The High Heaven, page 4
Between the buttes was an old tin barracks. The army had dragged it over some years back to make amends after a misunderstanding involving drunk soldiers and a dead heifer. Before he died, Oliver’s daddy had lost his mind in that barracks, digging holes toward a grand bomb shelter. At times it seemed his daddy had wanted to move the whole ranch underground. But like so much on the Gently place, the bomb shelter languished unfinished. Now the barracks was mostly a playhouse for the kids of tenants at the butte camp, of which currently there were four boys: Benny and José and Dusty and Luis, troublemakers all.
Oliver pulled up on Sorry and sighed. Sorry spun slowly clockwise, something the horse tended to do instead of standing still. Sorry walked like a drunk, even when held halter. The horse had moonblindness, meaning there were clouds in his eyes that waxed and waned, made him sensitive to light, got him confused at times. Plus maybe spinal parasites or encephalitis, according to the vet, who periodically tried to load Sorry’s ass full of fist-sized pills. Oliver always declined on Sorry’s behalf. A balance issue for sure but maybe more of a sensitivity than an impairment. The horse noticed the world spinning counterclockwise, Oliver figured, and simply compensated by spinning the other direction. Fair enough. Surely the globe’s spin accelerates toward annihilation. Why not try going the other way?
Atop the revolving horse Oliver took it all in—his place and everything falling apart between its fences. He spun toward the glowing runways of Holloman Air Force Base and its cargo planes of boys headed for Vietnam and spun toward the Organ Mountains and the glow of the missile range headquarters there, its labs of engineers dreaming up rockets headed for Vietnam or the moon, spun more toward the dim haze of El Paso and Juárez, spun toward floodlights of a checkpoint hassling folks coming up from the border, spun to the Monument where streamed endless headlights of Yankee families in station wagons leaving whole picnics of trash on the dunes as they hemmed and hawed over how beautifully desolate this place looked, spun finally again to the old monkey farm and the light of its radio tower flickering on for the night.
He’d told Izzy the monkey light was a nuisance and didn’t care to unpack the situation much beyond that. But of course it wasn’t just the light. NASA had shown up with those test monkeys right as his daddy really started to lose it. And NASA had got the army geared up to take yet more land again. Even with the monkeys gone now—the facility decommissioned and dressed up like a frontier town—the light taunted him still, flashing over pretty boys getting rich pretending to cowboy when he couldn’t hardly make a buck actually ranching. Despite calls and letters and visits to various official meetings of the town council and military brass and Hollywood suits, the monkey light stayed bright as the day it went up, just one fairly minor flare in the whole angry blaze of modern America rising around him, but Oliver felt the throb of its particular luminescence deep in the marrow of his discontent. Nowadays riding fence felt like it was less about keeping track of his dwindling herd and more about keeping everyone and everything else out. The fence line got shorter and stronger and he ventured out less. He was besieged by all things on all sides. And now the cult kid. What was it about her eyes? They were the strangest green, like translucent jade. It was the color of those weird stones he would find on the outer range, sand melted and fused inside the fireball of the atom bomb blast. Trinitite, they called it. Her eyes were like that. Goddamn. He put Sorry to a trot toward home. He was done getting pushed around and keeping quiet about whatever fell to his ranch, or exploded on his ranch, or got took from his ranch. He settled it in his mind then. Can’t let nothin ruin the child no more. Whatever she is, she’s our line in the sand.
THREE
SHE CARRIED THE GALAXY to the window in the kitchen and sat listening for God. The porch and the barn and the cutting room too, listening for God. Mornings and Oliver gave her free rein to wander the ranch with the Galaxy, exploring further from the house the more her leg healed, listening with her little ear right up to the Galaxy, listening all day for God. Sometimes she lay down in the pasture with the Galaxy for a pillow, like trying to sink her whole head into it. What would God tell this child? Oliver did chores where he could keep watch over her, or keep her in earshot, in case the Galaxy did come on. He jotted marks in a pocket notebook he kept for breaking horses. It was full of careful notations about weight and teeth and foot control, peculiarities of colts learning to take the bit, annotations on the stubbornness of mustangs he’d brought in over the years to save from getting auctioned off by the army to glue factories. He made little notes about Izzy’s leg and other notes when she talked scripture—He hangeth the earth upon nothing. When Maude got home from work at the hospital, she kept an eye on the child while Oliver thumbed an old Bible looking for what Izzy had said. When he found the girl’s words, he wrote down the numbers of chapter and verse. Here and there he asked about the light in her eyes. She would squint and put her hands up to cover them and after a pause she said always, Still light. He would note the date and write, Still light.
