The Flying Goat (2 page)

Maxie did not answer. He took up his beer-bottle, slowly unscrewed the stopper and wiped the top with his sleeve. He had the bland, secretive air of a man who has a miracle up his sleeve. His eyes, smaller now, were cocked at the distant dark cobwebs in the corners of the little hut. ‘I ain't sayin' I know. An' I ain't sayin' I don't know.'

‘But you've got an idea?'

Maxie tilted the bottle, closed his little weasel mouth over the top and the frog took a series of prolonged jumps in his throat. It was silent in the little hut while he drank, but outside the day was fully awake, the mist cleared away, the cuckoos in the spinney and down through the fields warmed into stuttering excitement of sun, the blackbirds
rich and mad in the long hedge of pink-fading hawthorn dividing the road from the house. The boy felt a deep sense of excitement and secrecy in both sound and silence, and leaned forward to Maxie.

‘I won't tell, Maxie. I'll keep it. I won't tell.'

‘Skin y-alive if you do.'

‘I won't tell.'

‘Well,' Maxie said. He speared bread and bacon with his knife, held it aloft, and the boy waited in fascination and wonder. ‘No doubt about it,' Maxie said. ‘Gippos.'

‘Does Uncle Bishop think it's gippos?'

‘Yis,' Maxie said. ‘Thinks like me. We know dug prints when we see 'em and we know fox-prints. And we know gippo prints.'

‘You think it's Shako?'

‘Th' ain't no more gippos about here,' Maxie said, ‘only Shako and his lot.' He suddenly began to wave the knife at the boy, losing patience. ‘Y' Uncle Bishop's too easy, boy. Too easy. Lets 'em do what they like, don't he? Let's 'em have that field down by the brook don't he and don't charge nothing? Lets 'em leave a cart here when they move round and don't wanta to be bothered wi' too much clutter. Lets 'em come here cadgin'.
Don't he? Mite o' straw, a few turnips, sack o' taters, anything. Don't he?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, you see where it gits 'im! Twenty hens gone in one night.' Maxie got up, sharp snappy little voice like a terrier's, the back of his hand screwing crumbs and drink from his mouth. ‘But if I have my way it's gone far enough. I'll blow enough holes in Shako's behind to turn him into a bloody colander.'

Maxie went out of the hut into the sunshine, the boy following him.

‘You never see nothin' funny down in the field when you went to fetch Snowy, did you? No gates left open? No hen feathers about nowhere?'

‘No. It was too misty to see.'

‘Well, you keep your eyes open. Very like you'll see summat yit.'

Maxie moved over towards the stables. Alexander, fretted suddenly by wild ideas, inspired by Maxie's words, went with him. ‘You going to need Snowy this afternoon, Maxie?' he said.

‘Well, I'm goin' to use him this morning to git a load or two o' faggots for a stack-bottom. Oughta be finished be dinner.'

Maxie opened the lower half of the stable door. ‘Look a that,' he said. The stable-pin had worked loose from its socket, the door was scarred by yellow slashes of hoofs. ‘Done that yesterday,' Maxie said. ‘One day he'll kick the damn door down.'

‘He kicks that bottom fence like that. Kicks it to bits nearly every night.'

‘Yis, I know. Allus looks to me as if he's got too much energy. Wants to be kickin' and runnin' all the time.'

‘Do you think he was ever a race-horse?' Alexander said.

‘Doubt it,' Maxie said. ‘But he's good. He's got breedin'. Look at how he stan's. Look at it.'

The boy looked lovingly at the horse. It was a joy to see him there, white and almost translucent in the darkness of the stable, the head motionless and well up, the black beautiful eyes alone moving under the tickling of a solitary fly. He put one hand on the staunch smooth flank with a manly and important gesture of love and possession, and in that instant all the wild ideas in his mind crystallised into a proper purpose. He was so excited by that purpose that he hardly listened to Maxie saying something about ‘Well, it's no use, I gotta get
harnessed up and doing something', his own words of departure so vague and sudden that he scarcely knew he had spoken them, ‘I'm going now, Maxie. Going to look for a pudden' bag's nest down the brook', Maxie's answer only reaching him after he was out in the sunshine again, ‘Bit late for a pudden-bag's, ain't it?' and even then not meaning anything.

