Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  “But Spook didn’t like that. And he reared. And the rope whipped”—she glanced at Sam—“and cut off Dad’s hand.”

  This, really, is where the story begins, with what John Chilson did next. He picked his hand up off the ground.

  The next part I remember: “And he says, ‘Get me to a doctor’ and starts walking with you back to the house?”

  Molly nods. I am finally getting the story right. There were two lessons that came out of this story. This was the first: Preserve what you can.

  At the hospital, doctors sewed her father’s hand back on and told him it might take, and that he must do exactly as they instructed, which meant no more Marlboros. John Chilson lay there in his hospital bed and nurses be damned, kept smoking with his left hand. His right rotted on his arm, and the doctors cut it off before it killed him.

  John Chilson accepted that loss. That was the second lesson: Recognize for lost that which you cannot save.

  Taken together, these two principles amount to a belief in original sin, probably the last conviction Molly and I still share across the divides—geographical, political, spiritual—between us. This is to say nothing so banal as “we are all sinners,” but rather that we are glad to be so. We hold on to what we believe is ours until we can’t any longer, and then we let go, because true conservatism knows that nothing lasts.

  A FEW DAYS LATER Molly invited me to join her and John and Sam for a trip to Denver to see a rodeo. I figured we’d get a chance to talk on the four-hour drive, but Molly and Sam slept in the jump seat of John’s green Ford F-150. When we got to the rodeo we split up. Molly wanted to find a lariat for Sam. I talked to trappers about beaver pelts and fox fur and bearskins and all the other pleasures of country living they thought the liberals were trying to take away from them, and I talked to a photographer for Cowboys & Indians magazine and one of his models, a sexy piece of work who’d posed in various outfits combining cowboy gear—chaps and hats and six-shooters—with bikinis, and I talked to a retired air force captain named Paul Schubert (“like the composer”) who greatly admired Cowboys & Indians because he appreciated guns and beautiful women adorned with turquoise. Captain Schubert had once considered the priesthood, “But then you can’t have one of these,” he said, gesturing to the model, indeed a beautiful woman adorned with turquoise. He was a little bit deaf, the result of a lifetime of shooting, not to mention getting shot himself. He’d taken his boy to a shooting range to teach him the meaning of firepower and had worn his special leather holster, an innovation he’d tooled himself to hold half a dozen guns at once. Quick draw and a shot fired; the ricochet nailed him. Lucky, he said, it’d missed his boy.

  And then, at last, I got to hear Molly, on the long drive back to Salida. Back through Bailey and past Sweet Fuck All and up over Kenosha Pass—and then the whiteness of South Park, at which sight I said, “Oh my God,” even though I’d seen it before. She stared out at the passing valley, which glared back, dazzling beneath the sun but for a few broken barns. “The things people do,” she said. I didn’t know whether she was talking about changes in the land or the crimes she had defended and the crimes she’d now prosecute, or simply her own decisions, her desire to put a finger on the scales, to counter all that she knew she couldn’t change. I waited for her to explain. Silence followed for a few miles. And then: “It’s almost like any action anyone could take, or does take, is of little consequence. No consequence, considering all that they are exposed to.” A mistake people make about this land, she said, is to suppose that it offers salvation. “You get to the point of thinking of the elemental forces of the world as if they’re not . . . cruel. But—look around.”

  The mistakes people make are her business now. The little boy up in Guffey, a one-stoplight town, who shot his best friend—who should pay, the shooter or the parents who left the gun loaded? The man in Florence who killed his neighbor with a shotgun for scratch with which to buy an Xbox—should he get the death penalty? The father in Cañon who raped his two daughters every night for years—shouldn’t the mother who didn’t stop him also go to jail? The old man out on the edge of Molly’s town, a photographer who made portraits of children and then when they left drew pictures of what he imagined to be their naked bodies—should he be punished for his sad, grasping visions?

  Once, Molly would have poured herself a glass of wine, lit up a Marlboro, and curled over her Bible, looking for answers and then more answers and then stories with which to answer stories, until she’d solved the problem by burying it in scripture and myth. Now she believes in solutions: convictions.