At night when they thought Izzy might be asleep finally in Jackson’s room where they’d situated her, Maude would whisper what she’d heard in El Paso about the cult at La Luz, all the rumors that they were hoarders and thieves and grotesque necromancers, that their denim was leather from human skin, that they awaited the arrival of divine chariots, machines from heaven, aliens who were angels and vice versa. Oliver mulled these things in anxious dreams of half sleep and in the morning he made notes on the gibberish of nightmares, that there were frequencies on which one might hear the echo of a wing in a time machine, fluttering: the angels coming. That the brains of these folk were bundles of antennae receiving scrambled broadcasts of other planets’ penultimate sermons of distress. That they were high on drugs from NASA. That they were all hollow inside, or full of dense nothingness like dead stars. Oliver didn’t bother sorting dream from rumor, or truth from either. He’d sit at the table with his coffee and doodle in his notebook while reading headlines about a Krishna cult drugging the youth of San Francisco, an orbiter photographing landing sites on the moon even as burnt astronauts were laid to rest, and the heavyweight champion of the world in thrall to a prophet preaching alien spaceships sculpted the Rocky Mountains. Reality had got stuck between rumor and dream too. Oliver studied his notes. Maybe you could break the whole world like a horse, but what for?
—
The Jeep came at a slow pace through the gate of the Gently place. The passenger door read ARMY above a big white star. Maude closed the curtains.
You oughta stay put, she told Izzy. We aint hidin but we aint advertisin neither.
Ye shall not shout until the day I bid you shout, said Izzy; then shall ye shout.
That’s the idea.
Maude met the Jeep in the road, leaned in the driver’s window. Major Laws, she said, why are you stirrin up my road?
In the most technical sense, Maude, my rank is Command Sergeant Major. But I do keep asking you to just call me Bill.
I’d rather not call you anything, if it’s all the same. You don’t ever come just for tea or beans. Yall about to shoot a missile over my head?
No ma’am. Nothing scheduled today.
They both looked up anyway. The sky was empty. Blue. What was the word? Cerulean. Maude hated the word, how it made the sky sound so awful patriarchal. But that was the color of it most days.
How’s your boy, Maude?
He’s at war. Yall won’t call it that but his letters do give that impression.
In country?
Aint that a surprise. Got the youngest in the worst spots. It’s sacrificial. Or something else primitive.
He’ll be a fine soldier, Maude. And I do pray for him. And you, of course. How about Oliver?
I’m afraid he’s beyond prayer.
I mean, might I speak with him?
If you want to go lookin, be my guest. Just keep from stirrin dirt all around my house.
Laws tipped his cap to Maude and drove out over the playa. On the southern side of the smaller butte he found Oliver hauling a wheelbarrow of rocks into the old barracks.
I got a problem, said Oliver, which is all these holes youngsters might fall in, holes that might swallow up cows seekin shade. My father spent five of his last good years diggin holes, these exact holes, tryin to get under this butte so he could have himself a bomb shelter. Only this ground aint all that forgivin. Hard as rock plus soft as sand. Nothin between. But that old fool wasted years diggin anyway.
It’s a sensible thing, said Laws, having a bomb shelter.
Havin to have a bomb shelter is the opposite of sensible. All that worry over Soviet bombs and the only people ever dropped anything on my family is yall.
I’m your friend, Gently. Your safety, the safety of Maude, is one reason I’m here.
But it aint any real bomb shelter, Laws. See? It’s half-assed holes. It’s just more problems.
I’m here as a courtesy because you haven’t answered any of our letters.
I don’t correspond with junk mail.
I’m here telling you then. Your grazing lease along Highway 70 will not be renewed. And I can’t say the exact timeline, but … well, they’re maneuvering to terminate it early too. Looking for any reason. Every other rancher in the county is taking this deal.
We aint movin.
That Apollo fire … this whole NASA situation … it’s changed things. They want to expand the test facility over from the other side of the San Andres Mountains. They’re dead set on this moonshot. And the army’s dead set on this Pershing missile. And, well, everybody just needs more space.
More space?
Congress aims to pump five million into making these NASA tests work. Now, that’s good for us, but … well, it’s good for you too. You could run cattle on this desert your whole life and not make money like this.
Can’t sell a rancher horseshit, Laws.
If you’re holding out for a payday, this is it.
What am I gonna do with moon money?
Evolve.
Why don’t yall snatch up that damn movie ranch growin like cancer at the old monkey farm? It’s prime acreage for blowin up.
The army does own that. And they’ll stop leasing it when they’re ready to use it again. Same as with your grazing range.
Aint the same.
Maybe your lawyers can get ahead of things this go-round. Buy you some time.
No lawyers. Can’t afford time.
Then read the letters, Gently. They’re making fair offers. It’s not my decision what happens if you don’t take it.
Aint ever a decision. It’s always some divine edict fallen from the sky to fuck me right down to nothin. Oliver yanked rocks from the hole, then threw them back in, hoping for an arrangement that sealed. The collisions echoed. He went on yelling, Can’t run cattle with no land save my goddamn porch. Can’t do it under constant missile tests. Can’t do it with Jackson off in Vietnam. Property tax inflated. Water rights always a fight. Astronauts blown up.
The rocks bounced and rolled from the holes.
You forgot to say about the cults creeping around, said Laws.
I didn’t forget the fuckin cults. The pistons in Oliver’s heart labored mightily.
Just take the money. So your boy can have something when the war ends.
Oliver spit.
