Cow F*ck*r

© 2008 by Preston L. Allen

Down in Palmetto Grove, the old folks used to tell the story of Junker and the cow.

Well, first, there was the cow. Pick a cow. Any cow.

Then there was the rope. A strong one.

And then there was Junker.

A citrus picker by trade, Junker had a funny voice that made everybody who heard him laugh. He was a sight to see—shoeblack, wiry, and decked out in his Sunday best bib overalls—but folks generally tried to keep the young ones away from him because of that thing with the cow.

Junker was what folks today might call a pervert.

Like everybody else back then, Junker had a wife and a half dozen raggedy kids that lived all jammed together with him in his little house of sticks. No electricity, no in door plumbing, no glass windows, all the furniture second and third hand. You know how it was—the work was hard and there wasn’t much money. Junker, a pious man who could be found in church every Sunday morning, wasn’t one to complain about it. You did what you had to do to get by. That’s how most people back then felt.

You did what you had to do.

But on nights when he thought nobody was looking, Junker would go outside for a smoke and then sneak into the barn with that cow and tie her up real good to one of the feeding stocks with her tail end out.

Then he would loop that thick rope nice and secure around her hind legs. Then he would get behind the cow and loop the rope around his own legs too.

By this time, his bib overalls were down and his business big and hard in his hand.

Now the cow would protest, mooing loudly and swinging her rump like crazy, but she couldn’t throw him off no matter how hard she bucked since her hind legs and his were bound together. Wherever she flung her rump, she flung Junker there too. After a while she would calm down with Junker massaging her backside and soothing, “Hold on there, Bessy. Hold on. Just now, you’re gonna feel something sweet, sweet, sweet,” which came out as “tweet, tweet, tweet” because of his funny cartoon voice.

That last line had the young ones cracking up the way the old folks told it, and a boy’s natural curiosity being such as it was made more than a few of them interested in seeing it for themselves.

That’s how Robert got in trouble.

He came down to Palmetto Grove to spend the summer with his grandmother and his cousins, and they snuck out of the house late one night and crept down to that barn to peek in and see the thing for themselves, and there it was, just as everyone had said, a mooing cow, a thick rope, and a man pushing his business into the cow’s backside.

What nobody had told the giggling-too-loudly Robert was that Junker had a temper like a hair trigger and he always carried a shotgun.

The first blast went high, but the second one tore through the side of the barn that the boy was hiding behind, splintering the boards into razor-edged shards and setting them in motion.

A spinning piece of wood sliced Robert’s face from his ear to his neck so deep it dug out his eye and nearly decapitated him.

Robert was nine.

He would live.