Everything makes sense when its placed the proper context. That’s why I didn’t so much as bat an eye when I met Billy Jean. I didn’t furrow so much as a single brow. Nor did I ask what she was doing in the living room, or why her face was so close to mine. I didn’t even scream when I finally woke up enough to notice her eyes were yellow and filled with rectangular pupils. Because you see, Billy Jean is a pygmy goat, and in the context of my father’s house she makes perfect sense. Nothing surprises me at my father’s house.
As I rose from my place on the couch, I stared at Billy Jean. She stared back and stomped her cloven feet on the hardwood floor. She demanded in a loud bray to know who I was and what exactly I was doing in her domain. I looked at her and stared down the hallway to where my father and his girlfriend sat in the kitchen. Bill Jean stomped again to regain my attention. She seemed to be trying to intimidate me.
“Of course,” I muttered. I watched my father and his girlfriend and looked back at the goat. It all made perfect sense.
I nudged Billy to one side with my foot as I made my way to the bathroom. She head-butted the back of my leg for spite before I shut the door to the bathroom on her and enjoyed a nice relaxing shower. When I got out she was still there.
Finally, as I came to the kitchen and poured myself a bowl of cereal I asked the question. “So, whose goat is that?”
“Ours,” my father answered, staring at the television.
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“Big George.”
“The Big George that makes moonshine?” At this point in time I had not met Big George. However, it stood to reason that if there exists a man who sells pygmy goats by the name of Big George, and that if this man is also an acquaintance of my father, it follows inevitably that this man must also enjoy brewing powerful hooch.
“Yeah,” My father confirmed.
“Fucking awesome.” I said. Billy Jean watched with jealous eyes as I ate my bowl of cereal.
After I finished breakfast, I went out to the deck, looked at the trees that had stood guard over the back yard since my youth, and felt sad for a while. The deep sadness that comes when you go back home and discover your father has decided to start raising useless farm animals. My brother joined me after a while, and as he was sitting down minding his own business Billy Jean head butted him in the side of the face and nearly knocked him out.
Fucking Awesome.
TWO MONTHS LATER
“That can’t be gas… can it?” I wondered aloud. My father and I were fixing the deck for Rachel’s wedding ceremony. Billy Jean was tethered to a pole not ten feet away. Her sides had swelled out like a boy with pockets full of candy since I had first met her.
“Oh fuck yeah, that’s gas. She’ll just rip one and it’ll all go back to normal.” My father answered with the tone of an expert. Of course this is the same man who insisted to the point of screaming that Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic movie “The Postman” was set during the American Civil War.
Every now and again I lifted my eyes from the deck, and cocked my head to the side. The conclusion came so hard I had to bite my lip. “No. No it can’t be gas. Look! It’s rolling!” I pointed enthusiastically.
My father stressed out from the preparations for Rachel’s wedding threw down his hammer and looked ready to hit me. “Get back to work! Goddamn kid making a fucking fuss over a fucking fart…”
Billy Jean brayed as my father broke off into more profane mumbles. But still, I wondered. There was no way that was gas.
ONE MONTH LATER
“Okay, I really don’t get this. You took her to a breeding farm, mated her with another goat, and you didn’t know she was going to get pregnant? Why did you take her in the first place?” As I looked from my father’s face to his girlfriend’s I realized there was no answer.
“Well damn it.” I concluded.
We had all gathered inside Billy Jean’s pen by the back of the barn, trying to coax the pygmy goat from its hiding place. She was nestled deep in what looked like a larger than normal dog house, and refused to exit. A blue black blob lay covered in hay in front of the goat’s house.
“You sure that isn’t a kid still wrapped up in its amnion?” I gestured to the blue black bog. I saw the look on my father’s face. “Is it a goat still in the sac?”
“No, your cousin Brianna said that she would rip it open with her teeth. It’s the placenta.” My father stated.
“Yeah, but the placenta comes out last in humans doesn’t it? I don’t see a baby goat around here.” I reasoned.
“Maybe it’s different for animals.” His girlfriend interjected.
I doubted that but said nothing. It had been almost forty-five minutes before I was called out to the goat pen. If there was a baby in that blue black mass I didn’t want to be the one who tried to revive it. That privilege went to my cousin Brianna who heroically arrived five minutes later, ripped open the amnion and gave lifeless creature in her hands mouth to mouth before pronouncing him dead.
