Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  ALSO BY JEFF SHARLET

  C Street

  Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from

  the Margins of Faith (coeditor)

  The Family

  Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible

  (coauthor with Peter Manseau)

  For Julie

  Contents

  1. Sweet Fuck All, Colorado

  2. Bad Moon Rising

  3. Begin with the Dead

  4. You Must Draw a Long Bead to Shoot a Fish

  5. Quebrado

  6. For Every Life Saved

  7. Clouds, When Determined by Context

  8. It Costs Nothing to Say

  9. She Said Yes

  10. What They Wanted

  11. The Rapture

  12. Rock Like Fuck

  13. Born, Again

  Acknowledgments

  1Sweet Fuck All, Colorado

  1

  WHEN I WAS eighteen I fell hard for the state of Colorado as embodied by a woman with long honey blond hair and speckled green eyes, who drank wine from a coffee mug and whiskey from the bottle. Her name was Molly Knott Chilson. That’s how she said it when she’d been drinking—Molly-Knott-Chilson, all three names, the latter two the marks of good family for those who knew Colorado, which I did not. We were freshmen at a college in the countryside of western Massachusetts, as far as could be in the Lower 48 from the Rocky Mountains and the ornery horses she’d grown up with, horses that charged out of chutes into rodeo arenas and ambled up into high saddleback passes where the trees are nothing but grunts of tortured bark and thick sharp needles. Those were some of the things Molly-Knott-Chilson loved: horseflesh, rodeo dirt, and gnarled pine.

  Also whiskey, especially Maker’s Mark, which was the best we knew of at the time, and the Bible. She wasn’t a Christian back then, but she read her Bible daily. She thought she might study religion. She bought herself a concordance. She would sit cross-legged on the floor, the concordance’s giant pages spread on her lap like the wings of a gull, a mug of wine or a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a Marlboro in the other, her back curved like calligraphy—she had worn a brace as a girl, and her legs were a bit crooked, and her toes wrapped onto one another because when she was little she’d refused to abandon a pair of shoes that she’d loved—and she would parse scripture.

  We thought whiskey and the Bible would help us understand what was happening in the world. We were eighteen and we’d grown up in an age of Mutually Assured Destruction, thinking there would never be a war again, not for America, unless it was the kind that flashed instantly across the sky and made us all disappear. But U.S. troops were piling up in the Persian Gulf, and our professors told us that Iraq’s oil fields, once aflame, would never stop burning. Then, one day in February, a man named Greg Levey stood in the middle of the town common and set himself on fire and burned into a lump of muscle and bone and ash.

  Molly-Knott-Chilson and I left class—everyone left class—and walked into town. It seemed appropriate to us at the time to spread across the two-lane road, even though the cars we were blocking were filled with other students and professors and people intent on seeing the remains, for what reason I no longer know. I have a few photographs of Molly leading the march. They’re black-and-white, so you can’t see the gold of her hair, but her lips are set and her eyes are wide not with horror or with anger but with what I’d come to understand, years later, as a sense of vengeance, calm and certain.

  In town our dozens grew to hundreds and then maybe to a thousand, filling the main intersection, sniffing the air for the scent of burning. A gold Monte Carlo with an American flag in its back window drove, very slowly, into my friend Hop. Hop jumped back, the car braked, the driver was satisfied. I hollered at a cop standing beside me. He shook his head and smiled and said, accurately, “You shouldn’t be standing in the road.”

  A riot followed, New England college town–style, the police filling school buses with protesters, protesters forming human chains in front of the buses, billy clubs breaking the links. I stayed out of the fight, thinking my camera was more important than my body, that I could do more good with a picture than with a lump on my skull. My logic failed me after I took a picture of a policeman knocking down an old Quaker woman. The cop swung on me next. I saw his half-open fist through my wide-angle lens; then a thump hard enough to put me down next to the Quaker. He plasticuffed my hands behind my back and hammered my face into the steps of the school bus that was trying to inch through the crowd, my knees scraping slowly along the road. An officer on the bus dragged me up the steps and pushed me into the aisle with the rest of the prisoners. As in a game of Twister, cuffed strangers maneuvered with one another to remove my camera from around my neck and pass it through an open window to someone in the crowd outside—preservation of evidence, or so we believed.

