Weird Dude Walking kept his head tilted down but slowly lifted his arms until they were suspended straight out from the sides of his body. It looked as if he were imitating a giant bird and would at any moment start flapping for takeoff. But his movements were slow and graceful, like those of someone at peace. The goats all moved forward at the same time, headed for the stranger. The largest, a fat old billy with a long, filthy beard, reached him first and sniffed at the wool suit. The man remained perfectly still, though his body seemed to relax a little, his limp hands dangling from the ends of his raised arms. Other goats crowded around, their nostrils flaring as they checked the air.
The nearest goat put its nose against the man’s coat, then opened its jaws and took the cloth in its mouth. The man kept his head tilted and made no sign of movement. The goats squeezed closer, and now others put their snouts against his skin. The big billy tugged on the coat, first gently and then harder, until a lower button popped free. The other goats nipped at the fabric, yanking their heads back with the clothing clenched between their jaws, their bleats growing more frantic.
Alex wondered if Weird Dude had worn some sort of scent that attracted the goats. Deer hunters would splash their coveralls with buck urine, hoping to entice does from the woods. Maybe there was a special scent to attract goats, though goats were tame enough that they didn’t need to be stalked. Alex fell back on the theory that the man had fed the goats before and they associated his scent with grain or sugar. Or maybe homegrown sinsemilla bud dulled Alex’s thought process. Alex liked that theory better, because then he could take the credit for growing mythical motherlode mindfuck instead of the possibility that something fucked up was happening that might be happening whether or not the observer was stoned. Like Einstein on acid or something, or an Escher drawing where you were on the inside looking out.
Whatever, man, because it’s happening no matter which theory fits ...
Desperate goat mouths ripped open Weird Dude Walking’s coat, the bone buttons sparkling in the sun as they arced to the ground. The man had on a flannel long john shirt underneath, but it was shredded in places and deathly pale skin showed through the openings. The goats tugged on the man but he kept his balance. Alex wondered why Weird Dude didn’t push the animals away.
Because this is only happening in your mind. Yeah. Okay.
The man’s arms were pulled down, and one of the sleeves was yanked free. Two goats played tug-of-war with the wool coat, and then jerked it off the man’s back. The coat settled on a patch of dried goldenrod. Weird Dude finally lifted his face and Alex expected either the awe-inspiring expression of a Mushroom God or else a Carlos Castaneda smirk. From fifty yards away, all Alex could tell was that Weird Dude looked sick, his skin unhealthy and sallow. But a smile creased his doughy face as he looked at the sky and endured the hircine assault.
The goats grew frantic, their teeth tearing the man’s clothes, and Alex almost left his hidden vantage point and went to the rescue. If Weird Dude had acted in any way alarmed, Alex would have emptied his quiver of arrows into the goats. But his unnatural serenity caused Alex to watch and wait.
The stoner stereotype called for an indecisive and befuddled reaction. Alex was no fucking stereotype. He knew he was a stoner and that put him several rungs above the people who bought his dope. For all Alex knew, this was some elaborate trick of the Drug Enforcement Agency, because the spooks would spare no expense in bringing down a single free-thinking, tax-exempt American. Because from such men revolutions were sparked.
The goats ripped until Weird Dude’s flannel underwear gave way, and then one of the goats bit deep into the man’s side. The man should have screamed, but the smile didn’t waver as the goat worked its head back and forth, trying to pull the piece of flesh free. Another goat went for the soft portion of the stomach just below the navel and backed away, a string of meat dangling from its mouth.
Alex gripped the tree in front of him, the bark scraping his cheek and his breath so loud he was sure the goats could hear it above their own noise. A mantra came to him, in a dull throb that mirrored his accelerated pulse: Not Real, Not Real, Not Real. And then came the syncopated accent beat: Not-Fucking-Real.
