Dairy Queen

  But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that he hadn't released all those bad feelings, he'd just passed them right to me. Because it hurt to hear him talk about what his friends had said, how they'd mooed and laughed at me and all. I'd forgotten how much I hadn't liked it until Brian brought it up. It shows why not to apologize: it just makes the other person feel bad. At least it made me feel bad.

  Especially because then I started thinking about that last thing Brian had said, about me being a cow and all. I'd blown it off when he'd first said it when we were fighting. But now I tried to remember, because it obviously bugged him that he'd hurt my feelings. It took some time and some effort, but I did remember. And then I spent the next few weeks wishing that I hadn't. I wished it a lot. I still wish it sometimes, to this day.

  Brian had said I was just like a cow, something about me dying—probably because he'd just seen Joe Namath go off to the slaughterhouse. He'd said I'd go up on a truck to die and I wouldn't even mind. Which was stupid, because people go in ambulances and die in hospitals like Grandpa Warren did. Besides, unlike cows I at least knew what I was doing. I mean, at least I got mad about stuff sometimes. I didn't much like getting up every morning, especially in the winter or when I was really tired, and I sure didn't like having to work every day with Dad breathing down my neck and treating me like an idiot.

  Now that I thought about it, though, what good did it do me, getting mad? Because I sure didn't tell Dad off—which he deserves—or quit. I just kept nodding even though I was about ready to kill him inside and went off to do exactly what he said. Which, I now remembered, Brian had also pointed out in his you-are-a-cow speech. That I did everything without complaining. Well, I was complaining inside, but who would know? My complaining inside just made me feel a little better. It kind of covered up—well, it had covered it up until now—how much I did what Dad wanted. Covered it up the way that frosting kind of covers up a bad cake, makes it go down easier. I just did what my parents told me, and my coaches, and Amber, and Smut, even. If Smut wanted to run back to the barn, I'd run even if I didn't feel like it, most of the time. I was nothing more than a cow on two legs.

  Heck, maybe cows get mad too. I've seen cows get so mad they bust a fence or something, although that's rare. But maybe all day long they're seething inside and you just can't tell. They just keep getting milked and chewing their cud and having babies because they just don't know any different. Don't know any way to stop. Maybe they don't even like silage but they eat it anyway because that's all there is. I don't like Dad's food but I force it down or else I'd starve. If it was between that and starving, I'd probably eat silage for that matter, and act just like the cows do. I wouldn't get mad so anyone could see.

  I sure didn't like thinking these thoughts, let me tell you. But every time I tried to stop they'd just come back into my head a different way, the way that Smut when you put her outside sometimes comes right back in through another door.

  When I got in from evening milking Mom was at the kitchen table doing paperwork. After I'd eaten a bit and drunk about a gallon of milk, she looked up. "This afternoon I ran into Mary Stolze." Meaning the English teacher who flunked me.

  I'd just been thinking that I couldn't possibly feel any worse and—BAM—now I did.

  "She's real concerned about how you're going to manage this fall," Mom continued. "She still thinks you can finish some of the work you didn't turn in."

  "So on top of everything else I'm doing, I've got to write a whole bunch of stupid papers?" I couldn't believe it. Those stupid English papers. Why of all nights did Mom have to bring them up now? Here I was trying to figure out what the whole point of my life was. The last thing I needed was to have to write a stupid paper on Hamlet.

  "Honey, you won't be able to graduate without that class."

  I kept eating, my head down. Mom kept talking but I didn't say anything else because that's what we Schwenks do. If there's a problem or something, instead of solving it or anything, we just stop talking. Just like cows.

  10. Wash Day

  The fact is, I wasn't mad at Brian for what he'd said. It's like when someone breaks it to you that there's no such thing as Santa. It stinks, but hey, you've got to know sometime. You can't be thirty years old or something and still sitting up Christmas Eve waiting. You've got to learn sometime that the world sucks. And I'd just learned it.

