Goat Mountain: A Novel Part 12

I scrambled to keep up, pulling with my right hand and clawing at the hill with my left, bent over low and toes digging in.

The dead man pooling all his weight now, hanging back and not wanting this burial, resisting a second death. Removed from the surface of the earth and sent into darkness, mouth filled with dirt and all light extinguished. Grains compacting above, layer upon layer, and no way to swim back through this, held down and drowned for eternity and lost. After Jesus invaded the world with the dead, we've been trying to keep the new dead from rising, the Christian burial no longer a chamber but only a thick layer of dirt, a barrier.

The light flooding the sky now a cruelty, a reminder, false promise. The beginning always shown to us at the end. The sunrise behind this ridge. We would remain in shadow. But the stars were gone and the sky a milky blue, without distance or depth. Even this blue a lie and no longer a promise, and the blue removed from every other thing.

Brown of the pine needles, each bundle of three thin spears curving and held together by a wrapping of darker brown. My face in close. Orange tint to the underside of each spear. My mind needing to focus on something other than the weight and labor.

Scab leaves dry and loose, every light shade of brown. Bracken fern and bedstraw. Wild raspberry low and creeping along the ground, rare green. Male pinecones scattered everywhere, thin and brown and dried out, fallen from the lower parts of the trees, their yellow-green pollen shed, like used sparklers on Fourth of July.

That other world, of other people, lost and far away. Only the two of us here, and the two in camp, and no other humans. The life I inherited was this, and I had no power to change it. There was only the land, and human life no more than rumor. Two plants can graft and grow together, sharing water and nutrients, but not two people.

We hauled that body up the slope, tearing into the ground with our boots, and what I had was endless. Acorns fat and shiny, the crowns covered with yellow dusty hairs. Gold cup oak, or canyon live oak. This was all my father taught me. Not how to live with others or who to be but only how to see, and only this particular place of chaparral and oak and pine, a place lost to me now, and some days I want to shake my small apartment like a cage and break free and run back to where I belong, but I can't do that, of course. The dead man took everything away.

We moved too quickly up that slope. We charged at everything, and never slowed down, all that would happen determined by momentum alone. We were crazy with outrunning something that could not be outrun. Wherever we ended up, we were still there. We never seemed to understand that what we had to fear was carried inside us. The Greeks understood this, twenty-five hundred years ago, but we've forgotten.

That mountain a living thing, and we rose over its flank into the stand of gray pines at the base of the upper glade. My throat burning and skin slick. Blood pulsing even at the backs of my eyes, legs shot. But we didn't stop. Normally we'd stay low to the ground here, sneak quietly through trees looking for bucks on open slopes above, but this time we huffed and heaved and broke into the open pulling this weight.

The slope steep, seeming almost to overhang, outcrops of dark rock, shelves of gra.s.s and the world tilted, curled back over us. My father dragged me and the dead man up a central draw, dragged us through medusahead that looked almost like wheat but could snag in animals' noses and ears and clung to the laces of our boots, pale barbs.

We traversed then, slipping across that open fall onto a shelf that jutted out and rose high enough to see all the way to the top of Goat Mountain. Everything else lay below, a clear view of everywhere we had been and on across the far valley to the mountains on the other side, mountains everywhere and no human habitation, only a few thin scars of roads.

My legs were trembling as I stood in place, no power left in them.

Well, my father said. This is as good a place as any. In view of where you shot him, but f.u.c.k it. I don't care anymore whether we get caught.

I could see the stone where the poacher had sat, lower along the ridge. In shadow, and I couldn't see blood from here, but I knew that was the stone, no more than two hundred yards away.

The flat where we stood not much bigger than what you'd need for a tent. The dead man lying on his back still, arms up, not caring where we stopped. Here was fine. He was an easy dead man most of the time, heavy as a sack of bricks but short on demands. He was in the way at the moment, though, lying right where I'd need to dig. There were a few maggots on the white-gray curve of his belly, come up through the bullet hole. Moving along but rolling to the side, a maggot always directionless, roving blind, dreaming of those eyes with their thousand mirrors, inheritance.

My legs were buckling, so I sat, but my father yanked me to my feet.

You don't get to rest. Grab those hands and we'll pull him upslope a bit. Then you dig.

Maggots, I said.

I know there are maggots. And maybe you should have to look at them.

My father put his boot under the man's back and heaved him over, face gone and I realized I hadn't taken a last look. I needed to see his face again. But all we had now was that cavern of hundreds of small white maggots crawling over each other hunting for flesh. No longer iridescent with flies, no longer beautiful, gone soundless and flat. The future we have to look forward to, learning to hear the chewing of a maggot, devoured slowly by everything that writhes, waiting for an afterlife that happened only once, when Jesus moved that stone, and isn't coming again.

