Gentleness Is Outdated in This Alien World

An excerpt from The High Heaven by Joshua Wheeler

He wondered if his eyes were open when he woke, such was the level of earlydark on the ranch. Oliver reached out. Maude was breathing. Good. He lay there until a single beam of light swept slowly through the room. He went to the window. Across the highway spun a beacon atop an old radio tower, around and around. He closed the heavy curtain he’d hung to block the damn shine of the radio tower. He tried to keep the snaps of his shirt quiet as he dressed then went to the child still curled up under the coffee table. She was breathing too. She wasn’t asleep but Oliver didn’t blame her. Maude had laundered her denim getup though bloodstain now clouded the acid wash. Her red sneak…

Gentleness Is Outdated in This Alien World

An excerpt from The High Heaven by Joshua Wheeler

He poured old coffee and put on his coat and went out on the porch and pulled on his boots, then studied the dregs in his mug as the watery grounds morphed pareidolic. The child limped out carrying her radio. They eyed each other sideways through the dark.

Why aren’t we dead? said the child.

I ask myself that sometimes. I don’t think it’s healthy though.

She stared at him. When I close my eyes, do you see light leakin out?

Why would light be leakin out?

She closed her eyes, held them shut. He bent close to her face, examined every angle of her grim squint. He wondered if he ought to be scared.

I don’t know, said Oliver. Can you hop off this porch? He helped her down and pointed around the house to where, across the highway, the light of the radio tower swept the desert, its beam passing over the barbed wire and onto his ranch. Sometimes, said Oliver, when I close my eyes, I see that damn light still.

What is it?

Well, that’s the old monkey farm. What’s left of it anyway.

Around the Gently place were all kinds of blinking lights, all switched on in the last decade or two, unnatural in color and mechanical in strobe, clear across the horizon from the army’s missile range to the NASA test track, from the border patrol to the air force base. The ranch was stuck like a black hole at the center of all that twinkling modernity. But this one particular tower was the worst—from dusk until dawn its safety beacon spun, spilled onto the outer ranges so probably the cows dreamed of damnation to a desert discotheque.

There aint monkeys there anymore, said Oliver. The lab’s been closed a good while. They got all kinds of others there now. Hollywood, if you can believe that. Movies sets and other nonsense like monsters and science fiction. But they aint bothered to kill the monkey light. Oliver spit. Sometimes closin your eyes don’t shut it all down.

Together they closed their eyes, took in whatever lights lingered in their personal darknesses. Then they looked at each other again, seriously contemplated the purpose of the other’s existence. The child’s eyes were green in a way that reminded Oliver of something he couldn’t quite remember but vowed to. C’mon then, said Oliver. He helped her back onto the porch and to the rusty benchswing where she stretched out her bandaged leg. I gotta feed the animals. You ready to say your name?

Izzy.

Izzy?

Just Izzy. Not short for nothin.

Alright, Izzy. Good name, Izzy. You’ll keep watch while I do some chores? Keep them eyes peeled?

At the stalls he dropped hay for horses and ground feed for the milk cow, threw scratch to pigs and checked the coop for eggs but there were none so he tacked up and rode east toward the gate where he’d left his Ford yesterday. Out that way, toward the Llano Estacado, there were no unnatural beacons of experimenters or warmongers. Out that way, for one precious sliver of horizon, all light was still only far off and ancient. The light of dead stars. He got off his horse and spent a long while rubbing his neck. Whenever tragedy was afoot, his war wound itched like there was shrapnel eager to get back to its origins. After all his jawing on the phone Maude had asked, Does your scar itch? He’d said it didn’t and it hadn’t started to yet so he rubbed it wondering why not as he climbed into the truck and hung his head out the window and drove slow, holding the long lead of his horse following behind until they got back to the porch and Izzy.

Come meet my horse, said Oliver. This is Sorry.

Izzy stood, limped closer.

What do you think about that? A horse named Sorry.

Izzy reached out and touched the horse. She said, Sorry, you’re a beautiful horse.

Oliver slapped Sorry’s rear and grinned. The child says you’re a looker!

He has made everything beautiful in its time, said Izzy.

