Goat Mountain Read online

  He heaved forward and swung back into the mattress, springs squeaking, and heaved forward again and ended up somehow on top of his feet and legs. Paused for a moment, peered curiously around, eyes blinking, some kind of bird too fat to fly. Same thoughts as any bird, thoughts of nothing, no mind. Icy soul of anything made too long ago, bird or reptile or rock. And then he tottered off toward the outhouse.

  Old and frail, shape-shifter. Trick of the devil. But my own blood. Walking unsteadily beneath the trees, disappearing behind the dark plywood sheets. Outrageous sounds then, as if he were a great bellows flattened. I expected to see him emerge reduced in size, but he came out the same rounded shape still, tottering back toward me and, as always, not looking anywhere. Eyes that had never seen.

  You can’t stay awake forever, he said.

  I backed away, preferring the company of the dead man. Even with his tricks, he was safer. I retreated to that stream and ferns and hanging body, and my grandfather passed before me to the table for a second round of lunch. Made himself a sandwich with his hunting knife, licked the blade and stabbed it into the wood.

  My father risen now also, no longer armed, nothing to gather, no gun and shells. Pissing next to his bedroll and then Tom rising and doing the same and the two of them wandering camp. I turned away and pissed into the stream, leaving no trace, no scent to be tracked, rifle tucked in the crook of my arm. My head turned to look over my shoulder, not taking my eyes off my grandfather.

  The dead man did not smell good. We hung the meat of bucks to tenderize them, let them break down a bit for at least two days. But no buck smelled like this after only a day. The dead man making himself a nuisance, not properly gutted and no hide to remove. Bits of lung and heart and intestine, entrails, balls intact. Everything that we stripped from a buck. When I’d finished pissing, I moved farther away.

  The afternoon had become hot. I could feel it at my back from the meadow, invading the cooler air. All pieces of memory that I tell myself over and over now, the most important few days of my life, days I want to remember in every smallest detail, but how did I tell them to myself then? I have no access to that mind. Grim dream in stops and starts filled with outrageous shapes.

  My grandfather rose from the table and walked like a toddler to his bed to grab his rifle. Held it barrel to the sky and checked there was no shell in the chamber, or did he let the bolt slide back an inch farther and load a shell? No way to tell from twenty-five yards away. I held my rifle in both hands, ready to push down on the bale to lever a round. The rifle heavy from standing with it for hours, my shoulders stretched and hung.

  I sidestepped and put the truck between us, a shield, and waited until my grandfather heaved himself into the cab, and Tom after him, and then my father came around to my side, looking at me like he had never seen me before, and then I climbed into the back.

  Riding in this truck as if we shared a common destiny, as if we could be brought together. Rolling slowly out of those trees onto open dirt road, letting the earth turn beneath us. Passing the dead land of the imaginary buck, crossing into wide views and gentle slope that curved all the way up to the high ridges, rockfall and talus slopes. Afternoon still, and hot, but the time of shadows, each tree up that slope standing individually and marking itself against the ground. Every small plant and fallen branch and stone making itself known, until a hillside was more than could be seen. A texture only. The creation too much.

  My father driving slowly now. This would be a hunt. Low whine of the four-wheel drive, the feel of the truck held back in gear. End of day the time when deer would come out of the brush to feed in the open and under trees.

  We passed the turnoff to the switchbacks and bear wallow, continued on to the next wide ridge that sloped downward into white pines, both sugar and gray. Big Bertha coming into view, second-largest white pine in the state, a trunk ten feet thick and tapering only gradually until the very top, where it gnarled and kinked and crested in a wide flat plane of branches and needles that had always looked foreign to me, something from Africa or imagined lands, not from this place. Standing leagues above any other tree, a kind of signal, a living monument. Its bark almost pink in this light. Centuries made visible and real, a recognition of time that we could touch.

  We always stopped here, always walked up to that ancient trunk and touched it with a hand, even if briefly. It had to be done, looking up into that enormity.

