Billy Ray's Farm

  You stop and eat in Redondo Beach, have a drink, talk shop. It’s a good meal, catfish in L.A. Later you go out to his house in Rancho Palos Verdes and then Jennifer comes in and you hug her. About midnight you go to bed, grateful to be where you are, finally, among friends so valued and good.

  Sunday is a day of rest. They go to church, you sleep late, have coffee, read the papers. In the afternoon you drive over to the supermarket and get those fat boy T-bone steaks.

  Late that evening you mix a couple of Bloody Marys and climb with Mark to the high hill behind his house, walking fat boy Ray, who is half Beagle, half Rottweiler, whom you once kept for a couple of weeks at your house in Mississippi, while Mark and Jennifer were taking a Christmas trip. Ray remembers you, and it’s good to see him again, too.

  The land rises steeply around you and the view of the ocean and the other hills is magnificent. You just sit and look at it all. Mark says that sometimes they see whales. There are peacocks, sixty to seventy of them, running loose. This land, outside the city, is awesome and spectacular. You don’t see any of this on L.A. Law. After a long while you go back down to the house with him.

  That night you cook the steaks and they are tender, medium rare, delicious. After supper you have a few drinks on the patio with him and then you go to bed, pleasantly worn out. Actually exhausted. Your legs are sore from walking around hotels lost and your feet still hurt. But finally you have come to a place on the book tour where you can rest with a brother in what you do.

  VAGABOND BOOKS IN Brentwood is packed with people Monday night. You spend two and a half hours in the bookstore and you sign many many books, new ones as well as old ones. You spent the day taking it easy on the patio, sipping coffee, listening to Leon Russell and k.d. lang, feeling the tiredness ease out of your bones, and the knot in your stomach slowly loosening, thinking of what all you’ve left behind you, the flights, the people in the stores, the bad food, the books, the drinks, the walking. You know that the rest of it’s going to be a piece of cake. You cooked eggs and sausage for you and Mark today.

  Craig Graham owns Vagabond and you haven’t seen him in five years, but you once met John O’Brien in his old store, long before Leaving Las Vegas was a movie, long before John took his own life. You speak of him with Craig. You’re beginning to segue a bit now, you’re beginning to be a little bit glad now that you are on tour. You’re glad to be where you are now.

  People keep coming up, over and over. Craig furnishes beer in green bottles and you’re signing books and drinking beer. Craig is so glad to see you that he tells you you can even smoke in the store, but when you take a short break after your reading, you smoke in the parking lot out back simply out of respect for the bookstore.

  L.A. is suffused in darkness now and just up the street is Nicole Brown Simpson’s house, the scene of the infamous crime. You go back inside and finish up with the books, and Craig says that people have been calling all day. It’s a good thing to hear, and you head across the street to the Daily Diner for a hamburger steak with onions. You can’t smoke in there, either, but they make a good Margarita. Later on, midway through your meal, you order a Wild Turkey and Coke, but they seem uncertain how to make it, or maybe the little blond beach girl waitress just can’t understand your homeboy accent. What she brings back is a glass filled with ice and Coke, and another glass filled with ice and Wild Turkey. But you don’t mind. Today has been a very good day, and Sunday wasn’t bad either. You, like Merle Haggard, are glad you’ve got a friend in California.

  TALKING TO MARK is one of the best things about being out here, sharing ideas, sharing secrets, talking about plans and work, and how we’re always up for whatever gig brings in the dough. How you work your ass off and it’s a big old groaning bear that won’t get off and can’t get off because there’s no way for it to get off. Everything else has to fall by the wayside: family, friends, social engagements other than those that take place by yourself on a black dirt road in a moving truck and a little Leonard Cohen. When your bros don’t see you in the bar for three months they know you’re working. One day months later you show up and they slap you on the back and ask you how it’s going. You smile sadly and say: It’s over. And riding in the long brown Caddy is good, too. You rode in it some in Mississippi. We tell jokes in there, chuckle up some anecdotes, cruising up and down the California coast like a couple of L.A. lowriders, which, for now, is exactly what we are.

