The Righteous (6 page)

“You look lovely today, Eliza,” Taylor Junior said. His voice was hoarse, as if he were just getting over a cold. He sat close enough on the bench that his leg touched hers.

She shifted so as to remove her leg from contact and said, “Thank you,” then turned back to her food.

“I noticed you in Sunday School. That woman has nice hips, I thought. Perfect ratio of hips to waist and legs of the right length and size. Not too skinny, but not overweight, either. One look and I knew you’d be both a good lover and fertile.”

Eliza never ceased to be astonished by the sheer, awkward rudeness of the young men of the church. A laugh came out of her mouth before she could stop it.

Taylor Junior looked annoyed. “What’s so funny?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But perfect ratio of hips to waist? Come on, you need to work on your pick-up lines.”

“What are you talking about? That wasn’t a pick-up line.”

“Small talk, then. Whatever you call it, it was incredibly rude.”

She’d put a gentle tone to her words, but Taylor Kimball sputtered angrily as he rose to his feet. “Are you looking for an invitation written on a silk napkin, delicately perfumed? This isn’t about pick-up lines. And you don’t have any say in the matter. You’re just a girl. And you won’t stay single forever, you know.”

“No, but
you
might if you don’t stop acting like such a jerk.” She was angry now. “There’s not a woman in the world who will go for that kind of come-on.”

Other women had overheard the conversation and they smirked as Taylor Junior grew even more huffy and red, if that was possible. Eliza was beginning to wish she’d kept her mouth shut.

“I’ll tell you something, Eliza Christianson,” Taylor Junior said. He had lifted his voice so that everyone in the surrounding area could hear. “No,
two
somethings. In the first place—”

But before he could posture any further, Jacob arrived at the table. He put a hand on Taylor Junior’s shoulder. “Here, have a seat. It’d be a shame to waste this good meal with an argument.”

Taylor Junior brushed away Jacob’s hand. “Your sister needs to learn her place.” The women at the table tried to hush him. Their amusement had turned to embarrassment. But Taylor Junior ignored them. “Did you hear what she said to me?” he said to Jacob and anyone who would listen. “Your sister—” and he spat this word for a second time, “just told me—”

“Whatever it was, I’m sure it was nothing.” Jacob returned his hand to Taylor Junior’s shoulder. “Sit down, Brother Kimball.”

“Don’t touch me. And don’t give me that brother garbage. You’re not my brother and you’re not my priesthood leader.” Taylor Junior stood taller and stared Jacob in the eye.

Jacob’s voice lowered, then. “Careful,
Junior
. Very careful.”

“Yeah, whatever. You don’t have a wife either, so who are you to threaten me?”

“I’m not threatening you,” Jacob said. The flash faded from his face. Only the grim set to his mouth remained to show he was angry. “But let’s be clear. You’re not going to marry my sister. Now or ever.” He turned to go. “I don’t want to see you sitting with her when I come back. Or talking to her.”

With that, he walked away. There remained silence, before the women turned back to individual conversations, each of which began jarringly, like a lawnmower sputtering to life. Eliza looked down at her food, waiting for Taylor Junior to leave.

He looked around, then stared at the back of Jacob. A shuffle. He made to leave, but before he did, he put his hand on Eliza’s knee and gave a vice-like squeeze. She winced.

“You little bitch,” he whispered. “I won’t forget this. And when you
do
become my wife, your wedding night will be one to remember. Your cunt’ll be so sore you won’t be able to sit for a week.” He got up and stomped toward the house. She was left trembling.

Jacob was cheerful when he returned, having missed Taylor Junior’s parting shot. “I hope Father isn’t disappointed. Because that little display disqualifies Taylor Junior from the marriage sweepstakes. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Eliza looked up in alarm. “He isn’t…he wasn’t…”

“Yes,” Jacob said, face suddenly serious. “He was.”

She glanced at Taylor Junior, now slamming the door of the house behind him, and then back to her brother. Elder Johnson, Taylor Kimball Junior. Who was the third choice?

By the time they left Blister Creek on Monday, Eliza could not stop thinking about Enoch. Surely he couldn’t be involved in Amanda’s murder.

