Chapter 10 Baz
BAZ
Baz woke in his sleeping bag on the floor of the general store, feeling an odd tugging sensation, as if the rolled-up jacket he was using for a pillow was moving out from under his head.
He opened his eyes and found himself face to face with a goat, its mouth full of jacket sleeve.
Baz sat bolt upright. The goat took a step back, but, being a goat, didn’t seem bothered other than that. It reached down to delicately nibble on his jacket-pillow again.
Not entirely sure that he wasn’t dreaming, Baz told it, “Stop that.”
The goat ignored him. He put a hand firmly on its nose and pushed it back.
He had heard that goats would eat anything, but he couldn’t really think of a reason why it would chew on his jacket, unless maybe it was the salty taste of sweat; he’d been wearing that jacket while clearing brush around the store yesterday.
This led his half-awake brain to wonder where exactly the goat had come from and how it got in.
Following on this thought was the realization that it wasn’t alone.
There was another goat standing up with its hooves on the counter, investigating the cans and bottles he had placed there the other day.
“Hey!” Baz said. “Go away!”
The goat, startled, bounced straight up and landed on the counter, almost effortlessly, except for knocking over a couple of bottles. Now, from its new vantage point, it resumed its investigations.
Baz looked around hastily to find out how many other goats had manifested in the night.
Early morning sunlight was streaming through the door. He had been leaving it slightly ajar so he could hear in case anyone had trouble in the night. Now the door stood all the way open, and in the street outside, he could see more goats.
Right, he thought, rubbing at his temples as if it might help wake up his brain.
Uncle Axl had mentioned this. There was a farmer who lived down the hill and brought her goats up to trim the grass and keep the underbrush from consuming the town.
One of the items on his mental to-do list was going down and talking to her, but it had been pushed aside by everything else.
Evidently, if you don’t go to the goats, the goats come to you.
He had crawled into the sleeping bag in a T-shirt and boxers. Baz stood up and looked around for his jeans, only to find that they had disappeared.
Was it possible that the goats had eaten them? At this point, he wouldn’t be surprised.
There was another goat, a very small one, standing on top of his pack.
“Shoo!” Baz said. This had no effect. He waved his arms. Still nothing.
He planted a hand on the goat’s side, expecting it to move, and tried to push, but it resisted.
Its fur was coarser than he was expecting, and it felt very warm, with muscles flexing beneath its hide.
It looked at him with its weird, yellow, slit-pupiled eyes, and an expression which conveyed the general sense of What even was that?
Meanwhile, the goat on the countertop thoughtfully sampled the lid of a tin can.
“You really do that? I thought that was something that only happened in old cartoons. Out!”
He found a sparsely bristled, old-fashioned broom in the corner and tried swiping at the goat on the counter.
Predictably, it tried to eat the broom, and now he was in a tug of war with a goat determinedly munching on the broom bristles.
Meanwhile, the other big one had decided to investigate his backpack.
He had no idea where the small one had gone. Probably nowhere good.
“For cryin’ out loud,” Baz said.
He was an alpha bear shifter with his own clan. He ought to be able to dominate a farm animal.
Baz stared intently into the goat’s eyes. At least now he had it as a captive audience, more or less, since it was still munching on the other end of his broom.
“You want to bend to my will,” he told the yellow eyes, which blinked slowly as the goat continued to chew on his broom. “You can feel yourself weakening ...”
“Are you having a stare-down with a goat?”
Baz jumped and looked over his shoulder in dawning dismay. That sounded like Arden.
That was Arden.
She was standing there looking sleepy and tousled in an oversized T-shirt and the same pair of jeans she had been wearing yesterday, which he knew because they had sparkly decorations around the waistband and (he remembered very clearly, without her having to turn around) on the back pockets.
Baz, meanwhile, was holding a broom with a goat on the other end, wearing a pair of boxers and his oldest, rattiest tractor supply store T-shirt, and nothing else.
He stared at her in horror.
Arden stared back, her gaze then drifting slowly around the inside of the old store.
“I came over to find out what was up with the goats.” She frowned. “I guess you might not be the right person to answer questions about that.”
