The Farm

Gordon.

He wasn't fucking goddamned her dad.

He was Gordon. Mark was Dad. Dad wasn't even Mark, just Dad. He didn't need a name. If she had a working cell phone like everybody else in the world she'd give Dad a call right now and tell him about this hick shit hole called Solom.

The wind blew the curtains apart, giving Jett a full view of the barn and its dark windows. She imagined ancient creatures flitting and fluttering around in me eaves.

Inside the hayloft, a light flashed. Must be a lantern, because it flickered and bobbed instead of cutting a solid arc the way a flash light would.

Jett was no hick, but even she knew better than to carry a lantern in a barn. With all that straw and stuff, a dry barn was like a whatchamacallit on a galleon, the kind of ship the English sank in the Spanish Armada in 1588. A powder keg. Where one spark meant ka-blooey.

She went to the window. The sun was low in the sky but not yet touching the horizon, so it was probably a little before seven. Why did some lamebrain need a lantern in the barn when it wasn't even dark yet?

The light came again, flashed once, then twice. Like a signal. One if by goat, two if by cow. Jett pressed her face against the glass and peered up the slope that faced the barn's opening. Under the dark canopy of trees came a flurry of movement, as if something or someone had been beckoned by the light.

Holy shit. This was like Nancy Drew or something. A real mys tery.

Jett thought about telling Mom, because Mom kept saying they were in this together and would 'get through it together.' But Mom had enough to worry about, what with a smelly kitchen and dirty dishes and a new husband and nothing to do all day but clean house. Actually, Mom would enjoy a good mystery, but if things got the slightest bit squirrelly, Jett would be sent to her room until matters calmed down. Who wanted calm? Certainly not a girl who was now a woman, almost, at least in the ways that counted.

She glanced at the textbook on her desk. The F-word was get ting lame and she should come up with a better alternative. But for now, it would have to do.

'Fuck off, Archduke Ferdinand.'

She left the room, pausing at the head of the stairs to make sure Mom wasn't lurking. A pot clattered to the floor in the kitchen downstairs. 'Shooty-booty,' Mom yelled, not aware she had an au dience.

Mom was busy making the perfect meal, all four food groups represented, as colorful as anything in Women's World Weekly, the calories toted up, the serving dishes neatly spaced on the dining room table. When Mom was in housewife mode, Jett could get away with murder. She slipped down the stairs and out the back door. The barn was thirty yards away, weathered and gray, the sun bounc ing off its dull tin roof.

Gordon's barn was weird. The boards on the top story slanted upward in the angle of a V, and the loft opening was a black, up side-down triangle. The barn leaned slightly to the side in a wobbly geometry. The other barns in Solom had the same appearance, like something M.C. Escher would draw while stoned. Jett's secret ob session with art might come in handy if she ever needed to sketch a picture of her pathetic life.

The barn was separated from the house by a brown stretch of garden. The vegetables were mostly played out for the year, the tomato plants hanging like crucified black witches from their stakes. The only green was from the rows of fat cabbage heads, thick bottom leaves curled and yellowed, evoking an image of blondes buried to their necks in the dirt. That would be sweet. Jett despised blondes, resented their vacant faces and blue eyes and the amount of silliness that the boys expected from them. Plus, Bethany was blond.

The frost had come two nights before, sending the garden to seed. Jett had been delighted by the sight of it, waking up to see the billion silver sparkles across the landscape. Then she'd had to wait for the bus at the end of the road and decided that cold was for the Eskimos, she'd take a sunburn in Charlotte any day. She dreaded the coming winter. Snow was a rarity in the Piedmont, but these mountains on the Tennessee border received four or five feet of snow per year. Probably glaciers, too, cutting through the valley and scooping up goats, cows, donkeys, and enough rednecks to fill the stands at a tractor pull.

Now, Jett, she could hear her mother say. Mom had a way of doing that, popping into her head with a voice of common sense when all Jett wanted to do was make fun of people and turn her back on the fucked-up world that never seemed to heed her wishes. She was an artist and an outsider, and that gave her a hammer. She could knock down anything that stood in her way.

Including the goat that stood between the edge of the garden and the barn.

Gordon's pet goat.

It was mostly white, with a few tan splotches on its belly. Two worn stubs of horns grew out of the skull like the thumbs of dirty gloves. The eyes were the color of a storm ditch, and the black pupils were horizontal slits against them. The goat raised its head and stared at Jett. A long tuft of hair trailed from its gut to the ground matted with the animal's own urine. Somewhere in there was its mysterious penis, but she didn't look too closely.

Abraham, the goat was called. One of Gordon's religious jokes, the kind he let loose out of one side of his mouth, sitting in his overstuffed chair while reading a book, not caring if anyone heard him or not. Gordon had a lot of inside jokes. He would chuckle to himself, the sound rolling up from his ample belly and squirting out beneath his mustache. Poor Mom tried her best to keep up, to ask him to explain, but lately she'd taken to answering with a half hearted laugh, a nod and a stare off into the corner of the room.

'Howdy, Abraham,' Jett said. 'Good kitty.'

Abraham dipped his head swiveled his neck to look at the worn patch of meadow behind him, then swicked his short tail to scare up some flies.

'Nice kitty, kitty, kitty.'

Jett approached the hog wire fence, getting a foothold in one of the wire squares along a locust post. The fence was topped with a single strand of barbed wire, but that would be no trouble for an athletic twelve-year-old. All it would take was a hop and skip, then a jump and roll like an Olympic gymnast finishing up a spastic rou tine. Abraham twisted his jaws, bits of green dribbling from the pale lips.

Halfway over the fence, her legs splayed on each side, Jett glanced up at the barn loft. The light flashed again, penetrating the center of the black triangle. Jett's hand hit the top wire and one of the rusted metal barbs pierced her palm.

'Shit fuck damn ass-wipe me, Jesus,' she said, depleting her entire repertoire of bad words. She put the wound to her mouth and sucked, hoping to draw out the tetanus and West Nile virus and her pes and whatever else you caught from farm animals. Abraham lifted his head, ears perking. His nose wriggled as he sniffed the air. He took three steps toward Jett.

'Nothing to see here, folks,' Jett said. 'Just move on along.'

The only moving Abraham was doing was closer.

'Seriously,' she said, her voice cracking just a little. 'No harm, no foul.'

Abraham snorted and his head doddered, the filthy white beard waving in the breeze. Jett looked back at the house. Mom was busy in the kitchen. Not that Jett would call for help, even if her life de pended on it.

What's the f-ing deal? Scared of a doofy goat. No wonder the kids at school make fun of you. You ain't country, you ain't moun tain, you ain't from round here. You 're freaky. You like to draw and read Vonnegut and Palahniuk. You have purple bootlaces, a black leather bracelet, and a button of Robert Smith in silhouette on your backpack. A Gothling in the land of Levi's and plaid cotton. A confused pilgrim in the Promised Land. No wonder you look like billy- goat bait from Abraham's point of view.

Easy meat.

'I'm not scared,' she said to Abraham. 'I'm the human here. I'm the one who can toss your ass on the altar or serve you up as stir-fry.'

Abraham was unimpressed. He eased closer, his musky stench assailing her. Jett dangled from the top of the fence, her crotch dangerously close to the barbed wire. She couldn't flip herself to ei ther side without risking some sort of unimaginable disaster, the kind that no amount of feminine products could stanch.

Maybe Mom would hear her if she yelled. But she pictured the scene that would greet Mom, her daughter straddling the fence, held at bay by a goat. Christ, she wasn't a four-year-old anymore. This wasn't a Charlotte playground where the crack kids would mug you for a nickel. This was her new home, the place where she would