"...this doesn't look like a B&B, Simone." Stephanie stumbled out of the dusty beige Volvo, her legs stiff from the long drive into the countryside, and ran her fingers briskly through her short blonde hair before lacing her pale fingers together behind her head so that she could stretch her aching shoulders and back. She twisted from side to side, taking in the small farmhouse cottage next to the driveway and the three large barns that dotted the low, grassy hills around them. "Are you sure this is the right place?" she asked. The GPS had given out not long after the paved road, a victim of their journey into the Land That Signal Forgot, and they might have missed a turnoff hiding in the tall grass alongside the dirt track that brought them in.
Simone climbed out of the car into the summer heat as well, doing her own set of awkward stretches. "It's got to be," she said, thrusting her shoulders back and her chest forward. Not that there was much chest to thrust--Simone shared Stephanie's slender, athletic build, even if Stephanie had a good seven inches of height on her friend. "The vacation prize package came from HJF, LLC, and the sign we passed back there said 'Happy Juice Farms'. Maybe it's some kind of tourist farm thing, like in 'City Slickers'?"
Stephanie furrowed her brow in consternation. "They better not make me slop hogs, that's all I'm saying. I came here to relax, not do chores." She recognized the hint of genuine frustration seeping into her voice beneath the joking tones, but she couldn't quite seem to banish it. When Simone invited her on this 'free weekend for two' she'd won through work, Stephanie somehow assumed that her friend did a little checking to make sure that the offer was authentic and not some kind of scam. To find out that they'd driven four hours out into the middle of nowhere, and Simone didn't even have a brochure? It drove her a little bit nuts.
Stephanie's anger died almost immediately when the cottage door opened, revealing a tanned Caucasian man with curly blond hair and twinkling blue eyes, wearing a pair of overalls and a white t-shirt that looked like it was painted onto his muscular physique. "Well hello, ladies!" he called out in a husky baritone voice. "You must be the folks from the city that won the contest, right? My name's Hal. Welcome to Happy Juice Farms, where happy cows make happy juice!"
"Dibs," Simone muttered under her breath, combing her fingers rapidly through her long dark hair in an attempt to make it more presentable after the long drive. Then louder, she added, "That's right! I'm Simone Kessen, and this is my plus-one, Stephanie Tower! We, uh... we thought we'd be staying for the weekend. Is that not right?" If they were, Steph couldn't imagine where--the cottage looked like it had two or three bedrooms at most, and a farm this big had to need a lot of help. The men and women who lived here were probably stacked like cordwood in such a tiny house.
"You ladies can stay just as long as you want," Hal chuckled, nodding his head at the door behind him. "Come on in. I'll tell you a little bit about the place, and you can have a glass of Happy Juice's finest and rest your weary bones a spell. I know it's a long drive, and a little bit of a bone-rattler towards the end on top of it all. You probably want to stretch out on a comfy couch and--oh, no, please," he said quickly, waving his hand in a gesture of negation as Stephanie opened up the hatchback to pull out their bags. "I'll have Bill and Joe get those in a little while. You're our guests, you don't have to drag your own suitcases inside."
Stephanie started to ask who Bill and Joe were, but the question answered itself when they walked into the cozy living room and saw two men hard at work scrubbing and peeling potatoes on the other side of a low interior wall. One had close-cropped dark hair, the other a mop of brown curls tucked under a baseball cap, but both possessed the same taut, brawny bodies as Hal. Suddenly Stephanie's weekend was looking up.
"Hi ladies!" one of the men said, looking up from his work to wave with a potato peeler in one hand. "Hope you enjoy your stay! We'd love to talk more, but we're making a little lunch for everyone and if we stopped to chat, we'd never get it done in time!" He looked back down at his spuds, quickly and deftly stripping the skin from each one before dropping it into a huge pot of water. Stephanie felt her stomach rumbling a little. They'd gotten breakfast and snacks at the start of the trip, but she'd never been very good at making her food last and there hadn't been many places to stop. Whatever lunch was going to be besides mashed potatoes, she hoped it was coming soon.
As if reading her mind, Hal stepped into the kitchen and opened the fridge. "They won't be done for a little while yet," he said companionably, "but you know what always fills a body up right? A little happy juice!" He took out a big pitcher of creamy white milk and filled two glasses with it. "This is the good stuff, ladies. Plenty of protein, sweet and delicious... I'm not gonna lie, we're all pretty proud of what we make around here and we're not shy about sharing it. I don't know if you're big milk drinkers--"
Simone giggled nervously. "I like a White Russian every once in a while, does that count?" Stephanie rolled her blue-gray eyes just a little. Not that she wasn't salivating over the hunks around here herself, but her friend always did have a bad habit of trying a bit too hard with guys. It had led her into plenty of crash-and-burn blind dates and more than a few regrettable hookups over the years, and by now Simone's disastrous taste in men had become something of a running joke between them. As soon as the brunette felt the first flutterings of love (or lust), she started acting like everything her new crush did was something she'd always wanted to try.
