Doug thought the Nevada skies were as blue and bright as the eyes of sweet Jesus himself. The Elko desert spread out before him in every direction. Pungent sage gripped the dry earth; cicadas buzzed like hundreds of tiny rattlesnakes. Doug and his uncle had parked their beat-up, diesel-fueled Ford to the side of the dirt road that cut a swath through the tenacious sagebrush and outcroppings of skin-tearing desert granite. A dusty apparition had risen behind their vehicle as soon as they turned onto the dirt road and haunted their progress until they stopped, where it settled back beneath the tires which had animated it. Doug listened to the tick of the cooling engine. He liked the hardy beauty of the desert, especially in the evening when the sun lit the landscape with its dying purple tones. But now the sun was just rising, and the day would be long and hot.

Doug thought about how much his father would have liked this scene, though he wouldn’t have liked why they were out here. Unc always called Doug’s father—also named Doug—”Dougley-Do-Right”, a name his father hated. Unc and Doug Sr. were about as different as brothers could be, and the rebel teen in Doug Jr. always admired the over-grown bad boy who was Unc. On Doug Jr.’s fourteenth birthday, his father died of a heart attack, and Jr. went to live with his uncle.

Doug approached his uncle, who stood near the driver’s side with the door open.

“What you doing there, Unc?”

Unc shook out a couple caterpillar-shaped lines of cocaine into the grooves in the seat of the Ford.

“All right then, I’ll grab some brews.” Doug reached into a cooler stowed in the back of the truck and freed a pair of beers lodged in the ice. He popped the tops with the edge of Unc’s lighter before taking a long pull on one and placing the other on the hood for Unc. Doug thought he would never taste a beer as good again.

“Thanks, boy,” said Unc and snorted the mixture of cocaine and desert dust through an old rolled-up dollar bill. He handed the bill to Doug and drained his own beer in several gulps. Unc grinned—something he only did when he was feeling right. Sober, Unc was silent and cold as marble.

They each pounded several more beers and snorted another fat line of coke. Faces numb, hearts pounding, they shouldered their camouflaged deer rifles—both thirty-aught-six, mounted with scopes, filled with long and wicked ammunition.

They hiked along the dirt road, their only conversation the crunch of their footsteps and the clinking of the beer bottles in Doug’s backpack. The sun rose steadily; the day grew hotter. Paranoia crept up on Doug, and with good reason. Deer season didn’t open for another two months. He wondered if poaching deer was a sin. He didn’t want to poach, but they didn’t put in for tags—Unc said only Californians and faggots put in for tags. And God certainly didn’t go for homosexuals, so how could He frown on poaching?

Unc picked his way uphill through thickening sagebrush. The air was heavy with the musk of the Nevada desert—sage and dusty earth.

Doug tried to lose himself in the euphoria of the coke, but when that failed he did what he always did when he was nervous and started talking.

“I’ll tell you what Unc, that sure is some good shit. I thought you was getting ripped off at that price, but my heart feels like it’s going to jump out of my goddamn chest.”

“Yeah, I know, right?” Unc turned around as he spoke and the bore of his rifle gaped at Doug for an instant. Doug took an involuntary step back.

“Hey, you know, maybe we should of brought them vests with us,” said Doug, referring to the dirty, orange safety vests still wadded up under the driver’s seat in the pick-up. Both men were dressed cap to bootheel in desert camouflage—more to hide from people then the partially color-blind deer.

“You want to get caught?” Unc’s cigarette-battered voice made him sound like he was about to hack up steel wool and broken glass.

“Well, no. I don’t. But there ain’t nobody out here, and I just think, well, you know.”

“Will you loosen up and stop with all that sissy choir-boy shit? You’re just like your old man. Fucking Do-Right, Jr.” Unc shook his head and fired a snot rocket into the sagebrush.

Unc continued up the hill.

“Safety first, that’s all.” The perspiration soaking through his clothes made Doug feel like he’d just stepped out of a sweat lodge.

