Other times I think he’s looking for my pituitary gland.

I got in the car and sped up the driveway to try and hold traffic up on the road- always a hopeless enterprise. The motorists on this stretch of highway not only fail to comprehend the high probability of having a deer blow through their windshield and turning them into sausage, they seem to think they can drive in excess of sixty miles an hour while talking on the phone, eating, and throwing fast food trash out the window at the same time. I stepped out into the road to motion a car to slow down with my flashlight, but they didn’t see me. I had to jump out of the road to avoid being hit.

I could hear the bulls coming up through the woodlot, and knew they’d either find a weak spot in our perimeter fence or make one soon enough. I was running toward the sound of them crashing through the brush when I saw Purley make it out onto the road and decide “I’ll just stand here for a minute or two in the middle of the road, in a blind curve, to catch a little breather and reflect on my prospects for the evening. What could go wrong?”.

My wife had come up in the truck and asked if I’d seen them yet.
I said “Yeah. Purley, and he’s going to get nailed.”

About a half-second later a light truck came around the curve, braked, skidded to the left and smacked Purley in the hip, whereupon he rolled up the side panel of the truck, considerably shortening its stopping distance. I figured he was pretty much a goner and I’d have to euthanize him once I found Llewd and got him penned back up.

I ran over to the truck, now missing much of its front end, to make sure there weren’t any unsecured bodies dangling out of the passenger compartment. Seatbelts, after all, can make it difficult to eat a sandwich and swig a Coke while you drive with your knees, so I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a couple of organ donors.
There were no dead at the moment. Purley was standing again, undoubtedly wondering how he could be thinking so much less about pussy than he had mere seconds before.

Two men got out of the truck
“Y’all OK?” I shouted over the motor of the truck, which had that post-wreck wheeze.
“That your cow?” One of them asked
“I’m afraid so.”
“Look at my truck. I’m going to call the law.”
He was pissed off, and rightly so. But I was annoyed. If he’d been doing the speed limit, he’d have had a slightly better chance to avoid the animal. A deer might have rolled up on the hood and killed the both of them- but whatthefuckever.
“You go ahead. I’ve got to find the other bull. This one isn’t going anywhere.”

They must have been a little dazed, and I immediately wished I’d been less abrupt with them. They were going to have to call the law in any case. I didn’t have a phone with me, and someone was going to have to show up with a big flashing light to prevent a pileup. I ran down the road looking for Llewd, who was in the next door neighbor’s field. When I caught up to him he was uninterested in the bucket of feed I’d brought to lure him. From the looks of it he was heading toward the lake, walking along the edge of the timberline. He was weaving in and out of the brambles, and I decided my chances of getting him were nil. I listened helplessly as his bellowing receded in the distance, toward some of the lakefront homes that used to go for a couple of million dollars. These days people are either trying to sell the second home, or dumping the primary residence and getting blackout drunk in the wide arms of the Hyco reservoir. Sometimes they’ll drive a jet ski up onto the rocks on the shore to make life more interesting for first responders. Job creators to the bone, they are.

Now one of these winners was about to encounter 1600 lbs. of hormone fueled muscle, culminating in two sharp points.

“After Llewd makes it through their imported boxwood hedge”, I thought, “he’ll stop for a drink at someone’s dock, and shit on it. I guess I’ll go put Purley in with the girls and go wait by the phone for all hell to break loose ”.

It’s for days like this you hoard the pain killers from your minor surgeries. My wife had surgery on her foot in the nineties, and she needed all of her pain meds. I haven’t gone under the knife since I had the wisdom teeth excavated, in fragments, from my head in the eighties, and I endured the pain so I could save them. I misplaced them during a move, and while I can’t remember exactly, I’m almost certain I must have cried.

Dreaming of an IV valium/demerol drip, or at least some Tylenol 3, I walked back toward the small crowd of people now huddled against the newly arrived patrol car.