  Much later, after Molly had paid my release fees not once but twice—the first time they must have been lost, said the desk officer—the police let me go into a warm winter night, the mist of melting snow giving the town a soft glow as we made our way back to the common, where a vigil had grown up around the ashes of Greg Levey. Molly gave me my camera. Apparently the story of the student who’d gotten a picture of a cop hitting an old woman had made me a momentary celebrity. “You guard that now,” Molly said, her voice clipped. “You’re getting that developed first thing tomorrow. We are going to nail that fucker.” Her tone was so sharp that even I was a little frightened, more so when I clicked open the back of the camera the next day and discovered it was empty: I’d forgotten to put in film. “We’ll gather witnesses,” Molly said, but of course that came to nothing—not then, anyway.

  That summer I drove out to Colorado with Molly, a straight shot accomplished without stopping except for gas. We had a red Chevy Cavalier I’d inherited from my mother, dead two years past of cancer, and in the backseat rode our respective best friends at the time: Andy, a six-foot-four rock climber, and Lorraine, a bone-thin poet with a shaved head and combat boots and many bitter sighs. They didn’t get along. It didn’t matter because we were going west. Home for Molly, not-home for Lorraine, rocks for Andy, and for me the country of my imagination. Molly entertained us as we drove with doggerel drilled into her head through many happy recitations by her father, a student of cowboy poetry and Western verse, such as this, “The Ballad of Alfred Packer,” the true story of a pioneer who survived his passage by—well, the poem tells the tale:

  Oh Alfred Packer

  You’ll surely go to hell

  While all the others starved to death

  You dined a bit too well.

  I remember from that drive the Platte River in Nebraska, flat and opaque and too dull to reflect the stars; a giant spider with knobby joints that crawled into my pants while I was taking a leak in tall grass; and, one morning, the mountains rising from the plains. There are higher mountains in the world, and more beautiful mountains; but there is no other range that so neatly divides an empire. To witness them in the morning, driving from the east, when the biggest mountain you’ve ever seen is a dollop of stone and dirt five thousand feet tall, smooth and rounded like mashed potatoes—to confront this jagged fourteen-thousand-foot wall is to understand that the earth is neither peaceful nor made for our purposes. I envisioned dead-end canyons, wagons going over cliffs, and trappers snowbound in cabins, and thought, No wonder Alfred Packer ate his friends.

  Molly’s mother and stepfather lived in one of the swankiest neighborhoods of Denver, but Molly had little use for cities. So we drove north and west to the town of Loveland, and from there
to the western edge, where a spine of orange stone called Devil’s Backbone lurches out of the ground. If you followed it you’d come to the house that Molly’s father built on a high patch of land at the end of a dirt road. We passed him as we drove in. He wore a cowboy hat and a thick gray mustache, and he sat easy in the saddle astride an enormous uncouth black gelding that I guessed must be Bo, Molly’s champion barrel-racing horse. Molly was driving, but she shouted out the window. “You get off that damn horse! That’s my horse!”

  “This horse doesn’t allow eastern college girls to ride him,” said John Chilson, who thirty years previous had gone east himself, to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

  “You get off that horse!” Molly called again. “Or I’m gonna rope you off!” Then she hit the gas and left her father in a cloud of dust as she raced up the road to see her dogs: a trio of thick-boned beasts that lived outside, except for the littlest, Ollie, who was the chief despite the fact that he’d make not much more than a mouthful for a coyote.

  That summer we lived fifteen miles up a canyon cut by the Big Thompson River in a little blue cabin on stilts. Mountains climbed straight up from our back porch; our front yard was a narrow highway and across it the Big Thompson, which to eastern eyes looked small even though it crashed over a streambed of boulders at a temperature not far above freezing. It was not a river for swimming.

