Read Online Goat by Brad Land - Free Book Online Page B

not be worn by every man, but only by him who is worthy to wear it.
    K APPA S IGMA C REDO ,
Bononia Docet,
Kappa Sigma Pledge Manual
    Ernest Howard Crosby, a brother and poet, wrote:
    No one could tell me where my soul might be;
    I searched for God but He eluded me;
    I sought my brother out and found all three.
    Bononia Docet,
Kappa Sigma Pledge Manual
    5
    AFTER BRETT AND I leave the interstate and take the Clemson exit, the tiger paws start. On the asphalt, footprints painted orange, five feet long, five feet wide, like monster tigers have walked there. I could lie down on them with only my head sticking over the edge of the toes.
    We pass fields, cows bending to the grass. Some sit, and I remember what my father told me about sitting cows, that it means rain. But the sky is clear and bright.
    We stop at a gas station called Tiger Mart. A square building painted orange, Go Tigers in black lettering above the doorframe.
    Inside the store, Brett and I buy cigarettes. I stuff the receipt in my pocket because I’ve started to keep things. Mostly just receipts and change, but anything really. A glass bluebird from my parents’ house. A tiger cut out from an Exxon gas card. Things like that.
    Outside we lean against Brett’s car and smoke.
    Too hot to smoke, he says. He looks up.
    Yeah, I say. Brett wipes his forehead with the back of his palm. Pulls the smoke. Drops it on the ground and crushes it with a foot. Looks over at me.
    You ready? he says. He knows I’m nervous. And even though things feel okay between us now, they’re still different. I know he feels like he needs to look after me, but part of him is broken too. The thing that happened to me a year ago is his thing too. And he is aloof most of the time. Stays in his head. Speaks only when necessary. And even though he doesn’t say anything I can feel his apprehension about me coming here, his nervousness, the way he smokes hard, the way he turns his head down the road toward Clemson in the afternoon heat.
    Sure, I say. I’m ready. Look down the road and squint my eyes. Brett pulls out another cigarette and lights it and I do too because that’s what we do when we’re nervous. Brett opens his door and gets in his car. Through the glass, the cigarette on his lips, smoke filling the inside of the car.
       
    THE MONSTER TIGER paws are painted the whole way into town. We cross under a brick railroad arch, the trees on both sides green with summer. Brett tells me the weather in Clemson works like this: in the summer and into fall it is bone-hot, heat rising opaque from the asphalt, grass burnt, soil fired hard. And when fall is over, around late October, the heat stops and the hard cold begins.
    When we get to Main Street, I know I’m there. Shops on both sides. Everything related to the school—Tiger Pharmacy, Tiger Sports Shop, Tiger Sports Bar. Orange everywhere—burnt-orange brick, signs, doors, walls painted orange.
    When Main Street ends there’s an open field. Girls in bathing suits laid out in the grass. Shirtless boys throwing footballs and Frisbees.
    Behind the field, the campus. Everything the same dull burnt-orange brick as the buildings downtown. A clock tower standing over everything. A right turn at the end of Main and a left past a soccer field, the football stadium called Death Valley. Lights at the top of the stadium like fists.
    The stadium is called Death Valley for the obvious reason, it’s meant to be a fearsome place where teams come to play and leave bleeding, but also because a legendary Clemson football coach, Frank Howard, got a rock from Death Valley, California, and had it attached to a waist-high monument at the place where the football players enter the stadium. Told the players that they couldn’t touch his rock unless they came to send people home limping. Players rub Howard’s Rock for good luck and to remind themselves that they are there to inflict pain.
    Cars everywhere, dropping off, pulling in, turning left, backing up,