Goat Mountain: A Novel Part 11

You really are a monster, Tom said.

What rule says you eat the buck and not the man? my grandfather asked.

Every f.u.c.king rule in the world.

Did the rules say this boy could kill that man?

No.

Well what happens to the rules then?

Sometimes I think I invented my grandfather, that he never existed on his own. His voice is my own voice now, and I can't find any separation. I can't find what was him then and what is me now. His views have infected me.

You are all f.u.c.ked in the head, Tom said. All three of you, and when we get back, everyone's going to know. Enjoy your last bit of craziness. We're leaving here today.

We're not leaving today, my grandfather said. We're going for a hunt today, and then taking a nap, and then going for another hunt, same as every other day. And we're leaving tomorrow, as we planned. And that buck's head is going to hang there until we leave.

We're not going for a hunt, my father said. I'm burying this man. I'm going to bury him right now. This has gone on too long. You can have your f.u.c.king head hanging there all you want, but the man is not hanging beside him.

My father went to the ropes then, worked in darkness, his back against the light, and I could hear the men breathing above me, could hear the snap of the fire.

Rope tearing against bark, and the dead man fell before me, all one piece in motion, a slab, no collapse or fold but only a hard dull fall onto his shoulders and then ankles swinging down slowly until they rested a few inches above the ground. Some part of him refusing to return to earth, something always otherworldly about him. Sly grin still and head ducked, capable of anything.

So you're ready to say this man's death meant something? my grandfather asked.

I'm not saying anything, my father said. And I'm not talking to you.

Well what does it mean to bury him?

You don't ask questions like that.

These are the only questions. What if we chop his head off and bury him with the buck's head? Does that make any difference?

Tom walked over to the fire and took out a long thick stick burning at its end. Red grid of coals inside the flames. He held this up and gazed at it. Would it matter if I burned your eyes out with this stick? he asked. Would that make any difference?

I'm not the one whose eyes should be burned out, my grandfather said, and he pointed down at me. If the man's death means something, then there has to be consequence.

Both of you, my father said. Please just kill each other now. I can't listen to either of you ever again.

What does it mean to bury him? my grandfather asked. What will that do?

The dead man was looking all around while we were distracted. s.h.i.+fty-eyed. Planning his escape. A quick leap over the stream, through trees and ferns and into that meadow. Head of a buck, body of a man, feet swiveling and flapping at the earth, arms yanking at his sides useless, but that great head with its rack and large eyes looking back, seeing all shapes. Body jerking below, but that head smooth, gliding over the earth.

My father crawled to the ankles and pulled them to ground, yanked out the hooks. The dead man free now, and I waited for him to run, but my father rose and picked up the ankles with their bloodless holes and dragged him toward the truck. The man's arms outstretched and knuckles curled, risen off the ground, locked into that shape, reaching for everything, no neck, orangutan Jesus pale and rotting and waiting. He would not go into any grave easily. I knew that.

Well I guess it's back to bed, my grandfather said, yawning and scratching his sides. We come close, and then we just go on. Dig your hole and try not to think about anything.

f.u.c.k off, my father said.

Yeah, my grandfather said. He turned and picked his way carefully over the needles and cones, barefooted, unsteady, and sat down at the table. Breakfast first, then I'll f.u.c.k off and catch a bit of shut-eye.

Tom tossed his firebrand back into the pit and returned to the griddle. Fine, he said. Aren't you going to ask any important questions, though? Why eat an egg? What is an egg? What does the egg have to do with the bacon? Is there any rule that says we have to eat the bacon before the egg? What if the bacon is the egg? Is there any consequence to an egg?

Help me lift him, my father said. He was talking to me, waiting at the back of the pickup.

I stood, but I didn't want to touch the dead man. I couldn't just reach down and hold those hands.

Right now, my father said. Hurry the f.u.c.k up.

My father in shadow, the truck blocking the fire. I held my rifle in both hands as I came closer and was hidden also. Cold and not yet morning.

Now, he said.

The dead man a pale bluish shadow against the darker ground. Those hands suspended and curled midair, warning us, trying to describe the enormity of something but frozen midwarning, without blood or sound or time.

Put down your rifle and grab his hands.

I was frozen, locked as solidly as the dead man.

f.u.c.k me, my father said. He dropped the ankles and circled the dead man in only three quick strides, grabbed my arm and hauled me around to the feet. Grab his ankles then, he said.

The dead man reaching for me. Unclear where the ground was or which way we hung in gravity. It looked like he was standing above with those arms reaching high, which meant I was lying on the ground, the world rocked ninety degrees, but there was only air behind my back. I was held against nothing, and the dead man bearing down. His head ducked low because he was about to spring.

Grab his ankles. My father's voice loud.

The removal of Jesus from the cross. His burial. The problem is that he's going to rise, and there's some premonition of that, and the premonition binds you in place. You can't move or breathe.

G.o.ddammit, my father said. Are you completely f.u.c.king r.e.t.a.r.ded?

Your son knows, my grandfather said from the table. He knows the man's death means something. He knows there's going to be consequence. He knows more than you do.

