird stuff,” Eden said, nodding in the direction of the hand scythe that hung from a hook in the wall.

            “Yeah, mom got into some cottage core shit near the end. For a while there she put up—”

            “Let’s get going,” Eden said, cutting me off. “We should go survey the farm equipment that isn’t on display, see what we’re working with here.” Emphasis: business. But she was right. We had quit our jobs and we desperately needed to convert what was left of my parents’ life into fungible cash. I nodded and tucked my unfinished sentence away with all the others.

            I sipped my lukewarm coffee as we walked along the dusty driveway past the field where the cows were grazing. I recognized one of them, a large white heifer with a black spot in the shape of a kettle on her side.

            “Hey old Betsy,” I called. The cow looked over with a heavy, cud-chewing expression, unconvinced. The barn rose up from the landscape before us, red and ugly as a blister.

            We hadn’t talked about it, the way my mother died in a fire in the barn. It was possible that we could get away with never talking about it, like we did with sex and Eden’s shitty personality and the deep wells of sorrow that lived under my eyes. But it was impossible to ignore the burn marks.

            They crept up the inside of the barn all along the back wall. I saw faces, snouts, dancing figures in the scorched wood. I thought of Goya’s Black Paintings that he left on his own walls as he descended towards death. That one of Saturn devouring his son. The strange angle of the god’s hips, the feverish look in his eyes. The detective hadn’t ruled out suicide, but what about filial cannibalism?

            I walked up to the ashy dirt near the wall, where my mother’s body would have been. Were her bones still hot when they found her? Do bones burn?

            “I guess she did a lot of the work for us.” Eden said from behind me. I turned around and saw what I’d missed while staring at the walls. All of the equipment was laid out and organized into neat rows. Several wide harrows and push cultivators were grouped together along with an ancient oxcart and a wooden yoke that hadn’t seen use since my great grandparent’s time. Then a row of rakes, hoes, spades, and forks lined up like teeth. All around were tiny piles of trowels, hay hooks, knives, work gloves, wire, screws, cans, ropes.

            Eden surveyed the equipment with a frown. She picked up an old spade, the wooden rod splintered and yellowed, and she banged it against her heavy boot. She nodded, as if she’d gleaned some information from the act.

            I hadn’t told Eden about the messages from my mom.

            “I finally found a way to get rid of it.” She’d texted me the day of the fire.

            “Rid of what?” I’d asked.

            “I’ll explain later. Don’t come.”

            I’d been planning to visit her that weekend. She often sent cryptic texts like this to cancel plans. I didn’t respond. When I heard from the police the next day, I thought I understood. She’d finally found a way to get rid of her life. She’d never been a happy woman. It’s no surprise she’d try to take the barn and all the tools with her. She hated the farm.

            We walked outside to the old Massey Ferguson tractor that sat in the overgrown cheatgrass, ketchup red and rusted to shit.

            “Look at this old lunk,” Eden said, spade still in hand.

            “You mean Mister Ferguson?” That’s what we always called the old Massie Ferguson tractor that had been in the family for three generations. “He’s no lunk.”

            I hopped up onto the sun worn leather seat. For the first time since arriving I felt that swampy pull of nostalgia. When I was young, Dad would affix an ancient oxcart to the back of the machine and he’d pull mom and I around the yard and mom would drink white wine from a mason jar and dad would say “whoa there” and “easy now” as if Mister Ferguson were a horse.

            The keys were in the ignition. I gave a twist but the engine didn’t jump to life or even sputter impotently. Eden opened the fuel tank and banged the fender with the spade. She stared into the cluster of metal parts that made up the engine, then commanded me to turn the key again. Nothing.

            “Carburetor looks fine. It’s sparking. It’s probably the magneto coil.”

            “Magneto? Like the—”

            “Honestly,” Eden continued, cocking an eye, “it’s probably not worth fixing.”

            “You want to sell Mister Ferguson?” I asked in a higher pitch than I’d intended.

            “Sell it!” She laughed. “We might have to pay just to give it to the junkyard.”

