Goat Mountain Read online

  The rifle was all I had, held close across my chest, and I was without scale, could have been any size, nothing around me fixed, and it was some time before I was above the camp, oriented by the water rushing into that sink and by pattern of moonlight on the roof above the table and on the cab of the pickup. More difficult to find the men where they slept, but I was careful, and I found the place where my grandfather had been ready to slit my throat with that knife, and I felt exposed and afraid and was shivering, looking constantly behind and to all sides, but I worked down closer through the trees until I could see the white of his mattress and his great bulk lying upon it.

  I held that rifle with my thumb ready to pull back the hammer and considered hunting my own grandfather. He had come close to killing me, and it seemed he could still do so at any moment. I didn’t know that I could sleep and count on waking up.

  I raised my rifle to my shoulder and lined up that round peep sight with the thin vertical tip on the barrel, old metal that my grandfather himself had held when he was a boy, the rifle he had used to kill his first buck, and the dark bulk of him was softened and made smaller by this deadly alignment of fin and circle, all invention colder and smaller than we expect, its power a transgression, an opening of the heavens themselves, and this eased my fear. I pulled back the hammer with my thumb and now no one in this world had any power to stop me. Whatever would be, I would decide. And the poacher had made all possible. There was no longer anything I couldn’t do.

  But I lowered the hammer and then lowered the rifle. I can’t say why I didn’t pull the trigger then any more than I can say why I did pull it earlier. The decisions we make come from nowhere near our conscious minds. I stepped back carefully to my sleeping bag and carried it farther off into the trees, higher on that slope, found a hollow behind a fallen trunk, a place blocked from view, and lay down and tried to get warm, held my rifle close and hoped for sleep.

  7

  THE DARKNESS A GREAT MUSCLE TIGHTENING, FILLED WITH blood, a living thing already before god came to do his work. No first breath but an earlier animation and pulse and pressure. I lay in that darkness waiting, and I did not sleep, and the stars meant nothing but only the dark spaces between them. That was what lived and breathed and flexed. The ground beneath me swinging gently, responding to the pull, and I was caught between. A kind of trap on springs and my grandfather in his great bulk tottering somewhere in the darkness, his footfalls landing anywhere.

  What can never be understood is time, why a foot falls when it does. My grandfather waiting my entire life, and something in me waiting also.

  It seemed possible that I would never sleep again. My mind as clear as the cold air, fully alert, and each moment expanded and nearly infinite. That night longer than all my life before it. No scale or measure in this world can ever be held constant. We are always slipping.

  But eventually I heard the pumping of the lantern, Tom risen to cook breakfast, and the trees appeared above me, created in an instant, transformed absolutely from their shadows, made in the light, thousands of needles without true color, yellow-white instead of green, and their heavy cones and branches and the deep etchings of their trunks. All distance gone, the heavens erased. The world flattened.

  I could not hear that soft roar of the lantern, a sound I loved, because the spring was too loud in the basin, but I could hear metal on metal, scraping and cutting as Tom worked, and I knew that I had passed into safety. My grandfather would not come for me now. Now the day had begun and we would all hunt together and all else that waited for us would be deferred.

  I remained in my sleeping bag, in the warmth, and the breeze rose even though there was no sign yet of the sun. A prefiguring, the air itself impatient for the day. I do imagine the creation like this. A thing awaited, a restlessness.

  The light of the lantern not steady but pulsing slowly enough to notice, a different kind of sun. And this camp become its own dwarf universe, separated from the darkness all around. I rose and pulled on my jeans and boots and jacket and hat, my shadow cast enormously against the slope and trees behind. Tom the largest giant of all, one swing of his arm covering my entire region in shadow and then gone again.

  I rolled and tied the old sleeping bag and left it under the protection of the fallen trunk. I stepped sideways along the hill, rifle in both hands, that shell still in the chamber, ready, and came at camp from a different direction, close along the spring and its pipe and stream, the sounds of my footfalls covered.

