A Rhinestone Button (18 page)

Job staggered from the house, Lilith calling after him, and got in his truck and sped off. He wondered what day of the week it was. Dr. Mary Taylor was only in her Godsfinger
office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and only in the mornings. She was back in her Leduc office the rest of the week.

Job parked his truck in front of the doctor’s office. As he got out of the truck he felt faint and had to hold on to the box to steady himself. Steinke walked by and, not looking him in the eye as he passed, muttered, “Zipper.” For a brief, horrifying moment, Job thought Steinke knew, everyone knew, about the time he and Will zippered their sleeping bags together. But then he saw that the zipper of his jeans was undone. When he zipped, he found his hands were shaking and there was a gloss of sweat on the palms. He felt his heart jerk against his throat and thought he might vomit as he faltered into the doctor’s office.

“I need to see Dr. Taylor.” The receptionist was a plump woman in a crisp, pink medics tunic, the kind he saw in the Sears catalogue. He didn’t know her. Dr. Taylor brought her receptionists from Leduc. They seemed to change from visit to visit. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“I’m sick.” He started for the doctor’s office door.

“You can’t just barge in.”

“Is she with someone?”

“No. But that’s not how it’s done.”

Job pushed on anyway, afraid that if he stopped he would collapse on the floor or vomit at any moment. Dr. Taylor stood when Job opened the door and waved off her receptionist, who closed the door behind her. The doctor was in her late fifties, petite, sun-lined and freckled.

Job explained his symptoms through gasping breaths but could not seem to get her to understand the severity of his plight. The smile on her face. “I feel like I’m going to die,” Job said.

“Sounds like anxiety to me.” She leaned on her desk, across from Job. “Classic symptoms. I know it feels scary. But it’ll pass. You been under some tension recently? Worrying about anything?”

Job waved his hand in the air; he couldn’t think where to start. But felt the breathlessness, the racing heart calming, now that he had an explanation.

“You know how many times you’ve been to see me over the last year?”

“No.”

“Eleven times. Headaches, backaches, stomach aches. Do you know what that says to me?”

“I’m a hypochondriac?”

“It says you need some fun, some relaxation. Take a vacation. Any place other than Godsfinger. You need to get out more. Or maybe, more to the point, you’ve got to find yourself a woman you really like. Get close, you know. A little intimacy goes a long way. A woman would do you a lot of good.”

“I’ve never been, you know, intimate.”

“Never?”

“A little petting. Once.” Thinking of Liv in the long grass, the cows around them, her hand up his back. Then he remembered Amanda Krumm in his father’s truck. “Twice.”

The doctor patted the air. “Don’t worry about it. Once you get close to a woman, start smooching, biology takes over. Your body knows what to do. It’s hard-wired into you. Then after a while you’ll learn the subtleties. Like a baby learning to walk. We were meant to walk upright. It’s hardwired into us. It just takes a little time to get the hang of it.
Maybe you’ll trip up. But in the meantime you’ll still have a little fun. Try it. Go find yourself a girl.”

Penny was just leaving the co-op, heading for her parents’ Ford Taurus as Job left the doctor’s office. Job hadn’t seen her since the night of the revival. He didn’t know what to say to her, thought it best to start with an apology.

“It would have come out sooner or later,” she said.

“But if I had kept my mouth shut—”

“Then Will would have been doing
that
, and I wouldn’t have known. Thinking about it makes me sick.” She threw her purse in the front seat. “All that wasted time. I feel so stupid.” Her voice took on a little girl’s squeak when she was angry, something Job had never heard before. Pink streaks, like a poorly washed window. He found himself wanting to keep her talking, to watch her voice. A vibrancy of colour here, in her anger, that he’d otherwise lost, even in the singing at church.

“Will says it’s just a stage,” he said. “He says he wants to marry you.”

“How could I marry him? He hardly ever wanted to touch me. And I thought that made him a gentleman.”

“He said you knew about his tendencies.”

