The Bull

A Story by cleankitchen

A short story about a couple of kids who go into the hills to catch a run away bull and it turns out badly for all.

“Hold still Jake, I gotta put pressure on it.” Jimmy said gently. I am lying face down in the back of a pickup truck traveling at roughly the speed of light down a winding two track with small rivers of water running across it that seem to necessitate extremely rapid braking and course corrections. It is raining, I am bleeding profusely and I am certain that our driver is quite drunk. You’re probably wondering how I got into this predicament. Let me explain.

Six hours ago Jimmy crashed his bike into our chicken coop and came running up to the house hollering like a lunatic. “Jake, Jake! You awake? The Thompsons cows got out, we got to get going.” He threw open our screen door and stood in the kitchen doorway, looking haggard as ever.

“Finish your breakfast son.” My mother said calmly as she reached up into the cupboard to pull out another plate. “Sit down Jimmy, I’m guessing you haven’t eaten yet.”

“I’m ok.” Jimmy stammered as he pulled out a chair and plopped down breathing heavily. My mother held a wooden match to a burner and placed a cast iron pan on it. She then deftly reached into the icebox with one hand quickly returning to the pan with two eggs and a few pieces of thick cut bacon. “No you’re not, anyone can see that. Now sit and eat and pretend to behave.” My mother said without looking away from the frying pan.

Jimmy had a deal with the Thompsons, if he helped them catch the cows that were perpetually plowing through fences he could fish their farm ponds. The Thompsons were a fairly old couple, they didn’t get around really well and they certainly could not be chasing bovines around the hills all day long. Normally their idiot son would take care of this sort of thing but he, like all the other able bodied men in those days, was overseas ‘trying not to get his a*s shot off’ as my mother so delicately put it.

The Thompsons have five small ponds on their property that are legendary among local fishermen, rumors abound about the size of the trout finning around in those cool, spring-fed waters. Normally the idiot son kept anyone from fishing the ponds so he could have it all to himself, now in an act of desperation the Thompsons had offered the exclusive right to those ponds to Jimmy if he could gather up their precious herd when they wandered off. Sort of like making a deal with the devil, if the devil were a thirteen year old boy with a perpetual farmers tan riding a rusty Schwinn with a banana seat who knew almost nothing about farming or handling cattle.

So there I was before I knew it riding in the bed of Jimmy’s older brother’s pickup truck bumping and swaying my way down County Trunk G towards the Thompsons farm. Jimmy let me know right away that he was going to be doing the talking. This was fine with me, talking not being one of my strong suits. He hadn’t quite figured out how we’d get all the cows back into the pasture and didn’t seem to be concerned with it, the general thought on this type of endeavor being that even if you did have a plan in mind the details of it would need to be changed along the way and I guess Jimmy’s general life philosophy has been that if those details are going to be changed anyway then why waste time thinking about them ahead of time? Why not just go in with no preconceptions and figure it out along the way.

We came bouncing off the pavement and hit the end of the gravel drive with a shudder, Jimmy’s older brother slammed the old truck into low gear and gassed the engine hard as we started the slow crawl to the top of the Thompson’s driveway. Upon reaching the house we were greeted by a yapping mongrel and a relieved looking Harriet Thompson. She is a nice woman, I guess. Not real quick on the uptake as my grandpa is fond of saying, and he would know being a former suitor. But that subject is best left for another day. Intelligence never was a strong suit of their family, the culmination of this being their idiot son who’d not only been blessed with an empty head but had the delightful temperament of mud wasp awoken in March.

Mrs. Thompson regaled us with the story that had brought them to their current predicament. “Aint but one cow that got out. Not the whole herd.” Jimmy and I exchanged quick barely concealed grins, this would be like taking candy from a baby.

“You might want to knock off makin’ googley eyes at one another boys, cause’ this aint no ordinary cow. This is one reeeeeeeaaaaaaaal son of a b***h.” She drew out the word ‘real’ so long that she almost ran out of breath, and with the end of her statement she spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the dirt as if to drive her point home. Jimmy and I were all ears, meanwhile our driver George had drifted over to his truck and was rummaging around in the glove box and holding something in a brown bottle up to the sun.

It was explained to us that the Thompsons had acquired a bull from one of the farmers in Glenbrook, which is a few dozen miles away as the crow flies. “We had some breedin’ for him but I guess he’d rather run off.” This bull was apparently what local farmers in our area called a ‘window breaker’ and had been locked in the barn several times only to be found later calmly grazing in the pasture with a double hung framing his neck like a gold medal. “I guess he’s even trapped himself in the damn silo. I’m tellin' ya this bull is either the dumbest son of a b***h on the planet or the smartest. I aint figured out which yet.” Miss Thompson said as she turned back towards the barn and pasture adjoining it, I guessed she was a fine one to judge bovine intelligence.

