Goat by Brad Land

Author:Brad Land
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363541
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-02-02T16:00:00+00:00

INSIDE THERE’S AN eighties band onstage. Guys in their thirties. The lead singer has long, tightly curled hair. They start this song “Come On Eileen” right when we walk in and the crowd up front starts bouncing up and down. Chance leaves Dave and me, goes over to a crowd of girls. We get canned beers from plastic trash cans full of ice. They taste like water and Dave and I go into the crowd up front, duck below the raised arms and jumping cigarettes. Someone spills a beer down my arm. I look for Brett in the middle of all the jumping bodies. Wes is standing behind a girl, arms around her waist, twisting his crotch into her back. He holds his arms up and cheers when the chorus starts and his beer tips over onto the girl’s head. She reaches up, pats her hair and keeps dancing. A pledge shuffles his feet and rocks his head. Another pledge sees us at the back of the crowd, holds an arm above all the heads and points. I point back and lead us toward Wes and I’m feeling all confident, pushing people aside and brushing past them like I’m someone who’s supposed to be here, like this is for me. I grab Wes’s shoulder and he turns around and smiles, raises his arms again and spills beer onto the girl’s head again. I pat her head and she smiles. Turns back around and starts to dance, arms above her head. Wes doesn’t say anything. Stands behind me and Dave, drops one hand on both our shoulders and screams, because, I guess, he’s happy.

I lose count of the beers I’ve drunk somewhere around sixteen. A pledge leans into a corner of the room, head down against his chest. A girl tugs at his arm and he doesn’t look up he just swats the hand away. Will Fitch stands next to the trash cans full of beer, stares straight ahead, blinks his eyes. The floor is slick with all the dirt from people’s shoes mixing with spilled beer. The band stops playing at two-thirty. The lead singer brushes his greasy bangs away from his forehead and thanks everyone.

You guys know how to rock, he says. Balls one hand into a fist above his head. Everybody cheers, throwing arms up toward the ceiling. Rock and fucking roll, he says. My face feels numb. I sit down in a wooden chair in the middle of the cabin. Dave stands next to me, cocks a hip to the right and puts his hands in his back pockets and we’re there in all the laughter and smoke and shifting bodies wondering why we were nervous at all because we’re rock stars with our snarls and shirts drenched from the sweat and beer.

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