Randy Kelly stirred to the sound of screaming goats. They were his goats, six of them: four Toggenburgs and two crossbred pygmies. This morning, he heard something plaintive in their high-pitched bleats. Had worms delivered one of them unto its death? He didn’t know. It had happened before.
His landlord, Tom Utley, lived nearby, at the end of Watkins Road. Utley despised Randy’s goats.
The screams erupted from outside Randy’s window, from the pen. He pulled on his cement-flecked boots, grabbed his rifle. In the pen, nipping at the goats, was one of Utley’s big dogs: a pit-bull he didn’t know the name of. In the center of the yard lay a dead pygmy, its throat bleeding, with chunks chewed from it. Randy fired. The dog skittered and hustled under the fence.
“Get the hell out of here,” Randy hollered. “I’ll be damned. Just look at this mess.”
The other goats whined as Randy walked to the slain one. He’d never named it. He’d called it the little one. Now, as it lay bloody, its beady eyes opened, staring at nothing, he wished he’d at least named it George or Bobby or something.
Randy laid concrete for a living, was pretty good at it. But he wished the goats would bring in some cash.
Randy’s wife, Pauline, was a home health nurse. She’d leave each morning in her scrubs and hit six or seven houses, hefting up asses, soiled bed sheets.
They rarely had sex anymore. Some nights, out of pity, Pauline would take Randy’s limp dick and rub it around. An attempt at some kind of duty, Randy thought. But they’d reached a point where it didn’t matter.
Plus, Randy was sure Utley was fucking her. He didn’t know when, or how, but he’d seen the way they looked at each other when Utley collected the rent. Once, he’d watched her take off her scrubs and he’d noticed she had no panties on. Tom was uppity, like a small-town lawyer.
He’d asked her about it. She said she wasn’t fucking Tom, but that maybe she should be.
That was months ago. Now, she and Randy barely spoke. He did all he could to avoid her. He’d go outside and whittle, for god’s sakes. They were awful together. In a perfect life, he’d have married a surgeon, a chiropractor—someone more sophisticated.
Randy had little money. He was behind on his rent. How he despised owing money to Utley. But people didn’t need as much concrete in the offseason, it seemed.
Randy climbed in the pickup—a ‘90s-era Chevy—and cranked the engine. He drove the quarter-mile to Utley’s doublewide and slammed the truck to a halt. Utley was on the porch, sipping a Miller Lite.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” said Utley, finally, through the cool silence.
“Did your dogs get loose?” Randy asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t have but one dog. There’s one prowling, a big pit. Gray. But he’s not mine.”
Randy seethed. He bit his lip, rolled his eyes extravagantly. Utley knew it was his, but his custom was to lie. Maybe Randy was a fool, but not in this matter.
“That dog broke into my damn goat pen and killed one. A pygmy. I need you to comp… to compensate me,” he stammered.
“To compensate ye? You owe me rent.”
Randy stood, unmoved.
“If I catch that dog in my pen, I’ll shoot it,” he said.
“Well shoot him, then. What kind of gun you got? A handgun? Better aim well. Randy, it’s not my dog.”
“I, by god, will.”
“Tell the wife I said hello?”
Back home, Randy was livid. He felt angry, like a prodded bull. He rolled his head around, popped bones in his shoulders. He saw himself in the busted bathroom mirror. A dark slit through his reflection. He looked insane.
As a child, he’d slept in a room overlooking eaves he thought resembled alien faces. For years—until he was twelve—he’d thought the faces were real. He talked to them, even. He told them to leave him alone, but they never did.
Randy headed for the woods. He’d stashed a gun—a .45 Colt revolver—in a degraded poplar knot. The leather case was visible against the moist tree-pith. He picked it up, threaded the handle through a carabiner on his jacket, and wandered around, trying not to look suspicious. But no one anywhere knew where he was, nor did they care.
When he got back to the trailer, he saw Pauline’s Monte Carlo, with its rusted, orange paneling. She’d come home early. Randy sighed, climbed the gnarled stairs. He opened the door and Pauline stared at him through the white television light. She eyed him with disdain.
“You got the rent money,” she said, but not as a question—it was an acknowledgement that he didn’t have it.
“I… well, you know I’ll have it just as soon as I can,” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said Pauline. “I know. I know you better have it next week or I’ll go live in a motel. That what you want?”
He didn’t know, so he ignored her. “You see where one of them dogs killed the little pygmy?” he asked.
“What’s a pygmy, Randy? A type of goat? Who gives a shit? Don’t blame it on Tom. How do you even know it was his dogs?”
“Dog. It was his dog. That gray pit. I saw it.”
“Randy, I don’t know whose dogs are whose. Anyway, your goats don’t bring us no money whatsoever. Tom doesn’t have any goats. Neither does anybody else.”
“People have goats.”
“Not many do.”
Randy’d had enough. He went outside and stood in the cold, gazing across the dun field. He looked at the goat yard, the hole beneath the fence. He stared into the black goat eyes, almost human.
