We were a couple of miles up Sego Canyon stopped in the dry bed of the creek in the shade of an old railroad bridge straddling the top-tubes of our bikes waiting for my mired lungs and heart to catch up when Goose first told me of his interest in the war. I just stood there, leaning over my handlebars, sweat dripping off my nose, and looked at him.His name was Gil Houser, but everyone including his mom called him Goose. They called him Goose, but I thought he more closely resembled a boa constrictor or greyhound. We were at the Burrito Rico one day and I said, “I don’t understand this Goose. You look more like a skinny dog to me.” So I called him Hound after that.I came into the world of Goose later than most of the people who knew him. And I’ll call him Goose here for the benefit of those folks. He was only Hound to me and to him, I suppose, when I was there to call him that.

Three years ago I skulked out of Salt Lake City and moved south to Green River to make a new start after I got caught cheating on my high-school sweetheart with a Village Inn waitress named Betty. My sweetheart of a girlfriend found a note written on the back of a breakfast check in my pants pocket one day while she was doing the wash. The note was from Betty, of course, and she’d written how she wanted to cool off in the Beer Cave at the local Conoco station that afternoon. That’s where Sweetheart caught us. Leaning up against the Coors cases ruttin’ like a couple of Eskimos. That’s all it took. Two days later I was gettin’ out of the city with little dignity and a few stitches in my scalp where Sweetheart had smashed a bottle of Michelob across my crown.

Unlike me, Goose was a smart man. He had three degrees from the College of Eastern Utah and one from the University of Phoenix. He knew his geology. And his sociology. And his English. And he knew his business and management. All this knowledge meant he could carry on cavernous conversations with the grill cooks at the Burrito Rico during lulls between the lunch rush and dinner. He was the general manager of the Rico, and I sometimes wondered why a guy like him would hang with a guy like me. I’m not just a nickel short; I’m a good thirty-seven cents short of a dollar.

I started out bussing at the Rico, but then worked my way up to the counter. I take the orders and put the meat in the tortilla and add cheese if the customer wants it. I slide the whole deal on down the line to Vanessa or Pedro, depending on what shift we’re all working, who puts in the salsa and rice and beans and whatever else the customer wants. It’s all very cathartic, sometimes. Unless a customer gets upset because we don’t have guacamole.

Cathartic. See that’s a word I wouldn’t know if it weren’t for Goose. Cavernous is another. I’m going to throw out a few of these esoteric words once in a while.

Goose and I liked to ride mountain bikes. Early on Goose noticed me riding my bike to work and asked me if I had ridden any of the trails around the area. He and I went out the next day that both of us had off which was a Sunday on account the Rico is closed on Sundays. He drove us east on I-70 in his truck, our bikes in the bed. The interstate cut a swath over the hardscrabble land, the Book Cliffs stacked through the shimmering air to the north. We got off the freeway and headed toward the cliffs and stopped at an old dirt road. This was nine o’clock in the morning in July. It was too hot already.

On the sandstone cliffs above where we unloaded the bikes there were pictographs, tall, long, limbless images, mute and sightless, like mummies painted on the rocks. Goose pointed them out to me, and we looked at them. We stood there a long time in silence, until I felt something like a touch on my back, and I turned around quickly to see nothing but sagebrush and the truck and our bikes laying there in the dirt.

We got on our bikes and peddled up the rocky and rutted road.

Goose was in better shape than I was. Unlike me, most of his earnings from the Burrito Rico went towards student loans. Mine went towards beer. We stopped and scuttled over in the shade of the railroad bridge in the dry, deep streambed, and Goose said, “I think I’m going to try my hand at the military.”

Blackbirds were hopping from limb to limb in a cottonwood downstream some and a chipmunk chattered in a juniper across the way, and he said, “I feel like I owe it.”

Here he was, he went on, riding a bike on this hillside, this good, solid, backbone of the earth mountain, free as a man can be while other men and women were dying defending that freedom. He said the guilt was getting into his heart like a tick in there sucking his blood. I’ll admit that was a pretty good image, and I understood a little what he was feeling, and I told him so.

We came out of the shade and peddled on past a cemetery and some old buildings that were falling down. Goose said it was a ghost town, an old mining operation that went bust. Warped, weathered wood and foundations scattered round with bricks. There was an old car looked like it was rusting right back into the earth, its elements giving in to gravity and the sagebrush pushing up through the fenders and trunk.

We rode on again until I was sweating and wheezing, and we stopped at the base of a tall cliff. We had just humped up through a clearing which lay behind us. Back down the old road a bell-shaped oak tree sat in the middle of the clearing like some alien life form. Beyond the tree was another tall escarpment that seemed almost a total barrier from where we had come. The big old sun bore down on everything. It was quiet. We could hear no clamor of man.

Goose said to me then, “This is one of those places I like to come to. I like to stop right here and look around. It’s a touchstone stop for me.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

Goose got off his bike and hunkered down off the side of the trail. He picked up some of the coral-colored dirt and let it slip easily through his fingers.