  You get up late on Tuesday and have coffee, cigarettes, a few Fig Newtons. Your feet are better now that you’ve had your boots off so much. Mark makes tuna fish sandwiches on dark bread and he puts on lettuce and mixes in olives and cucumbers. He shares with you a big bag of Ruffles. You take a shower and a nap and get ready for Book Soup. One more bookstore and Wednesday you go home. You’ll do Oxford, you’ll do Nashville, and a few days later New York. You’ll wind up in Texas, in Washington state, in Iowa and Minnesota, North Carolina and Miami, and lots of other places, and it will be a long haul until November.

  But things seem to be smoothing out now. You grab a beer from Mark’s refrigerator, and the two of you head down the hill to the car. Your time with him is almost over.

  NOW YOU’RE ON the plane back to Chicago, two hours late, and there’s a sense of dread inside you that you won’t get home tonight. Mark took you to the airport this morning, after a good crowd at Book Soup last night. You had a couple of beers and some schnapps, and saw some friends from Mississippi, and Buck Henry sitting at a table near the door. Mark talked you out of giving him a high five. You had supper in a good restaurant with some movie folks you’re working for, and Elizabeth of Taylor, Mississippi, who had just arrived. Now, hopefully, you’re on your way home. Tomorrow night you’ll do the store at home, and Blue Mountain will play, and the entire bookstore will be filled with your friends. It will be good to be home. But already you miss your big black-haired friend.

  You don’t make it home this night. Something was wrong with the plane and they had to fix it, so you spent the night in Chicago. Your wife had driven an hour and a half to Memphis to pick you up, and then you weren’t there. There was nothing to do but catch another plane the next morning, in the rain of Chicago, and wait for it to land you back in Tennessee.

  YOU’RE HOME NOW. All your friends are in Square Books, and Blue Mountain is playing, and there is a long line of people for whom you sign books. They’re serving beer and all your children are here and your wife is here and your mother is here beside you. You don’t feel like much of a whore anymore, now that you’re among your own people. It’s not over yet, and you’ve still got to drive to Nashville tomorrow night, but it’s a lot better than what it was. You can rest now, and sleep in your own bed, and play with your dogs. Part of it is over, not all of it, but you know that one day it will all be over, and you can return to your unremarkable life, the one where you sit every day at this machine and write your little words, and drink your coffee, and wander out in the yard.

  For now, the rest of the road waits.

  Goatsongs

  I SAW THE SON of a bitch while I was up on my tractor, running the rotary cutter along a wall of green sagegrass that was five feet high. It was August, hot, on over in the afternoon but not near sundown. The sky had softened, and the coyote was trotting along in the open like the most unconcerned thing you could imagine. I stopped the tractor when I realized that he hadn’t seen me. Or maybe hadn’t registered what I was.

  He ambled on across the freshly clipped pasture grass I’d cut the week before and dropped over into a patch of stuff about two feet high and stopped. I cut back on the throttle and the Cummins diesel sat there doing its steady chug. I knocked it into neutral and took the PTO out of gear, and heard the swigswigswig of the six-foot blade slowing down a little, turning freely, but so heavy and with so much momentum going that it would take it close to two minutes to finally come to a complete stop. He laid himself down in the grass and I got off the tractor.

  Just for the fun of it, I thoug
ht, I wonder how close you could get to him if you kept the outline of the tractor behind you and walked in a straight line to him. I didn’t have a gun. It was in the cabinet with the others at the house, and the house was about a quarter mile across the pasture. I could see it, cars and trucks parked in front of it. I couldn’t hear anything because of the tractor running. It would sit there and run like a clock as long as fuel was going to the motor. I didn’t think I’d be able to get close to him. But I hated him so bad I wanted to get another look at him. I wanted to kill him was what I wanted to do. But the gun was too far away. He’d probably run before I took many steps. But I started taking some anyway.

