The High Heaven, page 8
Where’s this one gonna explode?
I bet it hits the highway. Wouldn’t that be somethin?
It could explode our fort.
Maybe we should evacuate.
Mr. Gently aint ever evacuated. He says fuck ’em and I heard him say it too. He cusses more than you think. He’s always cussin. I know he says fuck a bunch.
The boys had occupied all the chairs by the time Izzy climbed up. She spun around to White Sands and the air base and the old monkey farm out there. She shifted the Galaxy around behind her back.
Why don’t you sit down and eat some dirt?
I don’t eat dirt, said Izzy.
We seen you do it too. Probably eats worms even!
This is an American fort and she aint American.
Who cares what she is?
’Cause she’s an alien, I care.
She’s just a girl.
The boys stared at Izzy because she was a girl and that was wild as anything.
She said, Where does the missile come from?
Utah. It’s over there. Benny pointed northwest. They all stood to look that way like they might see Utah.
They got Mormons in Utah.
Mormons worship aliens and they think heaven’s a planet with spaceships. You Mormon, Izzy? She’s Mormon, I bet.
Where’s the missile land?
It don’t land, stupid.
It explodes in the air. Then falls on the range anywhere it falls.
Why don’t you check on your radio, see if God knows where it falls. Luis grabbed at the Galaxy’s strap on Izzy’s shoulder. She shoved him back so he stumbled and fell, busted his brow on a rock. He touched the blood.
God is angry with the wicked every day, said Izzy.
Why you gotta talk like that?
Yeah, why are you fuckin creepy? Where’s your family, anyway? I heard they all left you.
A sonic boom shook the air. The chairs rattled. Benny held up the binoculars. He said, Hold on! I think I see it. But it was another minute until they could really see it. The white tail of it got longer, exhaust from rocket fuel.
Damn! It keeps comin.
It aint stoppin! It’ll come the whole way!
Oh, fuck us, we’re fucked!
The missile screamed overhead. They all threw themselves to the ground, covered their ears. The tail slowly dissipated in the sky over them.
Fucker’s headed clear to the border!
Damn. Fuck, I mean.
Goddamn.
I think we just blew up fuckin Mexico.
They lay there for several minutes, expecting maybe the whole horizon to turn mushroom cloud like on the newsreels.
Izzy twirled the Galaxy’s dial. Even if it never came on again maybe she could use it to tune the light, to get the story right before it leaked from her eyes. My mother died, she said. Aint a joke. She paused and twirled the dial the other way and said, One time the moon’s mother taught her to eat dandelions. And then the moon’s mother was dead.
The glow of the missile faded in the boys’ faces. Dead mothers were about the only thing that could be worse than wayward bombs and the boys got nervous in new ways, cowering atop the butte beside Izzy.
What the hell is she sayin now?
Demon babble sounds like to me. Didn’t I say she was a cult kid?
One time the moon’s mother was dead, said Izzy. But Brother Heel promised we’d get her back.
Are we blown up yet or what? I wanna go home now.
The boys trembled some and it emboldened Izzy. The moon’s dead mother had something we needed, she said. Brother Heel told us a spaceship of angels was coming to resurrect her. The moon went in there and put salt on her every day. Rubbed clay on her every day. The red clay of La Luz. All over the moon’s mother. A body doesn’t really feel like the moon thought, when it’s dead. Don’t really feel like skin then. They put a hole in her head. To get her brains and save them. They were in a jar. The brains of the moon’s mother. The moon dripped iodine in there. Down in the hole in the head of the moon’s mother. The moon’s hands were stained by it. And dye. The moon would dye her mother’s hair, to make it red like she liked, so she wouldn’t notice the hole in her head when she came back to life. And the moon’s hands were red because the moon’s mother was dead but coming back soon enough.
Out on the highway people finally ambled back to their cars. Traffic moved slowly but the kids kept on lying there atop the butte.
Luis said, What’d your momma have to come back to life for?
She didn’t come back, said Izzy. Everything went wrong because she didn’t come back.