            “You want to just throw away a perfectly good tractor?” I was trying to sound impudent but there was a crack in my voice and feebleness poured out of it. “Can’t we like, do something else?”

            “What like recycle it? Sure, just plop it in the blue bin with the soda cans.”

            “No, goddamnit, I just mean—uhg—” I was losing my solidity, like a corn flake in a bowl of milk. It was so easy to go soggy with Eden, but I held myself together.

            “I just mean that we could at least, I don’t know, try to sell it for parts or, like, give it away. Post something on Craigslist.”

            “Okay. Sure. You do whatev—gopher!”

            I looked just in time to see Eden drive the burnt out handle down with swift and mighty force. The metal head of the spade cut into the rodent’s brown fur. The blow severed something in the gopher’s spine. It didn’t squeal or squirm. Pink puffy stuff sprouted from its back, like insulation foam.

            “Don’t scream. You’re screaming,” Eden screamed at me. I closed my mouth but still I was screaming on the inside.

            “These fuckers will dig up the entire farm if you don’t control them,” Eden said. “Lucky we caught a slow one.” She leaned on the shovel in an all-in-a-day’s-work sort of way. Is she always right or always wrong? I wondered.

            I stooped down to examine the controlled gopher. Its long yellow teeth and black eyes still glossed with the leftover sheen of life. I’d heard my parents gripe about gophers but they’d never murdered them. Or had they? I realize that I don’t really know how my parents worked.

            I could have requested that Eden refrain from killing in front of me during this difficult time or I could have said this was all a very bad idea but I was stupefied. All I could think about was how they’d recovered a small scrap of paper from my mother’s charred hand. It had been bunched tightly in her palm, protected from the fire by epidermis and sweat and fingernails. It was the deed to the farm.

***

            That night, after Eden went to bed, I took the rum and the Diet Coke and the laptop out to the front porch. I lit a cigarette.

            I contemplated the tattoo on my finger as I smoked. The line was supposed to be exactly one inch. I’d been studying architecture and I thought it would be clever to have a built-in ruler on my finger for drafting. But within a month, the line had shrunk to five-sixths of an inch and I had switched majors. Then I graduated and couldn’t find a job in my field and I met Eden and Eden murdered a gopher.

            Now the tattoo just reminded me that mistakes come in a straight line, one after the other. All I had to do was connect the dots.

            I stepped on the spent cigarette with my weak little shoe. I opened the computer to make a post about the tractor on Craigslist. “Tractor for parts $500 obo”. Nothing fancy. I uploaded a photo I’d taken earlier. But it asked for a model number. I browsed the tractor forums for a few minutes, looking for an answer. The worldwide cabal of tractor freaks had nothing for me.

            Stumped, I lit another cigarette.

            A desert chill had descended and I wrapped myself tight in a scratchy porch blanket. A cow mooed in the distance. The wind kicked up and I heard a shutter slap. My chest tightened, spooked, though I knew the house wasn’t haunted. It had been built to resemble the idea of a nineteenth century Victorian farmhouse but it had more in common with a Lego piece than a mud brick. Spirits can’t take up residence in such synthetic environments. If my parents were ghosts they’d have split for Reno long ago.

            I took another slug of rum and Diet. But maybe I’m the ghost, I thought. Maybe it’s the descendants and not the ancestors that haunt a house. Maybe inheritance is the specter. Didn’t Marx say something about zombie capitalism? Drinking and smoking and thinking like an undergraduate are some of my hobbies.

            I knew I was distracting myself from the two paths that laid before me: I could put the cap on the soda bottle, go inside, and crawl into bed without posting the classified, a failure. Or, I could go out by the barn where my mom died and find that model number like a fucking hero.

            After a long pull of rotgut aspartame I stood up and started walking towards the tractor and the barn. I noticed the stars and cricketsong and swooshing of dry, unharvested alfalfa creating the nightworld. Everything was made more beautiful by my decisiveness.

