The Audacity of Goats

by J. F. Riordan

  Elisabeth frowned. She had been worrying too, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  “None. And when he doesn’t tell me I get suspicious.” They were silent for a while.

  “Worrying doesn’t help,” pointed out Elisabeth.

  “No.”

  “So let’s talk about harbor dredging to take your mind off it.”

  Fiona smiled suddenly and rather fiercely. “It’s hardly a gripping topic. But since you’re so interested, the lake levels are at historic lows, and the harbor is about four feet too shallow for the new ferries and increased traffic. So the harbor needs dredging. Only problem is that it will cost nearly $8 million and the state has refused to pay for it. It’s a potential disaster for the Island, and somebody has to do something.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about it.”

  “I didn’t actually say that.”

  Elisabeth gave Fiona the kind of look that, if she’d been wearing pince-nez, would have been over the top of them.

  Fiona smiled serenely back. “The question isn’t about the dredging itself. It’s about how to find the money to pay for it. And that, my friend, is the problem I don’t know how to solve.”

  “Does Stella know how to solve it?”

  “I hope to Hell not.”

  “Do you have anyone you can ask?”

  “I’ve asked.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Federal money.”

  “And?”

  “That it’s highly unlikely.”

  “Well, they can’t just shut down the Island.”

  “You wouldn’t think so.”

  They were silent again. Fiona got up suddenly and went into the living room. Elisabeth could hear the clinking of glass. “What are you doing?”

  Fiona reappeared with two glasses. “Getting some scotch.”

  “I thought you were giving up scotch.”

  “I keep thinking I will. But it helps me think.” She handed one glass to Elisabeth, and they both took a drink.

  “Ugh,” said Elisabeth. “Nasty stuff.”

  Fiona shrugged. “Lots of nasty stuff in politics. Guess we’d better get used to it.”

  When Roger arrived at Ground Zero, he found Terry waiting for him, and so began a new pattern for their mornings. By the time Mike arrived, Terry would be sitting at the counter drinking his macchiato, with no indication of anything unusual other than a certain color in his cheeks and a new and uncharacteristic preference for sweat pants. Mike, who was an observant man, made no comment about these changes, but he privately began to develop a theory.

  Pali and certain members of the ferry crew had a secret that they had been keeping for some time. They were a group of some half dozen men who had seen or experienced someone—or something—on the ferry. Some had seen the shadowy figure standing behind Pali in the pilot house one stormy night. Some had seen things inexplicably moved or out of place. But only Pali had felt some kind of communication with… it—whatever it was.

  Those who had known about the ferry’s ghost were a small, silent club within a small gossipy community. The reason they did not speak of it was simple: none of them wanted to be ridiculed. They each knew what they had seen; each privately questioned the experience; each re-lived the moments again and again searching for an explanation that would not uproot a lifetime’s philosophy. For some of them, there had been just one experience. For others, it was an irregularly recurring and unwelcome event. For Pali, it was something else.

  His—and he never knew what to call them: Visitations? Manifestations? Hauntings?—had been more than merely benign. They had been lifesaving. In the first case, literally, and then, as the contact grew and deepened, in a more metaphysical sense. On that stormy night when the wave had hit the ferry, when an invisible hand had taken the pilot wheel and steered the little ship to safety, Pali had been struggling with the meaning and purpose of his life. His poetry—what he had thought of as dabblings—had been all along an attempt to come to grips with his mortality. The shock of the first contact with—whatever it was—had shifted the focus of his life. As the contacts increased, and he began to feel a communication with It, the ghost had become his muse, even, he sometimes thought, his co-author.

  Now Pali was a published poet, selling first one poem, then another, then another. It had not been gradual. It had happened as rapidly as spring buds popping. Poetry was not, as any writer knows, a source of a living income, but nevertheless, out in the world there were these tiny things, a dozen, then two, then thirty poems that were proof that Ver Palsson had lived on this earth. For Pali, it was everything.

  But just as he had begun to feel that he had moved to a new place in his creativity, the music had died within him. The experience of a cadence awakening him in the night was gone. He no longer felt the spin of new words whirling into place like birds settling on a line. It had been months since he had reached for his notebook to write something down before it passed from his memory. At the same time, he had not seen, nor heard, nor sensed the presence of his friend.

  The visits were at an end.

  Pali could not explain the depths of his loss even to himself, and as the weeks, then months went by, his depression grew. It was more than writer’s block. It was a feeling of abandonment, as if a door to mystery and wonder had been closed to him, and he stood on the outside of it, unable to gain entrance to the place where he had once been welcomed. He felt a failure.

  From the beginning, the subject had been one Pali rarely discussed. Although he had told his story to Nika, and although she seemed to believe him, for reasons he could not explain, it was Fiona who always seemed to genuinely understand his experiences. After her initial skepticism she had come to trust him. She did not say much, but she listened well, and as a writer, she understood the vagaries of creation. And although she liked to laugh, so far, at least, she had not laughed at this.