  But my father passed without stopping, and I was still gazing back at the tree. A refusal of scale, a rupturing of normal form into this giant, an indication of what was always there lurking behind all that we believe. Any part of our world capable of this at any moment.

  My father driving us farther down into the lower glades. I knew now that was where he was headed. Two wide meadows that fell hundreds of yards down a hillside, one above the other with a strip of brush between. The most open land of the ranch, rimmed by sugar pines.

  The smell of sugar pines, sweeter like their name. And the enormous cones, two feet long and half a foot thick, wide petals of something not wood or flower but a substance all its own, curving outward together and darker at their tips. My father stopped in the final stand of trees before we’d enter the glades, stopped where he always had, and Tom was out to make room for my grandfather, who appeared without his rifle because he cared more for these cones than he ever had for deer.

  My grandfather a collector but only of these cones. Something I never understood. I hopped down and followed at a safe distance under the trees. Cool in here, the breeze that came at the end of every day, and the pines looked silky, the pale green arranged everywhere above us in brushed arcs, a kind of sanctuary, the trees very tall, taller here than any other stand of sugar pine I’d seen.

  My grandfather taking his first steps, leaning too far forward, a child in an enchanted garden. His tongue on his lower lip, mouth open and breathing hard. His hands forward, fingers open. Small hard bird’s eyes hunting for seeds. He reached down for a large cone and the weight of him seemed impossibly off-center, tiny legs behind and struggling now to catch up as he lurched forward and rose up and somehow he did not fall and he was holding a cone like a golden egg, peering at it up close, giant cone that perhaps was yet another way of reaching back in time. A pinecone nearly as large as his head, and he held it as he would a child or a lover.

  This is how I would like to remember him, standing with a newborn cone raised high in celebration under the soft pale sugar pines, a breeze and late-day sun reaching through, more cones everywhere at his feet. The closest I ever saw to rapture, and the only indication of something good or soft or innocent in him, the only time he might have had a soul.

  Fringe of his hair haloed in the light, his fingers pink and new as if he had only now entered the world, and that tongue working gently, pulsing forward and back, his only movement, as if speech had not yet been invented. What he felt or saw was sealed away from the rest of us.

  He turned the cone in his hands, and his wonder at it did not diminish. He was looking at it still as he walked toward the truck, and then he flipped it into the bed and turned away for another.

  He would do this for the rest of the afternoon, until the bed would be filled with these cones. He would want to keep them all, and there would be a quarrel with my father when it came time to pack the truck again, my father sliding the boxes of gear and the cones bunching and crushing. At my grandfather’s house on the lake, enormous piles of thousands of cones stacked behind the garage. A kind of nest? I never understood my grandfather, not one thing about him.

  My father and Tom had wandered off to the edge of the glade, and I followed, left my grandfather to his collecting. A wall of sunlight, the end of shade and cool breeze, grasshoppers flung in arcs through hot air, butterflies and dragonflies. I had to shade my eyes from the burn.

  My father lying in the dry yellow grass as if he were sunbathing, except his face was squinting in displeasure, eyes closed but no rest. Ants crawling over him, black f
igures on his arms and neck and boots.

  The pattern of wind in the grass, sweeping up the hill in rounded blows that veered and spread and vanished again. Silver gone yellow, returned to waiting, and then silver again, pressed low against the earth. No predicting where or when but only watching and waiting, seeing and forgetting. An element we could never hold, never capture, even as we breathed it. And the land in folds and rises already, preshaped. All made silent by the trees behind us, a dislocation of sound. What we saw seemed only a dream, another place of worship, but this time the congregation was left alone, the priest become a child tottering off into his cones.

  13

  DESERT THE HOME OF THE BIBLE. WE COME FROM DESERT. We’re meant to walk across dry ground, meant to breathe dry wind. This open glade of dry grass grown only to our shins, thin stalks with too much space between, not a place where more can grow. Hordes of us burning under the sun, water a clock and nothing more, step after step in our vast migrations, and how did we become so numerous?

  Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel, then Abel is gone, but there are enough people for Cain to build a city. We are sudden apparitions, risen out of the dust in great armies as Cain walked toward where he would found that city. Cain and the others we remember from the Old Testament are demigods. Noah lived nine hundred and thirty years. But we are more ephemeral, risen and walking, made of dust but filled with thirst. Dust that will not rest. And this is god’s will, but his cruelty was to make the dust think, so that it would know its thirst as it walked.

  Tom already far down that slope, a walker the same as thousands of generations before him, dissolving into the folds of earth, visible and then gone and then visible again, patterns sweeping over him, patterns he would not see or know but would participate in nonetheless.

  And I followed, as of course I would. Walking is all we know. Only the broken lie down and refuse to walk. My father with all taken away: his rifle, his will, his future. There was nothing I could do but leave him. The feel of that ground beneath my boots, ripped and changed forever, sound of it against the wind, a scab-land of spiked burrs and yellow thorns, dislocated and without source, brought here and forgotten.

  Some feeling of hope at the beginning of every walk, something in the act of setting out, a pleasure. The scattering of small lizards before me, bodies without momentum, a run and instant stop then run again. Gravity with no hold at that scale.

  I looked for the tallest of the grasses and pulled one from the ground, bent the end back carefully and creased it over itself and tied to form a slipknot. Squatting with my rifle close, the stock of it on the ground and barrel on my shoulder. I kept an eye on Tom where he was disappearing below and also on the edge of the glade above, where my father and grandfather were lost to their own callings.

  A small loop now at the end of the grass, slipknot noose for lizards, and I stood and walked carefully, each footfall held back and erased, and I followed these tiny remnants of time, plated backs and scaled necks, holes only for ears and expressionless mouth, eyes direct apprehenders of the world, no mediation, no thought. The first hunters and no desire to hunt but only shadows of movement and instinct to devour. If I held still, I became the same as any rock, unrecognized. All forgotten instantly, each moment new, the world as it is. On moving, I became something again. And so I became rock then movement then rock then movement then rock again across that desert until the yellow stalk I held outstretched with its loop hovered just above a fat lizard with blue along the sides of its neck.

  I was very still, and the grass in my hand trembled only slightly, moving less than the stalks around us that leaned over and shook and went upright again. Sound of that to a lizard. Head jointed, twitched to one side, cocked upward. Body a sack of thick skin, slumped.

  I lowered the noose very slowly, and the lizard cocked its head the other way, gauging what? I lowered until the edge of the loop came down past his chin, and then I yanked back and up and the lizard dangled midair in a panic that reached back to everything that had ever crawled. Legs and tail thrashing at air, body kinking, all soundless. The wind in the grasses and trees all that I could hear. I held him up close, looked into his eyes, and still no recognition. Tail a snake in a wave pattern, as responsive as water in wind, just as conscious. Yellow collar, blue throat, warm air, all equivalent.

  I lowered him to the ground and he charged at the collar. I let go. A lizard now with a stalk trailing, and perhaps it would trail always.

  Every field populated. Humans not sovereign. The lizard a predator, a giant, but not enough of him to cover this ground. All has been taken over by insects. Hundreds or thousands within reach no matter where we stand. I went down on my hands and knees, the rifle in dirt and bare grass, and watched the infestation. Ants black or black and red, polished and untouched and their legs not quite reaching ground, suspended just enough to leave no track. Stink bugs a dull gray and folded, bright orange along their edges. Grasshoppers nearly invisible against the light brown clumps of dirt, waiting until the very last moment to jump. The activity of the world mostly invisible to us.

  I rose and walked again, the hot air and late sun a pleasure, even the lizards and insects a pleasure, something about being that age, something I have trouble recovering now. I look at a field now and see nothing but time.