  “You have to keep human affairs in perspective. When you magnify the human role, when you magnify people and the consequences of their actions, the notion that we control everything we do—that minimizes God. Our actions are really of very little consequence. In the context of a place like this, you realize that. How meaningless, really, all our little dramas are.”

  We covered another few miles, John silent while Molly thought and Sam slept and I waited.

  “I believe in evil. I believe in the evil of acts. But I don’t believe any person can act, wholly, evil. That would negate God. I never had the concept of God as just goodness. A lot of people do. I don’t think there’s anything particularly Western about the forces that work on us—God, the weather, our fears, the fact that you have to reckon with the good and the bad. But I think there is something particularly Western about the awareness that—well, people came here because there were fortunes to be made, people threw it all away to come here and risk it, people left things behind. That leaves you exposed, and aware of the elemental forces. Growing up here, I’ve always had a unique feeling of freedom. I’ve never felt like I couldn’t walk out of a situation. I’ve never felt beholden. I’ve met a lot of people in my life who I thought had integrity, except that there were things they couldn’t walk away from.”

  “Do you remember,” I asked, “that guy who burned himself? The burning man on the town common?”

  She shrugged. “Just how dumb that kid was.”

  “He wasn’t a kid. He was in his thirties.”

  “Ugh. Even worse.”

  “When I think about this place—the West—I think about Greg Levey. Greg Levey and Melville. Remember when you told me to read Moby-Dick?”

  “Who’s Greg Levey?”

  “The burning man. You don’t remember his name?”

  “You were always an idealist,” Molly said, and looked away, out at the white plain. Sam, sitting next to her, woke up and began to sing. “Dinah won’t you blow, / Dinah won’t you blow, / Dinah won’t you blow my ho-o-orn!”

  “I understand Ahab,” Molly said. I nodded. “But,” she continued, “he is a fool.” She considered. “We are, too.” She let some more land pass. Maybe she was reconsidering. “If you yield to God without a fight,” she said, “are you worth a story?”

  • • •

  MOLLY AND JOHN HOPED one day to build a real home, a permanent home, on a piece of high dry ground outside town. When we went to look at it, the light and the dry yellow winter grass were of an identically soft hue; the sun seemed to be cascading into the bowl of the valley like liquid. A crick crossed the land, and a stand of cottonwoods guarded the western border, a bit of shade in the hot afternoons. There would be room for horses. John pointed to the two-lane, about a quarter mile down a gentle slope. “I’m thinking,” he said, “we’d build looking inward. With a courtyard.” His concern, he explained, was that someone might try to shoot Molly from the road.

  While I stayed in Salida I talked to a rancher, an actor, a witch, and a detective. The rancher, Joe DeLuca, was a man who had left the land his family had worked for four generations and returned, a corporate executive who thought he could manage his hometown into economic revival. He made charts to prove to the old-timers that the land was not agricultural and never had been, and he wrote proposal
s to bring high-tech “incubators” to the valley, and he compiled data on poverty in Chaffee County. This last category of data stacked ever higher. Since the last mines closed and the last train ran through town in the early 1990s, per-job income decreased 20 percent; housing costs had increased 300 percent. Joe ran for office on this information, won, ran for office again, lost; when I met him we sat in his truck out on the range of his land and talked about who had beaten him: his own party. Joe was a Republican. He’d lost to a Democrat with whom he had a lot in common, but his real nemesis had been a man named Frank McMurry, an old-timer whose family had been there as long as Joe’s, only Frank still had his family’s land. Frank ambled from house to house in his cowboy boots and talked about freedom and independence, but as far as Joe was concerned he took his marching orders from real estate brokers.