  But this last part, this loss, he had been struggling through on his own. He did not know how to explain any of it, and he did not know how to understand it. He knew instinctively that there were those in his own church who would consider him to be consorting with evil. But Pali knew there had been no menace and there had been no bargain. There had simply been a presence. A presence that seemed to understand poetry.

  “Maybe it’s an angel,” said Nika one night, as they sat together after dinner.

  “Maybe,” said Pali listlessly. “But if it’s an angel, it has passed me by.”

  “You should feel blessed. Angels don’t appear to everyone.”

  “I know,” said Pali. But he did not feel blessed. He felt abandoned.

  Pali thought of the accounts he had read of angel appearances. Angels were creatures of awe, and according to his readings, the most common reaction they inspired was fear. Pali’s experiences had not been frightening. They had been intensely quiet, accompanied by a deep internal roar as of some spiritual wind, and a feeling of companionship. And always, a poem had come into his mind, full, complete, and intact, like Athena springing from her father’s forehead. These were not his only poems, but they were his best ones. And they were the ones that had been published.

  Did this mean, Pali wondered, that he wasn’t a poet after all? That he was merely the secretary, the recorder of a greater mind than his? That his achievement, his proofs of his worth, did not actually belong to him? Pali went through his life as before. He loved his wife. He raised his son. He went to church. He piloted his ferry and directed his crew. But through everything, in the dust of his aspiration, these unrelenting questions dogged Pali’s thoughts and unsettled his dreams.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sitting at her desk, Fiona was looking at Pete’s face for the first time in a long while.

  “Pete? What was that? What was that sound?”

  Pete looked briefly over his left shoulder, then turned back and smiled into the camera. “Nothing serious. Some gunfire.”


  “Gunfire?”

  Even in the distorted lens of the computer camera, Pete’s characteristic expression of rueful good humor was captured and transmitted across half the world.

  “It’s nothing serious,” he said again. “Just a bit of exuberance.”

  Fiona took a deep breath. “Exuberance.” She paused before asking, “Where are you, exactly?”

  It was Pete’s turn to breathe deeply. “I’m in the Middle East.”

  He held up his hand before she could say anything. “It’s okay. It really is. The men like to celebrate by firing their guns in the air. They’re happy. It’s fine. We had a good day.” He smiled into the camera. “I’m fine.”

  “But if it’s fine, why do they have guns?”

  Pete smiled again. “It’s traditional. Sort of.” And then his tone changed and he became brisk.

  “It’s a beautiful country. Beautiful. And the troubles are limited, really, to only a few specific regions. I’m nowhere near anything dangerous. I promise.”

  “If that were true, they wouldn’t have guns.”

  “Everyone has guns, Fiona. Absolutely everyone. It’s a Second Amendment paradise.” He grinned.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Well, no. I didn’t imagine you would. But I didn’t want to hide it from you, either.” This was only sort of true, but it was his best approach at the moment. He couldn’t have her thinking he would be deliberately keeping her in ignorance of his whereabouts, or her anxiety would be permanent and unrelenting. But there was no way he was telling her where he was headed next.

  “Where are you, exactly?”

  “It’s okay. I’m leaving here tomorrow. I’ll be fine. And then maybe I can come help you with the campaign.”

  The conversation deteriorated into exchanges of affection.

  After they hung up, it occurred to Fiona that he hadn’t told her exactly where in the Middle East he was.

  Wily, indeed.

  It was on a routine trip to Sturgeon Bay for supplies that Roger saw a flyer posted that got him thinking: a group trip to Utah for a week-long yoga workshop. “Suitable for every level, from beginner to advanced,” it said. “Come and develop your practice in the serene beauty of the Utah mountains.” Color photos of mountain scenery were enhanced by silhouetted figures in warrior pose. “Take your skills to the next level.”

  The need to improve things with Elisabeth continued to loom large for Roger, and with growing urgency. He wanted to make more progress, and faster. Despite his usually impenetrable nature, Roger knew things were not going well at home. Getting better at yoga was therefore imperative.

  Frowning and nodding to himself as he studied the poster, Roger took one of the entry cards, stuffed it in his shirt pocket, and went on about his business.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Elisabeth was surprised one afternoon to find that Ground Zero was closed. Roger’s car wasn’t there, so she knew he wasn’t working in the back room, but she knocked on the door, thinking that The Angel Joshua—who had no car—might be. No one came. She looked at her phone. 2:15. What a very odd time for Ground Zero to be closed. Frowning slightly in puzzlement, but unconcerned, she shrugged to herself and went on with her day.

  It was about this time that the story of the ferry line’s ghost began to be whispered on the Island, and with it, the notion that perhaps the ghost had something to do with the screamer. In retrospect, it was surprising to Fiona that the story had been kept quiet as long as it had been, but she felt a deep regret that it was now a public topic of conversation. Her biggest concern was for Pali. He was not the kind of man who liked being the center of attention under any circumstances. But to be the center of a story like this would be excruciating for him.

  Fiona felt thankful that she had practiced her reporter’s instincts in not sharing his tale of ghostly inspiration with anyone. Pali had trusted her, and she had proven herself worthy of his trust. Whatever pain he might feel at the public discussion of the ghost, at least it would not encompass this deeply felt and personal experience. Not, of course, unless he had told it to someone else.