“Got to touch it every so often. If I don’t, I get antsy.”

I nodded sagely, even got down and sifted some of that dirt through my fingers.

I never tried to talk Goose out of it. Not once. His father on the other hand, well… Goose took me along with him to a family barbecue where the meat was frying and the beer was flowing. I was standing right there next to the hot grill and Goose’s father manning a spatula like a sword when the war was brought up. Goose said he’d met with a recruiter.

Goose’s father shoved the spatula under a beef patty and flipped it. “Damn shame, all those good young men over there,” he said. He slapped another raw patty spattering on the grill over the flames. “You sure you want a part of that?”

I looked away out of some familiar shame, some remembered conversation my father and I had, maybe. Seems like the most important thing we ever talked about was who drank the last beer, but I could sense where this, this watershed discussion between Goose and his father was headed, and I stepped away to go find me another cold one.

Don’t know if it was Goose or his father who asked, but the last I heard was, “Why?”

#

Goose signed up and found himself in the Marines. Didn’t seem right to me, considering all his degrees and knowledge, that they put him in with the grunts as an infantryman. A waste of brainpower, I say. He did the boot-camp with the staff sergeant chewing his ear and the pushups and the “I used to have the high-school queen, now I’ve got my M-16.” All that. I imagine Goose took it well. Such a genial man. He knew it was building him up, giving him some metal for the coming storm. And he did find himself a damn fine storm.

I was at the Rico doing my shift with Vanessa when Pedro came in just before quitting time. He had the news. Goose and his patrol had hit an IED in their Humvee. Goose was the lucky one. He lived. I swear I felt the tile under my sneakers shudder when Pedro said that, like an IED had went off somewhere underneath me too. Somewhere the other side of the world. A place where there was no backbone of peaceful mountain to brace the feet of men.

He spent six months in the vet rehab facility. The first time I saw him after he got back was when he came wheeling into the Rico. He waited in line and got himself situated in front of me. I had to look through the sneeze guard glass to see him down there.

“Give me a shrimp taco,” he shouted up at me.

I sometimes used to feel sorry for myself after my girlfriend and I split. But once I saw Goose in his chair, I knew any dumb-ass reason I had to feel sorry for myself was from top to bottom stupid. And besides, what I did to Sweetheart was my own fool fault. I still had my legs and what hung between them.

I spent time at Goose’s place that winter and spring after he got back. We talked a lot. Goose had no problem relating the horror of what happened to him and the other fellows in his patrol. He said they were on their way out to Samarra to hunt themselves up some insurgents. There were five other guys in the Humvee. Goose was driving. One kid, name of Billy, was telling them all about his girl back home in Tuscaloosa. Billy says his girl, Pam, has skin like the underbelly of a fat rainbow trout fresh from a clear-water stream. The captain turns and looks at Billy and says, “A fish? Your girlfriend’s skin was like a fish?” And that’s when the earth came up from under the vehicle in superheated chunks of metal and glass and rock, and, according to what they removed from near Goose’s spinal cord, a chunk of false teeth.

Goose said he didn’t feel any pain. He said it felt just like he’d been dropped in the deep end of the swimming pool. All wet and that muffled eerie way sound comes underwater. When he pivoted back to see if everyone in the Humvee was all right, he fell over against what little was left of the man beside him. Goose pushed himself up off the captain and realized he was top heavy and looked down to see his own legs were gone from pretty much the ass down. That’s when he closed his eyes on all that.

As the little bit of snow melted and the buds were popping out everywhere, I’d get Goose in his chair and push him around the block and down to the Rico. People would wave from their cars, sometimes honk and shout, “God bless ya, Goose!” Goose’d wave with what was left of his hand. I suppose it must have been some consolation for him. Though I don’t know how all the waving and God Bless Ya’s in the world could make up for it.

One day in June we were sipping beer and got to talking about the mountain bikes and the trails. He said how he missed all that something awful. We joked around with the idea of making an all-terrain wheelchair. We even wrote out some plans on napkins. Then we seriously wondered if someone hadn’t already come up with that idea. We looked it up on the Internet. Sure enough, they had them out there on the market. Hokey looking ones with big fat tires and such. Goose’s vet checks wouldn’t cover the cost of them though. You could purchase a fine automobile for the price they wanted for some of these off-road chairs. And they just plain looked ridiculous to Goose and me.

So we did a little half-assed retrofitting on his chair to make it off-road worthy and threw it in the back of his truck along with my bike, and I drove us out I-70 to Sego Canyon. We set out with red-tailed hawks circling and screeching above us in the bullet blue sky.

Didn’t get too far before I pushed my bike in among some scrub and got behind the chair and started pushing Goose up the old road.

By God, it was hard going and it took us the best part of the day, but we got up there to Goose’s touchstone stop. By then the sky had turned to slate and there were some grave-looking clouds building to the south. I asked him if he wanted me to hand him some dirt to let slide off his nub, and he just jumped out of the chair.