  Tom standing at the griddle backlit by the lantern. His camo baseball cap and jacket, mottled dark greens. One hand in his pocket, the other holding a spatula. He looked up and saw me.

  Same as any other breakfast, he said. Same as any other hunt. Holding your rifle. But I know the difference.

  Tom’s face in shadow but that voice the same as I’d heard all my life.

  You don’t get to do something and have it be nothing. Soon as we’re back, I’m going straight to the sheriff.

  You’re right, Tom, my father said. You should turn yourself in after shooting that man. It’s the right thing to do. My father on the other side of the table, downhill, his face revealed by the lantern. He had been visiting the dead man, perhaps.

  I don’t believe I heard you right, Tom said. He turned away from me and the griddle, faced my father.

  You heard.

  No, I can’t have heard you right, Tom said.

  Our work here is to collect the evidence, my father said. I’ve put that man in a sack, and I’ve apprehended you, and brought you back with the evidence. Three of us as witnesses.

  You’d do that.

  Yes I would.

  You’re sure about that.

  Yep. Though maybe there’s no need for anyone to visit the sheriff at all. That seems better, doesn’t it?

  Well. Tom turned back to the griddle. First hotcakes are ready, he said. Time to grab plates.

  I held my rifle down low, out of reach, and stepped just close enough to grab a plate. Tom put two pancakes on it and looked at me. I was in his shadow and could see his face now, stubbled and tired and his eyes distorted behind those glasses.

  I sat at the downhill side of the table, steered clear of my father. Rifle butt between my feet and barrel coming up past my right shoulder, in close and protected. I grabbed the pot of cream of mushroom soup steaming at the center of the table and poured it over my pancakes, creamy white with dark chunks, half-moons. Thick gravy, condensed without the water added.

  My father sat down opposite and yet managed not to see me. I was not there. He poured the gravy over his own pancakes and cut a piece with his fork. Roar of the lantern the primary sound now, close above us.

  My grandfather ambled out of the darkness to the table, and my father got up to allow him room to swivel his legs across the bench. The sound of his breath working, lungs too small for all that bulk, a heart the size of a walnut. Everything inside him shrunken away, until finally you could cut him open and find only endless fat.

  A plate put before him, and he poured the gravy and began chewing even before the food hit his mouth.

  My father cutting perfect double-layered triangles, as he always did. Portioning the same amount of gravy on each bite, chewing for about the same length of time, everything ordered.

  And then Tom joined, stabbing his legs in beside me. His plate piled with three pancakes, taking more. He poured the white gravy and then cut in a ragged way with his fork, working toward the center of the pancakes without trimming any edges. My father always annoyed by this, glancing over as he ate. And suddenly it seemed as if this could be any other hunting trip, rising early in the morning, before the light, my father glancing over at Tom’s plate and holding back from saying anything. The lantern and the spring. The wind coming up.

  The dead man just playing, a joker tied himself in a sack, horsing around. I looked over my shoulder and he was there, swaying a bit in the breeze, holding back his laughter, his chin tucked into his chest, eyes closed
.

  I do understand that something has happened, my father said.

  Hallelujah, Tom said.

  But think about what the two of you have suggested. We have killing and burning my son as one suggestion, and that from his own grandfather, who apparently has lost his mind.

  My grandfather said nothing in response. A jaw chewing as automatically as any cow’s, eyes vacant.

  And then we have the bright idea of going to the sheriff, so that we can all explain how this happened and why we brought him here and put him in a sack and on and on. We’ll have lots of time in pajamas for the rest of our lives to get the stories to work out.

  It’s not too late, Tom said. It’s still only one person committed a crime.

  Not true, my grandfather said. Not true. He was staring now at the dead man, sighting him from farther off than seemed possible, and his fist on the table with the fork sticking up.

  So what’s your bright idea? Tom asked.

  We bury him, my father said.

