Goat Mountain Read online

  He says we’ve seen one. Did you see one, or any sign of one?

  No, my father said.

  He was a big buck, I said.

  We heard that, Tom said. Outlined in sun, I’m guessing. All ablaze. Every point on fire, and leaping fast through all that crap.

  Yeah, I said.

  And disappearing just as we looked that way.

  Yeah.

  Okay, my father said. That’s enough.

  We’ve never seen a big buck this close to camp, Tom said.

  Doesn’t mean we didn’t see one now, my father said.

  How many years? Tom asked.

  Bats were flying over, pieces of the night come loose and diving down between us. No sound of their wings.

  What happens now doesn’t owe anything to what happened before, my grandfather said.

  Yes it does, Tom said.

  And what from before told us he would shoot that poacher?

  That’s not the same.

  Sure it is.

  The cold sinking down over us. The way we’d stood many times, gathered around the pickup in darkness at the end of a hunt, except there was no smell of sulfur. That was missing.

  That buck could be there or not be there, my grandfather said. You have no idea which it is.

  It’s getting cold, my father said. Time to get back to camp.

  All three of you have gone crazy, Tom said. All three of you.

  My father opened the driver’s door and the light came on. The only light on that entire mountainside, and my father’s thin hair as he tilted in. Then Tom scooting into the center with his rifle barrel leaned back against his shoulder, and then my grandfather.

  I sat down in the bed, kept low against the cold as the truck twisted and the four-wheel drive moaned, and we were back in camp quickly.

  My father fired up the lantern first thing, pumping at it in darkness and then lighting the wicks, like tea bags on fire, and then the flames sucked in and grew white-hot as he opened the valve more, the sound of a furnace, a soft roar.

  He set this near the griddle and then made a fire in the pit just before the table. Big Blue Tip kitchen matches and newspaper, smaller sticks and then the split wood he had brought. We sat on log rounds as Tom worked on dinner. The fire grown and the heat coming off it, the three of us leaning in as close as we could. The sparks lifting up into the pines. The fire setting us apart from all else. The first thing to distinguish man. Hunting in a group was older but shared by animals.

  There’s not much we can do that is older and more human than sitting at a fire. The way a flame surrounds a piece of wood and illuminates, how soft that flame looks, and how it seems nothing at all will happen to the wood. Blond still beneath, visible through flame, and the transformation to black is something unnoticed until it’s already done.

  No edge of a flame ever breaks or tears. It can take any shape at all, but every change is fluid, every edge rounded, each new wave born of the last and complete and vanished. It’s only in fire or water that we can find a corollary to felt mystery, a face to who we might be, but fire is the more immediate. In fire, we never feel alone. Fire is our first god.

  We could hunt the glades tomorrow, my grandfather said.

  We should go back for that buck, my father said.

  You know there’s no buck, my grandfather said.

  Three generations of us staring into that fire, into the first coals, radiating orange, a deeper color to the heat. The wood organizing itself as it was consumed, segmenting into rectangular coals. And where did this order come from?

  You don’t know that, my father finally said.

  What I know is that he’s not right, my grandfather said. Something in him is not right. And what we should be doing is killing him right now and burning him in this fire.

  You’re talking about my son, my father said. Your grandson.

  That’s why we should be the ones to take care of it.

  Neither of them were looking at me. They spoke about me as if I were a million miles away.

  I’d kill you first, my father said.

  I know that, my grandfather said.

  In firelight, their faces two versions of the same, separated only by time. Same eyes staring down into the coals, same hands outstretched, only the surface different. Older skin, and my grandfather swollen and infirm. But if you could cut away the fat, go back in years, you’d find the same man.

  What I can’t remember is what I understood. I know my own grandfather said I should be killed and burned, but I can’t remember what I felt when he said that. I think I felt nothing, because I remember nothing. Anger might have been possible. When there’s no understanding, anger is always possible. But I could not have felt any recognition, and for some reason I don’t understand now, I felt no fear.

  With every moment, things are getting worse for us, my grandfather said. Every minute that passes. That body hanging is like a clock.

  That’s true, Tom said. His voice from outside, unwelcome. The smell of steaks and onions on the griddle, popping of grease just audible beyond the drier sounds of our fire.

  Maybe stay out of this, my father said.

  I wish, Tom said. I do wish that. I wish I could erase when I met you. I’d lose all the years to avoid this now.

  We met before we even had memory.

  I’d erase it all.

  You’d erase your whole life.

  I would have had a different life, is all, and no matter what happened, it would have turned out better than now.

  That’s fear, my grandfather said. That’s only fear talking, and nothing about it is true.

  Please, my father said. Please just stop talking, both of you. His head bowed as if in prayer, mouth resting on his folded hands, elbows on his knees. His eyes closed. Praying to the fire, and the fire leaving shapes across him, the form of every beast from the beginning, atavistic summoning of which he was wholly unaware. We can never see these shapes in ourselves, and we can never see them in time. We can only remember them. If we go back and search, we can find all portents, every moment of our lives speaking to every other.