  “The party,” said Joe, repeating a charge I heard often, “is run by realtors. They use the Western myth to block anything that’ll slow down their developments, cookie-cutter two-acre lots. They need water, they take it. If they can sell water, they sell it. They don’t care about keeping water in the valley. Eventually all their developments turn brown. Water gets more expensive. Young families can’t afford to live in the country. You have to be rich to play the dream of the West.” He shook his head, looking out over his land, one of the last patches around still irrigated with respect for growing things. Surrounding it, edging up the slopes out of the valley, was new construction, McMansions spreading like lichen, ranches divided, subdivided, and chopped into ever smaller pieces for urban exiles who wanted to return to the land. The land they returned to they dubbed “open,” even as they filled the broad spaces. Its ethos they declared wild, even as they demanded “services”: wireless Internet and satellite TV and especially glaziers: The new pioneers must have magnificent picture windows. “The myth of the Old West is becoming a sea of houses,” said Joe. He practically spit. “The myth of the cowboy is a joke.”

  The actor, Greg West, lived in a shabby apartment over a gift shop on the main street of town. It was made glamorous by cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and dozens of movie posters, but the truth was Greg rarely had time to clean. Once he had worked on Broadway, costume design, and had taught at universities. Now he woke up at 4:00 every morning and began baking at Bongo Billy’s café at 5:00. At 1:30 he quit and went to work for his theater group: There were two, all volunteer, in Salida. Greg was a big man with a bowl of bright red hair; he had been cast as Winnie the Pooh in the next production, but he wanted me to know that he had directed A Lion in Winter not long before. He explained the lay of the land as he saw it: There was downtown, which was liberal, and there was the rest of the county, inhabited by CAVE people—Citizens Against Virtually Everything. He had fair reason to complain: Once he had put up a production of Damn Yankees, and some locals had demanded he change the title to “Darn.” That, and he was a gay man. He rarely had lovers, but he didn’t mind. There are certain things one gives up to live in the country, he explained.

  The witch lived south of Salida, in the next valley down, known officially as San Luis and unofficially as Mysterious, what with all the UFO sightings and the cattle mutilations and people like the witch, who dressed the part if the part could be said to be low-cut and sexy. Her name was Debra Floyd. She lived in an A-frame with dogs and cats and snakes and rats, in a sparse village of like-minded folks at the end of a dirt road backed up by mountains. For a living she accepted long-distance calls from people who believed in her power to tell them something about themselves. There was one restaurant in her town. Debra and I met there for dinner. She demanded news of the world, and when I told her, she shuddered and put her hand on mine and said, “I don’t think it’s safe out there.”

  It sure wasn’t. In the early 1990s Chaffee County law enforcement dealt with around two thousand cases a year. Then, in 1995, two cocaine dealers drove into town in a Rolls-Royce with a kilo of methamphetamine from biker gangs in California. Cocaine lasts twenty minutes or so. Meth lasts for hours—and, locals soon discovered, could easily be made at home with ingredients available at Murdoch’s Ranch Supply. Technically there was an obstacle: You had to show identification to buy fertilizer. That is, you had to say who you were if you wanted to buy shit. But this was strictly a scare tactic; in Salida, you lay your license down and shit is for sale, no more questions asked. You cook your shit in the country; that is what the country is good for. If you mix your recipe wrong it will blow you up. If you taste your own shit—every cook does—soon your teeth will rot into gray little stumps. You can spot successful cooks by their dentures. The local detective told me he wished heroin, once present in small towns, especially dying ones, just as in cities, would make a comeback; junkies sleep instead of tweaking. Tweakers thieve and brawl and scream. If tweakers have cars they drive them very fast, if they’re too young they ride their bicycles forever. Once two tweakers from Salida pedaled their bikes forty miles in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter. By the late nineties, Chaffee County law had as many as four thousand criminal cases annually, and now it’s at six thousand and climbing.

  I learned this from a leather-skinned man with a cross strung tight to his neck on a black cord. He was the detective. His name was Keith Pinkston. One day, out front of the courthouse, a deputy DA mentioned a case he’d won that had involved a mountain goat (endangered; a man had hunted one and then wasted the body, a crime for which he’d pay $120,000). Molly cackled, and since she was the boss, the rest of her staffers, all men, followed suit. But Pinkston caught only the word “goat.” “Pervert?” he asked. The DDA looked perplexed. “Reason I ask,” Pinkston went on, his voice the aural equivalent of his skin, “is, I ever tell you about my first case?” The DDA shook his head. “It was a man raped a cow.”

