Goat Mountain

2

IT’S RARE THE WORLD IS EVER TRULY NEW. RARE, ALSO, THAT we find ourselves at the center. But all had realigned at that moment. When we kill, all that is orients itself to us.

Cain was the first son. The first born of Adam and Eve. Cain is how we began, all who didn’t get to start in paradise.

Everything hurt, but it seemed I was only sore, nothing broken. Dark dirt and leaves damp and decaying. Dry on the surface, but I had disrupted the surface. My head was downhill, so I pulled my legs around until I was sitting, and all seemed to work. Legs and back and arms. My right shoulder and legs battered, neck stiff.

A new forest, all trunks very small, nothing old, and that was why I wasn’t broken.

Got lucky, I said.

The canopy forming a parallel slope above, just as steep. I was caught between these two planes, the ground that was and the slope above that. A shaftway heading down, a place always in shadow, the sun only a rumored brightness beyond.

The power of that rifle. My legs not braced well enough. It had blown me flat. I wouldn’t let that happen again. That was the way I was thinking. A child’s brain is a different thing entirely. What I can’t recover is how that brain created a sense of the inevitable, how it connected each thought and movement smoothly, as if they all fit together.

I hiked back up that slope, stiff and sore but still functional. Climbing my way through the trees, each one a handhold and every step of my boots leaving a dark scar in the hillside, the slope that steep that no step held. And when I reached the lip, I found my father and Tom aiming their rifles up at where the poacher had been. My father’s elbows on the hood, Tom braced in the passenger door. My grandfather held his rifle, also, standing at the tailgate, guarding the road behind.

What are you doing? I asked.

Waiting to see if someone comes looking, my father said.

You piece of shit, Tom said. You fucking piece of shit. He sounded like he was going to cry. He sounded weak.

I had no scope, no binoculars, so I couldn’t see anything up the ridge. It was quiet. Only insects, nothing else. No birds, no wind. The air hot even in shade. My father’s white T-shirt wet all down his back and sides and sticking to him.

I saw my rifle on the driver’s seat. I was reaching in when my father kicked the door closed. I yanked my hand away just in time.

You’ll never touch a gun again, my father said.

Yeah I will. I’m killing my first buck this weekend.

My father was very fast. The butt of his.300 magnum heading straight for my chest, but I jumped back out of reach.

What are you, he said.

We have to get out of here, Tom said. Just back out right now and find a turnaround and report what’s happened.

He could still be alive, my father said. We have to go check on him.

He’s not still alive.

You don’t know that.

I saw the shot hit. I was looking right at him in the scope. He’s not still alive.

Well we have to go up there.

No we don’t. We need to leave.

We’re not leaving, my grandfather said. My father and Tom both looked at him, but he didn’t say anything more.

Here’s what we’re doing, my father said. We’re driving in around the first bend, out of sight. And we’re locking the gate. Then we’re going up to check on him.

I’m not going, Tom said.

You’re going, my father said. We’re all sticking together.

Tom shaking his head, mumbling to himself. He lowered his rifle and walked back along the road, but he stopped after fifty feet and just sat down in the dirt.

My father drove through and came back to swing the gate closed, lay down on the ground to reach up through the lockbox. The tendons in his neck making a trough of his throat. His concentration complete, as if the only task in this world was getting that padlock closed.

My grandfather sitting in the cab, waiting, a thing of flesh with no thought. My father joined him, drove ahead slowly down a road transformed from dry yellowish dirt and spined platelets of live oak to pine needles. A stand of pines on either side, the road more shaded, falling toward a crease in the mountain where a creek ran only in winter. The road red-brown, carpeted in pine straw, the sound of the tires shushed.

I followed, and when I looked back, Tom was following behind me. A figure transformed in a single moment, in that one pull of a trigger. Slack shoulders, head down, rifle held loosely in one hand, a figure refusing to be who he was, where he was, a figure refusing time, also, still holding on to the belief that time could be turned back. Even at eleven years old, I despised him, found him weak, but I was a kind of monster, a person not yet become a person, and so it was possible to think that way.

Somewhere above us, the poacher, and I was eager to see. I wanted time to hurry forward, but every movement was slow, the air itself stagnant. The fall of my boots on this road muffled, the slope on either side indeterminate, shifting, impossible to gauge the axis because some current in my head surged on its own counter-axis.

The truck eased around the bend to the left, riding the shoulder of what would become another ridge, the form of the land generating from itself, and my father rolled to a stop, out of sight now from the gate. He and my grandfather stepped from the cab with their rifles and we met at the crease in the mountain, at the dry streambed.

