Solom

by Scott Nicholson

  The goat snorted a little and bobbed its head as if threatening her. Or else commanding her to climb the stairs.

  Whoa the fuck down. Goats don’t boss humans around. They’re stupid Fred-faced, squid-eyed, dumb-as-dirt pieces of meat on the hoof.

  The goat grinned, revealing a five-dollar chunk of marijuana bud that was stuck between two upper teeth. Jett almost laughed. This was the kind of stoner story she’d tell at the next party, if she ever made any friends in Solom: “Yeah, a goat came up while I was smoking and gobbled down my stash.”

  She’d leave out the part about the goat scaring her, and the man in the black hat, and the voice she’d heard in the boiler room behind the school. Because those were things that could get you locked up in the nuthouse, where the drugs were no fun at all, according to her friend Patty from Charlotte. Nuthouse drugs were designed to perform chemical lobotomies, eliminating the problems by stripping away any desire to suffer a thought or feeling. As tempting as oblivion was, Jett liked hers in small and controlled doses.

  Besides, who could be bored when a goat was after you?

  The wall was covered with garden tools, ropes, and harness. She picked out a hoe, figuring she could use the blunt end of the handle to drive the goat away. The animal clambered forward as she leveled the handle and pointed it like a jousting lance. In the distance, the Ward’s dog barked, followed by the sound of tires on gravel. Gordon must be home.

  Great.

  Gord the Wonder Nerd.

  She waited for his SUV engine to die and for the vehicle’s door to open. Then she could yell for help. Except the goat had paused, too, and lifted its head as if listening. Like maybe Gordon had a treat.

  If Gordon came to the barn, he would see the pot and bust her. She’d probably be grounded for the rest of seventh grade, or maybe even until high school. Gordon was one of those uptight people who made a big deal about morals without being religious. Because, despite all his blowhard lecturing at the dinner table about this and that denomination, and the fact that he was the great-great-grandson of a circuit-riding preacher, Gordon wore a sneer on his face when he talked about people going to church. Jett wasn’t sure what she believed yet, but one thing was for sure, she thought Jesus Christ was the kind of guy who wouldn’t put you down for a little bit of weed. True, he probably wouldn’t inhale, but he also wouldn’t hit you over the head with a Bible because of it.

  So calling for Gordon was out of the question. She had to make a decision on whether to try for the loft and wait it out, or scoot past the goat, collect her stash, and sneak around the back yard and into the house before anyone noticed she was missing. Mom had been a real space cadet lately, so Gordon would probably make the obligatory room check. She planned to be at her desk with a textbook open, so she could bat her eyelashes at him in a “What do you want?” look. Pop an Altoid mint, drop in some Visine, and she was bulletproof. The only symptom would be goofiness, and all twelve-year-old girls were goofy.

  She prodded at the goat with the hoe handle. It turned and trotted to the barn door, standing just beyond the reach of daylight, as if it were afraid the sun would burn its skin and turn its carcass to dust. Jett dropped the hoe and scooped up her baggie of marijuana. She tucked it in the pocket of her sleeveless jean jacket. Though she was craving another hit to cap off the buzz, the whole scene was getting to be like a psychedelic, fluorescent-colored episode of “The Twilight Zone.” She expected the ghost of Rod Serling to step from one of the stalls at any second, wearing a tie-died T-shirt and a ponytail, a pencil-sized joint replacing his ever-present cigarette.

  The rear of the barn had another large wooden door, suspended on rollers that slid in a steel track overhead. It was latched from the inside with a deadbolt, but Jett thought she’d be able to maneuver the heavy door open enough to slip around the back way. Gordon’s SUV door slammed. That meant he’d go through the front door in about fifteen seconds if he followed his usual routine. Unless he saw the goat in the barn.

  Jett wrestled with the deadbolt. It was rusty, as if it hadn’t been operated in years. She banged her knuckles trying to work the bolt free, scraping the skin. She put her knuckles in her mouth and sucked at the blood. Something nudged her hip, and she looked down to see the goat’s face turned up to hers, its nostrils dilating, eyes glinting in the dim light. The animal emitted a low moan, as if a hunger had been awakened by the scent of fresh fruit.