The guys who hit Purley told me he’d walked up the fence line where the cows were. He appeared to have a slight limp. The truck, however, had been scissored open on the passenger side and was looking on the black night with one jaundiced eye.

I leaned in the window of the patrol car to talk to the officer. He asked me if I thought I could get that bull put up this evening.

“Well, the one shouldn’t be a problem. He’s headed toward the rest of the cows anyway. It’s the other one that’s going to be trouble.”

“There are two?”

“Yeah.”
He typed some stuff into the computer mounted on his dash.

“Do you know where the other one is?”

“Headed toward the lake, I think.”

The cop winced. There was a stretch where he just gazed blankly out his windshield for about five minutes while his radio made small bursts of white noise. I tried to find a quiet place in my mind where none of this was happening. The quietest place I could get to was a vague memory of the scene near the end of Blue Velvet where Dennis Hopper is about to get his brains shot out.

“Get that one too.” He said.

In the few seconds I hesitated before I told him I could get the bull, I pictured myself stumbling through greenbriar and bashing my shins against piles of old discarded farm equipment for an hour, only to find Llewd balancing the terrycloth robed corpse of a man in his mid-forties across his horns, a corpse which was, interestingly, still clutching an empty highball glass with morbid vigor.

“I could murder a pint of vodka about now”, I thought.

As the cop drove off, we finished exchanging our insurance information with the accident victims.

While we herded Purley into the gate with the females, we both heard Llewd again, crashing through the woods nearby.

The cows lowed at him “Please share your genetic material with us! That short bull done broke his damn laig.”
‘I’m comin’ honey. Just as soon as I wrap this fence around my ass and drag it across the highway.”

We chased him over a low spot in the fence, and put him across the road with the females. There was little likelihood we could get him all the way back to his own enclosure in the dark, and besides, he’d already compromised it somehow (We learned the next day he’d lifted a pair of tubular steel gates, and crumpled them away from their pintles. It looked like someone had taken a trailer jack to them).

We’d done everything humanly possible to prevent Llewd from impregnating his daughter up until that point, and now we’d failed. This summer, we’ll probably wind up pulling a bulldog calf or some other genetic monstrosity out of her arse with a block and tackle.

Purley will not have healed sufficiently to even think about fucking his mother, fortunately, so there’s that.

Bailey will be milking her warped son Moon (roughly 37 in human years) until the calf rolls out of her like a cabbage from a plastic grocery bag. Then Moon will have to be moved to a separate pasture before he kills the calf so he won’t have to go through the trauma of being weaned all over again, the freak.

All of this is unavoidable now.

One thing, however, is going to change. Two things actually.

Come this May, Llewd’s nuts are going to be withering away. We purchased a kung-fu banding tool that will handle even advanced testicularity.

I’ve been practicing with it per the recommendations on the instruction sheet, with a bunch of socks got up to look like a bull scrotum. I couldn’t even get it to pinch mine.
(Just kidding.)

The trick is executing the operation before Llewd knows what’s happening. Failure could mean death. Mine.
If something goes wrong and I manage to live, there’s always one more approach.

This is the last thing looked upon by many mice and grubs:

We had a nice warm weekend to start off the year so I decided to gut a wahlfish. I’ve just about got the outside roughed in to the point I can bring it indoors to finish carving, sanding and painting it. It started life as a maple tree that got knocked over during last summer’s hurricane. While I was sawing it up into firewood I thought it might be worthwhile to save some of the larger portions of the trunk for woodcarving. This section was a little over four feet long, and I opted to carve another whale because I’ve already carved a smaller one for reference, and the idea of carving a four foot Guanyin or a wooden replica of a John White weroance is a little daunting at this point.

What I learned was I need to work a bit smaller in order to have a piece I can neatly bisect with a bandsaw and hollow out with chisels and gauges. I couldn’t leave this as a solid piece of wood because if I elected to mount it on the wall, it might bring sizable chunks of the wall down and take someone’s foot off or break a collarbone in the process. Solid weight must have been around eighty pounds.