No conference and no pause but only my father stepping forward into that bed, sound of his boots rolling smooth rocks beneath, and he was carried as if in an updraft, a thing meant to rise and slide along mountains.

My grandfather far slower, a shifting of that bulk at the beginning of every step, a weight that could fall in any direction at any time, no step secure. His.308 over his shoulder on a wide leather strap, his right hand hooked under this strap and pushing at it for balance and steerage.

Tom and I rose past him, up that streambed and then along a slope shielded by pine with only sparse growth beneath, easy to see and move beneath the trees. But then the pines ended and we had to push through brush, Tom raising his rifle over his head, twisting and turning through all that clung and tore. The sound of that isolating us, my father and grandfather gone.

Tom led the way, tall enough to keep his shoulders above, but the branches were in my face and so thick and springy I had difficulty pushing through. So finally I crawled beneath the growth, my chin ducked and face close to the dirt. Eyes closed to avoid being scraped. Knees pushing at the earth, and the sky made of thorns.

Where I was, I didn’t know. Tom was gone and all were gone. Movement of lizard and bird, dry shifts of sound. Home of snake and tick and every insect, and no path. No exit on any side, and the sun bearing down. Small dead leaves knit into sharp points. A weight of sound in that heat.

Clinging close to the skin of the mountain, pressing as flat as possible. A thing learned to crawl again. The mountain a heaving presence that could throw us all at any moment. I felt bulky, too large, not well enough attached. I began to feel afraid, and I wanted my.30-.30. I wanted to lever a shell into the chamber and have it ready. I rolled onto my back and held my breath and listened for movement.

Above me layer upon layer of spines. A place it would not be possible to stand. Live oaks as thick as any I’d seen.

I didn’t want to move. Any movement would only wrap everything more tightly around me. I was trapped, my heart jerking in my chest.

I did the one thing I knew to do when I was lost. I cupped my hands at my mouth, blowing between my thumbs. Sound of an owl, a hollow sound that would carry.

And then I waited. From high to my left came the answer from my father. And then from farther below, my grandfather. Each of us recognizable, no two sounds alike. And then Tom, from near my father.

I rolled back onto my stomach, pulled myself uphill, no longer lost.

False rattles, insects that sounded like snakes. Explosions of birds. The halting movements of lizards in leaves. I was looking everywhere constantly for the shape of a snake. On the earth above and to both sides and in the low branches that brushed over me. Most snakes I’d seen had been wrapped through branches, just off the ground. Same color but thicker. Baby rattlers no wider than your smallest finger and less than a foot long, looking almost identical to a branch, deadliest because they couldn’t gauge their poison yet and had no rattles, gave no warning. I was moving headfirst, so it was my head that would be struck, snake fangs in my forehead or cheek or the back of my neck.

Small movements everywhere, and my fear made me slow. Every few feet I’d stop and look around again. No place I’d ever wanted to be. And I began to think that staying low to the ground was the worst possible way. I began to wonder about trying to get on top of this. But of course I would only fall, ripping down through everything. So I kept crawling.

Hotter and hotter, rising toward noon. My eyes stinging from the salt, all of me covered in sweat, and I heard my father’s call, closer now, impatient, and answered back. I had managed to find the worst patch on the entire mountainside, and it was another twenty minutes of crawling before I was out of there. My bruised shoulder and legs stiffening, my neck kinked like it was broken, the fear all through me.

I was able to stand in brush just over my head, brush that grew like enormous clumps of gray-brown grass but with short trunks beneath. Enough space to push through, and above I could see the rock outcrops. I skirted the base of the lowest one and came up along the far side and found my father.

He was facing away, kneeling and using his rifle as a post to lean against. The barrel in close to his right shoulder and both hands wrapped around it. In his white T-shirt, he was like insect spittle hanging along a stick. The same shape, just as slack, and he didn’t turn to look at me.

Tom stood next to him, crucified by his rifle that lay across his shoulders, both arms hanging up over it, hands loose in the air.

They were both looking down at the ground, and I knew I’d find the poacher there. I didn’t hesitate, though. Some part of me was not right, and the source of that can never be discovered. I was able to walk up and look at that body and somehow I was not upset by it any more than looking at the carcass of a buck. If anything, I was excited. And perhaps this was because I’d seen so many bucks and everything else dead on the ground all my life. We were always killing something, and it seemed we were put here to kill.

