Read They Had Goat Heads for Free Online Page B

washed him in the basement sink.
   They went to the back yard. I went to the window and cranked it open. The fresh, summer air smelled good.
   Dad took Grandpa out of the Björn and told him to go play. Grandpa didn’t respond; he lay on the grass as if poured there, eyes half open, ribcage slowly rising and falling. One moment Dad scolded him; the next he encouraged him. Then he put a leash on Grandpa and started dragging him around the yard. Now and then Grandpa tried to keep up, but he was too weak, and for the most part he could only let himself be dragged. His face and scalp turned purple.
   One of the neighbors came over. I didn’t know his name. He wore red longjohns and construction boots. He had just killed a deer and wanted to show my father. He brought the carcass over in a wheelbarrow. He explained how he had “destroyed” the deer with his bare hands. He kept repeating the word “destroyed.” At first he and the deer merely wrestled in a playful manner, but things got dirty. The deer tried to run away but tripped over a fallen pine tree. The neighbor jumped on it and punched it in the head until it died. “Luckily it was a doe and there weren’t no antlers on it,” he said. “Otherwise I mighta cut my fists when I destroyed that crazy fucker.”
   Dad said it was a nice-looking deer, despite its mauled, almost unrecognizable head. The neighbor thanked him.
   Grandpa gasped for air. He convulsed for lack of oxygen.
   The neighbor wheeled the carcass back into his yard and began to skin it with a hunting knife. One strip of deerhide after another he tossed over his shoulders. The musculature of the deer was bright red. Fluorescent. It looked fake.
   Dad pulled Grandpa around the yard a few more times, falling into a soft trot. Then he came back inside and lay Grandpa on the kitchen counter. His neck was inflamed, bruised and bleeding. I checked his pulse. He was alive. We stared down at him.
   “I’m thirsty,” said Grandpa.
   Dad made a frog face. “Thirst is part of life. People get thirsty. That’s life.”
   “Respect your elders,” said Grandpa.
   “Fear your offspring,” said my father, eyeballing me.
   I offered Grandpa a shot of Tequila. He wanted water. I got him a glass of soda and carefully poured it into the gash of his mouth as if filling up a lawn mower with gasoline. He choked on the soda but managed to get some of it down. “That wasn’t water,” he remarked, then rolled onto his side and tightened into a fetal curl.

 
    FUNAMBULISM
     
    I insisted they replace the tightrope with a two-foot wide plank before walking across it. I also wanted the plank bolstered from the underside by a series of pillars and support beams. In addition, I wanted three nets set up—one near the ground, one halfway between the ground and me, one just a few feet beneath me, all made of spidersteel and reinforced with a Tungsten nanocomposite—and a strongman waiting to catch me beneath the third and lowest net in case I fell through them all. “Secure my path with handrailings, too,” I added, and then I realized there was no reason to walk across the plank when I could glide across it. I ordered them to construct an airport walkalator instead of a plank. “Make it four—no, five feet wide,” I said, putting on a sumo suit in case I fell down. I put on another sumo suit for good measure. And I decided that, instead of pillars and support beams, they should fill the circus tent with sand, fill it all the way up here to the tightrope platform, and then we can simply lay the walkalator on top, but since we’re on the subject, why use sand when we can use concrete? I barked, “Fill the tent with concrete!” and began to gesticulate as if my hair had caught fire. I quickly checked myself, however, and demanded that they not only fill the tent with concrete, but the whole city. Frenzied, they assembled a mountain of gravel bags and water barrels and