She had once felt the same way about Enoch that she now felt about Jacob. As a young girl, she had idolized them both. They were like Book of Mormon heroes. Captain Moroni with his Standard of Liberty. Ammon, who had cut off the arms of the Lamanite bandits and converted an entire nation of unbelievers. They knew everything. They could do anything.

And what girl ever had two brothers like Jacob and Enoch? They never teased her or told her to go play with her dolls. They had read her stories, and later taught her to read by herself. They had taught her to ride and groom a horse. They had taken her fishing at the beaver pond and when the brook trout weren’t biting had spun preposterous stories about a colony of gnomes that lived in Father’s beard, surviving on crumbs of toast and bits of jam they found clinging to his whiskers. Jacob used big, delicious words like
juxtaposition
and
defenestrate
with no sense of irony. Enoch whispered brain teasers in her ear during sacrament meeting just when she thought she would slip into a coma through sheer boredom.

But she was older now. For all that she loved Jacob, she saw that he was only human. He made mistakes. He could be condescending. He wrestled with his doubts. Enoch remained forever perfect in her mind.

So it was with reluctance that she raised her fears as they hit I-15 and headed south toward St. George. An hour and a half beyond that waited Las Vegas.

“Please tell me that Enoch is not involved.”

“I hope not, Liz.” Jacob sounded troubled. “Maybe he knows something, maybe not. But even if he does, it doesn’t mean he’s directly involved.”

“He doesn’t belong in Blister Creek. You said it yourself. And in the temple? It can’t be random. It’s got to be tied to the murder. But why? Why Enoch?”

Jacob said, “It’s like the story of Lehi’s dream in the Book of Mormon. He let go of the iron rod and is wandering strange paths through the mists and darkness. A Lost Boy.”

Jacob fiddled with the radio and settled on an AM station with an evangelical preacher, spinning nonsense about miracle spring water that could cure whatever ailed you, depending, of course, on your faithfulness. She wondered if the spring water were an out-and-out fraud, or if the whole outfit was a tool of the devil. The show was grating, and she was relieved when Jacob finally switched it off again.

“And why are they called Lost Boys?” Jacob said about twenty minutes later, as if there had been no pause in the conversation. “Lost sounds accidental. You lost your compass. Maybe someone gave you bad directions.”

“Are you saying that the Lost Boys intentionally lost their faith?”
“No, nobody does that. I’m saying it’s convenient that so many boys fall away. Boys, never girls.”

Eliza didn’t like the train of his argument. “Many are called, but few are chosen. It’s difficult to walk the straight and narrow path.”

“Get beyond the platitudes, Liz. When a young man leaves Zion, it’s a one-way trip. We don’t celebrate the return of our prodigal sons with a feast. We build fences. I have an uncle, for example, who was caught masturbating to an underwear catalog. He was young, and all young men are tempted by masturbation. The point is, he was caught. He’d always been the golden boy. Future church leader, they said.

“But heaven forbid you admire a few hotties in a J.C. Penny catalog. My grandfather bought him a one-way bus ticket to Calgary. Not too different from Enoch’s story, except that he killed himself a few months later.”

Eliza didn’t know what to say. It was a tragic story.

“In contrast, what happens when a girl flees in the middle of the night?” Jacob asked.

“They track her down. She’s not let out of sight until she’s married and pregnant.”

“Right. She’s certainly not allowed to make her own way in the world. That’s because young women are valuable, and young men are a threat.”

“But it’s still a choice,” Eliza said. “Nothing forces boys to rebel.”

“Nothing but human nature. That, and a conscious effort by older men to alienate the mentally slow and the morally weak.” He shook his head. “They’re not lost, they are expelled. That’s the simple truth of the matter.”

“So if not Lost Boys, then what?”
“Bachelor lions.”

“Bachelor lions?” she asked.

“A lion pride consists of a handful of male lions, often brothers, and a large number of females.”

“Yes, of course. And the females do the hunting, kind of like we do all the work in the church, yes?” She smiled. “And?”