  That body is still hanging there, my grandfather said. You don’t seem to understand, either of you, that what you do or say or think doesn’t matter now.

  Please just don’t speak again, my father said.

  My grandfather rose then and stepped into the fire. His boot with all that weight above it crushing down through half-burned limbs and coals, a hive of sparks, and then he stepped out, and no part of him touched. He was not something that could burn, and the fire now was broken, the pieces of wood become individual, flames reduced to their sources and no more than a few inches high anywhere.

  My grandfather continued on to the table, took his spot on the high side closest to the tree and creek. Sat down heavy and pulled his hat from his jacket pocket, an old green plaid hat with earflaps. No expression, just staring ahead into the darkness where the poacher hung and the brown of the burlap caught the light even from that diminished fire.

  My father turned away now from the fire, sitting on his low stump with his hands in his pockets and looking uphill, the base of the higher ridges, the trees showing faintly against the dark. I wanted in that moment to be able to talk with him, but what would we have said?

  Tom set the paper plates on the bench and filled each one with a steak and onions and slices of bread, and brought them to the table. He and I sat on the lower side, and the three of us began eating, and after some time, my father joined and ate also and we said nothing. Only sounds of chewing, the muted roar of the lantern, the water in the creek beside us, the wind above in the trees. We could have been alone, each of us, and that to me is the strangest thing now. That’s something I don’t understand, why there was never more connection. When I search my memories, it seems it was always this way, that every moment spent with my father or grandfather or Tom was a moment alone. And so it’s hard to know why they even matter. But they were the closest people to me in my li
fe. My mother had left before I had memory, my grandmother was dead, and these three men were all I had. They were all I knew, so at the time the distance must have felt natural, just the order of things. And it seemed inevitable that we would always be together.

  We finished our food and Tom threw our paper plates into the coals where they flared and curled and died out. He washed the forks and the griddle and wiped his hands on a towel and walked into the trees to his bedroll.

  My father disappeared also into the trees. And then my grandfather having to use his hands to help push up onto his feet and that unsteady walk to his mattress, the sound of the springs, rusty and old, as he settled himself in his sleeping bag.

  I sat for a while longer listening to the water and the lantern, two sounds from different worlds that fit together anyway because my earliest memories included them. Anything can become familiar and seem meant to be.

  I reached up and turned off the gas on the lantern. An immediate loss of light, and the water grown, the tea-bag wicks glowing red along their edges, thin lines that looked as segmented and broken as coals, and then they disappeared and all that was left was the water and darkness and then the light of stars forming against the dark outlines of treetops.

  The ancient world. Sounds of water and a breeze, that mountain lit only by stars. A small band of us sleeping on the ground in these trees, waiting for morning when we could hunt. Nothing changed in all that time, in all the world.

  I walked into the trees to my bedroll, laid out my sleeping bag and tucked inside, and I wish now I could have slept under hides. I wish now I could have gone all the way back, because if we can go far enough back, we cannot be held accountable.

  6

  ALL THE AIR GONE OUT OF THE WORLD, AND MY RIBS PINNED down, being crushed. An enormous weight, and I woke to my grandfather sitting on me. One hand on my face, pushing my head back against the ground, his other hand high in the air, holding his knife, ready to slash my throat like the throat of any sacrificial animal.

  My legs moving on their own, kicking at the ground, and my left arm, free, punching into his side, but the rest of me was pinned.

  He was staring down at me, that wide expanse of face featureless and the color of bone in starlight. No recognition, only a blank look into the hollowness of the world, and that knife held high, ready.

  I could have cried out, could have asked my father for help, but that would have required time and sequence, one act following another, and my grandfather above me with that knife was outside of time. That moment an eternity and also an instant, and it held every other moment between the two of us.

  Waterwheels here at the creek, his thick fingers holding an impossibly tiny nail in place against a thin slat of wood, tapping with a hammer, tapping lightly, careful not to split. Placing that slat between uprights in the stream, and the wheel coming to life immediately, a pulse to its revolutions, a pause between each of the two flings from water, and that pulse a reflection of our own blood.

  Those hands on the pier at the edge of the lake holding a catfish in moonlight. Slick dark dream created from water, from water and mud and whatever quickens in each living thing, mouth wide and gasping, rimmed by tendrils, an ugliness and beauty that would not be believed. Hands that never hesitated, that ripped that hook from deep inside the fish even if every organ inside was attached, even if the entire stomach had to be pulled out through that mouth. The tail churning side to side through air that had no thickness, nothing to push against, and the flesh in folds, loose-skinned, invented too quickly.

  The lake with its own stagnant breath always close, rotting of dead carp and birds caught in the tules, rotting of algae on the rocks, baked each day in the sun and then exhaling at night. The air thick with water and rot and these mudcats rising out of that, and my grandfather made of that also. A presence that had never begun but had always been.

  I waited for that knife to come down. Nothing I could do against it, my throat exposed and the rest of me helpless. My grandfather as large and unfeeling as mountains.