  But when I was eleven, time was unlimited and unknown, life a thing that stretched infinitely, and I walked through grass without being able to feel my ankles or knees or back, nothing yet failed, joints a rumor only, muscle and bone not yet separating. I felt no guilt at all, no remorse, and no worry as I know it now, only impatience, only movement, and this slope caved and rose and the wind swept past and I could see across to other mountains and feel the mountain rise behind me.

  I was looking for bucks again, along every edge. Approaching the line of brush and trees that divided the two glades, I slowed and crouched and kept my rifle low. The shadows stretching toward me, a thin ruff of cover. I ducked beneath branches of small gray pines and found Tom sitting against a trunk, hidden in shadow.

  No sign of a buck, he whispered.

  I sat against a trunk ten feet away. Our rifles across our thighs. A few more trees in front of us and then the bright yellow of the enormous glade below, large enough to be its own region. A ridge in the center with rock outcrops. A fold to the left that fell down into a large stand of sugar pines. Wide arcs of open field to either side, and a line of brush high on the right, a fire road hidden behind it.

  Breezy here, cooler in the shade, cicadas pulsing. Large dragonflies cruising the margins. A few small white butterflies in their jagged flights just above the tips of the dry grasses.

  I was there the day you were born, Tom said. There was no sign.

  Sign of what?

  Nothing to warn us. If anything, you seemed like nothing. I had a beer, I got bored, and I left.

  What was my mother like?

  Ask your dad.

  He never says.

  Well.

  The lower glade a great burning disk, and we rode an edge of it, tilting higher. The heat of it.

  It’s not just that you’ve done one thing, Tom said.

  What’s that?

  The problem is that you’re never going to follow any rule, ever.

  What does that mean?

  It means nothing. That’s the problem. There’s nothing left to hold anything together.

  I didn’t understand what Tom was saying. I do understand now. And I wish I could talk with him now. He was my best chance. My father and grandfather too distorted. But at the time, I said nothing. I only looked at him, this familiar face, eyes floating somewhere behind his glasses, this face like a boy’s.

  I would help, he said. You know that. If there were anything I could do for your family, I would help.

  Thank you.

  Well enjoy your last freedom. You’ll be sitting here like this, but the tree trunks will be bars and the wind will smell like piss and shit and sweat and puke and your but
t will be on concrete. You won’t be holding a rifle. No one could have seen what you are, but they’ll all find out when we get back. And from then on, every time anyone looks at you, you’ll see what they think of you.

  I looked out at that burning plain and the rock outcrops in the center, heaved up and broken. Scattered remnants fallen to both sides, broken long enough ago they were covered in lichen. But of course that’s how I see it now. At the time, I saw the glade, the outcrop of rock, and I thought nothing of it, had no sense of nostalgia or time or ruin that could make broken rock the scattered remnants, had no more thought than any lizard during moments like this that might have held a key. All wasted on my younger self, and I wish I could remember exactly what Tom said, because there might have been something more, something that would help now, but what I remember most is what he said next.

  You’ll rot for thirty years. And when you get out, I’ll be waiting. You’ll feel it before you hear it, the rifle slug in your back. Just remember, when you get out, that’s what’s coming.

  I remember that clearly because of the shock of it, because it was not like Tom, didn’t fit with any other memory of him.

  Tom walked into the glade, into the heat and sun and grasses, and angled off to the left, downhill. Camouflaged T-shirt and jeans, crouched, moving carefully, returning to the hunt.

  And so I hunted too. What I was born for. Emerged in the light and followed the edge of brush uphill, remained close and hidden against it, my right arm scraped at by spines and thorns. The lower glade an arena, and the two of us circling along its edges in opposite directions.

  Tom working his way toward that stand of sugar pines at the bottom, but I could see nothing there except shade and more of the cones that appeared giant even from a distance. Tom become smaller and nearly invisible against the dark brush, known only by his movement. What we expected to find was unclear. We could already see the entire glade, and there was plenty of space under those trees, no place for a buck to hide. We were circling a great emptiness.