The Goats Page 2

  Very quietly, hardly daring to breathe, he walked the log out into the water until the muddy bottom dropped away and there was nothing there at all.

  Margo Cutter, senior counselor, came down to the beach still carrying the bag of clothes. Max didn’t shine his flashlight in her face, of course, but he could tell by her voice that it must be grim.

  “They’re not there,” she said.

  Max flipped his cigarette into the water. “Well, they must be somewhere around. They wouldn’t try to swim for it, would they?”

  “I don’t think so. Laura can’t swim. She’s afraid of the water. What about Howie?”

  Max shrugged. “I don’t know. He can swim all right, but it’s a mile and a half, and he’s kind of wimpy.”

  He knew at once that he shouldn’t have said that, because it annoyed Margo and set her off again. “I just don’t understand how anybody could have thought that this would be even remotely funny.”

  “Yeah,” Max said, trying to sound conciliatory. “We’d better see if we can find them. We should have brought some dope for the mosquitoes. They’re pretty bad.”

  “I mean it. I don’t know what I’m going to say to her. She told me she wanted to go home, and I told her that this was such a wonderful place and that she’d make such wonderful friends. Some friends. I tell you, Max, I’m ready to quit over this. I never want to see some of those smug little brats again.”

  “Come on, Margo. It’s not that serious. I know it was a dumb stunt, but they didn’t mean anything—you know—harmful.”

  Margo shone her flashlight right in his face. “No? Well, what the hell did they mean? You tell me, Max. I really want to know. What the hell did they mean?”

  The Cottage

  WHEN THEY were close enough to the shore to touch bottom, she couldn’t walk. She tried to, but she kept falling over. Finally he had to drag her out of the water, holding her by the armpits. He dragged her over a narrow muddy beach and up on some grass before his feet slipped out from under him and he sat down with a bump.

  He sat there panting while she lay between his legs, staring up at the sky through glasses pebbled with water. It was beginning to get light, with that pale dawn light that robs everything of color.

  He looked at her body. It was long and white. She had no breasts, just two shriveled nipples. At the bottom of her belly was a little patch of hair, like a Hitler mustache. That meant that she was more mature than he was. He didn’t have any hair yet. The other boys called him Baldy. It was supposed to be funny, because he had thick curly hair on his head.

  We’re just little kids, he thought, and felt waves of self-pity sweep over him. He cried for a few minutes, and then stopped. She was shuddering and breathing funny, and her skin was cold, like damp rubber.

  “Get up,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t say anything.

  The grass they were sitting on was short. His brain had to work on that fact for a moment before he realized that it had been cut. They were sitting on somebody’s lawn. He looked around and saw a dark house tilting over them.

  “Get up,” he said again. “There’s a house. We’ll get some help.”

  She rolled slowly off his legs and curled up in a ball on her side, sagging into the grass.

  He stared at her stupidly for a minute, and then got to his feet and climbed the lawn to the house. It was small and empty. A summer cottage. Large board shutters had been fastened over the windows. Behind it was a grove of dark trees. He could hear the drum of tires as someone drove by on a hidden highway. There was nothing else.

  She hadn’t moved when he got back to her.

  “Nobody’s there,” he said. “It’s shut up. There’s a road somewhere. Do you think you can walk? We’ve got to get some help.”

  “You go,” she said quietly, into the grass. “You get someone.”

  He didn’t know if he could. He was shaking with cold, and he wondered if they were going to die. It seemed ridiculous, to die on the front lawn of someone’s summer cottage. There was a road not far away. At camp everyone would be snoring in their sleeping bags and soon they would be eating breakfast. It was summer. How could they be dying like this?

  “I’m going to try to break in,” he said.

  The door was locked and the shutters over the windows were fastened with big rusty wing nuts. When he tried to turn them, blood came out from under his fingernails. His skin was white and shriveled. He thought he would show the people who owned the house his fingers. Then maybe they would understand why it had been important that he break in. As he looked at his hands, he became angry at the people because they had locked up their house and because they weren’t there to help. He found a stone and smashed at the wing nuts on one of the window shutters until they broke off and the shutter fell onto the porch with an enormous crash. Shocked, he waited, afraid that someone might hear. It occurred to him that he wasn’t thinking very clearly.

  The window wasn’t locked. He lifted the sash and looked inside. The cottage was small, no more than a single room. There was a sink and some cupboards on one side, a table in the center, and a bed. Light fell in pale bars through the cracks in the shutters. He could just make out some blankets and a tattered quilt folded on the bed.

  He went back to the beach and made the girl stand up. She could walk if he helped her, but her knees didn’t seem to work properly. They kept locking with every step.

  When he got her through the window, he made her lie down on the bed and tried to cover them both with the blankets. It was hard to do. He had trouble getting the blankets unfolded, and they grated like Brillo against his bare legs. When he had done the best he could, he lay back. He didn’t feel any warmer. His hands hurt and his teeth were chattering. She began to curl up again, burrowing against him like an animal, thrusting her face into his neck and digging her fists into his ribs.

  “Hey,” he said, “what’s the matter with you?” She didn’t hear him. He wondered if she was feeling warm inside. He knew that when you froze to death you were supposed to feel warm inside just before the end.

  He took off his glasses and folded them neatly, but there was no place to put them. He looked up at the ceiling. Someone had pinned a centerfold directly overhead. It was of a lady with her legs spread. She looked as if she were falling on him from an enormous distance. It was such a joke. It was such a joke he wanted to laugh.

  He woke up when she rolled away from him. He could see blue sky out of the window. His hands hurt, but he was warm. Deliciously warm.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  She squinted at him with bleary distaste, as if she had stepped in something disagreeable and wasn’t sure what it was. Her glasses were all cockeyed, but still on her nose.