  “Back off, Fred,” she said.

  Jett threw back the bolt and leaned against the edge of the door, hoping to get some momentum. The door opened six inches. The goat jumped up and put its front hooves on the door, raising itself up to the height of her shoulder. It was bleating deep in its throat, and raised one hoof and banged it against the wood. Frightened now, almost forgetting her buzz, Jett flung her shoulder against the edge of the door, sending a fat spark of pain down her arm. The goat hammered on the door with both hooves as it creaked open another half a foot. Jett turned sideways and squeezed her body into the gap, squinting against the early evening sun.

  As she worked her way free, she felt a rough tongue against the back of her hand.

  Great. Goat cooties on her wounded knuckles. She’d probably get a staph infection.

  She struggled through the door and moved away from the barn. The goat was too plump to get through the door. An absurd wave of relief washed over Jett. Getting stoned had been almost more trouble than it was worth.

  As she went down the path that led between the barn and the garden to the apple trees near the house, she glanced back. In the loft opening was a dark shadow that looked a lot like a man in a black suit, arms spread, a wide-brimmed hat on his head. Jett blinked and hurried under the trees. She wanted her drug-induced visions to stay inside her head where they belonged, not out wandering around in the real world.

  But the world hadn’t been very real ever since she had moved to Solom. Thank God for dope.

  ***

  Evening fell like a bag of hammers, and Odus decided there was no better place to let the sun die on you than the cold bank of Blackburn River. He had two rainbow trout on the stringer and half a six-pack of Miller High Life floating in the water, the plastic ring tethered to a stick. The mosquitoes had quit biting weeks ago, and even if they were sorry enough to try to suck his blood, they would be drawing nothing but high-octane, eighty-six proof out of his veins. The bottle of Old Crow was nearly gone, and that meant another long haul into Windshake to replenish his supply. He cussed God and the virgin whore Mary for making Pickett a dry county.

  He was below the old remnants of the dam. Part of the earthworks was still in place, funneling water past in a series of tiny falls. The trout loved to lie among the rocks beneath the white water, where the oxygen level was rich and food dropped down like earthworms from heaven. Odus’s hook dropped in, too, though he had to work the reel with a steady hand because the bait washed downstream in the blink of an eye.

  The general store up on the hill was dark. That was contrary, because Odus had never known it to be closed for a full day. He’d called up to the hospital to check on Sarah, and the receptionist had hemmed and hawed about federal privacy rules until Odus claimed to be her son. Then the receptionist declared Sarah to be in stable condition and scheduled to be kept overnight for observation.

  A few tracks from the old Virginia Creeper line, some that hadn’t been washed away in the 1940 flood, lay in weed-infested gravel across the river. The creosote crossties had long since rotted, and the steel rails themselves would have been long been overgrown if the tourists hadn’t made a walking trail out of the line.

  Tourists were the damnedest creatures: they took the ugliest eyesores of Solom, such as fallen-down barns and lightning-scarred apple trees, and proclaimed them a glory of Creation. Took pictures and bought postcards, put their Florida-fat asses onto the narrow seats of expensive ten-speeds, and pedaled down the river road as if they were going nowhere and had all day to do it.

  Beat all, if you as
ked Odus, but nobody asked, because he was just a drunken river rat and didn’t even own any property. He lived in the bottom floor of a summer house and kept the grounds in trade for rent.

  But, by God, he knew how to troll for trout, and he could take a ten-point buck in October, and when spring came he could pick twelve kinds of native salad greens, and in summer he knew where the best ginseng could be poached, and then it was fall again and he could make a buck or two putting up hay or helping somebody get a few head of cattle to the stockyards. All in all, it was a king’s life, and he wasn’t beholden to anybody. If you didn’t count the Pennsylvania couple that owned the house where he boarded, and Gordon Smith, and the people who had loaned him money.

