The Goat Hunters

That was the summer of the wild goats, the pair who fled Old Man Wilson’s barn fire while the sheep all bleated and burned. Biking, we’d glimpse them in the tangled velvet of trees behind our house, grazing in addition to the grasses what strange museum of decay they could find: mushrooms, tree roots, and the oxidized barbed wire that ran the glade’s perimeter. You named them both. You were always naming what we found together.

I can’t remember a cool day that whole season, a day where briny dew didn’t nest in the scraggly sprouts above your lips. You started shaving before me, a limping knuckle waltz with the straight blade your daddy gave you. More than hair you grew nicks along your sharpened jaw, and behind my eyelids I tried not to trace the crosshatched patterns. We knew nothing but enough not to reach for one another.

I asked Maddie to show you better how to use the razor. My sister had more experience in hollowing out the caverns of her skin. You were too embarrassed to match her studied gaze as she molded your fingers with her own around the blade, the icy steel an oath between us as it drank accidental your blood. She smiled when you took the metal into your palm, growing confident, cleaving safe an avenue to the raised fruit of your throat. Now you’ll be able to teach my brother, she said with a thumb toward me, which launched us into a relieved hysteria.

You told me once you thought Maddie was hot, and I didn’t know how to respond. The part of me that was always reacting the way he thought he should told me to be outraged, told me to defend the intangible honor of my sister, a word that always brought the vapid image of jousting over a hapless princess. But that left no way to explain the plummeting of my gut, the way your grin scraped from the meat of my skin something I’d not felt birthing. I babbled dumb phrases, to stay in your lane, and you said you didn’t know where the lanes were anymore.

Our bikes wobbled down our ingrown town’s crooked cul-de-sacs, and we kept our helmets draped across their handlebars. If we saw anyone we knew, we’d dawn them, but they were too clammy to wear for long. My parents lectured me against the dangers of my brain splattered, the Rorschach of my thoughts on pavement, of some injury so permanent that I never saw light again. This was when I realized I wasn’t as scared of the dark as they were. That the fears I carried weren’t of pain or mortality but of being caught.

Old Man Wilson hired out his boy, Denton, to find the goats and bring them home, but the pair ended up far wilier than any of us would have thought. Where embers from the blaze had singed them, they had patches of fur missing, which is how we told them apart. We wanted to keep them gone in our tiny forest. We stopped blabbing to just anyone about where we saw them. We needed a way to better communicate with each other what we knew.

You’d insisted we buy the walkie-talkies after the first time your daddy cashed out his drunken stupor to purchase your momma’s ashy cheek. He’d hit her before, you told me later, but always in the space beneath her ribs, where it wouldn’t bruise. This lashing, though, cost her three days of work, where he both forbid her leaving the house and sulked about the money she was losing. I had no clue what to tell you as your voice crackled over the line, so much softer than the bluster you brought in person, no genuflection to deepen the tones. I still don’t know what to say. I’ve barely kept my head above the current of words I could have given us.

I gave just one, in the end, and it wasn’t enough. Just the other day, Maddie asked me about you in that whatever happened to the such-and-suches sort of way, and I told her I didn’t know. That I’ve looked for you online, crawling through hundreds of faces wearing your name. She was always better at finding than me, though, and she loaded within a few minutes a grown-up picture of you. With you looking on, we told each other for the first time the truths about our baptisms that August. I held my sister’s hands and asked for her forgiveness.

“My dad bought a gun,” you tell me.

“My dad’s always had one.”

“It’s different for cops.”

Really? I bite back.

“What’d he get it for?”

“Dunno,” you say. “Says he needs to protect us.”

I hear something like footsteps on the stairs.

I give our signal — two clicks on the send button — and toss the radio back behind the nightstand into an old holster I’d found in the basement, repurposed. The move is practiced; I’ve gotten good.

But nothing comes next. No disembodied head peering through my door announcing the time as if the orangey numbers of my clock aren’t branding it behind my eyes. I pick your voice box back up, lay you flat across my bare chest, relish the smooth cool of its plastic surface. Even with my window open, the air presses its wet tongues against my skin, and each morning I wake to find my sheets stained a little more horrid sort of yellow.

