Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

“And if I may…?” a third voice chimed in just as quickly. “You’ve claimed in your application that you have significant experience working with colleagues of diverse ethnic backgrounds. So would you please tell us which of them, in your opinion, has the greater natural facility for learning and should therefore be more highly represented in educational settings? Which is to say, if recruiting for an important administrative post would you be more inclined to hire the mongoloid, the caucasoid, or the negroid…?”

Then a fourth voice asked:

“Not to beat this particular horse to death, but if you happened to see a horse being beaten to death would you intervene? Or would you simply turn away as if it were an inevitable consequence of life? Like the coming and going of the seasons. Or like the emergence and disappearance of this or that civilization of the world, along with its language, its culture, and the institutions that it holds dear?”

For three tiring hours the committee prodded and poked with question after question about my previous experiences, my current proclivities, and my long-term plans for the future. If hired as Special Projects Coordinator would I stay at Cow Eye? Or would I leave within the first year like so many other transplants who’d been hired sight unseen after a single impressive phone interview? Would I buy a house? Was I looking to get married? Did I have any domesticated animals that I would be bringing? Any allergies? Did I practice yoga? Enjoy fishing? Hunt? What kind of truck did I drive and how many cylinders did it have? Were there any children on its front seat? In my rearview mirror? Had I ever had a particularly severe case of scabies? And if so would I be willing to volunteer the specifics of a non-invasive yet reliable and effective cure?

But the most perplexing question came toward the end of the interview just as it seemed that the three hours had mercifully run their course and that all my various skeletons had been disinterred and brought to air before the committee. A voice on the other end broke in suddenly, even urgently:

“Look,” it said. “Let’s get to the heart of the matter here. What each of us really wants to know is….do you eat bovine or don’t you? And what role, if any, should vegetarianism play in the ongoing rumination and excretion of innovative ideas?”

I admittedly had not been prepared for this particular question. But here my conciliatory instincts took over:

“Of course there is a time and a place for all things,” I said over the crackling distance of the rotary phone. “If you want to make a stew that is truly worthy you need both beef and vegetables!”

(I later learned that it was this flavorless response to the vegetarianism question — even more than my brilliant and memorable reply to the hypothetical bloated scrotum, even more than my tenuous ties to Cow Eye Junction — that got me the job.)

It would take more than two weeks for the committee to make its decision, and so, hanging up the phone, I was left to replay in my mind the answers I had given and to wonder how they would be taken. Still in a daze, I pondered how I had fallen so low, so quickly: from unbridled salutatorian of my high school class, to aspiring English major, and then to weary graduate student running on fumes but with just enough left in the tank to cross the academic finish line clutching my Master’s degree in Educational Administration with a special emphasis in struggling community colleges. Now after two failed marriages in quick succession (the first solely my fault, the second only primarily my fault) and a host of lackluster jobs leading pretty much back to where they started…here I was. Here I was in my dingy living room groveling before faceless strangers, a cup of tepid urine in my hand, pleading for a job at a community college I had never even seen. By now my life had become nothing more than a disjointed collection of half-starts and near-misses. My marriages tended toward ignominy. My jobs turned toxic. (“May we contact the references you’ve listed?” the committee had asked over the phone. “I’d rather you didn’t,” I replied.) Friends came and went — or I came and went from them . It was clear that the hot potential of my youth was cooling off like the cup of forgotten urine in my hand. Suddenly there was something very enticing about an ill-advised move to a desolate and distant place in the middle of a story that wasn’t mine. In the general direction of a new beginning. Toward the makings of a fresh start. Strangely and surprisingly, I found myself coveting the uncoveted position at Cow Eye Community College; intuitively I must have seen the legacy that I might finally be able to leave if given the chance. “Just don’t squander it,” I told myself. “Don’t flush it away like you have all the other advisable things in your life. Your marriages. Your career. Your friendships.” And as I dumped the cold urine into the bowl in my bathroom I promised myself that if given yet another chance to create a meaningful legacy I really would be more conscientious about it this time around. For life is not a random convergence of water to be cast away lightly with a single finger. It is a long and free-flowing river that meanders and winds in its own strange way but that always reaches its destination. A river is made of water, and water derives its essence from moisture. My life, I realized, was that very river and it had been dammed for too long. Let it flow! I told myself. Let my river flow from its eternal source through time and space to the awaiting campus of Cow Eye Community College!

*

Dr. Felch phoned me personally to offer the position. “Nice job handling the bloated scrotum,” he said. “That was an inspired answer on your part.” I thanked him and told him that I thought I’d blown the whole thing — especially the bloated scrotum question. “I’m grateful you’re hiring me,” I said. “And a little surprised.”

“Well it definitely wasn’t easy. Your references weren’t exactly unequivocal. But after two weeks of bitter debate among the committee, you were the only one left standing. Congratulations.”

Dr. Felch outlined the terms of employment at Cow Eye and promised that if I accepted the position he would take me under his wing and personally help me navigate the cultural divide on campus that had come to the surface during the committee’s questioning. “We’re at a crossroads,” he explained. “Not just the college. But our community as a whole. We need someone who can walk softly along the path. Someone unburdened by the encumbrance of meaningful friendships or strong personal beliefs. A person who can inspire others to action while himself remaining aloof and non-committal and slightly above it all. Someone who can do all this while being safe and dull and blandly palatable. In short, we need an effective educational administrator. And that’s why we have high hopes for you here.” These were not flattering words necessarily but I took them to heart. For once, it seemed, my ambivalence was a virtue. And what was more — my penchant for sidestepping commitment offered a promise of sorts; strangely, it inspired hope ! What had always been my greatest curse now became a great blessing as well: to be a lot of different things yet none of them entirely ! I called back the next day to accept the job.

That was a month ago, and now as I sat on my luggage next to the makeshift bus shelter I took in what would be my first real view of the edge of the town proper. Across the road two covered wagons from the nineteenth-century stood collapsed and broken, a flaming arrow still sticking out of one of them. Next to it was a filling station where an old rusted Model-T was returning to the earth near a battered gas pump from another era. Wrinkled men sat on a bench discussing the events of the day. A cashier in the general store across the way leaned her elbows into the newspaper pages she was reading; in the background the soulful drone of a harmonica could be heard. Sitting there I gazed across the ominous red dirt stretching around me through the centuries. The arid shrubbery reaching all the way to the horizon. The dead wind that could lay low for what felt like a moment lost in time, then suddenly swirl up out of nowhere to lift the dust high into the air. Large flies buzzed in the glare around me — I waved them off with the back of my hand — and black ants scrambled over the tops of my shoes. Everywhere I turned, it seemed, was a remnant of a thing that had once been but now no longer was. A section of old train track where the trains used to go. An abandoned cotton gin lying on its side. A rusting phone booth, its cord severed and its windows smashed out. The decaying remains of a buffalo carcass with coyotes still picking at the meat. To the left of me was a bucket of wampum and to my right, nailed to a telephone pole with a single ten-penny nail, a faded flyer for a concert that had happened more than a generation ago. All of this struck me as sad and meaningful and somehow mildly poignant. This was a strange future to have. But it was my future, and at this moment I was more ready for it than I had ever been before.