Gold Fame Citrus (21 page)

These surveys had, like all things, unintended effects reverberating outward from them. One such effect was to evoke in their authors a vestigial intimacy with the applicant: By sitting at their desks every three months to consider Levi Zabriskie’s superlative character, his family and friends developed the impression that they still knew the young man quite well, though they did not. For example, each of his recommenders indicated that they spoke with Levi “Weekly” or “Monthly,” though by the time he was discharged from the project he had not visited, phoned, written or otherwise interacted with anyone from home in many years.

And where was home, exactly? His first—an FLDS compound founded by his paternal great-great-grandfather, Clester Snow, a polygamist apostate—went to vapor the day his father deposited him in front of a shopping mall in Salt Lake City for getting an erection. Despite Levi’s being only twelve, he would, his father recognized, soon know what to do with it. Levi’s brutal second home, Pioneer Park, mercifully evaporated when he found his third, a ward, and in that ward his fourth and penultimate home: the sheep ranch above the
Dream Mine, run by his adopted family, the Zabriskies. It was mainly the Zabriskies who filled out the questionnaires.

The Zabriskies were an old Mormon family. A young, mute Zabriskie had survived the Haun’s Mill massacre in Missouri and carried the news to Far West, scratching the slaughter on a sheaf of birch bark. Zabriskies had been among the founders of Nauvoo, that short-lived asylum on a spongy crescent of the Mississippi River. Erasmus Zabriskie served as scribe for the Zion-bound Vanguard Company of 1847, where he grew tired of counting the revolutions of a wagon wheel and, with the aid of mathematician and apostle Orson Pratt, fashioned the ancestor to the odometer. Two Zabriskies—ten-year-old Orrin and baby Cecil—died during the Westward Exodus, both of tick sickness, both along that pitiless stretch between Winter Quarters and Fort Laramie. Orrin was buried in Wyoming but Baby Cecil stayed pressed to his mother’s bosom beyond Fort Laramie, grief-stricken mother and lifeless son pulled into the Salt Lake Valley on a handcart, the baby buried in what would become Pioneer Park, where Levi Zabriskie would live the winter he became a teenager. Hyram Zabriskie founded the Elk Mountain Mission in 1855, but abandoned it soon thereafter under Paiute attacks. Hyram’s eldest, Leroy, led the charge to resettle Elk Mountain, later called Moab, later called the Uranium Capital of the World. It was state congressman Xan Zabriskie who banned this nickname, insisting instead on “Canyonlands Cathedral.” Xan’s nephew Travis consulted for Gaucho Energy, TEVX, and the Astrid Group, arranging for Moab to supply the Manhattan Project with its ore biscuits. Travis’s second cousin, Neal Zabriskie, became a dean at BYU, and afterward sat on the Utah Supreme Court where he cast the deciding vote in
Utah v. Alaska
, moving Utah to the tip of the Western phalanx marching toward tundra mining. The Zabriskies had a book with all of this written down.

Mrs. Zabriskie, whom Levi called Candice or later Mom, was the kind of woman who could not sit still while her family enjoyed the meals she’d made. With all her boys save Levi away on missions or at school, and Levi not disposed to facilitate her doting, she turned her feverish industry toward remodeling their big ranch house. Candy Zabriskie’s energy was so boundless that she often had two teams of contractors in the house at once, one upstairs and one down. She never hovered over the decisions that gave most housewives pause, though she was a slave to trend and her swift assuredness would sometimes conjoin with her need for chic so that by the time she worked one crew from the guest bath to the den to the sunroom to the gym to the library, the guest bath was no longer to her taste. She fawned over Levi when he let her, but her attention made an ornament of her adopted son, so more often Levi fled outdoors, folding himself into the rhythms and mechanisms of Zabriskie Farms.

