Goat Mountain Read online

  I stood there breathing hard. I couldn’t hear a thing, only the static of my own head welling up.

  Marooned on this hillside, abandoned by my kind. The dark bulk of the mountain rolling beneath me. The brush all around a malevolence, watching and waiting.

  I was too angry to move. Just frozen with it, in disbelief.

  But the truck wasn’t coming back. It had vanished into another fold, and the temperature was falling fast, and I was wearing only a T-shirt and the buck was laid out on the road and it was miles back to camp.

  I didn’t know what to do, but I walked back down the road to the buck. There was no other option. I would need to try to carry the buck to camp.

  I found him in the road, a shadow against other shadows, this night without a moon, and I knelt in front of the cavity, careful to avoid the pile of entrails. I felt around in the dirt for my knife, having to crawl like a blind man, my fingers sifting dust until I found the blade. I wiped it on my jeans and then I reached for his hind legs. The Achilles tendon and sack of musk, bitter and maddening, and I sliced the gap between bone and tendon, a natural hollow covered by nothing more than thin hide. I cleared both legs in this way then reached for the forelegs. These I snapped at the elbow, broke until the bone jutted out, and I slipped each foreleg through a hindleg, making a backpack. Those jutting bones slipped through and caught on the Achilles tendons.

  My knife sheathed and rifle in hand, I lay down beside the buck, my back against his belly, and slipped his hooked legs over my shoulders, pulled his neck and head and antlers over my chest, cradled in close. Then I pushed up off the ground to a sitting position and struggled to stand.

  The buck weighed more than I did. Maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, even without the guts, and the weight was the same as stone. Hard and unyielding and real. I took a step forward up that hill, and another, and my legs were shaking, my back caving. There was no way I could do this for a couple miles.

  I did try. I kept moving, hunched forward and pulling and placing one leg and then another. His head and antlers thumping against my chest, a new kind of beast fused with man, walking together and sharing the same breath and blood. Hollowed out, but hide and hooves and antlers shielding the bareness and weakness of man. And what would I become? If I made it all the miles to camp, would I gain hooves?

  I believed this animal could become me. I felt that. I was a child still, and so none of the boundaries of this existence were set. All was possible. Metamorphosis. Desire and will and despair strong enough to change physical form and find a truer shape. My legs thinned at the calves and feet hardening, shrinking, and my thighs strengthening and rotating at the joint. A ridge across the top of my skull and bone growing, my neck thickening against the weight. Hair across my arms more coarse and dense and matting, skin toughening into hide. All sound magnified, coming closer, minute and exact, scent of every plant distinct, eyes finding light in shadow. All thought gone and replaced by the world. The immediacy and enormity of that world, and to become a part of it, finally, no longer removed. The curse of humanity is to lose the world, thought the loss of immersion.

  No doubts, no indecision, only instinct. I was something entirely other than the buck. And the night was not immediate to me. I did not know every sound and movement, could not smell most of what was in the air. I had no hide to shield me.

  If I could have transformed, I could have carried that weight. But I remained human and weak and faltered and fell sideways onto the ground, onto the buck, this backpack of flesh still warm.

  I pushed his head and antlers away and slipped free of his legs and stood and didn’t know what to do. The night black, truly black, the stars bright above but somehow casting no light on the ground. A separation of impossible distances, this lower world lost to the light.

  I grabbed those horns and pulled the buck, dragged him across the ground, uphill. Walking backward, stooped over, pulling with everything I had, wandering over this dark earth dragging a dead body limp and heavy.

  Hell not what we think of, populated and busy, torments everywhere and flames, figures hopping this way and that to distract and entertain. Hell will be solitary. Each of us dragging across an endless dark expanse, featureless. Hell will be an endless task. Nearly impossible to drag this body even a few more feet, my back in agony, and yet this will go on for a night entire, and then a confusion of nights and time lost and years passing and lifetimes and finally geologic time, the surface shifting beneath my feet, mountains rising and forming and wearing away and still this dragging and each moment too much, each moment unbearable. Hell is time refusing to pass and the enormity of it waiting still to be passed.