  The sun slipped a notch lower in the sky, spreading orange light across the ribbed clouds like marmalade on waffles. Fish often bit more at dusk, just as they did at the break of dawn, because the insects they fed on were more active then. A lot of the tourists went in for fly-fishing, and all the gear, complete with hip waders, LL Bean jacket, floppy hat, woven basket and all, would run you upwards of $300 at River Ventures, the little place up the road that rented out kayaks, canoes, bicycles, inner tubes, and every other useless means of transportation known to man. Odus figured the tourists must be bad at math, no matter how many zeroes they had in their bank accounts, because $300 would buy you more store trout than you could eat in a year.

  But that wasn’t his worry. Odus wanted one more rainbow on the trot line before he headed home for a late supper. He planned on stopping by Lucas Eggers’s cornfield on the way home and snagging a few roasting ears. That and some turnip greens he grew in the Pennsylvania folks’ flower garden were plenty enough to keep the ache out of his belly.

  He hit the Old Crow and was about to draw in one of the Millers for a chaser when he saw weeds moving on the far side of the river. The rusted-iron tops of the Joe Pye weed shook back and forth as something made its way to the water. Probably deer, because, like the fish, they got more active at sundown. But deer were likely to stick to a trail, not tromp on through briars and all. Odus played out some slack in his line and waited to see what came out on the riverbank. Odus didn’t have a gun, so he couldn’t kill the deer, and so didn’t care if it was a deer or a man from outer space. As long as it wasn’t a state wildlife officer ready to write him up for fishing without a license.

  At first, Odus thought it was a wildlife officer, because of the hat that bobbed among the tops of the weeds. But the hat was dirty and ragged like that of—

  The Smith scarecrow.

  Then the weeds parted at the edge of the river.

  The sight caused him to drop his pole in the mud, back up onto the slick rocks skirting the riverbank, and wind between the hemlocks and black locust that separated the water from the river road. His heart jumped like a frog trapped in a bucket. The orange light of sunset had gone purple, and the clouds somehow seemed sharper and meaner. A bright yellow light shone above the general store’s front entrance, the one Sarah claimed kept bugs away, though Odus could see them cutting crazy circles around the bulb. He broke into a jog, sweat under his flabby breasts and in the crease where his belly lay quivering over his belt. He didn’t once look back, and even though the river was between it and him, he didn’t feel any safer when he reached his truck.

  Odus was fumbling the key into the ignition when he remembered the Miller, and for just a moment, he hesitated. He would definitely need a good buzz later. But three beers wouldn’t be nearly enough to wash away the image that kept floating before his eyes. The best thing now was to put some distance between him and what he’d seen. Maybe some tourist would be out for a walk, or a bicyclist would get a flat tire, and it could take them instead.

  As he drove away, his chest was tight and he could barely breathe. He wondered if he could get a hospital bed in Sarah’s room, because now he knew what she’d been going on about as she lay on the sacks with her eyelids fluttering.

  It hadn’t been the scarecrow he’d seen. It had been much worse than that. The man in the black hat, face white as goat cheese, as if he’d been in the water way too long.

  And he had, if you believed the stories.

  About two hundred years too long.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Betsy Ward didn’t scream when she encountered the goat. She’d milked plenty of the critters, and the teats were tiny and tough, a work-out for her hands. But they usually kept to the field, even when they were riled. Occasionally one slipped through a gap in the fence or squeezed between two gate posts, but when they did that, they usually made a beeline for the garden or the flower beds. Goats had a nose for heading where they could do the most damage.

  But she’d never had one come in the house before. The back door was ajar, as if the goat had nudged it open with its nose. The mesh on the screen door had been ripped. Maybe the goat had put one sharp hoof on the wire and sliced it down the middle. Goats weren’t that smart, even if they smelled something good in the kitchen. In this case, the only thing going was the sweet potato pie. No doubt the goat had smelled that and come in for a closer look, though Betsy had no idea how in the world the creature had worked the door knob. Why hadn’t Digger run the goat off, or at least raised the alarm with his deep barks?

  “Shoo,” she said, waving her apron at it. “Get on back the way you come.”