  The glimpse I’d had of him, he didn’t look all coyote. He looked about half dog, or coy-dog. He looked like about half malamute, because he had patches of tan and black, and his ears didn’t look right. I knew it happened. I knew they bred with dogs sometimes and I knew that they ate a lot of dogs, and I knew they ate baby goats, too. I knew that bitterly, and I wished hard for my gun in my hand with each step I took. I took a surprising number of them in a straight line and he didn’t get up and run. I couldn’t see him, but my eyes had never left the spot where he’d stopped, even when I was climbing down from the tractor, so unless he’d crawled away, he was still there.

  The distance closed from fifty yards to forty to thirty to twenty, and once I got away from the tractor it didn’t make very much noise, like the land absorbed it somehow, or maybe the tall patch of grass I’d been mowing was muffling the sound. I wouldn’t have thought he’d have just trotted out across the open like that with me up on the tractor, but since I wasn’t walking on two legs it messed him up somehow, let him get within shooting distance of a man, a man who, luckily for the coyote, had no gun.

  I knew he was still there and I wondered what he would do if I surprised him. Would he run? If surprised at close quarters would he come at me? I didn’t have anything but a pocketknife, but I took it out and opened it up. I started taking baby steps then, looking into that tall grass, and when I got to within twenty feet or so I could see a brown mottled form curled and at rest, just a vague glimpse of it through the grass while the wind swayed it, and I figured he was taking a nap. And reckon how long he’d sleep? Reckon he’d sleep long enough for me to back all the way back to the tractor and get on the other side of it and then run bent over behind the wall of sagegrass back to the house and get the single-barrel out of the cabinet, and some buckshot, and then run back? And do this whole sneaking-up thing again until I got close enough for just one damn shot? Just one.

  There wasn’t anything to do but try. I started backing up, real slowly, real careful, watching the spot where he was.

  AS FAR AS I could tell, the Immaculate Kid came one afternoon when we least suspected him. We never even expected him. I was just driving the tractor around one afternoon, drove by Nanette lying in some grass and there was a little white thing with black spots next to her. You’d have thought I’d gone crazy. I started blowing the horn on the tractor, and whooping and hollering, and they heard me over there in the yard and came over, and I showed them our first baby goat.

  This was before bestial incest crept into the picture.

  What happened was that we’d taken Nanette on for a while. Tom had been trying to keep her in his pasture in town and it just wasn’t working out. But we have sixty-two acres out here, or my wife and her mama do, and they let me live on it, and Billy Ray raises cows on it.

  Billy Ray had gone to the sale at Pontotoc one Saturday. That’s one of those big barn deals where they run livestock into the ring, cows, pigs, bulls, heifers, horses and mules, donkeys and burros sometimes, and they’ve got an auctioneer with a microphone and he’s sitting up there in a booth above the smoke and the sawdust in the ring and once in a while a young pig jumps through the steel pipe ring and maybe shits in somebody’s lap. You can sell or buy. Billy Ray bought what he thought was a young goat that turned out to be a pygmy goat full grown. He had Tom’s permission to breed Nanette. But when he got that hairy thing home I said, Forget it, man, he ain’t going to be able to get up on her. Nanette was a regular-size-goat. We watched him try. She’d just be grazing while he was hunching on her. So we said, Nah, ain’t gonna work, and Billy Ray sold the pygmy goat to somebody else and I forgot all about it until that afternoon I found the Immaculate Kid. We called a couple of friends of ours and said, Oh hey come over and look at the cute baby goat. They came over, we took pictures, made videos, and Joe even got down behind an overturned feed trough with a pig puppet on his hand and messed with the little goat’s head and we had a big time. The pygmy goat had been gone for a long time, we thought way too long to have impregnated Nanette some way and left her alone all this time and her still deliver a baby. We were glad about it. We celebrated the young goat’s life, such as we could. We just didn’t know then all the trouble that lay down the road waiting for us. Because when you start messing with goats, well, they’re not cows. They’re goats, and somehow they achieve a realm of even worse nastiness than do cows. It’s probably pretty hard to believe unless you’ve witnessed it yourself. But it does occur. I told Billy Ray. He wouldn’t listen to me. Even when the baby goats started getting killed at night later. Even when they started getting their throats slashed. That’s always the problem: He won’t listen to me.

