The Goats (3 page)

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Authors: Brock Cole

BOOK: The Goats
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“Why? What's wrong? Do you think the people might come back?”
“I saw the launch out by the island when I went to get the water. They must be looking for us. They'll probably figure out that we came over here.”
The girl dropped her spoon and picked at a knot in the old quilt.
“Where can we go?” she said finally.
The boy shrugged. He had an idea, a picture really, of them camping out in the pine woods around the lake. Nobody knew where they were, but they were there, living like Indians.
It was not something he wanted her to consider. He knew she would just tell him how crazy it was.
“I wish we could just disappear,” he said finally. The girl was watching him. “They could look for us and couldn't find us. They'd be wondering what happened, but they would never know.”
The girl stared at the quilt again, looking into his vision, or maybe one of her own.
“Yeah,” she said. “That would be neat.”
He could hear a car somewhere, honking its horn, and a dog barking.
“I think I'd better call my mom,” she said after a moment. That made him feel bad. He didn't know why. “I mean, she'll think I'm dead or something.”
He nodded, not wanting to say anything.
“Do you want to call your mom or dad?” she asked. “Are they still married?”
“Yeah. They're in Turkey somewhere. I've got the address, but I left it back at camp.”
“What are they doing there?”
“They're archaeologists. They're working. Excavating some stuff.”
“That sounds interesting. Did you ever, you know, go and help them?”
“No. I went a couple of times when I was little. It was kind of boring, really.” He thought of the flat dusty site. The fragments of pottery laid out on the wooden tables with the white canvas awnings flapping overhead. Everything was covered with a reddish-gold dust. Small brown falcons with sharp pointed wings flew overhead.
“I liked Greece better, but they don't go there anymore. They thought I'd be better off here, where I could make some friends my age.”
“Yeah. My mom thought that, too.”
The flat bars of light shining through the cracks in the shutter had turned to gold as the sun rose. It was odd, but even though the light was brighter it was harder to see.
“Listen,” she said. “What if I call my mom and tell her to come and get us? Both of us, I mean. You could stay with my mom and me until your parents got back.”
“You really think so? That would be neat. You sure she wouldn't mind?”
“I don't know. I don't think so. She's always after me to invite kids from school over.” She paused. “I'm socially retarded for my age,” she said with a certain dignity.
“Yeah. Me too.” They looked at each other silently.
“Well, let's try it. We could have a great time, going to movies and stuff. The Museum of Science and Industry is just a couple of blocks away. They have all sorts of interesting exhibits and things.”
“Yeah? I think I'd like to do that.”
“They've got a big heart you can walk into, and these people all sliced up in thin little slices. They're stuck in these glass doors, and on the first door is just, I don't know, an elbow or something, but then you turn the doors and you can see everything. All their insides.”
He stared at her. “Are they real people? I mean, really real?”
“Yeah. There's a man and a lady. All sliced up.”
“But where would they get them? Who would they get to cut up like that?”
The girl shrugged. “I don't know. Maybe the people didn't have any family.”
They sat quietly for a moment, thinking about the sliced-up man and woman.
“Well,” said the boy. “There're some phones down at the municipal beach. Maybe you could call from there. Maybe we wouldn't have to go back to camp at all.”
“God, that would be great.” She wiped her hands
on the quilt. “I've got to get cleaned up,” she said. “I'm such a mess.”
She got out of bed, still a little shaky, but he could tell she felt better.
They crawled out the window and went down to the lake together. The girl tucked her sweat shirt up around her waist and waded into the water, scrubbing her arms and legs. The boy looked around carefully before he squatted down to wash his face. There was no one near. A man was fishing from a rickety dock several hundred feet down the shore, and the launch was still moored out by the island. The small gray boat was gone.
“Do I look okay?” said the girl, coming out of the water.
He regarded her thoughtfully. “Yeah, I guess so. You look like you might have a swimsuit on under your shirt. You shouldn't have gotten it wet, though. You can see through it.”
She pulled up the hem of the sweat shirt and looked at her stomach calmly.
“It'll dry by the time we get to the beach.” She wrinkled her nose at him critically. “Those pants look kind of queer.”
“Yeah, but there wasn't anything else.”
“Let's cut them off. Maybe they won't look so peculiar then.”
