Goat Mountain Read online

  Manzanita leering at us from both sides, deep red and peeling, taking a multitude of forms, arrays of thin branches all reaching straight upward or thick trunks twisting off sideways, leaves shaped exactly like eyes, twisting between white and green, thousands of them.

  Small birds everywhere, exploding through the manzanita as we neared. Low brown swoops and landings and chittering. The baffled sound of those tiny wings against air, a textured sound surprisingly loud over the low whine of the truck. Smell of wet earth, overnight dew, our tires digging and the truck wanting to bound forward, held back constantly by that low gear.

  The sun high on Goat Mountain above us, yellow on the broad rock faces, and the air seared into nothing, no color to the sky. We were still in shadow, mosquitoes wavering around me in the cold.

  The bucks would not be here at this time of day. They’d be out of the brush, in the open sections, under the trees or in the glades, feeding. And my father knew that. But he kept crawling over these closed-in slopes in a place where we would see nothing. These hills shaped like a carton of eggs.

  Mud in the troughs down low between hills, and the truck slid and caught and slid again and my father drove on recklessly, willing the mountain to try to stop us. He climbed again, the tires slipping, and descended into a worse trough, a place too wet for brush, mired the tires and dug out, crawled forward again, mired and sank until all four tires spat mud and water and did nothing but dig down. We were no longer moving.

  My father let off the gas, and I looked over the side, the tires sunk in past the hubs. We were somewhere below bear wallow, the only area on this entire dry mountain where you could bog down in mud, and my father had driven straight for it.

  I walked around the bed looking for a dry place to hop down, but the mud was everywhere. We were an island.

  My father turned off the engine, opened his door and stepped out, sank to midshin. We’ll need to dig out, he said.

  How? I asked.

  I don’t know. He rocked a bit, pulling a foot free and letting it sink again. Then he looked at the sky. I looked up, too, and there was nothing. The sun coming down closer, and you could feel its heat, but we were still in shadow.

  My father slapped a mosquito on his neck. Rocks, I guess, he said. Rocks or wood. Help me look for stones. Find some big ones.

  My grandfather and Tom weren’t moving. Apparently they weren’t going to help. So I left my rifle in the bed and hopped down, my boots become surfboards, sliding sideways into the muck, gone in their own directions, and I fell backward with a great slap. My butt and back hitting the surface and then settling, sinking, the cold ooze.

  My father yanked me onto my feet. Quit fucking around, he said, but there was no heat to it. He was a sleepwalker, stepping away through the mud, looking for rocks.

  We climbed the hill beside us, found stones and freed them and threw or rolled them toward the truck. Each stone partially buried. Some wouldn’t budge, connected to too much rock below, and on these I yanked and lost some skin from my fingertips.

  Like farmers tending our crop on this hillside, the sun reaching us finally. It could have been a vineyard, except the vines were dry brush, snapping and scraping against us, and the fruit emerged through the ground itself, just breaking the surface. Dark fruit with white lichen on its skin, ancient fruit, ripening long enough for the lichen to grow. Crops for a world slowed down, seasons extending for eons, winter impossibly far away. Timeless but dislodged now and thrown into the muck.

  We wedged the biggest stones behind the tires, one each, tamped down as low and close as possible, my father kicking with his heel. Then the next biggest in front of the tires, tamped down also, and more stones in front of these, creating a road out. On my knees in the muck, rolling and placing the stones. Cold but the sun warming us. My father and I working together, and my grandfather and Tom seemed not to exist. It seemed like just the two of us, and I liked that.

  We’re getting close, I said.

  Yep, he said. Closed-mouthed, allowing nothing. Hair a fringe in the light. I remember the weight of the need I felt, because I was still a child, only eleven years old. I think a child will have nothing less than ingesting a parent, swallowing them whole from the world, and anything other is a disappointment.

  It was too soon that my father stepped into the cab and turned on the engine. I stood on the hillside and watched as he gently gave power to the wheels, trying to keep the tires from spinning.