What?

Izzy pointed at Oliver, held her finger there like an admonition. She said, Also He has put eternity into man’s heart.

Her words lingered as dawn rose and the dead light gave way to day.

Twenty minutes to town and at the Mobil station Oliver stopped for more coffee and a newspaper. The headline was bold: LA LUZ CULT CLASHES WITH SHERIFF—CORPSE & LANDING STRIP ON FARM.

He parked at the hospital and walked in and loitered at the nurses’ station. A drunk with a chest of crusty vomit snored violently on the waiting room bench. The sound, like struggling to swallow his own face, echoed across the sterile tiles until Oliver could take it no more and rolled the man onto his side.

Your friend? said a nurse.

Not one I’ll claim, anyway.

Oliver stuffed magazines behind the drunk to prevent him from resuming the snoring pose and then followed the nurse to a storage room where she filled a bag with gauze and antibiotics and syringes ready to fix rabies.

What wild thing yall got now? said the nurse.

I’m just the gofer. As always. You know how Maude is. Workin with some or another charity in El Paso.

That woman. Rest of us look awful ugly in her saintly glow.

I’m blinded by three decades of it. Burned to a crisp by now.

Aint no other nurse got energy like Maude does.

Yes ma’am.

Anyways, be sure she brings a receipt or somethin. Admins do occasionally take stock.

Down the hall came echoes of hollering.

Jeez Louise, said the nurse, all night it’s been like a tabloid around here. I swear. Abuzz with cult activity. Can you believe such a thing?

I saw the headline. Cult and a corpse.

I know! Can you imagine such a thing?

No need for imagination, I guess. It’s all happened now.

You are right about that. Been waitin all night on the coroner. Now this army doctor just appears and takes charge. And Deputy Woodson down there cussin about he don’t know all what. Television news done called already ten times. From here plus Texas!

Unbelievable.

I can neither imagine nor believe, Oliver Gently. It’s all happened now. The nurse clicked her tongue a few times and whistled and rushed off toward the commotion.

Oliver rummaged in the bag a bit and looked around and moseyed nonchalantly after the nurse. Down the hall and through a set of doors he came to a window where he lingered out of view from those on the other side. The nurse tried to calm Deputy Woodson who shook his finger at a big fellow with thick-rimmed glasses, wide suspenders under a white lab coat. At the big fellow’s neck was a turquoise bolo tie with a silver slide that hung loose because it couldn’t get a tight cinch around his fat neck.

Oliver pushed his hat back, nosed up on the glass. Nearly half a century of cultivating a steadfast lack of interest in the affairs of others and there he stood surreptitiously gandering through a window like some kind of pervert peeper. Beyond Woodson and the nurse, stretched out on a surgical table: the corpse.

Nearly half a century of cultivating a steadfast lack of interest in the affairs of others and there he stood surreptitiously gandering through a window like some kind of pervert peeper.

Its flesh was dark and wrinkled and put Oliver in mind of an ancient mummy though the woman seemed to have been young. Her hair was bright red and despite the leathery state of her skin all that near-neon hair gave the sense of, well, vigor. The doctor tucked in his bolo tie, leaned over her. He held something viscous which he set down before reaching again into the woman who was cut open from the waist to the neck. He was taking her insides out. Some of them were piled on the table next to her like so much jerky. A heart. A liver, maybe. And something else: a little alien thing. Woodson cussed and turned away. The big man snapped a bloody glove off. He pulled open a long drawer from the cadaver locker and moved the arm of another corpse so he could lean there and ponder his findings and roll a slim cigarette and ponder more. He smoked and thumbed his suspender and tapped the turquoise stone on his bolo tie.

Oliver tried to halt a sneeze but couldn’t. Everyone turned as he wiped snot off the window. The doctor’s finger stopped tapping. He put out his smoke and closed the drawer. He pulled his suspender out like a bowstring, his index finger like an arrow cocked at Oliver who settled his hat and gave the man a slight nod like he had no fear but moved along anyway because his war wound slightly tingled.

In the waiting room the drunk awoke and felt every pocket and fold of his clothes, every bodily nook on the hunt for one last cigarette. The drunk said, Come here, friend. Do you have a smoke?

