Righteous03 - The Wicked (2 page)

Eliza put purpose in her stride as she left the children’s garden and took the nature trail that looped through the foothills. She ran over retorts in her mind, trying to think of the proper mix of scripture with which to season her outrage. Something like her brother would say. And delivered with Jacob’s confidence, too. It would put them in their place.

She walked the trail without spotting them and began to wonder if they’d already left. Maybe all they wanted was to deliver a message and leave her wondering and worrying. Mission accomplished, they’d exited the same way they’d come. Eliza poked her head in the Secret Garden, then came down the hill by the ponds. Her mind drifted from potential confrontation, to whether or not to tell Jacob and Fernie what had happened.

And then she saw them.

The lower pond had a pavilion where people could picnic or hold private parties. The men were emerging from the pavilion onto the main path, speaking quietly.

The taller man smiled when he saw her, the shorter, younger man narrowed his eyes and glanced at his companion, as if waiting for a cue. Eliza stopped and took a step back.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“To bring you home.”

“What do you mean, home? Blister Creek? Did my father send you?”

“Not your childhood home, Sister Eliza, your
new
home. Where you shall cleave unto your husband, where the two of you shall be one flesh.” He drew uncomfortably close, while the second man flanked her to the left.

Eliza lifted her hands in warning. “Stand back or I’ll cry for help. There’s a security guard and only one entrance. You’ll be arrested.”

He laughed, edged closer. “Arrested? For what, for telling you the will of the Lord?”

“I’m warning you, don’t touch me.”

“Don’t fight it, Eliza. Listen to the spirit.” He reached for her wrist.

Her cellular phone rang. She snatched it out of her skirt pocket. “Eliza Christianson.”

“Eliza? What’s the matter, are you okay?”

“What?”

“Why are you out of breath? It’s me, Fernie, what’s the matter?”

“Call 911, I’m—”

At “911,” the two men turned and strode down the trail toward the entrance. The taller man took a piece of paper from his pocket and let it fall as he rounded the corner.

“911?” A rasp of panic dragged across Fernie’s voice. “Eliza, what’s going on? Eliza?”

“Never mind, don’t call. It’s okay,” she said. “There were two men—well, never mind. They’re gone, now.”

“Don’t give me that,” Fernie said in a sharp tone. “What’s going on there? Tell me now or I really am calling 911.”

Eliza forced herself to sound calm. “Really, I’m okay now. They left as soon as I got on the phone. I was afraid, but they’re gone, I swear.”

It took a few more minutes before she convinced Fernie that it was nothing, just a couple of random guys giving her a hard time. She didn’t mention the polygamist connection.

Fernie let out a sigh on the other end. “I had an impression I should call you just now when I was working on the tomatoes. Thank heavens I listened to the spirit.”

“Where are you? Does Zarahemla have telephones now?”

“No, Jacob got me a cell phone. I hate the thing, can never remember to turn it on and then there are messages and I don’t know how to get them. I don’t want to find out.”

Eliza knew the feeling. Even carrying a phone felt like an affectation and in most cases, the person calling wasn’t someone she wanted to talk to: the restaurant, asking her to pick up another shift, her visiting teaching companion from church, wanting to set up appointments. Some newspaper reporter had got hold of her cell number and kept leaving messages wanting to interview her about the Blister Creek polygamists. No, thanks.

It wasn’t that Eliza wanted to turn Amish, get a horse and buggy and give up electricity. Not even her father was like that; Blister Creek finally had reliable cell coverage. But Eliza couldn’t see the point of some of the technological geegaws that people in Salt Lake wore attached to their heads or glued to their hands. Half the kids on TRAX spent their commute hunched over glowing screens, thumbs twitching away, barely aware of the real world.

“I appreciate the call,” Eliza said, “but I’m fine, really. I’m still planning to come down to Zarahemla on Monday to see everyone. We can talk face-to-face. And I miss those kids.” While she spoke, she walked down the bend in the trail and confirmed that the two men had left. She picked up the piece of paper the taller man had dropped.

“Nieces and nephews will have to wait,” Fernie said. “We found David.”

Eliza had started to unfold the paper with her free hand, but now stopped. “Really? That’s wonderful news.”

