Goat Mountain Read online

  Scent of the buck on me. Smell also of blood. Bent over to face the earth invisible below, stepping into that darkness.

  The spine in us comes from fish, the first vertebrate fish. And our legs and arms are fins. This is truth. The lungfish is more closely related to us than he is to most fish. He breathes air, walks across dry land, burrows in to wait for rain, lives as long as we do. Jesus in the desert, going back to his origins, would have seen his arms and legs shrink back into lobed fins, felt his tail regrow and complete the ridge of his back. He would have burrowed down into the earth and dreamed of water.

  Waiting and wandering and migration, all forgotten. I climbed that hill spine curled and strained and carrying my trophy, and I did not stop. We can return to that. One foot in front of the other even when we have no strength, even when we need to sleep and need food and need water. We can continue on anyway.

  The earth could have been flat. If it was created, then why not any shape? So gravity and steep hillsides must be meant as torments, a test of us. That hill rose before me, and my steps were not entirely solid but slipped back a bit, and brush tore at my face until I veered away, and then scraped from the other side and I veered again. I couldn’t see. The buck staring into the heavens and all illumined for him. If the world evolved, then it is what it is. If it was created, then its shape is the inferno.

  The sound of my footsteps and nothing more. Slow plodding, and after a while it seemed they could have been someone else’s footsteps, sound dislocated. I listened to this other figure hike along that road. Always near and out of reach. A phantom you could forget and then remember again. Each step isolated, pushing, carrying something. No momentum. A sound made of will alone.

  Hell an echo chamber, all without source. Our preview in this life is our sense of self, never constant, no solidity, nowhere to be found. A kind of shadow projected out over this brush and changing constantly in size, and the light that makes that shadow something beyond the range of what we can see. We know the shadow is there but can never find it.

  A scraping sound, this was all I heard at first. But then a low thud beneath it, my weight against the earth, proof. Cast just to my side, walking in tandem. And then slipping farther away and behind. My skin, also, a separate thing, overgrown by the oak and hung beyond the outlines of me.

  The gun a rack across my neck, cold steel, and the buck’s antlers bloodless. His upper vertebrae against mine, two-headed creature looking opposite directions, earth and sky, our eyes mounted to the sides. A guardian impossible to approach. A single set of lungs, single breath.

  At times my heartbeat felt doubled, a reverberation as it hung and shook in my chest. Wave pattern rippling outward, some relation to the thud of each footstep, no low sound ever contained, always reaching beyond.

  The road rising more steeply at the top of the glades. My toes digging in like hooves. Strange calves, too thick. No calves on a buck, only slim bone and tendon, all muscle up high. Our proportions are wrong, feet too large and swiveling.

  I hit brush in front of me, a wall of it, closed and blind, fully grown, and so I knew I was at the fork. I could see nothing at all, not even when I blinked and looked for outlines, but I turned to the right and felt the hump in the center of the road beneath me, covered in short brush, and stepped to the side into a wheel rut.

  I followed this trough, lugging that head. My elbows up, shoulders burning, tiny compared with the shoulders of a buck. Huge sweeps of muscle, able to leap, but they lay now in the road behind, disconnected. A pair of forelegs and shoulders and rib cage and section of spine wandering on their own, resting for a moment, lying down in the road. And farther down that road, another pair of legs unable to pull or drag, only pushing flesh into ground, going nowhere.

  I couldn’t risk being overtaken, had to keep moving. My footing uncertain beneath me, deep channeled rut carved by water. Large stones uncovered and gathered at the seam, and my feet slipping along the walls. In darkness, I wouldn’t know how deep. I could be following a channel that cut until the hill on either side was over my head or even higher and I wouldn’t know. Submerged and believing I was still on the surface.

  But the slope became less steep, walls lay down and rut filled. Shallow curve of ground, smell of sugar pines and sound of air moving through their tops, the road no longer a channel, and the toe of my boot kicked an enormous cone and I stepped on another, crunching down through it, and I was where my grandfather had gathered his cones.

  I had to rest a moment. Went down on my knees in soft needles and grass and tilted to the side to let the rifle butt hit ground and head fall. I pushed cones out of the way and curled into a fetal position, first and final form. Breathing hard. The ground already cold, all warmth of the day gone.

  Here is where they had decided to leave me, knowing I might not make it back, knowing the buck would be wasted on the road. I wondered what had been said. They might have said nothing. They might have just climbed into the truck and left.

  I didn’t know them, and they didn’t know me. All familiar shapes can become unfamiliar. One of the tricks of this world is the feeling that we belong.

  All we have is necessity. I got up from that ground because I was cold, and I would walk again because camp was the only refuge. I heaved that head and rifle again onto my back and tried to find my way in darkness.

  The road no longer well defined. My feet sifting through grass and the ground become uneven and almost immediately I was lost. This was no road. I stood in place, listening, as if the road might speak, and tried to find some internal compass, some sense of whether I had strayed to the right or left. The air curling around me, always a confusion, always misleading. The air is where the devil does his tricks.

  But of course there is no devil. We only want there to be. We want someone in charge. Hell is anarchy, each of us in charge of everything and nothing and hearing no other voices ever. Isolation more terrifying than punishment.