  “Who filed a complaint?” the DDA asked.

  “Sale barn,” said Pinkston. The cow raper had caused the cows back problems by mounting them too hard into their stalls. “But we finally got him. Yep. Serial cow raper. He was my first interview.” Except that at the time, the case had appeared to Pinkston’s superiors too subtle for a rookie; they ordered him to sit in as a legendary old cop named Post conducted the interview. “Classic Post form: ‘Did you do it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you do it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you do it?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, we know you did it.’ ‘Okay’ And he starts confessing all. Cows, sheeps—sheep?” Another cop nods his head at the collective plural. “Sheep, goats. He was feelin’ real bad about it. Post wraps up the interview and turns off the tape. ‘I got just one more question, Buck.’ That was the raper’s name. ‘Buck, was them cows tight?’”

  MY LAST MORNING in Colorado I walked out to my rental car and nearly stepped on a black widow. Although widows are said to be as common in woodpiles back east as in the high dry sun of Colorado, I had never seen one before. I considered crushing it; wondered if widows could jump; decided I could squash the fucker even if it did; and then stood there for ten minutes, watching it amble across some gravel and up into a planter, where it disappeared into dark soil.

  Back when she was a defense attorney, before she became a prosecutor, Molly wrote me a letter about widows.

  “Our window sills are full of them. Huge, fat ones. They’re slow and lazy and slick-bodied. After I kill one, I lay in bed afraid another will sneak in to bite Sam for spite. I wonder if he’d wake up and cry or if the poison would course through in sleep.

  “Fucking spiders.

  “Today I went to lunch with my best friend in town”—Lucia Hand, a probation officer. “She went to a conference in Denver last week on meth labs. I’m sure you’re aware of how dangerous these things are, and maybe have heard of cases where children and babies die in explosions. But it’s even worse, because the kids inhale the fumes all day, and then the meth burners leave the shit in the fridge to cool and the food gets infected. I see meth addicts at the jail and the courthouse. Their lips and teeth are gray. Or they have m
ouths full of dentures at age 28.

  “I guess it’s a pretty great high.

  “I’m reading Joshua, trying to make myself memorize. My dad is great at recitation, and it was really fun to listen to him as a kid. ‘Sun stand still at Gibeon, and Moon in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.’

  “I’d like to see the valley of Aijalon.”

  Then she closes her letter, as simple as a blank white moon over the mountain: “Good night.—Molly.”

  2Bad Moon Rising

  IT WAS A sweaty night in Knoxville, the end-of-August dead zone that burns out every summer, 1999. I’d gone down to visit my granny, but our talk wouldn’t move past my mother, dead then ten years. So I left to look in on downtown. That ended pretty fast—Knoxville was an empty place, what action there was mostly having migrated into the exurban ringworm that now grows around every American city. I wound up on deserted Gay Street—used to be bustling—around 11 p.m., looking down into a canyon between two deserted buildings where once something had stood; the hole that was left, scraped clean of all but a few bricks from the foundation, looked like a tooth had been pulled. Silty yellow street light didn’t quite reach the bottom.

  Then I heard the song: “I see a bad moon risin’. . . .” An old man was walking across the Gay Street Bridge with a transistor radio pressed to his ear, the tune loud but tinny and bouncing off the car-free blacktop like a ball nobody was chasing. “I know the end is comin’ soon. . . .”

  Just a foot-stomping jingle, really, jackhammer guitar and an earnest vocal, the lyric not really bluesy so much as churchy. Not pious but scared, the sort of worry that knows this world is no good and bound not to improve. The moon in this song isn’t a symbol of the nighttime, the naughty wild good time, but of darkness rising: “I feel rivers overflowin’,” Creedence sings. “I hear the voice of rage and ruin.”