How about you dig a hole, my father shouted back. How about you dig a big hole and get down in it and when we get back we'll throw the dirt over. I'd be happy to do that. No hesitation at all.

You can't bury everything, my grandfather said. Some things won't be buried.

Spare me.

What will this burial do? Will it mean your son didn't kill the man? Will it mean the man's not dead?

Did the bacon come from the egg? Tom asked. Did the bacon ever have wings? Is the bacon a pterodactyl?

My father knelt down in darkness at the man's side and cradled him, lifted him in a drooping slab, arms and legs not quite rigid, and turned to swing the feet in first over the tailgate, but they weren't high enough, even with the tailgate down. They were caught.

Aaah! my father yelled, and he dipped and swung the body to get those feet to clear, then pushed the dead man into the bed with all my grandfather's pinecones, sliding him along metal ruts. The body pale and rubbery and flexing, a different luminescence. Hands hanging midair still, over the edge, but my father swung the tailgate up and slammed them.

Get in the truck, he said.

Bravo, my grandfather said. You're halfway to nothing.

My father grim. I climbed in the cab and he was hunched forward over the wheel. You have done this, he said. This is all because of you. So you're going to drag that body all the way to the upper glade and give him a proper burial.

The upper glade?

That's right. My father turned the ignition then and the engine was surprisingly loud, rough and pulsing, racing against the cold. Grab the shovel, he said. Unless you want to dig a grave with your bare hands.

I walked to the fire pit, my grandfather and Tom both watching, and grabbed our camp shovel, hinged and small, army surplus. It would take forever to dig a grave with that.

But I climbed into the cab, and my father turned the truck around and swung onto the road, except there was no road to see and he did not turn on the lights. He drove in darkness. We left the fire and its light almost instantly, and there was no other light to steer by, the moon down now and only a dim scatter in one end of the sky.

The sound of the truck isolated us from the rest of the world. Held together in this cab waiting for what would happen. And yet sound is all my father could possibly have used to navigate. The scree along one side to know he was at an edge, the snapping of small branches under the tires and then drifting back into smoother sound of dirt and small rocks and pinecones crus.h.i.+ng, soft small grenades going off. Or perhaps he drove from memory, the shape of this road become a part of him.

A dark form beside me, a form I didn't know. I couldn't see him, and it seemed it had always been this way. My grandfather had erased him.

Falling through darkness, compression in the engine winding up high and my hand braced on the dash, and I couldn't see what was below. The dead man behind falling toward us, his arms outstretched.

What I know of my father is that he was moral. He wanted all to be made right. He would have remade us all, melted us down and recast us in a different mold. And this was why he had no chance. This was why he was erased and I can never remember him now as anything more than a shadow beside me, some reminder of who I perhaps should have been but could never possibly have been. You can't undo your own nature, and the moral are always left helpless in the face of who we are.

20.

JESUS HAD A PAGAN BURIAL. A CHAMBER WITH ROOM FOR the afterlife, closed off by a great stone. A desert burial, used for thousands of years before him. Not the beginning of any story. All the others rose from the dead also, to drink from their golden cups and drive chariots and parade around with jewelry and servants. Death a busy place. The only difference was that Jesus moved the stone.

Jesus broke the law, broke the separation between living and dead. A collision of our two worlds, and it could only be catastrophic. Jesus released the dead into our lives, set all the dead wandering the earth, freed the wraiths and demons we fear now, invaded the world of the living with all the figures of the afterlife, all the figures of h.e.l.l, freed from the pagan demonland of Hades. No river and boatman to separate us, and now when night falls we can feel them everywhere, their lungless breath.

G.o.d wanted this. He sent his only son as an invasion of the otherworld into ours. This is the story of Jesus. After thousands of years of separate worlds, we finally had to admit that the demonland was inside us, and so we told this story of Jesus moving that stone, opening the gate, flooding our lives with all that we are, sent by G.o.d, who is only our own will. Jesus is our recognition of the demon inside us, a recognition of the animal inside us, the beast. A recognition we wanted and needed.

My father believed still in our goodness. He believed we could make things right and keep the demonworld at bay, and so he was destined to struggle and suffer without end. He drove us on in darkness, falling into caverns and compacting into ruts and rises, sc.r.a.ped along both sides, high eerie screes along the body of the truck.

I held on and didn't know what would be. We could easily have gone off any edge and tumbled to our end. Some of the land around us nearly flat, but before the upper glades we'd be driving along drop-offs, long falls of hundreds of feet into rock and air, and I had no way of measuring where we were. I had lost all reference, same as that ancient boat trip into the lower world.

You'll bury him, my father yelled over the engine and sc.r.a.ping. You'll bury him and we'll never mention him again.

I think I knew even at the time, even at eleven years old, that nothing buried ever is gone.

The land remained dark, even as the sky became the blue of a gun barrel, hard and nearly black, even as the stars began to fade and I could see the trees against the heavens, rough shadows in the sky forming and falling away and forming again, sudden apparitions, still without reference.

You're going to dig down until your hands bleed, my father yelled. You're going to pay.

I just held on as we lurched through the end of that night. It's unclear what payment has ever done. Nothing has been undone. Every act has remained. What is it in us that makes us believe we can pay? This is a belief in some order, some accounting.