  I can’t help but think now of Abraham and Isaac, of course, and I wonder whether every story in the Bible comes from Cain. A riddle, all of it, testing a man and finding him worthy because he’s willing to kill? Cain as our goodness, our faith, our murderousness as our salvation? No guidance is possible from the Bible. Only confusion.

  And what does it mean that this was my grandfather, not my father? How do we read our lives when the story has veered off from what we know? A grandfather reaches further back, is more a father than the father himself. For him, the sacrifice is greater, the erasure reaching further into the future, but he also feels nothing, and so is there any sacrifice at all?

  My grandfather did not come from god. I’m sure of that. He came from something older, unthinking, unfeeling. He came from something as true as rock and stars, a place of no recognition, before names. And what he offered was annihilation.

  But not this night. This night the knife did not come down. My grandfather rose to his feet and air entered my lungs again and he turned and walked back to his bed. A messenger with no message, sent by nothing. I lay with my heart clenching and the oxygen flooding everywhere, and I had to put my arms out not to fall off that ground.

  I could smell smoke from the fire still, last smoke, and the occasional pop of a coal. I could hear water and wind rising as the blood ebbed in my temples, and I didn’t know where I could hide. All places here exposed.

  I waited until my pulse and breath were as near silent as they could be, and I waited until the soft snoring of the men was enough that it might include my grandfather, and then I rose in my socks, no boots, and moved slowly toward the creek. Each foot placed in the pine needles and tested, making sure no small branches or twigs might snap. Crouched and arms wide for balance, a kind of bird alighting in the shadows. The heat falling from me, the night air cold.

  I passed down through camp and made it to the truck. I was not far from the dead man. His sack white in the darkness, all color leached away, and I must have swayed in place, because he seemed to be moving. A pendulum ticking away in that night, as my grandfather had said.

  I stood with my hand on the driver’s door and waited, listening for any sound of my grandfather, keeping an eye also on the dead man for whatever he might do, and when I could wait no longer, I opened that door and the cab light came on and my hand lunged in behind the seat to grab my rifle, cool stock and colder metal, and I pulled it free, the heft of it, and closed the door gently, only a click, and the light was off and I was standing in darkness again, blinded. I wouldn’t be able to see if anything came at me. I could no longer see the dead man in his sack. I stepped away backward, quickly, crouched, the rifle held before me, and half-ran backward down that road, an ape reversed, far away from camp, and lay down in the dirt with the rifle at my shoulder, ready to skylight any man or beast that might come charging.

  I had only three shells in the rifle. No extra ammunition. As quietly as possible, I levered one of the shells into the chamber, ready to fire, my finger just above the trigger. Exposed on this road, forest on every side that could be hiding anything, and my ears still useless from blood.

  Lying at the very bottom of this ocean of air. Clung to that. The solidity reassuring. The haze of stars so far away they were the same as not real. No longer individual but so many billions they could create a wash of light. The origin of my grandfather the same, unreachable and unimaginable, and the origin of the dead man, also, and the origin of myself. All vacuums of meaning.

  TOO COLD IN THAT NIGHT to sleep exposed on the road in the dirt. I shivered and rose in a landscape transformed by the moon. The road a clear white path winding upward into forest that grew more dense and dark where we camped. This is the place we had chosen, the farthest in and most hidden.

  Above us, great faces of cliff and broken ridge, long pale slides of talus. Some instinct to back up close against the rock, and if there had been a cave, inside is where our camp w
ould have been.

  Standing alone in the cold, I could feel immensity, how small I was at this moment. Wearing only socks, underwear, and a T-shirt, I didn’t know how I had lasted this long. Kept warm only by fear.

  All was silent. Not a sound in that void. And without sound, the distances could have been anything. The rock faces impossible to gauge in size. All the world waiting, ridges in every direction as I turned. The still point, when the air had equalized and there was no breeze, and if the sun never rose, all would remain this way. Each night, it was possible to want that, to want the night to never end.

  I let the hammer down carefully on the rifle so it would not fire. The metal of that rifle the coldest element, and I tried to touch only the wood, held it in both hands before me as I walked toward camp. Like the last remnant of some larger band advancing still.

  I left the road as I neared, made my way up through trees to come at camp from higher ground. Large pines with cones scattered everywhere and fallen smaller branches, so that I had to test each step before allowing any weight. The walk of a blind man, each foot seeking ground and no momentum. Ready to stop at any moment.

  In the forest, all vision reversed. On the road, under the bright moon, all substance was light, outlined in shadow, but here all substance came from darkness, and it felt as if the world could have been created this way. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. This was how it began, before the light. Not absence of matter but antimatter. A void prefiguring. The first pull that shapes us.

  Walking through that forest, I had to focus on the darkness, because light was insubstantial and could only mislead. The forest grew as I walked, all voids always expanding, the distances seeming farther. From the road, I had seen the entire stand of pines between the rock above and road below, notched into the mountain, bordered and finite, but once I was in it, all borders fell away and new land emerged, small ridges and folds inventing themselves between me and camp and each step slower than the last.