Adrian Pearson - Cow Country

After a few minutes an old pickup truck pulled over to where I was sitting and Dr. Felch stepped out. “Sorry I’m late, Charlie,” he smiled. “Nice to finally meet you!” Dr. Felch was a graying man in worn cowboy boots and green John Deere cap and his grip was so strong it crushed my hand when he took it. “Hop in,” he said and hoisted my two heavy suitcases into the back of his pickup bed, easily, with one hand each; then he leaned over the tailgate and shoved a large bale of hay to one side so my suitcases could lie flat. “Sorry. This ain’t the cleanest truck in the world….” He motioned toward the front of the cab and I climbed in.

“Thanks for picking me up,” I said and pulled the heavy door shut. The inside of the cab was cluttered with litter, and the seat between us held a stack of manila folders with papers sticking out at different angles and a box of bullets resting on top. Dr. Felch did not use his lap belt and my side of the cab had none at all — just a thick layer of grime between the grooves of the cracked vinyl seat.

“It’s the least I could do,” he said. Dr. Felch explained that it was his personal tradition to pick up every arriving employee to Cow Eye Community College and that he’d been doing it religiously for the past twenty years now. “In this truck!” he laughed and started the engine back up with a roar of the big-block V8. The air was hot and each of us kept our windows down. Dr. Felch was hanging his elbow out the driver’s side and as he drove — never threatening thirty miles an hour — he had to raise his voice to be heard over the sound of the eight cylinders coming in through the windows. “I’ve picked up more than two hundred employees in my time,” he added. “From as far away as California !”

The college was on the opposite edge of town and driving along the dusty road leading from one end to the other, Dr. Felch pointed out the notable sites of Cow Eye Junction. Bleak as it all might have seemed, there was also a strange charm to the place: the rusting railroad depot; the beat-up post office with its soaring flag pole and twenty-three stars at full mast; the sprawling log headquarters of the Cow Eye Ranch — the original outfit that spawned the town of Cow Eye Junction and inspired its name. A mile or so from the bus stop we passed a sign welcoming us to Cow Eye Junction — “ Where Worlds Meet! ” it promised — and a few miles later the town’s lone convenience store where a single pickup truck was parked next to a hitching post with two horses tethered to it. Then we drove along the lip of a dried-up river that took us past abandoned sheds and pastures with decaying field equipment and shriveled cattle hides stacked up in heaps. There was a closed bait-and-tackle stand and a boarded-up nail salon and then we took a left and were driving through the town center where the mayor’s office stood shuttered — it was a Saturday — next to the county jail and across a sidewalk from the building that housed the local newspaper and a one-room museum dedicated to the history of the cattle industry in Cow Eye Junction. All of this, I learned, was inextricably interconnected, and almost everything and everyone he pointed to would in very short time have something to do with my new role at the college:

“That’s Mrs. Grisholm’s place,” he would say. “Our librarian. You’ll meet her at convocation on Monday. And that house right there is where Merna Lee used to live before her kids came from the city to get her. She was our longtime data person but sorta lost her trinkets there toward the end…”

To each of these things I nodded.

At one point Dr. Felch pulled out a pack of Chesterfields from his shirt pocket.

“You smoke?” he said.

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Your loss,” he said and tapped out a cigarette on his steering wheel, then plucked a book of matches from his shirt pocket. As he drove he took both hands off the wheel to strike a match and cup it to his cigarette; immediately the truck began to veer into the oncoming lane and I couldn’t help reaching out for the wheel. But Dr. Felch just laughed. “Relax, Charlie…I’ve been driving since I was eight!” Then he threw the match out the window and calmly took the wheel again.

Dr. Felch’s manner was friendly and direct and you couldn’t help liking him; yet there was also a detectable uneasiness in his movements — as if he were trying to have two conversations at once. We rode for a while without talking, and to kill the silence I asked him about my job; I had been so quick to accept the position of Special Projects Coordinator over the phone that I’d forgotten to ask what my new role would actually involve.

“I mean I probably should have asked you before jumping on that bus.”

Dr. Felch laughed.

“You must’ve been pretty eager to leave where you were coming from, Charlie?”

“Yes, I suppose I was. I suppose you could put it that way…”

“Well, whatever the case, I’m glad you’re here. A Special Projects Coordinator doesn’t have set duties. Or at least ours don’t. You’ll be my right-hand man, so to speak. Which means that from time to time I’ll be asking you to put out some conflagrations on campus. As well as starting a few controlled burns of our own…”

I looked over at him for an elaboration. But none came.

“Sounds intriguing,” I said finally. “I hope I’m up to the task.”

“Don’t worry — you’ll be fine. I’m asking Bessie to show you the ropes….” Here Dr. Felch informed me that Bessie was his assistant and she was “a Rottweiler” — but that I would love working with her because she was one of the few people in the world who had seen both day and night and who wasn’t afraid to articulate in blunt terms the difference between the two. In fact, on an honesty scale of one to ten — with ten being an old nun testifying in a courtroom and one being what the college wrote in its most recent accreditation self-study — she was about a twelve . “Just be sure to keep your pistol in your pants, or she’ll snap it off and hand it to you.”

“The nun?”

“No. Bessie.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” I said.

Dr. Felch talked for some time about my position at the college — his manner optimistic and expansive, if seemingly cryptic at times — but then suddenly changed tone. “I don’t want to discourage you, Charlie, but you’re the third Special Projects Coordinator we’ve hired in the last two years. The first didn’t even make it past his first bloated scrotum. And the one after him — well, she turned out to be an epic disaster. So let’s just say you won’t exactly be wading into a sea of high expectations.”

At the mention of my predecessor’s failings my ears perked up. “What happened with your last coordinator?” I asked. “Why was she such a disaster?”

Dr. Felch paused to take a drag of his cigarette and it seemed that he might change the subject. “It’s kind of a long story….” But then with no further invitation he launched into the sordid tale of how his most recent Special Projects Coordinator had proved to be an epic disaster.

“It’s ultimately my fault,” he began. “You see, we needed someone who could work with our divided campus and so we hired this gal after just a phone interview. She’d come to us with all the bells and whistles. Degrees from two Ivy League colleges. A sparkling curriculum vitae. Experience up the ying-yang. Countless awards and commendations. References from the Queen of England and Archduke of Canterbury. You know the type….”

I laughed.

“….So she gets in to Cow Eye and I pick her up at the bus stop. In this truck. And she refuses to get in. It’s dusty, she says, and there’s no passenger belt. You’ve got to be kidding me, I’m thinking to myself — dusty ?! — but I give her the benefit of the doubt and call our art history teacher on a Sunday and she drives out here in her Saab and picks this lady up with all kinds of luggage and her shih tzu and takes her back to campus. The next day the two of us meet in my office and I start to lay out the job expectations with all the usual caveats: that she’s facing a divided campus and that she’d better be prepared because these divisions run deep and if she’s not careful they’ll eat her up. Look, she says, I’ve got degrees from two Ivy League colleges, mediation experience up the ying-yang, personal references from the Israeli Knesset and the Shah of Iran….”