David Vann - Goat Mountain

I put my hand out to feel the crust. Platelets broken free. Formed by water and fire, all that had dissolved hardened again, the making of new rock.

My hand jumping from that ground, taken on its own life, and I had been shot. A hole through the back of my hand, blood everywhere, and the pain hot, searing hot, as if blood were fire.

My father screaming. Shoot me, you stupid fuck! Leave my son alone!

My hand against the dirt, and I didn’t understand. Two bullets in exactly the same place. It seemed inevitable there would be a third, that another bullet would go through the hole in my hand and into this vent, guided by something more than we know.

My grandfather grabbed the top of my head and pointed me downslope. Focus, he said.

The pain gathered in my skull. Leaking from my hand into the liquid space around my brain, molten.

My grandfather slapped me. Stay awake, he said. Get those crosshairs on him.

I put my cheek against the stock and found Tom in that scope. I could see him reloading, gun held downward, slipping rounds into its underside. Only his hands visible, one foot, part of a shoulder, dark as shadow.

I can’t shoot him, I said. I can’t shoot Tom.

You will.

The center of the crosshairs swimming drunkenly over Tom and that tree, the blood pulsing and my breath ragged. He raised his rifle, taking a sidestep, exposed, and I pulled the trigger and thought he would be dead. His body folded and thrown, this is what I would see through the scope, my own doing, and the look of surprise on his face, like the dead man, an unwillingness to believe.

But the bullet was swallowed somewhere without sign, taken away and vanished, as if it had never been fired, and I imagined I was immune, that no bullet could come from me again.

Tom fired. I could see that in the scope, and instantly my leg was ripped. I looked down and saw two holes in my jeans, my right thigh, blood already and a dull ache and the world shuttering.

The black of this ground become the air. My grandfather slapping me again, shaking me. My father screaming, a sound small and muffled and far away and meaningless.

My grandfather whispering in my ear. I will cut open every part of you. I will peel away strips until you cover the ground all the way from here to there. I will undo every part that was made.

The smell from inside him, the heat of him, and I knew that he would pull me apart with his bare hands and snap through bone and think nothing of it. In every memory he was there, waiting, annihilation and source.

He pulled the bolt and loaded the last shell as I held the rifle. You make this one count, he said.

So I raised that rifle into the sky and pulled the trigger, and the butt was not close against my shoulder so it slammed into my chest and knocked me down.

My grandfather’s hand over my face, fingers squeezing at the edges of my eyes. All of this comes from you, he said. From what you did. This is the consequence, and you will finish what you owe.

His fingers pressing in, and I was terrified I’d lose my eyes, the fear jolting me awake. I couldn’t see, but I swung at him with my good hand.

That’s right, he said. You shoot him or I take out your eyes.

ATERRIBLE GOD. THAT’S ALL WE KNOW. ATAVISTIC FEAR. God that would make us and destroy us, but we’ve forgotten this god. Our dreams of Jesus have made us soft.

My grandfather pressed me flat against that black earth and was ready to take my eyes. That’s what I know. The mass of him, heavier than this mountain, a different gravity. All that we fail to believe.

Pressing me down through crust, toward the inferno, all of me on fire. But then he held my head in both hands, as if he would care for me. And he was smiling. He was curious about my pain. Unconcerned about bullets coming our way.

You will kill, he said. Eyes gray and small and empty in their centers. Eyes made of time, threads in that gray streaming outward from darkness, bundles and cords of light begun invisible, appearing at the inner edge and crossing that ring to vanish again at the outer edge. The gray a kind of pearl, the surface no surface at all. I was sinking beneath those threads into others beneath, galaxies opening, bundles of pearl-gray cord infinite and revealed only here. I could fall through this place, fall through time, and there would be no end, no ground.

All that is terrible is beautiful. And the times we see are always too brief. A bullet tore into the back of my left leg, deep into the muscle, lodged in bone. No graze but a falling away of breath and thought and the spread of some deep animal fear. I closed my eyes and my grandfather sat me upright, shook me and braced a knee behind my back. The rifle in my hands, and he was sliding in another round.

You will kill him now, he said. You will find him in that scope and feel those crosshairs dig into his chest and let that bullet go. You will do that or you will die here.

I could no longer speak. I was falling away and my grandfather was keeping me from falling. I looked through the scope and saw empty sky, whited blue. Then trees from the mountains far on the other side of the valley rushing at impossible speeds, flung across the surface in arcs, then black ground, white twisted shapes, and my leg was hollowed out and burning, a kind of shell for holding flame.

My father had come closer. Somehow I knew that. An ally. My grandfather rising up like some great bear to meet him, and I knew he would crush my father. Skull in his hands. I fell back against the earth and he blotted out most the sky, becoming larger in every moment, feeding on our fear, and I swung that rifle upward and leaned the barrel against his side and pulled the trigger.

The boom in close, odd muffled sound with the barrel against him, and I knew the shot would have no effect. He was too large, growing still, and he was made of something we’ve never known, something that pulls against all else we can see or feel and makes its birth possible, something that can bring rock itself into being. This bullet would travel endlessly inside him and never find a target. It would travel for thousands of years and hit nothing because it would have a shadow somewhere immovable. Those thousands of years become less than an instant and the bullet vanished and winking into being and gone.

Dark sky above me swaying in place, and some vent had been opened. I heard his lung collapse, heard the breath of it come out through his side, and it seemed almost that he could be a man. My own head swimming, riding waves of pain and pulse, blacking out, but I could see him turn and look down at me and his mouth was open for air. No intake, and there was amazement on his face. He looked at me as if I were god myself, his final trick.

His arms and hands shrunken away and reaching for me. He was tottering backward, righted himself, tilted forward, and I knew he would fall and I would be crushed.

His eyes the brightest gray, brushed metal, and fixed on me as his enormous bulk came down. A fall we took together, meeting somewhere between, time slowed and gravity thinned, and what I felt was love.

That fall an eternity, and I was crushed between mountains, held against black earth by the weight of something darker still, and had no breath. My father’s face lost and desperate, made a child again, pulling at the great body, all his world gone. He pulled at that body until it was rolled off me, and then he wept over his father.

It was not possible for my grandfather to die. He broke every rule when he did that. God without end.

I’D LIKE TO THANK THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL Foundation and the University of San Francisco for generous support during the writing of this novel, and Colm Tóibín, Janet Burroway, and David Kirby for recommending me.