Hills in “Gods Go Begging” often are depressing places of despair, horror and desperation. The key scene where Jesse Pasadobles  gets caught in a gunfight in Vietnam takes place on a hill and it is on that hill that he and his comrades realize that they were merely decoys to throw off the Vietcong’s attempts to intercept their communications. It is on the hill that the chaplain goes mad and abandons his fellow soldiers. Hills feature prominently in the chaplain’s mad inner dialogue as he is carried down the river and stumbles over terrain like a Vietnam War era King Lear. Hills hold secrets. At first the legend was that his family had gold and silver in the hills, but it is later revealed the secret of the house on the hill was that the chaplain was Jewish, something his family hid from the townspeople.

The chaplain returns to a hill, though not his ancestral one or the one in Vietnam. The hill he returns to is Portero Hill, a depressing, crime and poverty filled area of San Francisco. It many ways it reminded me of the depiction of Arizona in “The Hungry Woman.” It is described as filled “with discards and heaps of trash on the hillside had begun to fuse with the industrial rubble down below to form a wide, formless mass of fast food wrappers, rusted metal, plastics and paper soaked in rainwater and engine oil.” It is described almost as military like, describing the projects as, “the dreary rows of buildings had been painted with a muddy, battleship gray enamel that had been detonated by the naval shipyard just before it was shut down (160).” It is covered with graffiti that is described as a camouflage that even the military can’t match. The denizens of the hill lead hopeless lives and the combination of trash and industrial pollutants make them “lose their cultural memory” and apparently any intelligence. It is a depressing account. But the chaplain returns to redeem himself and watch over Mai and he is the one that blessed Persephone and Mai as they lay dying.

It is difficult to get an accurate read on Potrero Hill, though. Jesse Pasadobles does not seem to be a reliable narrator and his description of Potrero Hill is fantastically nihilistic. In contrast, when Peresphone is describing their potential restaurant location, she tells Mai that she found a perfect spot for their restaurant on Potrero Hill telling her, “it’s a beautiful little business location with living space in the back….but best of all, behind the house is a beautiful little hill (246-47).” Even this instance of hope on the hill is shortlived, though, since both Mai and Persephone get murdered there.

Throughout “Gods Go Begging”, hills symbolize both loss of hope and redemption. It is the sight of the lowest of human misery, loss of human life, and shameful secrets. But through processing the painful past, Jesse and the chaplain especially, face their inner demons and come to a sort of uneasy peace and absolution.