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 grass 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 fuck 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 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.