He got in his Chevy and pried open the glovebox with a screwdriver. The lock had seized twenty-years ago. Inside was a beige Xanax bar, wrapped expediently in a cellophane. Randy chewed it up like candy. The Xanax beckoned Randy into a world of blissful amnesia, and he was more than happy to jump in. He called up J.F., a man who laid concrete with him, and told him to have a good holiday, that he wished his family well, even though the holidays were weeks away, and he didn’t really know J.F.’s family.
When he came to, Randy felt wobbly, confused. It was five in the morning. He couldn’t remember much. He threw on his coveralls and paced around the lot. His head unclouding. It was pitch dark, save a dim circle made by a floodlight. A fur of frost glazed the ground.
He went in the trailer again. He got his rifle. He was going hiking, he thought, for something to do. A small fan purred in the bedroom. Pauline’s voluptuous legs hung out of her panties and Randy thought they looked like white porpoises. He raked several cartridges off a dresser into his pocket. A good day to sit in the woods, get your mind off things. Randy would figure himself out.
He found a deer stand and climbed up. He sat with the rifle across his lap. He was at himself again. His confusion relegated to the periphery. Wind wafted soft and diligent on his bare neck. He liked the quiet vastness of the woods.
After an hour, a doe danced up the fence line. He put the crosshairs on her for a moment. Bang. He thought of Utley, asleep in his king-sized bed. Pauline will be laying there soon enough, he thought.
He decided he’d better check the goats. He’d been in the woods an hour. He headed back to the trailer, its dale of trash.
When Randy saw the Toggenburg billy with its throat mangled—”dead as shit,” said Randy to no one—tossed against the fence, pink blood caked on its fur, he tried to breathe. Hot anger welled in his throat. He knew, by no fault of his own, he’d reached a moment—which some are unfortunate to experience—that would require a drastic decision. Would he teach everybody a lesson? As he unpinned the revolver case from his jacket, he still didn’t know. He handled the Colt, spun the cylinder. Cracked the cylinder open. He slotted five hollow point cartridges and closed it. He clambered back to the trailer.
Pauline lay on the couch, eating cheese puffs. Jeopardy on the television. She didn’t look up when he walked in. Her cylindrical fingers were orange. Randy even saw a dusting of orange crumbs on the carpet, below her mouth. She kept eating. Her smooth chin worked in a circle, like something chewing cud.
He started up the road to Utley’s. He had no plan. Well, maybe he had some kind of plan: he wanted to shoot Utley’s dog. Otherwise, Randy was winging it. He wasn’t even sure the dog would be there. But he figured Utley would be. The countryside was damp, frigid. The yard at Utley’s doublewide looked water-leached and slick. A rusted swing-set.
This time, Utley was in the yard. It looked as if he’d poured cement around a lamppost he’d installed. Still won’t pay me to do it, thought Randy. Utley stood; he stood wide, his back to Randy. Finally, he turned to face him. Randy eyed him and said: “another goat died.” He flicked a cigarette butt. Utley squared up, like in an action film. He hadn’t heard Randy approach and took a step back.
“What’d you sneak up on me for, motherfucker?” said Utley.
Randy didn’t say anything.
He stood, neither of them talking for a long minute. A quickness to the windchill. The coldness engulfed them, kissed their temples, tapped at exposed skin.
“You can’t go shooting people’s dogs,” said Utley.
“You said it wasn’t yours.”
Again, silence—then Utley held out a silver flask, unscrewed it. He sipped and grumbled ahhh. “You want some?” he asked Randy, offering it to him.
“No. By the way, when was you gonna compensate me for them goats?”
“I already told you. If it was my dogs…”
“What about that dog over there?” interrupted Randy, motioning at the gray pit. “That’s the one that killed the first pygmy. Now one of my prized ones’s dead.”
“I’m not paying anybody, Randy. You’ve got no prize goat.” The air thickened, felt tense.
Before Utley could react, Randy had the .45 aimed at his heart. It didn’t take long. He popped twice, bang bang, point blank, blasting two massive holes. You could see through one of them. Utley fell. Randy shot him again, in the forehead, for good measure. He thought of the goat yard, their gregariousness with each other, the way they lived in some kind of harmony.
He stared at Utley’s body. It lay supine, the chest blown out like busted tomatoes.
Randy grinned. He thought of the times Pauline had called him stupid. He picked a couple of rocks and threw them at Utley. Goodnight, sweet prince, he thought. He thought he’d heard that somewhere.
He trudged home, saw Pauline on the couch. He thought of a stash of about a hundred dollars in a jar. Then, dejection set in. He cried, softly. He thought of Pauline, their relationship. He apologized to God and his dead Granny Neena. If anything, heartbreak had defined his life. Again, he exchanged the handgun for the rifle, and dawdled outside. The truck sputtered, and he smelled exhaust. It was 2 p.m., mid-November. He heard nothing in the distance. No one was coming to help anything. He started tonguing the rifle’s muzzle. It tasted of magnesia, like what you’d ingest before surgery. Before long, the muzzle touched his throat. The leaves burned orange and yellow against the farther ugliness. He sat on a crate. He stood the rifle, squatted against it, sad and regretful.
Clay Cantrell is a writer and editor from West Tennessee. His work has been published or is forthcoming in swamp pink, New Delta Review, and the Tampa Review. Recordings can be found at claycantrell.bandcamp.com.
