The High Heaven, page 1
The High Heaven
Also by Joshua Wheeler
Acid West
The
HIGH
HEAVEN
—A Novel—
Joshua Wheeler
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2025 by Joshua Wheeler
“In the Meantime.” Words and Music by Dolly Parton. Copyright © 2011 Velvet Apple Music. All Rights Administered by Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.
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Published by Graywolf Press
212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-64445-357-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-64445-358-2 (ebook)
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2025
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wheeler, Joshua, 1984– author.
Title: The High Heaven : a novel / Joshua Wheeler.
Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2025.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025009456 (print) | LCCN 2025009457 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644453575 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781644453582 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Unidentified flying object cults—Fiction. | Cults—New Mexico—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3623.H42985 H54 2025 (print) | LCC PS3623.H42985 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20250320
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025009456
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025009457
Jacket design: Kyle G. Hunter
Jacket images: iStock.com
For the cult kids
but man like an angry ape plays
such fantastic tricks before high heaven
as makes the angels weep
SHAKESPEARE
we’ve been living in the last days
ever since the first day … in the meantime
… in the meantime … in the meantime
DOLLY PARTON
CONTENTS
A Tale of the Acid West
A Texas Picaresque
A Southern Gothic Silhouette
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
There really was a cult called Bible Study in La Luz, New Mexico, in 1967. They really did get busted for building an interstellar landing strip and trying to resurrect a corpse. There really was a ranch at Twin Buttes, a place called White Sands Ranch, run by my forebears, a modest cattle operation to which one cult member escaped. But, as far as this novel is concerned, that is where any similarity to reality ends (and even those similarities, I’m required to tell you, aren’t what they seem). Here’s the disclaimer: references to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. Wash your brain. Start again. The characters are unreal. The places and events are unreal. All things in The High Heaven are figments of my—and now your—imagination.
The High Heaven
PROLOGUE
— 1948 —
ACROSS THE DESERT came the blast and the ranch house shook. On the stove cast irons jumped and on the wall framed pictures of dead horses rattled and the hands of the noonstuck clock jerked forward slightly and shuddered there. Lord, have mercy. The Gentlys covered their bowls of beans as their adobe walls disintegrated more with each of the world’s bad vibrations.
Lunch and a rocket launch. Another day of Cold War in New Mexico.
The blast’s afterscream echoed to the border and back. When the dust in the kitchen settled they went outside to squint against the sun, to look up and see what they could see.
Oliver’s daddy spotted the thing way off and high up over the missile range. He put his crooked finger to the sky. He poked the firmament and said, Out there.
It floated for a minute, quiet. A parachute deployed and streamed but never fully opened so the hunk of metal hurtled earthward, spinning wildly and flaming some.
Young Jackson had beans on his face and he kept saying Nazi. Oliver’s son was not yet two but his granddaddy had taught him the whole range of cusses. The toddler liked saying Nazi best. Everything fired off on the missile range alongside their ranch got greeted with his daddy’s hollered damnations of Nazis because most of the weapons were designed by one—Hitler’s V2 rockets and America’s whole missile program now run by a Nazi scientist who our government cleansed of his sins so he could experiment with killing machines for the good guys. We beat them goddamn Nazis, Oliver’s daddy would say, my own son whooped them Nazis just so we could bring them home to dream up space missiles all over my ranch?
Toward the twin buttes, beyond the gypsum playa, cattle quit on their cud and herded up and moved off from where the sky was breaking. Oliver covered Jackson’s ears for the explosion but none came. There was no dust or smoke. No mushroom cloud.
I guess it landed yonder, said Oliver as he rubbed the scar on his neck.
Yup. Maybe exactly yonder, said his daddy.
Oliver kissed his wife and kissed his young son, then he and his daddy tacked up and rode out toward whatever had come down now. Near Highway 54 they crossed the army’s recovery team, a fleet of Jeeps crawling with GIs peering through binoculars, engineers scribbling on notepads, a couple of hound dogs raring to get the scent. The soldiers yapped into radios, got frantic unfolding and refolding maps while steering through stirred-up cows.
They seem a little more urgent than usual? said his daddy.
The convoy hardly paused as the Gentlys passed by and rode on through the scrub of the Chihuahuan Desert, on toward the Sacramento Mountains. They stopped just once at a cow tank.
Way out here aint ours, said Oliver. But when the horses were watered they went on. Anything that landed on the ranch, even on the grazing leases, might get them a concession from the army in exchange for giving it back, or giving up the coordinates of it, restitution for the aggravation of running cattle near a missile range. No such remuneration would materialize if they collected rockets or bombs or parts of planes or any amount of dud ordnance from elsewhere. In fact, doing so was criminal. But anyway Oliver’s daddy tracked this one, whatever it was. They adjusted course, going one way and the other, not following any trail but the dim one in his head, driving the horses just plain mad as they cut through creosote and ocotillo, searched along the escarpment until the horizon got feverish with warnings of night. Then there it was: a crater like a grave.