            “Well, well, well Mister Ferguson,” I drawled as I approached the red giant. It was so heavy and calm, the way I imagined an elephant to be.

            “Let’s see if we can find out who you really are.” I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight. The harsh, clinical lighting left nothing obscured. I felt perverted, poking around and staring at the bare metal components, checking all the crevices.

            There it was. A metal plate mounted near some silver pipe. Model MF 65.

            “Gotcha bitch!” I said with drunken flair. It was the most joy I’d felt since we got in the car to drive out here. Then I heard it, right behind me. A cow’s guttural moo. I jumped. My soft stupid fingers loosened and the phone fell, its white light shining up right into my eyes.

            Blinded, I reached down to pick up the phone and felt the wet plunge. Few things are less alike to the touch than the inside of a body and the beveled case of an iPhone 12 Pro Max. I gagged but still managed to grasp the edge of the device. The blood was black as motor oil on my hand.

            I wiped my hand on my pants and pointed the light at the ground and saw the carnage. The gopher was more gruesome than I’d remembered. There was something sprouting up from its corpse, like one of those phallic mushrooms. I leaned in closer and recognized the charred wood of the spade handle poking above the soil about six inches. But that didn’t make sense. Eden had stuck the tool into the ground, but there was no way it had sunk so deep.

            I felt suddenly sober as I reached down and tugged on the handle. With my touch I saw the gopher’s fur shift and a stray fly buzz away. But the handle hardly moved. I yanked at it again and felt its resistance, its depth in the earth. I frantically searched around my feet for something, some clue, unable to believe that it was buried like this, intact, with the metal spade two or three feet deep in the soil. But I found nothing.

            When I turned around to make a wider search, my light shone on a giant white figure. Betsy, just a few steps away. She was watching me. The black spot on her belly, the kettle, was oscillating with her breath. Her ear twitched.

***

            “You left the gate open?”

            “No. I mean yes, sure. Betsy got out somehow. Maybe it was me. But what I’m trying to say—”

            “Did you close it?” It was the next morning. Eden was angrily stirring oatmeal on the stove. Always doing two or more things at once. I stood by the side door. The cottage core scythe hung there on the wall.

            “Yes! Fuck. I put her back and I closed it. But did you hear what I was saying about the spade? It doesn’t make any fucking sense. How did it get buried so—”

            “You were just drunk and imagining things.”

            “Then why don’t we go look at it right now?”

            Eden stopped stirring the oatmeal for a moment as she considered my proposal. Then she said, “Did you post the ad?”

            I had posted the ad. Doing something normal had helped cancel out the strangeness of the buried tool. I’d come back to the house and washed my hands and drank the rest of the Diet Coke and posted the MF 65 tractor on Craigslist. But I wasn’t going to tell Eden that. I was experiencing a moment of hypnotic hungover prescience. The kind where you see your harmful habits for what they are and swear off alcohol forever. But instead I was swearing off Eden and this cursed farm. We’d come out here in a desperate move to make a change, thinking that the problem was location or vocation, when it was clearly relation. I could still taste the aspartame in my throat and my foggy brain felt unhindered, powerfully numb.

            “I’m telling you, it was weird. I’m starting to think this was all a bad idea. Maybe we—”

            “Fucking fuck fuck!” Eden screamed so loud that, even with her back turned to me, it made me jump. “This was your plan! I did this to support you and your grieving process or whatever but now you’re going on about a shovel and—this is about the fucking gopher, huh?” I kept the scythe in the corner of my eye as if it might make a move. Eden was still stirring the oatmeal.

            “No it’s not the gopher!” I said, but I was crying and it was clearly somewhat about the gopher. “It’s just—I’m sorry,” I sputtered, my grit already spent. “I thought I could learn something about my mom and that the farm would be more—I don’t know—I was stupid.”

            “You are fucking stupid.” Eden said. She turned around and her skin flashed the same red as the tractor and I thought for a moment that I saw the scythe in her hand but it was just a wooden spoon that she’d been using to stir. Gelatinous slop slid down towards her hand. She was staring at me with her full attention. One thing at once for once.

