“Tractor Jack” by Daniel Southwell

There’s a guy in town named Tractor Jack. You’ve probably seen him around if you live in the area. You’d think that in a farm town like this, driving a tractor wouldn’t be unusual enough to warrant a nickname, but it turns out the nickname came from his days as an offensive lineman in high school, just tractoring people around, and he didn’t end up driving a tractor day-in and day-out until a few years later, and once he was doing that, it made the nickname less interesting. 

But I saw his penis the other day and that was interesting. Respectable, as you’d figure for a man his size, but a little off-colored. Not off-colored like a dirty joke but kind of purplish, like it wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Which made me wonder, what’s the correct color for a penis? I haven’t seen that many, not having played football myself, or been in very many locker rooms or shared changing rooms or whatever. 

You’ve probably got a couple of questions for me at this point, but I’m not sure which to talk about first. One is why did I see Tractor Jack’s penis, and the other is what did I do about my penis-coloration questions. I’ll answer the second one first. I started by driving up to the hill south of town, where I can get decent cell service, and watching a sampling of porn, for research. After a minute I decided to switch to gay porn, because I figured my penis-observing efficiency would be at least doubled that way. 

So there’s a lot of types of penises, and in porn they’re all big— unless the point of the porn is that they’re small, like a little cuckold type of penis—but none of them were colored like Tractor Jack’s. Mine seemed to be more or less in the average range, color-wise, for my ethnicity. Obviously the other ethnicities had correspondingly colored penises.  

I could have sorted the porn by ethnicity, I guess, but searching for “gay porn white men only” didn’t feel right. I didn’t want to contribute that kind of prejudice to the algorithm. 

So once I felt good about the color of my penis, I started to worry about Tractor Jack. If his penis was suffocating somehow, he might lose it, and once you’ve lost your penis, you probably lose a lot of other things: your self-confidence, your ability to pee standing up, maybe even the love of your wife. Tractor Jack’s wife Nance was a good woman, a pillar of our small town, but you’d have to imagine she has needs like anybody. And Tractor Jack himself has a great reputation around here. They say he was all loaded up in his truck to go to the state college after high school, with his books all purchased and his hair slicked back, and then his best friend got in a bad way with some drug or other and didn’t have parents or anybody around, so Tractor Jack said, Hell with college, and moved in with him, and threw out not just the drugs but everything that reminded his friend of drugs—all his old clothes and furniture and movies and whatever—and they were roommates in that empty house and worked at the hardware store together until Tractor Jack inherited his farm and eventually the friend moved out west and started snowboarding and lives a nice, drug-free life in one of those mountain towns where he teaches rich people to snowboard, and when he broke his leg on a slope one year he just sweated through it instead of going on painkillers because he didn’t want to risk it and Tractor Jack called him every night to talk him through the pain. 

So I decided I had to help Tractor Jack. 

I don’t know him particularly well, so I couldn’t just walk up to him like a close neighbor could and say, Does your penis feel normal, have you noticed any abnormalities, have you spent any quality time with it lately, maybe with a mirror involved since that belly can’t be helping you get a clear sightline on it.

It got so I was pretty clearly distracted by worry, and my wife Angela noticed. I’ve never been the kind of guy that loses his appetite when something’s bothering him. It’s more the opposite problem. She’d come into the kitchen and find me eating marshmallows out of the bag and say, Those were to bring to your parents’ cookout tomorrow. And I’d have to apologize and say I didn’t realize how many I’d eaten because I was distracted, and she’d say it didn’t matter how many I ate, because we couldn’t bring an opened bag to share, so I’d finish the bag because at that point we’d have to buy a new bag anyway. Anyway Angela could always tell when something was distracting me. So I had to tell her. 

We sat down on the couch together. It was our first brand new couch. We’d saved for it and bought it from a catalog and it came on a special delivery truck. It didn’t smell new anymore but we still thought of it as the new couch. It looked stylish but wasn’t comfortable. None of the comfortable ones were stylish. Why can’t they make one with clean lines that’s still soft when you sit on it? I asked Angela whenever I used it for the first few days. But I’d gotten used to it. 

So we sat on it, and I held her hand, and I told her I was sorry for being so distant and eating so many bags of marshmallows; it was just that I was afraid that Tractor Jack was losing his penis. 

The big man from the Ag Hall? she asked.

I nodded because he was the big man from the Ag Hall. One of them anyway. 

She asked why I thought that and I said I saw it the other night and she asked how that happened and I said it was when I was out with my binoculars, and she said, Oh, that makes sense. 

I’m really worried about him, I said. Imagine if mine just dropped off one day.

She agreed that would be terrible. Angela is an understanding person. The first time I got hit in the balls in her presence, she winced so much I could tell she was empathetic. Some women don’t make the effort to understand.