He stood there as best he could, considering, and pushed his scars into the earth, down in there where the dirt was soft from a recent rainstorm. Then he let himself down like a man doing pushups and put his face in it. He wallowed in it. The good earth. The safe earth. His touchstone.

He communed there for so long I finally took a seat in his chair, and it started rolling backwards down the incline. It got going fast and I was ten feet gone before the chair got snagged on a root and tipped me over. By the time I got myself dusted off and righted in the chair, Goose was propped on his half-ass peering over the weeds grinning at me.

I gave him the finger and said, “Damn, Hound, these things are dangerous.”

That’s when the clouds tore open and the rain fell, and we started to laugh. We laughed until we were soaked through, sitting in the mud shivering.

I helped him back up into his chair. He wrapped one arm around my neck kind of hooking the knotty clump of his hand on my clavicle. As I lifted him out of the mud, the bearing out that he was light, little more than a sack of wheat, bore witness as to how the core of a man is what makes a man. Goose’s body was half reduced, but in all estimation, Goose was still the man, just highly compressed.

On the way down through the muck and rain, I asked him why he didn’t get outfitted with some artificial legs and hands. I said I thought they were making good progress on prosthetics.

He didn’t say anything right off, just breathed heavy. The rain pattered down on us and the green leaves of the cottonwoods. Some surprised toads were in the road, a few musty smelling range cattle watched our progress.

“I tried them in the hospital,” he said. “They strapped them on me. I walked.”

“That’s good, Hound. Why didn’t you bring them home?”

“They took me outside one day into the sunshine, and I walked across the grass. Sat down on a bench.”

He paused. I worked the chair up and over a juniper root. My feet were soaked through and cold, muddy, slipping on the rocks.

“I sat there in the sun, and I could feel it, you know? All that sunshine pouring down on me, warming me up. But then I looked down at the shoes they had tied on to the end of those legs, and they were so far away from me.”

The chair’s tires squelched through the mud. Dusk was settling in early under the storm, and I was starting to pucker a bit with the fear that we might get stuck out here in the dark. If we had been on our bikes, the truck would have been a mere ten minutes away. If that. I don’t think Goose ever knew he had brakes on his bike.

“And I knew my toes would never feel the sun again or the ground. I took the legs off and dragged myself back across the grass. It felt good. The grass.”

I maneuvered down the old shot road, holding back the chair’s desire to roll unbidden. The rain eased up and then stopped entirely. The clouds rolled off to the south, and we made it back to the truck just as stars were starting to assert their presence up there. I got Goose in the cab, threw his chair in the bed, and walked the little distance back to where my bike was stashed. I looked at the shadowy pictographs on the rocks. It’s like they were watching me, those legless images from some earlier time, a time I couldn’t even fathom, and I felt some touch again on my back that made me shiver.

One of the Salt Lake papers ran an article on Goose in their Sunday special addition lifestyle supplements. They came to Green River with a camera and took a million photos of him in his uniform and his medals and of him in his chair and posing in the grass in the park. Made him look forlorn and handsome. The article’s angle was that of a humble hero, a local man makes the ultimate sacrifice but keeps his self-assured outlook on life. Like that.

Well the women started coming out of the bushes for Goose. He’d been shy with the ladies before his stint in the war, and he still was. He didn’t know how to handle it all. They were driving by his house and calling him at all hours, propositioning him with offers of love and nurturing and being the soil for his children to flower in. It was a shame that Goose’s sowing days had gone up with the shrapnel.

The women came and went and Goose had what fun he could with them, but then all that settled down too. One gal who hung around the longest left him an old Beatles record and this scratched on a piece of lined paper: “All You Need is Love.” Goose showed me that and laughed. “That and a dick,” he said. After a little more laughter that drifted off and away like our moods, he said, “Maybe they could make me a mechanical one.”

We got out on the trails and old back roads a time or two more. It wasn’t easy, but we saw the summer turn over and the leaves start to change. We talked about next summer, talked about fashioning skis to the bottom of his chair for winter excursions. We talked and laughed, and Goose seemed fine. But like with most friends and lovers and friends you love, the closer you are means nothing, and in the end you find yourself even further away.

Pedro brought the news to us again. It was late September. Vanessa screamed and dropped a pan of refried beans. I didn’t even know Goose owned a gun. It’s a mystery how he pulled the trigger with his hands the way they were.

I rode out that very next morning on my bike. Stood there and looked around a spell, smelled the rabbitbrush bloom, spotted another pictograph on the cliff wall. This one had legs and arms and was holding what looked like a stick or a sword.

I got the soil in a little jar.

At the viewing I had some trouble with the casket, but I got it open. No one said anything. I wanted to do it quick, and I dumped it in there and had the lid back down. I turned and there was Goose’s father. And it was one of those moments you hear tale of where you wish you were a bit more prepared. He looked into my eyes with the look of a man petitioning all the pent-up wisdom of an unfathomable humanity, as though I might account for his son’s foreshortened life.

Of course, I had no such accounting.

“His dirt,” was all I could muster.