“Sure. No problem. So he’s gone out, eh? You house-sitting?”
I stared at him. He was wearing exactly the same expression Harold Finley wore in grade eleven whenever he asked me if I was babysitting. Harold used to come over and we’d neck.
“I do have my own place,” I said, “but yeah, I guess I am.”
“Do you have to feed the animals as well?”
“The goats? Not till tomorrow morning. George did the evening milking before he left.”
“You have to milk them too?”
“Yup.”
“By hand? Like a cow, right?”
“Hey, Becker, don’t tell me you’ve never seen a goat.”
“I’ve never seen a goat.”
“I said don’t say that. Really?”
He grinned and knocked back his Glen-alcohol. “Show me one,” he said.
We threw on barn coats and I gave him the grand tour. He liked the goats, I think. They can be enchanting en masse. When a visitor comes to the barn, the goats don’t say much, but they all start watching. If they’re chewing cud, they’ll be too relaxed to get up, but they’ll crane their necks to keep you in view. The young ones will slip out of their pens (the gaps in the fencing are wide enough for kids to pass through) and prance around, acting cute.
I introduced him formally to each goat.
“Donna Summer, Julian of Norwich, Erma Bombeck, Annie Oakley, Kim Campbell, Rose Marie, Vicki Gabereau, Loreena Bobbitt, Princess Diana, Susannah Moodie, Cher, Saint Bernadette and Mother Theresa,” I said.
“Hi,” he said and got right in there, scratching faces and touching noses.
“This is Pierre Trudeau,” I said, guiding Becker down to the pen at the end where Old Pierre, a mournful, testosterone-driven love machine with a face like a muppet, waggled his stinking beard and moaned in welcome.
“The sire of the herd. Don’t touch him,” I said, but it was too late. Becker drew his hands back gently and looked at me.
“He pisses on his beard when a doe’s in heat,” I said. “Mother Theresa is raring to go and poor old Pierre can smell it. He’s been nuts all day.” The musk glands behind Pierre’s horns would have been giving the old goat a twenty-four hour, hot oil treatment.
Becker put his hands to his nose and sniffed.
“Whoa. Does this come off?”
“Soap and water, no problem,” I said. “Just don’t wipe your hands on your pants.”
He lifted his hands like a surgeon after a scrub. “I won’t.”
I caught a flying goat kid as it leaped up into Pierre’s manger. “This is Keanu. The new stud. He’s only a week old and he’s already sucking up to his dad.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Becker said, shaking its small hoof and rubbing its head. “I hereby anoint you with the body odour of the holy goat. Now can I wash my hands?”
We walked back up slowly, not saying much, enjoying the silence of the evening. I showed him where the bathroom was, then went back to the kitchen to rinse our glasses. He came out a few moments later, still holding his hands upside-down in the air.
“There was no towel in there,” he said. I found one in the hall linen cupboard and draped it ceremoniously over his hands. He smiled, then gasped, crossed his eyes and went stiff.
“Dr. McCoy,” he said, “that goat-poison. It’s—it’s got me. I can’t move!”
“I’m a doctor, Jim,” I said. “Not a spin dryer.” However, I moved in and dried each of his fingers carefully one by one. Then I took the towel away with a flourish. “Voilà. You are healed.”
He sniffed his hands. “I cant smell anything? Can you?”
I sniffed in his general direction. “Well, there’s a strong smell of Ivory soap, overlaying a more subtle, yet lingering odour—” a worry line appeared between Becker’s eyebrows “—of something male, some particular—”
“I’ll wash them again,” Becker said.
“I’ve got it. Old Spice, is it? Or Paco Rabanne?”
“Obsession for Men,” Becker said. “My ex gave it to me.”
“Oh. Well. I like it.”
“She hated it. It was a divorce-iversary present. I sent her sexy underwear. It’s a thing we do every year.”
“A weird thing.”
“Yeah, well, you gotta keep laughing, you know.”
“Any kids?”
“Bryan’s with his mom,” Becker said. “I get him alternate weekends. He’s seven.”
“Anything else I should know about? You have a Doberman, too, right? She’s in your Jeep.”
“No Doberman. I do have a fish, though. Called Wanda.”
“In the Jeep?”
“Yup. There’s an attack tank in back. Watch her like a hawk. She’s the jealous type.”
We were standing very close.
“You didn’t, you know, touch your stinky goat hands anywhere else, did you?” I said.
“I might have rubbed my face.”
I started sniffing.
“Maybe over to the left. Yeah. About here.”
He was a pretty good kisser, for a cop. There was no hurry, just a mutual and leisurely reading of the lips.
“Umm, Bkrr?”
“Mm?”
“You got plans for tonight?”
“Mmm. I was thinking of taking this interesting woman I know out for dinner and a game of pool in Laingford.”
“Lucky her. Anyone I know?”
“Well, she’s about your height, got a tiny scar on her chin just like that one…”
“You’re dating my evil twin sister, Hydra? You deceiving cad.”
We tussled. My hair got mussed, and he popped a button on his designer shirt. It was very satisfactory and we both hit pause at the same moment, which was better still.
“Let’s drop off whatever at the village hall and then go have dinner,” he said. Lug-nut knew I was going, and as we left, he settled down agreeably on the porch to wait. Life was working out just fine.
There were dozens of vehicles in the Cedar Falls Community Hall parking lot. Lots of Jeeps, pickups and 4x4s, although very few of them were new. Lots of junkers, too. The people of Cedar Falls aren’t rich. If they were, they’d be living in Laingford.
Becker squeezed his SuperJeep between a dented Ford van and a rusty pickup with wide tires, splattered with dried mud. I hoped the pickup boys didn’t leave before we did, or we’d find rude things scrawled on the Jeep windows when we got back. The pickup boys were trouble. They were four young guys from the Cedar Falls Chairworks, renting a house together in the woods. They’d been rowdy in the village and were locally suspected of having had a game or two of mailbox-baseball along the River road.
Frankly, they scared the heck out of me, but they weren’t doing much more than being obnoxious. They were of drinking age and they had jobs, which made them cocky and often really stupid. Still, I would have been happier if Becker hadn’t parked right next to them. I didn’t say anything, though. I figured he probably recognized the truck and parked there on purpose, being a cop and