He left the farm by the way he had come into it an hour or two before with the horse, going down by the stone track into the long field that sloped away to the brook and farther on to the river. It was hot now, the sky blue and silky, and he could see the heat dancing on the distances. As he went lower and lower down the slope, under the shelter of the big hawthorns and ashes and wind-beaten willows, the buttercups powdering his boots with a deep lemon dust of pollen, he felt himself sucked down by the luxuriance of summer into a world that seemed to belong to no one but himself. It gave a great sense of secrecy to what he was about to do. Farther down the slope the grasses were breast high and the path went through a narrow spinney of ash and poplar and flower-tousled elders on the fringe of it and a floor of dead bluebells,
bringing him out at the other side on the crest of short stone cliff, once a quarry face, with a grass road and the brook itself flowing along in the hollow underneath.

He went cautiously out of the spinney and, behind a large hawthorn that had already shed its flowers like drifts of washed pink and orange confetti, lay down on his belly. He could see, on the old grass road directly below, the gipsy camp: the round yellow varnished caravan, a couple of disused prams, washing spread on the grass, a black mare hobbled and grazing on the brook edge, a fire slowly eating a grey white hole in the bright grass. He took it in without any great excitement, as something he had seen before. What excited him were the things he couldn't see.

The trap wasn't there, and the strong brown little cob that went with it. The women weren't there. More important still, there was no sign of Shako and the men. There was no sign of life except the mare and the washing on the grass. Although he lay with his heart pumping madly into the grass, it was all as he had expected it, as he hoped it would be. He took the signs of suspicion and fused
them by the heat of momentary excitement into a conviction of Shako's guilt.

He waited for a long time, the sun hot on his back and the back of his neck, for something to happen. But almost nothing moved in the hollow below him except the mare taking limping steps along the brook-side, working her way into a shade, and a solitary kingfisher swooping up the brook and then sometime afterwards down again, a blue electric message sparking in and out of the overhanging leaves.

It was almost half an hour later when he slipped quietly down the short grass of the slope between the stunted bushes of seedling hawthorn and the ledges of overhanging rock, warm as new eggs on the palm of his hand as he rested his weight on them. He went cautiously and, though his whole body was beating excitement, with that air of indifferent innocence he had used back in the farm-yard. Down in the camp he saw that the fire, almost out now, must have been lighted hours before. He put his hand on an iron-grey shirt of Shako's lying on the ground in the sun. It was so dry that it seemed to lie stiffly perched on the tops of the buttercup stems. Then he saw something
else. It startled him so much that he felt his head rock faintly in the sun.

On the grass, among many new prints of horses' hoofs, lay odd lumps of grey-green hen dung. He turned one over with his dust-yellow boots. It was fresh and soft. Then suddenly he thought of something else: feathers. He began to walk about, his eyes searching the grass, his excitement and the heat in the sheltered hollow making him almost sick. He had hardly moved a dozen yards when he heard a shout. ‘Hi! Hi'yup!' It came from the far bank of the brook and it came with a shrill unexpectedness that made his heart go off like a trap.

He stood very still, scared, waiting. He saw the elder branches on the bank of the brook stir and shake apart. He felt a second of intense fear, then another of intense relief.

Coming up from the brook was young Shako: the boy of his own age, in man's cap and long trousers braced up with binder string, eyes deep and bright as blackberries in the sun, coal-coloured hair hanging in bobtail curls in his neck.

‘Hi! What you doin'?' He had a flat osier basket of watercresses in his hand.

‘Looking for you,' Alexander said. ‘Thought there was nobody here.'

‘Lookin' for me?'

Alexander's fear seemed to evaporate through his mouth, leaving his tongue queer and dry. He and young Shako knew each other. Young Shako had often been up at the farm; once they had tried fishing for young silver trout no bigger than teaspoons in the upper reaches of the stream. Shako had seen Snowy too.

‘Yes,' Alexander said. ‘When're you coming for a ride with the cob and me and Snowy? You reckoned you'd come this week.'

‘Won't be to-day,' young Shako said. ‘The cob ain' here.'

‘Where's he gone?' Alexander said. ‘Where's everybody?'

‘Old Gal's hawkin' down in Ferrers. Dad and Charley and Plum gone over to Huntingdon.'

‘Long way.'

‘Ain't nothing,' young Shako said. ‘Jis skipped over about some ducks.'

‘Ducks?'

‘Selling some ducks or summat.'

