Hunter's Heaven

HUNTER’S HEAVEN

There’s a dog with two legs called Faith that walks like a man. I didn’t believe it when Sara told me, but who knows? Crazy shit happens all the time.

She’s the one who also told me about the manure pile that burnt for months, the naked man who bit a cop, and the Valentine balloon that caused a power outage in thousands of homes and businesses. All true stories, she assured me.

“So you believe in miracles,” I said.

“One should,” Sara said. “Don’t you?”

I said, “No, I don’t. It’s just crazy shit, that’s all.”

“What about the woman in Nebraska that gave birth to a 14-pound baby that could talk?”

“Just crazy shit.”

Sara was my next door neighbour when I moved to the trailer park a few years ago. She wasn’t bad looking; short and skinny, a childish face, red hair tied in a bun, and nice amber eyes. Her tense forehead made her look anguished, even when smiling. Sara came over to talk almost every day, and didn’t leave until I started yawning and pretending to be asleep with my head falling forward and my eyes closing. Sometimes she brought me a piece of cake she made, or an orange from her tree.

I had two lawn chairs facing the TV with a small table between the chairs to set the beer and the ashtray. She sat next to me and talked while smoking cigarettes and looking at the TV screen, even when it was off. 

The park was called Hunter’s Heaven and I asked the landlord why, since it was in the middle of the desert and there was nothing there to hunt except maybe rats and scorpions, which doesn’t make it a heaven for any serious hunter. The landlord said there were two theories: the trailer park was sitting on a parcel of land that once belonged to a man called William Hunter. He had envisioned an irrigation system that would turn that dry land into an oasis lush with exotic plants and birds imported from South America and the Middle East. In the center of it, he would build his palace: Hunter’s Heaven. But Mr. Hunter expired before he could realize his dream, and the land was auctioned and bought cheap by second-rate developers.

The other theory was a lot less remarkable: that whole desert was once a forest where pre-historic men used to hunt wild game.

One day Sara came in as I was brushing my teeth and told me about a woman who crashed her car while driving drunk on Listerine. Then I heard small feet coming up my front steps. Sara turned her back to me, walked to the door, and started talking to someone outside. It was her kid, wanting to know where his mother was. I had been living there for weeks and didn’t know she had a kid living with her.

She sent him back home, sat on the lawn chair again and said my trailer had changed a lot since I’d moved in. I told her that except for the sword collection on the wall, nothing really had changed. She agreed, but said the place looked cheerier anyway. And started telling me that birds can get high from eating certain berries, then crash into buildings and die. It said so in the paper.

I didn’t talk much to the other neighbours. But sometimes I heard them outside – my door was always open because of the heat – and that’s how I found out about the bomb. They talked about it all the time. The government was experimenting with atomic bombs, and they were setting one up in the desert, not too far from Hunter’s Heaven. I went outside and searched the horizon, and saw a tower, maybe five miles away, that I had never noticed before.

Next time Sara came to visit I asked her if she knew anything about the bomb.

She said she had heard something, but it didn’t really interest her. And told me about a Presbyterian minister that collapsed and died in mid-sentence of a sermon after saying, “And when I go to heaven…”.

I asked her if she knew what an A-bomb really was, and that it could turn Hunter’s Heaven into hell in no time. She said she was sure the government wouldn’t do that to its own people.

“Besides,” she said, “dying is not my main concern,” and told me about a jockey who had died of a heart attack just before his horse crossed the finish line and won the race. 

“Death can’t take your victories away,” she said, “If your lottery ticket is a winner, dying before they draw the numbers won’t make any difference.” 

I argued that a bomb so powerful could erase her child’s future. She laughed, and I knew what her laugh meant. What kind of future could a child being raised in the heart of nothing by a destitute single mom possibly have?

I went to the door to look outside, one ear turned in her direction so she wouldn’t think I wasn’t listening. There was a diamondback baking in the sun, maybe 10 feet away or so. I spat on the ground, it came and licked my spit, and I guessed it liked the taste of it because it kept looking at me for more. I told it to go away; the well had dried up. The snake hung for a while, then lost hope and slithered away. I wondered if its skin was thin enough to feel the scalding sand under its belly. I thought a bit about what Sara had said, about dying right before something good happened to you. 