  Still, I sure wasn't interested in seeing Brian any time soon. But the next morning he pulled into the yard just as we were finishing our amazingly delicious burned pancakes and took this huge complicated thing out of the back of his Cherokee. So of course we had to go out and see what he was doing.

  "That's a power washer," Dad said. I knew he wouldn't like it.

  "I thought this might help with the barn cleaning," Brian explained. "Sir."

  "Hmph. It makes a hell of a racket. D.J., you better move the calves outside."

  Well. That was about the biggest shock of my life, Dad agreeing like that. So of course because I always do what Dad says, I went and moved the calves out to the garden, which isn't a garden anymore but it's still fenced in, and Brian went to work with extension cords and hoses as Dad shuffled around with his walker, poking his nose into everything. Then, thank God, Dad and Curtis went off to Dad's physical therapy, because if Dad spent all morning nagging at Brian I would have died.

  After his operation Dad of course couldn't drive, and Mom worked and even though I had a temp permit that let me drive him I had this little thing called a farm to work on, so it ended up that Curtis had to drive Dad around. At least Dad didn't beat up on him too much. That's one advantage to not talking. After a while people stop talking back.

  I guess it was kind of a shock to Brian though, seeing that. His jaw just about hit the ground. "Your brother's like fourteen years old! What are they doing?"

  "He turned thirteen last month." It was kind of fun, being matter-of-fact when Brian was so goggle-eyed. "They're just going to PT."

  "But he doesn't even have a license!"

  "It's a farm—he's driven for years. Besides, who's going to stop him? He's six feet tall."

  "Jeez," Brian said under his breath. "Your family is so different."

  "Duh." I didn't say that to be funny or anything, I was just pointing out the obvious. But we both laughed anyway.

  ***

  Brian did a good job with the power washing; I have to give him that. He got all decked out in a raincoat and rain pants and big waterproof boots and went right to work spraying down the walls. It was like a fire hose just knocking all that dried-up gunk right off. In about ten seconds he got all the cobwebs and dirt off the windows better than I could have in an hour. Water sprayed everywhere, all over the ceiling and floor and his raincoat and the sawdust bedding in the stalls, which frankly needed to be replaced anyway. So I went to work shoveling all the bedding into the manure gutter, and running the gutter's conveyor belt to get all that waste into the manure cart, and basically doing the hard work while Brian just stood there like a kid with a new water gun.

  "You want to try?" he yelled over the noise.

  "I'd probably break it." Which I immediately regretted but it was too late because he shrugged and went back to his spraying. He even went at the big fans until they were brand-new clean, and I turned them on even though we might get electrocuted but we didn't, and they started drying everything out. And in a couple hours that barn looked better than it had in years. Except for the fact that most of the paint was gone now too, and in lots of spots you could see the actual stone from when the barn walls were built a million years ago by my great-great-grandfather.

  Brian stripped off his raincoat, and it occurred to me that it wasn't just water soaking his T-shirt. He'd worked pretty hard. He packed the power washer back into his Cherokee while I drove the manure cart to the pit over the hill, little white paint chips floating on top. I sure hope that paint chips work as fertilizer because that's what they were about to become.

  W
hen I got back Brian was inside with Dad and Curtis, having lunch.

  "What do you want to drink, son?" Dad asked him.

  "We've got milk," I offered, which is a really old joke in our family because of course there's a 1,000-gallon tank in the milk house waiting for the milk tanker to come pick up the milk.

  Brian cracked up, I guess because milk jokes were still kind of new for him.

  Then I caught Curtis watching me. The expression on Curtis's face—well, he's the only person I joke with in the kitchen these days, and he didn't like me joking with someone else too much. And that one second of good mood I'd had laughing with Brian went right out the window. So we just ate. Brian said he could taste the horseradish in the sandwiches, which made Dad puff up like a rooster he was so pleased, but Curtis and I just stared at our food and forced it down.