  Push from the back, he said out the window.

  Okay, I said, and I slopped over to the tailgate and tried to push as he gave power again, though my feet only slid backward in the muck.

  But the pickup lurched forward, bracing against those stones, and then he gave it more gas and tried to get momentum and the entire truck swerved off the stone path, mired to the side but with enough speed now to slide forward onto higher ground and pull itself uphill by its front tires as the back ones spun helplessly until they too found a grip and he gunned it up that hill, fishtailing and exhaust in the air.

  He stopped at the very top, the body still rocking, and I waded through mud and stones and climbed that hill after him a kind of beast unrecognizable, caked entirely in mud. A bigfoot risen out of the earth and shambling along until I would dry in the sun and all movement would slow and I would be caught midstride, paused until the next rain, which might not come until winter. The rain would loosen my joints again and I would climb higher along the mountain and look for snow and a cave and come out every once in a while just to leave big footprints to make people wonder.

  We like bigfoot because he’s a reminder of who we were not so long ago. And if I were bigfoot, I would do my best to help the legends. I’d eat half a deer and leave its remains scattered on the road. I’d figure out some spooky noise, some hooting grunting thing that nothing else could make, some reminder that language had to be invented. I wouldn’t try to explain myself. If I saw a campfire, I’d come close but not too close, and I’d snap a few sticks.

  I raised my arms as I neared the truck, and tottered side to side, and moaned. More a zombie than bigfoot, but it was my first time. And it didn’t matter. No one commented, if they even noticed. I pulled my great hairy bulk over the tailgate and my father knew I was there simply by the movement and drove on.

  I held my rifle again and struggled to remain standing as we twisted and climbed and fell downward into gullies. Scanning the brush for bucks, but I could rarely see more than fifty yards to either side, and no buck was going to wait that close as we thundered in.

  We entered trees finally, the road still slick, and I recognized the lower entrance to bear wallow, a place I had always loved because I wanted to see a bear and had never seen one. Shaded in here, a wider gulley, very flat, the stream lazy, slowed to a stop. The earth much darker, black mud, and growth everywhere, high grasses and ferns and skunk cabbage and nettles. My father sticking carefully to the path of more solid ground that wound along one side, and even then the tires were sucking and slipping. The air cool and moist and the smell of rot.

  The wallows visited recently by bear. You could see their great rounded shapes and footprints along the edges. My father stopped the truck, as he always did, so we could gaze at these signs. But this time, I was already covered in mud, so I lowered over the side and slogged through cold black ooze and standing water, home of leeches, perhaps, or even worse. I lay down in the wallows, where the bears had been, the cold soaking into me, all the caked mud loosening and blending with rot, and I did mud angels on my back.

  The dead man was not the only innocent. I was a kid, and I was playing, as kids do, and the men were watching me from the truck and seemed fine with waiting, and the dead man seemed to exist in another world. We had no part in his history.

  I rolled over and lumbered along through the mud like a bear cub, my belly just above the surface, hands and knees gone from view and then emerged and sunk again. The truth is, I was being cute. I was trying to be cute for my father and g
randfather and Tom, and it’s very strange to think of it now. This is why I can’t get the story to fit together or make any sense of who I was. I had just blown a hole in someone, killed a man, and now I was acting like a bear cub. This could make sense only if killing was natural, something we were meant to do. My hands were paws and I was looking side to side, ready to snap at a butterfly or dig my snout into honey. I was in a playland entirely unlike the rest of the ranch. Giant green leaves from the skunk cabbage, curled and bright. It was possible to forget where we were.

