The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry Read Free Book Online Page A

university speech code, which Carolyn herself had helped compose. The professional conflagration that followed made the Central American incident seem a jolly marshmallow roast by comparison, and when the final facultyreview session concluded, Carolyn found herself endowed with a modest severance package but otherwise hopelessly outcast on all fronts.
    THE PUMP GAVE out a gurgle. Carolyn stopped pedaling, and dismounted. One corner of the small room was taken up by a number of five-gallon buckets. Carolyn selected one, fitted a funnel to the mouth of the carboy, emptied the contents of the bucket within, and returned to pedaling and reading her book.
    CAROLYN DIDN’T ALWAYS read her own books. In fact, she did so infrequently. But when she did read her own books, it was to reassure herself. To reassure herself that it was the outside world that failed to understand. That her poor book sales had no relation to the quality of the content. There was also the idea that the printed pages validated the work. So many talked of writing; she had done it. The fact that her words had languished in small print runs was secondary to the primary fact that she had put her ass in the chair, as she once heard some would-be rough-boy corduroy-blazered creative-writing workshopper say. Half the men in these workshops tended to project a combination of infantile sensitivity coupled with sublimated machismo. The sort of fellow who would be post-coitally teary but secretly hoping the woman would get out of bed and fix a nice snack. Carolyn often countered this image by conjuring up a mental picture of the guilty individual perched atop a pedal-powered monster truck.
    There were those in Swivel who saw Carolyn as a bitter woman, and little she did dispelled this. Publicly she had always maintained that she came to Swivel to live “the simple life,” a pronouncementthat probably did more long-term damage than the burn barrel ruckus, implying as it did that the citizenry were by default de facto simple.
    In truth she was more befuddled than bitter. She had done all the right things, sat on the proper literary panels, carefully doled out career-enhancing book reviews (always reserving the long knives for those outside the winner’s circle and off the foundation board), and right there on the dust jackets and back covers were the testaments—the “blurbs” as they were called in the coarser trades—all these eminent pacesetters testifying to her wisdom and perspicacity and artistic essentiality, and yet, and yet . . . she wound up in a defunct water tower pump house riding a bicycle to nowhere.
    In the wake of losing her position with the university, Carolyn had retreated to Swivel, where the cost of living—if not the tone of living—was more suited to her means, and rented a modest apartment above Reverend Gary’s Church of the Roaring Lamb. It was her intent to simply lay low for a year, do some writing, then begin the reentry process. In the meantime, she took it upon herself to uplift and enhance the citizenry by offering memoir-writing workshops and selling dream catchers on consignment at the gas station.
    The citizenry had proved stubborn in their unreconstructed lack of cultural acquisitivity. In that first year she sold but one dream catcher, and that to a drunken fisherman who mistook it for a musky lure. Glen Jacobson, a local handyman (known also for his skills as an unlicensed plumber and electrician), showed up for the memoir workshop, but he ignored Carolyn’s instruction, insisting instead that she help him edit a sheaf of handwritten limericks stored in a manila folder that smelled of caulk. Carolyn adjudgedthe limericks juvenile and told Glen his first assignment was to find a word that rhymed with misogyny . Punching it into an online rhyming dictionary, Glen found himself recommended to androgyny , which he in turn Googled, and what he saw next made him so nervous he wrote no more, and