You said she had somethin to come back for.
She’s lyin, anyway. Girls lie. All that moon nonsense is lies.
I did keep on coloring her hair. Bright red. I mean, the moon did. Aint a lie.
Her brains in a jar?
Why couldn’t she just stay dead? You gotta say or it’s lyin.
She don’t gotta say nothin. Especially if she’s a liar. She never touched no fuckin corpse.
The moon’s mother was having a baby, said Izzy. An angel put it in her. And so the moon didn’t matter anymore.
—
Rochas put a bootheel on the rail of the pen and leaned back as Oliver led the mare.
When does she fall? said Rochas.
Ideally she falls when I say. Aint really a stunt if it aint on cue.
I mean in the story, what causes the fall?
Hell, I don’t know, Rochas. A musket ball or a Remington or space lasers. You know how dumb movies are. All I know is them movie people pay a hundred times what they do for any normal quarter horse if you got one that can fall.
Maybe it would be easier to make stories where the horses never fall?
You can’t blame stories. Horses fall whether they’re in stories or not.
Except your horse. Which, it seems, does not fall at all.
Oliver could break a horse for chores but surely wasn’t any kind of champion whisperer. Taking the bit and safely falling from a gallop are far enough apart. His daddy had clowned sometimes at rodeos with a horse that would lie down and roll over, let him sit on its belly. That was the fluke of a silly horse more than any great feat of training. But Oliver hadn’t known how to breed buffalo, or run a petting zoo, and he’d done both of those things on the ranch, however briefly. He’d try his hand at any oddity to fill the ever-widening gaps of cash left by running cattle.
Now he was doing groundwork with a palomino mare called Awesome. He’d stack up a little hay, get the horse to halt at it, hold up her left foreleg, and reach over the saddle to the right rein and pull, backing the horse while clicking. She wouldn’t move until she did and then she’d just sort of slowly sulk groundward. It wasn’t much of a stunt. But at least she could lie down. Eventually she’d need to collapse at full gallop, like laid low by a land mine. Plus she had to do it without killing the rider. Oliver had to teach her without dying himself. Rochas was there in the event that twelve hundred pounds of horse flattened his friend, just in case there was anything he could do about it, which there wasn’t. So Rochas watched and spit and occasionally offered to retrieve his dynamite so they could all learn to fall a whole lot quicker.
The butte boys came around. Oliver said they might as well help so he got them banging sticks on the rail of the pen, hollering to help numb the mare to racket. The boys even took turns firing Oliver’s shotgun, the shots of salt spraying the ground. They’d been told to make movie noise and so it was gunshots and hollering about justice.
Now shut up for just one minute, said Oliver. The first thing you do when you get on a horse is you wait.
A few weeks back a location scout had come by. A massive television production was gearing up at the old monkey farm. The scout wanted horses and, in particular, horses that could fall. The scout had said, We’ll pay ten times anything you’ve been paid ever, if you got a horse that can fall. The bastard Doc Jolly had been right about Hollywood coming to town and that rattled Oliver to no end. But a hundred dollars a day to use a horse? That was life-changing cash. Oliver had let the scout take a good look at Sorry. But getting actors dizzy wasn’t a stunt. So now Oliver was training a mare named Awesome to fall, to play dead to help keep the ranch alive.
Awesome was colored like a gold coin with a champagne mane, shades that really popped against dunes of gypsum. Subtle contrast perfect for the miracle of a Technicolor broadcast. Damn. What a dumb way to appreciate a mare. Oliver pulled the reins so Awesome’s head came back to her right shoulder and she slowly, hesitantly went down to her belly, Oliver awkwardly straddling her. The clamor of the butte boys rose and fell.
Rochas said, That’s an Academy Award, for sure.
Oliver got up on Awesome and flung himself off to show the horse she could fall on her side into the haystack. He climbed on and threw himself down like this a half dozen times. He got up and got in her eyes because if your horse won’t look you in the eyes, all is already lost.