No.

Well then what is you here for then?

No reason.

Do you know why I’m here?

No.

I’m sayin I can’t explain bein here just now at this present moment exactly though I got premonitions regardin the purpose of hospitals. You aint got no smoke?

No.

Fixin up. That’s all hospitals is for. Aint that so? Well then aint you here to get fixed up then? Are we gettin fixed? Maybe the fix is in! Is that it? The fix is in!

I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Then go on and explain yerself! Explain both ourselves if you got a mind for figurin the cosmos! Why we here?!

It’s a mystery, said Oliver. He had the urge to try explaining more, wanted to start from way back: In the beginning. What was it they said at church? No man knows God from beginning to end. That’s right. And what was it the child had said this morning? Also he has put eternity into man’s heart. Well, damn. Izzy had been quoting scripture. Oliver hadn’t fully understood that until now and not until this very moment had he understood that particular scripture to be a taunt. God gave mortal man a mind to fathom and long for eternity, a concept at odds with our very nature—what cruelty. And what did little Izzy know of all that? Was she taunting him or was it just God’s taunts in the mouths of babes?

Oliver wasn’t the type to know Bible verses by heart—he had the gist, how humanity was forever falling short—but he should have recognized that Izzy was quoting scripture. What other scripture could he recall? One phrase had always stuck with him: the face of the deep. The Bible gets going with God trying to name everything—thinking up words for day and night and heaven and earth—but even before that it begins with darkness upon the face of the deep. Like, before everything: the deep. In the beginning . . . , the Bible says, darkness was upon the face of the deep. Well what in the hell is the deep? The deep gets a face but never a proper name. The deep, that darkness, is the beginning of all things. Damn. Maybe, in the beginning, God started calling names because he was scared of the dark.

Oliver wanted to tell the drunk that whether or not he would find that last cigarette was known long before the galaxies took shape. Oliver wanted to say this not because he believed it but because any god scared of the dark didn’t bode well for creation. The drunk went on rubbing himself hoping to manifest tobacco. Predestination was a lazy way to make sense of eternity. In time, Oliver knew, all things might happen. Not just one. Ranching had taught him that. Damn. Another realization—he should have known right away but he was sure of it now: that corpse, that mummy woman cut open, the little alien thing beside her, it wasn’t anything strange at all, just unborn.

The nurse came and dug through documents at the front desk. We got to clear yall out now, said the nurse. Yall got to go.

We aint here for any reason anyway, said the drunk. The mystery’s the only reason, if there be sense enough in that. Which there aint. On account of the fix is in.

In the parking lot Oliver climbed into his truck and idled there studying the newspaper:

Discovery of the partially decayed body of a 29-year-old woman ended a search that began when local authorities received a bizarre anonymous phone call telling them that members of a religious sect were preserving a body in a barn, awaiting the dead woman’s return to life.

The body was found in a shed on the property of Mr. Saul Heel, self-appointed prophet of the group. Mr. Heel lives on a farm in La Luz just north of old Highway 54, where he claimed his followers would assemble as the only survivors of the world’s end in 1969.

Mr. Heel led his followers up the canyon to Bridal Veil Falls, where the confrontation with police occurred. A fire was set but the group of roughly two dozen were all apprehended, save Mr. Heel, whose whereabouts are unknown. The fire is largely contained.

Besides various boxes of radio parts, likely stolen, officers noted a flattened area on the property identified by authorities as a landing strip for flying saucers. A sign at the edge of the landing strip reads “All children of God welcome, humans stay clear. Angels sign here, please.”

Oliver flipped the newspaper. Below the fold was another story—SPACE TRAVEL CLAIMS LIVES—about the Apollo astronauts aflame on the launchpad. He flipped from one story to the other, forcing them through the gullies of his brain simultaneously.

The newspaper said nothing about anything unborn. And it said nothing of a missing child.