The hole was a few feet wide, deep enough so Oliver disappeared below the belt buckle when he scrambled down into it. At the bottom: a rocket. He yanked a shredded parachute off the mangled nose cone. Burnt fuel wafted sulfuric like rotten eggs. Oliver coughed at the sour reek of oil from shark liver lathered on the steel to give army hounds a scent.
We better hurry up then, said his daddy. And don’t touch it too much.
You want me to touch it or not?
Hurry up and touch it some. Don’t blow up neither.
Oliver held his breath and untangled the parachute. His daddy crawled on down into the crater too. They stood there with hats in hand, waving stink from their faces.
You feel it? said his daddy. Like somethin inside?
Naw, I don’t feel it.
Sure you do.
Alright. I feel it then.
Good. Got a bad feelin.
From his saddlebag Oliver took wire snips. There was no hatch on the rocket and maybe that characterized the nature of whatever was inside—had to be ripped out because it had been welded in. They cut around where an American flag was faded to charred stars. They cussed and pried, freed a whole section from thick rivets, and pulled. Yup. Among the wires and transistors, tanks and gauges, in there with all the gizmo guts—a monkey.
Fuckin Nazi monkey, said his daddy. The monkey was strapped to a little chair. It couldn’t slump but seemed dead anyway. It wore goggles, lenses spidercracked. A camera was right in the monkey’s face. The camera whirred. Almost like a nutjob monkey, said his daddy. All the straps were like a straitjacket, and then the wires too, like some wrongfully convicted sucker sentenced to ride a rocketship electric chair. His daddy pondered the scene so hard he had to crawl up out of the crater and sigh bunches and hang his hat on a yucca. A breeze came. Through spindly clouds peeked the moon over mountaintops. The horses got antsy about every bit of it.
That’s a monkey, said Oliver.
I know when I see a monkey, son. Clearly we got a monkey. You aint got to say monkey.
Nothin else to say.
We just aint figured the words yet.
A gust rose. The Stetson flew off the yucca. His daddy cussed and picked the hat up and cussed more. With the hat he swiped the air before him like to catch the cuss so he could swallow it and cuss it again yet louder which, once the Stetson was settled again on his head, he did. Fuck, he said. Goddamn. Well, yank that monkey up out of there then.
The little buckles wouldn’t budge so Oliver ripped the whole of
In the distance: searchlights of Jeeps, hound dogs barking. The moon was all there now, shining big and curious.
Goddamn to hell and back, said his daddy. He slid into the crater one last time, snatched the camera, fumbled to switch it off, then crawled out and stuffed it low in his saddlebag.
They rode home fast.
Oliver hoped his wife was awake and willing to tell them the sensible thing to do now but of course she had already done the sensible thing and gone to bed with their boy. The two men sat there in a circle of porch light, bucket between them, a monkey laid low in it. They sipped whiskey. They spit at the hangfire moon.
If there is one good reason for stuffin a monkey in a missile …
There aint.
If it were ever meant for monkeys to fly …
It aint. There’s dominions of land and air and all that.
In the beginning.
No sense interminglin dominions. God done laid it out his particular way.
I guess. I just mean … why don’t we catch up to the Jeeps, said Oliver. Give it up. Kinda got the creeps havin it here.
I bet it’s worth more than we could know, son. So say my guts anyway. His daddy leaned over the bucket and reached in and undid some of the straps, pulled the goggles down around the monkey’s neck.
Might be plain evil to bury it in a jacket for crazies, said his daddy.
It aint ours. We can’t just bury it.
Yup. We better burn it.
But you said it was worth somethin.
His daddy held the limp monkey at arm’s length but sort of tenderly as he unbuckled more straps. I don’t mean cash. I mean I think it means somethin. In the grand scheme. I got that feelin anyway, said his daddy.
What feelin?
Wonky. Like in the grand scheme.
And that’s when the wrinkled eyelids flickered. The monkey gasped and coughed then ripped its goggles off altogether. It shot from his daddy’s hands, crawled onto his head, squatted there on his Stetson with eyes exactly the wide size eyes get after resurrection. Oliver swiped at it but missed and slapped his daddy who howled then wielded the bucket wildly as the monkey hopped and swung around like reborn in a hellish jungle but this was just New Mexico. They chased it all over the porch for a circus minute until finally they got the monkey trapped under the bucket, which his daddy sat atop, heaving and cussing and fumbling to light a cigarette.
They must’ve drugged it like a damn elephant, said his daddy. But it’s alive still, or again.
The monkey scratched. Banged on the bucket’s inside. Oliver stepped off the porch to catch his breath and wonder aloud into the night if things ever eased up, if all life everywhere wasn’t also some experiment in the grand scheme gone awry and dragged home by rednecks.
His daddy picked up the little chair from the rocket and tossed it to his son and said, I guess go lose this in the junkpile.