Izzy made the long walk from the house to the pen. The butte boys got quiet. She wore a dress of blue cotton. For all these months, she hadn’t worn much of anything besides her acid-washed denim vestments but now Maude had got her somehow in a dress with flowers on it. She still wore those sneakers but anyway she looked halfway normal which is what Luis whispered as she climbed up next to the butte boys, the Galaxy swung over her shoulder. She sat on the top rail and wadded her dress under her legs.
José said, Think fast. He tossed the shotgun. Izzy caught it, flipped the safety off, pulled the bolt action. The chamber was empty.
Don’t give it to me if there’s nothing to shoot, she said.
Oliver came quick and took José by the ear, twisting it, pulling him down from the rail. What’d you do wrong?
I didn’t respect the gun, sir.
And?
I didn’t respect the girl, sir.
Get on, said Oliver. He pushed José back toward butte camp. He turned to Izzy. You look real nice, he said. Tell her she looks nice, boys.
Izzy hung the Galaxy on the pen. She leaned the shotgun there too. Can I ride?
You’ll mess up that dress Maude got you.
I wore it to mess up.
Fair enough. Oliver helped her up into the saddle and showed her how to pull the reins for the trick. He told the butte boys to get noisy again. They did, reluctantly, suspicious of whatever black magic the girl might be up to now. Izzy circled once on the horse and came back toward the hay and cross-pulled like Oliver showed her and that’s when Awesome dropped totally convincingly for the first time. The mare flopped down onto her side like a cannonball had blown off her legs and Izzy was there in the mud, like blown up too, except she was grinning. The butte boys fell silent but Rochas cheered. And, well, if the child can work a horse and shoot a gun then she might be alright.
SEVEN
THE MONUMENT REMAINED open past dark only when the moon was full. Those bright nights they took Izzy there to explore beyond the ranch where there wouldn’t be too many townspeople with questions—mostly tourists out there, all hypnotized by the big shine above or its endless refraction by the dunes below. They tacked up and rode through the eerie glow, talking over the news of the day. Oliver had Izzy reading the paper aloud in the mornings as they rode the ranch doing chores, a kind of homeschool while Maude was off at work. Then full-moon nights and Izzy would recount to Maude whatever she’d read that month, like an oral exam on the story of our recent world, as they rode around skunkbush in the gypsum, little patches of dormant willow, even out there by Alkali Flats where one big cottonwood grew unaccountably from the top of a dune. The cottonwood’s massive trunk got uncovered a bit more every time they saw it, gypsum blown along so the dune shrank or shifted but the tree stayed still, seemed maybe to grow backward as it was uncovered, like its trunk had sprouted down from its branches. They often tied the horses there to rest under the cottonwood. Oliver said they were taking shade to avoid moonburn. Izzy said the tree’s gnarly branches were trying to snatch stars. They’d lie on the cool sand discussing the Summer of Love and hippies headed to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. They talked of race riots in Newark and Detroit. The newspaper printed a whole intricate map of the dark side of the moon and they talked about what might be there in those craters and if, on the moon, there was any such thing as sin. The Soviets landed a probe on Venus where surely sin was plentiful and they talked about that. There was no sound on the moon, according to the newspapers, so sometimes they moved their mouths noiselessly like they were talking on the moon and Izzy practiced screaming with just her body. They talked about scientists who had just won a Nobel Prize for overthinking the meaning of eyeballs. The human eye, these scientists proved, decides half of what you see before the brain ever gets a chance to think about it. Maude worried her eyes might deceive her always while Oliver claimed he’d long suspected everything was already tainted by the time he got a chance to think it over.
Izzy said, Can I ever get my eyes to show the really real actual world, the true way it is in my head?
Not with all that light leaking out, said Oliver.
Izzy laughed and twirled the Galaxy’s dial.