“Sorry,” I say. “Thought I heard something.”

“Your door still gone?”

“Yeah.” I turn my head to stare through the hollowed frame. Without my glasses I can shape the gloom into a frenzy of swarming flies. I used to have night terrors where my room would particulate around me, pixelate into thousands of moving parts. I would scream out from my sleep, but I never had the words to recount what had happened.

“Why’d they take it in the first place?”

I flush, getting somehow hotter than the sticky room has me already. I try to make it a joke. “They said they didn’t want me tempted anymore.”

“To do what?” you say in a tone that tells me your teeth are out.

“You know.”

Your laughter makes me turn down the radio’s volume. “Seriously?” you say. “Wait, do they make Maddie do it, too?”

“Perv.”

“Prude.”

“Quit thinking about my sister touching herself.”

“Caught me,” you say, all innocence, and my stomach backflips.

“Shit. Hang on,” you say. Without your voice, the flies draw nearer. They buzz, but I can’t understand their speech.

Your words come back in a new tone. “They’re fighting again.”

“About what?”

“Money.”

“I wish my parents would help you guys out.”

Static from you.

“I mean,” I’m treading words again, “it’s just dumb that the government won’t give your dad his money.”

“Government’s fucked,” you say, and I like the way your mouth percusses the harsh fricative.

“Fucked,” I say like it’s a new word.

“Fu-uck,” you say, and even though you deliver the line like an ape on dick pills to make me laugh, something at the fringe still tugs me up, crotch first. I laugh, overloud, slap a hand against my mouth, bite my tongue.

I hear your momma scream in the background.

“Shit, I gotta go.”

“Stay on the line,” I say, quelling a whiney panic from my voice. After a beat, you say, “I’m keeping you in my pocket, so don’t talk or anything.” And then I hear the over-amplified slam of your fingers as you shove me in, as your athletic shorts surround me in their hissing folds. Then there’s nothing but scratches and rushed air, a cutting susurration fighting back the encroaching flies outside my room. They’re shaping into humanoid forms in the gloom. Maddie’s hair made animate by the bickering tempest. The heady buzzing of the cracked face. A crooked arm reaching down to holstered hip. I start to wonder what’s happened to you, but as long as the radio keeps transmitting chaotic waves, I have to believe the flies will come no closer.

The clank of your clumsy hand. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Okay,” you say, and I listen to a calmer wind, your breaths coming through my chest from three houses down. They seem to be hitching on some buried blade in your lungs.

Maddie breaks Denton’s nose after what he calls her brother. She doesn’t think between the time her fist leaves her pocket and when it connects with his formerly unblemished face. She’s instantly horrified at what she’s done. Knows she’ll get hell for it at home. Her brother checks a grin, doesn’t even say thanks. She stares as blood puddles in Denton’s hands and drips to the overwaxed linoleum of the school cafeteria.

The next week he comes up to her in band practice, cradling two drumsticks in his left hand as he proffers the right. Truce? he says, which is different than an apology, but Maddie still gives him half-credit. The swelling in his face is mostly gone, but his nose will never be quite straight again. She takes a hand off her clarinet and spits in it before she holds it out. He laughs. Winces at the pain.

He asks her out for ice cream the week after that. My parents grounded me for breaking your face, she tells him. What’s your house number? he says.

Her daddy’s impressed with the boy who smooth-talks his way into Maddie’s life. Pulls him over once out on 42 just to ask him what’s what. Says he’s got real guts. Maddie sees it, too — so different than the chubby kid she’d once known, playing cops and robbers around the tiny river glade behind their cul-de-sac. He’s tall. Confident. Is, she thinks, someone respectable.

One date becomes two becomes hanging out every day after marching band. They try to reclaim the forest they so loved as kids. Hand-in-hand. There are ghosts in the woods, creatures scuttling out of sight. Always for her, there have been the eyes. Never for a second has she felt unwatched.

She read on her family’s dial-up that a spider’s eyes parse only light and shadow. Its ocelli figure from black and white where could be its prey. These pixels crawl back to her unbidden as the recluse lands on Denton’s shoulder. He swats at it with a yelp. She wonders what it sees in them, huddling close under sunlight slanting through the canopy. If she is more light or shadow.