  The goat stared at her as if she were a carrot with a spinach top.

  “Arvel,” Betsy called, trying not to raise her voice too much. Arvel didn’t like her hollering from the kitchen. He thought that amounted to pestering and hen-pecking. Arvel always said a wife should come up to the man where he was sitting and talk to him like a human being instead of woofing at him like an old bitch hound.

  Arvel must not have heard her over the television. The goat’s nostrils wiggled as they sniffed the air. The oven was a Kenmore Hotpoint, the second of the marriage. In the red glow of the heating element, she could see the pie through the glass window in the oven door. It had bubbled a little and the tan filling was oozing over the crust in one spot.

  The goat lowered its head and took two steps toward the oven. It had small stumps of horns and was probably a yearling. Sometimes a goat would get ornery and butt you, but in general they avoided interaction with humans, except when food was at stake. It seemed this goat had its heart set on that sweet potato pie.

  Betsy shooed with her apron again, then moved so that she standing between the oven and the goat. She didn’t think the goat could figure out how to work the oven door, but some sense of propriety had overtaken her. After all, this was her kitchen. “Get along now.”

  The goat regarded her, eyes cold and strange. She didn’t like the look of them. They had the usual hunger that was bred into the goat all the way back to Eden, but behind that was something sinister. Like the goat had a mean streak and was waiting for the right excuse.

  “Arvel!” By now Betsy didn’t care if her husband thought she was hen-pecking or not. You don’t have a goat walk into your kitchen and expect to take it in stride. She’d gone through three miscarriages, the drought of 1989, the blizzard of 1960, and the floods of 2004. She knew hard times, and she knew how to keep a clear head. But those things were different. Those were natural disasters, and this one seemed a little unnatural. Like maybe the goat had something more in mind than just ruining a decent homemade pie.

  Arvel entered the kitchen just as the goat charged. Betsy had her hands out, hoping to calm the animal, but its cloven hooves thundered across the vinyl flooring as it closed the ten feet separating them. Betsy saw twin images of herself reflected in the goat’s oddly shaped pupils. Her mouth was open, and she may have been screaming, and her hair hung in wild, slick ropes around her face. She didn’t have time to step away even if she could have made her legs move.

  The goat hit her low, its head just above her womanly region, driving into her abdomen. The nubs of the horns pierced her like fat, dull nails, not sharp enough to penetrate but packing plenty of
hurt. The unexpected force of the assault threw her off-balance, and she felt herself falling backward. The kitchen ceiling spun crazily for half a heartbeat, and she saw the flickering fluorescent light, the copper bottoms of pans arranged on pegs over the sink, the swirling patterns in the gypsum finish above.

  Then she was falling and the world exploded in sparks, and she thought maybe the pie filling had leaked onto the element. As she slid into the inky, charred darkness, the smell of warm sweet potatoes settled around her like the breath of a well-fed baby.

  “Pie’s done,” she said. Her eyelids fluttered and then fell still.

  ***

  “Honey, what are you doing?”

  Katy turned away from the squash casserole she was making. Her hands stank of onions. Little jars and bags of spices were strewn across the counter: basil, pepper, dill weed, cumin. Eggshells lay in the bottom of the sink, slick and jagged. The clock on the wall read ten after six.

  “I’m making dinner,” she said.

  “I hate casseroles.” Gordon took off his tweed jacket and folded it over his arm.

  “I found the recipe in the cabinet. I thought ...” Katy brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Her face was flushed.

  “Where did you get that dress?”

  She looked down and found herself in a dress she’d never seen before. It had an autumnal print and was a little more frilly and feminine than the austere styles Katy preferred. The dress was a little dusty but it fit her body as if it had been tailored. Why was she wearing it to cook?

  “It was in the closet, I think. Must have been something I packed years ago and came across while I was cleaning.”

  “You look nice.” Gordon went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Merlot. He didn’t stop to kiss her as he passed. He poured himself a glass of wine and sat at the butcher block table that stood in one corner and served as a stand for several houseplants.