She squeezed my hand and said, So what are we going to do?

I said I’d given it a lot of thought. I couldn’t just call the town doctor and say, So I was looking at one of your patient’s penises the other day, and I have some concerns. Angela agreed I couldn’t do that. So I told her the only way forward that I could see and she agreed—not too slow but not too quick either—which I figured was the perfect pacing for agreeing to that type of thing. 

So the next night I was in the car with my binoculars, parked around the corner behind the gas station, watching the Ag Hall. In movies when detectives do a stakeout, they’re always equipped with two things: a gallon of black coffee and a bottle to pee in. Well I figured if I did without the one, I could do without the other. I wasn’t fully dehydrated, you know, but I thought why make things harder for myself than necessary. Instead I chewed on some Twizzlers. I do like Twizzlers, but it drives me crazy when people call them licorice. Licorice is a flavor, not a texture. Licorice is black. You can’t just make cherry candy or whatever it is into a whip shape and then call it licorice. The flavor is named after the plant it comes from. That’s why you can make licorice flavor tea. Anyway.

Angela was wearing her dress with the lowest neckline, which also luckily had pockets so she could keep her phone on and hidden and I could hear what was happening. That’s important—dresses having pockets. To women, I mean. That’s the kind of healthy relationship Angela and I have. I pay attention to which dresses have pockets. 

She waited outside the Ag Hall for the farmers to come out one by one. When Tractor Jack finally came out, sipping a beer and enjoying the night—it was a very nice night, cool and clear—she sidled over to him and asked if they could talk. He said, Angela, right? From the library?

She took him over by his truck and I couldn’t see them anymore but I could hear them on the phone:

You’re a big boy, aren’t you?

Excuse me?

I’ve just been feeling so lonely.

Aren’t you married? To that little guy with the glasses?

I’m here with you now. 

Oh. You don’t have to…you can talk to me from over there.      

I have a condom here in my pocket. 

That dress has pockets? Nice.

Isn’t it?

I’m ok though, thank you.

I can just…take it out of this pack and…roll it right onto you.

I really appreciate the offer, but I’m going to pass. I’d better be getting home.

And Tractor Jack got in his pickup and drove away. Angela came back to me and got in the car without saying anything, which was unusual. She normally says things. 

When we got home, sitting in the driveway, I said, I know you’re worried about him, but it’s ok, we’ll find another plan, and she said, That’s not what I’m upset about!

So I waited to find out what she was upset about.

Apparently his rejection didn’t make her feel very good about herself, so I had to take her inside and pour her a glass of wine and pretend that I was a man at a bar so she could sidle up to me and flaunt that dress with its pockets and other appealing features, and when we finally ended up in the bedroom we had to use the condom she’d bought in the gas station bathroom. 

Later on she said we should have done it in the car, like we were in the Ag Hall parking lot, and I said, You were going to do it in his truck? and she shrugged and I said, It would have been dark! You wouldn’t have even been able to inspect the color! But she said she would have had him turn the dome light on. She said men always like to have the light on. Which felt pointed, because I don’t always like to have the light on. But yeah.

The next few days were hard. Angela said they were hard for her too. She mis-shelved a dozen books at the library and had to track them all down and reshelve them. Lots of people were coming in and looking for objectionable content so they could complain and have it removed from the shelves, but they always checked it out so they could inspect it and make sure it really was objectionable, and then they always renewed it, so she figured they were inspecting it extra thoroughly. That’s just how things were going at the library that summer. It’s not particularly relevant to our predicament, it just added to Angela’s mental state. And I guess it made me realize our town wasn’t one where you could just write someone a note about their penis.

So I was out driving around town more and more, imagining that mottle-colored dong. Wang. Weiner. I felt bad that those terms were coming to mind. It was a serious problem, and there I was, driving around with my binoculars and I couldn’t stop thinking middle school words. Schlong. That’s a Jewish one and I don’t know if I’m supposed to use it but it’s probably the best of all of them objectively. 

Finally I had to park and buy a bag of marshmallows and as I ate them I got desperate. I’ve gotten desperate a few times, and none of them ended well, but I figured that meant I was due.

Once was the time when I was eleven and I wanted to go along with my dad to the store but he said no—that was his thinking time—so I climbed on top of the car and held onto the luggage rack. The reason was, I wanted to poke the tower of bouncing balls. You know the ones, where you can pull a ball through the stretchy strings and then they all shift downward and you have to lob the ball back over the top and it’s hard to do, so usually the ball ends up bouncing down the toy aisle and you have to chase it and try over and over while the grownups wonder whose kid is running wild? My dad’s kid, that’s whose kid. Anyway the ride was exciting at first and then so terrible that I don’t remember most of it, and my dad went into the store and I snuck in after him, but he just grabbed one thing quick and left, because he didn’t know he’d brought a kid with him, and I had to get the store to call my house and I could hear his voice through the receiver in the employee’s hand when he said, My son is WHERE? 