  The body we drag in hell is our own, all that we’ve been and the weight of that, pulling backward and not seeing where we’re going, same as when we lived. Directionless, blind, pointless. Our suffering not building to anything, refusing meaning. Only dragging on.

  The body catching on root and scrub and rock, snagging. Having to heave and yank but with no back left and thighs burning, and when the weight drags again it has gained resistance, the ground a gatekeeper, refusing passage.

  Our sight will be the first sense to go in hell, because it was most precious to us in life. We’ll have it only long enough to see the stars above and learn their distance. We’ll spend some endless number of nights believing they might come closer, believing we might reach them. We’ll come to rely upon them as a consolation, and without meaning to we’ll begin thinking of them as a goal. They’ll offer escape, another place, and then they’ll seem fainter, less distinct, and this will last long enough we won’t be able to remember whether the stars were ever more distinct but our desire for them won’t have lessened, and then they’ll suddenly be gone entirely, just gone and no light anywhere and we won’t know whether we’re still able to see or not. We’ll want to rub at our eyes, poke and prod and try to bring them to life, but our hands will not be free.

  We’ll focus then on sound, the dragging of this body over rough earth. And because we’ll have nothing else, we’ll make a world of that sound. A scuff of hide over dirt all I could hear on this hillside, a heft and weight general and entire, but then sound separates and small stones shift beneath and roll and grind against outcrops of stone, small ridges like spine protruding, ripping at the hide, sound of tearing, and we can’t know what we’re dragging, an animal with stiff hairs or our own bodies because the sound of tearing is a sound of fear and can’t be known. Hooves over the ground, we should be able to hear those, some track they make, but the dirt in millions of grains and hundreds of small stones and momentary drag across tufts of grass and scrape against root and brush are so many sounds all at once we become lost. Sound itself a landscape of hell, no escape at all, and now we’re dragging in two worlds that grow further apart, world of touch and world of sound, the body we drag no longer indicated and perhaps not our own.

  Touch. Physical weight and strain, and this endless night colder and colder, all warmth fading and the sun never to rise again. Muffled world, blind and soundless, but not detached. Pain and nowhere else to focus but on that pain. The failure of the body, grinding of bone against bone, splitting of muscle, and nerves light up our dark sky. We have some sense of seeing again, but this time inside us, bright spots of grinding and tearing that race in slim lines, impulse and pattern, red network of pain, and seeing this removes us from it, limits what we feel, and we think we can manage, but then all goes dark again and now we know every pattern, every raceway, but only feel its surge, don’t see a thing. Pain. The sensation of pain, always fresh. And there is no other sense. Taste and smell never mattered during our lives, and they don’t matter in hell. We’ve forgotten them. And though we continue to walk backward, dragging this weight, we no longer know because we’ve become lost inside ourselves, each hell private and contained.

  17

  THE NIGHT COLD, THE AIR SINKING AROUND ME. I COULD FEEL IT thin as it chilled, and I wanted some shield from it. Dragging that buck m
y only way of generating heat, but my strength was failing. Pulling in short yanks now, no longer able to keep the movement unbroken.

  The buck was too large. I held those antlers and pulled but the rest of him was a weight formless and extending, the back half of him invisible to me now and fusing with the ground, sending shoots into the earth and anchoring. Flesh become root and curling around rock. No way to dislodge him. Grown in darkness, black sun.

  This night a day that I could not see. His neck stretched as I pulled, his body elongating and springing back. My steps reaching nowhere and all reference gone. Eternity.

  I was not going to make it. Shivering now in the cold, clammy from chilled sweat, my T-shirt thin. I dropped his antlers, a hollow sound that came from somewhere else, directionless, my body tilting, and set the rifle down carefully in that rack, where I would not lose it, and unsheathed my knife. I had to sever the back half of him, the part rooted in the ground, and I had to work quickly.

  I knelt before him and cut through hide and flesh at the lower edge of his rib cage, where he was thinnest. Pulling the flesh taut and yanking upward with the blade.