“The Lost Boys are like the males expelled from the pride. The bachelors. They lurk on the outside, making periodic threats. Eventually, they drive off the old males. They then murder the cubs of the pride so as to insert their own genes as quickly as possible into the population.”

“Okay, so the Lost Boys are bachelor lions,” Eliza said. “But doesn’t the fact that they’re mentally slow and morally weak, as you put it, make it unlikely that they’ll try to take over the pride?”

“Not everyone who is morally weak is mentally slow and vice versa. And it’s all relative. Our outcasts are more intelligent and capable than those of other polygamist groups.”

It fit with what she’d thought about the girls from other communities and their lack of intellectual spark. “But why? Why are they more intelligent?”

“It’s simple evolution, Liz, to borrow from the atheists of the world.”

Eliza scoffed. “Now I know you’ve lost your mind. We are created in God’s image, not descended from monkeys.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asked with one of his half smiles that may have indicated sarcasm, or may have just indicated that Jacob was, in fact, an evolutionist. “But that’s not what I’m talking about. Look, if a man is tall, his children are more likely to be tall, more so if his wives are also tall. What if he’s intelligent? What if he remains in the community precisely because he is intelligent, while his dumber brothers are expelled?”

Eliza thought about that for a moment. She’d talked to a young woman once from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who’d said that it was the elder brothers who became church leaders in her church, while the younger sons were expelled. In the Church of the Anointing, it didn’t work that way. More like a pride of lions, as a matter of fact. Tooth and claw.

“By that logic,” she said, “we’re all growing more spiritual as well, aren’t we? More likely to throw all our energy into the church? After all, we kick out the spiritually dull, too.”

“Yes, you could make that assertion.”

“Then what about you?” she asked. “Nobody would question your brains, but spiritually you’re not exactly conversing with angels.”

“Every village has its idiot, Liz.”

“So why? Is it just accident? Or is there some purpose behind this evolutionary stuff.”

“Why do we practice plural marriage, Liz?”

“To bring about the fullness of the gospel,” she said. “It was a practice of the ancient church of Abraham and Isaac, and a requirement of the Celestial Kingdom.”

“That’s the spiritual reason,” Jacob said. “But what’s the temporal reason?”

“To raise up a righteous seed. Proverbs says, ‘Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he shall not depart from it.’ ”

“Almost. There’s also a quasi-Darwinian viewpoint in the concept of a “righteous seed.” If it were just a question of teaching correct principles, why not encourage adoption into the families of the church leaders? No, it’s believed that to grow a righteous people, it is necessary to have two ingredients: first, the proper soil—that is, a proper spiritual upbringing—and second, a good seed. Hence, a man reproduces according to his moral and intellectual strength.”

“And a woman?” she asked.

“She reproduces according to her ability to get pregnant.” Jacob raised an eyebrow. “It’s a stud service, not a full-on breeding program. Gentiles experimented with something like this,” he continued. “They call it eugenics. Good genes.”

“Like the Nazis.”

“Right. It’s not the science that’s suspect—farmers have used selective breeding for thousands of years—but stuff like what the Nazis did, or in the United States, when they sterilized retarded people. It’s morally repugnant.”

“It’s not very effective, in any event,” Eliza said. “I mean, in the church. If you just select from the male half of the population, aren’t you doubling the length of time to improve the stock?”

“That is an admitted flaw to the system.”

And with that, they settled into silence as they left Utah and passed through the northwest tip of Arizona as I-15 made its way into Nevada. Jacob found CNN on the radio. The news was a typical snapshot of the world’s misery. There was more fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. A coup in Africa and a typhoon in China. A man in Ohio with body parts of a dozen people stored in freezers in his basement. They had caught the guy through the recipes he had mailed the local paper, which were rip-offs of Thirty Minute Meals, but with human flesh substituted for whatever meat Rachel Ray had selected.

And the drumbeat continued its grizzly tempo, some of it closer to home. Three dead in a drive by shooting in Las Vegas. A train had derailed in Denver, killing eleven. Someone had kidnapped an infant from a hospital in New Mexico. It was the child of a prominent Los Alamos scientist, eerily familiar to a pair of earlier abductions in California. The two babies had been kidnapped by a satanic cult and killed as part of a black mass.

