This is the story of Valentine's Day 2004, a day that will live in infamy. That was the day Centavo met Ouisie. The sky was blue, the birds were singing, and Ouisie was wearing about a quart of cow manure.
There was nothing Ouisie loved better than her father’s farm. Ever since she was a little girl she’d found ways to escape the tedium of activities befitting a proper young lady in favor of finding a more perfect tree to climb, collecting their chickens’ eggs, or hiding just close enough to the brook to hear its gentle water noises and let it lull her to sleep in the welcoming afternoon sun.
As the years passed, Ouisie’s parents had indulgently given up trying to push her into more delicate pursuits and swelled with pride as she became the most talented and skillful farmer in the region. When the Ladies’ Charity had their meetings and all the mothers would trot out their finest brags about whom their Dianas had married or what their Cynthias had stitched, Ouisie’s mother positively beamed as she offered that just the other week her Louisa had worked out a new way to divert water to the field.
Of course, everyone in town thought the Stocktons were rather eccentric for encouraging Ouisie in her oddness, but it seemed to be best to be polite since you’d never change their minds about it all. One could only hope that Mr. and Mrs. Stockton might not live to see the ruin they were sure to have wrought upon their daughter.
So the town pretty much left the Stocktons alone, and the Stocktons, in turn, left Ouisie alone, and thus, on the morning of Valentine’s Day, in 2004, Ouisie was out checking on the soybean fields, giving them a thorough evaluation before the start of the next growing season. The surprising warmth of the sun and the wide expanse of blue sky, like a gift in the middle of a depressing Iowa winter had drawn Ouisie into something of a trance, and so, with her hands in her pockets and her face turned up toward the sun, Ouisie walked straight into an icy patch of mud and manure, felt her feet fly out from under her, and fell flat on her back.
Stunned by the fall, Ouisie took a moment to gaze at the clouds for a moment, until she felt the icy water start to penetrate her wool coat and long winter skirts and soak through her starched, white undergarments. At the sting of the cold water Ouisie yelped and jumped to her feet. Now was not the time to stare at the sky and contemplate her life, she thought, as she tried to brush the mud and manure from her backside with her mittened hands. This was the moment Centavo first saw her.
Centavo had always heard that the state of Iowa was behind the times, but never had he realized they might be at least a century behind the times. That woman over there had worn a dress into a field of cow manure! Getting the land for his open bar avant-garde theatre and mall (for vegans only) was going to be no easy matter.
Centavo turned off the Lana Del Rey song he’d been listening to (he’d liked her when she was Lizzy Grant) and got out of his Dodge Avenger. Peering down through his horn-rimmed glasses, he admired the country dust that was gathering on his close-fitting jeans. He was definitely keeping it real—not that he’d call it that. He reached into the backseat and pulled out a couple of Pabst Blue Ribbons to help loosen up the formidable Louisa Stockton, lest she fail to grasp the inherent value of his stroke of entrepreneurial genius.
As Centavo approached the tall fence surrounding the Stockton property, he vividly imagined swinging himself effortlessly over it with a great deal of grace and an obvious nostalgia for the new wave of American spaghetti westerns his friends in Brooklyn had been attempting to make. As he actually attempted this maneuver, he found he lacked the upper body strength and settled for an indelicate scramble over the top, carefully making sure he didn’t fall into the field and disturb his newly-acquired mantle of road dust. This was the moment Ouisie first saw him.
As Ouisie looked at him questioningly, her feet firmly planted on the farmland she knew so well it was a part of her, Centavo introduced himself and explained his business plan for the open bar avant-garde theatre and mall (for vegans only) on top of Ouisie’s farm, financed by a source that could only be his own father while wearing a closefitting “Who is John Galt?” T-shirt. And that’s when Ouisie slapped him full in the face.
Centavo was stunned and outraged. He looked around at the farm – the sludge, the manure, the smell of pigs.
“Why did you do that?!” he squeaked, edging away from Ouisie with nervous little steps, his feet barely leaving the ground.
“Do you realize what’s wrong with your plan?” Ouisie demanded. “You’ll take my land, destroy a place that’s been here for centuries, to raise a cheap tourist attraction that might have a year or two of popularity at best, and that will be abandoned as soon as the next thing comes along! You will destroy something real – a place where people and earth connect – for some imitation of life.”
“You don’t understand,” said Centavo. “What I want to do is real. I’m opposed to consumerist culture as much as you are! This project is supposed to make a statement – I’m melding the gentrified urban, the suburban and the rural into a collage of conflicting stimuli. Don’t you see? I have to put it here. It’s ironic. You should just be grateful I want to bring something like this to this backwards place, bring it attention and give it some legitimacy. I mean, you’ve got something here, but I can make it mean something.”
With that, Ouisie launched herself at Centavo. She tackled him, sat atop him, and delivered three swift punches to the ribs.
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