The big man in the bolo tie exited the hospital and then Oliver knew him. Easier to recognize in the sun, his hands not in the dead. A doctor from the missile range with a silly name: Jolly. He was not fat but thick. His white lab coat stretched tight all over and he bulged through, a pale bull. He carried a bone saw, smaller than the one Oliver used in the cutting room at the ranch. Sharper. The pale bull came to the truck. Oliver couldn’t help but size up how he’d break down, all prime: chuck, flank, and brisket.

Doc Jolly set his saw on the hood of the Ford where it rattled as the engine idled.

I am sorry you saw that, said Doc Jolly. He pulled from his shirt pocket a leather pouch and pinched tobacco and rolled another long, slim cigarette.

I’ve seen worse, said Oliver. What did I see exactly?

Jolly struck a match and puffed. He flicked the match away. Through his nose he inhaled slow and delicate. Up from his mouth a couple of cloudy snakes slithered over his lip into his nostrils. He exhaled and ashed and the embers of it caught the wind and flared and disappeared.

Do you care to know what I think about the moon? said Doc Jolly. He spoke with an unplaceable accent, put on and tiresome, wrought maybe from reading too much.

Why would I care about that?

You sit there with the newspaper, my friend. The space race is on. These astronauts, dead and sacrificed. Nothing strange, in this day and age, about patriots politely discussing the moon, the moon and its casualties, Apollo in ashes, et cetera.

Along came the drunk, out from the hospital. He ambled up to the men, tried to snatch the cigarette from Jolly’s hand. At first, Jolly pulled back. Then he smiled and put the cigarette to the drunk’s lips. For a moment, between them was the mingling of smoke, their exhales all mixed up and intertwined as if from the same fiery lungs. And then the drunk stumbled off messily sucking the cigarette to the butt, mumbling, Hallelujah.

Why’d you give that fella your smoke?

I am not a smoker. Not really. I suppose it is just a puff here and there to help cleanse the stench somewhat. Do you know what I mean when I say the stench?

I get the feelin you’re standin here at my truck for a reason.

No reason. My apologies, sir. Doc Jolly lifted his bone saw and used it to scratch his back. In any case, said Jolly, what I think about the moon is this: I feel sorry for the moon. Like I feel sorry for Vietnam. The war goes on. Always has. And these places do just get caught up in it.

Oliver put the Ford in gear and drove off. Doc Jolly sat on a curb with the bone saw for a lap table. He hulked over his little pouch, rolled another slim cigarette, and inhaled the smoky snakes of it.

Maude injected Izzy a half dozen times. The child flinched when touched but didn’t blink as the needle went in. Antibody shots around the bite on her thigh and then vaccine in her arm. Maude dressed the wound and took a seat on the sofa and looked over the newspaper Oliver handed her as Izzy curled up in the easy chair, her stained hands red against the turquoise plastic of the radio.

Was it a sheriff’s dog that bit you? said Oliver. Was there a whole lot of gunshootin? Who set fire to the mountain? How’d you end up alone?

Izzy kept quiet.

Maude said, Tell us about your mother then.

Izzy thought for a minute. She said, He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.

I told you she’s talkin Bible riddles. What are we supposed do with that?

Will you tell us about your parents? We’d like to get you back to your family, when it’s safe. Where is your family?

I need this radio fixed, said Izzy.

Alright. Anything can be fixed.

It’s a Galaxy and we don’t deserve it but have it only by the grace of God. This was Brother Heel’s. The Galaxy connects us to all things . . . when it’s fixed.

It’s a Galaxy and we don’t deserve it but have it only by the grace of God.

Even when she wasn’t speaking the King James, words came from Izzy’s mouth like they were written down somewhere and that bothered Oliver, having to think about where they were written down and by who and to what end. The child said so little but what came out straddled naïveté and certainty, like any kid talking to dolls, explaining the whole world.

That aint authentic NASA gizmos, said Oliver. That’s just another busted Emerson. But we’ll get batteries if you want. Won’t help nothin. Out here TV don’t work half the time. Remember I showed you that monkey light? Missile range has got antennas and radars galore. There aint hardly airwaves left for Cronkite or Bonanza.

The Galaxy works, said Izzy. Anybody can hear it. Even you could hear it.

I believe you.

It’s how God talks to us. God comes on the radio.

Now, just what do you mean? God?