He had landed facedown. Much of the middle of his back was missing. The hunting vest was still orange up high at his shoulders but had turned red and brown and black everywhere else. He smelled just like a dead buck, exactly the same, and the same large flies had come to swarm around the wound. Iridescent flashes in the sun, black circular orbits bound magnetically to that place, the sound of dozens combining into one, a sound unnaturally loud in all the stillness around.

The rock above had been sprayed, all of it, a swath ten feet long. I understood this was a man, but what I was thinking was that this was an excellent shot. A perfect shot, from over two hundred yards, with a rifle too big for me, a rifle very difficult to hold steady. If this were a buck, everyone would be grinning. There would be hoots and the high battle cry we made only when a buck was killed. We would not be so unnaturally silent. With my buck knife I’d be opening up the belly, then pulling out the innards and eating the heart and liver, and all of that would be considered good. And what if we had never been told that killing a man was bad? Wouldn’t we feel the same way then toward a man?

No one spoke. My father and Tom hanging on their rifles and I stood just behind them, empty-handed, and the heat of the day increased. No breeze at all. My shirt burning against my upper back. And finally my grandfather appeared. He walked slightly uphill to a clump of brush and sat down heavily at its base, partly in shade. His rifle across his thighs, the way the poacher had sat.

The flies had doubled in number just in the time we waited for my grandfather. They were drawn as if by an enormous gravity at the center of this man’s back. They tried to get away but could not. Every escape bent into an arc that returned. All being pulled down in, the flesh alive now with hundreds of bodies crawling as well as the ones that flew. And we were pulled in the same way, four of us gathered around this man, staring down into that hole.

The flies crawling in short jerks, so that there was never duration, only change. A shifting image, moment to moment and within each moment, but we could never see how or why. I’ve tried to remember what I saw that day, tried to remember many times, but memory insists on causation and meaning, on a story. Each thing that is leads to the next thing, and there’s a reason for that. What I want to recover, though, is that moment in which there was no good or bad but only gravity, and there was no causation but only each moment, separate and whole. Because that was the truth.

My father was the first to speak. That was inevitable. He was the only one with the right and obligation to speak. This can’t be told, he said. What happened here can never be told.

The man’s dead, Tom said.

I know that.

Well.

Well nothing.

Just leave him, my grandfather said. Don’t touch him. Maybe look for the bullet in a tree uphill, see if you can find that and remove it.

My father made a growling sound then, frustration and despair. You’re right, Tom. We need to report this. The man has a family.

We’re not reporting it, my grandfather said.

He’s a monster, Tom said. He’s a terrifying little fucking monster. He doesn’t even feel bad. He’d do it again.

He was a poacher, I said.

My father turned around to look at me.

You’re the one who put the shell in the chamber, I said.

Eleven years old, Tom said. He’s eleven years old. This is unbelievable. My daughter is eleven years old.

My father was studying me. The sun so bright I was squinting, having to blink, but his gaze was steady. The buzzing a thousand voices, high and insistent, making each moment a panic.

You’ve ruined the rest of your life, my father told me. Are you old enough to understand that? You may live another eighty years, and every one of those years is destroyed by this.

His eyes a light blue, clear as water, unable to see outward. Sinkholes.

You’ve ruined my life too, he said.

My father could no longer reach me. He was the one person in this world to hold me in place, but he was powerless. I smiled. It was not something I planned, and it was only a bit of a smile, but there it was.

My father was very fast. I turned and ran, but in a few steps his hand was on my shoulder and he threw me down. Hard earth packed and dry. The small velvet eyes of manzanita leaves. He punched me and did not hold back. For the first time in my life, I felt what he could really do. His fists slapping into me as I curled, covering my head. He was swinging with both arms.

The fist in my back frightening. His knuckles hitting spine, waves of nausea, and I could hear his breath, leaning close over me. If you saw this from far enough away, you might think he was picking me up to hold in his arms, Madonna and child. Saving me from the wolves. But there was no danger from outside, nothing he could protect me against. What we had to fear was inside me, and he was not able to reach that. His fists did nothing. And I think he knew.

My father stopped and lay back in the dirt beside me. I could hear him panting. My body a confusion of pain, my brain unable to sort out where to focus. The air itself hurt. I knew at least not to do anything, not to say anything.

The flies a sound that could not be endured for long, the curve of each flight a distortion of sound, the tone gone lower, and hundreds or thousands of these Dopplers combined made a maw of the air, a growling that came from inside our own ears, without source, and I think it was this that made my father rise from the ground and walk over to the body. I uncurled and saw my father lean down to take this man’s hands and his rifle, and he began to drag him down that hillside.