Goat Tales

            I took one last swipe at the floor with the mop and looked at my handy work. Standing on the back stoop, the screen door propped open, the bucket set on the step next to me, I’d mopped my way out of the now clean and empty house. Moving day. I glanced through the kitchen into the living room, the front window sparkling in the early morning light, the rug vacuumed, shampooed and smelling free of any doggy odor. The house, bare of any trace of our residence was cleaner then it had ever been while we lived there.

            Bruce peeked past me. “Looks good,” he said as he picked up the bucket of dirty water and dumped it into the flower bed.

            I carried the mop, paper towels, and bucket now full of cleaning supplies to the back of the truck. Bruce followed the vacuum in his hand.

            The tailgate was down, exposing all our tightly and systematically packed possessions to the world. Bruce slid the paper towels in an empty pocket of space, making the packing job even tighter. I lifted the vacuum into the one empty corner of space in the back of the pick-up.

            “It can’t go there,” Bruce said, “that’s the spot for Anabel.” Anabel was our goat.

            “Where’s it go then?” I asked trying to envision the diagram Bruce had drawn weeks before that neatly displayed how every box, piece of furniture, sock, shoe, pot or pan would fit into the truck for our 1000 mile move from Illinois to Virginia.  He’d even duck-taped his shoes and socks inside the back bumper in order to not waste any space.

            He didn’t answer right away, so I turned my head to repeat the question. Bruce stared at me and then grinned. “I forgot about the vacuum,” he said.

            I looked at the 2 foot by 2 foot space neatly cleared in the right back corner of the pick-up. Just big enough for a little goat to stand, lie down, turn around. Just big enough for an old upright Hoover vacuum to fit. Obviously, not big enough for both.

            I wanted to leave the vacuum. We’d paid twenty-five dollars for it at a garage sale five years before. I figured we gotten out money’s worth. But, it still worked.

“We can’t leave a perfectly good vacuum,” Bruce argued, which is how we moved a 1000 miles with Bruce, me, two dogs, and a goat all riding in the cab of the truck.

            Two miles down the road, Anabel’s little cloven hooves were digging into my bare legs. Despite the heat, it wasn’t a good day to be wearing shorts. Bruce drove. Piper, the border collie, curled up at my feet. Finn, the golden, lay on the bench seat between Bruce and me. I folded Anabel’s back legs under her, making her sit like a dog. As I bent her front legs under her, trying to get her to lie down, her back end popped up. When I pushed her back end down, her front end came up. About the third try, pushing down on her back with my chest, I managed to get her to lie down.

It lasted about fifteen minutes. Piper stood up to change places with Finn. Finn stood up to go down on the floor. Anabel stood up to join in the fun and we started the whole process over. Tiny round little black and blues were appearing on my legs.

About the fourth time the dogs decided to change places, we pulled into a rest area. We leashed up the dogs and Anabel and headed to the dog walk area. Leaving everyone with Bruce, I headed to the bathroom. When I came out, a small crowd was gathering around the dog walk area. I wanted to get in the truck and leave, but I was attached to Finn and Piper.

The dogs, tails wagging, stared happily at the growing crowd. Anabel was standing on her back legs, trimming the bottom leaves off a young maple. Bruce handed me the leashes and headed to the rest room, when a woman came up to me.

“What kind of dog is that?” she asked pointing at Anabel, while Finn pulled on the leash trying to lick the woman’s hand.

All fiction writers are liars, Garrison Keillor says. At that point, I wasn’t writing much fiction. But I was tempted to say "she’s a rare European Goat Dog.” Instead, I told the truth. “She’s a goat.” The expression on the woman’s face was still worth it.