They found a serrated knife among the kitchen utensils, and the girl hacked off the legs of the pants while he watched, wrapped in the quilt.
“We should really pay for all this stuff,” he said uneasily. “I mean the pants and the shirts.”
“And the soup. We'll come back later and explain. They probably won't mind.”
When he put on the pants he tied two keepers together with a bit of string and pulled the T-shirt down over the bunched-up waistband.
“Well,” she said, “they still look a little strange, but probably nobody will say anything.” She was trying to brush out her hair with a vegetable brush that she had found hanging over the sink. “Be careful when you sit down, though.”
“Why?”
“Well, you can see.”
 
They folded up the blankets and quilt and washed the pot and dishes in the lake. The boy found a garbage can behind the cottage near the outhouse and put the bottle, the empty saltine carton, and the tin cans inside. As they left, the girl helped him prop the shutter back up on the window. They couldn't fasten it because he had pounded most of the wing nuts off, but he didn't think that someone just passing by would notice.
Behind the cottage was a dirt road. They followed it toward the highway, where they could hear cars passing.
“How far is it to the beach?” she asked.
“I don't know. Do you think we should try to hitch a ride?”
“I'm not supposed to hitchhike. It's dangerous.”
“Yeah. They might be looking for us, anyway.”
“We should probably stay off the highway, then.”
“Okay. We'll just try to stay close to the shore.”
It was not difficult. The lakefront was heavily built up, and between the cottages and the highway was a network of driveways and dirt roads. It took longer to walk along these than along the highway, but it was easy on their bare feet, and they didn't seem to attract any attention. They might be just two kids staying at someone else's cottage.
A crowd of local teenagers was swimming around the public boat launch. The boys wore cutoff jeans instead of swimsuits. They had white, hard bellies and dark-brown arms. They threw themselves into the water recklessly, each trying to make a bigger splash than the others. Two girls in bikinis smoked cigarettes and watched. Their faces were expressionless. No one would know if they were impressed.
The boy and the girl circled the crowd warily, walking behind a rusty Cadillac convertible and a pickup with a roll bar in the back.
“Wait a minute,” said the girl. As he watched she walked over to the door of the pickup and looked inside. The window must have been rolled down, because she suddenly stepped up on the running board and reached inside. She came back, her face stiff and expressionless, one hand clenched in a fist at her side.
“Keep walking,” she said.
“What did you do?” he asked, feeling panicky.
She opened her fist for a second without stopping. He saw a glint of silver.
“Hey, that's stealing! You should put it back!”
She stopped and looked at him blankly. “You put it back,” she said. She thrust the change into his hand and stalked off, holding her elbows.
He knew he wasn't going to put the money back. When he caught up with her he tried to look at her face, but she kept her head down.
“Hey,” he said, “I'm sorry. I must be a drain brain.”
She turned on him angrily. “We need it, don't we? I mean, how am I supposed to call my mom? They didn't leave us anything. They took our clothes and everything.”
“It's okay. I was just being stupid. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, then.”
After a minute she said, “How much is it?”
He looked at the change in his hand. “A dollar forty. How did you know it was there?”
“I didn't. I just remembered that people sometimes keep change in those little compartments on their dashboards. For tolls and stuff. They probably won't even miss it. We could pay them back, anyway.”
She was starting to limp. She must have hurt her foot on one of the roots that ran through the dust in the road.
“Yes,” he said. “We'll pay them back. We'll pay them back for everything.”
IT WAS too early for the municipal beach to be crowded. A few mothers with aluminum folding chairs sat on the strip of yellow sand that the township had dumped over the dark clay beach. Their feet were mired in shopping bags full of towels, yarn, and toys. Some small children squatted in the shallows, and a young couple was spreading a beach towel which looked like a giant dollar bill a few yards away.
Above the concession stand with its Pepsi-Cola sign hovered a blue haze from the grill. Behind the stand were two rows of wooden cubicles where people could change their clothes. The public telephones stood in their plastic bubbles next to the path leading to the parking lot.
“Do I look okay?” the girl asked again, pulling at the bottom of her sweat shirt.
“Sure you look okay. You look great.”
She made a face so he wouldn't think she believed him, and they came down out of the trees and started to cross the bumpy lawn to the telephones. They had to watch their step because of the little metal tabs torn from the tops of beer and soft-drink cans that glittered in the grass.