            A knock at the door.

            I looked over toward the entryway and by the time I looked back at Eden she was scraping the oatmeal into a bowl, her back to me again, our furious intimacy broken.

            I approached the door. I could see the helmet of blond hair through the glass triangle set in the door.

            I opened. “Hello.”

            “Hi, I was just coming by. I tried to call. About the tractor.” It was true I had posted my phone number and then never checked my phone. He had ruddy cheeks and soft brown eyes and an army green shirt with that logo with the American flag and the old militia muskets that feels somehow fascist but gives the wearer plausible deniability.

            “Oh. Oh yeah. Mister Fer—the tractor. MF 65.”

            “Yeah, you’re selling it?” He had a sort of Mormon way about him, by which I mean he possessed a gentleness that was at odds with his posture and his t-shirt. It confused me and my well worn defense mechanisms. The world is easier to understand when there are no nice men around.

            “Yes. Um. Yeah.” He was looking at me with concern, as if my nose was bleeding.

            “Is this a bad—”

            “No, no. You’re fine.” I said, though it was an awful time. Defense mechanisms: critical failure.

            “Can I, uh, see it?” His hands were in his pockets, like some child in an Andy Griffith production. I thought then that this man has never once considered that humans are a plague on this Earth and that what we’ve done to the orcas—not to mention the frogs and the orangutans and the poor fucked up albatrosses that accidently feed plastic to their babies—is unforgivable. He wore bootcut jeans.

            “Yes,” I said. “It’s just out by the barn. But how did you know where to go? I didn’t post an address in the ad.” Did I?

            “Oh yeah,” he gave a shy smile. “Sorry to barge in. Your Harper, right? Aren’t too many people posting out here and I sometimes been over to help your folks and seen the tractor. Chris?” He said his name as a question and glanced at me quickly, expectant, then turned his eyes down. “We went to school together.”

            “Right! Yes.” Not right. No. I did not remember him but Chris? Anyone could be a Chris. “Follow me!” I beckoned, too loudly, hoping to avoid any talk of school. I glanced back towards the kitchen before stepping out the door and saw Eden’s elbows moving vengefully as she scrubbed the oatmeal pot in the sink. The man followed me.

            “You’re the—I heard about—sorry about your mom.”

            “Yeah, it’s too bad,” I said rotely, without feeling. Chris was quiet. We passed his truck. It was bulbous, botoxed. I felt an inappropriate amount of hatred for the vehicle. I knew I was judging Chris in order to avoid some crucial introspection but I had no desire to untangle all that.

            When we got near the tractor I tried not to stare at the gopher and the shovel handle on the ground but of course I did. The flies hopped on and off the corpse and flew around it in quick, lopsided circles. The handle of the spade was still there but it was all quite banal in the daylight. Chris didn’t even look down as he walked right over the mess in sensible boots.

            “Where’s the seat?” He asked. I looked up from the scene of death and saw that the tractor seat was missing. It was there yesterday when I took the photo. Who steals a tractor seat?

            “Weird.” I said, unhelpfully, pretending it was normal enough. But I looked back at that shovel in the gopher and I felt what I can only describe as a bad vibe enveloping me.

            “It doesn’t matter,” Chris was quick to reassure me. “It’s a project either way. I could probably get it on a flatbed tomorrow if that’s okay. Say, two hundred bucks?”

            “Sure,” I said, though I was not sure at all. Tomorrow? Wasn’t I leaving?

            “Alright,” Chris said. He put his hands in his pockets again, as if waiting for me to perform some dealmaking etiquette. I had nothing.

            “Um, good deal,” I said feebly. I needed to get back to the house.

            “You know, your mom was trying to sell this place to my folks,” said Chris, oblivious to my rapid heartbeat. “Dead cheap price but still my pop needed financing.”

            “Hmmm,” I said, but I was looking at the gopher again. The face was deconstructed, the hide slipping away from the skull, one eye looking wildly at the sky, the other gone, pounded into the earth by the spade.