Eliza was congratulating herself on standing apart from the misery that afflicted the world, when she remembered Amanda. Her ghost-white flesh, the jagged grin that gaped from ear to ear.

“Can you shut it off?” she asked when she could take it no longer. “It’s too depressing.”

He shrugged and turned off the radio, then returned to his thoughts. They stopped for dinner, then continued. Twilight approached. At last, Las Vegas.

The city was a gaudy bauble, glaring with such light that it banished the night. It was cool outside the city as the dry air bled the heat into the night sky, but when they pulled into the city they had to turn the air conditioning back on to cope with the heat stored in the asphalt and cement.

They drove down The Strip.

She gaped at the flashing lights, at the crowds, and at the spectacle: erupting volcanoes, replicas of Paris and New York, casinos and hotels that competed against each other to attack the senses with a garish display of wealth and worldliness. They stopped at a light and a young man pressed a glossy flyer to Jacob’s window flaunting a naked woman pinching her nipples. The ground was littered with such filth.

They parked and made their way into the crowds. There were people of all imaginable races and classes on the streets and coming and going from the casinos. Homeless, tourists in shorts and tank tops, slick young men, scantily clad women, men in business suits. Even, she was shocked to see, families with children. Lots of them.

The prophet had taught that there had never been a city more wicked than Las Vegas since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah. She shuddered and wanted to return to the car.

“What are we doing here?” she asked, gripping Jacob’s arm and refusing to meet the eye of a tout who tried to pass them something. “Doesn’t Enoch live in a crack house somewhere? Not here, surely.”

“Come on, Liz. Do you believe that? Look, if you’re scared, just shut your eyes and think about how righteous you are. The Lord will protect.”

“Jacob, don’t.”

He must have heard the hurt in her voice, and the fear, because he turned to face her. “Sorry. You didn’t deserve that. Listen, we’re safe here. Maybe safer than we were in Blister Creek. But you’ve got to get a grip on yourself.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. “This way.”

“Where are we going?”

“Place called Caesar’s Palace. It’s one of these monstrosities along here.”

“But how do you know where to find him?”

“Father kept an eye on him for awhile. I told him to send money, but you can’t do that, of course. Father doesn’t know, but I came down once, tried to talk Enoch into getting out of Las Vegas. But he’d already, I don’t know, fallen in with the wrong people. It didn’t go well.”

They found Caesar’s Palace. Eliza approached with growing dread. They entered a room of a size to swallow thousands of people. Stretching from one side of the enormous room to the other were slot machines, video poker games, roulette and blackjack tables, digital displays churning with ever-growing jackpots, together with the sound of machines spitting out coins or blaring wins with light and electronic sound. Gaudy, faux Greek statuary pocked the room, joined by scantily clad cocktail waitresses and smooth young men wearing parodies of togas or gladiator costumes. And everywhere, people.

They milled from machine to machine, some excited, others glassy-eyed zombies who didn’t appear to know if it was night or day. Two men swept past her in robes and she thought them employees of the casino until she got a closer look and saw they were Arabs.

Jacob looked down at the paper again and regained his bearings. They picked their way through the casino. They approached a man in a suit standing behind a bank of television screens. Each screen showed a different part of the casino. It took a moment to recognize her brother.

Enoch and Jacob were not twins, but being only ten months apart they looked so alike they might as well have been. The primary difference was the color of their hair. Jacob’s was strawberry blonde, and Enoch’s a dark shade of red. Enoch watched them approach with a frown.

“You again,” he said to Jacob. “My God, we see all kinds here, but I swear I recognized you the instant you came through the doors. It wasn’t just the clothes that clued me in. There is that self-righteous way that you carry yourself. You don’t want to be polluted by accidental contact.”

His words stung, even though they weren’t directed at her.

“Nice to see you, too,” Jacob said, smiling.

“What are you doing here?” He looked at Eliza and his face softened slightly. “And Liz? You brought Liz?”