Goat Mountain

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 grass 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 space, 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 canals, 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. Reassuring 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.

Goddammit, 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.