            “She should have just sold it on the open market. Could have gotten out good with prices these days,” Chris continued, his hands now out of his pockets, animating deals that could have been. But I was slowly stepping away from him and from the corpse. “Singleton got seven fifty just for the land. No septic or anything. Your mom could’ve gotten at least that.”

            “My mom?” I said, not fully processing what he’d been saying.

            “Yeah, she could've done well for herself.”

            “Tomorrow then,” I said, as I began walking in earnest away from the gopher, the tractor, the barn. The nice man, Chris, smiled at me sadly. Sad for the deals not made, for the hysteria of me and my mother and my kind. But he was right. My mother should have just sold it. Why hadn’t she left? Why haven’t I left? I finally found a way to get rid of it.

            Chris gave me a little wave and walked over to his truck and I looked back to the house and that’s when I noticed that my car had disappeared.

***

            There is an explanation for everything, I thought as I ran back to the house. Eden just went to pick up eggs. My mother died in an accidental barn fire. Some hooligans took the seat from the tractor and buried the spade as a prank. I pretended it wasn’t terror, but a slight chill, which was creeping up the moles on my back, one by one.

            I walked into the kitchen. The room smelled like linoleum and rancid olive oil. The oatmeal pot was drying on the rack. The cottage core scythe hung on the wall. But sitting on the table was a note, scribbled on the back of a Christmas card that had been magneted to the fridge.

            “It was just a fucking gopher. This whole thing was a bad idea. —E”

            She stole my fucking car. Our fucking car. The fucking car that had her mother’s name on the title but that I always took to the mechanic. What a perfect nemesis Eden was. With a fury that I normally reserved for politicians and people who are beating me in cards, I grabbed the cottage core scythe from the wall and slammed it into the table, aiming for Eden’s note. I missed, but still the blade stuck into the wood with a satisfying thunk. I took a deep breath and then I went and packed all of my things.

            I sat back at the table and lit a cigarette. There were no Ubers within a two hundred mile radius. All of my friends were in a city eighteen hours away. I could rummage around for a neighbor’s number, explain that my girlfriend abandoned me because I was mad that she murdered a gopher and now I needed a ride to the city. I could try to walk to the closest Family Dollar and end up dying of heat exposure in some cowfield. Listing bad options is another one of my hobbies. I put out my cigarette on Eden’s note.

            It occurred to me that this is when you call a friend or a mother to help you figure out your next steps. I glanced over at the empty rum bottle on the counter.

            Tomorrow it is. I’d wait for Chris to come, get the two hundred cash, and catch a ride with him into town and then get a Greyhound. I could sell the house over Zoom or whatever. People did that.

            I lit another cigarette, hoping that my smoke would ward away the malevolence that lurked about. I tried not to think about the barn and the gopher and spade. There is an explanation for everything. The phrase was like a chant in the back of my mind. But I knew I stood no chance against my own brain when it was fully operational.

            I went to the oaken writing desk with a cover and a keyhole where I knew my mother often stashed her vodka. It wasn’t locked. Inside were two barren bottles and one full bottle. Always empty or full for her. I opened it and blessed mom for her preparedness.

            There were a bunch of papers piled incoherently in the desk. I sifted through them lazily as I sipped. Old checks, a jury summons, a few personal letters from my aunts. Below all this I found a vintage calculator with the strip of paper that spits out whatever you type. Then there was the manual for the MF 65. My name was written on the cover in red marker.

            There is, for everything, an explanation. Harper is my mother’s maiden name. You could call this farm Harper Farm, if you wanted to. Some people did. I put the manual aside to give to Chris.

            Beneath the manual I saw the heavy printed script of an official document. Closer examination showed that it was a property transfer deed from 1986, the year after my mom inherited the farm. It had another name on it, Frank Jessop, who was a well known man about town who wore his pants high up on his waist. The deed was unsigned. So she’d been trying to sell the farm since she got it, since before dad died. When I picked up the deed I eyed more papers below.