The boy sat down on one of the railroad ties that held back the gravel of the parking lot. He put his hands under his legs to keep his pants closed, and watched the girl as she pushed a quarter into a telephone.
 
Mrs. Pritzer stuck her head into Maddy Golden's office.
“It's Laura.” She kept her face carefully blank, to show that it wasn't her place to express an opinion. “Line 5.”
What now, Maddy asked herself, reaching for the phone on her desk. Mrs. Pritzer was still standing in the open doorway. Maddy looked at her, raising her eyebrows in inquiry.
“It was a collect call, Mrs. Golden. I hope I was right to accept the charges. I thought it might be important, even if it is a personal call.”
“Yes. Yes, it's all right, Mrs. Pritzer.”
The older woman withdrew, some obscure accounting of her own satisfied.
“Hello, Laura? Honey? Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” There was a long pause. “Mom?”
Maddy tried to keep her voice bright, confiding. “Yes? What is it, honey? You know you shouldn't call me at the office unless it is really important. I mean an emergency or something.”
“Yeah, Mom. Mom? I've got to come home.”
Why? Why couldn't Laura adjust to camp? Why did her life have to be so tangled, so difficult? The questions remained unasked, clenched down in Maddy's throat.
“Listen, Laura,” she said carefully, “we talked about this before, and we decided we'd give it another chance. Do you remember? I thought you'd made some friends. You did tell me that, you know.”
“I know, but you've got to come get me, Mom.”
“Don't start crying! You're not a baby anymore! Now tell me what's wrong. Can you do that? Are you having trouble with the other kids?”
“Yeah.”
“Well? What kind of trouble?”
There was another long pause.
“I don't know. They're all really despicable. They're all hypocrites.”
Maddy sighed. Laura's favorite words. What had she done to raise a child so stiff and unbending? She was a little prude, that was part of the problem. No wonder the other kids gave her a rough time.
“Listen, Laura, I don't think that's a real reason. I
mean, I know that some people aren't very nice, but you have to learn to deal with them, not just at camp, but everywhere. I mean, I have to deal with people who aren't very nice, too, you know.”
“I've got to come home, Mom. Now.” She was wailing. Literally wailing. Maddy wondered if Mrs. Pritzer was listening on the extension, twisting things around in that dried-up brain of hers.
“Laura. You are not listening.”
“It's really important, Mom!”
“Okay, okay.” Maddy put her hand over the receiver and sat back, closing her eyes, trying to stay calm.
“Okay,” she began again. “There's a Parents' Weekend coming up, isn't there?”
“Saturday. But you said you weren't coming.”
“Well, I am coming. I mean, if you're having problems, I've got to, haven't I? We'll talk about it then. Okay?”
“I don't know, Mom. I really …”
“Laura, I don't know what else I can do. I'm trying to earn a living. For both of us. You can really help me if you try to manage things by yourself for a change. Talk to Miss Cutter if you want. You said she was very nice, didn't you?”
“She's okay, but …”
“But nothing. This is very important, Laura. It's just two days. I really want you to show me that you can handle these problems by yourself, at least for two days. Okay?”
There was silence.
“I said okay, Laura?”
“Okay, Mom.”
“All right, then. I'll see you Saturday about lunchtime. Now I want you to have a good time. Try to do something different. Are you having your period?”
The question had popped out before she could stop it. She could hear in it the fond, prying note that she had so hated in her own mother's voice.
“No.” Laura swallowed the word, shutting Maddy away.
“I'm sorry, honey, I know you don't like to talk about it, but sometimes when a girl gets her period, she feels depressed. It's just a fact of life.”
There was another silence and then the receiver buzzed in her ear. Laura hadn't even said goodbye. Didn't she realize how upsetting that was? Maddy had always had this dread of not saying goodbye properly. Of course Laura knew it. She was very good at picking out little ways to punish her mother.
Mrs. Pritzer stuck her head in the door again. She didn't like to use the intercom. She liked to be able to see Maddy's face if she thought the call might be interesting.
“It's a Mr. Wells.”
“Who is he? What does he want?”
“He's the director. At Laura's camp,” said Mrs. Pritzer. She beamed in bland triumph. “Line 3.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Pritzer.”
I could kill her, thought Maddy, hardly knowing
whom she meant. I could really kill her. She pushed the button on the phone angrily.