“No vests,” said Unc, his tone settling the issue.

Doug slipped on a sand-covered stone and dropped his rifle—CRACK!

Unc hunched into himself like he’d been clubbed over the head as the round tore up the ground a few feet in front of them. The cicadas went mute, but ringing filled both men’s ears.

“Jesus jumped-up Christ! You trying to kill me?” yelled Unc. Doug readied himself for an ass-kicking, but Unc only let out a whoop like a deranged Indian. “Goddamn, boy. I’m going to need myself some new drawers. Shit, give me one of them beers.”

Doug hands shook so badly he could barely pop the tops. Unc took a snort directly from his baggie of coke and eyeballed his nephew.

“What’s the matter? All shook up? Here, have a little bump to steady your nerves.” Unc passed the cocaine to his nephew. After his bump, Doug drank his beer and imagined how terrible killing Unc would have been—the splattered blood, the shattered bone. The two of them didn’t really have any family left—just their mother. But she wouldn’t come to Unc’s funeral. Doug would be the only person standing over Unc’s closed casket, the only person shedding tears. Unc had a wife once, but she left when Doug came to live there. Sometimes Unc said fuck her, family sticks together; sometimes Unc said he hated Doug for chasing off the only woman he ever loved. The fact she would have left anyway didn’t make Doug feel any better.

What did make Doug—and Unc for that matter—feel better was slamming more beer and snorting more coke.

“You think they’re over that ridge, Unc? I think they are. I can feel them. Remember a couple years back when we came out not too far from here?”

Unc nodded.

“And we saw them as soon as we came over that ridge, like this one, and they were all there, and you just whipped up your rifle and fired once and they all took off and you thought you missed?”

“And then we humped over there to check,” said Unc, “and there was that big old buck lying in the snow with the top of his skull blowed off.”

“And there was that mess of brains,” continued Doug, “steaming in the snow next to him, remember that? I still can’t believe you made that shot.”

“Yeah,” said Unc, “and his tongue was sticking out like this.” He twisted his head to one side, doing his best dead deer impression. Both men laughed. Their laughter died, then their conversation. They finished their beers and were back on their way.

They neared the crest of the ridge in silence.

At the top, something bolted between them. Though it couldn’t possibly be a deer, both men brought their rifles to their shoulders and found themselves aiming at one another.

Doug’s heart felt like it was trying to escape through his sternum.

“Boy,” said Unc, “we’re fixing to kill each other if we stay together.” Unc pointed east where huge sagebrush and a few fierce trees reached up from the desert hard pack. “You head over that way. I’ll go this way. If you see any bucks—hell, any kind of deer—try to flush them to me. I’ll do the same.”

Doug crashed through the tall sage and around rocky outcroppings. His mind wasn’t on the hunt anymore. He felt a pleasant haze despite the heat of the day. He wasn’t worried about poaching fines anymore; he felt invincible. He wasn’t worried about his job at the factory, or about how much he’d been missing church recently due to his hang-overs. His twenty-eighth birthday was coming up and he finally had someone to celebrate it with besides Unc—an overweight but pretty gal he’d met at a bar with a mechanical bull. His first serious girlfriend. She laughed often in piercing bursts, a kind of shriek that Doug found annoying, but he liked her. No person, especially female, had ever treated him with the tenderness she did. Her hands were soft, light, and she smelled sweet, like baking cookies. He loved the way she smelled most of all. He imagined himself marrying her, walking down the aisle with his hair slicked back and his unruly whiskers tamed for a day. Maybe they would have children—little boys or even a baby girl. He might be able to love a little girl, if she could learn to hunt.

Doug heard a branch break and he stopped dead. His head barely topped the brush here and a deer could easily have been hiding nearby. He listened, every muscle stiff and tight. Silence. Then a jack rabbit burst from the underbrush and sped away from him. He relaxed and his thoughts returned to his girl.

Unc’s bullet ripped through his heart before he heard the shot.