“He told me he sometimes had fantasies about men. I had no idea he acted them out. I mean, he said he loved me.”

“I think he did. Does.”

“Then why didn’t he want me? If I was attractive enough he’d want me. Barbara says those urges can be changed. She says I should wait and he’ll come around.” Penny waved at the window of the Out-to-Lunch Café. “She
just spent an hour trying to convince me. But it’s over. I don’t want anything more to do with him.”

“I’m sorry,” said Job.

Penny nodded down the street. Job turned to see Liv sitting in Darren’s truck in front of the co-op. She waved and smiled.

“You two were pretty cozy at the revival,” said Penny. “I heard she was over at your place.”

“To see the crop circle. Jason wanted to see it.”

“I heard she and Darren are back together, trying to work things out.”

Job watched his boot kicking gravel, the woodpecker shit still on the toe. “Well, I should get back home,” he said. “Field work. See you at church?”

“I can’t go back there,” said Penny. “The only reason I went at all was Will. And you. I think I’ll head up to Pastor Divine’s church this Sunday. Give him a try.” She took his hand. “Why don’t you come up with me? We could go out for lunch after. Make a date of it.” She kissed Job on the cheek, smiled at him as she got in her parents’ car. “Think it over. Give me a call.”

A brief thrill ran through Job. He watched Penny’s car drive off, then turned, smiling, to find Barbara leaving the co-op. She looked up from the handbag she was rummaging through, caught sight of Job and walked the other way.

Liv called him over. “How you doing?” she said.

“Okay, I guess.” Job glanced at the side of the truck, at the letters proclaiming
Liebich’s Trucking
, then at his boot scuffing dirt.

“He’s just driving me to Wetaskiwin,” said Liv. “We’ve got a few things to settle. Listen, I heard some of the talk at
the café. About Will. And some about you. Don’t let it get to you, okay? It’s just talk. It’ll quiet down when something more interesting turns up.”

He wanted to ask, What are they saying? But he couldn’t bear to. He already knew. Or guessed.

“How’s Penny?” she asked.

“As good as can be expected. I guess she won’t be spending much time around here any more. She’s talking about getting involved with Divine’s church.”

“I think she’d be very happy there.” Liv pasted on a fake smile, blinked twice.

“I take it you don’t like Penny.” Or could she be jealous? The thought pleased him.

“I don’t have much feeling for her either way. It just seems like her only goal as a good little Christian is to be cheerful all the time. You can do that with weed, if you want, and get a better result.” She turned her eyes on the storefront. “So, where were you after the revival? I waited, but you’d disappeared.”

“I had to pack away the tables, clean dishes.”

“Couldn’t they have waited?”

Job watched the Bullick kid make another pass on his bike, said nothing.

“Thought I’d see you at the café at least.”

“Things have been kind of strange.”

“I gather.”

Dithy Spitzer marched across the road, headed towards them. Job looked back down at his boots. “So, what things are you settling?”

“What’s that?”

“With Darren.”

Liv pulled at a thread on the hem of her shorts but stopped when the hem started to unravel. “We’re taking Jason to see a counsellor.”

Darren banged out the co-op door. Cowboy hat tilted back to expose his forehead. Reddish skiff of stubble across his chin. Eyes like slough water before a storm. He carried two Pepsis and handed Liv one through the window. “Hey, Job,” he said. “Any more aliens land on your place?” He laughed as he walked around to the driver’s side and got in the truck.

“Give me a ring,” said Liv, “all right?”

“Yeah, sure.” But he knew he wouldn’t, because at the moment he stepped back from the truck and waved, the only clear thing in his head was the image of Darren’s hand on the skin of Liv’s thigh.

As Job watched Liv and Darren drive off, a cold spray of water hit him in the back of the head. And there was Dithy, water pistol aimed menacingly at him. “You got to get out more,” she said. “Go!” She sprayed him again, this time in the face. “Go!”

He waved his hands to avoid another spray to the face, then stumbled back up the sidewalk and headed to his truck. He reached it just as a trike skidded to a halt beside him, raising a cloud of dust. Ben.