Like milk, apparently. "We don't have any booze out on the farm," Hal said, bringing the two ice-cold glasses back out into the living room, "but I don't think you'll miss it none. Our happy juice goes down smoother than any Kentucky bourbon, and you can drink a whole heck of a lot more of it and still feel great." He handed one to Stephanie and another to Simone, and looked at them with an expectant smile on his face. It felt a little too much like being in a commercial for Stephanie's tastes, but she duly took a small swig of the cool, creamy drink.
She had to admit, as milk went, it was pretty nice. It tasted sweeter than she was used to, and thicker too--it was more like drinking heavy cream, or a milkshake that had been sitting in the fridge too long and had liquefied. She couldn't imagine chugging a whole glass of the stuff down, especially not one the size Hal had given her, but it wasn't half bad, either. Stephanie was unsurprised to notice that Simone took a much longer gulp, and smiled broadly once she swallowed. "Wow, that's nice!" she chirped, with a determined cheer in her voice that only Stephanie had known her long enough to recognize as forced. "And you say it all comes straight from your farm?"
"Oh, yes, ma'am!" Hal exclaimed cheerfully, giving the two of them a bright, beaming smile. "We got about fifty head out there in the barns, and they each give about two gallons a day. That's enough to make a lot of men happy with our happy juice. Heck, it's what we all drink with every meal, right, Joe?"
The man with the short dark hair who was scrubbing potatoes nodded. "Nothing like a little happy milk from happy cows to make a man nice and strong and...." He trailed off abruptly, blushing bright red beneath his well-trimmed beard. Stephanie had a pretty good idea of what he was about to say, though. Suddenly the room seemed a little warm, and she took another swig of milk to cool off. If this was what was responsible for giving the guys all those muscles, she wouldn't mind putting it in the vending machines at work.
Simone was already halfway through her first glass, guzzling down long gulps with a satisfied smack of her lips after every drink that made her sound like she was auditioning for a Dairy Council ad. "That really is good!" she said. "And so sweet, too! Do you feed your cows something special to get it to taste like that?" Stephanie knew her friend had no more interest in animal husbandry than she did--Simone couldn't even take care of a pet rock, let alone a hard of fifty cattle. But of course if Hal was into it, the dark-haired woman would no doubt pretend to be just as excited about every detail.
And Hal seemed to be eating her interest up with a spoon. "Oh, we find cows that are just naturally sweet," he said, giving Simone a pat on the shoulder as she took another long drink of milk. "And we make sure they stay nice and happy, too. Nothing makes for happy juice like a nice happy cow!" Simone tipped the glass all the way back theatrically, letting the last few droplets of cream dribble into her mouth. Hal laughed. "Looks like someone's pretty happy already, huh?"
Stephanie frowned. She wasn't about to pretend that she knew much more about farming than her friend--her commitment to agriculture started with baby animals at the working farm that the local zoo ran every year and stopped with that Paris Hilton series she watched in junior high. But weren't cows supposed to be grazing during the day? The happy ones, at least. She remembered some activist in college handing her a pamphlet with all sorts of awful pictures of cows at big factory farms, kept penned up all day and pumped full of special hormones to increase milk production. 'Imagine how you'd feel stuck in a stall all day with those things on your tits!' he'd shouted at her as she walked rapidly away.
Wasn't that supposed to be the big thing about a family farm? They let the cows roam around and feed on grass, letting them exercise and enjoy the fresh air? Stephanie looked down at her glass, but her mind was on the barns in the middle distance. They looked pretty big, but three barns for fifty cows didn't seem like a lot of room. They couldn't be all that happy, not unless they were getting Swedish massages and watching in-stall entertainment or something. Whatever it was cows liked to watch.
Hal refilled Simone's glass, but Stephanie barely noticed. She was too busy staring at her own milk, wondering what really made it so smooth and sweet and creamy. Maybe they evaporated off some of the water, like the cans of condensed milk she used to make pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving? Or maybe it was drugs in the feed like that activist creep was talking about back in college. Maybe they were taking cow steroids to make them lactate better or something. Stephanie had a sudden, incongruous mental image of a cow being stripped of its gold medals and had to choke back a surprised giggle. She giggled again, unable to hold it back a second time.