Young Shako sat down on the grass, Alexander
with him, careless, as though he knew nothing and nothing had happened. Ducks? Ducks was funny. He lay on the grass, some inner part of himself alert and listening. Ducks was very funny.

‘You said we'd have a race,' he said. ‘You on the cob and me on Snowy.'

‘Cob'd eat 'im.'

‘Who would? What would?' Alexander said. ‘Snowy's been a race-horse.'

‘Well, so's the cob. We bought 'im from a jockey-fella. Out at Newmarket. Jockey fella named Adams. Best jockey in England. You heard on 'im ain' y?'

‘Yes, but what's that? Snowy's a real race-horse. You can see it. Some hunters came by the other day and he nearly went mad. He can smell the difference in horses. Besides, we know he's been a race-horse. Ask Maxie. He's got his pedigree.'

‘Pedigree? What the blarming oojah?' Young Shako said. ‘That's nothing. You know what a pedigree is?'

‘Yes.'

‘What is it?'

‘Well, it's what he is. What he's been.'

‘What the blarming oojah?' Shako said. ‘It's
summat wrong with 'is legs. Any fool knows that. Pedigree – any fool knows it's summat wrong wi' his legs.'

Alexander sat silent, almost defeated, then coming back again.

‘You're frightened to race, that's all. Make out the cob's gone to Huntingdon because you daren't race.'

‘Frit?' Shako said. ‘Who's frit? I'll race y' any day. Any time.'

‘All right. To-morrow,' Alexander said.

‘No.'

‘See. I told you. Daren't.'

‘What the blarming oojah! They ain't goin' be back from Huntingdon till Friday.'

Alexander stared at the sky, indifferent.

‘What time did they go?' he said.

‘Middle o' the night sometime,' young Shako said. ‘They were gone when I got up.'

They lay for a little while longer on the grass, talking, young Shako trying to talk of big two-pound trout seen farther downstream, in the still golden hollows of the backwater where the mill had been, but the mind of Alexander could not concentrate and he had eyes for nothing except the tiniest of
sand-coloured hen feathers clinging like extra petals to the edges of flowers and grass, suddenly visible because he could see them horizontally, a hen's-eye view – the same pale creamy-brown feathers that he sometimes found stuck by blood to the eggs that he collected morning and evening from the orange-boxes in the hen-roost at the farm. When he saw them, realizing fully what they meant, he lost track of what Shako was saying altogether. He got to his feet and made some excuse about going back to the farm. Shako got to his feet too, saying, ‘Yis, I gotta meet the old woman and hawk this cress', his deep black eyes careless and tired and Spaniard-like in the full sun, his voice calling Alexander back from the dozen paces he had taken across the field.

‘You wanna race Friday I'll race you if they're back. If they ain't back I'll race you Saturday.'

‘All right.' In that second Alexander came to his senses. ‘I'll come down and see when they are back,' he said.

He made the climb back up the slope, over the warm projecting rocks and up through the spinney and into the warm security of the breast-high grasses beyond it in a state of such excitement
that he could not think or speak to himself. He could only beat his hands like drumsticks on his brown bare knees in a tattoo of triumph and delight.

That night he knew that his uncle Bishop and Maxie sat up in the farm-yard with loaded guns, Maxie in the little corn-hovel, his Uncle under the cart-shed, from somewhere about midnight to the first colour of daylight about three o'clock, waiting for Shako. In the small back bedroom where in autumn and winter the long brown-papered trays of apples and pears would be laid out under his bed and over every inch of the cold linoleum of the floor, so that there was a good excuse for never kneeling to say his prayers, he kept awake for a long time, listening for something to happen, yet hoping and really knowing it wouldn't happen, suddenly falling asleep in a moment when as it were he wasn't looking, and waking an hour too late to fetch Snowy from the field.

Of what had happened down at the brook with
young Shako he did not say a word all that day, Thursday, and all the next. He heard more talk of two-legged foxes, talked to Maxie himself of the way the men had sat up listening and waiting and hearing nothing but the sound of Snowy kicking the fences over the dead quiet fields. He saw the constable come into the yard again, making a pretence of taking measurements, arguing, really whiling away, as Maxie said, the bleedin' government's time and doing nothing. He knew that his Uncle and Maxie sat up that night again, waiting for a Shako that he alone knew would not come, and he let it happen partly out of a queer impulse of secrecy and partly because of a fear that no one would ever believe his simple and exciting piece of detective fantasy.