This Might Hurt a Bit

by Doogie Horner

When we got to the farm, we discovered the first of many flaws in our plan.

  The cows were not asleep.

  The cows were wide-awake, and the whole herd turned their broad, bored faces to us in unison as we sloshed up to their pen through the ankle-deep mud.

  Second, although cows are not especially nimble, they had a surprisingly effective evasion system: For every step toward them we took, they calmly took one step away from us. Once we walked into the pen with them, they wouldn’t let us get closer than about twenty feet. We tried running after them, but it was impossible to run in the quagmire of mud and manure in their pen.

  Aside from a few small splashes of paint PJ was able to flick onto the cows, our first night of cow painting was a total failure. But failure didn’t deter us. We had nothing but time. About once a week we’d sneak out and try again, tinkering with our methods, using different strategies and mediums. Spray paint seemed like a good idea, but the sound of the paint spraying out of the nozzle scared the cows and caused a stampede that almost killed us. We tried wearing black-and-white clothes to “blend in” with the cows and fool them. One time we even climbed up onto the roof of a barn and tried pouring paint onto the cows below. But so far none of our methods had worked.

  Cows may be dumb, but apparently they’re not as dumb as we are.

  Which is why tonight I am very interested to see what secret weapon PJ has in his backpack. It feels like Christmas morning as I ask PJ, “All right, Mr. Ninja, what’s in the backpack?”

  “Please,” PJ says. “My dad is Mr. Ninja. Just call me Ninja.” He pulls a pair of empty two-liter soda bottles out of his backpack and hands them to me, and it’s still Christmas morning, but now it feels like I just unwrapped a pair of socks.

  I turn them over in my hands. “Oooookay. What are these?”

  “Those are empty soda bo—”

  “Yes, I know they’re empty soda bottles, PJ, but how are we going to paint the cows with them?”

  “Well, the bottles need to be filled with water,” PJ says. “Fill them about three-quarters full. There should be a spigot around here somewhere. Maybe behind the barn?”

  “Okay . . . and then what?”

  “And then we fill the water with this.” PJ hefts two big containers of Kool-Aid powder out of his bag: cherry and blue raspberry. “We use the water to mix concentrated batches of Kool-Aid, and then”—he sets the Kool-Aid down and pulls two big Super Soakers out of the now empty bag—“fill these guns with the Kool-Aid. We’re not going to paint the cows. We’re going to dye them.”

  Jake can see my mind is blown. He throws his hands up in a simulated explosion. “Boom!”

  “My God,” I gasp. “PJ, you’re a genius.”

  PJ gives a dismissive wave. “Aw, I’m blushing. You can’t see it under the mask, but I’m blushing.”

  I take the empty soda bottles and walk behind the barn to look for a water spigot or a hose. There has to be something for washing out the cow pens and such.

  The grass is high and filled with scrubby weeds, so it’s hard to see down near the ground, where a spigot might be. There are pieces of junk, empty beer cans, and wooden boards hidden in the grass, and I trip a couple of times. I’m so focused on looking down that I almost walk into something hanging from a tree only a few feet in front of me.

  I hear a buzzing sound, smell something rank, and look up to see a mutilated deer carcass hanging by its feet, strung up from a tree branch by a chain. I almost walk right into it in the dark, and I lurch back and step onto an empty beer can with a loud crunch. I’m eye level with the deer’s chest, which is sawed wide open from its crotch down to its neck. The wound gapes obscenely. The guts have been scooped out, exposing red muscle and white ribs, bright and saturated with color even in the dark. The inside of the deer seems to be moving, and as I lean closer, I see it’s flies crawling around inside the chest. The deer’s head is still attached, the soft tan fur of its throat so smooth and untouched that it looks like a stuffed animal, one that some nasty kid has ripped all the stuffing out of.

  I’m about to throw up, but I close my eyes and the nausea passes.

  When I open my eyes, I don’t know why, but it suddenly feels very important that I look in the deer’s eyes. I can’t see them because the deer is hanging upside down, its head swaying gently a few inches off the ground.