  I’d brought with me a stack of books about Indians: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglala, and a collection of photographs by Edward S. Curtis. Then I learned that Curtis had made his portraits of “noble savages,” last of their race, by carrying with him a trunk full of costumes. The pictures were beautiful, mournful, fake. They were portraits of longing, that of Curtis and of his subjects and of me looking at them. The books had been my mother’s but she’d never been out west, never seen the real thing.

  I brought with me also a postcard of a Lakota Sioux war chief named Red Cloud. But when I learned that Red Cloud had sold out to “the white man,” I tore it into four pieces. Then I reconsidered and I taped the four pieces together and tacked my Red Cloud jigsaw to the fake wood paneling beside our bed in the cabin in the canyon, a reminder, useless that summer, surrounded as I was for the first time by what I took for the real thing—the West, the mountains, a girl with green eyes, a black horse, and a bottle of whiskey—that longing is as much of a lie as corruption.

  I thought that I loved the mountains. I’d wake up before sunrise and slip out of bed and walk out the back door straight up a hill of no account, just eight thousand feet above my New York home. To get to the top I had to kick my leg against a ponderosa pine and shimmy my back up a pale red reef of sandstone until I could twist and flop onto its sloped crown and from there climb up a crumbling fracture in a ridge, speckled and spotted like calico, to a plateau that glowed in the rising sun, which was edging, just as I had, over another ridge to the east. From the plateau I could see deer and sometimes bighorn sheep—they’d turn and stream away like water at the sound of a whisper—and I’d consider throwing a rock, imagine I could hunt, that I was a caveman. But more often I lay naked on the cold stone and let the sun warm me. I often fell asleep. I knew there could be rattlers nearby, baking like me. I imagined us, snake and man, like the lion and the lamb, redeemed by the light hitting rock and skin and scale. The snake never struck, it’s true, but if you fall asleep in the sun at an elevation of eight thousand feet, you’ll turn red as a berry.

  Our landlords and next-door neighbors were an elderly couple and their silent middle-aged son, Ron, who poached deer for them and hunted mushrooms they grilled and ate with steak sauce. Otherwise the three of them watched the road. In tourist season it usually lit up with sirens at least once a night as ambulances and police wound up and down the canyon after drivers gone into the river. One evening that was Molly’s father, John Chilson. He came walking in barefoot and smiling—he wouldn’t say what had happened to his shoes or his car—and commandeered a pair of boots and a cowboy hat with a sunflower on it and went walking into the dusk, refusing a ride, holding his thumb in the air, waving to our blank-faced neighbors and placid Ron.

  Ron had been bitten by black widows, many times, once—according to his mother—“turning green.” He and his parents were sober, gentle people, and they shared with us the trout Ron fished illegally from the Big Thompson. We stacked the fish in our freezer and never ate them, since we had heard that oil, or mine tailings, or beer factory dregs had leaked into the river and poisoned it. When we left at the end of the summer we forgot to get rid of the freezer trout, and the thought of Ron, who did not speak, finding them there uneaten shames me to this day.

  MOLLY AND I ARE a wedding each and twenty years past that time. Molly married a carpenter from Alabama named John Kearley, a tall and stoic man honest as snow, in a tiny mountain church on a perfect day marred only by the discovery that the monarch butterflies purchased by Molly’s mother and handed out to be released in lieu of rice failed to thrive in the high altitude: They fluttered dead to the ground. I married a woman who’d grown up in the dead or dying dairy country of upstate New York, not far from my own hometown, and thereafter we moved from city to city. I went west to Molly’s wedding, she came east to mine, but the gulf between us has grown wider over the years than just the two thousand miles between the Rocky Mountains and the coast.

  For instance, the guns.

  When Molly was eighteen she and two girlfriends bought a rusty old beater and set out to wander the country for the summer. Molly’s father tried to give her a pistol. She refused.