  If I chose the wrong direction, I would be twice lost and turned around and never find my way back. I cut to the left but stayed low to the ground, dragging the buck’s head and the rifle, sweeping my free hand over grasses, feeling their tops, searching for a hollow, a place where the grass had been flattened.

  My palm a diviner, searching for disruption, for a track in the void. My eyes closed, as if that might help. Closed against the darkness. Reaching back to some earlier knowledge of air and ground.

  And the air did cave, and my hand swept down, and the flattened grasses formed a faint track, and I rose again, too tired to lift the head, holding antlers in one hand, heavy and slumped, my rifle in the other. A figure shuffling alone in darkness in a dry place of thorn and scrub, carrying a severed head and a gun. How could that not be a landscape of hell? And it had duration, also, an infinite time on that road, climbing the slope and traversing and falling repeatedly off the track into spines.

  I don’t know what the devil would look like if he did exist. I think he would have my face, but I know the rest of him would take a different form, and that form could not be of only one beast but would be all the beasts we fear, foreign and corollary. You’d never be able to see the devil entirely, always some part of him shifting and hidden. He can never be outlined.

  My grandfather was the closest form I knew, his face my own but deformed and soulless, his body shifting constantly and never seen in full, terrifying and capable of anything. He was close enough.

  I shivered on that road and drew closer and closer to him, bearing my burdens like gifts. A severed head to placate the fiend and avoid annihilation for one more day.

  And as I walked, a strange thing happened. I began to believe that I could see. The world illuminating just faintly, some internal light I could cast into the void, and then brightening into dark blue, and I realized it was the moon, hidden still behind mountains but turning one part of the horizon white, outlining ridges and peaks far away across the valley.

  The road visible now, all forms of the a
ir receding, all become thin, no longer frightening. I hiked faster, trying to warm, desperately cold, my teeth clacking and shoulders bent down and stretched. I knew where I was now, and not far left to go.

  Falling forward, stumbling, the road clear, the land flattening and space opening up among the trees waiting on this hillside, a stillness to them, a great calm, a reassurance. Grown in parallel, all knowing the same warp of the earth. The world returned. Vacant mountain, no demons here.

  The moon a stationary thing as it moved. Solid and near. Light soft, indirect, and all revealed, the ferns of the reservoir and wild grape climbing all along that bank, shape-shifting, large leaves in mounds and trellises, filling every gap and hollow, a kind of blanket to cover deadfall and rut.

  I was the only demon here, my cargo a form of blasphemy in that peaceful night, scuttling along, hunched and burdened. Rushing now, almost running, and I looked over my shoulder, felt that I was followed, some other part of my own self, feeling too exposed now in the light, needing cover.

  Running, those horns bumping at my thigh, nose swinging into my knee, the rifle solid in my other hand. Passing beneath ponderosa pines, the small dark shapes of their cones above me against the whitened sky. Up rises and around curves and down across flats, more contour than I had ever realized in the truck, the land growing, but I was gaining.

  Scrape of my boots loud but I felt I could outrun anything now, and I pounded up the final draw toward camp, steeper than I had remembered, and hit the open space just before our grove.

  I slowed here and went down on my knees, dropped the head and lay in the dust of the road with my rifle as I had the previous night, waiting and listening for any sign of my grandfather. Breathing hard, winded, and my blood pounding, but I waited until I could calm and hear. He had no relation to the ground. That was the problem. Those pencil legs without sound, and the orb of him above that, able to shift anywhere. You wouldn’t know what you were seeing or hearing until too late.

  The heat falling away from me again, and I could find nothing, and my skin slick now with sweat and chilling. The trees before me, thick grove in which the men slept and the dead man waited. I rose with the antlers and left the road, followed the stream. The meadow just beyond was another moon, luminous and white.

  The dead man hanging without his sack, banded by shadows. Hanging from his bare and bloodless ankles. I could see him and then not see him and then see him again as he shifted through those trees.

  The sound of the water a camouflage he was using. I could not hear his movement, only the stream, endless. A sound growing as I neared, taking over until I could no longer hear even my own blood and breath. Trees rotating on their bases across the ground, as if all were held on a great dial. Some low sound to that, deep tumblers of stone, but it could have been only the water, a heavier fall into a deeper pool.

  His chin ducked close against his chest, the tops of the trees his references, and he slid among them at will. This was the temptation, this is how the demon has always moved, never looking directly. Shadows everywhere around Jesus, and what he had to learn was that there was only his own.

  I held the buck’s severed head high as I entered those trees, held it before me as a shield, no beast here more terrifying than I could be. Those luminescent eyes, dead galaxies holding an afterlight, and the dead man could no longer slip away, veered and shifted and went nowhere, was held in place at the hooks and contained until I stood before him and the dial no longer moved beneath me and the trees rooted again.

  My trophies, both of them, equivalent, no difference, and neither would be taken from me. I dumped the head on the ground and my rifle beside it. Loosened a rope and let another hook fall.