Also, wouldn’t it be funny to mess up death’s plans by killing yourself first, while doing something so heroic and dangerous that you’d become immortal?

And then everything became white and torrid, as if the sun had expanded and touched the earth. I shielded my eyes with the palms of my hands, and heard Sara screaming inside. Then I felt her pushing me out of the way as she ran outside crying and calling for her kid, Adam.That’s when the shockwave hit us. Sara was knocked to the ground. She looked at me and pointed to her house. Her lips kept moving, but I was deaf for a while and couldn’t hear a thing. Though, I knew she was worried about her son.

I ran to her house, where a pale 7 year-old boy with orange hair was standing by the door, arms crossed around his chest, looking fascinated at the horizon where a mushroom cloud had formed. I said, “Adam? Are you okay?” He didn’t answer me.

A few days later, Jeff – Jeff is the guy who lives across from me with a couple of parrots and his pet lizard in a bright yellow trailer where he collects fossilised dinosaur footprints he picks up around the desert – Jeff appeared out of nowhere and came to my door. 

He said. “Hey neighbour, a bunch of us are going to the bomb site tomorrow morning just to have a closer look at the damage and see what it’s all about. Wanna come?”

“Isn’t it dangerous?” I said.

“How come? It’s already exploded,” Jeff said.

I meant the radiation – they’d been talking about it on TV – but Jeff assured me that was bullshit. Once the heat and the shrapnel were gone, there was nothing left to fear.

I didn’t have a car, and it was kind of far to walk in the heat, but Jeff said some of them had trucks, so everyone could get a ride. I motioned for him to come inside for a cold beer. Sara was there, as usual, and when Jeff saw her, he smiled at me and winked an eye, and said, “Hope I’m not interrupting.”

What a nerve, to insinuate something was going on between Sara and I. It kind of put me in a bad mood, but I dismissed it, and grabbed a couple of beers in the fridge.

I told Sara about Jeff’s plans and asked if she wanted to join the group.

“Not interested, really” she said, “but I bet my boy would love to go. He’s crazy about firecrackers and all things that explode.”

Jeff mentioned his dad had just returned from Korea and brought a real hand grenade as a souvenir from the war, which he kept on the coffee table at his house up in Phoenix. One summer it was 118 degrees and Jeff’s mom was afraid that the grenade would go off with all the heat. Just in case, she removed the frames with photos of her parents and brothers from the coffee table.

Next morning, the residents of Hunter’s Heaven gathered outside. Sara and Adam wore their good clothes. Once all the trucks filled with people, there was no place left for Betsy and Bob, the very first residents of Hunter’s Heaven. A young couple offered their seats, but Bob refused, saying:

“Nah, thanks. There’s better stuff to watch on TV.”

It was a short ride, and in the end we couldn’t get too close. A crater, where the explosion had occurred, was fenced in with barbed wire. Inside it, we could see charred pieces of fake houses scattered everywhere, automobiles burnt to the ground, half-buried limbs and heads of dummies, some furniture, and other common things. I guessed they were testing the effects of the bomb on everyday life. The road ahead was closed; we couldn’t go any further, but none of us had any desire to do so anyway.

Everyone seemed disappointed, except for Adam. After feasting his eyes with the scene, the boy looked satiated and a little sleepy, as if he had eaten a big meal. The corners of his lips were pointing upwards in the shape of a subtle smile, the satisfied smile of a glutton with an overstuffed belly.

On the way back, Sara said, “Didn’t I tell you there was nothing to see there? Death and destruction are mundane.”

“What about Hiroshima?” I said.

“Even that must be boring. These days, killing one million is just as easy as killing one,” and then she told me how a Canadian inmate under suicide watch had managed to choke herself to death by swallowing a pocket-sized Bible. She’d heard it on the radio. Crazy shit. It happens everywhere, all the time.

—