8-30-04

On the road to Avenal, my ex-neighbor and family acquaintance, Simony Lloyd Gibbs Jr., joins our conversation about twenty minutes into the ride.

After selling sprockets at Jehovah’s Cyclery, he left his apparent vocation to become a socialite, or the San Joaquin Valley variation of the type - not much fitting it’s description by any means. He was a man with a head the size of Texas and wore a cowboy hat fit for two, or in his case, for one. He was straight out of a woefully horrid Texas shootout. His coat was gray, not large enough to conceal his formidable belly, but nevertheless emblazoned with rhinestones up and down each seem. I’d like to imagine it was the only one of the kind he owned.

We, Ezra and I, had been discussing the new solutions to storing plutonic waste and the danger it was posing to the Ogallala Aquifer, the United States’ largest underground reservoir, running from South Dakota all the way down through the lone star state.

Lloyd was not one to pipe in the face of reason. He was all about predestination of human thought - never yielding to the natural paths of the curious mind. He was a simpleton.

“I have three wives,” he told me.

“What you mean is that you have had three wives, right?” I responded.

“No, I have three.”

He obviously was not saying that he had three wives. He more or less was aggravating me. My response apparently fell somewhere on his emotional barometer between indignant and noncompliant.

To me, he was either begging the question of his senility, or confessing his desires for two more wives.

I was somehow hoodwinked into taking Lloyd to pick up his latest speculation, a purebred Holstein cow. This was under two conditions - one, that he give me seventy-five dollars and two, that he ride in the back seat. Apparently I was the only person Lloyd knew whose car owned a trailer hitch - something I still am not completely certain is true.

Five miles from our destination I was forced to stop on the account of my needing to use a restroom, knowing full well that I was not about to spend a moment more than I had to at the ‘cow store’ and realizing there would not be a chance for this on the twenty-mile ride back with a cow strapped to the top of my car.

I pulled over the car at a rural convenient store called Charlie’s Emporium. “Emporium of what?” I enquired to myself. It was a crooked piece of architecture - I would be dumbstruck if it met any of the nonexistent building codes of central California - but it seemed to be quite the bustling marketplace on this Friday afternoon.

After finishing up restroom tasks, I chance to see Lloyd talking with a small, slender, dark old man.

He was propositioning the man to trade his used rainwater for a can of lima beans. As irrelevant as the transaction was, regarding of both parties, it was a testament to the newfound disgust toward Lloyd growing inside me. To be truthful, I’ve known of the man since childhood, only occasionally finding myself in conversation with him, usually regarding his lustrous feelings toward the neighborhood girls - those conversations, however, did not arise until my adult years thank the Lord - but still very distasteful coming from him.

My disgust for him was not overridden with nausea or such, just a revelation of his transparency. A man who has found himself trapped under manure and cannot free himself for fear of getting his hands dirty is allegorically correct by reason of Lloyd’s inner workings.

Somehow Lloyd had picked up in their conversation that the man he was dealing with was of Native American descent. The natives of the area are said to have once believed that the accumulations of natural gold found in central California came from the rain, on the account that they gold was found on the ground after rainfall. Gold was lifted out of the soil and left above ground once the rain dried away. To his credibility, Lloyd was working on the notion, hoping the man was naďve enough to still believe in the centuries-old myth. I was not privy to this myth at the time. It now occurs to me that Lloyd was not truly hoping the man would make a financial investment in his rainwater, but rather was insulting the man by reason of his ancestral ‘foolishness.’

“I can do this and that as eloquently as that peter-piper!”

All I know is that I hoped this scam wasn’t going to finance another rhinestone suit.

Somehow, along the way out the door he found yet another subject to engage in deceitful bargaining.

All of this made me wonder how many sales at Jehovah’s Cyclery were tainted with his demagoguery.

I abruptly ended the charade, making my way back to the car - the other two following.

I looked over at Ezra. She was still smoking her cigarette.

The slaughterhouse was coming up on the right. All the cows were huddled as far from it as possible; they were up against the fence near the road.

I curiously wondered, staring blankly at the cows, the fence, the slaughterhouse, and the shallow pond directly across the road from all this madness. “Would these cows much prefer to walk over and swim to their collective deaths and is the true purpose of the fence to keep them from doing that?”

There was a long, uphill dirt road that led to the barn where I assumed we should be. Up to our car walked a man of about six-foot-two, way too tall to be a cattle rancher. I took reservation in addressing this anomaly, however. Lloyd inspected his purchase. I think this was maybe the second time that day I saw him hint at something resembling a smirk, or maybe what was more of a sneer. Whatever it was, our cow was loaded into a rusted, old single-horse trailer, which the rancher told us he did not want back. Lloyd’s third smirk of the day came after finding out he could keep the trailer.

And we merged onto the interstate.

Somehow unaware of the hastiness of impeding traffic behind me, I watched as a passenger-less blue sedan behind me was looking to pass.

As he signaled his way into the oncoming lane to my left, his headlights made it up to about parallel with my door when I noticed he was not likely to make it.

He clipped trailer causing my two pieces to fold at the hinge, until the cow snapped off, separate from my vehicle. We spun around once; the trailer spun several times, four if I counted correctly, until it collided back with the passenger side of my vehicle as we skid off the road into the dirt above the tarn to the right.

As we made contact with the trailer, the back passenger seat flew open, dumping Lloyd down the hill where he drowned in the lake. The cow was fine. She, or maybe it was a he, I forget, was still in her trailer, but was heeing and hawing like a horse. And mooing.

Koinis Coles
Volunteer Writer