The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories by Christopher Merkner

need someone to be with who won’t tell me what to do.”
    I nodded and rubbed my face. I had a lot I wanted to say that she was making me swallow.
    I had never been to the mountain. I had no idea what people did on the mountain. It is the only mountain in Wisconsin. Indeed, it is the only mountain within a one- or two-thousand-mile radius. Indeed, it’s not a mountain at all. It’s a bluff, andbecause we see it as a bluff, a total fraud, we call it a mountain. Miners liked it years ago. But that didn’t last, and I can see why. It has always seemed a particularly depressing mountain to me. It has always seemed like some ecological flaw, a misstep of creation, an eyesore that suppressed our property values and our perspectives—a painfully slow rising from the earth matched only by its salient and rather unpleasing drop back down again—a metaphor to kill the pleasure of all metaphors in and around and about this countryside.
    I probably should have discouraged her from driving. She was fourteen. She passed cars on the right edge of the highway. She played extraordinarily loud music. The music seemed unbelievably unrelatable. I wondered at the calibration of their anger and what a world looked like in which people wore their anger so openly, or a world in which people paid money to hear people so fluent with their anger. I nearly bit my hand off as we rounded the tight switchbacks. I have never been more grateful to see a parking lot.
    We left the car and crossed a wooden bridge leading to a prefabricated cabin built off the face of the mountain. I wanted to know how she’dknown this place was here, but she would not read my note. She said, “Let’s go” like we were actors in some television crime drama. But I kept pace with her, and I remained silent. We paid fifteen dollars each (she paid for herself on a credit card I had not, to my knowledge, cosigned for her) for a flimsy tin lid. The broken-toothed and partially bearded man at the counter said, “He know what he doing?”
    â€œNo one knows what they’re doing, Billy,” my daughter said.
    He laughed. His mouth was a gothic cage. “You go like this,” he said to me. “Not like this. Got it?”
    I nodded. I did not have it. I had no idea what he was talking about. I smelled whiskey, and I wanted a long drink. He pointed us out the back door, which he had propped open, and I could see through the back door another long bridge and a set of stairs that went down to the creek near the base of the mountain. He winked at me.
    I followed my daughter. She didn’t speak. I didn’t speak. It was, by then, late afternoon. The light fell against the face of the mountain rock in a pleasant way, so that I could see the black flies swarmingagainst the pollen and motes. At the bottom of the stairs we went straight for the creek bed. I knelt down.
    â€œNot here,” she said.
    I stood back up.
    She was looking around me, around us, and back up to the prefabricated cabin. Sensing, I suppose, that we were not being watched, she moved quickly up the creek, and I followed. We walked for another twenty minutes until we arrived at the entrance to a mine portal. The entrance was boarded over. The creek was spilling from beneath the boards. She stomped into the water, across the slick rocks, and went directly to the entrance to begin yanking boards away.
    I am not great at transgressions, which makes me both a great and horrible father. She seemed to expect that I would not be able to assist her in her violation of mine property, as she did not turn around to ask for help. She grunted; noises I had never heard her make came up from her belly and her heart, and she pulled against a final plank with a yell I had actually heard her use before, somewhat frequently, with her mother. But she could not get that last plank away. She turned to me. “Someone used screws.”
    I made a face. I came over.
    Indeed,