Sweeping Up After Heroes

In My Defense, the Goat Started It

There is a goat on the roof of the Value Mart, and it is, as far as anyone can tell, completely fine, which is more than I can say for the Value Mart.

"That's not our jurisdiction," I say, watching it chew on what used to be a HVAC unit, forty feet up, like it's a snack it ordered special. "Goats aren't a hero thing."

"The goat is not the job," Dad says, already unloading the truck. "The goat is a consequence of the job."

The job, it turns out, is that a hero named Torque got into it with somebody last night over the Value Mart parking lot, and Torque's whole power is spinning things, which sounds cute until you learn "things" includes a delivery truck, a shopping cart corral, and, apparently, a petting-zoo trailer that had the extremely bad luck of being parked two spots over. The goat rode the storm. The goat, honestly, seems like it's having the best day of anyone involved.

"Somebody's going to have to get the goat down," Deshawn says. Deshawn's our newest full-timer, twenty-six, built like he could bench-press the truck, and constitutionally incapable of hiding an emotion on his face, which makes him either the worst or the most honest person to have on a crew, depending on the day. Right now his face is doing pure, unfiltered dread. "I don't do roofs. I've told y'all. I don't do roofs, and I especially don't do roofs with livestock."

"I'll get the goat," I say.

"Nora." Dad, warning tone.

"I'm sixteen, not made of glass. I'll use the ladder like a normal person."

What actually happens is I get halfway up the ladder, the goat looks at me with the specific contempt only livestock can produce, and Grandpa Tomás, who was supposed to be sitting in the van "resting his knee," appears at the base of the ladder holding a bag of Value Mart produce he apparently just bought off the shelf mid-collapse.

"Carrots," he says, like this explains everything, which, annoyingly, it does. "Works every time."

It works every time. Five minutes later the goat is eating out of Grandpa's hand on solid ground, and I am back to the actual job, which is assessing whether Torque's little tantrum cracked the Value Mart's foundation, which it did, extensively, in a pattern I'm starting to recognize the way you recognize a friend's handwriting.

"This isn't random damage," I say. "Look at the c***k lines. They all point toward the loading dock."

"Coincidence," Grandpa says, too fast, in the specific tone he's used every time I bring up anything Meridian-adjacent since the warehouse. He's been doing that for three days now. Fast answers. Short answers. The kind of answers you give when you've already decided what you're not going to say and you're just waiting to see if the question goes away on its own.

It does not go away on its own. I've had the folder for three days, hidden in my closet behind a shoebox of shoes I don't wear, and I've read every page of it at least twice, and here is what I know: Meridian Holdings owns the Pemberton Street Laundromat building, owned it quietly, through two shell companies, for six years before Meridian the hero ever showed up to "save" it. And now, apparently, Meridian Holdings also owns the loading dock at this Value Mart, according to a permit filing Priya pulled up on her phone in the parking lot while eating a hot dog she got from the world's most inappropriately-timed food truck.

"So every building that gets hit," I say slowly, "the actual company that owns the building, underneath the shell companies, is the same one."

"So far," Priya says, chewing. "Three for three. Might be a coincidence."

"You don't actually believe that."

"No. I said it because saying 'we've uncovered evidence of a possible conspiracy involving a licensed superhero' out loud in a Value Mart parking lot felt like a lot for a Tuesday."

Here's my self-contained problem for the day, underneath the goat and the crumbling foundation and the general Tuesday-ness of everything: Deshawn overhears us. Deshawn, who is loyal to this crew in a way that's almost embarrassing, who brought soup to my house the week I had the flu even though he'd known me two months, who does not have a single manipulative bone in his large, earnest body. Deshawn hears "conspiracy" and "superhero" in the same sentence and gets a look on his face like a kid who just found out there's no tooth fairy, except the tooth fairy is capitalism, and it's actively worse than he imagined.

"We should tell someone," he says. "Like, an actual someone. A journalist. The news."

"Deshawn." I say it fast, the way Grandpa's been saying things fast to me all week, and I hate how much I sound like him in that second. "We don't have proof of anything. We have a folder and a hunch and a very suspicious goat situation."

"The goat's not suspicious, the goat's just a goat."

"That's not the point."

"Then what is the point, Nora, because from where I'm standing, the point is that a hero's company might be blowing up buildings he already secretly owns, for reasons nobody's saying out loud, and everybody who works here is acting like that's normal, and I don't want to be the guy who found out and did nothing. My mom raised me better than that."

And there it is, the thing I don't have a joke fast enough to cover. Because Deshawn's right, and I know he's right, and I've been sitting on this exact feeling for three days with nothing to show for it but a hidden folder and a headache. I open my mouth to make it funny, to make it small enough to carry, and what comes out instead is the truth, plain, no punchline attached.

"I don't know what to do with it either," I say. "I've had it three days and I froze. I didn't tell my dad. I barely told Priya. I've just been reading it over and over like the fourth time through it's going to explain itself."

Deshawn looks at me for a second like he wasn't expecting that, and honestly, neither was I.

"Okay," he says, quieter now. "Then we figure it out together. But we don't sit on it forever. Deal?"

"Deal."

Grandpa's watching this whole exchange from by the truck, still holding the goat's leash, which somebody produced from somewhere I genuinely do not want to know about, and when I catch his eye, he doesn't look away fast enough to hide what's on his face, which is something between pride and fear, in roughly equal measure, like he's watching me walk toward a door he spent twenty years trying to keep shut.

"Grandpa," I say, walking over. "I know about Meridian Holdings. I know it goes back before the laundromat. I need you to stop doing the fast-answer thing and just tell me how deep this goes."

He's quiet for a long moment. The goat headbutts his leg gently, looking for more carrots, and he absently pats its head, buying himself time the way he always does, tools and animals and small tasks standing in for the words he doesn't want to say yet.

"Deeper than three buildings," he finally says. "Deeper than Meridian, probably. I've been finding pieces of this since before you were born, and every time I think I've found the bottom of it, there's another floor."

"How many floors are we talking about?"

He looks at me, and for once, there's no deflection in it at all.

"I genuinely don't know," he says. "And that's the part that scares me."

Behind us, the goat, apparently done with carrots and done with this conversation, wanders directly into the crime scene tape and knocks over a cone, and somewhere by the truck, Dad shouts my name in the specific tone that means the goat is now, somehow, my responsibility again.

I don't move yet. Because Grandpa just told me the truth for the first time in three days, and it's worse than the lie, and I need one more second before I go be normal about a goat.