And so he left his daddy hunched there smoking anxiously atop the bucket, the monkey beneath howling high now and loud but only for a moment longer and then all was quiet as Oliver walked with the rocket chair into their junkyard ashimmer in thickest moonshine.
His daddy will die in a few years, all the bad feelings having gnawed him hollow. The weapons tests won’t stop, and the ranch will end up encircled by the missile range. Oliver’s little boy will grow and go to war in jungles far away. More scientists will come to this desert with plans for bombs and rockets and there will be more monkeys too, a whole farm of space monkeys will come and go and Oliver won’t hardly talk about this first one, won’t even tell his wife about his daddy back there probably strangling that poor monkey for God knows why. Every nineteen years the moon gets full again on the same day at the same place in the sky. Every nineteen years all the moon’s phases line up against the constellations just the same as before. Nineteen years for things to come around again to changing the same as they already changed. So it will be just exactly nineteen years before Oliver ever tells this story and when he does it will be to an orphan child and he’ll tell that little girl just like this, the best he can remember. I don’t know no way this helps, he’ll say to the girl. But it all happened. And the brainwash book says, No lies.
A Tale of the Acid West
— 1967 —
ONE
HE HUNG HIS HEAD out the window of his pickup, his Stetson on the dash. The breeze rustled Oliver Gently’s matted gray hair, cooled the scar on his neck. Above: every star shied to whispers of predawn chatter. Oliver wasn’t any kind of champion for giving baths to machines, especially after long days tending cattle, and so his Ford’s windshield would get damn dirty. Persistent spits of New Mexico rain caked dirt over dirt but never hard enough to wash any away. Best to let it be. He said it was like seasoning a cast iron skillet. In summers, he could fry the best eggs you ever had—over easy—right there on the hood, no yolk running, all on account of that high desert seasoning. No worries if the day’s first rays of sun refracted off every particle of filth on his windshield. With his head out the window, nose full of pine and fir, Oliver dropped the Ford into neutral and coasted the steep part of Sunspot Highway, down through the Lincoln Forest.
He’d risen early to take a side of beef to Rochas deep in the Sacramento Mountains. It was important Rochas not be awake or else he’d decline the delivery by brandishing his rifle, hollering, Peligro! They were both about fifty, him and Rochas, had served together in our Second World War. But Rochas had gobs of wisdom mixed with various simmering ires. His face was craggier than Oliver’s but that just made it more animated when he hollered, which he did always, and was maybe one way all the crags crept in.
Rochas had been perfecting a rant for the last two decades or so, about minding your own business, how nobody did it anymore—Zapatero a tus zapatos, Rochas would say, mixing his mother’s dichos with his own high-minded rambling—how everybody felt the need to be always in the business of others, how every fissure of turpitude in the once-immaculate moral carapace of humanity was traceable to individuals sticking their noses where they didn’t belong, namely into the shit of some other individual. A situation that results, Rochas didn’t have to remind you, in shame for both parties, one forced to gander at what he’d tried vigorously to expel now displayed prominently on his neighbor’s face. The rant spiraled always toward the same conclusion: Mi casa es su casa just means mi caca es su caca, and anyway keep your caca to yourself.
Rochas played the misanthrope but he surely had reason to get cranky these days. He was newly laid off from a job exploding mountains at the quarry. With so many mines closing down in ’67, his blasting days were likely over. The side of beef was Oliver’s offering to an old buddy, an offering Rochas would never accept unless it near-magically appeared on his doorstep as he snored at 4:30 a.m. Oliver unloaded the foam coolers in the dark and went on toward Cloudcroft to unload a forequarter at Western Bar and Grill, the whole time feeling guilty for missing out on Rochas yapping about Love Thy Neighbor being a commandment for bygone times when you had to ride a damn camel across all of Egypt to get a cup of sugar. Now telephones and satellites and televisions. Spaceships, hombre. Infinite worlds to harass on a whim. Just look at the shitshow in Vietnam. Shame. All of us shitfaced. The dirt roads through Lincoln Forest contorted fairly nauseatingly, tough to navigate at first light, so Oliver hung out of his pickup more than usual, peering both around the dirty windshield and around the bend, when the child was there—apparitional—standing just beyond the tree line and wearing red sneakers.
He shrank into the Ford’s cab and kept on for a quarter mile. When he finally stopped, he sat there with his arm across the bench seat, running through all the tricks his wife deployed for scolding him. About his heavy pours: Everybody deserves to relax. Even whoever toils distillin your Old Crow. About waiting until noon to deliver beef: Rochas is stubborn. You know he’d be just fine eatin mud all winter long. About his filthy pickup: Surely we can afford a whole other truck for lookin presentable in town on Sundays. His wife had a way of agreeing with him in order to change his mind. Right now she was in his brain saying it was fine to drive on because everyone knows ghosts can fend for themselves. Especially the young ones.