  Thick muscles of his back, pushing until blade met bone. I stood and leaped over him, become nimble in the darkness, same as any imp or devil, and kicked his spine. His back rubbery and resistant as a root, impossible to crack. So I knelt and took the knife in both hands, blade up, stabbed low into thick muscle, tore upward.

  He was shifting in the darkness, changing shape, not wanting to be severed. The slope rolling beneath us, becoming steeper, and I held on to that knife, digging a trough.

  The night colder and colder, the sun never to rise, flesh severed and thickening and severed again, and I seemed to make no progress. His back an endless thing, and so I must have been tearing holes all along it. But finally I came to bone, and placed my hand over his spine and there was no meat on either side and I could feel the rough discs laid one on another.

  I kept my hand in place, my one reference in that night, and fit the tip of the knife into a seam between discs. All that we can know housed in bone. Every image, memory, thought, and touch cabled in bone and easily pried apart. The mechanics of what we think is a soul. Hell a place where all is dismantled, all laid bare, all reduced to blood and bone and flesh gone dead, pieces of us lying in darkness never to form again. Working my knife side to side and feeling the discs separate, a gap forming, stabbing deeper into that cord that connects us to the world or perhaps creates it.

  We don’t know what makes life. Spine and brain hooked up to a pump and oxygen, but that’s not enough. We can put all these parts back together forever and never make a thought, and perhaps this is our task in hell, to try to build what we had taken for granted. Feeling our way across the ground searching for some missing piece, some hunk of discarded flesh that will provide a spark.

  I stabbed into that spine and wedged the blade until all was severed and lost and only a few ribbons of meat left to attach one half of him to the other. I sawed quickly at these, my knife digging into the ground, and finally was free.

  I was quick to grab my rifle and pull at those horns, before he could grow together again or root his upper half. Lighter now, half his weight gone, dragging again over the earth. Still heavy enough I had to pull with both hands, stepping backward, my rifle wedged between his antlers.

  Veering into brush, scraped along my side, angling back again, my heels digging, the sound of him like canvas, that hide thick. Dragging and dragging in darkness, and the sound of this dragging became everything. Never continuous but separate with each footstep, delayed and burdened, shortened and he grew heavier, managed to expand somehow or increase in density. Sixty pounds, maybe, dead weight, but it felt like more than that, and I hadn’t known this road was so long. Not even at the fork yet, at the top of the glades. First cold breath of air coming up the road toward me, no longer still.

  No heat left, and the air coming to take whatever might remain. My back bowed and gone rigid. Looking down I thought I could see his eyes, some greenish light at the back of them, some night vision luminescent still, faint enough I might only be imagining it, vanished in a blink, but then there it was again, faint galaxy of stars far away, green or perhaps blue, and there were two galaxies, both eyes because I held his antlers so that he was facing me, as if we would meet and I would always pull him closer as I retreated.

  The two of us hung in space, satellites around some center not yet discovered, the mountainside lurching beneath us. Rotating faster and I could not see anything except those two universes bright and faint as dreams, the charms of hell, meant to distract, promises from the deep. Attached to a great weight that was ending me.

  He was growing again, sending down roots again, invisible in darkness, long thick shoots into the earth as we dragged more and more slowly across the ground, all hidden by this distraction, and then I caught the outward tracer, the quick orbit of a fly. The sound of it sudden and far too loud, and I wondered if it had been there all along. I didn’t know. Visible now, and others also in their arcs like shooting stars, a green-blue that matched the light from deep inside the buck’s eyes, an ethereal light, promise of heaven, an endless trick in hell.

  No flies in darkness. Another trick. They were meant to sleep and wait for day. Eyes large and made of many small mirrors of light. The buck had become what fed upon him. These eyes of his not his at all.

  I panicked now, dropped his antlers and my rifle and ran up that dark channel careening into brush: scrub oak, chamise, coyote brush, buckbrush, all the inventions of Hades. Fingers ridged and clumped and sharp and reaching toward me. I was eleven years old, only eleven, and the terrors I could imagine were not yet limited but were closer to their sources. That buck a demon that could conjure other demons and warp the world.