Instead of blood spilling from Weird Dude’s wounds, a milky substance oozed out, thick as cottage cheese. The goats bit into the man, and one butted him in the left thigh, causing him to lean to one side. A dirty brown goat grabbed the outstretched arm as the man tried to regain his balance. Its teeth clamped on the wrist and dragged the man toward the ground, the black hat flying from the man’s head and landing in the trampled vegetation. Once the man was on his knees, the goats clambered over him, rending the flesh of his neck and back. Not once did the man cry out.
The goats’ bleats grew muffled as their mouths filled. They fed on the clabbered juice that leaked from the man’s torn flesh.
Weird Dude Walking ain’t fucking walking anymore.
Alex broke from the trance that seemed to have fallen over him as he watched the bizarre spectacle. This was no psychedelic vision, this was an ass-end-up slab of reality. He gripped his bow and arrows and stepped from his cover. “Hey,” he shouted.
The goats kept feeding. Weird Dude was buried beneath the goats, hidden by the mass of dirty, furry animals that were now in a feeding frenzy. The bearded billy backed out of the herd with a prize, a swinging slab of meat that looked like the man’s cheek. No blood leaked from the ripped skin, only a few dribbles of moon-white liquid. Another goat tottered away, dragging what looked to be the strip of a forearm. A third dipped its head into the downed man’s belly and came up with a swollen rope of intestines decorating its blunt horns like a Satanic Christmas trimming.
Alex fought an urge to vomit. The vestiges of the morning’s bong hits faded, and even the high from the seedless, resin-sticky buds he’d crammed into the recent joint had deserted him. He grew kick-ass weed by any standard, but no buzz was deep enough to mask the insane scene that played out before him. Fuckers didn’t just crawl out of the weeds and get eaten by goats. Didn’t happen. Maybe in a video game, maybe in a shitty direct-to-video horror movie, but certainly not here on the slopes above Solom, where the Bible thumpers said God was closer than ever and the sky weighed three thousand pounds and the government didn’t meddle too much and his girlfriend Meredith was sleeping off the effects of a bottle of wine and three orgasms and NO FUCKING WAY IN THE WORLD WAS WEIRD DUDE GETTING REAMED BY GOATS!!!!
Alex debated his options. He could charge into the midst of the herd and scatter them, but as much meat as they had stripped from Weird Dude, Alex didn’t see any way the man could still be alive. He had four arrows, so he could thin the herd a little, except then they might turn their eye to fresh prey. And he knew how goats were—once they got a taste for something, they gobbled it until it was extinct. The third option made the most sense: back the hell away, get in the truck, and pretend this had all been a hallucination. Forget reporting the incident to the authorities, because authority equaled government equaled search warrants.
When he started the truck, one of the goats looked up from the corpse and stared in the direction of the noise. A couple of maggot-white fingers protruded between the twisting lips. The goat looked right through the windshield and met his eyes. Alex was probably just stoned—yeah, that had to be it—because there was no way the goat could have been grinning. Either he was stoned or else he had cracked, and he was too rational to crack.
As the pick-up bounced up the pitted mountain road, Alex realized that Weird Dude Walking, even while the goats were eviscerating him, had not uttered a single sound.
***
“The goats is riled,” Betsy Ward said. She dried her hands on her apron, wincing because her skin was chapped and the cool weather hadn’t helped a bit. She had a sweet potato pie in the oven. It was a point of pride with her, because sweet potatoes didn’t grow worth a darn in the mountains. Yet Arvel’s crop always turned out fine. You’d think God was a tater man, judging how He
blessed the Ward household.
“Goats?” Arvel was watching a reality show on TV. Betsy couldn’t tell the shows apart, but one thing most had in common was they got women into tank tops and tight shorts at some point. Which was all the reason Arvel needed, whether he admitted it or not. Betsy’s tight-shorts days had passed some twenty years ago, but she didn’t hold that against the skinny things that paraded around before the cameras. No, what she held against them was the make-up, the hair styles, and all the nipping and tucking that went on these days. Any woman could look good with a little cheating.
“Goats,” Betsy said. “Over at the Smiths. Except the new wife ain’t named Smith.”