 
“She can't come,” the girl said. “Not until Saturday.”
He wasn't surprised. He had seen her crying. Her cheeks were still wet with tears. She had let them run down into the corners of her mouth.
“Saturday,” he said. “What are we supposed to do until Saturday?”
“I don't know. Go back to camp, I guess.”
The boy looked down to the beach, where some children were running back and forth over the sand. The sun was high enough so that the glare hurt his eyes.
“I really really don't want to do that,” he said.
“Me neither. I don't know what else to do.”
“Did you tell her? About us being the goats?”
The girl shook her head. She sat up and straightened her shoulders. “My mother and I don't communicate very well,” she said.
The boy nodded. They watched a man with a little girl and boy trying to set up a volleyball net. The little girl was waving one of the poles around, like a flagpole without a flag.
“Don't do that, Tracy,” the man said. He made his voice sound very patient, warning his daughter that in a minute he was going to get mad.
“How much money have we got left?” asked the boy. “I'm starving.”
“Still a dollar forty. The operator gave me my quarter back because it was a collect call.”
“Let's get a hot dog or something.” They got up and walked toward the concession stand, trying to look casual.
The man behind the counter was big, with damp pink hands.
“What do you want?” he said.
There was a chalkboard propped up over the grill listing what the man sold and how much it was. The boy studied it carefully. Hot dogs were seventy-five cents. They didn't have enough for two. They could buy a hot dog and a Coke or a Mars bar.
“I don't know. You want to split a hot dog and a Coke?” he asked the girl.
“Let's get potato chips.”
“Okay. A hot dog and a bag of potato chips, please.”
“What do you want on the hot dog?”
The man and the boy both looked at the girl. She wrinkled her nose so that her glasses would slide back up.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You mean raw?” asked the boy.
She looked at him indignantly. “It's not raw. It's just plain.”
“Not even catsup or something?”
The man threw down the dish towel he had been wiping the counter with and walked away.
“Hey,” said the boy, but the man ignored him. He
walked around a tall rack of open shelves that extended from the floor to the ceiling. It was partially filled with wire baskets of people's clothes.
There was another counter in the wall of the concession stand facing the back row of the changing cubicles. An old man and a woman were standing there in their bathing suits. The man threw the wire baskets with their clothes on the rack of shelves. He gave them each a safety pin with a little brass tag on it. The boy and girl watched silently until the man came back.
“A plain hot dog and a bag of potato chips,” said the boy.
They carried the food to the row of railroad ties by the parking lot. They didn't want to sit by the people on the beach. They took bites from the hot dog, each biting from an opposite end. It didn't taste very good.
“There's one bite left,” said the girl. “You can have it.”
He didn't say anything. He was watching a boy and a girl at the back of the concession stand waiting for someone to take their clothes. They were both very tan and had long blond hair. They didn't mind waiting. The girl leaned on the counter, and her boyfriend let his hand slide down over the seat of her swimsuit. She slapped his hand away and then leaned over again.
“Do you want to get some clothes? I mean, some real clothes? If we're going to walk back to camp we need some shoes.”
“How do we do that?” she asked, putting down the bit of hot dog carefully on the railroad tie so that it wouldn't roll. She tore the corner off the potato-chip bag with her teeth.
“There's only that one guy at the hot-dog stand. He has to sell stuff and take people's clothes by himself. If you kept him busy I could grab a couple of baskets.”
She thought of them running across the lawn carrying the baskets, the fat pink man screaming at them.
“That's crazy.”
“No, it isn't. I could do it.”
The girl saw that he was still watching the couple waiting to check their clothes. They looked like an advertisement for shampoo or sugarless gum.
“All right,” she said, her eyes going narrow. “What'll I do?”
“How much money have we got?”
She counted their change. “Sixteen cents.”
“Is that all? I thought we'd have enough for you to buy something else.”
“There was the tax.”
“Well, couldn't you pretend to buy something?”
“I don't know. Wait a sec.” She picked up a bit of cinder and the last bite of hot dog. She rubbed the cinder into the pink meat. “Okay,” she said. “Where shall we meet afterward?” She was holding the bit of hot dog in the flat palm of her hand, as if it were not quite clean, and frowning at him seriously.
“Behind the changing places.”

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