21.

MY FATHER LEFT ME THERE WITH THE BODY AND SHOVEL, but he took the gun. He hiked uphill into short brush and then exposed rock and climbed along the spine of Goat Mountain, great chunks of broken rock like vertebrae leading up to that wide bald summit, the head, a thick plate meant for ramming, studded with outcrops that might as well have been horns. My father smaller and smaller, receding into the distance until he was no more than an ant on the larger vertebrae, disappearing in crevices and emerging again, the beast become larger toward the head.

The wide open slope where I stood would be the pelvic bone, and this seemed right for the place to bury the dead man, to bury him where he had been born. The goat a favorite form of the devil, the devil half man, half goat, and able to give birth endlessly, unceasingly, to every hybrid form, and when he's filled the world with enough of his own shadows, he'll rise up. This spine will unlock and rip itself free from the lower slopes and all smaller stones will fall away. He'll shake that great head and free it too and then his pelvic bone will tilt upward and there will be legs below and this slope will find itself hundreds of feet in the air and the dead man buried and clinging here.

But no one knows when the devil will rise or why. Doesn't he already have everything he wants? It's hard to know what he would gain.

This ground made of rock. The shovel loose and small and stabbing in no more than an inch or two, my bones jolting, impossible task. I removed the dry gra.s.s and hint of soil and the small loose stones, creating a scab on this hill and nothing more, no depth. I knelt in the center of the scab and was only confused. The day brightening and my father gone along that spine, and the air warming.

The dead man was not helping. Facedown for a nap, tucked into that hill, not concerned by the colony in his back. Dreaming of his chariot and four horses, golden bridles and reins and gold curved all along his arms. Driving fast across the earth, but this is desert and there must be sand in great dunes, and as he tries to gallop up a dune, the wheels dig in, the hooves mire, and he's sinking and sinking in sand, whipping his horses and going nowhere. Or maybe this kind of dream stops when you're dead. Maybe the pressure and panic are gone.

The dead man was looking straight down into the earth. His head not relaxed and laid to the side on a cheek like a man sleeping but instead peering down. Rock as open s.p.a.ce, veins of lighter stone like air curving around heavier stone, and the dead man might see into this world. A great lake at the center, molten and shifting, and all along the edges of this burning lake are beaches and islands, flatlands and mountains forming for a day or an instant and dissolved again, landscapes of impossible beauty never seen directly but only through density and mirage without air, and here the colonies of demons wait to rise through fissures and ca.n.a.ls, pressed toward the surface, slipping along molten rips until they come closer and slow and finally are caged in hard stone, held forever just short of their desire, birthed only by the will of Satan, made of rock himself, half submerged, the one who would regress and recover and no longer deny. All forms are obedient to him. He has no fear and can take any shape. He looks only down. He knows that what happens anywhere above doesn't matter.

I enlarged the scab. That was all I could do. No shovel can dig through rock, just as no center of us can be reached or understood. We can only work away at the edges, chew away our own skin, and so I stabbed with that shovel in both hands like a knife plunging downward, on my knees before some sacrifice, and each stab went almost nowhere and I flung aside almost nothing.

My knees bitten into through my jeans, my hands blistering, the air thickening with day. The rock I uncovered was dark and ridged, weathered in some earlier time and then buried again.

One of the mountains near here submerged completely, buried under a plate and half burned, then returned to the surface again. Its rock half transformed and exposed now, showing us the underworld. Imagine that, an entire mountain gliding along and diving into the furnace, then rising out again quickly enough not to dissolve.

Nothing around us has ever been stationary. All of it is moving now, and all of it will be burned. It's an error to wonder when Satan might rise up. He's rising up now, the small stones falling away all along this ridge in piles of scree, that spine and goat's head freeing itself, already named, but all we might hear is a rock falling one night, and perhaps another rock the next year, and all we might see is nothing.

We won't see him rise, and neither will our children or our children's children or a hundred generations after, but some generation will know him as risen and gone wandering and will not be able to see Goat Mountain as it is now, all signs of it erased except a few small mounds disconnected. No one will imagine that they were once one mountain.

I removed all that would grow and all topsoil that would grow it, and the only part left of this shelf was under the dead man, so I stood uphill and put my toe under his ribs to turn him as my father had, but I was not strong enough. He was rubbery and the ends of him stayed where they were and his ribs sprang back.

