Robert Butler - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain - Stories

A he-goat. I had not checked the sex of the goat. I spun around and there were children all around me, drawn close, no doubt, to see this strange man and his strange snack depart. But when I turned, they drew back squealing. The white goat had stopped by the far fence. I knew it was my white goat because it was standing where I had last seen it and because it was looking at me almost in sympathy, as if it understood what I was going through with the attentions of these other little creatures.

It was a very hard thing for me to do, but I moved back into the pen, amidst the children. I would not look at them, but in my peripheral vision I could tell they were all turning to watch me, some of them even following me. I approached the goat and it looked very nervous. I spoke to it. “It’s all right,” I said. And then the toughest thing of all. I went to the goat’s tail and I crouched down, and I heard two dozen little voices gasp. Thanks to Buddha I saw what I needed to see underneath the white goat, and I rushed out of the pen and the park as if the darkest voodoo demon was pursuing me for my very soul.

That night, as my wife slept, I bent near her with her own best sewing scissors and she was very beautiful in the dim light, her face as smooth and unlined as the face of the fifteen-year-old girl that I married. How was it that fate had brought such a woman as this to a man like me? Even if my surface hides quite a different sort of man. She sighed softly in her sleep and though it was a lovely sound, it only made me restless. I could not bear to look very long at my wife’s beauty until this whole thing was resolved, so I went to the back of her head and gently raised some of her hair so the lock I took would not be missed, and the silkiness of her hair made my hand tremble. Badly. I feared even that I might slip and cut her ear or her throat. But I took a deep breath and my blade made a crisp little snip and I was ready to work my voodoo magic.

The next morning Bu’ó’m said she was shopping at the malls with her mends. I said, “You know those women would be plucking chickens and getting high on betel nuts in the alleys of Saigon if we had won the war.”

Bu’ó’m huffed faintly at this and she even whispered to the toaster, “Try saying something new.”

It’s true I’d made this observation before and I said, sincerely, “I’m sorry, my pretty butterfly. You have a nice time with your friends.”

Bu’ó’m turned to me and there was something in her face that I could not place. Part of me wanted to believe that it was a wistful look, almost tender, appreciative that I am the kind of Vietnamese husband who might even apologize to his wife. But another part of me thought that the look was simply repressed exasperation, a Vietnamese wife’s delicate loathing. Either way, we said no more and when I left the house, I did not head for the telephone company.

I drove to a local library and read the newspapers and the news magazines for a few hours. The world was full of struggle and you had to be clever to survive, that much was dear, and in the backseat of my car in a gym bag was a hog bladder full of blood and the shit of a he-goat and it was tied up (this was not an easy thing to do, as it turned out) with a lock of my wife’s hair. I had Tr n V n Ha’s address and I knew the neighborhood he lived in. At a quarter to twelve, I carefully folded the newspaper I was reading and replaced it on the shelf and I walked past the librarians with the softest tread, the calmest face (I was still a splendid spy, after all), and I drove up Manhattan Boulevard and under the West Bank Expressway and a few more turns brought me to Ha’s street and I found his house on the corner.

I still had five minutes, so I parked across the street and slumped lower behind the wheel and observed the place. His was a shotgun house in a neighborhood of shotgun houses. They get their name from the fact that you could stand on the front porch and shoot a shotgun straight through to the back porch and the buckshot would pass through every room in the house. It occurred to me that this was the perfect design for a man in my situation. These houses were probably invented by an architect with a butterfly wife. He wanted to make it easy to draw a bead on his rivals. Just as I was about to answer this with the observation that a shotgun was not my style, something struck me about a shotgun house.

Doctor Joseph said I was to throw the bladder over the house. I had a ranch house or Cape Cod or such in my mind, a place where I would stand near the front porch and throw the bladder over the peak of the roof and it would roll down the other side and the task would be done. But the shotgun house is very long, stretched out deep into the lot. I could not throw the bladder that far. I was not a good thrower to start with, and this was just too far. Would the magic work if I threw the bladder over the house from one side to the other? Ha’s place sat very near to the house next door and there was a fence in between.

It was a high, solid fence, I noticed, so that the neighbors could not see into his bedroom window where he met his lovers. This thought made me very angry and I looked at my watch and I had only two minutes to figure this out. I grabbed the gym bag from the backseat and stepped out of the car. Over the house, I thought. Over the house. If it goes over from side to side, it is still over the house. Surely that’s all right, I thought. And I was lucky that Ha’s house was on a corner lot. I could not deal with the narrow passage and high fence, but the other side of the house was open to the street and I walked briskly around the corner.

On this side there were three large trees, side by side. They seemed to block the house, but looking closer, I could see that there was a space of a few feet between each one. I looked at my watch and I had no time to waste now, only a matter of a few seconds. I set the gym bag down at my feet and drew out the bladder, long and dark gray and with a bandanna of Bu’ó’m’s silky hair. I placed myself between two of the trees and the alarm began to beep on my watch and I did not know how to hold the bladder, how to move my arm. Overhand or underhand? The alarm beeped on and I felt panic like a frightened goat running around in my chest and I chose to use an underhand throw. My arm went down, I kept my eye on the peak of the roof, and I flung the hog bladder as hard as I could, just as the alarm stopped beeping.

The bladder flew almost straight up, hooking just enough to crash through the leaves of the tree to my left and drape itself on a branch. I won’t tell you exactly what it looked like to me, this bulbous skin doubled now and dangling from the limb of the tree. Yes I will tell you. It looked like a monstrous set of testicles, and it made me crazy with anger at Tran Van Ha and I knew it could not remain there. Hanging there like that, it would probably work magic that was the exact opposite of what I’d intended. I decided that the bladder had been flung at noon and in a real sense it was still in the process of going over the house. The trip had no time limit on its completion, I reasoned, so I went to the tree, which was an oak with some large lower branches, and I began to climb.

As with many small men, I am very agile. I have not had much experience climbing trees, but the sight of the bladder above me and the thought of Ha and his desire for my wife drove me up the tree in a trance of rage. The bark scraped, the leaves grabbed at me, the gulf beneath me grew larger and larger, but I went up and up without a look down or a Single thought of my own safety until I was nearly as high as the top of the roof and I’d drawn opposite the bladder. At this point I reached for a limb to steady me but it was dead and cracked off and clattered down onto the roof and my head snapped back with a little shock of understanding. I was in a tree and high off the ground.