Stewart, for instance, had simply come trotting in one day, a halfgrown pup eager to enlist. Varmint-Boy was living in our swamp in an old U.S. Army tent so he decided he would act as the induction officer. He whistled the pup into his tent and shot him up with a boot-camp dose of methadrine. For hours the new recruit drilled chasing birds and fetching sticks, until the shadow grew long and the drill instructor bored. The exhausted pup lay down to sleep but of course could only stare and ponder. Pondering is hard for a dog and not necessarily healthy, but Stewart survived (though he never lost that strung-out stare) to become the top dog. The Varmint was finally drummed off the place for this and other such crimes against innocence.
Killer came from much more conventional sectors. He was the mascot for our high school team, the Nebo Hill Billies. Our symbol is the charging goat. For ten seasons Killer was tied to the bench of the football team, where visiting teams tried to run over him. He was paraded across basketball courts where opposing symbols reared and teased at him. Terry-cloth bears and papier-mâché eagles. Enough to sour any animal.
The meaner he turned the more they came at him. The eye was put out by a baseball spike in a close play at home. The horn he lost during a Creswell homecoming game. A Creswell scatback was down after a hard hit on the punt return and the ambulance had driven across to get him. Killer had tugged at his tether when the flashing contraption drove onto the field. The fallen hero was lifted into the machine and the siren was started. This was more than Killer could endure. To the applause of the stands he snapped his dog chain and charged head-on into the ambulance. Fans that witnessed this famous charge spoke afterward of it with wonder and affection. "Not only knocked the headlight and turn signal clean off he then got tangled underneath in the front suspension; it was another half hour before they could get it all unloosed and towed off the field."
The wonder lasted but the affection fled with the goat's aromatic recovery. The vet said the roll beneath the ambulance had ruptured the little musk sacks on each side of the goat's anus – he could no longer turn the sacks on and off. Only leave them on. The vet said the only solution was neutering, cutting of the testosterone that stimulated the musk. The Nebo Hill Boosters thought it over and concluded that rather than have a ball-less billy for a mascot they would build one out of papier-mâché, and Killer was out of a job.
When they asked over the school announcements who had a place capable of adopting a poor retiring mascot, my oldest boy, Quiston, an Aries, had volunteered our farm.
It took three of us to separate the man and the goat, Dobbs and I holding the animal, Davy wrestling with M'kehla. This was a mistake. It very nearly got M'kehla and my cousin into it. Something was said in the scuffle and Davy and M'kehla sprang apart, glaring; they were already into their karate and boxing stances before we could step between them.
Dobbs mollified Davy with a cold Oly and I convinced M'kehla to come down to the pond with me to cool down and scrub off. After his first dip he was laughing about the flare-up, said it wouldn't happen again. Maybe, however, he should drive his bus down here out of goat territory. He could park it in the shade of the ash trees on the swamp side of the pond.
I stood in the open stairwell and directed him down. The sound of the engine brought Percy straight from his nap and running from the house.
"Look at him hop." M'kehla laughed. "He thought I was leaving without him."
He parked where he could get some of the overhanging shade and still see the water. He swiveled out of the driver's seat and strolled to the rear of his living room on wheels.
"Come on back. Let's get high and analyze the world situation." He sprawled across his zebra skin waterbed like an Ethiopian nabob.
The day mellowed. A soft breeze started strumming the bus roof with the hanging Spanish moss. My kids and Percy were splashing in the pond with their tubes; their shouts and laughter drifted to us through the swaying daisies and Queen Anne's lace. M'kehla and I sipped Dos Equis and argued. We had just started on the Third World and our fourth beer when someone came banging at the bus door.
M'kehla opened it and my nine-year-old son Quiston leaned in, wet and wide-eyed.
"Dad!" Quiston yelled up the stairwell. "Percy's found a monster in the pond!"
"What kind of monster, Quis?"
"A big one… crouched on the bottom by the pumphouse!"
"Tell him I'll come out after while and get it," I told Quiston.
"All right," he said and headed back toward the pond with the news, his white hair waving in the weeds. "Dad's gonna get him, Percy! My Dad's gonna get him!"
I watched him go, feeling very fatherly. M'kehla came up and stood beside me.
"It doesn't worry you, Dad? All this faith?"
I told him, Nope, not me, and I meant it. I was feeling good. I could see my friends and my relatives arriving up by the barn. I could hear the squawk of the sound system as Dobbs got it wired up to announce the branding, rodeo style. I could see the new honey-colored cedar posts in the corral and the pigeons strutting on the bright new wire. And Old Glory was fluttering over all. "I got faith in all this faith," I told him.
"Do you?" he asked. "Do you really?" And this time I answered right back: Yep, I really did.
We drank beer and enjoyed our old arguments and watched the crowd gather. Rampage and his kids, Buddy and his. The Mikkelsens, the Butkovitches. The women carried dishes to the kitchen; the kids went for the pond; the men came down to the bus. Bucko brought a case of Bohemian stubbies. After about an hour of tepid beer and politics Dobbs tossed away his half-empty bottle out the window.
"Alright e-nuff of this foam and foofarah," he declared, right at M'kehla. "Break out the heavy stuff!"
As a man of the trade, M'kehla always had a formidable stash. He uncoiled from his zebra lounge and walked to the front of the bus. With a flourish he produced a little metal box from somewhere behind the driver's seat. It was a fishing tackle case with trays that accordioned out when he opened it, making an impressive display: the trays in neat little stairsteps, all divided into partitions and each section filled and labeled. From a tiny stall labeled royal coachman he picked up a gummy black lump the size of a golf ball.
"Afghany," he said, rolling it along his fingertips like the egg in the henhouse.
He pinched off a generous chunk and heated it with a butane lighter. When it was properly softened he crumbled it into the bowl of his stone-bowled Indian peacepipe and fired it up. At the first fragrant wisp of smoke Percy came baying up the stairwell like a hound. He had smelled it all the way to the pond.
"Hah!" he said, coming down the aisle rubbing his hands. "In the nick of time."
He was wearing Quiston's big cowboy hat to keep from further sunburning his nose and neck, and he had a bright yellow bandanna secured around his throat with a longhorn tie slide. He looked like a Munchkin cowpoke.