“I need towels!” Brianna ordered.
My dad brought three of my nicest shirts from the house.
“Dad! Jesus goddamn Christ, get a fucking towel!” He returned less than a minute later. Brianna rubbed for some time. Wrapped her lips around its dead little face and blew. Massaged as if her fingers held the spark of life. Nothing worked.
We put him in an old cardboard box and buried him by the fire pit.
Brianna made the announcement when I came back. “I think she’s got another one. She still hasn’t passed her placenta.”
This made a certain anatomical sense to me, as Billy Jean had a lump on either side of her body, and unless her womb extended through her spine it stood to reason she was carrying two kids in different parts of her body.
“Well what do we do?” I asked.
“Someone’s going to have to sit out here with her.”
“Well I’ve got things to do.” My father announced. His girlfriend had already left. She had things to do as well. I stared at Billy Jean’s rectangular pupils. I don’t particularly like animals, but I wasn’t going to sit around and let one die in child birth.
I grunted. “Guess that leaves me.”
After everyone else had gone inside, Brianna took me aside. “Did they mate Billy Jean with a Nubian?”
“I don’t know.” My brother told me later that they had, and that during the process of mating the goats had enjoyed a vigorous bout of urinating in each others faces. I guess that doesn’t just work for Jim Norton.
“That baby was too big. I think they mated her with a regular goat.” When Brianna said it, it all made perfect sense. That was exactly the kind of fact my father would overlook.
I groaned. Stupid dad. Big peg small hole. No wonder Billy was too worn out to tear the sac open. Brianna and I exchanged pleasantries for a moment before she too left. So I sat there, alone with the goat.
And waited.
SIX HOURS LATER
And waited.
John Hodgman has been there for me through some very rough times. As I sat there, waiting for Billy Jean to drop her second kid I re-read one of my favorite books, “The Areas of My Expertise.” Although it was, as advertised, a “Compendium of Complete World Knowledge” I discovered that the book contained no sections on either husbandry or midwifing.
It was night now. Full night. I read by the glimmer of a book lamp I had purchased many years ago as a child for a long road trip. I was huddled in an afghan my grandmother had stitched together, trying to hold out the cold. Billy Jean groaned inside her small house, wrapped in hay, her eyes occasionally flashing demonic yellow by the light of my book lamp.
“Did you know that there was once another state named Hohoq?” I asked Billy Jean. She groaned at me. “Were you EVEN AWARE OF IT?” I prompted.
Billy Jean yelled at me for a long time, so I was quiet for a while. Somewhere around three o’clock in the morning I decided that since I could see my own breath in front of my face that it was time to go inside.
I finished “The Areas of My Expertise” and went to bed.
I hoped she would pass the kid before I got up in another four hours. She didn’t.
THE NEXT DAY
I spent the next day with Billy Jean and David McCullough’s “1776.”
I made small talk with Sharon, our next door neighbor. We talked about how much we disliked meth-heads. I didn’t like them because I had met enough on the oil rig that I felt I had my fill of them for life. She didn’t like them because she worked in a psychiatric hospital. After a while, she went inside because she had to put a bowl of candy on her front porch or Spencer the roaming feral neighbor boy would break into her house looking for some.*
After about six hours my sister came out of the house. I frowned. Rachel never left the house unless forced.
“I lost Natasha.” Rachel said, her voice rich with the hidden accusation that this was somehow my fault.
I sat up in my chair. “You fucking WHAT?!?”
“I need you to go knock on people’s doors to see if they’ve seen her.” I was already climbing out of the goat pen. The chicken wire scratched the backs of my legs.
“Fine. I’ll get the right side of the street, you get the left. How long has she been gone?” There would be time to yell at Rachel later.
Rachel looked at me like I’d suggested we enter Special Forces training. “Uh… I’M not going to go knocking on people’s doors. Do you have any idea how embarrassing that would be? And I don’t know how long she’s been gone.”
I sighed, rubbed my hands over my face to stop from shouting, and then decided on a course of action. “Walk down to North End Park. Spencer might have tricked her into going there.” Although he is only a six year old boy, Spencer is not to be trusted in the best of circumstances. I think of him as a real life Dennis the Menace with Asperger’s Syndrome.
I left Billy Jean alone in the pen, figuring if she hadn’t passed her second baby by now she wasn’t going to do so in the next hour.