Arvel had put in a hard day at Drummond Construction, driving a concrete mixer over the twisting mountain roads. Concrete mixers were the most contrary vehicles on earth, according to Arvel. The weight could shift in two directions without warning, and once in a while the slooshing mix of sand, gravel and mortar coincided with the deepest cut of a sharp curve, and nothing had a mortality rate like the rump-over-clutch pedal tumble of twenty tons’ worth of cement and steel. Or so he said.
“What are you worrying about goats for?” Arvel didn’t turn from the flickering light of the screen. “They’ve not got in the garden in two years or so. Leave them be.”
“They ain’t right. They come down to the edge of the fence and stare at me when I’m hanging out laundry.”
“Maybe you ought to lose some of that fat ass of yourn and then they’d quit staring.”
Arvel had never made a mention of her weight until he’d taken up watching TV every weeknight, some five years back. Since then, he’d scarcely shut up about it. She wished she could shrink inside her gingham dress, but she was here and this was all of her. “They started about time the new wife moved in. Been breeding like rabbits, too.”
“You know how them billy bucks are,” Arvel said. “They’ll stick it in anything that wiggles, and some that don’t.”
A commercial came on for some kind of erectile dysfunction product, and a wattled old guy was in a hot tub with a woman young enough to be his daughter. Arvel thumbed down the sound with his remote. “You keep going on about this new wife. If you want to know what I think, I bet you’re mad as a piss ant because she’s skinnier than you.”
Betsy was double upset. Arvel had no business looking at the neighbor’s wife. Even though Betsy did, every chance she got.
“She ain’t no skinnier than Gordon’s first wife, and you never said a thing about her,” Betsy said.
“Rebecca was different,” Arvel said, eyes flicking back to the TV to make sure the commercials were still going and Arvel was listening. “She’s from here.”
“She was,” Betsy corrected. “Was.”
“Let’s not get into that.”
“She drove too fast for these twisty roads. Heck, Arvel, I know she turned a few heads, probably even yours, but the stone truth of it is she got what was coming to her.”
“Like you know what happened to her?”
“I ain’t saying a thing. The sheriff and the rescue team called it an accident, and they know better than me.”
“Solom’s took more than a few through the years,” Arvel said. “Forget it.”
“I can’t forget it.”
“You think it was the Circuit Rider?”
“I don’t know.”
The commercials were over and Arvel punched a button. The sound burst from the speaker, and a dark-skinned boy with greasy hair was explaining why somebody was kicked off the show. “I smell something,” Arvel said.
The pie. The crust must have burned. Betsy had forgotten to set the timer. She was getting more absent-minded every day, but she blamed it on worrying about the neighbors. With a possible wife-killer next door, not to mention his witchy-eyed stepdaughter, your train of thought was liable to get derailed now and then. When you threw the Circuit Rider into the mix, it’s a wonder anybody in Solom ever got a wink of sleep.
She hurried from the living room and went into the kitchen, where the goat was waiting for her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shit.
Jett couldn’t take another second of reality. She probably should have hidden in the woods, but needed to be close to the house in case Mom called. Jett could always claim to be feeding the chickens or something. The barn door was nearly closed, allowing just enough light to take care of business. Her back was against the wall, and from her sitting position, she could see the back door that led to the kitchen.
She laid out her World History book and pinched some of the pot from the plastic baggie. In Charlotte, she’d owned an alabaster pipe carved in the shape of a lizard, but she’d left it with her best friend. It was time to improvise. She took the piece of aluminum foil from her pocket, twisted it into a narrow tube, and used her pinky to make a hollow depression in one end. A piece of baling wire hanging on the wall of the barn served to prick three tiny holes in the curved end of the makeshift pipe.
Smoking in the barn was dangerous. During his Great Barn Tour of July, Gordon had made a big deal about how dry the place was. Apparently one of his grandparents’ barns had burned to the ground in the 1940’s, but that had been the fault of lightning. This barn had been built on the same foundation, and lightning never struck twice in the same place, did it?
