Goat Mountain

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 grass.

Well.

Well what? How the fuck 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 glasses 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 gods, 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.

Tom bent down to pick something off the ground, something I couldn’t see, but when he straightened, he had a small stone in his hand, and he hucked it at my grandfather where he slept. Rise and shine, fucker, he said. Looks like we’re going on the hunt after all.

Aborted snore, half a lung sucked into his throat and blown back. Smacking sounds then, chewing on some meal from dreams, first images of what the world might be, and then an enormous yawn.

We all waited unmoving. The trees not pillars but ribs, this place not a cathedral but a cavern, and my grandfather was held nowhere. He was both smaller and larger than this mountain.

He bent his knees in the air, wearing only his boxers, legs thin as bone, draped with loose pale skin and no meat, and he swung them forward to rise to a sitting position. Hundreds of pounds somehow levered by nothing at all. Only boxers, naked otherwise, and the great teats hanging down, pink and waiting to feed all that would be.

You look like deer, he said. Frozen in place, watching, about to jump.

Fuck that, Tom said. I’m not afraid of you.

My grandfather smiled.

Tom looked away, then sat down and started making a sandwich. My father and I unfroze and worked on our own sandwiches. The water thickening and slowing beside us. Pink meat and yellow cheese, white bread, red ketchup. All of us aware of every movement my grandfather made, pulling on his pants and boots, his shirt and jacket, tottering off to the outhouse and returning with his vacant stare to sit on the uphill bench beside Tom and swing his legs in. He reached for his knife, drove it into wood to stand beside our knives, large curved blades, and in this moment we could have been all the same, but only in this moment.

I see you decided not to use the buck’s head, my grandfather said. So the man has had a proper burial?

My father glanced at me and didn’t answer. The two of us on the downhill side sharing a bench, hanging on.

Something went wrong, my grandfather said. I’m curious now.

I focused on chewing. The bread gumming at the roof of my mouth.

Well? he asked.

But my father only ate.

Did he come back to life? Was that the problem? Did you lose track of him?

My father brushed the crumbs off his hands, grabbed his knife and sheathed it, then stood. I’m leaving for the hunt in five minutes, he said. I don’t care who’s left behind.

Tom grabbed his knife and looked at my grandfather. Then he sheathed it and stood and walked away toward the truck. I’m ready, he said. His rifle already slung over his shoulder, and I saw he had his canteen, too.

What was it like to bury your kill? my grandfather asked me.

I didn’t, I said.

So he’s not buried?

No.

My grandfather smiled. Where is he, then?

In the upper glade. In two pieces. He fell apart.

Fell apart.

Yeah.

My grandfather grabbed his knife and looked at it. He was chuckling. Fell apart.

It looked like he was taking a dive.

Into what?

I don’t know.

My grandfather’s pig eyes cold and small. The chuckling and grin on the surface only. The rest of us here for his grim entertainment. Holding his knife in one meaty fist, point up, twisting it slowly as if gouging the air, working a small rip, tearing a bit at the fabric of the air, opening some vacuum invisible that would begin to pull all things inward. Annihilation. It was always what my grandfather promised, and it might begin in one tiny point, without warning. He had a different relation to air and light and sound and weight. He was nimble even in the places we could not see.

Long curve of that blade, beveled to an edge too slight to know. Milky thickness beyond the bevel, metal polished so smooth it might have been liquid, pewter gray, associated with the mercury running through the veins of this mountain, similar satiny surface and unfathomable weight beneath.

A trick of my grandfather’s to distract. Each of us lost, over and over.

The knife suddenly gone below the table, sheathed. And then he shifted his great bulk, swung his legs over the bench, and wandered off returned to nothing at all, a heap of flannel and wool.

My father had already started the truck. Sitting in the cab with Tom. Last hunt. The two staring ahead past the stream and waterwheels into the hillside, waiting.

The buck waiting also, slow revolution of blue-green galaxies at the back of those eyes, beyond annihilation. The rip my grandfather had opened might pull all things toward it but those eyes. Impulse and source.

This camp no refuge. It was not possible for us to carve out any place of our own. I understand that now. The stream and ferns and trees no barrier against the open meadow beyond or the mountain above, no separation.

My grandfather grabbed his.308 and stuffed into the cab, the truck dipping on that side, hanging tilted, and I waited until his door was closed, then passed and climbed the bumper.

My father backed and turned and we rumbled onto the road again, and I didn’t know where we were headed. A hunt an evasion, an attempt to stall everything else.

The air ten degrees hotter the moment we left the trees. The sun bright off the top of the cab, and I was squinting. Usually the afternoon hunt was later, when the sun was lower. Everything off balance this trip. My father and I were supposed to have taken a nap, but all my father wanted now was movement.

Each tree trapped in its own heavy shadow, pinned down. Every open area blasted and washed out in white. Grasshoppers flung like small rocks heated until they popped. Dragonflies cruising on solar wings.

I tried to look for bucks, but a buck here would be no more than a mirage. Shadow form stamped into the white and then fading almost instantly. Thrum of cicadas overwhelming, rubbing at the air and dissolving shape, making it nearly impossible to see.

White manzanita, each bush of it a thousand velvety mirrors, arrayed on both sides of the road, hung separate from the earth, winking among green manzanita with leaves almost as bright. Their only intent confusion. The road lost somewhere in that maze.

We fell into the draw below the reservoir, and the leaves of the wild grape had all fused into one brightness, hot mantle of a lantern flung and grown. Shade then, and my eyes with no time to adjust before we emerged in light again, and we passed the road to bear wallow. My father driving us on.

No blue to this sky. All blue burned away. Heat waves risen over the blackened arms of fallen ponderosa pines, melting in waves amid dry brown sedge. Thick clumps of it on all sides, resisting erasure, spiking through the melt. The road before us a memory of water, dry now but rutted with scabs grown inward.

Falling downward always, this road the beginning of what would become a canyon, our stamp left on the earth. And my father took the next turnoff, a little-used track overgrown with thistle purple and green amid the brown, a road leading to the burn, the lowest section of the ranch where a wildfire had swept through and laid waste to all. A place where the ground itself was red and black as if still on fire and might cave away beneath you as you walked. False diamonds there, clear shards and chips as thick as your finger lying everywhere on the surface, as if all might be given, formed under pressure in some earlier time and now simply offered up.