She then took us on a quick tour of the farm, enlightening us on where the bull was (the barn) and how he extricated himself (muscling his way through a locked gate) from what I can only assume he felt was a sticky situation. Being the young men that we were, we were envious of the bulls charmed life and couldn’t understand why he wanted to run. But the sexuality of his situation didn’t quite reveal any clues as to where the old bull had wandered off to. I guess what I mean to say is the grass was no greener on the other side of the mountain, unless it was literal grass not metaphorical.

Returning to the truck we began to discuss our strategy. Jimmy suggested we head south, back towards Glenbrook by way of the town roads. Stopping to check the dirt for cow tracks as often as we could and then going in on foot once we had triangulated his position by paved road. This seemed like a fine place to start to me, George took a long pull from his mysterious brown bottle, threw it in his shirt pocket and pulled the choke on his old Chevy and turned the key as his way of saying that he agreed with the plan. George generally was not one for talking and he was terribly lazy, I often wondered if he was related to the Thompsons in some way. But what he lacked in intelligence was of minor importance as he was the only of our acquaintances in possession of an automobile at that time, this was the only contribution he needed and unfortunately he was just smart enough (like our bull) to recognize it.

Three hours later an empty brown bottle clinked in the back of the pickup as we bounced down a farm road that ran north of the Thompsons between there and the river. “Is your brother ok?” I asked Jimmy suspiciously eyeing the empty brown bottle.

“Course he is, what the hell you talkin’ about Jake? My brother can drink gallons of that stuff, learned it working with the foresters last summer.” Jimmy said without hesitation. “I tried it once, tasted like kerosene mixed with pine needles. Not bad though.”

I was not surprised that Jimmy had tried some or that it had tasted like kerosene, I had smelled enough and even sneaked a taste of it myself as I washed the tin cup my grandpa used when we went fishing or hunting up in the mountains. I was a little worried about Georges driving ability when sober. I’m not sure how to describe the feelings I had about a drunken George behind the wheel of a pickup truck with wooden sides, no tailgate and what I’m guessing was a semi-functioning braking system. To say I was mildly perturbed would be an understatement. I tightened me grip on the rough cut bed rail and tabled the queasy feeling I had about George’s driving for the moment. “Jimmy, how are we going to get the bull back to the….”

The words were ripped out of my mouth as George cranked the wheel of the old Chevy hard to the right and jammed his foot so hard to the floor that all the debris in the back of the truck (including us) became airborn and hit the rear of the cab. I pried my fingers from the lumber that comprised the rails of the truck bed and wiped the dirt and dust out of my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

“George, jeezus! What the hell!” I know what you’re thinking, and no, it wasn’t me. Surprisingly it was Jimmy that had asked this extremely bold question of his older brother. “Look” said George in a typical mono-syllabic response gesturing to the road in front of us.

There in the middle of the dirt road was our bull, standing about ten feet away from and old covered bridge that spanned the south fork of the river where it was deep enough not to be forded. “Huh, I didn’t even know that bridge was there. Did you?” Jimmy croaked nonchalantly as he hopped down out of the truck. “Nope.” I said in mono-syllabic fashion. I was not worried about the bridge at that point, what I was worried about was two thousand pounds of irritated short ribs and Sunday roast that stood fifty feet away peering at us as if we were aliens. Did I forget to mention that this bull had horns?

“So, here is the plan.” Jimmy said as he grabbed a twig and began to scratch a rough map into the dirt of the road directly behind the sideways pickup truck. “You circle behind and drive the bull up the road towards the truck and when he gets close enough I’ll toss a lasso around his neck. The other end will be tied to the bumper of the truck and presto, we walk our bull right back to the Thompsons like he was your mommy’s beagle out for a stroll” The look on Jimmy face as he said this led me to believe he had total confidence and saw no obstacles. I had a similar feeling with the exception that mine was a sureness that someone was going to get gored. I kept these thoughts to myself as Jimmy rummaged around in a rusty toolbox, that George had produced from behind the passenger seat of the truck, and handed me an old hatchet. “Here is a weapon if you need it.” He said with a sneer. “I got the rope, so let’s get this thing going. If this rain holds off I might even fish tonight.”

