The fact is, I wasn't mad at Brian for what he'd said. It's like when someone breaks it to you that there's no such thing as Santa. It stinks, but hey, you've got to know sometime. You can't be thirty years old or something and still sitting up Christmas Eve waiting. You've got to learn sometime that the world sucks. And I'd just learned it.
Still, I sure wasn't interested in seeing Brian any time soon. But the next morning he pulled into the yard just as we were finishing our amazingly delicious burned pancakes and took this huge complicated thing out of the back of his Cherokee. So of course we had to go out and see what he was doing.
"That's a power washer," Dad said. I knew he wouldn't like it.
"I thought this might help with the barn cleaning," Brian explained. "Sir."
"Hmph. It makes a hell of a racket. D.J., you better move the calves outside."
Well. That was about the biggest shock of my life, Dad agreeing like that. So of course because I always do what Dad says, I went and moved the calves out to the garden, which isn't a garden anymore but it's still fenced in, and Brian went to work with extension cords and hoses as Dad shuffled around with his walker, poking his nose into everything. Then, thank God, Dad and Curtis went off to Dad's physical therapy, because if Dad spent all morning nagging at Brian I would have died.
After his operation Dad of course couldn't drive, and Mom worked and even though I had a temp permit that let me drive him I had this little thing called a farm to work on, so it ended up that Curtis had to drive Dad around. At least Dad didn't beat up on him too much. That's one advantage to not talking. After a while people stop talking back.
I guess it was kind of a shock to Brian though, seeing that. His jaw just about hit the ground. "Your brother's like fourteen years old! What are they doing?"
"He turned thirteen last month." It was kind of fun, being matter-of-fact when Brian was so goggle-eyed. "They're just going to PT."
"But he doesn't even have a license!"
"It's a farm—he's driven for years. Besides, who's going to stop him? He's six feet tall."
"Jeez," Brian said under his breath. "Your family is so different."
"Duh." I didn't say that to be funny or anything, I was just pointing out the obvious. But we both laughed anyway.
***
Brian did a good job with the power washing; I have to give him that. He got all decked out in a raincoat and rain pants and big waterproof boots and went right to work spraying down the walls. It was like a fire hose just knocking all that dried-up gunk right off. In about ten seconds he got all the cobwebs and dirt off the windows better than I could have in an hour. Water sprayed everywhere, all over the ceiling and floor and his raincoat and the sawdust bedding in the stalls, which frankly needed to be replaced anyway. So I went to work shoveling all the bedding into the manure gutter, and running the gutter's conveyor belt to get all that waste into the manure cart, and basically doing the hard work while Brian just stood there like a kid with a new water gun.
"You want to try?" he yelled over the noise.
"I'd probably break it." Which I immediately regretted but it was too late because he shrugged and went back to his spraying. He even went at the big fans until they were brand-new clean, and I turned them on even though we might get electrocuted but we didn't, and they started drying everything out. And in a couple hours that barn looked better than it had in years. Except for the fact that most of the paint was gone now too, and in lots of spots you could see the actual stone from when the barn walls were built a million years ago by my great-great-grandfather.
Brian stripped off his raincoat, and it occurred to me that it wasn't just water soaking his T-shirt. He'd worked pretty hard. He packed the power washer back into his Cherokee while I drove the manure cart to the pit over the hill, little white paint chips floating on top. I sure hope that paint chips work as fertilizer because that's what they were about to become.
When I got back Brian was inside with Dad and Curtis, having lunch.
"What do you want to drink, son?" Dad asked him.
"We've got milk," I offered, which is a really old joke in our family because of course there's a 1,000-gallon tank in the milk house waiting for the milk tanker to come pick up the milk.
Brian cracked up, I guess because milk jokes were still kind of new for him.
Then I caught Curtis watching me. The expression on Curtis's face—well, he's the only person I joke with in the kitchen these days, and he didn't like me joking with someone else too much. And that one second of good mood I'd had laughing with Brian went right out the window. So we just ate. Brian said he could taste the horseradish in the sandwiches, which made Dad puff up like a rooster he was so pleased, but Curtis and I just stared at our food and forced it down.
After lunch Dad insisted on coming out to the barn with the new cane the PT lady had given him because he didn't need a walker anymore, which meant we moved about three feet an hour, and then once we got there you could see big puddles the fans hadn't dried out yet, and even though I figured Dad knew about canes and wet floors it still made me a little nervous. Not to mention him glaring at everything like this was a beauty contest or something.
"Needs paint" was all he said. Thank you too, Dad. He eyeballed Brian: "You know anything about painting, at least?"
"Um, what? I'm painting?" Brian looked blindsided.
"Jimmy Ott sent you over to work. Right, D.J.?"
God, Dad can be such a jerk. What was I supposed to say? That Brian didn't have to paint because he was only here for a week of preseason training? I'd cut off my arm before I said that. So I shrugged because I didn't know what else to do.
"Darn right," Dad added to himself. He inched his way back to the house, stomping that cane down each time like he was working a pile driver.
I turned to Brian. "You don't have to paint, you know."
"Aw, I probably should. If Jimmy Ott found out, I'd be in trouble with him all over again." He didn't look too happy about it, though.
I felt so bad that we messed around in the toolshed for a long time trying to find paint that was still, you know, liquid, and then because the barn was still too damp to paint we went running. It was cooler today at least, so it didn't feel so awful.
"I hope it's okay," Brian offered at one point, "me bringing the power washer over, after you told me not to and all."
"Jimmy said it would be okay. I was..." He grinned sheepishly. "I was complaining, you know, about how you wouldn't listen to anything I said about stuff like power washing. And Jimmy said not to take it personally because you didn't know anything about machinery less than forty years old. You probably didn't know what a power washer was."
I guess I could have gotten mad, but it was pretty funny. I grinned back.
Just then Mom passed us in her Caravan, looking a little surprised to see us out there on the road jogging away. I tried to figure out something to say about that but I couldn't come up with anything. Bringing up something stupid like the Vikings draft picks probably wouldn't work, seeing as Brian follows Green Bay. We couldn't really talk about training because it'd be like talking about breathing or something—we were already talking it to death. Maybe I could ask how truck sales were going? No, that would be the stupidest thing of all—
"You know," Brian said all of a sudden, spooking me, "I like running with you."
"Oh."
"When you don't feel like talking, you don't talk. That's pretty cool."
We ran the rest of the way without saying anything else, me wondering the whole time if he'd said that not talking in general was cool, or that I was.
***
"So," Mom said at dinner in her fake casual way, "you're running with Brian?"
"Uh-huh." I polished off a couple pints of water.
"What's he doing running?" Mom asked.
"Training for football." Which was true.
"How come you're running with him?"
"Because he doesn't run fast enough." Which was also true.
"Well, that's awfully thoughtful of you," said Mom.
Whew. I didn't have to lie. I'm not too good at lying. And Mom, well, I don't know if she thought I was some kind of Good Samaritan or she was just too tired to bring it up, but she didn't mention that F or my English papers or anything like that. So that was good too.
I didn't realize until I was in bed that night that I hadn't thought one bit all day about being a cow, I guess because I'd been so busy. And I didn't think about it in bed either if you want to know the truth, because about three seconds after remembering the cow stuff I was asleep. You know that expression "fall asleep"? That's what it felt like. Like I was a plank that someone let go of and I just fell smack into this dark warm place where I didn't think or move all night, and that was just about the best thing ever.