  After lunch Dad insisted on coming out to the barn with the new cane the PT lady had given him because he didn't need a walker anymore, which meant we moved about three feet an hour, and then once we got there you could see big puddles the fans hadn't dried out yet, and even though I figured Dad knew about canes and wet floors it still made me a little nervous. Not to mention him glaring at everything like this was a beauty contest or something.

  "Needs paint" was all he said. Thank you too, Dad. He eyeballed Brian: "You know anything about painting, at least?"

  "Um, what? I'm painting?" Brian looked blindsided.

  "Jimmy Ott sent you over to work. Right, D.J.?"

  God, Dad can be such a jerk. What was I supposed to say? That Brian didn't have to paint because he was only here for a week of preseason training? I'd cut off my arm before I said that. So I shrugged because I didn't know what else to do.

  "Darn right," Dad added to himself. He inched his way back to the house, stomping that cane down each time like he was working a pile driver.

  I turned to Brian. "You don't have to paint, you know."

  "Aw, I probably should. If Jimmy Ott found out, I'd be in trouble with him all over again." He didn't look too happy about it, though.

  I felt so bad that we messed around in the toolshed for a long time trying to find paint that was still, you know, liquid, and then because the barn was still too damp to paint we went running. It was cooler today at least, so it didn't feel so awful.

  "I hope it's okay," Brian offered at one point, "me bringing the power washer over, after you told me not to and all."

  "Sure. It was great."

  "Jimmy said it would be okay. I was..." He grinned sheepishly. "I was complaining, you know, about how you wouldn't listen to anything I said about stuff like power washing. And Jimmy said not to take it personally because you didn't know anything about machinery less than forty years old. You probably didn't know what a power washer was."

  I guess I could have gotten mad, but it was pretty funny. I grinned back.

  Just then Mom passed us in her Caravan, looking a little surprised to see us out there on the road jogging away. I tried to figure out something to say about that but I couldn't come up with anything. Bringing up something stupid like the Vikings draft picks probably wouldn't work, seeing as Brian follows Green Bay. We couldn't really talk about training because it'd be like talking about breathing or something—we were already talking it to death. Maybe I could ask how truck sales were going? No, that would be the stupidest thing of all—

  "You know," Brian said all of a sudden, spooking me, "I like running with you."

  "Oh."

  "When you don't feel like talking, you don't talk. That's pretty cool."

  We ran the rest of the way without saying anything else, me wondering the whole time if he'd said that not talking in general was cool, or that I was.

  ***

  "So," Mom said at dinner in her fake casual way, "you're running with Brian?"

  "Uh-huh." I polished off a couple pints of water.

  "What's he doing running?" Mom asked.

  "Training for football." Which was true.

  "How come you're running with him?"

  "Because he doesn't run fast enough." Which was also true.

  "Well, that's awfully thoughtful of you," said Mom.

  Whew. I didn't have to lie. I'm not too good at lying. And Mom, well, I don't know if she thought I was some kind of Good Samaritan or she was just too tired to bring it up, but she didn't mention that F or my English papers or anything like that. So that was good too.

  I didn't realize until I was in bed that night that I hadn't thought one bit all day about being a cow, I guess because I'd been so busy. And I didn't think about it in bed either if you want to know the truth, because about three seconds after remembering the cow stuff I was asleep. You know that expression "fall asleep"? That's what it felt like. Like I was a plank that someone let go of and I just fell smack into this dark warm place where I didn't think or move all night, and that was just about the best thing ever.

  11. Training

  Brian and I sort of settled into a schedule. He'd show up after breakfast and head into the barn with me, doing weights or sit-ups and jumps and stuff while I painted. Then he'd paint too while we waited for Dad and Curtis to leave for PT or food shopping or whatever, and then we'd really go to work.