Levi found salve in the operations of his adopted family’s ranch, its chores and puzzles and solitudes. He slaked himself with the enterprise, taking on essential projects like revamping the entire irrigation system, and also those unglamorous duties reserved for the migrants, shit-shoveling and posthole-digging. None of the Zabriskies’ other boys had displayed much interest in manual labor, and Mrs. Zabriskie feared their ward would think they’d adopted Levi to work him to death. Thus began her campaign to get him to join the youth group’s Wednesday night volleyball league. Levi became a devilish outside hitter, and by the fall of his senior year he was offered volleyball scholarships to Ohio State and USC. USC was, by then, the last university with athletics in California and, having absorbed those ropey beach boys who ten years prior might have donned the jerseys of now-shuttered UC Irvine, Pepperdine, Stanford, and Long Beach State, the Trojans were national champions nine times over and chomping
for a tenth. But Levi was afraid to go too far from home, and his adopted mother even more afraid he would, and thus his early decision for Southern Utah University and the euthanasia of his Olympic aspirations.

Owing to a brief leave of absence for his mission in Toronto—its Soviet deprivations, often noted by his companions, were lost on Levi—he was among the final class at SUU. Levi wearied of that institution’s nostalgic handwringing, so much so that he disappointed his adoptive parents by not attending commencement. He disappointed too his housemates—two of them future fillers of government questionnaires—who had, in the spirit of celebration, driven across the Nevada border to fetch real beer. Disappointment or no, Levi would not submit to a group photo to be juxtaposed with SUU’s first class, thirteen blond boys in white hoods standing rigid in front of the Ward House on loan from the Church, a photo marked
Cedar City, Iron County, Utah Territory
. This was his first act of blatant rebellion, though the milestone would not make it into any questionnaires.

Instead of attending his graduation, Levi returned to the ranch, becoming the operations manager under the man who was by then his father. While farms across Utah collapsed, Zabriskie Farms hung aloft, thrived even, thanks to Levi’s impossibly innovative irrigation system, which brought him some notoriety in the field, though no one else truly understood it. He made a name for himself in Fish and Game, then Conservation, and at thirty-one, was recruited by the National Laboratory for the project they said would save the Southwest.

The project took him to Albuquerque, where he grew lonely and morose. Unused to scholarly solitude—a dreary, deadening brand of aloneness compared to the bracing and alive quiet of nature—Levi occupied himself with the team’s lead physicist, his first older woman (twelve years) and his first gentile. She was distant and literal and
secretly doubted Levi’s inclusion on the project team. They did not live together—they each had their own pods on the National Lab campus—so pulling away from her ought to have been easy. But Levi doubted his own inclusion on the project team too, and each evening, as he thought of returning to his pod, to the bound technical manuals stacked on his only shelf, the generator shuddering in the corner, he veered toward hers instead. By day they sat side by side at lectures and roundtable discussions, where Levi was routinely presented with the choice between attending to her erotic disdain of him and the agony of paying attention to the sessions themselves—sessions that seemed to bore even those who had organized them, even those who were, at that very moment, participating. Again and again, he chose to occupy his mind with the proximity of his shoe to hers, the press of his thigh on hers, the brush of the back of his hand against her bare knee. In this way Levi was quite successful in diverting his attention from the topic at hand, be it evaluating the fricative qualities of two tunneling prototypes, modeling fault slippage, or the projected patterns of ash dispersal. Soon, he was almost entirely oblivious to the theory underlying the initiative’s endeavors: new faults would tap new aquifer.

Another diversion was offered by his mountain bike, which he’d brought to New Mexico, and which—when he could resist his grim, transfixing lover—he rode not in the mountains, but into the city, by then almost completely abandoned. Aside from Toronto, he’d not spent any time in a city since the year he spent on the streets of Salt Lake, panhandling at the Gateway mall, sleeping in dry drainage culverts where the coldest day of winter took two of his toes. In Albuquerque he rode through Old Town, the rounded brown backs of adobes huddled into squares, in their center always a bronze Catholic with excellent posture, always looking West, many of the placards blacked out with Sharpie where they’d once read
SAVAGES
or
PRIMITIVES
or
GREAT CIVILIZER
.

He rode until dark, and then past dark. As Christmas neared he rode along the fences of the wealthy subdivisions, looking for houses with luminarias lining their rooftops, real candles flickering in their bags. When he found one, as he occasionally did, he stopped pedaling and stood straddling his bike beside the tall iron fence protecting the rich, smelling their fire.