If the Galaxy’s broke, we can’t hear God.

Alright, kiddo. Now . . . you mean like a church program, or some hellfire preacher? What station plays God?

He’s just . . . He is the radio, said Izzy. I am that I am and who is and who was and who is to come.

Oliver stared at her like from the paying side of zoo glass. He threw his arms out and stammered, unable to say any of the blasphemous things echoing in his brain, because Maude already had her nails digging into his thigh.

What about this Mr. Heel? said Maude. The newspaper claims he’s missing. Is he maybe out searchin for you?

No.

Somebody’s bound to be missin you.

Izzy spun her dials and said, My mother’s gone. Brother Heel was bringing her back. But he’s gone too. His head exploded on the mountain. In the fire . . . he rose up. Izzy raised her palms high, raised her gaze too, had a whole moment of what Oliver could understand only as some pantomime of zealous supplication. Then she curled back into herself, into her busted Galaxy.

There shall be no flesh saved, said Izzy.

Early evening and riding a stretch of fence might clarify something. Always more holes to patch. More concerns to ponder low in the gurgling worrypits of the gut. A wilderness of fear stones slowed the man down but at least belly pain wouldn’t put him in the loony bin. My mind is sound, said Oliver to his horse as he tacked up. Aint no god in radio.

He patted Sorry’s rear, brushed his patchy mane. Most everybody, upon first encountering the miserable beast as an ugly foal, had reflexively apologized to his long face out of some innate guilt about their own repulsion, but they’d said sorry with such empathy that the horse got sort of sweet on the word, like it was his name, and so it was.

Giddyup, Sorry.

They went northwest toward Highway 70. The day’s last rays of sun glared off the big stretch of white dunes across the road. The ranch sat near two buttes, called Twin Buttes, though the shape and character of the buttes were different enough. In the Chihuahuan Desert any big rock jutting from the dusty plains is an anomaly, and here were two, a real incongruity with the Gently place in the middle. How had Izzy ended up here?

Though Oliver’s granddaddy had written Twin Buttes Ranch on all the official paperwork, few ever used that name. The ranch was spitting distance from those blindingly white dunes, the dregs of some ancient lake, one of the world’s great natural wonders, according to brochures from the visitors’ center at White Sands National Monument. So the name was sometimes White Sands Ranch and always the Gently place but almost never Twin Buttes Ranch, even though the brand adorning the gate and burned into the cattle was pretty clearly a couple of flat-topped hills with a slim rib of moon slung over them. Looking out on the ancient gypsum dunes Oliver thought again about the face of the deep, if this was its opposite or end, the blinding maw of sand he’d been raised in. If you came to town and asked after White Sands, folks would think probably you meant the missile range, because the military was the biggest business around and of course they’d taken the name for themselves, for their proving ground: White Sands Missile Range. For this reason above all, Oliver hated when folks called his ranch White Sands. In two decades the government had gone and turned one of the world’s great natural wonders into an unquenchable wound of war games. Twin Buttes by the Monument, Oliver had said for years, by way of direction to the Gently place. Veer left at the blinding maw—steer clear of any bombs.

And why was it that the child now reminded him of this—one more weapon crash-tested at the Gently place.

He eased Sorry along the fence, eyed his spread, added all he saw to an already infinite list of decrepitudes. The barn roof leaked. Cow tanks strewn across the playa leaked. Somehow everything leaked though there was never rain enough to fill the cisterns. The well was low and what came up was briny. The big corral plus all the pens were held upright primarily by rust. The yellow paint he and Maude had annually caked on the house peeled now all over like a thick hide poorly fleshed so big patches of adobe were exposed and crumbling. The cinderblock slaughter house needed a new chain hoist and the cutting room had a broken freezer. Toward the buttes there were two rickety single-wides and an Airstream where various extended family or hired hands had lived over the years before Daddy ran them off. Oliver had renters out there now at the butte camp. He couldn’t afford to pay cowboys but occasionally he’d knock money off the already piddly lease for a hand bailing hay. He was down to sixty head of cattle now, just what he could manage with his son joined up and gone to Vietnam. Hardly a living, sixty cows.

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 moon blindness, 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.

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