In the meantime, said Laws, we’re testing the Pershing missile. Air defense. They’ll be incoming in March and then again through summer. You know the drill. I won’t insult you by sending out any private for you to browbeat when he says to evacuate. But I’ve brought the test schedule. You take your wife to town on those days. Tenants too. That’s the law.
So yall can lock me out?
This is separate.
Aint nothin separate.
Laws held out the test schedule.
Missiles I understand, said Oliver. Forever war. The moon, fuck it, let’s go. But I got questions about this cult. You know who was fooling around with that body? Yall’s army doctor was over there. Or whatever he is. Big boy with the dumb bolo tie.
Maybe so.
Jolly.
I don’t know the doctor much. I do missiles. His field is psychiatry.
You know that girl was pregnant?
What girl?
The damn girl they was resurrectin. Shit almighty, Major.
If you want trouble, well, Doctor Jolly was asking about you too.
What’d he say?
He asked if you had kids. I don’t know. He was asking after Jackson, I guess. And I guess some MPs had a report about a girl wandering around here.
There’s always kids around here. I got tenants. Who yall fixin to displace, by the way.
I don’t care if you got a whole children’s choir in your barn. Your problem is this schedule of missile tests and those notices about your lease which, if you have any sense, you’ll dig out from the trash.
Laws shoved the schedule into Oliver’s chest and left.
Near the barracks the Gentlys had a little cemetery, a family plot between the buttes. For years Oliver had tried to keep the graves covered in white sand, give some respectable look other than just plain dirt. But the wind. Such wind. Oliver walked to the cemetery and swept what gypsum he could back toward the headstones for Maude’s folks and the headstones for his own folks plus a little grave with no marker at all. He pushed himself up using his daddy’s headstone but as he leaned there, the stone broke.
His daddy had always collapsed at the dinner table after a long day riding range. But then whiskey and beans and he’d get that second wind while ranting on atom bombs. Oliver had been off at war when that first one was tested, when it shook the Gently place and lit up the sky an hour north at Trinity. His daddy had never quite got over that, the fact of annihilation like that, harnessed and let loose just up the road a stretch. He could believe anything then, any story, actual and rumored, about the nefarious goings-on among warmongers. In his later years, after Momma died, he’d list them all at dinner, every threat to home and country, then he’d muster strength enough to go off with his lantern and pickax and all manner of shovels, often dragging Oliver along to toil in rocky dirt. When the old man keeled over from a heart attack, it was cigars and whiskey and bloody steaks but mostly it was the dumb struggle of trying to burrow under a desert butte to hide from a mushroom cloud that was born and bred and, his daddy was convinced to the last breath, bound to return again, one way or another, to the Gently place.
Oliver picked up the pieces of his daddy’s headstone. He loaded them into the wheelbarrow and took them back to the barracks, then tossed them into the holes. That was that. The end of the bomb shelter. Surviving ought not be all cowering.
When he got back to the house Izzy said, I’ve seen that star before.
She meant the one painted on the army Jeep and Oliver said, Yes ma’am. I bet you have. That star means time is runnin out.
Izzy said a helicopter with that star came down to the farm at La Luz the day before the raid on the mountain. It was a sky machine from heaven, said Izzy. Brother Heel called it a false sign.
—
Truth is she worries me some, said Oliver. He and Rochas trailed a springing heifer calving out. Izzy lingered near the barn, limped around the pasture as Maude fixed a pen with straw and water.
Because she eats dandelions? said Rochas. That’s a trait of poor folks more than martians. Stranger, maybe, that your dandelions flower in winter. Your land is what’s mixed up.
Izzy kneeled to pinch a plant at the dust, pull it up tenderly, long roots intact. The red tint of her hands was fading though she still wouldn’t wear anything but the cult denims. She pulled leaves from the dandelion’s stalk, put them in a pocket of her coveralls. She chewed the roots. Seed heads dispersed around her face, feathery pods floating off on the wind as she crouched to forage more.
Oliver looked at the heifer then yonder to Izzy and back again. He took out his notebook and wrote, Chews weeds. The heifer was off from the herd, lying down and getting up and lying down again, hunting for the right dirt to birth in.
I’ve been thinkin about her red hands, said Rochas. My tia worked out there, at the old pottery factory in La Luz. Her hands would get that way. Red. I bet they had the girl digging in it.
Diggin for what?
There’s your mystery.
Well. I been thinkin on those camels. Ever since I saw that Doc Jolly.
No se, hombre.
At the county fair. Back in ’59. My boy Jackson won a ribbon for showin a Hereford hog. They had those camels there. Remember that? The last few of a feral herd. Left over from the Civil War. Had them sad camels like on exhibition.
’59 I was dynamiting. Chino Mine. This calf coming?
Maybe so.
The camels …
Anyways, yeah. The camels. I don’t know. I got a feelin, Rochas. I think the army’s lookin for this girl. I saw her mother dead. And what all they done to her. She was pregnant too. Which the papers don’t say. She was all cut open. Never seen somethin so terrible.
The crazies cut open the mother?