  The problem was that the weather was too good. Every day came up blue-sky sunny, and you could see on the Weather Channel—which Dad keeps on all day because weather's so important to farming—that it was going to be blue-sky sunny for days. So because there wasn't any rain to worry about, Dad announced on Wednesday morning that it was time to mow the clover. Which meant me mow the clover. Which meant me mowing and then kicking it the next morning so the other side dries, and rolling it the next morning so the dew burns off, and then baling and bringing all the bales in just like hay. It was basically the rest of my week. Super.

  Coming back from mowing, though, I passed the heifer field and that gave me an idea, and then once I got to the yard that idea got even better because there was Curtis coming out of the house in his good shirt and everything to go to the dentist. He loves going to the dentist, which is the weirdest thing I've ever heard. We used to tease him all the time about it when we were kids. So he and Dad went off and I raced into the barn to find Brian rolling paint on the walls like he'd been stuck doing it for a million years, and I said, "Come on!" and off we went to visit the heifers.

  The heifer field is about the prettiest spot on our whole farm. You can see for miles, the hills all patterned with hay and corn and pasture until they fade away into the sky. I climbed the fence and walked around, the heifers following me because they don't have anything else to do. I found that nice flat spot near the middle, and I stood there with my hands on my hips with the heifers all gathered around like they were waiting for me to make a speech.

  Brian angled over, not all that comfortable around cows yet. Just because they're dumb doesn't make up for the fact that as heifers, or yearlings even, they're still pretty big.

  "Yup. This is a field all right," he said.

  "This is where Win and Bill used to practice. And me, when they couldn't get anyone else."

  "This?" Brian was amazed. "But what about that ... stuff?" Meaning the cowpies.

  "Aw, jumping them teaches you footwork. You want to try it out?"

  Trying to look all trainerlike, I whipped out the football I'd brought along. Brian looked like he didn't want to try it one teeny bit, but I guess he figured he didn't have much choice, seeing as it was this or painting. So he sighed and held out his hands, and I tossed it to him as best I could, and we started passing.

  I made it really easy for him and stood in the middle of the field so he could work on his aim, which sucked. He'd throw the nicest little pass you've ever seen, and it would go sailing ten feet to my left and land with a little thunk and spook the heifers. Smut of course thought we were doing this all for her, and she was just about in heaven.

  Every time Brian missed he'd blame something—the heifers or the wind or Smut distracting him.

/>   "Stop it," I said. "That doesn't help."

  "If it weren't for the stupid cow poop everywhere—"

  "Ignore it. Just try again. And just—just concentrate."

  It was hard. I've never been a coach before. You have to tell people what they're doing wrong without getting them all demoralized. I must have said ten times, "That was perfect. But try it this way..." It was extra hard because when I tried to point out his screwups he'd start complaining about why it wasn't his fault.

  "So what!" I finally snapped. "You think there aren't distractions in a game?"

  "This isn't a game. This is a cow field. In a game—"

  "I've seen your games. You think your receivers like being chewed out for your mistakes?"

  Brian tossed down the football and headed off the field.

  I was happy to see him leave. What a whiner.

  He was almost to the gate before I remembered that we only had three more days. Besides, he'd apologized to me on Monday, for something a lot worse than what I'd just said.

  I took a deep breath. "Brian! I'm sorry."

  He looked back at me.

  "Come on. We promised Jimmy Ott a week. It's just until Friday."

  "You know," he said, "it's not your job to bust me. It's your job to help."

  I couldn't help grinning. "You mean Jimmy doesn't bust you?"

  "Yeah! And do you see me standing out here with him?"

  So we got back into a groove and he listened to me just a little bit more, a fraction of an inch more, when I told him he was standing wrong. Still, we got along okay. We kept saying "Just till Friday" whenever things got tense, like a little cheer almost. It made it bearable, knowing it wouldn't be forever, Brian so sore from all his weights and throwing and stuff, and me sore too from painting and our jogging in the afternoons, and both of us biting our tongues not to make a crack that would ruin everything. Just till Friday.