That winter wanted to snow but was unable, lacked the moisture, and gusted its frustrations. Levi often rode into the train trenches for shelter, and to admire the graffiti and, with luck, to see some movement, for a few trains did come through still. One day he descended into the trench and discovered a train stopped, which he had never before encountered. He walked his mountain bike along the narrow canal between the train and the trench wall, grazing his hand along the grated cars. Something asked him to stop and peer into one grated container. He put his face to what he realized too late was an airhole.

The container shuddered and a shape came at him: graceful, lethal, very much alive. It roared, charging the grate. Levi staggered back, pushing himself against his bicycle and the concrete wall of the trench. His eyes groped the darkness beyond the grating, where materialized the massive medicine-ball head of a tiger. It roared again from its container, a cavernous bellow more felt than heard.

Despite the animal’s closeness, Levi found himself queerly unafraid. The tiger went on roaring, his bellow traveling up and down the train trench. The naturalist within Levi noted the tiger’s long canines like stalactites streaked with rust, the very small, very worn teeth between them. He noted the beast’s gums, pink, splotched with continents of black. He looked deep into the creature’s mouth, its white-haired tongue, the brown pits where its molars once were. He looked, finally, into its yellow eyes, fearful gems. A warm stink hovered in the trench, drawing Levi’s gaze up and down the train to its many like containers. Levi heard something like a loon cry, then from
another grated car a slow scraping of a creature massive and, somehow he knew, elderly. The train’s brakes hissed their release and the cars lurched forward, impounding the citizens of the Albuquerque Zoo east on the Santa Fe Railroad, the old line that brought all the trouble west.

As the train began to move, the tiger stumbled sideways, and as he vanished Levi knew his trembling fatigue. Cars flashed past and Levi somehow knew too the hippo’s thirst, the crocodile’s nausea, the mania of a pair of wombats trying to burrow into steel, the communal madness of a pack of Mexican gray wolves pacing ceaselessly, the aches of a mother giraffe with legs folded beneath her, long neck crimped to the confines of her container.

He recognized the sensation. Their voices were the voices of Zabriskie Farms, of the sheep and of the sandstone above the Dream Mine, and of the deep netting of aquifer he’d found there, which fed the ranch. They were the voices as he’d first heard them in the dry clay streaks along the Salt Lake culvert, which first woke him on the coldest day of the year. They were the voices of the matted lawn of Pioneer Park, which urged him to walk, stagger on feet gone clubs from what he did not yet know was frostbite, to the Temple lawn, which beckoned him inside, to the vestibule where the basin of holy water whispered, faintly and finally,
Rest
, whose voice he was heeding, nearly eternally, when Brother Zabriskie arrived very early and nervous, for he’d been invited to give, that morning, the Fourth Sunday Address.

In the Albuquerque train trench, Levi felt immense grief at the zoo creatures’ leaving. They called to him the same way the rock and dirt of Utah had, though their voices were not literal, the way some in his ward described the voice of God. The call was a sensation rather, a sudden seeping of their experience into his heart. Had anyone asked,
he might have described it as a rapport with Creation, though in his mind he named it simply
the call
.

In the train trench and beyond, Levi yearned for the call. He ached for it. He’d not felt it in too long, and could no longer do without it. He ignored his lover, the minor flutters she sent up from his loins now insulting in comparison to this higher tug. Alone in his pod he remembered long-forgotten sermons by his grandfather, sermons that had always frightened him, telling of the Snows as a touched people. Stone seers, he called them. The records had been destroyed by the Quorum of Twelve, family lore insisted, but among other lesser miracles a Snow had looked to an egg-shaped agate in a white stovepipe hat and predicted Brigham Young’s impossible ascendancy.

His yearning urged him out again, his fearsome legacy transmuted now into desire. He shirked his duties, stalked the city on his bicycle, wrecked, intolerably aware of the vacancy opened up in him. One day, it took him to a bridge spanning the dry wash where the Rio Grande had been. He listened at its rail, futilely, then left his bike and climbed down to the waterless plain. He sat on a flat rock once submerged and listened. He stroked the hot stone. He dug his hands into the dry loam. He turned over and pressed his torso against the rock, feeling its warmth all through him. He felt, finally, a welling of harmony, a communion with the rock and the silt. He was a vessel, clutched fistfuls of gravel, moved as their covenant told him to move. His feet, touched by divine nature, tingled, and he shuddered against the stone.