Hollowing this out with chainsaws proved a little unnerving. It worked, but I don’t want to make a habit of doing it this way until I can get a Kevlar body suit.

I wondered briefly if I shouldn’t put a couple of guitar strings inside and tune them up so the whale will sing when the house is settling.

It would probably just be making an annoying ghostly sound all the damn time.

After I got this part done, we spent a bit of the early evening up at the pond with the mules, and watched the rain move slowly in from the north.

Avoid the burger casserole.

…when I spoke to Princess Zuppa, I told her “Princess Zuppa, you said that some people believe in God, but you believe in Decency,” and she said “Yes, Mrs Shepherd, what about it?”
and I said “But Decency didn’t create the world, did it?” and she said “No, but I’m not interested in that, it’s for the physicists to find out how those big balls of stone orbit around each other. Still, you can say that it was decency that created us, people. Without Decency, mothers and fathers would have eaten their children as soon as the children were born, and that would have been the end even before the beginning.”*

When I went for my interview to work at the Book Ex, I’d been doing an excruciating penance in the mail room of a certain product testing firm that employed any vertebrate with the faintest X-ray verifiable cortical enlargement NC State would throw at them. After a year of patient suffering, I felt I deserved a break from folks who genuinely believed the sexual harassment training videos were a primer on how to properly coax fellow employees into the stairwell for a quick stress assessment against the wall, and for whom the English language was never more than an avoidable elective, except for those occasions when it was an embarrassing halo of brain-devouring fire.

For the interview, I wore a new pair of linen trousers and a plain Gitman Brothers Oxford with a tie. It was summer, and a jacket of any kind was an impossibility. Even though I worked out regularly in those days, my body had already undertaken the bizarre reallocations of fat and muscle that make a man look like a jackass in any approximation of fitted clothes. I knew I was going to get the job, but I also had the curious apprehension I was walking to a sentencing hearing with a big FUCK IT tattoo on my forehead.

After my wife let me out of the car at the stoplight two blocks away from the bookstore, she doubled back around Five Points to give me a wolf whistle. This mercifully interrupted the interview, already in progress in my head.

Interviewer: You’re nearly forty, and this is an entry level position. How much do you drink? Are you drunk now?

Interviewee: Uhhh. I was raised among books. My father was a grad student once.

Interviewer: We’ve employed readers here before. Many of them were drunks.

Interviewee: I suppose I’ve drank my way through a book or two, but I’m not reading nearly as much these days since I got the liver panels back. Do you really expect me to work here sober? I noticed the upstairs windows are broken. I can glaze those.

Interviewer: You glaze windows?

Interviewee: Glaze windows, hang drywall, show up after two hour’s sleep, cut and install decorative molding, plasterwork, painting, paneling, frescoes, intarsia, tiling: you know, The jobs you always hire drunks to do. Plus, I can read and count. They made me read a bunch of books in college, and I went through a stretch where I read a lot of books independently because I couldn’t have gotten fucked if I’d been driving around in a gold-plated Bugatti, and you know what they say.

Interviewer: What do they say?

Interviewee: Something about books in a time of no sex. I forget.

Interviewer: Could you work that up into a window display?

The actual interview found me similarly trapped, and offering custodial services as a stand in for actual library experience. But what was clear, besides the fact that I’d stumbled into another job that the swollen army of un and underemployeds would ignore until the last can of Vienna sausages had vanished from the shelves at Shorty’s Quik Stop, and Shorty himself had dialed in an emergency order for Little Friskies, is that I’d been their choice once I submitted one of the three applications received.

As Wayne, the guy who lived in the innermost circle of the law section, put it later, “I worked to get them to hire you. I knew you could at least read. And of course you’d forgotten, but I was your grad student freshman comp instructor. I failed to use English instruction to intervene between so many of you and that Mexican ditch weed. The least I could do was help you get a job.”

Woodrow, the guy who got his bookstore chops running a pornographic video library out of a 7-11 in Tennessee, added “The other two applicants listed Ayn Rand as a big influence on their lives.