“Do you see my pants anywhere?” Baz said, somewhat desperately.
“I think that goat’s got them.”
He hadn’t even noticed yet another goat on the far side of the counter, which had dragged his jeans across the room and was chewing on the hem.
“Out!” he half-yelled, giving the broom a tug.
“Do you want me to do anything?” Arden asked, her voice choked with suppressed laughter.
“See if you can get my pants.” He didn’t want to let go of the broom because that would be letting the goat win, but he was afraid that if he tugged it onto the floor, broom and all, he would hurt it. Although considering the goat’s weightless bound up to the countertop, perhaps not.
“You folks having problems?”
The new voice drawled its rhetorical question in a deadpan tone. A new person appeared in the doorway that Arden had just vacated.
The woman who had just entered the store wore a large floppy-brimmed hat and a T-shirt that read GOAT HOARDER. Her feet were encased in absurdly large mud-covered rubber boots. She carried a long, slender stick in one hand.
Baz had never thought about what a goat herder might look like, but this was about what he would have expected.
“What do you normally do to get a goat off your countertop?” he asked.
“I normally don’t let it get to that point,” the goat woman said.
She strode forward and delivered a brisk tap to the goat’s hind leg with the stick.
The goat completely ignored her. “Right,” she muttered, and grasped the goat’s collar with one strong, competent hand.
Baz had not previously noticed they had collars.
She gave it a pull. The goat pulled back, leaning until it nearly went down on its hindquarters.
At least it let go of the broom, so Baz abruptly had both hands free.
He tossed the broom back into the corner, since it was clearly useless, and went to help Arden rescue his jeans.
The other goat, apparently feeling outnumbered, let go of his pants and Baz ruefully inspected their goat-slobbered length.
Meanwhile, the goat farmer was now in a struggle that the goat was losing only by virtue of being slowly dragged towards the edge of the counter, which made Baz feel somewhat better.
“Fortinbras, you have one hoof in the glue factory if you don’t cut it out,” the goat farmer growled between her teeth.
Fortinbras started nibbling on her sleeve.
“Do goats mind being picked up?” Baz asked her, zipping his jeans. They were damp. He tried not to think about that too much.
“Not if they’re used to it, which most of mine are when they’re young, but this one’s probably about a hundred and twenty pounds. So basically, sure, if you can pick him up, be my guest.”
He wasn’t exactly sure how to pick up a goat, but he tried putting one arm around the goat’s chest and scooped the other under its hind end.
The goat looked astonished enough that it gave only a token struggle, at least at first. By the time it started actually kicking, he had it outside.
The other goats trooped along behind as if this was the most exciting thing they’d ever seen, aided by the goat farmer tapping them with the stick now and then.
Arden trailed at one side, looking amused and occasionally reaching out to give a goat a cautious pat.
Baz half-lowered and half-dropped the goat, which was now struggling in earnest, in the street. The goat farmer reached behind her to close the door now that all of the goats (Baz hoped) were out.
“You’re strong,” she said, inspecting his muscles.
Baz revised his guess of her age considerably downward now that he saw her in the sunshine.
Her hair, down to her shoulders, was silvery white, so he had just assumed from that and her distinctly offbeat fashion sense that she was older.
But her face was almost unlined; she was either prematurely gray, or she had done that silver fashion dye thing that he had never understood.
A small swarm of goats—a herd? a flock? a murder?—was dispersed among the houses, chewing on grass. Baz found it difficult to count them because they were in constant motion. He guessed there were about twelve or fifteen of them, all sizes ranging from large and leggy to very small and round.
Baz wondered if complimenting a woman on her goats would sound like a bizarre pick-up line. Anyway, he only had eyes for Arden. It felt even more awkward to stand here without saying anything, though.
“You have a lot of goats,” he offered.
She pointed wordlessly at her shirt.
“Right,” Baz muttered. He pushed away Fortinbras, who was now trying to nibble on the bottom edge of his T-shirt.
“They’re not going to hurt you,” the goat lady said. “They’re friendly.”
“A little too friendly,” Baz muttered, pushing Fortinbras away again. “Er, not to be rude, but did I miss some kind of scheduled goat maintenance visit or something?”