“You won’t think it’s wonderful when I tell you where we found him, or what he said over the phone when Jacob called.”

Her heart sank. “You’d better tell me everything.”

The sick feeling only spread as Fernie told her about David. Jacob’s contact hadn’t softened David’s heart, it had turned him mean and dangerous, both to himself and to others.

Maybe he’d listen to me,
she thought.
Or is he so far gone that he wouldn’t even care?

After she hung up, Eliza thought about the two men. She opened the paper the taller man had dropped. If there was any doubt that it was a message for her, it disappeared. Cursive lettering spidered across the page:

Give honor unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

She frowned. What was that supposed to be, his way of courting her? An invitation to marriage?

Eliza thought about Fernie’s invitation. Maybe the timing was right for a road trip.

#

Two days later, Eliza walked into a bar for the first time in her life. She was three hours by car southeast of the polygamist enclave of Blister Creek, across the border into Nevada. The atmosphere assaulted her: throbbing music, lights, the nauseating smell of sweat and smoke and perfume and beer, all mixed together.

She showed her ID and pushed past the bouncers at the door. She couldn’t shake the feeling of shame, that someone would see her, report back to her father, or to the bishop. Maybe she should have brought Fernie, although that might have been worse. They’d have clung together and clenched their eyes shut like two girls being scared by a campfire ghost story.

It got worse. As she made her way in, she realized it wasn’t just a bar, it was a certain kind of bar. Three almost-nude women gyrated on a stage. The closest was an attractive but hard-faced blonde woman with breasts jiggling like over-filled water balloons, rigid and at a right angle from her body. The woman caught Eliza’s eye, gave her a leering smile and wrapped her legs around the metal pole that thrust obscenely from the stage. Eliza looked away. She almost turned around and walked out.

No, you’re not giving up now. You’re strong and you can do this.
Eliza pretended it was Jacob’s voice urging her forward, and this gave her just enough courage to go on.

And then she spotted her brother, David, sitting alone near the stage, with a drink in front of him and a stack of five-dollar bills. Eliza slid in next to him, but he didn’t look up, and instead kept his eyes fixed on the dancer.

“Can I sit down?” She had to shout to be heard over the pulsing music.

“Sorry, no lap dance,” David said, without bothering to look at her. “I’m practically tapped out.”

David took one of the five-dollar bills and shoved it in the stripper’s g-string, already feathered with bills. For this, she gave him a private show that lasted ten, fifteen seconds, before she moved away in an overpowering cloud of perfume, with a strut and a sneering look at the men around the stage that said,
You can look, but you can never touch.

Eliza found herself repelled by the woman, but then the stripper turned toward the back of the stage to give way to another dancer and the mask slipped. For an instant, Eliza saw behind the catty expression to a tired woman near the end of a long shift. It was a look Eliza saw every night at the restaurant. A student who’d been racing back and forth to the kitchen all night who now needed to go home and cram for his biology final. A woman anxious to get home to her husband, just back from deployment. This stripper, Eliza realized with a pang of shame at her initial judgment, might have a sick child at home, or a rent check due. When the woman reached the back of the stage, she wrapped her legs around the pole and thrust in time to the music.

“Man, those were some ugly tits,” David said.

“Then why did you pay her to shake them at you?”

“Boobs are boobs. Even the bad ones aren’t half bad.” David shrugged, finished his drink with a clink of ice cubes, then waved for the bartender to get him another. He still didn’t look in Eliza’s direction. “Yeah, they’re probably all fake in this joint.”

She found herself studying the blonde woman again. All she had to compare them to were her own and no, her breasts didn’t look anything like that. “But how can you tell they’re fake?”

“Come on, boobs don’t stand up like that. Those suckers float like helium balloons, except they’re harder than the bunions on my grannie’s feet. I can still feel where she whacked me in the head, probably leave a goose egg. Do you girls all have to get boob jobs? I think the average guy prefers them natural, even if they’re on the small side.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that, and anyway, I’m not exactly comfortable discussing my breasts with my own brother.”

David turned with a sharp expression which widened into surprise. “Eliza? Goddamn it!”

“That’s not really necessary. You seem to be damning yourself well enough on your own.”

