Righteous - 01 - The Righteous Page 6

“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 se
nses 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?”

  She took Jacob’s arm, suddenly afraid of Enoch and how angry he’d become. “I’m with Jacob.”

  “Figures.”

  “Leave her alone,” Jacob said.

  “Right, I’ve got no beef with Liz. It’s you, Jacob. It’s because of you that I’m here.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Sure it is. If you hadn’t been so damn good at everything, not to mention smug about it, I could have been just a normal kid. Instead, I was compared to you every step of the way.”

  Jacob said, “And all the times you got into it with Father? That was my fault too? Oh, yeah, and the beer and cigarettes? Are you going to claim that I bought them for you and forced them into your mouth?”

  “I made a few mistakes,” Enoch said. “Big deal. I believed in the gospel, I still believe in it.”

  Eliza was struck with the incongruity between Enoch’s words and his behavior. Enoch, who claimed he still believed, had taken a job in the heart of Babylon. The belly of the beast. Why?

  Enoch said, “But that’s the funny thing. I believe and I’ve been kicked out. Nobody knows what you believe, Jacob. I don’t think even you know.”

  “That’s not true,” Jacob said, but the way his words came out Eliza could tell that Enoch had cut him with that last remark. “I know what I believe. Just cause I don’t run into the street and shout my beliefs to the world doesn’t mean that I don’t have them.”

  “You’re a doubter.”

  “I’m waiting for God to direct me.”

  “Hah! That’s your way of saying that you do whatever you want because God hasn’t yet revealed Himself to you. As if you need a personal invitation. God’s plan is freely available in the scriptures and from the mouths of the prophets.” Enoch had raised his voice and now he looked around as if concerned with who might be watching. “Now, what are you doing here? I’ve got a job to do.”

  Jacob said, “What were you doing in Blister Creek last week?”

  “What are you talking about? I haven’t been to Blister Creek in three years and don’t intend to ever set foot there again.” He had a suddenly itchy nose and blinked, and Eliza suspected that he was lying, in spite of the vigor of his words. “Now, go away. I can’t talk right now.”

  “That’s fine. What time do you get off work?”

  “What’s that to you? You planning to wait?” Enoch asked.

  “Yes. As long as necessary. I’ve been sent by the prophet,” Jacob added. “If you still believe, as you claim, then you will obey his will and speak with me.”

  Surprisingly to Eliza, this caught Enoch more off guard than Jacob’s mention of Blister Creek.

  He rocked back on his heels. “The prophet sent you?” A long pause. “But, I…why would he have sent you? Why wouldn’t he have sent…?”

  Jacob stayed silent and Eliza realized belatedly that this was his tactic, to let Enoch keep talking and revealing information. But before her mind could catch up to Jacob’s, she said, “You know something, don’t you?”

  “About what?” Enoch looked newly guarded.

  She had grown frustrated. “About Amanda’s murder, Enoch. What do you think?”

  His face turned pale. “Amanda Kimball? Murdered? No.”

  “Murdered,” she repeated. “Two days ago. With her throat cut from ear to ear and her tongue ripped out by its roots.” She didn’t know yet what that meant, but Enoch would, if he’d really been at the temple, and she emphasized it for maximum effect.

  Enoch staggered out from behind the television screens. He took two steps away, as if he were trying to flee. He knocked into a cocktail waitress, who dumped her tray with a cry. Drinks spilled to the floor, but Enoch paid no attention to the mess or to the waitress sprawling at his feet. He turned and threw up.

  Chapter Seven:

  Enoch lived in a brick apartment building two miles northwest of The Strip. He was too shaken to drive, so they left his car at the casino and went in Jacob and Eliza’s Corolla. Enoch had begged out of the rest of his shift on account of illness.

  When they reached the apartment, Enoch retreated to the bathroom and locked the doors. They could hear running water from the sink and more sounds of their brother being sick. He looked terrible when he came out. He went straight to his bedroom to change his clothes.

  Meanwhile
, Eliza had taken a look around the apartment. It was not what she was expecting. It was just a small, clean apartment with no crack pipes, no ashtrays overflowing with butts, no empty beer cans lying around, and no evidence of a roommate, transsexual stripper or no. The only evidence of a worldly lifestyle was a television and a stereo. So much for the rumors. Eliza and Jacob waited on the couch.

  When at last he joined them, Enoch was pale but in control. “Sorry about what I said earlier. I’m so tired of lectures. I thought you’d come back for more of the same, and brought Eliza to dish up an extra helping of guilt.”

  Eliza said, “You’re my brother. I love you. I thought I’d never see you again. And I didn’t come all the way from Canada to tell you to shape up.”

  “Well, maybe that would have been better. Not this other stuff.”

  “You wouldn’t have listened anyway,” Jacob said. “You weren’t interested in advice, remember?”

  “You still could have helped in some way. I didn’t need a lecture, but yeah, I could have used help. I was destitute, forced to drop out of school. And I didn’t know jack about how to survive out here. You have no idea how low I sank.”

  “We can’t help you,” Eliza said. Her anger had faded and now she felt guilty. “You were excommunicated. We have to shun you.”

  “Have to? That just kills me. Who came up with that shunning crap anyway?” Enoch shook his head. “But that doesn’t matter. No thanks to you, I survived. I found help.”

  “Meaning you took up with the Lost Boys,” Jacob said. “Is that it?”

  “Ah, so I should have waited for my family to come around. They would have helped. Eventually. Right?”

  “We can go around and around,” Jacob said. “But that’s not why we’re here. Someone murdered Amanda Kimball last Wednesday. You know something about that, Enoch. What?”

  He said nothing, so Jacob tried again. “Why target Amanda? What possible reason would they have to kill her, and as a traitor, too, with her throat cut and her tongue ripped out?”

  “They told me they weren’t going to kill her,” Enoch said. “Just frighten her. Remind her of her covenants, and let her know the prophet wasn’t pleased.”