“No, I just bring them here when the weeds are getting high. I have an arrangement with the property owners. That is, the previous owners.” She gave him a sharp look from under her hat. “Are you the new owner?”
“Yeah. Co-owner,” he clarified. “I meant to come down and talk to you when I got a chance.”
“Then I guess it’s good I came up to you.” She said it firmly, unsmiling; Baz’s smile, having assumed she was being friendly, withered and died on the vine as she went on talking. “I’m Elvy. They call me Elvy the Goat Lady.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Arden said under her breath, coming up beside him leading the small goat with a finger hooked into its collar.
There was a delighted squeal from across the street. “Baby goats!”
Fern came running, barefoot, long skirt swishing and her mass of red hair still pulled up under the antique silk kerchief that she wrapped it in while she slept.
(She had once told Baz that it helped prevent her hair from becoming unmanageably tangled in the night.
He thought it made her look even more like an old-time pioneer housewife than she normally did.)
Heedless of the dirt on her feet and her long skirt, Fern dropped to her knees in front of two of the small goats. One of them promptly tried to climb into her lap.
“They’re not babies, they’re pygmy goats,” Elvy said. “Nigerian dwarf goats, to be specific. The others are mostly Nubians with a few Boers.” She pointed with the stick. “That’s a Boer.”
It was a weird-looking goat even by goat standards, oddly proportioned with a low-slung body, a truncated-looking face, and a thick, long beard that sprouted from a small area under its chin and made Baz think of his uncle’s old ZZ Top albums.
The Nubians, including the one that had been on his countertop, were long-legged goats with floppy ears and a variety of coat colors, mostly splotched brown, black, and white.
They looked basically just like what Baz imagined a goat would look like.
His actual experience with goats was pretty minimal, since his clan ranched cattle.
Horses and cattle and sometimes even sheep, he could deal with. Goats were a new experience.
Which reminded him that he knew nothing about Elvy’s situation, other than the fact that she owned the goat farm.
“Do you get paid for this?” he asked Elvy. “That is, do we owe you anything?”
Elvy shook her head. “The arrangement that I had with the previous owner is that I get unlimited free grazing in exchange for keeping the brush down and occasionally having a look to make sure nobody was trying to squat here or loot the place. I could tell someone was staying over here, so that was one reason why I decided to bring the goats over and find out if it was the new owners or someone else.”
Baz carefully did not look at Arden. “Well, now you’ve met us,” he said.
“You’re all the new owners?” Elvy asked.
“Yes, actually. There are four of us—er, five,” he amended quickly, with a glance at Arden. “And a few who aren’t here yet. Oh, there’s my cousin.”
Lexie came down the street, wearing pajama pants and an oversized sleep shirt, looking tousled and cranky. “Baz, why are there goats everywhere?”
“Meet Elvy the Goat Lady,” Baz told her. “Elvy, this is my cousin Lexie, and the one with the lapful of goats is my other cousin Fern. Does anyone know where Declan is?”
“Probably still asleep,” Lexie said. She pushed away a goat that was trying to nibble the waist strings on her pajama pants.
“He was up half the night working on his new house. Doing what, I’m not sure; I just know that I kept getting woken up by hammering right across the street from me.
” She scratched the goat between its floppy ears.
“Oh, that reminds me. We need more building supplies. I’ve been keeping a running list. Someone needs to take the truck into town today and go shopping. ”
“I’ll do it,” Baz offered. He turned to Arden. In the morning sun, with her hair tousled, she looked amazing; he had to get his train of thought back on its tracks and remember what he was going to ask her. “How do you feel about a trip to town? I’m sure there must be a few things you could use.”
“Sure.” Arden beamed at him. “That’d be great. Thanks.”
And it would give him a chance to be alone with her, without his entire clan around, not to mention a couple dozen goats.
“You’re probably going to want to change pants first,” said Elvy the Goat Lady, looking at his crotch.
Baz looked down and had the deeply unhappy discovery that the goat had been chewing on it, and his boxers were showing.
“Baz,” Fern said at the same time, looking up rapturously from the pygmy goats in her lap. “Can we get a goat?”