  I flopped onto my side and enjoyed the squish and ooze. I had just been a bigfoot, was a bear cub now, and I even thought of dinosaurs. Bogs and marshes and mud pits just like this were where they went to be remembered. Dying out on dry ground you could only vanish, but if you crawled into the mud, you might make it into a museum exhibit a hundred million or two hundred million years later. Truth is fairy tale. We can’t really believe there were dinosaurs, because we can’t imagine that span of time. We can see their bones and tell ourselves we know a brontosaurus walked and that huge neck swung through the air, but that’s not the same as belief. Belief is much closer, more intimate, than knowledge. Dinosaurs happened in a different world. But killing is still with us. Killing is a past world that overlaps with ours, and if we can reach back into it, our lives are doubled.

  9

  THE BIBLE CELEBRATES MANY KILLINGS. GOLIATH IS A bigfoot, an earlier and more beastly form of human, and this is what we most want to kill, our competitors, the Neanderthals and giants and other monstrous forms of our earlier selves. Killing the poacher, I was just like David, defending my family and our land and the law. I was on the side of god. “This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a god in Israel,” David says. The act of killing might even be the act that creates god.

  There are times I get excited and think I did something beautiful in killing that poacher. A triumph. I wander around my small apartment like a thing possessed, pacing, and I can feel my righteousness. But then I think he was only a man, only one lousy guy back in the fall of 1978, long ago, some hunter out to kill a buck on someone else’s land, insignificant. And that makes me only an ordinary killer, with no special claims.

  Wallowing in that mud, playing the bear cub, I had a frightening innocence. Born into a world of butchery, a child will embrace butchery and find it normal. Or at least I did. And this was before the testosterone would kick in, before puberty. I was a monster even before I was remade into another kind of monster.

  My father never did tell me to get out of that mud. He grabbed his .300 magnum from behind the seat and held its barrel pointing to the sky, pulled back the bolt partway to check that nothing was in the chamber. Then he slung it over his shoulder and began walking. My grandfather and Tom followed. We were going to hunt right here, down through brush and these hills that had no view. There was no chance we’d see a buck, and everyone knew that and began the hunt anyway.

  I grabbed my rifle, followed over a lip at the edge of the wallow, and entered a different land entirely, a land dry again, a land with no hint of water. Live oak, my least favorite tree, and the shade from it spotty and low. We were traversing a wide choked hillside, not going down into the egg-crate hills, and I had never been here before. I would have lost track of the men if it hadn’t been for the enormous sounds my grandfather made tearing through live oak and buckbrush. If you hadn’t yet seen him, and you heard only these sounds, you’d have the most terrifying imaginings.

  The sun hot and blinding, and the mud on me pulling at my skin as it dried. The spines of the live oak leaves. My jeans and jacket caked and heavy. I was thirsty, and there was no water. There was never any water. A kind of test in my family, to hike all day in the brush in the California sun and drink nothing.

  I emerged in an area of gray pines. The men waiting for me, two ridges forking off below.

  You can each take a ridge, my father said. We’ll wait fifteen minutes and then go down through the center to flush.

  My grandfather walked the ridge on the left, Tom to the right. Their rifles no longer slung but held before them, ready, and both men alert. The canyon below fell off suddenly, bits of cliff and loose rock. Tall thin darker ponderosa pines rising along steep slopes.

  The canyon still in shadow. The bottom of it would see sun for no more than a few hours each day. A place that looked smaller than it was. Once we were down there, it would grow considerably. I knew that.

  There’s nothing I can do, my father said. You’ve put me in a situation where there’s nothing I can do.

  My father standing at the edge of an outcrop of rock, looking down. You imagine all that could happen in your life, he said. You imagine all that could happen to your son. You worry about him breaking a leg or not getting along in school, or not wanting to hunt, or maybe even what kind of man he’ll turn out to be, if you ever look ahead that far. But you never see this. There’s no way of seeing this, especially at eleven years old. It’s just not something that happens.

  Sorry, I said.

  My father laughed, a bitter strange sound like strangling. Yeah, he finally said. You’re sorry. Well that fixes it.