I knocked on all the doors in the neighborhood. I rang all the bells. No one had seen her. Not even Trashmouth or her mother, who Spencer also preyed upon. Trashmouth did want to know “how the hell” I lost a kid. Sometimes I think Trashmouth should use nicer words seeing as how she is only eleven. But then again, this is the Harbor. I told her that I hadn’t lost any kid, but she didn’t believe me.
An hour later, after I had knocked on every door in a two block radius I walked down to North End Park and found Rachel, Natasha, and Spencer all playing together on a swing-set.
“Was anyone going to tell me about this?”
Rachel expressed no worry. Nor did Natasha who was enjoying her ride on the swing. Spencer expressed the least concern. Not that his wax features are really capable of conveying emotion. I sometimes worry about what that boy will do when he gets to be an adult.
I left in a huff and went home to take up my post in the goat pen. Billy Jean’s tail was pointing straight up in the air and she walked painfully. There was blood coming out of her vagina.
THE NEXT DAY
I was starting to worry. I had been by Billy Jean’s side almost constantly and she hadn’t so much as gone to the bathroom. My father arranged a visit to the veterinarian. If they couldn’t fix her for less than $250 I was going to have to have her put down. If they couldn’t put her down for less than $250, I was going to have to kill her myself. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to that possibility.
I dragged her, as she fought every step, to the animal carrier by the bed of the truck. I couldn’t push her in no matter how hard I tried. She yelled at me, stomped her feet, and head butted me every chance she could.
I finally threaded the tether through the back of the carrier and pulled her as hard as I could until she was inside. Then, tipping the carrier up at an angle so she could not escape, I closed and locked the front gate. Billy nipped at my fingers as I closed the gate.
She rammed every side of the carrier she possibly could as I lifted her up and set her down in the back of the truck. I surrounded her with bags of compost to hold her still. She yelled at me as I got in the truck, until I turned up the radio and drowned her out. After three days of this, I was exhausted.
THE NEXT DAY
Two hours later I finally found the veterinarian’s office. Well, the RIGHT veterinarian’s office. I had shown up at another one and waited for almost twenty minutes before figuring out I had come to the wrong place. Now, having checked in at the right service desk, I had Billy Jean by her tether in the parking lot waiting for the service door to open.
One of the women at the front desk admitted me into a room with cement floors and a number of large stands and hoists for livestock before closing the door behind me. Before I had so much as a second to wonder where the veterinarian was hiding, Billy Jean took the longest piss she has ever taken in all our acquaintance with one another. That was when she walked in. She, a human woman. The vet’s assistant. Her hair glowed like the sun… or yellow like the hard tang of Billy Jean’s urine.
“Oh! Um… hey!” I said, a dumb smile on my face. Billy Jean wasn’t done pissing. She was making up for the last three days with interest.
“Oh no!” The vet’s assistant shouted. “Let’s get her over the drain!” Working with the most beautiful twenty-something veterinarian’s assistant in the world, I managed to move Billy Jean over the floor drain at about the same time her goat bladder ran out of goat piss.
“I am so sorry about that.” Unpredictable excretory action is one of the many reasons I don’t particularly care for animals.
She smiled back at me. “Don’t worry about it. The floors slope down, we’ll just hose out the place later. I just cleaned it is all.” She smiled at me. I smiled back. Billy Jean walked between my legs and I had to put the tether behind my back before she tripped me. She tried to bite one of the benches. I figured since it was metal there wasn’t much she could do to hurt it.
“So… um… are you in training to be a vet?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m in my last month of internship actually.”
Then something remarkable happened. I flirted. In real life. Better than I have ever flirted before in the history of my life. The mysterious “connection” I always heard about was finally tangible. I was “connecting” and I knew it. We were talking about ossification, and it was hot. Gloriously hot. She was INTO me.
A woman kicked open the door and strode in. She looked tired as all hell. Like she’d had about as much in life as she cared to handle.
“You Woods?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Get her up on the stand.”
I lifted Billy Jean, not without some effort, onto a small stand that would put her at about waist height with any standing human. The vet sat down behind her on a bucket. She stared straight at the area normally hidden by Billy Jean’s tail.
“She has a retained fetus?”
“That’s what I figured out on the internet, but I don’t really….”
“Cows and horses are my specialty. I’ll do the best I can.” The vet cut me off.