  But, he’s tough as hell, can go out and work in all kinds of bad weather, and is already a much better man than I ever thought about being, except that he thinks women ought to stay in their own place. But he’s real smart and funny, and he’s already twenty-four, and it’s only now, at forty-eight, that I can see how much of a boy I was at his birth, when I was twenty-four.

  The Immaculate Kid never was good for much. He was too wild to pet, so we didn’t get to play with him. After a while we just ignored him, and he and Nanette ranged over the pasture like the cows did, not really soulmates.

  Billy Ray’s got all kinds of cows, calves, heifers, bulls. Mamaw’s place is sixty-two acres of good land with grass. And after the new goat had been hanging around for about six months, I began to wonder when those things became sexually active. And would a goat do its mother? I knew dogs would. I knew dogs would in a second. I don’t figure big cats would do it. I think their family ties are stronger than that. But he didn’t know and I didn’t, but I went ahead and said something, you know, something like, Well look Bud, now, you don’t want to let that thing get old enough to where it’d get to thinking about screwing his mama before you sell him, okay? And of course he assured me that wouldn’t happen. And I went happily on with whatever project I was involved in, either writing something or building something or cutting something down and dragging it somewhere I’m sure.

  And one day I saw him riding her. A goat on its mother. I found Billy Ray and said, Come on, let’s get him loaded up and sell him, we don’t want to have baby goats born from a mother and son, come on, go catch him, and he did get up and try. He tried for a long, long time. He chased that damn goat all over this place several times, and I don’t remember how long it took him to catch him, but I think it was a long time. Eventually the goat got gone and I hoped Nanette wasn’t pregnant.

  Fast forward about three months and one morning Nanette’s got three babies about the size of rabbits, with little striped faces and hanging ears, and they’re bouncing and bucking around on their new legs, and they were just about the cutest things I’d ever seen in my life. One was a black one, one was a little brown one, and one was gray-and-black. You could pet them. They weren’t deformed. They looked pretty normal. I felt a failure to prevent animal incest nonetheless.

  But they were just cute as hell. I got them into the heifer pen because I was already thinking about coyotes. The heifer pen’s built out of woven wire and it’s right behind Mamaw’s house, where Babe, Billy Ray’s big Walker hound, sleeps. I figured they’d be safer there. They weren’t too hard to catch. They’d run, but you could catch them, and they’d bleat, maybe in terror, who knew? But e
ventually you could run them down and play with them some. I did it several times.

  I MADE IT BACK to the tractor without him getting up and seeing me. I ducked behind it and bent over and started running. The wall of green sagegrass was a couple of hundred yards long. It’s one of the main pastures and it grows so much grass the cows can’t eat it all, so we have to mow it a few times each summer. That was what I’d been doing that afternoon. I’d mowed a lot of it but there was still plenty to go. It’s probably six or seven acres, maybe more. It’s hard for me to look at a piece of land and say how many acres are in it.

  So there I was, running, bent over. Running bent over, running bent over, running bent over. It’s a hard way to run. Man was not meant to run that way. I figured once I got a little ways off from him I could straighten up. But I wasn’t going to stop running, not if I had even a slim chance of getting the gun and some shells and getting back up there before he left. I was going to shoot him in the head after what he’d done to my baby goats. He’d done come on the place and killed. Over and over. I had the right to defend my livestock. Even if they were all already dead.

  So, I ran bent over for a long time, until I got down under the slight rise of land that lay between us, and then I straightened up and kept jogging back toward the house.

  I don’t remember who was in there. I jogged to the gun cabinet and got my Harrington & Richardson single-shot 12-gauge, and scooped up some OO buckshot and some no. 4 steel shot and jogged back out the door, shells in the pocket, piece at port arms. Like in the bad old days of the marines when you’d get to do that shit for nine miles. With a raincoat on. And a full marching pack. Just because some sadistic son of a bitch who outranked you was having a bad day. Or, maybe, I don’t know, he probably enjoyed doing it to us. I know there are people like that.