So I knelt close on the downhill side and leaned over him. A hand at his armpit and another at his waist, and the maggots in close and surging, and I did not like this but I saw no other way. My face inches from him and the smell not what I had imagined. His earlier smell gone, taken by the maggots, and now he smelled almost like bread, or the wet dough of bread, yeasty and thick. The transformation into Communion, the body become bread and sustenance. Putrid, also, of course, but perhaps I was used to that, had been living in that smell, and the maggots really had made a change, and there was something milky, also, milk in a pail and the smell of udders. As if the dead man really would sustain us, as if that were his will. His intentions for us had never been clear.

I rolled him toward me, soft and heavy, his flesh feeling just like dough, and I might have been at some great table, and the maggots hidden against my knee now and his belly in close and I looked toward his face and he was looking down at me, benevolent. The most open expression, mouth loose and eyes gazing deep into mine and beyond and all relaxed, no more tricks, only sincerity. He was worried what would happen to us when he was gone.

I stared into those eyes. I couldn't look away. A different life to dead eyes, all fear gone, all reserve and calculation. A nakedness. An acceptance.

I knew now that we needed to give the dead man a proper burial. He needed a coffin to shield him from the dirt, so that those eyes could gaze always and be clear. It would be best if he could lie here on open ground, and even better if he could hang upside down again and look up into the heavens with those eyes that were limitless and might see even to the stars, but he needed to be protected, also. The thought of something ripping him into pieces was unbearable.

It's hard to know what the dead need or want. I had never heard the dead man's voice. Everything about him was only a rumor. If I had been there to know him alive, I'd know what to do now.

Tell me, I said. Tell me what to do.

It was then the sun hit, and this seemed a sign, but a sign of what? The warmth in my hair and I knelt over him and waited. The two of us on that narrow shelf on a steep slope, all fallen away around us, and I waited but the dead man did not speak. The sun only fell lower down my face and neck and chest, too hot and bright to look at, igniting welts of poison oak that had spread everywhere, and so I was scratching and my chin ducked like the dead man's and eyes squinting while his remained wide open.

My knees hurt in the rocks so I stood finally and grabbed the shovel, bent low and chopped at the area where he had lain. Stab and fling. The sound of rock and shovel, always dislocated, seeming to come from a few feet to the side, as if someone else were out here digging. Hinged shovel loose and worthless, dented and rusted at the edges and used in some war, burying the living as well as the dead.

I just kept digging, because I didn't know what else to do. I tried not to look at the dead man again, though he was constantly in the way, his feet and hands everywhere. I tried to take the entire area an inch deeper, kept hitting bedrock until I heard my father's footsteps above, rough slide of his boots.

He was bright in the sun, holding my rifle, coming down the glade fast, as if no step could ever fail. I had nearly forgotten him. And I looked down and realized that what I had dug here was not at all what he had wanted. What I had done didn't make any sense.

I couldn't do anything else, I said. It's all rock here.

My father charging still, unable to hear me, sliding and then quick steps to stop himself on this mound. His breath in jabs.

That's not a grave, he said.

It's all rock.

You owe that man a grave, and you had plenty of time.

We stood on either side of that body and the dead man made no comment. We needed my grandfather. He never hesitated, never seemed to hit a moment when all was unclear and no way forward.

My father leaned over and yanked the shovel from my hand. He gave me the rifle to hold, and I was happy to have it back. Rea.s.suring weight, old steel.

My father stabbed at that mountain, and the mountain did not yield. A few small sparks, flint, as if he might find a fuse, but soon enough even those were erased by the sun and there was only the sound of metal striking stone.

Okay, my father finally said. Sweating in the sun, his T-shirt damp at the chest and his forehead wet. Okay.

He dropped the shovel and squatted low with his forearms on his knees. Looking down at the body. I wanted a burial, he said. Hiking on the ridge, I even felt a bit of hope. I thought maybe we'll leave this behind us. Give the man a decent burial and go home.

My father weak again. No anger, only sadness. I have sympathy for him now, and I wish I could go back, but I had no sympathy for him then. I stood removed on that raw patch of earth, and whatever closeness I had felt with the dead man I did not feel with my father.

Not a lot of options, my father finally said. And we need to end this.

My father stood then and grabbed the dead man's ankles and ran to the side and flung. It was so quick, I hardly saw it. I didn't get to say good-bye, didn't have a last look at his face. Sidesteps along the slope and my father just yanked the dead man into the air and then his pale body was scudding downward and stopped about fifteen feet below us, snagged on something, caught short.