  But once the story had somehow surfaced, it flashed through town like a hot fire. It was all anybody talked about, and Pali, the reluctant center of the tale, was questioned incessantly wherever he went. By tacit agreement, neither he nor Fiona mentioned the poetry. This was too personal, too private a detail.

  One of the most keenly interesting questions pursued was who the ghost had been. Was it a European who had gone down with his ship? The victim of some long-forgotten crime of passion? Or could it be an even more ancient spirit, perhaps a member of the Potawatomi or Ho-chunk tribes? Could the screaming somehow be related to this spirit’s personal story? To its undoubtedly tragic demise?

  The more practical residents rolled their eyes at this silliness. The occurrences were mysterious, no doubt, but there was always an ordinary explanation for these things. Some bored kid’s prank was the obvious cause. At the most extreme, maybe there really was some summer person who had lost his mind. Everyone needed to just take a deep breath and get serious. Ghosts indeed! But even these sober and steady souls were enjoying the excitement. Everyone, at least, could agree that life on the Island wasn’t going to be dull this winter. And besides, if it wasn’t a ghost, then what—or who—the Hell was it?

  Mike had an artist’s eye. Small details in color or texture registered automatically in his awareness, and perhaps because his eyes were so intimately involved in his work, he was an acute observer of human behavior. So it was with growing interest that he noticed that Terry had been beating him to Ground Zero every morning, and that he had been carrying a small duffle bag.

  The first time the duffle bag had made its appearance, Terry had tried to push it out of sight—a difficult thing to do at a counter—and the next morning it was not there. But Mike couldn’t help noticing as he passed Terry’s truck each morning that the duffle bag was on the seat. Struck by an idea, he touched the hood of the truck as he passed one morning on his way in. It was cold.

  Mike thought about the duffle bag, about Terry’s many questions to Roger about his yoga practice, and about the conversation he and Terry had had about his growing concern with his blood pressure. These things added up to a remarkable possibility in Mike’s mind, a possibility so unlikely—and yet so clearly in evidence—that he was finding it difficult to resist the temptation to see it for himself. “Who could?” he asked himself.

  Observant though he may be, however, Mike was not nosy, and he assumed that his friend would tell him what he wanted when he wanted to. Since Terry had not chosen to confide in him, that meant he would be embarrassed. Mike had an impish nature, and Terry’s secretiveness about what he was doing in the mornings deeply amused him. Wisely, discreetly, and patiently, however, Mike decided to leave it alone. Chuckling about it in his truck on his way to a day’s work, he had to admit to himself that it wasn’t easy.

  Ben had had another disappointing day. There had been no sign of any particular animal at the creek, but the corn had been gone, and there were lots of turkey tracks in the mud. He had lingered on a boulder nearby, trying to be patient and quiet in hope that the deer would come while he was there. But besides the company of birds and squirrels he had seen no other creature.

  At last he bestirred himself. It was getting dark, and he was expected home. Heading across the field on his usual route, a movement near the woods caught his eye, and Ben looked up to see a herd of deer. There was no way he could know whether it was the same herd, but although there were several smaller animals—yearlings, probably—there were none with a hurt leg or peculiar gait. Maybe it was a different herd. Or maybe his little friend had already succumbed to natural selection. Discouraged, Ben made his way slowly home.

  Fiona’s campaign plan, developed with the advice of her friends, was a simple one. In a bigger environment, there would have been consultants and media managers waiting in the wings to fatten themselves with promi
ses of perfectly useless robo-calls, door hangers, and television advertising. On the Island, however, the pickings were too slim for these professional vultures, so the soundest principle was the one most easily followed: talk to your voters.

  Terry, an old hand at local campaigns, had given Fiona advice that she intended to follow. She had come to the mainland to run some errands and stopped by to drop off a tool he had forgotten at her house. Terry was building new cabinet doors for an enormous summer house being built to overlook the harbor. “Listen,” he said, talking over his shoulder as he adjusted the table saw. “Around here people don’t like that big city stuff. They don’t really care what party you’re in. They want to know whether they can trust you. People will vote for you because you told them you liked their dog. They’ll remember you for that. Don’t waste your money on all that other stuff. Knock on doors. It’s the fundamental requirement of politics.”

  And so, dutifully—if a bit resignedly—Fiona embarked upon a methodical plan to knock on every door on the Island. It was not as simple as it might have been in a bigger community—even one the size of Sturgeon Bay—because the houses were generally too far apart to walk. Instead, it meant driving from house to house, usually on Saturday and Sunday when people might actually be home. She had gone to the Town Clerk’s office, retrieved a list of registered voters, and carried a clipboard so she could keep track of where she had been and to whom she had spoken.

  The weather was not cooperative. Every weekend now, it seemed, was damp, windy, and raw. More than once Fiona found herself questioning why she was doing this. But the thought of Stella running the Island, of being bullied by her; the thought of having to sell her little house to Stella, of being driven off the Island by Stella’s vengeful power plays, was sufficient incentive. Figuratively and literally, Fiona put her head down and got on with the business of running for office.