The Junkyard

My brother and me like to tinker around with old cars. I had this red ’55 Ford Thunderbird that was needing a part, and we heard about this junkyard that kept a bunch of old cars and would sell their parts. So, we went out there and talked to the guy who owned it and he said we could just go out there in this big old junkyard, find the part we needed, and bring it back to pay for it. Well, me and my brother got out there and were having a grand time exploring all the old cars and things. My brother’s deathly scared of snakes, though, and there was lots of tall grass around, so I was going in front and kicking through the tall grass. I came around to this little clearing among a patch of old cars and I stopped because there was this big sinkhole in front of me, right in the middle of this big old junkyard. Well, I looked over the edge and I couldn’t see the bottom. So, I found me a big rock and I tossed it in there, but I never heard it hit the bottom. Me and my brother were real puzzled then, and we got to thinking, maybe we could hear something bigger hit the bottom. There was a big truck transmission sitting right next to the hole, so I said to my brother, “Why don’t you grab one end, and I’ll grab the other, and we’ll start swinging this transmission until we can get it in that hole, to see when it hits the bottom.” He thought that sounded like a good idea, so he took one end and I took the other, and we got to swinging it pretty good, and then let it sail right in the hole. We listened and we listened – never heard it hit the bottom. As we were sitting listening at the edge of the hole, I heard something behind, and I turned to see this big white goat, one of the biggest goats I’d ever seen, with horns about a foot long, charging right straight at me. Well, you’d never believe it, but I jumped out of the way, and the goat missed me but he jumped straight into that hole. My brother and I couldn’t believe it, but we never heard the goat hit the bottom either. We were sitting puzzling over the whole thing, when the junkyard owner came out, and was looking around, said, “Have you seen my goat?” I said, “Was he big and white with real long horns?” He said, “Yeah, that sounds like him.” And I said, “Well, you’d never believe it, but we were standing here, and that goat charged straight at me and I jumped out of the way and he jumped straight in that hole there.” And the junkyard man said, “Well, huh, that can’t be my goat. He was tied to a big truck transmission.”

Paraphrased from a story told by Wayne Henderson, 2/16/08