The Jesus Cow Read Online Free PDF Page B

.”
    Harley shook his head again.
    â€œIn a manger .”
    â€œWell . . . ,” said Harley, “it wasn’t a manger .”
    â€œIt is now,” said Billy, raising both eyebrows meaningfully. “I’m framing the narrative .”
    â€œYou’re framing something,” said Harley, “but it doesn’t smell like narrative.”
    â€œSon, sometimes yer thicker than bad slab wood,” said Billy, digging around in the mail and pulling out a copy of the Weekly Dealio, a local newsprint shopper that had survived the online age, hanging on via anniversary and gag fiftieth birthday announcements, auction notices, pet kennel listings, used car ads, and the overwrought poetry of real estate agents.
    â€œCheck this out,” said Billy, flapping the paper open and spinning it around so Harley could see the front page. The entirety of it was given over to an advertisement for Clover Blossom Estates. House after house, lot after lot, every single square in the grid was stamped REDUCED .
    Harley looked at Billy quizzically.
    â€œIf a fella was sittin’ on a gold mine . . . ,” said Billy, and let it hang there.
    Harley looked at the ad again, then back to Billy.
    â€œUndevelopment,” said Billy.
    â€œUndevelopment?”
    Billy pressed on. “Go whole hog with this holy calf business . . . don’t stop with T-shirts . . . charge admission to see him, sell the mother’s milk, sell patches of his hair, posters, cancoolers—everything you can, right down to his freeze-dried holy turds hung in amber from a necklace. Shoot, you could even rent him out! Reverend Gary down at the Church of the Roaring Lamb would froth at the mouth to trot that thing out Sunday mornings. It’d be a red-hot attendance booster.
    â€œYah, there’s lots you could do. Then, when you’ve got more money than God and his three leading televangelists, and the worshipful hordes clogging the byways have trampled Klute’s property values down even further, you go after that bully with everything you’ve got and start buying back Clover Blossom Estates, lot by lot, matchbox by matchbox, everything at cut-rate, and finally you bulldoze the whole works right back to the way it was, thus jabbing your middle finger in the eye of history, progress, and—while you’re at it—so-called manifest destiny.”
    â€œUm . . . ,” said Harley.
    â€œUM?!” said Billy. “I lay out God’s own plan to lift you out of poverty, to bust free of your usurious manacles by turning a low-dollar bull calf into a multimillion-dollar extravaganza of winning one for the little guys, of bloodying the nose of the muscle-brained bigfoot happily trampling your family history in the name of the almighty dollar and the best you can muster is ‘UM’?”
    â€œWell, I just—”
    â€œThis is the viral age! You Instagram a single snapshot of that calf, the world will tweet and retweet a path to your door. And we haven’t even begun to talk endorsements .”
    â€œI really don’t think—”
    Billy snorted, and flipped the Weekly Dealio into the trash.
    Harley took a deep breath, let it out, then spun the last of the suds around the bottom of his beer bottle.
    Low overhead , he thought.
    He took the last swallow of beer. It was flat and warm.
    Let’s not make a scene.
    â€œI gotta think on it, Billy. Right now I’m leaning to black shoe polish.”

CHAPTER 6
    C hristmas morning broke to the rumble of a junk truck. Margaret Magdalene Jankowski came downshifting off the overpass and past the old water tower she had hoped to scrap, her split-shift Ford straight truck squatting to the overloads beneath the weight of a dismantled combine (Meg was ninja grade with a blowtorch), a rusted harrow, and a flattened Ford Festiva, the snug balance of the load testament to the fact that this was a woman who knew her way around ratchet straps