  I pulled my knife, and I cut at the air, spun in that blackened road and ripped at all that came up from behind. Blade finding nothing, and that was more frightening still. Lunging at vacuums, shadows that breathed in close and vanished.

  You could say this is what I’ve been doing ever since, in all these years, that nothing has changed, this moment suspended infinitely, repeating. But meanwhile the world has ratcheted on, each action following the next as if all would lead somewhere.

  I walked back down to the buck, stepping slowly, not able to see the ground, feeling my way as if at the edge of some cliff, the ocean below, arms out and knife still ready. Steeper ground than I remembered, a fall with each foot and then scrape of dirt and rock and feel of my fingers against nothing.

  The buck waiting. Clung to the earth and burrowing into rock, rib and spine and flesh grafting into plant form, rigid cell walls, plunging downward, digging, grafting into mineral, walls hardened and hardening still, fault lines and ruptures reaching below where I stood now. I had very little time.

  I needed to sever that neck. That was the only way. Sever the neck, grab his antlers and my rifle and run.

  Empty, ragged gap at his throat, cut through to bone. Thick muscle behind this. I knelt again at this altar, every altar in the afterlife a place of blood and butchery, just as in life, and I sliced through hide and into flesh, carving down through everything I could not see. Waiting for the knife to hit stone, the metamorphosis. Neck turned to stone that would enclose my knife and lodge it there forever, reach upward into my hand and bind. The feel of my own flesh crystallizing, blood gone rigid, caught in this act and held. What does it mean when we turn to stone?

  I dug through that neck as quickly as I could until I heard metal on bone and wrapped the knife around, cutting everything that might still be hidden. I grabbed the antlers then and yanked backward hard. Cracking sound, and I yanked again and twisted and then I dug that blade between vertebrae and stabbed and finally severed.

  A severed head. I couldn’t help but look at the buck’s eyes and see that they were still galaxies entire, made of some substance that wouldn’t fade, a luminescence beyond blood. The buck not diminished.


  I was careful not to let his open neck touch ground. As long as I kept him aloft, he would not root again. I held his antlers with one hand at my shoulder and let his eyes look up into the sky. I knew not to look longer at them.

  Heavier than I ever would have dreamed, that head and neck and antlers, and I had to stoop over to pull up that road, and the weight was too much for one hand. Dead weight of flesh, our bodies so much heavier than we imagine.

  I wasn’t sure what to do, standing in place bent over and breathing hard, my shoulder burning, but I slipped the rifle barrel up until it lay across my shoulders and then I could grab the antlers with both hands.

  If anyone could have seen me in that darkness, it would have looked as if I was trying to wear his head and horns, trying to pull them in place of my own, bent over and become any beast, hiding away from mankind.

  18

  JESUS IN THE DESERT, FORTY DAYS IN WILDERNESS, GOING BACK, refusing civilization. His feet hardening into hooves, ears tufting, a ridge grown across his head and sockets for horns, bone growing, and he leans over onto his forelegs and finds an easier stride. Able to pick his way among the rocks, dainty of foot, ready to leap and run at any threat. The hide thickening across his back and shielding him from the relentless sun. Galaxies forming at the backs of his widened eyes, luminescence, night vision, a second day.

  Our stories of transformation have been taken, erased from the Bible we have now. Where is Pan, half goat, with a man’s torso and goat’s horns? Where are the mermaids, half fish? Where is Medusa with her head of snakes? These stories are a part of us and can’t be erased. The Bible isn’t finished until what was erased has been returned.

  Jesus was hiding. And what do any of us have to hide except the beast? Hooves and antlers and the world returned, a landscape animate. Jesus as aurochs, the bull, thick dark horns, shaggy hanging head thundering across desert stone. Or gone down lower onto his belly, thick toes ending in points, tongue flicked outward to smell, platelets all along his back, eyes like beads.