The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry Read Free Book Online

when things were really going her way. Despite her late night atop the tower, she had risen early today, awakened by the rumble of Meg’s junk truck. Bless my friend Meg , she thought, and found herself taken aback by her unconscious use of the word bless , but even more so the word friend . She hadn’t used either word in a long, long time.
    The bicycle was clamped into a wind trainer, one of those roller mechanisms that converts a standard bicycle into an exercise bicycle. The trainer in turn had been modified to spin a small pump. A short hose connected a thirty-five-gallon plastic carboy to the pump’s intake valve; the other end of the pump was attached to alonger hose that snaked across the floor and out a small hole in the wall that was stuffed with insulation.
    Carolyn pedaled steadily, her book propped on a rack mounted on the handlebars. Outside, a sign on the pump house door said ACCEPTING NO VISITORS . Carolyn had screwed the sign to the door the day she moved in. The first time Billy saw it, he chuckled, elbowed Harley, and said, “Who’s offering?”
    â€œNice ,” said Harley. “Be nice .”
    Billy grimaced. “That woman has halitosis of the soul.”
    ABOVE ALL AND through it all, Carolyn Sawchuck considered herself A Woman of the People. She had focused on becoming A Woman of the People as a second act after being A Woman of Arts and Letters failed to pan out after four underappreciated (and undersold) books, a pair of Guggenheister awards, a fat curriculum vitae’s worth of grants and fellowships, two poetry chapbooks, and an endowed chair at the state university in Clearwater. Until the abrupt end it was a satisfying academic arc, although even at its apex Carolyn was not the sort of person for whom satisfaction was a natural state.
    It was the vacation home in a Central American expatriate artists’ community that put her on the path to a commoner’s ruin, what with it being burned to the ground by the very same Marxist collective revolutionaries to whom she had given safe harbor and free copies of her recent treatise on “Indigenous Empowerment in a State of Transitory Postmodern Meta-Contextualism.” Wishing to demonstrate her commitment to the cause (and also unload a few boxes of poorly translated and even more poorly selling chapbooks), Carolyn had set up a fund-raiser based on a sparsely attendedpoetry reading and free beer, after which (and it was never clear if this was the result of the free poetry or the free beer) the revolutionaries burned her retreat to the ground, and—essentially—the grant money that had served as a down payment. They also unloaded her iPad on eBay.
    There followed a crash course in the intricacies of the Central American insurance industry, and when the ash and paperwork settled Carolyn was left with a scorched adobe shell and an underwater mortgage that had been of sketchy provenance in the first place.
    It was possible she might have survived this personal setback had she not subsequently suffered a professional setback precipitated by a “think piece” she composed for the literary blog Haute Ignorati in which she impugned a female freelance writer for selling out the sisterhood by penning a style magazine article entitled “Six Sexy Steps to Steamroll Cellulite,” having failed to take into consideration that said female writer was a self-insured single mother who composed her cellulite article on a card table and pawnshop laptop in a one-bedroom apartment overlooking a Shopko loading dock as opposed to on a fresh MacBook in a writing den constructed from sustainable bamboo and tenure.
    It developed that the cellulite scribe was a bit of a bootstraps feminist in her own right, and returned fire. In the ensuing online strafing session, Carolyn was shocked to find herself cast and cornered as a tone-deaf member of the privileged class and in violation of an obscure subsection of the