The tape had been stapled to both sides of the door, and my dash outside had ripped one end away from the staple, which was still embedded in the door frame. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure that nobody was watching, then used my Swiss Army knife to wriggle the staple out. I lifted the tape back into position, poked the prongs through the plastic just to the right of the original holes and hammered it back with the butt of the knife.
Satisfied, I turned back to the driveway. The cops would have to study it pretty closely to know that it had been tampered with. I was betting that they wouldn’t check to see if the dog food was still there, any more than they’d check to see whether there was still cereal in the cupboard.
Lug-nut had disappeared.
“Shit,” I said aloud. I called his name, and immediately got an answering bark from the quonset hut next to the house. “Come, here, boy!” I said. I know my dog-wrangling techniques from reading Ted Wood’s books. When Wood’s cop-hero tells his wonder-dog Sam to Come, Stay, Keep, or Attack, the dog responds with impeccable, life-saving promptness and barrels full of loyalty.
Lug-nut did not come.
I went into the building to get him.
I’d never been in John’s garage before. Like the dog, it had been his private domain—men only. It was like a mad mechanic’s laboratory. The colours were muddy, all brown and black, and everything was covered in a thin layer of grease and dust. The floor-space was huge. You could have played baseball in there. There were two cars side by side, with open hoods, their guts spilling out and scattered as if some giant predator had been making a meal of them.
Tools were piled on top of one another on every flat surface, and from the ceiling hung chains and pulleys, rope and rubber hoses, like trailing fronds in some mechanical jungle.
I am a complete innocent when it comes to car mechanics, and so I found the atmosphere oppressive. If I’d known what it was all for, I would have felt better.
Lug-nut was waiting for me towards the rear of the building, where it was dark. I called him again, and he barked back, but stayed put. He was sitting in front of a vehicle which had been covered with a dirty tarpaulin and there was something familiar about the shape of it. I looked around for a light switch and found a trouble-light suspended from the ceiling in the corner. I switched it on and the naked bulb cast surreal shadows on the shrouded shape in front of me.
The tarp didn’t quite cover the front bumper, and I’d know that hideous browny-green paint job anywhere. John’s missing truck. Francy was always complaining about it, said it offended her sense of hue. Looking at that colour with an artist’s eye was like listening to a beginner violinist if you had perfect pitch, she said. John had painted the truck himself, shortly after buying it from Otis Dermott. It had been purple, and John had refused to drive it until he got rid of “that faggy colour.”
I lifted a corner of the tarp carefully so I could see into the cab. I don’t know what I was expecting. Another body, maybe.
There wasn’t one, which was a good thing. There was, however, a dark stain on the passenger seat, and the barrel of a shotgun poking up from the floor. I let the tarp fall back, switched off the light and headed for the open air.
As I left the garage, Lug-nut came trotting at my heels—obediently, now that he had shown me what he obviously thought was important. Then I caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look at the house and saw a tall, painfully thin figure loping off into the bush. Lug-nut barked and lunged, but I managed to grab his collar in time to stop him from giving chase. It looked like Eddie Schreier. Nobody else in the world runs quite so much like a frightened spider. The door to the house was still shut and the tape was still up, but I guessed it had been Eddie upstairs, making that noise I heard. What was going on?
I walked Lug-nut to George’s truck, still holding his collar, and put him in the cab. Maybe Eddie had returned to grab Francy’s copy of Lady Chatterley. Maybe, but not bloody likely. I added Eddie to my mental list of people to have a chat with really soon, then fired up the engine and headed home.
Fifteen
Stuff gets born and lives and dies
like fire and sex and that look
in your chocolate eyes.
–Shepherd’s Pie
I drove down to the barn to unload the grain and found George in the kidding pen with Erma Bombeck, who was in labour. Erma was five and an old hand when it came to giving birth, but George liked to be on hand anyway.
“Hey, George. I thought she wasn’t due till next Thursday,” I said.
“She wasn’t. But I found her groaning and pawing at the ground around eleven, and she has had some discharge, so I put her in the pen. She was always stubborn. She is ready now, she says, not next week.”
“You got towels and stuff?” George keeps a stock of “goats only” hand towels up at the house. Birthing goat kids is a messy business, and towels and hot water, trite as it may seem, are important.
“Yes, Polly. It shouldn’t be long now.”
The first time I witnessed the birth of a goat (triplets, actually; they nearly always come in twos or threes—sometimes four on a good day), I had disgraced myself completely. I’d thought, “Oh, wonderful. The miracle of birth. Let me in there.” What I hadn’t bargained for was the guck. I had crouched at the ready, a clean towel over my arm, having been instructed to take the newborn kid, clean it off and give it back to the doe to nuzzle until the next one came along. It had been a difficult birth. The first of three was trapped sideways in the birth canal and George had to reach inside to turn the little fellow around. That didn’t bother me so much. I’d read James Herriot, and I knew this was sometimes necessary, but when George’s arm emerged from the depths of Donna Summer, clutching a slimy, twitching thing, ropes of mucous hanging off it like, well, you know—my gag reflex kicked in, big-time.
“Get out of my barn,” George had roared, hearing my preliminaries. I tossed him the towel and ran outside to be sick in the manure pile. We both apologized later. He said it happened occasionally to first-timers, and he should have been more sensitive. I reminded him that he had been up half the night with the pregnant doe and was tired and worried. All he needed was to have some city-girl throwing up in his nice, clean barn.
The next time someone kidded I was in there like a pro, grinning from ear to ear. I have even done the unspeakable “reach in and tweak” trick one New Year’s Eve when George was out late carousing with Susan at the senior’s club and Julian of Norwich had delivered early.
Erma Bombeck was in deep labour now, lying on her side and pushing, yelling with each push in an outrageously human voice.
“Puske vaan” George said, softly. Finnish for “push like hell,” I guess. He always muttered in his mother-tongue during a birth. The goats seemed to like it. “Anna tulla vaan.” The first kid made its appearance, popping out so fast that George had to catch it. He quickly cleared the matter away from its mouth as Erma turned her head to inspect her offspring. It was a very pretty kid, almost completely white, with caramel-coloured markings on its back and caramel-coloured ears.
“A male,” George said with satisfaction. Dweezil’s heir, maybe. Two more followed in quick succession, were cleaned, and arranged in a squirming, bleating row at Erma’s side. Two does and a buck, all healthy, and the buck was quite large.
It always made me a little teary-eyed, being in at the birth. There’s something extraordinary about new life—the incredible tenacity of it. Goat kids start bleating only minutes after being born, start trying to stand up almost immediately. By the time we left the barn, one was already trying to get her tiny muzzle around Erma’s enormous teat.
Outside, in the thin autumn sunshine, Lug-nut was