G.o.ddammit, my father said, and he slid down to the body and put both arms under and flung again and the dead man tumbled sideways, rolling faster and faster and gaining speed, pirouettes on a stage held sideways, and then he dove headfirst and planted his neck and the rest of him flipped over, a somersault, and landed hard and that's when the top half of him somehow came loose and soared into the air without the waist or legs. He had ripped in half at the cavern, freed now from all that would trouble him, and he was as graceful as any diver, arms out together and chin ducked and waiting for immersion. His work in this world complete.

22.

OUR CAMP AT THE LOWER END OF THE GOAT'S RIB CAGE, where he breathes. No Eden. This entire slope expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting. The enormous heart made of stone hidden away somewhere behind us under that ridge.

When we returned, my grandfather on his slab had his arms spread wide and mouth open, as if he would devour all, reclaim and ingest the world he had made, only borrowed by the rest of us. A great splitting sound from deep within him, shifting of continents, audible even over the truck.

Tom as far away as he could be, sitting in an old camp chair beyond the basin, facing us and my grandfather, not sleeping. His rifle across his knees.

My father turned off the truck and my grandfather's breath caught and it seemed almost that he might not breathe again, and I could hear only the water, but then he sucked in another great chunk of sky and the tumblers inside him ground again, chewing on rock and tree and cloud and returning each thing to what it was made of to be made again.

Is it done? Tom called out.

Yeah, my father said. He walked over to the table and I walked behind him with my rifle, keeping an eye on my grandfather and also on the buck's head where it hung now alone. Walking a kind of gauntlet between them. Antlers made larger by having no body. Head peering down but large eyes animated still. Something in them beyond what could be killed.

Where? Tom asked.

Upper glade.

Upper glade? How do you bury a man in the upper glade? That's a cliff with gra.s.s.

Well.

Well what? How the f.u.c.k did you bury him there?

My father sitting on the wrong side of the table, the downhill side, Tom's place. Tom standing now and pacing, holding his rifle in both hands like some wind-up soldier. He was always like this, guarding nothing, waiting for something but wholly unprepared, spooked from the moment I first pulled that trigger and spooked still, believing maybe everything was unreal and nothing had happened. He was like most people in that way. Continuing on, day to day and year to year, outraged and doing nothing.

Let's just have lunch, my father said, and he didn't even look up. It wasn't a question. Because every Tom can be ignored. Tom didn't use his rifle but hung it over his shoulder on an old webbed strap, more army surplus, then opened one of his wooden boxes and began pulling out bread, lunch meat, cheese, mustard, ketchup, pickles, because that was what he did.

You didn't bury him there, Tom finally said.

In a way, my father said. It's done, anyway. An open-air burial.

As in no covering of dirt.

Yeah.

That kind of burial.

Yeah.

Well that'll look good.

No one's going to see it.

Won't they? Tom set down a paper plate with the lunch meat, perfect circles of flesh remade. Then he leaned in across the table, his face close to my father's. Listen, he said. Let's just leave right now. Before he wakes up. I'll say it was him. Even if it wasn't, it might as well have been. He's the one we have to watch out for. Tom glanced at me then, and he didn't seem entirely sure.

Stubble along Tom's cheeks and neck, dark stubble. Wearing no hat. Dark hair matted to his head. Those thick gla.s.ses and thin wire frames, eyes large and afraid.

Tom, my father said quietly. His face equally as stubbled and dirty, a vertical line in his cheek filled with dirt and sweat. The two of them peering at each other in close, humanity conspiring against their G.o.ds, against fate, ducked close in conference through every age, as if they could hide.

We just leave now, Tom whispered.

He's my father.

Save your son. That's enough. Someone doesn't make it out of this. There's no way around that.

Tom, you're not talking sense.

I'm the first one talking sense this entire trip. You listen, because this is the first time you've heard something that's not crazy.

My father shook his head and closed his eyes. He put his hands up over his face and rubbed at his forehead. The water in the basin a constant weight, and the stream beside us made of lead, pulling down this patch of earth and dragging it away. All of us holding on against that.

We just go back tomorrow, my father finally said. As we planned, and we move on. If we ever hear who the man was, we send something to his family to help them. Anonymous. And that's it.

Rivers of lead or mercury, heavy and silver-gray, working down through this mountain, the arteries and veins. This entire ridge the buried goat made not of blood and flesh but of mercury and stone. I can't find the source of that pressure now, but it was always when I sat at that table, and perhaps it was only panic at how little held us together.

You think about this, Tom said. This is the rest of your life you're deciding right now.

It's already decided, my father said. There's nothing I can do. You and he both tell me to do things I can't do.