I shared a smile with the lovely vet’s assistant. Somewhere off in the distance, as I stared into the beautiful face of the vet’s assistant, a latex glove snapped on a hand. The vet’s assistant turned up the corner of her mouth. We could still feel the connection. Later, the connection commanded, later you will ask for her phone number. I knew I would do this, even though I had never really done such a thing before.
“I’m going to need you to hold her as tight as you can.”
I wrapped my arm around Billy’s neck never breaking eye contact with the beautiful girl I knew I was going to date. It was a strange moment for me, and I wanted to consider it as long as I could….
And then Billy Jean screamed. And then I and the beautiful vet’s assistant looked backwards. And then we saw the vet’s hand inserted into Billy Jean’s vagina up to the wrist, and then we looked at one another, the vet’s assistant and I, and knew that our love could never escape the stain of this moment and our connection shattered like so much fallen glass. It got worse when the vet spoke, her hand still inserted in Billy Jean’s vagina.
“Well I’ll be damned if I can feel anything rolling around in there. Damn she’s tight. Your dad said $250 was his spending limit, right? I’m going to give you some penicillin. It’ll run you about $80 for a week long treatment. See if we can’t clear up the infection, let her pass whatever’s left inside her. Hopefully she’ll stay alive long enough.”
The beautiful vet’s assistant turned to me again. “You monster!” her eyes accused, although she said nothing. “You’re going to let this beautiful creature die because you’re too CHEAP to explore every alternative!” Only her sense of professionalism held back the curses. I swallowed very hard, wanting to explain that this pygmy goat, was in fact, not actually even really MY pygmy goat but could not find the words. So I just swallowed again.
I felt her hostile glare on me, even as we held the goat down for the vet, who demonstrated how, with three people, a single miniaturized goat could be forcefully injected under the leg with penicillin. The vet’s assistant left in a huff as soon as she could.
I left the office horribly confused, not unlike a child who has just had a gay experience at summer camp, and sat in the car for the longest time thinking about what had happened before starting the ignition. I could hear Billy Jean screaming at the indignity in the back.
LATER THAT DAY
It took everything Rachel’s husband and I cold do to inject her before night time, as I had been instructed. She needed an injection every twelve hours. She fought the both of us. Nipping, kicking, and head butting.
“God damn it this sucks.”
Rachel’s husband is highly agoraphobic, so he said nothing to this remark, and waited for explicit instructions before doing anything. I finally got a handful of the fat under Billy’s leg and shoved the needle inside.
Rachel’s husband’s eyes got very wide as Billy Jean screamed her human scream. He let go in a moment of panic, and it was only the quickness of my hands that allowed me to finish the injection before he ran off to the house.
“It screamed!” I heard him tell Rachel later that night when he didn’t know I could hear. “It sounded like a person that was being murdered.”
That was the first and only time Rachel’s husband helped me give Billy Jean her medicine. I was going to have to get clever.
SEVERAL MORE LATERS
The best way I figured to lure Billy Jean into a false sense of security, was to deprive her of food long enough that she would be too hungry to be suspicious. I started feeding her once a day, leaving the bowl in an open place just outside her pen. I left it there, ran out of her field of view, climbed halfway up a tree with the help of some boards Charlie Woods and I had nailed there as children, and waited.
After some time had passed, Billy Jean would emerge from her pen, sniff the air, and make her way over to the bowl. I watched, high enough in the tree that I was outside her field of vision. When she was fully engrossed in her bowl of oats, I dropped out of the tree, ninja style, and ran as fast as I could, tackling Billy Jean, pushing her over onto her back, grabbing a fistful of fat under her leg and injecting her with the life-saving penicillin all in under ten seconds. She screamed every time.
“Don’t you even pretend, I’m an asshole!” I shouted when her rectangular pupils began to regard me with terror. “If it weren’t for me you would be dead right now!”
So she lived, and lives to this day. I’ll be damned if she ever passed anything. I looked every day and there was nothing there.
*Yes, there actually is a boy named Spencer who would break into people’s houses looking for candy. My father came home once and found him spread out sleeping in the middle of the bed in his room with a pack of Rollo’s. Spencer had let himself in earlier in the day and decided he wanted to watch television. Also, one time I pulled into the driveway, and he ran up to the side of the car without my noticing, and when I looked up his face was pressed against the glass like a spirit mask from Darkest Africa. His eyes were like glass balls set into the face of a preserved animal. Hollow and lifeless. Oh how I screamed.