            Another transfer deed, this one with a different name that I didn’t recognize. Below that, another. And more. Eleven in all, each with a different name and date. All of them unsigned.

            One of the deeds had writing in the margin. My mother’s hurried hand. “It won’t let me get rid of it!”

            I threw the deeds down, refusing to become ensnared in whatever real estate trap my mother had fallen into. Several of the papers wafted to the floor and I couldn’t help but see the diagram drawn crudely on the back of one of them. I recognized the layout of the barn, the little piles of tools represented as little scribbles, even the tractor drawn as a rectangle. Near the back wall where my mother’s body had been found was an X. Next to the X, a word: sacrifice.

            There is, of course, an explanation for everything. All phenomena can be explained with the dutiful application of knowledge and the scientific process. An explanation always presents itself, in time. Please, allow me to explain. My mother was crazy.

***

            I woke up to a sound in the middle of the night. A monsoon front had drawn up from some gulf in the night, thickening the world. Everything was lubricated. My legs slid against each under the sheets like a couple of sauteed mushrooms. Rancid sweat pilled up on my forehead. My pits and crotch were unspeakable briny hollows.

            The sound again. From the open window. A labored mooing, almost like a donkey’s wheezing hee-haw. I lifted my head from the moist pocket of the pillow to peek through the window and realized I was still drunk.

            Through the window was a moonless night, the insects and leaves and distant highway quieted by the wet air. But not the mooing, which came again, calling my eye down to the white blob of Betsy. She was out again, somehow. Not by the barn this time but here, at the house, right below the window.

            I unstuck myself from the bed and moved to the door, where I paused to listen. Another bellow came, strained and thin. She is sick, I thought. Should I call a large animal veterinarian? Best to get her back in the enclosure either way. I made a pit stop in the kitchen for a nip at the bottle. I stared at the scythe, stuck in the table, and wondered if I should bring it with me for protection. From who? Betsy? I went out the door empty handed.

            “Shhhhhh. There there Betsy,” I called as I crept towards her, my hand held out in a gesture of benevolence. She was drooling heavily and her eyes reflected the sickly yellow light of the porch lamp. Is this how I get some novel bovine flu? I wondered. But I’ve always been brave or maybe stupid when it comes to engaging with animals so I stepped forward.

            When my hand touched her neck and I felt the misty fur she let out another moo, this one weak, sputtering out into a breathy moan.

            “Let’s get you back through the gate,” I said as I gently pushed her. She wouldn’t move. “What’s wrong?” I asked, looking into her yellow eyes. I stroked her neck and rubbed her wide gut and that’s where I felt it.

            A ridge, a border. There was bristly fur and then a lip, and beyond that Betsy’s belly turned hot and smooth.

            I pulled back my hand and the vodka retched in my stomach. I looked up at Betsy’s head, as if she could explain. Her panting had intensified. I crouched and slowly brought my hand back to her. It was the kettle-shaped black splotch. It wasn’t Betsy’s hide at all. It was leather. Old, processed cow in place of fresh, raw cow.

            The missing tractor seat. Somehow, I knew that’s what it was. Did someone sew it onto her like a patch? When I turned the radiant light of my phone on the cow it was undeniable. There were creases where the leather had been folded over the seat and remnants of old stitching. Betsy’s hide was red and puffy where it met the leather splotch.

            My lungs seized. Betsy began to moan again. I couldn’t move her. I couldn’t call a large animal veterinarian. I couldn’t explain this. What I could do is go and get the bottle of vodka and the scythe and go into my room and put a chair against the door handle like I’ve seen in the movies and wait for tomorrow.

            On my bed, I drank and listened to the mooing, calling me down to hell. 

            Don’t come. My mother’s final message to me wasn’t a rejection but a warning.

            After some time the air could hold no more water and so it gave up trying. The rain must have soothed Betsy because she finally quieted.

***

            I was laying in bed and smoking my third to last Marb when the sun rose. For many hours I’d been in a fugueish state, my wet and addled brain working slowly, like the anaerobic bacteria in a swamp, producing a bubble of consciousness here or there.