  Bury him, Tom said. A proper Christian burial. Do we invite his mother?

  It’s easy, my father said. All this land, and no one here, no way to check all of it. We go out in the brush somewhere and dig down and bury him and forget about the whole thing.

  As if it never happened.

  Yeah.

  And what happens when they come looking for him?

  Let them look. We don’t know anything.

  And what happens when they find that blood where he was shot?

  Nothing. There’s no body. And we don’t know anything.

  We don’t know anything.

  Yeah.

  And your son never says anything, never in his entire life. Doesn’t slip and say something at school.

  Yeah.

  That man in the sack is not the problem, my grandfather said. You take care of that and you still have taken care of nothing.

  My zombie dad suddenly the fucking philosopher.

  Zombie?

  Yeah, Dad, as in you’re never fucking home. You’re as lively as a piece of wood. And now suddenly, when there’s a problem and I could use some help, you’re fucking Aristotle. Hooga booga. We know not what comes from our own arses. Doing something is doing nothing. Waa waa waa.

  My grandfather swung that fist with the fork faster than I had imagined possible, and now his fork was standing up in my father’s forearm where his sleeve was rolled back, the tines deep in his flesh and already turning red at the edges. So sudden it seemed almost as if forks were supposed to stick up out of forearms.

  Then a bellowing from my father, yanking the fork free, hints of red in the air, red even in the flattening light, and my father merged with that great bulk, a collision that reversed time, that took what had calved away and found it entire again, one mass falling backward, suspended, a fall soft and continuing, a kind of love almost, the underside of boots waving above the table now and a whump of sacks of flesh hitting earth, a snarl of sound unrecognizable to me, and nothing set in motion would ever cease. A tumbling and grunting across ground I could not see, so I stood, as Tom did, and we watched this mass work its way toward the land of miniature waterwheels and islands and channels, and these giants, at times separate, at times combined, rose and fell across that land, the water a way to mark movement, great splashes and sprays in the shadow now of the tree but carrying light anyway, a faint blue to it even when lofted, and I was standing now at the water’s edge, and holding my rifle in both hands, and my father labored for me. He was crying. I could hear that. He was weeping as he pummeled my grandfather and was pummeled back, slapping sounds flat and unconnected. Tumbling into light again, farther downstream, and I saw my grandfather’s mouth open, great dark hole inhaling, fueling that mass. I knew my father had no hope.

  My father was weakened by a sense of right and wrong. The unjust was a weight to him, and he would return the world to a perfect order, and that can never be done. But my grandfather worked from older rules, I see now, from what shifted mountains and made light bend. He was waiting only to see what would happen, and no outcome was any less desirable than any other. I didn’t know that at the time, but I had some sense of it, a fear that was wholly earned, an instinct that was unerring, an instinct my father had somehow lost.

  My father lay flat on his back in the stream, face barely above water, and my grandfather lay across him looking up into darkness and used only his elbow, jabs downward and my father buckling each time, and my grandfather seemed not even interested, unwilling to make a greater effort. Only these lazy, punishing jabs, and the blank stare into nothing above.

  That face, that blank stare, is what I still need to understand. How could I kill and feel nothing? Can we ever know how we have become?

  This is why I keep looking to the Bible. It’s almost entirely worthless, and I don’t care about Jesus, but the Old Testament is a collection of stories from an earlier time, atavistic shadows that I keep wandering through, hoping for recognition.

  The fight was over, my father defeated, and my grandfather rested on him, that elbow still jabbing downward now and then. The stream considering them just another island, the cold soaking into my father, and Tom and I stood at the bank and did nothing. My grandfather not a force that could be mitigated in any way. We could only wait.

  And finally he rose. To his knees, pushing at my father for leverage, and then one leg up and a kind of rush and fall forward to get the other leg under him, and he kept falling forward with heavy steps across that stream and past the table and all the way to his mattress, where we heard him collapse again.