“Who sent you, Jacob? He can kiss my ass. And pass my well-wishes to the old man. He can kiss my ass, too. Oh, and all his wives too, and all my brothers and sisters and half brothers and half sisters. All the whole inbred clan can kiss my apostate ass.”

“Is the vulgarity really necessary?”

David scoffed. “Liz, you’re in a strip club. In case you didn’t notice, you left Utah about twenty miles back. And you left the nineteenth century as soon as you drove out of Blister Creek.” He looked her up and down. “At least you got rid of the prairie dress and pony tails, that’s something, I guess. Oh, right, you’ve taken up with the Salt Lake Mormons. What does Jacob want?”

“Jacob didn’t send me.”

“The hell he didn’t. He’s the only one who knows where I am. He called and started hassling me about Word of Wisdom stuff.”

“Okay, so he told me how to find you, but it’s true. I told him I was coming to find you and he just shrugged. He’s got bigger things to worry about than one loser of a brother.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Like tracking down other losers, of course. The family is full of them.”

A smile cracked his face and for the first time she saw the playful young boy she used to watch catching frogs down by the reservoir, who used to bury himself in the hay loft and hide, then jump out, screaming, when Jacob or Enoch came to feed the horses.

She put a hand on David’s wrist. “Let me take you to Zarahemla. Jacob will be glad to see you. He loves you and it hurts him to see you like this.”

“No, thanks.” He waved for another drink. “Getting kicked out of the church was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m not about to get sucked back in.”

“Nobody is trying to suck you back in. Come on, let’s get out of here. We can talk.”

“About what?”

“About getting you out of this lifestyle and back where you belong.”

“Are you kidding me? I like this lifestyle. I’ve got a job driving delivery and nobody gives me crap. After work I come here and spend my money on beer and strippers and then I go home and sleep like a baby. I don’t think about God, or Jesus, or Joseph Smith, or any of that. And maybe I’m going to hell when I finally croak, but you know what? I’m good with that.”

“And what about the drugs?” she asked. When David said nothing, she pressed, “David, I know. It’s not just pot is it? That’s poison. It will destroy you.”

“What’s it to you? Why are you so damn preachy? You’re worse than Father, at least he doesn’t give me the puppy eyes.”

“And that thing at the bus station in Vegas? You’re still bruised around the eyes.”

David’s stare hardened. The stripper had come around the stage again, but this time he waved her away without a glance. “What, is he spying on me now? He wants to bring me back into his little cult, so he hires a couple of thugs to mug me and beat the shit out of me, then sends my sister out to give me a sad face once I’m softened up, is that it?”

“David, please. I’m not here to talk about religion or the church or any of that. And Jacob doesn’t care about it either.”

“Not what I heard. He’s Father’s
numero uno
now, isn’t he? And what about this other thing, the Zarahemla compound?”

“Now who is spying on who?”

“People talk.” He downed his drink, waved for another. A slur had begun to work its way into his speech. If what Fernie said was accurate, he’d go home and fill himself with worse things.

“Exactly,” she said. “And that’s how we heard about what you’re going through. Look, we’re not building any sort of cult. I’m not even in the church anymore, remember? All I’m doing is trying to help one of my brothers, so he won’t be a Lost Boy anymore. Is that so bad?” She put her hand over his.

“I’m not a Lost Boy.”

“Well, someone who left, whatever. I know you’re not happy here, how could you be? Jacob could help, and he needs people like you.”

“What do you mean, people like me? Where do I fit into his church?”

“If everyone who cares jumps ship, anyone who thinks about it long and hard, rather than swallowing every bit of mumbo jumbo, what does that leave him with? Fanatics. People who think the world is coming to an end, the nuts and crazies. More self-proclaimed prophets.”

“You left, didn’t you? Tell me, if it’s so wonderful, what’s up with that?”

She nodded. It was a good point, and how could she explain it? There was too much pressure to marry some old guy with a dozen wives, and until Jacob could change the entire culture—and that would take time—she couldn’t stay. So she’d taken up with the Salt Lake Mormons. They were different, but they hadn’t been what she’d been taught or what she’d expected. Bishop Larsen—her whole ward in Salt Lake—accepted her eccentricities, and when people discovered her polygamist background, they embraced her all the more. The belief? Well, she didn’t know where she stood, but for now she was comfortable.