But I was even more desperate this time. I finished the marshmallows and felt revved up. I drove down to the Ag Hall and went in and found the bathroom and waited in a stall. I put my pants down around my ankles so if anyone came in they would think I was pooping. But I just sat on the lid. I had a lot of time to think, and occasionally I almost lost my sense of desperation, but I hung onto it. A good man’s penis was at stake. A man who, one time, saw a bird stuck in a bramble ahead of his combine, powered the whole thing off, climbed down, and pulled it loose even though it scratched and pecked at him. Maybe if you’re from the city like I was, you wouldn’t understand what a good man that makes him, but not everybody around here would do that. All kinds of birds and mice and snakes get chewed up by machinery here and it’s just kind of a fact of life. And besides, that time of year a farmer’s probably working twenty-hour days, taking pills just to keep from nodding off, and climbing down from up there must have felt like a whole day’s work by itself. So maybe not a perfect man but better than most, I’d say. 

I saw a few pairs of boots and heard a few penises at the urinal. But I could tell none of them were Tractor Jack.

And then the right boots came in. Lace-up steel-toes. He wasn’t a poser. You can wear cowboy boots if you’re a cowboy but no one in our town was a cowboy. This is important. You can’t just pretend to be a profession you’re not. It’s cheating. 

So I came out of the stall and went to the urinal beside his. Usually I would respect the urinal etiquette and leave one between us, but in this case I had to exercise situational morality. I had to time it right. Before his stream started. 

I heard him unzip and then I pretended to lose my balance. I slipped. I flailed my arms. I went down to one knee, and for balance I grabbed…

You knew where this was going: I grabbed his penis. And because I’d grabbed it, I had to look at it. You don’t “accidentally” grab someone’s penis for balance and then just not give it a cursory glance. And after all that work, I guess I got my money’s worth. I was so busy looking at it that, for just a minute, I didn’t notice Tractor Jack standing there looking down at me while I held it. He was pretty curious, which I guess you or I would be, too. 

I stood up and then finally remembered I should let go of it. 

Is that all you want to do? he asked. 

I guess I’m not always very good at picking up on subtext or even plain text, because for a minute I didn’t understand what he was getting at, but then he started showing me what he was getting at, and some of the other things I could have theoretically wanted to do, and it turned out I did want to do them, I just didn’t realize it until he was doing them. And then I was doing them back. At some point he went and latched the main door to the bathroom so nobody walked in on us which was a good idea but not one that occurred to me since you can’t latch the main door in every bathroom. Not the multi-seaters anyway. 

So there we were having a very good time with hands and mouths and such, and I was glad I’d watched all that gay porn because it gave me some ideas that Tractor Jack seemed to like. 

It all came as kind of a surprise to me and I won’t pretend I didn’t feel a little competitive with Angela, seducing the man she’d failed to seduce, but then I realized this was probably why she’d failed, but then I wondered about Nance, his wife. Not that I was afraid of wrecking their home. That seemed like it was between them and not my business. But since part of my initial concern was for her sexual thriving, I wondered. But then he did some things with his mouth that made me realize something, and the thing was: I should probably mind my own business. 

Eventually we were done and curled up together in the stall. It wasn’t a gross bathroom, don’t worry. So he said he didn’t know I was into men like that, and I said I didn’t either, which made him understandably wonder what I was doing with my hand down there earlier. So I had to tell him that I had been scoping out his house to burgle it and saw him changing clothes through my binoculars, and that Angela and I made a pretty good living burgling the houses in town for just a few things here and there and selling them down in the city. He didn’t seem worried though. He might have thought I was joking. 

Oh, he said and laughed. That’s just a birthmark.

Oh, I said, and lay my head back down on his chest.

Outside we could hear the business of the Ag Hall going on. I realized I still don’t really know what an Ag Hall is, or what people do there. It didn’t matter. They seemed to be doing just fine at it, whatever it was.

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Originally from New York City, Robert Bharda has resided in the Pacific Northwest where for forty years he has specialized in vintage photographica as a profession, everything from daguerreotypes to polaroids. His digital “Quantisms” originate from templates composed of all organic materials (mushrooms, leaves, flowers, seashells) and seek to release dynamic motion from fractal potential. His illustrations, artwork, and photography have appeared in scores of publications, including Naugatuck River Review, Catamaran, Cirque, Northwest Review, Blue Five, Superstition, and Adirondack Review. He is also a writer of poetry, fiction, and critical reviews published in 100+ journals and anthologies.

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