Doug started to fall when he saw it.

How he and Unc hadn’t already seen the two-story wooden cross being built in the middle of the desert confounded Doug. The racket of hammers, saws, and pulleys was enormous. Strangest of all, the builders were angels. They flew down to collect boards, sawed to the correct length by other angels, and soared back up—packing the wood on one shoulder to more angels who attached the pieces with nails and ancient mallets. The angels were robed, filthy, and sweating. Despite the heat of the day, they worked at an amazing pace.

Standing at the foot of the cross was a man with his hands on his hips. Though he lacked wings, he was similarly robed, yet less dirty. In place of a halo was a hard hat. He turned suddenly, as if Doug had surprised him, and then approached.

“What are you doing here, boy? We aren’t hiring off the street.” His eyes were bright blue, his pale face sunburned on his nose and cheeks. His voice was deep, soothing. Long blond hair slipped the restraints of his hard hat to dangle around his glowing face.

“Jesus?” asked Doug.

“That’s what they call me.” Jesus produced a can of Copenhagen from within his robe. He snapped the can several times with his middle finger to pack the chew to one side. He put a huge dip in his lip and then proceeded to light a cigarette.

“I sure didn’t think the Son of God would smoke and chew. Especially at the same time.”

“Why not? Did I ever say you shouldn’t smoke? Or chew?” Jesus flicked ash off his cigarette and fired a thin stream of tobacco-spit into some sagebrush. “All this moralizing is kind of hard to take from someone doing toot.”

“No one calls it that anymore.”

“Whatever,” said Jesus. “What are you doing here boy?”

“Well I was just hunting and then I heard this shot—”

“Hold on,” said Jesus as he turned to bellow at one particularly ragged angel, “Does that look level to you? Christ, you have an eye like a dead fish! Slap your whiskey stick on there. You obviously can’t eyeball it.” He turned back to Doug. “Sorry about that.”

“Is this real?” asked Doug.

“What?”

“This…all this? The cross? You?”

“Oh, I thought you meant the world in general,” said Jesus. “Yes, I’m real. So is the cross. As real as anything else. Nice, huh?” Jesus spit again. “That baby’s going to be tits on a Ritz when these sorry sacks finish up. Carpenter angels—I’ll tell you—they’re hung-over on Monday and half-drunk on Friday. Only good three days a week.” Jesus removed his hard hat to wipe his brow.

“If this is real,” said Doug, “then that means there’s a Hell. So, there is a Hell, right?”

“Kind of. Not like you’re thinking. People make their own versions. I don’t have much to do with all that.” Jesus shrugged and lit another cigarette. He offered one to Doug, but put the pack away when Doug only stared at him.

“Am I going to go to Heaven?” asked Doug.

“Do you want to?”

“Well. Yeah.”

“I don’t know.” Jesus shook his head. “Drunk on Sunday, doing cocaine all the time, having lustful thoughts.” Jesus counted off the sins on one hand, the lit end of his cigarette bobbing up and down as he spoke. Doug felt a profound terror hatching in his gut.

“Oh, Father, please forgive my sins! I am weak, I fell prey to the Devil—”

“The Devil?” Jesus cleaned the dip from his lip and laughed. “Relax, I’m just kidding. You can go to Heaven if you want.”

“So all them other religions, they’re wrong?” asked Doug. “I knew it.”

“No, no. They’re not wrong. How could they be wrong, Doug?” asked Jesus. “They all come from the same place. There is only one place to come from, after all. This is all there is.” Jesus held his arms out, extended from his body, as if to hug the whole world. Or die again. “You experience what you perceive. Or is it the other way around? I forget. I never was much of a philosopher, despite the rumors.” Jesus dropped his smoke in the desert dust and ground it with his heel. “Truth is, it doesn’t matter what you believe. You want to believe this?” Jesus swept his hand toward the cross and laboring angels. “That’s fine. Believe it. Go on son. You’re saved.”

Doug hit the ground, his heart in tatters.