  The cicadas pulsing around us, pressurizing the air. My father stepped to the side, top of a chute, and went down fast. Almost like surfing, his right hand out and touching rocks as he slid down the face. Steps that sank ten feet. Rifle slung diagonally across his back, right side tucked into the hill. White T-shirt, brown Carhartt pants and boots. He made a slalom course of that slide of rock, traversing down and then twisting in the air, planting his feet again, left hand now to the hill.

  Below him, a cliff edge. This run of loose rock ended in a deadfall I couldn’t see past. Only air beyond.

  I couldn’t move or speak. I could only watch as he tucked in closer and planted his feet hard, hopped once more, twisting to the right. Still sliding as he stepped onto solid rock and grabbed at small scrub with his hands. His momentum should have carried him past, but he managed to cling there. And then he traversed that rock and made it to a tree that grew at a crazy angle, some twisted thin thing heading out into space, and there he rested. He leaned against it and looked up at me.

  Come on, he said. It was against the rules to speak that loudly on a hunt. But our role was to flush, and maybe he just didn’t care.

  What I thought, standing there on that lip, was that he wanted me to die. He knew I wouldn’t make it down that slide onto rock the way he had. I’d keep going over the cliff edge and then I’d be gone. He’d no longer have the problem of what to do with me.

  He waved for me to come, and I almost did it. I almost stepped down into the slide. But then I just kept walking along the rim, keeping to higher ground, following the path Tom had taken, and I looked for an easier way down.

  I was afraid to look at my father, but when I took a glance, I thought I saw him grin. Just one side of his mouth, but a grin, and then he was traversing again, getting away from those cliffs, crossing into a steep patch of pines that leaned in close to the slope. He disappeared into the trees, and I began my descent above them. If I fell, I’d have those trunks to reach for.

  My boots sliding downward, rifle in one hand and the other clawing at plants and rock, trying to slow. Small flowers and low-growing weeds like vines but all too thin, ripping through my fingers, and I slid full body, shirt and jacket riding up, my side scratched. And still I couldn’t stop. I hit pine needles, slippery, fell faster, aimed for a trunk and hit with my boots, collapsed against it.

  I was breathing hard from fright. My father far below surfing through trees, and I couldn’t imagine doing that. Wide spaces between trunks, plenty of room to fall through, the rocks of the creek a long ways off.

  I didn’t want to move. I thought about just letting my rifle go, so that I’d have both hands, but a rifle had to be taken care of always.

  So I eased away from that tree and be
gan falling again, frantically crabbing to the side to get in line with the next trunk. Dangling off the edge of the world, it felt like. A place my father would never have brought me before. All rules had changed.

  I hit that next trunk and stood on it, lay back against the slope and closed my eyes, everything inside spinning, my heartbeat out of control. I couldn’t rest long, though. He’d leave me behind, and I had no idea how to get out of this canyon.

  I slid down to the next trunk, and the next, until I was in a chute of larger rocks, reddish and veined, and these I could climb down through carefully, the footholds solid. A river of rock in motion too slow to see. A river of flesh, dark red and marbled in white, muscle of this mountain exposed. This was not our land. I had never been here before, and I wanted to leave.

  I could see my father at a wide boulder in the creek below, rifle out, elbows braced on the rock, scanning both hillsides with his scope.

  The weight of the slide above me, tension of each rock holding every other rock in place, flexing under strain, and I was in a mad rush to get out from under. Running where I should not have run, one misstep and I’d have broken my leg, but I charged out of there and along the creek and stood panting behind my father.

  Quiet, he said.

  My breath shaking out of me, the canyon rims above seeming to pull inward, the sky receding, sucked away in a vacuum. Is this part of the ranch? I asked.

  No.

  My father concentrated as he scanned those hillsides, looking for movement in the trees. The creek trickling around us. It might have cut this gorge, but it was almost nothing now, nowhere more than a foot or two deep. The rock green at my feet. Strange mountain. Large chunks of pale green with white veins running through it. A rich darker green where it was wet.

  There’s no way out, my father said. Not this canyon, but what you’ve done. There’s no way out.