  I drop the soda bottles and get down on my hands and knees in the prickly grass, but I still can’t see the deer’s face. A cold breeze blows through my jacket as the deer’s body twists in the wind. I grab the antlers and tilt the head up so it catches the moonlight, immediately feeling disrespectful as I bend the neck at an extreme angle.

  The deer’s eyes are as lifeless as black marbles, the only light there two pinprick reflections of the moon.

  There are thorns in my palms and a spider crawling inside my pant leg as I let go of the deer, and the tree branch creaks under the deadweight. I almost knock over the bucket of black blood under the swinging body as I lurch away, sick to my stomach again. I lean down with my hands on my knees, taking big gulps of fresh cold air.

  After a couple of seconds I feel steady enough to walk back to Jake and PJ and tell them to find some water on their own. I pick the soda bottles up from where I dropped them, and there, snaking through the grass, is a hose.

  — — —

  When I walk back with the full soda bottles sloshing heavily in my arms, Jake and PJ are at the perimeter of the electric fence, surveying the empty pasture beyond it.

  Jake sights down the barrel of the squirt gun like it’s a sniper rifle. He sweeps the farmyard before stopping at me with a little click! of his tongue. “What took you so long?”

  “Nothing,” I say, handing PJ the two bottles. “Here you go.”

  PJ pours as much Kool-Aid powder into the water as he can while still keeping it a liquid. Then we pour the concentrated Kool-Aid into the two Super Soakers and carefully funnel it into a couple of water balloons as well. Jake and I take the guns, and PJ gingerly places the balloons into his book bag and hoists it onto his back.

  We then consider the electric fence that stands between us and the pasture.

  The same way jewel thieves become experts on safes, we three brave cow painters have become experts on electric fences. There are various wire configurations—single wire, double wire, the rare triple wire—and voltages ranging from mildly unpleasant to nearly lethal. Some fences don’t even have current running through them. At one point they did, the cows got shocked, and now they think it’s still live.

  However, the electric fence we’re looking at now is definitely live. It’s so alive I’m afraid it will reach out and grab us. It has not one, not two, but four wires, all thick gauge, wrapped around white porcelain insulators on every third post. Just seeing those insulators tells me there’s serious voltage in this fence, but I can also hear the electricity humming through the wires, a low pitch I feel in my molars.

  I’m about to suggest, Maybe there’s a gate somewhere, when PJ takes a running start and jumps over the fence, clearing the top wire easily and landing lightly on the other side. Jake casually threads himself between the two middle wires, avoiding them by only an inch or two. Then they both turn and look at me, surprised to see I’m still standing on the other side of the fence.

  I’ve never touched an electric fence, and I never want to. Jake touched one on purpose once, because he wanted to know how it felt. He stood there shaking for a second, then tore his hand away.

  I asked him, “What did it feel like?” and his answer was succinct: “Bad.”

  Young Ben Franklin waves impatiently at me now. “C’mon, dude,” Jake says. “Stop being such a baby.”

  I toss my squirt gun over the fence to PJ, then get down on my hands and knees and crawl under the fence, through the mud and shit.

  Jake and PJ laugh in disbelief. “Dude,” Jake says, “what are you doing? You’re getting covered in shit!”

  “I know, I know.” I crawl
underneath the bottom wire, chest pressed into the mud and poop. This close to the ground, the smell is incredible. For the second time in less than five minutes, I almost throw up. When I stand up on the other side of the fence I can feel the clammy stripe of muck running down the front of my shirt, pressing cold against my skin.

  Jake and PJ laugh so hard they have to hold each other up.

  “It’s fucking stupid!” I yell, waving at the fence. “Why would you put up a fence like that? Who do they think is going to break in here, Hans Gruber?!”

  “Who?” Jake laughs, trying to catch his breath.

  “Die Hard !” Sometimes I forget that not everyone has seen it a million times like me.

  “Whatever, dude,” Jake says, still laughing.

  PJ tosses me my squirt gun and I almost drop it because my hands are slippery with poop. “The fence isn’t to stop people from getting in,” PJ says. “It’s to stop whatever’s in here . . . from getting out.”