That’s an immediate disqualifier.

It’s about the same as saying you’re fascinated by Syvia Plath or Anne Sexton. If there’s one thing we don’t need here it’s a fucking cutter, or someone trying to put their tongue in a light socket.”

So many nervous young women and heavily lacquered frats came to the store looking for Ayn Rand that the left-leaning members of the staff started an unofficial program we referred to as “Let a Hundred Flowers Find That Shit Themselves”, and when the boss wasn’t paying attention we advised customers “The Fountainhead” might be upstairs near the abandoned freight elevator shaft. Or in it. “Atlas Shrugged”? – over by the microwave oven, with the Sylvia Plath.

The location and business plan of the Book Ex made it a favorite haunt of losers of every stripe, not just mine. And if people unaccustomed to the vastness of the place walked in expecting books alphabetized by author and arranged by subject, they were in for a painful surprise.

The store began amassing books in 1933, when Repeal shut down the illegal liquor house that formerly occupied the space. In its early years, publishers’ reps would arrive on a set schedule with their respective house’s offerings and restock or remove items from the shelves as necessary. The store stayed open till around ten in the evening, because more people read then. And it was before the racially motivated implosion of Durham nearly bled the downtown to death.
My theory is the Book Ex employed a small army of orphans who knew the locations of the books published by, among many others, Random House, Harper and Row, Gallimard, St. Martin’s, and the Loeb Classics (during my tenure, reduced to a small band of obscure Greeks, the most notable among them probably Diodorus Sicilus). The little green volumes, and one or two red Latin ones clung to a small shelf upstairs beneath a grimy wired glass window where a local professor tended his sorrowful mushroom garden of archaic porn.

On slow days, we’d dismantle the local prof’s Porn stash, and meticulously redistribute it throughout the stacks. Before long, it would reform itself under the same grimy window. Sometimes new erotic titles would make an appearance there.

No one knew how they got past management, which was Dobsonian fundamentalist in orientation. We assumed the professor was purchasing his books and setting up his “skin crib” away from the prying eyes of his wife, who admittedly, must have been a real hardass if she wouldn’t let him read Fanny Hill at home.

I can see why she might have been disturbed by some of the newer additions, especially if getting roughed up and peed on was not her thing.
Hell. It disturbed me.

A customer would have to approach the long front desk (more like a bar, and probably a relic of the drinking establishment), ask for a book and identify the publisher. If they couldn’t, there were large publisher’s indexes to consult. This was more than likely done by the original owner, a man with the appropriately Dickensian name Marley, who was reputed to be every bit the skinflint his name suggested. I never met him. His beneficiaries ruled from afar.

Marley would then summon one of his dusty, rattle-chested orphans forth into the endless dark stacks to hunt down a law textbook (in my day, that would be Wayne), or Karl Woermann’s “Geschicte der Kunst” which I thought I remembered seeing in the sad professor’s porn crypt, and I would run upstairs, because I was one of the few employees who still had knees.

I enjoyed working there for the most part, at least until the first year law students showed, already jacked up for the elaborate pissing contest they were doomed to lose.
It became unbearable for me to take a bunch of shit from a bunch of gel-scalped mokes lining up for a feeble shot at a fourth or fifth tiered school, in a discipline already overrun with people possessing actual talent and acumen; not to mention the scores of rich legacy shitheads being groomed to rule the country for the next ten years. Although I’m sure some of the latter group acquired their textbooks by theft, too.

I had other priorities, and quit. I had a barn to build anyway.

The Book Ex went out of business a few years back, selling books by the pound.

Now it appears the building is going to be rehabbed into a restaurant. I always thought it would be a much better spot to tie one on than it was to sweat one off, and a plate of fried eggs and a grilled cheese sandwich would have made it heaven. But no books?- screw it.

*Stefan Themerson, Hobson’s Island
One of many lovely books I purchased with my employee discount.