  “Where are we?” she said finally.

  “In the house. The cottage. I broke in.”

  “You broke in?” She stared at him. “You just broke in? They could put us in jail!”

  “No, they couldn’t,” he said, but he wasn’t really sure. “You were passing out all over the place. I had to.”

  She grimaced and wiped her hands against her chest as if they had dirt on them.

  “I feel sick.” She craned her neck around. “Aren’t there any clothes or something?”

  “I don’t know. Shall I look around?” He waited until she turned away, and then he got out of bed slowly. It hurt to stand up. His legs and arms ached. He pulled out the drawers in a cupboard by the sink and found some towels, a pair of pants stiff with paint, a grubby sweat shirt, and a couple of T-shirts.

  He put on the pants. He couldn’t stand on one leg, so he had to sit down in a chair to do it. Then he put on one of the T-shirts. The clothes were too big. They were for an adult.

  “This is all there is,” he said, taking the girl the sweat shirt.

  “That’s okay. Give me that other undershirt, too.”

  She drew the sweat shirt up over her arms and lay back, looking at the
ceiling where the centerfold was floating like some kind of angel gone bad. The boy went back to the sink and rummaged in the shelves overhead. There were cans of fruit cocktail and chicken noodle soup and an open box of saltines. In a rusty refrigerator he found a half-empty bottle of ginger ale. He carried the crackers and the ginger ale back to the bed.

  “Eat some,” he said.

  The crackers were soft and stuck to the roof of his mouth. She couldn’t swallow the crackers, but she drank some of the ginger ale. It was warm and flat. Then she dozed off again.

  He lay down carefully beside her, propped up on one elbow so he could look at her face. Her hair was matted and her forehead puffy with mosquito blotches. Her ears were waxy and not very clean. They had been pierced, but she didn’t have earrings.

  He couldn’t remember now why she was supposed to be a real dog. He couldn’t even tell whether she was pretty or not. She had long eyelashes and her lips curled up at the corners. That seemed very remarkable to him.

  When he woke up the second time, the girl was trying to crawl over him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m going to be sick. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “What?” She crouched over him, unbelieving.

  “There isn’t one. It must be out in back.”

  She looked around, a little desperate. “Do I have to crawl out the window?”

  He nodded.

  “God, I don’t think I can. I’m really going to be sick.”

  “Use the sink,” he said. He was afraid she would be sick on him if she stayed where she was.

  “The sink? How can I use the sink?”

  “I don’t know. Just do it.”

  She looked at him as if he were crazy, but nonetheless lurched out of bed and toward the sink. She didn’t make it. He looked away, trying not to hear.

  When she had finished, she stayed where she was, her mouth wide open and twisted down at the corners. She was crying, but no sound was coming out.

  Reluctantly he got up and went over to her. “It’s okay,” he said. “Really, it’s okay.”

  She made a horrible gulping sound. “Look at the mess!”

  “It’s okay. It’s just ginger ale, mostly.” He grabbed a dish towel that had dried into a hard, shriveled wad and tried to wipe her face. She swatted at his hand, knocking her glasses off so that they skittered across the floor.

  “Oh, God, I need somebody to take care of me!” She blundered past him to the bed, crawling under the covers as if she wanted to hide there forever. He found her glasses and carried them over to the bed. They weren’t broken. She wouldn’t look at him, so he folded them and put them on the mattress by her head. She had stopped crying. She was staring at the ceiling and sighing through clenched teeth. She kept shuddering over and over.

  After a few minutes she stopped.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  “You want something to eat?”

  She shook her head, still staring at the ceiling.

  “I could make some soup. Maybe you’d feel better if you ate something. There’s chicken noodle or chicken noodle.”

  She wouldn’t smile.

  “What do you want?”

  “Chicken noodle.”

  He found a can opener in a drawer and opened one of the cans of soup. He dumped the soup into a pot, but when he held the can under the faucet and turned the tap nothing happened. He found a bucket behind the curtain under the sink.

  “I’ve got to get some water out of the lake. They must have turned off the water here. Okay?” She didn’t say anything. She was still staring at the centerfold as if it might swoop down and smother her.

  When he climbed through the window he could see that it was going to be a beautiful day.

  He carried the bucket down to the water’s edge and looked out toward the island. They hadn’t swum across the shortest way. The island was far down the lake.

  He could see the camp launch, a big white boat with varnished top sides, sticking its nose up into the trees there. As he watched, a small gray outboard worked its way into view from behind the island. A man in a white shirt was standing in the bow looking into the water.

  The boy filled the bucket and went back to the house. He splashed some of the water into the soup and put it on the stove. It was a butane camping stove and it lit without difficulty. The rest of the water he sluiced over the damp spot on the floor. He could hear it dripping through the cracks in the floorboards into the earth below.

  When the soup was hot he found two cracked cereal bowls and poured the soup carefully into them. There were some spoons in the drawer where he had found the can opener. He put a spoon into each of the bowls and carried them over to the bed.

  The girl had torn up the second T-shirt and fashioned it into a pair of panties. They looked like a cross between a diaper and a bikini. She put them on under the covers.

  “We should keep track of the stuff we use,” he said. “So we can pay them back.”

  “It was an old shirt,” she said, as if he had meant to criticize her.

  “Yeah, I know. That’s okay.”

  When the soup was gone, he opened a can of fruit cocktail. She poured it into their empty bowls, dividing up the red cherries evenly without comment.

  “I don’t think we should stay here,” he said when they had finished.

  “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. Yo
u 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.