            As the morning light cut through the window, displaying the silhouette of the sycamore tree, I could see that it was all wrong. Between the shadows of the tree branches was a familiar criss-cross pattern. I stood up and looked through the window and saw that one of the ancient harrows from the barn was enmeshed in the upper portion of the tree, worked into the wood as if the trunk had grown around it. I wasn’t surprised. It wasn’t a matter of understanding anymore, only a matter of escape. I held fast to the scythe with one hand and smoked my second to last cigarette with the other and I waited for Chris.

            It wasn’t long before I heard the faint roar of the many cylindered truck. I ran down the stairs, onto the porch, and out towards the barn. Betsy was nowhere to be seen but I did spot several other cows milling about in their enclosure. Halfway to Chris, my foot landed in a hole and my inadequate shoes did nothing to assist me. I fell hard, landing awkwardly with the scythe in my hand, cutting my abdomen below my left breast.

            “Fucking gophers,” I cursed. “I was on your side!” There was quite a bit of blood coming from the wound but I was numbed by alcohol and that sweet adrenal juice. I stood up and hobbled towards Chris with my bum ankle. He had exited the vehicle and stood with his helmet of hair near the flatbed trailer.

            “Chris!” I called out. He was yelling back at me but I couldn’t hear.

            “Chris! Chris!” I kept calling, my bloody hands held out in front of me.

            “What the heck happened to the tractor?” Those were the words I finally caught in the wind. There was a frenzied, almost rapturous look in his eyes.

            I looked over to Mister Ferguson and he was right. Something had happened. The seat was still gone. But so was the steering wheel and most of the metal parts that made up the engine and one of the back tires. Instinctively, I looked around to see if they were buried with the shovel or sticking out of a cow’s belly.

            “Chris,” I said, searching for eye contact, but his pupils were scattered. Already he was backing away. “It was my mom, Chris. I think. I know it sounds crazy. But—”

            “Are you okay—I don’t think—” He had his phone in one hand. He was dialing a number as he neared his truck.

            “Wait, don’t leave, Chris. She was trying to get rid of it!” I knew it was madness but still the impossible theorem was rising from my throat and I couldn’t stop it from spilling over. “She wanted to sell it but she couldn’t. The farm wouldn’t let her. So she did a spell! She did this ceremony! I found a diagram.”

            “I’m calling—” he said as he brought the phone up to his ear.

            “But Chris. You see? She died when she did the spell. Sacrificed herself to get rid of the farm and it worked! But that’s the problem. Where was it supposed to go? You can’t just get rid of something!” The hint of triumph in my voice shocked me. Was I laughing?

            “It’s one of those laws of the universe, of physics, right? Matter isn’t ever destroyed! Matter lives on!” I said to Chris, almost giddy. “It has to go somewhere. All the little parts of the tractor. The barn, the tools! It’s like those trash cans that say landfill on them to remind you that there is no throwing anything away. You know? It came from somewhere and it has to go—”

            My voice was cut off by Chris's truck door slamming, the cylinders pumping. Pumping? Pumping what? I couldn’t see him through the tinted windows, but the truck looked solid and sure of itself as it skidded away.

            I let myself fall to the ground, adrenal juices depleted. It was nice to stop and just watch the cheatgrass and alfalfa blow in the wind a bit. I took out my last Marb and I lit up. There was great pain in my foot and my torso but I told myself it was just my time to feel pain after mostly not feeling it my whole life.

            As I smoked I noticed an odd new heaviness in one of my forearms. I could see a square outline in my wrist. When I touched it with my tattooed finger it was hard and cool. I knew that if I were to slice the skin open I would see MF 65 engraved on a metal plate. Where else was it supposed to go?

            I looked up and saw that a part of the barn roof was missing. Strewn about me were several half buried farm tools. Betsy and the other other cows were watching me from the pasture. The cows and now the cops coming down the long dirt drive.

            Somewhere below, aquifers of something.

Carl Phillips