“What are you doing driving that thing into town?” said Job. “Your dad will have your hide.”

“The bull, he’s in the lake!”

“All right. Get in the truck. We’ll come back for the trike later.”

Job dragged dust to the farm, picturing the worst: the bow of the bull’s back like a whale’s breaking water, its head submerged, drowned.

“Mom doesn’t want me spending any time with you,” said Ben. “Not alone.”

“Yeah. She told me.”

“You’re not gay, are you?”

“No.”

“I had the trike down in the coulee. I left the gate open. It’s my fault the bull got out.”

“You know you’re not supposed to drive the trike down the hill. You could kill yourself.”

“You going to tell Dad?”

“I imagine he’s not home, if you took the trike out.”

“He said something about meeting Pastor Divine.”

But when they reached the farm, Jacob was in the yard, just getting out of the car. He talked to Ben as if Job weren’t there. “What are you doing with Job? Didn’t you hear a word your mother said?”

“Ben ran into town to tell me the bull’s in the lake,” said Job.

“How’d you know?” Jacob asked Ben.

“He saw from the top of the coulee.” Job felt the corner of his eye twitch. A thing that always happened when he told a lie. “I’d asked him to watch the cows. Pasture’s running low. Thought they might try breaking through to the upper hayfield.”

“Well, let’s go get the bull out of the lake,” said Jacob, sighing. As if he were in charge and this was one more thing he had to take care of. “You,” he said pointing at Ben, “stay here.”

Job drove the Case with the front-end loader down to the lake. Jacob followed on foot behind. Twenty-five feet out into water, past cattails and slough grass, out where a child could sink to his death in mud, the bull was wallowing. Job picked up stones, then, stepping up to the water, flung them at the bull, aiming to splash just in front of the animal’s head.

“What’re you doing?” said Jacob, catching up to him.

“Trying to get the bull out.”

“Why not just pull him out?”

“Might not have to,” said Job. “Rather not get into the water next to him.”

The bull jerked his head back from the splash of each stone flung into the water, but stayed firmly lodged in muck. Job took a few quick steps into the lake, thinking he could scare the bull into pulling itself free, but only succeeded in getting stuck himself. He took a step forward but found his boot left behind. Job stepped back into the boot. He swung around, yanked his boot free, dragged himself forward to the bull.

An American bittern hidden in the reed canary grass sounded for all the world like a slough pump:
glump, glump, glump
. The lake smelled of mud and the slough mint growing around its edges. Coarse grass sliced into Job’s fingers as he moved through it, leaving nicks like paper cuts. A sudden, eerie shiver ran up Job’s spine, the same shiver he remembered from childhood when, stepping into slough water when he knew he wasn’t supposed to, he found himself stuck knee-high in gumbo and in black water up to his waist. He feared his father’s licking but was more scared of what dark, unnamed thing skimmed below the water’s surface.

The old bull was tiring. Job smoothed his hand over its face and neck like he might a horse, murmuring to it, trying to calm the animal. The bull looked back with one wild eye. Job found himself caught in its stare. Startling, to be this close to such an alien consciousness. But then animals had no consciousness, did they? At least that was what Abe had taught his sons, that animals had no souls. It made butchering time easier, bearable. Yet there was a soul here—Job felt certain of it—a terrified soul.

He bent a little closer, scratched behind the bull’s ear, looked into that one eye. “There, there,” he whispered. The bull leaned its head into Job’s hand as a dog might, enjoying the scratch. Job was rarely this close to his bulls, except for the times he pinned them in the chute for injections, or clipped their hooves, or treated a wound. It was never wise to make a pet of a bull, the way he made pets of some of his cows. A bull was unpredictable, calm one moment, pawing the ground the next. A creature ruled by raging hormones and drives. The bull’s breath was loud, wedges the colour of raspberry sherbet, but transparent now. Job put a cheek to the creature’s massive head to listen closer to its breath, but the colour did not intensify.