The sky had taken on an ominous color. I’m sure it matched the shade of my face as I slid down the bank of the river to get around the bull. Prickly ash and Blackberry gouged my skin as I climbed up towards the junction where the dirt road met the old wooden bridge, finally emerging back onto the road about thirty or forty feet behind the bull. I buried my fear, gripped the hatchet handle and started hooting. The bull did not take notice. I gave Jimmy a perturbed glance and escalated my hooting, walking about ten feet towards the bull who then glanced back over his shoulder at me and breathed out audibly. I again escalated my hooting, at this point I was sure I sounded like sex crazed Barn Owl. That’s when the rain began to come down in huge drops that felt like stones on my shoulders. I could barely see the bull but I kept hooting and moving forward foot by foot. Miraculously the bull started to walk towards Jimmy and the truck. Foot by terrifying foot he inched his way back down the road. I peered through the heavy rain shielding my eyes with the back of my hand. I could see Jimmy swinging a loose loop of rope around his head in a rough approximation of a Montana cowboy.

Several minutes later the rain had let up to a moderate level that washed down the dry dirty road creating miniature canyons and watersheds. The bull was nearing the rear of the truck. I watched with admiration as Jimmy let the hand holding the loop open up and release. I watched, horrified as the loop landed over one of the bull’s horns. I did mention the bull had horns right, large black impressive horns that exited his skull and continued at right angles to his body spanning maybe three and half feet. I stood open mouth as Jimmy put pressure on the loose end of the rope to pull the loop tight and it tighten it up around the bull’s one horn. The bull was not immediately aware that he was in any kind of danger, sort of like catching a large Carp he just kept walking unaware that he was hooked until the slack in the rope began to disappear and the rope tightened up. Only then did he understand that he was in yet another sticky situation. Jimmy stood in the bed of the truck, George was leaning on the opposite fender (looking smarter by the minute) and I stood, alone and shivering in the middle of the road holding the handle of a rusty hatchet as my only defense against two thousand pounds of pissed off muscle, sinew and horns.

The bull hit the end of that rope (which was probably thirty feet) and flinched as his head was pulled to the right almost the way you steer a horse; he then let out a massive groan, stamped his feet and swung his head from right to left rapidly. I could see the rear end of the truck moving with each sway of the bull’s head, after ten or fifteen seconds even Jimmy started to have a worried look on his face and I could see George scanning around for suitable climbing trees. I could only think of the joke my grandpa always told about getting chased by a heifer and having only to run faster than the guy he was fishing with, I tried to think of something else as the bull worked at pulling himself free from the weight of the Chevy. I could only picture that bull wandering around the pasture with the rusted bumper from a pickup truck still tied to his horn. ‘I ate the rest of the truck, you got a problem with that?’ he’d say to anyone who got near him.

After what seemed like hours the bull began to calm a little and I thought my earlier premonition of an eminent goring was unfounded. Jimmy got his confident look back and George had somehow found another bottle of Gin and was looking very cool about the whole affair. I hesitantly took a few steps toward the truck and that is when the bull began to charge me. It wasn’t like the movies either, he didn’t stamp his foot to warn me and I’m fairly certain no steam came out of his nostrils. He just started walking toward me picking up speed quickly. When he hit the end of that rope his head was down and his neck muscles tensed and quivering. Craaaaaaaaack was the only sound as the tip of his horn broke off and rope slid from it.

I did what I never thought I could do in a million years no matter how many times I’d seen it done in the rodeos that came to our town every summer, I stood my ground. Let me say that again, I (twelve years old, wet and shivering, weighing maybe one hundred and ten pounds holding a tool meant for splitting kindling) stood my ground. I have tried to think if what was going through my head at that moment and why I came to that decision but can only come up with one solution �" there was no one to run faster than.

The bull got closer and closer and time seemed to stop, I gripped the hatchet so tight that my hand hurt for days after, though that turned out to be minor pain. In the instant I realized the bull was not bluffing I finally turned and began to run towards the covered bridge dropping the hatchet and putting as much power into my scrawny legs as I could muster. I could sense him behind me, I could feel the ground rumble like I was standing next to train tracks, I swear I could even feel the bull’s breath on my neck as he got close enough to swipe at me with his horns. The first time he swung his head to the right he caught the back of my shirt and I could feel the tip of his horn (the good one) ripping though the wet flannel as if it was tissue paper. The second time he connected. I can only recall hazy details from then until we got back to town.

I remember being thrown into the air and seeing the bridge, truck and ditch all whirling around my body like I was on a merry go round, feeling like I had been stung by a wasp in my right butt cheek and I remember hitting the ditch and rolling down to the river through the prickly ash and blackberry plants and laying on the bank with one arm in the cool water and the faces of George and Jimmy hovering over me with equal parts amazement and concern.

So there is the story of how I came to have the nickname of one-cheek (in certain company) and the story of a bull that came to have the nickname of one-horn and how three young fools went in search of certain trouble and found it in volume. As far as I know one-horn is still roaming the hills around the South Branch of the LaFayette River, George is still a drunk, Jimmy is still scheming about how to gain access to those legendary ponds and I am still grounded (and limping).