  He and Jake go “Ooooooooh!” and wiggle their fingers at me, trying to be scary.

  I give my Super Soaker a single brisk pump, like I’m cocking a shotgun.

  “I ain’t afraid of no cows.”

  We walk in the direction of the moos. I’m careful to avoid cow patties, especially since the soles of my shoes are the only part of me that isn’t covered in shit yet.

  The pasture is wide and tranquil in the moonlight, a welcome respite from the grubby farmyard. It’s so vast that we walk for a couple of minutes without seeing any cows, and I start to wonder if their ghostly moos are just the wind, but then the herd slowly emerges from the darkness ahead of us.

  The cow is not a beautiful animal, but it does have a rustic majesty, a natural dignity intensified by the moon glow the herd is bathed in. Of course that dignity is undermined somewhat by the fact that cows fart so often and so loudly that it sounds like someone clapping their hands. A whole herd farting together sounds like an appreciative audience begging for an encore.

  When we get within twenty feet, a few cows on the outside of the herd notice us in their bored, uninterested way. They glance at us while chewing and flick their tails, generally ignoring us. But then our next step passes the magic distance, and the nearest cows slowly lumber away from us.

  This is as close as they’ll let us get.

  “Okay,” I say, pumping up my Super Soaker and aiming it at the nearest cow. “Let’s see if this works.”

  I squirt the cow’s side, a short burst that leaves a long blue line on its white flank.

  The cow flinches, and for a second I’m worried that it will start running and we’ll have another stampede on our hands. I recall how far the run back to the electric fence would be, and I’m not sure if we could make it without getting trampled.

  But then the cow just snorts, looks at me with bored indifference, and goes back to munching the grass under its feet.

  It works. It works. My God, it actually works.

  None of us say anything, because we don’t want to spook the cows, but PJ grabs me in a rough hug and whispers, “YES!”

  I feel the same thrill of invention that I imagine the Wright brothers must’ve felt taking flight at Kitty Hawk, or Neil Armstrong felt stepping onto the moon. Mark my name in the annals of Uppity Fucksburgh and erect a statue here of me covered in cow shit, doing a fist pump.

  Jake squirts some cows with his water gun, and I squirt a few more, and they all react the same way: They notice, but they don’t really mind. PJ lobs a water balloon at one cow and it does mind that. The cow practically jumps and then trots off, deeper into the herd. Luckily, it’s near the edge of the herd and doesn’t set the others running, but after that we stick to the squirt guns just to be safe.

  The dye works great. The colors look desaturated, like all colors do in the moonlight, but we can still see them dark and clear against the cows’ white fur, and I know in the light of day they will be Technicolor bright. The dye is way better than paint, I realize, because it’s also nontoxic. After they stand out in the rain for a couple weeks, it’ll just wash out!

  The squirt guns leave long, loopy splashes of color. After a half hour of painting, the herd looks like an LSD trip. Jake is able to handle his gun with the greatest degree of accuracy and manages to shakily write EAT ME on one cow. I try to paint one cow like an American flag, and it sort of works, in an abstract, Jasper Johns kind of way. Will my American-flag cow spark a political debate that forever changes our nation? Probably.

  The cows really don’t seem to mind that we’re squirting them. They don’t love it, but I guess they’re used to getting hosed down by the farmer every now and then. They’re basically ignoring us, just munching on the grass, but then suddenly all of them lift their heads in unison. The whole herd pauses like that for a moment, then trots away alarmed, deeper into the pasture.

  What spooked them? The herd’s sudden absence makes me feel exposed. The pasture is wide open, the night sky stacked with heavy clouds.

  I turn to look at Jake and PJ, who are similarly confused.

  “What was that about?” I ask, but then Jake’s gaze shifts past me, over my shoulder. I turn around and see, cresting a hill on the horizon, the moonlit silhouette of a lone cow.

  Behind me, PJ gives an appreciative whistle. “That’s a big cow.”

  The big cow pauses on the summit, as though it knows how good it looks standing in front of the low moon like that and wants to give us a moment to admire its stature. Then it rears back, kicks its front hooves in the air, and gallops down the hill toward us. Fast.