  I stepped into the water, bitter cold, and pulled at my father’s arm, helped him to stand and the water fall off him. He had done this for me, but there was no way to recognize that. Very little of what was important could ever be said. We had almost no language.

  Dry clothes, my father said. In the truck.

  So I went to the truck and found his clothing and a towel and came back to help him strip as he sat at the table. His jacket and shirt off first, and he looked pale and thin in the lantern light, jaundiced by the wicks and their yellow glow. Only hints of pink. I rubbed the towel over his back and down his arms and he sat with his chin against his chest, like the dead man, just not hanging upside down. But the two of them cold and pale and slumped and waiting, and I thought of them both as victims of my grandfather, as if the dead man had met his end from my grandfather, not from me.

  My father put his arm around and I helped him stand and push off his wet jeans and baggy white underwear. Hairy and goose-bumped, and he sat back down and dried himself with the towel, slowly, and I helped him put his feet into dry wool socks and brown Carhartt pants and his boots and we forgot underwear but he said it didn’t matter. I helped him stand again and he got the pants hitched up and buttoned. Then a white T-shirt and an older jacket that smelled of smoke and blood and oil. Dark green cloth that felt like oiled canvas and bore stains everywhere in great shapes like a frieze of all that had happened to us, and in a way this was true, because here were the blood and guts of unnumbered deer and fish and geese and everything else, and our history was somewhere in all that we had killed, and it was a history, certainly, without words, a history that could be told only in shapes with more direct corollaries.

  8

  THE SKY FROM BLACK TO DEEP BLUE, THE DARK HULKS OF the trees standing above us now, the lantern extinguished. Gathering our last things, my pockets filled with .30-.30 shells. The stars erasing. We would be late for this hunt, not yet in position at first light.

  I waited in the bed of the pickup, one foot cold and soaked. Shivering in the cold, but the sun was coming soon and the day would be hot. The light a kind of trick, in each moment a different blue, washing out slowly. It was hard to say what blue was.

  Even the sack could have been blue, and the body inside it. Hanging from that pole, still waiting. A patient dead man. And I wondered whether we would ever move him. We might not. He might just hang there forever.r />
  Tom already waiting in the cab, and then my father walked over, stiff and slow, still cold, and finally my grandfather rose from his mattress and had somehow changed into dry clothing also, but he no longer had boots. Soft shoes instead, leather moccasins. And his head bare. The hat with earflaps soaked or gone. White hair in short tufts on either side of his head, the wide baldness between. Speckled skin, and slack, like a great white toad. Mouth too small and eyes too small, but otherwise recognizable. He climbed in, the pickup lurching and recovering, and then we drove out.

  This land gone pale, all color drained. Shadow and distance only rumored, soon to be. Etchings of lines, of tree trunks vertical and fallen, of ridge and cloud and road and no distinguishing between them, only lines carved into the same flat plane. The light not a light of this world but more a temperature, a coldness through which we could see. And our movement along that road felt without orientation, as if we could be turned on our side and not know it.

  And then none of that was true. The hillside became real, a great solidity extending, and the trees stood vertically and the road was cut into the earth, and the sky above was in its own separate plane and all had been made again and the previous light was only memory and not even that.

  We passed beyond the area of the imaginary buck, beyond the waste of deadfall and poison oak, and I could feel it rising already along my face and neck and hands, my skin growing and itching. A distraction, always annoying, something that had to be ignored. What I was looking for was my first buck, and I would not let that be taken away.

  But my father turned downward into the lower sections, thick brush and narrow low ridges, a place I would be unlikely to find a buck. This seemed intentional. The pickup winding down and then up steep fire roads like a roller coaster with the brush scratching along both sides. A constant high scree and no view anywhere, all bucks no doubt fled before us from the sound. The sky turning white and yellow. All of us straining to hold on as the truck twisted and lurched and the hood pointed into the sky and then down into ditches. A kind of punishment from my father, pointless hunt, no hunt at all.