They’re laughing and she’s holding his shoulder where the spider had been when he startles her with a kiss. His lips purse in a way that makes them hard to melt into and then it’s over. He looks at her, shy, and then he startles her with a confession: I don’t believe in hell anymore.

She looks him square in the crooked nose. She knows what he’s getting at. Something’s rushing in her ears. She pulls him farther into the glade, all the way to the shore of the river. Picks up the perfect stone. She wings it and it leaps four times on the sweaty back of the water. Doesn’t quite make the other side.

I’m scared of heaven, she says.

Our pastor gave an entire sermon about Adam’s rib. About the derivation of creation, the pecking order of feminine desire. We struggled not to laugh. We imagined the extra rib in Eve to be her breasts, and we used our half-assed doctrine as an excuse for more than one expedition to find the missing structure in each others’ chests. You be Eve today, you told me once, and it’s the only time I ever saw you blush.

The divots between your ribs held a sort of theological inspiration for me, gave me permission to leap past the fear of our double-tapped Morse code signal to stop talking, to break apart. In those spaces between your bones, my fingers became their own creatures, beholden to none. We had no language then. Our prayers had tapered off, even as we stroked the places where our wings should have been.

Without words between us, we could refuse the notion that tracing each others’ bodies signified anything like desire. That the tautness of our stomachs had nothing to do with lifting our sweat-stained shirts, and instead came from the dirty things we’d talk about, stuff heard in any boys’ locker room. Always about the girls. Did you see what Delaney wore on the last day of school? Natalie and Chad got caught by her parents when he tried to climb through her window. Brent said Meghan got her period at the public pool. We struggled to imagine blood and water, the peculiar affirmation of a creative power we’d never have.

And really, the girls were a mystery to us. As we partook, albeit crudely, in the unveiling of the supposed miraculous surrounding them, we disrobed only ourselves. My sister, I think, knew better than me what was happening. She cornered me after my shower one evening and asked me flat out. But I laughed. Gay guys wanted to stick it in each other. They wanted to kiss dicks. You and I weren’t anything.

But my sister was as shaded from my view as I tried to be from hers. I’d be attending her high school come fall, and although she’d already made me promise I wouldn’t be embarrassed to find her if I needed anything, I couldn’t shake the day not two weeks before when she’d pretended not to notice us on the sidewalk downtown. Who’s that beanpole Maddie’s with, you’d asked me. And then as they’d approached, we’d seen it was Denton, the kid whose nose she’d flattened. He still had severe babyface, even with the realignment of his features, and he was always smiling like he didn’t get the joke. I don’t know what she saw in him. When we were kids, Maddie and I would try to see who could keep their eyes crossed longer. Once we made it almost five minutes before I hyperventilated that I couldn’t remember which double was her, and which was the maligned fabric of my vision’s weaving.

You told me you wanted a sister, and I told you I sometimes wanted mine never to have been born. Not that I wanted to be an only child, but that I wanted to keep her safe in the womb of unexisting. The darkness of nothing that has come to be such a solace to me these days. A sort of remembering in reverse. Before God created the world, our pastor said, there was only emptiness. No senses, nothing to sense. And despite the way the preacher dodged the inevitable, I thought, God was lonely. He couldn’t stop himself from needing to touch.

Or to meddle, you said, and even though you pulled up the edges of your mouth and chanted and shook your hands around like a power-tripping deity, I knew you were, in the smallest, safest place of your head, thinking of the tiny bundle of bloodied fur and flesh that your momma had delivered in the hallway bathroom of your old house. The one that made her stop trying. Start refusing your father’s advances. You’d been only four or five when people started telling him he had the right to look elsewhere, even as you found that, from here on out, you could never look away.

So we became gods in our own way, you and I, biking into the summer’s echoing corridor. We loved best the sun’s shrugging off its responsibilities, the time of dusk when we became invisible and the houses on our streets lit up, dioramas for us to imagine ourselves inside, tableaus of feasible normality. Through their perfect boxes we could see the Traversens sit for their late dinners, the Sheridan kids looping their endless movie nights, watching the tapes in rewind as often as forward. We witnessed muted squabbles between husbands and wives, providing a ridiculous dialogue ourselves, laughing until water sprung from our eyes.