  “That’s no cow,” PJ says. I turn to reply to him, but he’s not behind me anymore. He’s tearing back toward the fence at a full sprint. A split second later Jake mumbles “shit” under his breath, drops his squirt gun, and runs for the fence too.

  My brain says, Kirby, you should run too, and yet I cannot.

  I’m transfixed by grim fascination. The big cow approaches with surprising speed, and as he reaches the bottom of the hill, now on the pasture proper with me, I see with my own eyes that PJ is right indeed; this is no cow. The beast drops its massive head like a bulldozer lowering its shovel, and moonlight glints dully off wide, curved horns. Their ghostly whiteness reminds me of the bright ribs inside the deer carcass, and something about this connection at last unsticks me. I turn and run even though in the pit of my stomach I feel it’s too late.

  As I run, I suck cold air into my lungs, and they tighten up, the beginning of an asthma attack. My left foot goes straight into a cow patty and comes out clean, minus the shoe. I’m running off-balance, limping a little and tripping every time my unshod foot steps on a rock or a sharp stick, which is every single step.

  Faintly at first, but growing louder every second, I hear the bull closing in behind me. Its breath is a terrifying wet chugging, like a locomotive made of meat. I do not turn around to look. I focus in front of me, searching the dark horizon desperately for the electric fence.

  For a few frantic seconds I don’t see the fence at all and fear I might be running in the wrong direction, deeper into the field, but then I see the white porcelain insulation knobs floating in the dark. A moment later the fence itself emerges, bobbing up and down in my vision, farther away than I’d like it to be but still, possibly, close enough to reach before I get trampled. PJ is already on the other side, hopping up and down madly and waving at me to come on, come on, hurry up! Jake reaches the fence and leaps over it headfirst, like he’s diving into a pool.

  The bull is closing in. I can tell because in addition to its heavy breathing I hear a disturbing new sound: the deep drum of pounding hooves.

  I’m not going to make it.

  The fence is still about twenty yards away, an impossible distance. Even worse than the distance are PJ’s and Jake’s faces, twisted into masks of terror as they back away from the fence. I’ve never seen Jake look scared, and the expression on his face right now could best be described as “steeling yourself to watch your friend die.�
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  PJ yells, “Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” and jumps up and down. He throws his backpack toward me over the fence, trying to hit the bull, I guess, but instead it lands in front of me and I have to jump over it and I almost trip.

  I can’t run any faster.

  A second later whatever was in the backpack splinters loudly as the bull tramples it under his hooves behind me—much closer behind me than I expected.

  I run faster.

  Jake and PJ back away from the fence.

  I feel the bull’s weight behind me, its gravity so profound it pulls me toward it like a black hole. Its pounding approach shakes the ground under my feet, and although I’m not close enough to jump over the fence, I jump anyway, because if I wait one second longer, I’ll be skewered on its horns.

  I leap headfirst, like Jake did, and at the top of my arc, time seems to slow down and I see everything with superhuman clarity: the thin strands of wire wound together to make the electric fence’s cables, the rusted screws that fasten the insulators to the metal fence posts, the individual blades of grass on the other side of the fence, the side of safety, so close. But I can also see that, indeed, I was not close enough to jump, and I’m not going to sail over the top of the fence. Instead, I’m going to land smack in the middle of it.

  My head and shoulders luckily pass through the second and third wire, but my stomach lands on the middle wire, my body stuck halfway through the fence.

  An irresistible current sweeps through my body, contracting all of my muscles, even the tiny ones in my face. My toes curl tight. My whole skeleton is united in one single vibration, a tuning fork struck by God’s hammer.

  I must black out for a second, because the next thing I know, from a great distance I hear PJ yell, “Ah! It stings!” and then I’m looking up at the stars, PJ and Jake each holding one of my arms and dragging me away through the mud on the other side of the fence. They let go of me and I try to stand up, but I can’t feel my legs and I immediately fall onto my ass. The best I can manage is to teeter into a sitting position, and when my vision clears, I’m looking up at the bull.