  The men might hear this, and my grandfather could move as fast as any demon. But I felt some odd strength, invincibility almost, after all I had been through on that road. I didn’t even glance behind. I only grabbed this hook and the head of the buck and looked for where to impale. No hind legs, no Achilles tendons, all abandoned. And not possible to violate one of those eyes. So I faced him away from me, caught between my knees, and reached around to hook him in the mouth, yanked back hard to drive that hook into his throat. Then I let him fall again and went to the trunk to raise the rope until his head dangled near the dead man’s ankles, leaning in close to the dead man, nodding and looking down. Here they could ponder each other and wonder how each had come to be. Man staring into the heavens, buck gazing down from above.

  19

  KICKED AWAKE BY MY FATHER, STILL DARK. HE’D FOUND my hiding place behind the fallen trunk. Get up, he said. Familiar shadow, made foreign now by my time on the road.

  Exhausted and curled in my sleeping bag, I did not want to wake. Breath heavy. But he jabbed his boot in my side again and I sat up. Okay, I said.

  Get over here, he said.

  He walked away, backlit by a small fire, yellow outlines of him and a cavern forming above in the trees. Domed ceiling of any cathedral. The moon low on the other side of the sky now, setting, fading in firelight. No stained glass. No windows, even. Open arches.

  My back in knots, but I rose and pulled on my jacket and hat and boots and followed him across shadows and deadfall, hollows and pools of black, carrying my rifle. The trees dry above, all color leached. My skin coming alive.

  Tom at the griddle, a kind of Hephaestus I see now, working in darkness, without a lantern, working always with hot iron and sizzling flesh, no longer forging in metal alone. My grandfather still on his slab of marble, but I thought I saw an eye open as I passed. My father gone beyond the fire to stand before the hooks, our altar.

  Dead man and buck the same color, pale yellow, horns and ankles made of the same bloodless material. Almost as lifeless as the painted plastic hanging in any church.

  You can’t hang a man next to a buck, my father said.

  That’s all I have left of the buck. I had to leave the rest of him in the road.

  They’re not the same.

  They are the same, my grandfather said from behind us. I turned and he was already up in his long johns, a mound of flesh wrapped loosely in cloth stained and yellowish in this light, his robes. As if we all had come here to be judged by him.

  Don’t start, my father said.

  Well what is the difference? Your son has killed a man and a buck, and you and he have hung them here. You hung the man yourself. You skewered his ankles as if he was an animal.

  They’re not the same.

  How are they not the same?

  I’m not listening to this, Tom said. He walked over and was holding a spatula, the small fire close behind him, associated with him. Bright spots of grease along his bare forearm. We eat a buck. We bury a man. There’s the difference, you fucking monster. He was pointing at my grandfather with the spatula, as if it were some kind of knife.

  There’s nothing left to eat, I said. You made me leave everything in the road.

  My grandfather smiled. The best part of youth, he said. The utter lack of humor.

  What does that mean? I asked.

  Take that head down, my father said. I won’t have them hanging together. My father’s face creased in this light, long thin shadows down his cheeks. He was a weak figure. He could make no demands. He determined nothing, and this had always been true.

  It’s my first buck. I get to hang him here.

  My father’s arm a sequence too fast to follow, a kind of shadow that struck the side of my face and knocked me into the dirt. My skin burned and bones of my face throbbing. On my knees and still holding my rifle.

  He’s right, my grandfather said. He gets to hang his first buck here. That’s the rule we follow. If we don’t follow that, then why not eat the man and bury the buck?

  And suddenly that’s what I could see. On my knees on that ground, the blood still pumping in my face, I could see Tom carving pieces off the dead man and frying them on his grill. A different kind of church, the body of Christ more literal, no icon in wood or plastic but actual
flesh and each of us feeding from it every day. Feeding from the flesh of bucks, too, and finding no difference.

  You really are a monster, Tom said.

  What rule says you eat the buck and not the man? my grandfather asked.

  Every fucking rule in the world.

  Did the rules say this boy could kill that man?

  No.

  Well what happens to the rules then?

  Sometimes I think I invented my grandfather, that he never existed on his own. His voice is my own voice now, and I can’t find any separation. I can’t find what was him then and what is me now. His views have infected me.

  You are all fucked in the head, Tom said. All three of you, and when we get back, everyone’s going to know. Enjoy your last bit of craziness. We’re leaving here today.

  We’re not leaving today, my grandfather said. We’re going for a hunt today, and then taking a nap, and then going for another hunt, same as every other day. And we’re leaving tomorrow, as we planned. And that buck’s head is going to hang there until we leave.

  We’re not going for a hunt, my father said. I’m burying this man. I’m going to bury him right now. This has gone on too long. You can have your fucking head hanging there all you want, but the man is not hanging beside him.

  My father went to the ropes then, worked in darkness, his back against the light, and I could hear the men breathing above me, could hear the snap of the fire.

  Rope tearing against bark, and the dead man fell before me, all one piece in motion, a slab, no collapse or fold but only a hard dull fall onto his shoulders and then ankles swinging down slowly until they rested a few inches above the ground. Some part of him refusing to return to earth, something always otherworldly about him. Sly grin still and head ducked, capable of anything.

  So you’re ready to say this man’s death meant something? my grandfather asked.