We couldn’t see our faces except in the glow of these near-strangers’ homes. It was easier this way, hiding in the language of predictable tropes, stories woven of flesh not our own. Flesh not of those we tried and tried not to love. We were always trying, you and me. To be something palatable. We slept and let our bones be stolen away.

The goats stare us down through their blissed-out meal. Eve’s chewing what looks to be poison ivy, and Adam lies prone, root muncher he is.

“Denton tried to make one of them eat a firework,” I say for some reason, then add, “A lit one.”

“Idiot,” you say, and a frown takes hostage your features. “Isn’t he supposed to be bringing them in?”

I shrug. It’s easily the hottest day of summer, and our muggy bike helmets have soaked our hair to dripping. We practice the law, dutiful. Or my parents’ arbitrary rules. I never really know the difference-just a loose, inexplicable image of my brains leaking on the asphalt, swarming with gorging flies.

When we were little, our moms used to shave our heads as they chatted to each other. Some solidarity that passed once my dad started dressing up as an officer to tote your dad home from the bars. I always hated the way my scalp looked so lumpy without its silky blanket, but you got inspired, a grinning alien come from Pluto to eat as many human toes as you could find. I don’t know where any of your ideas come from.

You peel off your helmet, and the goats watch in mild interest, maybe hoping for a new source of food. It’s been weeks since the barn burned down, and they seem happier than ever. Your dark hair is matted and mussed. I unclip my own strap, begin the slow giving up.

“My dad took me to an autopsy,” I say to bring you back.

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. I think he wanted to win an argument.”

You pull from your bag your straight razor, and I realize you mean to shave right here as I talk, so I keep going, letting the words spin out.

“There was this guy — we went up to Columbus you know — this guy playing guitar and I tried to give him money.”

One of the goats farts, and we both bust up.

“So?” You say, reclaiming your breath, rubbing at a place on your neck you’ve sliced.

“So that’s not allowed, I guess.” I leave unspoken what we both know: my dad’s steely temper, the icy calm that comes over him before he begins dissecting me with his quiet scolding.

“What was the body like?”

“I dunno. Cold.”

“You touched it?”

“No, she — it — just looked like it could use a blanket or something.”

“Because she was naked?” I blush, and you push in. “Were you turned on?”

I shove you, hard. Your foot catches on some invisible divot in the ground and you go down on your ass, the blade spilling from your grip. You look up at me, winded but not angry. You had it coming.

I glance back to the road. “Yeah, it’s hard to be horny after they cut her open.” I make a motion with my hand, drawing the line as I’d seen it done, ear to ear like an overlarge smile. You wrinkle your nose, and I hate that I find it cute.

“What’s that got to do with the homeless dude?” You’ve left the razor where it landed, and your eyes on me are hard to ignore.

“I don’t know,” I say. “My dad said she was a junkie. The woman on the table.”

“Huh,” you say. I pick up an acorn and make as if to throw it at Adam. He bleats, implacable, intent on his prize.

“Don’t,” you say, and your hand is sticky on my arm, even if your grip isn’t tight. You hold it for a second and when we release the oak seed back to the ground, it is something we both want: for once to be boys who don’t destroy.

“We should go to the pool,” I say. “It’s fucking hot.”

“No shit,” you say, still staring at the grassy dirt in front of the goats. “But it’s Tuesday, so all the toddlers will be pissing themselves learning how to float.”

“Shit,” I say, because it’s this summer we’ve learned to cuss, not out of any obvious need besides relieving the sudden boredom of turning fourteen. Or maybe we want to sound more grown up than we are. Or maybe I like watching you spit out the words. No. I watch your mouth too much.

You reach into your pack, pull out the walkie-talkie. You press your lips against the mouthpiece.

“Here’s an idea.” Your voice comes squawking through the radio in my own bag. I grin and unzip, take it out.

“I’m all ears.”

“You know that spot your dad fishes?” you say. I nod, thinking of the many times he’s tried to teach me the dance of a dead fly on the river to tempt the fish to bite. You have to become the fly, he’s told me, so the fish know it’s real. Imagine the cold of the water on your wings. Your antennae.

You look at me, wait for the verbal response.