Maude had no idea what their talk of eyelight meant—how they had joked about Izzy whirring like a weird projector, how maybe she and Oliver were both in on the same strange hallucination. They didn’t bother trying to explain to Maude what they couldn’t. An Apollo spaceship finally went up, this one without monkeys or people. Oliver didn’t want to talk about NASA so much because it meant pondering the end of his ranch. But then, when they talked about the war and where Jackson might be caught up now, Oliver didn’t like that conversation either even though he always made Izzy read the Vietnam dispatches loud and twice. When war reports came on the television news, Maude and Oliver always got real quiet. Izzy scooted closer when the television cut out from interference, even touched the television like she could make the picture come back with good news, nose up to the glass like Jackson used to do, and Oliver always told Izzy to scoot back. You’ll get sucked in, he said. Letters from Jackson came every other week or so and Izzy read these aloud too. Other letters Izzy read aloud came from the army just down the road, from lawyers using lots of technical terms from this or that committee, words Izzy stumbled over as she read aloud the demands for Oliver to respond without delay. He said if they wanted something they ought to come see him face-to-face but said also that they knew better than to come stand on his land making demands. Letters from Congress came too, about the expansion of NASA and how many Apollo missions were planned and how much Earth they needed for a moonshot, plus the amount they reckoned Oliver’s little bit was worth. Not much, they claimed, even though everybody seemed to want it. From the cottonwood under every full moon, they could track how the movie ranch at the old monkey farm had expanded, the frontier town growing like a gold rush except it was all facades glowing unreal under the light of that damn radio tower. At Maude’s behest a business card was commissioned that read EQUINE STARS OF TWIN BUTTES RANCH and a stack of them were presented to Oliver as his Christmas gift at the end of 1967. In the new year, Izzy rode with the cards on full-moon nights, handed them to park rangers and crowds of moonlight picknickers who looked clearly or vaguely Hollywood. Everyone said it was good timing to have horses that weren’t camera-shy. The production might take over the old monkey farm for damn near the whole year, maybe more if the show was a hit. There was money to be made, they said. It was like Bonanza and Gunsmoke combined, this production, like the whole epic of the American West, the elaborate tragedy of manifest destiny through the story of just one ranching family, violent and star-studded, plus it had such a great name for a Western—High Heaven. So then back at the cottonwood Izzy talked with the Gentlys about Bonanza and Gunsmoke and if their horses could ever really star in High Heaven. They talked of everything—more lunar probes with cameras for eyes, students massacred in a place called Orangeburg, ten thousand more boys sent to war, even twins conjoined at the head who got surgically separated. Izzy wondered what that meant for the brains of the twins or how their eyes connected, even after separation, like if maybe what one twin saw, the other couldn’t help but ponder. Sometimes Izzy felt herself thinking things she’d never seen and wondered what that meant about any brains she’d been severed from. More and more Izzy wanted to talk about television and so they talked about the final episode of a show Izzy loved but Oliver declared hogwash because at the end the family was stuck just the same way they’d started—lost in space. By March it was warm again and Maude made a point to shift the conversations. She wanted Izzy’s education to be more than irritation at newspapers or anger at the government or prattling on about television.
You know this white sand isn’t even white, said Maude. Isn’t even sand.
Soon Izzy knew the whole story because Maude got to telling it every time they rode the dunes in moonlight. Two hundred and eighty million years ago, all of Earth’s continents were a single mass. Back then the Gently place wasn’t the Gently place or even a ranch or even land at all because this whole expanse was under a sea. Even the moon was bigger then. On the beaches of that sea, dimetrodons roamed—thirteen-foot-long carnivorous reptiles with a massive sail, scaly and rising warlike from their spines. Oliver claimed to have seen fossilized trackways of these monsters but he could never find them to show Izzy. She said she could maybe feel the echo of their presence anyhow. Maude said the whole landscape was like an echo. Think about the gypsum, Maude said. Settled beneath the waves of that ancient sea, dissolved after flowing from all over the western tropics: millions of tons of a mineral called gypsum, the same gypsum we’re on now. After earthquakes, after ice ages, after new rivers and new mountains: the waves are long gone and the dimetrodons are long gone and the moon is smaller and more distant but in a way the sea is still right here: three hundred square miles of shimmering dunes.