  When she was twenty, she left college for a year to move to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota so she could learn the Lakota language. I visited her there; for Valentine’s Day she gave me a semiautomatic rifle. Just a .22, but still it was something for me to learn enough of the confidence of guns to be able to say “just a .22.” Molly herself had acquired a simpler pump-action rifle, for safety and for power—the calm that comes with the possession of even a small weapon and, maybe more important, the knowledge of that from which it can protect you and that from which it cannot. She lived in a gray two-room foundationless shack, surrounded by pale red earth and black pine trees, and her only company besides my visits were box-elder bugs. They’re the size of houseflies, but they’re quiet and they don’t bother your food. Mostly they just sit there, diagonal red lines gliding across their folded smooth black wings, geometry without meaning.

  The territory she was in was said to be, per capita, the poorest and most violent land in America. It was also some of the emptiest. You could drive for a long time before you’d pass another car, longer still before you saw anyone walking. When you did, you passed without stopping only at danger to your standing in the invisible but strict society that laced the Black Hills. You were always supposed to offer a ride. But there were some people who refused, or who simply didn’t answer. There was one old Lakota man who wandered the highways like a ghost. Nobody had ever heard him say anything, nobody had ever seen him eat anything. The story went that once upon a time he’d walked the flat misty bed of the White Smoke River instead of the highway, an antisocial gesture not appreciated by other Lakota, who declared that the man must have taken an animal lover. People said a beaver must have seduced him down amid the shallow pools of the dried-out riverbed, which would explain his condition: It breaks the mind to fall in love with something you can never have, something that was not meant for you.

  Molly tried to escape the West only once. After college she moved to North Carolina. It almost immediately overwhelmed her. “Time has become something of a panic,” she wrote in a letter that ended with a pasted-in photograph of blubber spilling out of a gutted whale, a flourish meant to express her sense of dislocation.

  “The South has made me more aware of myself,” she tried to explain, “more observant of my place in America than any place I’ve ever been.” She alre
ady understood what it might mean to say one had been prepared, as she had, to “debut” at sixteen, but she had thought she would be able to leave all that behind. “It is not a comfortable awakening,” she wrote, “to begin to unfold systems of caste, status, and desire, and find them both artful and brutal, mean and sublime.”

  She began drinking more, quietly and alone or with men and women mean and sublime. She wrote, with concern, about “the fecundity” of her surroundings. “I am beginning to see dead snakes on the road, and ants in the kitchen.” She wrote, with concern, about the South’s “endless divisibility of history,” about “the spectacle of currency, occurrence, posture,” about the “ritualization of chaos that keeps hands from cracking the bone.”

  She’d found a job in a fish store. “Leon, an old Italian man who conducts himself with the grace of someone who has never been lonely, brings me newspapers on Thursday morning. He wraps them in the same piece of twine every week and beckons me to hold them as he unties it.

  “‘Miss Colorado,’ he says happily, rolling the r. ‘Do you miss your snow this morning?’”

  Molly and I broke up after college. I still have the rifle she gave me, but I haven’t taken it out of its leather sheath in probably ten years. Molly pawned her pump-action for a couple hundred dollars, to a Jewish gun collector in a Denver suburb who was so crazy for weaponry and the West that he claimed to have made it onto a liberal watchdog list of American neo-Nazis. Her father offered her a Beretta, and this time she accepted. John Kearley asked her to marry him, and she also accepted.

  John had grown up in Tennessee and Alabama transfixed by the legends of the Civil War, a past to which there was no return, so he’d left and gone to Washington to work for a senator. But Washington wasn’t meant for him, or he wasn’t meant for Washington, so he moved to Colorado, thereafter to descend from the mountains to the world of politicking and cities only reluctantly. He collects watches. He is straight backed and deep voiced and gravely chivalrous. He loves guns earnestly and completely and without anger, just as he loves watches, complicated things that can be understood and harnessed, but never truly controlled. He used to carry a .40 caliber Glock in the glove of his truck, and he had acquired more guns than he had yet managed to fire. Among them: a Ruger .357 magnum handgun; an SKS assault rifle; a Keltec .380 pistol; a Stevens 12-gauge shotgun; a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun; a Browning .22 Huntsman pistol; an SR1, a Romanian AK-47 clone.