My father stayed perfectly on that road he couldn't see, followed its every twist and turn as every shape leered from above and fell behind, outran all that would cling or follow except, of course, the dead man, who followed just behind us.

The sky bluer, less black, and in addition to the dark branches of trees pa.s.sing above I could see the woolly shapes of brush to the sides, could see contour of the land, of the mountain rising to our left. The high ridge that led all the way to the top of Goat Mountain, tapering here, reachable, and somewhere just below it the upper glade, a bare patch of gra.s.s that fell steeply into pines. The highest open s.p.a.ce, with a view out over everything. The dead man would have the million-dollar view, as the dead always have. We don't believe in death.

The road visible now as two pale tracks with a dark hump between, and the brush and trees vanished from my side. I looked down a long fall into nothing, an edge of the world. The twilight arrived just in time. Boulders and rock faces blue apparitions faint and s.h.i.+fting, pulling from below. A feeling I can remember now, one that has never vanished or diminished, that deep chasm and its tug at us.

My father did not ease off the gas, and he did not hug the uphill side but simply drove on, the tires inches away from the edge, and I must have been holding my breath and willing the truck to remain on its path until we curved to the left and away from this void into trees again, darkened and again nearly blind as we arrived.

I remained in the cab, holding my rifle. I did not want to touch the dead man.

My father came around and opened my door. You're going to do this, he said. You're going to do this right now. And I'll hold your rifle. You'll need both hands.

I did not want to give up my rifle.

Get out here now.

I couldn't move. This mountain the wrong place to be. But my father grabbed the front of my jacket and yanked me out. Held me upright in the dust and took the rifle. Tall, much taller than I was, looming over me, a giant without understanding. He did not seem weak. Made stronger without my grandfather near, each generation sapping the next.

I'll carry the shovel, too, he said, and he pushed me and I walked to the tailgate and let it down and the dead man's hands reached out. Enough light now in that blue dawn to see the hollow shape of him, thin and pale. With his head ducked and arms up where he could not see, he looked like a child asking for help, asking to be lifted.

Touching the dead. We're not supposed to touch the dead. This is why we make a comfortable afterlife for them, so they will not reach out. We hope to distract them, keep them busy. Burial is a hope.

Grab his wrists and pull him out.

I can't do that.

You killed him. So now you bury him.

I can't touch him.

My father levered a sh.e.l.l into the .30-.30, a sound so loud I suddenly realized how quiet it was. A few small birds, light wings and leaves, an occasional chirp and nothing more. The sky changing from dark blue to a lighter blue did not make any sound.

My father pressed the end of the barrel into my neck. You're my son, he said. I'm here to help you. I'm trying to figure out what the h.e.l.l you are and trying to keep you from becoming that. But if you don't grab those wrists now, I'm going to pull the trigger.

Cold metal against my neck, pressing in, and a hollow I could not feel but the bullet would travel down that hollow and rip through my neck in an instant so fast it could not be known, and I did believe my father would pull the trigger. He had been pushed too far.

So I grabbed those wrists, cold and mostly bone, and felt the dead man's curled fingers on my forearms, his fingernails the same as any beak or claw or horn, the part of us made of something other than flesh, the part we want to deny, the reminder. I pulled and was afraid he'd separate, just rip in half, but all of him slid, and he did not complain or say anything at all, and I yanked again and he slid out until I was stepping backward quickly and he was falling, the weight of him off the end of that gate, and I could not let him fall on me, jumped back and let go as he landed hard.

The sound magnified in this bend of road, under these trees. The dead man sly still, waiting for the right moment to make his move. Different from the buck, not rooting into the earth but trickier.

Not far from here was where he had begun, a living man sitting on that rock. Dragged downhill by my father. Dragged again by my grandfather across the meadow at the edge of our camp, and dragged back by my father to be hung a second time. Our lives repet.i.tion, not only us but all who came before, and Jesus, too, dragging his cross, form of suffering, form of a human life. In all our stories, we drag and sc.r.a.pe a weight across this earth. Called the Pa.s.sion. Jesus a story of our pity for ourselves.

Get moving, my father said, as all fathers have said, enforcers generation after generation, slaves on every road.

So I grabbed those hands, fingerclaws sc.r.a.ping the underside of my wrists, and pulled him, and he slid more easily than the buck but was heavier, even hollowed out. He could not return to the earth. His connection had been severed. No root to burrow down, no transformation into plant or rock. The buck elemental still, made of the same material as the stars and trees. But the dead man heavier and heavier, acc.u.mulation of weight, gravity hole.

My heels digging into that loose slope of pine needles and leaves and fallen twigs over dirt, catching on rock beneath and the next step slipping again. Dragging in heaves backward, all movement shortened, my pull at one end become only inches of progress, all of him expanding and contracting and slipping back down and I didn't see how I would ever make it to the upper glade.

The dead man with his heels together, maintaining perfect form, swaying back and forth, a diver coming up from the depths or descending still.

d.a.m.n it, my father said, and he yanked one of the dead man's hands from me and pulled hard up that slope.