She sprinkled some of the dark green leaves into the depression and set the pipe on her book. She’d taken some matches from the tin box on the mantelpiece. She snapped one of the sulfur-tipped stems free from its folded-over cardboard sleeve. “Get a degree at home,” the matchbox read, along with an 800 number, and beneath that, in smaller letters, “Close cover before striking.”
“Fuck it.” She scratched the match head across the rough strike pad and the flamed bobbed to life. She tucked the pipe between her lips, applied the flame, and inhaled. The first hit tasted like hot metal, like braces, and she nearly coughed. The harsh smoke settled in her lungs, and then she blew out gently. The match had burned down to her fingers, so she held the pipe in her mouth while she used her other hand to grab the burnt end of the match. She then turned the match upside down so it would burn the unused portion of the paper.
The Kid knows all the tricks.
The next hit was a little smoother. She held the flame just above the grass so that it toasted rather than scorched. Yep. That was the ticket. Her throat was dry and she wished she’d brought a soft drink from the fridge. The smoke filled her nostrils, weakening the smell of old dust and animal manure.
She let the buzz work its way through her nervous system, feeling her pulse accelerate. Tears collected in her eyes. Good shit. Tommy Wilson may be a world-class jerk, but he had good connections. A smile crept across her face, and it felt good. Why did the cops and Jesus freaks get so uptight about something that was so natural? She hadn’t smiled in weeks, and now here she was with her cheeks stretching and her head feeling light.
The fucking weight of the world temporarily lifted.
Fucking. What a weird word, when you think about it. I mean, fuck, what was the big deal? Mom said I was able to have babies now and maybe that has something to do with the tingling I feel down there sometimes. I don’t understand how a boy’s weenie can fit in there, as little and floppy as they are. At least Mom didn’t give me the jazz about safe sex. Guess she trusts me.
Trust. Jett looked down at the pipe and the bag of dope, the crumbled marijuana scattered across her book.
I don’t have a drug problem. “Drug problem” is what the English teacher would call an “oxymoron.” Well, the TEACHER’S a plain old fucking moron.
Jett’s stoned leap of logic seemed like the most hilarious thing since Beavis and Butthead did America, and she giggled. The sound was like blue bubbles in her brain. She closed her eyes and listened to them pop.
Blop bloop blooooop.
Beh-eh-eh-eh-eh.
Beh-eh?
That wasn’t right.
She opened her eyes to find the
goat standing right in front of her, its head at eye level with hers. She rolled away with a start. The goat lowered its neck and sniffed at the marijuana, then licked at it.
“Get away, you ugly fucker,” Jett said, picking up a dry, dark clod that was probably a goat turd. She flung it at the goat, but it swabbed its tongue across her stash again.
Damn it, this is war.
She gave the goat a kick in the side, not too hard but loud enough for a thunk to fill the barn. The goat turned toward her. For the first time, she noticed the pale brown horns. Though they lay nearly flat against the animal’s skull, the tips curled back under and out above the ears like oversize, twisted fish hooks.
“Easy, there, Fred,” she said. Gordon had names for the goats but she hadn’t bothered to learn them. He’d taken them all from the Old Testament. She wondered whether it was Adam, Seth, or Ruth. Couldn’t be Ruth, because it had a tube of loose flesh hanging from its loins. She figured the goat didn’t know its name, either, so “Fred” would work just as well.
She backed away and the goat stepped closer. At least she’d distracted it from her expensive cash crop. Now if it would only go out the door and act like the brainless sack of fur and manure it was.
But it didn’t go for the door. It backed her to the foot of the stairs that led to the loft. And the loft was where she’d blanked out the day before yesterday. Freaked Mom out but good. The bitch of it was, the black-out hadn’t been drug-related. She’d let Mom suspect drug use because the alternative was just a little too weird, even for her.
Jett didn’t want to go up those stairs. Because the image of a man flashed across her the inside of her forehead, like a still from a out-of-focus slide projector. The man with the out-of-fashion hat with the low crown and wide brim, the one who had warned her to “Know them by their fruits.” She had a feeling he was waiting up there in the silence and dust of the hay bales.
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